Riots In France - The Journeys Of An Islamic Terrorist And A Partisan Of The French Left, A Chronicle Of Two Lives

Abdul al-Rahman grew up in a village near Mopti, a town halfway between Bamako to Timbuktu in Mali. His family were goatherders and had led a simple, pious life. They were little affected or interested in the radical changes that were happening in the country, let well enough alone when ISIS and Tuareg militants asked for water and food. Hospitality was part of their African Muslim culture - one did not refuse guests no matter who they were.  It was part of the brotherhood of likeminded, God-fearing people and was seen as a tribute to Allah. 

The young Abdul was fascinated by these guests.  He wanted to hear their stories of courage and valor, ride their camels, and even shoot their guns.  The guests were very kindly to the boy who clearly thought they were the medieval knights of Muhammed's army, and spent hours around the fire talking to him about Islam, the desert, and the holy war against the infidel. 

They left as abruptly as they came - government troops and French legionnaires had been sighted to the north and east - but their visits profoundly influenced the young boy who wanted to be like them, to leave his uninteresting, hard life and join them in their holy crusade. 

 

He never got his wish, for French soldiers had pushed ISIS militants far in the desert and close to Algeria, the government in Mali had fallen and a new more aggressive one had taken its place. Abdul returned to his goats, the scrub brush of the northern Sahel, and herding his troupe on the long, hot journey to the Mopti market. 

At about this time, the emigrations to Europe had begun, and the countries of the EU governed by welcoming regimes who felt it was their moral duty to admit needy refugees, did not only open their borders, but assisted the refugees who had come in small unseaworthy boats, many of which floundered during the crossing. 

Abdul's father said that the family's future was in France, and if the boy could make his way there, he would soon be able to bring everyone over.  With a hundred euros, a small bag of provisions, and Allah's blessing, Abdul made his way to the Mediterranean with a salt caravan, found passage across the water into Spain where he was welcomed by border security, and after weeks of travel by foot, freight cars, and cattle trucks finally arrived in France. 

The northern suburbs of Paris have become notorious after the insurrection of a decade before when thousands of Africans descended on the center of Paris and rioted from the Rue de Rivoli to the Eiffel Tower. It took the government weeks to finally bring the disturbances under control, but the angry spirit of revolution remained.  On the surface the northern suburbs were quiet, but behind closed doors, radical Islamic leaders planned for an eventual new and more complete assault on white infidel France. 

By the time Abdul arrived in Paris and got settled with his distant cousins from Timbuktu who took him in, the restiveness of the community had reached its limits.  It was no or never to take to the streets, demand attention, reparations, and restitution, and consolidate the growing Muslim minority in the city and throughout France. 

Young men like Abdul were recruited into the movement, treated royally as new soldiers of Allah, indoctrinated and educated in the way of civil disorder, and prepared to defend themselves against the police. 

Abdul, a simple, uneducated, credulous boy took this enthusiastic welcome as a sign of the coming prosperity and good fortune which would enable him to bring his family to France; but he never lost sight of the job at hand - bringing white, Christian Paris to its knees. 

It was a heady, exciting time for the young boy.  He was a soldier in the army of Allah, a trusted comrade of men and boys from Africa, and a crusader in the fight for a Muslim caliphate which would extend from east to west and from there to all parts of the world. 

The white, wealthy, Christian French were the enemy, the infidel, to be eliminated by Allah's righteous sword. The battle against them was no less than jihad, one of many fights to establish an Islamic regime. 

During his time in the norther suburbs he came to hate white people and saw them as the oppressors, the former colonialist overseers and enemy of the black man.  If they died at his hand, he would be rewarded by Allah. 

And so it was that he took to the streets in October 2026 to lay waste to the privileged enclaves of Paris.  Thousands of black and brown Muslim immigrants like him joined in protest, raided, looted, and destroyed shops owned by the oppressor, defied the police and won each and every battle they fought. 

Martine Fontenay had always been a proud advocate for the socialist governments that had ruled France with so much dignity, compassion, and consideration for the French worker.  Although the grand socialist experiment in the Soviet Union had failed to fulfill its promises, this was not because of the idea - Marx, Engels, and Lenin were brilliant thinkers who brought hope and moral justice to the people - it was due to the overreaching of Stalin who lost his way.  

Socialism in Western Europe was still and would always be the only political philosophy which offered justice, equality, and social harmony.  

Martine supported the open borders which allowed thousands of needy sub-Saharan Africans and Maghrebians to come to Europe to flee the harsh autocratic regimes and enforced poverty of their countries.  France would welcome them, shelter them, and give them every benefit due to a native Frenchman. 

Martine was a small business owner with a florist shop on the Rue de Rivoli - a family establishment since before the war, and well-known for the quality of its offerings, the art and grace of its arrangements, and the generosity of the staff.  

All was good with Martine.  She balanced private enterprise with a firm belief in statism, socialism, and progressivism.  She was proud to be French, a country which for centuries had led Europe in statesmanship, arts, letters, and philosophy. 

She resisted the nationalism of those who reminded Frenchmen that their country was The Eldest Daughter of the Church for having repulsed Muslim invaders at Roncesvalles.  It was that xenophobia which lay behind Islamophobia, and she knew and firmly believed that Islam was a religion of peace.  Muslims were always welcome in France for their piety and religious devotion added to the similar Christian devotion of the native-born. 

Even though the higher taxes authorized by successive socialist governments took a significant bite out of her profits, she never once protested.  Such tax revenues were necessary to assure that the poor, the marginalized, and the disadvantaged got their due. 

She shook her head in dismay at the reported misery in the northern suburbs.  The African immigrants who lived there deserved better, and even the most liberal governments were not doing enough.  It was time for a further opening of the national treasury to help these honorable, worthy citizens. 

Then came the October riots.  Her shop windows were smashed, gasoline was poured over every display, every table, every appointment, every flower, and set alight.  She could only stand and watch on the sidewalk as her beloved shop went up in flames. 

 'I am one of you', she pleaded, but for all her support of the black man, the Muslim, the immigrant, and the foreigner, she was just another white Christian who needed to be terrorized and destroyed. 

