The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Criminal Carnival in Madison, Wisconsin

Posted on | July 25, 2026 | No Comments

Amy Curtis: “If you don’t know Wisconsin, let me explain that Madison is so left-wing it flies in circles.” Indeed. Kamala Harris got 75% of the vote in Dane County, which is a higher percentage than Harris got in Fulton County, Georgia. The fact that a drug-addicted career criminal fresh out of prison was wandering the streets of Madison is not surprising. What is surprising is that, when the aforesaid criminal was accused of stealing bicycles and attempting to burglarize vehicles in broad daylight, the Madison police actually tried to arrest him:

The man who was killed by police in Madison, Wisconsin, a shocking caught-on-camera shooting — sparking protests — was a violent ex-con with a lengthy record, including for assaulting cops, The Post can reveal.
Corey Durrell Ruiz, 38, was identified by local officials and his family in social media posts.
State Rep. Shelia Stubbs, a Democrat, said Ruiz “should still be alive.” Brandi Grayson, the head of the Madison-based black community advocacy group Urban Triage, decried the shooting as, “Another black man is dead on a Madison street.”
Protesters have flooded the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, where the shooting happened and local black activists have seized on the killing.
Ruiz had recently been released from prison, and had knifed a cop moments before he was fatally shot, according to authorities.
Prison records show that Ruiz was Hispanic, and not black — though court records listed him as African-American.
Online court records show at least 25 criminal cases dating back to 2007. In 2023, he was convicted of battery to a law enforcement officer and resisting a law enforcement officer. He most recently was convicted in 2025 of retail theft and resisting police.
The Wisconsin State Journal quoted friends as saying that he was homeless and had longtime problems with drug addiction.
He was released from prison in May of this year and was listed as having absconded from supervised release.

Lots to chew over in that brief excerpt, but the main thing is that Ruiz had only been out of prison for a few weeks and was in violation of his parole (which is what “absconded from supervised release” means)

Corey Ruiz (left); his final arrest (right).

Also highly relevant is that “friends” of Ruiz said “he was homeless and had longtime problems with drug addiction.” If you fell on hard times, would you become homeless? Almost certainly not, because you have friends and family who would take you in until you got back on your feet. However, if you’re a drug addict with a violent criminal history, even your own family won’t let you stay under their roof. Anyone who’s dealt with drug addicts understands this — a junkie will steal everything that’s not nailed down if he can sell it to feed his habit, which is why the junkie is not welcome even at his family members’ homes. But then the junkie gets shot by a cop, Ben Crump shows up to “demand justice,” and suddenly those very same relatives — lured by the scent of a generous wrongful death settlement from the city — turn out to praise the deceased felon they turned away when he got out of prison:

The family of the man shot and killed by Madison, Wisconsin, police during a confrontation spoke out Friday about their grief during an emotional news conference and called for justice.
Corey Ruiz’s mother, daughter, partner and siblings joined attorney Ben Crump, expressing their sadness and frustration about his death.
Elsa Ruiz briefly spoke before breaking down in tears.
“He loved his daughter. He loved his family. He did not deserve to be taken out like that,” she said, referring to death of her son, which was captured on video by bystanders.
Madison Police Chief John Patterson said officers were responding to a call Wednesday afternoon about a person allegedly checking parked vehicles when they confronted Ruiz and, police said, he fled on a bicycle. . . .
After Ruiz fell from his bicycle, Patterson said, a struggle ensued between Ruiz and four responding officers and Ruiz allegedly pulled out a knife, injuring one officer. That officer fired the shots that killed Ruiz, he said. . . .
Crump contended there was no reason for the police to chase Ruiz in the first place.
“This was a suspicion of a property crime, there was no property crime,” he said. . . .
Veronica Ruiz, Corey Ruiz’s older sister, said the public should not judge her brother by his past.
“His criminal record tells a tale of trauma, of pain, of struggle. It does not define who my brother was,” she said. . . .
Marjorie Aliomar, the mother of Corey Ruiz’s 13-year-old daughter Kah’Liyah, told reporters that she saw the video of the shooting before she was told that it was Ruiz. She noted that it took place close to their home and her daughter’s school.
“I hate that she has to walk past this every day, and … I hate that he will never see her graduate,” Aliomar said.

