Read and Heed – Page 34

SHOCKER!!!

Posted on November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 by Mike

There’s a remarkable concession appearing in The Washington Post today:

“a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.”

The latest data shows that 58% of COVID-19 deaths in August 2022 were from people who were vaccinated or boosted. Based on past figures and the current trends, we can reasonably estimate that the number of vaccinated/boosted COVID-19 deaths will only rise. (In September 2021, the vaccinated accounted for 23% of COVID-19 deaths; in January/February 2022, the vaccinated were 42%.)

This is what happens when you rush ineffective and dangerous vaccines.

It’s also what happens when you blindly put your trust in institutions wholly, demonstrably undeserving of it.

The lesson of Thanksgiving

Posted on November 24, 2022November 24, 2022 by Mike

Very simple, very easy: eschew socialism.

Turns out, you can’t just ignore economics and human nature.

Socialism really does sound good on paper though, right? We’re all going to own everything together and take care of each other. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.“

It sounds so nice. And we all want to be nice, right? People are emotionally drawn to socialism because it sounds so good. It sounds fair. It sounds — nice.

But do you know what’s not nice?

Corpses.

That’s exactly what happened the Pilgrims got when they took a stab at socialism.

Most Americans don’t know that the Plymouth colony was originally an experiment in socialist utopianism and were it not for a complete 180 a couple of years in, we probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the bountiful feasts most of us will indulge in today. There would have been no Thanksgiving because there would have been nobody left to give thanks.

It just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without including Rush Limbaugh’s classic recounting and analysis of the true meaning of the day.

“On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims,” now known as Pilgrims, “led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established” how they would live once they got there. The contract set forth “just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs,” or political beliefs. “Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible.

The Pilgrims were a “devoutly religious people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.” They believed in God. They believed they were in the hands of God. As you know, “this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey” to the New World on the tiny, by today’s standards, sailing ship. It was long, it was arduous.

There was sickness, there was seasickness, it was wet. It was the opposite of anything you think of today as a cruise today on the open ocean. When they “landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves.” There was nothing.

“[T]he sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims — including Bradford’s own wife — died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.” They endured that first winter. “When spring finally came,” they had, by that time, met the indigenous people, the Indians, and indeed the “Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers” and other animals “for coats.” But there wasn’t any prosperity. “[T]hey did not yet prosper!” They were still dependent. They were still confused. They were still in a new place, essentially alone among likeminded people.

“This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than what it really was. That happened, don’t misunderstand. That all happened, but that’s not — according to William Bradford’s journal — what they ultimately gave thanks for. “Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract” that they made on the Mayflower as they were traveling to the New World…

They actually had to enter into that contract “with their merchant-sponsors in London,” because they had no money on their own. The needed sponsor. They found merchants in London to sponsor them. The merchants in London were making an investment, and as such, the Pilgrims agreed that “everything they produced to go into a common store,” or bank, common account, “and each member of the community was entitled to one common share” in this bank. Out of this, the merchants would be repaid until they were paid off.

“All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well.” Everything belonged to everybody and everybody had one share in it. They were going to distribute it equally.” That was considered to be the epitome of fairness, sharing the hardship burdens and everything like that. “Nobody owned anything. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California,” and other parts of the country, “and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way.

“Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that” it wasn’t working. It “was as costly and destructive…” His own journals chronicle the reasons it didn’t work. “Bradford assigned a plot of land” to fix this “to each family to work and manage,” as their own. He got rid of the whole commune structure and “assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage,” and whatever they made, however much they made, was theirs. They could sell it, they could share it, they could keep it, whatever they wanted to do.

“For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense,’” without any payment, “‘that was thought injustice.’ Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself? What’s the point?…The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive.

“So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? ‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands [everybody] industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’…

“Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s. … In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves. Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you’re laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.

“And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.’” The word of the success of the free enterprise Plymouth Colony spread like wildfire and that began the great migration. Everybody wanted a part of it. There was no mass slaughtering of the Indians. There was no wiping out of the indigenous people, and eventually — in William Bradford’s own journal — unleashing the industriousness of all hands ended up producing more than they could ever need themselves.

So trading post began selling and exchanging things with the Indians — and the Indians, by the way, were very helpful. Puritan kids had relationships with the children of the Native Americans that they found. This killing the indigenous people stuff, they’re talking about much, much, much, much later. It has nothing to do with the first thanksgiving.

The first Thanksgiving was William Bradford and Plymouth Colony thanking God for their blessings. That’s the first Thanksgiving. Nothing wrong with being grateful to the Indians; don’t misunderstand. But the true meaning of Thanksgiving — and this is what George Washington recognized in his first Thanksgiving proclamation.

No wonder shitlibs loathe and despise this quintessentially American holiday so intensely. The Thanksgiving story revolves around gratitude; humility; pluck; human fallibility. It is a glorious confirmation of human resilience and adaptability. Above all else, it stands as a resounding condemnation, in the most practical and readily comprehensible of terms, of their preferred ideology: socialism. For your typical, garden-variety shitlib, what’s to like?

On your feet or on your knees

Posted on November 20, 2022November 20, 2022 by Mike

It’s a binary solution set, we have only just those two choices now.

Conservatives Can’t Run And Hide From The Left Anymore. They Have To Stand And Fight

Analysis: TRUE. PRO TIP: “Stand and fight” will not in any way, shape, or form involve voting harderer at them.

One of the comforting fictions conservatives are increasingly tempted to tell themselves is that if they just move to a red state or county, the insanity of the woke left won’t affect them and their family. Ensconced in safely Republican communities, perhaps they’ll be free not just from disastrous Democrat policies but also from the pernicious sexual propaganda of the left. For conservatives with children, this is especially important.

But it’s a mirage. There is no American town or hamlet remote or red enough to prevent the infiltration of leftist ideology, which today often comes from institutions that in an earlier era would have been seen as the guardians of a decidedly Christian civic virtue. Not only are left-wing activists taking over these institutions, but they are also working to ban conservatives, and especially Christians, from the public square altogether.