Abdul was one of those who torched Les Fleurs de Paris and who danced around the flames, cheering loudly as the building incinerated and was turned to smoking rubble. 

'How could you?', she said, grabbing Abdul by the shoulders; but he just shoved her to the sidewalk, spat on her, and joined his comrades as they broke into the more lucrative shop next door, and ran out with thousands of dollar of merchandise. 

Abdul was never arrested and made his way back to the suburbs delirious with the joy of victory, embraced by his comrades and shouting 'Allah be praised!'. 

Martine broke down with uncontrollable sobs as she looked at the smoldering embers which were her store.  She was beaten, morally confused, and bitterly angry.  She had nothing now - no longer a faith in The Other, no business, no history, alone, and irreconcilably lost. 

'Be careful what you wish for' is the first thing that comes to mind, but that demeans the tragedy of Martine Fontenay.  She meant well, she thought she was doing good, but lost her common sense, logic, and objectivity along the way.  She ended up a disillusioned, credulous, frustrated and angry woman but still had no understanding of what had happened.  

Such is the fragility of idealism, a philosophy which is rarely put to the test.  Martine Fontenay did not choose to question her beliefs, the Africans did it for her. 

Plus Sizes Disappear - The End Of Fictional Reality And The Demise Of Identity Culture

Letty Marshall was a 'plump' girl.  That was how her parents always referred to her even as she burst even sizes three grades too big for her.  

The girl had an insatiable appetite.  'Growing girls need food', was how her father kindly observed as his daughter put away enough food for an army base.  There was no end to requests for more, no matter what was served. She was insatiably omnivorous. Meat, potatoes, vegetables, salads, and deserts were all the same to her.  She was simply unstoppable at the dinner table. 

She raided the refrigerator, kept bags of Pecan Sandies and Oreo cookies under her bed at night, drained carton after carton of chocolate milk at school lunch, and begged and cadged the Salvadoran ladies behind the lunch counter for seconds and thirds. 

Most parents are used to buying new clothes for the children as they outgrow the old; but in Letty's case, the Visa bill was extraordinary.  She ballooned into a caricature of Michelin Man before she was ten, nd adolescent hunger only accelerated her weight. 

 

Fortunately for her, she grew obese at a time when fat-shaming was a no-no and inclusivity was in. Plus size women were no different than anyone else, said progressive advocates, and should be treated with the same love and respect.  Stores like Lululemon were outed for discriminatory sales practices when they limited their selections to Size 12 - 'a normal size for normal young women', said then CEO Charlton French who was summarily dismissed by the company's board.  Plus sizes returned to the racks.  

Lululemon didn't want fat girls ruining their svelte, youthful image. They put the plus size racks near the rest rooms and broom closets and wished they could somehow engineer a special entrance for them.  Image is everything in sales and marketing, and Lululemon resented the social pressures that were trying to force them into a market miasma they had fought years to avoid.  

'We are not for everyone', the Marketing Director announced when the company policy reverted to 'normal' and the fat racks were removed.  He might well have said, 'Fat people not welcome, they ruin the brand'. 

Meanwhile, in a tribute to diversity, Letty Marshall was elected Prom Queen at Lincoln Roberts High. She waddled up the stairs to the podium to give an address to the student body and then climbed down to dance with her partner, Prom King Randall Owens, captain of the football team, dreamboat, voted the most desirable boy on campus.  

Randall knew it was a set up.  He and his girlfriend, the svelte, Hollywood-ready darling of the school, voted most likely to succeed, most likely in the movies, laughed at the proposition.  He, this gorgeous hunk of manhood dancing with a preposterously grotesque Jabba the Hut caricature because the principal, proudly out of the closet, all dykey with butch haircut, suit, tie, and cordovans, a caricature of all lesbian women, wanted to show her true colors and the flag. 

Students were not supposed to notice either the obesity of Letty Marshall or the Bernal Heights tough girl persona of Ms. Weldon, the Principal.  They were instructed to treat everyone as equals, accept their differences as part of the human condition but never the laughable circus performer ridicule to which they would have been subjected in a less tolerant, obtusely ignorant period. 

The school gym was overheated - despite May weather outside, the heat pumps had not been shut down - and Letty because of her size always the first to perspire with even modest effort, sweated like a pig, drenching her prom dress and leaking onto the rented tux of the Prom King.  

The scene wasn't exactly like the prom scene of the horror movie Carrie where the prom queen is set up by a group of catty girls, has pigs' blood dumped on her from the rafters, and then in horror and with violent anger uses her supernatural powers to set the gym on fire and incinerate everyone. However it was on everyone's mind as the chosen couple danced around the floor to the enforced silence of the crowd. 

Then the dam burst and the students couldn't take it any more.  They had been so corralled, trussed, harnessed, and intimidated by school administrators anxious to present the school as the most evolved and progressive of the district, that it was inevitable that there had to be a tipping point.  A shout came from the back row, something about Burger Queen and Big Whopper, then echoed again and again up and down the assembly.  Before the principal was able to restore order, the place was like a bear pit. 

You really can't blame the students.  After all day after day they were told to see things that just weren't there.  The school valedictorian was a dummy from the inner city, transferred to this predominantly white school to make it more diverse.  In his graduation speech, dressed in a dashiki, Rasta braids down his back, a stand out for nothing except his origins, he babbled something about the Mississippi River, Gone with the Wind, and the white oppressor.  Assuming loud and prolong applause, he continued to stand at the podium until the principal gave him the hook. 

The president of the class was a gummy 'little person' perhaps the least likeable of any of the hundred or more students, a pissy little runt who pushed and wheedled himself to the front of the cafeteria line. 

Teachers whaled away during each and every class about diversity, equity, and inclusion, banging on about Engel's work on 'Classless Equality' and the plight of the black man.  Even French I had its go at diversity. In textbooks the Cafe des Deux Magots, the Latin Quarter hangout for Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus, now had Algerians and Nigerians sipping wine at the front tables. 

In other words the school had it coming.  What were they to expect?  A herd of complaisant, obedient sheep?  What was adolescence if it wasn't objection, defiance, and individual expression.  The school with their incessant reminders to respect diversity, their sensitivity seminars, and their public admonishments to hew the progressive line should have seen the prom event coming. 

