Disasters Near and Far

Fly Fall from the friendly skies!

Posted on July 21, 2021 by Mike

Man, I sure am getting a lot of mileage lately from that old ad slogan, ain’t I?

It seems like a really bad idea, yet it’s one United Airlines reportedly just bought into – probably for many millions of dollars (the actual sum hasn’t been disclosed). It will “invest” in the development – italics to emphasize the nonexistence at present – of the ES-19, an electric aircraft that exists on the drawing board only. This hypothetical aircraft is being developed by a Swedish company with the cloying name, Heart Aerospace – which summons images of kumba-ya’ing around the campfire in a collective hug.

But will it fly?

Not with me in it, it won’t. Not ever, not one single time.

It is claimed that the ES-19 will have a range of about 250 miles – which is just barely enough to make the short hop from DC Dulles to a regional airport such as Roanoke, in SW Virginia. With very little margin to spare. What happens if the plane needs to circle, as because of traffic or weather?

Maybe it would be a good idea to equip this one with parachutes rather than flotation devices.

People who know airplanes raise other pertinent questions, such as the drain on the electric airplane’s batteries during taxiing from the terminal to the runway, which as anyone who flies commercially knows sometimes takes half an hour or more. All the while, the heat or AC must be running, in addition to the lights and all the plane’s electrical systems. Does the advertised 250 mile range factor these considerations in?

The FAA nominally requires redundancies and margins-of-error for commercial aircraft especially. It is why, for instance, commercial aircraft that fly over the ocean must be able to remain in the air if one or more engines cut out.

What if the batteries cut out?

Which – it bears repeating – it is more likely to because an electric airplane will necessarily be heavier than a jet-powered airplane because of the massive weight of the batteries that will be necessary to drive electric props sufficiently powerful to get it in the air. But the weight of all those batteries will necessarily reduce the amount of time it can remain in the air.

If it smells of unicorn farts, your nose is working.

Astute commenter Baxter raises a glaringly obvious potential-failure-point issue that leaves one totally mystified as to what the everlasting fuck the Supergenii™ skull-sweating over this fever-dream could possibly be thinking—besides MUH GAIA!!!, that is.

Other things to think about: Batteries suck when it gets cold. Forget an electric car in the winter when it’s 20 degrees F. Planes need to fly high where there is less air friction. Think about a plane (summer or winter, doesn’t matter) at 35,000 feet where it’s 65 degrees below zero F. Plane batteries will obviously need to be heated. Where does that heat come from? The batteries, limiting range even more so.

Obviously, as with the Goobermint-decreed transition from ICE cars to useless, unreliable, and unsafe coal-powered ones, the hidden agenda here is to eventually eliminate flying altogether. Except for the Kommissars, natch. They’ll still carry on as before, just without having to sully themselves with any unpleasant physical proximity to us beastly, smelly serfs in the airport cocktail lounge anymore. The vlasti won’t be replacing their in-flight steak or burger with the new bug-beef they’re foisting off on us proles either, you betcher.

Breaking down the breakdown

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Mike

As I’ve said in a different but very much related context: a process, not an event.

How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse
Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.

The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.

Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.

The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy’s connections run. Put another way, the economy’s as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.

One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It’s such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.

The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.

Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources. We see this everywhere in the global economy: a handful of plants and companies (sometimes a single source of essential components) process or manufacture essential components in much larger systems.

This is how you end up with thousands of newly manufactured vehicles parked in lots awaiting one critical part that is in short supply.

We’ve seen this movie before; we already know how it ends, or we should. Yet somehow, a great many of us seem unable—or unwilling, perhaps—to learn.

No, we won’t be getting those flying cars either

Posted on July 18, 2021July 18, 2021 by Mike

The future ain’t nearly as bright as it used to be.

When I was born in 1971, we were just two years removed from the first manned moon landing. There would be a total of six manned landings, all by Americans, from July of 1969 to a a few weeks before my first birthday. I was born at the peak of the age of space exploration. As a kid I remember watching the shuttle launches and I recall pretty vividly the Challenger disaster in 1986 while I was at school. Growing up we watched Star Trek on TV and saw Star Wars, E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the theater. It seemed to us that we were on the cusp of exploring space, a new age of discovery where humankind would escape the bonds of earth, conquer the stars and perhaps even make contact with aliens! The future was bright.

As a child in the 1970s and 80s, 2020 seemed like a long way into the distant future and while we couldn’t predict what that would bring, it was assumed it would bring a progressively better society and that space exploration and great technological achievement would make life immeasurably better. Colonies on the moon and even Mars were just assumed to be the natural near-future next steps.

Instead we get billionaire vanity projects.

Space is no longer the final frontier, at least not for the bulk of humanity. It will become the playground for the ultra-wealthy. According to Space.com, seats on Branson’s Virgin Galactic will run around $250,000 each. There are lots of people who can afford that but the vast majority of humanity will not. As chaos descends on the world, can we be far from seeing space colonies where the wealthy can flee from the devastation? The proles will be ordered to drive tiny electric cars to “save the environment” while the ultra-rich blast off on huge rockets to take selfies in space, just like we will be told to eat the bugs to reduce our climate footprint while the rich eat steak.

That starry eyed kid I used to be in the 1970s is facing the ugly reality of life in the 2020s. It isn’t a bright future for humanity but a slow war of attrition that a small cabal of elites are winning.

I don’t dream about space travel anymore, I just dream of a future where my family will be left alone. Even something that simple seems as fantastical as exploring the stars.

