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Old-Fashioned? Me?

Beauty, Modernism

I am often accused of being an old-fashioned man.  This, despite the fact that I’m using a keyboard to enter my thoughts into a digital medium via a thing called the Internet.  And hey, I prefer brass cartridges over muzzle-loading, so I’m not that  old-fashioned (unlike some of my Readers, who believe that this brass thing is just a passing fad).

If you want to know what gets me going, however, consider the following pics, and guess why I tend to prefer tradition over modernity.  We’ll open with the modern ones:

Interior design:

Cars:

Handguns:

Women:

Men’s appearance:

Foods:

And you all know about my preferences in architecture:

So yeah, I guess I am old-fashioned.  Feel free to envy me.

Reading Lists

Education

This article got me thinking, because it’s not something I’ve been involved with since the kids finished homeschooling (if such a thing ever happens) and went off to college.  Go ahead and read the thing first, as it sets the stage for what follows.

I’ve often been asked what books I steered my own kids towards during their schooling, so here’s the group from which I drew.  They are the books that every child should have read before age 18, in alphabetical order by category*.  It’s very biased towards Western Civilization, for obvious reasons, and is by no means comprehensive, but enough to provide a good foundation.  (The Son&Heir, for example, was so taken by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca  that he ended up reading everything she ever wrote.  Whatever they find interesting, let them run with it.)

Kim’s Recommended Reading List For Homeschoolers

Politics:
1984 —  George Orwell
Animal Farm —  George Orwell
Of Civil Government — John Locke
On Liberty — John Stuart Mill
Our Enemy, The State — Albert Jay Nock
The Prince — Niccolo Machiavelli

Economics:
Basic Economics — Charles Sowell
The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith

History:
From Dawn To Decadence — Jacques Barzun (this book is required reading; it can serve as a general history work and in a pinch, can be the only  history book read before college)
Heroes — Paul Johnson (biographies)
A History Of The American People — Paul Johnson
A History Of The Jews — Paul Johnson
The Iliad, The Odyssey — Homer
The Proud Tower — Barbara Tuchman
United States Declaration of Independence (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and the Federalist Papers)

Military History:
Carnage And Culture — Victor Davis Hanson
The First World War — Martin Gilbert (or John Keegan)
A History Of Warfare — John Keegan
The Second World War — John Keegan
A War Like No Other — Victor Davis Hanson

Philosophy/Religion:
The Bible
The Book of Journeyman — Albert Jay Nock
Confessions — St. Augustine
Essays Moral and Political — David Hume
Intellectuals — Paul Johnson
Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man — Albert Jay Nock
The Republic — Plato
Summa Theologica — St. Thomas Aquinas

Plays (Shakespeare):
Coriolanus
Hamlet
Julius Caesar
King Lear
Macbeth
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Othello
Richard III
Romeo & Juliet
(Shakespeare’s major History Plays — Henry IV etc. — require a concurrent English history lesson, otherwise the characters are meaningless and the dialogue almost incomprehensible.)

Plays (Other):
Billy Liar — Keith Waterhouse (the novel is good too, but the play is the thing)
Faust — Goethe
The Importance of Being Earnest — Oscar Wilde
Lysistrata — Aristophanes
‘Tis A Pity She’s A Whore — John Ford
Waiting For Godot — Samuel Becket

Poetry:  (all their works, with recommendations)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson — The Eagle,  Charge Of The Light Brigade
Matthew Arnold — Dover Beach
Rupert Brook — The Soldier
Samuel Taylor Coleridge — The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
John Donne — The Good Morrow and A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
John Keats — Ode To A Nightingale
Rudyard Kipling — The Gods Of The Copybook Headings
Richard Lovelace — To Althea, From Prison
Shakespeare — all the Sonnets (as many as can be digested)
Percy Shelley — Ozymandias
Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass
William Wordsworth — Tintern Abbey, The Solitary Reaper

