Strongest, most effective military on Earth?

The Lone Superpower.

Navy Refuses to Deploy Warship While Commander Remains Unvaccinated
U.S. Navy officials have said a warship can’t be deployed because its commander has refused the COVID-19 vaccine.

The service said an East Coast guided-missile destroyer is “out of commission” after a Florida federal judge ruled that the Navy and Marine Corps cannot remove its officer for being unvaccinated against COVID-19.

The warship now remains docked in Norfolk, Virginia.

It comes after U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, a George H. W. Bush nominee, ruled on Feb. 2 to bar Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and all other military officials from taking punitive action against the unnamed Navy officer, who sought religious exemptions to the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Merryday wrote that the Navy’s rejection failed to note that the branch has separately granted hundreds of medical exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate

Annnnd…Cut! Print! That’s a wrap, people! We have now officially reached peak Covid stupidity, I do believe.

Top military officials determined that the commander’s religious beliefs were sincere and that they would be “substantially burdened” by being forced to get vaccinated, but also claimed that granting the exemption request “would have a predictable and detrimental effect on the readiness of you and the Sailors who serve alongside you.”

Oops. Looks like I mighta spoke too soon.

Admiral Daryl Caudle filed a statement on Feb. 28 saying that the Navy “cannot have a Sailor who disobeys a lawful order to receive a vaccine because they harbor a personal objection any more than we can have a Sailor who disobeys the technical manual for operating a nuclear reactor because he or she believes they know better.”

DAYUMMMM, dude, this Covid-stupidity hole is deep enough already! So stop digging, willya?!? Bill, with all the analysis of this risible nonsense you’ll ever need:

The American Dream will end in farce.  And then nightmare.

Not quite there yet, Bill. From where I’m sitting, it ended in farce a goodish while back. And as I’ve been saying, the nightmare part has already begun.

Update! Here’s a link to the original article, hat tip Bill, just in case anybody has problems with the archive.is one. I never have had any trouble with ’em myself, but I’ve heard from others who have here and then.

Blowback for Brandon

Hey, if the shoe fits…which, y’know, it does.

BREAKING: Laid-off Keystone XL pipeline workers BLAST Joe Biden for LYING about American oil production

Laid-off Keystone XL pipeline workers had choice words for President Joe Biden in a Fox News segment Saturday. Focusing on soaring gas prices across America, the segment included interviews with a group of laid-off workers.

“We should be able to sustain ourselves and not depend on other nations raising their price and then affect us. That shouldn’t even be in the question,” one worker told Fox News.

The Fox News reporter then asked: “If we want to get the price of gas down right now, we want to drop the price of gas, what do we need to do right now?”

“Put us to work right now. And you will see not only the fuel prices go down, but you will see the price of everything else go down with it,” the worker replied.

Workers then turned attention to Biden. “He’s pushing for solar and wind power, but it’s been proven over and over, that’s just not as efficient as burning natural gas, refining crude.” Another worked continued, saying: “We are sick of hearing, ‘This is Putin’s price hike.'”

Plenty more where that came from—every word a gem, every word the plain and simple 24-karat truth, the most salient insight helpfully emphasized above by moi. Brandon and his co-conspirators should be made to own their intentional sabotage of American energy independence, though. After all, it’s not as if they haven’t lectured, hectored, and pimped their silly, emasculated electric toy “cars”—along with the whole kit and kaboodle of their obsolete and unworkable “sustainable energy” folderol—long enough for everyone to know their true colors by now: Green, and Red.

It’s not as if they don’t realize the damage their lunatic jihad against fossil fuels—the most efficient, reliable, easily-gleaned and -managed energy source there is as of right this minute, the only one even remotely capable of powering a robust industrial economy—has and will do to the US, its economy, and ordinary Americans, mind. They know full well. It’s just that they don’t give a flying fuck at a plate-glass window about it, that’s all. At this point, they appear to have lost all patience, abandoned the gauzy illusion of logical persuasion and fair debate, and have moved on to openly waging economic war against the legitimate interests of the nation and her people—a most cruel and abominable war indeed.

Alas, but this is who they are. This iswhat they do. For the Left, the Almighty Agenda—raw, untrammeled power and control—always and forever comes first, overriding all other concerns. T’was ever thus, or nearly so. The last honest, honorable, and sincerely patriotic Democrat expired along with JFK or thereabouts, leaving us with the bizarre degenerates we’re saddled with at present. The modern bumper crop of amoral, hedonistic Democrats are an affliction, a cancer, one that must be excised completely, by whatever means necessary, if the body politic is ever to be restored to some semblance of health. Mike Walsh knows the score…mostly.

