Yesterday some caller accused Rush Limbaugh of giving up, being burned out. Why? Because Rush announced he wasn’t going to listen to the State of the Union address and would be watching the season premiere of Justified instead.

Rush said he wasn’t burned out. Right.

I find that the above clip helps get your mind right. Especially the last 17 seconds played over and and over and over and over and over again.

Hail to the Chief.

They’re little. But you have no idea what they can do.

Used to be a blog called Deerhound Diary. Wolves would know better than to mess with a bigger, stronger, faster, smarter version of themselves who hate Satanist movies. Wouldn’t they? But they might not think they have much to fear from a Scotty.

Scotties do not f***ing care what wolves think.

Just a thought for you to think of on SOTU night.

Unlike most of you, I don’t feel superior to Keanu.
But I’m wise, you see. A rare thing.

Unhappy kids fight with me. I feel like the final scene in The Matrix where Neo is slow motion against Agent Smith. They think they’re winning, but because they don’t actually know anything, they’re just making me sad.

This isn’t meant to provoke, specifically, Brizoni, but he’s an exemplar of the millennial brand. Sorry. A brand is all you are these days. Without actual education, you’re just Wiki-hitters.

My wife felt compelled to call me today because she didn’t like my tone. Pessimistic. She was extremely concerned. Why would I be pessimistic about millennial assholes who think they know everything and know absolutely fucking nothing?

Why? Because the future depends on smart people, not Rand cultists. Fortunately, she calmed me down. Reminded me that if there’s somebody as genuinely genius as me, there are others. Not everybody is a mediocrity named Bri.

A train wreck that will inevitably lead to a ratings wreck.

Given all the world changing events in the news this week, I have decided to address the most important one: the catastrophic return to the air of Fashion Police.

What were you thinking, Melissa? Obviously no one can replace your mother, Joan Rivers. But Kathy Griffin???!!! Pullease!

The great thing about Joan Rivers was that she was an equal opportunity offender. Nobody was not a potential target. She never (or rarely) dragged politics onto the set. Why we could stomach the occasional unfair shot at Sarah Palin, for example. It was only occasional. We’ve learned, since her death, that Joan was actually pretty conservative. Perhaps the reason for her take no prisoners approach to comedy. She was bawdy, frequently crude, and yet impossible to classify as anything but funny. And, as befits a show about fashion, she was keenly aware of fashion and passionate about what was the good and the bad of it.

Kathy Griffin is the opposite of all this. She’s mean without the redemptive quality of being universal. Because most of her shots at humor have political roots. She’s ostentatiously leftist, feminist, pro-abortion, pro-LGBT, and merciless about attacking everyone whose politics don’t suit her. She’s not a comedian at all. She’s a “look at me” monologist who’s made a career out of irrational resentments and inexplicable personal grievances. She is not, like great comedians are, an observer but a shrieking victim of her own stupid biases and behaviors. For her that’s where the laughs are. And she’s a slob who knows squat about fashion.

No doubt Joan liked Griffin because everyone likes heirs to paths they pioneered. Joan made it okay for a female comic to be edgy and vulgar. But some heirs are bastards and not worthy of the name. With Griffin at the helm, Fashion Police will rot into an ETV version of The View, a barely disguised propaganda tool of progressive hatefulness.

It’s tempting to make some kind of racial point here. The contrast between a polished Manhattan jewess and a rude, raw-boned Irish tramp. But as soon as my mind went there, I bethought myself of Dylan Moran, who could be described in exactly the same terms I just used, except that he, exactly like Joan Rivers, is just plain funny. If he knew or cared about fashion, I’d pick him in a heartbeat to replace the irreplaceable Joan.

Of course, Dylan Moran is probably either drunk or unavailable or both. Which leaves us with the problem of how to replace Joan Rivers and save Fashion Police.

My nomination is Stacey London, late of “What Not to Wear.” Nobody knows more about fashion, and she’s feisty to a fare-thee-well. No standup comic, but let’s not forget the immense Dewey Decimal style catalogs of Joan Rivers jokes, the army of writers left behind by the great lady, and the screen presence Stacey brings to the table. Could she make vagina jokes and get away with it? She could, to a certainty.

