Please forgive the scarcity of posts. It’s a combination of a slow news cycle and a spike in real world work commitments. Hang in there, things will pick up.
photog
Month: January 2020
09JAN2020 – Photo of the Day
09JAN2020 – Quote of the Day
The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Which Way Goes Tehran?
Is Tehran willing to play brinksmanship with President Trump? We’re about to find out. It’s a relatively complicated calculation for me. The Iranian people are extremely disgruntled against their theocratic regime due to economic problems associated with the American embargo. Recently the government’s suppression of protest was responsible for the death of hundreds of anti-regime partisans. Will that make the mullahs less likely to hazard a war or do they think it will distract the people who will instead concentrate on an outside aggressor. And what are the leaders guessing about the temperament and intentions of President Trump? Do they think he’ll be cautious about engaging in a shooting war during an election year or do they think he will be forced to save face if they kill American soldiers?
With regard to the second question, Tehran may be basing their estimation of the President’s response on their experiences with George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Obama was entirely unwilling to deny Iran anything they asked for. His deal with the Iranians included $150 billion dollars in tribute including over a billion dollars in one hundred-dollar bills packed onto pallets for ease of shipment. There was the ideal American President from an Iranian perspective. With Bush they had a man who earlier on needed to be avoided due to his campaign of Middle Eastern military reduction. But once he allowed himself to become immobilized in the quagmire of the Iraq occupation, he was a fantastic victim for the Iraqi Shiite surrogates that Iran controlled. He was too weakened by the damage he had done to the American military and his own constituency to see that holding Iran responsible for the Shiite resistance should have been part of his larger campaign. Also, he never ended Iran’s nuclear program when he easily could have.
Getting back to the point, if the Iranians judge that President Trump will be either too pacifistic like Obama or too strategically naïve like Bush, they may be in for a nasty shock. If they manage to kill a large number of American soldiers in this revenge campaign it’s entirely possible that President Trump may elect to escalate the conflict with a very extensive series of missile and aerial strikes against the most important assets of the Iranian military forces. If a series of strikes to take out Iran’s ballistic missile stockpiles, the nuclear production facilities and the jet fighter and naval vessels were to occur it might not be easy for the mullahs to continue their war.
A further thought occurs that if human intelligence allowed targeting of “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei and his clerical kitchen cabinet that might put an end to the Iranian regime altogether.
Now these are enormous escalations based on where we are right now but anyone who has followed the Middle East knows that just to engage in tit for tat low level violence is to play to their strengths. It is even possible that the missile strikes that the Iranians have fired may be a minor incident that won’t require a strong response. We’ll know soon. By morning the damage reports will begin to appear.
It seems to me that Tehran will elect to use proxies to harass Americans anywhere they have a chance. That is more their style. But if they decide to get in a shooting war with President Trump, I predict they will get more than they bargained for.
08JAN2020 – Quote of the Day
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good… Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
08JAN2020 – Photo of the Day
Another, Other Step in the Right Direction on Voter Fraud
Five states have 19 counties (probably urban centers) that have more voters registered than they have adult residents, California, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The federal government is going to litigate this. Sounds like a good idea.
Accentuating the Positive
One of my favorite bad thinkers never tires of reminding his readers and listeners that a negative identity is not a strong position to be in. In other words, if you define your identity by what you are against then you lack a basis for defining what you are for. This is the charge he lays at the feet of Conservative Inc. By defining themselves as only against progressivism they are constantly addressing whatever new outrage the Left cooks up but they fail to define what they themselves do stand for. If you’re always on the defensive you never have a chance to advocate for the things you actually want to see implemented.
Far better is to look at what you do believe in and formulate it into a clear and coherent statement. That way when someone asks your stance on this or that example or scenario you have a rational basis for your answer. And also, it gives you a logical basis for formulating an agenda of actions for the future, a plan. Now my identity is relatively innocuous since at heart I’m just a garden variety civic nationalist. What I would want is a return to normal American society with plenty of allowance for individual differences in background and culture. Plenty of room for normal people who want to raise their kids as good American citizens.
So, that all sounds reasonable but when you look at our present situation it becomes much more complicated. For instance, the Boy Scouts of America was an organization with the specific mission of providing boys with a fraternal organization to help them become physically fit, mentally awake and morally straight. And because of that mission it was hounded by homosexuals and feminists until now it isn’t for boys and soon, I’m sure they’ll have to remove the word straight for fear of offending the delicate.
My example is meant to show that trying to define a positive identity makes you a target for those who hate what you are. They will see what you stand for and try to destroy it. The same thing has been done to almost all other social organizations. The US government has forced women into every fraternal organization with the sole exception of religious organizations. And of course, many of these have surrendered too. One of the only exceptions I know of is the Knights of Columbus which is a Roman Catholic fraternal organization which excludes women as anything but auxiliaries.
Well if that is the only exception then that will have to be the path forward. It’ll have to be a religious fraternal society. The organization must utilize the Freedom of Religion under the First Amendment to protect it from the invasive forces of the federal government and may need to restrict itself to states that do not regularly harass conservative organizations. The mission of the organization can be loosely grounded in the usual fraternal agenda. Service to the community, family activities and religious or ethical training are all things that fall under the purview of a religious fraternal organization. The thing that has to be carefully defined is the religious requirements that define the organization such that you can avoid all the latest abnormal behavior. Luckily the Christian Bible (at least the one used up until the 1950s) has scriptural authority for avoiding the whole LGBTQ agenda in one fell swoop. The only thing I’m not sure of is whether it can be structured so that any member from one of the remaining traditionalist sects is eligible or whether a separate religion will need to be founded in order to give it legitimacy. In other words, is it enough for me to be the Grand Exalted Master or do I also have to be the Pope?
All of this sounds crazy but maybe that is what this world actually requires to permit men the freedom to live their lives as they wish to. When the churches themselves become corrupt and controlled by the insane maybe it’s not crazy to think that new churches need to be formed. This sort of dovetails with my earlier talk about the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club. But of course, as time goes on it becomes less of a joke and more of a necessity. And if anyone knows of an existing fraternal organization that already covers all the bases, I’m interested in let me know and I’ll look into it. Until then I’ll order Camera Girl to make me some sandwiches while I think up secret handshakes and build a mystic decoding ring.
07JAN2020 – Quote of the Day
Human nature is full of riddles; . . . one of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste of freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?’
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
07JAN2020 – Photo of the Day