A specter is haunting America—the specter of the Democrat Party. Like an evil spirit that cannot be exorcised, the Democrats have been plaguing the United States since Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804. Ferociously pro-slavery, the Democrats divided the country practically from its inception, blocked the path to abolition and eventually took up arms against the nation after the election of the first Republican president, firing on Fort Sumter and seceding en masse from the Union. And, a week after they had lost that war, one of them assassinated Abraham Lincoln, elevating a Democrat from a Confederate state to the presidency, and plunging the country into more needless turmoil.

With a track record like this it’s a wonder the party is even still legal.

It really shouldn’t oughta be, and I mean that with every fibre of my being, literally and sincerely. No nation-state with the least regard for its own legitimacy is in any way obligated to tolerate the existence of a powerful political party flatly sworn to undermine, weaken, and injure said nation-state, even as it is diligently beavering away at that self-same project. As for the tyrannies, look to history to provide numerous examples of just how forgiving a dictator and/or ruling cabal usually is when it comes to clutching national parties fomenting unrest and insurrection fondly to its bosom, allowing them to carry on unmolested.

Hell, in those places you’re liable to the get the chop merely for walking around in public view with the smallest, most respectful and innocuous protest sign conceivable hoisted over your shoulder. Anything more radical than the most obsequious and Milquetoast-ian dissent, and the State’s bullyboys will fall on your doomed head like a crap-ton of sizeable rocks. Won’t be no dragging of the feet about the matter, either. The absolute least such an igner’nt fool can anticipate is to wake up next morning chained to a wall of a damp, noisome cell enjoying a ferocious headache; a seriously split lip; a whole passel of fresh new aches, pains, and deep-purple bruising scattered about his body; and little to no memory of how he got himself into this sorry state.

Make no mistake: rhe more strident you wax in your political agitation, the worse things are going to get for you. Count on it. Far better to just keep your lip zipped; walk with a bit of a stoop and a shuffle, no hint of any confident strut showing through; accept whatever Authority gives you without question or complaint; and make sure you’re always securely tucked into the middle of a crowd of other people, safely out of easy sight whenever you’re out and about, and you’ll be all right. Probably. Think “grey, ordinary, bland” so hard you actually project that image bodily, so that the aura of your shy, harmless nature rises off of you in visible waves.

For more on this, you want to take a leisurely stroll through the indispensable Julie Kelly’s AmGreat Jan 6 “riot” archive. These columns are an unflinching examination at the mid-to-late stages of America’s godawful descent from more-or-less proper governance into Tyranny Most Dire, vital material for anyone with a stomach strong enough to handle them. It’s dismal, ugly stuff, trust me it is—achingly painful reading for any poor naif still clinging to the battered belief in the ongoing existence of his cherished but long-extinct Republic, however far afield it may have strayed from the golden dreams of its Founders. Be sure you have a fifth of something stout handy when you do this. Trust me, you’re going to need it.

And yet, after the bloodiest war in our history—and with a sizable component of “peace Democrats” in the North actively rooting and voting against Lincoln in the election of 1864 while supporting his opponent: the failed Union general George McClellan—they’re still around to plague us. It wasn’t until the arrival of Ulysses S. Grant as commander of all the Union armies in 1864 that Honest Abe found the right man for the job: someone who would mercilessly crush the life out of the Democrats and their armies, destroy slavery, and reunite the states.

The midterms are still eight months away but Real America is crying out for succor right now.

Well, DUH. They’re worried, they’re out of work, the grocery-store pickin’s are mighty slim. Which is no real issue anyhow: even if there WAS food on those shelves like in the Goode Olde Days of yore, they couldn’t afford to buy any thanks to Bidenflation. Certainly, a few gallons of gas for the drive over is WAY out of reach. For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans are confronting real deprivation and want, after long luxuriating in the plenitude created by the system they passively watched being ruined a-purpose, when they weren’t actively helping destroy it. Worse, as I’ve said before, this is only the beginning of our national nightmare. When it will end, IF it will end, is known only to God Himself.

I only wish I could believe that this planned disaster, with its concomitant needless suffering, would be enough for Americans to finally and fully understand what the bitter, toxic fruits of Demonrat rule have been for nigh on a century, and to firmly decide they don’t want anything more to do with the lousy bastards. If the howling hell-storm now unfurling all around us finishes the criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party for good, erasing all traces of their malignant misrule forever, I’d consider it well worth the suffering. Sorry, but I can’t.

Hoping that their Uniparty partners-in-crime might be taken down along with the Dems is just bugfiucknuts. Oh, I suppose it’s barely&mdas;BARELY—possible, sure. But it’s wildly, grotesquely improbable. Nobody should waste any time fantasizing about it, lest such useless woolgathering obscure or distract us from the arduous real-world work required to actually get the thing done.

