Category: Hmmm…

Dezinformatsia

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Don’t believe a word they say. Not EVER, about ANYTHING.

The theme of the bumbling Russians was clearly preconceived and coordinated, and commenced in earnest within the first 24 hours of hostilities. CIA/MI6 fronts like Oryx, Bellingcat, and the war-mongering Kagan family propaganda mill The Institute for the Study of War have pumped out this narrative so relentlessly that it has now been almost universally enshrined as “received wisdom” in the western state-controlled corporate media and among large numbers of clueless, arms industry-compromised former generals – even to the point of entering into the body of assumptions embraced by many “experts” who I expected to be more discerning.

One of the more inexplicable narratives included in this disinformation package has been the allegation that Russian troops are poorly trained conscripts who are thrown into the meat grinder with antique weapons, little ammo, and so little food they are literally starving.

These tall tales are then woven back into the main strand of the narrative: the Russian army is a disorganized mob of demoralized “orcs” whose only real talent is plundering household appliances, raping young women, and randomly gunning down old folks on the streets.

Attached to this constant refrain are repeated comparisons to the allegedly incomparable professionalism, organization, training, and weaponry of US/NATO forces. The implication is that any undersized company of exceptional American soldiers would be more than a match for an entire oversized battalion of incompetent Russians.

I’ve concluded this unrelenting narrative must have as its aim the persuasion of the general public and policy-makers in NATO countries that western militaries are so vastly superior to their Russian counterparts that no one should entertain reservations about making war against them.

Well, I mean, DUH, of course they’re superior! Drag queens; dumpy, out of shape broads utterly incapable of meeting physical-fitness standards, necessitating continual relaxation of said standards for their benefit; “transgenders” only in it for the free dick-chopping; outdated, poorly maintained equipment and/or vehicles; air-“superiority” fighters that can barely even get off the ground occasionally; PC Wokesterism running rampant throughout the higher ranks; militant feminazi officers demoralizing the grunts under their command by making them parade around in spike heels publicly—C’MON MAN! With all that and more besides going for it, why on earth wouldn’t Amerika v2.0’s military be the most fearsomely powerful fighting force in the entire multiverse, striking terror deep into the hearts of all prospective adversaries?

And with that preface, let’s turn to the primary question: could NATO fight and win a war against the Russians on this same battlefield?

My answer is an emphatic NO – for three distinct but equally disqualifying reasons:

  1. There is zero persuasive evidence that NATO soldiers, weaponry, training, logistics, and command are superior to that of the Russians.
  2. Sufficient NATO forces could NEVER be assembled, equipped, and sustained to defeat the Russians in their own backyard.
  3. The very attempt to concentrate sufficient US forces in the region in order to take on the Russians would very likely result in the disintegration of the global American Empire and its massive network of overseas bases – thereby rapidly accelerating the already-in-progress transition to a multipolar world.

As to point #1 above, it bears repeating what I have argued multiple times in recent weeks: this war has seen the Russian military quickly evolve into a battle-hardened and quick-to-adapt fighting force. The US has not faced such a force since World War II.

Many believe the US is a “battle-hardened” force. This is utter nonsense. Of the many thousands of troops currently manning US combat units, only a minute fraction has experienced ANY battle whatsoever, and NONE have experienced high-intensity conflict such as is taking place in Ukraine.

Honestly, I consider point #3 more feature than bug, myself. Regardless of whether Russia is or is not really All That with a Cherry On Top militarily, unless and until

  • The US has thoroughly unfucked its own military, and
  • Its populace has outgrown its girlish squeamishness regarding war in general and evinces the will to not only fight, but to win, and
  • Its moronic political class is entirely forthcoming about US war aims, and what “winning” might and might not consist of

…Amerika v2.0 has no business whatsoever attempting to wage war against anyone at all, let alone any near-peer nation. Period fucking dot, end of fucking story.

Plenty more dispiriting but incontrovertible stuff in the linked article, all of it every bit as condemnatory of the idiotic notion of further escalating Bribem’s Needless and Futile War as I just was.

(Via WRSA)

Update! Scion of a family with a tradition of military service explains why he’s decided he’ll have none of it, yielding several priceless quotes in the process of so doing.

‘Eroded patriotism’: Teen shares why he now won’t follow in father’s footsteps as military recruiting lags
‘Symphony of sewage’ out of White House deters veteran’s son from military service amid recruitment shortfalls

Aden Gilbert grew up watching war movies, fighting enemy combatants in video games and listening to his dad’s Marine Corps stories. He considered following in his father’s footsteps but changed his mind as he saw the country and its leadership heading in a direction antithetical to his values.

“If we’re prioritizing being woke, and we can’t actually protect the majority of American people  . . . what’s the point of having a military?” Gilbert asked Fox News. “Is it really worth joining and putting our life on the line for ideologies that we don’t agree with and that we don’t want to necessarily protect?”

Military children have historically been more likely to serve their country than their peers. Ten years ago, more than a quarter of new recruits had a parent who had served, and around 80% reported having at least one family member who had done so, according to a Pentagon survey.

“It was something that a man of honor would do, to serve and protect his country and serve and protect those values that existed back then,” Gilbert, 18, said. “But I think things are a little bit different now.”

Indeed they are, son. Astute of you to notice.

The military is struggling to fill its ranks as young people like Gilbert forgo service. The Marine Corps and Space Force are the only branches that anticipate meeting their enlistment goals this year. The Army, Navy and Air Force expect to fall a combined 26,000 enlistees short in fiscal year 2023. The Army also fell short in 2022 by about 15,000 soldiers (25% of its goal).

Military officials have pinned much of the blame for lackluster recruitment numbers on a competitive job market and a dwindling pool of qualified applicants. Only 9% of young Americans are interested in serving their country, according to the Department of Defense.

“I would rather tiptoe around literal landmines than have to tiptoe around people’s pronouns,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert has always considered himself a patriot, but said the left has “successfully eroded patriotism” by pushing restrictive laws, “woke” ideology and “celebrating satanic themes in music and Hollywood.”

“It just angers me seeing our president as the conductor of that symphony of sewage,” he added.

You’re by no means alone in that sentiment, me boy. Not by a long yard, you ain’t.

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The problem with cities

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Is that eventually, one way or another, their problems become our problems.

Imploding Cities Will Drag All of Us Down — Even if You Don’t Live Anywhere Near One
There is so much wrong with America’s cities, it’s hard to see why any contributing member of society would live and/or work in one of them. Some of the issues arise from far-Left local governance while others are generated by more widespread Leftist policy. These are coupled with an organic workforce evolution, as the United States transitions from an industry-based to an information-based economy. The result is urban areas caught in a downward spiral — and, as with any sinking vessel, threatening to suck everyone nearby down with them.

First, a quick refresher on the compounding problems of urban areas. Chief among them is that big cities are dark blue, and thus they’ve become crucibles of Left-wing policy failure. Uncontrolled crime, roving drug and mental-illness zombies, and swarms of sanctuary-recipient asylum scammers are crowding out reasonable people and businesses. The normals who remain to take advantage of access to cultural events (such as they are) and restaurant variety are also subject to totalitarian social controls and two-tiered justice systems that punish them when they fight back against criminals. But no matter how desperate the situation becomes, city councils can be counted on to double down on woke policies, then double down again.

