Category: Alternative History

If Hitler had won the Civil War…

WHOA, that’s good squishy!

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As CF Lifers will know by now, I often like to commend skillful writing here on Ye Aulde Colde Furye Blogge when I run across it, if only because I enjoy it so much my own self. Also well-known is my fondness for military history/historical fiction, which is where this post comes in.

I’ve lately been reading one called Wings Over Summer, a sort of prequel which covers the lives—and deaths—of the Spitfire pilots serving in the RAF’s (fictional) 646 Fighter Squadron during the Battle of Britain, with the second (really, the first) volume of the two-part series recounting their exploits during the Siege of Malta. The author, a chappie yclept Ron Powell, definitely has some writerly chops, as this extremely amusing excerpt confirms.

WingsOverSummer 1

WingsOverSummer 2

Since I couldn’t find a way to simply C&P the above passage in the Kindle Unlimited application, I had to screen-cap the above passage in two parts, hence the size discrepancy. But still: great stuff, no? A little biographical info on the author:

After 32 years in the Royal Air Force, from which he retired as a Group Captain (full Colonel) pilot commanding the first stage of flying training for the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, Ron moved to south Wales to pursue his long held ambition of becoming a writer. Since then, he has written an illustrated history of events in the skies above Britain in the summer of 1940, The Battle of Britain, Hitler’s First Bloody Nose; an acclaimed novel, Wings Over Summer, set in the same period; a sequel, Wings Over Malta; and two volumes of memoir, Shropshire Blue: A Shropshire Lad in the RAF, the first, Preparation For Flight, about growing up on the English/Welsh border and his early years in the RAF, including working on Vulcan nuclear bombers on a Cold War air base, the second, On The Buffet, about his RAF pilot training. He has also written numerous short stories and articles and gives talks on a range of topics, including the Battle of Britain.

There’s also a website with more on Group Captain Powell’s life and RAF career, perusable here.

Quote of the year century millennium

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Via commenter Bruce over at Diplomad’s fine establishment.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

Indeed so. That there’s Marcus Tullius Cicero speaking to us from the annals of history (or perhaps not), a guy who surely knew a thing or two about Enemies, Domestic and the wanton damage and destruction they can wreak upon any Republic, then or now. Cicero also well knew how such enemies are most properly and effectively dealt with.

Though he was an accomplished orator and successful lawyer, Cicero believed his political career was his most important achievement. It was during his consulship that the Catiline conspiracy attempted to overthrow the government through an attack on the city by outside forces, and Cicero suppressed the revolt by summarily and controversially executing five conspirators without trial.

Bold mine, and entirely dispositive. Alas for his own suffering, tottering Republic though, Cicero went on to provide a pluperfect example of that damage I mentioned a minute ago:

During the chaotic middle period of the first century BC, marked by civil wars and the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, Cicero championed a return to the traditional republican government. Following Caesar’s death, Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony in the ensuing power struggle, attacking him in a series of speeches. He was proscribed as an enemy of the state by the Second Triumvirate and consequently executed by soldiers operating on their behalf in 43 BC, having been intercepted during an attempted flight from the Italian peninsula. His severed hands and head were then, as a final revenge of Mark Antony, displayed on the Rostra.

Again: bold mine, and entirely etc. New category for things like this: Enemies, Domestic. Considered just renaming the “Our Enemies” cat, but then thought, nah. “Enemies, Domestic” is much more specific, seems to me; certainly, in our parlous age it’s all too apt.

The truth is outing

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Tucker’s latest amounts to pretty much just rubbing Faux Nooz’s nose in it.

Tucker’s Explosive Interview With Former Capitol Police Chief: The Story Fox Didn’t Air, Pelosi, and Who Knew What When
Tucker Carlson’s latest episode of his show on X, formerly known as Twitter, aired Thursday and it certainly was a bang-up one. It featured an interview with former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund.

As Tucker explained, he’d filmed an interview with Sund earlier in the year (when he was still working for Fox). It was scheduled to run on Monday, April 24, Carlson said. Then Carlson was let go from Fox that Monday morning and the interview never aired. Because the interview footage is owned by Fox, Tucker can’t run it. So instead he invited Sund to come on his X show and tell what he knew.

One of the biggest points Sund made was that it was revealed after Jan. 6 that other agencies had intelligence of how dangerous it might be but that wasn’t passed on to him. He said the intelligence he received indicated it would be like other MAGA rallies. But the FBI, the DHS, and even the military had intel suggesting more was afoot. But they didn’t tell Sund or put out any alerts as they might normally do, “But there were zero for Jan. 6,” Sund said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Sund wasn’t told, even though he was on a conference call around midday on January 5 with the law enforcement leaders from the D.C. Metro Police and the FBI (head of the Washington Field Office Steve D’Antuono). He even had the military and the National Guard on the call, he said. But he was not told about the intel. Sund explained it wasn’t only him, the head of the MPD also was not told. He said a new report that came out last month revealed that Antuono had a lot of information.

“It’s almost like they wanted the intelligence to be watered down for some reason,” Sunds mused. He said it was handled very differently by the intelligence agencies and military than it normally would have been.

He said it was crazy that even when they were under attack he has to go to those two people to get permission to bring in help. He immediately contacted the House Sgt. at Arms Paul Irving at 12:58 on Jan. 6, asking to bring in the National Guard, telling him it was bad, and an emergency.

But in response, Irving said he was going to have to “run it up the channel” and “get back to you.” Sund told Tucker that Irving didn’t have to run it up the channel in an emergency; Irving could have authorized him. But he didn’t. And “the chain” was then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sund said.

Sund said he next called the Senate Sgt. at Arms Mike Stenger. Stenger said they should wait until they heard back from Paul Irving.

Sund said even after they got approval through Irving, he was still getting flack from a general in the Pentagon who was on a call with him, Mayor Muriel Bowser, and the head of the Metro Police. That general said that he didn’t like the “optics” of sending in the National Guard. Sund said he told him, it was “life or death.” He said Robert Conte, the MPD Chief, couldn’t believe it.

Then came the shooting of Ashli Babbitt and Sund pleaded with the general there was now a shooting going on. Sunds said he yelled at the general, “There are shots fired, is that urgent enough for you now?”

My sympathy for this poor guy’s anguish over the J6 “riots” is extremely limited, seeing as how it was the cops who did all the shooting and murdering that day. “Urgent”? For Ashli and poor Roseanne Boyland, it certainly was. Please note the vast gulf between “we have shots fired” and “our guys have just gunned down an unarmed civilian for no good reason, and gang-stomped another to death.”

But Sund had one more stunner, and it was about the riots around the White House in 2020 when St. John’s Church was burned. He said that someone “higher up” stopped the head of the MPD from providing aid to the White House to protect it. He said he knew it wasn’t from the Chief of Police so it had to be someone higher. He said they were prevented from going on White House grounds to help defend it. But according to Sund, in that case, the charges were dropped against the rioters. The disparity of how the justice was applied was “scary,” Sund summed it up.

Okay, no quibble with that one. In fact, in light of that self-evidently partisan disparity—not to mention the hundreds still languishing in durance vile without benefit of trial, an attorney, or in some cases, even being charged; the ongoing nationwide manhunt for well over a thousand more; or Jake Chansley spending a couple years in stir for the heinous crime of being given a guided tour by police, then having the outrageous temerity to prop his feet up on “Boxwine” Pelosi’s desk (how DARE he!!!)—the J6 “insurrection” will forever remain what it always has been: far too much ado about nothing.

Yeah, cry me a fucking river, Offissa Pupp.

Happy Pearl Harbor Payback Day!

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Surber just comes right out and says it.

We should have dropped three bombs
Sunday marks the 78th anniversary of the Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, dropped the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Three days later, we dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The Japanese warlords still voted 3-3 on surrendering. Intervention by the emperor ended the war and the Japanese told the allies it planned to surrender, which it did on September 2.

