Life Without Bacon

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller

“Marine” Le Pen, her mother once said, “is the absolute clone of her father”; They are both, in their own way, political narcissists

One of the in-depth articles in The Economist's new sister publication, 1843, is the take on Marine Le Pen, l'étrangère by Sophie Pedder, The Economist's Paris bureau chief.

 … The politician who once compared Muslims praying in the streets in France to the Nazi occupation is fast emerging as the scariest, most redoubtable party leader in Europe. On a continent shaken by the double convulsions of Islamist terrorism and the greatest refugee influx in modern history, identity politics is marching back, and Le Pen is in the vanguard. Long before other leaders began to shut the doors and roll out barbed-wire fences, she denounced a borderless Europe and warned darkly of a “giant migratory wave” that would engulf the continent. Today, such troubles play straight into her hands, strengthening her appeal at home and her standing among right-wing nationalists abroad. She believes herself to be on a patriotic mission. She wants to defend a nostalgic version of France from an army of perceived threats – the euro, globalisation, competition, immigration and Islamism. “She is fighting for a sovereign, patriotic, free country,” says Florian Philippot, her closest lieutenant, who came to the party from the nationalist left. In the mind of bien-pensant French, however, Le Pen seeks nothing less than to overturn the liberal order in France and dismantle the post-war project of an integrated Europe. …

Out of the rubble, into a mansion

 … Le Pen shares neither Jean-Marie’s talent for blustery oratory nor his self-destructive narcissism. But her methodical opportunism and street-smart intuition make her a far more fearsome politician. Le Pen père, whose politics dug into a seam of anti-Semitic, ultra-nationalist, Catholic nativism, sought to provoke. His daughter has greater ambitions: to disinfect a marginalised extremist movement and turn it into a serious party ready to govern. “Her father never wanted power, and never tried to achieve it,” says Sylvain Crépon, a political scientist at the University of Tours, who studies the FN: “He avoided responsibility. She on the other hand is building up a network of elected officials, working her dossiers, recruiting experts: exactly what is needed to win power.”

It was not inevitable that she would go into politics. That formative explosion in the bedroom was, she says, a political awakening of “the most violent, the most cruel, the most brutal” sort. It was not just the realisation of her father’s vulnerability that marked her: it was also the shock of discovering the indifference of French officialdom towards her family. No perpetrator was ever caught. No word of consolation came from the local mayor or any government representative, even though at the time Jean-Marie already had behind him a six-year spell as a member of the French National Assembly. His toxic politics meant that his family was ostracised, and the young Marine resented this perceived injustice. She wasn’t just angry; she wanted to rehabilitate the family name and secure the FN the respect she thinks it deserves. “If I’m very honest,” she says today, her tall, broad frame somehow outsized for the tiny sixth-floor office she occupies at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, “at the start of my political career, that was a driving force.”

Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, known from childhood as Marine, was born in a maternity clinic just outside Paris on August 5th 1968, two months after students started ripping up cobblestones and overturning barricades on the Paris left bank. … Pierrette described their life as “a bit bohemian”, with “friends at all hours of the day or night” dropping by for wine and improvised dinners that usually ended in hearty song, with Jean-Marie blasting out sea shanties learned in his Breton childhood.

 … Two words recur in Le Pen’s recollections of those years, at school in Saint-Cloud and later as a law student in Paris: sacrifice and wound. The FN was on the rise and its leader accused of torture during his time as an officer in the Algerian war (allegations Mr Le Pen has denied). Life at school as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter involved “a series of little humiliations: the parents of my friends who wouldn’t invite me to their house, or wouldn’t let them come to ours; the brutality of certain teachers.” Did this influence her decision to go into politics? Her gaze is unblinking: “We are all the children of our wounds.”

The politics of victimhood

The outsider is a popular pose among politicians. Many try to strike it: think George W. Bush and his Texan reinvention, or even François Hollande, a graduate of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration who ran for the presidency from a faux-humble post as leader of the council of rural Corrèze. David Cameron (wisely) does not even try. Only a few, among them Angela Merkel (a physicist raised in the former East Germany and, like Le Pen, a woman in a conservative, patriarchal party), carry conviction.

 … Despite her dynastic position and her family mansion, the overwhelming impression she leaves is of a politician driven by the angry energy of the authentic outsider. Polite Parisian society certainly sees her that way – and, in a country governed by a tight, self-protecting elite, her status gives her particular power over the political imagination.

Her childhood was decidedly peculiar. Her mother walked out when she was 16, took up with a journalist, who had been researching a biography of Jean-Marie and ended up seducing his wife. Le Pen did not see her mother for 15 years: “My world fell apart.” Huguette Fatna, a Martinican who is godmother to Le Pen’s second daughter, told me that her mother’s exit “tore her apart”. And that was not the end of it. In 1987, after a bitter divorce case, Jean-Marie gave an interview in which he declared of his wife with characteristic bombast, “If she hasn’t got money, she could always become a cleaner.” Pierrette’s response was to pose for Playboy in a skimpy French maid’s outfit. The girls were shattered. Le Pen wrote: “It was an act of unbelievable psychological violence that she inflicted on us.”

 …  “What she lived through when she was young, and then the three babies and the divorce, all reinforced her will to fight,” says Fatna, who helped her at the time. Le Pen puts it this way: “It takes a lot to destabilise me.”

What is so intriguing is that the battle she has chosen to fight is the same as her father’s. This was not a given. If there was one daughter who everybody thought would take up the Le Pen struggle, it was the eldest sister, Marie-Caroline. She was the first to go into local politics, standing as a young FN candidate at her first election in 1985 against Nicolas Sarkozy, then the mayor of Neuilly. Marie-Caroline was later elected a regional councillor in the Paris region, a post she held for 12 years. “Marie-Caroline was far more politicised,” says Edouard Ferrand, who knew the Le Pen girls at the time and is now an FN member of the European Parliament: “And Yann took charge of organising the big political events. But Marine was completely apart from all of that.”

For a while, “she didn’t think about politics”, says Gilbert Collard, a lawyer who represented Le Pen’s mother against Jean-Marie in their divorce case. Le Pen was set on a career as a lawyer, having studied at the University of Paris-Assas and then entered the Paris bar. “She was a very good lawyer. She had conviction and courage and a desire to win,” says Collard, who is now a far-right deputy. Le Pen was not up all night with just her books. She was also known for heavy partying, chain-smoking, and as a bon vivant: “laddish” is the word she uses, unapologetically. “She wasn’t at all uptight,” says Edouard Ferrand, a member of her social circle at the time, with a blush.

