Midnight Cowboy (1969, by John Schlesinger) is one of those films one ought to see before dying.
John Denver with Annie's Song.
An over the top leftist lunatic, but we will forgive him that if only because of this song.
Slaap wel.
MFBB.
"UC Merced Chancellor Dorthy Leland said there was no evidence to believe Wednesday’s attack by a freshman computer science student from Santa Clara was “in any way related to terrorism.”
Preliminary evidence, she said, suggests 18-year-old Faisal Mohammad “appears to have been motivated by personal animosities, not a political agenda.” She said, “it would be irresponsible” to draw any link to terrorism “based solely on the ethnicity of the suspect.”
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Sheriff Vern Warnke echoed Leland’s statements, saying evidence gathered suggests the attack was an “act of an individual for a vendetta … nothing to indicate there was any political or religious motivation.”
Investigators seized numerous items from the backpack Mohammad carried into the classroom, including several zip-tie handcuffs, petroleum jelly, a night-vision scope, a safety hammer, and rolls of duct tape, among other things.
Warnke said it remains unclear precisely what Mohammad had planned. Local and federal authorities, including the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, have yet to find anything to explain his motivation.
“We have nothing to indicate this person was on anybody’s radar,” Warnke said, “absolutely nothing they could find to indicate he was doing anything other than being a college student at UC Merced.”
Mohammad was shot and killed by UC police Wednesday after he stabbed and wounded four people in the ramapage that began in a second-floor classroom..."
"....He was a progressive authoritarian’s dream come true, a conservative republican’s worst nightmare, and probably the single most divisive figure in his country’s history.
This was Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada’s third-longest serving prime minister (almost 16 years in total). After an academic career honing Marxist ideas, and many years as a socialist intellectual-at-large, during which he wrote “honest observer” whitewashes of international communism that would have made John Dewey proud, he finally made a pragmatic turn toward the “center,” abandoning the CCF party -- the hardline socialist precursor to today’s New Democrats -- to join the more electable Liberal Party. Maneuvering through the staid Liberal ranks by cleverly surfing the late ‘60s youth wave of peace, love, and good vibes, he was elected Prime Flower Child in 1968, in a national fit of what came to be called “Trudeaumania.”
During his first years in office, his girlfriend was Barbara Streisand. At the end of his final term, it was Margot Kidder. In between it was several other lefty women, some of them famous, in addition to the emotionally unstable wife who bore his sons, and reportedly also a couple of black eyes during the years of their marital breakdown. He likewise wielded his political power with little regard for moderation, tradition, norms, or principled commitment. Indeed, his great dream, and proudest accomplishment, was a document rechristening Canada -- a member of the British Commonwealth -- as, in effect, Trudeauland. The Constitution Act of 1982, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other American leftists love to cite as exemplary of the modern social democrat philosophy they wish could replace the antiquated U.S. Constitution, was primarily Trudeau’s achievement.
He admired Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba, fostered anti-Americanism in Canada like no previous prime minister, but in the end was as devoted to his legacy and his messiah fantasies as to his socialism. He established a model of iconoclastic lone avenger leadership that has infected Canada’s politics ever since, with even so-called conservative Stephen Harper succumbing to this “I make the rules around here” ethic throughout his years as prime minister. The most accurate name for his style of governance was “Trudeaucracy” -- analogous to “Maoism” -- a term coined in 1972 by journalist Lubor Zink, an escapee of communist Czechoslovakia who saw something familiar in his adopted home’s new leader.
During Trudeau’s nationally televised funeral in the fall of 2000, the older but more boyishly handsome of his sons, Justin, took full advantage of his first opportunity in the limelight to flaunt his devotion to his father’s spirit for all to admire. His flamboyant, self-important eulogy ended with a prolonged pose -- er, I mean pause -- with head pressed in grief against Dad’s casket, a moment which became the single most representative image of the funeral."
"...Justin Trudeau’s quick political rise, culminating in his Liberal Party’s election with a majority government on October 19, was a series of “Oh, yes!” moments for those who pine for the good old days of Trudeaucracy: an empowered Quebec separatist movement; “language rights” forced down everyone’s throat; the country balkanized along East-West and English-French lines as never before; leftist social engineering; Keynesian economics; a vanguard position in the global entrenchment of relativist “multiculturalism”; the nationalization of the energy industry; the decimation of a once proud military; support for communist expansionism around the world; and a leader who says things like, “Viva el Primer Ministro Comandante Fidel Castro!” and praises Mao Zedong for eradicating hunger in China (presumably by letting all the starving people die off).
For those not so sanguine about the memory of Trudeaucracy, Justin’s ascent, though seemingly as pre-ordained and unstoppable as male pattern baldness, was a series of “Oh, no!” moments, as a once plucky little population spread sparsely over a vast, noble land looked at itself in the mirror each day and thought, “Is this really all we have left?”