Businesses are fleeing. In the ones that remain, shopping for basic goods has become a frustrating exercise in waiting for an associate to unlock the case so you can grab a razor and some toothpaste. Add in today’s high interest rates, which make owning and running a business prohibitively expensive, and the writing is on the wall. PJ Media colleague Rick Moran reported last month that large San Francisco commercial businesses, like hotels and malls, are simply walking away from their obligations, handing the keys to the banks with which their real estate is financed. Concurrently, major retailers are declining to renew leases and are simply closing their doors, unable to break even in an atmosphere where retail theft is encouraged. This process is occurring to some degree in major cities across the country.

While we conservatives point and laugh at the plight of woke cities from the comfort and safety of our suburban and rural homes, we may want to take a moment to consider a sobering issue. The effects of the imminent collapse of the commercial urban real estate market will ripple out across the financial sector and affect just about everyone in one way or another.

Remember the mortgage-backed securities crisis in 2008? And how, even if you didn’t default on your mortgage or didn’t even own a house, the entire economy tipped into what the hyperbolic media tagged “The Great Recession” and we all suffered? So, this would be kind of like that, except the problem will start with a commercial real estate collapse.

Which collapse is happening even as we speak (so to, umm, speak). Real Americans who aren’t shitty-city dwellers have no place they can reasonably expect to find succor, either:

Don’t start daydreaming that we’ll have a Republican president by then who will refuse to bail out imploding cities, either. When you realize that everyone’s pensions are involved, you understand that not bailing out these banks and cities was never going to be an option. They have us over a barrel. So we can expect a cool trillion or two to flow from Big G’s coffers. This, while we are still reeling from the inflation and high interest rates from the last crisis, the Great COVID Overreaction Rescue Plan.

There is much to recommend city life: museums, entertainment, fine dining, varied shopping and cultural experiences, travel hubs, and excellent medical care are all steps away. A large segment of the population prefers such a stimulating and convenient lifestyle, and they would happily live in cities regardless of whether they worked at home. Enterprising landlords could convert less-used office space to living space and continue to run a profitable business. But so long as Soros DAs, activists, and city councilors keep making urban life unlivable, America’s cities will continue to circle the drain. And we’re all going to get sucked down with them.

Too bad, that, and no, it ain’t really fair. It’d be all too easy to assume that, what with the industry and manufacturing that for many years was centered in our large cities now gone the way of the dodo, the cities’ influence over and ability to affect the outlying areas might have diminished a great deal, but it just isn’t the case. As ever-larger numbers of those in a position to do so flee the urban shithole-zones, the rest of us Flyover-Country types will almost certainly be feeling the pain too—and the lamentable tendency of those big-city refugees to vote for the exact same things that ruined their own befouled nests* is only the beginning of it.

* Which tendency may or may not be apocryphal, interestingly enough, according to what you’re reading and who wrote it

News you can REALLY use

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From Sido, on a topic he knows a thing or two (a-HENH!) about.

Everyone knows that Americans can’t manufacture anything anymore, we just aren’t competitive on labor costs. In order to have the stuff we want, we have to send those manufacturing jobs overseas. Sure it destroys the working class but those people can learn to code or better yet get low paying service jobs at dollar stores selling stuff workers in China made. Progress! The free market at work!

It is pretty hard to get anything made in America, from electronics to clothing to just about everything else, all of it is made in China or some third world shithole full of child labor sweatshops. As a nation we are pretty much resigned to grumbling about everything being made in China while still buying stuff made in China.

Not to mention that China is a controlled economy with a billion people making low wages and living in cramped conditions most Americans would find intolerable.

But is that paradigm true? Can Americans really not compete with China and other Asian countries when it comes to manufacturing? I don’t think it really is, not on everything, and the big reason is that there is one thing that Americans make that is affordable and high quality:

Guns.

America makes guns. Lots and lots and LOTS of guns. From “low end” stuff to super high end firearms costing multiple thousands of dollars, like Staccato 2011s that run from a couple grand to over three thousand for competition guns. There are guns for every price point and every budget.

This video helps demonstrate that as The Honest Outlaw tests a Bear Creek Arsenal AR-15 and finds it to be actually pretty decent.

Let me say clearly that BCA is not my first or fifth or tenth choice for a primary or back-up rifle. Thanks to my dealer discounts I am in a position to get higher end ARs and BCA does have something of a reputation for the occasional quality issue. Still, for the vast majority of AR owners it is probably more than adequate. Bear Creek makes their firearms in North Carolina and has something like 220 configurations and calibers in their line-up (see here).

On the other end of the spectrum you have outfits like Sons of Liberty Gunworks and Daniel Defense who make very expensive rifles for people who like to mock “Jus’ as Gud” poors. Between the two extremes are an enormous array of manufacturers from Palmetto State and Anderson to the big names like Ruger and Smith & Wesson and the smaller mid-tier places like Stag and Rock River. Of course you can also mix and match as the parts needed to make an AR are also widely available and made in the US from barrels to detent springs.

Pistols are the same, although I would caution that there are brands you should never, ever buy, most specifically Hi-Point and SCCY, both making absolute garbage. I refuse to carry either brand as an FFL. Right now you can buy all sorts of handguns for under $500 that are well made, reliable and accurate for the majority of shooters from places like Ruger, S&W and many others. The most popular handguns for a long time running are made by Glock in Austria but the rest of the industry has caught up to and I think surpassed Glock, and of course most serious shooters who own Glocks replace most of the Glock parts with after-market parts made in America.

Well, if the politicians and their Corporate Americans sponsors/partners/co-conspirators/whatevers have decided the US is to be left with a viable manafacturing base in only one or two fields, I’ll take guns as one of those and be glad to get it. Read all of it, you’ll enjoy it. Meanwhile, in the comments, Moe Gibbs offers a few penetrating insights.

I am one of those who “learned to code” ages ago, earning a handful of STEM degrees in undergrad and grad right out of high school. Contrary to what Brandon and others think, not just anyone can “learn to code” and I sincerely doubt that Brandon himself has anywhere near the intellectual horsepower to wrangle an old-fashioned STEM degree. I’ve spent my entire career working in defense electronics, which, like arms manufacture, did not lose its all-America focus until fairly recently. My employer, a Big Three in defense, is now admitting non-citizen H1-Bs into the workforce, citing a paucity of native-born American applicants. But just ten years ago we had exactly zero, none, nil.

When I started in my field during the Reagan defense boom, every single assembly, pc board and wire harness was made from scratch, in house, to very exacting military standards from America-sourced raw materials using American-made tools by native-born, English-speaking American citizens. Today, we buy replaceable commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) computer-on-a board assemblies from all over the world, which are essentially ticking timebombs, unrepairable when they break, often incompatible between manufacturing sources. They are obsoleted so quickly and often that the only viable approach is to buy as many of the things as we will ever possibly need at the start of a program, including a ponderous number of ‘spares’, which results in no cost savings to the customer (U.S. taxpayer) at all.

To bring manufacturing back to these shores, Americans would have to accept a very sharp reduction in compensation, and, hence, a serious crimp in their luxurious lifestyles. With burger-flippers commanding $15 an hour, skilled wiremen and component assemblers would naturally demand $40 an hour or better. And no way is any commercial venture going to turn a profit if the guys and gals who assemble hand mixers and home security systems and flat-screen TVs pull down such wages here while chinese slave laborers are paid a fraction as much.