With the new movie Oppenheimer‘s debut last month and the end of the teaching of American history in a positive light, lefties have resurrected the argument against using the A-bomb to end World War II.

The Atlantic published the first and perhaps only rebuttal you need to read to this daft argument in December 1946. Written by Karl T. Compton, an atomic physicist and president of MIT, one of the many people involved in the development of these two bombs, the article addressed the argument against the bombings.

Compton wrote, “About a week after V-J Day I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: ‘You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches.’

“‘Could you have repelled this landing?’ we asked, and he answered: ‘It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you.’

“‘What would have happened then?’ we asked.

“He replied: ‘We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated,’ by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.

“It is easy now, after the event, to look back and say that Japan was already a beaten nation, and to ask what therefore was the justification for the use of the atomic bomb to kill so many thousands of helpless Japanese in this inhuman way; furthermore, should we not better have kept it to ourselves as a secret weapon for future use, if necessary? This argument has been advanced often, but it seems to me utterly fallacious.”

The Japanese would rather die than surrender. They proved this in battle after battle.

That’s about the size of it, yeah; as Don goes into later in the piece, if you don’t think so, ask any survivor of the Bataan Death March or the Rape of Nanking about it, if you can find one. Truman knew it too:

Bombing Japan into surrender was the only option. Harry S. Truman considered the bombing to be his biggest achievement as president and rightly so. He had survived as a field artillery officer that meatgrinder we now call World War I.

Truman wrote a letter to Compton in response to that Atlantic article.

The president said, “Your statement in the Atlantic Monthly is a fair analysis of the situation except that the final decision had to be made by the President, and was made after a complete survey of the whole situation had been made. The conclusions reached were substantially those set out in your article.

“The Japanese were given fair warning, and were offered the terms which they finally accepted, well in advance of the dropping of the bomb. I imagine the bomb caused them to accept the terms.”

The only reason we did not drop three bombs is that we did not have a third one.

We do now.

Heh. Yep. Roger Kimball says it wasn’t only American lives that were saved.

The atomic bomb saved Japanese lives, too
The choices we face are often not between good and bad but between bad and worse

Something else that has contributed to the fraught atmosphere is the war in Ukraine. After all, one side in that conflict, Russia, controls the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, more than 6,000 warheads. My friend Roger L. Simon is right: atomic weapons are “as close or closer to being used today than ever since World War Two because of the endless war in Ukraine.”

That is a sobering thought.To his succeeding questions “Was this worth doing? Was it moral to build such an extreme weapon?” I would answer “yes” and “yes.” I also, by the way, support our use of this most horrible weapon in Japan. Why? Because its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War Two. In so doing, it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. Data point: the military is still using the huge supply of Purple Hearts it manufactured in anticipation of an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

But put the number of American lives saved to one side. The use of the bomb, by ending the war, also saved millions of Japanese lives.

This was widely understood at the time. In subsequent years, however, a new, mostly left-wing, narrative has grown up which faults President Truman for using the bomb. Today, as Oliver Kamm noted in the Guardian, “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” are often used as a shorthand terms for war crimes.

That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave laborers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire — and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

What is the essence, the core, of conservative wisdom? One part is that when it comes to the real world, the choices we face are often not between good and bad but between bad and worse. This is particularly true in times of war. A difficult lesson. But crucial for those who wish to do good as well emit good-sounding slogans.

Of course, for the Left there is no sincere regard for numbers of lives lost or saved; by their facile, jejune calculus, they don’t really care about such mundanities at all. No, what chaps modern-day shitlib asses the hardest is that American won.

SIDE NOTE: my post title was hijacked from WRSA.

Straight dope on…ummm, dope

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Why are certain pharmaceuticals becoming rare as hen’s teeth in the FUSA? Bill lays it all out over at the DP mothership, then hits on a related topic in his latest for Substack: Blogs – What Are They Good For? Both posts are of the impossible-to-excerpt variety, so just click on over and read ’em all.

No fate

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But what we make. So far, we seem to be making a piss-poor job of it.

Recently, I was asked to make the “pessimistic case for the future.” I present instead more of a “pessimistic take on the present.” The future, while imminent, is obscure. The present, by contrast, is knowable. This is also not so much a “case” replete with exhaustive evidence—there isn’t space for that, nor is there a need—as a quick tour through our present hell. No one who thinks “everything is fine” will be persuaded otherwise. Those who see the seriousness of our problems hardly need proof. Nor have I made any attempt to be evenhanded, much less philosophically detached. My account is perforce one-sided. I hope it is wrong.

Alas, all evidence to date indicates that it isn’t. In fact, seeing as how this is Michael Anton we’re talking about here, one might reasonably assume that it’s all dead accurate; with him, that’s practically always the case. In this essay, Anton breaks his arguments down into sub-categories, which for purposes of this excerpt I’ll present as is, formatting intact (ie, italics). No better place to begin than the beginning, right?

The Constitution Is All but Dead

We Americans are supposed to govern ourselves via a constitution that rests on a specific understanding of natural right (right and wrong, good and evil, better and worse exist by nature) and natural rights (government’s job is to secure people’s God-given rights to life, liberty, property, etc.). The Constitution specifically declares and delimits the purposes of government and its powers, and it specifies how we the people choose the officers of the state, who are supposed to exercise those powers.

We still choose, sort of, but that hardly matters, because the people we nominally elect do not hold real power. And when they do, they often use it for unconstitutional ends. America’s real rulers are not the constitutional officers we nominally elect, and certainly not the American people, whom our understanding of political legitimacy asserts to be sovereign. They are, rather, a network of unelected bureaucrats, revolving-door Cabinet and subcabinet officials, corporate-tech-finance senior management, “experts” who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police them.

Add to this the routine, repeated violations of our explicitly guaranteed rights—Big Tech censoring free speech, big cities denying the right of self-defense, the government itself violating the right to be secure in one’s person, home, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures—and it becomes more than a stretch to describe the United States as any longer a “constitutional republic.”

We Have Two-Track “Justice”

How the same offense is treated by our “justice” system depends on who’s committed it and, often, for what purpose. At the upper strata, compare the treatment of Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe with that of Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn. Clinton illegally hid, and then deleted, her proprietary—and classified—communications from government records. Comey and McCabe orchestrated the Russia Hoax and lied about it. None of these three was even charged.

The latter five have all been hounded by the state—some convicted and imprisoned, all at least bankrupted and defamed. Their crimes, to the extent that any were even committed, were all much less serious than those of the regime darlings.

Compare the treatment of the Jan. 6 protesters with the total impunity granted to the summer 2020 rioters. One example: Two lawyers, literally caught throwing Molotov cocktails, were given slaps on the wrist. Meanwhile, Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with first-degree murder (one of six charges) for shooting two deranged thugs who were in the process of trying to kill him. All over the country, and especially in blue-ruled precincts, acts of self-defense will get you arrested, jailed, and possibly imprisoned. Meanwhile, in the Black Lives Matter era, so long as the perp is the correct race or acting in a sanctified cause, violence and arson are excused.

Skipping a couple categories down, we come to what I consider to be the most condemnatory, troubling, and just downright infuriating of the entire lot.

We’re So Blinkered by Ideology that We Can’t—or Won’t—Apply Obvious Solutions to Simple Problems

The same way we don’t lock up criminals because “racism,” there is almost no end to the sensible things we refuse to do, and the stupid things we eagerly do, because of ideology.

The United States is presently in the midst of our worst energy crunch since the 1970s. Instead of expanding supply, we are constricting it. Why? “Climate change.” But nuclear would generate energy without carbon emissions. The same people who say no drilling also say no nuclear. Why? Supposedly, because the plants themselves and the waste they generate are “unsafe,” though nuclear power has a near-perfect record in this and nearly all countries. (The real reason is to force everyone to don the hairshirt.)