Poor Letty Marshall.  She was the victim in all this. She was too dimwitted to realize she was being used as a pawn in someone else's game.  She was just as manipulated, used, and abused as the affirmative action students who don't belong in competitive circles, and who are seen for the undereducated and less intelligent social props they are.  

If people were simply left to rise and fall in the same Darwinian epic that has described human and animal society since the first signs of earthly life, everyone would be far better off.  Honesty is the best policy and when fiction is foisted off as fact, the wheels are soon to come off the bus. 

When the diversity dust settled and it no longer had the foothold in American society it once did, Letty Marshal went on a diet, and thanks to Ozempic, lost an elephant weight.  She was much healthier and much happier, especially because she could now fit into those cute Lululemon jumpers. 

American History Redux - Prairie Justice, An End To Protected Groups, And A Return To Laissez-Faire

For anyone who grew up even a few decades ago, it is hard to understand how Americans' skins have become so thin - how insults, innuendos, slights, and insinuating remarks have become such causes célèbres.  Bullying was par for the course on school playgrounds, an element of maturing; a learning process whereby the weak in their defeat learned about the enemy and the middling figured out how to evade, negotiate, compromise, or avoid.

Taunts were expected – racial and ethnic slurs and remarks about disability were common currency, the labeling of ‘other’, the natural signifiers of difference and threat to the community  No one was animated by hatred.  There was no hostility towards Jews, Poles, or Italians.  They, after all, were the furriers, druggists, and clothiers of our communities; those who worked lathes and presses or cut hair, paved streets, or cut hair.

At the same time, it was assumed that in an America still honoring self-improvement, individualism and enterprise,  foreigners would quickly and surely become economic and social players.  It wasn’t long before ‘No Irish Need Apply’ became ‘Only Irish Need Apply’.  Irish Americans quickly figured out the system and within a generation or two ran Boston, Philadelphia, and New York .

The Mafia, perhaps the most powerful and influential organization of civil society since the partisans of radical Republicanism during Reconstruction, was quintessentially American.  Its communitarian, hard-knuckled, authoritarian, and generous neighborhood rule after only a few decades of struggle, expressed the best of the Republic.

In a generation the Jews of the Lower East Side, rag-pickers, pushcart-sellers, and money-lenders came to rule New York and Hollywood.

This self-reliance, individualism, and fiercely competitive spirit was not just an occasional feature or one which applied only to the waves of immigration in the early Twentieth Century.  It came a century before when the new American republic learned of the vastness of the lands that lay beyond Philadelphia and Boston.

In the spirit of Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny, new Americans moved across the Ohio River and settled the prairie, the plains, the Southwest, and the Pacific coast.  There was no law and order, no government caretaker, no one to tell settlers what to do or how to do it.  Lawlessness was met with force, justice at the end of a six-gun, compromise and contract by standoff, violators shot, rustlers and cattle thieves hanged from the nearest tree.  

It was a time of rugged individualism, self-motivation, optimism, and adventure. Wealth was created, income earned, the market was no different from Paleolithic trading of cowrie beads. According to embryonic market forces, things increased in value and required more defense, will, and commitment to hold. The algorithm had not changed an iota millennia later. 

The West was a violent place.  If it wasn't rustlers, thieves, and outlaws, it was the Comanche, the Apache, and the Piute - all intent on defending their land from white usurpers.  To make the new nation whole, to build it from coast to coast took courage, determination, and purpose.  Settlement by settlement the nation became populated, productive, and wealthy. 

Nobody gave anything to those who settled western lands.  Pioneers, settlers, farmers, and ranchers built their own empires and defended them with resoluteness and defiance. 

The American character of today is a product of the past. America's recognition of history, pride and cultural patriotism is a living legacy.  Westward Expansion, that heady period of American history where Monroe and Jefferson were determined to create a country from coast to coast, to create a European continent in the New World, to dominate, control, and profit from the remarkable land discovered by Columbus, settled by pilgrims and cavaliers in New England and Virginia, explored and claimed by Lewis and Clark, and settled by new citizens tempted by the unimaginable richness newly settled. 

Wagon trains, the horse-drawn caravans of 'prairie schooners', the Donner Party and the crossing of the Rockies to the promised land of California, the winning of the Southwest, the clearing of the cypress, snake-infested swamps of Mississippi to make way for cotton plantations, the northward expansion to Alaska...all were not simply the ordinary territorial imperative common to all countries in history, but an expression of common character.  

So it is with dismay and disbelief that anyone with even a cursory look at American history and culture sees the erosion of this individualist ethos, the closing of the American mind, the inhibition of free expression, the dampening of an entrepreneurial spirit in favor of communalism, and the attempt to reform and reconfigure the country according to utopian notions. 

The genius cluster - Musk, Page, Ellison, Huang, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others - are called oligarchs by progressives. Wealth and individual success are ipso facto signs of elitism, white privilege, and rightwing extremism. Protected groups - blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, transgenders among others - are deemed off limits for criticism, social satire, inquiry, and doubt. Legitimate inquiry into the nature of intelligence, talent, creativity, social integration and any other socially relevant characteristic can only be carried out within careful, 'respectful' parameters - i.e. not at all. 

The culture of diversity and identity demands an ipso facto acceptance of all racial, ethnic, and social groups as equal and thus beyond criticism or inquiry.  Why the black man still is a product of lawless, dysfunctional, and anti-social communities is a question not to be asked because it has been answered - racism and white oppression.  The seemingly irrational conclusion that biological sex is no proven indictor of sexuality which is a social construct is considered received wisdom.  The redistribution of wealth to create a fictitious state of universal equality is an a priori truth.  

As a result of both trends - the creation of protected, untouchable classes and the assumption that a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion is the final, absolute, unquestioned final social paradigm, the ethos of America has been seriously challenged.  The individual is not only dismissed but demeaned in the pursuit of social justice.  European civilization is at heart a racist, colonialist, exploitive culture which should be expunged from history, of no relevance to the new America. 