Just like another moon mission, we could bring manufacturing back home, but only if we had literally no other choice. Who is going to be first to give up their $68,000 Beamer to commute in an old beater to work on the assembly line at a repatriated GE manufacturing plant? What “successful” childless working couple is going to downsize from their 3800 square foot McMansion to live in a modest tract home and raise a brood of White children with stay-at-home mom on a single blue collar income? The genie of entitlement and affluence is well and truly out of the bottle, and wrestling that bitch back inside would take some truly monumental effort.

As it happens, I grew up exactly like the example I boldfaced, the primary departure from Arthur’s outline being that my dad couldn’t fairly be considered blue collar (he was a Blue Cross/Blue Shield salesman and, later, a benefits administrator before finally starting his own independent insurance-sales biz), and it was nothing less than idyllic. So much so that for years, it’s been my oft-stated contention that my parents’ generation was the last one to get child-raising in the traditional, all-American fashion right. The loss of that tradition—abandonment thereof, more like—has been a costly, damaging mistake for the entire country.

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MOAR NUKES, PLEASE!

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Stat.

During the recent power outages and denial of interweb service, I took up reading a book I picked up a while back on a subject I have always had questions: The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future by Robert Zubrin (Polaris Books 2023). It’s a very thoughtful argument that debunks the toxic falsehoods that have been spread to dissuade us from using it by the ignorant, the fearful, and the fanatical from returning to the use of Nuclear power as a remedy to our festering Twenty First Century problems. Here’s a quick synopsis of what I culled from his book.

In a very literal sense, energy technologies have molded humanity. The invention of cooking with fire by those small brained Homo Habilis dudes cut the metabolic energy needed to digest meat, making it safer to consume and allowing the primates to eat more small animals or their enemies. Evolution directed some of these surplus calories to their brains, enabling the hungry organ to grow in size and ability, leading to the industrious little guys, Homo Erectus, the forerunner (to) us, the Bozo Sapien.

Over the millennia, humans learned to harness fire to smoke meats, craft pottery, bend metal, and more, forming much of the material basis of the pre-fossil fuel world. Wood power (or what is now called “biomass”) was such a good deal that parts of Europe started running out of forests in the 1700s. Britain was the first nation to innovate itself out of this dilemma, which they did by burning coal.

Mastering coal and other fossil fuels prevented energy scarcity, but also led to an unforeseen revolution in human life. Synthetic fertilizer, electricity, cars, plastics, smart phones, x-rays, ChatGPT—nearly all elements of modern life—exist because of fossil fuels. Today billions of people enjoy a prosperity that would be unimaginable to their ancestors.

This history of energy begins The Case for Nukes. Robert Zubrin, an American aerospace engineer of three decades tells the history of energy to set the stage for one of his core arguments, that humanity should use more energy. Over 700 million people languish in extreme poverty today and billions have not reached a standard of living equivalent to that of a developed country.

In contrast, radical environmentalists urge people to use less energy, which they believe is necessary to avert climate and ecological apocalypse. Zubrin contends that slashing energy use would be so harmful as to be borderline genocidal, but he does recognizes that the environmental harms of fossil fuels are unsustainable. Thus he endorses nuclear energy, asserting that only atomic energy can lift all people out of poverty while conserving the environment.

The fabulously talented and visually stunning Diogenes Sarcastica™ closes her post by gleefully declaring, “I say let’s start smashing some fucking atoms and keep the lights on,” a proposal with which I must enthusiastically agree; by gum, those fucking atoms have it coming. Before that beautiful, beautiful dream can hope to become a reality, though, it will be necessary to dispense with a great many Luddite shitlibs, which requirement I consider to be more plus than minus—a side benefit, shall we say, making the whole thing a win-win for everyone that matters.

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Poesy

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In comments to the Horatius/Trump post SteveF mentions a certain pome with which I was heretofore unfamiliar. So I looked it up and MY, but it’s a dandy, albeit long as an afternoon suffering all the tortures of the dentist’s art. A bit more of it, then.

XXVI
But the Consul’s brow was sad,
    And the Consul’s speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall,
    And darkly at the foe.
‘Their van will be upon us
    Before the bridge goes down;
And if they once may win the bridge,
    What hope to save the town?’

XXVII
Then out spake brave Horatius,
    The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
    Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
    Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
    And the temples of his Gods,

XXVIII
‘And for the tender mother
    Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
    His baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens
    Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
    That wrought the deed of shame?

XXIX
‘Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul,
    With all the speed ye may;
I, with two more to help me,
    Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
    May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
    And keep the bridge with me?’

XXX
Then out spake Spurius Lartius;
    A Ramnian proud was he:
‘Lo, I will stand at thy right hand,
    And keep the bridge with thee.’
And out spake strong Herminius;
    Of Titian blood was he:
‘I will abide on thy left side,
    And keep the bridge with thee.’

XXXI
‘Horatius,’ quoth the Consul,
    ‘As thou sayest, so let it be.’
And straight against that great array
    Forth went the dauntless Three.
For Romans in Rome’s quarrel
    Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
    In the brave days of old.

XXXII
Then none was for a party;
    Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
    And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
    Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
    In the brave days of old.

XXXIII
Now Roman is to Roman
    More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the high,
    And the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction,
    In battle we wax cold:
Wherefore men fight not as they fought
    In the brave days of old.

Rings all too familiar in the modern ear, no? Especially those last two stanzas, which encapsulate the current situation in Amerika v2.0 pretty thoroughly. Proving once again that, in art as in life itself, some things really never DO change, and that the same can truly be said of eternally-immutable human nature—the shitlib conceit of malleable, perfectible Progressivist Man notwithstanding.

Much, much more rich, buttery epic-poetic goodness at the link, incredibly enough, which you should read if you’re inclined in that direction, finally clocking out at an eye-bulging Stanza LXX. Pity the poor shoolkids who had to memorize the entire pome way back in the Aulden Thymes, if Pournelle’s claim is to be believed.

Inside baseball side note: Man. A. LIVE, but what a right royal pain in the ass formatting that was! Thanks to the abject failure of the MarsEdit find-and-replace function to do its ONE FUCKING JOB, replacing all the paragraph HTML tags with line-breaks throughout the above excerpt of the pome by hand was a most arduous task indeed. Necessary though, to keep things all clean, tidy, and looking as they should around here. I swear, the things I do for you people…

Ahem. And now, to get cracking on tomorrow’s Substackery.

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1

Got our number

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Don’t look now—OVER THERE, A SQUIRREL!—but the Rooskies just confirmed that they take the old Biblical admonishment to “know thine enemy” very seriously indeed.

Needless to say, It’s not a ‘smiley face’ sort of situation.

His final words?

“So far, the finally degenerate Western political class is trying to raise the stakes in bloody clown horror. In a state of persistent dementia pushes our little world to the third world. The stoned Kiev regime is inciting the war to the last Ukrainian.”