There is nowhere today that conservatives can run and hide from the left. They can either surrender or stand and fight.

Again: true. Which is why we’re eventually going to have to either kill them in job lots, or submit entirely to them.

Fine by me — *What the hell, fine by me*

Then this happened.

Consider what’s playing out in the small town of Taylor, Texas, population 16,807. Situated about 40 miles northeast of deep-blue Austin, it has long been precisely the sort of place conservative families might move to raise their children — a quiet and peaceful town full of churches in a deep-red part of the Lone Star State.

For decades, Taylor has staged a Christmas — not “holiday” — parade down Main Street. The Taylor Christmas Parade of Lights is a beloved tradition that for the past 10 years or so has been organized under the auspices of the Taylor Area Ministerial Alliance, or TAMA, a coalition of local churches.

Last year, as a result of an oversight in the application process, an LGBT advocacy group called Taylor Pride was included in the parade. The oversight in this case was that the old ladies who volunteer to organize the parade and process float applications had never heard of a group called Taylor Pride and didn’t realize what it was. (And no wonder, before the summer of 2021 the group had never staged a public event.)

By the time parade organizers found out, it was too late. Two men dressed in drag, one as a female Santa and the other scantily clad in glitter, were suggestively gyrating to dance music on the Taylor Pride float as it rolled down Main Street in the annual Christmas parade — as it happened, right in front of a float for Saint Mary’s Catholic School, which was full of children.

Parents and attendees were understandably outraged. Soon after the parade, TAMA decided that in the future, parade entries must be consistent with traditional biblical and family values, and made an announcement to that effect ahead of this year’s parade. The point, as TAMA’s statement made clear, was not to exclude any individuals or groups from attending or even participating in the parade, but to ensure the floats were family-friendly and not contrary to Christian teachings.

Guess what happened next. Go on, I dares ya. I TRIPLE DOG dares ya.

A spokesman for the city has since falsely characterized the situation to at least one local news outlet, saying TAMA had “made it clear that they did not want certain people to be a part of the parade,” and, “They were going to go in a little bit of a different direction…and make it a little bit more exclusive.”

This is exactly the opposite of what’s happened. The only thing that’s changed is that TAMA has realized that LGBT groups like Taylor Pride have targeted their town and attempted, with some success, to infiltrate and undermine their traditional civic celebrations of Christmas. So they decided to push back and insist on the survival of their traditions. Good for them.

Good for them indeed, as far as it goes. Which will never be quite far enough, alas; the shitlib wreckers will be back, again and again and again, until the Normals trying to preserve some small corner of the nation as their own throw up their hands in resignation and defeat. Any decent, upstanding Real American desirous of simply being left alone by the degenerates, weirdos, and sundry neo-Marxist carbuncles must face the hard facts: the Left recognizes no limitations, boundaries, or restrictions on what they will do in order to prevail. Unlike us, they fight hard, fight dirty, and plan for the long term.

The point here is that Taylor might as well be every conservative community in America.

And before you know it, it WILL be.

By now, Christians in Taylor must surely know that next year, there will be only one parade down Main Street in December — and it won’t be the Taylor Christmas Parade of Lights. Unless they vote the city council out of office and clean house in City Hall, traditions like the Christmas parade will soon be a thing of the past there, another lost battle in a never-ending war of attrition waged by the left. Same goes for the public library and the public schools. If conservatives don’t take them over, the left will.

It might just be one small town in Texas, but Taylor stands as a cautionary tale. It isn’t enough to move to a red state or a Republican district. You are going to have to fight the left, and win, or surrender to them. There is nowhere left to hide.

Precisely so. Unless and until Normals resolve to fight back against them with equal ferocity (at LEAST), and keep on fighting not merely until they seem to be beaten, but until they are crushed utterly—beaten so severely they’re rendered incapable of so much as lifting their empty heads off the pavement to frown weakly up at us—the fight will NOT be over. The one small comfort here, if there even is one at all, is that this necessity is NOT some horrible atrocity we’ve inflicted on them for no good reason, just out of our own pure hatred or lust for bloodshed. It is a necessity that THEY have forced on US, all unasked for and unwanted. So, y’know, on their own heads be it.

The power of information control

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Mike

It’s the first crucial step along the way to establishing dictatorial control over everything else.

In light of the clown show that was the election on Tuesday I wanted to share some of my thoughts on what I see as the path forward from here. I made a post on Gab yesterday that got tens of thousands of engagements both on and off Gab. I think it’s important to analyze why this post resonated so widely and where we go from here.

That’s Andrew Torba, following up on the Gab post I mentioned here last night.

One thing I noticed in the thousands of replies of this post is the unity across the generations. If you know anything about the Gab community, or perhaps from your own experience with the people in your own life, it’s that Boomers and Zoomers rarely agree on anything especially when it comes to political strategy.

On this subject though there seems to be a mass consensus across every generation from young to old: between election fraud, citizen disenfranchisement via decades of illegal aliens invading our country, and the Regime’s total control over the flow of information and censorship of any dissent: Republicans have zero chance of winning the Presidency in 2024.

Millions of people are waking up to the reality that a small percentage of the population controls 98% of the flow of information and news to the people. This is incredibly important. No other political issue matters more. He who controls the media controls the minds of the masses. It’s that simple.

Gab community member @PaxChristus made a post that demonstrates this reality well.

In Russia, where gay propaganda is banned, 70% of people oppose gay marriage and that number has been increasing in recent years.

In America, where opposition to LGBT is heavily censored, 70% of people support gay marriage and that number has been increasing in recent years.

Democracy is purely about information control.

As the top commenter on this post pointed out, German conservative revolutionaries like Oswald Spengler realized this in the early 1900’s.

Democracy has become a weapon of moneyed interests. It uses the media to create the illusion that there is consent from the governed. The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. The notion of democracy is often no different than living under a plutocracy or government by wealthy elites. -Oswald Spengler

People like Fetterman “winning” is just another Regime humiliation ritual on the American people. They have that much control over our country that they can have Biden installed in the Presidency and Fetterman—who has literal brain damage—installed in the US Senate.