“I WANTED TO DO OTHER THINGS,” SAYS LE PEN: “BUT POLITICS IS A VIRUS.
IF YOU HAVE IT, YOU CAN NEVER GET AWAY FROM IT”

 … In the competition for a place on the FN’s national executive, she was up against traditionalist old-timers calling for “Tous sauf Marine” – anybody but Marine.

Yet there is a single-minded ruthlessness about Le Pen, which also explains the calculated charm and professional smile that she can turn on and, just as abruptly, off. When she stood for the FN leadership in 2011, determined to forge a more respectable party, it was against Jean-Marie’s preferred heir, the ultra-nationalist Bruno Gollnisch. Her decision to run stemmed from an unbending faith both in the project and in her capacity to bring about the dédiabolisation (de-demonisation) which her father had systematically resisted, by distancing the party from his anti-Semitic and xenophobic outrages. Over the years, father and daughter had repeatedly rowed about the direction to take the party. “Believe me, he was not at all happy when I decided to run,” she says. In the end, he swung behind her, but only weeks before the vote. “All his life – and he has led this party for over 40 years – he has found it difficult to step back,” Le Pen says. His view, she suggests, was simple: “the FN, c’est moi.”

The ties that bind

 At the heart of Le Pen’s quest for power is this relationship with Jean-Marie: a constant tension between affection and rivalry, duty andrevolt. “With the father these girls have, either you rebel or you surrender,” says Gilbert Collard: “If you don’t react, if you don’t stand up to him, you disappear.”

 … The decision to expel Jean-Marie, says Nicolas Bay, the FN’s secretary-general, was “a moment of personal courage”. Not everybody around Le Pen thought her capable of it. The last straw was when Jean-Marie repeated his claim that the Holocaust was a “detail” of the history of the second world war. It imperilled Le Pen’s efforts to purge the party. The split with her father “was extremely hard on a personal level”, she says. “Jean-Marie Le Pen is an unreasonable personality, with a histrionic, theatrical side,” says Gilbert Collard. “We couldn’t continue our political struggle with all these discordant notes.” Her team insists that the row was not staged, pointing to the public hurt Jean-Marie inflicted on her when he declared himself “ashamed that she carries my name”, urged her to “marry her concubine” (Louis Aliot and Le Pen are not married) and railed against the “gay lobby” of advisers close to her within the party. Collard suggests that, far from feeling wounded, her father revelled in their break-up: “Jean-Marie Le Pen has lived his life through opposing others. He is at ease with conflict.”

Yet the uncompromising brutality of her decision to expel her father underlines how alike they are. “Marine”, her mother once told a French newspaper, “is the absolute clone of her father.” They share the same strengths, including a canny reading of political space and how to exploit it. Jean-Marie built his protest movement around the Fifth Republic’s demands for a strong party system. Le Pen is trying to exploit the traditional parties’ current fragility and engineer their collapse. They are both, in their own way, political narcissists.

 … Above all, father and daughter share a cold and calculating political instinct. She suffered young from his political choices; he became the victim of hers. Le Pen does not deny the likeness. Of the three daughters, she admits, “physically, I am the one who most looks like him, and the one whose character is the most like his.” After all, she could have chosen to stay out of public life, like her sisters (one of whom went off to work for Club Med for a while), and retreat instead to her suburban house west of Paris, where she has lived since a Doberman belonging to her father killed one of her beloved cats. Yet here she is, like her father before her, back on the campaign trail at the price of inevitable absences from her own teenagers. She recognises that she has chosen to make “enormous sacrifices”, and with her eyes wide open. “The heart either breaks or hardens,” she says, quoting a French proverb: “Mine hardened.”

 … Does she ever worry about her own safety? With a chillingly steady gaze, she replies: “I am impermeable to fear.”

More on Marine Le Pen, notably these:

• The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's
Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists,
Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”…

• The Question Arises: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist
or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

Donald Trump either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the defined boundaries of federal power

Donald Trump’s concept of the federal government’s proper role ought to make any conservative cringe 

writes Benny Huang.

Last week, the GOP’s leading candidate answered a question from an Afghanistan veteran named Robert Kitelinger who asked, “In your opinion, what are the top three functions of the United States government?” Trump listed security, healthcare, and education.

He said something a little different in August 2015 when he listed his top priorities as the military, veterans and jobs. These two statements are not necessarily irreconcilable of course.

 … Perhaps his priorities shifted over the last eight months? That’s possible however unlikely. A better explanation is that he can’t remember what he pretended to believe yesterday much less what he pretended to believe eight months ago. That was then and this is now.

 … Though I’m not certain the questioner intended to put Trump’s conservatism to the test, he did and Trump flunked. Two of those three issues should have nothing whatsoever to do with the federal government. I’m speaking of healthcare and education, neither of which can be found among the federal government’s enumerated powers. According to the tenth amendment, those powers should be left “to the States respectively; or to the People.”

Security is and should be a federal responsibility. The preamble to the Constitution tells us that one of the federal government’s purposes is to “provide for the common defence.” … What’s happening on our southern border can rightfully be called an invasion and no one’s doing anything about it.

So Donald Trump is standing on solid ground with the first of three functions he named. Yet he’s weak even here because there’s reason to believe that he doesn’t mean what he says. Political positions are as disposable to him as wives or that pledge he signed to support the eventual Republican nominee. Nor does Trump strike me as the type of guy who really cares about the tidal wave of third world immigrants—both legal and illegal—crashing on our shores. He is, after all, a member of the employer class which has always sought to reduce the price of labor by increasing its supply. In the past he’s admitted to using illegal aliens from Latin America as landscapers at a golf course he owns in Florida.

 … I suspect Trump’s lying about security, most of all border security, because it’s hard to imagine a man who has benefitted so handsomely from cheap labor actually turning off the immigration spigot. He might do it if only because he will want to be reelected and it will be hard to make people forget the promise he made a thousand times over.

But what about the other two functions of the US government Trump identified? This is where Trump goes off the rails.

 … Donald Trump … either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the defined boundaries of federal power. It’s hard for him to imagine any government being too massive or too powerful as long as he’s at the head of it. That scares me, though not as much as the fact that he’s leading the Republican delegate count with only seventeen states to go.

1843: The Economist Looks Towards the Future

The Economist has started publishing a new sister magazine, 1843 (after the year of the original weekly's founding; audio interview), with such in-depth articles as Marine Le Pen, l'étrangère and Why Do We Work So Hard?

Documentary on the Great Cinematic Epic That Never Came to Be: Jodorowsky's Dune

Being released in France right now is Frank Pavich's celebrated documentary on the filming of Jodorowsky's Dune, the genesis of one of cinema's greatest epics that never was.

The Chilean writer, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing 15 years ago (besides my many interviews with his frequent co-worker Jean Giraud (Moebius)) drips with passion as he talks of all the artists he will bring together to make a film of Frank Herbert's science fiction bestseller.