The Once-Great Nation status inflicted on us by the revanchist Left is not all it’s cracked up to be, not by a long yard. The ironic thing is that once we’re all fully and firmly settled in and resigned to a third-world lifestyle, they’re the ones who are going to be most miserable living it. Pretty much everything that makes Proggie’s preferred big-city, citizen-of-the-world living arrangement so appealing to him—high-tech personal electronic gadgetry; reliable and affordable household electricity, powering advanced appliances and conveniences; ubiquitous Internet access points, most of them free of charge; ethnic restaurants; a fulsome glut of entertainment/nightlife choices; trucked-in fresh fruit and vegetables, &c—will assuredly NOT be available in the dismal Neolithic-era civilization they so shrilly advocate.

As always, Leftist useful idiots blithely assume that they’ll be exempt from the privation and disaster created by their ideological and political preferences—that their delusional self-definition as the Good, Smart, and Moral Ones forever immunizes them against the consequences of their own unworkable stupidity. Our only consolation is that, as they find themselves blindfolded and marched over to be put against the wall and shot down like dogs—UNEXPECTEDLY!!!™—the looks of shock and disbelief on their once-hopeful faces are always priceless. Happens every time.

Sink, sank, sunk

Posted on July 16, 2021July 16, 2021 by Mike

Tell me the one about “the most powerful military in the WORLD” again, Daddy. That one’s my favorite.

The other day, WRSA linked to a recent great read by Cdr Salamander, who’s probably known to Pentagon brassholes as Cdr. Cassandra, on just exactly how f**ked up the US Navy has gotten.

Before you head over to RTWT (which you should do), hydrate.

Because you’re either going to cry a river, or be vinegar-pissing mad, either of which is going to take a full tank.

He ain’t just whistling Dixie about that, either; the post opens with a jawdropping pic featuring what looks to me like a rusted-all-to-fuck-and-gone superstructure/bridge from a USN destroyer or perhaps heavy cruiser, just before the breakers turn the poor neglected thing into razor blades…and a CIWS* mount with its gun-muzzles rusted also! I swear to you, I can think of five or six former sailors and Marines in my personal circle of family and close friends who would jump at the chance to come out of retirement and deal out some old-school NCO justice to everyone responsible for such a shameful dereliction of duty.

TL;DR:

The Navy sucks ass right now, because going back to 2009 (perspicacious readers may note a specific change of administration that correlates with that timespan), all flag- and general-rank promotions were run through a filter of pre-woke communist civilian and military zampolits. Only ass-kissing toadies need apply. The current can’t-sail-can’t-shoot-can’t fly-can’t-fight genderfluid diversity Navy is how that plan worked out.

GIGO.

In short, when the only admirals the Squids promote are ass-kissing back-stabbing four-star fuck-ups, the entire Navy takes it in the neck. And. It. HAS.

You can’t even blame this on the blue-haired transgender enlisted, because the fault was letting them up the gangplank in the first place; everything else is just gravity working, plus time, and salt water. Both literal, and metaphorical.

There’s a simple cure, in about three parts. Sadly, Cdr Salmander’s once-wonderful comments seem to have gone away (we can guess why), so we offer our cure here.

Follows, Aesop’s simple three-step solution for unfucking the Navy—all of which identify and address the underlying issues correctly, would almost certainly work a treat, and which therefore have absolutely zero chance of being implemented. In sum:

Do that, and you’ll have the ass-kicking world-beating US Navy last seen about 1990, if not 1945, by Christmas.

Re-enlistment will hit 100%, and we’ll have the fleet we paid for. And certain countries thinking they’re the New Big Dog will be in for a rude awakening.

Do it not, and we may as well de-fund the Navy, and to save further time and effort, just send everyone in the U.S. free copies of Rosetta Stone Mandarin and Cantonese.

Some may think I’m too harsh on the sister service. On the contrary, a functional Navy is vital for US interests. Speaking as a former Marine, for naval gunfire support and amphibious transport, just for openers. Let alone the basic missions of carrier force projection, maintaining freedom of the seas by the surface fleet, and control of the shipping lanes and nuclear deterrence by the Silent Service.

We currently – and going back a decade and more – have a Navy full of Squids and Shitbirds. Starting at the E-ring in the Pentagon. Those at the bottom of the totem pole are that way precisely because of those at the top, whether by active sabotage, foolish encouragement, spineless apathy, or malign neglect and dereliction of duty. Period. Complicity should become a hanging-from-the-yardarm offense.

We need, and deserve, a Navy of sailors. History teaches harsh lessons to nations who fail to provide for their own defense, and we’re dangerously close to the shoals of learning that lesson, in a Pearl Harbor sort of way. Hoping it doesn’t happen is not a good plan.

Rather more drastic measures, just shy of actual guillotines, are needed. In haste.

Oh, I dunno now, let’s not be too hasty about ruling things out here. Myself, I’m very interested in your guillotine idea, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Like I said, good, practical ideas all, with less than the proverbial snowballs chance of ever seeing the light of day in the Navy as currently constituted. What we have here is an endless Swamp circle-jerk: the necessary reform and rejuvenation of the Navy will require that its misbegotten, politicized, and self-serving higher-officer class be reformed first. That, in turn, can’t happen unless and until the civilian “leadership” is also reformed, top to bottom. And that means removing and replacing the sleazy, corrupt DC ProPol class which is ultimately responsible for the decline and decrepitude of not only the US military but the whole damned country…which reform, thanks to their accumulation of near-limitless power, can now be accomplished in but a single, radical, and distasteful way.

Link to CDR Salamander’s post, which you should also read, here, and to the report itself here.

