The Culture of Death—and of Disdain
See the Wall Street Journal article, below.
News quiz: 10 questions from the big stories of the week (8/10)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/10/07/news-quiz-10-questions-from-the-big-stories-of-the-week/?undefined=&utm_term=.6894b05e5d1a&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
Mother Nature's dark side revealed
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-4925950/Mother-Nature-s-dark-revealed.html
The WIRE: Your week in review
https://personalliberty.com/wire-week-review-20-63/
HEALTH
Johns Hopkins Scientist Reveals Shocking Report on Flu Vaccines
http://realfarmacy.com/johns-hopkins-scientist-reveals-shocking-report-flu-vaccines/
Why ‘beer bellies’ are a myth — and new research on why beer may be good for you
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-beer-bellies-are-a-myth-and-new-research-on-why-beer-may-be-good-for-you-2017-10-06
McDonald's is now selling a McVegan, a non-dairy, no-meat burger
https://moneyish.com/ish/mcdonalds-is-now-selling-a-mcvegan-a-non-dairy-no-meat-burger/
EDUCATION
Why Georgetown University Students Want More Conservative Professors on Campus
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452412/georgetown-conservative-professors-students-intellectual-diversity?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202017-10-07&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
PROGRESSIVES UNHINGED
Austin replaces Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3592708/posts
ALT____
White Supremacists Again Rally in Charlottesville
http://www.newser.com/story/249758/white-supremacists-again-rally-in-charlottesville.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=att&utm_campaign=rss_us_syn
SPORTS
Shock poll: NFL now least liked sport, core fans down 31%
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/shock-poll-nfl-now-least-liked-sport-core-fans-down-31/article/2636837
TAXES
Who Pays Taxes 2014
https://www.ntu.org/foundation/blog/who-pays-taxes-2014
BUSINESS
When Working From Home Doesn’t Work
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/when-working-from-home-doesnt-work/540660/
Project Loon cleared to help restore wireless in Puerto Rico
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/project-loon-cleared-help-restore-073500214.html
‘Full of crap’ -- Tesla’s Elon Musk just got seriously dissed by a GM exec
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/full-of-crap----teslas-elon-musk-just-got-seriously-dissed-by-a-gm-exec-2017-10-06
DHS
What about Event Security?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452381/make-soft-targets-harder-reduce-mass-murder-risk
DEFENSE
SecAF Wilson Touts ‘Offensive’ Space Weapons; McMaster Details ‘Framework’
https://breakingdefense.com/2017/10/secaf-wilson-touts-offensive-space-weapons-mcmaster-details-framework/?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=57119643&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9nYCXAE6CV-T_JKRI8k4zMoGRSOgGgNOMQLKeLHjQ-PVvz1e8WcxrkkV0iiOSwN_2QAPZQ_Ka-KMQk2F44jmkLvyEW7g&_hsmi=57119643
LAW ENFORCEMENT
'Devil's Drug' Flakka
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByJnXBP5IW4
IMMIGRATION
ICE Warns California of More Raids After Sanctuary State Law Signed
https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/10/ice-warns-california-of-more-raids-after-sanctuary-state-law-signed/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LegalInsurrection+%28Le%C2%B7gal+In%C2%B7sur%C2%B7rec%C2%B7tion%29
Trump administration releases hard-line immigration principles, threatening deal on ‘dreamers’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/10/08/trump-administration-releases-hard-line-immigration-principles-threatening-deal-on-dreamers/?utm_term=.975b68162285
TERRORISM
FBI terrorism unit says 'black identity extremists' pose a violent threat
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/06/fbi-black-identity-extremists-racial-profiling?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=247032&subid=24222148&CMP=GT_US_collection
Black Lives Matter shouts down ACLU
https://www.yahoo.com/news/black-lives-matter-shouts-down-005231924.html
NORK
The case for brinkmanship with North Korea
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-case-for-brinksmanship-with-north-korea/2017/10/06/f8f93da8-a958-11e7-b3aa-c0e2e1d41e38_story.html?nid&utm_term=.dee205d49aaa
RUSSIAGATE
Collusion and the Trump Dossier
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452427/trump-dossier-russia-collusion-investigation?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202017-10-07&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
POLITICS
Trump is on track to win reelection
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-on-track-to-win-reelection/2017/10/06/91cd2af0-aa15-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html?undefined=&utm_term=.adca7e9b13f5&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
Shifting attitudes among Democrats have big implications for 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/shifting-attitudes-among-democrats-have-big-implications-for-2020/2017/10/07/a1741398-aae1-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html?utm_term=.80742f6a57bf&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1
--
“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.”
