Knowing the magic as you write it. The post The Beatles song Paul McCartney knew would be a hit: “This is good” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

The almost 78-year old talks about his most famous role.

His ex-wife Phyllis Gates essentially blackmailed him.

“He was never not funny,” his daughter, Maggie Mull, wrote.

“He was never not funny,” his daughter, Maggie Mull, wrote.

⚠️ Order your shirts here: https://www.markdice.shop Use promo code WINNER at the checkout to save 20% off this weekend! ? Order my new book from Amazon here: https://amzn.to/40vEC9U ⚡️ Join my exclusive Locals community here: https://markdice.locals.com/support ? Sponsor me through Patreon here: https://Patreon.com/MarkDice Order my book "Hollywood Propaganda: How TV, Movies, and Music Shape Our Culture" from Amazon: https://amzn.to/30xPFl5 or download the e-book from Kindle, iBooks, Google Play, or Nook. ? Order my book, "The True Story of Fake News" ➡️ https://amzn.to/2Zb1Vps ? Order my book "The Liberal Media Industrial Complex" here: https://amzn.to/2X5oGKx Mark Dice is an independent media analyst and bestselling author of "Hollywood Propaganda: How TV, Movies, and Music Shape Our Culture.” He has a bachelor's degree in Communication from California State University and was the first conservative YouTuber to reach 1 million subscribers (in 2017). He has been featured on Fox News, Newsmax, the History Channel, E! Entertainment, the Drudge Report, and news outlets around the world. This video description and the pinned comment contains Amazon and/or other affiliate links, which means if you click them and purchase the product(s), Mark will receive a small commission. Copyright © 2024 by Mark Dice. All Rights Reserved.

Back in April, during a question-and-answer session at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) addressed South Africa’s legal proceedings against Israel in the International Court of Justice, brought under Article 9 of the Genocide Convention of 1948. Although Senator Warren’s academic expertise — some would say nominal academic expertise — resides in the field of commercial law, she did not hesitate to hold forth on matters of international humanitarian law and international criminal law. Asked about the provisional order issued by the International Court of Justice on Jan. 26, 2024, which determined that it was “plausible” that Israel’s actions had violated the Genocide Convention, the senior senator from Massachusetts responded that “if you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so.” Sensing that this casual assertion was perhaps a misstep, Warren hastily added that she wished to go beyond a “labels argument,” maintaining that “it is far more important to say what Israel is doing is wrong. And it is wrong … It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend to your will. It is wrong to drop 2000-pound bombs, in densely populated civilian areas.” It’s All About the Labels It seems curious for a lawmaker and former Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School to avoid a “labels argument,” given that the grand edifice of the law has been constructed largely out of “labels arguments.” Every case of homicide brought before a court is subject to precisely such an argument. It is not enough to say that homicide is “wrong.” Was the homicide murder in the first, second, or third degree? Or was it manslaughter, and if so, was it voluntary or involuntary? Or was it a justifiable homicide, carried out in the line of duty, or self-defense? Or should we excuse the homicide based on infancy or mental incapacity? A great deal depends on the particular label that we attach to the taking of life on an individual level, and the same applies in the case of armed conflicts. Does the bloodletting constitute genocide, or a series of war crimes, or crimes against humanity? Did it begin with the crime of aggression? Or is it a legitimate exercise of the inherent right to self-defense? The act of dropping a one-ton Mark 84 general-purpose bomb on a city is not in and of itself a crime. What makes that bombardment a crime or an entirely legitimate act of war is the label we affix to it. (READ MORE: The Democrat Split on Israel) By professing a wish to avoid “labels arguments,” and preferring generalities like “what Israel is doing is wrong,” Sen. Warren unwittingly lent support to 19th-century legal theorist John Austin’s position that “the law obtaining between nations is law (improperly so called) set by general opinion. The duties which it imposes are enforced by moral sanctions: by fear on the part of nations, or by fear on the part of, sovereigns, of provoking general hostility, and incurring its probable evils, in case they shall violate maxims generally received and respected.” A “so-called law set by general opinion” is not the same as positive law, or natural law, and is of even less utility when there is no domestic or international consensus regarding a given conflict. Some feel “what Israel is doing is wrong,” others feel “what Israel is doing is right,” positions that will necessarily inform one’s opinion on the criminality or legality of Israel’s actions. We are a long way from law as