Life in a once-great nation

Screwed, blued, tattooed

Posted on August 17, 2021August 17, 2021 by Mike

The always-wise and eloquent Claire Wolfe is wondering about a few important things.

We hardly need Arnold Schwartzenegger to tell us our freedom is screwed.

As determined as we freedomistas may be to uphold our mental and philosophical freedoms, our political freedoms and economic freedoms are gone-gone-gone. They’ve been going for decades of course. But we now live under a regime that in eight months has ruled via a combination of ever-shifting whim, diktat, incompetence, and a complete disregard for reason, principle, or constitutional law.

When you’re ruled by capricious madmen, your external freedoms are moot. Here today, gone tomorrow, partially restored for a few moments the day after that, made illegal and punishable by heaven knows what the following day.

Knowing we’re headed for some sort of revolution, I’ve surrounded myself with history books. Seeking parallels. Seeking key differences. Seeking advice from the past. Seeking useful blog fodder.

What can we learn not to do from the French? How are we like, and different from, the Americans of 1774? Must we expect the Russian revolution or might we be smart, luck out and get the kind they had more recently in Estonia or East Germany or Hungary? What can the fall of the Roman empire and its long aftermath tell us? How about the Irish, with their centuries of failure followed finally by a “success” that tears them apart to this day?

I’m telling you, though, I read and read and read and got nada.

While history does at times conveniently rhyme — or echo; we can hear the echoes of several civilizations now — our circumstances are so different they’re like discordant, meterless, meaningless nonsense verse, conveying nothing coherent.

I called up a friend with whom I often brainstorm.

“Give me some insights, preferably with a dose of optimism,” I requested.

For half an hour he ranted about…how screwed we are.

Yes, we’re like the French in 1789 or the American colonists in 1774 or the Irish in 1916. But we’re much more like Germany in 1933.

I have no hope for us; we are such a nation of cowards. We have no backbone.

Even after decades of being lied to, we’re watching Americans not only bow down to every bit of nonsense uttered by the establishment, but seeing those of us who question the nonsense demonized as vermin, to be exterminated.

It’s the kind of self-righteousness that goes along with absolute spinelessness.

Well. That was cheery.

Oddly ironic, ain’t it, how we’ve suddenly found ourselves tossed about on the stormy seas of all-too-familiar history, and yet are in completely uncharted territory simultaneously. But since Claire brought up the French and all, Dave Renegade reviews a little French history that might well contain a useful lesson or three for us.

History once again repeats itself as Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban in a matter of days. Or should we acknowledge this as a surrender since the American puppet army did not give any resistance to their conquerors. I doubt the Afghanistan government installed by the United States was popular except with the opium traders. I also doubt that this was an intelligence failure: the CIA knew what was going to happen. They found greener pastures to rape under the illegal Biden administration.

The analogy of Napoleon’s return to power from Elba should also be considered. Napoleon landed back in France on March 1, 1815. He regained power in Paris on March 20, 1815 without any resistance.

Napoleon was recognized by the military and the people as their rightful leader:

[Napoleon] landed at Cannes on March 1st, intending to travel to the city of Grasse, however the road he wanted to travel did not exist for the Bourbons had given up on expensive works in order to have money. It was known that Grasse was in favour of Royalist cause at the time, yet Napoleon’s sudden appearance led to submission towards the Emperor. After this display of loyalty to the Emperor, Napoleon began to march confidently to Paris as the population were in favour of his cause. There was zero opposition until they reached a battalion on the road the fifth day after landing at Cannes. The commanding officer of said battalion refused to talk to Napoleon. Hearing this, The Emperor took matters into his own hands and walked straight at the battalion with his 100 soldiers treading behind slowly, ripped open his jacket, exposed his chest to the entire battalion and shouted “Let him that has the heart kill the Emperor”. Upon seeing this, the soldiers threw down their arms, tears in their eyes, and shouted “Vive l’Empereur!”

How about another repeat to replace an illegal and unpopular government?

Dave goes on to roll out a scenario involving a reclamation of power by the rightful POTUS (Trump) which parallels Napoleon’s. It has its appeal, I guess, but is unlikely in the extreme to happen. He includes several useful suggestions for what should happen after that, all of which are good.

Honestly, though, I’m pretty much all done with Trump, and I’m by no means alone in that. He had his contribution to make; if nothing else, Trump pulled off the lid to expose what a great big box of pure, undiluted nasty the US government has become. But now—love him or hate him, for better or for worse—his time has passed. From what I’m seeing, he’s lost a significant chunk of his core support at this point—so much of it, in fact, that I have to wonder if he’d even be re-elected in an honest election today. I seriously doubt he would, frankly.

Kabul falls, hilarity ensues, Trump blamed

Posted on August 16, 2021August 17, 2021 by Mike

Parseltongue from the mouth of the lamest, most ineffectual Voldemort ever.

