Author: Mark Noonan

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

China Joe announced that we’ll be sending 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine – this, apparently, is what the Kraut’s demanded before they would agree to send Leopard tanks. Ukraine is getting a hodge-podge of military equipment which they have no training or maintenance facilities for. This will get interesting.

Russia, meanwhile, continues to push forward in certain areas, likely to prep for an offensive after the Spring rains. We’ll see how this comes out – but I suspect, long term, that Russia will have some Abrams tanks to sell on the international arms market. The bottom line, absent a collapse of Russian will to win, is that Russia has vastly superior numbers over Ukraine and the outcome is only a matter of time.

New York City erected a Medusa-looking statue on their courthouse – in honor of RBG and abortion, so at least kinda appropriate. Very ugly, though. But that is the point of modern art: to be ugly. To be something you hate but can’t get rid of.

Also in New York City – for ages they had de-facto segregation in their schools. This was to allow New York’s rich progressives to have high quality public schools while proclaiming their allegiance to diversity without, you know, the diversity. There merely skimmed the cream of the crop of minority students to put into class with the kids of rich, white Progressives. Former Mayor DeBlasio, true to his Leninism, put an end to that – rather than have test scores determine who got into the swanky, Manhattan public schools, they created a supposedly scientific algorithm which would decide…naturally, it really just managed to shove into these schools kids who were in no way prepared for high education achievement. There is a bit of poetic justice here in that rich, white liberals lost their little education plantation…but the bad news is that now all of New York’s public schools suck. This is considered fine by the upper end of the Ruling Class because they send their kids to private schools and, hey, who wants to take the time and effort to improve all schools? Better to just score some DEI brownie points by wrecking the few remaining good schools.

Surrounded by armed guards, California Governor Newsom proclaimed in the streets that “weapons of war” have no place there. Make no mistake about it: Newsom will be hard for the GOP to beat. He’s good looking, sounds good on TV and, of course, the MSM will cover up his crimes and puff him up as the Second Coming. But he can be beat – his State is a complete disaster outside a few, rich coastal enclaves. The way to handle him in debate is to simply get truthful about him: “Governor, you hate the people of California. You want them to suffer. You talk about ‘weapons of war’ but what you really are trying to do is make honest citizens into criminals while you deliberately and maliciously allow real criminals to run amok.” Words like that – 100% true – will put that arrogant ass into a defensive mode and he won’t know how to deal with it as he’s never had a hostile question asked of him.

What do to about rising egg prices and people suddenly dying? Claim that the eggs are causing sudden death. I’m serious: it is what they are trying to assert. This after they tried to assert that all the sudden deaths are due to climate change.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan66 Comments

So they found yet another trove of classified documents illegally in China Joe’s possession.

It really is a matter of anyone who goes up against Trump wrecks themselves, don’t they? Sure, Biden managed to cheat his way into Trump’s job…but we’re already well past the point that Joe’s reputation has been utterly destroyed because he went up against Trump. Having mountains of classified documents going back at least 15 years when his hack AG went after Trump on a bogus claim of mishandling documents is just the perfect manifestation of karma…and the millionth time the Democrats have proved that whatever they accuse us of, they are guilty of doing.

Personally, I don’t see a nefarious reason on the part of Pudding Brain for having them – whatever those around him might have done with the documents (Hunter would have had to be a saint not to sell them to the highest bidder…and “saintly” isn’t a word I’d use to describe a man suing in court to prevent his illegitimate daughter from using his surname), I think that Joe, himself, kept them because they made him feel important. Biden’s whole career has been a mere series of lies he’s told himself to make out that he’s the hero of the show – the smartest, bravest, most important man. He probably thought it was cool that he could see secret information and just wanted to hang on to it as a talisman of his greatness.

But the real issue is that he really did break the law – just as Hillary did – and we already know that no legal sanction will be applied. It was apparently only in this last couple days that DOJ officials started searching for docs. Until then, they allowed Biden’s personal attorneys to do the searching. This after they raided Melania’s panty drawer searching for secret documents. That is the problem with our society – the double standard. Laws are applied differently depending on how juiced in you are with the Ruling Class. Such a thing is unsustainable.