it is generally understood, and while we needn’t go so far as German General Berthold von Deimling, who declared that “war is self-defense that knows no rules,” we should at least pay heed to the esteemed international jurist Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, who acknowledged that “if international law is, in some ways, at the vanishing point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing point of international law.” The Vanishing Point of Law’s Vanishing Point Here, at the vanishing point of law’s vanishing point, there is a temptation to forgo the hard work of gathering evidence and proving the elements of a crime, in favor of facile rhetorical appeals to emotion. Sen. Warren may breezily refer to “ample evidence” of genocide carried out by the Israel Defense Forces, but she is not interested in actual evidence of genocide, the likes of which can be found not in the Gaza Strip, but rather in the Birkenau ash pond, the mass graves of Rwanda, and the Cambodian killing fields. In its May 24, 2024 order, the International Court of Justice demanded that “Israel must take effective measures to ensure the unimpeded access to the Gaza Strip of any commission of inquiry, fact-finding mission or other investigative body mandated by competent organs of the United Nations to investigate allegations of genocide.” Other investigations, carried out by members of the rather clumsily-named United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, have produced allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity on the part of both Israel and Hamas, while the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, requested arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders based on similar accusations, but notably without recourse to the more dramatic charge of genocide. Despite her desire to avoid “labels,” Sen. Warren was nevertheless willing to voice the opinion that, “as an application of law,” international courts will have “ample evidence” to convict Israeli leaders of the crime of genocide, even though the Israeli military has informed Palestinian civilians of planned military operations in the Gaza Strip, opened up land crossings at sites like Erez West, facilitated the establishment of the floating pier, supported the rehabilitation of hospitals in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza, and has left the other Palestinian territory in the West Bank untouched as it wages war specifically against the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 mass slaughter. It is, I suppose, possible to debate whether Israel has disregarded “the principles of distinction, proportionality and adequate precautions,” or has engaged in “gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys,” as the UN Commission of Inquiry has claimed. It is even possible to debate whether both Israeli forces and Hamas have committed acts of sexual violence, again as claimed by the Commission of Inquiry, although I would hope any sane observer would admit that a comparison between the systematic rape of Israeli hostages and the public stripping of Hamas terrorists taken prisoner is a profoundly false equivalence. It is not possible, however, to argue that Israel is committing genocide without abandoning one’s credibility unless the very meaning of the word “genocide” has been fundamentally altered. Have We Redefined Genocide? It was Rafał Lemkin, the Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, who coined the word “genocide” in 1944 to describe Nazi Germany’s campaign of extermination conducted against European Jewry and other groups categorized as Untermenschen. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah, Lemkin considered the “Nazi butchery in the present war” to have been the paradigmatic example of genocide, but he noted that the “phenomenon of the destruction of whole populations — of national, racial and religious groups — both biologically and culturally” was not unprecedented. History, he wrote, “has provided us with other examples of the destruction of entire nations, and ethnic and religious groups. There are, for example, the destruction of Carthage; that of religious groups in the wars of Islam and the Crusades; the massacres of the Albigenses and the Waldenses; and more recently, the massacre of the Armenians.” (READ MORE: Armenian Christians Undergo Ethnic Cleansing. DC Politicians Pocket the Change.) The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, followed Lemkin’s lead, likewise recognizing that “at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity,” and defining the crime as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Already the concept of genocide was becoming rife with ambiguity, largely due to the phrase “in whole or in part.” Any armed conflict will result in the destruction of “part” of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Firebombing cities, dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations, and engaging in vicious house-to-house street fighting, will all inevitably result in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, but those acts do not necessarily constitute genocide, which is essentially a crime