Category: Current Events

Atlas Shrugged Redux

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Back before the 2016 election Michael Anton made the analogy that we had to rush the cockpit to save the United States from being hijacked by its domestic enemies.  It was a good analogy at the time.  But time has revealed that when the plane landed the airport police, the air traffic controllers, the baggage handlers and even the stewardesses and the guy in the Cinnabon kiosk are all working for the terrorists and they promptly haul you off to prison for interfering with the scheduled impact of your plane with a skyscraper or government office.

However, you want to characterize the 2020 election, about half the country voted for Joe Biden.  And for the last three years they’ve seen what Joe Biden is going to do to this country.  He’s run the country into the ground.  The opinion polls say Biden is something close to neck and neck with Donald Trump for the 2024 election.  In a rational world that should not be.  Biden should be polling at 20%.

Let’s face it.  The American people are either too stupid or too crooked to want to stop what is currently going on.  You can’t persuade them that they don’t want what they obviously want.  Women want the feminist future that they have been promised.  The non-white population wants their grievances against the white population to be endlessly acknowledged and restitution endlessly paid.  The sexual deviants want their constantly changing claims about themselves continuously celebrated.  The millennials and zoomers want Gaia to be appeased by returning the human race to subsistence level technology.  And they also want to have the government pay for their college loans and allow them to live a childless existence on a government subsidy that allows them to eat crickets, watch porn and eventually die meaningless deaths.  Adding all these groups together, apparently, they have the numbers now to get their way.

Well, then that’s that.  Democracy says they should get what they vote for.  The Democrats promised them all those things.  So, let the Democrats do what they said they’d do.  Joe Biden is emptying the Treasury, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and eventually all of our retirement accounts.  He is bringing in the third world, en masse, through the Mexican border and allowing the FBI and the Justice Department to enforce a reparations policy by allowing urban street crime to go unchecked against the middle class of the cities.  Everything looks like it’s going according to plan.

There is resistance in some conservative areas of the country like the South and Central regions but for the majority of the population it’s full speed ahead.  The east and west coasts are getting rid of gasoline automobiles and oil and gas heating systems and replacing the office workers and small business people in their downtowns with migrants, homeless addicts and gangsters.  They’re indoctrinating their kids to want to be transgendered and then they’re facilitating the sexual mutilation of these children as a way to eliminate as many people as they can.

And if that is what people want, they should have it.  All the areas of the country that want these things should get them.  And they should get as much of it as possible, as soon as possible.  The areas that vote against these things will have to figure out ways to insulate themselves from these policies.  They will have to make state laws that shield things like the use of fossil fuels from any federal mandates against its use.  The states will have to protect children from federally mandated educational requirements that try to introduce sexual deviancy into the schools.  The states will have to have their own requirements to deal with the onslaught of illegal immigrants.  And they will have to protect themselves from the Justice Department and its vicious anti-white and anti-religious policies.

All these things will have to be done.  But the states that have already succumbed to the coalition of the damned (listed above) must be allowed to enjoy all the benefits they have voted for.  And they are impressive.  Their cities will become homeless encampments reminiscent of the poorer parts of Mexico City.  Their electrical grids will become more theoretical than actual.  Continuous electrical service will no longer exist but instead will become a sort of patchwork of planned outages and accidents.  Their court system will no longer adjudicate those caught in the commission of crimes by the police.  Instead, it will be used solely against political enemies of the regime, basically, straight white men who still think they have rights under the formerly enforced Constitution of the United States of America.

All these things must be allowed and even encouraged in the areas where they’ve been voted for.  And after this has been allowed to go on long enough; years, decades; who knows; then maybe, just maybe, there might be a change of heart.  Enough of these Democrats might say, “Hey, why are things so lousy here and so nice over there in Florida?”  Why does cousin Dave in Texas have neighbors who live in houses with lawns while my neighbors live in cardboard boxes on my lawn surrounded by their own droppings?  How come he’s got a Walmart and a Home Depot down the road and all I’ve got is the welfare office and the local crack house?  How come he’s got four kids and six grandkids and all I’ve got is a son who used to be a daughter and a daughter who used to be a son?

Well, anyway, that’s what I think.