A degenerate Western political class, foisting “bloody clown horror” on the rest of the world? A state of persistent dementia? Yep, I’d say this guy (Dmitry Medvedev, that would be, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council) knows us extremely well; better than we know ourselves, from the looks of it. Meanwhile, back in “Keeeev” (just around the bend from “Pock-e-stahn,” in the preferred argot of obnoxiously smug former presidents, Western Enemedia “news” anchors, and other pretentious “citizen of the world” twits across the multiverse)…

Does that sound like a country that’s on ‘the back foot’ or ‘losing’? Not to me…Have the Russians had setbacks? Sure… part and parcel of war. HOWEVER The fucking moronic Krainians? They’re running out of people. The latest vidyas I’ve seen, from the Krainians themselves? The fucking ages of the ‘cruits and boots they got?

Jesus.

I’m younger than the majority of these guys.

I’m pretty sure if Grandpa is on the front line, yer in “Germany circa 1945” territory. I mean for real. 65 year old guys, in uniform, looking miserable? They should be at home but apparently Krainfeld is bound and determined to kill off every single male Krainian between the ages of 16 to 65.

Not that fucking faggot and his Kocaine Klown Krew are actually on the front lines…nope…he’s faaaar too much of a rock star. In fact I’m pretty sure he’s actually holed up where the green screens keep him looking like he’s still in the Kraine, as I have my doubts…hjuyhjfucking if anything, I highly encourage someone in the Kraine, or Putin himself, to put both the Kraine and us (the rest of the world population) first and put Krainfeld out of OUR collective misery.

I.E. drop a Kaliber on his fucking ass.

Fuck him.

Sideways

Preferably where even dental records wouldn’t help with ID.

Jes’ Sayin;’

We could use a little dose of that particular prescription right here at home, I’m thinking. Maybe Putin might be, umm, persuadable on my nuke-DC proposal.

Trump as Horatius

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Now here’s a YUUUGELY flattering comparison I’ll bet you never thought of before.

Donald Trump – Our Horatius at the Bridge?
After reading the account of Horatius again, I wonder if some of the electorate view Donald Trump as our Horatius. Bear with me; I’ll explain all that.

Horatius’ fame resulted from his action described in Macaulay’s poem and by Plutarch; he planted himself at a bridge and, with only two comrades, faced down an invading army until the bridge could be removed and the gate closed. He did so without question, an act of courage, patriotism, and duty so profound that it has survived through the ages.

Even so, a lot of people jumped on board the Trump train right at the outset, and lots of those folks are still riding that train today. Is it because they see Donald Trump as the latter-day Horatius?

It may very well be. There are several parallels.

Horatius took a stand, with only two faithful followers, against an invading army. Donald Trump’s campaign now portrays him as the only man who could take on the army of the Deep State, and that he is taking a stand to do so.

Horatius was unafraid, taking his stand out of a sense of duty to Rome. Trump’s message was that the Deep State scares him not a whit, that he is losing wealth by running for President, but that he does it out of a sense of duty to America.

Horatius took his stand with two others, also loyal soldiers of Rome, who shared his commitment. Trump sells himself similarly, that he is a “team builder” who would put together a crew to put our national affairs in order.

There are, of course, some key differences.

Naturally there would be, not all of which redound to Trump’s discredit. In the final analysis, we’re left with this.

There are probably a lot more holes in the comparison than I’m mentioning here. An actual scholar of ancient Rome would probably pick the idea apart. But I do think that this is a big part of Trump’s appeal. It’s a potent symbol: The strong, stoic man, standing at the head of a small band of heroes, with weapons drawn, saying, “No more. It ends now. This far and no farther. Now we will drive you back.”

Mind you, I’m not saying Donald Trump is that man. He may prove to be, but it remains to be seen. But I think, consciously or unconsciously, that this is the image he is trying to portray, and it may well work for him if he can resolve some of his other issues. And it may be a cautionary note that Horatius’ brave stand being what it was, Rome still fell to the Etruscans.

Here’s another important cautionary note. About five hundred years after Horatius, another Roman leader emerged, and this one saw the end of the Republic. That’s a parallel that voters should be watchful for. Caesar was a populist, legally elected Dictator first for ten years, then for life, largely on a slate of jobs and benefits for the common people of Rome. But in the end, his actions led to the fall of the Republic and the rise of the totalitarian Empire.

It’s tempting to say it can’t happen here. But a lot of Romans about 49 BC probably thought the same.

It may be tempting to say that, but that’s probably due more to its being comforting than it is to any factual accuracy. Because, as history has demonstrated for us over and over again, it can happen anywhere—and it WILL.

Fiddling with numbers

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Yahoo News tries it and, thanks to Divemedic, comes a cropper.

In this editorial piece disguised as news and statistics, Yahoo tells us that there are only about only 16.7% of Americans actually own firearms.

the top twenty percent of all gun owners actually owned 55% of the guns. In terms of absolute figures, ten million people owned 105 million guns – for an average of ten guns per person, and the remaining 87 million guns were owned by 34 million people – for an average of 2.6 guns per person. The population of the U.S. was 263 million in 1994 – indicating that only 16.7% of Americans had actually owned a weapon.

So their claim is that 44 million people own all of the guns. That is complete and total bullshit, and I can prove it. Let’s use concealed weapons permits as an estimate of the number of gun owners. Florida alone has approximately 2.6 million active concealed weapons permits. With 12% of all Florida residents having a concealed weapons permit, this would mean that three in four gun owners have a CWP. That would be a very high percentage, indeed.

How many people in Florida have weapons but no CWP? That is impossible to know, but what we do know is that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement conducts 1.5 million instant background checks for firearm purchases per year. The anti-gunners are claiming that all of these firearms are being sold to the same people over and over.

I just don’t see it. It is far more likely that, when called by some random “survey taker” that the person answering the phone either says, “Guns? We don’t have any guns here,” when asked, or they simply refuse to take the survey. I just don’t think that surveys are a reliable means of “research” on any topic like firearms. I might as well take a survey of high school boys, asking them about their number of sexual partners. I’m equally as likely to get an accurate count in either case.

Yep. Then again, though, it’s not as if the Enemedia “people” are really trying for accuracy here, either. The point, the REAL point that we’re all not supposed to know about or notice, is to propagandize; to demoralize Our Side and enhearten their own; and to mislead and obfuscate generally. That, after all, is what propaganda is for, its raison d’être. There IS a factual bottom line here, which DM helpfully spells out for us.

If even one percent of the gun owning public decides to respond in kind to being called an enemy of the people, there will be somewhere around 1.8 million people who are armed, pissed off, and know how to shoot. Many of them spend their weekends hitting small targets at thousands of yards, because they think it’s fun. They will not be lined up in neat ranks out in a field somewhere, just waiting for you to nuke or drone strike them.

The US police cannot even begin to control the gang problem in our inner cities, and the membership of those gangs is only around 800,000 or so and the gang members aren’t actively hunting cops, no matter what the cops try to claim. This is a fight that cannot be won, but they don’t care because liberals are not the ones who will be getting killed. Or so they think. That is dangerous thinking indeed. The people of each side who are the least stable will be the ones who decide when the violence begins and how far it goes.

Pretty much, yep, and t’was ever thus. This all reminds me of a couple of things right off the bat: Number one, the wise old Heinlein quote from SGT Zim in Starship Troopers (Chapter 5) that posits “There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.” Number two: “Can you count, suckahs? The future is OURS, if YOU can count!”

I can dig it, Cyrus.

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The perfect “pResident” at the perfect time

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Okay, maybe not “perfect,” precisely. Fitting, appropriate, or consonant, more like. Justified, say.

