We like this column by Mark Steyn so much, and find it so funny, that we’re quoting it in full.

Our only comments are these:

We fervently hope not to have any Democrat succeed Obama to the presidency.

As America is at war, a president is needed who knows what’s going on in the outer world and can be a first-rate commander-in-chief. And such a person is more likely to be a man. (If the Republican Party had a Margaret Thatcher to offer for election it would be different, but it doesn’t. Such people are very rare.)

“Ignore the noise – Clinton will win in 2016,” we are assured by a columnist in Hillary’s journalistic namesake The Hill. “The email flap will be gone soon enough.”

That’s probably the way to bet. Rightie pundits are going on about government-issue Blackberries, insecure servers, federal record-keeping, the law, national security, peripheral stuff like that. Leftie pundits are saying: yawn, nobody cares, it’s never gonna catch fire, give it up. Everyone implicitly agrees that Hillary did something she shouldn’t and that her justification for doing so is ridiculous. The only disagreement is whether it makes any difference. The Hill‘s Fernando Espuelas says no:

Clinton has a built-in advantage — her gender… Some percentage of Americans, likely a large one, would like to cast a historic vote. When polling points to Americans wanting “change”, what bigger change than a woman as president?

A change to a competent citizen-executive whose administration spends within its means, ceases obstructing economic growth and middle-class prosperity, and restores American influence in the world?

Oh, well. One takes his point: Most other citizens of developed and not-so-developed societies cast those “historic votes” long ago – Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, India, Dominica, Jamaica, Guyana, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Israel, Turkey, Portugal, Germany, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia, Transnistria …

At the time of those “historic votes” on a good half of that list, “gender” was not “a built-in advantage” but a built-in disadvantage that skilled and nimble female candidates had to be exceptional to overcome.

If I follow Mr Espuelas correctly, he’s saying that America is getting round to its “historic vote” so late that “gender” is now such an advantage that any old female candidate can be dragged across the finish line, no matter how shopworn, wooden, charmless, tin-eared and corrupt.

Maybe. But, even so, Hillary Clinton is still a severe test of that thesis. Charles Krauthammer detects “Early-Onset Clinton Fatigue”. Whether that is yet afflicting the electorate, it certainly seems to have gripped the candidate. At that press conference, Hillary seemed to be going through the motions. Flush with Saudi cash and a well-oiled shakedown Rolodex, Clinton Worldwide Inc has no reason not to run for president, but apparently no compelling reason to run. When the candidate runs into trouble, grizzled drooling attack dogs from the Nineties – Lanny Davis, James Carville – are loosed from their chains and limp dutifully from the Old Pooch Home to bare their remaining fang for their mistress.

Is there anyone new, young, talented willing to defend Hillary? I mean, other than Huma [Abedin], the only woman in America whose marriage rivals the exhibitionist creepiness of the Clintons in their heyday.

Let’s take The Hill‘s chap at his word: “Gender” will trump whatever stiff the Republican primary season throws up. In that case, why not run a woman who isn’t quite so bloody awful at running? Someone younger, someone whose principal selling point isn’t her husband’s surname, someone with actual accomplishments and a political philosophy? She doesn’t have to be that much younger, or accomplished. Elizabeth Warren is two years younger than Hillary, and her principal accomplishments are TARP and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, neither of which is my cup of tea. But that’s two more accomplishments than Secretary Clinton can claim. And okay, she’s not the most riveting public speaker, but she’s Tom Jones at Vegas next to a speak-your-weight machine in a pantsuit. And yes, Senator Fauxcahontas Crockagewea Warren’s got her own scandal – in that she got hired as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color” on the basis of a dubious claim to be one thirty-second Cherokee and having contributed Cole Porter and the Duchess of Windsor’s favorite crab dish from an upscale Manhattan restaurant to a cookbook of authentic tribal recipes.

Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, isn’t that kind of a charmingly amateur, sweetly naive racket? It’s a small-town home-cooked mom’n’pop racket compared to the 24/7 industrial-scale multinational Saudi-kissing pedophile-jetting rackets of Clinton Global Mega-Racket Inc,

As I said, Senator Warren is a mere two years younger than Secretary Clinton, which means, if she’s ever going to run for president, it has to be now. Why not go for it? Wouldn’t Democrats like to elect a real first female head of government like Thatcher or Merkel or Golda Meir or all those Scandinavians? Why should all those Americans itching to cast that “historic vote” have to have it tainted and thrown away on dynastic succession? How “historic” can your vote really be when, insofar as Hillary’s “running” at all, she’s running as if she’s already won and she’s just running out the clock till the coronation? Are Democrat women so cowed and subservient they’re just going to have the House of Saud’s candidate shoved down their throats and meekly be driven to the polls in theirs burqas by Lanny Davis?

Well, yes. Probably. Okay, definitely.

But we can always dream. And my bet is that, after Tuesday, a lot of Democrats are dreaming. A Hillary presidency is an “historic first”: not the first female president, but the second Clinton president, and the second-rate Clinton president.

Warren-Sharpton

(Picture from PowerLine)

The excellent British historian Andrew Roberts explains, with brilliant clarity, why President George W. Bush led the invasion and conquest of Iraq in 2003.

We have posted quite a few – but never enough! – stories about the persecution of individuals by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Stasi-like EPA. As a reminder of just how cruel, callous. and lethal its bureaucrats are, here’s a snippet from a story we posted on April 2, 2014, titled Human sacrifices carried out by the EPA.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to the Obama administration what the Inquisition was to the Catholic Church.

It tortures its victims with harassment, bankrupting fines, and toxins rather than with rack and fire (so in that respect the Inquisition was even worse), but its function – to terrify people into submitting to a persecuting authority trying to establish lies as incontrovertible truths – is the same.

We then quote from an article in the Daily Caller:  

The Environmental Protection Agency has been conducting dangerous experiments on humans over the past few years in order to justify more onerous clean air regulations. …

Just how it did this, without the consent of the human guinea-pigs, is described.

We concluded:

The whole story confirms that Environmentalists see human beings primarily as polluters of the air and earth and seas, enemies of a “healthy planet”. They are as deranged and as evil as those who tortured people to death to please the “loving” god they believed in.

And this is from Global Warming.org:

Regulation during the Obama age has been characterized by the political regulation — one whose purpose is to benefit a narrow special interest, rather than the public at large.

Consider, for example, President Obama’s EPA.

In 2008 and 2012, green advocacy groups spent scores of millions of dollars to help elect Obama. In return, these special interests have been rewarded with the reins to the EPA. In this fashion, they can direct state power to persecute their political enemies.

In practice, this quid pro quo relationship results in regulations whose public health justifications are highly dubious, and whose only discernible purpose is to target “dirty” fossil fuels. …

Now, we are glad to see, the Republican-majority  House of Representatives is legislating to limit the powers and curtail the arbitrary actions of the EPA.  (A rare instance of the GOP doing what it needs to do, to counter the tyranny of the Left in power.)

We quote an article from Canada Free Press, by Alan Caruba:

The folks at the Environmental Protection Agency, starting with a long line of its administrators that now includes Gina McCarthy, think you and the Congress of the United States are stupid. They have been telling lies for so long they can’t imagine that their chokehold on the American economy will ever end.

It is, however, coming to an end and the reason is a Republican-controlled Congress responding to the countless businesses and individuals being ravaged by a ruthless bureaucracy driven by an environmental agenda determined to deprive America of the energy sources vital to our lives and the nation’s existence.

This was on display in early March when Gina McCarthy [head of the EPA] testified to the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, asking for a nearly $500 million increase in its 2016 budget. The total discretionary budget request would have topped out at $8.6 billion and would reward states nearly $4 billion to go along with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

The problem is that the Clean Power Plan is really about no power or far more costly power in those states where the EPA has been shutting down coal-fired plants that not long ago provided fifty percent of all the electricity in the nation.