of intent. It is for this reason that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ruled in Prosecutor v. Akayesu (1998) that genocide “is distinct from other crimes insomuch as it embodies a special intent or dolus specialis. Special intent of a crime is the specific intention, required as a constitutive element of the crime, which demands that the perpetrator clearly seeks to produce the act charged. Thus, the special intent in the crime of genocide lies in ‘the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’” Just as there are mass killings that lack genocidal special intent, there are killings on a smaller scale that are undoubtedly motivated by genocidal animus. Ethnic cleansing, a term with no precise international legal definition, may not threaten the existence of an entire nation or ethnic group, but the crime lies somewhere on what we might call the genocidal spectrum. The South African sociologist Leo Kuper referred to “genocidal massacres,” while the political scientist Robert Melson introduced the category of “partial genocide,” and another concept, cultural genocide, refers to the spiritual, national, and cultural destruction, as opposed to the physical, destruction of a people. Biological taxonomists can be divided into splitters and lumpers — those more or less likely to divide a taxon into multiple taxa. Genocide scholars and international criminal legal jurists are much the same, prone as they are to spar over the exact label to affix to various large-scale human rights crimes. (READ MORE: The Bible Calls Us to Courage and Freedom) And so once again we find ourselves in the midst of a “labels argument.” Noam Chomsky, in a 2011 conversation with George Monbiot, notoriously disputed the categorization of the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre as a genocide, allowing that the systematic murder of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys was “certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it ‘genocide’ so cheapens the word.” This was nothing new, as Chomsky similarly claimed that the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodian genocide, which took some two million lives, was “not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state but rather attributable in large measure to peasant revenge, undisciplined military units out of government control, starvation and disease that are direct consequences of the U.S. war, or other such factors.” Yet Chomsky is not alone in his Bosnian genocide denial. In the run-up to the vote on the United Nations resolution designating July 11 as the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica,” the Israeli Ambassador to Serbia, Jahel Vilan, assured Serbians that “Israel has never accepted calling the crime in Srebrenica a genocide,” and that “when you call Srebrenica genocide, in my opinion, it diminishes the importance of that term, which I believe should only be used for genocides.” One wonders what Ambassador Vilan would call the Medz Yeghern, or “Great Evil Crime,” the Armenian term for the undeniably genocidal Armenian Genocide, which remains officially unrecognized by the Israeli government despite repeated efforts by the Knesset to do so, as part of a diplomatic effort to placate Turkey and Azerbaijan. The Evidence Mounts of a Genocide in Ukraine The Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, in his 2022 Overcoming the Past: Ukraine’s Global History, translated into English as Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation, urged his readers to “look at Bucha. After the Russian retreat, the bodies of 461 residents were found here. In the broader area, there were 1,137 victims. Most had been shot and many showed signs of torture. Bucha now stands beside Srebrenica and Darfur as prime examples of modern genocide.” Russia’s campaign of terror in Bucha, Izyum, and elsewhere does indeed resemble the Serbian massacres in Bosnia, viz. the extrajudicial executions of military-aged males and community leaders, the systematic rape of women, and the abduction of children. There is clearly a genocidal special intent on the part of Russians — hardly a day passes without a Russian public figure urging a “final solution to this problem, the eradication of Ukraine, as a project, hostile to Russianity, forever,” or declaring that Ukraine “has several million people” who “need to be partially eliminated and partially squeezed out.” Given its nature and scale, it is fair to say that the Bucha massacre is comparable in kind, if not quite in degree, to the paradigmatic genocides of the 20th century. This is a legitimate topic for debate as part of our ongoing “labels argument,” yet unfortunately in the current climate it seems that “mere” allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity no longer seem to move the needle. Veronika Plotnikova, the head of the Coordinating Center for Support of Victims and Witnesses of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, announced earlier this year that her office has collected pretrial information regarding some 128,000 Russian war crimes, ranging from deliberate attacks on civilians and torture to the destruction of cultural property and