Consider for a moment, and be grateful for, how perfect “Joe Biden” is as president of this foundering republic. He and his family project the rectified essence of every depravity now driving the life of our nation to some murky bottom, where it may be forced to assess its sorry state, repent, and perhaps recover (or just give up and die). There he stands, without ambiguity or conscience: “Joe Biden,” the personification of a failed state.

As a criminal enterprise, for instance, the Biden family influence-peddling operation among foreign powers reflects exactly the racketeering character of corporate America today — which is to say, making money dishonestly, and often for doing nothing.

The Biden business model also applies nicely to medicine and higher education, two endeavors saturated in prestige and pomp, like the doings in the White House, but which, similarly to that hotbed of policy and action, in the case of medicine, produces shocking amounts of unnecessary death (est. 251,000 a year from iatrogenic treatment errors), and in the case of higher ed, the production of specious and harmful Big Ideas — while both endeavors expand like turbo-tumors within the dying body of an expiring manufacturing economy.

As in the Biden model, dishonesty is now the keystone in both “Meds” and “Eds.” Our public health officialdom hasn’t stopped lying about the Covid-19 episode since it began, and in every aspect from the origin of the disease (if that’s even what it was), to the deaths statistically attributed to it, to everything about the “vaccines” cooked up to stop it. In turn, those officials coerced America’s doctors into withholding the best treatments (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) while applying deadly protocols (remdesivir plus intubation) guaranteed to kill hospital patients — which the government then rewarded with gargantuan bonus payments.

Higher ed has now turned its energies from learning to political activism, meaning the performance of morality preening stunts for acquiring status under the pretense of addressing social problems that boil down to bad behavioral choices and mental illness. Higher ed is now in the business of generating more of both those things in the form of manufactured racial antagonism and sexual torment (in partnership with the medical establishment). All fields of study in college are now racialized and genderized, and all at the expense of organized knowledge, which gets burdened with fatuous theory and spurious crypto-religious missions. The price of admission to this carnival of fakery multiplies at a faster rate than the generalized annual dollar inflation, abetted by federal loan guarantees that “Joe Biden,” in his munificence, seeks to abridge with a jubilee for student debt.

Of course, it’s the fantastic psychodrama within the Biden family that presents the most arresting model for America. “Joe Biden” tells us over and over that he loves his son, who he calls “the smartest man I know.” A father’s love is a wonderful thing, for sure. And yet, is there anything that Hunter Biden has not done to destroy “the Big Guy,” short of, say, driving a number nine knitting needle ear-to-ear through the old man’s skull?

OH NOES, we must all hope and pray that such a thing will never, ever happen. Why, that would be just awful. PLEASE DON’T DO IT, HUNTER! Well, unless an opportunity presents, and you just feel like it that day.

Putting the shoe on the other foot, though: is there anything Pedo Jaux has not done to destroy Hunter? Using his son as a bagman, then glomming a worse than usurious share of those ill-gotten gains for himself; blandly placing him in dangerous situations shaking down ruthless men; idolizing and lionizing his dead brother whilst essentially ignoring him; shaming his entire dysfunctional “family” with all his grifting, his groping, his serial sexual deviancy—time after time, Hunter has been urged into criminal behavior, without even the courtesy of a reach-around for shouldering all that risk.

So if this greatly-put-upon Prodigal did wake up one late afternoon with a sudden irresistible urge to spike the Big Guy’s brain via his crusty earhole, who could really blame him for acting on it?

Meh, then again, it might just be a case of the bad apple not falling far from the poisoned tree. Myself, if the whole damned Organized Crime familia dropped dead five minutes from now, I wouldn’t be shedding any tears over it.

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Can’t get their lies straight

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Fun and games in the White (Bag) House.

Holy Coke: The White House Cocaine Story Changes Yet Again
You may want to sit down for this unexpected development, but the narrative surrounding the bag of cocaine found at the White House has changed again.

If you’ve been following this story from the beginning, you are probably aware of its many iterations. First, we were told that “cocaine hydrochloride” was found “near” the White House. The desired implication obviously was that the cocaine was medicinal (in this case, an anesthetic nasal spray) and that it wasn’t actually found inside the buildings.

Things then shifted dramatically when reports, including from The Washington Post, said that the cocaine was actually found in the White House library. Suddenly, the story wasn’t just about some hazmat situation nearby, but that was hardly the only twist. By Tuesday, things had shifted further, this time with a claim sourced to the Secret Service that the cocaine was found “in a work area of the West Wing.”

That’s quite the progression given how simple it should have been to figure out the truth from the start, and sure enough, there’s a new development. According to the latest reports, the cocaine was found in a “cubby” at the West Executive entrance.

We have entered the realm of absurdity, and I don’t think anyone should be expected to believe these constantly shifting claims being bandied about by the White House. This latest iteration is especially convenient in that it puts the cocaine in a highly trafficked area where the administration can wash its hands of the issue. But ask yourself, if the cocaine was actually found where this latest claim says, why didn’t they just say that from the beginning? Whoever found the cocaine initially knew where they found it. It wasn’t some grand mystery, only revealed after several days. Yet, we’ve been left with no less than four different revisions of the location.

All the while, the idea that the Secret Service doesn’t have the means to quickly figure out who left the cocaine remains laughable. There are cameras everywhere at the White House outside of the family areas. Certainly, the West Executive entrance is covered in them. There’s been ample time to view the tapes at this point and release a conclusion.

Well, sure, but as ever the truth is the absolute LAST thing they want escaping into the wild and becoming widely known amongst the Serf Class. Although, in light of a gathering shitstorm of ugly rumors that Hunter fled his recently-rented, extravagant LA mansion palace to go “stay for a while” at Daddy’s house because, due to having recently fallen off the wagon yet again (does any semi-sentient being really believe he ever WAS on the wagon? SRSLY?), Pedo Jaux wanted Cracky-boy someplace where a closer eye could be kept on him, it’s not even a little bit hard for Joe Layman to figure out what’s really going on here.

For a passel of such inveterate, compulsive liars, you’d think these hapless clowns would be better at it than they are.

Flying off into aviation history

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After trying for decades to rid themselves of it—and, happily, failing miserably—the venerable, awesomely-capable A10 Thunderbolt II is finally getting shuffled off to Buffalo by the Chair Farce shitwits.

The A-10 Warthog Making One Final Flight — to the Boneyard
Beloved as much by the grunts on the ground as the pilots who flew it, the A-10 ground attack jet is being retired after five decades of very loud and effective service. Air Force enthusiasts everywhere are going to miss that ugly S.O.B.

The Air Force announced plans last week to replace two of the last remaining A-10 squadrons with more modern F-16s and F-35s. “This is all in line with the service’s goal of divesting the last A-10s before the end of the decade, if not sooner,” according to Yahoo News. Air Force brass have been trying to retire the hog for years but Congress has kept telling them no. This new announcement indicates that the A-10 will not keep flying until the 2040s, after all.

But what a jet, even if it did have a face not even a mother could love.

Hey, speak for yourself, Steve. I think they’re goddamned beautiful, myself.