Wikipedia:

director Alejandro Jodorowsky … proceeded to approach … Pink Floyd and Magma for some of the music; artists H. R. Giger, Chris Foss, and Jean Giraud for set and character design; Dan O'Bannon for special effects; and Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Amanda Lear, and others for the cast.

Various trailers exist for Jodorowsky's Dune, which did not come to pass, when the producers lost faith in the Paris-based film director, theater director, screenwriter, playwright, actor, author, poet, producer, composer, musician, and, last but not least, comic book writer, not to mention spiritual guru.

(Jodo's attitude probably did little to help, when the man came back with the screenplay for a 14-hour movie and when he was quoted as saying, “I don’t want to make industrial films to earn money, to make a living. I want to make films to lose money, films that oblige me to search employment in other creations.”)

Wikipedia, again:

The film notes that Jodorowsky's script, extensive storyboards, and concept art were sent to all major film studios, and argues that these were inspirational to later film productions, including the Alien, Star Wars, and Terminator series. In particular, the Jodorowsky-assembled team of O'Bannon, Foss, Giger and Giraud went on to collaborate on the 1979 film Alien.
 
"It was a great undertaking to do the script," Jodowrosky says in the film. Speaking of Herbert's novel, he says: "It's very, it's like Proust, I compare it to great literature."

Should we love Che Guevara?

Fortunately for musicians, artists, authors, homosexuals, and t-shirt salespeople, Che’s reign of terror came to a sudden end when he and his companion Willi were caught by two Bolivian soldiers as he was attempting to export the Cuban revolution to that unwilling nation. Che dropped his fully-loaded weapons and surrendered without a fight.

Was Che Guevara a racist and homophobic? asks J J Cohn on Quora (gracias por InstaPundit).

Should we love Che Guevara?

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster.  Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's 'labor camp' system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.

Related: "I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated": A Recap of No Pasarán's Che Guevara Posts

Obesity: The Evolution of Man

Le Monde's Serguei on the evolution of man

Pointers for Tourists in Paris Cafés and Restaurants

As an expat, The Daily Telegraph's Stephen Clarke's thought that he would

give a few pointers for tourists here, and not just about waiters. They’re the kind of things I talk about in my books, especially Talk to the Snail, which has a whole chapter about getting served (or not), and Paris Revealed, my insider’s guide to the city. (You see, the self-plugging instinct needed to express itself somewhere.) So here are some bullet points to help visitors avoid taking a hit or shooting themselves in the foot.

• First and most importantly, begin every conversation in Paris with a smile and a loud “bonjour”. This will eradicate at least 50% of all known problems. In the evening it’s “bonsoir” of course. Even if the other person doesn’t say it, you should do so cheerily and it will show them that you are a well-meaning and self-confident person, and that kind of person usually has a good time in Paris.

• If you want a latte in Paris, and you aren’t in a Starbucks, ask for a café crème bien blanc. If you want a cappucino, you can try, but it’ll cost you, and you might be better off settling for the simpler  and cheaper “un crème, s’il vous plaît.”

• If you want a small beer, ask for “un demi”. This is 25cl, about half a pint. They might offer you “une pinte” – half a litre – yes the French still love imperial measures, whatever they might tell you. Note that there is no such thing as a “grand demi”. A demi is a demi. The waiter will list the beers and you have to watch out for pronunciation. Kronenbourg is “kron-on-boor”, Carlsberg is “karlsss-bear-k”, Heineken is “ay-nay-ken”. The slightly taster beers on tap are Grimbergen (“greem-bear-gain”), Leffe (“leff”) and Affligem (“aff-lee-game”). Worth a try.

• Have a close look at the wine menu. Sometimes, a bottle of wine is the same price as six glasses, in which case you might as well order by the glass.

• Be aware that soft drinks, including mineral waters, cost a fortune. The French almost force kids to drink coffee and alcohol to save money. If you’re offered water and don’t want an expensive bottle just say “une carafe”. They’ll bring you one. And you can ask for a refill at any time. (The same goes for bread, by the way. You can ask for more at any time – within reason, of course.)

• Never break the two rules of a French café. Don’t order a coffee at the bar then go and sit down. There are two different prices, and two different tills, for these orders. And don’t go to a table laid for lunch or dinner and order just a drink. You’re wasting everyone’s time.

• At a café you can go and sit at any free table (while obeying the above rule). In a restaurant, always find a waiter or waitress and ask. There might be a waiting list or reservations.

• Don’t try to order until everyone has decided what they want, or has prepared the key questions that will help them make their decision. Waiters are busy and haven’t got time to stand about while people um and er.

• Don’t mention the word “végétarien”. It will only cause unnecessary panic. They’ll usually have something veggie without realizing it. If not, simply ask for one of their salads “sans le jambon” or “sans le poulet” (without ham or chicken). Just don’t try and be swanky and go off menu. You’ll only annoy the chef.

• Tips. On most French menus there’s a 15% service charge, so tips aren’t compulsory. For a drink at the bar of a café, leave 10 cents. For a sit-down drink, 50 cents or a euro is fine. For a good lunch or dinner in an ordinary café or restaurant, three or four euros is OK. In a smarter place, you’re going to have to leave paper money. Up to you how much you want the waiter or waitress to love you.

So there you have it. It’s like going on safari. You don’t provoke the lions, do you? Obey the rules and you will get excellent service, unless you come across a real rogue beast who short-changes you or brings you two litres of beer when you only wanted 25cl. In which case, avoid confrontation by complaining calmly, as if you’re an old hand at all this; don’t go there again; and make sure via Twitter or elsewhere that everyone else knows about the danger.

Free Short Story From the Upcoming Vampire Musketeers Book

Head over to Sarah Hoyt's weblog for a Free, Complete Short Story from the upcoming Sword and Blood, which you can pre-order at According to Hoyt.

This story is set in the world of Vampire Musketeers, and it is the origin story for Aramis.  There will also, eventually, be origin stories for Porthos and of course Athos.  We already have D’Artagnan’s in Sword and Blood.

If you like it, consider pre-ordering Sword and Blood, which comes out Monday.

Click to see more of No Pasarán's Sarah Hoyt posts…

Did the Serial Comma Take a Hit?

In a series of three items or more, I like to think of the items as those of a list (a list of equals) preceded by bullet points. Hence, the need for the serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma or (perhaps best of all) the listing comma (thanks to Maggie's Farm, to Bird Dog, and to the internet for the link).