The American Left is most like Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator who announced that his country was in The Year Zero.  The past existed only to be destroyed.  Every trace of the bourgeois, capitalist, depraved culture which came before his Maoist insurgency had to be erased.  As a result millions of Cambodians were killed in a nationalist genocide. 

With Donald Trump, progressive shibboleths are being taken down one by one.  The redistribution of wealth, the gender spectrum, open borders, multiculturalism, the derogation of private enterprise, the rise of statism and big, interventionist government, limitations on free speech as a means of engineering equality, are being challenged as features of a discredited, failed socialist system.  

Outliers are becoming fair game for satire once again, a sign of the health of free speech, in danger during the depths of the Biden era.  Every protected community has enough strange and curious habits and characteristics to fill a Jackie Mason bill at Grossinger's a thousand times over.  Comedic satire is hilarious because those outlandish clothes, pimp walks, street slang, and faux white talk of the ghetto are funny! And so are swishy, girly-girl, sashaying gay men.  Or the 'I Am Me' waddle of plus-sized woman. 

For very European immigrant group the taunts heard from resident Americans were shots across the bow, urgent messages to shape up, fly right, and act American. Italians, Poles, Irish, and others were not robbed of their ethnic identity.  They just subsumed it within the larger cultural ethos of the times. 

Today's identity culture says, 'Hands Off!' and the journey to full integration within society is slowed, deferred, and made even more difficult.  The 'Other', the outlier has always been suspect since the earliest human settlements. 'Stick to your own kind' has been the rule, not the exception; but majorities have always been inclusive when outsiders join in. 

Progressive 'diversity' and identity politics have encouraged separatism and isolation 

The genius cluster - the billionaire entrepreneurs who have remade American culture through almost unimaginable technological advances - are not oligarchs but seminal Americans.  Schools should not focus on those who will be the least productive members of society but those with the most potential.  Talent, intelligence, creativity, individualism, and ambition should be promoted not discouraged. 

The artificial, politically-sponsored tethers that restrict children's activities and speech should be removed.  Let children figure out who they are by themselves, thus preparing themselves for the adult world. 

Let America be America again. 

Old Flames - The Totemism Of Past Girlfriends Or, Romance Dies Hard

Bob Fielding had just been left on the curb by his wife of many years.  'I've had enough', she told him through the screen door, and that was that.

Bob had never lived alone, although he made a pretense of emotional independence.  His long trips to the heart of darkness were his statements of macho self-assurance; but he was always glad to be back home to his own bed, the New York Times and coffee, a round of golf and some time off on the Bay. 

He never questioned what he wife did during his African sojourns for he took her much for granted.  She had been a devilish little coquette at Miss Porter's, and came into her own during her exploratory college years when 'Who am I?' morphed into 'Who cares?'.  A hot ticket...Queen of Tarts...The Devil In Miss Jones...but all that was left behind after two serious years of graduate school, a Madison Avenue job in publishing, and marriage to Robert Fielding, Yale graduate, World Bank economist, traveler, and man of certain sophisticated tastes. 

Bob had no doubts about his wife's fidelity, felt that she loved him as much now as when he met her, and assumed that on every return from the Dark Continent, she would be there with dinner on the table and the bed turned down. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.  For all Bob's own fidelity and honorable intentions, he was a mistake; but because of sunken costs - he, as a banker could understand that concept - Alison Jones stayed on in the marriage far longer than she should have.

Not that he was a bad husband.  God forbid she should be married to the likes of Brandon Philipps, philanderer-in-chief of Philipps, Locke & Suitland, a man without a filament of moral fiber, a sexual vagabond worth only the notable salary and interest from a private income he brought to the marriage.  Poor Polly was left to weep over her sewing night after empty, soulless, lonely nights. 

No, Bob was a good husband; but with plenty of good years ahead of her, she was not about to languish in the suburbs, tinkering with faucets and spread sheets.  She was still 'Miss Jones', a woman of agency, a tigress, a still attractive belle of the ball with no intention of wasting a drop of her remaining sexual energy.   

And so it was on that cloudy, unusually cool May afternoon that she said her goodbyes to her husband, Bob. Of course divorce proceedings would involve meeting again, but there would always be the insulating layer of lawyers, so when she said goodbye, the deal was as good as done. 

Bob had no interest in finding out where his now ex-wife had gone.  He was not one to cry over spilled milk, and he was feminized enough to never question a woman's prerogatives, so he turned to his own needs, at first licking his wounds but then ginning up the wherewithal needed to meet the brave new world. 

Of course he moped around the house for a while trying to bustle and make himself useful, but ended up in unmade sheets and take-out.  'This will not stand', he lectured himself in the bathroom mirror one Tuesday, and vowed to turn over a new leaf 

His trip to Ouagadougou would be just the thing to clear his head.  A thorny Bank issue to be resolved, money at stake, and the First Minister was to be courted always picked up his spirits, and now that the job was all he had, he put even more life into it. 

The First Minister had heard of Bob's divorce - the corridors of the World Bank always echo with juicy gossip - and he would use the information wisely.  He would treat the newly singled economist to a treat that would make any man forget his wife - a beautiful Fulani woman, one of his consorts, available at his beck and call and assure that his Bank loan would proceed without a hitch. 

Now most men would take kindly to the First Minister's offer, but although Bob thought that getting rid of all traces of his ex-wife would be a simple matter, he did not count on residuals - those nasty, niggling bits of a marriage which stay with one after divorce.  Bob didn't want Mlle. Sekou, but a partner, someone to fill his life not just his bed. 

He thanked the First Minister for his consideration and generosity, guaranteed him the approval of the next tranche of money due to him from the World Bank treasury, and assured him that his credit would always be good in Washington. 

 

Separation does many things to a man, not the least of which is a re-assessment of life and sexual ways.  After the divorce, Bob examined his life of rectitude, civil temperance, and doing the right thing and wondered if he had squandered his youth. 

Bob had not been unhappy as a married man. Marriage gave one a needed center, consolation, commiseration and last but not least, sexual intimacy.  All fairly pat and predictable but not so bad, a kind of needed architecture with familiar walls and carpets to make forays into the outside world less threatening.  He had not squandered anything.  He had willingly and happily married Alison, and their days together should not be measured by the last one when she walked out the door. 