In February 2014, the Institute for Energy Research reported:

“More than 72 gigawatts (GW) of electrical generating capacity have already, or are now set to retire because of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulations. The regulations causing these closures include the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (colloquially called MATS, or Utility MACT), proposed Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), and the proposed regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.

To put 72 GW in perspective, that is enough electrical generation capacity to reliably power 44.7 million homes — or every home in every state west of the Mississippi River, excluding Texas. In other words, EPA is shutting down enough generating capacity to power every home in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

Over 94 percent these retirements will come from generating units at coal-fired power plants, shuttering over one-fifth of the U.S.’s coal-fired generating capacity. While some of the effected units will be converted to use new fuels, American families and businesses will pay the price with higher utility bills and less reliability for their electricity.

What nation would knowingly reduce its capacity to produce the electricity that everyone depends upon?

Answer: The United States of America.

Why? Because the EPA has been telling us that coal-fired plants produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and it is causing ours and the world’s temperature to increase to a point that threatens our lives. They have been claiming that everything from blizzards to droughts, hurricanes to forest fires, are the result of the CO2 that coal-fired plants produce.

That is a huge, stupendous lie.

In the Senate Committee meeting, McCarthy said, “Climate change is real. It is happening. It is a threat. Humans are causing the majority of that threat … the impacts are being felt. Climate change is not a religion. It is not a belief system. It’s a scientific fact. And our challenge is to move forward with the actions we need to protect future generations.”

Climate change is real. It’s been real for 4.5 billion years and it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that humans do, least of all heating, cooling and lighting their homes, running their businesses, and everything else that requires electricity.

McCarthy said that the EPA’s overall goal was to save the planet from rising sea levels, massive storms, and other climate events that impact our lives. No, that’s not why the EPA was created in 1970. Its job was to clean the water and the air. … Its mandate had nothing to do with the climate, nor does the provision of energy have any impact on the climate.

The reverse is true. The climate has a lot of impact on us.

Regarding the “science” McCarthy referred to, according to a 2013 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there were record low tornadoes, record low hurricanes, record gain in Arctic and Antarctic ice, no change in the rate of sea levels, and there had been NO WARMING at that point for 17—now 19—years.

When Sen. Jeff Sessions asked McCarthy a number of questions about droughts and hurricanes, she either dodged providing a specific answer or claimed, as with hurricanes, that “I cannot answer that question. It’s a very complicated issue.”

Asked about the computer models on which the EPA makes its regulatory decisions, McCarthy replied, “I do not know what the models actually are predicting that you are referring to.” Sen. Sessions said that it was incredible that the Administrator of the EPA “doesn’t know whether their predictions have been right or wrong”. 

As for any “science” the EPA may be using, much of it is SECRET. …

Or has been secret. Now that is changing.

The Secret Science Reform Act (HR 4012) [was] introduced by the House Science Committee late last year. The bill would “prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from proposing, finalizing, or disseminating regulations or assessments based on science that is not transparent or reproducible.”

The House passed the Act on November 20, 2014, and it has been received in the Senate, read twice, and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. If it passes the Senate, that will be a giant leap forward in gaining oversight and control of the EPA.

Until then, the EPA’s administrator and staff will continue to work their mischief in the belief that both Congress and the rest of us are stupid. We’re not.

It would be best if the EPA were entirely abolished.

My reaction to the letter was utter disbelief. During my 29 years here in the Senate, I have never heard of – nor even heard of it being proposed – anything comparable to this. If I had, I can guarantee that no matter what the issue was and no matter who the president was, I would have certainly rejected it.

That was what Secretary of State John Kerry said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today about the letter forty-seven Senators wrote to the Iranian government telling them that no deal made with a president of the United States is legally binding unless and until the Senate ratifies it.

Some are calling the letter an act of treason.

John Kerry would have us know that he cannot even believe it happened.

Can we believe his “utter disbelief”?