Long Fiction:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
Alice In Wonderland — Lewis Carroll
The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
The American — Henry James
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
A Handful of Dust — Evelyn Waugh
The Chronicles of Narnia — C.S. Lewis
The Count Of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas
Don Quixote — Cervantes
A Farewell To Arms — Ernest Hemingway
Emma — Jane Austen
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
The Invisible Man — H.G. Wells
Zorba the Greek — Nikos Kazantzakis
Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift
The Mayor Of Casterbridge — Thomas Hardy
The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
Fathers and Sons — Ivan Turgenev
Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert A. Heinlein
Les Misérables — Victor Hugo
Carry On, Jeeves — P. G. Wodehouse
Lord Of The Flies — William Golding
Crime and Punishment — Feodor Dostoyevsky
Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
The Harry Potter Stories — J.K Rowling
Women In Love — D.H. Lawrence
The Complete Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle
Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
The Portrait Of A Lady — Henry James
The Wind In The Willows — Kenneth Grahame
Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier
Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
Sons And Lovers — D.H. Lawrence
Uhuru — Robert Ruark

Short Fiction (Authors, with recommendations):
Daphne du Maurier (The Birds, Don’t Look Now)
Ernest Hemingway (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Killers)
Edgar Allan Poe (The Pit And The Pendulum)
Herman Melville (Bartleby the Scrivener)
Ambrose Bierce (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge)
Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book)
Flannery O’Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Good Country People)
Guy de Maupassant (Boule de Suif, The Necklace)
James Thurber (The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, The Unicorn in the Garden)
O. Henry (The Gift Of The Magi, The Cop And The Anthem)
Raymond Carver (Where I’m Calling From, Little Things)
Saki (Sredni Vashtar, The East Wing)
William Faulkner (Mountain Victory, A Rose For Emily)

Erotica:
Ars Amatoria — Ovid
Delta Of Venus — Anaïs Nin
Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure (or Fanny Hill) — John Cleland
The School of Whoredom — Pietro Aretino

*Please note that your opinions may vary — and indeed they should — depending on what direction you’re setting your kids along.  (For example:  if your bent is more to the religious, then obviously the Bible and / or St. Augustine will require more time and dedication, and so on.)

News Roundup

Funny Stuff

1)  Woman dies when she falls onto an eco-friendly metal drinking straw which impales her in the eye — you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this story.  Or at this one:

2)  Bankers are fired and get all sobby —  that’s what happens when you don’t call in enough loans and fail to toss your quota of poor people out onto the street.

3)  Irish man, 19, ‘is raped by two men in Magaluf after being kicked out of a brothel for having no money’ — I have no idea what the problem is, here: he was looking  for some sex, wasn’t he?

4)  Gay group wearing ‘lesbians are women’ t-shirts are removed by police from the National Theatre bar after a transgender staff member was offended by their views — I’m trying to think how it’s possible to fit more annoying shit into a single headline, but I can’t — unless Michelle Obama was the trannie.

5)  Clinton confidante Epstein charged with arranging child prostitutes for friends —  will be murdered or “commit suicide” in 3… 2… 1…

6)  African leaders launched a continental free-trade zone on Sunday that if successful would unite 1.3 billion people, create a $3.4 trillion economic bloc and usher in a new era of development — it’s gonna fail.  Africa wins again.

7)  Older female rhinos are sent in to help young male get horny — redefines the meaning of “cougar”, dunnit?  (I’m trying to visualize “older female rhinos” and “sex”, but all I can think of is Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters.  Sorry.)

Some Theory

Africa, Immigration, Patriotism

I had never heard the term before, but looked it up when reading this excellent article from Z-Man.  Magic Dirt Theory  is “The theory that someone immigrating to a country automatically and magically becomes the same as the native population.”  Hence:

[P]eople like Rashida Tlaib think it is real. She thinks if her people move here, displacing the heritage stock, nothing changes but the complexion. Her people will suddenly stop acting like her people and take on the habits of our people, but with more color.