Gasoline, home heating oil, electricity, natural gas—the prices continue to soar, already past the point of recent plausibility and heading into economic terra incognita. Millions of illegal aliens pour across the nearly erased southern border. A befuddled Joe Biden threatens to sleepwalk us into an armed conflict with the ghost of the old Soviet Union in the form of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and disinformation is rife on both sides of the conflict in the Ukraine. In a parliamentary system, Biden’s government would have fallen right after the debacle in Afghanistan—but barring a miracle we’ve got another three years to suffer.

For just over a year, Americans have watched with admirable patience as their economy collapsed, their legal system was perverted to serve the interests of a few, their nation’s military degraded, and their freedom of speech subverted via the government’s fascistic and unconstitutional co-opting of the social media sites. Meanwhile, woke corporations and a thoroughly compromised media crack down on the commercial and personal privacy of anybody that runs afoul of the New Normal while manic Greens demand a return to the days of three-masted schooners and windmills. Such relentless cultural and economic sabotage would be considered an act of war if done by anyone else—but here it goes by the fellow-traveler names of “dissent,” “patriotism,” and “progressivism.”

Walsh goes on from there to lob a few undeserved stinkbombs at Trump as if he was still at all relevant, and then this:

The other is Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Smart, pugnacious, and unflappable, DeSantis has emerged as the chief thorn in Joe Biden and the Left’s side. After his narrow win over a guy who was later found dead drunk in a Miami Beach hotel room he was sharing with a gay porn producer who had overdosed on crystal meth, DeSantis has cemented his hold on the former swing state, turning it solid red. Unlike Trump, who at the moment is powerless, the squeaky-clean DeSantis upstages Biden and the Democrats on a regular basis; his canny and unflappable handling of the “pandemic” has given rise to a new nickname for the Sunshine State: the Free State of Florida.

DeSantis, 43, can make no public noises about seeking the presidency at this point. He must get past his re-election for governor in the fall first and hope the voters rally to take back control of Congress from the narrowest-of-narrow Democrat majorities. With his wife, Casey, now seemingly recovered from a bout with cancer, he is sitting pretty.

It’s widely thought that if Trump declares, DeSantis will wait his turn in 2028. But why should he spend four years on ice behind a lightning rod with no further political future? Polls already show him creeping up on Trump and a smashing re-election victory will only gain him more prominence. Lots can happen in three years, especially when his possible primary opponent is getting on in years. After Biden, will America want another geriatric president? Or will the voters prefer a guy 32 years younger, with nothing but upside?

I hope and pray he stays on in Florida instead. DeSantis can render the remaining handful of non-authoritarian fragments of what was once the great American republic far greater service there than in Mordor On The Potomac, where the Deep State’s legions of orcs, trolls, and winged Nazgul will rip him to bloody gobbets of raw meat as they did Trump.

Sorry, Mike, but there really, truly is no voting our way out of this. However it comes about, something far more direct, proactive, and potent than toodling on over to the local polling place to cast a meaningless ballot in a systemically corrupt “election” is gonna be required of us. Possibly, a way may yet be found short of actual, violent revolution against the bloated, evil Federal Leviathan. We should all pray for that. But it WILL involve some level of violent upheaval, of that I’m certain. The yawning divide between us is simply unbridgeable to allow for anything less, and unless and until the Left’s marrow-deep megalomania is well and truly extinguished the conflict will rage on, even intensify.

For my own part, I find myself losing interest more and more in national politics and the DC doings. After all we’ve witnessed since Inauguration Day 2016, the DC charade and rot so gallantly exposed by Trump has left me largely indifferent as to who might be installed in the now-tainted White House as figurehead-of-state, beyond whatever entertainment value one can derive from it. Our self-declared Masters are gonna do what they’re gonna do regardless, leaving the workaday schlubs to pay the freight for their disastrously inept folly as per usual. Until they’ve been thrown off, by hook or by crook, there really isn’t a whole lot for the little guy to do other than just grin and bear it.

Update! More on Brandon’s wholly-intentional and pre-planned fuel-price assault on America.

Nonprofit food deliveries concerned cost of gas could price out volunteer drivers
It’s never been more expensive for volunteer food drivers to make deliveries for nonprofits. The cost of gas in Georgia is more than $4 per gallon, an all-time high.

Meals on Wheels volunteer driver Sal Depasquale brings food to 89-year-old Frances Crowder once a week.

“He’s always on time,” Crowder said. “Oh boy, I don’t know what we’d do without Mr. Sal.”