Yeah, but Corey wasn’t living with you, was he, ma’am? He wasn’t living with you, or his mother, or his sister. He had been on the streets ever since he got out of prison, because he was a junkie and a criminal, and you couldn’t do anything about that, could you? Now that there’s a chance at collecting some slice of a settlement payout from the city, however, you’re standing up there in front of the TV cameras telling us how much you loved him, and nobody in the media is even asking the obvious question: “If you loved him so much, why was he homeless?”

What a constant humiliation it must be, working as the police chief in a city like Madison, where the protest mobs turn out demanding “justice” when a criminal gets shot after stabbing a cop. How can you enforce the law in a community where the citizens believe it’s acceptable to stab police officers? I’m sure every officer on the force in Madison would gladly resign if they could get a job anywhere the people are sane enough to realize that nobody deserves a second chance to stab a cop.



 

Category: Crime, Wisconsin

In The Mailbox: 07.24.26

Posted on | July 25, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Head is finally clear; throat is still sore and I’m weak as a kitten. So much for catching up.
Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Ross: A Day of Impossible Victory with John Paul Jones (1779), also, Dr. Evil – Fauci, The Comic Book
357 Magnum: Welcome to the Panoptican,  Is Self-Defense Legal in Massachusetts? and Leftist Violence
EBL: Cod Fat, Michelin Fried Fish, “Looking for a Place to Happen”, Critical Drinker’s Odyssey – Meh, and Spruce Beer
Twitchy: Ben Shapiro Schools Piers Morgan – Free Speech Means I Don’t Have To Feed Your Clickbait Show, David Axelrod Deletes Tweet After Falling For Fake Trump Gold Coin Meme, and So Much For The First Amendment
Louder With Crowder: Megan Rapinoe refuses to calm down, claiming you’re anti-women’s rights if you don’t support men invading women’s sports, Someone put up a billboard that says no child has “two dads,” and the LGBTQ+ community is beside themselves over it, Shiloh Hendrix Found Guilty – Breaking Down the Sham Verdict, The IRS made a $20K mistake, now they are threatening to seize a 76-year-old man’s farm if he doesn’t pay for it, and That AWFL woke reporter who compared Caitlyn Clark to Emmett Till? She “apologized” by doubling down
Vox Popoli: The Secret History of Psykosonik, also, The Addition of Economic Attrition
According To Hoyt: Summer Time, and the Livin’ is Easy, The Golden Summer, Behold this One Strange Trick, All The Legs, All The Pants, and Once More Into the Breach!
Cedar Sanderson: Lightly Toasted Marshmallow Strip #16, also, Novel News
Stoic Observations: The Cobb Left Party, also, Puritanical Coders
John C. Wright: To Know and Love and Serve the Lord, also, Rocks & Brains & Darwin
Defending The Wood Perilous: To Kickstart or Not To Kickstart
Mazelit Airaksinen: NYC Doc Claims Jews Smell & “Criminally, Illegally, & Fraudulently” Live In America