But, as Z-Man points out, that’s bullshit.

[M]uch of what we think of as American society exists because heritage Americans support it. The people who created this society would have done so wherever they landed. We know this because it has happened in places like Australia and even Africa. Despite it all, countries like Rhodesia and South Africa were able to create first world societies. In the game of dirt, no place has more tragic dirt than the Dark Continent. Yet Rhodesia existed. South Africa existed.

Yup.  When a people has a culture of corruption, that culture will follow them.  Likewise, if they’re dependent on government handouts in their source country, that notion of dependency will come with them.  And if they come from a culture of rampant crime… let’s talk about El Salvador’s MS-13, shall we?

Now what we have the Left trying its level best to destroy everything that we hold dear and sacred about our country — and it is OUR country, not some rancid fucking cross between Third World Shithole #1 and Third World Shithole #2 — all in the name of some made-up meme about equality or racism or colonialism or patriarchy or FFS why don’t we just start whipping these people in the streets for trying to undermine all the things that a) started this country and b) made it great.  (Oh, and by the way, this IS and HAS ALWAYS BEEN a great country, despite what these MFCS Leftists keep trying to push on the rest of us.)

My only regret in all this is that Donald Trump doesn’t have an identical twin brother so we could vote him into office in 2024 and 2028 — which would at least give us time to make the necessary concrete blocks for the feet of every last socialist in the United States.

I need to quit ranting now, lest I get even more angry and the Southern Poverty Law Center gets all miffed  and declares Splendid Isolation  and its readers to be a hate group — like we care.  (That  bunch of godless hucksters needs to stand near the head of the line of the concrete block distribution, but let’s not go there yet.)

What pisses me off royally (if I may be a little solipsistic here) is that I came to this country to pursue the American Dream — the original dream, as created by “heritage Americans” — and now these fucking bastards on the Left want to take that away from me.  Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, and again I say, fuck ’em.

What I want to do with this Magic Dirt is bury all these bastards six feet under it.

Total Agreement, Total War

Marxists, Politics

Try as I may, I cannot raise a single objection to anything in this article:

Debate and discussion with any of the manifestations of the left is a non-starter since the left does not debate or discuss. It adheres to a rigid orthodoxy that will allow no reconsideration or reflection on the putative axioms it regards as sacred. It is, in essence, the contemporary version of Bolshevism. The left will lie, slander, cheat and commit violence to further its goals. Its mind is deadbolted shut.

And unlike pontificators (like Z-Man) who do a great job of diagnosing the problem, but have no other answers other than vague nostrums of “organizing” — such as discussed here:

Remaining content with radio talk, podcasts, interviews, essays and articles that alert the public to the impending disaster, though not to be scanted, is only a necessary first step. Delivering an angry vote may stave off the brunt of the calamity for an interval, but will not significantly alter the dynamics.
In the present situation, the trouble is that Trump’s greatest virtue—arbitration, diplomacy, compromise, carrot-and-stick—is also his critical vice. He may be excellent on trade and the economy, but does not seem to understand that on the home front in today’s political and cultural climate, the art of the deal does not work. The Democrats in their current disposition are not interested in dealing. Antifa is not interested in negotiating. A totalitarian plutocrat like George Soros, who as a youth collaborated with the Nazis and is proud of it, is not interested in consultation. The media are not interested in reporting the truth.
The Democrats, for example, are no longer an established political party but a revolutionary organism bent on scrapping the Constitution. Antifa is a guerilla outfit reminiscent of Hitler’s Brown Shirts, the Red Brigade and Baader-Meinhof. The media have become outright propaganda bullhorns for the left. None of these are trading partners. They are not economic rivals. They are not foreign nations that have to take American military power and punishing tariffs into account. They are fifth columns that are irremediably corrupt, extremist by nature, and absolutely relentless.

David Solway has a plan.  