Inserted betwixt the above paragraph and the next one, we find one of those ubiquitous clickbait links to another related article, which I found modestly amusing:

BIDEN: ‘CAN’T DO MUCH RIGHT NOW’ TO LOWER SOARING GAS PRICES, ‘RUSSIA’S RESPONSIBLE’

Gratifying to see this hapless liar floundering so desperately, innit? Allow me to translate Dopey Gropey’s usual ham-fisted prevarication into Truth:

  • Say not “can’t,” Gropey. Say “won’t,” or if that doesn’t suffice to keep the risible, pathetic attempt at deception semi-viable and your lying ass covered, try “have no desire to” instead.
    • Okay, the closing schnauzer-slodder is getting quite damned stale at this point. After so many years watching you blaggards fellate your beloved USSR, all dewy-eyed and face lovingly aflush as you were gratingly demanding the US hew closely to its horrid example, later compounded by your latest beloved candidate for Token First Female President’s use of the Rooskies to underhandedly, illegally, even treasonously slither her way into the White House, your sudden volte face into frothing hatred for all things Russia and/or Putin has a distinctly malodorous aroma wafting from it. As for Putin himself, I just can’t make myself jump into those waters along with everybody and his sister’s cat’s grandmother, seemingly. Yes, yes, yes: dictator, strongman, warlord, thug—got it, granted, so stipulated. So what the bloody deuce did y’all expect from Russia, anyway? I mean, it’s Russia, ferchrissake. Throughout its history, whenever they’ve slipped up and allowed somebody who really WASN’T one or all of those things to take power as head of state, they’ve bestirred themselves to correct the error toot sweet. I do heartily disapprove of his jumping poor Poland, yes; I would much prefer the valiant, indomitable, and admirable Poles to remain free and independent. But is there a soul so innocent and/or oblivious as to have been at all surprised by it?

      His deplorable Ukraine incursion aside, though, which I’m confident will be undone sooner rather than later, I must confess I’m just a wee mite fond of Putin. His sneering, openly-expressed contempt for President Mommy Jeans I thoroughly enjoyed; his proud basking in traditional masculinity and its multitude of related sins, with none of the obllgatory genuflecting and fashionable groveling towards the LGBTQIXN39Whatthefuckever herd-orthodoxy I find refreshing. He’s something of a throwback to an earlier era, a more clear, natural, and honest age. I must say, if the choice was offered of either Putin or the decrepit bleeding hemorrhoid we’re suffering under now as the US president, I’d take the unevolved Rooskie trog any day of the week, and twice on Sundays. We could use a strong, no-bullshit leader like ol’ Vlad right about now, I think.

In any event, Brandon’s odd reflex to blame anything and everything on Russia has not a thing to do with reality and everything to do with Gropey’s will to somehow survive politically, to stanch the copious bleeding of his innumerable self-inflicted wounds. But enough of that, back to the original topic we go.

Meals on Wheels is a nonprofit food delivery service. Depasquale has been a volunteer driver for more than 10 years. 

“It’s a valuable service, and it helps people who need help,” Depasquale said.

It’s never been more expensive for drivers to make deliveries. The cost of gas in Georgia is more than $4 per gallon, an all-time high. Depasquale makes three or four deliveries every week. He’s concerned if prices continue to skyrocket, volunteer drivers like him will drop out. This could dramatically increase his workload and pain at the pump.

Cross Services, Meals on Wheels’s parent company, is watching gas prices around the country. The company still has enough drivers to make deliveries, but are afraid that could change if prices stay this high.

“Hopefully we’ll retain them,” said Cross Services Senior Services Coordinator Mary Jo Buettner. “But, again it depends on how long that price of gas stays up so high and keeps going up.”

As long as Democrats are in charge, be assured that that is precisely what they’ll do. For them, this situation is no disaster, no terrible problem that must be remedied. It represehts the successful implementation of a long-standing policy goal—a win, not a loss or mistake. The misery will not just continue, but increase…until they have been removed from power. Far from being complex or difficult to understand, it really is just that simple, folks.

Want to Make America Great Again, Heritage Americans in flyover country, small towns, and suburban enclaves? You have to Make Democrats Afraid Again, then see to it they stay that way. Like it or not, it’s the only way; nothing less will do the trick.

A final note: my brother tells me that his conversations with other truckers indicate that, should diesel passe the five-dollar/gallon mark, a large number of his fellow independents and owner/operators intend to shut ’em down. They’ll do it too; they’ll have to, they won’t have any choice in the matter. My brother his own self is near that point already; he told me the other day that his every-other-day fillup, formerly around 250 to 300 dollars, cost him well over eight hundred bucks last time. No business can go on hemorrhaging that kind of money for very long before quickly bleeding out. Think the huge truck-driver shortage, a genuinely dangerous situation, couldn’t possibly get much worse than it already is? Think the price of every good, every commodity, can’t keep rising so insanely? Think this is a crisis we’re in now? Just you wait until thousands more trucks, the lifeblood of our economy, have been taken off the road for good.

