Category Archives: culture

The Barbarian Strikes Again

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The Russians just attacked Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a thousand-year-old Orthodox Christian holy site and cultural icon in Kyiv. The hit was direct, not a nearby one for which the Lavra was merely collateral damage. The targeting was deliberate. And it was repeated, with a subsequent strike adding to the damage. This is far more than just a Russian communist attack on religion, for all that the barbarian has

confiscated church property, tortured clergy, and otherwise persecuted Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox believers[.]

It’s also more than a simple campaign of terrorism that would make the 13th century Mongols overrunning Russia blush. The modern-day barbarian appears to be starting a campaign to erase Ukrainian culture altogether.

It’s long past time Europe—and the US—stopped dilly-dallying around with half measures and stepped up support for Ukraine, arming and supplying them at the rate they need, with the weapons and materiel they need, so they can drive the barbarian back out of their nation, and do it so decisively that the barbarian will be unable to attack again for years if not generations.

Entertainers Entertaining

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Hollywood’s “entertainers” and NLMSM “journalists” put on a 3-hour show to compete with and draw viewers from the cage fight circus that President Donald Trump (R) put on to kick off our nation’s three-week celebration of our 250th birthday.

The event, called “Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment,” was hosted by far-left activist and actress Jane Fonda…and the Committee for the First Amendment in New York City.

Bette Midler, reediting an Arlo Guthrie classic:

All you fascists bound to lose
Lose, you fascists bound to lose
We’ll battle ICE together, until they cut and run,
just like in Minneapolis, and when the midterms come
you’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose.

Joy Reid:

The threat is not coming, friends. It is here. Brendan Carr, the man who wrote the blueprint to dismantle the FCC and Project 2025, is now running it. He is weaponizing the agency to bully and control the press and suppress the wider televised media.

Robert De Niro:

I hate to say it, but loving our country is starting to sound like an abused spouse saying they love their abuser. I can’t love a country that’s led by a racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant.

The competing show was neither competitive nor entertaining. Pro tip from the peanut gallery of viewers: if you want to compete with an entertainment event, bitter hysteria is not the way.

The Death of the Alarm Clock

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Maybe a loss as a minor cultural item, but the loss of the alarm clock has no practical consequence, even though one of the editors of The Wall Street Journal thinks so. The opinion writer opened her piece with this:

A friend who recently joined the Medicare rolls encountered a new test at his last physical. To confirm he still has his marbles, he was asked to draw a clock face displaying the time 10 minutes after 11. He passed, but would a fourth-grader? Not necessarily, I suspect, due to the near-extinction of the alarm clock.

I suspect otherwise.

————-
| 11:10 |
————-

Easy enough for the 4th grader to do, even with AACII art. Maybe, with ASCII art, especially so for him.

The Problem with Platner

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Graham Platner has won the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Maine primary election and has become Party’s nominee to be one of Maine’s Senators in the fall general election. That’s bad enough, but that’s not all.

Party senior leadership and middle tier politicians are enthusiastically endorsing this…person.

  • California Congressmen Adam Schiff and Ro Khanna
  • Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal
  • New York Senator and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
  • Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz
  • Minnesota Senator Tina Smith
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren
  • Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (socialist and Independent, but he caucuses with Party)
  • Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego

All of these support Platner and are touting him to be the next Senator from Maine, replacing the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins.

This is Graham Platner:

Platner has a Nazi symbol for a tattoo on his chest that he has only lately tried to cover over with another tattoo—a move he made only when the public began objecting to his tattoo, not because it took him nearly 20 years to figure out that it was a Nazi symbol.

Platner has a long history of abusing women, including physically, and he has been caught sexting women in the last couple of years—after he was married.

Platner holds women at least partially responsible for their own rapes.

Platner openly disparages American voters, here, Maine voters, saying in plain words that rural Mainers are racist and stupid.

Platner disdains our police, saying that all of them are bastards.

Platner, himself a military veteran, has only contempt for our military men and women. He demonstrates this with his slur of a wounded, and Purple Heart recipient, soldier, insisting that the man was dumb for having gotten shot and deserved to die.

The problem for our nation isn’t a single Senator with such obnoxious and anti-American (not just unamerican) positions.

The problem is bigger than that: those positions of Platner’s–bigotry, misogyny, hatred of police and our military personnel–are, by Party endorsement, Party’s ideology and election platform.

Dominic Green Asked

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In his lede, Green asked

Which is worse, a young Englishman bleeding out in handcuffs while police ignore his cries for help, or the vice president of the United States expressing his opinion about it?

What JD Vance, the supposedly miscreant Vice President, said was this:

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies, abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, through his spokesman (apparently because Starmer is too timid to speak for himself on this),:

accus[ed] unnamed foreigners of “trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets….”

How does Green’s question even exist? Given the naked bigotry demonstrated by the British police and by the government that created that police department, there can be no question of relative morality here. The one is an accurate commentary; the other is naked, state-sanctioned, and this time murderous, bigotry.

Nor was Vance’s statement in any way an interference in British democracy. There was no push for the British to do anything differently, only an objection to what that government has chosen to allow on its streets. If there was any pressure from Vance’s remarks, it was only because his words struck hard into what passes for a conscience in that government’s collective mind.

There’s a hint on the whole interfere in our democracy matter, though:

The administration-adjacent Elon Musk, whose X website outflanks Britain’s speech laws, told his 28.5 million followers to share the Nowak footage “to everyone you know,” so that all can see how the police “cravenly kowtowed to his murderer.”

Outflanks Britain’s speech laws. Maybe the nation that increasingly restricts what is permissible speech and that increasingly shrivels religious freedom is becoming less and less a democracy in the first place.