Canada is perceived, even within its borders, as being cold, straight, and achingly dull. And cold. Did I mention cold? Also not as gay-friendly as, say, Britain, California or New York City.
Tired of being referred to by Walt (and others) as Prime Minister of Canuckistan, or Emperor of the Not-so-great White North, Blackie McBlackface has decided his country needs an image makeover.
Mr Socks, as his people lovingly call him, is seen here, accompanied by his, errr, partner, introducing his country's new name and flag.
About a month ago, Dr Jordan Peterson (for whom Walt has all the time in the world!) wrote an article for the Daily Wire entitled "Russia Vs. Ukraine Or Civil War In The West?" In this thought-provoking piece, Dr Peterson listed the reasons why we're seeing an extended conflict in Ukraine, and explains why a culture war in the West has fueled the Russian fire.
Since the Daily Wire is accessible only to members, the article was not widely read or circulated. So Dr Peterson read it aloud on his YouTube channel. Click here to watch the entire video. It's over 51 minutes long. If you're thinking that's too much -- some other time, perhaps -- Ed. has prepared the clip below in which Dr Peterson sums up his message of warning.
We hope you will now be motivated to click on the link to the full video to understand why there's much more to the war in Ukraine than just resisting Russian imperialism. Those who, like Walt, cherish the ideal of a free and independent Ukraine, need to take a broader and deeper view of the conflict.
We cannot be assured that we are on The Right Side until we understand the moral, philosophical and ideological positions of the combatants. If it comes down to a civil war between those who stand for the values of Christian civilization and those who espouse today's politically orthodox secular humanism, whose side should we take?
Thanks to Agent 9 for pointing us in the right direction.
9/11 changed everything. Right? Everybody knows that. Until 9/11, America, having won WWII single-handed, was thought by its people to be impregnable. [= can't have children? Ed.] The idea of enemies, especially backward barbarians [= people with beards. Ed.] attacking and killing Americans on their own soil was inconceivable [= can't have children? Ed.]
Then 9/11 happened and the United States of America became what I call the Paranoid States of America. I am not alone in thinking that Americans panic easily. The late great George Carlin said those exact words in a bit about "germs", which he performed years before the Great Dempanic.
But this is not about the threat to the nation's wellbeing posed by the Wuhan flu or monkeypox or whatever health crisis comes along tomorrow. This is about how the Deep State used 9/11 to take control of the administration and take away Americans' freedoms, all in the name of "national security".
What follows is excerpted from The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, by Frank Rich (Penguin 2006). Talking about the Great Anthrax Scare -- remember that? -- which began just three weeks after 9/11, Mr Rich writes:
Bush said little about it, delegating the problem to ineffectual Cabinet members like [Tommy] Thompson, the secretaryof health and human services, and the attorney general, John Ashcroft.... They were Keystone Kops in the costumes of bureaucrats, ready at any time to slip on a banana peel....
Ashcroft often shook as if he'd just seen not only great Caesar's ghost, but perhaps John Mitchell's as well. In his disregard for the law, Ashcroft often did seem determined to emulate the Watergate-era attorney general, though on a grander scale.
It wasn't enough for Congress to enhance his antiterrorist legal arsenal legitimately by passing the USA Patriot Act before most of those on the Hill had taken the time or the trouble to read it; the attorney general changed other rules without consulting senators or congressmen of either party at all.
He abridged by decree the Freedom of Information Act, an esssential check on government misbehavior during peace and war alike, and discreetly slipped into the Federal Register a new directive allowing eavesdropping on conversaqtions between some lawyers and clients.
If the administration was really proud of grabbing "emergency" powers at wartime, why was it doing so in the dead of night? Ashcroft refused repeated requests to explain himself before congressional committees. At one House briefing where he did show up, he told congressmen they could call an 800 number if they had any questions about what his department was up to.
Remind you of anyone? Sounds to me like Merrick Garland, answering for the FBI raid on President's Trump's Florida home! Getting back to what Mr Ashcroft did, supposedly to protect national security, Mr Rich continues:
Ashcroft's Justice Department seemed to be squandering time and resources on wild goose chases that pumped up arrest numbers without making any progress on tracking down terrorists.... But Ashcreoft had been zealous and then some about warning of other terrorism attacks while the anthrax threat was proceeding under his nose.
