Tag: Fred Reed

Thoughts from Below the Rio Bravo: A Preliminary to Going into Hiding

Guest Post by Fred Reed

To understand of many Mexican attitudes toward the United States and immigration, you have to go back to the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, of which most Americans have never heard. The United States attacked Mexico in a war of  territorial acquisition, occupied Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, and drove south to conquer Mexico City. It did it because it could.

The attitude of Americans who have heard of the war is usually, “Get over it.” Mexicans have not gotten over it. People get over things they have done to others more easily than they get over things others have done to them.  Tell Americans to “get over” Nine-Eleven, or Jews to get over Germany.

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To the Barricades! : We Will At Least Be Less Bored

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Katie, bar the ever-lovin’ door. Compromise seems a forlorn hope in today’s strange version of America. Anger runs too deep. All that is left is to choose sides. We will then see whether the country sinks—continues sinking–into a Soviet future already largely upon us, or we see armed mobs battling in the streets.

Does this sound crazy? I don’t think so. The hostility is beyond anything I have seen in what has become a depressingly long life. In the media, on the web, anger seethes. Countries both civilized and not have plunged into bloodshed over as little. Think of Sunnis and Shias, Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics, Spanish and Basques.

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Working Toward Tripartite Racial Disunity: Maybe Not a Really Great Idea

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Regarding Latinos not as citizens but as internal enemies of America is an idea pushed not just by many racialist websites (e.g., Vdare).but also by Donald Trump. The outlook is particularly characteristic of something called the Alt-Right, a substantial if loosely defined group who are horrified at the thought of racial amalgamation. Hostility intensifies as one moves farther along the right wing to where the feathers end and giddy space begins.

It is perhaps worth noting that the accounts of Mexico in the anti-immigrationist literature bear little or no resemblance to the Mexico I have lived in for fifteen years. The streets are not strewn with garbage, it is not legal to screw little girls of twelve years, guns for home defense are not illegal, and Mexican school children behave like everybody else’s. The racialist sites often do not check facts, do not correct false claims when notified of them, and not infrequently simply lie. Many of the leaders seem never to have been to Mexico, speak Spanish, or have the foggiest notions of the world below the Rio Bravo.

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The Worship of Ammunition: An Interlude with Moon’s Church

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Having recently watched documentaries of various dismal cults, notably Buddhafields and Scientology, I bethought myself of Moon’s Church, owner of the Washington Times, and my brief association with it ages ago. Thinking that it might be of sociological or psychiatric interest, I post the following. Early Seventies. Unpublished:

 

The tall scrawny freak with the red hair converted in the spring of 1972, several months before Jerry wandered, roaring, onto the scene. I had recently graduated from both Vietnam and college and, not knowing what else to do, was living with a collection of hippies at Stafford Court House, Virginia. The other freaks were the usual unemployed prophets, fruit-juice drinkers, tarot-card readers and desert patriarchs in from communes in New Mexico. Most were sane without being extreme about it. A few were psychic train-wrecks trying to reassemble themselves, and mind-burnt druggies who had learned to package brain damage as mystical insight.

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GIGO and the Intelligence of Countries: Disordered Thoughts

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Apologies to the reader. Perhaps I wax tedious. But the question of intelligence is both interesting to me and great fun as talking about it puts commenters in an uproar. It is like poking a wasp’s nest when you are eleven. I am a bad person.

Clearing the underbrush: Obviously intelligence is largely genetic–if it were cultural in origin, all the little boys who grew up in Isaac Newton’s neighborhood would have been towering mathematical geniuses–and obviously the various tests of intellectual function have, at least among testees of similar background, considerable relation to intelligence. Some individuals have more of it than others. For example, Hillary, a National Merit Finalist, scored higher than 99.5 percent of Illinois and can reliably be suspected of being bright. Some groups are obviously smarter than other groups. Mensans and Nobelists are smarter than sociologists. Of course, so are acorns.

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Oncoming Racial Doom: The Clash of Cultures

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Curiously, what made me give up all interest in the problems of blacks was not their virulent racism, the horrendous rates of crime, or the parasitism. Instead it was the assaults by blacks and their fellow travelers on Confederate monuments, particularly in New Orleans. Similarly, the banning of the Confederate battle flag at Gettysburg, for God’s sake. For reasons doubtless opaque to the historically ignorant, this annoys me.  Why should the least productive, most criminal, most dependent of the population rewrite history that in any event they don’t know? The erasure of the South and the Confederacy by people most of whom couldn’t spell it, of Washington and Jefferson and Lee by grifters, race hustlers,  wanton illiterates and the Brownshirts of Black Lives Matter…enough.