Men in Bob's position all act in the same way. Their first step towards putting their life back together is contacting old girlfriends.  The elision into singlehood, 'dating' and the difficult search for a marital partner would be far easier with someone known, a former lover whose inner rooms had already been explored. 

Time however had not been kind to Laura Owens.  From pictures posted on social media, she was still appealing in New England socially mature way, but when he explored further, he found that she had become fat, un-comely, yenta-looking and far from the ideal woman she had been decades earlier.  

What was he thinking?  She had three adult children, an early Teamster retiree as a husband, a home – of all places – in Mantoloking, home to ‘Jersey Girls’ and Mafiosi from Newark, and an interest in ‘gardening,, self-help, and autism’.  Needless to say, he never called, wrote, messengered, or texted.



The aborted search and the discouraging discovery of a woman transformed, through Bob off the trail, and Alison returned to his thoughts with a vengeance. The problem wasn't with her leaving or her recurring memories, but with the past and reconciling it with the present.  

He was past-due on sexual attractiveness.  Although men his age routinely had lovers thirty years their junior, they had come to these affairs knowledgeably.  Women, whether young or old, are attracted to maturity, sexual confidence, financial security, and maleness – the savoir faire of an older man – but Bob had none of these.  His only hope was pairing with a woman of his own age,  someone like himself who had made wrong early choices, realized too late that it was time to change, and had to settle for what she had agreed to. 

There were such things as bright beginnings; but where to look?  In his day there were singles bars, library reading rooms, and alumni seminars; but virtual dating – more controlled, more efficient, and more cost-effective – had taken over.  How could he possibly navigate this new electronic universe; and would the output be worth the input?

So, he continued to mine the alumni resources as far back as country day school.  He had heard that Nancy Boothby – his eighth grade love - had moved to California; and that had possibilities; not like resettling in Iowa or Nebraska, and might signal a sexual and emotional freedom that had lasted since the Sixties; but she had died of breast cancer many years earlier.

There was Belinda Dandy who was from solid Chicago stock – the Dandy family had built a paper empire to rival Scott – and Belinda had hoped that Bob would marry her and join Daddy in running the company; but rumors were that she had married an Italian and was living on the Riviera – or a Mexican with a Cancun villa; or a Serbian with holdings throughout the Adriatic and the Black Sea. Bob saw that he had no hope in this company of international gentlemen, chose not to renew contact with Belinda, and closed the book on her, Smith College, and weekends at the Taft.

After two years of this, Bob realized that his old captain’s license was no longer valid.  Navigating these new sexual waters but so dying for sexual encounter with another human being that he might look the other way in the morning was not an easy task.  So much had happened over the decades since he and Alison were married that he felt that he no longer even had a toehold in the market. 

Of course there were women as sexually dépaysée as he was – adrift in sexual waters, hoping for a familiar buoy, but grasping more than getting purchase – but where were they? Finding the right woman would be like finding a needle in a haystack unless the gods intervened; and pray he did for divine guidance  if not resolution, to no avail.  He was as alone and lonely as he had ever been. 

He continued to mine the Internet for old loves, even marginal ones like Lacy Birnbaum whom he had taken to the Lefferts prom and who had been laughed at because of her gimp and misunderstood because her father had short-changed customers at his clothing store and in a very Republican town campaigned on behalf of ‘the little man’.

Resignation to old men’s bathrobes and Chinese take-out was on his horizon because it already had happened to many men of his age.  Watch out, he told himself, but with no words of self-encouragement.

The list of old girlfriends had dwindled to nothing.  They either had died, persisted in bad marriages, were divorced and living on generous personal incomes, or were resigned like him to incidental contact.

It would be nice to report that Bob eventually found his soulmate; but he did not.  He was simply too inflexible, too fixated on ideas and principle, and too stubborn to give an inch.  There were plenty of women who would gladly have had a fling with him, married or not, but he was too sexually inept.  He had never had to rely on clues and suggestion – if progressivism is anything, it is not subtle; things are either right or wrong - so he was lost with women who react first on instinct and intuition, and only second on fact.

There are no particular lessons in this story.  Marriages are doubtful things but with remarkable shelf life.  Most people get married, either put up with it or end it. A few are happy and a very few murder their spouses - Turkish soap operas are particularly good at that - but all in all it is one of those things that one does and finds out the consequences when it is too late. Fortunately there are few George and Marthas Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf affairs;  and thank God there are very few Goneril and Regans around to murder their husbands, but marriage is usually not a pretty thing to watch.  

Bergman's Scenes from A Marriage is perhaps the closest to reality - a tough-going slog - and Anna Karenina is a great proto-feminist story.  There are thousands of marriage stories, one overlaid on every other, so there's a lot of experience out there. 

Bob was just one of many who fit into a classic subcategory - Looking For Old Flames which have died out. 

Musk Derangement Syndrome - Spite, Jealousy And Envy, The Ethos Of Hatred

Elon Musk has just made a flying car to go along with Space X, his company leading the world in rocketry, space exploration, and the next generation of planetary exploration.  Within a generation data centers requiring no special cooling and solar powered will be on the moon. Mars colonization is well within the realm of possibility.

 

Musk's Boring Company with sites in Las Vegas, Austin, Nashville, Dubai, and other developing sites was founded to reduce urban traffic by creating underground transportation systems.  The Las Vegas Loop includes 68 miles of approved tunnels and over 100 planned stations. 

Musk's Neuralink’s brain-computer interface (BCI) is a tiny, fully implantable chip that reads neural signals and translates them into commands, enabling people with severe paralysis or neurological conditions to control devices with their thoughts 

Tesla was one of the first electric cars to be produced commercially and is now the market leader.  Musk and his Tesla enterprise featuring well-designed, powerful, and efficient vehicles influenced the whole move towards electric transportation 

Musk's purchase of Twitter, now 'X' was instrumental in rolling back the arbitrary, invasive censorship of free speech of the previous owners and a disturbing trend in social media, and as such set a new standard for open discourse. 

And this man is reviled.  Hated by the Left, vilified as Donald Trump's Rasputin.  Musk is a member, say progressives, of a cabal of white, male billionaire oligarchs out to control the American economy, become the de facto political rulers of the nation, and eventually take it over by establishing a new capitalist caliphate. 

