I am Hispanic/Latino/Caribbean who was never into what I am supposed like in music which is Salsa and related Afro-Caribbean music. For some reason my ear was more attuned to Prog Rock with the occasional trips to Blues, old Jazz, Big Band and Country. Lately I am getting keen on what some call Appalachian music (If you watched “Justified” you may have heard some of that) so you can say my tastes in music are eclectic.

But there is one song that gets triggered immediately by just reading the name of the city. And I even have to sing the first line of it. It is like a Pavlovian thing or I am left with a sense of unease.

♫ Amarillo by mornin’
Up from San Antone ♪

OK, this is where it gets weird: If I read/listen/say the word in Spanish, no trigger.

The brain is a very strange machine. Oh well, it is George Strait, you can’t go wrong.

Politico came out with an article on the Miller/Acosta spat, The Ugly History of Stephen Miller’s ‘Cosmopolitan’ Epithet.

Of course, Politico has it go back to Soviet Anti-Semitism and therefore Miller is a white supremacist, QED so it Trump, yada yada yada…

Politico hits the nail on the head when it comes to defining the connotation of ‘Cosmopolitan.’

So what is a “cosmopolitan”? It’s a cousin to “elitist,” but with a more sinister undertone. It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality. (In this sense, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine might have been an early American cosmopolitan, when he declared: “The world is my country; all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”). In the eyes of their foes, “cosmopolitans” tend to cluster in the universities, the arts and in urban centers, where familiarity with diversity makes for a high comfort level with “untraditional” ideas and lives.

For a nationalist, these are fighting words. Your country is your country; your fellow citizens are your brethren; and your country’s traditions—religious and otherwise— should be yours. A nation whose people—especially influential people—develop other ties undermine national strength, and must be repudiated.

That’s 110% right, fuckers.  The problem is Politico is Cosmopolitan so embraces that attitude rather than see why it upsets nationalistic conservatives.

Here is sort of the stereotypical idea of a cosmopolitan person:

A moneyed individual.  Perhaps a famous professor or a progressive businessman.  He likes to go to fancy cafes for wine bars and sit and drink and wax philosophical with other like minded, wealthy, progressives with the sort of self righteous hubris that only the erudite progressive can have.  He feels a closeness to other like minded, wealthy, progressives and could/does feel at home at a fancy cafe or wine bar in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rome, etc.  He is a citizen of the world.

So far Politico and I agree.

The problem is, he doesn’t feel at home in Indiana, Nebraska, Texas, or Alabama.  He feels no connection to the denizens of the Rust Belt, Bible Belt, Bread Basket, or Great Plains.  He is an insufferable prick who believes his erudite, progressive, education makes him superior – both morally and intellectually – to the salt-of-the-earth hard working Americans.  He doesn’t understand people outside his bubble, and doesn’t want to.

If that was it, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.  Let him stay in his bubble.  They don’t.  Self assured in their superiority, they want to craft laws and policy that feels good for wealthy, progressives in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rome, etc., but what works for the jet-setting Cosmopolitan doesn’t work for the guy with the pickup truck and no passport in Middle America.  Mr. Cosmo is more than happy to sell out the interests of his fellow citizens, who he is (even if he doesn’t realize it or like it) tied to economically, for a bubble of international elitists.

When the elite from New York or San Francisco cares more about the policy option of another wealthy elite from London or Paris than the opinion of the farmer in Nebraska or the factor worker in Indiana, you get problems and resentment.

This is what Politco wants to ignore.

When the Acostas of the US want an immigration policy that makes the Acostas of London and Paris applaud, but hurts the Joe Sixpack trying to make a living in Western Pennsylvania or Ohio, it’s not unreasonable to tell the Acostas to sit down and shut up because they are being cosmopolitan jackasses.

I don’t believe that Miller was blowing an Anti-Semitic dog whistle.

He was reminding Acosta that we just suffered eight years of Cosmopolitan Obama, who crafted policy based on what his peers in Europe would think about it rather than how Middle America would benefit from it, and Trump wasn’t going to do that shit anymore.

If Acosta wants to live in his Comopolitan bubble, with his head shoulder deep up his own ass, sipping fine wine through an enema bag, let him.  As long as he stays there.  The moment he wants to make national policy fit his view from inside his colon on 5th Avenue, he deserves to be called out.

Over at the Moms Demand Action Facebook page, I caught this.

A trans woman was murdered in Atlanta.

The response from the MDA comment peanut gallery was predicable.

It’s all Trump’s and the NRA’s fault.

Some of the comments makes me wonder if these people can read.

Not past the headline apparently.  If they did they’d of read:

It is not currently clear what the motive was behind Dangerfield’s murder and whether or not she was targeted because she is transgender.

“At this time we don’t have anything that’s telling us that, but we’re not ruling out any possible motive,” Patterson said.