The first alert of a probable new attack was issued two weeks after 9/11. On the first month anniversary of 9/11, the attorney general and the FBI warned again that new attacks by terrorists either in America or overseas might happen in the "next several days." Bush endorsed this alert, but neither he nor anyone in the government explained how serious the threat was or what form it might take or when it might happen.
Before you say "So what? That's ancient history... and Bush was a Republican," please consider that the DOJ and other organs of the Deep State never gave back the far-reaching and unconstitutional powers they arrogated [excellent word -- look it up. Ed] to themselves in the aftermath of 9/11.
The Deep State and their bought-and-paid-for media say now that President Trump's keeping certain unspecified "top secret documents" mixed in with other papers at Mar-a-Lago represents a "threat to national security". I would like to know from whence comes that threat?!
Who is threatening the Paranoid States of America, now that Saddam Hussein has been killed, along with Obama Bin Laden and their successors. Who hates America and Americans enough to wage jihad against the Land of the Somewhat Free?
OK, it's the Islamic extremists, right, the ones who pulled off 9/11 but haven't really done anything horrible on American soil since. Is the DOJ seriously suggesting that Mr Trump is somehow colluding with the mad mullahs and will reveal to them our plans to start the Gulf Wars again?
If not the Arabs, then how about the Russians? The Dumbocrats already tried without success to portray Messrs Trump and Putin as co-conspirators against Democracy with a capital D. It didn't work. China, then? Couldn't be. China only does business with Hunter Biden and Mr. Big.
So I repeat... where is the threat to national security? If, anywhere in the three dozen boxes of papers which have now been taken away from the Trump residence, there is one single iota, jot or tittle of evidence proving that President Trump was planning to sell out or otherwise harm the US of A, I'd like to see it.
Hell's Angels (Ballantine Books, 1967) is perhaps the straightest and best book by Hunter Stockton Thompson, Doctor of Gonzo Journalism. It is more than sensational reportage about a "fringe group with unacceptable views". It is a study in the sociology of California in the 1960s, a dark omen of a darker future, not just for California but for all of America.
Near the end, in Chapter 21, HST has this to say about the psychology which informed the Angels' notoriously antisocial actions, and indeed their lives. The emphasis is mine.
It is a sense of being cut off, or left out of whatever society one was presumably meant to be a part of. In a strongly motivated society the victims of anomie are usually extreme cases, isolated from each other by differing viewpoints or personal quirks too private for any broad explanation.
But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President [Eisenhower, in 1960] feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular -- especialy among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place.
Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The lawas they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug.
America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger, and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.
In the terms of our Great Society, the Hell's Angels and their ilk are losers -- dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem.
The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything, it is not the "moral revolution" in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like the Hell's Angels have been finding for years.
The difference between the student radicals and the Hell's Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.
55 years since Dr. Gonzo wrote those lines, it looks more and more as if the Angels were right to "fight the future". Today is the tomorrow they fought against yesterday. And, if things continue as they have, if Western Society continues to be led down the wrong road, the future looks even worse.
Readers of WWW sometimes ask me what I'm so angry about. "What is it," they write, "that you're against?" By way of reply, I can do no better than this oft-quoted line from The Wild One.
Four events over the last two weeks seem to be linked. I'll recap them and you can see how long it takes you to figure out the connection. [Kind of gave it away in the headline, didn't you? Ed.]
Item: Police in Albuquerque NM had their hands full, trying to figure out who was stalking and killing Muslim men. The lamestream press were quick to speculate that the murders were the work of a white supremacist, probably a Trump supporter. Fear struck the hearts of the local Islamic community, and politicians everywhere trumpeted the need for tolerance, and freedom of religion.
There were not a few red faces -- not from sunburn -- when the coppers arrested Muhammad Syed, 51, a fellow follower of the Prophet. UPDATE ADDED 16/8/22: According to Reuters, Police now believe Shaheen Syed, 21, the son of the prime suspect, may have played a role in the murders.
"We have a free country here – why did he do that?", asked another member of the supposedly tight-knit Muslim community. Turns out Mr Syed was "possibly" infuriated that his daughter married into the "wrong" branch of Islam. Apparently Shia and Sunni Muslims don't mix in America any better than they do in Iraq.