His captaincy of DOGE, the Trump-initiated government department to reduce and eliminate useless, costly, and unnecessary bureaucracy, was described by the Left, as an assault on democracy, and his elimination of USAID, the government foreign assistance agency, was responsible for untold millions of child deaths. 

False allegations, sour grapes on a monumental scale - nothing less than supreme envy, a virulent ad hominem hatred worse than any of the worst racist smears the Left uses to discredit, demean, and destroy.  

As a garnish to Trump hatred, they have added Diversity Equity Inclusion, a fictitious, dangerous, and destructive program to dismiss and denigrate the traditional values of talent, ambition, competition, hard work, creativity, and intelligence and replace them with superficiality - racial, ethnic, and gender identity replaced foundational values and, progressives said, would usher in a new world of equality. 

They have, throughout the ten years of Donald Trump's political rise, offered nothing substantive, nothing even resembling a platform, not one single constructive proposition to further American interests and the welfare if its people. 

Nothing about structural reform, economic opportunity, enterprise-favorable legislation, energy self-sufficiency, or private sector job creation. Just homilies, nostrums, and fanciful idealism. 

This bilious hatred, this deep-seated, horrific animus, this apoplectic desire to destroy is the social expression of one of the Deadly Sins - envy.  Progressives have made their reputation on the basis of criticism, loathing, and resentment.  Professor Richards Deming of Yale, a socio-biologist who holds dual chairs, one at the Department of Psychiatric Medicine, and the other at the Department of Socio-Biology, wrote this in The American Journal of Forensic Medicine (Vol. 21, pps 42-47)

Envy is not one of the Seven Deadly Sins for nothing, for it is at the heart of many of personality's worst psychiatric disorders.  It fuels hatred and unfounded spite  It generates falsity, improbable allegations, rumor, innuendo, and lies.  It is irrepressible in those whose moral architecture is missing a few struts and I-beams.  It is inevitable in a society based on enterprise, competition, and survival of the fittest.  The weak will always envy the strong, then hate them for oppression, ignorance, insensitivity, and worse. 

Envy has a social dimension, for it is one of the most infections and viral of the Deadly Sins.  Those who envy-hate a public figure, such as witnessed today with the American Left's virulent hatred of Donald Trump, share the feeling among themselves, and in so doing allow it to pick up steam, add other falsehoods, damning allegations, and bald inventions.  Before long an entire sub-sector of the electorate envies and hates the President without knowing why. 

 

This envy-hate now includes Elon Musk - again, in the classic ways described by Prof. Deming, without foundation until it becomes a bolus of political hysteria. 

The Left has always chosen to disregard history.  In their campaign to promote progressivism, or progress towards a more verdant, compassionate, peaceful world, they have ignored the ten millennia of human history.  Ever since the first human settlements, human nature - aggressive, self-interested, self-defensive, territorial, and irrepressible - has ruled.  Wars, civil and tribal conflict, palace coups, village murders, regional violence, and hegemonic acquisitions have been common. 

Yet, progressives say, those historical facts are nothing but aberrations from a nature truer than the the one embedded in human DNA - a higher nature, one of spiritual calling, a secularly divine one.  Forget the past and look only to the future, they urge. 

And so it is that a priori judgements become the new rationality.  The tautology rules.  Elon Musk is evil because he does evil.  We are doing good because what we are doing is good, etc.  There is no need for comparative analysis, logical exegesis, hard to come by conclusions. 

Progressives in their febrile idealism are as gullible and credulous as those in a fundamentalist Southern Baptist church who shout Hallelujah! and see Jesus Christ come down from the rafters to take them into his arms. 

There is no need to look at Elon Musk's many remarkable accomplishments - a genius that beggars the imagination, a once in a thousand lifetimes genius.  His net worth is enough to consign him to the inner circle of hell, for any billionaire must have made his fortune disreputably on the backs of the poor.  His destruction of USAID, an agency doing good, saving lives, reducing misery and alleviating misfortune is witness to his innate evil.  He ipso facto, a priori, and QED evil. 

Again, Prof. Deming:

'Envy-Hate', for we must call this new psychiatric syndrome for what it is - a combination of two of the most virulently distorted human psychological expressions - lives without logic and is sustained and strengthened by fervor alone.  That is, no additional information about the subject of this Envy-Hate is necessary.  The case is always closed early on with the first infection of the virus.  Once irrational, irreconcilable envy and hate have taken hold of one's psyche, not only is there no turning back, but the illness progresses, gets worse.  One is doomed to a life of animus, hate, jealousy and psychological misery

Luckily there is no stopping Elon Musk and his remarkable genius.  The man will go on to revolutionize the American economy, have a singular impact on the configuration and future of American society, and will be recorded as even more important than the industrialists of the early Twentieth Century - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan, men who singlehandedly brought America out of an agrarian age into one of industrial preeminence. 

 

This time there is more at stake.  The post-human generation, one of seamless mind-computer interface, and limitless genetic reconfiguration is within a generation; and Elon Musk and the other men in his genius cluster - Huang, Page, Ellison, and others - are accelerating its coming.

Would we like to be like Elon Musk? Beautiful wives, lovers, and many children with all of them; the wealthiest man on the planet with the ear of every world leader, close adviser to the President of the United States, popular hero, cultural icon, and an intellectual Genghis Khan?

Of course we would, and so would each and every one of the haters, men and women fueled by nothing but viral animus. Sideliners, insignificant whiners, political, economic and financial ciphers. 

It's the Musk era, get over it. 

Diversity At Work - An African American Develops A Flying Car, The Genius Of Elon Musk

Elon Musk, an African American born and raised in South Africa, naturalized in the United States, and now an American citizen, is responsible for some of the Twenty-First Century's most important inventions and technological advances.  

 

He was first to develop an electric car, his Space X is revolutionizing space travel and opening exploration and development of the moon and Mars, he has developed technology to return sight to the blind, is engineering futuristic ways of underground rapid transit, has advised the President of the United States on the future of Artificial Intelligence, and as a principled conservative has championed free speech and free enterprise. 