Our drug problem is fueled by Mexican cartels that cross our border with impunity. But we don’t secure the border because “no human is illegal.” Monkeypox is transmitted at homosexual orgies. We won’t close bath houses because “love is love.” But we will close churches, gyms, and restaurants over Covid. That’s an emergency!

“WE’RE so blinkered”? As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, whatchoo mean WE, white man? The shitlibs own that one lock, stock, and barrel. Which of course Anton knows, as the above-cited examples demonstrate without explicitly spelling out.

By the end, each of Anton’s sub-cats tie in together to present a scarifying portrait of where we now are, with seriously ominous indications of where we might be heading. Essentially, he uses interlocking bricks to construct an unassailable wall of logic and observation as deftly as a Master Brickmason. For instance, the connection betwixt “We Prioritize “Diversity” Over Mission and Performance” and “Our Military Doesn’t Win” is readily apparent, with the first being a primary reason for the second. It’s a blunt-force yet subtle strategy of argumentation that even TeeWee lawyer Perry Mason could only shake his head in awe and admiration at, being fond of the same sort of thing himself.

Most condemnatory, depressing line of all has to be the one which caps off the mercifully-concise “Nothing Works Anymore” sub-cat: “The whole country is becoming the DMV.” To which the response can only be: ouch. Also: YIKES!

Much, much more yet to this typically top-notch article, of which you should definitely read the all. Adapted from Anton’s contribution to Encounter Books’s Up from Conservatism compilation, it’s as comprehensive, unflinching, and clear-eyed an examination of the roots of our woes as can be imagined. From the EB website’s book-blurb:

The Conservative Establishment’s consensus of the past two generations has almost totally broken down. Conservatism was unable to stop or even slow the Left’s rolling revolutions in nearly every sector of American society—from classrooms to boardrooms, from the military to the culture at large. The Left has successfully transformed the nation over the past few generations, racking up victory after victory, with no clear end in sight. This is not sustainable for the country or the constituency represented by the Republican Party. For the Right to have a serious future, it needs to rethink its positions and think more deeply about the essential policy questions which will define the future of the country: race, men and women, sexuality, religion, the economy, foreign policy, and other major issues. This collection of essays, written by some of the Right’s most interesting thinkers and practitioners, seeks to reframe the ideological and policy direction of the American Right.

Can’t find a whole lot to argue with there, other than to say I’m extremely doubtful that “think(ing) more deeply about…policy questions” will ever avail us much. When you get right down to the nut-cutting, it amounts to putting the policy cart before the ideological horse.

The conflict presently before us doesn’t primarily revolve around “policy,” but fundamental beliefs. Unfortunately, we find ourselves smack in the middle of a struggle involving ideologies which are entirely incompatible, one insistent on totalitarianism and absolute, unchallenged State power over the individual, the other on ordered liberty and the right to be left alone to live as one chooses, within certain constraints to which both parties are in agreement.

There can be no reconciliation of the two, no satisfactory compromise, no middle ground. As pretty much all of 20th-century history more than adequately demonstrates, whenever and wherever the Leftist glioblastoma is permitted to metastasize and flourish within a liberty-oriented body politic this conflict is made inevitable. One side must win, the other must lose. Once the victor has been determined, “policy” will necessarily flow from there.

Betcha didn’t know THIS

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Borepatch links to one of his golden oldies (from 2011, no less) that’s just chock-full of fascinating stuff.

We have quite good records of sunspot activity going back to 1700 A.D. We have decent records of the price of wheat going back much further – pretty good ones to 1500 A.D., and sporadic records all the way back to 1250 A.D. (!). The reason is that bread is the staff of life – no bread, and people starved.

In short, grain prices are a pretty good proxy for climate, in the days before thermometers. Certainly better than, say, bristle cone pine tree rings. This is important for two reasons, and the combination is very bad news indeed for people who cling to the “Carbon Dioxide is killing Mother Gaia” theory.

First, the price of grain and the number of sunspots have been known to be very closely correlated for hundreds of years. William Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus) first published this, back around 1800. When there are a lot of sun spots, he said, the price of grain is low – harvests are good. When there are few sun spots, harvests fail and the price of grain soars.

Remember, we have records on this that are so old that this has been known for literally hundreds of years. You might say that, err, the Science is Settled.

To understand why this is so incredibly bad for the warmist crowd, you need to compare and contrast with the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (Carbon Dioxide heating the planet). The theoretical underpinning of AGW predicts a warm zone in the mid-Troposphere (say, 8 miles up or so) in the tropics. Essentially, this is a heat pump that cycles captured heat from the increased Greenhouse effect down to lower atmospheric levels (rather than radiating out to space).

The only problem is that with maybe a million weather balloons looking for the hot spot, nobody’s found it.

BP carries on from there, and it’s…well, like I said, it’s fascinating. Among other notable things, the piece utterly demolishes the persistent shitlib tomfoolery insisting on CO2 as the primary cause of all climatological woes, piece by piece and bit by bit, until not a single molecule of that mythology remains viable. The Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ hoax is explained in plain, non-obfuscatory language which doesn’t require a hard-sciences doctorate to comprehend. As Borepatch so pithily puts it: The whole edifice was constructed from cardboard and tape, and anyone could see that it was wrong.

Elegantly written; brilliantly conceived; meticulously researched; reliant entirely on actual, for-real science instead of the usual shitlib Pseudo variety, with politicking left entirely out of the mix for once and a solid dollop of historical fact thrown in for additional backup—with sincere apologies to the fine folks at Watt’s Up With That, who have been doing yeoman’s work on the subject for many years now, this is without doubt the best, most comprehensive yet concise treatise on the subject I’ve ever seen. BP has an equally-stellar (of an even older vintage, namely 2009) companion piece here.

You mustn’t miss a single word of this one, folks—both the linked posts, really, they’re good, good stuff. Taken altogether, they add up to all the debunking of the AGW hoax you’ll ever need. Bravo, Borepatch, and well done indeed.

Update! Fool that I am, it just hit me like a pie in the face that Watt’s Up is in neither my browser bookmarks nor Ye Aulde CF Blogrolle. Error corrected, with further red-faced apologies to WUWT for the reconkulous oversight.

How the sausage is made

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I’ve never been in the habit of watching videos linked or embedded by other bloggers; don’t know why that would be, I’m by no means opposed to it, and I certainly hope CF readers will watch the ones I embed. Hypocritical of me, perhaps, but hey, it is what it is. Don’t hate me ‘cause I’m beautiful, to swipe one of my favorite Little Richard quotes.

That said, though, for some odd reason I felt compelled to watch one MisHum included with last night’s ONT, the first half of it anyway. And in so doing, I learned something I didn’t know before, namely the backstory of how a great ‘70s classic-rock tune came to be.

“No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature” is a medley by the Canadian rock band The Guess Who. It was released on their 1970 album American Woman, and was released on the B-side of the “American Woman” single without the “New Mother Nature” section. The single was officially released as “American Woman/No Sugar Tonight” and peaked at #1 on the RPM magazine charts and #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, for three weeks on both charts. In Cash Box, which at the time ranked sides of singles independently, “No Sugar Tonight” reached #39.

According to Randy Bachman, the inspiration for the song arose after an incident when he was visiting California. He was walking down the street with a stack of records under his arm, when he saw three “tough-looking biker guys” approaching. He felt threatened and was looking for a way to cross the street onto the other sidewalk when a little car pulled up to the men. A woman about 5 feet tall got out of the car, shouting at one of them, asking where he’d been all day, that he had left her alone with the kids, didn’t take out the trash, and was down here watching the girls. The man was suddenly alone when his buddies walked away. Chastened, he got in the car as the woman told him before pulling away: “And one more thing, you ain’t getting no sugar tonight”. The words stuck in Bachman’s memory.

Bachman then wrote a short song in the key of F♯ called “No Sugar Tonight”. When he presented the song to Burton Cummings and RCA, he was told that the song was too short. Bachman and Cummings expanded the song by adding to it a song Cummings had written that was also in the key of F♯, “New Mother Nature”.

