Category: Alternative History

If Hitler had won the Civil War…

“This is the most important thread you can read following what happened last night”

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So sayeth the fine folks over at Not The Bee, and they might well be onto something.

Some post-election thoughts:

1- Everything I have been saying about democracy was vindicated last night. The fact that such a massive number of people voted for more of the same after two years of horrific mismanagement shows that it is unfit to choose its own leaders.

2- Public education and its consequences have been a disaster for the American people. Any Christians that still think sending their children to public schools is a morally neutral choice are choosing national suicide.

2a- The damage is probably already irreversible at this point. The D’s staved off what should have been a bloodbath through the youth vote. The boomers and Xers can no longer counterbalance the pozzed generations electorally.

3- With such an advanced level of moral degeneracy, the best thing for the world is that American global influence wane rapidly, and it probably will. Our unique flavor of degeneracy seems to be bound up with a commitment to incompetence, and our global hegemon cannot last long.

Ahh, the elusive silver lining shows up at last. But Jefferson’s fabled “reign of witches” will NOT just “pass over” on its own; it will have to be ushered out, and quite forcefully. In the contemporary context, Jefferson’s profound wisdom doesn’t meet the case, as the rest of the passage shows (emphasis mine):

It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt…If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

What will it avail us to retain our principles, once all else is lost? Jefferson seems to have had the sequence exactly backwards this one time.

At this historic moment, it strikes me as surpassing strange that Jefferson, of all people, would counsel reliance on “luck” and “patience” instead of bold, vigorous action in defiance of corruption and raw tyranny. After all, this is the same man who also told us this:

What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms…What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.

One of these quotes is NOT like the other. Ah well; Thomas Jefferson, great as he inarguably was, was only human too. And no human can be right EVERY time.

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Giving the hornets’ nest a good, hard shake

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Hoo BOY, but Peters has really put his foot in it with this one.

Things have probably never been more dangerous than they are today. At least, not since  election day, 1860. Whatever the outcome of this election, it could result in something like what happened after that election.

Lincoln’s election was intolerable to the people of the South, which shortly after his election in 1860 began to form what became the Southern Confederacy and shortly after that, attempted to withdraw from what it, with cause, saw as a political system that not only did not represent its interests but which it saw, also rightly, as a system that could not represent its interests. That last being an important point rarely, if ever, discussed in the schools established by the government that forced the Southern states back into the “union.”

The North controlled the “union” politically and so actually because the North had the population and the money to dominate federal elections. And so the South had no way to redress its grievances within the construct of the “union.”

It was not the election of 1860, per se, that triggered the South’s attempt to withdraw but rather the realization that future elections would go similarly. What option does a minority have in a political system that is based upon majority rule? The choice is either acceptance of subordinate status and hope the master will be kind – or get away from the master.

It is exactly what the American colonies had done – and for same reasons and realizations – those “four score and seven” years before the election of 1860. Their successful attempt to withdraw from the union – with Great Britain – is celebrated by modern Americans, many of whom also think (if that is the right word) that the failed attempt by the people of the Southern Confederacy to do the same, for similar reasons and on exactly the same basis, in terms of the principle at issue – i.e., that of being governed by themselves rather than a distant people with whom they had increasingly little in common and who wielded political control over them that could not be redressed within the context of the “union” – was, somehow, a kind of crime.

And so, the Southern states – like the American colonies, which were also states – declared their political independence from the “union” and fought for it.

If today’s elections ensconce the power of the political Left, whether legitimately – in terms of the actual votes – or because the votes were jiggered with – the people who are not of the Left will have to face the awful realization that the Left is in perpetual control and that they no longer have any means, within the system, to combat it. That the oppression of the Left cannot be voted away.

It must be gotten away from – or submitted to. The latter being a condition as intolerable to those not of the Left as the subordination of the not-Left is to the Left. This is a matter of irreconcilable differences – and both sides know it, just as they knew it in 1860. Like a failed marriage, it is not what either party wanted at the beginning. But it is what it has become and there is no fixing it except by separating the estranged or forcing the estranged to endure one another in a state of mutual, endless hatred.

That’s about the size of it, yeah. His analysis is perfectly correct, from premise to conclusion, right down the line—and for that heinous atrocity, certain of us will never forgive him. Eric, bless his workaholic heart, has posted a sort of companion piece/post-mort today, which is also well worth a read.

The Bolsonaro’ing of Arizona – and America?
The reference being to the loss at the ballot box of someone who appeared to be far more popular than his opponent and certain to win. Just like the Orange Man.

Until the votes were counted.

The Bolsonaro’ing of Lake being especially similar and even more suspicious in that her opponent was more than just her opponent. Katie Hobbs is also, conveniently, Arizona’s secretary of state, which means she is the state official who has legal oversight and so power over…Arizona’s elections. Including her own. This being kind of like having your estranged spouse’s attorney handle your divorce settlement. For this reason, Hobbs will never be acknowledged as the legitimately elected governor of the state, by millions of people in the state – even if a majority of people did vote for her rather than Lake.

This being catastrophic for “our democracy,” if those who say that cared about that.

What was on the ballot yesterday – and not just in Arizona – was the legitimacy of the system itself rather than who was running for office. The Left may have succeeded in diverting the “red wave” that had been predicted – and which in some cases, as in AZ, seemed certain. But it did so in such a way that the results will only further heighten suspicions that the fix was in, again.

Kari Lake wasn’t just ahead of Katie Hobbs in every poll. She was well-ahead of Hobbs in every poll taken since early October. How does a 3-4 percent lead (in the polls) become a 2 percent loss? Maybe because the polls were wrong. Or maybe because the votes weren’t right. Even if they were, many of those who didn’t vote for Hobbs will never believe the votes were right because of the fact that Hobbs was in a position to assure they were “right.”

Similar uneasiness percolates generally. With reason.

With GOOD reason, INDISPUTABLE reason, more like. Read both the linked pieces, they’re par for Eric Peters’ usual high standard of excellence.

It’s quite painful to have to admit it, but since Our Side always rakes the DemonRats for their extreme resistance to undertaking any honest self-examination after losing an election—a circumstance that’s become more and more rare with every passing biennial—seems to me that after yesterday’s Red Flop squib some soul-searching might well be in order for Our Side this time.

Atop the list of necessary adjustments is a rose-tinted misperception I used to complain about all the time back when Rush Limbaugh repeatedly touted it on-air: the idea that, as he always put it, America is a “conservative-majority nation.” Claptrap, pure and uncut, and the sooner we all wrap our heads around that fact the better off we’ll be. Really, how could any serious person imagine otherwise, after six-seven decades of a dismayingly successful Long March Through The Institutions, wherein several generations of American youth have been brainwashed into unquestioning acceptance of every tenet of hardcore Leftist dogma? If we ever truly were a “conservative-majority nation,” we damned sure are no such thing now.

Which, after yesterday’s debacle, leaves us right back where we’ve long been: standing before the fabled Cartridge Box, all agape and aghast at just how we might ever have come to find ourselves in this sorriest of passes. Attribute it to whatever you like—chicanery, apathy, outright fraud—but yesterday’s sad repeat of what by now has come to seem an eternal cycle amounts to inescapable confirmation of something we don’t wish to admit but have long known just the same.

Yes, Virginia, there really IS no voting our way out of this.

Update! Steyn agrees with me, and has for quite a while now.

At SteynOnline we have been marking our twentieth birthday by strolling back through the archives. (For earlier entries, see below.) This morning we have reached 2008, when there really was a wave – blue, as waves generally are, but augmented by many, many conservative commentators eager to repudiate the Bush years. Here is how I began that year’s morning-after column:

‘Give me liberty or give me death!’

‘Live free or die!’

What’s that? Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just trying out slogans for the 2012 campaign and seeing which one would get the biggest laughs.

My Republican friends are now saying, oh, not to worry, look at the exit polls, this is still a ‘center-right’ country. Americans didn’t vote to go left, they voted to go cool. It was a ‘Dancing With The Stars’ election: Obama’s a star, and everyone wants to dance with him. It doesn’t mean they’re suddenly gung-ho for left-wingery.