“Outrage that my negotiations may be all for nothing”, would ring more true.

But more importantly: when Kerry  was a Senator …

Daniel Greenfield recalls and comments at Front Page:

Only months after he was sworn in [as a Senator in 1985], Kerry joined [Senator] Harkin on an infamous trip to Managua, to meet with Comandante Ortega… The trip, moreover, occurred a few days before a key vote in Congress on Contra aid — the bill proposed to send $14 million in humanitarian assistance to those anti-Communist rebels.

Said Kerry, “Senator Harkin and I are going to Nicaragua as Vietnam-era veterans who are alarmed that the Reagan administration is repeating the mistakes we made in Vietnam. Our foreign policy should represent the democratic values that have made our country great, not subvert those values by funding terrorism to overthrow governments of other countries.” Note that, certainly by implication, the senator characterized the Contra resistance as “terrorism”.

Those fits of outrage that lefties are suddenly having over the GOP Iran letter, the argument that Senators have no right to interfere in foreign policy, all of those were made up in the last 5 minutes.

Kerry didn’t merely send a letter. He worked with a foreign enemy Marxist government to subvert President Reagan’s policy.

Senators Kerry and Harkin returned to Washington with a kind of peace plan — Ortega was saying, Cut off all aid to the Contras, engage in bilateral talks with us, and we’ll call a cease-fire and restore civil liberties. Kerry hailed this as “a wonderful opening”.

The Reagan administration was not impressed — in fact, it fumed. The State Department made clear that the Sandinistas had to talk to the Contras themselves, not to Washington: “Without such a dialogue, a cease-fire is meaningless — essentially a call for the opposition to surrender. The opposition is asked to accept Sandinista consolidation of a Marxist-Leninist order in Nicaragua.”

[Then Secretary of State] Shultz decried “self-appointed emissaries to the Communist regime” in Managua, and said, “We cannot conduct a successful policy when [such people] take trips or write ‘Dear Comandante’ letters with the aim of negotiating.”

Henry Kissinger added, “If the Nicaraguans want to make an offer, they ought to make it through diplomatic channels. We can’t be negotiating with our own congressmen and Nicaragua simultaneously.”

In the end, the trip backfired. Not long after the senators left him, Ortega flew off to Moscow, to affirm his alliance with the Soviets. …

The Sandinista anthem called the “Yankee” the enemy of mankind and a year before Kerry’s visit, Daniel Ortega had threatened the United States with war while crowds of his supporters had chanted, “Here or There, Yankees Will Die Everywhere”.

“Here or There, Yankees Will Die Everywhere” is also coincidentally the foreign policy of the Obama administration.

And we’re not even getting into Kerry undermining President Bush by chatting up Assad.

We could just do a coffee table book of photos of Kerry committing treason. …

But Kerry, like Biden, is amping up the fake outrage and pretending to be upset that Senators sent a warning letter to a foreign government …

John Kerry first became notorious when he bad-mouthed his country during the Vietnam war, and lied about atrocities being committed by his fellow soldiers.

He was on the Steering Committee of an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and as such he did this:

John Kerry has admitted to meeting in 1970 in Paris with Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, the “waiting-in-the-wings government” ready to take over South Vietnam once the Communists won. The Viet Cong operated as the military arm of the PRG. Kerry also met with representatives of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the official name of the North Vietnamese communist government in Hanoi. North Vietnam’s lead delegate at that time was Le Duc Tho, who along with Ho Chi Minh was one of the original founders of the Communist Party of Indochina and one of North Vietnam’s chief strategists. …

The now public FBI record clearly indicates that the VVAW of November 1971 had come under communist influence and was acting directly with the enemy to work against US military objectives in the war. Not only was the VVAW continuing to undermine support for the war in the United States through its false claims of war crimes and atrocities, but now the VVAW was negotiating with America’s enemies to effect the release of POWs to enhance their credibility as an organization, and actively encouraging soldiers in the field to refuse orders to engage the enemy in combat.