The narrator of the vid over at the Ace place goes on to relate the tale of how the A-side of which “No Sugar” was the B, “American Woman,” was put together as well, and it’s a doozy in its own right.

The music and lyrics of the song were improvised on stage during a concert in Southern Ontario (the guitarist, Randy Bachman, recalled it being at a concert in Kitchener, although Burton Cummings, the lead singer, said it was at the Broom and Stone, a curling rink in Scarborough). Bachman was playing notes while tuning his guitar after replacing a broken string, and he realized he was playing a new riff that he wanted to remember. He continued playing it and the other band members returned to the stage and joined in, creating a jam session in which Cummings improvised the lyrics. They noticed a kid with a cassette recorder making a bootleg recording and asked him for the tape. They listened to the tape and noted down the words that Cummings had extemporized, and which he later revised.

The song’s lyrics have been the matter of debate, often interpreted as an attack on U.S. politics (especially the draft). Cummings, who composed the lyrics, said in 2013 that they had nothing to do with politics. “What was on my mind was that girls in the States seemed to get older quicker than our girls and that made them, well, dangerous. When I said ‘American woman, stay away from me,’ I really meant ‘Canadian woman, I prefer you.’ It was all a happy accident.”

Heh. Upon the single’s release “American Woman” quickly raced to number one on the Billboard chart, moving on from there to worldwide commercial success and writing the Guess Who into the hitmaker-history book forever.

The music biz is just brim-full of fascinating, fun stories like those; that’s among many other factors that attracted me so intensely from a very early age, inspiring me to devote my entire life to chasing that most beautiful of dreams. Plenty of barbed hooks to be found in the briny deeps of the musician’s world, I assure you, and once they’re set in ya there just ain’t no wriggling off of ‘em. As I recently said in a comments-section response to a Quora query concerning the cons of playing the guitar:

The biggest “con” of all: it’s TOTALLY addictive. Back when I was taking students, if it was a newbie first thing I’d tell them was, “sell the guitar now and walk away. Otherwise, it’ll get in your blood and you’ll never have a pot to piss in for the rest of your life.” None of them took my sage advice, go figure.

With the guys who already knew how to play and just wanted me to teach them my own particular style, I didn’t bother saying anything. I knew they were lost already, and would never, ever recover. 😉

S’truth, and I know whereof I speak on this one. Learning to play; training yourself up to proficiency; screwing up the nerve to climb up onto a stage and play before an audience for the very first time; getting used to committing that unnatural act until you’ve reached the point where the stage is the one and only place in all the world where you feel truly alive, truly yourself—tougher to kick than heroin, that is, but a WAY better, more enjoyable high. Plus, there’s not all that puking right after you geeze up to contend with, either.

Yep, it’s a sickness, that’s what it is.

Slapback

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Mo’ bettah fallout from Tucker’s interview with Russell Brand, previously covered here.

Tucker Carlson: Entire American media, including Fox News, lying about Jan. 6
Jan. 6, 2021 “was not an insurrection. It was not armed, and its purpose was not an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government,” Tucker Carlson said in his first interview since leaving Fox News.

While major media continue to push the “deadly insurrection” narrative, Carlson said in an interview with Russell Brand on Friday that “the more time passed, it’s now been two and a half years, it becomes really obvious that core claims they made about January 6 were lies.”

Carlson went on to say: “The amount of lying around January 6th, and it was obvious in the tapes that I showed, is really distressing. And anyone who is covering for those lies should be ashamed of themself. And that would include almost the entire American Media, including Fox News.”

Carlson said there “were people at Fox News” who were angry at him for airing the video from Jan. 6 that was released to his staff by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

“If you think I’m cherry picking, taking it out of context, show me where,” Carlson added.

Included in the video that Carlson aired prior to his firing by Fox News was that of the so-called “Q Anon Shaman” Jacob Chansley. Chansley was sentenced to prison after essentially being escorted by police through the Capitol as if he were a VIP tourist, Carlson told Brand. “To put Jacob Chansley, an American citizen, a Navy veteran, in jail for years after he was let into the Senate chamber by uniformed Capitol Hill police officers and then I play that and I’m the bad guy?”

Well, I mean, DUH, Tucker. To the Swamp-state Powers That Be—Uniparty politicos, FedGovCo bureaucreeps, thug Stasi agents both federal and local, Enemedia—who all have an obvious vested interest in keeping the phonus-balonus J6 narrative alive and kicking and the truth about it dead and deeply buried, you ARE the bad guy. Take it for the badge of honor and backasswards compliment it actually is; it’s in no way a bad thing to have the very worst of the worst aligned against you.

What if…?

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You’ll never in a million years guess who the author of this brilliantly-conceived and -written piece is. I mean, never.

The quaint conceit of imagining what would have happened if some important or unimportant event had settled itself differently has become so fashionable that I am encouraged to enter upon an absurd speculation. What would have happened if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg?

Once a great victory is won it dominates not only the future but the past. All the chains of consequence clink out as if they never could stop. The hopes that were shattered, the passions that were quelled, the sacrifices that were ineffectual are all swept out of the land of reality. Still it may amuse an idle hour, and perhaps serve as a corrective to undue complacency, if at this moment in the twentieth century—so rich in assurance and prosperity, so calm and buoyant—we meditate for a spell upon the debt we owe to those Confederate soldiers who by a deathless feat of arms broke the Union front at Gettysburg and laid open a fair future to the world.

It always amuses historians and philosophers to pick out the tiny things, the sharp agate points, on which the ponderous balance of destiny turns; and certainly the details of the famous Confederate victory of Gettysburg furnish a fertile theme. There can be at this date no conceivable doubt that Pickett’s charge would have been defeated if Stuart with his encircling cavalry had not arrived in the rear of the Union position at the supreme moment. Stuart might have been arrested in his decisive swoop if any one of twenty commonplace incidents had occurred.

If, for instance, General Meade had organized his lines of communication with posts for defence against raids, or if he had used his cavalry to scout upon his flanks, he would have received a timely warning. If General Warren had only thought of sending a battalion to hold Little Round Top the rapid advance of the masses of Confederate cavalry must have been detected. If only President Davis’s letter to General Lee, captured by Captain Dahlgren, revealing the Confederacy plans had reached Meade a few hours earlier, he might have escaped Lee’s clutches.

Anything, we repeat, might have prevented Lee’s magnificent combinations from synchronizing and, if so, Pickett’s repulse was sure. Gettysburg would have been a great Northern victory. It might have well been a final victory. Lee might, indeed, have made a successful retreat from the field. The Confederacy, with its skilful generals and fierce armies, might have another year, or even two, but once defeated decisively at Gettysburg, its doom was inevitable. The fall of Vicksburg, which happened only two days after Lee’s immortal triumph, would in itself by opening the Mississippi to the river fleets of the Union, have cut the Secessionist States almost in half. Without wishing to dogmatize, we feel we are on solid ground in saying that the Southern States could not have survived the loss of a great battle in Pennsylvania and the almost simultaneous bursting open of the Mississippi

However, all went well. Once again by the narrowest of margins the compulsive pinch of military genius and soldierly valor produced a perfect result. The panic which engulfed the whole left of Meade’s massive army has never been made a reproach against the Yankee troops. Everyone knows they were stout fellows. But defeat is defeat, and rout is ruin. Three days only were required after the cannon at Gettysburg had ceased to thunder before General Lee fixed his headquarters in Washington. We need not here dwell upon the ludicrous features of the hurried flight to New York of all the politicians, place hunters, contractors, sentimentalists and their retinues, which was so successfully accomplished. It is more agreeable to remember how Lincoln, “greatly falling with a falling State,” preserved the poise and dignity of a nation. Never did his rugged yet sublime common sense render a finer service to his countrymen. He was never greater than in the hour of fatal defeat.