*Close-In Weapons System, an either missile- or gun-based perimeter defense system in use on just about all of the larger USN ship classes to defend against enemy missile and/or aircraft attack. The one in Aesop’s pic looks to be the Phalanx, which is built around the venerable, trusty old Vulcan B61 20mm autocannon—a tried-and-true workhorse of a Gatling gun that was originally developed for the USAF in 1959, mounted in a multiplicity of aircraft ranging from the F4 Phantom, to the F111 Aardvark, to the F16 and -18, to the stupidly-abandoned F22 Raptor

With rust in the fucking barrels. Lord help us all.

South Africa intel

Posted on July 14, 2021July 14, 2021 by Mike

If you’re looking for a sitrep on the festivities taking place now on the southern end of the Dark Continent, only not written in Afrikaans, DuToit would be the obvious place to find such.

What I witnessed over the last 48 hours tells us a lot, so let me distill the essence. In the beginning the mob was in control. Yes they were clearly in control as they marched relentlessly forward like an army ant formation advancing through the jungle. They devoured all before them and they were unstoppable. But importantly, they were controlled and focused. There was a clearly defined plan, so command and control is alive and well, but invisible. They knew when to hit designated targets. They knew where the police were absent. They knew where shopping mall security was most vulnerable. They were collectively acting as part of a plan.

Who are those central but invisible command and control people? Will our intelligence services possibly start to figure this out?

But the other thing that was clearly visible was the rapid way that civil society responded to the communal threat. Groups of citizens rapidly formed into militia, and mostly acted with restraint and to great effect. I don’t know the final numbers, but my gut feel is that more arrests were made by citizens acting in well-organized groups, than by the police.

I also note that some of the militia went beyond the act of arrest, and meted out instantaneous justice. Its unclear what the body count it, but certainly there were many. Some shot, some beaten and some even hacked to pieces by machete. I have seen credible video evidence across this entire range.

But the core lesson is that civil society responded by organizing themselves, rapidly and effectively. We will now see the dawn of a new era, where those civil groups become better organized than the government, which has clearly failed. In effect we had no government over the last 48 hours, because while this mayhem was playing out, Jesse Duarte gave a press briefing about an NEC meeting pretending to still be in control.

The Ruling Party has simply lost control. The civil service is so dysfunctional as to be a liability now easily bypassed by an increasingly confident and effective civil society.

Clearly attempts by government to disarm civilians will fail. Of this I am certain. Just as certain as I am about the emergence of self-organized militia centered on credible leadership and existing networks of security force personnel that have been sidelined by government purges.

This is the real New Dawn. Not the feeble message spewed out by the now embattled and increasingly illegitimate Ruling Party. Their days are numbered.

That’s not actually Kim talking there, but a former military intelligence guy he excerpted. As for Kim his own self, he sees things the same way I do.

Anyone who thinks this can’t or won’t happen here is deluding himself. The only reason that this hasn’t happened in the U.S. so far is that unlike South Africa, Blacks are in the minority; but it means that where they are a significant proportion of the population, this will happen — think Minneapolis and Ferguson, times ten.

I see burned-out city centers, and rampant poverty and lawlessness therein. After that, I’d really rather not speculate.

No point in it anyway. Historically, once balls of this type have dropped, there’s simply no way to know which way they’re going to roll or where they’ll end up coming to rest. Predictions are no more than a way for idle hands to pass the time until the tsunami of violence and anarchy washes over their own personal doorsteps.

More useful analysis from DuToit here.

See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya

Posted on July 14, 2021July 14, 2021 by Mike

Unexpectedly, inadvertently, and for the first and only time in his entire useless existence, senile alleged “President” Grampy Fingerbang has done the right thing.

Good Riddance, Afghanistan
merican forces are finally departing Afghanistan. While Donald Trump had promised to end the inconclusive war there, he eventually gave in to the pleas of the defense and intelligence community and continued the war. Other than a few dozen more dead Americans, and a few more hundreds of billions of dollars up in smoke, it’s not clear what these additional years of effort achieved. Now Joe Biden has finally acknowledged the political and military reality: if we haven’t lost, we certainly are not winning or making any progress.

One of the most remarkable things about the last few weeks is how utterly brittle the Afghan security forces and government have turned out to be. After billions of dollars spent on training, equipment, and support, the Afghan National Army is abandoning large bases, along with state-of-the-art guns, optics, and military equipment. These are now in the hands of the Taliban. For all the talk of our Afghan partners and their heroic national commitment to democracy, none of it turned out to be worth much when the training wheels were taken away.

It is not even clear if the American-supported Afghan government will last as long as the Soviet supported regime, which held on for three years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

While it is clearly time to leave, it is worth thinking for a moment about why the entire Afghanistan mission, particularly after 2002, was a fool’s errand.

The mission became distorted over time. After 9/11, Americans wanted revenge. That mission was a simple one: punish the Taliban, destroy al-Qaeda, and capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Within a month of the attacks, our troops were in the field.

The campaign featured a novel operational approach. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to show the military that it needed to learn to do more with less. His concept of “transformation” limited troop numbers, a feature of what was called the “Revolution in Military Affairs.” This theory proposed that the combined effects of high-speed communications, sophisticated sensors, and precision air power, would succeed where the traditional military’s risk-averse, heavy footprint would fail.

At first it seemed Rumsfeld and the revolutionaries were right. Very quickly, the Taliban melted away under pressure from American special forces, the Afghan Northern Alliance, and a fusillade of precision guided bombs in the months after 9/11.

But the first hint of trouble appeared soon thereafter. In the Battle of Tora Bora and later in Operation Anaconda, the Army’s lack of artillery (on Rusmfeld’s order) and the lack of sufficient blocking troops allowed the lion’s share of al-Qaeda, including Bin Laden, to slip away and obtain refuge in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. He wouldn’t be killed for another decade.