Yes, sadly, it is. Justin Trudeau is Prime Minister-Designate of Canada. Within days of the election, he had signalled the change by promising a major Canadian role in next month’s UN climate fascism summit in Paris. Canada has officially had its Obama Moment. After barely clinging to her sanity with years of the ineptly almost-conservative Harper government, she has finally revived the era of Trudeaucracy. This round, however, promises to be Trudeaucracy revisited as farce, the New Left lobotomized -- Obama North.
The distinctions between Trudeau the father and Trudeau the son -- charismatic intellectualism vs. the cult of celebrity, politics as a clash of ideologies vs. politics as pop showmanship, pragmatic socialist gradualism vs. knee-jerk sloganeering, communist fellow-traveling vs. Islamo-pandering -- are a microcosm of late modernity’s final stage of degeneration into nothingness. Fighting against the shapeshifting, duplicitous creature that was twentieth century progressivism was a difficult battle, unsuccessfully waged. But at least its opponents, the last-gasp defenders of political freedom, knew there was a monster under all those masks, and understood its danger and its foreignness. Today, civilization having sunk, its great battle lost (to update Yeats), we fight only the masks, and make our desperate lunges against a shadow. Progressivism, fulfilling its natural development, has abandoned us to leaders and leading intellectuals who barely even pretend to have ideas or ideals. We are ruled by slogans and ciphers, oppressed by an anti-human will-o’-the-wisp that has insinuated itself into our bloodstreams and neurons. In other words, we effectively enslave ourselves -- too weary to fight, too sated with gratifications to think, too timidly dependent even to object very strongly -- which has been the great project and purpose of real progressivism since its first seeds germinated in Germany two centuries ago.
Progressivism’s practical actors and beneficiaries remain among us, of course: the thugs and greedy backroom manipulators of the so-called left and right factions of the ruling establishment. But the intellectual superstructure of the movement, the men who made the theoretical case for collectivist authoritarianism in the name of the historical advancement of mankind -- totalitarianism’s brilliant liars and self-deluders -- are mostly a thing of the past. Their arguments, no longer needed, have withered away, as the State was supposed to have done in Marx’s theory. Today, rather than being prodded and cajoled toward the abyss with labyrinthine philosophical polemics and utopian rhetoric, we hurtle into disaster on greased wheels of sheer stupidity. In Canada’s instantiation of this final descent, the neo-Rousseauan idealism and distorted quest for “justice” that engendered the old Trudeaumania have been superseded by a simple, empty-headed mania, an enthusiastic longing for nothing. In other words, nihilism at last."
"Nearly 1,000 soldiers and around 100 pieces of military equipment have been deployed in Lithuania as part of the month-long Baltic Piranha military exercise taking place in the framework of NATO’s “assurance measures,” launched in response to perceived “challenges” posed by Russia.
The war games, which will last until October 28, will see 500 Lithuanian soldiers join forces with Belgian, American and Luxembourgian troops.
Some 280 soldiers from Belgium and 45 from Luxembourg have brought with them their own hardware to test it in action as part of the NATO Rapid Reaction Force. Belgians have arrived on board armored Piranha infantry vehicles, while Luxembourg’s soldiers delivered Dingo II reconnaissance vehicles.
The joint Belgian and Luxembourg company will train to provide support for the US Army’s 12th Combat Aviation Brigade soldiers. Currently around 200 US troops are stationed in the country on rotation.
“The exercise will include moving on public roads and parts of it will take place near populated areas, including meetings with local civilian institutions and people,” the Lithuanian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
The war games will take place at the Kairiai training ground near Klaipeda, and the firing range at Pagegiu, in addition to other facilities throughout the country."
"Dear LGBT Community,
I am not your daughter. I never carried a flag in one of your gay pride parades. I have never written a letter on your behalf to a congressman or anyone else, and I have never felt the need to make people accept the fact I am the daughter of a lesbian. Perhaps it’s because she never felt the need to force people to accept her for being one.
No, I would never align myself to a community as intolerant and self-absorbed as the LGBT community, a community that demands tolerance with fervor and passion, yet does not give it in return, even to its own members at times. In fact, this community attacks anyone who does not agree with them, no matter how lovingly any difference of opinion is expressed.
I myself am a product of the Lesbian Revolution of the 1980s. My mother always knew she liked girls, but tried hard to be a good, straight, southern Baptist girl. When I was a year old, she left my dad for another man, whom we lived with until I was somewhere around four years old. After the divorce, she told my father to leave, which he did, and in his own words, “I did because I knew I couldn’t fight the entire family to see you.” I cannot remember the man she left him for very well, but I can remember being happy living with him. It did not last, however, and when she left him, she left him for a woman.
Silencing People about Homosexuality Won’t Change What Kids Can See
I knew from a young age that living with two women was not natural. I could especially see it in the homes of my friends who had a mom and a dad. I spent as much time with those friends as I possibly could. I yearned for the affection that my friends received from their dads. I wanted to know what it was like to be held and cherished by a man, what it was like to live with one from day to day.
As far as I was concerned, I already had one mother; I did not need another. My dream was that my mother would decide she wanted to be with men again, but obviously that dream did not come true. My grandfathers and uncles did the best they could when it came to spending time with me and doing all the daddy-daughter stuff, but it was not the same as having a full-time father, and I knew it. It always felt secondhand.
