Author: Linh Dinh

My local dive, Friendly Lounge, was mentioned in I Heard You Paint Houses, a book soon to be turned into a movie by Martin Scorcese. Now Friendly’s featured quite prominently in The Last Don Standing, an account of the Philly mob by Ralph Natale. An infamous snitch, Natale still spent 27 years inside. As I type this at Friendly, guitarist Jimmy Bruno and organist Joey DeFrancesco, both Philly guys, are killing it in the background. Anyway, this new book dubs this bar a training ground for the Mafia: Hard case DiTullio developed an instant soft spot for the young Natale, … Continue reading →

The post Mob Rule appeared first on LewRockwell.

According to a Nielsen study, the average American adult consumes 10:39 hours of electronic media per day in 2016, up a full hour from 2015. Each year, it increases. At 13:17 hours, blacks expose themselves to the most, with Asians the least at 5:31 hours. During many cross-country train trips, I’ve always noticed that the calmest and most content people in the lounge car were the Amish, those with no cravings for electronic media. Their children, in particular, were always impressively serene. Instead of hunching over a private movie, or being plugged to detonating beats that irritated everyone nearby, the … Continue reading →

The post Media-Drugged Zombies appeared first on LewRockwell.

Germany is smaller than California. Within the last two years, it has allowed in roughly two million Muslim refugees and immigrants, all by fiat. Having no voice in this radical demographic change, many Germans are fuming. Last year, I wrote from Leipzig that Germany has lost its autonomy and sanity. Teaching at the university, I registered that all my students were openly sympathetic towards Muslim refugees, so I suggested they look harder at their government’s complicity in the US’s endless war against Muslims. The best way to help Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians is to not kill them and destroy … Continue reading →

The post Is There Any Hope for Germany? appeared first on LewRockwell.

First, of, what is meant by “deep state”? According to ex-CIA Philip Giraldi, “Every country has a deep state of some kind even if it goes by another name. ‘The Establishment’ or ‘old boys’ network’ was widely recognized in twentieth century Britain. ‘Establishment’ has often also been used in the United States, describing a community of shared values and interests that have evolved post-Second World War from the Washington-New York axis of senior government officials and financial services executives. They together constitute a group that claims to know what is ‘best’ for the country and act accordingly, no matter who … Continue reading →

The post The Deep State’s Cynical Puppets appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s remarkable that I’ve been friends with Giang for nearly four decades. We’ve spent but a year in the same state and, frankly, have little in common. Giang studied computer science, business administration, and engineering technology. He makes more in a year than I do in ten. He drinks Bud Lite and recycles corny metaphors and analogies. A director of marketing, Giang actually told me, “I can sell a freezer to an Eskimo.” Driving from California last week, Giang stayed at my sweltering apartment for two nights. Since he had never been to Philly, I took Giang to a decent … Continue reading →

The post Postcard from the End of America appeared first on LewRockwell.

A friend in Frankfurt emailed me on July 19th: It is sheer madness what is happening here… The noose is tightening and yet—it is still only the beginning… What took place in some dull regional express close to Würzburg, a town in Franconia in the middle of Germany, was—in some respect—like a watershed event—just like the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. The mantra from above is still “Islam belongs to Germany” or “We will make it (in regards to the Refugee Crisis)” but there are fewer and fewer people buying it—which does NOT mean that more people … Continue reading →

The post Letter From Germany appeared first on LewRockwell.

A hundred-and-fifty-one years after the abolition of slavery, America has a half white, half black president, a black Nobelist in literature, whites who attribute not just every form but instance of black dysfunction to white racism, blacks who demand reparations, the mainstreaming of innumerable black slang terms, including “diss,” a new phrase “negro fatigue” and the bumper sticker, “IF I HAD KNOWN THIS, I’D HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON.” It has often been stated that slavery is America’s original sin. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin ruminated on its cons and pros: The Labour of Slaves can never be so cheap here … Continue reading →

The post Death of a Nation appeared first on LewRockwell.

In Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell observes, “American pluralism was not an ideal with which people started but an accommodation to which they were eventually driven by the destructive toll of mutual intolerance in a country too large and diverse for effective dominance by any one segment of the population. The rich economic opportunities of the country also provided alternative outlets for energies, made fighting over the division of existing material things less important than the expansion of output for all, and rewarded cooperative efforts so well as to make it profitable to overlook many differences.” Racial, ethnic and religious differences … Continue reading →

The post Blacks, Cops, and a Sinking Economy appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Dinh Dynasty lasted only 12 years and ended in 980, but in the 20th century, there were around a dozen plays about one of the Dinh queens, Duong Van Nga. When I was a kid in Saigon in the 1970s, a folk opera about her could pack a theater night after night. In 2013, an elaborately produced 12-part series about Dinh Tien Hoang [Dinh the Celestial King] appeared on TV. Posted on YouTube, it has generated many comments. In 2015, a dorky, hour-long animated film was made about the king’s childhood. People remember as they should. Just about any … Continue reading →

The post Ahistorical and Deluded, With Fireworks appeared first on LewRockwell.

A billboard for Comcast pitches a lineup of “reality” shows, with this caption, “Recommended for you. Because the real reality is boring.” In contemporary America, real reality is also less real than Big Brother’s cartoony version. While we’re driving, walking, at work, lying in bed or even in the bathroom, Big Brother dictates what we know. Big Brother’s hypnotic screens have become our arbitrator of reality. What capture us most are not the propaganda images, which can be ludicrously unconvincing, but the voice over. If Big Brother says it, it must be true. Unlike in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does … Continue reading →

The post Big Brother’s Virtual Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

From “Positano,” a 1953 article by John Steinbeck: About ten years ago a Moslem came to Positano, liked it and settled. For a time he was self-supporting but gradually he ran out of assets and still he stayed. The town supported him and took care of him. Just as the mayor was their only Communist, this was their only Moslem. They felt that he belonged to them. Finally he died and his only request was that he might be buried with his feet toward Mecca. And this, so Positano thought, was done. Four years later some curious meddler made a … Continue reading →

The post Humanity Endures and Remembers appeared first on LewRockwell.

My friend George, in his mid-60’s, was a vice president of an insurance company. He’s told me a few amusing stories of fraud. A man with a claimed bad back was filmed lifting concrete blocks and bowling. A supposedly blind dude was filmed driving a car, steering a Jet Ski and examining jar labels in a store. Dogged detective work landed these cheaters in jail. A factory was scheduled to die at noon, but words leaked out, so within three hours, more than 300 claims of workplace injuries flooded in. Allied with the union, doctors and chiropractors got most of … Continue reading →

The post Our Crooked, Violent Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

Waking up to news of the Orlando shooting, I thought of the possibility that a Muslim shooter would be identified, in which case a Trump presidency would be nearly guaranteed. As with 9/11, the 2015 Paris massacre and the San Bernardino shooting, Islamic terror is immediately fingered, with the purported killer already dead. What lightning fast police work, eh? With so many corpses to sort out, the name and origin of the perpetrator are immediately available. Omar Mateen is 29-years-old, of Afghan descent and is a registered Democrat to boot. After the Boston Marathon Bombing, the Tsarnaev brothers were meant … Continue reading →

The post The Orlando Gay-Bar Shooting appeared first on LewRockwell.

Philly is blessed with a generous allotment of public space at its very center. On any day of the week, weather permitting, there are throngs of people at Love Park, Dillworth Park and near the Clothespin. Around this 45-foot-tall sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, I’ve seen an assortment of petty hustlers selling everything from loosies to oddball T-shirts, such as the one that said, “IF YOU SMELL SOMETHING STINKING… IT’S ILL-ADELPHIA BECAUSE WE’RE THE SH!T. Black Israelites can often be found nearby. Wearing studded wristbands, studded belts and studded vests over studded, knee-length, fringe tunics, they rail against white people and … Continue reading →

The post Michael the Philly Messiah appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last year in Leipzig, Germany, I met a young woman who had just returned from Chicago, where her family lived in tony Lincoln Park. She had also studied at Williams College in Massachusetts, where tuition alone was near $50,000. Germany was too white, she complained, and she was ashamed of the anti-immigrant attitude shown by many of her countrymen. For Christmas, she went to Palm Springs, California. Though only in her mid-twenties, she had traveled to dozens of countries. The young woman loved American multiculturalism, and it’s easy to see why. For those above a certain income level, diversity simply … Continue reading →

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