Unable to use our forces in our nominal ally’s territory, the United States and NATO emphasized the secondary aspects of the mission. They got to work on “nation building.” Political and military leaders defended this approach as enlightened realism, because al-Qaeda flourished at the extremes, in either weak states or politically repressive ones. Developing governing institutions and security forces, while expanding human rights to women and minorities, would create enduring stability and reverse the conditions in which al-Qaeda previously thrived.

This was an ambitious strategy, made twice as hard by the artificially low levels of troops. It became even more challenging after the start of the Iraq venture, which put Afghanistan on the backburner until the 2009 surge. Afghanistan is a famously violent and tribal place, where disparate tribes only unite under the banner of Islam to expel foreign invaders. The American concepts of democracy and liberalism were a message that worked at cross purposes to our efforts to obtain legitimacy and security. After all, these changes slowed down the decision-making of the Afghan government, while also alienating many Afghans, Taliban or not.

The biggest mistake we made in Afghanistan was presuming we had to turn the Middle East into an American-style democracy in order to have peace. We presumed we had to rectify the root causes in order to maintain national security. The same scenario played out in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In all of these cases, our efforts did not increase our security or enhance stability, and sometimes made things worse.

More limited and realistic options were available, including the old fashioned punitive raid. Wrecking a place sends a message too, a message of deterrence. Because we viewed it as our duty to lift up the Afghans—strange people with whom we have no historical or other connections—and because no one wanted to admit the flawed foundations of the war, we ended up there for 20 years, long after most of al-Qaeda had decamped for Pakistan.

Even accepting the strategic premise, it’s not clear that anything we did enhanced stability or reduced international terrorism. Afghanistan has been in a state of civil war since our arrival. ISIS also materialized in the meantime. Al-Qaeda is still around. And attacks within the United States by immigrants and home-grown Islamic terrorists have continued the entire time.

By trying to do too much, we accomplished too little. The U.S. military is perfectly capable of bombing, killing, and capturing people. But, even with the help of its second army of contractors and do-gooder NGOs, the United States is not particularly good at nation building. We are no longer the America of the Marshall Plan, and the people of Afghanistan are not the same as Germans, Japanese, or even Iraqis for that matter.

To turn disorder into order is a difficult thing. Democracy is probably not the best tool for doing it. Historically, liberal democracy is normally an end stage form of government, not a foundational one. Moreover, our entire approach does little to account for the strict Islam of the Afghan people and their pre-Islamic tribalism. This comprehensive religion, coupled with this cultural inheritance, is not fertile soil for a democracy, let alone a liberal one.

Leaving Afghanistan does not diminish the bravery of our soldiers, the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks, or the need to avenge those deaths and remain vigilant against terror threats.

But we are neither avenging nor remaining vigilant in Afghanistan today. Since 2002 or so, we have been going in circles against a local resistance to our presence. Any temporary gains soon evaporate, as we lack sufficient troops to hold what we have cleared, and the Afghan security forces are woefully inadequate to consolidate the gains. The overall connection of any of this activity to U.S. security is minimal.

Our feckless, thoroughly politicized general-officer corps turned the Graveyard of Empires into the Playground of the Ruling Class, their own private test-bed for weapons systems, surveillance technology, and tactical doctrine. The experiments and aimless fiddle-fucking around cost too many good soldiers their lives, shattering morale and unit cohesion without producing anything of notable use. American troops trained to kick ass and take names were forced to bleed and die under preposterous ROEs that put them at severe hazard while granting every advantage to a savage and deadly foe.

From early on, it became all too clear that Afghanistan was to be an open-ended campaign in which victory would remain undefined, unpursued, and beyond reach, the ultimate outcome a foregone conclusion. The Playground should have been shut down years ago. The hapless Biden deserves no credit for it whatsoever, but I’m glad to see this unholy mess finally grinding to a halt, however ignoble and humiliating a one it might be. The FUSA—its “leaders,” its subjects, and its military—bears a moral obligation to not even dream of launching another war of any kind or magnitude until the multifarious issues raised by its Afghanistan dumpster fire have been properly addressed.

The whole enchilada

Posted on July 9, 2021July 9, 2021 by Mike

Ace links to an absolutely brilliant theory-of-everything thread, which I ran through ThreadReader so you don’t have to. CAUTION: excessively lengthy excerpt follows, for which I make no apology because there was just no way around it.

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself.

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.

Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution – agencies, the press, Congress, academia – gaslit them for another year.

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.

It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem.

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now.

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, b) The press is part of the operation, c) Election rules were changed, d) Big Tech censors opposition, e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, f) Trump is banned from social media.

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them (from) getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.

Believe it or not, there’s still a lot I left out, of which you should read the all. If anybody has done a better job of pulling together all, and I do mean ALL, of the events of the last five years than this, I’ve yet to run across it. Bravo, MartyrMade, and a humble tip of the ol’ chapeau to you for this most excellent work. In the end, it all boils down to Ace’s closer:

It’s time to start talking seriously about the crisis of illegitimacy in the former America republic, and what exactly the subjects of the Ruling Class — not the citizens, we’re not that, we’re subjects, and we will pretend no longer — will do about it.

Actually, it’s way PAST time. We’ve been doing precisely that here at CF for quite a while now.

Update! JD Rucker picks up on this masterpiece, correctly identifying it as a must-read.

Must-Read Twitter Thread: Here’s Why We KNOW the 2020 Election Was Stolen
Twitter is general(ly) a cesspool of bad ideas argued by people with even worse takes on those ideas. The days of being entertained by Twitter disappeared when Donald Trump and tens of thousands of conservative Twitter accounts were banned in January. Occasionally, a gem still pops up.