We have to remember that the people in power are rootless cosmopolitan globalist elites. They don’t see themselves as Americans. They see themselves as “global citizens.” They have no pride in our country. They hate it, they hate us, and they want to humiliate Americans while extracting as much of our resources, labor, and military power as possible.

That’s about the size of it, yeah. Bleak as the current situation is, though, Torba isn’t succumbing to despair just yet.

The Path Forward: Balkanize and Build
Voting harder isn’t going to cut it. We have to build. The existing system will collapse. It’s not a matter of if, but when. When that happens we need to have Christian infrastructure in place to fill the power vacuum. The Amish have had it right this entire time. Their communities are growing and thriving. They will continue to do well. We must become a form of neoamish, building sovereign communities and families away from Babylon. Technology is okay and a good tool. It’s something we can use to our advantage to communicate, build, and engage in commerce with one another.

We are the new pilgrims. We must move to deep red states, push them further right, build, and secure a future for our families. Forget politics at the national level. That rigged game is over. Focus on state and local elections, not what is going on in DC.

Conservatism has failed. It has been trying to conserve a country and a culture that is never coming back and has long been gone. The future of the West depends on those of us who are going to build. Build our own infrastructure, our own families, our own communities, our own parallel economy, and our own strongholds of deep red states. We’ll build a wall around the borders of those states if that’s what it comes to. We need to accept exile from Babylon and get to work.

Americans appear to have lost all touch with the independent pioneer spirit, resolve, and flint-eyed personal grit that made this country great to begin with. Some of us had it stolen from them by main force, while some willingly abandoned it to lapse into lotus-eating, preferring instead to become indolent, pampered brats without the inner steel to defend all that is rightfully theirs: liberty, prosperity, and the pursuit of happiness, in the sense of the words our Founders meant by them. That precious, golden heritage can never be restored to us unless we roll up our sleeves and restore it ourdamnedselves.

(Via Dave Renegade)

Notes on the passing scene

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Mike

Diplomad weighs in.

Big waves of either color have proven rare events in our history. We have a very large, complicated, and diverse country, its politics, as a consequence, vary considerably from one region to another. What’s important in Arizona, does not necessarily register as an issue in New York, for example. Our wise founding fathers saw this, even in 1789, and created the electoral college, three co-equal branches of government, and a federal system with considerable power left to the individual states and the people; they were willing to live with a certain amount of national political deadlock or, let’s say, ambiguity for the sake of restraining the central government’s power. It’s a good system. It’s system of checks-and-balances generally has worked well for us for nearly two and a half centuries.

Today, however, we have serious trouble in America. We see that young people, ages 18-29, can be and are bought and swayed by the ludicrous promises and policies of the increasingly authoritarian Democratic Party–since its founding an odd mix of thugs and so-called intellectuals. This party, the world’s oldest, promises, and ensures, no consequences for bizarre and destructive personal behavior. Our cities are a horrific mess. Our educational institutions have become a nightmare under Democratic rule. They produce credentialed, smug, lazy, ahistorical, illiterate and silly brutes with strong self-esteem, an overwhelmingly sense of entitlement, and disconnected from the real economy. These stupid brutes basically add nothing to our material, spiritual, and intellectual wealth. They are ripe for manipulation and exploitation by the lords of the new left, and its billionaire allies in the mass media, high tech, and Pharma industries. They are the lemmings of the woke movement.

Appeals to patriotism, historical practice, and just common sense, make increasingly less headway with this mass of stupid voters. These electors now respond more to emotional appeals, often relying on fake science–e.g., men can become women, men can get pregnant, global climate “crisis,” the COVID “crisis”–promoted by cynical social media “influencers” and politicos, among others. They deny the existence of a crime wave–you are racist if you point it out–and any inflation concerns are dealt with by government subsidies, e.g., COVID payments of various types, student debt “forgiveness,” etc. They hate children and want to see them tortured or dead. They spout off a distorted version of history, which demands that America and the West atone for sins with reparations and open borders. They hate our country and the Western civilization from which it springs.

All that, of course, is quite apart from the corruption of the electoral process itself. Stealing elections is a well-honed art by the Democrats. In the last few election cycles, the Dems have become evermore cynical, and less and less worried about keeping what they do out of view. They have no shame in using the bureaucracy and law enforcement to harass and intimidate the political opposition. They are aided in this by, as mentioned, a complaint and actively complicit media complex and the high lords of high tech. Dem officials in government have no hesitation in using the bureaucracy to torment and silence opponents.

I have to laugh/cry when I see conservatives arguing among themselves over we should run Trump or DeSantis in 2024. The Dems are quite happy to see and foster this silly debate. They run a mummy for President, a human vegetable for the Senate, and a DEAD guy for a State assembly seat, and they WIN! Their candidate for governor in Arizona just happens to be the person in charge of ensuring electoral integrity in Arizona. Yet, despite all this, we get labelled election deniers, get censored, thrown off media platforms, and ridiculed as conspiracy theorists if we express doubts about our election system. It simply doesn’t matter how good your candidates are if the system is rigged to ensure they lose.

In any nation whose “election” system is as demonstrably, flagrantly corrupt as ours has become, questioning said “elections” is much more than merely reasonable; in truth, it’s every patriotic American’s sacred duty.

Know thine enemy

Posted on November 11, 2022November 11, 2022 by Mike

Kenny left a response to Skeptic’s comment, here:

No way PA chose Climate Change, Abortion and Trans/Pedo Grooming over Inflation, Energy Jobs, Crime, The Economy, Education and other bread and butter issues and even the gaslit polls admit that. THOSE were the hot button issues and Frankenstein Two Headed Man was on the WRONG side of every one.

