Witchfinder ISO witch
The Witchfinder General and his media shop otherwise known as CNN might occupy themselves with the revelation that the second-cousin of the ex-girlfriend of the caterer who supplied the Trump campaign with sandwiches for two weeks in February 2016, is famous for giving caviar as Christmas presents, and we all know which wicked nation it is that produces caviar: proof positive that "Russia hacked the election and Trump was in up to his neck with Russia! Impeachment proceedings to commence in a matter of hours!" But for those of us with better things to do, Russia didn't flip a vote and Trump is as immaculately unentangled by outside interests including foreign powers as any president or candidate for president in the history of the republic.
The investigations, plural, of the House and Senate and Department of Justice and FBI and special counsel, plus the totality of the press, must amount to the greatest investigative effort in any society and any age, and yet they've turned up no evidence of collusion with Russia and no evidence even that Russia flipped a vote. But instead of the manifest conclusion that nothing has been found because there's nothing to be found, the investigations proceed, so that by now it's plain there is a presumption in these investigations of guilt, inverting the American standard of presumed innocent, and more than that, the onus in these investigations is shifted from the government to the accused, the burden placed on Trump and his people to prove a negative, and of course there's no proving a negative.
Only lately the Witchfinder General has descended to ordering raids by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the office and the home and even the hotel room of Trump's personal attorney, on questions having nothing to do with Trump: i.e., this is an investigation in search of a crime, or else the Witchfinder means to "put the screws to" lesser figures associated with Trump like in some prosecution of a mob boss, whereupon they'll "sing or compose", produce dirt on Trump or invent it. So the object of these interminable investigations can only be the vetoing of the vote of November 8 2016, by criminal or quasi-criminal allegations, affirmed and elevated by a hyperventilating hysteria in the press and popular culture, until some combination of Democrats and Never-Trumper Republicans in Congress muster the numbers for an impeachment vote. To impeach Donald J. Trump as 45th president of the United States, expel him from power and repudiate him and his works for all time, and assert again the ascendancy of the elite over those bumptious peasants who delivered to Trump 306 electoral votes of 538. Or short of that, to turn up some arguable malfeasance which might be useful politically to Trump's many enemies, if it doesn't amount to "high crimes and misdemeanors", or barring that to depress Trump's popular approval under the weight of suspicion, or at the very least to divert the energies of Trump and his administration with subpoenas and allegations and insinuations and daily developments.
The trouble for the Witchfinder General and his legions is that it turns out, Trump is cleaner than even this Trump-booster had reckoned on, and manifestly he's un-divert-able. If Trump starts his day with an ambitious agenda of ten items, and in the middle of that day some illicit and malicious leak against him explodes in the press like the Hiroshima bomb, by the end of the day those ten items are no less dispatched for the distraction. Bill Bennett who was secretary of education for the greatest president of the 20th Century after the Second World War, namely Reagan, has observed that even Reagan in his first year never ticked so many agenda items as Trump managed in his Year One. Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and it does seem that Trump is the Great Multitasker.
So where does it end: the partisan, malicious investigation without restriction in resources or in scope, in search of any wrongdoing or arguable wrongdoing on the part of its mark or anyone even marginally associated with him, protected and promoted by an effective monopoly in the malicious and mendacious press and popular culture, against a force-of-nature president with 306 electoral votes and as it turns out with clean hands? I know no way of forecasting the future but by casting into the past, and all that I've seen of Donald John Trump and of his multitudinous and multifarious enemies since sometime in the summer of 2015, persuades me to bet on Trump.
The Witchfinder General and his media shop otherwise known as CNN might occupy themselves with the revelation that the second-cousin of the ex-girlfriend of the caterer who supplied the Trump campaign with sandwiches for two weeks in February 2016, is famous for giving caviar as Christmas presents, and we all know which wicked nation it is that produces caviar: proof positive that "Russia hacked the election and Trump was in up to his neck with Russia! Impeachment proceedings to commence in a matter of hours!" But for those of us with better things to do, Russia didn't flip a vote and Trump is as immaculately unentangled by outside interests including foreign powers as any president or candidate for president in the history of the republic.
The investigations, plural, of the House and Senate and Department of Justice and FBI and special counsel, plus the totality of the press, must amount to the greatest investigative effort in any society and any age, and yet they've turned up no evidence of collusion with Russia and no evidence even that Russia flipped a vote. But instead of the manifest conclusion that nothing has been found because there's nothing to be found, the investigations proceed, so that by now it's plain there is a presumption in these investigations of guilt, inverting the American standard of presumed innocent, and more than that, the onus in these investigations is shifted from the government to the accused, the burden placed on Trump and his people to prove a negative, and of course there's no proving a negative.