Again: only the beginning, now unstoppable, needless and nonsensical. All of it, every last bit, a man-caused disaster created entirely and intentionally by Leftard Democrats, for nefarious purposes. That’s the long and the short of it. I won’t be lending my endorsement by participating further in American “elections,” as if they were above-board and credible, thereby granting tacit, open-ended license to my oppressors to do as they please, rather than the bread-and-circuses theatrical distraction they in fact are. But I do wish someone who feels differently about it would sit down and explain to me how ANY decent, reasonably intelligent and informed adult—seeing all that we’ve seen, knowing all that we know, at least nominally awake and of sound mind generally—could even hypothetically justify voting for a Democrat, ever.

And yet.

Where such people are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes, when I’m in a twee coffee bar or near a spontaneous drum circle, I can feel them.

The mind, it boggles.

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OUCH!

Also: OOF.

GOP Sen. Mitt Romney still has his moments,

He does, does he? Name three. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

but it seems like those moments are becoming a bit less frequent lately. He still deserves an apology from Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for being right about Russia back in 2012, because he absolutely was. But over the weekend, he made a statement for which he should be the one doing the apologizing.

Yesterday, he accused former Hawaii Democratic congresswoman and military veteran Tulsi Gabbard of “parroting false Russian propaganda” and declared that “her treasonous lies may very well cost lives.”

As we pointed out in our post about it, the Russian government apparently appreciates Gabbard’s comments about U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine and has in fact been airing her interview on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Russian state TV. But even taking that into consideration, Romney’s tweet goes way too far.
And, needless to say, Gabbard herself is quite angry about it. So this morning, she took to Twitter to take Mitt Romney to task over it…

Follows, a long and blistering Twitter thread from Gabbard that leaves Mittens a smoking ruin. Sad to say, the Threader unroller seems to have made a deal with the devil, sold for a mess of pottage and hidden behind a paywall, so I can’t do a plain-text excerpt of this glorious and richly deserved burn and assuredly ain’t about to transcribe all that myself. But it’s well worth the click-over, believe me.

I keep saying it: yeah, I know, dear Tulsi’s a Shitlibocrat, bassackwards and completely wrong about plenty and to spare. But dammit, I still like the cut of her jib. Unlike any of her fellow Demonrats, she actually does get one right now and then.

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No matter how paranoid you are, you ain’t anywhere near paranoid enough

Coming soon to an Orwellian nightmare-nation all too near you. Quite nigh upon us, in fact. Like Sandberg’s fog, it crept in on little cat’s feet—inch by inch, over the course of many decades—and is now well-established and will be extremely difficult to overthrow. Even moreso, sickeningly, since so many so-called Americans actually support it. The Covid trial run showed that clearly enough.

Yesterday, when a December 2021 news article was belatedly linked at (ironically enough) Citizen Free Press, I saw The Perfect Citizen come one giant step closer to reality. Under the title “Worldwide Social Credit Industry – Infrastructure to Support Social Credit Systems Represents a $16.1 Billion Opportunity by 2026,” the article matter-of-factly discusses the great money-making opportunities now possible in the emerging field of police-state surveillance of the citizenry. After listing some of the multinational corporate giants competing for market share in our future slave-state, it summarized the “opportunities” in a set of bullet points:

“The COVID-19 pandemic has facilitated substantial interest in citizen monitoring solutions…

  • Cameras and other optical equipment for social credit systems will reach $723M globally by 2026
  • Advanced computing will be used in conjunction with AI to provide nearly flawless identification and tracking
  • Various forms of biometrics will be used for identity verification as well as verifying the presence/location of people
  • Starting as tangential to public safety and homeland security, the social credit market becomes mainstream by 2026
  • Social credit systems represent the ability to identify (mostly people but also some ‘things’) and track activities for purposes of grading behaviors and applying ‘social credit scoring.”

While no mention is made of the Maoist origins and goals of “social credit” ideology, the article admits that “most systems will have socially acceptable behaviour at their core…government, companies, and society as a whole must determine ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘marginal’ behavior within the social credit market…[S]ystems will ultimately be used for a variety of commerce and lifestyle-related issues…accessibility within public places such as concerts, sporting events, and other assemblies. High social scoring individuals within the social credit market will be granted preferred access to both real and digital assets…[T]he convergence of … disparate technologies…will facilitate value within the social credit market…sensors, biometrics, cameras, and other optical devices, computer vision systems, and other advanced computing platforms.”

Ah, the banality of evil as our natural rights and freedom die not in a blaze of glory on a battlefield but by slow-motion absorption into a real-life “Matrix” of cybernetic transhumanism facilitated by financial advisers.

If the familiarity all this doesn’t leave you with chilled blood and gooseflesh, you aren’t paying attention. The title mentions “war propaganda,” but for some reason the author barely even mentions it in the piece. Bill takes up his slack for us:

The Basic Principles of War Propaganda – Wikipedia

Contents

1 Contents
1.1 1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves!
1.2 2. Our adversary is solely responsible for this war!
1.3 3. Our adversary’s leader is inherently evil and resembles the devil
1.4 4. We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!
1.5 5. The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention
1.6 6. The enemy makes use of illegal weapons
1.7 7. We suffer few losses, the enemy’s losses are considerable
1.8 8. Recognized intellectuals and artists support our cause
1.9 9. Our cause is sacred
1.10 10. Whoever casts doubt on our propaganda helps the enemy and is a traitor

Seems relevant.