Yeah, whatever gets you through the night. Nothing cool about the “President”; no star quality about Senator Fetterman, as we must learn to call him. The Biden-Pelosi decrepit gerontocracy has dissolved your citizenship at the southern border and shriveled your horizons on all fronts from unaffordable gas to unavailable baby formula. And the fathead right will still be bleating their bromides about “a center-right country”. Whatever the country is, the voting machines are “center-left”. Back in the real world, one consequence of last night is that Trump is likely not to run again, and ol’ Joe is – mainly because he could have a Fetterman-sized stroke tomorrow and a state funeral at the weekend, and the Dems would still bet they could get him across the finish line.

“Senator Fetterman.” Hard to believe, ain’t it? But if there were any further evidence needed to show just how badly broken and corrupt America’s “election” system truly is, that alone ought to be plenty enough to convince even the most dewey-eyed Pollyanna currently extant.

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Hearty congratulations to all involved

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A dark, disappointing day for those folks eagerly anticipating a Red Wave that never quite materialized, certainly, but not without its sunnier side all the same. First on the list of reasons for every American to stand up and cheer themselves hoarse: the honest, wise, and true voters in the Peach State have overwhelmingly reelected Stacy “MBT” Abrams to her second glorious term as Georgia’s governor!

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp Declared Winner Over Stacey Abrams

Waitwaitwait, WHAT? WHAAAT?!? How did THAT preposterous, counterfactual nonsense get up there? Stop LYING, you LYING LIAR BASTARDS!


NOOOO!!! What the fucking FUCK are you Fake News Election Denialist Tarrrumpapumpumkins trying to do to us here with these transparent fabrications, anyhow?!?


Sweet bleeding Christ on a pogo stick, it’s like one of those horrible bad dreams you just can’t wake up from, no matter what you do!

“No one in Georgia’s history has done more to create jobs, cut taxes, restore sanity to your schools, put criminals behind bars, protect the unborn, and secure all the God-given liberties enshrined in the Constitution of the United States than Gov. Brian Kemp,” former Vice President Mike Pence told a crowd in Georgia.

“We’ve been doing good in this day because we have been saying no to Stacey Abrams,” Kemp said. “We were listening to you, and because we’ve done that, we’ve got an incredible economy. We’ve got the most people ever working in the history of the state, the lowest unemployment rate in the history of the state.”

Stop it! For the love of God, will you people please just STOP IT ALREADY!!! I can’t even…good Lord, it’s as if…why, it’s…it’s…

AT LONG LAST, HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?!?

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Amerika v2.0’s energy future: ain’t none

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As laid out by our senile, decrepit, corrupt old pervert of a Pretend pResident.

Biden Keeps Promising To Make Energy More Expensive. Believe Him.

Precisely so. After all, it’s the only thing the rat-bastard has ever said that was actually true.

Yes, we’re going to make energy more expensive.

That’s Joe Biden’s closing message for 2022. “We’re going to be shutting these [coal] plants down all across America and having wind and solar,” Biden told a crowd in deep blue California on Friday, arguing that it was “cheaper” to generate electricity from wind and solar.

I’ve noted this before more than once here, but it bears revisiting now and again: the technology of the distant, long-dead past can never be adequate to meet the energy demands of modern industrialized economies.

The earliest-known references to windmills are to a Persian millwright in AD 644 and to windmills in Seistan, Persia, in AD 915. These windmills are of the horizontal-mill type, with sails radiating from a vertical axis standing in a fixed building, which has openings for the inlet and outlet of the wind diametrically opposite to each other. Each mill drives a single pair of stones directly, without the use of gears, and the design is derived from the earliest water mills. Persian millwrights, taken prisoner by the forces of Genghis Khan, were sent to China to instruct in the building of windmills; their use for irrigation there has lasted ever since.

The vertical windmill, with sails on a horizontal axis, derives directly from the Roman water mill with its right-angle drive to the stones through a single pair of gears. The earliest form of vertical mill is known as the post mill. It has a boxlike body containing the gearing, millstones, and machinery and carrying the sails. It is mounted on a well-supported wooden post socketed into a horizontal beam on the level of the second floor of the mill body. On this it can be turned so that the sails can be faced into the wind.

The next development was to place the stones and gearing in a fixed tower. This has a movable top, or cap, which carries the sails and can be turned around on a track, or curb, on top of the tower. The earliest-known illustration of a tower mill is dated about 1420. Both post and tower mills were to be found throughout Europe and were also built by settlers in America.

To work efficiently, the sails of a windmill must face squarely into the wind, and in the early mills the turning of the post-mill body, or the tower-mill cap, was done by hand by means of a long tailpole stretching down to the ground. In 1745 Edmund Lee in England invented the automatic fantail. This consists of a set of five to eight smaller vanes mounted on the tailpole or the ladder of a post mill at right angles to the sails and connected by gearing to wheels running on a track around the mill. When the wind veers it strikes the sides of the vanes, turns them and hence the track wheels also, which turn the mill body until the sails are again square into the wind. The fantail may also be fitted to the caps of tower mills, driving down to a geared rack on the curb.

Interesting enough as a historical study, no doubt, but there’s a reason windmills were in the main abandoned: because, as civilization progressed and technological advances were achieved one after another, something much better came along to replace them. As, y’know, tends to happen over time. As for solar panels, they are by no means anything new either.

It all began with Edmond Becquerel, a young physicist working in France, who in 1839 observed and discovered the photovoltaic effect— a process that produces a voltage or electric current when exposed to light or radiant energy. A few decades later, French mathematician Augustin Mouchot was inspired by the physicist’s work. He began registering patents for solar-powered engines in the 1860s. From France to the U.S., inventors were inspired by the patents of the mathematician and filed for patents on solar-powered devices as early as 1888.

Take a light step back to 1883 when New York inventor Charles Fritts created the first solar cell by coating selenium with a thin layer of gold. Fritts reported that the selenium module produced a current “that is continuous, constant, and of considerable force.” This cell achieved an energy conversion rate of 1 to 2 percent. Most modern solar cells work at an efficiency of 15 to 20 percent. So, Fritts created what was a low impact solar cell, but still, it was the beginning of photovoltaic solar panel innovation in America. Named after Italian physicist, chemist and pioneer of electricity and power, Alessandro Volta, photovoltaic is the more technical term for turning light energy into electricity, and used interchangeably with the term photoelectric.

…That same year (1888), a Russian scientist by the name of Aleksandr Stoletov created the first solar cell based on the photoelectric effect, which is when light falls on a material and electrons are released. This effect was first observed by a German physicist, Heinrich Hertz. In his research, Hertz discovered that more power was created by ultraviolet light than visible light. Today, solar cells use the photoelectric effect to convert sunlight into power. In 1894, American inventor Melvin Severy received patents 527,377 for an “Apparatus for mounting and operating thermopiles” and 527,379 for an “Apparatus for generating electricity by solar heat.” Both patents were essentially early solar cells based on the discovery of the photoelectric effect. The first generated “electricity by the action of solar heat upon a thermo-pile” and could produce a constant electric current during the daily and annual movements of the sun, which alleviated anyone from having to move the thermopile according to the sun’s movements. Severy’s second patent from 1889 was also meant for using the sun’s thermal energy to produce electricity for heat, light and power. The “thermos piles,” or solar cells as we call them today, were mounted on a standard to allow them to be controlled in the vertical direction as well as on a turntable, which enabled them to move in a horizontal plane. “By the combination of these two movements, the face of the pile can be maintained opposite the sun all times of the day and all seasons of the year,” reads the patent.

Uh huh…on each and every day the sun is shining, which is nothing like every day, not anywhere in the entire world. Then we get into the storage end of the solar-power equation, ie, batteries. Which, despite some genuine improvement over recent years, is a whole ‘nother kettle of expensive, unreliable, not-ready-for-prime-time fish, other than on a very small, private-home scale.