Now, Kenny is a great guy, a well-read, smart, and knowledgeable guy. I feel myself privileged indeed to be able to count him as a friend, and to have him amongst us here at CF as an active participant. But he’s missing something in this one instance, something YUGE. To wit: he’s making the mistake of imagining the shitlib Left, in Pennsy or anyplace else, think more or less the way Normal Americans do. By the numbers:

Climate change? You mean “saving Mother Gaia” from the wanton, destructive depradations of greedy, venal, outside-Nature Hoomon Beenz
Abortion? You mean “a woman’s right to choose,” a sacramental right to “health care” which MUST be protected at all and any cost
Trans/Pedo Grooming? You mean the fundamental right to enjoy total, unrestricted sexual liberty, not that this “Grooming” nonsense ever happens anyway, you H8ful liars
Inflation? Ain’t none, since our most excellent President did such a marvelous job reviving a US economy Trump, in his supreme arrogance and incompetence, had so idiotically wrecked
Energy? If it ain’t green, it’s mean, you H8RRZZ
Crime? What are you, scared or something, you big coward?

And so on from there. Not only is there no shared opinions between Us and Them on the issues of the day, we don’t even agree on which issues are legitimate matters of concern and import among sensible, well-meaning people in the first place.

Shitlibs in PA, along with their likewise cognitively-challenged brethren, sistren, and whatevren scuttling fearfully about in their decaying urban hellscapes across the blighted plain, will always and forever vote against Real Americans, America That Was, and absolutely everything Our Side holds dear, worthwhile, and righteous. Because reasons, that’s why. Previous Presidents have been pleased to begin their every public address with a reference to “My fellow Americans,” which for a long, long time held at least some water. Not anymore; not since the mid-1960s at least, possibly longer. The TWANLOC acronymic is a Thing, and it’s all too apt a descriptor nowadays.

Update! The way they think. If you want to be generous and call what they do “thinking.”

If you’re reading this, chances are that when you cast your vote, your focus is on real-life issues. Gas prices. Inflation. You care about law and order, and hence didn’t like it when Democratic mayors and governors allowed Antifa and Black Lives Matter to run riot. You care about individual liberty, and hence resented the restrictions imposed during the pandemic by many of those same Democratic mayors and governors.

Millions of Democratic voters, however, don’t think like that. Many of them can afford not to. They’re part of the social, cultural, and political establishment—or at least think they’re part of it, or want to be seen as being part of it. They’re well off enough, for example, not to have to worry too much about rising prices at the gas pump or supermarket.

But even those Democrats who aren’t so well off, and whose lives are affected by grocery bills and lawlessness in the streets, won’t let such phenomena change their vote. Because their politics, take them for all in all, aren’t very firmly grounded in reality.

On the contrary, millions of them are driven, to at least some extent, by ideology. They buy the idea that American capitalism—and the American consumer—should take a serious hit to stop climate change, an ideologically rooted concept for which they’ve seen no evidence whatsoever. They defend the depredations of Antifa and BLM as noble assaults on a corrupt system, even if their own windows end up being broken.

Their own individual liberty, if on their radar at all, is far lower down on their list of values than gestures in the direction of collective well-being, so that during the lockdown they welcomed state-ordained limitations on their movements—even though those limitations had no basis in science. They believe that certain groups are by definition oppressed, and so will automatically oppose any action, however reasonable or just, that might conceivably harm illegal immigrants, offend Muslims, or make trans people uncomfortable—and by the same token will support almost anything that will presumably make members of these groups happy.

Moreover, the media that they trust have taught them to view with contempt voters who are preoccupied with such issues as crime and the cost of living. They’ve been persuaded that when some voters speak of crime, it’s a coded way of expressing racism, and that when some voters complain about high gasoline prices, they’re simply being selfish: for isn’t it far more socially responsible to worry about climate change—to which fossil fuels contribute massively—than to gripe about whatever one has to pay to fill one’s gas tank?

They see themselves as taking the long view. The unselfish view. Yes, you can describe their politics as “virtue signaling”—and you’d be right. But there’s something else they want to signal: the boundary between themselves and the rest of us. They’re desperate to make it clear to the world that they’re not MAGA folks—not grubby little “deplorables,” always preoccupied with their own narrow interests and their own so-called freedom.

After Biden took office, his handlers defined him largely in opposition to Trump. Trump wanted to build a wall, so Biden opposed it. Trump made the U.S. energy-independent, so Biden had to undo that, prontissimo. Millions of establishment Democratic voters operate the same way, perhaps often unconsciously: they define themselves in opposition to the likes of us.

By George, I think he’s got it!

Ultra über mega MAGA Express derailed?

Posted on November 9, 2022November 9, 2022 by Mike

Our old friend Stephen says Trump is toast.

Gut-check time: Donald Trump is now 0-4 in elections held since his big win in 2016, and he could go 0-5 if his man Herschel Walker loses the Georgia runoff in December.

There’s enough blame to go around, this isn’t all on The Donald. All the Washington leadership failed us. A few state legislatures probably moved too far, too quickly after the Dobbs decision, scaring largely pro-choice GenZ young adults to vote in defiance of the polls.

But as the de facto party head, Trump can’t escape his share of the blame. So it’s my unpleasant duty to examine the rot at the top.

Trump’s man in Pennsylvania, a TV celebrity doctor of questionable ethics, lost to a stroke victim who can barely speak. Yes, there was cheating in Philly — there’s always cheating in Philly. That didn’t stop Trump from winning Pennsylvania in 2016, and it wouldn’t have stopped any other GOP candidate against John Fetterman, except for Trump’s hand-picked candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Despite rising wages, energy independence, and no new wars, Trump lost the House in 2018. He lost the White House two years later the Senate in Georgia’s double-runoff the next January, and his slate of Senate candidates underperformed on Tuesday night.

There’s been so much losing, I’m tired of all the losing.

If you still want Trumpism, MAGA, and all that, fine. So do I.

But we won’t get it from Trump.

I’ll always be grateful to Trump for showing the GOP how to fight, and particularly for the slate of justices and judges he and McConnell pushed in such numbers through the Senate.

But those wins are forever ago in political time, and there have just been too many unaccountable losses in between.