Melissa. Honey. Listen to your audience. We fans of Fashion Police do not want a vicious banshee sitting in your mother’s chair. We want a shrewd, clever, irreverent woman who knows the ins and outs of every clothing store, boutique, and designer in New York and Los Angeles. We can get politics and causes anywhere. The Fashion Police have a unique and limited jurisdiction. Long may they rule on their chosen beat.

They won’t rule long with the likes of Kathy Griffin.

Ignore my advice at your own peril. Not happy with you at the moment, Melissa. Sorry.

He’s so ladylike.

Well. We have to take our kudos where we can. Look at Cameron. He looks like he’s on the verge of manspreading. Obviously they’re both wusses, but optics count.

Avant garde feminism? Mylie Cyrus’s new pic? No. Same old same old.

Women are fooled once again. Men want to see their private parts. Women think they triumph by showing them off. Is it art? No. It’s women’s private parts exposed. More fun when they want us to look up their skirts. It’s the flirtation that’s fun, not the flesh. Relatively few vaginas are lovely. How does this kind of game get played? Stay tuned.

Why is this man laughing? Because he got a thousand feminists to let him photo their vaginas. And he gets to pretend he’s an artist. Actually he’s another con man to avoid.

Women are in over their heads. Women have played a major part in human history from the beginning of recorded human history. Nefertiti. Cleopatra. Lucretia Borgia. Catherine de Medici. Elizabeth I. Madame de Pompadour. Catherine the Great. Marie Antoinette. Napoleon’s Josephine. Mary Lincoln. Queen Victoria. Margaret Trudeau. Princess Di. Hillary Clinton. Educated, influential, wealthy beyond measure. But where are their artistic and literary contributions? Nowhere. Mary Shelley wrote a Gothic novel. So did all the Bronte sisters. But Mary Shelley was not Percy. And the Brontes were not Dickens. There’s never been a good woman poet, and the only good woman novelist was Virginia Woolf. For whatever reason. And forget music composition, art, sculpture, architecture, and, uh, physics. Never happened. To this day. On what level and in what way are we supposed to recognize them as equals? Because they can get law degrees and sue us for their various inferiorities? No. In the meantime, look out for feminist guys bearing cameras…

African-Americans are overplaying their hand. Life is not about reparations. It’s about starting from the beginning and making your way. If more than three quarters of your children are born out of wedlock and hardly any son has a father, the results are dull and predictable and usually sad if not violent. Diamond earrings and gold chains don’t make up the deficit. They’re responsible for most murders in this country. It’s racist to notice that? I don’t think so. Shouting and shutting down traffic doesn’t fix any of that. If it does, let me know. I’m waiting.

Islam is not a religion, but an antique barbaric spasm. Their holy scripture — which as far as I can tell is an incompetent plagiarism of the Bible — commands monstrosities. Beheading of infidels. Stoning of adulterers. Cutting off the clitoris of a female child. Killing of defiled daughters who don’t have four witnesses of rape. That’s not a religion. It’s just torture and terror, a flight backward from the 21st century to the 7th. Ally ally Akbar. God as the devil incarnate. Not a religion but a death wish. Doomed, damned, and horrific. Until they repent for their excesses, they deserve to be exterminated from the earth. And the Pope is a fucking coward for not recognizing it.

Progressives are braindead totalitarians, so ignorant they have learned nothing from their own history. Like all Marxists, they know no history and never argue logically. They call their opponents the most obscene and scatological names they can think of because they have no counter-arguments and are intellectually, morally, and ideologically bankrupt. Uneducated idiots. Why I don’t argue with any of them anymore. Can’t wait to hear from the first progressive who can articulate for me a positive vision of the future that isn’t a reengineering of Original Sin.

Atheists are the biggest fools of all. They think computers invented themselves and humor is a threat worse than climate change. They miss the most fundamental principle of all. No organization can exist without a template, its own DNA. You can’t ever be anything otherwise. The universe has DNA.

I’ve worked for companies that had no creative DNA in their makeup. There was no way to introduce it. I’ve worked for companies that could remember a past talent for creativity. I think the universe works the same way. Our universe has DNA for intelligence, creativity, vitality, morality, and humor.