Ironic, is it not, that the very ones who have for so long insufferably claimed to have a corner on plumping for “new ideas” and “fresh concepts” and “progress”—even going so far, in their boundless hubris, as to misnomer themselves “Progressives”—are the selfsame ones who today insist that “the way of the Future” is to regress to the dim and distant past. Back to the Harsanyi piece for the sad, sorry denouement.

In California, which not only leads the nation in “clean energy” production but is leading the rest of us into rolling blackouts, residents pay 24.62 cents per kilowatt-hour for energy, around double the national average. There are only three other states where residents fork 20 or more cents over, the isolated Hawaii and Alaska and the frack-banning New York. The price of a gallon of gas in California is around two dollars over the national average, at $5.458. In Texas, it’s $3.173.

The president also forgot to mention that affordable natural gas, propelled by technological efficiencies like fracking, is as much a reason for the struggles of coal.

After West Virginia’s Joe Manchin groused about Biden’s denigration of his state’s top industry , the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “walked back” the comments, contending that the president’s “remarks yesterday have been twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended; he regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offense.”

How they were distorted, she did not say. The statement stresses that the president understands that “the men and women of coal country built this nation” but that, yes, we must shut down the coal industry — as well as the oil and gas production. Biden is sorry that you’re offended. “Our goal as a nation is to combat climate change and increase our energy security by producing clean and efficient American energy,” the statement falsely goes on to say. Wind and solar, both victims to vagaries of the weather, aren’t, by any definition, “efficient.”

The kerfuffle, as with most debates over gas and oil, is confusing. The administration’s stated goal — one of the major policy planks of the Democratic Party — is to deliberately, through mandates or bans or taxes or contrived “markets,” make fossil fuels prohibitively expensive to force a “transition.” Biden’s Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice promises that a 100 percent clean energy economy and net-zero emissions will exist no later than 2050. California has banned new gas-powered cars by 2035. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, supported by virtually every Democratic Party presidential candidate last time around, is far more extreme.

None of these climate plans can be implemented without the effective nationalization of the energy sector and the banning of fossil fuels. Solar, after decades of mandates and subsidies and cronyism, accounts for around 3 percent of the national portfolio. Both wind and solar need to be propped up by fossil fuel generation. In anything resembling a functioning market, “clean energy” loses, not only to oil, gas, and coal, but also to nuclear power.

Well, they need to be propped up by sustainable, plentiful fossil fuels if one assumes that the shitlib goal is to provide energy sufficient to heat and cool American homes, keep American fridges and freezers stocked and the sustenance within them unspoiled, invigorate our economy, and just generally keep Western Civ moving forward efficiently and affordably. Unfortunately for us all, there is no discernible sign to date that any such thing is their actual goal. Quite the opposite, in fact.

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The Great Divide

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Fran gets down to the nitty-gritty of it for us.

Well, it’s finally here: Election Day 2022. Until late this evening, those of us unwilling to break the law can know very little about what’s taking place. Unfortunately, there are quite a few who are willing to break the law. Whether they can cheat sufficiently to retain their grip on the federal Leviathan will be the determinant of much that follows. They managed it in 2020; we must not assume that they can’t do it again.

It’s part of the cleavage that has riven the American people into two mutually hostile camps.

The division isn’t principally a matter of ideology, or of attachment to particular government policies. It’s mainly about self-concept.

We in the Right mostly adhere to the original conception of the United States as The Land of the Free. There are a few paternalists among us, but the great majority of us simply want to be left alone in our private pursuits. In consequence, what we want from government at all levels is to stay the BLEEP! away from us. Keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off our wallets and stick to keeping order in the streets. We can manage our own affairs without your “help.”

Over there on the Left, they’re mainly persons who hold “an assumption of differential rectitude” (cf. Thomas Sowell). They regard themselves as our moral superiors. In their minds, that entitles them to boss us around. Questioning their self-assessment provokes behavior decent persons would prefer not to face. However, not questioning their self-assessment allows them to assume that we’re okay with having them run our lives.

This cleavage in the American people is bringing about a cleavage in the nation. It’s assumed a fairly definite geographic shape. Those preponderant in one region are looked upon with disdain (at best) by those preponderant in the other. The current trend in intra-national relocations is slowly but steadily reinforcing that division. It’s also providing grounds for intensified intra-national hostilities. If you needed something to lose sleep over, you’re welcome.

None of this should be news to any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch. The driving processes have been at work for decades. What matters most is the division between the moral visions of Red and Blue America. Yes, such divisions have existed before. But never has one side preached to itself that its superiority justifies the subjugation of the other by any means necessary.

A hell of a thing, innit, when those whose sole desire is to be left alone to live as they see fit must contend with a fanatical, über-arrogant opposition whose Prime Directive is that it must never, ever leave anybody alone. Really, though, the hell of it is that only one side can legitimately lay claim to being the contemporary representatives of the vision laid out for America by its Founding Fathers in the DoI and the US Constitution. Which goes a long way towards explicating the visceral, frothing opposition to those things, as well as the Founders themselves, on the part of the Goosesteppin’ Left.

Going asymmetrical

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Progress, if you like.

In 1337 the “Hundred Years’ War” started. Great armies marched to meet each other in the fields of battle. They fought and 2.3 to 3.3 million men died.

In 1792 the French Revolutionary war started. It lasted 7 years and between 1.2 million and 1.4 million men died in the fields of battle.

In 1803 the Napoleonic wars started. Somewhere between 3.5 million and 7.0 million men died in the fields of battle and in the misery of being on campaign.

Between 1955 and 1975 somewhere between 0.9 million and 3.8 million people died in the Vietnam War. There were around 300 thousand soldiers killed in Vietnam, 58 thousand Americans and 254 thousand South Vietnam.

What was the significant change between the previous wars and Vietnam?

Asymmetrical Warfare.

During the 20 years of “The Troubles” in Ireland 8 to 10 thousand people were active members of the IRA. By the 1980’s it was believed that there were around 450 active members and 300 support members. Yet this small number of dedicated people were able to keep the British at bay.

This equates to around 9/100,000 at the low point and 10/100,000 at the high point. If there was this level of asymmetric warfare in the US that would be around 30,000 active participants every year. Even with people rotating in and out.

In 2021 there were 38.5 million hunting licenses issued. If we assume 12/100,000 this would be 4632 people with the right equipment in hand to take a deer sized target at 100 to 200 yards. Not to mention all the other firearm owners that don’t hunt but are proficient with their firearms.

So at a low end we would have somewhere around 5000 and at the high end about 50,000 actives in the such warfare in America.

All of these people look just like the people they are living with. We saw what this was like in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition there is a higher probability of members of the resistance existing unseen within the government/military complex.

We look at what people with minimal industrial knowledge were able to accomplish. Their ability to make hand crafted firearms, their ability to create IEDs. All of that knowledge from people that don’t have the same level of education as most of the people that read this blog.

Do not take counsel of your fears, do not despair, no matter what. As history tells us, even at the lowest ebb, when the situation looks bleak and all seems lost, hope endures.

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(Un)Righteous retribution

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Is it civilizational self-defense, or state-sanctioned murder?

Here’s the thing – a civilization that cannot come up with the moral testicularity to execute a creature who murders over a dozen of its children is a civilization in serious trouble. The minimum standard for any culture that intends on surviving – and surviving means dealing with the barbarians within and without – is to take its own side in the fight for survival. Eventually, there will be a backlash. The only question is how ugly it will be.

This injustice in the Sunshine State – appropriately deplored by Governor DeSantis – is a symptom of the larger problem. You see it manifested across our culture – suicidal tolerance and performative forgiveness. In places like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and other blue cities – it is always blue cities – the inhabitants murder each other with glee. But more than that, they generally act like savages. We have all seen the videos. Random creeps menacing citizens on the subways, packs of thugs raiding convenience stores or shopping malls, pitched battles between groups of aspiring Einsteins in Walmarts, animals cold-cocking citizens who are simply minding their own business. But no one stops them. No one holds them to account. The cops’ shrug, because the blue politicians have told them to stand down. The answer to those of us who protest is always the same – shut up, racist, and also give us your guns so that you cannot defend yourself from what the government refuses to suppress.