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Attorney For Shiloh Hendrix Explodes After Disorderly Conduct Verdict in N-Word Trial, Justice Department Moves to Revoke U.S. Citizenship From 10 Criminal Migrants, South Korea’s Crackdown on U.S. Companies Threatens South Koreans’ Access to Advanced Technology, Italy Names the Problem While America Renames It, and The Manufactured ‘Bipartisan’ Push for an AI Kill Switch
Animal Magnetism: Animal Magnetism LIVE Ep. 96 – Alaska And Baby Birds
BattleSwarm: Fuck You Tim Walz, Karmelo Anthony Conviction Aftermath: “Only Good Cracker Is A Dead Cracker”, Federal Judge To Hood County: No You Can’t Have Immunity For Arresting Someone For A Meme, Austin: Soros DA = 74% Higher Homicide Rate, and LinkSwarm For July 24, 2026
Behind The Black: 13th Starship/Superheavy launch goes almost perfectly, Martian crater with many gullies flowing into corroded “irregular cellular structures”, GAO releases a schizophrenic report on NASA, JAXA successfully tests older solid-fueled motor for use in its Epsilon-S rocket, and Google owns 6% of SpaceX
Cafe Hayek: Brandon Farris’s Defense of Steel Tariffs Fails, Trump Acts to Increase U.S. Trade Deficits, Is the “China Shock” Responsible for Trumpian Protectionism? Oren Cass Again Swings and Misses in His Attempt to Discredit Economists, and Trump Abandons His ‘America First’ Stance!
CDR Salamander: The Next War Will Come Home, also, Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: SpaceX Flight 13 Superb, The Subversion of the Republic, Mamdani, Grocery Stores, & Political Ice Floes, Mamdani & Netanyahu, and Can Musk Do More Impossible Stuff?
Dana Loesch: Midweek News Roundup
Don Surber: DSA is not in America’s DNA, also, Saudis go nuke
First Street Journal: Killadelphia, Even The Philadelphia Inquirer has questions about defending Larry Krasner, This is what happens when the George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating “progressive” prosecutors get elected, Democrats playing stupid games, and To paraphrase what Mary McCarthy once said about Lillian Hellman, “Every word (Larry Krasner says) is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
Flopping Aces: This Week In Radical Leftism – Washington Post Still Dying In Darkness
Gates Of Vienna: Hijrah Colonization: “This Is What Surrender Looks Like”, Philanthropic Jihad, Recalling the Butchery of July 22 2011, A Persian Carpetbagger, and In-Flight Sharia
The Geller Report: NYC Landlords Sue Commie Mamdani for ‘Blatantly Illegal’ Rent Freeze, 278,000 Noncitizens Registered to Vote in Just Four States: California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, Preparations Continue For ‘Massive Attack’ on Iran, Texas on the Brink: Paxton Stands Between Liberty and Talarico’s Radical Leftist Takeover, and RINO Traitor Senators Cornyn, Tillis Drag Their Feet On Blanche Nomination But Voted For All Obama, Biden Appointees
Hollywood In Toto: Yet Another Huge Sign That Woke Is on the Run, The Perils (And Promise) of Elon Musk’s A.I. Odyssey, The Dink – Pickleball Finally Gets Its Own Sports Comedy, Chris Rock Goes Navel-Gazing Route with Misty Green, and Here Comes a Four-Hour Elon Musk Hit Piece?
Legal Insurrection: DOJ Investigating Whether Harvard’s China-Based Aid Programs Discriminate, Interior Dept. Proposes Expanding State Authority Over Grizzly Bear Management, Pete Hegseth Chooses New Schools to Affiliate With War Department, DOJ Sues Colorado Over In-State Tuition for Illegals After Equal Protection Project Complaint, and Penn State Raises Tuition While Also Raising President’s Pay, Spending Millions on DEI
Nebraska Energy Observer: Speaking Kinda Quietly and Carrying One Hellova Big Stick, Ann Widdecombe, I think we are going to miss them, Straight from the Jackass’s Mouth, and Scattershot Friday
Outkick: Dan Le Batard claims ESPN is run by McAfee and white people in unhinged rant, Restaurant chain’s promo goes awry during Bosox win streak, John Tortorella opens up about being fired by Vegas after losing Stanley Cup final, Bills’ latest addition to new stadium painfully on-brand, and Wife swap with friends ruined by father-in-law/Messy married affair with co-worker/Wedding objections
Power Line: Accused Widdecombe killer in court, Trump’s Success, and AI’s Bias, Real friends of fake Dan, Senator Sheehy has a few thoughts, and Nuremberg Trial For Trump?
Racket News: Meet The New Boss Same As The Old Boss
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Backs Property Tax Amendment, Swipes At Democrats Over Spending
Shot In The Dark: President Trump, also, Self-Inflicted Wound
The Political Hat: Quick Takes – Academic Ridiculousness, Firing Line Friday: Human Rights, Foreign Policy, and Ronald Reagan, Quick Takes – Friction For The Euthanasia Slippery-Slope, and Firing Line Friday: Firing Line 1966-1986: World Leaders
Transterrestrial Musings: Be Careful What You Gavel For, It’s Desperately Needed, RIP John C. Dvorak, Commercial Space, and The Willful Ignorance Of The Anti-Semites
Victory Girls: Democrat Socialist Communists Plan To Get Rid Of The Constitution, Democrats Feeling Tetchy About Donald Trump And Iran, Mamdani Puts On Theater Show When He Can’t Arrest Netanyahu, Plumber Shuts Down Business After Obama Center Fails To Pay, and First Lieutenant Posts “F” Trump Video On Final Day
Watts Up With That: Renewables ‘Can’t Keep Up’ With Data Centers – As Usual, the Left Wants Government to Step In, Canadian Wildfire Smoke Is Not Proof of Climate Change, Yet Another Embarrassment From The National Academy Of Pseudoscience, New York’s Wind Permitting Scandal, and Newsom’s plastics bill increases prices, punishes the poor
The Federalist: Mamdani Isn’t The Problem, It’s Immigration, New Jersey Dem Governor Pledges Transparency, Blocks Election Docs Release, The Problem With Nolan’s Odyssey Is That It’s Not Homer’s Odyssey, Louisiana Governor, AG Model Fight Against Lawfare After Bogus New Orleans Indictment, and American Manufacturers Are Reshoring, And The Big Beautiful Bill Helped
Mark Steyn: An Evening for Some Terpsichore, Blow-Up – Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer, The People of Quebec v. Niqab, Live Around The Planet: Wednesday July 22nd, and Take Your AirPods Out