Only lately the Witchfinder General has descended to ordering raids by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the office and the home and even the hotel room of Trump's personal attorney, on questions having nothing to do with Trump: i.e., this is an investigation in search of a crime, or else the Witchfinder means to "put the screws to" lesser figures associated with Trump like in some prosecution of a mob boss, whereupon they'll "sing or compose", produce dirt on Trump or invent it. So the object of these interminable investigations can only be the vetoing of the vote of November 8 2016, by criminal or quasi-criminal allegations, affirmed and elevated by a hyperventilating hysteria in the press and popular culture, until some combination of Democrats and Never-Trumper Republicans in Congress muster the numbers for an impeachment vote. To impeach Donald J. Trump as 45th president of the United States, expel him from power and repudiate him and his works for all time, and assert again the ascendancy of the elite over those bumptious peasants who delivered to Trump 306 electoral votes of 538. Or short of that, to turn up some arguable malfeasance which might be useful politically to Trump's many enemies, if it doesn't amount to "high crimes and misdemeanors", or barring that to depress Trump's popular approval under the weight of suspicion, or at the very least to divert the energies of Trump and his administration with subpoenas and allegations and insinuations and daily developments.
The trouble for the Witchfinder General and his legions is that it turns out, Trump is cleaner than even this Trump-booster had reckoned on, and manifestly he's un-divert-able. If Trump starts his day with an ambitious agenda of ten items, and in the middle of that day some illicit and malicious leak against him explodes in the press like the Hiroshima bomb, by the end of the day those ten items are no less dispatched for the distraction. Bill Bennett who was secretary of education for the greatest president of the 20th Century after the Second World War, namely Reagan, has observed that even Reagan in his first year never ticked so many agenda items as Trump managed in his Year One. Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and it does seem that Trump is the Great Multitasker.
So where does it end: the partisan, malicious investigation without restriction in resources or in scope, in search of any wrongdoing or arguable wrongdoing on the part of its mark or anyone even marginally associated with him, protected and promoted by an effective monopoly in the malicious and mendacious press and popular culture, against a force-of-nature president with 306 electoral votes and as it turns out with clean hands? I know no way of forecasting the future but by casting into the past, and all that I've seen of Donald John Trump and of his multitudinous and multifarious enemies since sometime in the summer of 2015, persuades me to bet on Trump.
Firearms constants and fear-of-God variables
Since the first English settlements in North America, Americans have kept and borne firearms. The first to land at Plymouth were a deputation sent on ahead of the bulk of the Mayflower company, and when they waded ashore it was with matchlocks smoldering.
And for three-quarters of the age of the Second Amendment guaranteeing the right of civilians to keep and bear arms, firearms in America have been repeating ones. Samuel Colt's patent on the revolver was issued in 1836, and a Colt .45 in each hand gave a man 12 rapid-fire rounds. Or take the Winchester rifle, introduced by Winchester Repeating Arms in 1866, which got off 15 rounds before reloading.
In any age before ours, firearms were a more common and casual feature of American life, and for a time before the 1930s fully-automatic or machine guns were available lawfully to civilians, and yet the phenomenon of the "school shooting" is a novelty; I suppose it was the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado that inaugurated the school shooting as we conceive it, and that's no older than a couple decades. So the gun is not the variable, in mass shootings; not the possession of firearms and not their repeat-action.
A man who fears God and Hell is a man who never will walk into a school and murder 17 innocents. Why did the Vikings murder innocents wantonly, and rape and steal, but that they were the last pagans in Europe, and why did they quit but that they also were converted to Christianity. Their Norse paganism assured them not only that murder and the rest were perfectly fine but that the bold murderer earned a place in the Norse heaven called Valhalla. That sort of thinking will fortify a fellow for a good run in raiding, but as Christians the Vikings' murderous barbarism was insupportable. The world without the Judeo-Christian God, which the Left and the elite labor daily to revive, is the world of Viking barbarism and of school shootings.
The popular culture as much as the press, and the public schools and the universities, and the Left and the Democrat Party, have taught this generation that the universe "just happened" somehow, humanity evolved somehow from pond scum, and the Bible is a lot of lies invented by old white males to suppress the rest; too many of this debased generation have accepted that rot and a small fraction have extrapolated the thinking to its logical nth degree, whereby there's no compelling reason for not walking into a school and murdering 17 innocents, not if we're all just overdeveloped pond scum in a just-somehow-happened universe and there is no God and no Hell. The phenomenon of the school shooting is unthinkable in America until this present generation, which happens to be the first generation since human habitation in North America with any number of takers for the proposition that there is no God.
The end of the world, "Plus: Cheap Eats"
It was my misfortune lately to be exposed to the cover of New York Magazine for July 10-23 of '17, whose feature was "The Doomed Earth Catalog; When will the planet be too hot for humans? Plausibly within our children's lifetimes." The cover was barren save for a doctored image of Earth from space, browned and its clouds mostly burned away.
I was instructed in Armageddon-ist environmentalism in that form of child abuse called Nova Scotia Public Schools, and even then, before I knew left from right politically, I knew a hoax. In a century the observed planetary temperature has risen by 0.9 of a degree Celsius, departing unrecognizably from the precipitate skyward projections of the hysterical and unempirical computer models which prophesy Armageddon. But my question here is whether the Armageddon-ists believe that the Armageddon they're prophesying will come: I couldn't help but observe that the cover dusted itself off from the end of the world with "Plus: Cheap Eats 2017... [and] Wu-Tang and the Pharma Bro..." If a fellow believed truly that his children would perish in the Hadean catastrophe of a scorched planet, "too hot for humans", would he flip the page to read about "Cheap Eats" and "the Pharma Bro"? I never did believe the Armageddon-ism, and I wonder if the believers believe it.