For example, writing "For breakfast, we had eggs, bacon, OJ and pancakes" is akin to writing

For breakfast, we had:
• eggs
• bacon
• OJ
and pancakes

Doesn't the list look wrong, raw, mistaken, or unfinished? It looks even worse if one bullet point is missing from earlier in the list:

For breakfast, we had:
• eggs
bacon
• OJ
• and pancakes

Even though there is a case for the final "and" substituting for the final bullet point, try adding a bullet point to the last item as well:

For breakfast, we had:
• eggs
• bacon
• OJ
• and pancakes

And ergo, each item in a list needs a (listing) comma between it and the previous item:

For breakfast, we had eggs, bacon, OJ, and pancakes.

The clincher is this: whether there is a final comma or not does not bother people who don't care about the issue one way or the other; while its absence does grate on those who do care about the issue (and about the visuals). Thus, making sure it is present turns out to be a win-win for everyone.

Now the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto brings in a teaser: Is a man named Miller being engaged to one woman (his girlfriend named Jody) or to two women (to one unnamed woman, i.e., his unidentified girlfriend, in addition to another, i.e., a woman who is not his girlfriend and whose first name we are notified about)?

Miller: "my girlfriend, Jody, and I were about to get engaged."

I used to think that it was practically impossible to make a case against the listing comma (not just display a lack of interest in the li'l bugger at the end, not caring one way or the other, but make an actual case against it), but over the years I have seen one or two instances thereof, and one Wall Street Journal pundit, James Taranto, manages to do so:

We bring this up to make a grammatical point. The Washington Post does not use what is known as the "Oxford comma" or "serial comma." Thus you would write "bacon, lettuce and tomato" rather than "bacon, lettuce, and tomato."

In the case of the BLT that's a distinction without a difference. But look carefully at Miller's statement "my girlfriend, Jody, and I were about to get engaged." Without the Oxford comma, the meaning is clear: Jody is an appositive; he is identifying her as his girlfriend, then naming her. With the Oxford comma, however, the meaning would be ambiguous--an ambiguity on a slippery slope to polygamy.

To be clear, I am not 100% convinced that the above amounts to an indictment of the listing comma, which I continue to champion, but it's an interesting perspective in any case.

I found a similar instance myself regarding a newspaper report on the Catholic liturgy many, many years ago, and if ever I find it again (provided I kept a copy), I will add it to this post.
Related:  • Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference!
Lynne Truss is the author of several other books, with Bonnie Timmons, from The Girl's Like Spaghetti (Why, You Can't Manage without Apostrophes!) to Twenty-Odd Ducks (Why, every punctuation mark counts!)…
• Should the Semicolon follow the diastole, the trigon, the interpunct, and the diple?
• The Case Against the Misuse and Overuse of [Square] Brackets (and Parentheses)

  

 Update (cheers to Anne-Elisabeth Moutet):

I Think My Dog Is a Democrat

Thank God Instapundit is back.

It has been seven days (it felt like seven weeks!) without any of the PJ Media websites
here in Europe (not just Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit), and now they all finally appeared again.

(Sometimes they feel like the only things that keep me sane) :)

I just finished going through old posts, and made it to the last posts I remember reading, five full "Earlier Posts" pages back.

FYI, it turns out that for me, at least, the blackout due to a fairly massive DDOS attack lasted from March 22 to March 29, or exactly a week.

One of the first posts I chanced upon after seven days concerned Bryan Lewis's I Think My Dog's A Democrat…

One Small Problem with Cartoons and Pundits Mocking Conservatives

Again, we are treated to cartoons mocking conservatives (drawn by cartoonists foreign as well as domestic"), based upon nothing that the conservatives say, upon nothing that the conservatives do, and upon nothing that the conservatives even go so far as to think.

As Ann Coulter writes in Mugged, there's a reason the left has to always find code words for racism behind everything conservatives say: because there is nothing remotely racist in what they are actually saying (or actually thinking, for that matter).

Xavier Gorce's Le Monde reminder from 2008:

This country was not founded on respect to authority but, to the contrary, on disrespect and distrust of any authority that has not proven itself worthy of respect

Be sure to make regular visits to the weblog of Bojidar Marinov, an author whose writings have been linked several times on No Pasarán — notably his The French healthcare system, even if taken at its best, is like an expensive jewel on a beggar’s neck.

The author of articles like Political Opportunism Doesn’t Fight Tyranny, It Perpetuates It, Marinov pens such gems as It’s Time to Start Teaching Our Kids Disrespect To “Authority” (warning: strong religious language). You may not agree with everything he says, but he sure makes a powerful case for everything he writes about. You may not like the religious tenor of his words, but he sure makes a case for Christians, and for their pastors, being (or, rather, having been in the past) the strongest revolutionaries the world has even seen.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

• Political Opportunism Doesn’t Fight Tyranny, It Perpetuates It:

The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate … would be completely useless outside the US, where local “magistrates” are simply employees of the central government. In the UK, for example, the resistance of local officials to tyranny would be nothing less than rebellion no different than the rebellion of private individuals; a lesser magistrate is simply not a magistrate anymore if he fails to obey the will of his sovereign, the centralized state. Thus, in its pure form, the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate works as a deterrent to tyranny only where tyranny has already been pushed back and thus room for independent action has been legally secured; and in our modern world, this means only a few polities in the world, limited to the US, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, and may be South Africa – and these polities trace their liberties back not to bloodless reforms but to violent revolutions which forced the central government to agree to limit its powers.

 … The words of Mather Byles – a nephew of Cotton Mather – should always be before our eyes before we rush to support a local official who is allegedly putting up resistance to higher authorities:

Which is better – to be ruled by one tyrant three thousands miles away, or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?

Therefore, before we decide that a local magistrate’s resistance is an application of the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate, we need to ask ourselves two questions: […Read the whole thing™]

• Comparing Ferguson, November 2014, with… Boston, December 1773 (!)
— Hypocrisy Is the Worst Possible Policy:

By 1773, about half of the colonists had adopted a rebellious attitude towards the British government, and even against their local governments which happened to be loyal to the Crown. This rebellious attitude didn’t come from reading John Locke or the French Enlightenment; both Locke and the French philosophes did not exercise much influence among the common folk in the colonies; and even among the educated elite, their influence was not felt until the late 1760s.

It was the Reformed preachers in the colonies who denounced the British tyrannical government and built the ideological foundation for armed rebellion.