And then there is the spectacle of family members of murder victims “forgiving” the criminals as if forgiveness was a simple act and not a process that demands action by the person being forgiven. This bizarre misunderstanding of Christianity is mixed with what seems to be a desire to front to the world as somehow enlightened – “I want to announce that I forgive the barbarians who raped and murdered my daughter. They did not repent, they did not seek forgiveness, and they have not yet been punished, but I’ll do it now anyway. Look at me.” Not that you want to take theological hints from a guy who grew up a Californian Methodist, but the forgiveness of God does not just manifest out of the blue; the one receiving grace needs to take steps to obtain it. These moral posers – and it is posing, sad and horrifying, but posing nonetheless – demand nothing to obtain forgiveness, so the forgiveness they offer is meaningless narcissism.

Yes, in case you are wondering, I am criticizing the family members of rape and murder victims who refuse to demand justice. Their moral voguing is perpetuating a paradigm where more people’s kids die. Forgive those who seek forgiveness; don’t hand it out as moral welfare and be shocked to find a society full of moral welfare bums.

Oh, and forgiveness does not mean letting them out of jail.

I must confess to being of two minds regarding the death penalty issue, and have always been. On the one hand, yes, there are certainly people who need killing among us, and I do get Schlichter’s strong conviction that civilization cannot long survive without defending itself against the wanton brutality of such ogres. Then again, though, I also have serious reservations about the State’s ability to handle this most grave of matters responsibly, competently, and correctly. As Divemedic concisely says:

This story is why I remain opposed to the death penalty in practice. You can’t trust anyone in our “justice system.” Even with a confession.

The guy spent 35 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit before his conviction was overturned. The cop who got his conviction was using questionable tactics to secure confessions for years.

And this is but a single case, out of literally hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them. It’s been estimated that anywhere between 46,000 and 230,000 innocent people have been incarcerated due to a wrongful-conviction rate which hovers between 2 to 10 percent. Given what we all already know about how incompetent, ruthless, and untrustworthy government, at any level, all too often is—much less how thoroughly tainted and dysfunctional the American “justice” system has proven itself to be just in recent years—can any of us be too terribly comfortable with granting it the power of life and death over us? Can we AFFORD to be?

 

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Repeal the 17th—NOW

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Ain’t gonna happen, of course, not without an epic cataclysm…most likely a bloody one. But while we’re just spitballing here, the 16th has to go too.

To Save America, Repeal the 17th Amendment

Last week we looked at the pernicious effects of the 16th amendment, and how for more than a century it has destroyed almost any chance the middle classes ever had of accumulating wealth, since their money is confiscated at the source, and has taught working Americans that the first call on the fruits of their labor belongs not to themselves and their families but to the federal government. (Real estate used to be the exception, although that too is now the province of the rich.)

Whereas the feds managed to scrape by from 1788, when the Constitution was ratified, to 1913, when the 16th was endorsed by 38 states (two more than the requisite number), on tariffs, and excise taxes, with only occasional resort to some sort of temporary income taxes, the way was now open for Washington to reach directly into the pockets of every American. This was a sea-change in the relationship of the federal government to the citizen, and the beginning of federal dominance over the very states which had given it birth and thus the entire population of the nation—not as members of sovereign states but as individuals.

The 16th, as several readers noted, was also significant in that it overturned the constitutional language regarding taxation under Article 1, Section 9: “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” That went out the window with the 16th and its game-changing language that “the Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

In other words, the idea that states could be subject to an individual “head count” tax of their residents only in direct proportion to their share of the overall population was now gone. This malevolent blunder turned out to be the first of several colossal blows to the nation-as-founded during the so-called “Progressive Era” headed by presidents Theodore Roosevelt (what in the world is he doing on Mount Rushmore?), the gloriously corpulent William Howard Taft, and the cadaverous Woodrow Wilson.

According to the liberal Khan Academy, the period was:

an era of intense social and political reform aimed at making progress toward a better society. Progressive Era reformers sought to harness the power of the federal government to eliminate unethical and unfair business practices, reduce corruption, and counteract the negative social effects of industrialization. During the Progressive Era, protections for workers and consumers were strengthened, and women finally achieved the right to vote.

That’s one way to look at it. The problem is, it’s looking at the era through the wrong end of the telescope by people who love the intentions and can afford to ignore the results. Left unquestioned is whether the federal government had the right under the Constitution to what it did. And the answer is clearly no—so it simply changed the Constitution via the perfectly legitimate amendment process, and induced a gullible and resentful populace to go along; recall that nobody thought the Income Tax had a snowball’s chance in hell of ratification, and yet it was ratified. (Don’t start yapping at me that the 16th was “illegally ratified.” It wasn’t, which makes things even worse.)

Which brings us to the 17th amendment. The relevant bit reads: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. ” Prior to its ratification in 1913, the same year as the 16th and a spectacularly disastrous year for our real democracy, senators were chosen by the various state legislatures, in order to keep them tethered and answerable to their state governments: they were senators from the Great State of Whatever, not interchangeable “United States senators.”

I’ve been beating this particular dead horse for years hereabouts, and Walsh is perfectly correct: the 17th Amendment was the killshot for Constitutional governance, the Amendment that grotesquely flouted the core Founding concept of the sovereign States having their interests represented in the US government. As such, if you had to pick one specific development out of the myriad of ’em that cemented our status as a lowly, impotent Serf Class groaning under the immense weight of a bloated federal government whose power is without limit, whose expansion is perpetual, and whose intrusiveness is beyond challenge or even scrutiny, the 17th would have to be it.

There are two (2) primary obstacles standing in the way of any prospective restoration or rebirth of America That Was: the 17th Amendment, and the government “school” system. Unless and until those obstacles have been dealt with, the desperately needed American renaissance we all yearn so much to see will remain but a dream.

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A Biden for all seasons

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Heroes aren’t born, they’re made. Or, in the case of the Biden familia, made up.

DISGRACE: Joe Biden Falsely Claims Son Beau ‘Lost His Life in Iraq’

“Disgrace”? Nah, not really. That implies that the Biden marionette has some capacity for feeling shame or embarrassment. Onwards.

Joe Biden has often invoked his late son Beau Biden.

For example, after his botched  withdrawal from Afghanistan he evoked his late son in a shameless effort to avoid criticism of his actions.

“So, when I hear that we could’ve, should’ve continued the so-called low-grade effort in Afghanistan, at low risk to our service members, at low cost, I don’t think enough people understand how much we have asked of the 1 percent of this country who put that uniform on, who are willing to put their lives on the line in defense of our nation,” Biden said last year when he announced the war in Afghanistan was now officially over. “Maybe it’s because my deceased son, Beau, served in Iraq for a full year, before that.”

Biden also alluded to Beau when he spoke to the nation after the terror attack at Kabul airport. “Being the father of an Army major who served for a year in Iraq and, before that, was in Kosovo as a U.S. attorney for the better part of six months in the middle of a war,” Biden said. “When he came home after a year in Iraq, he was diagnosed, like many, many coming home, with an aggressive and lethal cancer of the brain — who we lost.”

It was grossly inappropriate for him to constantly invoke his son who died of brain cancer as though it was the same thing as if he had lost his life while serving our country. But on Wednesday while giving a speech in Colorado, Biden claimed that Beau actually lost his life in Iraq.

Biden’s brain might be Swiss-cheesed, but it’s hard to wrap my head around the idea that he would have forgotten how his own son died. So this naturally begs the question as to whether Biden was confused because of how often he brings up Beau as though he was a war casualty or whether he just thinks it makes him look better to say he was.

And frankly I don’t know which answer is worse.