Fairchild-Republic stepped up to meet the Air Force’s need, and the result was the A-10 Thunderbolt II. Neither sleek nor sexy, the Thunderbolt is usually called the Warthog or just the Hog. The whole jet was designed around the 30 mm GAU-8 Avenger rotary autocannon whose (airborne!) ammo magazine is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It’s capable of firing depleted uranium shells that tear through the thickest armor like a hot knife moving at 3,324 feet per second through melted butter.

Because the A-10’s job is to get in close, the pilot sits in a “bathtub” made out of titanium. During the Gulf War — when the Warthog first really captured the public’s imagination — I saw one jet on CNN that returned from a mission missing almost a third of one wing and probably half of the other. (I’ve searched for years for that clip but to no avail.) A fully-loaded Hog can carry an additional eight tons of various missiles and bombs.

The Hog’s engines are mounted high and to the rear with a slight tilt up towards the front. That’s to avoid sucking in debris on damaged airfields. Those Fairchild engineers really did think of everything.

The first development version of the Warthog flew in 1972, and it entered service in 1977. More than 700 were built, but only a few dozen are still in service. Although built in numbers to counter Soviet armor, our much-reduced force of A-10s found plenty of jobs that only they could do in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yup—which tends to be the way such things go, even in an age of overemphasis on flashy new technological gew-gaws and gimcracks: the older, sturdier, battle-tested platforms seem almost to be imbued with a will to live as powerful as any sentient being’s, and somehow always find a niche to fill. This next passage makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little.

For what it’s worth, the Air Force has long argued that the F-35 Lightning II multirole stealth fighter is better prepared for ground attack in the 21st Century.

As a lifelong Warthog fan, it pains me to say this, but they’re probably right.

I wrote years and years ago at the original VodkaPundit.com that “stealth is the price of admission to the modern battlespace.” Non-stealth jets simply don’t stand a chance against the latest generation of air defense systems. Hell, they barely stand a chance even against a slightly older one.

The war in Ukraine has proven me (and many others) correct on that score. Despite having a much larger and more modern air force than Ukraine, Russia has been unable to achieve air superiority — even in the early months of the war, long before Western antiaircraft systems began service with Ukraine. Russia has no combat stealth aircraft in service, so even their most advanced Su-34 attack jets have been mostly limited to lobbing inaccurate dumb bombs from safe distances, outside the reach of Kyiv’s air defenses.

In a war with China or Russia, the A-10 likely wouldn’t survive. If — and this is a big if — there’s still a role for manned ground-attack jets, it’s with stealthy planes like the F-35 that are hard to see, harder to kill, and can fire a variety of long-range stand-off weapons.

Yeah, no, not so much. In the first place, war with China or Russia is unlikely in the extreme. In the second, you’re (and the Chair Farce as well) making some highly unfounded assumptions about the one-size-fits-nothing F35 Turducken, which is so bug-ridden, fantastically expensive to build and maintain, and over-engineered it’s no better than fifty-fifty whether a full squadron could even manage to get off the ground in-theater.

As for the casual dismissal of manned combat aircraft, that’s another thing the desk-bound zoomies have been pimping for decades now with little to no success, for a very simple reason: there is no substitute for boots on the ground, swabbies on deck, eyes in the sky, and Marines storming ashore. All the adolescent onanism extolling futuristic, bloodless warfare waged exclusively via drones, combat mechs, and AI geekery controlled from extreme standoff range will never replace the human ability to adapt, improvise, and overcome on-scene, in the heat of the moment—especially in the kind of 5G brushfire conflict against some dimestore dictator in Shitholistan’s ragtag army of goatherds we’re much more likely to find ourselves engaging in going forward.

Stephen’s point about latest-generation air defenses is well-taken, certainly. But how many of those exorbitantly expensive cutting-edge systems are going to be finding their way into the hands of the kind of backasswards Third Worlders we’re likely to be squaring off against, really? Admittedly, I damned sure wouldn’t want to be caught with my ass in the breeze at the stick of an A10 and have some illiterate yahoo set off my threat-warning alarms by pointing one of those high-tech death spikes at me. But still. I don’t have any numbers on how many times such a thing has happened to some poor ‘Hog jock, so I won’t offer any guesstimates on the odds for or against, or what the frequency of such incidents might actually be.

Looking at the bigger picture, though, the days of massive armies marching in serried ranks to take up entrenched positions along a clearly-defined MLR, underneath a sky-full of overly delicate air-superiority aircraft, are over. At least for the foreseeable future, war will be grubbier, dirtier, closer-in, and more vicious than some tech weenie peering at a computer screen a thousand miles away can begin to imagine. Modern warfare has become more of a shoot-and-scoot proposition, fought by adversaries close enough to smell each other’s weeks-ripe BO before things go loud. Hyper-sensitive, persnickety gadgetry that can be rendered combat-ineffective by a fistful of dust in the avionics suite or sucked into an intake won’t be up to the job.

Maybe the A10 really is past it, I’m hardly qualified to say. But I bet there would still be plenty of occasions when some poor ground-pounder up to his eyeteeth in the real, the bad, and the scary would be mighty glad to hear one in the hands of an experienced, crafty pilot loitering overhead. To abandon a proven-effective tool in favor of the premature forced adoption of an apteryx like the Turducken is exactly the kind of fanciful wishful-thinking shitlibs have become notorious for.

Definitions and re-definitions

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Pondering one of the Left’s most effective, reliable, and oft-used tactics. The wind-up:

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and a group of 14 other attorneys general penned a letter to Target CEO Brian Cornell this week expressing concern about the store’s removal of some of its Pride products.

Target lit a media firestorm last month when it announced it pulled an unspecified number of products from its shelves after the company faced “confrontational behavior” at its stores as well as threats of violence on its customer hotline.

While Ellison and AGs from California, New York, Maryland and more offered support for Target’s intention to keep its workers safe, they questioned if Target gave in to threats.

“While we understand the basis for this action, we are also concerned it sends a message that those who engage in hateful and disruptive conduct can cause even large corporations to succumb to their bullying,” the AGs wrote, “and that they have the power to determine when LGBTQIA+ consumers will feel comfortable in Target stores or anywhere in society.”

And then ace relief pitcher Porretto takes the mound to hurl the (red) pill.

Of course, neither Target’s workers nor its (remaining) customers are in any danger. They have no objective reason to feel “unsafe,” regardless of their sexual and political alignments. That’s not the point. The point is to keep the LGBTQ “pride” pressure at the maximum.

The above shows us three important things about the Left:

  1. Agenda: Forcing LGBTQ “pride” crap upon normal Americans.
  2. Priority: Worth involving high law enforcement officials and veiled threats.
  3. Method: Redefining normal Americans’ reactions to “pride” marketing as bullying.

The agenda is plain enough: thrusts by the LGBTQ promoters, particularly the promotion of transgenderism, are very much in the Left’s interest. The priority takes a moment to discern; state attorneys-general are far more significant players in public affairs than most suppose, as the law enforcers of their states answer to them. The method, as it so often is, is the redefining of entirely legitimate consumer behavior – i.e., the choice not to shop at Target – as “bullying,” a prosecutable offense in most states. While it’s rather difficult to prosecute persons whose identities are unknown, that’s a mere detail. The attack rhetoric of the attorneys-general is what matters.

There’s a ball-under-the-shirt aspect to this. Those attorneys-general aren’t aiming at prosecuting consumers for not shopping at Target, an absurd undertaking. Their concern is Target’s response to the loss of consumer traffic. They want the LGBTQ “pride” campaign “out loud and proud,” represented conspicuously in as many retail establishments as possible. Forcing arrant abnormality on normal people requires a massive full-court press.