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Tools & Home Improvement
New Releases – Tools & Home Improvement


 

Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 07.23.26

Posted on | July 24, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Wretchedly ill all week from a cold or some such. Hope I feel better tomorrow so I can get caught up on all manner of things.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

h/t Snarknado on X

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Ross: The Day That Started A World War – George Washington At Ft. Necessity (1754)
EBL: The View’s Sunny Hostin has to pay herself slavery reparations, French Laundry Fish, Helen of Troy, “Banjo Odyssey”, and Marcha de Cádiz
Twitchy: Gov. Hairgel Moans About Sports Being Infected With Politics, The AWFLs And Boomers Are Singing Again, and Rotard’s Paranoia Just Gave The Democrats’ Midterm (Illegal) Strategy Away
Louder With Crowder: Chicago Mayor Thinks Voters Are Dumb Enough To Believe He Decreased Violent Crime And Grew The Economy, Ratchet Crockett Has Hissy Fit Over “White Men” Thinking American Values Are A Good Thing, DSA Co-Chair called out live on camera over her agenda to release prisoners, Pandering Democrat Gov. Candidate Says To Support Illegal Street Vendors Over Lawful Mexican Restaurants, and Donald Trump puts worthless college degrees in the crosshairs, and it’s about time
Vox Popoli: A Genre Vote, The End of the Boomer Cons, If It Sounds Implausible, and A Strange New Regard for Peace
Cedar Sanderson: We Make Ourselves
Sensurround: A Temporary Alliance With The Enemy, also, I’m Furious at What We’ve Done to People With Gender Dysphoria.
Jim McCoy: A Sense of Murder
JOhn C. Wright: In A Fight Between Neal Stephenson & William Gibson, Who Would Win?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: So I’ve Been At This 22 Years, It Seems
Don Surber: They should have just kept Starmer
Racket News: On Substack’s New AI-Spotting Tool & The Importance of Human Thought, also, Don’t Let Activists Or Robots Choose Your Words

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Patio, Lawn, & Garden
New Releases – Patio, Lawn, & Garden


 

Category: Linkagery

Friedrich Nietzsche vs. Robert E. Lee

Posted on | July 23, 2026 | No Comments

One of the benefits of being a bad student is that, by the time I began to take the world of ideas seriously, I was already an adult, with a job, a wife, three kids and a mortgage. It was in the early 1990s, when I was on the staff of the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, that I began haunting the local used book store, snapping up old volumes at 50 cents or a dollar each, pursuing an autodidactic course of remediation, to fill in the gaps in my knowledge that had by then become apparent to me.

The reason I view this way of learning as beneficial is that, unlike my younger self — a carefree hedonist, partying his way through school, paying just enough attention to scrape by — the 30-something me had sufficient life experience to evaluate ideas in a pragmatic manner. By comparison, those who were more diligent and conscientious during their schoolboy years are apt to be impressed by intellectuals in a way that it was impossible for me to be impressed. Understand the difference I’m attempting to illuminate here. Suppose, hypothetically, that I had actually given a damn about my grades when I was in school. In such an imaginary scenario, I would have eagerly followed the instruction of my teachers, taking notes as they explained subjects, striving to internalize the conceptual theme of their lessons so that I could regurgitate it on tests, in essays, etc. In other words, I would have become a mental carbon copy of my teachers, my knowledge limited by whatever was in the assigned textbooks and emphasized in the classroom lectures.

Think about the earnest young student, devoted to maintaining a top GPA, who takes a political science course in which Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is an assigned text. In the usual order of things, the professor will have an outline of the lessons he intends to teach during the three or four class meetings in which Tocqueville is discussed. The diligent student will be expected to know by heart some specific points the professor seeks to drive home — the stuff he’s got to know for the final exam — and this summary version is likely to be the entirety of what the student remembers about Tocqueville’s great book. By comparison, think of me, a young newspaper staffer with a full-time job and a family, taking it upon himself to read Democracy in America in his spare hours, with no professor to tell me which parts of Tocqueville’s book I should underline and memorize for the final exam.