According to the commonly accepted theology at the time, borrowed from Calvin and the English Puritans of the previous century, tyrannical government was not a lawfully established government and therefore all acts of resistance against such government were Biblically justified.  Sermons like the following, from Jonathan Mayhew, a Congregational minister at West Church in Boston in the 1760s, were commonplace:

It is blasphemy to call tyrants and oppressors, God’s ministers. They are more properly the messengers of Satan to buffet us. No rulers are properly God’s ministers, but such as are just, ruling in the fear of God. When once magistrates act contrary to their office, and the end of their institution; when they rob and ruin the public, instead of being guardians of its peace and welfare; they immediately cease to be the ordinance and ministers of God; and no more deserve that glorious character than common pirates and highwaymen. So that whenever that argument for submission, fails, which is grounded upon the usefulness of magistracy to civil society, (as it always does when magistrates do hurt to society instead of good) the other argument, which is taken from their being the ordinance of God, must necessarily fail also; to person of a civil character being God’s minister, in the sense of the apostle, any farther than he performs God’s will, by exercising a just and reasonable authority; and ruling for the good of the subject.…. When magistrates rob and ruin the people, instead of being guardians of its peace and welfare, they immediately cease to be the ordinance and ministers of God, and no more deserve that glorious character than common pirates and highwaymen.

 … We have become heartless Romans in our thinking, and we think about justice as children of Caesar: in terms of legal technicalities, not in terms of real justice and righteousness. We have become statists, turning the legal statutes of godless governments into moral imperatives. We have taught our children to do so as well. It is only a matter of time before they start being herded to concentration camps because “you don’t resist a cop.”

In order to return to the Biblical view of justice, we need to start thinking ethically, not legalistically. We need to lay the ax at the root of every law the governments in the US impose on us, and compare it to the Bible.

We need to start every discussion about laws or crimes or policies with the question: “What does the Bible say about it?” And we need to ask this question first and foremost of what the government does and what its officers do. The righteousness of a nation depends on the spiritual maturity of its individual citizens, but let’s not forget that the spiritual maturity of a person is measured by his ability to judge and discern good and evil based on God’s Law (1 Cor. 2:15; Heb. 5:14), not by his willingness to submit to godless governments.

 … We need to restore our Black-Robed Regiment and they need to thunder from our pulpits condemnation on our tyrannical government and its brutal henchmen. We need them to lead us in re-asserting the rights given to us by our Creator, which we have allowed to be re-defined by the State. We need to demand that the special rights for government employees be canceled and cops be just as subject to scrutiny and resistance when they are outside the boundary of the law as any private citizen out there …

 … The more we refuse to do these things, the farther away we are from the spirit of the Founders of this great nation, and the closer we are to even worse tyranny than what they fought against. And the more we refuse to do these things while celebrating those Founders, the more we reveal ourselves as hypocritical, and the less able we are to influence our culture.

• How Far Back Are America’s Pastors Willing to Roll the Ball?:

For the last 100 years not only have the pastors refused to challenge unjust laws, they have refused to even bring the Bible to whatever laws the different levels of civil government have passed and enforced, to check whether they were unjust or not. In fact, worse than that, for the last 100 years the pastors in this country have openly declared that the Bible doesn’t have anything to do with the political realm, that the Gospel is limited to the individual soul and the institutional church, and therefore has nothing to say about the powers of the land. “It’s not the pastors’ job to talk politics,” has been the refrain. And since politics is where the issues of justice and injustice have been discussed and resolved, this has effectively barred the church from any authoritative voice in discussing justice or injustice.

Note well: it was not the civil government that barred the church from speaking justice. It was the pastors themselves.

 … If the pastors in this nation were faithful to the historical example of the Black-Robed Regiment of the Revolutionary Era, the pulpits in this country would have been thundering with denunciations of all these government violations of the Ten Commandments, from the public school system, taxation, and regulations, to police, immigration restrictions, and foreign wars. Civil disobedience and rebellion against unjust laws would have started much earlier, a century ago, or, at the very least, 40 years ago.

• It’s Time to Start Teaching Our Kids Disrespect To “Authority”:

I can almost hear God’s sarcasm. “Ya like that conservative idol of yours, ‘respect to authority,’ don’tcha? Let Me see how you like living under its legislative and executive power.”

And this is not the first time. We all remember Nancy Pelosi and her arrogant claim that “Obamacare is now the law, you will obey it.” Or, “Roe v. Wade is the law, we must all obey it.” Etc., etc.

The more conservatives bow before that idol, the more their enemies in the political arena use that same idol to impose more tyranny, and the more God laughs at their idolatry.

You want more “respect to authority”? Here, have government-protected and sponsored abortions. Have government-enforced and sponsored sodomy. Have Islam in government schools. Have gun regulations and control. Have higher taxes. Have inflation. Have business regulations. Have IRS and control over pulpits. Have FEMA camps. Have the NSA and the TSA and invasion of privacy.

And . . . don’t forget to “respect authority” every time you protest against those. You have the right to not like all these, but as long as you obey and “respect authority” – which means your local cop who will arrest you if you don’t obey – everything will be good, and you are safe, and you won’t suffer the consequences.

And teach your kids to obey and “respect authority.” This way, they will always be safe. Especially when some day they are told to board the cattle cars.

God has a way to mock those who trust in idols. He has the time to wait until Americans – and especially American Christians and conservatives – feel the full burden of the “respect to authority” idol on their backs. They are beginning to feel it, but they are still unwilling to smash the idol to pieces. It’s so attractive, after all, and it promises all this security and prosperity – and it sounds so, er, “conservative.” So God has more of it for them.

Until one Fourth of July they wake up and remember that this country was not founded on respect to authority but to the contrary, on disrespect and distrust of any authority that has not proven itself worthy of respect. It was founded on enthusiastic popular resistance against authority. It was founded on the sermons of men who used the pulpits to declare null and void any authority that violated the rights of the free citizens.

From those religious dissenters, the Pilgrims and the Puritans, to the Battle of Athens TN (1946), this country was driven by a spirit of defiance to men in power who violated the rights of private individuals. For 45 years, during the Cold War, it was this tradition of defiance that inspired the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. The same tradition was at the foundation of Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall!” speech. The same tradition inspired hundreds of American movies from before Hollywood went socialist and statist; and these movies taught people around the world that there was a country in the world where the individual citizen can stand up to government bureaucrats and even shoot them, if they acted illegally.

And when they wake up and remember this, they will clearly see that the advance of tyranny in the last 20 years was based on one single factor:

The Christian and conservative worship of the idol of “respect to authority,” an idol their forefathers detested, despised, spit upon, and actively opposed, and thus built the freest nation in the world.

• When They Come for the Smaller Groups…:

[The tactics of Germany's Nazis] was clear:

The government never has the resources and the manpower to terrorize the whole society. State terrorism, therefore, is done by separating and marginalizing social groups: first smaller groups, then larger groups, until each group is subdued.

This is the old Roman principle of divide et impera: divide your enemies so that neither of them associate with the others. Thus, none of them will come to each other’s aid. Then your hand is free to conquer them one by one.