A-yup, and they never have been exactly shy about implementing it, either. That, along with their dogged, single-minded determination and their eagerness to get down into the mud and fight dirty, are all part of the reason they keep right on winning in their ongoing battle not just with us, but with objective reality itself.

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What if…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

Best of

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An Independence Day compendium.

A Fundamentally Important Question for Independence Day
It will determine whether we survive as a free people.

As the Fourth of July fast approaches and we consider the many alternatives available for recreation and entertainment, we should pause to ponder an important question tied closely to the deeper meaning of the day.

The question is deceptively simple, but it goes to the heart of our relationship with government and every significant policy issue that confronts us. And the answer to the question will determine whether we survive as a free people.

The question to ponder on Independence Day is, simply: Where do our rights come from?

That is indeed the Question of Questions, the most critical query of them all. It is exactly what distinguished the United States as Founded from the operational understanding which had held throughout Whypeepuh Civilization™ right up until the Founding Fathers stood the previous arrangement on its head with the barest handful of almighty words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Bold mine, of course, and wholly dispositive. It is to our great discredit that those sacred words are no longer drilled into the empty skulls of every schoolkid from early on, forcefully and verbatim. This lamentable gap in their education is probably the single greatest reason why we are where we are—the principal signpost demarcating the Progressivist victory. It’s been a long, slow degenerative process that began with guess who? Three only, first two don’t count.

With their property and person protected by a Constitution enacted to secure the natural rights affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, the creative genius of a free American people produced unparalleled progress and prosperity.

However, as the twentieth century unfolded, certain politicians and intellectuals – with Woodrow Wilson the embodiment of both – thought that the principles of natural rights, individual liberty, and law-limited government embodied in the Declaration and Constitution were outdated relics of a simpler agricultural past that dangerously undercut to ability of the government to deal effectively with the complex challenges of industrialization and urbanization that confronted the nation in the new century.

Wilson and others believed that they had more “progressive” ideas for the updated and radically altered form of government they thought America needed. With the American economy and society becoming more and more complex, the progressives argued that founding assumptions about popular sovereignty and self-government needed to be rethought and the role of the people in the functioning of their government narrowed significantly.

For government to function efficiently in the “new republic” of the progressives, controlling authority needed to be consolidated in the executive branch where it would be exercised by credentialled technocrats who, insulated from the pressures of democratic accountability, would be free to use their expertise to regulate the affairs of Americans and modify private sector arrangements as needed to produce the results desired by the regulators. So was born the administrative state.

To justify and facilitate this massive anti-democratic concentration of power in the executive branch bureaucracy, progressives sought, and still seek, to discredit the concept of natural rights and replace it with the age-old authoritarian concept of malleable rights that are created by the government and then distributed and redistributed by the government according to its evolving policies and the needs of its supportive constituencies. And so were spawned the abuses of the administrative state.

Indeed so. It’s long been my sincere belief that Woodrow Wilson, curse his black soul, was the most loathsome, insidious threat to America As Founded ever to befoul the White House with his noxious presence.

Now, on to our next Best Of candidate.

Never Forget How Covid Controls Corrupted Independence Day

Fret not, James, I for one have absolutely no intention of ever doing so.

America was founded by rowdy folks who enjoyed nothing better than applying tar and feathers to British tax collectors. For a couple centuries, Independence Day was a day for raising a ruckus with firecrackers and plenty of other friendly detonations.

But in recent times, the Fourth of July has been downgraded to simply another victory lap for our political masters. We are still permitted to celebrate Independence Day but unfortunately, federal, state, and local governments routinely trample the rights that the Founding Fathers sought to make sacrosanct.

The Fourth of July in Washington has been going downhill ever since 9/11. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson scratched out the word “subjects” and replaced it with “citizens.” But on Independence Day 2003, I wondered whether that had been an editing error. I saw long lines of people waiting outside government checkpoints around the National Mall, kowtowing for permission to celebrate independence according to the latest edicts. Police and security agents continue to have a far heavier holiday presence in Washington and many other places than in earlier times.

How many Americans recall that the Fourth of July originally consecrated independence achieved thanks to resistance to a corrupt, oppressive regime? In 2018, Facebook, auditioning for a Federal Censorship Medal of Honor, deleted a Texas newspaper’s reposting of a portion of the Declaration of Independence because it went against Facebook standards on hate speech. Facebook used the same standard to suppress photos of the Branch Davidian home in flames after the FBI tank assault.

In 2019, when President Trump ordered the Pentagon to bring out of mothballs some World War II-era Sherman tanks, the media was indignant. The Washington Post condemned Trump’s “gaudy display of military hardware that is more in keeping with a banana republic than the world’s oldest democracy.” But the real problem was not the military relics. It was exalting government power and politicians on a day meant to celebrate individual liberty.

In 2020, politicians in most areas effectively canceled Independence Day. Governors and mayors had quickly imposed “stay at home” orders restricting 300 million people after the Covid pandemic erupted. Most of the media ignored the fact that Independence Day occurred under the most dictatorial restrictions of the modern era. Crowds were banned from watching fireworks that governments often chose not to ignite.

The Maryland Office of Tourism offered residents consolation prizes – the opportunity to watch a “virtual pet parade” online or see a “virtual Independence Day Tour” of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

Could Independence Day ever become more servile? “Hold my beer,” announced Team Biden.

And then Faux Jaux proceeded to get busy showing us all how it’s DONE. More rich, buttery goodness, same tasty source.

Independence Day is a time to recall the past crimes of officialdom. The Founding Fathers carved the First Amendment to ensure freedom of the press after the crown’s appointees muzzled criticism of King George’s regime. The Second Amendment, recognizing the right to keep and bear arms, was spurred by British troops seeking to seize firearms at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches because British agents with general warrants would ransack any colonist’s house. The Fifth Amendment’s eminent domain provision was written after British agents claimed a right to seize without compensation any pine tree in New England for British navy ship masts.

But the battles our forefathers fought to secure our rights have long since been forgotten amidst a deluge of abuses at the federal, state and local government level. There are good reasons why barely 20 percent of Americans trust the federal government nowadays.

Americans should take their Fourth of July to higher ground. What matters is not what politicians say on any given day but the principles and values by which Americans live. Regardless of how often government agents violate the Constitution, citizens retain all the rights for which our forefathers fought.

Not if they aren’t willing to fight to defend them, they won’t—really, truly, literally fight. As in for-real, honest-to-Jeebus, all-caps WAR-type stuff. As the incomparable Confederate cavalry officer Bedford Forrest so memorably opined: war means fighting, and fighting means killing. Key quote: When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty. ‘Nuff said.

For me, then, the pivotal question was never whether Real Americans are prepared to die for their freedom, but whether they’re prepared to kill for it.

Our final chapter in this Best Of collection comes from Bruce Thornton.

Patriotism Under Siege
But we still have much to celebrate this Fourth of July.

This year’s Fourth of July arrives at a time of doubt and even disdain for our nation’s birth and foundational principles. For most of our history this day has celebrated the bold, epochal Declaration of Independence that staked a claim to self-government and freedom from the world’s most powerful empire. The nation that followed after eight years of war went on to become, and still is, the freest, most prosperous, and, for all its all-too-human betrayals of those principles, the most generous great power in all of history.