Growing up without the presence of a man in my home damaged me personally. All I wanted from the time I was a little girl was a normal family. When I graduated high school, my thoughts were not entirely where they needed to be. While my friends were excited about college, a piece of me was missing, and I knew I would never feel whole until I found it.
Men Need Women Need Men
I had a desire unlike any other to create my own family and have stability, and this led to two extremely unhealthy relationships. Luckily, I found my way out of both, but after being hurt and used so badly, I decided happiness just was not meant for me. Shortly afterwards, I met my husband, and everything clicked. For the first time, I felt alive and complete. Having children and seeing a man parent a child for the first time was beautiful and awe-inspiring. It only reinforced my belief that a child needs a mother and a father, and that same-sex parenting and single parenting are far inferior to heterosexual parenting when done correctly.
Knowing next to nothing about males is hardly all that was hard about being raised by two women. It probably comes as no surprise that growing up in Podunk, Oklahoma, was not a walk in the park. Unlike other kids who were apparently raised in gay utopias, I grew up very alone and isolated. I was an only child and there weren’t other kids around like me to talk with and relate to. No one I knew understood what I struggled with each day, and I had no option but to keep it all inside.
As an adult, I have tried to talk to my mom about how difficult my life was, but she simply cannot relate because she was raised by a mom and a dad. As a child, I would not have spoken out about the way I was being raised, either. I love my mom. She was the center of my universe and the thought of saying something to outsiders that would have hurt her devastated me. Writing this letter right this very moment is devastating me.
But I am doing it anyway. I am doing it because people need to know that it is not all roses. The effects of growing up the way I did still plays a part in my life today. I was beyond self-conscious as a child, and constantly worried about what others thought of me. I was always terrified of someone finding out my mom was a lesbian and then wanting nothing to do with me. For most of my life, the perceived opinions of others have dominated, and only recently have I been able to let that go.
That is only the tip of the iceberg. The studies claiming we are just as well or better off than our peers raised by straight parents are hardly scientific in most cases, and do not represent us all. People need to know that some children of gay parents do not agree with gay adoption and marriage, just like some gay people themselves don’t agree with it, either! But you will notice that fact is not making headlines.
The Huffington Post published two responses to Heather Barwick’s recent letter here at The Federalist, and both were written by people who were raised with members of the opposite sex in the home—a male raised by women, and a female who had brothers present. It makes total sense that their experiences were not like mine and Heather’s, since we were both raised by women.
And just because one product of artificial insemination does not feel she was robbed does not mean others don’t. I am aware there are kids out there who disagree with my point of view, just like there are gays out there who disagree with the LGBT community’s point of view. But to suggest this is not a reason to validate and listen to a handful of children raised by gays, and who are against it, is ridiculous. After all, it is but a handful of people demanding we redefine marriage and parenting, and we all see how well that’s going.
Not Yours,
Brandi Walton
Brandi Walton grew up in southern Oklahoma as the only child in a lesbian household. She has decided to come forward at this time to discuss the issues surrounding children of homosexuals in hopes of educating the general public. She is married and is the mother of four children."
"...Over a year into the European migrant crisis, a lorry driver and a haulage union representative has warned that morale is at an “all time low” among truckers who are faced with the daily ordeal of navigating the daily chaos at Calais.
And what exactly is this “ordeal?” It is this: hordes of Muslim “refugee” invaders flood onto the roadway, blocking traffic and criss-crossing lanes as they attempt to enter trucks and buses in any manner possible. It looks like this.
As one trucker noted, “It is not a pleasant thing to be sitting in a cab with people running every which way.” He asked, “Do you think you could see the whites of another human’s eyes seconds before running into them? I don’t know if I could. I don’t know how it would affect me and I don’t want to find out.”
Increasing numbers of truckers are traumatized for fear of hitting an invader as drivers attempt to navigate this chaotic and dangerous scene. It is taking an emotional toll. As one trucker said: “All I want to do is come to work, do my bit and get home to my family safely with my sanity and pride. This is becoming more and more difficult as the days go by.”
And the truckers are put in an untenable position as they face not only the daily trauma of trying to do their job without killing someone, but face large fines if any invader makes it into the UK aboard one of their trucks. How, pray tell, any of these poor souls is supposed to protect against that is anyone’s guess. Are they supposed to get out of their truck and confront a mob of young men fresh from North Africa and other Islamic hellholes?
Meanwhile, this is occurring against the backdrop of invaders getting killed by freight trains that also run through this port area. And of course, no such backdrop would be complete without high drama reaction from the left, as useful idiots in the UK stage protests, replete with fake blood, in support of migrants and open borders. They have catchy slogans like this one: “No more borders, no more nations, no more racist deportations!”
Hey, y’all over there across the pond. If things keep going the way they are, you’ll get your wish. There will be no more United Kingdom or any other nation. Except one. It will be the Islamic Caliphate 24/7. Good luck with their “racist deportations,” because that is the least they will have in mind for you folks...."