This appears to violate US Code 18 USC 953, which directly forbids US citizens from negotiating with foreign powers, as well as Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution, which defines treason as giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war. …

It is clear that the VVAW leaders understood the seditious nature of their activities – they relocated twice to avoid surveillance by government authorities. That turned out to be a vain hope, since the FBI had multiple informers inside the meeting.

They then debated and voted down a proposal to assassinate several pro-war US Senators. John Kerry, who until recently claimed to have resigned from the VVAW the previous June, was also present for this session according to the FBI files and a number of eyewitnesses. Senator Kerry now says he remembers nothing of the Kansas City meeting.

John Kerry would continue to serve as the VVAW’s primary spokesman for several more months. Newspaper reports indicate that he represented the VVAW in public appearances at least as late as April 1972.

The FBI files on the VVAW raise many questions, but one thing is clear: John Kerry and his VVAW comrades were welcome guests of the Vietnamese communists in both Paris and Hanoi, guests who could be counted on to actively support the leadership of America’s wartime enemy.

But this same John Kerry is stunned that Senators should have written that letter to the Iranian government. He says he “has never heard of anything comparable” to it, and that he could “guarantee that no matter what the issue was and no matter who the president was”  he “would have certainly rejected it”.

He’s right that the Senator’s letter, which treats an enemy of the US as an enemy, is not comparable to his giving aid and comfort to an enemy in war time.

What Kerry himself did exactly fits the definition of treason. 

And in addition to all that, the deal itself that Obama and Kerry are “negotiating” with the Iranian enemy is a sell-out of American interests. What’s going on in Geneva is better described as collusion than negotiation. It’s a display, a performance, to make it seem as if something is being done to prevent Iran “getting the Bomb”, when the real purpose is to put “the Bomb” in its claws. It is a process of treason.

And what has the whole presidency of Barack Hussein Obama been but just such a process?   

Yesterday (March 9, 2015), on Fox TV, Charles Krauthammer pointed out to Bill O’Reilly that the Left now has control of almost all the institutions that shape our culture. He is right.

The chief disseminators of ideas – the universities, the entertainment industry, and almost all the press and TV news media – accept and propound Leftist values and aims almost as naturally and unquestioningly as we breathe air. The only exceptions, as Krauthammer pointed out, are Fox News, “three pages of the Wall Street Journal”, and talk radio. Of course the intolerant dictatorship of the Left wants to silence them. The Left brooks no dissent.

Generation after generation is growing up and becoming the workers and welfare-dependents, the rulers and bureaucrats, the parents and teachers, the writers and preachers of what used to be the free world, convinced to a man and woman – and every one of the other 70-plus genders now compulsorily recognized by the Left – that there is such a thing as “social justice”, that it is supremely desirable, and that it can be attained by government controlling the economy, pretending to control the climate, and tightly regulating how and where and for how long people live their lives.

Leftists really do believe that their dogma is “the truth”, and the only good. Just like religions. Which is why we say that the creed of Leftism, though it does without a traditional divinity, is a religion. It has a god of sorts in History, which it holds to be the uber-director of our destiny, warning us, like the Borg in Star Trek: “Resistance is futile.”

Those of us who still cling to the quaint old-fashioned notion that individuals should be free to live and think and act as they choose, and that their freedom should be protected by the rule of objective law, are a fast diminishing minority. Our own descendants will consider us cranks.

America was founded on the idea of individual freedom protected by the rule of law. Because its people were safe and free, they made the United States the mightiest and the most prosperous country of all time.

It was good while it lasted.

Nice to see a (beautiful) Lebanese woman, as a TV host, silencing a (repulsive, obstreperous, arrogant) imam she is interviewing:

Today we post under Pages (listed at the top of our margin), essay number 13 in Part Two of the series titled The Darkness of This World, by Jillian Becker.

It continues the discussion of French writers whose works are concerned with Evil, praise it, and argue passionately that it should be done.