The truth is even worse than those two options: Biden is using his dead son for his own selfish purposes, climbing up onto the coffin to thump his sunken chest and bray so as to score political points, in the manner of all DemonRats. As for Beau himself, his place in the annals of military history is secure.

Biden claims son Beau was the man responsible for shooting down Richthofen

In a speech to a teeming throng of over half a dozen supporters yesterday, “President” Joe Biden proudly praised his deceased son Beau as the flying ace who successfully ended Rittmeister Manfred Von Richthofen’s record-setting string of more than 80 victories in aerial combat, shooting the Red Baron down over northern France in April 1918.

Okay, I admit I may have made that  last part up. But really, it’s only a matter of time before he does this, and you know it.

Since somebody or other brought up Richthofen just now, I have this great biography of him I got…shit, I don’t even remember how many years ago that was. What I DO remember is that it had some amazing photos of the man, his aircraft, his brothers Lothar and Albrecht, his Flying Circus, and such-like. The one that really gets me is this one:

The Lion in winter
Richthofen suiting up for a wintertime mission

Yep, it’s COLD up there among them clouds all right, aloft in a flimsy, drafty old crate with no cockpit canopy, no heater, and nothing but a small windscreen to huddle behind as a shield from the bone-chilling fury of the elements. Those pioneering WWI combat flyers, coming in on the very heels of Orville and Wilbur’s brief inaugural flight at Kill Devil Hills, were something else again.

Think of it: machine guns mounted on the top wing of their biplanes on a swivel, until a truly reliable synchronization gear came along towards the end of the war; aiming was done exclusively with Mark 1-Mod 0 eyeball, firing with the hand not occupied full-time with the stick. No radar, no HUD, no electric engine-starter motors, no communication with either ground control or the rest of their flight elements.

WWI combat aviators were a valorous, fearless breed for whom a “bombing run” consisted of hurling hand grenades from the cockpit at ground targets (or sometimes, enemy aircraft). These guys make today’s man-bunned, skinny-jeaned, feminized Hipster cock-noshers pleased to misnomer themselves “men” look like the dainty imposters they so truly are.

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Gone in 60 70 seconds

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The day what little remained of America That Was was murdered—on purpose, with malice aforethought, by evil, conniving bureaucrats.

On March 16, 2020, following a long weekend of negotiations and deals about the coronavirus, Donald Trump, Deborah Birx, and Anthony Fauci spoke at a White House press conference for the first time about nationwide lockdowns.

They handed out a sheet of paper – it mostly consisted of conventional health advice – that said in tiny print: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

Shut it all down. Everything. Everyone. As if the whole economy were a nightclub closing early.

This amounted to a full repudiation of not only the Constitution but also freedom itself. At the very least, it was a fundamental attack on the First Amendment guarantees of the freedom of religion because it attacked the rights of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and everyone.

All evidence suggests that Trump did not know that the tiny text was in there.

The reading of the text was left to the question and answer session.

Even when it was read by Fauci from the podium, Trump seemed distracted by something else, almost as if he did not hear or did not want to hear it. Later he bragged that the whole thing was his doing, but looking back at the history of that day, it is not so clear.

Let’s take this apart frame by frame to understand what happened in these 70 seconds as part of the Q&A session.

Which the author goes on to do, meticulously and deftly. Then:

Fauci reads the text and then he steps away from the microphone. He had just read what is in fact the most totalitarian instruction ever given by any government in the history of the world – I can’t think of another case of such a thing – that all human interaction must stop from sea to shining sea. After all, all congregate places include homes too. Then Fauci steps away from the microphone.

Here you can watch the full 70 seconds. Deconstruct it yourself. See what you think. It was momentous, probably the most significant in American history, the culmination of weeks of persuasion and planning.

Everything followed from that brief moment: lockdown chaos, the closed schools and churches, the end of basic rights, the wrecking of business, and then began the spending, inflating, mad welfare checks, and the demoralization of the population that continues to this day.

The population now subjected to shock and awe, the mask and vaccine mandates seemed minor by comparison.

All of it unfolded in 70 seconds on March 16, 2020. So far as I know, this is the first and only article written so far to reconstruct this brief moment in time.

And so it is, of which you should read the all, grim as it surely is.

Being human and all, Trump made many blunders during what by any standard would have to be acknowledged as a surpassingly momentous Presidency, but this one was probably the biggest, most damaging of them all. His inattention, in concert with his inexplicably blind faith in the good intentions and integrity of the Deep State’s horde of orcs like Fauci and Birx, would go on to doom him (and us) to a single term, and set the stage for the abominable “Biden administration” farce—a wholly disastrous “reign of witches” which will assuredly afflict America for generations to come, until such time as our posterity rediscovers their love for the blessings of liberty and determines that all and every measure must be taken to restore them.

Jefferson’s 1798 letter to John Taylor from whence the “reign of witches” quote originates, written in the wake of the passage of Adams’ notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, is worth reviewing at this point. Certainly, although there are significant distinctions to be noted between the circumstances of that era and our own, the thrust of the letter remains every bit as relevant today as it was back then, as is ever the case with the words and thoughts of the great man.

It is true that we are compleatly under the saddle of Massachusets & Connecticut, and that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings as well as exhausting our strength and substance. Their natural friends, the three other eastern States, join them from a sort of family pride, and they have the art to divide certain other parts of the Union so as to make use of them to govern the whole. This is not new. It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order, and those who have once got an ascendency and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantages. But our present situation is not a natural one. The body of our countrymen is substantially republican through every part of the Union. It was the irresistable influence & popularity of Gen. Washington, played off by the cunning of Hamilton, which turned the government over to anti-republican hands, or turned the republican members, chosen by the people, into anti-republicans. He delivered it over to his successor in this state, and very untoward events, since improved with great artifice, have produced on the public mind the impression we see; but still, I repeat it, this is not the natural state. Time alone would bring round an order of things more correspondent to the sentiments of our constituents; but are there not events impending which will do it within a few months? The invasion of England, the public and authentic avowal of sentiments hostile to the leading principles of our Constitution, the prospect of a war in which we shall stand alone, land-tax, stamp-tax, increase of public debt, &c. Be this as it may, in every free & deliberating society there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties & violent dissensions & discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time. Perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch & delate to the people the proceedings of the other. But if on a temporary superiority of the one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the Union, no federal government can ever exist. If to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusets & Connecticut we break the Union, will the evil stop there? Suppose the N. England States alone cut off, will our natures be changed? are we not men still to the south of that, & with all the passions of men? Immediately we shall see a Pennsylvania & a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy ,and the public mind will be distracted with the same party spirit. What a game, too, will the one party have in their hands by eternally threatening the other that unless they do so & so, they will join their Northern neighbors. If we reduce our Union to Virginia & N. Carolina, immediately the conflict will be established between the representatives of these two States, and they will end by breaking into their simple units. Seeing, therefore, that an association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry, seeing that we must have somebody to quarrel with, I had rather keep our New England associates for that purpose than to see our bickerings transferred to others. They are circumscribed within such narrow limits, & their population so full, that their numbers will ever be the minority, and they are marked, like the Jews, with such a peculiarity of character as to constitute from that circumstance the natural division of our parties. A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to it’s true principles. It is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war & long oppressions of enormous public debt. But who can say what would be the evils of a scission, and when & where they would end? Better keep together as we are, hawl off from Europe as soon as we can, & from all attachments to any portions of it. And if we feel their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, & then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake. Better luck, therefore, to us all; and health, happiness, & friendly salutations to yourself.

Adieu.

Sounds all too familiar, no? Even moreso for the coda, painfully so.

P. S. It is hardly necessary to caution you to let nothing of mine get before the public. A single sentence, got hold of by the Porcupines, will suffice to abuse & persecute me in their papers for months.

There can be no serious doubt that, if Thomas Jefferson was alive today, such “extremism” would long since have motivated the FBI to raid his home, rifle through his papers and personal effects, and roughly bunge him into durance vile for a long stretch, as retribution for his many “crimes against the State.”