Follows, just one contemporary example, with no further commentary either provided or necessary from Bill. The accompanying image spells it out well enough.

No. Just…NO

Here they go again.

(A) group of 27 foreign policy heavyweights has signed an open letter to the Biden administration calling for a “limited no-fly zone.” The campaign is led by ROBERT MCCONNELL, co-founder of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation.

Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN warned Saturday that Russia would view any nation declaring a no-fly zone “as participants of the military conflict.” It’s one of the few things that Biden and Putin seem to agree on: A no-fly zone would start a war between NATO and Russia.

Well, DUH. Establishing a “no-fly zone” being, y’know, an act of war and all, requiring as it will the destruction of Russian military assets up to and including fighter jets and/or pilots. One doesn’t have to have deep family ties to the Rodina to understand how that might be viewed by the Rooskies as hostile and aggressive behavior, no?

But in their new letter, these signatories are calling for something a little different:

Yeah, I just bet so. Problem being, however “limited” this piss-poor joke of a proposal might be, “no-fly zone” still means pretty much what it means: physically denying Russia the ability to conduct aerial-combat operations, to put the aviation component of its military force into action.

As president, Bill Clinton made promises to Ukraine he shouldn’t have, thereby writing checks that the US and NATO of 2022 can’t possibly cash, and maybe even shouldn’t. While I hate tyranny anywhere and any way it rears its ugly head, admire the spirit the Ukies have shown so far, and wish them well generally, one fact remains: not our circus, not our monkeys. It’s like this, I believe:


Oh, mustn’t forget:

Some of the big names who signed: retired Gen. PHILIP BREEDLOVE, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe; IAN BRZEZINSKI, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense; PAULA DOBRIANSKY, former undersecretary of State for global affairs; ERIC EDELMAN, former undersecretary of Defense; EVELYN FARKAS, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia; DANIEL FRIED, former assistant secretary of State and U.S. ambassador to Poland; JOHN HERBST, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine; JOHN KORNBLUM, former assistant secretary of State and U.S. ambassador to Germany; DAVID MERKEL, former deputy assistant secretary of State and NSC director; WILLIAM TAYLOR, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine; ALEXANDER VERSHBOW, former U.S. ambassador to Russia and NATO; and KURT VOLKER, former U.S. ambassador to NATO and special representative for Ukraine negotiations.

All them big brains, all that experience, all that savvy…and not a win to be found among ’em.

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Ch-ch-ch-changes

If you noticed my latest addition to the sidebar at top right, let it serve as the announcement of some big ones coming, at least for my crippled old ass anyway. For one, I’m due to be released from the rehab center early Thursday morn, the mere thought of which makes me absolutely giddy with delight.

Gonna be the beginning of an extremely busy time, though; this checking out from the hospital, being fitted for a prosthetic, and such-like schtuff seems to bring a lot of churn along with it. So even as I ease my way back into walking, driving, and plain ol’ ordinary living, I’ll be easing back into whatever the hell it is I do around this ol’ websty as well. I can’t thank you people enough for hanging with me through this awful ordeal, and couldn’t even begin to put into words how much your kind attention, your love and support, and your patience means to me. We’ll be back to what our new normal is going to be real soon now, and keep chooglin’ on from there.

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The Daily Donnybrook

Welcome to Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. Do note that the official CF comments policy remains in effect here, as enumerated in the left sidebar. All new posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…

Idiocracy on the Horizon

This is a long essay, about 3700 words, so I’m putting a summary on the front page and the main essay “below the fold”.

Modern, first-world society needs a lot of bright people to keep everything working. Because of a number of social forces, average intelligence in the Western world is declining and can be expected to decline to the point that the modern infrastructure cannot be maintained. Some solutions are proposed for averting this fate.

Continue reading “Idiocracy on the Horizon” →
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Catching Up

Greetings Y’all

Been talking with Mike, he sends regards and all the ‘usual froo-froo’ if’n you will. Think the man is a mite -peeved- at the whole “Winderz versus Apple” thing as, as I stated before, Fearless Leader apparently enjoys the “Dark Side” and usually does all his work on an Apple. The lappie I sent him was a Spawn-Created Winderz machine, which, after that one poast before this apparently yet another loooooong poast he’d been working on got TOTALLY ate the fuck up, so he’s been in a “Fuckitall” mode til he gets out and back on his Apple.