Biden Says He Stands By Decision to Leave Afghanistan, Doesn’t Discuss Botched Exit Plan, Takes No Questions
In prepared remarks delivered from the White House, Monday Afternoon, Joe Biden focused on explaining why pulling out of Afghanistan was the right thing to do, rather than addressing why the administration’s plan was so poorly executed.

“I stand squarely behind my decision,” he said, referring to President Trump’s decision to exit Afghanistan. “The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.”

Biden cast blame on his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, arguing that his administration’s hands were tied by the plan Trump set in motion last year.

He also repeatedly excoriated Afghanistan’s elected leaders and military for not putting up more of a fight against the Taliban. He said that they in essence squandered the time and money America spent to build up its security forces.

“We gave them every tool they could need,” he said. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. [What] we could not provide them, was the will to fight for that future.”

Biden even said that it was “wrong” to put Americans in harm’s way to do a job that Afghanistan wouldn’t do itself, and positioned himself as being a leader who was willing to make the difficult call to leave Afghanistan that a generation of Washington officials were incapable of doing. He added that the United States will continue to provide humanitarian assistance and try to exert soft-power influence to improve the conditions on the ground.

Biden also blamed our Afghan allies for their dire predicament, claiming they didn’t want to leave earlier because they still had hope for their country.

“I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner,” he said. “Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it is because the Afghan government, and its supporters, discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.”

The “***president***” then hurriedly scuttled back to his secret lair, contemptuously showing his back to the adoring press gaggle without taking the slightest notice of them.

And that’s a wrap, more or less. No real need to discuss the bumbling, blibbering dolt’s spluttering dumpster-fire of a statement much further, I don’t think. It’s not as if the doped-up zombie has any real idea of what he’s saying anyway, if he ever did.

Heart of stone update! Question asked, question answered.

He walked out without responding to questions from the press. The transcript records one and only one of the questions shouted at him: “Mr. President, what do you make of the Afghans clinging to the aircraft?”

Oh, a throw rug, a unique and intimidating doormat, some extremely unappetizing pancakes…

Just another humiliating defeat

Posted on August 16, 2021August 16, 2021 by Mike

Everything old is new again.

pic.twitter.com/skQjngLckd

— Dr. Nickarama (@nickaramaOG) August 15, 2021

Know what’s really gonna hurt, though? When some enterprising soul out there does some digging and establishes that the Kabul Chinook is the exact same damned one from the Saigon ’75 photo. Seeing as how the only hardware the “world’s strongest military” has that actually works as it’s supposed to is all fifty to seventy years old, that wouldn’t be any big surprise.

Ultimately, Antipresident Biden owns this embarrassing debacle lock, stock, and barrel—or his handlers do, rather. But let’s not be too quick to lay it ALL at his feet; as always, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Doug Lute, a retired Army general who directed Afghan strategy at the NSC for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told The New York Times that the puzzle for him “is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?” 

Big brass ones on this blame-shifting rumpswab, you gotta give him that much. Which would have to be Requirement One for the guy who directed Afghan strategy for No Such Agency, under not one but TWO (2) US presidents, to blandly declare himself mystified over the absence of contingency planning for a more dignified exit from the Graveyard of Empires. Now I’m certainly no expert, but it seems obvious enough that, as not only a high NSA mucky-muck and superspook but also a former US Army general, Lute might rightly be thought of as one of the folks officially responsible for the development of things like, ohhh, contingency plans, no? As in, that’s a critical part of your job description?

Additionally, it’s widely known that the US military has long made having a plan in place for EVERY imaginable contingency—including some pretty fanciful ones, at that—among its top priorities. Yet somehow—for a twenty-year quagmire which even not-particularly-attentive Americans could readily discern we were losing, the current “president” and his predecessor both having implicitly conceded defeat by announcing an imminent US disengagement and withdrawal—there was no planning done to prevent the anarchic, bloody rush for the exits we just witnessed.

As I said about Faux Jaux, though, so it is with this Lute loser: plenty of blame here to go around.

The US Embassy in Afghanistan spent more time planning for Pride Month than it did for the withdrawal. One unforced error after another. https://t.co/hgqN8PKIrR

— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) August 15, 2021

Steyn spreads the blame around even further, to some candidates richly deserving of their portion.

One of the depressing aspects of the Swamp is that everything becomes a racket – including even your armed forces. Look at that buffoon at top right, the guy who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Thoroughly Modern Milley: that’s an awful lot of chest ribbonry for a nation that hasn’t won a war in three-quarters of a century. During his recent wokier-than-thou Congressional testimony on “white rage”, I wish someone would have asked Thoroughly Modern what they were all for:

Well, this is for Korea…Vietnam…This small ribbon’s for the Jimmy Carter helicopters-in-the-desert fiasco, because that went tits up far quicker than it usually takes…Here’s the Pentagon Female Empowerment Award I got for introducing Take Your Child Bride To Work Day to Jalalabad…This one’s from the Association of Non-Binary Staff Colleges for Most Transitions in a Single Battalion…Oh, and this most recent one is for getting into a Twitter spat over Tucker Carlson…

If you don’t have total contempt for Milley and the rest of the brass right now, you’re part of the problem.