Atheists think they have the market cornered on all these things. But without any source. They think they thought it up for themselves with all their rational brilliance. Usually, these are youngsters. Sometimes they’re old old fools like Richard Dawkins. But I’m old enough to have some humility.

The universe is THE comedy that makes fools of all the self styled smart ones.

This was the fight AFTER Ali should have retired for good. He took repeated shots to the head no fighter should take. I remember. I was begging, “Stop now! Please!” He did not.

Some perspective here. Muhammed Ali was a Black Muslim. Most of the men he fought were nothing like that. The documentary called Facing Ali is a revelation of how this man transcended narrow sectarian divisions. My own favorite image of him is with children, both black and white, playing and sparring with them like a kid.

This movie has nothing to do with that. It’s about the perspective of old men, the chief foes Ali faced in the ring. Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, George Foreman, Ron Lyle, Ernie Shavers, Leon Spinks, Henry Cooper, and others.

Some if not many of these were once rumored to detest Ali, notably Frazier and Norton. What comes through in the documentary is their nearly unanimous admiration and gratitude to the greatest prizefighter who ever lived. For his talent, yes, but also for his humanity. For most the shot he gave them at his crown was the breakthrough moment of their lives, and their personal stories are of hardship survived, determination to surmount wasted years, and the opportunity to go up against the most heroic figure in their world.

Even losing, as most did, did not diminish their appreciation. For some it was an opportunity to begin life anew, for others it was an immediate instant of awareness that they had been allowed to become part of a legend.

All — even an accident-crippled Ken Norton — express sorrow for the subsequent physical ills of the great champion. Even Joe Frazier wipes away tears of sorrow.

Youtube is charging to see the whole film. It’s well worth it.

This is an opportunity to see a fraternity of men whose like we will never see again. Seeing them coalesce in thankful and magnanimous love for the major combatant in their lives is moving in the extreme. To a man, they seem to love Muhammed Ali. I do too.

Something to factor into our grievances and resentments about Islam.

Oriana Fallaci. As brave as she was beautiful.

Now the men are worms, and the best and worst of us are women.

American feminists are insane, probably brain-damaged sociopaths. They fret about rape — and who would want to rape them? — while they celebrate the right of women to dress and act like streetwalkers. They fight for the right to kill babies conceived in promiscuous lifestyles. Nuts.

On the other hand, the only remaining investigative reporters with a nose for hard news are women. Sharyl Attkisson. Katie Pavlich. Michelle Malkin. And Kimberley Strassel.

I’m proud to announce that Kimberley Strassel has accepted me as a Facebook friend.

But I have to acknowledge that these iconic women were not the first. Here’s an excerpt from Tim’s latest comment.

I just so happen to have started reading the Rage and the Pride by Oriana Fallaci last week right before the Paris shootings. As she describes them: “Hens who are only able to flap inside the henhouse. Cluck, cluck, cluck, my dears.”

Fallaci. She knew eunuchs when she saw them. Tragic that she’s not still here to comment on the current state of affairs.

Addio, Oriana.

Yeah. They crushed Alabama and they killed Oregon..

I know lots of people hate Ohio State. I can’t explain my feelings on this night without confessing that my mother and her parents were all Buckeyes. And therefore so am I. Here’s the last pic I have of my mother, who died a decade ago.

She was in her sixties then. But she was always beautiful.

Tonight I can feel her beside me. She majored in Romance Languages at Ohio State. French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. Worked on the Manhattan Project. Raised us tirelessly and constantly. No better woman ever lived.

So hurray for the Buckeyes. Long may they live. And long may she shine as an example of what women can be.

She always loved Sinatra. I can still picture her dancing to one of his songs. Light of foot and light of heart. She was joy in the moments you want to remember. And iron in the moments you want to forget. Buckeye babe. I’ll get her a helmet sticker. The kind of guy I am. What kind of guy are you?

My hole card is tenderness. Tenderness forever.

Not a unique phenomenon. Women want you to look. Why resent it when you do?

We were just talking about the new hardcore feminists. Here’s another proof of their exhibitionism, which is a mix of self love and self loathing.

Women of New York Draw Their Own Boobs. (Watch the whole slide show. Even you women. Yours are probably better than you think.)

Most of them are not very good drawers. But the project itself says a lot. They really really want to show off their boobs.