A Bloomberg Poll has Trump up over Biden in 5 of 7 Swing States

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NEW POLLS: Trump Beating Biden in 5 of 7 Swing States, Tied in a Sixth

“As for the state-by-state results, in Arizona, Biden is polling at 43 percent while Trump has 47 percent. Biden is also trailing Georgia (Trump 48-Biden 43), North Carolina (Trump 47-Biden 43), Pennsylvania (Trump 46-Biden 45) and Wisconsin (Trump 46-Biden 44)

The Michigan poll shows Trump and Biden in a 44 percent deadlock, and Nevada is the only battleground where Biden is shown to be leading — with 46 percent to Trump’s 43. The poll determined in a closed matchup between Biden and Trump, the former president leads his successor by 4 points overall.”

Of course, what does this actually mean if you can whip up an extra ten percent of the votes anytime you need to on election day or even a week afterwards?  But it does tell you that if Joe Biden gets “re-elected” in November 2024 there will probably be a lot of people emigrating out of blue states and into red right afterwards.

Even a Worm Will Turn. How About the Canadians?

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Based on current polling Pierre Trudeau is now slightly less popular than skydiving without a parachute  but still not as unpopular as being eaten alive by rats.  At this point the Canadian press sent their stupidest reporter to try and make the Conservative party candidate, Pierre Poilievre, look bad.  It didn’t go well for the reporter.  This clip went viral.

The reporter had a bunch of lazy generalizations and stereotypes about conservatives and Poilievre slaps him down each time telling him to give specific examples or specify who “they” are that are being used as references.  It’s a lot fun.

Could the Canadians have had enough?  As with everything, in the environment we’re in only the result will answer the question.

The Other Guy’s Point of View

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I was having a conversation with one of the HVAC technicians that was fixing my home heating system the other night.  He was about my age and was a soft-spoken guy and like most people in New England, he was a Democrat.  And I think he brought up the election in the context of the challenges that Biden faces on account of things like the cost of oil and gasoline and food.  And his challenge with voting against Biden was that he considered Trump a bad guy.

The fellow said, “But look how much he lies, how can that be acceptable?”  So, I asked him what it meant that everyone on the Left lied about the Russian-Trump investigation.  How could it be acceptable that the FBI knew it was a hoax but they used it to damage the Trump administration for a couple of years.

He had nothing to say about that.  So here is this guy who I’d say is a decent man.  He knows that a lot of the policies of the Left are crazy.  He thinks the whole green energy thing is incoherent and doomed to failure.  But he has the talking points about Trump and his followers being “dangerous” and uncouth.  He wants the Republicans to come up with a more palatable candidate.  In other words, they want to be able to say both Biden and Trump are both unacceptable.  Which really means they don’t think they can win with Biden and so they want a way out of the status quo.

I think the Democrats have come to the conclusion they can’t win with Biden.  He’s deteriorating and even if he maintained his current mental state, he can’t debate anyone and he has so many liabilities that general election commercials will shred him mercilessly.  So, the party wants desperately to replace him with Newsome.  Of course, they have to replace Biden and Harris.  Neither of them is viable.  They have to allow a primary challenge to Biden.

I’ve been hearing that the primary challenge has to happen before January.  I don’t know that that’s true.  The Democrats often switch around the rules to suit themselves and I don’t see how a late entry into the primaries would be disqualifying.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if in March or April Joe Biden decides not to run and a replacement candidate is selected by acclamation by the Democrat National Committee.  After all that’s what they used to do in the real old days and I’m sure that the by-laws of the Committee have some sort of loophole that allows the backroom boys to use their emergency powers to make such a decision when an act of God, like Joe being blackmailed into bowing out, occurs.

Now, when all of this happens, that fellow I was talking to will think it was a stroke of good luck.  Now he can stop worrying and thinking about the problems in front of him.  Instead of senile, crooked Joe Biden he has young, honest Gavin Newsome.  Sure, Newsome espouses the same failed policies that got Biden into the jam he’s in.  California’s insane energy policies are the blueprint that Biden is using to destroy the rest of the country’s economy.  Newsome is just as corrupt as Biden.  All he has going for him is better hair and a few more brain cells.  But the Democrat voters just want to be assured that the plan is back on track.  The arc of history is back to bending toward Barack Obama’s promised land of social justice and climate healing.