Which brings me to the next. Mike’s gettin’ sprung from ‘durance vile’ inside of oh shit, what about 5 days from now? He texted me at the beginning of the week (we haven’t talked much what with the torture sessions they’ve been legit putting on him) saying he had like 7 days left.

Not that I’m ignoring him nor y’all, I just been busy AF lately. Like everyone else, I’ma bit more’n nervous ’bout the whole Krainian thing, and I’ve been actually working on assisting Mike and his Brother with some defensive suggestions for the new compound…well not ‘new-new’ but now fully refurbished thanks to y’all’s donations (Thank Billy for getting the funds to Mike on the DL… good dude there… bit of a smartass, but a good dude). Mike’s brother has a “couple of acres and a mule” so to speak that the cash helped refurb to ‘cripple friendly’ and is going to be Mike’s “Hunker in the Bunker”

Hope he’s got room for me, Wifey and Sapper.

But otherwise, he’ll be back in a short-short. Like I said, he’s busy giving name, rank and serial number only to the torture specialists, and it’s only a matter of a few days til he gets sprung.

My apolly-olly-geez for being remiss in the updates… quite literally, shytte at MY A.O. has been off the chain stupid with Dumbunny to the point I… I had to call the fuzz in, which is a violation of Rule #1 “Never call the fuzz, deal with it yourself and have a shovel on hand”.

Problem is, Dumbunny is Wifey’s only Spawn, and I’m -not- allowed to ‘terminate with extreme prejudice.’

Yet.

So, stay tuned and we’ll see what happens

More Later I Remain The Intrepid Reporter
Big Country

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The Daily Donnybrook

Welcome to Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. Do note that the official CF comments policy remains in effect here, as enumerated in the left sidebar. All new posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…

“‘The brand is so toxic’: Dems fear extinction in rural US”

IE, what your saner, Real American sorts would call “a good start.”

The party’s brand is so toxic in the small towns 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge publicly their party affiliation. These Democrats are used to being outnumbered by the local Republican majority, but as their numbers continue to dwindle, those who remain are feeling increasingly isolated and unwelcome in their own communities.

Obviously, this is a wee mite hyperbolic, since if it was literally so this next guy would be pissing down his leg from fear at the mere suggestion of being quoted in an interview. Which only means that, even in its state of near-Nirvana, the good folks in northwest Pennsy still have work to do.

“The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable,” said Tim Holohan, an accountant based in rural McKean County who recently encouraged his daughter to get rid of a pro-Joe Biden bumper sticker. “I feel like we’re on the run.”

*shiver* Okay, I gotta confess: I think I just came, just a little. But you guys know why this is happening, right? Take a wild guess. Just one.

The climate across rural Pennsylvania is symptomatic of a larger political problem threatening the Democratic Party heading into the November elections. Beyond losing votes in virtually every election since 2008, Democrats have been effectively ostracized from the overwhelmingly white parts of rural America, leaving party leaders with few options to reverse a cultural trend that is redefining the political landscape.

Yup, you got it: Racism, of course and as always.

With disadvantages like this, you can be sure that the fraud in the next major election there is gonna be absolutely epic.

19

Well done, Mister LaForge

The ones they want to ban most are the very ones they ought to be forced to read, up to and including putting a gun to their empty heads if that’s what it takes.

Literacy advocate, Star Trek star, and game show host LeVar Burton wants people, particularly children, to read banned books. The former Reading Rainbow host appeared during a segment about banned books on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. In the piece, Burton attempts to read some seemingly innocuous books only to get cut off because of a book banning for one contrived reason or another. Eventually, Burton runs away after hearing sirens nearby, but not before encouraging folks to read banned books “because that’s where the good stuff is.” You can watch the entire The Daily Show segment below.

The topic of banned books reached new heights when a Tennessee school district banned Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, which chronicles the cartoonist’s father’s experiences in a concentration camp during the holocaust. Many have rallied against this movement, including author and CBLDF supporter Neil Gaiman, who wrote, “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.”

They can call themselves anything they damned well please, but the song always remains the same with creatures like these. and always will.

5

Unthinkable

Let’s say you have a friend. A smart friend who knows about a lot of things. He has good suggestions for getting little kids to eat politely in public, he’s able to get your car running well enough that you can drive it to the shop, and he knows why the supermarket shelves still have gaps. But your friend has some crazy ideas, like saying that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or that race is more than a social construct or that the borders should be closed to immigration for a generation.

The question is, should you listen to him on these things? On the one hand, he’s smart and he keeps his eyes open and he thinks a lot. On the other hand, nobody really believes that stuff, do they? And anyway, he’s just a guy. It’s not like he’s famous or won a Nobel Prize, right?