I wish they all would. They don’t need the excuse of a PETA or anti-nuclear protest. Just whip off your shirt and enjoy the attention.

Men don’t respond well to displays of male genitalia. But even women like the sight of a great rack. Men, of course, like all boobs, even the ones that droop and sag and flop around. The real power women have over men.

If the feminists are serious about taking control, this would be their ultimate weapon. Topless women in every workplace. Who will gainsay your orders? Who will defy your authority? Brassieres and nipple-hiding blouses are the surest proofs of the patriarchy ever invented.

Penises are ugly. Breasts are beautiful. And wouldn’t the Islamists be outraged?

Destiny: You tend to find your soulmate.

The new hardcore feminists seem to hate men. They’re looking for rape under every beer keg in colleges and universities across the land. It reminds me of the relationship between progressives and flyover country. The only thing that matters is what happens on the two coasts. New York and Los Angeles are the two poles of the universe, and everywhere else is nowhere.

Forget the “differences attract” nonsense. Like tends to find like. Today’s feminists are looking across the vast flyover country of decent guys to focus on the true objects of their desire: the monolithic sexual animals who really are attracted to the thought of having hate sex with man-hating women whose deepest regret is that they weren’t born with a penis and testicles. And just like the bicoastal rivalry between NY and LA, the women (NY) wish to impose their will on the men (LA) who are most like them. Men who think the opposite sex is trash, worth only of subjugation and, well, use.

What’s the equivalent of date rape drugs like rohypnol? Maybe the fabrication of rape narratives that never happened. One is aggressively predatory male in nature. The other is passive-aggressively predatory female. They are mirror images of each other. One could say they deserve each other.

So I have some advice. If you’re a hostile, man-hating feminist, take a step back. Most of the 90+ percent of men who have the humanitarian impulses you claim to prize are put off by you, afraid of you.

Nice men are habitually afraid of women, not just angry mean women but all women. Afraid to say they are attracted to her. Afraid to ask her out. Afraid to make a move sexually. All your speech codes and campus regulations and kangaroo courts were put in place years ago by their upbringing. These are not men who are native cowards. They produce prodigious accomplishments most feminists are incapable of. They have the cultural disadvantage of being, gasp, gentlemen.

Why, then, do you completely overlook them and focus instead on the cavemen who simply want to bend you over a table and shtup you?

Maybe the animals are the ones you really want. But in that case, stop the fighting. Bend over the table and get shtupped.

Not trying to be abusive. But you sure do look like a bunch of sexually frustrated females. To the rest of us. Meaning the huge population of nice guys who have learned to avoid every woman with the look you always have on your not terribly attractive face.

Or something.

They DO try, you know.

Now that we’ve mostly dealt with the Islamic problem, I thought it was time to talk about the new feminist grudges, manspreading and manslamming.

What’s “manspreading”?

The folks at Gothamist have bravely taken on the scourge of “manspreading,” the male practice of sitting on a crowded train with your legs spread wide apart. It’s a habit so nefarious the MTA even built a campaign targeted at scolding men who do it. Now Gothamist has taken a camera on the subway and confronted guilty manspreaders about their unthinkable behavior.

And what’s manslamming?

In early November of last year, 25-year-old labor organizer Beth Breslaw decided to confront male entitlement one sidewalk stranger at a time. She was inspired by a friend’s experience: Having heard that men were less likely than their female counterparts to make room on a crowded sidewalk, this friend wanted to test the theory herself while commuting to and from her job in the Financial District. From then on, she spent every day getting repeatedly body-checked.

When I explained the crisis to my wife, she said “huh?” I explained that I was manspreading as we spoke, holding my legs far enough apart to put my elbows on them, as all men do when they lean forward. She had heretofore been unaware of the sexual aggression it represented, especially since the real aggressor on our couch is Raebert, the deerhound who always wants his head on my or my wife’s lap.

So I thought maybe it was time to discuss both these sexual issues.

Manspreading first. Factually, not that many people are on an urban subway when you consider the whole population. But men do tend to sit with their legs apart and their elbows on their knees all the time, in bus stations, on couches, and even in the awful confines of airline seats. It’s not a display or an aggression, or even a microaggression. It’s just a desire to be able to spring from the seat into action if there’s a need. And a convenient resting place for our elbows.