I’m in favor of razing the Pentagon and salting the earth – or, at the very least, firing Milley and the massed ranks of “parade generals” (a useful Commonwealth term) and moving the few guys left to a new HQ in a strip-mall on the edge of Cleveland. The bigger your armed forces get, the more they become a racket – as the US-created “Afghan National Army” “300,000-strong” (and now down to, oh, twenty-seven maybe) has just conveniently demonstrated. As for where all the money wound up, the Taliban’s tour of American “ally” and former Afghan vice-president “Marshal” Dostum’s palatial spread provides a clue.

I’ve said for years, into the void of silence from Bill Kristol, Max Boot and the rest of the shock’n’awe crowd on the laughably misnamed “national-security right”, that the entire American way of war needs rethinking.

As for the enemy, the good news is that if your regime is attacked by America you’ll likely wind up with even more territory than you started with:

The Taliban now controls more of Afghanistan than it did before the US invaded in 2001.

That happens to be true: the only change effected over two decades of Nato occupation is that the Taliban now controls northern Afghanistan, which it didn’t do on October 7th 2001. But don’t worry; here’s how US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spent his Saturday night:

Very productive conversation with Canadian Foreign Minister @MarcGarneau about our efforts to reach a diplomatic solution in Afghanistan.

In the course of that “very productive” telephone call, the Taliban took three more cities.

America is not “too big to fail”: It’s failing by almost every metric right now. The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we’re Weimar with smartphones.

Clearly, Chairman Xi and his allies occasionally muse on the best moment to yank the dollar out from under. If you were in Beijing watching telly today, would you perhaps be considering advancing those plans?

At this point, if they aren’t, then what the hell are they waiting for?

A fragile peace

Posted on August 5, 2021August 5, 2021 by Mike

Looking on as, all around us, the collapse accelerates.

In the distant future, as Gibbon did, some historian will stick his wrinkled finger on a calendar date and pronounce “and on this date, the United States of America fell.” If by some miracle I were to witness the event, I would not be surprised if that date was already in our past. Historians have the benefit of hindsight, but also of not living in the aquarium they spend their lives researching. Some say Rome fell in 476, as a puppet emperor was deposed and sent into retirement. Did Roman citizens know this was an ending of things? No. To them the real emperor resided in Constantinople. Since they had first drawn breath, all power resided there, in New Rome. Old Rome had been a shadow for generations, and even in Italy, rule had long been pronounced from Ravenna, itself far less important than the economically powerful East.

Justinian the Great thought himself the Emperor of the Romans and ruled over the Mediterranean shores as tightly as many of his predecessors, more than half a century after the fall. What changed, then, on that day historians marked? Symbols changed; I suppose. We see discontinuity, but there was none. We see change, but such change was gradual, the product of generations.

The point is essentially arbitrary. A finger found its way to a date on a calendar, one small event in a sequence of centuries, and thus was it pronounced: Rome has fallen.

Look out of your window and see urban gentrification, perhaps. Or peaceful suburbia. Perhaps you see farm fields, forests, or the unbroken concrete towers of the projects – those never particularly peaceful, but no worse, perhaps, than you recall in your youth. America outwardly looks like America.

On the Internet, however, it is every cyberpunk dystopian hellhole ever conceived. And worse, perhaps. The things that lie beneath on Twitter should scare anybody.

A video was posted the other day of two thieves conducting an armed robbery. One of the victims pulled out a handgun and shot one of the thieves. You could tell the affiliation of every commenter. Their cultural and moral values were so diametrically opposed that nothing could unite them. To the Leftist, this was a great tragedy, and the victim was evil for killing some presumably poor person for the crime of attempting to feed themselves and resist systemic oppression. To the Rightist, the armed robber had forfeited his life the moment he drew that weapon and attempted to steal someone else’s possessions. The shooter was to be commended for eliminating such a clearly deficient specimen.

In a way, it does not even matter which one was right, though I suspect my readers would have a strong opinion. What matters is the diametrically opposed viewpoints, the hatred and vitriol thrown back and forth between people who are theoretically of the same nation, the same cultural stew. Of course, they are not of the same milieu, not truly. We know that now. Was it always this way, and the Internet just exposed it? I do not know. Maybe.

Regardless, there is no peace beyond the wifi.

Yet the fragile peace – with its occasional flare-ups – that holds in the real world cannot hold forever. What will happen if that dam ever bursts? If all the animus, hatred, and vitriol of social media crosses into reality?