the mass deportation of Ukrainian children. All these allegations combined are not as shocking to the collective conscience of the world as the single, almost talismanic word “genocide.” The power of that particular word has made its colloquial use omnipresent at this point. Activists on the identitarian right warn that “the opioid epidemic, made possible through mass immigration and open borders, is intentionally designed White genocide.” Herman Cain, Mark Crutcher, and others have argued that abortion represents “planned genocide” and “black genocide,” while the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform regularly holds demonstrations in which photographs of aborted fetuses are presented alongside images of the Holocaust and other 20th-century genocides. Transgender and other queer activists campaign against “trans genocide.” Marxists fulminate about “capitalism as structural genocide.” Little of this has anything to do with the writings of Rafał Lemkin or the provisions of the Genocide Convention, but the concept of an ultimate crime that exists far beyond the pale of civilization will inevitably prove rhetorically useful. All the more reason, then, to employ the term carefully and thoughtfully. When confronted with the inevitable horrors of armed conflict, we must retain our capacity to collect and assess evidence, maintain a sense of proportion, and recognize what crimes are, and what legitimate actions are not, beyond the pale of civilized conduct. Genocide sits at the apex of all human-inflicted horrors. Its ink has stained the blackest pages of modern history. It is not an allegation to be tossed around unthinkingly, and to claim to find ample evidence of it where none exists must surely be the most monstrous calumny that can be uttered by a policymaker or jurist. Shany Mor, in his January 2024 Mosaic article “A Special Dictionary for Israel,” elucidated how the world invests international legal terms like “proportionality,” “collective punishment,” “occupation,” and “genocide” with new meanings meant only for Israel. The claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza, however improbable, are once again couched in scholarly language and legal principles that are invented for Israel and Israel alone. Were any of them applied to any other theater of conflict, there is scarcely a military action in the world that couldn’t be classified as genocide. In this, they are following a well-worn tradition, one that thinks itself invisible, but is actually transparent. That “well-worn tradition” — and the reader is no doubt aware of the odious tradition to which Dr. Mor alludes — is one American politicians would do very well to avoid. The post The Vanishing Point of International Law: Genocide and the ‘Labels Argument’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

More than 25 years ago in his 1996 HBO Special, Back in Town, the late-legendary comic, George Carlin became one of the first comedians to try and make abortion “funny.”  It wasn’t. With lame jokes like “How come when it’s us, it’s an ‘abortion,’ and when it’s a chicken, it’s an ‘omelet?'” Carlin asks the audience, “Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden? When did this happen that we pass chickens in goodness?” Not funny. Carlin’s customary schtick in those days was to use abortion as a way to attack pro-life conservatives. Bludgeoning pro-lifers with the worn-out claim that we do not care about women and children, Carlin trotted out the tired trope: Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to 9 months. After that, they don’t wanna know about you. They don’t wanna hear from you. No nothing! No neonatal care, no daycare, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re preschool, you’re f***ed. Normalizing Abortion In attacking conservatives on abortion, Carlin was simply reflecting the politics of the 1990s. Support for abortion began to soften from the heady days following Roe when the pro-abortion movement was in its ascendancy. It was a time when even Democrat politicians had to find a “workaround” with the abortion issue. When Bill Clinton first uttered the words, “Safe, legal, and rare” in 1992, the slogan became the mantra for millions who wanted to support a “woman’s right to choose” but did not want to be seen as promoting abortion. (READ MORE: Victory or Defeat? The Supreme Court’s Abortion Pill Ruling Is Neither.) Those days are over and the phrase “Safe, legal, and rare” has been expunged from the pro-abortion rights conversation. It was removed from the plank of the Democratic Party in 2012 as young feminists living in the age of dwindling access to abortion aren’t interested in a mantra that implies that there is something shameful about the procedure, even if it has kept many people in the pro-choice tent. Socialized to reject any form of appeasement on abortion rights, today’s feminist comedians are “all in” on abortion, and unlike George Carlin, who never acknowledges that a child is killed in an abortion, comedians like Alison Leiby and Lizz Winstead use the death of the unborn child as part of the joke. In fact, in opening her one-woman show, Oh God, A Show About Abortion