This is one of them. Darryl Cooper, AKA @MartyrMade, is a podcaster who had a Twitter thread go viral with 13k retweets and 20k likes of the first Tweet alone. Normally I post the thread in its original form, but this one is 36-Tweets long. There’s also a good chance it will be deleted because it makes very cogent arguments of not only why millions of Trump supporters believe the 2020 election was stolen, but also why we are justified to believe it.

Did massive, widespread voter fraud happen? Yes, we believe it did. But even those who do not believe so should read this thread to understand why our perspectives on the election will not be swayed by those who have made lying to us their profession.

Indeed we won’t, nor should we be. At this late date, anyone gullible enough to place the tiniest iota of trust in anything coming from the maw of FederalGovCo is too damned stupid to figure out how to tie their own shoes. Even if they have Velcro straps instead of laces on ’em.

Updated update! I already knew that Rucker is the proprietor of the NOQReport portal blog, which I’ve had in my bookmarks since, like, forever. What I didn’t realize until just now was that I hadn’t installed NOQR in the Portal category in Ye Olde Blogrolle yet. Oversight duly addressed, with a big fat mea culpa and most humble apologies to JD.

Oathbreakers

Posted on July 7, 2021July 7, 2021 by Mike

See if you can guess who said this.

“My heart starts racing like most other Black men in America when I see those blue lights behind me,” he claimed. “You don’t know the anxiety, the despair, the heartache, the fear, the rage and the disappointment that comes with living in this country…every single day.”

So what kind of guy might say something like this, anyway? A few possibilities for your consideration:

A grungy punk rock kid idling on a St Mark’s Place apartment building’s stoop in lower Manhattan
A rabid Marxist Harvard student…or professor
A Los Angeles BLM “protester”
A vagrant crackhead taking a dump on a San Francisco street
A Chicago gangbanger/arsonist
A Nation of Islam weirdo
LeBron James

A: None of the above. Ready for the big reveal, gang? If you had your money on Chief Master Sergeant Kaleth Wright, top advisor to former Chief Of Staff of the United States Air Force David Goldfein, please go to the pay window to collect your winnings.

Okay, then. Here we have a high-high-brass USAF non-com who raised his hand and swore an oath most solemn, of his own free will, to lay down his very life if necessary in defense of the selfsame country for which he feels nothing but “anxiety, despair, heartache, fear, rage and disappointment” over being condemned to live in, the poor dear. Does that strike anybody out there as being really, really close to disloyalty?

Ready for the truly scary part? Wright is by no means alone in those sentiments in today’s military. Not by a long yard, he ain’t.

This is Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr’s new Air Force.

Brown, the first black Chief of Staff of the Air Force, ought to be a living symbol of opportunity. Instead, like other disloyal military leaders, including his predecessor, Chief of Staff David Goldfein, he’s smearing America, and conducting a witch hunt for imaginary racism.

The racial attack on the U.S. Force from within began with the Black Lives Matter riots.

“I am a Black man who happens to be the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force,” Chief Master Sergeant Kaleth Wright tweeted using his official Air Force account. “I am George Floyd…I am Philando Castile, I am Michael Brown.”

Even Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison admitted there was no racial element in the Floyd case and had not even tried to add to the wrongful prosecution with hate crime charges.

But Wright, the top advisor to former Air Force Chief of Staff Goldfein at the time of the Black Lives Matter race riots, suggested that he could be killed by white police officers at any moment.

It made you wonder why Wright hadn’t left America for somewhere safer like Cuba.

It makes me wonder why every self-respecting American patriot still in hasn’t gotten the hell out already.

The Air Force’s top enlisted leader smeared America, identified with criminals, and urged everyone to be angry. He ranted that he had been inspired by socialist rapper Killer Mike to pursue “plotting, planning, strategizing, organizing and mobilizing”. And together with his boss, Goldfein, they would be working on a “full and thorough independent review of our military justice system”. The review, predictably, accused the military justice system of being racist.

Air Force Chief of Staff Brown claimed that the report contained “things I’ve actually felt”.

Feelings were now more important than facts not just on college campuses, but in the Air Force.

What about actually defending America?

Air Force Magazine said that Brown and Chief of Space Operations John Raymond suggested that there “should be a balance between mission readiness and ensuring people’s voices are heard”. Mission readiness was only at best equivalent in value to conversations about racism.

And before long, mission readiness will be less important than accusing America of racism.

Before long? What with Amerika v2.0’s all new LGBTQ, PurePC, and femiNazi-friendly military; its nigh-traitorous general-offiçer corps; and its inability to notch a clear win since WW2, looks to me like that ship has already sailed.

Final stages

Posted on July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 by Mike

Or, if you want to be a bit more prosaic about it: death throes.

The events at the spa were bad enough. The attack by AntiFa, and the subsequent actions of the police in 1) refusing to defend the peaceable protestors and 2) arresting a man who dared to defend himself make it plain that Los Angeles, California is about to collapse into complete chaos – and it might take the whole state with it.

The Golden State is the chief “produce cart” of these United States. Imagine it as a “failed state” in which there is no order and no safety. Be quick about it; soon you won’t need to imagine.

The lesson in this “should” be “obvious.” Sadly, it isn’t.

Throughout the nation, public order is breaking down. I can hardly name a city of significant size where Black Lives Matter and AntiFa don’t run rampant. Municipal police departments are either indifferent or impotent. Though there haven’t yet been many, reports of home invasions by those forces are making honest, peaceable Americans fearful about their own homes. As for urban commercial districts, I hardly think I need comment.