Driving down the street, look at the signs. MAGA signs never taken down. Declarations that this house or that house believes in the core tenets of Progressive Faith. Screaming matches over mask and vaccination policies. The peace in the real world stands on the edge of a knife. Everyone fears to cross the line, to admit openly what they know privately: these are not my countrymen. These are not my people. I do not like them, and they never liked me. They do not share my values, and I do not share theirs. We have nothing in common.

What happens when all pretenses are stripped away?

Someday, the historians will look back on our history, and they will find a moment – perhaps one as seemingly-insignificant as the deposition of a minor puppet ruler in Italy was to the story of Rome – and they will say “this is the day America was cleaved in two.”

Perhaps those same historians will say of the Cold War that both the USSR and the USA fell, the former due to economics and the latter due to cultural infighting. Perhaps like the ancient fall of Sassanid Persia and the diminishing of Byzantium. Or perhaps it will be seen as something entirely different. We live in the aquarium they will someday comment on. None of us will live to know.

Regardless, there is no singular America, not anymore. Only the outward appearance still exists – and only so long as the waning pretenses of peace last in the real world. Not forever, I imagine. Perhaps not even very long.

Those “waning pretenses of peace” hold solely because Real Americans, some unknown percentage of them at any rate, still want it to. It will last not one minute past the moment when the last thread of their patience has snapped, the last tatterdemalion remnant of their natural optimism and restraint has been ripped to pieces. And then, it’s Katy bar the door: open season on shitlibs, no bag limit, no ammo restrictions. Weapons free, and happy hunting!

The really remarkable thing to me is how the Collectivists, whether from arrogance or blind stupidity, insist so mulishly on keeping the pedal firmly to the metal in spite of absolutely everything. It’s as if they’re completely unaware of Dead Man’s Curve looming closer and closer just down the road, and that they’re already going much too fast to negotiate it safely and avoid a horrific crash. Human civilization has traveled this same road many times before; its hazards are known, the roadmap accurate, specific, and crystal clear. They KNOW what comes next, what has always come next. Yet still, they persist. It’s mind-blowing, is what it is.

Sick burn

Posted on July 28, 2021July 28, 2021 by Mike

This is what it sounds like/When ~~doves~~ generals cry.

The Conservative Case for Cyberbullying America’s Generals

Oh goodie, I like it already.

On July 22, Major General Patrick Donahoe, the Commanding General of Fort Benning, reported from his official Twitter account that he was seeing a “surge” in ICU visits among young soldiers due to Covid. He reported that he would mandate the vaccine if he had the power to do so.

I replied, pointing out that the DOD has lost a total of 26 out of over 2 million personnel in the last year and a half to the virus. In the fourth quarter of 2020, there was a 25 percent surge in suicides across all services. In those three months alone, 26 additional servicemembers took their lives compared to the prior year.

The military’s response to the Coronavirus is almost certainly to blame for the rise. I exited the service in May of 2020, having had plenty of time to witness these policies firsthand. Deployed troops returning home were forced to quarantine for weeks at a time. Masks were required in all public spaces on base. Gyms were shut down. Commanding officers dramatically reduced liberty limits to within only a few miles of base. Those, like me, who were stationed in Camp Pendleton, were prohibited from traveling just 30 minutes south to San Diego during our off hours.

In light of these draconian policies, it is no wonder that troops experienced a surge in psychological illness and suicidal ideation. Turning barracks into prisons is a recipe for problems. Nor did the catastrophic “outbreaks” of Covid materialize. Virtually all servicemembers known to be infected with the virus recover. The handful of Covid related deaths are sad, but they never rose to the level of a crisis. On average, nearly a thousand military personnel die because of training accidents, suicide, and illness every year.

General Donahoe accused me of engaging in “false equivalency” and of downplaying the vaccine, arguing that it was the path to “normalcy.” As the return of mask mandates for both the vaccinated and unvaccinated in cities like Los Angeles attest, this is clearly not true. The real path to normalcy is for military leadership to adjust their risk tolerance. Treating healthy people like biohazards over an illness that has killed two dozen personnel in a force of millions is insane. Those preventative policies have consequences, too; the surge in depression and suicide among the young is real.

Preventative measures make matters worse. One need only look at the case of Michigan and Sweden. Both territories have an equal population. Yet, Michigan suffered 50 percent more deaths from Covid despite implementing lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates while Sweden did not. General Donahoe simply brushed these facts aside, deciding instead to call me a member of the “disinformation tinfoil hat team” for pointing them out.

He also tweeted at the university where I am a student, Hillsdale College, and told them to “come get your boy” for questioning the military’s quarantine and lockdown policies. General Donahoe, apparently, thinks the private sector is just like the military, where criticism can be stopped, and careers ended, with a mere snap of the fingers. As the thread attracted more attention, one commenter asked the General “how many wars he’d won.” The General responded by accusing the questioner of “shilling for Putin.” When I asked if Putin was the reason America had lost in Afghanistan, the General blocked me.