Does it really take up extra space? It seems to me that women are reacting to the endless strictures to keep their legs together, lest men look up their skirts. Fine. Spread yourselves. Let us look up your skirts. And while you’re at it, jettison the giant handbags, backpacks, and other baggage you invariably carry with you when you travel by subway, train, and airliner. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been assaulted by female luggage — in the aisle, from overhead, and in a seat on public transportation. Also, given that most of the U.S. population is obese, does a few degrees of leg askewness really matter? People on public transit are fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. There are women who more than compensate for the worst cases of manspreading whose thighs are so thick I can’t even see up their skirts.

On to Manslamming. Which is even sillier. I have the advantage here of being a man. If the premise were true, these alpha male slammers should barge through everyone. They don’t. Walking sidewalks in big cities is a cooperative exercise. Sure, there are jerks. People who give way to no one. Most are not that. I rarely bump shoulders on big city sidewalks.

Two rules. Good for both sexes. First, don’t be walking sidewalks to make a testosterone statement. Walk to get where where you’re going as expeditiously as possible. The biggest obstacle is pairs of people who are so busy talking to one another they don’t see anybody else. The second biggest obstacle is people on cellphones, male or female. They don’t see nothing.

The second rule is to pick the right side to be on. Pedestrian traffic tends to divide itself into this way and that way. If you insist on going this way against a that way flow, you can count on shoulder bumping experiences, whether you’re a guy or a gal.

My own worst pedestrian experiences have to do with women in malls and airports. You know. The old broads who are ambling along three abreast talking at half the normal walking pace. They don’t know and don’t care that they’re holding other folks up. Because they’re the only ones in the whole goddam place.

Which brings us to Femsteering. This article says something true I haven’t heard in 30 years. [boldface added]

…Breitbart [London] has discovered an even more pernicious gender-specific public nuisance that is endangering anyone on the roads. The phenomenon is known as “femsteering,” and it describes the almost total inability of any woman to competently operate an automobile. Though whispered about on men’s rights forums, in working men’s clubs and on the pages of tabloid newspapers for decades, this is the first time the trend has been discussed in the open in a serious publication.

According to the activists drawing attention to this ugly expression of female privilege, femsteering affects all of us: men, women and children, and threatens the personal safety of anyone on the motorway or, especially, on busy streets outside schools. Its effects are dramatic and visually arresting, they report: crumpled bumpers, crippled cyclists and petrified passengers screaming: “Mommy, why are you driving us into the wall?!”

Yet some women insist the whole thing has been cooked up as yet another way of oppressing women. Asked yesterday to comment on the phenomenon, Guardian blogger Judy Truncheon said: “For too long men have expressed their cis privilege by alluding to a mystical driving manoeuvre no woman has ever successfully executed, referred to as ‘parallel parking.’ It’s time feminism took a stand against this patriarchal fairy story and said it out loud: women can drive just as well as men.

“So-called ‘health and safety’ restrictions placed on women, demanding that we stop applying lipstick at 80 miles an hour and texting at clogged-up intersections before lurching into oncoming traffic are folk tales put about to discourage women from expressing themselves and as a way of perpetuating inequality.” Short-lived cable TV documentaries with titles such as Are You Ready To See The World’s Worst Female Drivers? have contributed to “unhelpful stereotypes” about women, she added.

Truncheon’s comments will come as a surprise to husbands everywhere, who have for generations been left with inflated insurance premiums and hefty repair bills for the carnage inflicted on family vehicles by the fairer sex. Men point to the numerous examples from their own lives and the privately whispered meme among men about their better halves and motor vehicles.

This is intended as satire but it’s also true. Women generally have better insurance rates than men, as the insurance companies proudly tell us, but the facts hide the facts. Men drive fast, they drive drunk, and they drive a lot more. Women drive into things, not because they’re drunk or mad, but because their spatial consciousness isn’t quite up to men’s. Uncomfortable fact. Last year, they asked Richard Petty when Danica Patrick was going to win a NASCAR race. He laughed. “Never,” he said.

Never. The same timeframe in which feminists are going to win the superiority over men they insist they deserve.

Completely doubled up. Until he needs to run. Impossible? Only to leftists.