Item: Last Tuseday a Texas jury found Yaser Abdel Said, 65, of Lewisville, guilty of the murder of his daughters, 18-year-old Amina Said and 17-year-old Sarah Said, in a taxi in 2008. Mr Said had evaded arrest for over 12 years following the slayings of his children, which was provoked, defenders said, by the girls' insistence on comporting themselves like other American teens.
Even though the crime was committed in Texas, prosecutors did not pursue the death penalty, so Mr Said received an automatic life sentence. Why was the death penalty not demanded? Perhaps because the killings were, according to Mr Said's religion and culture, a "matter of honour".
No, those are not the Said girls. They are Asra Abdullah Alsehli, 24, and Amaal Abdullah Alsehli, 23, whose bodies were discovered in their Sydney, Australia, apartment on June 7th. .
Item: The Alsehli sisters were last in the news five years ago, when they fled from a family holiday by jumping on a plane from Saudi Arabia to Sydney, where they claimed asylum, saying they renounced Islam and had become atheists. Their parents were said to be displeased and begged the girls to come home, but, so far as is known, made no attempts to repatriate them against their will.
When the rent on their apartment went unpaid for three months, the Aussie authorities went for a "welfare check" and found mail piled up outside the door. When they gained entry, they found the two women's bodies, fully clothed, in separate bedroom. There were no signs of forced entry or injury.
Police called their deaths as "suspicious" and "unusual", and are awaiting autopsy and toxicology results to figure out what could have happened. Although the sisters' background, and how they came to be in Australia, were common knowledge, Inspector Knacker said there is "nothing to suggest" their family should be considered suspects. So that's OK then.
Local police Sergeant Friday said they aren't sure what motivated the attack. Walt will explicate the muddification, and thereby come to the point of this article.
Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding after a fatwa (religious decree) issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini, for the grave sin of airing his "unacceptable views" of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed in his 1988 book The Satanic Verses.
Mr Rushdie, who was born in India to non-practising Muslims and identifies as an atheist, was declared an apostate, and forced to go underground as a bounty was put on his head. He was granted police protection by the government in the UK, where he was at school and where he made his home, following the murder or attempted murder of his translators and publishers.
Hadi Matar reportetdly supported the Iranian government, which had demanded Rushdie's execution. He reportedly posted a picture of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei on his Facebook page. According to an analysis of Mr Matar's social media footprints, he supports Shia extremism and the goals of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Investigators found pictures of Iranian commander Qassem Solemani, muirdered in 2020, on Mr Matar's cellphone.
Spotted today on the Breitbart News report of the FBI raid on President Trump's home.
.jpg)
In case you haven't noticed, there's a new politically correct curseword, used by liberals and wokesters to condemn anything that they don't like or that runs contrary to their agenda. The word is "unacceptable".
"Unacceptable views", is it? "Unacceptable views?" I could see actions being unacceptable -- farting in church, for example. But views? You mean we're not allowed to think for ourselves any more? "Unacceptable" by whose standards? Are we talking about political correctness here, the sort of thing John Cleese decried in the interview posted here yesterday?
Ever since (perhaps just because I've been listening for it), I've noticed that increasing frequency with which politicians and the lickspittle media use the U-word -- Unacceptable -- to describe any thing, person, action or thought which they don't like.
The latest example to come to my attention was the reaction of the mayor of Cincinnati OH, to the latest manifestation of the Summer of Rage, which occurred early today. At least nine people were wounded -- none critically -- in a shooting outside the Mr. Pitiful bar, in the Ohio city’s Over-the-Rhine district, a popular nightlife area.
Another shooting in the neighbouring Central Business District left two wounded, but Inspector Gadget of the Cincinnati PD said it was unclear whether the two shootings were related. Mayor Aftab Karma Singh Pureval [Really, that's his name. Ed.] called the gunfire not just "unacceptable" but "completely and totally unacceptable."
So there. I fully expect that the hoodlums [Note that Walt didn't use any unacceptable nouns. Ed.] guilty of that kind of anti-social behaviour will cease and desist forthwith, now that they know it's "unacceptable". Selah.