Once again, if GOP primary voters select Trump as the nominee, he’ll have my full support. But for all the reasons I’ve just given you, I don’t expect him to make the comeback I once hoped he would.

I’ve slowly come around to that same conclusion myself, albeit reluctantly. At this point, Trump appears to me to be a kinda-sorta inverse Gen Sherman: if nominated, he won’t be allowed to win. If elected, he won’t be allowed to serve. I’m seeing much chatter out there from disappointed, frustrated, and/or disgruntled 2016 Trump voters flatly renouncing their previous support for him, swearing they won’t bother voting for him again. I don’t necessarily share the sentiment, mind, but I do understand it.

Yes, Trump will almost certainly run for Prez in 2024, right enough. Much as I do hate to say it, however, I see the odds of him overcoming the margin of fraud to win (a non-negotiable prerequisite in all US “elections” going forward, after having two (2) consecutive elections stolen without repercussion), taking office, and accomplishing much of anything that won’t be totally undone before lunchtime on Jan 21, 2028 by his incoming DemonRat successor—exactly as took place in Jan 2021—as being mighty slim indeed.

Like I said, I do hate to say it, I truly do. But, well, there it is.

On the other hand update! If disagreeing with reliably-execrable, ten-pounds-of-dogshit-in-a-five-pound-sack “Crunchy Con” nitwit Rod Dreher is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

I woke up this morning in London hoping — not just hoping, but expecting — to see news of a Red Wave having crashed upon the shores of an America sick of the woke Democrats. I was disappointed. The Red Wave talk turned out to be bullshit. As I write, we still don’t know the outcome of control of the Senate. We do know, though, that the Trump-endorsed candidate in Pennsylvania was beaten by a brain-damaged Democrat. That tells you something. That tells you a lot, actually.

What a contrast between DeSantis, a conservative who actually gets things done, and wins (even a majority of Latinos!), and Donald Trump, a has-been whose candidates — with the exception of Sen.-elect Vance — fared poorly on Tuesday. The underwhelming election results on Tuesday, in a country suffering from high crime and high inflation, ought to send a big sign to the conservative electorate: the more the Right stands by the fatmouthing loser Trump, the further behind we will fall. I concede that Trump’s endorsement likely carried JDV over the line in the Ohio GOP primary, and for that I’m grateful. But the future of American conservatism is not with Donald Trump.

It has fallen to Matt Walsh, Chris Rufo, Libs of Tiktok, and others to take on the scourge of gender ideology. With the exception of DeSantis, no other major elected Republican politician has wanted to touch wokeness. I cannot understand why. The country is falling apart, the libs are becoming totalitarians who are coming after children, and most of the GOP just sits there with its thumb up its backside, running on the thrilling platform of “hey, at least we’re not the other guys.” No, forget it. That’s over.

To the MAGA diehards, I say: is this really what you want? A Republican Party that can’t decisively whip the Democrats even in an extremely favorable year? Because this is what you are going to get if you keep sticking with Trump. Like it or not, a lot of independents just hate the guy, and that’s never going to change. Conservatives like me would vote for him in 2024 just to keep the Democrats out of office, but in that case I would vote knowing I was checking the box for a big mouth who won’t get much done, because whereas Ron DeSantis would actually govern, Trump would do nothing but preen and talk about himself.

Oof. So much to dislike there it’s difficult to know where to start picking it apart. So I ain’t gonna bother.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

The Great Divide

Posted on November 8, 2022 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The long, dark road

Posted on November 6, 2022November 6, 2022 by Mike

A sneak peek at Schlichter’s new book, We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America. All boldface in the excerpts mine, by the way.

Will America Fall With A Bang Or A Whimper?
Radio host and writer Kurt Schlichter’s latest book, ‘We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America,’ games out many scenarios that could lead to the country’s collapse with illuminating and even amusing results.

Although entertaining on its own, Schlichter’s crash course in classical history has a deeper point that applies to today. Like Rome, America will fall, but this fall won’t be anything sudden or even perceptible to most people. He explains that America’s fall will probably “be a transformational change. … The old ways can simply stop meeting the needs of the present, and something different replaces them.” For the past three decades, Schlichter charts the mounting corruption of the American government, the departure from constitutional limits, and the growing unrest among Americans, particularly conservatives. Even if these problems are fixed, the system will be different than it was in the early ’90s.

Even though President Trump turned away from this apparent trajectory somewhat, Schlichter acknowledges that Trump’s administration suffered from personnel issues for his first two years, and then was sunk by Covid-19 and trusting the experts. Now, “when Biden was sort-of elected, the Democrats pushed hard as they could to the left even though the voters had seen fit to literally provide them the barest imaginable legislative majority.” Consequently, certain checks on political abuses like the Electoral College, election integrity measures, the filibuster, and the authority of elected officials (vs. unelected technocrats) are being challenged or eliminated.

This brings Schlichter to today’s precious present in which an ascendent leftist elite imposes its will on a resistant population. Indeed, the global response to Covid offered a taste of this, as national governments stripped populations of most of their freedoms in the name of public health. What distinguishes the U.S. from other nations, however, is that Americans have the right to bear arms. For Schlichter, this is the ultimate check on power: “They [Americans] understand that the decision to allow or disallow any act by the government ultimately resides with themselves.”

Americans like to tell themselves that cozy lie, but absent a credible and somber threat to resort to those sharply-curtailed 2A rights if and when they must, all the guns ever made add up to no more than empty bluster, easily laughed off by our tormenters as just more hot air expelled by unserious, contemptible blowhards.

This leads him to think that a time will come soon when violence breaks out. He grants that quite a few things will need to happen before this happens: “What this [a civil war] means is that for America to reach a state of tyranny, there must not only be massive and systemic violations but, simultaneously, the elimination of any meaningful ability to address those wrongs, either under the Constitution or otherwise.”

Um. I really don’t have to point out the gaping hole in the premise here, do I?