What all that tells me is that before America can ever get around to facing reality, reality is going to have to hit Democrats in the face with a baseball bat’s worth of truth.  It’s going to take economic ruin and lifestyle squalor to get these true believers to cry uncle.

Well, that’s what we’re here for.  The Lord Humungous will have to set up shop in the wasteland and begin throwing the voters into the soup pot before they admit that “our democracy” may no longer be all that it was cracked up to be.  The question is whether we will be at the leading or lagging edge of the curve.  New Zealand has kicked out their blue team and installed the conservatives.  But who knows how the tide is running in various places.  I think we’ll be lagging the curve.  I expect the suffering to increase significantly for quite a while.    I wouldn’t even be too surprised by a Biden second term.

After all, the Left has invested enormous resources into election fraud.  Why wouldn’t they pull out all the stops in 2024?  Sure, it’s transparently fake.  And the voting populace already says they believe 2020 was stolen.  But no one has successfully done anything about it.  So, what’s to stop the next bigger round of fraud?

Now what could change all this is if the international situation really deteriorates.  A hot war for us with Iran or even Russia could launch the price of oil into the stratosphere and truly wreck the economy.  That might be enough for the Dems to say uncle.  Would that get my friend the technician to say uncle and vote for Trump.  Yeah, I’ll bet it would.  But he’d still claim that Trump is a bad guy and would wish that Nikki Haley was his choice.  Well, you can’t blame him.  She is a good Democrat.

So that’s what I heard from the other side this week.

“Bugs, Mr. Rico. Zillions of em!”

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ZMan takes the Dean of Science Fiction to task on his concept of a soldier only franchise in “Starship Troopers.”

Of course he’s rightly basing it on the book but even the highly toxic spin that the director took with the movie still made it a fun experience to watch them zap those bugs.  Hopefully some of Heinlein’s better novels and juveniles will be brought to the screen the way they deserve.

For fans (and detractors) of the book there is a lively discussion in the comments of the post.

Mercenary Rule

17OCT2023 – Just Some Impressions of the Current Day

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In Israel military and political leaders are sweating blood trying to thread a needle that has no eye; how to rescue hostages, kill the Hamas leadership and its psychopathic foot soldiers, minimize “civilian” Palestinian deaths and protect their own troops from harm while accomplishing all this in an urban environment that resembles some hellish first-person shooter video game.  Chances to accomplish all of these objectives is objectively zero.  And they know that.  The real mission is to destroy Hamas while not failing catastrophically at the other objectives.

Of course, if they fail at that primary objective then all the other failures; deaths of soldiers, hostages and civilians will have been in vain and therefore infinitely worse.  And they approach this mission with the knowledge that Hamas orchestrated this cataclysm for the express result that they would get to kill a lot of Israeli soldiers without the Israelis achieving their goal of eradicating Hamas from Gaza.  I’m sure the IDF knows all this.  For that reason, I’m guessing that they will resist the pressure brought to bear by Israeli peaceniks, moderate Arab state leaders and Joe Biden, that the battle in Gaza be limited and without result.  But that’s my assumption.  All past experience has been that Gaza is an insoluble problem that cannot be resolved.  Time will certainly tell.

In the House of Representatives word is that many of the establishment leaders are bowing to necessity and approving Jim Jordan’s bid to become Speaker.  Here, I don’t even have an inkling about what will happen.  As far as I can tell most of these politicians are crooks who only follow orders from their paymasters so it’s impenetrable to me.  Maybe the need to come up with an aid package for Israel will force the establishment shills to accept Jordan against their wills in order to allow the legislation they want to proceed.  Possibly some good will come of this accident of timing.  I’ve heard Jim Jordan is supposed to be the one in ten thousand, honest man.  I hope he is and I wish him well.  What I do hope is that he draws the line at further funding for Ukraine.  After all I think it’s only fair that we restrict our support to one major war at a time.  Ukraine has had their chance.  Now let them work it out with the Russians.  If that’s still possible.

Joe Biden is going to Israel.  I’m sure he’ll regale them with tales of his service at the battle front in 1948, 1967 and 1973.  He might even relate the story of his hand-to-hand duel against the dastardly Arab terrorist Corn Al-Pop.  He was one bad dude.