Don’t tell anybody, but he’s feeling hangdog. He ate my glasses last night. I didn’t yell at him, but he knew anyway. Here’s how he’s looked all day.

Think dogs don’t feel guilt? Call your nearest animal behaviorist for phenobarbital.

Won’t look me in the eye.

Anyhow. Why we can ride through the maelstrom of nonsense about fanatics killing civilians in Paris. We grieve, but it was bound to happen. As my wife reminded me, I did leave my glasses on the nightstand. He doesn’t eat my glasses when I leave them outside the bedroom.

I was there. If you ordered Coke, the waiters suavely popped the bottles between their legs. No harm. And les filles who saw American boys ordering Coke were enchante.

I wouldn’t write this but for another fairly sleight reminiscence by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger.

Just now, I was reading, “Police have ordered all shops closed in a famed Jewish neighborhood in central Paris . . .” (Article here.) The neighborhood, of course, is the Marais, and in particular its Rue des Rosiers.

In the summer of 1982, I was between high school and college, and in Paris for a bit. Arab terrorists — same people as today, nothing ever changes — attacked a delicatessen in the Marais. On the Rue des Rosiers. It was called Goldenberg’s. Not sure whether it’s still there.

Anyway, there were six people killed, including two American tourists. More than 20 other people were injured. You know the drill. Same old scene.

In Jerusalem, the prime minister, Begin, said something like, “If the French state can’t protect these Jews, I will.” He meant in Paris itself. He was just blustering, of course, engaging in some bravado. But I was kind of impressed with it.

We had all been taught to hate Begin, needless to say. He was the Hitler of the Middle East. Never mind Saddam, Assad (père), or Khomeini. Menachem Begin was the bad guy, eating Palestinian children for breakfast.

August 1982 was just one step on my road to growing up. My lessons were hard, but there were those who had it harder — like the dead and their families.

Over the years, I’ve wondered, “Why the hell is there a single Jew in France? Why the hell is there a single Jew trying to do business on the Rue des Rosiers?” I wonder it again now.

No, I’m no expert either. But I was there in 1963, when Charles de Gaulle was the target of multiple Algerian assassination attempts. We had to stay home a couple of times because Paris was locked down after another incident of Gaullian gunfire. He would not let them go as a French colony. I saw him (almost) in a Bastille Day parade. My dad got me one of those cardboard towers with mirrors, and I was unable to make it work. But I heard the oceanic cheers when he rode by.

I’m the one in the upper right corner of the part just to the left of the buildings.

You can think, if you like, that at 11 and 10, my sister and I had no idea what was going on in the world while we were experiencing the pageantry of life in the vicinity of the Champs Elysee.

I was a car buff, sure. But I knew there was something different about the French.

A woman spit on my father when he didn’t let her hijack a cab taking his wife and kids home. I’d never seen that before.

On the other hand, my mother got her hair done and never looked more beautiful. And my sister and I always felt rich in Paris because we had 35 centimes each for the Metro, so that if we ever got lost we could buy our way home.

Simplest subway map I’ve ever seen.

My sister and I were not unaware of the world. We both remember the headline of the International Herald Tribune that announced the death of Jackie Kennedy’s baby Patrick. We went home to a November that resulted in the assassination of our president. Which changed everything forever.

In between we experienced near death in a hurricane at sea.

We went to Europe on the QE1. Perfect service.

Came home on the Leonardo da Vinci. We nearly died. A hurricane named Beulah. We saw panic and vomit.

Just in case you didn’t believe me. HURRICANE. Click on the image. Real hurricane, real fear.

Funny thing. Our mother took us all over Paris. Place de la Concorde, the Louvre, Musee d’Orsee, and everywhere else too. The Catacombs. The Sewers. Place Vincennes. When my dad got time he took us down through the south of France. Many chateaus. My memory isn’t what it what it was but I remember Chenonceau.

Most beautiful place I’ve ever been, except for Isola Bella. White peacocks beat everything. Click!

So I think back to de Gaulle in France in that summer of 1963. I’m minded that you can move on or become the captive of your past. America tried heroically to move on. We tried to overcome the legacy of slavery. Maybe it can’t be done.