It’s at this point that Schlichter’s role as polemicist turns into one of a prophet, forecasting a variety of outcomes in the near future. First, he describes an America captured by the hard left, which brings tensions to a breaking point. Unfettered by the constitutional checks and balances, the Democrats would wreck the economy with uncontrolled deficit spending, permanently restrict individual freedoms, and refuse to enforce laws on protected classes. Any modicum of prosperity, peace, and stability would immediately be lost in an anarchic frenzy.

Huh. Maybe I do at that. Kurt speaks as if those “massive and systemic violations,” the intentionally rubbled economy, uncontrolled deficit spending, &c are mere grim but as yet unrealized future possibilities, instead of having long since come to pass, every last one of them.

Assuming none of these prognostications come to pass and the center holds for a little while longer, Schlichter concludes that Americans will have three choices: restore the constitutional order, elect a right-wing authoritarian leader, or elect a left-wing authoritarian leader. Since he discussed the last option already, he spends some time on the second option, the conservative authoritarian. He likens this to the reign of Augustus Caesar, which, at least in the beginning, had many things going for it. In one fell swoop, an authoritarian leader could fix the problems of crime, immigration, woke indoctrination, energy and water shortages, and people like Ilhan Omar holding office. However, as Schlichter concludes, “Yes, an authoritarian can make the trains run on time for a while, but that kind of regime has to derail eventually.” A few decent emperors may have succeeded Augustus, but none of them were quite as effective.

I’ve been leaning towards Option 2 for a good while now myself, albeit reluctantly. The wise old quip about socialism—you can vote your way into it, but must shoot your way out—holds equally true for all other flavors of authoritarianism. That stipulated, in order to undertake any truly serious effort to restore American Constitutional liberty to ourselves and our posterity, we must first rid ourselves of the insidious threat to freedom and individual self-determination posed by our “Enemies, domestic” on the Left. And there’s only one sure way to achieve that most laudable of goals: by suppressing Leftists and Leftist cant ruthlessly, ferociously, every time and everywhere they dare to rear their ugly heads.

I’ve often stated that I have no good or easy solutions to propose for this crippling conundrum; this is not an admission of intellectual shortcoming or inadequacy on my part, mind. It’s simply because it’s become my firm belief that, at this late stage of the game, there ARE NO good or easy solutions left to us. Henceforth, every choice will be difficult, costly, and damaging in one way or another.

At each and every turn, we readily descry a path fraught with hazard, uncertainty, pain, and wretchedness. Through a perfectly natural human reluctance to confront the ugly reality of our situation, to relax into comforting fantasy about where we now are and what we now must do, we have painted ourselves into a very tight corner indeed.

One thing is certain: carrying on under the delusional fiction that we still live in the America we grew up in—a stumbling but still essentially sound America with a badly warped but still basically functional system—will get us noplace we want to be, and gain us nothing worth having. No matter which way we finally jump or what we finally decide to do, there’s trouble up the road for sure.

The TRUE threat

Posted on November 4, 2022November 4, 2022 by Mike

HINT TO SHITLIBS: It ain’t us, it’s you.

Biden’s Rhetoric is a Threat to the Republic
This isn’t just pandering to the base

The only good thing about this speech is that it didn’t have a color scheme out of V for Vendetta and didn’t feature Marines in the background. Whoever runs these things at least learned from that attempt at looking like Biden was about to declare martial law, suspend habeas corpus and make everyone read Gender Queer and How To Be An Anti-Racist at gunpoint in a gulag.

With the countdown underway, voters have made it clear that they care about the economy and crime. Anyone who finds the “threat to democracy” routine persuasive is already a solid blue voter and ActBlue donor who probably showed up for at least one D.C. protest.

This isn’t just pandering to the base, it’s pandering to the Elizabeth Warren base.

Biden’s call to “vote knowing what’s at stake and not just the policy of the moment, but institutions that have held us together as we’ve sought a more perfect union are also at stake” is an admission that his faction has lost the policy argument and doesn’t have anything else to work with.

While the delivery is laughable, the premise isn’t. Biden’s speeches may not interest voters, but they continue to push the totalitarian message that “democracy” is embodied by Democrats and threatened by Republicans, that if Dems fail to win, then the result will be the end of America.

That kind of rhetoric is typical, but under Obama and Biden, it’s been backed up by arrests, investigations, surveillance, raids, imprisonment, censorship and the whole banana republic gamut.

Daniel is a bit too blasé about Slow Joe’s overheated bargain-basement histrionics amounting to no more than mere pandering to Leftard extremists to suit me. Bribem and his fellow like-minded fanatics aren’t so much pandering to their proven-violent followers as they are trying to motivate them, along with granting tacit permission for them to do what they so badly want to do already.

It’s never been more vital that Heritage Americans pay unflagging heed to a hoary old military mantra, a handy phrase I was first introduced to at the NAS Oceana O-club by the fighter-jocks therein assembled: head on a swivel, total SA. Indeed, it could well turn out to be a matter of life and death for some of us before all is said and done, depending on where you are, what you’re doing, and who you’re with.

A Woke military is worse than no military at all

Posted on November 3, 2022 by Mike

Man, this decline-and-fall business isn’t turning out to be nearly as amusing as it looks like being in all those old movies about the Roman Empire in its final days.

Our Disunity Is a National Security Threat
The military now reflects the selfishness and fragmentation of our culture. Welcome to the looting-the-treasury phase of imperial decline.

In the lawsuit challenging Harvard’s affirmative action practices, a group of senior retired military officers filed an amicus brief, which argued that maintaining affirmative action was a “national security imperative.” Those signing off include four former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, six former superintendents of the service academies, and 17 retired four-star generals, including Wesley Clark and William McRaven.

A ““national security imperative”? SERIOUSLY? Sorry, fellas, but I’m gonna need you to explain to me, in detail, exactly how you arrived at THAT bizarre conclusion.

Recruiting an adequate number of troops and increasing their quality also seems pretty important. But we know that recent efforts at recruiting have been a disaster, amplified by the mass expulsion of troops who refused the COVID vaccine.