Encountering the text as a grownup, without the guidance or assistance of any instructor, with no agenda other than to acquire knowledge of a hitherto neglected subject, is a very different experience than how the high-GPA teenager encounters the same subject. And I pursued this autodidactic experience with many subjects: Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, on and on. Which brings me, after that 500-word preamble, to the case of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Richard Spencer, moments before the world-famous punch.

Remember the “punch a Nazi” meme? On the day Donald Trump was first inaugurated in 2017, Richard Spencer was on a sidewalk in D.C. giving an interview to the Australian Broadcasting Company, when some Antifa thug blindsided him. Spencer was widely recognized as a leader — arguably the leader — of the so-called “alt right,” and it was this notoriety that made him a target of violence. I’d known him for nearly 10 years by then, having first met him when he was still a graduate student at Duke University, when we were both members of a panel discussion of the notorious Duke lacrosse rape hoax. Richard Spencer is extremely intelligent. He got his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and was pursuing a Ph.D. at Duke before he dropped out of that program. These are all prestigious, selective universities, and we may therefore deduce not only that Spencer scores very high on standardized tests (which, as everyone knows, are a proxy for IQ), but that he is also a diligent student.

Years ago, I remarked that Richard’s basic problem is that he read Nietzsche at too young an age. Thank God I avoided that, because if I hadn’t been already a busy adult when I finally got around to reading Nietzsche, perhaps I might have been similarly radicalized.

Fortunately, I knew about Nietzsche before ever bothering to read anything he’d written. Nietzsche has a dreadful reputation among the kind of Christians I grew up around. Nietzsche has been widely denounced as an apostle of nihilism, the man who provided the philosophical basis of Nazism. There are those who insist that Nietzsche has been misunderstood, and that he doesn’t deserve such a bad reputation, but my point is, I was warned, and took those warnings seriously. So when, in my early 30s, I spent a weekend actually reading Nietzsche, my attitude toward his work was much like my attitude toward Karl Marx’s writings, which I’d also read extensively during those years.

Does Nietzsche “think outside the box,” as they say? Yes, and in doing so, he reminds us why the box is there in the first place. If “God is dead,” to take his most famous phrase seriously, then where are we? What are the rules in a godless world? Absent a shared moral code, what can be the basis of law? What does it mean to be Beyond God and Evil?

As a sort of thought experiment — the stuff sophomores chat about in a dorm room after they’ve had few bong hits — Nietzsche’s vision has some merit, and I would not deny that there could be benefits to engaging with his ideas, so long as you are adequately forewarned, as I was. Some very profound and scary stuff there and, reading it as an adult, my reaction was to cling even more tightly to “that old rugged cross.” Taking seriously the concept of a post-Christian world, and realizing what it might actually mean, I would urge everyone to pray that no such nightmare ever befalls us. And all of that (now past the 1,000-word mark) is preamble to explaining why I am bringing up Robert E. Lee.

“Boomer conservatives suffer from slave morality,” was the sentence which got me started on this. Never mind who wrote that sentence on X, but of course I recognized “slave morality” as one of Nietzsche’s most influential concepts. It is a deliberate insult to Christians and also, more infamously, an accusation against Jews. Without going into a detailed lecture, suffice it to say that Nietzsche accuses the Jews of devising a subversive value-system, subsequently embraced and spread by Christians, that seeks to undermine the earlier aristocratic value-system of the pagan world — “the transvaluation of all values,” as he calls it.

If one wanted to defend Nietzsche, it might be said that he makes this argument in the context of criticizing the kind of “democratic” egalitarianism that conservatives have always deplored. All of us know people whose ill-considered liberalism is rooted in a confused mishmash of pietistic notions of charity, mercy without judgment, etc. Rather than be content with such specific criticism of the soft-headed foolishness of liberals, however, Nietzsche’s “slave morality” argument attacks Christianity, per se, and in doing so, indicts the Jews as the authors of a devious scheme to sabotage everything noble and aristocratic.

Now, pay careful attention to this:

My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

These are the words that Robert E. Lee wrote after the war in a letter to his former staff officer, Col. Charles Marshall. Pause for a moment to consider everything that Lee had lived through at that point, and how much cause he had for discouragement. What tremendous courage he displayed in refusing to “despair of the future”! Well do we understand why Lee has been so widely admired, and praised by men of judgment. Churchill called Lee “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived, and one of the great captains known to the annals of war.”