France didn’t try nearly as hard. And they are paying the price. Their guilt over imperialism has destroyed them. Their country is going to be terrorized to ruin. But America was the least imperialist of the great western powers. In European countries, there is no cultural contribution from their immigrants. They live in isolated ghettoes, “no go” zones, dead ends of society.

Different in America. Yeah, we haven’t had an Italian president yet, but we’ve had Irish and black presidents. It can be done.

The key is not to build the future on guilt over the past. The past will hunt you down, eat you alive, and ultimately kill you if you let it.

France does not have the equivalent of jazz, rhythm and blues, or even Oprah Winfrey. They take credit for crude burlesque acts like this:

And things, unlike that, I wish I’d done.

But I’m just a Jersey boy who was once in France.

Post-Modern Nihilism is a seductive thing. I expect Jihadis know what to do with that nose-ring. Islam always knows what to do. I refuse to imagine it.

Like most of you, I expect, I’ve been watching lots of news reports and reading lots of opinion articles from all over the political spectrum. Something bad happened in Paris. But it didn’t begin in Paris and it won’t end there. Here are my thoughts. The problem is Islam. And the people who submit to it. That is what Islam means. Submission, not peace as it is so often represented. The ones who submit are the problem. They’ve been sold a bill of goods.

They hate western civilization. They believe in an authoritarian truth that cannot be disputed. They elevate historical grudge to an ideology of permanent ineradicable grievance. They want to roll back industrial civilization to a level that is barely above a subsistence economy and population. They want everyone subject to the dictats of a handful of didacts who speak for absolutely everyone and can pass judgment on the poor infidels who have no chance of redemption except through perpetual humiliation and self sacrifice. Why the infidels deserve death or worse. Their sanctifying alternative offer is utter guilt and misery in life with a faint promise of redemption in the manifestation of the greater good.

Most of all they hate the United States of America. Because it celebrates freedoms their ideology cannot accept and which they despise. They hate the United States because it exists and looks like it will continue on much the same terms regardless of their superior wisdom.

If you’ve been wondering why western leftists continue to defend Islam as a religion of peace, look no further. They have more in common with the beheaders than they have in conflict. They are all Islam. Even their apparent differences really aren’t.

Contemporary leftist feminists, for example, are trying to destroy man-woman sexuality. Maybe in their heart of hearts they really are in favor of female genital mutilation, meaning clitorectomies. Then they will be free to worship with comforting apathy the gods of human annihilation represented by climate change, pandemics, and other incarnations of old scripture prophecies confirming original sin.

If you want to die, go ahead and die. Most of us don’t. But Islam is making its big bid. We’ll be better off without you.

Be sure to take the New York Times with you when you go.

I got a reminder today.

You can try to outrun your past but it will always catch up with you. I got a call today from a bright young thing who wanted me to attend a 45th Reunion of my class at Mercersburg. I have no desire to go back. My roommate and best friend died at the age of 40, probably from drug propensities he acquired at Mercersburg in the sixties. When the Penn State scandal hit, I reached back to Mercersburg, wondering how seriously they took the fact of pedophile teachers, who were not numerous but were always somehow covered up, much after the fashion of the Catholic Church. They stonewalled me. Sergeant Schultzes all. “I know nothink.” Even men for whom I had such a lifetime of respect that I called them mister when I phoned them in my late fifties.

Life may be about loss, but it’s not about dismissal. I have written a lot about Mercersburg over the years. I sought feedback from the BYT about her experience as a recent graduate and what she had heard about the old times. She told me she’d heard it was a “dreary place.”

This is so ridiculously wrong that I emailed her what I suddenly realized was almost a book length volume of evidence to the contrary.

Part of which I would now like to share with my Mercersburg brethren and anyone else who cares.

When did Mercersburg get so rich?

Culture Shock

Never watched “The Social Network.”

How Old Am I?

The New America

Sorry for all the no bottom-line promos. But I’m tired and my car battery is dead in the cold. I’m still just a Mercersburg boy.

Her name was Edith Sanski. She was 22. I was 10. She kissed me in Menton.

First time and place I fell in love. There is passion there and don’t you dare brand it all as effeteness or cowardice. (No. Don’t get wrong ideas. Edith was a singer with a becoming overbite who was just being sweet to a boy with an obvious crush.) France has been a friend, regardless of her loose talk. The graves at Normandy are scrupulously maintained. The memory remains. Sad but not regretted.