at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village in New York City, Alison Leiby, who has built her career on making jokes about her own abortion, told the audience: “My mom told me to kill it tonight…I already did.” Just as Carlin equated abortion with breaking an egg for an omelet, Leiby attempted to relate aborting the unwanted unborn child to killing a cockroach that invaded her apartment: “Being pregnant and knowing that you want an abortion is a little bit like catching ‘a cockroach under a Tupperware in your apartment. And you’re like uggghhh, I know it’s there and I do have to kill it, but I need, like, a minute to deal with this.’” The DNC Is Shaping Up to be an Abortion Fest Again, not funny — but the fact that Leiby uses the word “kill” so often throughout her pro-abortion standup routine reveals a willingness to acknowledge that a human being is indeed being killed during an abortion. And even though Leiby makes light of the procedure, she cannot minimize the gravity of an act in which an unborn child is killed. Despite all of this, Leiby brought her show to the Kennedy Center last June to rave reviews describing “nonstop laughs” in a show about abortion. The Kennedy Center was an interesting choice to bring a pro-abortion show because at one time the Catholic Kennedy family was staunchly pro-life. Of course, by now, it appears that most of the Kennedys support the Democratic Party platform of abortion on demand — no matter how late in the pregnancy. (READ MORE: A Brazilian Bill Criminalizing Abortion After 22 Weeks Ignites Political Firestorm) To be sure, the laughs keep coming from the pro-abortion crowd. On June 24th, Lizz Winstead, one of the creators of The Daily Show, began screening for No One Asked You – a pro-abortion documentary that Vanity Fair has called “hilarious.” June 24th was chosen for the screening because it was the date in 2022 when the Dobbs decision came down. The show was intended to mark the two-year “Overturniversary” of Roe. A long-time abortion advocate who, like Leiby, has had an abortion that she does not regret, Winstead founded the Lady Parts Justice League (now known as Abortion Access Front) in 2015 to train advocates and expand access to abortion. In comments to a reporter for Vanity Fair, Winstead sarcastically said that “becoming the abortion comedian is a great career move. Super lucrative, your phone never stops ringing with job offers, and you’re going to make millions of friends.” The truth is that becoming an abortion comedian has indeed been a good career move for Winstead. The subject of a puff profile in Vanity Fair, Winstead recounted her own abortion and spoke about the ways in which she has been “urging Democrats to fight back more bluntly—and creatively” on abortion: “One crucial element of Winstead’s work, chronicled in the film, has been traveling to dozens of abortion clinics—everywhere from Little Rock, Fort Worth, and Atlanta to Louisville, Tuscaloosa, and Detroit—to lift the spirits of beleaguered staffers. Sometimes that involves staging a happy hour comedy show; other times it means planting trees that brighten up a clinic’s grounds and block the view of antiabortion protesters.”  (READ MORE: The Man Behind the Hyde Amendment) And now Winstead is taking her abortion comedy act to this year’s Democratic National Convention. In what promises to be a full abortion-fest in Chicago, Winstead will be entertaining Democratic Party politicians and their supporters with a variety revue called “A Cavalcade of Cooch” with singers dressed as giant mifepristone pills.” It is likely that many at the Democratic Convention will find her abortion comedy hilarious because they still see abortion as their ticket to success in November. But these are not serious people. Truly thoughtful people know that abortion is no joke.  The post Abortion Isn’t Funny appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

For years, Joe Biden has reminded me of someone else, but it’s been difficult to place my finger on who exactly that is. No face comes to mind — or rather, variations of different faces come to mind — nor does any name spring readily to hand. Earlier this year, I finally figured it out, and Thursday night’s debate only confirmed it: Biden is C.S. Lewis’s Unman. Although best known for the Chronicles of Narnia series, Lewis was a prodigious cultural critic and almost abnormally prescient thinker, enabling him to correctly anticipate many of the difficulties and evils we face in this 21st century. Two of his works in particular are worthy of the description “prophetic,” his Space Trilogy (better termed the Ransom Cycle), and the nonfiction treatise The Abolition of Man. Coupled together, these works predict and — almost a hundred years in advance — describe the inner workings and motivations of those who today champion evil in the Western world. The Unman Is Born Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of the Ransom Cycle is a straightforward enough story about a trip to Mars, born of a contest between Lewis and his Oxford colleague J.R.R. Tolkien to see who could write a better science fiction story. The story explores themes of language, communication and community, morality, and