Re-read Lee’s letter, now, and what do you notice? He professed his duty “to serve” his fellow man, which is what he had done his entire life. Lee was the very embodiment of the “servant-leader” role that Christian preachers urge men to embrace. It is in serving our fellow man, after all, that we emulate Christ. A Christian does not even expect gratitude from those who benefit from his service. Like a soldier, he does his duty not because he expects to be praised, but simply because it is his duty.

Christian faith is, or at least ought to be, a sort of internal guidance system. Seeking always to do the right thing because it is right — rather than because you fear punishment for doing the wrong thing, or because you expect some kind of reward — this is true morality. The fact that Lee, who had commanded a mighty army that fought the greatest battles in his nation’s history, should in his final years of life speak of himself as disposed to serve others, rather than expect them to serve him, is testimony to how deeply rooted his moral code was.

What would Nietzsche have to say of Lee? Certainly this “great captain” embodied everything that an aristocratic value-system would consider praiseworthy. His ancestry was impeccable, the Lee family having been among the most eminent in Virginia since its earliest colonial period, and if anything, his mother’s side of the family was even more eminent. The greatest stain on Lee’s fortunes was that his father, the Revolutionary hero “Light Horse” Harry Lee, had been bankrupted because of bad postwar investments — the victim of a swindle — so that young Robert grew up in the shadow of genteel poverty, his mother dependent on her Carter relatives. By his own good behavior, however, Robert E. Lee made himself recognized as a man of promise at an early age, showing his merit in the Mexican War and other appointments as a young officer.

“Then the war came.” So many Southern stories turn upon that sentence. In the span of just a few months, the nation found itself thrust into a crisis that led inevitably to war, and over the next four years, the South was devastated in a way no one had imagined was possible before the war came. Lee became world-famous as a result — a historic figure in every sense of the word — and yet here he was, the president of a college in rural Virginia, writing a letter to his former aide to explain that his painful experiences had not “indisposed me to serve” his fellow man.

“Slave morality”? If so, we need more such slaves. But don’t come hurling at me phrases from Nietzsche as an insult, because I might be less courteous and patient than General Lee was. Deo vindice.



 

Category: History, Intellectuals

In The Mailbox: 07.22.26

Posted on | July 23, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The Epic Indie Summer Sale Is On!
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: U.S. Crime Rate versus Canada and Australia, also Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight
Doug Ross: Cuba Report – The Comic Book Version
EBL: Allen West Explains The Uncomfortable Truth, Fileting, The Real Tragedy of the Odyssey, Battle of the Pyramids, and MAGA Kamala Kamalot
Twitchy: Fifteen-Year Pro-Hamas “Forever Student” At Columbia to Be Deported, Rep. Gill Introduces Bill To End Birthright Citizenship For Children Of “Invaders”, and “It Never Happens” – Mexican Illegal Sexually Abuses & Murders Two-Year-Old In Virginia
Louder With Crowder: Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton Claims ICE Is Killing Illegals That No One Knows About, Thousands Of Illegals Were Registered To Vote In New Jersey, The Democrat Governor Calls It An Oopsie, Ratchet Crockett says if you rooted for Argentina over Spain in the World Cup, you’re, like, totally racist, Smithsonian director forced to testify under oath if she still thinks politeness is, “white supremacy”, and Trans Democrat Candidate Brags About Living In Poverty In Cringe Campaign Ad
Vox Popoli: The Byron AI Campaign, The Thumb on the Scale, Augmentation, Not Replacement, Let’s You and Him Fight, and One Trump, Two Trump
Stoic Observations: The Examined Life
Cedar Sanderson: Lightly Toasted Marshmallow Strip #15
Jim McCoy: Interview With Sam Robb
Ammo.com: What Causes Mass Shootings?
Upstream Reviews: IndieVerse Allies

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Cuba Libre
Don Surber: The Boasberg boomerang
STUMP: Chicago Pension Watch – No, There Aren’t Many Choices

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Snacks & Sweets
Survival Food


 

Category: Linkagery

Of Lawyers, Samoans and Journalism

Posted on | July 22, 2026 | No Comments

Over the weekend, I wrote:

What is terrorism? It is the use of violence for political purposes, and is akin to guerrilla warfare — “insurgency,” as we are now wont to call it.

