London Riots – Coulter and Phillips

I’m not feeling real talkative today. But I have noticed the riots over the past few days in England as well as the stock market swings. I’ve read a good bit of Dr. Dalrymple so the riots are not entirely surprising, even if they are dismaying and larger than life. Since I am not feeling very talkative, here is a column from Ann Coulter, yes – her, about the causes. I think she’s on the right track. Here, from: The Sun Never Sets on the British Welfare System”

Coulter writes:
Those of you following the barbaric rioting in Britain will not have failed to notice that a sizable proportion of the thugs are white, something not often seen in this country.

Not only that, but in a triumph of feminism, a lot of them are girls. Even the “disabled” (according to the British benefits system) seem to have miraculously overcome their infirmities to dash out and steal a few TVs.

Congratulations, Britain! You’ve barbarized your citizenry, without regard to race, gender or physical handicap!

With a welfare system far more advanced than the United States, the British have achieved the remarkable result of turning entire communities of ancestral British people into tattooed, drunken brutes.

I guess we now have the proof of what conservatives have been saying since forever: Looting is a result of liberal welfare policies. And Britain is in the end stages of the welfare state.

In 2008, a 9-year-old British girl, Shannon Matthews​, disappeared on her way home from a school trip. The media leapt on the case — only to discover that Shannon was one of seven children her mother, Karen, had produced with five different men.

The first of these serial sperm-donors explained: “Karen just goes from one bloke to the next, uses them to have a kid, grabs all the child benefits and moves on.”

Poor little Shannon eventually turned up at the home of one of her many step-uncles — whose ex-wife, by the way, was the mother of six children with three different fathers.

(Is Father’s Day celebrated in England? If so, how?)

The Daily Mail (London) traced the family’s proud Anglo ancestry of stable families back hundreds of years. The Nazi war machine couldn’t break the British, but the modern welfare state has.

A year earlier, in 2007, another product of the new order, Fiona MacKeown, took seven of her eight children (by five different fathers) and her then-boyfriend, on a drug-fueled, six-month vacation to the Indian island of Goa. The trip was paid for — like everything else in her life — with government benefits.

(When was the last time you had a free, six-month vacation? I’m drawing a blank, too.)

While in Goa, Fiona took her entourage on a side-trip, leaving her 15-year-old daughter, Scarlett Keeling, in the capable hands of a 25-year-old local whom Scarlett had begun sleeping with, perhaps hoping to get a head-start on her own government benefits. A few weeks later, Scarlett turned up dead, full of drugs, raped and murdered.

Scarlett’s estranged stepfather later drank himself to death, while her brother Silas announced on his social networking page: “My name is Si, n I spend most my life either out wit mates get drunk or at partys, playing rugby or going to da beach (pretty s**t really).”

It’s a wonder that someone like Silas, who has never worked, and belongs to a family in which no one has ever worked, can afford a cellphone for social networking. No, actually, it’s not.

Britain has a far more redistributive welfare system than France, which is why France’s crime problem is mostly a matter of Muslim immigrants, not French nationals. Meanwhile, England’s welfare state is fast returning the native population to its violent 18th-century highwaymen roots.

Needless to say, Britain leads Europe in the proportion of single mothers and, as a consequence, also leads or co-leads the European Union in violent crime, alcohol and drug abuse, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases.

But liberal elites here and in Britain will blame anything but the welfare state they adore. They drone on about the strict British class system or the lack of jobs or the nation’s history of racism.

None of that explains the sad lives of young Shannon Matthews and Scarlett Keeling, with their long English ancestry and perfect Anglo features.

Democrats would be delighted if violent mobs like those in Britain arose here — perhaps in Wisconsin! That would allow them to introduce yet more government programs staffed by unionized public employees, as happened after the 1992 L.A. riots and the 1960s race riots, following the recommendations of the Kerner Commission.

MSNBC might even do the unthinkable and offer Al Sharpton​ his own TV show. (Excuse me — someone’s trying to get my attention … WHAT?)

Inciting violent mobs is the essence of the left’s agenda: Promote class warfare, illegitimate children and an utterly debased citizenry.