(Via WRSA)

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1

Occam’s Razor says…

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No, 9/11 was NOT an “inside job,” perpetrated by the US goobermint, Mossad, whothehellever. The conspiracy theorizing began before the smoke had cleared in Lower Manhattan; sad to say, the preposterous theories have only proliferated ever since, and would seem to be deathless. I’ve run this Cracked mag classic debunking the nonsense here I don’t even know how many times over lo, these past 21 years.  I’m happy to do so yet again.

Now, fans of this site know, I don’t be trustin’ me no government. I’ve put in time at various intelligence agencies and at one major government contractor (Kellogg, Brown & Root). I’ve worked for these people and let me tell you, the government is a mess. And elected officials, don’t get me started on those people. They’ll do anything it takes to get votes.

But here’s the thing. The 9/11 “Truth” guys, the Loose Changers and all the many websites, they don’t just think government is corrupt. They think everybody, and I mean everybody, is either evil on a demonic scale, or a mindless sheep.

For instance, how much money would it take to get you to kill 3,000 random, innocent Americans? Or, say you stumbled upon somebody else’s plan to kill 3,000 innocent Americans. How much would it take to get you to stay silent afterward?

A hundred dollars? Two hundred? Two hundred fifty?

Well if the conspiracy guys are right, there are people reading this right now who took that deal. No kidding.

Here’s why. The entire 9/11 “Truth” movement rests on the idea that the World Trade Center towers were rigged with explosives, a “Controlled Demolition” like you see with old buildings. That’s the whole thing. They say the buildings couldn’t have come down otherwise.

Forget the fact that no experts on the subject agree with them. That’s not the point right now. We’re just trying to get inside these guys’ heads.Now, maybe you could keep the plan itself a secret. A few dozen murderous black ops guys, demolitions experts with a grudge against the USA, maybe they’ve been brainwashed. Who knows. Maybe it could be done. People point out that the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb was kept a secret, so why not this?

But the cover-up. Holy shit, guys. Covering this thing up after the fact would be like trying to keep the atomic bomb a secret after Hiroshima. Just wait ’till you hear this.
First, picture the demolitions teams wiring up the World Trade Center towers with explosives prior to the attack. Obviously you couldn’t do it during business hours, since it’d be kind of hard to explain to the 100,000 people who worked at or visited the WTC towers on any given day why you had a huge chunk of wall torn out and were wiring up a bomb on the steel beams there.I mean, keep in mind, I don’t know how big of a job that would be (no one has ever demolished a building that size before) but a building just half the size of one WTC tower took 4,000 separate charges to bring down. Four thousand.

That job took seven months of prep work… and they had the run of an abandoned building, without having to hide their work from 100,000 people every day. Our demolition crew, on the other hand, can work only at night and has to spend the last bit of every shift carefully repairing the wall and hiding any evidence of charges or detonators as not to be discovered during the day.

Huge teams of demolitions experts, who had no problem wiring a building full of innocent New Yorkers to explode, hired in secret, worked every night for what had to be a year (and that’s only if they had a big enough crew) placing maybe 10,000 separate charges in each tower and another few thousand in WTC 7 (the smaller WTC tower that also collapsed, later in the day on 9/11).

And nobody notices.

Truckloads of bombs, dozens of mysterious workers, going in and out of the building, night after night. Security at the building doesn’t catch them, Port Authority Police don’t catch them, random eyewitnesses who stumble across the operation and call the cops don’t catch them, maintenance workers who stumble across wet paint and repaired walls and bits of strange wire don’t catch them, security cameras don’t catch them.
The bomb-sniffing dogs who were brought in from time to time (remember, these buildings were bombed by terrorists in 1993) who are trained to find even one bomb, fail to notice the 10,000 bombs lining their building.If you’re saying that nothing could possibly be more retarded than that, you’re wrong.

No, they’re just getting started.

And indeed they are. The article includes a link to Popular Mechanics’  thorough flensing of this crapola, another good ‘un that I’ve excerpted several times here. The PM piece has been split into two separate articles, one on the WTC specifically and one covering the Pentagon, which the conspiracy fever-dreamers absurdly maintain was never even hit by a plane at all. To wit:

At 9:37 a.m. on September 11, 51 minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, the Pentagon was similarly attacked. Though dozens of witnesses saw a Boeing 757 hit the building, conspiracy advocates insist there is evidence that a missile or a different type of plane smashed into the Pentagon.

CLAIM: Two holes were visible in the Pentagon immediately after the attack: a 75-foot-wide entry hole in the building’s exterior wall, and a 16-foot-wide hole in Ring C, the Pentagon’s middle ring. Conspiracy theorists claim both holes are far too small to have been made by a Boeing 757. “How does a plane 125 [feet] wide and 155 [feet] long fit into a hole which is only 16 [feet] across?” asks reopen911.org, a website “dedicated to discovering the bottom line truth to what really occurred on September 11, 2001.”

The truth is of even less importance to French author Thierry Meyssan, whose baseless assertions are fodder for even mainstream European and Middle Eastern media.

In his book The Big Lie, Meyssan concludes that the Pentagon was struck by a satellite-guided missile—part of an elaborate U.S. military coup. “This attack,” he writes, “could only be committed by United States military personnel against other U.S. military personnel.”

FACT: When American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon’s exterior wall, Ring E, it created a hole approximately 75 feet wide, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Pentagon Building Performance Report.

The exterior facade collapsed about 20 minutes after impact, but ASCE based its measurements of the original hole on the number of first-floor support columns that were destroyed or damaged. Computer simulations confirmed the findings.

Why wasn’t the hole as wide as a 757’s nearly 125-foot wingspan? A crashing jet doesn’t punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building, says ASCE team member Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University.

Oof. The piece goes on from there to take out the rest of the trash with similar aplomb. Personally, I find it disgusting the way 9/11 has faded from our collective consciousness, although admittedly it was probably inevitable that it would. Worse yet is the way that, as Steyn has pointed out, rather than making life tougher on the Muzzrat nations who financed, abetted, and joyously cheered the atrocity, we’ve preferred instead to make it tougher on ourselves with walled-off public spaces and government buildings; grossly intrusive yet ineffectual airport “security”; total, 24-7-365 police-state survellaince, and such-like.

Instead of calling a spade a spade and placing the burden of guilt and responsibility squarely on the shoulders where it rightfully belonged, we sheepishly acquiesced to Bush’s wholly grotesque “Islam literally means peace” falsehood as if 9/11 was OUR fault—painstakingly tripping over ourselves in apology for heinous acts of persecution which never actually happened, inspired by a purported “Islamophobia” that never actually existed. Those who DO remember should make sure that they remember it correctly and accurately, not the bizarre, twisted hobgoblin haunting little conspiracy-theory minds.

Don’t fall for the bullshit, folks; all you’ll end up doing is making yourself look like a damned fool. Should you ever be tempted to take such nonsense seriously, ask yourself one question: Do you really think the bumbling, inept FederalGovCo we’re all too familiar with could ever have the competence, cunning, and intelligence necessary to successfully pull off as massive, as complicated a hoax as this? And then keep it going in total silence, with nary a leak, whistleblower, or exposé cropping up anywhere for all these years?

Like I said: preposterous. Absurd. Bullshit.

Everything old is new again

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Mark Twain is claimed to have said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn’t, but after reading Divemedic’s ingenious post, I’m saying to hell with all that; it definitely repeats itself, as far as I’m concerned.

In a nation weakened by worldwide economic issues and a world that has grown weary of war and strife, a chief executive struggles

The head law enforcement officer of the nation, acting on orders of the chief executive, orders a raid on the opposition party’s headquarters. There, the police find evidence of seditious material, including a plot to attack public buildings. The chief executive takes to the airwaves with claims that the opposition is planning to attack the capitol.

Shortly thereafter, the capitol is attacked, and one of the men arrested in an unemployed construction worker who admits to being under the command of the leader of the opposition party. The chief executive declares, “we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”

A few hours later, the chief executive issued an executive order that effectively abolished freedom of speech, assembly, privacy and the press; legalized phone tapping and interception of correspondence; and that 4,000 people be arrested, imprisoned and tortured.