I have argued that Trump must bring anti-trust legislation to bear on the major internet platforms and search engines now practicing overt censorship on users they oppose and to redefine them as public utilities. He must go further. His initiative on the census citizenship question is laudable but insufficient. He must use the means at his disposal, as did Lincoln, to confront the domestic enemies of the republic with uncompromising force: to declare Antifa an enemy of the state and arrest its financial backers on grounds either of sedition or treason, to be determined by a military tribunal; to bring Democrat politicians who have betrayed the nation (selling 20% of Uranium One to the Russian firm Rosatom, promoting the Benghazi scandal that cost four Americans their lives, weaponizing official agencies like the IRS and FBI, spying on its political opponents, streaming illegals and Third World immigrants to camber the demographics in their favor, subsidizing Iran with pallets of cash, accepting donations and colluding with foreign nationals) before the courts; and to de-license journalists and their media organizations that are in clear violation of the SPJ Code of Ethics.

In other words, Trump has to become what the Left has been claiming (baselessly, of course) that he already is:  a ruthless foe of the Left and someone who does not compromise with those who themselves aren’t prepared to compromise.  In other words, the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the nation needs to fucking do his job and direct the agencies that report to him to do their jobs.  And fire the ones who refuse.

We have all these laws that are supposed to protect us, protect the Republic and our way of life.  I would suggest that at this point, a failure to do the above would be the grossest act of betrayal by our elected President.

For the real and imminent threat to the republic comes not from Russia, China, Iran or North Korea. It comes from within: from the gatekeeper dot-coms, from the legacy media, from the Democrat Party, from billionaire tycoons laboring to dismantle the nation, from the social justice consortium, from political actors in the municipal and jurisprudential realms who support insurgency and do everything they can to thwart the president’s initiatives, from educators who have turned schools and universities into indoctrination camps, and from Guevara-like cadres growing bloodier and more frenzied by the day. If this is not a clear and present danger that portends the death of a nation and the eventual birth of a Marxist-like dictatorship, then nothing is.

The enemy is not at the gates;  he is inside the walls, and already well-entrenched.  We need — no, we insist on — massive and all-encompassing legal warfare against this virus that will destroy this country.

Only the President can do that.  Only this  President can do that.  And it’s time.

Not Gonna Happen

Elections, Politics

Over at PJM, ol’ Roger thinks our presidential campaigns are too long (I agree) and wants to do something about it:

How about postponing the campaign until Thanksgiving and allowing the country and Congress to go about their real business? The British manage their campaigns in only 60 days. Maybe we could squeeze it down to, say, 180.

While he makes some excellent points about the folly of long election campaigns, Roger falls into the liberal trap of wishful thinking.  Whenever some asswipe Lefty (i.e. all of them) makes some stupid proposal, the common response from conservatives is twofold:

  • “How are you gonna pay for it?” — OR —
  • “How are you going to do that, exactly ?”

To whit:  “Free health care for everybody” gets question #1 in response;  and “We’re going to come around to your house and take away your guns!” gets question #2.

The problem with trying to limit the length of presidential (or any) electoral campaigns is that we have that pesky Constitution, in the form of the First Amendment.

If it’s (say) a week before Thanksgiving and someone says, “When I’m president, I will…”, telling someone that “You’re not allowed to say that yet” would result in you getting your pee-pee severely whacked by the courts, and deservedly so.

The Brits get away with their 60-day election campaigns by simply banning election speeches and so on before the start date.  Try doing that in the U.S. of A., and a shit-storm will ensue.  We’re a free people, and if Governor Sextoy Butt-Plug (D) of Michigan wants to announce in 2019 that she’s going to run for the presidency in 2031, she’s perfectly within her rights.

I’m irritated by  the perpetual campaigning thing myself, but at the same time, the First Amendment is more important than my irritation.  Some people are frightened by guns, but the Second Amendment is more important than their trepidation.  That’s how the whole thing works, even if it is inconvenient sometimes.