How many think this but won’t say it?

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Memorial Day and the Rising Gorge: More than I Can Take

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Apparently I have missed Memorial Day by being on the road in Guanajuato. I gather I should have thanked Our Boys for their service to the exceptional nation. I will pass. My tolerance for nauseating twaddle has diminished with the years.

To begin with, “Our Boys,” so affectionately denominated, are not our boys but suckers of the ruling rich. Think not? Think again. Ending the draft protected the sons of the well-off from military service and the military from anti-war movements. If you draft the moneyed elegants of Princeton, you get resistance. Instead the oligarchs send the expendable children of the lower orders. Who volunteer.

Further, the soldiers are not heroes but mercenary killers morally indistinguishable from hitmen for the Mafia. A kid joins the military, perhaps never having heard of the Pentagon’s next target country–Iraq, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, wherever. It doesn’t matter. They are just countries.

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Notes of a Reformed News Weasel: Understanding the Vacuity

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Do you wonder why the legacy media are such puzzled otherworldly twits? Why, for example, they had no idea what was happening in the recent election? Why they seem to know so very little about America or much of anything else?

Some thoughts from a guy who spent a career in the racket:

Ask journalists when they were last in a truck stop on an Interstate, last in Boone, North Carolina or Barstow, California or any of thousands of such towns across the country. Ask whether they were in the military, whether they have ever talked to a cop or an ambulance crewman or a fireman. Ask whether they have a Mexican friend, when they last ate in a restaurant where a majority of the customers were black.  Whether they know an enlisted man, or anyone in the armed services. Whether they have hitchhiked overnight, baited a hook, hunted, or fired a rifle. Whether they have ever worked washing dishes, harvesting crops, driving a delivery truck. Whether they have a blue-collar friend. Know what the Texas Two-Step is, have been in a biker bar.

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Sally Cone Hits the Dating Scene: Kind of Weird, but Maybe….

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Oh Lord, where is my Haldol? Recently I saw online a documentary on sex robots. The reporteress, a short-haired woman seething with quiet indignation,  Viewed  With Alarm the very idea. Progress is rapid on these love assistants, she said. They move. Some do, anyway. They talk, but not too much. Before long they will have skin-temperature silicone. Today we have all those deplorable men sitting home, lonely and isolated, choking their chickens and pondering suicide. Soon they will instead be rocking and rolling with Robo-Barbie.  This worried her. She said.

If this be true, the why, one wonders, do men want sexbots? Aren’t there already women all over the place at skin temperature?  Sez me, it’s because women have lived too long in a monopoly economy and so let down quality. It used to be that men had jobs and money, and women had that, so they married to let each get some of what the other  had. The woman had to be agreeable as a selling point. Now women have jobs and don’t need men, or to be pleasant. Some are nice anyway, but it’s no longer a design feature. Of course they often end up old and alone with a cat somewhere on upper Connecticut Avenue, but they don’t figure this out until too late. Anyway, they stopped being agreeable. They learned from feminists that everything wrong in their lives was the fault of men.

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First Transgender President: Trump Becomes Hillary

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Oh Lord, it’s happening–the remanufacture of Trump by the Establishment. During the campaign, Trump and the Basilisk had nothing in common but their hair dye. Now, almost daily, he looks more like her.

He gets embarrassing. Regarding the alleged gassing in Syria, quoth Donald:

“When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies — with a chemical gas … that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line. … And I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me … my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.”

God almighty. Who wrote this–a middle school girl with C’s in English, or the President of the United States? Did he retire to his bedroom for a good cry?

Apparently he ordered his missile strike without bothering to find out what happened. The usual suspects are driving him like a sports car.

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The Authoritarian Impulse: Getting What We Really Don’t Want

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As a society crumbles, as bitter divisions grow and disorder spreads and nothing seems to work, anger comes and people begin to want a man who will say “Enough!” and slap down the malefactors–by any means necessary. A man who will make the trains run on time. A man who will make it safe to walk in the parks.

This is the authoritarian impulse. As corruption grows,  as a coagulated government fails to function, the temptation comes. It is coming.