But, of course, there is no doubt whatever that the mere military victory which Lee gained at Gettysburg would not by itself have altered the history of the world. The loss of Washington would not have affected the immense numerical preponderance of the Union States. The advanced situation of their capital and its fall would have exposed them to a grave injury, would no doubt have considerably prolonged the war; but standing by itself this military episode, dazzling though it may be, could not have prevented the ultimate victory of the North. It is in the political sphere that we have to look to find the explanation of the triumphs begun upon the battlefield.

Curiously enough, Lee furnishes an almost unique example of a regular and professional soldier who achieved the highest excellence both as a general and as a statesman. His ascendancy throughout the Confederate States on the morrow of his Gettysburg victory threw Jefferson Davis and his civil government irresistibly, indeed almost unconsciously, into the shade. The beloved and victorious commander, arriving in the capital of his mighty antagonists, found there the title deeds which enabled him to pronounce the grand decrees of peace. Thus it happened that the guns of Gettysburg fired virtually the last shots in the American Civil War.

…If Lee after his triumphal entry into Washington had merely been the soldier, his achievements would have ended on the battlefield. It was his august declaration that the victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy towards the African negroes, which was not in harmony with the moral conceptions of Western Europe, that opened the high roads along which we are now marching so prosperously.

But even this famous gesture might have failed if it had not been caught up and implemented by the practical genius and trained parliamentary aptitudes of Gladstone. There is practically no doubt at this stage that the basic principle upon which the colour question in the Southern States of America has been so happily settled owed its origin mainly to Gladstonian ingenuity and to the long statecraft of Britain in dealing with alien and more primitive populations. There was not only the need to declare the new fundamental relationship between master and servant, but the creation for the liberated slaves of institutions suited to their own cultural development and capable of affording them a different yet honourable status in a common wealth, destined eventually to become almost world-wide.

Let us only think what would have happened supposing the liberation of the slaves had at that time been followed immediately by some idiotic assertion of racial equality, and even by attempts to graft white democratic institutions upon the simple, gifted African race belonging to a much earlier chapter in human history. We might have seen the whole of the Southern States invaded by gangs of carpet-bagging politicians exploiting the ignorant and untutored coloured vote against the white inhabitants and bringing the time-honoured forms of parliamentary government into unmerited disrepute. We might have seen the sorry farce of black legislatures attempting to govern their former masters. Upon the rebound from this there must inevitably have been a strong reassertion of local white supremacy. By one device or another the franchises accorded to the negroes would have been taken from them. The constitutional principles of the Republic would have been proclaimed, only to be evaded or subverted; and many a warm-hearted philanthropist would have found his sojourn in the South no better than “A Fool’s Errand.”

Read on to find out who the author of this sagaciously prescient essay is, then go grab a look at the fascinating backstory of how it came to be written in the first place, including a piercing prefatory quote from no lesser a light than Shelby Foote his own self. From the previously mentioned backstory article, a shimmering vision of a nascent Utopia is proposed, in stark juxtaposition with something a good deal…less felicitous, shall we say.

The reader is invited to see, from that surprisingly utopian perspective, our own world as both dystopian and implausible. The narrator mentions Jan Bloch’s once-famous book, The Future of War, which predicted with what proved remarkably accurate military detail the devastation that would attend war between major European states. But Bloch drew from this prediction the conclusion that such a war would never happen. (The author) asks: Suppose it had? A prostrate Europe might have descended into depression, unemployment, Bolshevism and fascism. Why, today in Britain the income tax might even be 25%! (In actuality, of course, all those things happened.)

Parenthetical aside in the penultimate sentence courtesy of moi, so as to preserve the secret of our mystery-author’s identity and thereby avert spoiling the surprise for you folks.

Taken for all in all, the whole thing is dispiriting enough to call to mind the wise words of John Greenleaf Whittier from his “Maud Muller” pome:

Of all sad words of tongue and pen
The saddest are these, “It might have been.”

Le sigh. Ah well, as I said yesterday, it all went the way it went—and so, here we all are. Whether that’s for better or for worse, I leave to the reader to determine.

Be sure to read both these fine works in their entirety, and in the order I linked ‘em. I won’t go quite so far as to say you’ll enjoy them, necessarily; in fact, parts of the first piece are almost painful to read, for reasons which I’ll refrain from going into now because spoilers again, but which will quickly become apparent. That said, both are thought-provoking and conversation-inspiring enough that I think you’ll find them very rewarding nonetheless.

Pickett’s Charge

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Borepatch reposts an oldie but goodie on the swift and sudden ebbing of the Confederate High Tide.

Robert E. Lee is without doubt one of the greatest generals these shores have ever seen – arguably the greatest of all. And so I’ve always been mystified why he ordered General George Pickett to lead 12,500 of the South’s finest troops across nearly a mile of open ground against fortified Union lines, that July 3 afternoon so long ago.

The lesson of Fredricksburg from the previous year should have told him what to expect. General Longstreet had learned that lesson, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade his commander to call off the assault. Overcome with emotion – a premonition of slaughter, really – he couldn’t even speak the final order to advance, but merely nodded assent to Pickett’s request to charge. When the stragglers returned to their lines, General Lee (worried that the Yankees might charge to follow up their success) asked Pickett to rally his Division. Pickett replied, General Lee, I have no Division.

The War Between The States (“Civil War” to Yankees) was a brutal affair, where the weaponry had advanced faster than the tactics. It remains to this day the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history, with more casualties than any other war we’ve fought. When you consider how much the population has grown since the mid-nineteenth century, it was even worse.

The psychological scars of that war were to linger for a generation or more. The sense of loss – needless loss – is perhaps summed up by Pickett’s Charge. William Faulkner captured this sense in Intruder In The Dust:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances…

Pickett never forgave Lee. Asked many years later why the charge failed, he replied that he thought that the Yankees had something to do with the outcome. He might have said that Lee had, too.

A few notable quotes from some of the men who were there:

I think that this is the strongest position on which to fight a battle that I ever saw.
—Winfield Scott Hancock, surveying his position on Cemetery Ridge

It is my opinion that no 15,000 men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.
—James Longstreet to Robert E. Lee, surveying Hancock’s position

This is a desperate thing to attempt.
—Richard Garnett to Lewis Armistead, prior to Pickett’s Charge

The fault is entirely my own.
—Robert E. Lee to George Pickett, after the Charge.

Almost to a man, all of Lee’s most reliable and trusted subordinates, foremost among them the eminently competent and formidable GEN Longstreet, were shocked and horrified at Lee’s uncharacteristic folly in ordering Pickett’s division to attack Hancock’s essentially unassailable position in the Union center atop Cemetery Ridge.

Having spent most of my “adult” (HA!) life intently studying Civil War history, reading everything I could get my hot little hands on from the time I was about fifteen or so, there’s another contributing factor that I consider probably the overriding one: CSA cavalry commander JEB Stuart’s ill-advised ride all the way around Meade’s army, a blunder driven by Stuart’s personal vanity which left Lee blind as to the enemy’s numbers, dispositions, and intentions and thus figured tremendously in the bitter, costly outcome.

At this point (ie, June 28th—M), Stuart had crossed the Potomac and uncovered the enemy’s movements (although unbeknownst to him, his courier had not reached Lee). He had captured a variety of goods, destroyed enemy property, and generally made a nuisance of himself. Yet all of this came at a cost. He was now approximately eighty miles southeast of the Confederate army, and the Federal army stood between him and Lee. He had yet to link up with Richard Ewell’s corps as his orders dictated. Worse, his ability to communicate with Lee was circuitous and precarious at best. Robert E. Lee, in turn, was “surprised and disturbed” to learn on June 27th that Stuart and his troopers were still in Virginia. Lee ordered scouts to try and locate his lost general. There was a growing, uneasy disconnect between Lee and his cavalry commander.