the inkling (no pun intended) of what we today call progressivism, and also serves to introduce the principal character of Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge professor, as well as the antagonists Edward Weston, a noted physicist, and Dick Devine, who later becomes Lord Feverstone. It isn’t until the second book, Perelandra, that Lewis introduces a more-than-merely-human villain: the Unman. Having been sent to the Paradise of Venus, Ransom finds himself confronted by Weston, his old nemesis. But this time, Weston claims to have adopted and (more alarmingly) further developed Ransom’s Christian beliefs, arguing that God and Satan are, in fact, one and the same person. “I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that force into me completely,” the scientist cries out, before beginning a series of horrific convulsions. (READ MORE: The Most Disastrous Debate Performance in U.S. History) The next time Ransom meets Weston, still on Venus, there has been a distinct and definitive — even a diabolical — change, though Ransom initially finds it almost impossible to identify precisely what that change is. “Something which was and was not Weston was talking: and the sense of this monstrosity, only a few feet away in the darkness, had sent thrills of exquisite horror tingling along his spine, and raised questions in his mind which he tried to dismiss as fantastic,” Lewis writes. Ransom then discovers Weston mutilating, with his bare hands, a little frog he has found and the two make eye contact: If Ransom said nothing, it was because he could not speak. He saw a man who was certainly not ill, to judge from his easy stance and the powerful use he had just been making of his fingers. He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and coloring and features. In that sense he was quite recognizable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognizable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: “I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me.” … And now, forcing its way up into consciousness, thrusting aside every mental habit and every longing not to believe, came the conviction that this, in fact, was not a man: that Weston’s body was kept, walking and undecaying, in [Venus] by some wholly different kind of life, and that Weston himself was gone. Lewis and Ransom dub this iteration of Weston, the Unman. Much the same might be said of Biden, the Unman in the White House, the Unman on Thursday night’s debate stage. (READ MORE: Nine Takeaways From the Trump v. Biden Debate) When the Unman squats on the ground, Lewis writes, “The body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man: it was more as if some external force maneuvered it into the right position and then let it drop. It was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely non-human.” Ransom describes it as “watching an imitation of living motion which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow lacked the master touch.” Could the same not be said of Biden? The decrepit old man stands, walks, talks, waves, shakes hands, and scratches his nose or his ear the same as you or I might, but that spark of humanity is missing. His face does indeed resemble the face of a corpse, as though some puppeteer had attached strings to make the President smile or frown or scowl. It would all be a brilliant technical achievement as far as imitation goes, but it would still be mere imitation. In fact, it is mere imitation. I’ll come back to this point shortly. The final installment in the Ransom Cycle, That Hideous Strength, introduces a shadowy cabal of politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, scientists, police officers, and sexual deviants allied with the Unman whom we might be excused for comparing to the Democratic Party, although Lewis refers to them as the Belbury group. The characteristics of the Belbury leaders are not unlike those of prominent Democrats. Lord Feverstone is charismatic, charming, and fairly good-looking, although the noble characters describe him as having “a mouth like a shark.” The aged civil servant John Wither is a master of speaking loquaciously and even eloquently, but only making matters more and more vague and obscure, even seemingly contradictory; he might be said to be a personification of relativism. The psychologist Augustus Frost is almost the opposite, cold and calculating, precise to the point of becoming somewhat nihilistic. The physiologist Filostrato is morbidly obese, the police chief Hardcastle is a butch lesbian, and the “mad parson” Straik is a bitter heretic. A Prescient Comparison to the Democrat Party These inane and increasingly disturbing figures are a perfect parody — almost a perfect replication — of the Democratic Party of today. It is little surprise to discover that the Belbury folk are directly beholden to demons, whom they call “macrobes,” devoted as ever to their scientific jargon. Given its rabid, almost religious promotion of abortion — a scientific jargon name for the horror of child sacrifice — and all manner of sexual, psychological, ideological, and spiritual depravities, it would be equally unsurprising to find that the Democratic National