Later that year, a sensational criminal trial got under way. The man who burned the Capitol, the leader of the opposition party, and several key figures of the opposition party went on trial for sedition.

As the trial proceeded, a different kind of trial captured the public discourse. A member of the opposition undertook an independent investigation of the destruction of the Capitol. The combined research resulted in the publication of The Brown Book on the Insurrection. It included early accounts police brutality, as well as an argument that the insurrectionists were simply pawns. The chief executive’s party members were the real criminals, the book argued, and they orchestrated the insurrection to consolidate political power. The book became a bestseller, translated into 24 languages and sold around Europe and the U.S.

At any rate, a full 5% of the legislature was declared to be in league with the accused insurrection. They were imprisoned and held for a trial that would never come. Their seats were left vacant, and the leader’s party was free to hold legislative referendums without them present.

Fearing that the insurrectionists were gaining enough power to become a threat to the very nation, the legislature passed an enabling act that temporarily granted emergency legislative powers to the chief executive so that he and the head of the nation’s law enforcement could deal with the spreading insurrection. Soon thereafter, the chief executive passed away after a sudden and brief illness. The chief law enforcement executive then declared himself to be the new chief executive, then used his emergency powers to pass a law declaring himself to be the permanent head of government and disbanded the legislature. He ordered jailed anyone who opposed his new powers.

Read on for the O Henry-esque twist at the end.

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Second look at the Bundy Ranch standoff?

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The Bundy family’s take on our awful central government’s true nature was more accurate than they’ve ever been given credit for.

BUNKERVILLE, NEVADA—The Bundy Ranch roundup has understandably stirred thin-stretched emotions as the federal government seizes cattle belonging to the Bundy family. The family settled in the late 1800’s and has ranched in the area since. The federal government allowed Nevada ranchers to graze their cattle on federal tracts of land adjacent to their private properties for generations. The federal government later created the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to administer and “protect” the vast swaths of federal land—including the land the Bundy family’s livelihood was—and still is—dependent upon. The BLM began restricting ranchers’ usage of federal lands to protect various species, and the BLM decided to restrict the Bundy family’s usage of the federal land they historically grazed. The federal government told the Bundy family that a tortoise existed on the land and therefore the land’s usage for cattle would have to decrease—thus creating a scenario where the Bundy family could make fewer resources. A 20-year legal battle ensued.

There exist a number of elements to the story that inject shades of grey into the dominant media narrative. Perhaps hundreds of Bundy supporters have already shown up to the ranch area to “protect” the family and their land—which is federal land—but federal land such usage was promised to the family in the government’s efforts to get people to settle the West after Mexico ceded the land to the U.S. Court documents—discussed later in this article—reveal that the Bundy family decided at some point that the federal government was illegitimate and that they no longer had to give heed to the federal courts. The Bundy family patriarch has openly stated his willingness to use force against federal agents if they take his cattle off of the federal lands; the federal agents stand ready to use force against the family or their supporters if they interfere with the cattle removal. Both sides are armed, both sides are frustrated, and the rhetoric and hyperbole surrounding the entire matter has left many onlookers from around the world confused as to what is actually happening.

In the immediate aftermath of the infamous cattle roundup, Cliven Bundy granted a number of high profile media interviews continuing to deny—to the point of absolutely ignoring family history—what the federal courts have twice told him.

“I believe this is a sovereign state of Nevada,” Bundy recently told a radio reporter. “…I abide by all of Nevada state laws. But, I don’t recognize the United States Government as even existing.”

Oh, it exists right enough, I’m afraid. Cliven and several of his compatriots ended up finding that out the hard way. The thing I remember being struck by more forcefully than anything else at the time was the near-universal condemnation of the Bundys from the Right. Even folks whose ideological inclinations might be taken as suggestive of deep antipathy for FederalGovCo, its minions, and its nefarious works were suddenly tripping over themselves to join [wpdiscuz-feedback id=”hw7r99ujes” question=”Comments? Complaints? Thoughts?” opened=”0″]the mad rush to take the Almighty State’s side[/wpdiscuz-feedback] on this one.

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Same as it ever was

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Bayou Pete commends the late John Ross’s Unintended Consequences, an early-on staple of the dystopian-future/Civil War v2.0 genre, to our attention, posting an excerpt from the hefty 700-page tome’s Author’s Note as a lure for prospective readers.

A friend in law enforcement told me that because of this book’s content, I should not let it be published under my own name. Violent events happen in this story, and our country’s current situation is such that these events could indeed come to pass. My friend’s fear was that this book might precipitate such violence. He told me to expect to have drugs planted in my car during routine traffic stops, or have other similar miseries befall me and my family. He advised that if I did have this work published, I should use a pseudonym, employ an intermediary for all publisher contact, and in general prevent myself from being linked to the finished work, to avoid reprisals.

I didn’t do that, not only because of free speech considerations, but because I disagree with my friend’s hypothesis. I believe that if the instigators glimpse what may lie ahead, they will alter their behavior before wholesale violence becomes unavoidable. It is my hope that this book will reduce the likelihood of armed conflict in this country.

History has shown us that government leaders often ignore the fundamental fact that people demand both dignity and freedom. Because of this disregard, these decision-makers then initiate acts that are ultimately self-destructive. To illustrate this point I will remind the reader of the origin of two of modern history’s most destructive events, and of all the warning flags that were frantically waving while the instigators rushed headlong towards the abyss.

In the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, European leaders formed two major alliances. Germany, Austria, and Italy comprised one coalition, and Britain, France, and Russia the other. Belgium remained neutral per an 1839 treaty signed by all of these nations except Italy. The smaller European countries became indirectly involved in the two aforementioned alliances. One such example was Serbia, a country Russia had pledged to aid in the event of war between Serbia and Austria. Despite Russia’s presence, Austria annexed a large part of Serbia, a province called Bosnia, in 1908.

Few people remain emotionally indifferent when their culture and country are taken over by an aggressor, and the Bosnian Serbs were no exception. Many Bosnians despised the government that had chilled their independence. In spite of this obvious fact, the Austrian leaders sent an archduke to the capital of Bosnia to survey the people Austria now ruled. This archduke was resplendent in full military ceremonial dress, festooned with medals and other military decorations, and accompanied by his elegantly-dressed wife. An objective observer might at this point have said, “Stripping motivated people of their dignity and rubbing their noses in it is a very bad idea.”

As we all know, the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination has reverberated and echoed throughout world history ever since the day it occurred, beginning with its immediate consequence, WW1, leading in its turn to WW2, and continuing right on through the Bosnia-Serbia conflict of the 1990s. In our time, the war-tocsin’s reverberations are starting to sound downright clangorous once again.

Today in America, honest, successful, talented, productive, motivated people are once again being stripped of their freedom and dignity and having their noses rubbed in it. The conflict has been building for over half a century, and once again warning flags are frantically waving while the instigators rush headlong towards the abyss, and their doom.

It is my hope that these people will stop and reverse their course before they reach the point where such reversal is no longer possible.

Sadly, tragically, our own wannabe despots seem to be no more intelligent, reflective, or modest than their predecessors, making any reversal of their hell-bent-for-leather race to catastrophe and horror unlikely in the extreme. Peter follows up with some essential, if grim, wisdom that none but a self-serving, supremely arrogant ProPol could fail to take note of.

I believe the (fictional) internal conflict that John Ross foresaw for the USA back in 1995 is perilously close to becoming a reality in 2022. The reasons are more varied and complex than he predicted almost thirty years ago, but the outcome is likely to be very similar. I hope and pray that doesn’t happen, because I’ve seen civil war and internal conflict in several nations and know how absolutely, genuinely horrific it can be for those caught up in it. However, those pushing to impose their views and policies on the rest of the country appear blind to that reality. They simply won’t leave people alone. They’re imposing their views and insisting that the people of this country “get with the program” – or else. (To cite just one current example, adding 87,000 people to the IRS is not about more efficient functioning of that agency. It’s about picking on dissenters and making their lives unbearable, just as the IRS did when it was “weaponized” under the Obama administration. Expect the same thing today as then, only on steroids.)