Jeb Stuart having crossed the Potomac, he found himself at a crossroads. Instead of turning northwest to attempt to unite with Lee and Ewell, he decided to continue his raid and turn east. Moving to Rockville, a Washington D.C. suburb, Stuart captured 125 Union supply wagons, loaded with food, hay, bread, bacon crackers and more. Thinking in bigger terms, Stuart contemplated then dismissed the possibility of striking Washington itself. Having by now captured nearly 400 Union prisoners up to this point, Stuart took some time to parole them, then plodded northward with his newly captured wagon train throughout the rest of the 28th and 29th. The splashier his raid, the further away Brandy Station seemed.

On the 29th, while his men cut telegraph wires and tore up the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Stuart discovered that the enemy was in Frederick, Maryland. The move seems to have jolted Stuart, who realized the sudden importance of uniting with Lee “to acquaint the commanding general with the nature of the enemy’s movements…” Finally, Stuart recognized just how serious the Union movements were, and just how imperative his presence with the Army of Northern Virginia had become.

By now, Stuart was actively searching to unite with Ewell, but didn’t know where to find him. Believing Ewell to be in Carlisle, Stuart set off for that town, only to discover that it was occupied not by Ewell but instead 2,400 Union militiamen. Threatening to shell the town if the Yankees didn’t surrender, “shell away and be damned!” came the reply. So shell away Stuart did, opening fire on the town. The Confederates were so exhausted that many of the troops slept through the bombardment.

Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee, only thirty miles away, remained unsure of Stuart’s whereabouts. Inquiries to subordinates brought only disappointment. An aide overheard Lee grumble that “Gen’l Stuart has not complied with his instructions.” Finally, one of Stuart’s riders located Ewell’s corps in Gettysburg, and returned to Stuart with orders to march for the town. This was the first communication that Stuart or Lee’s army had with one another since June 25. In that time, the Army of Northern Virginia had blindly moved north and found itself unwittingly trapped in an engagement at Gettysburg.

In the morning hours of July 2nd, Jeb Stuart made his way to General Lee. “Well, General Stuart,” Lee said simply, “you are here at last.” However muted, the rebuke no doubt stung. Stuart and Lee’s conversation was, according to an aide, “painful beyond description.”

Muted, perhaps, but coming from the quiet, calm, gentle-spoken Lee amounted to an extremely sharp condemnation indeed—a fact with which Stuart was all too well acquainted.

That said, Lee’s crushing defeat on the third day of battle at Gettysburg, capped off by the pointless disaster of Pickett’s Charge, was in fact brought about by numerous conditions and precipitating events and is not fairly attributable to any single cause, man, or decision: among those, the loss of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville in May looms especially large.

In the end, though, it all went the way it went. Who can say, really, even with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight? Much as I hate to do it, I just gotta include Mike Walsh’s paean to GEN US Grant here, dang his beady little eyes. But with a YUUUGE caveat, which will be revealed anon.

These first few days of July are of importance to every real American. Not simply because the Declaration of Independence was unanimously adopted by the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, the document in which the new United States of America proclaimed its irrevocable break with Great Britain. We rightly celebrate that momentous event in world history tomorrow, the Fourth of July, with fireworks and hot dogs and perhaps even a renewed sense of patriotism in these troubled times when the foundations of our country are under relentless attack from the cultural sappers of the universities all the way to the top of our political system, headed by a senile old man who can only remember the grudges he bears toward the country he now ostensibly leads, and for which he has no love.

Of equal importance in our history, however, are the two epic battles fought during the same period in 1863, during the Civil War. Today is the third day of Gettysburg, the day when Pickett’s Charge spelled the end of southern dash in the face of the north’s overwhelming pluck and endurance, a mad suicidal race across a open field raked by Springfield rifles and twelve-pounder “Napoleons” cannon fire. It was the southern commander Robert E. Lee’s greatest blunder of the war, ending his brief invasion of the north and helping to seal the South’s ultimate defeat.

“Overwhelming pluck and endurance”? Well, okay, sure. But of far greater importance was the North’s overwhelming superiority in materiel, manufacturing, and able-bodied males of fighting age—advantages that would prove to be insuperable, and decisive.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Ulysses S. Grant was about to cement his place in military history by concluding his nearly two-month long siege of the formidable Confederate fortress of Vicksburg. The town sat high above the Mississippi River on the eastern bluffs, its artillery commanding the mighty river in both directions. Behind it, to the east, were the forces of the breakaway Confederate state of Mississippi itself. The task looked impossible. But Grant was already an experienced hand at river warfare, having proved his mettle early with the victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, working in tandem with the gunboats of flag officer Andrew Foote.

With his victories at Shiloh in 1862, which put the Tennessee River in Union hands, and at Vicksburg, Grant had twice bisected the Confederacy. It was the “Anaconda” strategy of the retired General of the Army, Winfield Scott, made flesh. Then, in November, Grant marched east and broke the stalemate at Chattanooga, leaving Georgia wide open for invasion and, ultimately, Sherman’s march to the sea. Despite General George Meade’s repulse of Lee at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln’s choice for a new commander of all the Union forces was clear: in March of 1864, Lincoln summoned Grant to Washington and named him general-in-chief of the Union forces. The moment had met its man.

That Grant was the greatest American of all time is indisputable.

Yeah, NO. Grant’s claim to greatness was never really based upon his competence as a general, his tactical acumen, or his inborn adroitness as a leader of men, but on bulldog stubbornness and pugnacity; unswerving determination; and a willingness to pour out the lifeblood of the soldiers under his command like water over desert sands in the pursuit of ultimate victory. His military success wasn’t so much a matter of the happy marriage of talent to experience, then, but more of personality and deeply-ingrained habits of mind.

Grant, the “greatest American of all time”? Oh puh-LEEZE, Mike. Over men like Jefferson, Washington, Adams, then? Over Patton, Nathanael Greene, Audie Murphy? Claire Chennault, Chuck Yeager? Over the indomitable Samuel Whittemore, even? I got no real gripe with the man, I really don’t, even as what for many years I’ve proudly referred to as an Unreconstructed Southron I don’t. But really, now: with a list of names like those as fellow contenders for the title, Grant wasn’t even “indisputably” the greatest American soldier of all time.

Update! Finally finished reading Walsh’s piece, after walking away in frustration and pique at the preposterous remark I just dispensed with above, and I must say I have no quibble at all with the closer:

Grant was there for his country in its hour of need. Now that a new, even deadlier threat has emerged thanks to the neo-Marxist Left that considers our entire country illegitimate, who will take his place? Only one thing is certain: he has to crush them as mercilessly as Grant crushed the South, except this time there can be no magnanimity, only unconditional surrender.

Amen to that, buddy, with big ol’ bells and a pretty bow on top.

Reading list update! Having mentioned being a life-long Civil War history buff, I feel compelled to commend to your gracious attention the works of the foremost writer and scholar on the topic: the truly remarkable Shelby Foote, in particular his spellbinding, magnificent magnum opus The Civil War: A Narrative.

I’ve read ‘em all; from Bruce Catton to Samuel Mitcham to you name it, I probably have it in the rickety ol’ bookshelf. Foote stands head and shoulders above them all, no question; for something that most would probably consider a dull, dry, overchewed subject at this point, Foote’s masterful writing chops; his insight; his encompassing grasp of the issues, the people, the times, and the battles themselves are simply beyond compare.

He truly brings the historical record to flesh and blood life for the contemporary reader; even if you have little interest in the subject, you’ll find this masterpiece impossible to put down. And even if you consider yourself quite knowledgable already about this pivotal event in American history, I guarantee you’ll learn something you never knew about before from the Foote books. Yes, they really are that good. This 10-minute vidya discourse on Pickett’s Charge, G-burg in general, and the present-day political wrangling over the Confederate Battle Flag ought to tell you all you’ll ever need to know about the man’s ready, marrow-deep knowledge of all things Civil War.

I decided long ago that if somehow I was required to get rid of all my books except one, I’d keep Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. Yes, it’s a three-volume set, but if I wasn’t allowed some sort of consideration for that I’d say to hell with it, just go ahead and kill me now then.