Committee was taking its orders straight from the mouth of Satan. Abortion is a prime indication of this demonic bent. Abortion itself is referred to by Democrats as a positive good — that is, a good in and of itself, not merely the imperfect or morally questionable means to a good end. Those who threaten access to child sacrifice are accused of threatening democracy, which is more and more frequently and openly referred to as “sacred.” Biden himself used that word in Thursday night’s debate. The use of the term “sacred” is no mere accident. Lewis describes this marriage between modern science and a warped, inverted awareness of the spiritual world in That Hideous Strength: A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. … The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the results. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with nineteenth-century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. … It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they disregard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe … would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen. We now return to Biden. The Catholic priest and exorcist Malachi Martin discussed a concept he called “perfect possession,” which is not the typical form of possession, whereby a demon takes control of a human individual’s body, essentially doing things against that individual’s volition — but is instead when an individual bends his volition so repeatedly, so concertedly, and so completely in line with the will of Satan himself that the two become, in a very real sense, indistinguishable. (READ MORE: Trump v. Big Government: The Department of Education Won’t Die Easy) Hell itself, I believe, necessitates an annihilation and absence of distinctions and distinguishing features, so that for such an individual, Hell on earth might be a reality. It is possible that Biden, who was raised a Catholic, has so abandoned the faith of his fathers, so rejected and repudiated God Himself, so embraced the will of Hell, that there is now no distinction between “Biden” and whatever demon he has modeled himself after. That Biden’s soul may now be in Hell, having invited Hell into himself so unreservedly, and his body might be kept walking and talking and (barely) undecaying here on Earth by demonic forces. Biden may be, in fact, the Unman. The post Biden Is the Unman on the Debate Stage appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Special elections, or by-elections as they are called in Canada, are often said to be harbingers of the change that one might expect to see in an upcoming general election. In Canada, it’s trickier to make predictions because the ruling party can call a snap election at any time to prolong and consolidate its power if it thinks the wind is blowing in the right direction. The last general election in Canada was one of these snap elections. It was held during the pandemic even though Trudeau had promised not to do so — just one Trudeau lie among many. In any event, he did win but was only able to form a minority government. In normal times such a government usually lasts only around two years before a vote of no confidence brings it down. However, Trudeau has formed an informal coalition with the socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) because, since both plummeted drastically in the polls, they have held on together for dear life. The smart money says that there won’t be another general election for another year or so when it will be legally required. In the meantime, we have just had a very interesting special election in the electoral district next door to the one that I live in. (READ MORE: Gavin Newsom Is on Top of the World) Monday evening I was a volunteer scrutineer for the Conservative Party during the counting of ballots at one of the polling stations. This is something that I hadn’t done for some time but I remember well the very first time I did it. I was 14 years old at the time, so when I turned up at the polling station a debate ensued as to whether someone too young to vote should be allowed to participate in the counting of the ballots. Canadian federal elections are run by a federal agency called Elections Canada that sends one of its agents, called a returning officer, to every polling station to supervise the proceedings. This person has the final word in all disputes. In the end on that occasion, the returning officer determined that though I was not yet eligible to vote I was quite capable of counting ballots and also of judging whether any had been spoiled. Consequently, I was duly seated around a table with representatives from the other parties, the ballot boxes were opened and we examined and counted the contents one at a time. Yesterday evening I was pleased to learn that aside from a few minor procedural tweaks nothing had changed compared to my earliest experience in ballot counting. A Fiercely Contested Election in a Liberal District Canada is known for the integrity of its elections, so much so that she is often asked to act as an observer in the elections of sketchy foreign countries. In Canada, before each election, the voting roles are refreshed. An agent of