Madness

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An open letter to Silicon Valley

Dear Silicon Valley,

Get out.

No seriously. Leave the country, or stop furtively trying to tinker with it through the Democratic Party.

As a conservative, I’ve had it up to *here* with your quest to redefine humanity through technology and idealistic visions. Haven’t any of you watched Terminator? You’re creating Skynet, and don’t seem to have any qualms about it. The time has come for you to vacate America and leave us sensible people to our traditional ways.

Now, I realize my demands might sound mad, hysterical even. But this is no joke. Silicon Valley is poisoning the country. It’s time for you to break off and form your own techno free-for-all land of fake girlfriends and endless pornography. I implore you to expedite the process before you further corrupt America’s impressionable minds.

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D.C. cyclists are the worst

The 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta has got me thinking a lot about our society’s interconnectedness. There is a great scene in Jerome K. Jerome’s comedy tale Three Men in a Boat where the weary boating men come across the riverbank where King John, surrounded by indignant bishops and barons, was forced to grant Englishmen their God-given liberties. That one moment can be traced to today, and all the arguments we Americans have over keeping our country intact.

Here in Washington D.C., the ancient lineage upon which our country was founded is practically forgotten. The typical American no longer sees himself as a part of unfolding history. Instead, thanks to liberalism, he is a hyper-autonomous individual who works for himself and no one else.

This point is best illustrated by a recent article in Washington City Paper. The topic is bicycling, a favorite activity among the yuppy, progressive D.C. denizens. With total obliviousness, author Will Sommer asks, “Riding a Bike on the Sidewalk Makes Sense. Why the Hate?” Sommer is dismayed at the anti-bicycle attitude so prevalent in the city. He’s also perturbed that a police officer once stopped him for the crime of riding his bike on a sidewalk. To him, non-cyclists don’t get it. Even though it’s illegal to bike down the sidewalk in some parts of the city, Sommer is undeterred. “I still bike on the sidewalk…because riding on the sidewalk has its place everywhere in the city,” he asserts.

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Admit It: an 18-year-old shouldn’t be allowed to vote

Reprinted from the Press and Journal

Mark my words: Come January 20th, 2017, Hillary Clinton will be sworn in as the first female president of the United States of America. The media will swoon, the nation will rejoice (at least the half that voted for her), and Chris Matthews will get that old thrill of up leg.

Hillary is, of course, the wife of former President Bill Clinton. She was Secretary of State under President Obama. And she served as a senator during the Bush administration, supporting most of his key initiatives, including the ill-fated Iraq War. With that kind of experience, Hillary will continue many of the same policies, domestic and foreign, that have defined Washington for the past 20 years.

There is something new, however. During her recent campaign kickoff on Roosevelt Island in New York City, Hillary announced that if America sends her back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she will implement “universal, automatic” voter registration for any citizen who turns 18-years-old. The crowd went wild over the idea.

At first blush, automatic voter registration doesn’t sound sexy. We live in a democratic republic, so it makes sense that citizens should be able to vote. But why the push for registering all 18-year-old citizens automatically?

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Magicians of the Outer Right

It’s a common error to think that mystics and magicians are generally liberals or leftists. At least in America.

Most Boomer Americans, monolingual, insulated from the rest of the world and from history, associate “magick” with hippies, the “60s”, Tim Leary, pot and acid, and sexual freedom. When they think about it at all which isn’t often, these days. Most younger Americans don’t think about it at all, being too busy sexting, face booking and in other ways competing for visible status. Ritual, programmed self-hypnosis and other inner work are less common now, since they don’t yield outward signs of wealth or cool.

At least not right away.

I don’t know as much about Europe directly, but my impression is that there’s bit more attention to these subjects still, especially in Eastern Europe, and across the age groups. But as a rapidly shrinking population of young people plugs in, turns on and tweets out, I suppose the same thing is happening there, too.

In truth, ritual magick, symbolic meditation and related practices have always been the tool of a tiny, cognitive elite, in all societies and across all civilizations. They’re simply too difficult, too esoteric, too scary and too uncertain. And while I jest about status-signaling today, it’s always been important to most people, and occult practices have never brought the kind of status boost that killing the biggest buffalo, having the biggest automobile or (nowadays) being the biggest “victim” did.

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Chris Cillizza is wrong: the rampant infidelity of the political class matters

Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post’s “The Fix” tries really, really hard to be a nice guy.

A ham on Twitter, Cillizza does what many journalists can’t do: he pokes fun at politics while also taking it far too seriously. For one, he despises the Netflix series “House of Cards.” As a journalist, he hates the idea that Washington is run by a bunch of overpaid narcissists driven by “self interest, money, power or some combination of all three.” He believes there are plenty of good people in D.C. who work in the shadows, running the country while glory hogs take all the credit. That’s a cute notion, but totally detached from the disease-filled swamp that is the nation’s capital.

Cillizza isn’t just blind to the depravity that exists in and around Washington, he’s an active apologist for the worst kind of behavior. Recently, Mississippi senator Thad Cochran announced his marriage to his long-time aide Kay Webber. The two were rumored to be in a relationship last election cycle, as Cochran fought off a primary challenge from State Senator Chris McDaniel. During the race, a McDaniel supporter snuck into a retirement home to snap a picture of Cochran’s then-bedridden wife, Rose Cochran. The would-be photographer and amateur gossip hound wanted to prove that Sen. Cochran was involved with his aide while his wife suffered from progressive dementia. The late Mrs. Cochran had been living in the home since 2000.

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Mad Men was a depraved and decadent show that gave us an incredible portrayal of humanity

The AMC television series “Mad Men” came to a close this past Sunday. After eight years, the critically-acclaimed show culminated in a dreamy reairing of Coca-Cola’s famous “Buy the World a Coke” ad from 1971. Critics panned it, but I saw the scene as a fitting end for a show about America’s cultural declivity into the hell of moral relativism. In its prime, the sentiment of the sing-songy Coke ad was nice, but the idealism of the post-1960s was too infantile to work, as we now know four decades later.

Within the show’s context, the ad didn’t represent world peace. Rather, it was one of the resolutions sought by the show’s main characters. It was the end product of protagonist Don Draper’s journey to the pits of sorrow and back. To use the cliché phrase, it also represented the End of an Era (the show’s timeline spanned from 1960 to 1970). Though the series finale was ambiguous and not entirely conclusive, “Mad Men” as a show contained some of the hardest lessons learned in life. In between the drinking, impropriety, womanizing, scams, backstabbing, and licentiousness, there were acute moments of actual humanity.

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