 … The Soviet Communists did the same. They also started with a broad appeal to all the “classes,” marginalizing and demonizing only small groups. The “capitalists.” Then the priests. Then the “intellectuals.” Then the rival leftist parties, like the Mensheviks. Then certain ethnic groups were demonized: Ukrainians, Georgians, Chechens, the German Anabaptist rural communities along the Volga River. Then the kulaks (the wealthy Cossack peasants of Ukraine and South Russia) were singled out and exterminated. Then the category of “kulak” was expanded to include the not-so-wealthy peasants – until whole regions in Ukraine were starved to death (the Holodomor), while the rest of the country watched passively. Then came the military elite.

World War II put a temporary stop to it. But it also created a new class of men who were trained to fight and suppress their fear – the veterans. So the NKVD started targeting veterans even before the war ended. (Solzhenitsyn was taken from his artillery unit in February 1945, three months before the end of the war.) Thousands of veterans went to the GULags straight from the front lines, not even having the chance to see their families again. It was Solzhenitsyn who later realized that if the people didn’t remain passive but united to shoot at government agents when they came to do arrests, millions of lives would have been spared.
 
The Chinese Communists did the same with their minorities. In the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, people with glasses were singled out as enemies and shot or worked to death.

I still remember the way the Bulgarian Communist government treated the ethnic Turkish minority in Bulgaria in the 1980s. (I was born and grew up in a predominantly Turkish part of my town, so I knew the truth about the Turkish minority, and I knew the propaganda was lies.)

Everywhere, totalitarian governments do the same: one group after another, singled out, marginalized, demonized, and then safely destroyed or brutalized. And the rest of the population remains silent. Why? Because “I am not a Jew, or a Ukrainian, or a Menshevik, or a kulak, or a person with glasses.”

The massacre in Waco [of May 2015] bears all the marks of this tactics. A group is picked so small and marginal that most people won’t associate with them. The group is then marginalized and demonized, and all kinds of false accusations are said about them – violence, illegal drugs, illegal weapons, etc. Then, when the group is so marginalized that the majority of the population won’t trust them, and won’t take their word for anything, the government ambushes them and guns them down. The group is scared and subdued. The police are trained and conditioned to not question orders – they will need that conditioning for later, when the “enemy” is moms, or old people, or kids.

And the public? The public is conditioned to disengage. “I didn’t say anything because I was not a biker.”

 … The pattern is clear: Since the American public is too large an elephant to eat, it must be subdued in small bites: black inner city kids, bikers, off-the-gridders, Christian activists, gun-owners, etc. Every time, the group must be small enough and marginalized enough so that the general population find it easy and safe to disengage.

British cops ignored a child sex ring for 11 years but not for one moment will they tolerate a white guy using the word “towelhead”

Benny Huang is kind enough to provide us with a list of Stuff That Will Get You Arrested in the UK (While Child Rapists Go Free):

Matthew Doyle of London ruined his life when he confronted a Muslim woman in his neighborhood and asked her to “explain Brussels”—a reference to the recent Muslim-perpetrated terrorist attack in the capital of the EU. “Nothing to do with me,” the woman replied, a response that failed to satisfy Doyle. The two parted ways, which should have been the end of it.

But then Doyle made the fatal mistake of recounting the incident on Twitter. His story was not well received in cyberspace where several people tweeted their disapproval, some of whom called upon his employer, a well-known London talent agency, to fire him. Finally, Doyle did the unthinkable and—gasp!—tweeted a slur. “Who cares if I insulted some towelhead?? Really.” Shortly thereafter the bobbies were leading him away in handcuffs.

 … You’d think that the cops would have bigger fish to fry. This is Britain after all, which happens to have the highest violent crime rate in Europe. Shouldn’t the police concern themselves with street gangs or something? It might free up some of the cops’ time and resources if they’d quit policing internet thought crimes for a while. Just a suggestion.

It bears remembering that this is the same country where multiple child sex rings were exposed starting in 2013, the largest and best known of which was centered on the city of Rotherham. The Rotherham scandal involved mostly Pakistani men trafficking school aged white British girls. Authorities were alerted to the existence of the sex ring in 2002 but chose to do nothing for fear of inciting hatred against religious and ethnic minorities. A whistleblower was pressured to keep quiet and ordered to take an “ethnicity and diversity course.”

So there you have it—British law enforcement ignored a child sex ring for eleven years but not for one moment will they tolerate a white guy using the word “towelhead.”

Indeed, the New York Times has identified the true crime of Rotherham: Westerners' "Easy, Powerful Stereotypes" Against "Asian" Perpetrators Which "Overshadow the Bigger Picture".

And the Rotherham sex ring isn’t even the first example that Benny Huang has read of authorities brushing pedophilia under the rug because the perps belonged to a well-organized, militant minority.

 … Perhaps the most candid article I have ever read from the British press came from Scottish journalist Hugo Rifkind, who wrote in 2009 “We Brits Don’t Do Free Speech, Thank Goodness.” I found Rifkind’s defense of state-sponsored censorship abhorrent but at least he was honest enough to admit that it exists. Plenty of people rationalize that speech is still free in the UK because only really bad people are being arrested for saying really bad things. Rifkind’s column called on his countrymen to stop lying to themselves and just admit that speech has been criminalized and most of his readers like it that way. “Yes you are against free speech,” he wrote. “Almost all Brits are. It’s in our nature.”

Speech can be a crime in Britain—and it doesn’t even have to contain a threat of violence. For those who might be travelling to that island nation in the near future I offer a small sampling of mere words that can get you arrested in the UK.

Read Benny Huang's sampling of transgressions, which include a Nelson Mandela joke, displaying the Bible in its entirety, and quoting… Quoting who? Adolf Hitler? Stalin? No. Quoting Winston Churchill!

In the UK you can be arrested for preaching against homosexuality on a street corner or for saying, from the pulpit no less, that Islam is satanic. You can also be jailed for saying that Mohammed married a nine year old girl. That last one isn’t entirely accurate—Mohammed married a six-year old girl named Ayesha but waited until she was nine to consummate the marriage. Or at least that’s what the Hadith says. Just to be safe, steer clear of saying anything that might anger Muslims or homosexuals, Britain’s most favored groups, who are always and everywhere protected from offense. If they feel butt hurt about something you will be arrested. And let’s face it, those two groups are always butt hurt about something, the little darlings.

Just how did Britain descend to this level of madness?

Benny Huang quotes two factors that lead to the criminalization of mere words…

In the meantime, Benny adds, this insane fear we have of offending Muslims is getting people killed—and raped.

