I need to issue a Light Posting Alert for the rest of this week. Because where I was once one and now we are two, we’re moving from my modest accommodation:
… to more palatial digs just across the road, so to speak:
Fortunately, we have few household belongings, relatively speaking. Ye Olde Ammoe Locquer, however…
Wish me luck.
*Note: this post may contain just a wee bit of exaggeration.
Cue the violins:
So Mrs. Clooney / Julia Roberts-lookalike Amal Clooney gets all whiny about The Donald putting the boot into the Jackals Of The Press:
Amal Clooney said President Trump ‘vilifies the media’ and makes journalists ‘all over the world vulnerable to abuse’ among other jabs during a multi-day conference in London.
The human rights lawyer was speaking along with British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt on Wednesday when she made her first remark.
Without mentioning Trump by name, she said: ‘The country of James Madison has a leader today who vilifies the media, making honest journalists all over the world more vulnerable to abuse.’
Abuse, my suffering African-American asshole: 1) there’s no such thing as an “honest journalist” nowadays, and 2) never mind Twatter abuse, modern journalists should get daily ball-kickings or scourgings to get them pointed in the right direction. Trump lets them off lightly, given their boorishness and naked partisan behavior.
And referring to my earlier comment: ever wonder why Amal Clooney and Julia Roberts have never been seen together in the same room?
Face it: if the lawyer looked like (say) Maxine Waters and was married to Wallace Shawn, the Press wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a lineup.
I can see why Clooneywife is so sensitive about the media: without their fawning and uncritical support over the years, she’d still be signing property transfer contracts in Kabul, let alone married to Mr. Hollywood and splitting her time between an estate on the Thames and a villa on Lake Como.
I am often accused of being an old-fashioned man. This, despite the fact that I’m using a keyboard to enter my thoughts into a digital medium via a thing called the Internet. And hey, I prefer brass cartridges over muzzle-loading, so I’m not that old-fashioned (unlike some of my Readers, who believe that this brass thing is just a passing fad).
If you want to know what gets me going, however, consider the following pics, and guess why I tend to prefer tradition over modernity. We’ll open with the modern ones:
Interior design:
Cars: 
Handguns:
Women:
Men’s appearance:
Foods:
And you all know about my preferences in architecture: 
So yeah, I guess I am old-fashioned. Feel free to envy me.
This article got me thinking, because it’s not something I’ve been involved with since the kids finished homeschooling (if such a thing ever happens) and went off to college. Go ahead and read the thing first, as it sets the stage for what follows.
I’ve often been asked what books I steered my own kids towards during their schooling, so here’s the group from which I drew. They are the books that every child should have read before age 18, in alphabetical order by category*. It’s very biased towards Western Civilization, for obvious reasons, and is by no means comprehensive, but enough to provide a good foundation. (The Son&Heir, for example, was so taken by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca that he ended up reading everything she ever wrote. Whatever they find interesting, let them run with it.)
Kim’s Recommended Reading List For Homeschoolers
Politics:
1984 — George Orwell
Animal Farm — George Orwell
Of Civil Government — John Locke
On Liberty — John Stuart Mill
Our Enemy, The State — Albert Jay Nock
The Prince — Niccolo Machiavelli
Economics:
Basic Economics — Charles Sowell
The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith
History:
From Dawn To Decadence — Jacques Barzun (this book is required reading; it can serve as a general history work and in a pinch, can be the only history book read before college)
Heroes — Paul Johnson (biographies)
A History Of The American People — Paul Johnson
A History Of The Jews — Paul Johnson
The Iliad, The Odyssey — Homer
The Proud Tower — Barbara Tuchman
United States Declaration of Independence (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and the Federalist Papers)
Military History:
Carnage And Culture — Victor Davis Hanson
The First World War — Martin Gilbert (or John Keegan)
A History Of Warfare — John Keegan
The Second World War — John Keegan
A War Like No Other — Victor Davis Hanson
Philosophy/Religion:
The Bible
The Book of Journeyman — Albert Jay Nock
Confessions — St. Augustine
Essays Moral and Political — David Hume
Intellectuals — Paul Johnson
Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man — Albert Jay Nock
The Republic — Plato
Summa Theologica — St. Thomas Aquinas
Plays (Shakespeare):
Coriolanus
Hamlet
Julius Caesar
King Lear
Macbeth
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Othello
Richard III
Romeo & Juliet
(Shakespeare’s major History Plays — Henry IV etc. — require a concurrent English history lesson, otherwise the characters are meaningless and the dialogue almost incomprehensible.)