I wonder how many, besides me, got a feeling of joy in the heart contemplating arresting everyone at WEF and, after confiscating their money, set them to hard labor? It did flash through the mind as I thought about how wicked and corrupt they all are (they literally had to import hookers to keep up with demand in Davos…and we all know that among the “goods” imported were minors)…and just for a moment a flash of justice came to mind. I think that more and more are getting to that…getting, that is, to understand just why the Jacobins did what they did.

Hulu is running a series based upon the entirely bogus 1619 Project materials. They really are determined to get Americans to hate their own nation. And our response must be the ruthless defunding of all Leftist ideology – DeSantis is leading the way on this in Florida. Who controls the schools, controls the future. I’d rather we just abolished the education system…but if we can’t, then we’d better control it and ensure that our beliefs are transmitted to the next generation.

The cops in Atlanta killed a white Antifa criminal and, so, other white Antifa criminals then rioted in black neighborhoods. And, yes, CNN stuck with the “mostly peaceful protest” reporting. Governor Kemp has ordered a crackdown and it seems that even the city government is willing to hit back…but the fracas stared in one of those Antifa “autonomous zones” which emerged in 2020…what in heck is such a thing doing in Georgia in 2023? A state which re-elected its Republican governor by 7.5 percentage points? Why did Kemp allow that thing to continue? Really: in our Red States, we must start insisting that the GOP hammer the Left…we can’t stop Antifa from ruining Portland, but we can sure save Atlanta.

Perhaps We’ve Just Been Living Wrong?

Mark Noonan18 Comments

Scott Presler opines that for the GOP to have long term success, it is going to have to become the natalist party – that is, the party in favor of family formation. This is true. Attentive readers of the Mirrors series have probably figured out that Queen Caelestine is pro-natalist; always trying to get people married and wanting everyone making babies at a rapid clip. This is, of course, a bit of my philosophy being inserted in a small way to the narrative. But I don’t think we’ve really thought much about how this would come about.

It seems to me that our problem here stems from our too-long adolescence and too-long education.

Remember that back in the day, a girl and a boy getting married at 16 or 17 wasn’t at all unusual…with the young couple then either working on the family farm/business or striking out on their own. It is a bit of a shock to the modern mind to think of that – in fact, we probably think of it as tragic. But the bottom line is that we become physically capable of bearing children at a pretty young age: and if one wishes to argue against biology, that is fine – but the reality is that our physical being is ready for childbearing a lot younger than we find acceptable in the modern world.

Right after I read Presler’s Tweet the Rush song Subdivisions came on the playlist and the refrain just leaped out at me:

Subdivisions
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out

Subdivisions
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out

All of us, I think, can remember back to our middle and high school years and remember how out of sorts and out of place we felt. That sensation is what Neil Peart was writing about in the song. But what, really, was the problem? That we were 16 or 17 years old and felt we had no proper place in the world. That we didn’t know what our lives were for or what we would do. By that time we had already been in school ten or eleven years, had at least a year or two left to go…and then the prospect, pushed massively by society, that we would do at least four more years of school after that and then start our career…and don’t get married! You’re “too young”. You’ve got plenty of time for that! Get your education. Get your job! And, hey, the old morals are gone so just find someone to have sex with…its ok. Nobody will judge you.

Except yourself, of course. The mind rebels against what is wrong even if that mind can’t articulate it.

I conclude – and this literally just flashed in my head earlier today – that the increasing alienation of youth since, say, World War Two is based upon this lifestyle of 12-16 years of education followed by career and then marriage and children if convenient. The final result of this is kids who are saying they are non-binary or what have you: we’re so long down this path of essentially denying biology – denying our own humanity – that the latest generation is rejecting the very idea of biology and what it means to be a human being – what it means to be male or female. We’re getting here – and it is likely to get much worse – because we have tried to craft a lifestyle which is not adjusted to humanity. We’re trying to be cool so we aren’t cast out…but what we’re not trying to be is human. And even the adults who get through this to become functional members of society are still awash in divorce, anti-depressants and pathetically going to fertility clinics at 35 in a desperate bid to push out a kid before the clock expires.