Heh. Whiny-ass little bitch.

My interaction with the General serves as a microcosm of the American military’s cultural rot. Here we have a two-star General who spends his days on social media hyping a vaccine for an illness that poses minimal risk to his troops. When pressed on why America can’t win wars and why he embraces policies that treat healthy people like biohazards, his first response is to accuse his critics of treachery and then block them from view.

This is what $693 billion a year buys you: unbridled arrogance from the leaders of a military that can’t win against third world tribesmen armed with small arms and homemade explosives. A significant portion of our military leaders, like General Donahoe, are totally detached from reality. They face no consequences for losing wars or losing troops to preventable suicides. Many of them don’t really command anything at all. They are so ensconced in layers of bureaucrats, staff, operations and logistics shops, briefs, intelligence reports, public affairs officials, and aides that there is usually no danger of the public uncovering their true character, lack of leadership, or empty careers.

The American people need to demand more from their leaders. They need these heroic defenders of freedom to account for their lost wars, failed policies, and ideological radicalism. Twitter gives the people the perfect avenue to do so.

Americans are beginning to realize that their military leaders are failing them. Even if politicians fail to demand better of them, we can and should still make our opinion known. Our generals are, far too often, soft, coddled elites and unthinking ideologues. It is time for the American people to start cyberbullying their generals.

At the very least. And they should by no means limit themselves to just the generals, either. Oh, and we seem to have ourselves an answer on that “won any wars lately?” question, and guess what? Though I’m surprised beyond belief at this, it turns out that—contra Gen Deskwarrior and alllll his Pretty Perfumed Pentagon Princes, diversity might NOT in fact be “our greatest strength” after all.

The Pentagon’s wokester generals, such as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, have touted Critical Race Theory as the military’s focus and a great success story.

The guy under him, though, didn’t have such good news.

According to DefenseOne:

A brutal loss in a wargaming exercise last October convinced the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Hyten to scrap the joint warfighting concept that had guided U.S. military operations for decades.

“Without overstating the issue, it failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it,” Hyten told an audience Monday at the launch of the Emerging Technologies Institute, an effort by the National Defense Industrial Association industry group to speed military modernization.

The Pentagon would not provide the name of the wargame, which was classified, but a defense official said one of the scenarios revolved around a battle for Taiwan. One key lesson: gathering ships, aircraft, and other forces to concentrate and reinforce each other’s combat power also made them sitting ducks.

“We always aggregate to fight, and aggregate to survive. But in today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if you’re aggregated and everybody knows where you are, you’re vulnerable,” Hyten said.

Even more critically, the blue team lost access to its networks almost immediately.

This is ugly stuff. The military’s top strategic and tactical maneuvers — such as the massing of force (remember “shock and awe”?) and information dominance from Big Tech, fell into enemy hands like a captured weapon. Long-range missiles made amassed force a liability, as such targets are easy to spot in a big group, while cyber-hacks (notice how those are stepping up?) took care of the rest, leaving the ships virtually useless with no information to go on.

Both things have served the U.S. well in the last wars, from the Persian Gulf War of 1991 to the Iraq and Afghanistan endless wars that followed. Apparently, the long endless wars that never ended until apparently now on Joe Biden’s watch served as a study point for our enemies to observe our strategies and tactics. Leaving the show on for a long time permitted authentic enemies with big firepower, such as Russia and China, all the study time they needed to get a sense of how our military operates.

A big mistake on their part, I’m thinking. After all, the only thing America’s increasingly ineffectual, poorly-led, and PC military might possibly have to teach anybody nowadays is how to lose very, very slowly.

“An Open Letter to Joseph Robinette Biden”

Posted on July 26, 2021July 26, 2021 by Mike

Michael Smith’s title graciously refers to The Not-So-Great Pretender as President of the United States of America, without the asterisks and sneer quotes I always include. Nonetheless, what follows is a most thorough and comprehensive scorching of Grampy Gropey Rapefingers’ worthless ass, a righteous blast of hellfire and brimstone the Drooltard In Thief has worked diligently to earn. Gropey deserves every oozing blister it raises. To wit:

President Biden:

It gives me no pleasure to write to you today and publish this in a public forum, but circumstances dictate this will be the necessary vehicle for what I know will be the redress of grievances for many Americans like me.

I must inform you that you, sir, your Vice President, and your entire administration are unfit to govern this country.

The reasons why are legion, and I offer but a summary below, but each is clearly evident from your words and actions to date.

Your lies are brazen, and while Americans have come to expect both lying and brazenness from politicians, seldom have we seen a President who lies with the specific goal of producing harm.  You, sir, are that president.

