Skinny Dips

With Halloween so recently in the rear view mirror, it's not surprising that some high-profile racists are allowing their masks to slip enough to show the more than skin-deep ugliness underneath.

CNN's Don Lemon, about whom it can truly be said "when Life gives you Lemon, take Life outside and beat it senseless," just declared that when it comes to terrorism, absolutely no group of people should be demonized. Except White men, of course, because they're "the biggest terror threat in this country."

To prove this, he cited statistics of killings by alleged White terrorists over the past 20 years or so, with the total number of victims being approximately the same as any 3-day weekend in the conspicuously non-White environs of Chicago.

Meanwhile, bitter clinger Hillary Clinton was being interviewed about civility in politics (because who could possibly be more of an expert?) when the program's host briefly confused Cory "Spartacus" Booker with Eric "Fast & Furious" Holder. Hillary helped the host over this embarrassing gaff by quipping of the Black men, "they all look alike."

The audience and usually volatile media outlets just laughed it off because, darn it, racist comments are funny when they come from screamingly liberal Democrats! Who can forget Senator (and former KKK member) Robert Byrd's heartwarming description of the working class poor as "White niggers?" Or Joe Biden's amazement that candidate Barack Obama was "articulate and clean," or Harry Reid's marveling at Obama's pleasingly "light skin" and ability to speak with "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted one."

Oddly, screaming Progressives can always get away with this kind of blatant racism, while those who show the least inclination to conservatism will be cast into the fires of Hell for saying anything, no matter how innocent or well intended, which can be construed as being racist.

As a case in point, Megyn Kelly has just been canned from a $69 million contract for mentioning casually on her morning show that it used to be okay for White kids to dress up as Black characters when she was a kid. When corrected, she apologized fully and sincerely and wanted to open a dialogue to help all sides express their views and perhaps find greater understanding between the races. But nooOOooo. Instead she's been thrown under Rosa Parks' bus and had her journalistic career ruined, not because of an act of hate speech, but because of an act of the far less acceptable honest speech.

Somehow, the word "hypocrisy" just isn't enough to describe the despicable double standards of the race-obsessed on the Left.

AND DON'T FORGET...

Speaking of things that make us feel like projectile vomiting...

Don't forget to turn your clocks back on Sunday so that you can screw up your sleep cycles, enjoy seeing midnight blackness outside at around 6 pm, and enjoy all of the gut-wrenching effects of jet lag without actually having to go somewhere potentially fun.

If Trump would promise an executive order ending Daylight Saving Time, we think he could pretty much lock up the midterm results he (and we) are hoping for.

Happy Halloween 2018

We take Halloween pretty seriously at Stilton's Place, as evidenced by these actual interior decorations we've been enjoying for most of the month...

We're also ready with a full contingent of outdoor decorations for the trick-or-treat crowd, including inflatables, video projectors, creepy music, and psychedelic lighting. Unfortunately, rain and wind are predicted tonight (damn you, global climate change!) so we may just end up watching storms with our noses pressed against the window while eating tiny candy bars instead of greeting costumed kids.

But hope springs eternal, and we'll be ready to make the outside of stately Jarlsberg manor suitably creepy if there's a break in the weather.

And speaking of hope springing eternally, we'd like to share the graphic below from our good friend Johnny Optimism. Every year on that site, we post a collage of decorated Halloween wheelchairs as a reminder that when Life gives you lemons, you should kick Life in the ass and throw your lemons at it, then do something totally awesome.

Considering the all-too-spooky news lately, we think it's a timely bit of advice. So enjoy Halloween, and take optimism and inspiration from these kids (and their wonderful parents)!

Illuminutty

Is insanity the new normal? We hope not, but we're starting to have serious concerns. No sooner do authorities collect a Trump-obsessed bomb maker than the story is blasted out of the spotlight by another hate-filled maniac who went on a killing spree in a quiet Jewish synagogue, leaving 11 dead and more wounded. This is tragic and unacceptable craziness.

Following hard on their heels, legions of "news" people and social media gadflies are weighing in on whether Trump's "rhetoric of violence" (which mostly seems to be an unfortunate appreciation of rough-housing and fist fights) caused one or both of the incidents cited above. Spoiler alert: no, it didn't - except to the extent that the mentally unstable can get inspiration from almost anyone or anything before acting out. Do we know for a fact that neither of the crazed individuals was inspired to action by Hillary Clinton's impassioned call to treat your political enemies with "incivility" when they "want to destroy everything you stand for?"

We'll happily concede a scintilla of nuttiness in Trump, but considering the fact that the Obama administration wrapped a thick fog of insanity around every aspect of government (thus normalizing it), and Hillary "Guilty of Literally Everything" Clinton was set to continue our straightjacketed march into Hades, conservatives' only "rational" choice in 2016 was to choose Clinton's irrational opponent. The fact that he's still been spectacularly successful only underscores that we're not in Kansas anymore.

News people and politicians regularly demonize their opponents now in more-or-less Biblical terms, and preach that if you're not against the "evil" and actively fighting it ("Get in their faces! Let them know they're not welcome anywhere!"), then you're evil yourself and damned to political perdition. Unless you do penance by repeating (or acting upon) slogans like "Punch the Nazis" and"Kill White People."

Is anyone sane on college campuses these days? Conservative speakers are physically attacked, fires are started, and windows smashed. Minority students falsify racist attacks by scrawling graffiti and hanging nooses. "Safe spaces" are needed for students to recover after experiencing "micro aggressions" like, presumably, gnat farts. And a recent study suggested that as many as 26% of all college students may now be experiencing PTSD symptoms left over from their candidate losing in 2016. Snowflakes, indeed.

And while we hate to say it, we've recently seen a disturbing amount of craziness offered up by people who are good friends, as they cite wild conspiracy theories denying the obvious realities surrounding both the pipe bombs and the steroid-fueled whacko living in a van which looked like a Trump parade float. "He's too stereotypical to be real," "His window stickers don't look faded enough," "Anonymous Internet sources say he was a Democrat right up until the day this happened," "How did he drive all those bombs to the mailboxes in one day," and on and on.

With love in our hearts, we encourage anyone with this mindset to take a deep cleansing breath, think of the mantra "Sh*t Happens" on your exhale, then rejoin the less dramatic world of the marginally sane.

Yes, there are real conspiracies (the whole Mueller Russian investigation is a fine example), but it's a bad idea to develop an entire cosmology based on the idea that nothing that we see is real, and nefarious puppet-masters like the Bilderbergs, Zionist Jews, Globalists, or the Illuminati are constantly pulling the invisible strings running from the 9/11 attacks to Sandy Hook to the crowded secret cemetery in Arkansas that holds the bodies of Clinton murder victims.

More than any time in living memory, we are being bombarded by nuttiness, conspiracies, and calls to violence. We are pressured around the clock to replace reasoned discourse with emotional actions. It is a contagious fever - and an exceedingly dangerous one.

For all of this, we have no answers. But we can at least point out that somehow all of this madness must end - and soon - if the American experiment is to outlive us all. Until then, "be sane" and encourage sanity in others.