~ Jack London
From the Wall Street Journal (without permission)https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-of-deathand-of-disdain-1507244198?mod=trending_now_5
The Culture of Death—and of Disdain
Why do Americans own so many guns? Because they don’t trust the protected elites to protect them.
When news broke at Christmastime five years ago of what had happened at Newtown a friend, a news anchor, called and said with a broken voice: “What is the word for what we feel?” I thought for a moment. “Shattered,” I said. “We are shattered, all of us.” When people in ensuing days spoke of what had been done to the little children in the classrooms, I’d put up my hands and say no, we can’t keep putting those words in the air, we can’t afford it. When terrible images enter our heads and settle in, they become too real, and what is real is soon, by the unstable, imitated, repeated.
When Columbine happened in the spring of 1999, it hit me like a wave of sickness. I wrote a piece about the culture of death that produced the teenage shooters: “Think of it this way. Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar. . . . The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazines, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by—all are waves. The fish—your child—is bombarded and barely knows it. But the waves contain words like this, which I’ll limit to only one source, the news:
“. . . was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested . . . had her breast implants removed . . . took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired . . . said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide . . . is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens . . . court battle over who owns the frozen sperm . . . contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women . . . died of lethal injection . . . had threatened to kill her children . . . had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself . . . protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism . . . showed no remorse . . . which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student . . .
“This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody.”
We were bringing up our children in an unwell atmosphere. It would enter and distort them. Could we turn this around?
And here is the horror for me of Las Vegas: I was not shattered. That shatters me.
It was just another terrible story. It is not the new normal it is the new abnormal and deep down we know it’s not going to stop. There is too much instability in our country, too much rage and lovelessness, too many weapons.
On television, the terrible sameness. We all know the postmassacre drill now. The shocked witness knows exactly what the anchor needs and speaks in rounded, 20-second bursts. Activists have their bullet-point arguments ready because they used them last time and then saved them in a file called “Aurora,” “Virginia Tech” or “Giffords, Gabby.”
We are stuck, the debate frozen. The right honestly doesn’t understand why the left keeps insisting on reforms that won’t help. The left honestly doesn’t understand how much yearning there is among so many conservatives to do something, try something, make it better. They don’t want their kids growing up in a world where madmen have guns that shoot nine rounds a second. Many this week at least agreed bump stocks can be banned. It probably won’t help much. But if it helps just a little, for God’s sake, do it.
But: Why do so many Americans have guns? I don’t mean those who like to hunt and shoot or live far out and need protection. I don’t mean those who’ve been handed down the guns of their grandfather or father. Why do a significant number of Americans have so many guns?
Wouldn’t it help if we thought about that?
I think a lot of Americans have guns because they’re fearful—and for damn good reason. They fear a coming chaos, and know that when it happens it will be coming to a nation that no longer coheres. They think it’s all collapsing—our society, our culture, the baseline competence of our leadership class. They see the cultural infrastructure giving way—illegitimacy, abused children, neglect, racial tensions, kids on opioids staring at screens—and, unlike their cultural superiors, they understand the implications.
Nuts with nukes, terrorists bent on a mission. The grid will go down. One of our foes will hit us, suddenly and hard. In the end it could be hand to hand, door to door. I said some of this six years ago to a famously liberal journalist, who blinked in surprise. If that’s true, he said, they won’t have a chance! But they are Americans, I said. They won’t go down without a fight.
Americans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Because all of their personal and financial information got hacked in the latest breach, because our country’s real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength. And they’ll be the ones programming the robots that’ll soon take all the jobs! Maybe the robots will all look like Mark Zuckerberg, like those eyeless busts of Roman Emperors. Our leaders don’t even think about this technological revolution. They’re too busy with transgender rights.