You began your campaign in 2019 by shamelessly repeating the vile and debunked “Charlottesville Good People” lie about President Trump, and your prevarication has grown since then. That this is the tack you have taken after lying about being a “moderate”, should come as a surprise to no one. Your career in politics is measured by lies about your college experience, your speeches, and your positions.

You have lied about the greatest threat being white supremacy while you, sir, are the greatest threat to America. You casually make the intellectually lazy libelous and slanderous claim that white people are racist based solely on opposition to your regime.

You have employed lies, as well as Soviet style propaganda and agitprop, to create a rift knowingly and purposefully between Americans of a magnitude not seen since the American Civil war.

You have imposed regulations and requirements through the unelected bureaucracy in your agencies even though they lack the constitutional powers to promulgate and enforce said regulations and requirements.

You and your administration have engaged in unequal application of the law, enforcing it in arbitrary and capricious ways to advantage your supporters and disadvantage your opponents.

You and your administration have also engaged in the most egregious acts where the Bill of Rights are concerned – violating nine out of the first ten amendments – the only one spared (so far) is the Third Amendment. Sad to say, not a single person I know would find it surprising in the least if you ordered quartering of federal troops in private homes. It is that dire.

Our Declaration of Independence says:  “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Well, sir, we have rapidly come to a point where we find we are no longer disposed to suffer insufferable evils. We believe we have made the case that you, sir, your administration, and your party have no moral authority to govern the right and righteous people of this nation.

Regrettably, we the people find we must withdraw our consent to be governed by you, your Vice President, and your entire administration and in the true spirit of the founding of this great nation, we do so assert it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for our future security and to assure the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Respectfully submitted on this 20th Day of July in the Year of our Lord, 2021.

Michael Smith
Citizen of the United States of America

There’s much more included in Smith’s recounting of the “long train of abuses and usurpations,” because of course there is. WRSA’s CA urges that this truly momentous j’accuse be disseminated as broadly as possible, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s as brilliant a document as it is timely, a throaty roar of defiance which may very well become a historical milemarker for future generations (if any) to reflect on and, hopefully, to cherish as a turning point. The CF Chapeau is hereby humbly doffed to Mr Smith for producing this stirring work. CA seems to have run across it via a likewise brilliant if much bleaker post from Kevin at TSM, which I’ll attend to quick as I can.

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.

“Who’s in denial” Part the Second

Posted on July 20, 2021July 20, 2021 by Mike

Been waiting with bated breath for the second installment of Claire Wolf’s characteristically brilliant magnum opus to drop, and finally it has.

Who’s in denial about our current cultural and political state of collapse?

Most everybody. Millions of ordinary people who think bad times are always temporary are in denial. Oligarchs and plutocrats who believe we ordinary people are eternally tractable and malleable are in denial. Intellectuals who believe increasing quantities of fashionable nonsense are in denial. Politicians and their handlers who believe they can rule by fiat without consequences are in denial. Fools who imagine “the science” is a religion and that dissent from any statement by a ~~high priest~~ government-approved scientist is heresy are in denial.

I’ve been in denial about the true depth of our circumstances and about how truly evil (and insane) our new totalitarians are. I venture to say every one of us is in denial about something pertinent to freedom’s future. Even the best of us have blind spots, no matter how much we pride ourselves on having clear heads and open eyes.

Anyone who doesn’t see that we’re in deep, deep trouble must be very carefully NOT looking. Yet even the most clear-headed can’t see the future.

And by “future” I don’t mean a year or 10 years or a century from now (though that, too). I mean what might happen tomorrow. Or what’s happening today that we just haven’t found out about yet.

But who can blame those who yawn and go on with life? Yesterday no doubt brought some equally shocking, horrifying, or scandalous news. Tomorrow will bring more word of the ridiculous, the invasive, the totalitarian, the impossible. Some days we might get hit with two or three or four such outrages. Which one do you adopt as your cause when by tomorrow morning five more equally outrage-worthy acts will have fallen to your attention?

This is not apathy. This is not even the famous “outrage fatigue.” This is a sign of fatal decline. People know either that they can’t do a damn thing against the onrushing absurdities and evils or that they’ll try to accomplish something and be trapped forever in a game of Whack-A-Mole.

It’s chilling, as well, when you remember Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
I’ll update Voltaire for our times: “Those who believe absurdities and force silence upon doubters, ensure atrocities.”

Good people are famously slow to perceive real evil. Famously slow to react radically (in the original meaning of striking at the root of a problem) once they realize conventional solutions no longer avail them. Once pushed to the wall good people can be famously more dangerous than their would-be masters acknowledge. Still, we’re slow — often tragically slow. We act only after the thing we love is already lost or crumbling.

That’s particularly true when we understand that virtually everything we read or hear is a lie, a distortion, a manipulation, or a sheer display of moonbattery. We realize we’ve been disenfranchised. Self-appointed (or dubiously elected) political and cultural leaders can get away with any damn thing they please. And they’re all rushing to do their dirty deeds as fast as they can, before we can catch on to what they’re doing, let alone react. So far, this tactic seems to be working in their favor.