I wrote about France (you could look it up) critically, lovingly, and even slavishly long before today’s tragedy:

My own observation is that the amount of emotion expended in… arguments about France has very little to do with France itself and a great deal to do with what one thinks the other guy believes about France. Maher is using the topic of things French to poke a stick in the eye of his own straw-man stereotype of American conservatives. Most hardcore French bashers, on the other hand, aren’t as hostile to France as they are to self-styled liberal sophisticates like Maher who see themselves as world-class intellectuals in the tradition of Sartre, Foucault, and Rousseau. It’s all cultural war by proxy. And France is, of course, an incredibly picturesque and symbolic backdrop for a war between opposing cultural perspectives.

I believe Bill Maher when he says, “I don’t want to be French.” His most subtle punchline is his correct assumption that his fiercest critics won’t ever believe it.

I also happen to think that both sides of the culture conflict are ill served by choosing France as a theater of war over competing American visions of our national future. There are simply too many disqualifying ‘but’s’ in every instance that make the French experience irrelevant. Hopelessly, completely, permanently irrelevant.

The France they’re all talking about doesn’t really exist, certainly not as any kind of template for American life, good or bad. France is a small country. We are a huge one. France is an old country with a young constitutional government (all its predecessors having failed for centuries). We are a young country with an old constitutional government. France is ethnically homogeneous with a fairly homogeneous religious minority of immigrants it can’t or won’t assimilate. We are ethnically heterogeneous with a heterogeneous minority of immigrants, most of whom do or will assimilate successfully. France is located at the heart of the most violent continent in history, while we overwhelmingly dominate the most peaceful continent in history (barring the uninhabited Antarctic). France has a legacy of conquering its neighbors, executing hundreds of thousands of its citizens, and engaging in oppressive colonial actions in the Third World that continue to this day. We have our own legacy of slavery and warfare against the Indians, but if you’re into comparing bloodstains, this is an apples-to-oranges comparison without meaning or relevance. France is an exhausted nation with a seriously declining birthrate, and its crimes and misdemeanors on the world stage are those of an aged cynic who has learned to seek every possible personal advantage with the least possible personal risk — and to hell with all your naive ideals. We are an energetic, growing nation still willing to risk making big mistakes for big rewards.

In this context, the liberal habit of cherry-picking the “good things” about France to fling in the face of conservatives is delusional and counterproductive. They forget that almost no one of any political stripe wants America to be France. The conservative habit of comparing American liberals to the effete French is equally counterproductive. For the most part, the effete liberal Americans who really would like to be French have already moved there. Johnny Depp. Gwyneth Paltrow. Who else?…

On the other hand, conservative bashers of all things French would do well to remember that this nation they so despise has produced some of the greatest writers, philosophers, artists, architects, generals and armies in recorded human history. If your French-bashing goes beyond humor for the sake of entertainment or clever satire, you’re doing yourselves no honor in the process. For example, it’s fine to make dozens of jokes about how cowardly the French are, but before you get too carried away, read up on the battle of Verdun in World War I. Less than a century ago, the French army was filled with heroes so stupefyingly brave that they allowed themselves to be wasted by the hundreds of thousands to no real purpose. Read, study the battlefield photographs, and the contemporary accounts of the action — then, by all means, give us some more cowardly French jokes. That’s our birthright as Americans, and will remain so as long as we don’t take our jests — and ourselves — too seriously.

I also love Paris. My heart is with all the French tonight.

Everyvoice. Only funnier.

Don’t even know which one to begin with. Male or female. How he started. A guest didn’t show, so he filled in, playing both parts. He’s done it ever since. The thing to notice is not whether the guest is male or female but the speed with which he switches from one voice to the other. People pay to see that. There are times when it seems he’s seems he’s overtalking, but that’s a mere illusion.

Here’s a male guest. Note the intrusion of an irate caller.

And here’s a female guest.

Every single night, there are irate callers. Think about that fact.

Dogs hate cats and vice versa.

Actually, they don’t. Among other false ideas you have to get over.

When they hide, it’s impossible to find them.

The missus got up late this morning and somewhere along the way, Raebert went missing. If you’ve seen him out there in the wide world, give us a ring.