Americans have so many guns because they know the water their children swim in hasn’t gotten cleaner since Columbine, but more polluted and lethal.
The establishments and elites that create our political and entertainment culture have no idea how fragile it all is—how fragile it seems to people living normal, less privileged lives. That is because nothing is fragile for them. They’re barricaded behind the things the influential have, from good neighborhoods to security alarms, doormen and gates. They’re not dark in their imagining of the future because history has never been dark for them; it’s been sunshine, which they expect to continue. They sail on, oblivious to the legitimate anxieties of their countrymen who live near the edge.
Those who create our culture feel free to lecture normal Americans—on news shows, on late night comedy shows. Why do they have such a propensity for violence? What is their love for guns? Why do they join the National Rifle Association? The influential grind away with their disdain for their fellow Americans, whom they seem less to want to help than to dominate: Give up your gun, bake my cake, free speech isn’t free if what you’re saying triggers us.
Would it help if we tried less censure and more cultural affiliation? Might it help if we started working on problems that are real? Sure. But why lower the temperature when there’s such easy pleasure to be had in ridiculing your mindless and benighted countrymen?
There ate 1300+ comments. Here are a few of the better ones:“. . . was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested . . . had her breast implants removed . . . took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired . . . said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide . . . is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens . . . court battle over who owns the frozen sperm . . . contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women . . . died of lethal injection . . . had threatened to kill her children . . . had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself . . . protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism . . . showed no remorse . . . which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student . . .
“This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody.”
We were bringing up our children in an unwell atmosphere. It would enter and distort them. Could we turn this around?
And here is the horror for me of Las Vegas: I was not shattered. That shatters me.
It was just another terrible story. It is not the new normal it is the new abnormal and deep down we know it’s not going to stop. There is too much instability in our country, too much rage and lovelessness, too many weapons.
On television, the terrible sameness. We all know the postmassacre drill now. The shocked witness knows exactly what the anchor needs and speaks in rounded, 20-second bursts. Activists have their bullet-point arguments ready because they used them last time and then saved them in a file called “Aurora,” “Virginia Tech” or “Giffords, Gabby.”
We are stuck, the debate frozen. The right honestly doesn’t understand why the left keeps insisting on reforms that won’t help. The left honestly doesn’t understand how much yearning there is among so many conservatives to do something, try something, make it better. They don’t want their kids growing up in a world where madmen have guns that shoot nine rounds a second. Many this week at least agreed bump stocks can be banned. It probably won’t help much. But if it helps just a little, for God’s sake, do it.
But: Why do so many Americans have guns? I don’t mean those who like to hunt and shoot or live far out and need protection. I don’t mean those who’ve been handed down the guns of their grandfather or father. Why do a significant number of Americans have so many guns?
Wouldn’t it help if we thought about that?
I think a lot of Americans have guns because they’re fearful—and for damn good reason. They fear a coming chaos, and know that when it happens it will be coming to a nation that no longer coheres. They think it’s all collapsing—our society, our culture, the baseline competence of our leadership class. They see the cultural infrastructure giving way—illegitimacy, abused children, neglect, racial tensions, kids on opioids staring at screens—and, unlike their cultural superiors, they understand the implications.
Nuts with nukes, terrorists bent on a mission. The grid will go down. One of our foes will hit us, suddenly and hard. In the end it could be hand to hand, door to door. I said some of this six years ago to a famously liberal journalist, who blinked in surprise. If that’s true, he said, they won’t have a chance! But they are Americans, I said. They won’t go down without a fight.
Americans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Because all of their personal and financial information got hacked in the latest breach, because our country’s real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength. And they’ll be the ones programming the robots that’ll soon take all the jobs! Maybe the robots will all look like Mark Zuckerberg, like those eyeless busts of Roman Emperors. Our leaders don’t even think about this technological revolution. They’re too busy with transgender rights.
Americans have so many guns because they know the water their children swim in hasn’t gotten cleaner since Columbine, but more polluted and lethal.