Los Angeles may be the forerunner of a complete social collapse from coast to coast. The consequences will include food shortages, loss of electrical power, unavailability of fuels, disruption of the roads, open gang violence, and many other things. If you think having the kids confined to the house this past year was bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet – and I hope you never do, though in my view the portents are grim.

The following is from a novel-under-construction:

“Public order is a matter of public will,” Merrell said in his most famous first-term address. “We have lacked the will. We dislike to compel immigrants and the young to conform to the norms of public decorum. We dislike to demand that public charges aim for self-sufficiency and make an honest effort to achieve it. We dislike to budget for law enforcement. We dislike to see armed men who embody the authority of the law patrolling our streets. We dislike to erect and staff prisons. We especially dislike to clear the streets of vagrants and idlers by force, or to hold parents responsible for the deeds of their miscreant children. Yet these measures, not ‘tolerance,’ nor ‘leniency,’ nor ‘understanding,’ nor ‘compassion,’ nor ‘community service,’ are the ones that will mitigate our problems with poverty, vagrancy, vandalism, and more serious crimes.”

Would anyone care to argue with John Merrell?

Remember the immense improvement in the condition of New York City when Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent forth its police to enforce all the laws, including the ones pertinent to “quality of life?” You don’t have to be that old to recall those years. Giuliani’s success in making the Big Apple a pleasant place to live, work, and shop was why he acquired the sobriquet “America’s Mayor.” Contrast the Giuliani years with those of the odious crypto-Communist Bill de Blasio.

I remember it quite well; as it happens, I moved to NYC for the very last thrashing about of the Dinkins mis-administration, and the difference when Giuliani took the City Hall reins was impossible to miss. There’s really no credible way to deny that the man singlehandedly saved NYC from itself, although certainly there are plenty of fools who tried then and still do today.

Of course, since I lived on the LES the professionally designed and printed posters plastered all over downtown featuring a pic of Rudy with a Hitler-style brush moustache and thinning combover, denouncing him as a “Nazi” and “literally Hitler,” were equally impossible to miss. Alas, New Yorkers have for many years been people who simply don’t understand what’s good for them; like a child balking at the taste of his medicine, they’d just as soon stay sick, thanks.

There is only one issue that matters in the elections of the years before us: law and order. No candidate who refuses to make that his one and only priority should receive even a single vote. Unless and until peaceable Americans are once more able to go about their lives without fear, this nation will come ever closer to chaos and disintegration. Whether anything could be reclaimed from the wreckage is dubious.

The traditional norms of public deportment, from the prohibition of violence all the way to standards of decency, must be enforced humorlessly and without exception. Nothing else will serve. What people choose to do in the privacy of their homes is of no moment.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. But nobody should be laying down any significant sum betting that it’s at all likely to happen. The chaos, division, and strife sown by the Evil Left has been working way too well for them to expect they’d dream of tolerating such a thing. There’s only one effective way to deal with their recalcitrance, a macabre last resort that we’re all perfectly well aware of. They seem bound and determined to leave us with no other choice but to kill them off in job lots—and with every passing day, I grow more convinced that they ought to get their wish.

Patience will out

Posted on July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 by Mike

An (eventually, ultimately) optimistic take from Robert Gore.

The trial for Derek Chauvin and the lack of one for the Capitol Hill policeman (name still unknown) are another reminder—not that any are needed—that savages aren’t fair. It’s pathetic and ludicrous to expect an appellate court to grant Chauvin a new trial, although it would have ample grounds to do so in anything resembling a fair judicial system.

It’s like saying, “Wait until 22 and 24!” or, “Wait until the Arizona vote audit!” after last year’s blatant election theft. The savages have instituted corrupt arrangements that will enshrine their power in perpetuity. Expecting them to tolerate anything that would jeopardize those arrangements is like expecting water to run uphill. Fair or even quasi-fair elections would threaten their power. They are, like fair trials, but a memory.

Savages beget savagery and nothing else, until they are stopped or they stop themselves. Don’t count on them recognizing the production—a civilized and thereby forbidden act—and the producers—civilized and thereby forbidden people—that keep them fed and alive. And don’t count on them not making your weaponry, your last line of defense, a use it or lose it proposition.

They recognize no limits, certainly not the constraints imposed by reality. They may have to lay waste to the world before whomever remains of the honest and productive realize that their lives are a defend them or die proposition. For decades, America’s rulers and their accomplices have said about the enemies of the day: they only understand force. It’s projection, ascribing to others one’s own motivations. They’ve dressed it up in all sorts of verbiage, from Make the World Safe for Democracy to We’re All In This Together, but force is what they understand and to which they’ll always resort. The only thing that will stop them is superior force more competently wielded.

Government of the savages, by the savages, and for the savages doesn’t have much to draw on, and decades of propaganda have told savages to look to the government for every need. Vegetarian stew in every pot, two Teslas in every garage, paid for diplomas on every wall, a band-aid for every scratch, and a kiss for every boo-boo are just the minimum of what they’ve been told to expect. If they don’t get them it’s the selfish civilized’s fault. But who will they blame when the selfish civilized skip town or quit? And who will feed them?

The separatists will have the productive capabilities. Many of the country’s honest entrepreneurs (as opposed to its crony socialists) have already migrated. They will also have military expertise, especially after the savages eliminate retrograde rightwingerism and transform the US military into the most diverse, empathetic, and politically correct conflict resolution force the world has ever seen. (Oh, how the world trembles!) Notwithstanding the many thanks they’ve received for their service to the savages’ government, many veterans will join the civilized.

