By Selwyn Duke

What is a “weapon of war”? Given all the talk about how such things mustn’t be on our streets — the claim that a firearm thus designated mustn’t be available to citizens — it’s an important question.

If by the phrase is meant a weapon designed for or used in warfare present or past, then the muskets and flintlocks the Founding Fathers carried qualify. So do spears, knives, the bow and arrow, and clubs and rocks.

Speaking of which, while agitating against AR-15s’ legality in 2013, then-vice president Joe Biden said that if “you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.” Aside from sounding close to what 84-year-old Kansas City man Andrew Lester did when shooting innocent teen Ralph Yarl on April 13, there’s an irony here….

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By Selwyn Duke

We discussed why the West is the greatest civilization to ever grace this planet, bar none. My appearance begins at 31:09. 

By Selwyn Duke

We discussed Biden family corruption, how pseudo-elites in general are selling us out to China, and our nation's moral decay. My appearance begins at 6:58. 

By Selwyn Duke

Explaining the birds and the bees has always been uncomfortable for some parents — but one day it may get so complicated that someone will have to explain it to the parents.

That is, if new technology that may affect the way they become parents is made reality.

Called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), it could in the not-too-distant future be used to create babies not only without sexual congress, but even without those requirements for in vitro fertilization (IVF): eggs and sperm.

A process with both promise and perils, IVG may someday be used to “provide a cure for many types of infertility, to slow or even turn off biological clocks, and to enable the kind of embryo selection that sends chills up many spines,” 

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By Selwyn Duke

No, this isn't my last appearance because I've been booted, but because my friend Chuck is finally embarking upon a much-deserved retirement. It was an honor, though a bittersweet one, to be the very last guest in his long and storied media career. I'd been on Talkback for more than 15 years, starting with George Putnam and then, when Chuck took over in 2008, with him. And I know that when Friday 1:00 p.m. rolls around this week, I'll think about how I'd always been on with Chuck at that time and feel just a bit of emptiness. That's the way life is. 

I wish all the best for his future. Godspeed, Chuck. 

My appearance begins at 52:20. 

Note: If you want to fast-forward to my segment, you must right-click on the in-line MP3 player below and then click "Open link in new tab."

Talkback-04-28-2023

By Selwyn Duke

You may remember the name Rachel Dolezal. She’s the woman who resigned as an NAACP chapter head in 2015 after her parents revealed that she was not black as she claimed, but white. What you may not know is that far from chastened, Dolezal has doubled down, calling herself “unapologetically black.” In fact, she apparently fancies herself a persecuted pioneer.

What’s more, she has a point — if you accept our time’s fashionable premises (more on this later).

Of course, racial (and ethnic and religious) fakery is common today. There’s Muslim activist Raquel Saraswati, who, her mother says, is actually white and of European descent. There’s Congressman George Santos, who claimed to be Jewish before clarifying that he really meant “Jew-ish” (he gets the George Costanza Award for effort). There are all the “Pretendians,” such as Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), “Sacheen Littlefeather,” author Erika Wurth, disgraced ex-professor Ward Churchill, Queens University professor Robert Lovelace, and the academic Sami Chen. Then there are other black-by-popular-demand types, such as “racial justice activist” Satchuel Cole, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student CV Vitolo-Haddad, George Washington University history professor Jessica Krug, and (possibly) left-wing activist Shaun King.

As with many or even all of the above, Dolezal advantaged herself via her identity lie.

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By Selwyn Duke

We discussed the Tucker Carlson situation right after the story of his leaving of Fox broke. My appearance begins at 28:55. 

By Selwyn Duke

A few decades ago we had Al Gore, who boasted about fighting Big Tobacco not 10 years after boasting about having grown mucho tobacco. Now we have the third-millennium version of smoking out of both sides of your mouth:

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is reportedly “test marketing” a complete ban on tobacco products — while her state is encouraging residents to buy marijuana at legalized pot dispensaries.

Apparently, all smoke particles inhaled into your lungs are equal, but some are more equal than others.

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By Selwyn Duke

Fifty-five years ago already, Star Trek portrayed civilizations that worshiped über-powerful, artificially intelligent computers. In “The Return of the Archons” (1967), controlled and sometimes terrified people speak of the “will of Landru,” who is “everywhere” and stamps out individuality to absorb humans into a collective called “The Body.” In “The Apple” (1967), a planet’s primitive inhabitants worship a computer they fancy a deity, one that will kill anyone threatening its power. Yet with actual artificial intelligence (AI) now being developed, some are wondering if life will imitate art.

This issue has again been raised after billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk revealed that Google co-founder Larry Page aspires to create an AI super-intelligence that would essentially be a “digital god.”

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By Selwyn Duke

“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them down between the millstones of taxation and inflation,” goes a line apparently misattributed to Vladimir Lenin. While the quotation is more likely a paraphrase of Lenin by famed economist John Maynard Keynes, it also “seems like a pretty good description of what the Biden administration is doing to America’s middle class,” wrote the New York Post a year ago already. Of course, “inflation,” as in rising prices, is at least largely caused by a phenomenon expressed via another definition of the term: inflating the money supply.

Now, one thing Lenin absolutely did prescribe, explicitly, was the raising of prices by continual money-supply inflation. He did this, he said, because it was the only way to truly destroy “economic freedom” or, as he put it using the term applied to economic systems by socialists, “capitalism.” This is absolutely relevant for us today, too, for a simple reason:

A path of currency destruction is precisely what our government is pursuing.

And both major parties are guilty — though perhaps for different reasons.

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