I hope John Ross’s vision of what might happen in the USA may never come to pass…but I fear that may be a pipe dream. Read his novel for yourself. It seems eerily prescient in many ways.

Prescient? I’d say so, yeah. Not having read Ross’s classic yet myself, I took advantage of Peter’s link to the free version and downloaded it (there’s also a for-pay edition available at Amazon), for which gracious inclusion I humbly thank him.

7

Pobody’s nerfect

Posted on      by     

Ron, we hardly knew ye.

A shameful aspect of woke intolerance has been the degrading of historical figures who fail to meet current standards of politically correctness. This vindictive fervor has spread from removing the statues of Confederate commanders and statesmen to removing those of American Founding Fathers who owned slaves to pulling down the statues of abolitionists who were not as radical as they might have been. It is therefore upsetting to discover the role played by Governor Ron DeSantis, who has become a poster boy for conservatives, in contributing to this madness. Like his predecessor Rick Scott, DeSantis thinks it’s a good idea to dishonor a Confederate commander in order to elevate a civil rights icon.

In 2018 Scott signed into law something that DeSantis put into effect in 2019, removing the statue of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith from Capitol Hill in Tallahassee and replacing it with one of the civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. If Scott and DeSantis were trying to highlight their devotion to the civil rights cause, perhaps to increase their share of the black vote, all they really did was behave foolishly. Both Bethune and Kirby Smith deserve to be honored as Floridians, although unlike Kirby Smith, Bethune was born not in the Sunshine State but in Mayesville, South Carolina. I have no idea why this should be a zero-sum game, as it seems to be with Southern Republican governors. DeSantis, Scott, and Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas have all removed statues of Confederate heroes from place(s) of honor and substituted for them civil rights activists.

No one is asking that Southern governors add to the number of Confederate memorial statues (that still abound in the former states of the Confederacy.) If our Southern Republican governors want to give recognition to more recent state celebrities by erecting statues to them, that is their right. The question is: why demean long-honored heroes in trying to pay homage to civil rights pioneers? Even if Southern Republicans have become strangely indifferent to seeing those associated with the Confederate cause being slighted, the swapping undertaken by their governors still strikes me as unseemly. It reflects badly on the character of those leaders who engage in such clumsy virtue-signaling. Why can’t they add new heroes without subtracting older ones, who long commanded respect?

As an historian I can find much to admire in Bethune and Smith both. A dedicated and deeply religious black educator, Bethune focused on the Christian development of her students. She also deplored any misconduct on the part of blacks and like her mentor Booker T. Washington, Bethune, who was a stern disciplinarian, stressed the need for blacks to behave in a civil fashion in their own society as well as in the larger white one. Significantly, she allied with the Democratic Party and the New Deal administration in fighting disabilities against members of her race. And she played an important role in drawing away the black vote from DeSantis’s party to the Democrats during the 1930s. (Before the mid-1930s blacks had been overwhelmingly Republican.)

Kirby Smith is equally worthy of our respect, as a remarkably intelligent military leader and a dedicated natural scientist. Beside his resourceful service in the Confederate army, in which he won victories from Virginia to Texas, he distinguished himself as a brave commander in the Mexican War, after graduating with honors from West Point. After the Confederacy’s defeat, Kirby Smith devoted the remainder of his life to being a professor of mathematics and botany at the College of the South in Sewanee.

Apropos of absolutely, positively nothing, the Playboys played a huge, buck-wild fraternity party for a cpl-three years running at the University (not College; more on that anon) of the South, which was one of the loveliest college campuses I ever did see. Good times, good times. Onwards.

He also spent considerable time collecting and categorizing plants and became a distinguished botanist. There is no reason Florida’s pantheon of state luminaries cannot make room for this distinguished native son as well as for Bethune. Even more relevant, there was no justification for removing Kirby Smith’s statue, which was already placed on Capitol Hill in Tallahassee.

Finally, I can’t imagine that Bethune, any more than Kirby Smith, would have any use for the woke America now demanding that we celebrate her.

What decent, intelligent, reasonable person possibly could?

It’s mighty disappointing that DeSantis would go along with this nonsense. Now admittedly, nobody is right about every last thing, and a governor of DeSantis’s rapidly-burgeoning stature has only so many hours in his day to get things done. This forces said gov to prioritize some things over others. That said, it remains my unswerving belief that there of right ought to be NO more concessions made to the shitlibs, no matter the issue.

The Leftard camel has been allowed to poke its big, ugly snout way too far into the tent already for my liking, and I can’t even begin to imagine that DeSantis is in agreement with those assholes on this particular topic. Any and every time they can be dealt a defeat, regardless of its perceived import, they not only should be, they must be, just as a matter of principle.

A little more on the University of the South:

On July 4, 1857, delegates from ten Southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church in the United States—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—were led up Monteagle Mountain by Bishop Leonidas Polk for the founding of their denominational college for the region. The goal was to create a Southern university free of Northern influences. As one of its co-founders, Bishop James Otey of Tennessee, put it: the new university will “materially aid the South to resist and repel a fanatical domination which seeks to rule over us.” Another of the co-founders was John Armfield, at one time co-owner of Franklin and Armfield, “the largest and most prosperous slave trading enterprise in the entire country.” His promise of $25,000 per year far exceeded any other donations and was considered a “princely offer” by a Nashville newspaper. The majority of the land for the university was donated by the Sewanee Mining Company on the condition that a university “be put in operation within ten year”. Today, according to Steven Deyle, “[d]espite his central role in its establishment, Armfield’s contributions to the University of the South, an institution that supposedly symbolized southern ideals, have all but been forgotten…The initial reports and histories of the university barely mention him, and except for a bluff named in his honor, there is no other commemoration for Armfield on the campus today.”

The six-ton marble cornerstone, laid on October 10, 1860, and consecrated by Bishop Polk, was blown up in 1863 by Union soldiers; many of the pieces were collected and kept as keepsakes by the soldiers. A few were donated back to the university, and a large fragment was eventually installed in a wall of All Saints’ Chapel. Several figures later prominent in the Confederacy, notably Bishop General Leonidas Polk, Bishop Stephen Elliott, Jr., and Bishop James Hervey Otey, were significant founders of the university. Generals Edmund Kirby Smith, Josiah Gorgas and Francis A. Shoup were prominent in the university’s postbellum revival and continuance.

Because of the damage and disruptions during the Civil War, construction came to a temporary halt. Polk died in action during the Atlanta campaign. He is remembered always through his portrait Sword Over the Gown, painted by Eliphalet F. Andrews in 1900. After the original was vandalized in 1998, a copy by Connie Erickson was unveiled on June 1, 2003.

In 1866, building was resumed, and this date is sometimes used as the re-founding of the university and the year from which it has maintained continuous operations (though official materials and anniversary celebrations still use 1857). The university’s first convocation was held on September 18, 1868, with nine students and four faculty members present. Presiding was the Rt. Rev. Charles Todd Quintard, vice-chancellor (chief academic officer) of the university, second Bishop of Tennessee and “Chaplain of the Confederacy” (compiler of the Confederate Soldiers’ Pocket Manual of Devotions, 1863). He attended the first Lambeth Conference in England (1868) and received financial support from clergy and laity of the Church of England for rebuilding the school. Quintard is known as the “Re-Founder” of the University of the South.

During World War II, the University of the South was one of 131 tertiary institutions nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which offered students a path to a Navy commission.

As I said, it’s a damned pretty place, nestled in the Tennessee mountains just a tad over fifty miles from Chattanooga. If I remember right, it’s also a hop, skip, and a jump from the real-life location of the fabled Rocky Top, made legendary by this bluegrass chestnut.

 

 

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