It might be Friday the 13th, but it’s Tommy Robinson’s lucky day: he’s free!
For those unfamiliar with Tommy Robinson, he is a journalist-activist. Robinson was jailed once before, ostensibly for contempt of court. In fact, his “crime” was calling the defendants in an then-active child grooming trial “Muslim child rapists.” For having the pique to critique Islam, Robinson was jailed.
Today’s Number of the Day from pollster Scott Rasmussen notes that 76% of American voters believe that illegal immigration is bad for the country. That is a substantial majority (and it makes you wonder about the other 24%).
When breaking that number down by partisan affiliation, it’s not surprising that 90% of Republicans believe that illegal immigration is bad. What is somewhat surprising is that 63% of Democrats believe that illegal immigration is bad. That suggests that opposing illegal immigration and border control continue to be winning issues.
I’ve been awash in local boosterism lately. As a Jeffersonian at heart (especially now that I’m a freehold yeoman farmer, what with my single fig tree, twenty yards of grapevines, and drooping pecan trees), small town, rural living appeals to me at a deep level. I am, like most Americans, infected with the bug of urgent nationalism, as it seems that every major problem is a national issue (due, in no small part, to two centuries of centralization and the breakdown of federalism), but I increasingly seek to think and act locally. That’s where the most immediate and substantial changes to our lives occur.
The slow summer news cycle has seen me engaging in a bit more navel-gazing this summer, and thinking more about the things that matter in life: our towns and communities; good books and music; friends and family. Cultural issues are, potentially, political; as the late Andrew Breitbart often said, politics is downstream from culture. Books, music, and movies matter, and the local level is the best place to see culture in action.
All of that armchair philosophizing aside, this week’s Lazy Sunday looks back at some posts about small town life, both in Lamar and Aiken. Enjoy!
I am, perhaps, not acquitting my adopted home town well. It really is a lovely—and very cheap—place to live. I suppose I’ll have to write a more favorable account of Lamar life soon to make up for these two negative portrayals.
That’s it for this Lazy Sunday. I’m hoping to check out Yemassee‘s Shrimp Festival later this month (September 19-21), schedule-permitting. As the days shorten and the weather slowly cools, it’s time to get out to some local festivals in some small, rural towns.
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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It’s been quite a nice week, Hurricane Dorian notwithstanding. Last night I called my first varsity football game (I’ve been calling junior varsity games for a few years now), and I am eternally grateful to the eagle-eyed coaches in the pressbox who fed me some of my best lines.
After the game—a blowout of such proportions that the second half instituted a “running clock,” which meant an abbreviated evening for yours portly—I drove to my hometown of Aiken, in the western part of South Carolina. My destination for the weekend: the large arts and crafts fair known as Aiken’s Makin’.
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Today’s post marks 250 days of consecutive posting. That’s a major milestone in my ongoing project to blog daily, which I last commemorated in a substantial way at Day 101. With this post, I’m a mere 115 days away from reaching a year of daily posts. So close, and yet—so far.
I tried to find a word that meant “250 days” in the way that bicentennial means “200 years,” or sesquicentennial means “150 years” (from those words, I reason that 250 years would be a “sesquibicentennial”). My search proved fruitless, though I did learn that 250 is the number of men that rebelled against Moses in Numbers 26:10 (thank you, Wikipedia).
Hurricane Dorian is roaring its way up the eastern seaboard today, and the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, where I live, is due to get several inches of rain and some high, heavy winds. I’m praying that the storm passes through quickly and as easterly as possible, so as to minimize damage from the winds and flooding. If the storm stalls, two or three inches of rain in Darlington County, South Carolina could become substantially more.
I’m no stranger to flooding. Back when Hurricane Matthew hit in 2016, my old place flooded about eight inches up the walls, destroying many of my worldly possessions, and afflicting my clothes and other belongings with a faint mildewy stench that never really went away.