Lessons From Our Father, The Man of Infinite Wisdom, the All-Knowing Barack Obama

Let's see if I understand what transpired in the wake of the 2014 elections, followed by Barack Obama's decision to unilaterally use executive orders to pursue immigration "reform"; if I understand the left's arguments correctly, and if we take them to their logical conclusion, this is what we must conclude:

• A leftist is an unusually sterling creature, an infinitely wise being who is more intelligent than the rest of us, who is more thoughtful than the rest of us, who is more generous that the rest of us, who is more humanitarian than the rest of us, and who therefore understands all problems correctly and who instinctively knows the solution to every problem that faces us.

• Thank God there is one man, a man of infinite intelligence, a man of infinite compassion, a man of infinite wisdom, who understands this more than any other, more even than any other leftist. (If he says that and that the public debt ought to balloon to $7 trillion — more than ever before, then who are we, and who especially are those treacherous Republicans — it's all their fault anyway! —  to question his infinite wisdom?) This nigh-divine being is, the Lord be praised, in the White House.

• Indeed, Barack Obama is so in tune with the American citizen, he is such an embodiment of the American people that when 2/3 of the voters do not come out to vote in the 2014 mid-terms — a vote that led to a shellacking of Obama's Democratic Party — he knows what these Americans think, he knows what causes they are supporting, he knows his people as his own sons and daughters.

(By some strange coincidence, all Americans who refrained from voting in 2014 — 100% of 'em — sympathize with, and they all of them support, not the positions of the Republican Party, but those of Obama himself.  It is not, say (off the top of my head), 40% support (more or less) the Democrats, 35% support the Republicans, and the rest are undecided or don't care; no, 100% support the deeply wise, wise views that only Barack Obama has. This also explains how good it was for the "father of the nation" to cheat in the 2012 election, by having the IRS cripple Romney's conservatives.)

• Therefore it is nothing but a blessing for the father of the nation to politicize every decision he takes (have Obamacare wait until after the 2012 election for the full price thereof to become known; (secretly) tell the Russian president to wait until after the 2012 election to go ahead with cooperation; wait until after the 2014 mid-term to announce his executive action on immigration…)

• It ensues that Republican leaders are (all) wrong, that Republican voters are (all) wrong, and that — for the good of the people — the Republican party probably ought to be banned. Alright, perhaps not banned, but purged of the evil leaders who do not understand all the good that this man is doing for us, all the blessings that he is bestowing on the American people. ("Yes we can" fundamentally transform America; "Yes we can" raise taxes, magnify government expenses, and triple the debt; "yes we can" create an army of bureaucrats; "yes we can" have the government and its bureaucrats intervening in as many lives as possible to "help" these wretched souls.)

• So, all these bitter citizens who cling to their bibles and guns need to have their thoughts changed to understand all the good that this "father of the nation" is doing for us, his children, and how stupid, and how egotistical, and how treacherous, and how backwards and reactionary it is to even dare oppose all those deeds. Re-education camps might come in handy here…

• The people must work with this genius in the White House, the wise, wise man who understands all problems and who knows the solution to all problems. (Just see the re-set with Russia, which has led to a non-antagonistic Kremlin, a Moscow that hasn't bothered America, or the West, or anybody else, since 2009 when the clueless cowboy Dubya left the White House.) They should not vote against him, and his decisions, and his henchman, they should just shut up and feel guilty and ashamed of their lack of knowledge and of openness to his infinite wisdom.

• Indeed, Obama is such a genius, such a humanitarian, that he probably ought (we should only be so lucky) made president for life. A Caesar, lionized to the heavens, like Che Guevara, Allende, Mao, Lenin, Musso— wait, scratch that last one.

• If you don't believe all of the above, and if you dare question, or get satirical about, this black man's policies, you are something akin to a traitor and a racist, if not both.

See also: How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State

The women marked for death by Islamic fatwa face threats with fear, courage

On the top of the Fox News home page, Pamela Geller appears among The women marked for death by Islamic fatwa [while facing] threats with fear, courage…

“There is a refusal to think about this era on its own terms” says the boogeyman for proselytizers of painless multiculturalism, a rumpled intellectual the French left loves to hate for challenging the its May 1968 orthodoxies

HE is the intellectual much of the French left loves to hate

writes Adam Nossiter in his New York Times profile of Alain Finkielkraut,
the writer whose rumpled look has racked up multiple magazine covers, the bookish essayist turned omnipresent media star and boogeyman for proselytizers of painless multiculturalism. Alain Finkielkraut’s mere presence in a television studio raises temperatures and sends accusations of racism flying.

 … After several dozen books, an influential weekly radio show, frequent interview requests and his induction in January into one of French civilization’s holiest — albeit most conservative — shrines, the Académie Française, Mr. Finkielkraut has no intention of shutting up.

 … The national audience for Mr. Finkielkraut’s themes, returned to obsessively and buttressed by a seamless web of references, is now larger than ever in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2015.

Before and after the attacks, those themes have not varied: Much of Islam is radically incompatible with French culture and society; Muslim immigrants represent a threat; French schools are crumbling under a mistaken multicultural outreach; the inherited corpus of French culture is in danger; and anti-Semitism is on the rise again, this time by way of Islam.

Many of the 2015 attackers were French. “Hatred of France is present in France,” Mr. Finkielkraut said in a recent interview. “What the attacks proved is that we have a redoubtable and determined enemy.”

 … “Today, when some, like me, speak of the problem of Islam, we are denounced as the successors of Maurras and Barrès,” said Mr. Finkielkraut, naming two influential far-right thinkers of pre-World War II France. “There is a refusal to think about this era on its own terms.”

MR. FINKIELKRAUT’S political roots are on the left, though.

 … His wife, the lawyer Sylvie Topaloff, has been quoted as lamenting the friends they have lost over her husband’s political views. Yet his ideas carry just enough of an old tradition of left-leaning nationalism in France — exemplified by one of his favorite authors, Charles Péguy — for him to be acceptable to the law-and-order faction in the ruling Socialist Party.

 … In Mr. Finkielkraut’s view, [Felicien Marceau, who did broadcasts for German-controlled Belgian radio during World War II, before fleeing — accused of collaborating with the Nazis] was blinded to the dangers of Hitler by the horrors of World War I; and the French left, obsessed because of fascism with the National Front, has been blind to the dangers of radical Islam.

 … The historian Mr. Nora, in the [Académie Française] induction speech, spoke of Mr. Finkielkraut’s “omnipresence” and noted that he was at the very top of a “blacklist” of those challenging the French left’s May 1968 orthodoxies.

“You are the one who breaks the public omerta, who says — and very well indeed — what the politicians can’t say, and what the journalists don’t want to,” Mr. Nora said.