While things carried on for a while out of habit, eventually the patriotic, mostly white, rural Americans who formed the backbone of the military started doing an about face. Polls show that fewer veterans now want their kids to follow in their footsteps. Conservative Republicans, once the most stalwart supporters of the military, have lately become more critical and less trusting.

No real mystery about that. Hell, I’ve wondered for a while now what the hell any new enlistee might think he’s signing up to defend with his very life, literally, and what the hell might be keeping career soldiers in the ranks nowadays.

Declining interest in service by conservative and white Americans is not irrational. Why fight for a governing class that hates you, deems you the central political problem, seeks to humiliate you, and disrespects your ancestors at every opportunity? Why serve an American empire that pursues foreign wars like those in Iraq and Ukraine that have almost no relationship to actual national security and explicitly serve a left-wing ideology?

One might respond that military service is good even under these conditions in order to get useful training and make a living. But even under such a self-serving standard, the incentive to do so is declining, as white men within the military are subject to a rigged game, where it is harder to get ahead, and the old standards of excellence no longer matter. This will only get worse without a dramatic reset in the culture of our military and political leaders.

During the War on Terror, lavish praise for military service flowed from a widespread feeling of guilt. After the 9/11 attacks, the country wanted safety and revenge—but, other than service members and their families, very few Americans carried the burdens of war. The civilian-military gap was amplified by the increasing self-perception of servicemembers as “warriors,” rather than mere soldiers. From this romantic view of military service as a superior way of life undertaken by superior people, we see the first seedlings of a warrior aristocracy.

A constitutional republic and a warrior aristocracy are polar opposites. The European aristocracy found its origins in rewards for battlefield merit, where particular acts of bravery led to a title bestowed on the hero and his heirs, as well as land, the right to income from taxes for land-bound peasants, and exemption from taxes otherwise owed to the king.

Since every national military establishment must necessarily be representative of the broader society it both serves and is drawn from, how could anybody find any of this at all shocking? As corruption, venality, and self-absorption have gradually become endemic in American society, its military has declined right along with it, in direct proportion. How could any reasonable, rational person possibly expect otherwise? Thus:

In exchange for the prestige and perquisites of military service, one thing is absolutely essential: loyalty to the country, the Constitution, and the American people. Without patriotism, the military becomes a very sophisticated gang, one that easily can be turned against the American people. Some will scoff that such a prospect is unthinkable, but one would have thought General Mark Milley undermining the commander-in-chief or a Marine selling his services to the Chinese were impossible too.

Again: shocking? Unexpected? Hardly. “Loyalty to the country, the Constitution, and the American people” have all become mighty thin on the ground amongst the general populace, over many decades. In effect, the military amounts to a mirror held up to American faces, no more nor less. If Americans don’t like what they see there, the only people who can change that is…well, guess who.

The threatening truth

Posted on October 30, 2022 by Mike

Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

It is instructive – it is vitally important – that we remember how truths about “masks” and “vaccines” and the actual danger of “the virus” were cat-called as “misinformation,” “anti” Science and, yes, “denialism.” How those who dared to speak the truth were persecuted and punished – and still are (viz, the recent punishing of Dr. Peter McCullough, the eminent cardiologist, for stating truths about “the virus” and the “vaccines”).

That is what comes of tolerating cat-calls in lieu of conversations, no matter how uncomfortable those conversations may be. No matter how wrong some people may be, sometimes.

If a person is antagonistic toward a group of people on account of race or religion or some other such non-specific attribute, that will become clear enough soon enough – and that person’s arguments or statements can be picked apart on the basis of sloppiness, inaccuracy and disingenuousness (after a pattern has been established, after it becomes clear that contrary facts aren’t acknowledged and the person’s arguments and statements change to reflect the chastening effect of truth). That person’s statements and arguments can then be dismissed as wrong, without resorting to cat-calling.

It is easy to cat-call the arguments and statements of those you disagree with – and even easier, if you dislike them, personally.

With good reason.

It is very easy, for example, to dislike the person of someone as personally loathsome as Dr. Fauci – or the CEO of Pfizer, Anthony Bourla. But it is also easy to deflect and dismiss – and even pathologize – any questioning of their actions, their views, their policies, as being “anti” – including, in the case of Bourla, – “semitic” as simply (exactly the right modifier) motivated by dislike of them personally, or on account of their race or religion. And that – if accepted as argument-ending before there is an argument – confers upon their actions, their views and their policies a kind of blanket immunity from being questioned or criticized.

Well, a free society cannot exist without questioning and criticism, whether right or wrong and however uncomfortable certain topics may make some people feel. A free society requires people who can think – and aren’t cat-called for doing so. Even when what they think – and say – is racist or anti-Semitic. Not placed in air-fingers quote marks because it is a fact that there are such people.

But there are also worse people.

They are the people who use those terms to cat-call people who aren’t those things but who make statements or raise questions they’d rather not address, often because they are true and the truth can be very threatening, to falsehood. We’ve had an object lesson about that over the course of the past almost three years now. The lies told us about “the virus,” which were used to further worse lies about “masks” – and then on to “vaccines” – which nearly led to camps – show us what happens when such lies are protected by accusing those who dare to question them as being “anti,” as being “deniers.”

And there is still the road ahead of us, with a fork in it.

Peters explains why this fork is a most perilous one indeed, and why it’s imperative that we choose the right one.

The Kingdom of Hell

Posted on October 30, 2022October 30, 2022 by Mike

As the drunken psychotic Karl Marx himself specified, seizing control of and then “fundamentally transforming” the very language itself remains Item One on the shitlib agenda.

Transgendering Language
As has become flagrantly obvious over the years, the political left and its myrmidons in the media, medical industry, social agencies, public libraries, and school system have become slickly adept at framing the cultural debate between conservatives and “progressives” by mutilating discourse, fudging long-accepted distinctions, and decoupling terms from their culturally ascribed referents. What was understood for centuries and millennia as decency becomes indecency, good becomes bad, virtue becomes vice, settled tradition becomes feral violence, family and marriage become barbarism and bondage (the feminist mantra), and so on. Conversely, what is destructive of customary order becomes enlightened transformation.