Elections Canada visits every residence in the district to determine how many eligible voters live there. Very little mail-in voting is permitted and although there is some early voting, most of it occurs on election day and all voters must show up with a government-issued photo ID that shows the same address registered on the voting list. The returning officer is there is ensure that no exceptions are made to that rule. (READ MORE: That Debate Might Be the End of the Road for … Barack Obama) Not surprisingly, with the Liberals so deep underwater in the national polls, yesterday’s election was fiercely contested. It was considered to be a safe seat for the Liberals because they had held it for 30 years and during the last election they won it by 24 points. Nevertheless, under the circumstances, the party sent in some of its top guns including Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to ensure they did not lose it. Also, not surprisingly, at the polling station where I was an observer for the Conservative party, the only other party that was represented was the Liberals. Apparently, the other parties decided to write this one off or perhaps they just didn’t have enough personnel on hand to cover all of the bases during the ground game. As we counted the ballots and the Conservative candidate started well and pulled ahead in the count the Liberal observer stood beside me red-faced with fury written all over her face — honestly, for a while there I was afraid that she might actually stroke out. We were observing at a rather small station that had needed to use only one ballot box to contain 86 ballots. In our only disagreement, the liberal scrutineer and I disputed over this number. Our dispute was quickly settled by the rule book at hand — we didn’t need to summon the returning officer. At the end of the count, the Conservative candidate had 41 votes to the Liberals 31 with the rest going to sundry other candidates and I was pleased to have helped preside over a happy result for my party. This count was encouraging, although not typical. The Liberals were getting superior numbers at other polling stations and by the time I showed up at the restaurant where the party was to be held, we were trailing by about 500 votes. Naturally, many eyes were glued to a big screen where the results were being tabulated as they came in. This is Canada and it was the evening of the final game of the NHL season between the Edmonton Oilers and the Florida Panthers, half the screen displayed the ongoing game and viewers alternated their comments between what was going on at the polls and what was happening on the ice. No Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup since 1994, and since hockey is Canada’s national sport, it was disappointing when the Oilers lost to the Panthers. When I left the party at midnight about 80 percent of the ballots had been counted and the Conservatives were still trailing the Liberals by about 500 votes. So wasn’t it just great to wake up the next morning to learn that we had won! We had flipped a rock-solidly safe Liberal seat by a two-point margin, enough to guarantee that with Canada’s strict voting procedures, this result would not change even if there were to be a recount. What Explains the Change in Canada? There are different ways that one might think of explaining this. There is, of course, the general discontent that I have already mentioned: There is ongoing inflation caused by wanton government spending, house prices, and rent have doubled since the Liberals took power, feckless carbon taxes are hurting middle-class pocketbooks, and dissatisfaction with the general divisiveness of Liberal rule, the most salient feature of which has been divide and conquer. (READ MORE: How Conservatives Can Finally Get Judicial Nominations Right) But there is another noteworthy factor that I think came into play in this particular district. Fifteen percent of its population happens to be Jewish, most of whom have traditionally voted Liberal. Since Oct. 7 that demographic has been feeling deeply betrayed. Anti-Semitism in Canada, as elsewhere, is surging and the Liberals have been doing nothing substantial to counteract it. On the contrary, they have been posing false equivalents between it and Islamophobia. Moreover, Canada has turned against Israel at the UN, so much so that after a vote early in the war with Hamas its leader, Dr. Ghazi Hamad has publicly thanked Canada for her support. This year during Toronto’s annual Walk for Israel 50,000 people showed up, about three times previous showings. Despite traditionally voting Liberal, the Jewish population of Canada is generally somewhat more conservative than its American counterpart. With the Biden administration constantly hampering and restraining Israel’s war effort by withholding arms shipments and trying to help the Israeli opposition topple the Netanyahu government, who knows how American Jewry will vote in November? Though it won’t be happening any time soon America sure could use some Canadian observers come November. The post A Canada Election Didn’t Go As Planned. Is it a Harbinger of Things to Come? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.