OK, let’s say there’s a Nobel Prize winner who is also a war hero, a progressive reformer of corrupt bureaucracies, and a respected historian. A man whose many inspirational sayings are still being quoted approvingly more than a century later. A man who firmly believed in American exceptionalism and that it was driven by the superiority of White Americans of northern and western European descent. A man, Theodore Roosevelt, who said “The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average [American] Indian.”

Or take another Nobel Prize winner, in the hard sciences this time, who helped to discover or measure aspects of the universe that were essential to developing our current understanding, helped to develop anti-submarine technology during WWI, and led the way in transforming Caltech into one of the leading research institutions in the world. Robert Millikan believed that Nordic civilization was the best in the world and was a founder of a eugenic society which encouraged the less capable not to have children.

Or take any number of other geniuses in the scientific or artistic realms, or visionary businessmen, or philanthropists, or founders of now-widely-approved social movements, people whose vision, brainpower, and achievements are viewed as something special, something that puts them above the norm. People who also held views that aren’t mentioned in polite company these days. William Shockley, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Margaret Sanger, and Cecil Rhodes each changed the world. Each was recognized during their lifetime. And each held views on race or religion or eugenics which are not allowed today.

Riddle me this: If a man is widely regarded as a genius, extremely intelligent and knowledgeable and capable of great feats of logic or intuition, why do you reject his opinion when you don’t like it or, worse, when you think your neighbor won’t like it?

You might counter that a man can be a genius in one field but just as much of an idiot as anyone else outside of his specialty. That’s fair; there are certainly a lot of people fitting that bill. However, Millikan and Roosevelt and Albert Schweitzer were hardly one-trick ponies. Each was accomplished in many and diverse fields, each of them well versed in meeting with people and evaluating them and gaining their support. Roosevelt and Schweitzer in particular probably met more people in more walks of life than anyone today who is judging them.

Why, then, would you dismiss them without a thought if they say that, based on their observations, blacks are generally less intelligent than whites, or that women in general will get less done in the workplace than men, or that Jews in general will look out for the interests of other Jews rather than the interest of the society they live in? Isn’t it possible that these geniuses are more observant than you or more able to find patterns in what they observe?

The geniuses are not always correct. They are a product of their times and the people they observe. They can be wrong. The question is why their ideas are not given even a cursory study. Is it because they go against what you’ve known your whole life? Because they raise questions about your own goodness or value as a person? Because they give you an ick feeling?

If those questions aren’t challenging enough, consider this: Times change. Mores change. The unspeakable idea of today could have been the common wisdom of yesterday or vice versa.

Alan Turing was as great a genius as has ever lived. He was also a homosexual. This was not acceptable in mid-twentieth-century England and he was charged, convicted, and chemically castrated for it, which led to his suicide. Today, of course, his homosexuality not only would not be a crime or a bar to professional advancement, it would actually be a leg up for professional advancement in any university in England or the United States. True, these days homosexuality is mostly viewed as “born that way”, but seventy years ago it was viewed as a choice and Turing’s “choice” tainted all of his work in the eyes of the contemporary leaders and populace.

Bottom line, if a very intelligent and capable person has an opinion that goes against what you believe, at least consider the possibility that you are wrong. And, whatever you do, don’t “cancel” him because he didn’t mouth today’s shibboleths.

Afterward: This doesn’t fit the flow of the main essay, so I’m sticking it down here.

You’ll note that the derided ideas mentioned above tend to cluster around a few areas, basically coming down to one group being better than another or else wanting to improve the species. That’s an artifact mainly of other people getting upset over such ideas. It may also be a product of manipulation of search engine results. There are plenty of other unpopular ideas espoused by intelligent, accomplished people: Computing pioneer Richard Stallman was cancelled because he found it ridiculous that sex with a willing 17-year-old female “child” was called rape because the age of consent in the Virgin Islands is 18.

I started thinking about the topic of unacceptable ideas from otherwise lauded figures because of a rapid series of unfavorable mentions in podcasts and articles: Dr James Watson, despite his genius and his foundational accomplishments, “had to be” cancelled because of his views on female scientists. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony, lauded by some for their efforts in getting women the right to vote (and criticized by some for the same reason), have been derided by others for decades because they prioritized female suffrage over black suffrage. (On the flip side, Frederick Douglass was criticized by some at the time because he prioritized black suffrage over female suffrage.) Albert Schweitzer, despite (or because of) spending most of his life helping blacks in Africa, viewed blacks as less intelligent and capable than whites, which has led to him being posthumously cancelled on several college campuses, and a disavowal of his racism apparently is obligatory whenever his name is mentioned in a BBC science podcast.

Once the subject caught my attention, I was inspired to search for inventors, scientists, originators of social changes, and broadly-defined geniuses who had “mostly good ideas but…” Search engines gave me little but complaints about anti-semitism, racism, sexism, and eugenic beliefs. I found a few unacceptable ideas in other categories but that was more a matter of stumbling across them than of being directed to them.

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