A comparatively recent and most egregious case in point involves what is now called “conversion therapy,” the target of the non-binary and transgender prepossession preaching “diversity” to minors — a cult that has now acquired conventional status. But what is “conversion therapy”?

It is a term calculated to deceive, to reverse normal assumptions by condemning parents concerned about their children’s sexual identity. Thus, to take an instance of adroit dissimulation, according to Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “So-called ‘conversion therapy,’ sometimes known as ‘reparative therapy,’ is a range of dangerous and discredited practices that falsely claim to change a person’s sexual orientation.” The truth is precisely the opposite. Responsible parents do not wish to “change” or “convert” their children’s sexual orientation but to retain it.

The real “conversion” that is taking place is from natural sexual identity at birth to non-binary and transgender dysphoria, assumed as a therapeutic given. Nonetheless, it is the parents who have been criminalized in law for an offense committed by a persecuting and iniquitous government. Witness Canada’s Bill C-4, which declares that conversion therapy harms society because “it is based on and propagates myths and stereotypes about sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, including the myth that heterosexuality… and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations” (emphasis mine). The Bill is a farrago of abject nonsense, as is the concept of sex as “assigned” at birth by medical personnel and society.

The irony of gender ideology is particularly mordant. Psychological, chemical and surgical mutilation is a function, not of parents maiming their offspring as is generally claimed, but of the gender theorists and predatory groomers who transition (or “convert”) children via persuasion, doctrine, pornographic material, sexual gadgetry, hormone treatments, puberty blockers, testosterone infusions, metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, orchiectomy, voice therapy, facial reconstruction, mastectomy, hysterectomy, and other undiminished horrors. It is the official mandarins in the precincts of authority who are the real criminals, encouraging and even forcing young people to embrace life-altering outcomes that promise to be, for many of them, a lifelong condition of misery and dysfunction.

Meanwhile, as noted, the gender mavens will jail parents who object to the insertion of the state into the natural family. They will move to pass legislation, like Ontario’s Bill 89, that seeks to place the state in loco parentis — as in totalitarian societies, the child is understood as belonging to the state, not to the family. They will hide their congenial abominations under perfumed euphemisms like “gender-affirming health care,” but they are nonetheless recidivist felons. The stench of their dogmatic atrocities befouls the cultural and social environment. Their starting point is to conceive the abnormal as normal; preserving the normal is consequently regarded as a “conversion.” The device is a classic non-sequitur, assuming as a rhetorical fact what has not been or cannot be established, like the “Have you stopped beating your wife?” canard. It is as effective as it is disingenuous.

No coincidence, that, seeing as how Canada is well gone into its own fundamental transformation into a totalitarian society, with Amerika v2.0 trotting along dismayingly close behind it.

These apprentices of evil must be held to account.

Absolutely, indubitably correct. The sticking point being that there is only one way that can ever be accomplished, and no amount of well-written op-eds, well-constructed arguments, well-attended protests and/or rallies, or VOATING HARDERER™ at them is gonna suffice to turn the trick. What can speeches, essays, and debates possibly avail anyone when the very words themselves have been stripped of all meaning?

Going asymmetrical

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Mike

Progress, if you like.

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

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

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

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

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

Asymmetrical Warfare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power, destruction, death

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Mike

Quoth Captain Malcolm Reynolds: If somebody tries to kill you, you kill ’em right back.

Middle Earth had its Mount Doom, into which the One Ring of Power could be tossed, ridding that evil from J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional setting. Real Earth is not so fortunate, but in all other aspects the lessons drawn from his classic apply. It only comes up short in one respect. Tolkien never delved into the psychology of Sauron, Saruman, and the lessor denizens of Middle Earth who lusted after the One Ring’s power, other than to depict the inevitable corruption of the soul their lust produced.

There are two conclusions uncorrupted souls have difficulty accepting, although both experience and logic point uncompromisingly towards them. The first is that those in power and those who lust for it want power for power’s sake, ultimately to destroy and kill. The second is that they want to destroy and kill because they want to destroy existence and kill themselves. We owe the first conclusion to Orwell, the second to Rand. (For a fuller explanation see “The Last Gasp,” Robert Gore, SLL, March 24, 2020.)

This article assumes both conclusions are well-founded and that the second in particular is the key to understanding where the world is now and where it’s going. They offer a realistic assessment of the chances for nuclear Armageddon.

It is no coincidence that the twentieth century witnessed history’s most totalitarian regimes and its bloodiest wars and genocides. By all indications the twenty-first century will extend the connected trends. Power goes hand-in-hand with destruction and death. Governments are based on their capacity to inflict violence; what else can they produce? Rejecting lofty rhetoric and revolutionary rationales, Orwell wrote that: Power is not a means; it is an end. The twentieth century demonstrated that power is a means to inflict incalculable destruction and death. Know them by their fruits—those are the true ends of those who seek and hold power.

Report after report details the injury and death inflicted by the Covid mRNA vaccines, puncturing hollow platitudes and invocations of “Science.” The travesty offers a refresher course we don’t really need: from world leaders down to petty politicians and functionaries, they want to kill us. Those who aren’t killed are to be frightened into compliance with their ghastly and tyrannical edicts, herded like cattle into some other slaughterhouse.

The gelatinous souls who move whatever direction the bowl tilts usually don’t recognize what’s happening until the moment of their execution. Beforehand, a few of the more intellectually adept will argue that the powerful will be limited by their instinct for self-preservation—if they kill too many they’ll end up killing themselves. Perhaps that thought offers comfort, however scant.

But what if the powerful are like those mass shooters whose terror ends only when they turn their guns on themselves? What if mass murder is the means to their desired end: suicide? Someone who kills himself but no one else is to be pitied. Someone who kills innocents before taking his own life perpetrates paramount evil.

Which would give our putative “leaders” not one moment’s pause, being willing representatives of Paramount Evil their own selves.

(Via Dave Renegade)

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