Yet, he is vilified by the Left.  In the most blatant, absurd, and indefinable accusation, progressives are claiming that because he is a multi-billionaire, he is ipso facto a Robber Baron, a predatory capitalist, an anti-social anarchist, and the leader of a cabal of like-minded oligarchs out to wrest control from the people and concentrate it in their hands. 

He, Huang, Page, Ellison and others are out to dismantle the architecture of democracy and create an autocratic state of which they will be the politburo. 

Musk and his colleagues are inheritors of the great  industrialists of the early Twentieth Century - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan who revolutionized the American economy and in so doing turned a simple agrarian society into an industrial powerhouse.  

Musk et al are doing the same thing for the country, accelerating its economic preeminence, and preparing the world for the first post-human generation. 

When the human genome has become completely understood, genetic engineering can create a new race of human beings more resistant to disease, climatic variations, and other environmental hazards. A race more adept, able, and intelligent to control the world around them and which can reach formerly impossible levels of being. 

Once complete interface between mind and machine has been achieved - that is when the electronic circuits of the brain are connected to the AI-facilitated ones of the computer - human experience will instantaneously become complete virtual, allowing the individual to roam through an unimaginable cyberspace of his own creation. 

Engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

Genetically engineered human beings, living in a perfectly virtual world where physical reality is meaningless and irrelevant, will be of a new race, a post-human race.

Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

As importantly, 'The Genie Out Of The Bottle' reality assures that there is no turning back.  No matter how much naysayers, Chicken Little The Sky Is Falling worriers, obstructionists, religious fundamentalists, and political fanatics may howl at the moon, this post-human generation will come.  There is no way to stop recombinant DNA engineering, mind-computer electronic symbiosis, and Artificial Intelligence. 

There has been a hysterical outpouring at the arrival of every new technology - the automobile, the phone, the electric light the computer, the smartphone, nuclear energy - and today's hysteria about AI, virtual reality, and genetic engineering is no different.  However as in all cases of technological advances there is no turning back. 

The American Left has made its name as The Party Of No.  America is not a land of limitless opportunity, intellectual brilliance, ambition, insight, and competitive energy, say progressives, but a hateful, acquisitive, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, rabid place of inequality.

Elon Musk and his cabal of billionaires embody all of these traits and represent a throwback to the unprincipled past of raw individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and anti-communal greed. 

Theories like this hearken back to the International Jewish Conspiracy or The Trilateral Commission, absurdly nonsensical unfounded assumptions of corporate and social evil, creations of hopelessly uninformed, credulous minds. 

These sentiments are hysterical because they have no foundation.  These men alone have created tens of thousands of jobs, jettisoned America into a revolutionary future, one which promises rewards for everyone far greater than ever before imagined.  They, other than commonly held sentiments of enterprise and patriotism, do not form an insurrectionist group bent on world domination. 

When conservative commentators have ironically noted that the Left's premier program of Diversity Equity Inclusion has worked wonders - men like Elon Musk have risen to the top of the American socio-economic pyramid and have shown the world just what individuals of African origin can contribute - progressives shout 'racism'.  America has always favored white men, and once again is showing its true colors. 

However, in so doing those commentators and their many supporters are pointing out the fallacy of the progressive racial agenda.  Africans despite decades of independence and every incentive and opportunity for rapid development have done nothing, and are mired in underdevelopment, corruption, poverty, and economic indolence.  During the same period South Korea, China, and India have become world economic powers. 

The old shibboleth of colonialism has long crumbled. This is no longer an excuse for such miasmic mismanagement and endemic corruption.  The progressive myths of the sentience, natural intelligence, forest-bred environmentalism, tribalism's communalism no longer have any credibility. 

Slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation are similar shibboleths which are no longer excuses for the bottom-rung academic, intellectual, social status of the black American population.  As much as liberals may limn the praises of inner city street culture, it is dysfunctional.  

If a policy of individualism, opportunity, talent, ambition, desire, and competitive spirit had taken the place of the one of entitlement, identity, racial politics, and white guilt, the situation in America would be quite different. A race-blind American culture of success determined by talent, ability, and enterprise might well be multi-racial and diverse.   

So the ironic statements about Musk, the African American genius, might well serve to expose the hypocrisy, myopia, and febrile fantasies of the progressive Left. 

Meanwhile, these same progressives are calling Donald Trump 'Racist' for calling out the anti-white pogroms of South Africa and Zimbabwe whose governments have deliberately expelled white farmers, resulting in the complete failure of agriculture, and the downward spiral of economics and finance.  Those whites who have chosen to remain in South Africa are subject to continuous racial hostility in an attempt to force them to leave. 

Donald Trump has welcomed these white Africans to the United States and has been roundly criticized for it.  Yet his welcome is yet another unveiling of progressive reverse racism - a hard and fast animus against white European-origin Americans as legatees of slavery, colonialism, and cultural assassination. 

White European-Americans have a lot to be proud of, for their forbears created Western civilization - arts, letters, literature, philosophy, science, music, and more while Africa and its diaspora have contributed little. 

It is not racist to be legitimately proud of your own culture - the whole progressive ideal - but when white Europeans express such historical patriotism, they are vilified.  

Citing Elon Musk as a great African American should be a wake-up call to the ideologically fanatical Left, and show Americans the true nature of 'diversity equity inclusion'

Sexual Entitlement - Reparations, Retribution, And A Pound Of Flesh, A Woman's Right

Alicia Mill married at a time when everyone did. There were the outliers, the math whizzes who took jobs at IBM, the few who thanks to family connections went on to Wall Street, the odd lesbians, and the simply unmarriageable - those at the end of the bell curve who as desperately as they might want a Yale marriage, were left alone. There's someone for everyone, goes the old adsge, but some women are simply beyond the pale. 

Not so Alicia who was attractive, intelligent, and with all the social graces a Boston Brahmin background could afford.  She was la creme de la creme of New England society, sure to marry well to someone of her class, live a prosperous and generously endowed life in New York, Palm Springs, and St. Bart's. 