The heart of our affection does not come from blood and soil, but from truly revolutionary ideals expressed in the Declaration’s preamble: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The new nation was created to “secure these rights,” not to bestow or create them, and it “derives [its] just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Such obvious truths, however, have been for decades contested by some of our country’s most privileged beneficiaries, and the patriotism that expresses our country’s goodness disparaged and mocked. In its place a fashionable oikophobia ––the hatred of one’s country, principles, virtues, history, and the fellow citizens who still believe in our civic ideals and their goodness––preens morally and embraces the impossible utopias that such oikophobes promote.

Patriotism, the beating heart of our “unum” that binds the “pluribus,” is besieged at a time when we face dangerous developments like enormous debt, open borders, and assaults on our Constitutional order and Bill of Rights at home, and abroad totalitarian rivals “filled with passionate intensity” to supplant our global power, and diminish our freedom.

This sensibility was widespread among intellectuals, causing George Orwell to observe in 1940 that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.” Worse, they were “trying to spread an outlook that (is) sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.”

Obviously, these attitudes affected morale during the interwar years and contributed to the popularity of appeasement, as Winston Churchill said in 1933: “Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals…But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?”

Orwell’s and Churchill’s evaluations have turned out to be some of the best descriptions of our own country’s decades of anti-patriotic intellectuals, writers, and professors. And just as in England, Marxism has been the virus that has spread this dangerous fashion, especially among the so-called “woke.” Starting in the Twenties, variations of Marxist collectivism and anti-nationalism began to permeate American culture both high and low. The reason is obvious: The United States’ freedom, individualism, and entrepreneurial genius are all diametrically opposed to Marx’s “scientific history,” and collectivism’s bloody failures.

That’s just about the size of it, yeah. The battle lines couldn’t possibly be more clearly drawn, the enemies of freedom now out in the open and exposed—loud, proud, and all too obvious—the stakes for all of us of the highest imaginable sort. Which raises another of those age-old questions that have confronted Mankind since at least the glorious American Revolution, perhaps before: Will there be liberty, or will there be tyranny? There is no third option here, no honorable compromise that isn’t tantamount to defeat and surrender. Our Founding Fathers knew it; contemporary Americans urgently need to reacquaint themselves with the cold, hard facts before it’s too late, and we are well, truly, and forever lost.

All the above-excerpted essays are worth reading in full.

Update! if y’all will forgive the self-indulgence, it might be a good time to remind everyone of my own Independence Day essay, posted over at the Eyrie yesterday. Worth a look too, if I do say so myself.

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Pride goeth

Posted on      by     

Hrm, let me see now—goeth BEFORE something or other, wasn’t it? Something like that, I think, can’t recall just what.

LGBT groups are widely supported by every power center in our society. Major banks, corporations, globalist think-tanks and governments all inject incredible amounts of funding into woke projects. Rebels don’t get support from the establishment power structure, only useful idiots do. And this time the establishment is using leftist activist idiots to target the western world with the same tactics it has applied against other nations.

But how does Pride really undermine our civilization?

First, the basic mantra of Pride is…well…pride. Pride is a failing and a weakness, not a virtue. I’m not sure why someone should have any pride in their sexual proclivities. Being gay does not make you special. It makes you a minority, but it’s not an accomplishment that deserves a parade or an entire month on the calendar. The saying “Pride comes before the fall” exists for a reason; self aggrandizement based on zero accomplishment and delusions of entitlement lead to a path of self destruction.

Second, Pride activists are rebels without a cause. There are no rights under the law in the west that gay and trans people don’t have. Zero. Zip. Zilch. In other words, they must now create reasons to rebel from thin air. So, what is all the whining and rage about? What do these revolutionaries do after they have already been given equal rights? As far as I can tell, the LGBT+infinity movement is now dedicated to targeting and indoctrinating (grooming) children.

Nearly every law recently passed in conservative states dealing with LGBT issues specifically protects children from ideological brainwashing in public schools, or prevents the chemical and surgical mutilation of their bodies in the name of gender politics. Trans activists refer to such laws as “genocide.”

Why? Perhaps because they know that in order to perpetuate their numbers they MUST groom kids into the fold. A large percentage of LGBT devout have no children and will never have children. So, the only way they can continue their cult is to hijack the minds and bodies of other people’s children.

This is the hill leftists have chosen to die on, and for good reason – Any successful color revolution requires the support of the youth. If you can turn a society’s children into soldiers for the cause, it is much more difficult for that society to fight back. The natural inclination of most adults today is to bend to the whims of their kids, not go to war with them. The problem is that many kids are generally ignorant and inexperienced. They are easily manipulated and easily used, and are more likely to be exploited for ill purposes by evil people.

Third, the primary tool for pursuing and brainwashing western youth has been the public school system, and more specifically the teachers and teachers unions. The speed at which public schools are now openly embracing far-left ideology is shocking, and it is all due to the teachers. Understand that public schools have your kids for half the day, while you might be lucky to get a couple hours with them per day on average. Most parents work hard, and don’t have time to keep track of their kid’s personal lives and who is influencing them.

Leftist teachers argue that sexualized discussions in class should be protected as a form of civil rights activism. They say it is discriminatory to block lessons on LGBT issues and gender identity issues. This is obviously nonsense. There is absolutely no reason for teachers to be talking to students about sexual subjects, whether gay or straight, and there is zero concrete evidence to support gender fluid theories. Again, this is ideology, not science.

In a strange method of circular defense, leftists often argue that children are far more at risk from religious “groomers” such as Catholic priests. As if to say, “Hey, they do it, why can’t we?” It’s a common retort, but a false one.

According to studies cataloging child sex crimes Public School TEACHERS are 100 times more likely to sexually abuse children than Catholic priests. And guess which political party teachers unions give 94% of their donations to? Yes, the Democratic Party.

Surveys show a massive imbalance of leftists in education. Among English teachers, there are 97 Democrats for every three Republicans, with the proportion being even more one-sided among health teachers, with 99 Democrats for every one Republican. Among math and science teachers there are 87 Democrats for every 13 Republicans. The bottom line? The woke problem among children in the US is primarily a teacher problem. Get rid of the leftist teachers and you get rid of the problem.

Fourth, the basis of the Pride movement, beyond pride itself, is exaggerated sexuality for gays in an era of oppressed sexuality for straights. Have you noticed that straight people (especially straight men) are now heavily admonished for any expression of desire, while gay people are allowed to flaunt their sexuality in the streets, even in front of children? There is a grotesque double standard being put in place which glorifies gay sexuality while straight sexuality is attacked.

The elephant in the room here needs to be addressed, which is that a society that is conditioned to be increasingly LGBT, or that transitions people from childhood using indoctrination, surgeries and hormones is going to have collapsing population numbers. And maybe that is one of the establishment’s goals – To make the west infertile.

Well, hey, what better way to destroy Western Civ in toto? Y’know, exactly as The Plan I keep harping on explicitly urges.

SO. Anybody out there still doubt that this really is a bona fide war being waged against us, folks? Or that Real Americans who believe said civilization to be worth defending better damned well get it in gear and starting fighting back against The Enemy, with a quickness?

Anybody? Bueller…?

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