After last year’s mostly peaceful riots and the January 6 Insurrection That Nearly Overthrew The Most Exceptional Government In History, many savages bought firearms for the first time. Unfortunately for them, there’s a big difference between buying a firearm and knowing what to do with it, and most of that knowledge (and millions of firearms) are on the side of the vets and the civilized.

Many of the vets have also received on-the-job training in guerrilla warfare, against which the US government is batting zero. The government has many scary weapons, but it has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to keep such weapons out of the hands of its adversaries. Perhaps the separatists will prove as clever and capable as the Vietnamese, al Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban, and Iraqis and other groups have been at capturing US government weaponry. Notwithstanding their diversity, empathy, and political correctness, the conflict resolution forces would then find their weapons turned against them.

At this point, imagination is far more important than a deer-in-the-headlights’ fixation on present realities, because those realities are changing so quickly and chaotically. When the ground is continuously shifting under your feet, you can’t know where you are with any certainty. Your chance of saving yourself depends on knowing where you want to go and having an idea of how to get there.

Skepticism about imminent revolutionary change is understandable, but often betrays a misunderstanding of how revolutions in politics, science, culture, art, philosophy, learning, and all other fields of productive human endeavor work. The explosion visible to all is almost always preceded by a long, burning fuse visible to few and understood by fewer, only generally apprehended after the explosion.

The burning fuse in this case is the awesome force of decentralization sweeping the planet; the revolution is actually well underway. Centralization is a legacy idea and government is its legacy institution. After centuries of centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government failures, and after the failure of the most centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government in history, legions of intellectuals of impaired intellect and infinitesimal imagination still hail or fear a centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical global government. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of people out there trying to institute such a government, but they’re building a three-foot-high wall of beach mud and sand against a tidal wave.

That wave will arrive, of that there can be no doubt. Afterwards people will point to some contemporaneous event as the catalyst, but the catalysts have been accumulating for decades, their leitmotif decentralization. Multi-volume sets could be written about them all.

Don’t get too attached to today; tomorrow it’s gone. The questions that will emerge from the chaotic maelstrom: Freedom or tyranny? Civilization or savagery? Anyone who chooses civilized freedom is going to have to fight for it, but it’s a fight that can and will be won.

We can but hope…and prepare, plan, and load magazines.

I preminisce no return of the salad days

Posted on July 3, 2021July 3, 2021 by Mike

Another Ironbear masterpiece of commentry that needs to be moved out front here.

There is no going back. We live in post-America now, and have for quite some time. We can’t go back to the America of the Founding any more than we can go back to the bright, shiny, thriving, hopeful and optimistic America of the ’50s. There is no time machine that will take us there.

Conservative thinkers like Smith, Codevilla, and the rest err in thinking that there is somehow some way to dismantle and excise the degeneracy of Progressivism while keeping the worthwhile parts of what Codevilla calls “Republican America”.

There is not.

Post-America is not going to somehow revitalize and go back to being America. We’re in the degenerate phase of a decadent civilization, and, to date, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a degenerate civilization that has reversed course and revitalized into a thriving, growing, and vital civilization.

Breakup and partition is inevitable at this point. Empires always fall apart.

What grows out of that is no more going to resemble the America of George Washington than the Western Civilization that grew out of the breakup of the Roman Empire resembled Classical Rome.

The primary question at this point, and the one that thinkers like Smith and Codevilla refuse to face squarely – because that would require admitting that they’re spinning their wheels – is whether the breakup and collapse will be slow and gradual over centuries like Rome, or fast and bloody like Yugoslavia.

I don’t believe that quick and peaceful like Czechoslovakia or even the Soviet Union is in the cards for us.

The secondary question is: What comes next? What grows out of rubble?

Smith and Codevilla can’t answer that for the same reason I can’t: the caterpillar can’t envision the butterfly.

Yup, that’s about the size of it. I myself am frequently guilty of using phrases like “restoring America” and the like, despite knowing that such a thing not only won’t happen, it in fact CAN’T happen. We’re walking on uncharted and extremely dangerous ground now, and the destination is uncertain at best.

“Can Radical Federalism Save America?”

Posted on July 2, 2021July 2, 2021 by Mike

Worth a try, of course. But doubtful. Very, very doubtful.

Eminent conservative thinker Angelo Codevilla had an article titled “To Rescue a Nation” last week at the American Mind that’s very much worth reading. To save the republic means ending the escalating tensions and conflicts precipitated by growing divisions. A radical approach is necessary.

To allow divergent peoples to peacefully coexist and find some commonality of purpose so the nation may survive, differences must be accepted and governance made to conform to that reality. To achieve that good result, Codevilla asserts that we need a “radical de-centralization” or, as might be said, a radical federalization of the nation. It’s the remedy for saving the country from disunion or tyranny. But is this worthy goal achievable?

Almost certainly not. At this point, whether it’s even desirable or not is eminently debatable. There’s a certain inconvenient reality the more reticent and respectable commentariat overlooks that undoes every argument they try to make: the nation is ALREADY split, in every truly meaningful sense. The divergence of political ideology, ambition, and intent has widened into a yawning chasm. It is a gap that can no longer be bridged. The point is moot; tyranny is already in place, and the only thing disunion lacks is an official, de jure proclamation of it.

The arguments proferred by authoritarian Leftists—who loathe the Founders’ conception of what constitutes just and legitimate governance to their very marrow—and those of Real Americans—who revere those noble principles, mourn their loss, and wish to see them restored to their rightful primacy—are wholly intractable. Tyranny and liberty are incompatible; sooner or later, the eternal conflict between them will be resolved. History shows that it will not, it cannot, be done peaceably unless one side acquiesces. The author knows this as well as the rest of us do:

We’re tempted to say that Codevilla’s vision aligns the nation more closely with its inception, with the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union — at least in that spirit. A looser federation of states and enhanced localities with Washington more focused on core functions — national defense being preeminent – would boost chances of the United States continuing as one nation.