But then, sometimes rapid shifts toward evil or insanity work to the advantage of We the Deplorables, as well.

Okay, enough with the excerptin’. As with Part the First, Claire takes a deep dive into American history to help shape her argument, but this time out she throws some of the less-well-known and seldom-discussed aspects of that era into the mix. It’s all solid stuff, a genuine, all-caps MUST READ. Hie thee thither.

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.

Love Desire wins!

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

The mopping-up phase of the Culture Wars is upon us, when the victors walk the field shooting enemy wounded.

Some still have hope the war can be won, as seen in this headline: “Christopher Rufo says he’s outmaneuvering ‘hostile media’ on [Caucasians Require Termination]: Most people ‘on our side’”.

Rufo is right the majority of people are against teaching Caucasians Require Termination (CRT), but that counts for little, because in wars the side with the more powerful weapons win. Teachers unions, for instance, have already vowed to continue promoting the evilness of whites in spite of any rules against it. True, the baizuo pushing this might come to grief when it is realized they are white, too, but for now, they are triumphant.

All rulers and Experts say “Diversity is our strength”. There is no state more conducive to turmoil than Diversity. And maximal Diversity is CRT.

Think on it. There isn’t any major entity, from religion to education to business to government, that is not now in the hands of the Enemies of Reality. Their victory would now be complete were it not that the victors are a minority of persons. And because Reality must continuously be fought. You will have to repeat forever, and with great force, that men can be women or it will soon be disbelieved.

The 2020 election functioned as a tearing down of the Berlin Wall, a visible symbol of the futility of continuing the war. Regular readers will recall how we tried to fight the Fortifying, as they victors called it. But we lost. The truism that history is written by the victors will apply here, and has been applying to our memories for some time. The statues of great men like Lee fall to the cheers of Desirists, to be replaced by those celebrating the wastes of society.

Some, like Ed West, are painting the end of the war as not much more than a regime switch. When Reality ruled, busybody aunts, the Karens of their day, kept public morality in line. Now, with Desire the soon-to-be-victor, busybody aunts, the Karens of our day, will perform the same duty. This is nothing more than the commonplace observation that women in societies do most of the morals policing.

He says, “The revolutionaries were always going to create new rituals, new speech codes and new forms of censorship. England has changed a huge deal since our great victory in 1966, but in many ways it has barely changed at all.”

Of course it is true that public morals will be monitored and maintained. That is a constant. Somebody’s beliefs must be imposed and others’ shunned, canceled, or even censored. It’s that the wrong side’s views are now imposed.

West is right, however, when he explains how moral relativism was one of the weapons of war wielded with great success by the Desirists. “Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win.” It is more than clear that it has been abandoned in their victory. The woke are all vehement moralists.

We know that we have lost because their morality has become official. Yet we also know that we cannot accept it.

So how to fight? First, save yourself and your family. Then think about your neighbor. Then think about your neighborhood and village. Then think about your county, then your state or region. Worry last about the country as a whole. As they move towards nationalizing everything and then toward supra-state governance, there will be less and less you can do about the state anyway.

Do you really think they’ll let you vote your way out of this at the national level?

Those still foolish or blind enough to believe that the systemic corruption of our “elections” only began in 2020 (CLUE: it did not) notwithstanding, it’s plain to more sentient types among us that free, fair, and honest US elections have long since been no more than a myth—a comforting fantasy naifs cling to as a toddler does his passie, his teddy bear, and his blankie. Of all the aphorisms, folks sayings, and old saws in existence, there’s probably none more apposite to Amerika v2.0 than this one: If voting could really change anything, it would be illegal.

Secession Nation

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

The South will rise again?

Two in three Republicans in the South support SECEDING from the US while almost half of Democrats out West say the same, survey finds
A whopping two-thirds of Republicans in the South favor seceding from the United States while nearly half of Democrats in the Pacific region and almost 40 percent in the Northeast say the same, according to a new survey.

Support for secession is also considerable among independents in the Midwest and Great Lakes regions, where 43 percent say they would favor breaking away and forming their own country.

Half of independents in the South also favor secession while 43 percent of Republicans in the Rocky Mountain states share the same view.

The survey, which was conducted by Bright Line Watch, polled 2,750 respondents. The figures were published in the June 2021 edition of the Bright Line Watch Survey Wave 15 Dataset.

Overall, support for secession was highest in the South, where 44 percent said they favored breaking away from the Union.

Interesting. But then, how surprising can it really be that the descendants of the folks who already tried once to divorce themselves from what they recognized as a contra-Constitutional government might turn out to be sympathetic to the idea still, now that federal tyranny has finally blossomed fully?