My use of the word “wont” in that sentence drew praise in the comments from my old friend Bert the Samoan lawyer:

Also, beautiful use of “wont.” The Bunhead would be proud.

“The Bunhead” is a reference to Mrs. Opal Lovett, an English instructor at Jacksonville (Alabama) State University who taught both Bert and me back in the day. Mrs. Lovett wore her hair in a bun, as did all proper old-fashioned Southern ladies back in the day. There were many such old-fashioned Southern ladies among the teachers of our youth. For example, my homeroom teacher in seventh grade was Mrs. Alexander, who spoke in a very deep drawl, more common in the coastal lowlands of the South than in the Piedmont region near Atlanta where I grew up. One of my childhood friends liked to tell about the time when Mrs. Alexander, offended by the smell of some students’ inadequate hygiene, briefly lectured a classroom about their “foul body odors,” which with her drawling voice struck my friend as hysterically comical.

Mrs. Alexander was the wife of Robert Alexander, who was principal of Turner Middle School at the time. His long and distinguished career as an educator in Douglas County made him the namesake of Alexander High School. When there was recently a sex scandal at Alexander High that made national headlines, I felt that scandal rather personally, having known the man for whom the school was named. Such behavior is unworthy of anyone associated with that name. But I digress . . .

JSU student newspaper staffer, 1983.

Bert the Samoan Lawyer will attest that, in my youth, I wasn’t much concerned with propriety and reputation, to put it mildly. Had there been a vote for “Most Likely to Become a Conservative Pundit,” certainly no one would have nominated me. While I showed some penchant for feature writing, as entertainment editor of the student newspaper at JSU, I had no interest in politics. It was Mrs. Lovett, in fact, who suggested to me my senior year that I should take some assignments writing regular news, sports, etc., in order to accumulate clippings that would demonstrate my ability to do different kinds of journalism. Almost by accident, after a couple of post-collegiate years doing various other things — nightclub DJ, forklift driver, rock-and-roll bands — I stumbled into a $4.50-an-hour entry-level job as a staff writer for a weekly paper in Austell, Georgia, and from there slowly worked my way up the ladder until I landed at the Washington Times in 1997.

“Writing is a skill, not a talent, and this difference is important because a skill can be improved by practice.”

That’s one of my quotes someone collected online, and a point that needs to be emphasized. At a family reunion down in Alabama many years ago, one of my great-aunts or distant cousins asked me what I was doing, and when I told her I was working for a newspaper, she replied, “Oh, you were always so creative!” Well, perhaps so, but newspaper reporting isn’t about “creativity.” In fact, it’s quite the opposite — in this business, you get fired for “creating” anything (e.g., Stephen Glass).

It is kind of weird, when you think about it, that we should regard the ability to write narrative prose as a creative talent akin to composing symphonies or carving statues. However good any journalist may be at his craft, he isn’t Mozart or Michelangelo. Grant that there is some element of innate aptitude involved in journalism, but merely being able to write a news story about a school board meeting — the kind of stuff a local newspaper reporter does — isn’t a “talent,” it’s a skill. Having started my career on the very lowest rung of the ladder, I was keenly aware that improving my skill was the key to getting ahead, and I consciously committed to improvement: Work harder, work faster, get better every day — but never let ’em see you sweat.

Eric “Otter” Stratton is my role model here. When he’s practicing golf with his Animal House brother Boon, there’s this colloquy:

Boon: “I gotta work on my game.”
Otter: “No, no, no, don’t think of it as work. The whole point is just to enjoy yourself.”

Treat your “work” as fun, and strive to make it seem you achieve success effortlessly. Those other guys, half-assing their way through life? They’re not even in the building when you’re burning the midnight oil, cranking it out in a desperate rush to meet your next deadline. You don’t owe them anything, especially not an explanation of why you’re better than them. You earned what you got, and if they envy the apparent ease of your success — imagining you’re just lucky — why let them in on your secret?

There was a time in the 1980s, when Bert the Samoan Lawyer was editor of a small newspaper in Alabama, and I was driving a forklift, and how I envied him! Even though Bert explained that it was a crappy job — overworked and underpaid — still it was obviously more prestigious than what I was doing, and I was surprised when he later quit the newspaper business and went to law school. Probably I should have heeded his warning about conditions in the journalism racket. There have definitely been times I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have stuck to driving a forklift. However, Bert became a remarkable success as a lawyer, and on occasion has provided me with very valuable legal advice, free of charge. Somehow or other, the envious shoe got switched to the other foot, and Bert has from time to time expressed the idea that my Gonzo adventures in journalism are a greater achievement than his lofty status as the most eminent Polynesian-American attorney in the Southeast.

