Category Archives: History

After Brexit

Britain somehow carries on:

Ever since David Cameron announced a referendum on Britain’s EU membership in February 2016, the British people have been issued the direst imaginable warnings. Before the referendum, the then–chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, among others, predicted an immediate recession in the U.K. if the voters were unwise enough to disregard his instructions and vote to leave the EU. But we did disregard his instructions, as we did those of the prime minister and the heads of all the other major parties. We disregarded everybody, in fact, who warned us that our future would be darker, poorer, more ignorant, and more insular. In June 2016 we voted to leave the EU.

For a variety of reasons that arose after that decision (not least the ineptitude of Theresa May’s government and her minority rule after the 2017 election), the scare stories stepped up. The warned-of recession was claimed to have merely been deferred. And the financial threats were the least of it. The media and politicians on the Remain side upped the volume on all their dire warnings. Disappointment and rage about losing the referendum were transferred into a number of vitriolic behaviors, but most prominent amongst them was the claim of increased insularity.

Media, including a new, strange propaganda paper called the New European, offered the British public “farewell tours” to the Continent. Such publications strongly suggested that once Britain left the EU, we Brits would be unable to visit again. We would return to where we were before we entered the Common Market in 1975. And as centuries of literature and history attest, until 1975 nobody from Britain ever went to the Continent. In fact, prior to 1975 we had been a strange, hobbit-like people, famously incurious about abroad and choosing never to visit the place.

RTWT

The Democrats And 2016

They still haven’t come to terms with it.

They probably never will.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Democrat groans in response to Bloomberg’s defense of capitalism should terrify all of us.

[Update a while later]

First link is fixed, sorry.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The debate was a glorious Wrestlemania.

Bill Barr

…and his critics’ derangement syndrome.

Anti-Barr polemics dwell on the parade of horribles that might come from his tenure at Justice, without pausing to consider that a norm-busting violation of the rules targeting a politically inconvenient individual already occurred — it was the abusive FISA surveillance of former Trump campaign official Carter Page.

The supposed institutionalists and civil libertarians who are piling on Barr are more outraged that the attorney general wants to get to the bottom of this abuse — and related 2016 investigatory overreach — than by the abuse itself.

It’s no wonder that Barr has a poorly disguised contempt for his critics, many of whom are so inflamed by their opposition to Trump that they’ve lost any sense of standards. In a peppery speech to a Federalist Society conference last year that is now one of the counts against him, Barr rightly warned that “it is the Left that is engaged in a systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.”

As has always been the case.

THe WW II Museum

A review from a friend:

***** and I went to the WW2 museum in New Orleans. Brand new, big, still expanding, expensive and boring. The Germans and Japanese were bad; Roosevelt was good; it was all very sad.

Nothing about the Hitler Stalin pact. Nothing about the role the CP played to keep us neutral, until Uncle Joe got attacked. And Roosevelt’s concentration camps? The American people did it, not Roosevelt’s executive order (funny how that works).

It was shallow, not much to look at (the captions and film shorts looked like they were written for Sesame Street), and relentlessly politically correct.

I usually think I will spend an hour or two in a museum, and end up spending the whole day; this time, we payed parking for the whole day, and left after two hours.

Not recommended.

But, we had dinner in the Neon Pig restaurant in Tupelo. Best hamburger in the world!

Well, glad he enjoyed the burger.