It’s hardly just the South that’s fed up and wants out of an ever-more intrusive Union though, if this article is correct. Here’s the truly telling part:

In the Northeast, about one in three (34 percent) favored secession. Nearly the same percentage of respondents – 32 percent – in the Mountain region favored secession.

Thirty percent of those surveyed from the Heartland also backed the idea, while 39 percent of those in the Pacific states said they, too, supported it.

The survey from June found that there was an increase across the board in the number of Americans who supported the idea of secession.

In January, just after President Joe Biden was sworn in, Bright Line Watch conducted a similar survey asking the same question.

It found that fewer Americans in each of the five designated regions supported secession.

In the Northeast, 32 percent of voters said they supported seceding from the US. In the South, it was just 33 percent – with half of Republicans backing the idea.

In the Heartland, less than one in four supported seceding while 28 percent of those in the Mountain region said the same.
In the Pacific, just one in three Americans backed the idea of secession.

Well well well well WELL. Wonder what might’ve brought about this change in attitude among so many of us?

Whatever the case may be, perhaps Charlie Daniels (PBUH) had a touch of clairvoyance back in the 70s. Admittedly, he was talking strictly about music, but still.

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.

A tale of two elites

Posted on July 10, 2021July 10, 2021 by Mike

One of these things is not like the other.

Without a doubt, the founding generation’s leading figures were from the colonies’ elite. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and their fellow preeminent revolutionaries were wealthy and celebrated in their time. These were not hardscrabble peasants yearning to commit regicide and confiscate wealth.

As the Declaration makes clear, they already had their fortunes and honors. They could have ridden out the troubles with the English crown in comfort, occasionally petitioning the king for parliamentary representation or the repeal of offending acts. Thus, their stand for independence and liberty was as incongruous as it is inspiring.

The founding elite rebelled to expand the freedom of their fellow human beings. Patently, the expansion the founding generation sought wasn’t completed in their time. And while many of them tried mightily, they ultimately failed to abolish slavery and grant, without qualification, the franchise to all men and women. But to denounce the seminal victory for human freedom by comparing it to the current blessings it has borne is, at best, preposterous. It is injurious, at worst, because it masks the venality, mendacity, and cynicism of America’s current elite.

In an era resounding with cries against elitists, the current ruling class knows they are in the populist crosshairs—and this targeting is coming from elements within both major parties. The situation is still manageable for them, but only if Left (Sanders supporters) and Right (MAGA) do not combine to curb the elitists in both the private and public sectors.

So how best to divide the opposition? Become strange bedfellows with the only party willing and able to go all the way to crony socialism: the Democrats and their DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity—M) cult.

As noted previously, the Democratic Party’s powerbrokers aren’t democratic. Despite their professed concern for the downtrodden, today’s Democratic Party leaders hold that such “concern” can only be exercised by a top-down administrative monolith governed by a ruling elite who arbitrarily and capriciously dole out patronage and privileges and redistribute wealth to expand and perpetuate their power. The current elite—the vast majority of whom already identify with them and participate in the scheme—could find no better partner than the Democrats’ powerbrokers onto which to graft themselves in the pursuit of transforming our republic into “our oligarchy.”

It is just common sense, however cruel: the current elite must prevent Left- and Right- populists from combining and devising and implementing the means to bring elites to heel; and, consequently, safeguard liberty, equality, and prosperity in our republic.

They needn’t worry themselves overmuch about that. There is no common ground, no shared values, on which the two might unify. There is but one way the conflict can be resolved and the misnomered elite “brought to heel.” It assuredly does NOT involve voting, political compromise, or gentlemanly debate.

In defiance of both parties’ populist movements, one witnesses the incestuous marriage of America’s current elite and the Democratic Party’s power brokers in the temple of the DIE cult. You weren’t invited. But they expect you to visit the registry and send a gift—or else.

Talk about disparate visions. The founding elite risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to rebel against a tyrannical government to expand human liberty. The current elite has protected its wealth, power, and privilege by abetting a tyrannical government to curtail human liberty.

Of course, some may say that the current elite passing themselves off as the protectors of democracy at the very time they covet an oligarchy to curtail American liberty and protect their own wealth, power, and privilege does, indeed, take “balls.” I am not so sure. For even if the current elite fails in their oligarchic aim, they will still retain their lives and much of their fortunes.

Perhaps. But only if they’re allowed to. That one is still very much up in the air and, whether our third-rate “elite” scoundrels realize it or not, the choice won’t necessarily be theirs to make.

CF Search

Login, RSS, &c

CF Archives

Categories

2A/Mostly Guns

Alt-American

Big Dogs

Essayists

Mil

Nuttin’ But News

Odds Bodkins

Overseas/Non-US

Portals

Pure Bloggery

REAL Journalism

Substack Scalawags

The Funny Pages

Comments policy

CF Glossary

Subscribe to CF!

Shameless begging

Correspondence

Allied territory

Notable Quotes

RSS feed

.