Which she did, to Barrington Pierce Alling, direct descendent of President Franklin Pierce, heir to the Barrington family of Northumberland and first colonial settlers of northern New England, and relative of Fielding Alling, financier, confident of J.P. Morgan, and one of New York's first families. An arranged marriage could not have matched a more perfect couple. 

Yet for every perfect algorithm, there are dropped stitches, imperfections, and flaws overlooked in the suspension of disbelief.  

Alicia was perfect as far as checking the boxes of perfection were concerned, but she had some nasty, overlooked, but seminal traits that were so inbred and familial that they were overlooked, cloaked as they were with the mantel of breeding, education and social ease. 

These 'imperfections' were nothing serious - no horrendous reserves of anger, hostility and frustration - and were only what was taken for granted in women.  A kind of Don't Tread On Me uber-feminism bred of privilege, the suffrage of great aunts, and naturally occurring defiant pride. 

Alicia's forbears had had to put up with patriarchy, male privilege, Victorian mores, and second-class citizenship, and the canniness, calculated chicanery, and downright castrating ambitions of women in her family were to be expected. 

Of course no prospective mate in a love culture bothers with deep inquiry, and is happy to be romantically taken with a beautiful, charming, complaisant lover.  In Third World countries like India and Turkey where arranged marriages are still common, delving into these matters is de rigeur. No woman or man wants to be surprised. 

Caste, skin tone, and breeding may be important and decent markers for compatibility, but the real meat and potatoes of a marriage lies within. 

America being a love marriage culture, this inner world of psycho-social dynamics is overlooked. 

And so it was that Alicia, more endowed with the family traits of a certain stubborn righteousness, turned on her clueless husband soon after their wedding, a fabulous affair, one of many days, held on the lawns of Barrington Alling's family estate overlooking Long Island Sound. A wedding reported in the New York Times and even in the Wall Street Journal usually not given to social reportage. 

Alicia was a 'tweener' a woman caught between prim Victorian rectitude, pre-Sixties pride, and the first loud, insistent demands of feminism.  She was a product of all three when she signed the marriage contract, had nothing but love in her heart when she did, but proceeded to exact her due from day one. 

Living with a man was something new, untried, and unexpected.  True, she was the daughter of a marital union, but her mother and father, both independently wealthy, went about their own business, sat at the opposite ends of the formally-set dining room table, and retired to separate bedrooms.  Tooth-by-jowl arrangements had never been discussed; and yet there she was, seeking some cold comfort under the duvet with a a snoring, restless man. 

'Can't you do something about the snoring, darling?' she said one morning not long after the honeymoon.

The dutiful husband tried nasal separators, sleeping posture aligners, a variety of over-the-counter and organic alternative remedies, but no dice.  Not only did his snoring continue, but increased in volume and depth as the weeks wore on. 

'I love you, sweetheart, and I am always there for you and will come when you ask...' but she decamped in the spare room which she made her own - dolls from her childhood, balms, creams, and lotions, an Edwardian full-length mirror, and peace and quiet. 

As far as the promised visitations, they became few and far between. Sex wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and there was plenty to be had in other quarters if she so desired. 

After that - the tethers that bind having been loosened and the emergence of her own private life encouraged - it was a quick step to de-masculinizing the rest of her marital life.  

He - dear Barrington - was either to be home on time for dinner or to give a good accounting of his whereabouts.  Toilet seats were to be permanently and irreversibly down.  Hairs in the sink - an affair for the upstairs maid - couldn't be overlooked in the interregnum, and she called her husband to task at each and every errancy. 

Nor was it long before Alicia took a lover - a surprising liaison given her pedigree since Arnold Bates was not of her kind.  Not quite the Connie Chatterley-Mellors epiphanic union, but satisfying in ways that poor Barrington would never understand.  

Rutting was what it was all about, and more delighted she could not be until Arnold and turned out to be not unlike every other man she had come across. Except for a rather wolf-like sexual attention, he was her uxorious husband with a big, overly-responsive dick. 

Barrington, as considerate and sensitized as he was to female needs, had soon had enough of his wife's hectoring, noodging, and incessant harping.  He settled for Amanda from Accounting for his first extra-marital affair, but quickly moved upscale until he was in Turkish pasha territory, an idyll and promised land from which he did not want to return. 

'Where have you been?', Alicia asked  having been up half the night waiting for his key in the lock. 'Working at the office' no longer held water, and the two had it out at two in the morning, both contrite and promising to mend their ways. 

But before long of course, Alicia, as much as she hated herself for such bourgeois inanities, was after her husband for pee on the floor, pots left on the stove, leaves caught in the downspouts, and shirts on her side of the closet. 

She simply could not help herself. No matter how she tried, the umbrage remained. The toilet seats, the hairs in the sinks, the leaves in the drain, the diffidence, the excuses, the indifference were not just incidental, bothersome, usual interruptions of marital accord, but symbolic of a growing disregard for her feelings, her being, and her self. 

She upped the ante and found surprising ways to take her husband to task, to bring him around, to tame and domesticate him. 

She was owed that much at least. She had not signed on for such penance. 

It got worse.  While never descending to the bathos of George and Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf where the characters 'flay each other to the marrow', it was pretty bad.  Marriage was bound to have its ups and downs, but never this - this complete regard for female integrity, the essential value of woman. 

It got even more worse.  The Michael Douglass film, The War of the Roses, was only a milder version of the affair between the Allings.  No physical violence, no broken furniture, no racks and bastinadoes, just pounds of flesh taken in very small pieces, Mao's 'death by a thousand cuts'. 

'This is my right', said Alicia as she enjoined her husband in this war of wills. I am fighting patriarchy, male privilege, and machismo.  I am the castrating goddess Kali.  I am the Destroyer, the Enabler - or words to that effect as she planned her next assault. 

In modern, less mythological terms, she was simply bringing the fight to the enemy in a campaign of reparation and retribution.

She failed of course.  Barrington simply gave notice and left, and Alicia was left with the empty house, the mortgage, and a mess to clean up. 

Be careful what you wish for is the old Chinese proverb, but Alicia standing amidst the detritus couldn't even remember first principles - why she had bothered to get married in the first place. 

But what's done is done.  Barrington is living in Tampa Bay with his young wife, and she, Alicia, is making do.