Being a great lawyer involves a lot of writing, and Bert’s scholarly work has been featured in a number of legal journals, although such writing doesn’t afford him much opportunity to display his penchant for satirical humor, for which he was well-known in his JSU years. The Bunhead taught us well, in terms of grammar and such, and Bert was always a more diligent student than I, whose collegiate career was an extended party occasionally interrupted by attending classes. There are some who have accused me of engaging in satire, of being “creative” in my writing, an allegation I strenuously deny. Believe it or not, there are some people who have gone so far as to insinuate that Bert is not even a Samoan, but trust me — I report only the facts. As is my wont.

Yes, it can be used as a noun, too. Class dismissed!



 

Category: Education, R.S. McCain School of Journalism

In The Mailbox: 07.21.26 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | July 21, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

Blast from the past

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Ross: The Day Daniel Boone Escaped The Shawnee (1778),
357 Magnum: Portland Police to Citizens – You’re On Your Own
EBL: The Acali Raft Experiment, Michael Knowles Odyssey Review, “Charlemagne”, and Shakira World Cup Half Time Show
Twitchy: United Airlines Agent Calls Passenger Racist, Threatens To Call ICE On Him, Van Jones Dismantles The DSA And Socialists Just Can’t Deal, and Suck, Suck, And More Suck From The Rotard
Louder With Crowder: Democrat Candidate Demands More Foreigners Like Her Take Over the Government to Advocate for “The Global World Order”, Black Texan puts James Talarico on blast for refusing to answer questions from voters, Sunny Hostin busted using her celebrity privilege when cops caught her son trespassing, Zohran Mamdani gets confused and thinks New York City is not part of America, and ABC News expected Trump bashing, but Bill Maher wanted to blast commies taking over the Democrat Party instead
Vox Popoli: The State of the State, Conflict Incapable, Smells Like Corruption, “A Historic Disaster”, and SANS BEAUTY
Upstream Reviews: The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin
John C. Wright: Aition & The Honor of Poets

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Do You Know Why The PRC Has A Polar Strategy?

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Home & Kitchen
New Releases – Home & Kitchen


 

Category: Linkagery

The Pro-Hamas Socialist Democrats

Posted on | July 21, 2026 | No Comments

Anti-Israel protesters in New York City

Six months ago, a poll showed Mallory McMorrow leading in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan being vacated by the retirement of Sen. Gary Peters. Two weeks ago, McMorrow quit the race after polls showed her support dwindling to a single-digit percentage. Meanwhile, Abdul El-Sayed, who was in third place in January, had surged into a nine-point lead in the primary by mid-June, with Rep. Haley Stevens in second place. McMorrow’s exit from the campaign has now turned the bid for the Democratic nomination into a two-horse race, and Stevens is ahead — but just barely — mainly because AIPAC has been pouring tens of millions of dollars into the state to try to stop El-Sayed. The Michigan primary is August 4, and it is fair to say that AIPAC is desperate to halt the slide of the Democratic Party into the de facto American branch of Hamas. Recent primary victories by anti-Israel candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America have set the alarm bells ringing. It all goes back to October 2023:

Most Americans to this day have only the slightest inkling of the atrocities Hamas terrorists perpetrated against innocent civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. If they knew, surely they would be revolted by the way so many Democrats — particularly those affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — have embraced the anti-Israel narrative of the war Hamas began that day. Indeed, it is fair to say that much of the DSA’s rhetoric on this topic is indistinguishable from Hamas propaganda.
The grinning poster boy for democratic socialism, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is up to his eyeballs in this pro-terrorist agenda, as the American Jewish Committee has observed:

For example, the DSA’s New York City chapter, with which Zohran Mamdani is affiliated, organized a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square the day after the October 7 Hamas massacre. At the rally, protesters chanted slogans including “Resistance is justified,” “Globalize the Intifada,” and “Smash the settler Zionist state”

Take note that this DSA rally happened before Israel had launched its military response to the 10/7 massacre. And what sort of “resistance” by Hamas did the DSA mob declare “justified” on that day? . . .

Read the rest of my latest American Spectator column.



 

Category: Democrats, Israel, Terrorism
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