When I was a kid back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, rebellion was in fashion. The idea that your elders were lying to you was pervasive. “Never trust anyone over 30″ was a popular motto.

Social change was remarkably rapid — you can date women’s lib to 1969, not 1968. And gay lib can be dated precisely to the evening following Judy Garland’s funeral in July 1969.

Today, though, I’m fascinated by the credulity of younger, well-educated people toward their elders, and the endurance of their bad old ideas. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, has been dead and gone for years, but the mellifluous old blowhard is still constantly cited by the relatively young as a great thinker whose golden ideas must remain unchallenged by we lesser mortals doomed to live in this age of brass. (more…)

Excuse me, but what’s the date today?

July 3rd.

Okay. Uh, what year is it?

2008.

So, 9/11 was like six years and eight, almost nine months ago, right?

So, why are we reading articles like the following today, rather than, say, six and a half years ago? Was Homeland Security too busy hassling octogenarian retired Marine Corps generals on their way to give a speech at West Point when their Congressional Medals of Honor set off the metal detector?

The AP reports:

Proposed Justice Dept. rules would allow FBI profiling

By Lara Jakes Jordan The Associated press

Article Last Updated: 07/02/2008 11:52:02 AM PDT

WASHINGTON (AP)- The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.

Law enforcement officials say the proposed policy would help them do exactly what Congress demanded after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: root out terrorists before they strike.

(more…)

The headline, from an English-language paper in Sweden is French man with two asses surprises Swedish officials.

The obvious thing wrong with it is that  most people these days will prefer to call them “donkeys,” but the real thing wrong with it is that he’s not actually a Frenchman, but apparently an Arab named Jacques Abdelaziz. The reaction of the Swedish officials is…interesting.

Customs officials in Gothenburg were at a loss as to how to deal with Jacques Abdelaziz and his two four-legged pack animals when the trio wandered off a ferry boat from Denmark on Sunday afternoon.

Abdelaziz, who hails from Brittany in northwestern France, has been wandering around Europe for the past two months with his two donkeys, Nounou and Toutoune, according to the Göteborg-Posten (GP) newspaper….

(more…)

Or, anyway, happy first anniversary! Appropriately, the anniversary coincided with Brenda Walker’s recent main-page article, World Refugee Day: Mondo Multicult—Courtesy Of The UN And The Bush White House.

Ann Corcoran, co-founder and co-proprietor of Refugee Resettlement Watch (RRW), was one of the principals in the successful campaign to keep Hagerstown, Maryland from being inundated with the fruits of the Virginia Council of Churches’ compassion, described by VDARE’s Thomas Allen in an article last November, Patriot Activists Fight Off Refugee Invasion In Hagerstown, MD. (I think it’s notable that these Virginia do-gooders chose to exercise their taxpayer-funded compassion in another state.)

Corcoran opened her own first-anniversary post with

Just one year ago today, Judy and I launched Refugee Resettlement Watch. Our original purpose has not changed—we want to help you, our readers, learn more about this government program which very likely is affecting or will affect your lives.

How will it affect your life? Well, it’s worth keeping in mind that Hagerstown’s win was undoubtedly some other town’s loss, since the Hagerstown-bound refugees presumably didn’t vanish into thin air. So learn how to inoculate your community against the designs of the Refugee-Industrial Complex by keeping up with RRW–even join their conversation!–and recognizing that the Virginia Council of Churches may have you within its sights even now. (North Dakotans, this means you!)

Is there anything more maddening that the Congress voting to send military aid to corrupt Mexico? It’s bad enough to use American tax dollars to buy crime-fighting equipment for a country wealthy enough to pay for it outright, but the Merida Initiative sends valuable materiel to a hostile neighbor that could be far better utilized by our own law enforcement officers: U.S. funds for Mexico drug war frustrate Texas sheriffs [Houston Chronicle, July 2, 2008].

Besieged Texas sheriffs vowed Wednesday to press the White House and Congress to deliver emergency assistance to law enforcement officers battling drug cartels along the Mexican border to match the $400 million on its way to Mexico.

The sheriffs said they were frustrated that President Bush and Congress agreed to provide assistance to Mexico, as part of the Merida Initiative, without offering additional federal help to their departments. [...]

Implementation of the Merida Initiative is “really disappointing and disheartening because Washington seems totally oblivious to what we’re facing on the Mexican border,” said Webb County Sheriff Rick Flores, chairman of the 19-county Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition.

“If they allocate resources and money to Mexico, they should also consider protecting our side of the border first.”

Amen to that. As usual, Washington has everything upside down, handing out freebies to a corruption-ridden neighbor while short-changing our own people.

Allan Wall is scheduled to be interviewed by Chuck Wilder on “George Putnam’s Talk Back” show (George Putnam has been off the air lately due to health problems ). The interview is scheduled for 1:05 p.m Pacific Time, Thursday July 3rd, or 4:05 Eastern. You can listen live here, and it’s repeated at 8 p.m. Pacific Time each night.

I can’t avoid looking at the names that third world spamsters come up with trying to sound honest to rich stupid Americans:

My Dear Trusted Friend,

I am Mr Carl Marx, Head of Files/Records Department in the African Development Bank, Cotonou, Benin Republic in West Africa. Going through the files and records in my department I observed an abandoned sum of 12.500.000.00 (Twelve million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) belonging to a German business magnate and property consultant, Late Andreas Schranner.

Carl Marx? Where have I heard that name before? Sure, you can have my credit card number. With a name like that, what could possibly go wrong economically?