The little coup that couldn’t

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Was the Prigozhin Putsch a Putin put-up job?

The unexpected thing that happened however was Putin transferred a large number of Tactical Nuclear Weapons to Belarus.

Now why the fuck did they do that?

I think I have an idea.

So…Wagner had some ‘issues’ with the MOD and Priggy got all riled up on the regular…yelling screaming, various ‘incidents’ that were, oddly enough publicized by the Russians themselves, which had the NATO kids and the Krainians all happy as it showed ‘fractures’ in the SMO and it’s most effective group Wagner. Wagner being a Private Military Company, not fully subordinate to the MoD, but hey…they did do the majority of the heavy lifting.

Now. Not getting into the whole breakdown of the “Who How Where and Why” of this mutiny. What I noticed was the pattern of it…Priggy and his boys, with very little interference from the “Regular Army” started marching North towards Moscow with the “intent of throwing Shoigu and Gerasimov out” and possibly taking control of Russia itself and throwing Putin out completely.

Needless to say, the US and the Krain practically nutted on themselves on the word of this coming out, but there’s also some word leaking that they (NATO et. al.) had a hand in this and had paid off Priggy to do this exact thing…we’ll never know the truth but the RUMINT is flying around out there…

Either way, what got MY attention was where Priggy and his boys had stopped on their Magical Mutiny Tour:

Looking on Google Erf, Elets or Yelets has a major East-West Highway which hooks onto another major highway…now, supposedly Wagner and Prigozhin have accepted “exile” in Belarus. And the reports are they stopped in Elets, hooked a left, and drove down into Belarus…word is it about 25k troops that went with him, with about another 10k staying behind.

Now, to me?

Putin doesn’t let reporters who say bad things about him in the news live.

Why the fuck isn’t Priggy and his boys being jailed or at least Prigozhin himself? Putins killed for a hell of a lot less offenses. And then, as it’s been stated before, the fact that the Russian DotMil essentially didn’t raise a finger to stop him? Granted there were a couple of choppers and planes ‘supposedly’ shot down, but that, to me remains to be seen, as the propaganda these days? Almost impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I do know and have gotten word on where Wagner did end up:

The NATO Kids and everyone was so thrilled at the idea of a Mutiny, how much you want to bet that they started moving equipment towards the southern Edge of the Battlespace with the intent of pushing (again) into the Kherson A.O.? Any bets they didn’t think this might be a head-fake?

‘Cos now they have the Russian Tip of The Spear sitting about a HOP-SKIP-AND-A-JUMP from the Heart of Kiev.

This “mutiny” was an active Markirovka that allowed Putin to move 25-35000 of his most hardcore fighters openly and publically to the very edge of Kiev, and NO ONE NOTICED OR REALIZED IT.

Well Played, if in fact this’s what was the case.

I’d say so, yeah. Not to worry though, the “Free” World is in the very best of hands; Biden’s Bunglers are on the case, and no doubt know exactly what they’re doing, here as everywhere else. I’m confident their countermove is going to be every bit as brilliant as their Sooperdoopergenius!™ ploy of getting the Ukraine-Russia prelude to “nooklear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies” underway to begin with was. Sing that sweet song of “victory” one more time for us, MAJ Kong!

If you’ve never seen Stanley Kubrick’s bitterly sardonic masterpiece Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb before, right about now would probably be a great time to remedy that deficiency in your education, I’m thinking. Y’know, before it’s too late, and little luxuries such as movie megaplexes, video rental kiosks, online streaming outlets, and Teh Innarnuts itself all become rare as teats on a boar hog.

Update! Aesop, as is his wont, begs to differ—YUUUUGELY. Who knows, really? The only thing we can safely assume is that nobody outside the directly-involved players in the Kremlin and the Wagner camp do for sure. Since Pedo Jaux Biden doesn’t even know what year it is anymore, and “his” team of soi disant “intellectuals” and “elites” are likewise clueless mouthbreathers themselves, it’s a lead-pipe cinch that they certainly don’t. Me, I‘m with the meme a hunnert and ten percent.

NotRootinForPutin

Ever more interesting update! Most intriguing take to date would have to be Kim Dotcom’s. Entertaining as all get-out, too.


I like it. I really, really like it. Well done, DDC. Via Dave Renegade and GP.

The Black Knight

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Another stunning find from what I now consider to be the greatest email list there is, was, or ever will be.

Is it true that there is an ancient alien satellite which is known as the ‘Black Knight’?
Yes. In fact, the reason we know it exists is that photos of it were taken during manned space missions in 1998.

It has been reported that it appears and disappears, does not show up on radar, it changes shape and it was in an orbit that was stable – meaning it had been there for a long time. This was reported to be known that neither we nor the Russians had put this into space.

As a result of these reports, it supposedly became the object of study by a lot of people and organizations around the world. Over the years, various researchers, news reporters, Youtube videos and amateur astronomers have made various claims about it.

It was reported to have first been seen and reported in 1958 – about the time of Sputnik but others have said it shows up in ancient writings as much as 13,000 years ago. It has also been reported that radio signals emanate from it and that Nikola Tesla was able to receive and decrypt those signals in 1898.

The generally accepted theory is that because we did not know what it was or who put it up there, it was seen as a threat to be analyzed and monitored. This went on for years during which time it was not seen for long period of time. Meanwhile, our technology for tracking and photography got better and better so the next time it was seen, it was tracked and photographed extensively. All the data was sent to the Air Force center for analysis by the best methods possible. Or at least that is what has been reported.

Those reports state that all that analysis paid off. They finally determined what it was and where it came from.

Fascinating, no? Read on for the slightly, ummm, deflating conclusion (yeah, I know—sorry, I couldn’t resist). Pics and vid included.

Amusingly enough, a while back I read a sci-fi novel about a mysterious object yclept “the Red Knight” which, thanks to the above, I now realize was a fictional analogue to the Black Knight of legend, which at the time I hadn’t ever heard of.

This Red Knight, see, was on its way to crash-landing somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, sparking a race to recover it amongst several sinister factions possessed of varying degrees of ill intent. As things worked out, the Red Knight had originally been put into geosynchronous orbit as Earth’s sole effective defense against some malicious entity which wouldn’t or perhaps couldn’t approach us as long as the Red Knight remained present and on the job to fend his malevolent ass off. Thus, the Good Guys had to obtain the object and get it back into orbit as quickly as possible, before the alien planet-devouring entity learned it had fallen and made its move against our lovely Blue Marble.

I remember enjoying the book, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called or who authored the blasted thing. Seems like maybe it was part of an ongoing series, I’m thinking. MR Forbes, perhaps? I dunno, seems like the kind of thing he might write.

Triumphant update! HAAAAA! I found it, I found it! Turns out it was “Red Knight Falling,” one of author Craig Schaefer’s fantastic Harmony Black/Vigilant Lock series of novels, all of which I absolutely love. The Amazon write-up:

FBI agent Harmony Black and her team, Vigilant Lock, face a new type of threat: one from beyond the stars.

They’d always heard the Red Knight was an urban legend: in 1954, three years before Sputnik launched, a mysterious satellite was sighted circling Earth, though no power on the planet had such technology.

But the Red Knight is real, and what’s more, it’s inextricably linked to a supernatural force no one yet understands. Like a moth to a flame, this dark presence collides annually with the airborne satellite. Except this year the Red Knight is on course to crash-land…in Oregon.

Vigilant Lock sets out to find the crash site and secure the remnants before the mysterious power is drawn to Earth. But they soon discover the mission is far from straightforward—and they aren’t the only ones tracking the Red Knight. To stop a deadly occult threat, Harmony and her team must use all their resources: technology and sorcery, science and magic. Fortunately, Harmony has only begun to discover her growing power.