The title of this essay is The French Pandemonium (Three). Its subjects are the twentieth century writers Michel Foucault and –  to a lesser extent – Jean Genet.  

Here is part of the essay:

When the Second World War was over in Europe in 1945, and the enormities perpetrated by the Nazis had been fully revealed à tout le monde, Evil did not lose any of its popularity among the anti-bourgeois intelligentsia of France. If those who had survived war and occupation, deprivation and terror, and in some cases confinement, had a sense of being supped full with horrors, it seems to have been short-lived. Their appetite for blood, for torture, and even for mass murder, soon revived.

Most of the novels and plays of Jean Genet – works in which he “explored the potentialities of evil” – were published or performed after the war. He wrote fascinatingly about criminals. His play Haute Surveillance, first performed in 1949, is about a prisoner who, sentenced for committing only small crimes, murders a fellow convict in order to be recognized as someone capable of doing far worse. The bourgeois audiences found it shocking, but not the intellectual elite. In 1952 Jean-Paul Sartre published an essay about him titled Saint Genet. What made Genet a saint in Sartre’s eyes was his criminality. He was a saint because he was a thief. And – even more glamorously romantic – he was a homosexual prostitute in the days when that too could land a man in jail.

All convicted prisoners were victims of the bourgeois and his civilization, in the opinion of Michel Foucault, another of our demons. He declared: “Delinquency, solidified by a penal system centered upon the prison, thus represents a diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power of the dominant class.” …

Foucault, the French demon par excellence, was a disciple of Georges Bataille. Their tastes were the same. Foucault endorsed the master’s praise for “erotic transgression”, rhapsodized over “the joy of torture”, and longed to assist his hero in carrying out human sacrifice as a holy act and a thrilling work of art. Together they schemed – but did not institute – a “theatre of cruelty” (as had the clinically mad Antonin Artaud before them), in which actual murder would be performed for an audience. They saw a profound moral value in murder – if the murderer gets a buzz out of it.

Some ideas emerge from Foucault’s writings distinctly enough to be examined. Among them, that the law-abiding bourgeois should be punished with violent oppression; mass reprisals are preferable to individual trials; and cruelty should be a normal way of life. Yet he is praised for being “always ready to protest the fate of the wretched and powerless”.

Even if some of his works can be interpreted as “protesting the fate” of the criminal, the lunatic and the sadist, “always” is going much too far. The mass of his oeuvres proclaims his enthusiasm for rendering anybody and everybody wretched and powerless, preferably maimed, and best of all dead.  

He did not except himself. To “redeem existence” from “unbearable banality”, he hankered to be caught up in what he called “limit experiences” of pain, terror, madness, and fatal illness: “the overwhelming, the unspeakable, the creepy, the stupefying, the ecstatic”, embracing “a pure violence, a wordless gesture”. All this he sought for himself, and – though an intensely self-obsessed man – generously desired for others too; and if others did not want it, well, they should be forced to endure it. And even if the victims could not raise their consciousness so as to be overjoyed, the inflictions would not be wasted, because Foucault could wring for himself from their suffering, the last drop of excruciating pleasure.

And this pleasure should not – he fantasized – be only an occasional treat. A demon such as he should not have to perform acts of torture and life-endangerment only for a rare thrill, but such experience should be continually on tap. He believed, like Bataille, that cruelty should be a way of life – the only way of life, a constant part of everybody’s everyday life. “We can and must,” he wrote, “make of man a negative experience, lived in the form of hate and aggression.” …

Foucault sought pleasure in the pain of both body and mind. He mutilated his body and terrified his mind. As nothing was more terrible than death, he desired it most passionately. “Complete, total pleasure,” he declared, “is related to death.” He contemplated suicide, thought of it often through the greater part of his life, and claimed to have “attempted” it many times. He expected and intended that suicide would be the way he’d die. He made “lifelong preparation for it”. It would be “a simple pleasure”, a “suffering pleasure”. It would be a way of “exploring experience in its negativity”.