No evidence it was a hate crime.

The victim was shot at the South Hampton Estates in College Park, GA.  College Park is a city, surrounded by Atlanta, which was listed as a murder capital in 2016.  College Park is a high crime area just outside Hartsfield-Jackson airport.

So right now what we are looking at as a person shot in a high crime neighborhood of a high crime city.

The article ends with this statement:

Thus far, at least 16 transgender people have been murdered in the United States alone this year.

Wow, that has to be…. I don’t know.

According to GLAAD “2016 was the deadliest year on record for transgender people” with a total of 21 trans people murdered.

In 2014, the CDC reports 15,872 people were the victims of homicides.

In 2015, the number was 15,696.

2016 is supposed to have a increase in murders.  The numbers are not available yet, but lets make a conservative estimate of 15,500 to 16,000.

That means of 21 murders is between 0.131% and 0.135% of all homicides.

The transgender population of America is roughly 1.4 million or 0.6%.

Going by those figures, trans people are underrepresented in homicides.

GLAAD noted that half of the 21 trans victims are people of color.  According to the FBI, in 2015, 53.1% of murder victims were black and 2.8% were “other” races, putting the “POC” category at 55.9% of murder victims.

Trans homicides are proportional by race to the general population.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not excusing any of these murders.  16,000 murders is way too many.  It is the identity politics nature of the coverage that is upsetting.

“OMG, it is a massacre of trans people and it’s all Trump’s fault!!!”  Even when the numbers don’t support that.  The narrative has to be maintained and Moms Demand Action is going to do everything to push the narrative.

A collage of some comments in Social Media about the upcoming Death Wish remake.

And what really must be pissing SJW is that 99.99999% of the comments in Social Media are in favor of the flick barring the purists that are afraid this version will not do justice to the original.

Miguel covered the story of Professor Charles K. Smith of San Antonio College showing up on the first day of Texas campus carry in body armor.

The professor told the media he did this because “I was just saying I don’t feel safe.”

No.  What he did was grandstanding bullshit.

The whole argument against campus carry is (paraphrasing) “if a professor says something that offends a student with a CCW, the student will lose his/her cool and shoot the professor.”  Hence the “free speech concerns” that are raised by the anti-CCW crowd.

If Professor Charles K. Smith really was afraid of offending a student during a geography lecture, so much that student would shoot him, why would he antagonize his students by wearing body armor to class?  That just screams “I don’t trust you not to be a bunch of trigger happy reactionaries.”

If he was so afraid of his students being so unhinged that they would turn violent over a lecture, why did he even teach?  Seeing as how every day before August 2, they could have reacted violently without a gun, just like the baseball bat wielding snowflakes at Evergreen State.

It wasn’t about his personal safety.  It was about making an anti-gun statement.

Here’s the thing.

Back in 1996, after the Port Arthur Massacre, Australian Prime Minister John Howard gave a speech to a crowd of firearms enthusiasts and hunters in which he advocated for a gun ban.  He did so, with a bullet proof vest poorly concealed under his jacket.  This enraged the crowed, who were deeply offended that the Prime Minister would just assume that a bunch of hunting and shooting clubs would respond with violence.  The media took the backlash of law abiding gun owners offended by being addressed by the Prime Minister in body armor as clear evidence that they were unhinged people who needed to have their guns taken away.

It was a character assassination of Australian gun owners.

I don’t know if Professor Smith knew about the John Howard incident, but I believe he was attempting the same sort of thing: provoking a reaction from law abiding gun owners to prove that he was right to be afraid of them, after insulting them to their faces from a position of authority.

Of course, as a full-fledged Old Fart ™, the original Death Wish with Charles Bronson will never lose a place in my heart, but I am willing to give this one chance since it is Bruce Willis.

However, the Left is already leaving track marks in their allergen-free undies about this movie.

And if anything, the timing and location of the new movie is spot on: Chicago today. Where the old Death Wish was in the 1970s New York when the Big Apple was at its worst, Chicago is the 21st century equivalence. Back then, same as now, Liberals threw a fit at the idea of a Vigilante weeding out the scum of NYC and we should expect more of the same for this new version.

In the book itself (which by the way, once again available after many years off the shelves, even used) there is a quote by the hero, Paul Benjamin (the name was changed to Paul Kersey for the movie) and it has a great definition of Liberal.

“It came to me a little while ago what we really are, we liberals. We demand reforms, we want to improve the situation of the underprivileged – why? To make them better off materially? Nuts. It’s only to make ourselves feel less guilty. We rend our garments, we’re eager to show how willing we are to accept any outrageous demand so long as it’s black, or youthful, or put up by someone who thinks he’s got a grievance. We want to appease everybody – you know what a liberal is? A liberal is a guy who walks out of the room when the fight starts.”
Death Wish – Brian Garfield. (1972)

Succinctly put, don’t you agree?