I highly recommend all the books in the Harmony Black series, along with Schaefer’s very-much-related Daniel Faust series. They’re all fun, gripping reads, if you’re into that sort of thing at all. Schaefer’s Amazon bio, from the same page:

About the Author
Craig Schaefer’s books have taken readers to the seamy edge of a criminal underworld drenched in shadow through the Daniel Faust series; to a world torn by war, poison, and witchcraft by way of the Revanche Cycle series; and across a modern America mired in occult mysteries and a conspiracy of lies in the new Harmony Black series. Despite this, people say he’s strangely normal. He lives in Illinois with a small retinue of cats, all of whom try to interrupt his writing schedule and/or kill him on a regular basis. He practices sleight of hand in his spare time, although he’s not very good at it.

The occult; Vegas intrigue; cracked-open interstices between Earthly reality and Hell itself; official governing boards staffed and chaired by demons which require incredible feats of human derring-do performed by a slick Vegas magician who has some very powerful cards up his sleeve, all while managing his love-affair with one of those demons, a beautiful shape-shifting wench named Caitlin whose uncle is in a power-struggle with…aww, never mind, I’m getting too far afield with this.

I ask you, though, what’s not to like? I repeat: highly, highly recommended. With all my heart and, um, soul, you might even say.

Another ‘Zon bio for Schaefer can be found here, author’s own website here.

Braggadocious update! Not to pat myself on the back unduly or anything, but I just had a thought.

  • Steers to some top-quality fiction about Hell, demons, seedy-but-slick Vegas magicians, conniving space aliens, ’n’ shit
  • Fun-with-linguistics challenges
  • Brutal, heartless rips on the sudden undoing of the now-defunct Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ doomsay narrative and those who’ve pimped it
  • Extended ruminations on secession
  • RAYCISS™ diatribes
  • Bare-knuckles exposes of the literally-Satanic nature of FederalGovCo
  • Godawful post-title jokes
  • Cool write-ups on old music, old cars, and old Harleys
  • Professional wrasslin’, boxing, and street-brawling
  • Unbowdlerized cussing rendered with style, aplomb, and elegance—nossirreebob, there ain’t any of that gingerly, annoying *** mincing-around here, and ain’t never gonna be neither; as they say about getting old, this blog ain’t for pussies

And most of those within just the past few days, too. I gots to say that even after lo, these many years, the free ice cream here at Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge still offers the best bang for your blog-buck in the whole dang ‘sphere. No need to thank me, gang, I’m happy to do it for y’all.

Helpful update! Forgot to do it before, but here’s the link to the Daniel Faust series, which I also wholeheartedly recommend.

How many Epsteins have there been?

Posted on      by     

FederalGovCo: murdering politically-inconvenient prisoners in their cells and absurdly claiming their deaths were actually “suicides” since 1995.

Last January, Tucker Carlson featured a segment that challenged the theory that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. He was not alone. Many doubt the official narrative. What the doubters don’t realize is how the press used the cover-up of a 1995 brutal prison homicide to facilitate the cover-up of Epstein’s (very likely) homicide.

On August 21, 1995, Kenneth Michael Trentadue was found dead in his allegedly suicide-proof cell at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City. Pieces of his skull were missing in three different places. There were deep bruises underneath his arms, including bruises shaped like a person’s fingertips running along his biceps. His knuckles were deeply bruised and swollen.

According to the government, Trentadue’s appalling injuries resulted from his hanging himself in that “suicide-proof” cell during a 24-minute interval between bed checks. The FBI and the DOJ successfully made their suicide fantasy the accepted narrative about Trentadue’s death.

The only person who wasn’t fooled was Kenneth Trentadue’s brother, Jessie Trentadue, a trial lawyer in Salt Lake City who kept challenging the government’s lies. What he could not figure out was what triggered the violent assault. That issue was addressed in the Rohrabacher Report, which examined the many controversies surrounding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It turns out it may have been a case of mistaken identity:

Bank robber Richard Guthrie claimed that he would soon be revealing information that would blow the lid off the Oklahoma City bombing case. The next day, he was found dead, hanging in his cell, purportedly a suicide. This suspicious “suicide” mirrored the similar death of Kenneth Trentadue, another prisoner, who may have been tangentially and incorrectly linked to the Oklahoma City bombing. The death of these two prisoners, who happened to be very similar in appearance, is more than disturbing. (Emphasis added.)

According to the FBI, Richard Guthrie was a member of the Midwest Bank robbers gang that reportedly shared stolen monies with Timothy McVeigh to help fund the Oklahoma City bombing. Trentadue may have been beaten to death by prison guards because they mistook him for Guthrie.

There’s more to this gruesome story, all of it revolting, appalling, and just scary as all hell. Even more sobering is that, in all likelihood, such atrocities possibly date back to well before 1995; in fact, knowing the kind of government we have long had and the nature of the monsters working within it—particularly in the ludicrously-misnomered Department of “Justice”—I think it a dead certainty that they do.

The most sobering aspect of all? Another dead cert: the longer we sit on our fat, comfy asses and just docilely put up with it, the worse it will get—and the more extreme the measures taken to correct it will have to be, until “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out” is not merely an amusing slogan and/or CF post category, but becomes something more along the lines of a mandate, even a way of life.

Speaking of post categories, I think it’s high time I updated the “Life in the O!gulag” category with a new name: “Life (and/or death) in the Amerikan gulag.”

One of these things is not is JUST like the other

Posted on      by     

Sgt Mom sounds off, five by five.

Some days ago, Buck T. at Ace of Spades HQ linked to this essay regarding the great Satanic Day Care Abuse Panic, and how elements of that exercise in public/law enforcement/media insanity duplicates many of the features of the current Trans-Kids! Eleventy!!! panic. Which it does, in some respects, especially in how the establishment news media elevated the panic …because that’s what the media do: Scare the ever-living-snot out of the reading/viewing public because that is what sells issues and page views. Once the panic-train gets going, every cynical exploiter of the panic wants to leap aboard the current trend.

There are some differences, though. It’s not just so-called child-abuse therapists and ambitious law-enforcement on the make, as it eventually turned out with Satanic Panic. Now it’s a particularly vicious combine; messed-up adults wanting to generate a good supply of similarly messed up juniors so as to have their pick of sexual partners down the line, deranged parents looking for social kudos among their peers, and teens going through the awkward stage being influenced by social media to no good end. It has also been suggested in a couple of different comment threads that it’s an out for white teens and pre-teens being blamed for everything imaginable under the sun. They can climb a couple of more levels above their status as white oppressors by joining another and slightly higher class of the so-called oppressed. The current trans-fad also gives a perfect out for messed up adults to get a sexual kick out of displaying their particular kinks in front of an audience – no matter if it is their kindergarten class, the genuine women in a gym changing room or a Target bathroom. And let’s not forget how a certain class of medical specialists appear eager to ensure a long and substantial income stream, from ministering at a profit to those patients who have actually signed on to an unending round of hormones and surgery – surgeries which don’t appear from the testimonies of those unfortunates who opted for them in haste and now have repented at leisure.

As for me, my flag is nailed to the mast. One cannot change sex. It’s in your DNA, and obvious (for all but an unfortunate few) at the moment of development in the womb. Live as you want; put on a dress, grow your hair long, put on makeup and call yourself Loretta. It changes nothing about your DNA.

I’m with ya one hunnerd and ten percent on that one, Sarge. Having been well past the age of majority back when it occurred, I vividly remember the Great Satanic Panic hysteria my own self. The differences between then and now are there all right, and they’re quite real. But the biggest difference, and probably the most damaging of them in terms of societal harmony and cohesion, is that today the volume of such media-manufactured panics is greatly amplified by social media, ubiquitous cell phones and tablets, and the Innarnutz itself—where hysteria can easily travel around the globe two or three times before the truth has even had time to find its boots, much less get them on.

Another major difference looming large over all of us is that back then, the Enemedia monolith hadn’t gone wholly over to the side of Leftist delusion, deceit, and batshit insanity—or at least were a lot more cautious about putting their in-built bias proudly on display for one and all to see. Y’know, as it has now.

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

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