To take his death into his own hands would not only hasten that crowning moment of “complete, total pleasure”, it might also bring about, at last, the release of his other Self. The “other” Michel Foucault would be emancipated in his own death-throes, to experience “a moment of free existence in suicide”.

He fantasized about participating in a “suicide orgy”, and eventually, in full consistency, that was the way he chose. He went, equipped with instruments – or “toys” – of torture, to orgies of sex, drugs, pain, cruelty, and terror, knowing that they were a way to his death, and intending that that’s what they should be. He endured and wallowed in them in the bathhouses of San Francisco where homosexual men congregated, many of them infected with the HIV virus. And when he knew he had AIDS – incurable at that time – he returned to the bathhouses deliberately to infect as many other men as he could. It was slow suicide and slow murder; according to his philosophy, the transcendent “limit experience”. How much he really enjoyed the prolonged period of slow physical disintegration to which he condemned himself no one of course can know. But he did not try to cut it short by some swifter means to death in order to achieve that moment of exquisite agony in which he expected to feel himself – or his hidden Self – liberated by death. …

Absurdly hyperbolic praise has been heaped upon him. Paul Veyne, professor of History at Vincennes, said of Foucault that he was “the most important event in the thought of this [20^th] century”. Yet far from contributing to the advancement of mankind, his example was atavistic: to live by the dictates of the instincts, the appetites, and the emotions – in other words to be savage. …

The immense popularity of Bataille and Foucault, the rapturous reception accorded their demonic works, could only mean that France itself was turning away – continuing to turn away – from reason and civilized values.

On the European battlefields of literature, philosophy, and politics, Romanticism has won an overwhelming victory. The “horrible workers” predicted by Rimbaud, have been elevated by public (bourgeois!) taste into the intellectual giants of contemporary thought. And they have influenced taste everywhere in the pan-European world. Now, in the early twenty-first century, in most of the faculties of the humanities, in most of the academies of the West, the French cult of Evil is virtually an orthodoxy – even in America.

You can find all of it here.

Saturday is a good day for exposing silliness.

Silliness is always to be found among the devotees of political correctness.

And the devotees of political correctness are always to be found in the universities.

Today it may be found in the University of Michigan. It is “banning” words.

Professor Jonathan Turley writes:

The University of Michigan has spent $16,000 on a campaign to get students to use “inclusive language” and stop using certain words and phrases.

Among the banned words and phrases are: crazy, insane, gay, tyranny, illegal alien, fag, ghetto, and raghead.

He points out that –

Once schools begin to list approved and disapproved words, there is a slippery slope toward the inclusion of any word that could possibly insult any person or group.

And that –

Most of my friends who are homosexual refer to themselves as “gay”.

The level of intelligence among those at the University of Michigan who are trying to shrink the English language is demonstrated by this:

“I wanted to die” is listed as offense to “people who have attempted or committed suicide”.

That prompts us to say that the language-censors at Michigan University are positively retarded.

But – oops! – that’s another “banned” word. This comes from Truth Revolt:

Students at UCLA are uniting in solidarity over a new political correctness campaign: to ban the “R-word”.

The campaign, called “Spread the Word to End the Word”, asks students to pledge to eradicate the words “retard” and “retarded” from their vocabulary. 

UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) hopes to get the entire nation to stop using those two words.

The Spread the Word to End the Word campaign is part of a larger national movement to stop people from using the word “retard” or “retarded”. Using the word as a negative label can be offensive because it is associated with people who have developmental or learning disabilities.

In other words, retarded people.

More chicanery in the sleazy Clintonworld:

DAILY SABAH WITH AFP

BAGHDAD

Published 9 hours ago

The ISIS group began bulldozing the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in northern Iraq on Thursday, the tourism and antiquities ministry said.

The self-proclaimed State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) “assaulted the historic city of Nimrud and bulldozed it with heavy vehicles”,  the ministry said on an official Facebook page, the group’s latest attack on the country’s historical heritage.