Like the British riot girls interviewed by the BBC, the Democrats tell us “all of this happened because of the rich people.”

We’re beginning to see the final result of that idea in Britain. The welfare state creates a society of beasts. Meanwhile, nonjudgmental elites don’t dare condemn the animals their programs have created.

Rioters in England are burning century-old family businesses to the ground, stealing from injured children lying on the sidewalks and forcing Britons to strip to their underwear on the street.

I keep reading that it’s because they don’t have jobs — which they’re obviously anxious to hold. Or someone called them a “kaffir.” Or their social services have been reduced. Or their Blackberries made them do it. Or they disapprove of a referee’s call in a Manchester United game.

A few well-placed rifle rounds, and the rioting would end in an instant. A more sustained attack on the rampaging mob might save England from itself, finally removing shaved-head, drunken parasites from the benefits rolls that Britain can’t find the will to abolish on moral or utilitarian grounds. We can be sure there’s no danger of killing off the next Winston Churchill​ or Edmund Burke​ in these crowds.

But like Louis XVI, British authorities are paralyzed by their indifference to their own civilization. A half-century of berating themselves for the crime of being British has left them morally defenseless. They see nothing about England worth saving, certainly not worth fighting for — which is fortunate since most of their cops don’t have guns.

This is how civilizations die. It can happen overnight, as it did in Revolutionary France​. If Britain of 1939 were composed of the current British population, the entirety of Europe would today be doing the “Heil Hitler” salute and singing the “Horst Wessel Song.”

____________________________________________

Melanie Phillips from the UK also opines here:

An illuminating report on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme (0810) this morning said it all about the British riots. Some teenage thugs who were hooding up to go looting were asked why they were doing it. Maybe they couldn’t afford the trainers and other goods they were setting out to steal? Yeah, we can afford them, came the reply; but since the goods were there to be robbed, it was an opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. What about their parents? Did they know where they were? Yeah, came the reply, but the most they do is shout at me. And as for the police, well the worse that can happen is that I’ll get as ASBO (antisocial behaviour order).

Some of the rioters and looters are as young as eight or nine. I then listened to a spokesman for Manchester city council appealing to parents to ensure that their children are not on the streets tonight. Why can’t people see what is staring us all in the face? We are not up against merely feral children. We are up against feral parents. Of course the parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or they are helping themselves to the proceeds too.

The parents are the problem; as are, almost certainly, their parents and their parents too. Not that any of them necessarily even know who their parents, in the plural, are. For the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem, behind the total breakdown of any control or self-control amongst the rampaging gangs of children and teenagers who are rioting, burning, robbing, stealing, attacking and murdering, is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a fully committed, hands-on, there-every-day father.

—————————————–

Take note of that last line about the lack of a father. A “fully committed, hands-on, there-every-day father”, or even yes, two parents period – a family unit. I guess some of these people don’t even know their grandparents. This dissolution has been going on for some time. This is what the breakdown of the family looks like — murder and mayhem.

Not so good, no. As for me, I’m fine. Still in-between places but I do transitions well. I have a few now, and so – I am attempting to regain and keep my balance. And, have fun at least some of the time!

I’m not updating as much as I’d like in other words, since I am in the midst of a move, but I’m still here. Thanks to all who read.

smoke a cigar for liberty

Save liberty — smoke a cigar!

Apparently, cigarettes or cigars are being rubbed out in the UK from photographs of Winston Churchill, The Beatles, and FDR. No cigarette holder set firmly, squarely between the teeth of an attentive looking FDR – no. That would influence someone to take up the deadly cancer sticks. Possibly, your children could be removed from your home for seeing you smoke, if they haven’t already been removed for being fat, at least in the UK.

The UK and all of Europe is ahead of us in this niggling yet fiery war against improper offensive speech and dangerous unhealthy imagery, but since so many people I know want the USA to be just like Europe, this may change soon. In fact, it is already changing. Speech codes proliferate on campus. Young people, at least “well-educated” ones tend to take for granted the idea that speech should be censored and expression pulled through a wire mesh of politicized ideology to sift it down to its least offensive, most palatable — pap.