Two years later, my old apartment—“a Handi House in two rednecks’ backyard,” as my younger brother put it—was flooded again in a torrential downpour—a pop-up rainstorm that dumped around ten inches of water onto Florence, South Carolina in the span of an hour.
Some time ago, I somehow ended up subscribed to daily updates from Quora.com, the website where users can submit answers to other users’ questions. Apparently, I told Quora that I like dinosaurs, because most of the featured questions in my daily digest are about evolution.
Lately, however, I’ve been receiving more questions—and answers!—about astronomy. I love space exploration, and I dream of one day walking on the surface of the moon. It’s an outlandish dream, and one that I know is unlikely to ever be fulfilled, but I yearn for that opportunity.
So I was thrilled to see the kind of question that the science scolds on Quora hate—qualitative, rather than purely quantitative, in nature. The question, simply, was thus: “What is the creepiest planet in our solar system?”
The start of the school year always means the start of the grand narrative of American history. It dawned on me some years ago that, over the course of roughly 180 days, I undertake an annual, oral retelling of the story of the United States. One day, I plan to record my lectures, taking the best bits, and compiling them into a lengthy podcast series. After that, I’ll never have to teach again!
Regardless, the story always starts the same: a brief overview of the pre-Columbian Americans (what we used to call “Indians,” and more clumsily “Native Americans”), followed up with Spanish exploration from Christopher Columbus through Hernan Cortez and on.
A major part of those early lessons is the encounter of the bloodthirsty Aztecs and the gold-mad Spaniards. Students love the story of the advanced Aztecs, sacrificing humans to ensure the sunrise, and the arrival of the fiery-haired Cortez and his ragtag band of conquistadors and buccaneers.
Big Tech companies routinely run roughshod over free speech, working hand-in-glove with the Deep State of our government to curtail our rights. This kind of public-private tyranny is designed to allow the government to control speech when it legally and constitutionally cannot, by allowing large tech companies to write vague, ever-changing “terms of service” agreements that are weaponized to silence or smother conservative voices.
With the potential to control what citizens see or don’t see, Big Tech firms like Facebook and Google have the power—given their incredible market share—to suppress news favorable to the president (for example), burying news that doesn’t fit their hip, Leftist viewpoints. Even when third party websites can exist, they face demonetization: get dropped by PayPal, and your ability to take donations or collect subscription fees withers.
All that power means Big Tech companies will likely play a huge role in the outcome of the 2020 election. President Trump and conservative Republicans will be fighting an uphill battle against a blackout of the techno-elites’ making.
As such, this week’s Lazy Sunday is dedicated to four pieces about the techno-weirdos that lord over our society like the robber barons of the Gilded Age:
We’re living in strange times, when technology has the potential to destroy our fraying social fabric—and to suppress the views of anyone who disagrees with the mercurial beta soyboys that run these companies. I am loathe to recommend government intervention, but these companies represent an existential threat. Break them up!
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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It’s Labor Day Weekend, which means a glorious three days of rusticating for yours portly. The school year is back in full swing, but I’ve been slowly recovering from an extended cold that began as a sore throat, morphed into days of nose-blowing, and metastasized into a hacking cough. The cough should—God willing—be the final phase, and it seems to be getting better with a combination of Mucinex, expired cough medicine, and rest.
The plan this weekend is—aside from some light grading—a lot of rest. I’m also excited to watch the South Carolina Gamecocks play their season opener (kick-off is tantalizingly close as I write this post). My girlfriend has come up to my little adopted hometown, and is feeding me all sorts of delicious things. It’s a fairly idyllic weekend, minus the cough.
It’s these sorts of things—resting after a week of hard work, enjoying a good meal, reading interesting books, and watching college football (all with good company, of course)—that make social peace such a coveted prize, and so worth preserving. There is so much hatred and insanity in the public square now, and I fear that the socket wrench of revolution is ratcheting up with ever-greater intensity.
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The Portly Politico 