Joe Biden in the Holy Land.  Surely the Lord of the Old Testament has some lightning, earthquake and brimstone saved up for just such a contingency.  I mean, Joe is like some local representative of Sodom or Gomorrah showing up after a local atrocity.  Turning Dr Jill into a salt pillar seems like letting him off light.  But politics makes for strange bedfellows.

The election and Trump indictment news moves along on the expected trajectories.  The more certain that Trump will be imprisoned the more certain that his support among Republican voters will increase.  It’s like some fateful confluence of irresistible forces is dragging us to a crisis that can only be resolved by a radical shift in the status quo.  Maybe it’s an illusion but it seems that we won’t be splitting the difference this time.  It appears that the system is breaking down catastrophically.  Now I say appears because as has been mentioned innumerable times before, there is an awful lot of ruin in a world empire.  But short of armed intervention by the military it seems like people are getting fed up with the dysfunction that has been imposed on the whole country.  But we’ll see.

Anyway, that’s what I have to remark on today.  More madness and more dysfunction.  More of the same.

Israel Tells Zelensky to Stop Chasing the Ambulance

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“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked to make a solidarity visit in the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel but was told “the time is not right,” Hebrew-language media reports.”

What they’re saying in a polite way is “Save your grandstanding for a time when we’re not still burying our dead and avenging their deaths.

Zelensky must be afraid that the United States might send some money to Israel without him getting his cut.

He truly is a pathetic and grotesque figure on the world stage.

Statics and Dynamics

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Every chemical engineering student in my college had to take a smattering of other engineering courses to get his degree.  We took an EE (electrical engineering) course and an ME (mechanical engineering) course or two were equivalent to some of ours like thermodynamics and heat transfer (although usually our sections had some additional requirements that were specific to chemically reactive systems.  And we had to take a CE (Civil Engineering) course.  I think the text I used for the CE course was called “Statics and Dynamics.”  Here we talked about stress and strain and the different forces that needed to be calculated in order to specify the required strengths of materials used to design and construct a structure like a bridge or a dam.  And it was always stressed that a safety factor was always needed.  Even for the most cut and dry application that had been cookie cut for generations.  You always wanted the strengths of the components to be greater than any possible forces that could be credibly imagined, by some generous factor.  And the less well defined the risks the bigger the factor should be.  So, if you’re building a nuclear power plant, something that didn’t even exist within the living memory of people still alive today and which has enormous inherent risks, you don’t skimp on the materials of construction.  Ask the guy who designed the damping rods for the Chernobyl reactors.

Now as complicated as a bridge or a nuclear power plant design is imagine designing a global nuclear deterrence system based on mutually assured destruction with something like ten nuclear nation states all of which are in various uneasy states of enmity and competition with each other and three of which possess very large stockpiles of nuclear ICBMs.  The policies needed to maintain this balanced system mostly requires that the major players do not willingly attempt to destabilize the status quo through direct confrontation with each other.  And unbelievably we got through about seventy-five years of this without a single nuclear exchange between the nuclear armed states.  A miracle.

And probably the reason it all worked was because, for the most part, the system was a defensive crouch that provided a nuclear tripwire that the Soviets were afraid to cross and at the time we were still too smart to try.  But then the Soviet Union fell and we all stopped worrying about nuclear war and both sides thought to let things lay.  And that got us to 2000.  But then 9/11 happened and the neo-cons became politically important and ever since they’ve been wondering what would happen if we could leverage those wonderful relics of the last century, the ICBMs.  So, color revolutions became the thing to do and now arming former Soviet republics is the new game.

Well, here’s the thing.  Nuclear weapons as a defensive weapon is one thing.  Nukes as a tactical offensive threat, even one that you just talk about, is a totally different animal.  In fact, instead of being a stabilizing factor it’s a powerful destabilizing one

The analogy that is the basis of this whole essay is the difference between the strength of concrete in compression as opposed to against a shearing force.  You can take a concrete pier and load it vertically with the weight of a building.  This compressive force can be enormous and the pier is completely stable and far below the maximum loading it is designed for.  But take that same pier and mount it sideways and try to use it as a beam with the same weight cantilevered and it will fail.  That material does not have the same strength laterally as it has in compression.  It will fail catastrophically.  So, the engineer designing a structure has to know the strength of a component but also the correct circumstance in which to use it.