Here, Dennis Prager, a conservative who actually understands the difference between transsexuals and transgender people, as shown here in an interesting column on the “T” in GLBT and why it is not always the same as “transsexual”, writes about the growing list of words and phrases considered too offensive or dangerous to write or say or apparently, think…

First, his column on transsexuals and transgendered people, which particularly impressed me. You don’t find many people out there who begin to understand the difference. While “transgender” has been used as an umbrella term, and I try not to niggle too much about language, the fact remains that transsexual people are actually quite different in many respects from many who would consider themselves “transgender”. Prager appears to understand this:
Here:
“And few people, conservative or liberal, have any trouble accepting a transsexual, i.e., someone who has surgically changed his or her sex.

But what does any of this have to do with the transgendered, i.e., people who do not psychologically identify themselves with their biological sex, who act as if they were a member of the opposite sex, and who have not changed their biology? Why does the Left include the transgendered in its activism on behalf of gays?

Why activists connect men in dresses to same sex marriage

While we may not agree on his opinions in that column regarding same sex marriage, (I believe in it strictly from the perspective of liberty), Prager is absolutely right that the left believes that differences between the sexes are socially constructed and therefore actually part of a greater paradigm of power and powerlessness; everything, even biology, is seen through a mesh of oppression/oppressor. Transsexuals are actually not necessarily interested in destroying binary gender — as it’s called, but this is often conveniently ignored.

And, since the world is viewed by the left as a veritable booby trap of sensitivities and oppressions, language is examined first from the perspective of who it might offend or harm.

Here, in a more recent column, Prager notes the left’s growing attack on speech. And, remember, an attack on speech is ultimately, an attack on — thought.

Dennis Prager writes:

“Graphic torture and frontal nudity may be shown on screen, but smoking cigars or cigarettes may not. A Churchill museum in London has removed the cigars from wartime Churchill photographs, FDR has had his ubiquitous cigarette holder removed from his photographs, and the cigarettes have been removed from the Beatles’ hands in the famous photo of them crossing Abbey Road.

The list of forbidden words and behaviors due to Leftist activism is quite extensive.
The latest example is the left’s war on any words or imagery that come from the worlds of war or guns.

Already, “crusade” has been removed from Americans’ vocabulary — lest it offend Muslims. Overnight, the left effectively banned the use of a perfectly legitimate word that usually described an admirable preoccupation with doing good — “that newspaper is on an anti-corruption crusade.”

Now, the left has announced that words such as “target” and “cross hairs” are offensive — on the idiotic pretense that such imagery causes people to murder. If I were the CEO of Target stores, I would be concerned — will my company be sued because of its name and logo?”

From this article:
Put left-wing speech control in the cross hairs

And, yes, I know it is old news by now, but I was particularly impressed by Palin’s spirited defense of free speech in her post-Arizona shooting speech. I don’t think I have ever heard an American politician speak with such fervor and clarity about speech and why it is important that it remain free.

Caroline Glick had some interesting comments in this regard, even noting that Palin is a “revolutionary leader”, and that the Tea Party movement is also “revolutionary” in its fierce and unapologetic call for more liberty.

“In certain ways, Palin is a revolutionary leader and the Tea Party movement is a revolutionary movement. For nearly a hundred years, the Left in its various permutations has captured Western policy by controlling the elite discourse from New York and Los Angeles to London to Paris to Tel Aviv. By making it “politically incorrect,” to assert claims of Western, Judeo-Christian morality or advocate robust political, economic and military policies, the Left has made it socially and professionally costly for people to think freely and believe in their countries.

What distinguishes Palin from other conservative leaders in the US and makes her an important figure worldwide is her indifference to the views of the Left’s opinion makers. Her capacity to steer debate in the US in a way no other conservative politician can owes entirely to the fact that she does not seek to win over Leftist elites. She seeks to unseat them.

The same can be said of the Tea Party. The reason it frightens the Left, and the Republican leaders who owe their positions to their willingness to accept the Left’s basic agenda, is because it does not accept the Left’s policy agenda. “

From here:
The Aim of Blood Libels

I’m playing catchup here folks, but I did want to note these articles and ideas