Plays (Other):
Billy Liar — Keith Waterhouse (the novel is good too, but the play is the thing)
Faust — Goethe
The Importance of Being Earnest — Oscar Wilde
Lysistrata — Aristophanes
‘Tis A Pity She’s A Whore — John Ford
Waiting For Godot — Samuel Becket
Poetry: (all their works, with recommendations)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson — The Eagle, Charge Of The Light Brigade
Matthew Arnold — Dover Beach
Rupert Brook — The Soldier
Samuel Taylor Coleridge — The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
John Donne — The Good Morrow and A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
John Keats — Ode To A Nightingale
Rudyard Kipling — The Gods Of The Copybook Headings
Richard Lovelace — To Althea, From Prison
Shakespeare — all the Sonnets (as many as can be digested)
Percy Shelley — Ozymandias
Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass
William Wordsworth — Tintern Abbey, The Solitary Reaper
Long Fiction:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
Alice In Wonderland — Lewis Carroll
The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
The American — Henry James
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
A Handful of Dust — Evelyn Waugh
The Chronicles of Narnia — C.S. Lewis
The Count Of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas
Don Quixote — Cervantes
A Farewell To Arms — Ernest Hemingway
Emma — Jane Austen
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
The Invisible Man — H.G. Wells
Zorba the Greek — Nikos Kazantzakis
Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift
The Mayor Of Casterbridge — Thomas Hardy
The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
Fathers and Sons — Ivan Turgenev
Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert A. Heinlein
Les Misérables — Victor Hugo
Carry On, Jeeves — P. G. Wodehouse
Lord Of The Flies — William Golding
Crime and Punishment — Feodor Dostoyevsky
Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
The Harry Potter Stories — J.K Rowling
Women In Love — D.H. Lawrence
The Complete Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle
Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
The Portrait Of A Lady — Henry James
The Wind In The Willows — Kenneth Grahame
Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier
Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
Sons And Lovers — D.H. Lawrence
Uhuru — Robert Ruark
Short Fiction (Authors, with recommendations):
Daphne du Maurier (The Birds, Don’t Look Now)
Ernest Hemingway (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Killers)
Edgar Allan Poe (The Pit And The Pendulum)
Herman Melville (Bartleby the Scrivener)
Ambrose Bierce (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge)
Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book)
Flannery O’Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Good Country People)
Guy de Maupassant (Boule de Suif, The Necklace)
James Thurber (The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, The Unicorn in the Garden)
O. Henry (The Gift Of The Magi, The Cop And The Anthem)
Raymond Carver (Where I’m Calling From, Little Things)
Saki (Sredni Vashtar, The East Wing)
William Faulkner (Mountain Victory, A Rose For Emily)
Erotica:
Ars Amatoria — Ovid
Delta Of Venus — Anaïs Nin
Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure (or Fanny Hill) — John Cleland
The School of Whoredom — Pietro Aretino
*Please note that your opinions may vary — and indeed they should — depending on what direction you’re setting your kids along. (For example: if your bent is more to the religious, then obviously the Bible and / or St. Augustine will require more time and dedication, and so on.)
1) Woman dies when she falls onto an eco-friendly metal drinking straw which impales her in the eye — you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this story. Or at this one:
2) Bankers are fired and get all sobby — that’s what happens when you don’t call in enough loans and fail to toss your quota of poor people out onto the street.
3) Irish man, 19, ‘is raped by two men in Magaluf after being kicked out of a brothel for having no money’ — I have no idea what the problem is, here: he was looking for some sex, wasn’t he?
4) Gay group wearing ‘lesbians are women’ t-shirts are removed by police from the National Theatre bar after a transgender staff member was offended by their views — I’m trying to think how it’s possible to fit more annoying shit into a single headline, but I can’t — unless Michelle Obama was the trannie.
5) Clinton confidante Epstein charged with arranging child prostitutes for friends — will be murdered or “commit suicide” in 3… 2… 1…
6) African leaders launched a continental free-trade zone on Sunday that if successful would unite 1.3 billion people, create a $3.4 trillion economic bloc and usher in a new era of development — it’s gonna fail. Africa wins again.
7) Older female rhinos are sent in to help young male get horny — redefines the meaning of “cougar”, dunnit? (I’m trying to visualize “older female rhinos” and “sex”, but all I can think of is Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters. Sorry.)
I had never heard the term before, but looked it up when reading this excellent article from Z-Man. Magic Dirt Theory is “The theory that someone immigrating to a country automatically and magically becomes the same as the native population.” Hence:
[P]eople like Rashida Tlaib think it is real. She thinks if her people move here, displacing the heritage stock, nothing changes but the complexion. Her people will suddenly stop acting like her people and take on the habits of our people, but with more color.
But, as Z-Man points out, that’s bullshit.
[M]uch of what we think of as American society exists because heritage Americans support it. The people who created this society would have done so wherever they landed. We know this because it has happened in places like Australia and even Africa. Despite it all, countries like Rhodesia and South Africa were able to create first world societies. In the game of dirt, no place has more tragic dirt than the Dark Continent. Yet Rhodesia existed. South Africa existed.
Yup. When a people has a culture of corruption, that culture will follow them. Likewise, if they’re dependent on government handouts in their source country, that notion of dependency will come with them. And if they come from a culture of rampant crime… let’s talk about El Salvador’s MS-13, shall we?
Now what we have the Left trying its level best to destroy everything that we hold dear and sacred about our country — and it is OUR country, not some rancid fucking cross between Third World Shithole #1 and Third World Shithole #2 — all in the name of some made-up meme about equality or racism or colonialism or patriarchy or FFS why don’t we just start whipping these people in the streets for trying to undermine all the things that a) started this country and b) made it great. (Oh, and by the way, this IS and HAS ALWAYS BEEN a great country, despite what these MFCS Leftists keep trying to push on the rest of us.)
My only regret in all this is that Donald Trump doesn’t have an identical twin brother so we could vote him into office in 2024 and 2028 — which would at least give us time to make the necessary concrete blocks for the feet of every last socialist in the United States.
I need to quit ranting now, lest I get even more angry and the Southern Poverty Law Center gets all miffed and declares Splendid Isolation and its readers to be a hate group — like we care. (That bunch of godless hucksters needs to stand near the head of the line of the concrete block distribution, but let’s not go there yet.)
What pisses me off royally (if I may be a little solipsistic here) is that I came to this country to pursue the American Dream — the original dream, as created by “heritage Americans” — and now these fucking bastards on the Left want to take that away from me. Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, and again I say, fuck ’em.
What I want to do with this Magic Dirt is bury all these bastards six feet under it.