And that’s what we’re doing.  We’re trying to use nuclear deterrence as an offensive weapon.  It’s the shield we hide behind as we snipe at the Russians behind proxies, like the Ukrainians, the Poles and maybe the Balts.  We’re playing nuclear brinksmanship and we’re playing it badly.  We’ve just given the Russians the excuse to call in proxies of their own.  Possibly Hamas is the first of these.  Maybe after them come some Lebanese or other Iranian proxies only this time inside our border.  And maybe that’s what the neo-cons are hoping for.  But it’s a stupid play.  We did the Middle East invasion game after 9/11.  It was a disaster.  If we do it again with Russia and Iran and China as our enemies it will be a bigger disaster.  The nuclear deterrence won’t deter the conventional wars.  But if we push this whole rivalry too far it might just get us the nuclear war we thought could never happen.  Brilliant political malpractice.

So, the moral of the story is, make sure you hire a competent engineer when you’re building something that your life depends on.  In our case don’t hire Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden.  They’ve got collapse written all over them.

New Zealand Comes to Its Senses

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After five years of Jacinda Ardern’s Karen-in-Chief act with the COVID uber-lockdowns as the straw that broke the camel’s back, New Zealanders have come to their senses and voted out Labor and brought back the conservatives.

This horse-faced harpy was constantly on display to the American news watcher as a paragon of the progressive future we could all someday hope to emulate.

But now the NZ conservatives have to deliver on their promises; lower taxes, lower prices on food and fuel, law and order.  Well, that’s what they better do or the voters will put another annoying woman with monstrously large teeth back in charge.  No normal person wants that.

Clarity at Long Last

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This essay is from Ilan Benjamin, whose cousin Daniel Pearl was a journalist that was beheaded by islamist terrorists in Pakistan during the “War on Terror” in 2003.  He narrates how Pearl’s murder did not destroy the family’s idealism and devotion to peace and the whole progressive agenda:

“In 2012, I returned to the States to study film at University of Southern California, and published a book about my military service that criticized the Israeli government. This didn’t win me many friends, but I continued to advocate for nuance regardless. I proudly supported Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA+, and feminist causes. I called myself a progressive Jew.”

But over time he couldn’t fail to notice that this didn’t buy him any points with the Left with respect to Israel:

“I assumed—if I cared enough, if I mourned for the Palestinian dead, if I put nuance above all else—our neighbors and their allies would give us the same decency.

How wrong I was. This past week, as over 1,300 Jews were slaughtered, the most murderous attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I saw the true face of Palestinians and their allies. All around the world, they celebrate. They gloat. They mock our tears. They do not protest against Hamas. They embrace pure evil.”

And now he has learned a lesson:

“To non-Jewish friends who have reached out, thank you. It is simply the human thing to do. To friends who dare justify what has happened, you are not friends. You are nothing but Nazi supporters dressed up in leftist intellectual language.

…

Unlike our enemy, I feel no joy at the prospect of going to war. But if our people’s existence is at stake, I will do what I must. I will be the world’s favorite villain: the Jew who has the audacity to defend his people.”

Mr. Benjamin has learned that the Left has a hierarchy and regardless of what he would wish he is near the bottom of that hierarchy because he belongs to a branch of western civilization.  He is a straight Jewish western man.  The only thing below that on the hierarchy is a straight Christian western man.  And of course a Palestinian is much, much higher up in that hierarchy.

But the true revelation is not where he stands in the hierarchy but what actions this organization; the Left, will condone by those it favors.

Literally anything.

Their favored partisans can rape women next to the bodies of their slaughtered friends.  They can saw the heads off of infants.  They can film these atrocities.  And the Left will still proudly trumpet a full-throated harangue that these psychotic murderers are the real victims.

Mr. Benjamin at long last has had his eyes opened to the truth about his progressive friends.  Basically, they are either evil or insane or both.  Possibly going forward he should examine the people who are the enemies of these “friends.”  He might find additional clarity and maybe some more reliable friends.