Recently I read that in Brazil some thirty men gang-raped a young woman, left her emotionally devastated, bleeding, with a ruptured bladder, and laughed as they did it before posting the video online. My first thought  was, that they should be rounded up, shot without ceremony, and dropped into a public sewer. I meant this without a trace of hyperbole.

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Columnists

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In Washington, where the rice paddies of self-importance are nourished with the night soil of mendacity, columnists are viewed with the seriousness properly reserved for lung cancer. This is ridiculous. Columnists, the rodent class of journalism, have the dignity of carney barkers and merit the social standing of bellhops. It’s a living. For most of us, barely.

A columnist’s job is to tell readers things that they already believe. His function is purely confirmatory. What he confirms may be nonsense, and often is, but this is irrelevant. There is after all everywhere a boom market in nonsense.

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Time and the Tidewater: Thoughts and Remembrance

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If the reader will permit me this once a somewhat personal and idiosyncratic essay–heretofore I have never been either personal or idiosyncratic–I will promise never to do it again. No one can doubt the reliability of my promises.

I have played in writing over the years with my birth in West Virginia and my consequent but imaginary possession of twelve toes. (Most readers will not care where I was born, and a fair few clearly wish that I hadn’t been. Well, this isn’t your day.) Anyway, I entered this world in Bluefield General Hospital, McDowell County, West Virginia, because my mother was staying with her father, a medical doctor in Crumpler, an unincorporated coal camp up the holler from North Fork, while my father was gunnery officer aboard a destroyer in the Pacific.

In fact my people are pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater. I am Frederick Venable Reed Jr, my mother’s maiden name being Betty Venable Rivers–a cousin marriage, which some will suggest explains a lot. The Venables were prominent in the gentility of Southside Virginia.

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A Budget without Russians: The Empire’s Nightmare

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Methinks the insane hysteria over Russia needs to stop. It probably will not. For reasons of domestic and imperial politics the American public is again being manipulated into a war frenzy by Washington and New York. It is stupid, without justification, and dangerous.

The silliness over Russia is, obviously, part of the Establishment’s drive to get rid of Trump. Yes, the man is erratic, contradictory, shoots before he aims, backs off much of what he has promised, and may be unqualified as President–but that is not why Washington and New York want to get rid of him. It is about money and power, as is everything in the United States. Wall Street, the Pentagon, the Neocons, and the Empire run America. Trump has threatened their rice bowls.

Consider:

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Sidestepping the Military Leviathan: Make Money, Not War

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Mock-up of planned Russian-Chinese airliner to compete with Boeing and Airbus. To enter service by 2025. Ambitious? Oh yes. Remember when we laughed at Toyota, Airbus, and Trump?

Is Washington really going to start a trade war with China, or is it just huffing and puffing for position? I don’t know. Mr. Trump has inexplicably failed to brief me. A point worth bearing in mind:

The United States cannot compete commercially with a developed Asia, or China.

America has nowhere to go. It is a fully developed economy that cannot grow rapidly if it grows at all. America is also a country of only medium size with a white and Asian population of a bit more than two hundred million who do all the brain work. It has a decaying system of education, declining living standards, and an economy crippled by huge military expenditures.

By contrast China has a billion Han Chinese, intelligent government, a great deal of room to grow and high rates of doing so. The combined land mass, population, and economic potential of Asia are staggering. In differing degrees, Asian nations are growing.

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Trump to Build Death Camps for Trans-gendered People of Color: Will Deport All Woman

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I love it. Of all the things about Trump that our silly-ass Aunt Polly media might have considered–policy toward China, relations with Iran, reform of taxes–they seemed most agitated about…his sex life. Yes. Sure, he is  a misogynist, homophobe, Islamophobe, fascist, Nazi, anti-Semite, and probably kicks his dog. Maybe a cannibal. But the truly horrid discovery was…that he thinks dirty thoughts about girls (as we all do–unless we are girls, and think dirty thoughts about boys) Shocking. Shocking. Clearly he hates women.

The famous dirty-talk tape is my favorite example of high-school outrage coupled with horrified old-maid moralism. It reveals what any sensible person would have assumed– egotism (a rare thing among the rich and famous), and a sexual interest in women.  How is this misogyny? If there is one thing normal women don’t like, it is men without sexual interest in themselves. And who can blame  them? Who wants an asexual boyfriend?

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