But there’s a sticking point, and it isn’t trifling. In fact, for the nation’s elites (the oligarchs — Codevilla uses that descriptor, too) and the left, radical decentralization is precisely what they oppose. Whereas republican America would, and portions of Woke America may, welcome a significant decentralization, which amounts to a policy of “live and let live,” a radical centralization of the nation is what oligarchs and the left seek.

The oligarchs do so, principally, for power that leads to wealth. The left, which holds to Marxism, lusts for power and seeks wealth but also craves control over lives. Marxism — not judged by its blarney, but by its practice – demonstrates that it’s about hierarchy, concentrations of power, and control — not of an authoritarian stripe, but a totalitarian one, as history makes abundantly clear.

Today, these anti-liberty factions are playing a zero-sum game, and they’ve given no indications that they’re willing to compromise or are open to realignments of government that thwart their aspirations.

Which is precisely the tack Team Liberty must now take also. It was the starry-eyed “willingness to compromise” and blasé acceptance of “realignments of government that thwart their aspirations,” combined with their fatally-mistaken granting of an undeserved assumption of honest intentions and fair-mindedness to the Left that got us all in this mess.

Alas, this is where I must part ways with the author, who otherwise seems to grasp our conundrum more acutely than most.

Codevilla says that to rally and lead a national movement a galvanizing figure must emerge. He doesn’t appear to be keen on Trump, because he believes Trump is too self-focused. Here we disagree. Trump has largely galvanized Red or republican America. As president, despite relentless hostilities, he accomplished for the nation. He drew large audiences, in person and across mediums, including last Saturday night at an Ohio rally. Yet, the organization behind Trump has been inchoate and most often ad hoc. Trump may be the General Washington republican America needs. What he requires are able lieutenants who can effectively organize behind him.

In a word: NO. Trump’s time has passed. He had his opportunity, and whatever may have motivated him to do so, he failed to seize it. He may or may not have some part to play in what’s to come, I really couldn’t say. But he has shown himself to be a far less effective champion than Real Americans had hoped. Love him or hate him, when the rubber met the road he took his foot off the gas and stalled the car. I can no longer see him as the man to get the motor running again and drive us on to where we need to be.

With the closer, the article gets back in track.

A critical consideration is that the oligarchs and left would offer robust counters to republican America’s “defensive” offensives. The stakes are sky-high for them. We must grasp the nature of the enemy.

Men and women, bent on domination, and in many cases, with years of sweat equity invested in achieving their aims, aren’t going to be quickly deterred. They will fight and fight hard. As we saw during the Trump presidency, they have no compunction about using false accusations and illegality (Russia Collusion hoax), destroying reputations, brazen disinformation (the January 6 “insurrection”), resorting to election chicanery, stoking public fear as a means of manipulation (COVID lockdowns), and loosing Antifa and BLM to incite riots. Exposed in 2020 was the ugliness and, in fact, ruthlessness, of anti-liberty factions. They can get uglier and more ruthless without a doubt.

And they will. None but a fool could have any doubt about that by now. As has been more than amply demonstrated, they intend to rule. There is no length to which they won’t go to make that happen—none. Will we let them?

Which isn’t an argument against fully joining the fight and committing to nothing less than total victory. Republican America has plenty at stake, too: the rule of law and liberty. It’s simply to impart the understanding that in war — cold, hot, or somewhere in-between — it’s best to anticipate a greater intensity of conflict for a longer duration than decent people would hope, particularly when wars are civil in nature.

The status quo is unsustainable. The question is, can republican America win the day, ushering in a fundamental decentralization of the nation, thereby permitting divergent peoples to share one nation, bound by some traditions and some shared beliefs and aspirations? Perhaps. Or will this clash between very different worldviews lead to the permanent partition of America? Or will it boil down to a zero-sum game, with one or the other side prevailing? Much awaits future events.

There should be no further discussion of whether “republican American” CAN win the day. It’s deflating, demoralizing thumbsuckery, and we can no longer afford to indulge in it. “Republican America” MUST win, and that’s flat. No matter what it takes, no matter how distasteful the actions required of us, the alternative is far too terrible to contemplate.

Courtroom wrangling, legislative mucking about, the strongest imaginable words, idle daydreams of a way out that doesn’t involve resorting to violence against an enemy that has already done just that—none of these, alone or combined, are anywhere near sturdy enough tools to wreak a reconciliation between two adversaries whose commitment to diametrically-opposed beliefs is unswerving. He who flinches from battle has already lost the war. Try as we might to find another path, throughout human history it has always come down to the same, simple equation: One side must win. One side must lose.

We MUST not lose.

An encouraging word

Posted on July 2, 2021July 2, 2021 by Mike

Since I couldn’t make it work as a comment over at Expat’s joint, I’ll just post this here and hope he sees it:

“A single grateful thought toward heaven is the most perfect prayer.” — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

One of the best, most profound quotes I know of. Hang in there, ol’ son. Long as you’re still breathing, they haven’t beat you yet.

The greatest meme of all time!

Posted on July 1, 2021July 1, 2021 by Mike

Ye Olde Intrepide Reporter has it.

Kinda says it all, don’t it?

Oh, and speaking of Expat, he just got canned from his job, so could probably do with a little help. The generosity of you CF Lifers has always humbled and amazed me, so if any of you rapscallions can send a shekel or two his way I’m sure it would be hugely appreciated.