The establishments and elites that create our political and entertainment culture have no idea how fragile it all is—how fragile it seems to people living normal, less privileged lives. That is because nothing is fragile for them. They’re barricaded behind the things the influential have, from good neighborhoods to security alarms, doormen and gates. They’re not dark in their imagining of the future because history has never been dark for them; it’s been sunshine, which they expect to continue. They sail on, oblivious to the legitimate anxieties of their countrymen who live near the edge.
Those who create our culture feel free to lecture normal Americans—on news shows, on late night comedy shows. Why do they have such a propensity for violence? What is their love for guns? Why do they join the National Rifle Association? The influential grind away with their disdain for their fellow Americans, whom they seem less to want to help than to dominate: Give up your gun, bake my cake, free speech isn’t free if what you’re saying triggers us.
Would it help if we tried less censure and more cultural affiliation? Might it help if we started working on problems that are real? Sure. But why lower the temperature when there’s such easy pleasure to be had in ridiculing your mindless and benighted countrymen?
Terry Hardeman
2 hours ago
Watching Ken Burns' documentary on the Vietnam War recently, I was somewhat taken aback by the sentiment being expressed by veterans of that war who said things like, "We never thought the government would lie to us", "We unfailingly believed in America and what it stood for", "We were the good guys". Then towards the end of the series, the same men returned home to hatred, chaos, riots in the streets, cities burning, getting spit on, and were like "what the hell happened to my Country while I was gone?".
I couldn't help reflect that the carnage and schism that wrent the fabric of our nation at that time came directly after the Supreme Court banned the prayer and the teaching of religion in our schools.
I knew how the Vietnam Veteran's felt, because I served in the Middle East for nearly two years from 2007 to 2009, and was deployed during the 2008 presidential election. I came home in September of 2009 to find my Country hardly recognizable from the one I left. Our Post 9/11 War and Vietnam were very different but also eeriely similar.
Eight years of Barack Obama traumatized the American People. I don't know if we will ever be the same country we were on Septiember 12, 2001. Then churches were filled to capacity and young men signed up to go fight Jihadists in droves. Now they are tearing down status of Robert E. Lee, joining Antifa, being male or female is a question of identity, and raising the Black and Red banner of global Communism, while again spitting on America and those who serve it. Evil prospers and grows.
We've turned our backs on God and we are about to reap the whirlwind. Peggy is right on this one. About 30% of American's see this, though they don't have the power or impact to reverse course, but that doesn't mean they won't go down without a fight.
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."- 2 Chronicles 7:14
Jay Davidson
2 hours ago
Consider the origin of our nation: Regular citizens (The Militia) took up arms, the equivalent of the "assault rifle" of that day, which was a single-shot muzzle loader, and proceeded to destroy their far more powerful government at that time, namely Great Britain. In place of an overbearing, and dictatorial government, the writers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence, changed the world up to that time. They had the temerity to declare the freedoms associated with elites, the powerful and government, would instead flow to the American citizen. How incredible.
The Founders also realized that the "assault weapon" of that day, the single-shot muzzle loader, would allow those free citizens the possibility of the rights of all citizens to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Americans own guns, and train regularly, in order to remain free. Instead of focusing on one evil and cowardly gunman, consider that 100 million Citizen gun owners who don't coerce, or intimidate, but stand in silent defense of citizens rights.
Ken Jorgensen
2 hours ago
The title of the column troubles me because it says our whole culture is a culture of death. Most of us live our lives shaking our heads in amazement and/or disbelief of what the media puts in front of us. That culture ain't us. For example, I used to listen to a radio station in San Francisco from which every newscast covered gay issues, homeless issues and the reliable murder and mayhem from Oakland, Richmond and SF. If an alien civilization was listening they would conclude that gays, the homeless and murders were the most important populations or stories in the area. Good news was never covered and when a Republican was President - Reagan, Bush, why they were portrayed as the most evil men - homeless and unemployment numbers filled the airwaves. When Clinton and Obama were President, somehow the homeless and unemployment memes disappeared. I think the culture of death resides in the media not the citizens.
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