… Mr. Finkielkraut, for all of his warnings about the difficulty — if not impossibility — of assimilating France’s approximately four million Muslims, is not advocating their expulsion. Yet he has no practical agenda for how to integrate them into French society.

He has little to say about the evident discrimination against Muslims in France today, or about the anti-Muslim violence since the attacks. The Muslim teacher who clashed with him on television, Wiam Berhouma, raised these points to no response — before telling Mr. Finkielkraut to shut up.

For Mr. Finkielkraut, the problem is with Muslims, not with France. “We’ve got to fix very clear rules,” he said in the interview. “Secularism has got to prevail. And we can’t compromise on the status of women.”

He is adamant about that last point. “Everything plays out there,” he says. “People are telling us that problem comes from all sorts of oppression by the West. No. The problem comes from the oppression by Islam of women. We’ve got to help the Muslims resolve this question.”

Easter traditions around the world, in pictures

The Daily Telegraph treats its readers to Easter traditions around the world, such as Sweden's Easter hare (not Easter bunny) and Australia's Easter bilby.

The Most People Lynched at One Time in American History, All 11 of Them, Were White

Many people, especially in Europe, assume that lynching was nothing less than a gratuitous crime, and a crime committed exclusively against blacks — specifically innocent blacks and in any case, whatever the race, innocents.

In fact, almost a third as many whites as blacks were lynched (think of the many cowboys on their steeds in the Old West), and just about always, it was a response to a very real crime that had, or seemed to have, been committed. As for lynchings of blacks, we always hear of how it was a Southern atrocity, if not an American one, but many fewer details about how most of them seemed to occur in places that amounted to being almost single-party (Democratic) states.

Indeed, the largest number of people killed by a mob in one place at one time in American history was 11, and all 11 of them were white.

Lynchings were not always done with a noose or a necklace, however, and this month marks the 125th anniversary of that "mass" killing — t'was not a roping, but (mostly) a shooting (inside the prison) — which occurred in New Orleans.

Indeed, lynching has certainly at times been — very — misguided, but at times it has seemed to be the only way to get justice for a crime.

When you learn that the 11 men were Sicilian, it should give you some sort of a hint of the criminal elements involved; when you learn that the reason their lives were disposed of was due to their acquittal for the murder of a police chief after the jury and/or the judge had allegedly been paid off by the Mafia, you will start understanding that sometimes lynchers have a good reason to be angry (see also: tar and feathers).

To this day, there is controversy about whether all of the 11 men belonged to the Mafia (see typical Hollywood film trailer below), but one thing that seems incontrovertible is that, in the wake of the lynchings, the Mafia decided that, contrary to their counterparts in Italy, American policemen should no longer be the targets of assassination.

The New York Herald, European Edition, March 15, 1891:

The late Chief of Police David C. Hennessy, of New Orleans, is avenged — not by the arm of the law, for the jury yesterday [March 13] acquitted six of the Sicilians accused of murdering him, and failed to agree on a verdict as to the other three — but by his indignant fellow citizens, who, satisfied that the men were guilty, sent them swiftly today to their last account.

Roused to action by speakers this morning, a mob made a dash for the prison, determined to take the Italians out and lynch them. Having burst through the prison doors, the mob fired volley after volley into the cells, and the men were riddled with bullets.

The New York Herald, European Edition, March 25, 1891:

The metropolitan police are working assiduously to check the rapidly-growing organization of Italians in the country, which has the avowed object of taking a sanguinary revenge upon Americans for the New Orleans lynching. Detective sergeants Perezzo and Lissaro have been especially detailed to watch the movements of their countrymen. They have succeeded in tracing the whereabouts of two leaders of the Mafia in New Orleans, who arrived in New York on Friday. They are being shadowed by Inspector Byrne’s men, who have orders that on the first sign of an attempt to incite their compatriots to violence the two are to be arrested. 

It seems that Obama likes the military only as a production line for historic “firsts” that he can take credit for

Our military is a mess, warns veteran Benny Huang. Don't assume it's accidental.

How it must have pained Marine Corps General John Paxton to tell Congress that his service might not be prepared for war. … He fretted over inadequate training and equipment particularly in the fields of communications, intelligence, and aviation.

 … Nor is the Marine Corps alone in its negative self-assessment. Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley told Congress that his branch is prepared to do battle with ISIS—and no other potential adversary. The US would probably lose a war with China, according to General Milley. Or with Russia, North Korea, or Iran. According to an Associated Press article: “Mark Milley says years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, constrained budgets and troop cuts have had a cumulative effect on the service.” Essentially, our military is capable of defeating the guys Obama described as the JV team but not a conventional force of any heft. Pathetic.

 … It doesn’t help that their commander-in-chief pretends not to hear what they’re saying. Just two months ago, President Obama delivered a State of the Union address in which he pooh-poohed the very idea that our armed forces are languishing in disrepair. Said Obama:

“I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.” (Emphasis added.)

What a dolt. Surely he can’t believe that our military’s combat effectiveness can be measured in dollars spent? The measure of any endeavor is always results. His argument reminds me that, once upon a time, Mr. Obama was just a left-wing community activist. He still sounds like one.

Didn’t President Obama consult his top military leaders before including that remark in his speech? If he had they would have told him what they told Congress last week—namely, that the military is woefully unprepared. If we rule out the possibility that he’s never had such a conversation with the brass then we must conclude that he flippantly dismissed what they told him, probably with the same nifty factoid about military expenditures that he used at the State of the Union. Obama clearly didn’t listen to his advisors because they told him something he didn’t want to hear.

Or is there another possibility? Could it be that this president knows quite well how much the military has atrophied under his administration and he’s pleased with it? In order to prove such a claim definitively I would have to get into his mind to determine his true motives, which I obviously can’t do. There’s nothing in his public statements to indicate a hostility toward the military, though there’s enough anecdotal evidence to indicate a casual disrespect, such as his now infamous latte salute and the completely unreasonable rules of engagement he imposed on combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a man with no military experience and it shows.

He’s also the president who opened all combat positions to women. That alone would have been a mistake but of course his administration exerted downward pressure to get women into elite units such as the Army Rangers without actually requiring them to meet standards. After two women “passed” the Ranger course this summer, it came to light that they had received special assistance and unlimited opportunities to reattempt portions of the course that they had failed. “We were under huge pressure to comply,” said one Ranger instructor. “It was very much politicized.”

It seems that Obama likes the military only as a production line for historic “firsts” that he can take credit for.
 … Obama has always admired people who hate US military power but we’re supposed to believe that he doesn’t.

Our military has fallen on tough times and it will be up to the next president to rehabilitate it. Whether the harm that has befallen our military is the result of mere neglect or actual malfeasance is difficult to determine though I wouldn’t rule out the latter.