We forgot that the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath. We’ve been going about it backwards – trying to rework humanity to fit a certain sort of society when sanity lies in making society conform to human needs.

Laying aside the animal need for food, water, shelter and clothing, the primary thing a human needs is community. We are a social species. We literally cannot survive as a species without others of our kind around…and even individual survival is gravely threatened when we are on our own (break your leg on a hike with friends and you’ll probably make it – break your leg hiking alone and there’s a good chance you’re going to die). Biology commands – and we Believers hold that God also commands – that we engage in sexual relations. Anyone who remembers being 15 knows this – the urge was persistent and insistent. It was so strong that all of us did wonder for a bit just why there was a moral code against rampant sexual activity. But especially as we aged, we understood the wisdom of confining sex to a committed relationship. But I think we get it wrong – backwards – when we say, “hold off on that urge until you’re 25! Gotta get that education and career, first!”. We’re also kinda stupid – the sex urge will not be repressed for that long. I do believe that if we really want to fix what is wrong, we’re going to have to really think about what we want.

I do think we spend too much time on education. Don’t know about you, but high school was mostly pointless for me. They weren’t teaching me anything new – and in the things I was actually interested, I was rapidly far in advance of what the school was teaching. It might very well be that adding high school to the education mix for 90 percent of us is a waste of time. And if high school is pointless for most of us, college even more so.

Plus when we take a kid of 14 and say, “hey, just 8 more years and you’re done with school”, we’re telling someone who wants to get rolling on life right now that they’ll have to wait. That they have to stay in leading strings for years longer and then, if the behave, they’ll be allowed to start doing the Adult things.

I’m not saying there isn’t a need for higher education – but what I am saying is that almost nobody needs it and, in truth, it has long become counter-productive. First off, on account of it being dumbed down. In order to keep up the fiction of Education – Career – Marriage we’ve routinely lowered the standards for higher education to the point that a mediocre 12 year old from a century ago knew more than doctoral students at Ivy League universities today. You can only keep the fiction going, after all, if it is for everyone. But, of course, everyone isn’t suited to higher education – and nor should they be. A healthy society has a certain number of artists and thinkers…but usually less than 1 percent. And they are only able to create art and thought because almost everyone else is busy making things happen.

And after community, the next thing a human needs is to be needed. We are built to contribute – to do something useful for ourselves and our community. It is, as I’ve noted, the only way we can survive. Except for short periods and baring physically debilitating accidents, we can’t even feed ourselves without the assistance of others.

How useful does a 20 year old in college feel? And there’s your answer to why the purple hair, nose ring and a sudden assertion that they are a different gender. They are doing nothing. They aren’t really learning anything – save for spoon-fed Marxist drivel. Small wonder they get a little kooky…like a junior league Nero or Caligula…the real difference being that Rome in ancient days could only carry the freight on a few of them at a time…while our overly wealthy society affords millions nominating their horse to the Senate. And here’s the real kicker – almost all 20 year olds in college are incapable of higher education. It is supposed to be for the 1 percent – maybe the top 5 percent if you’re being really generous in giving out passing grades. These poor kids are uselessly doing something they are entirely unsuited for. Lunacy does result. BLM/Antifa riots, as well – not for nothing did fascists, Communists and Nazis find their most ardent spirits among 20th century college students…a collection of increasingly mis-educated kids unsuited for higher thought but who were also being quit useless…and here comes The Cause to give their existence a point.

As Chesterton pointed out, we have to begin all over again at the start. If a house is built so that it knocks a man’s head off as he comes through the door, it is built wrong. You can’t reform it – you have to tear it down and build it again. Properly.

There was a little joke meme I saw the other day which went along the lines of “me who had my kids at 18 and 20 watching from the beach as my 40 year old career-first friend deals with her 4 year old”. Lot of truth in that. It really comes down to how we will spend the best years of lives.

Do you remember being 20? My goodness, the energy. As I was in the Navy at the time this manifested itself in my ability to spend weeks at sea in a four hours on, four hours off rotation, hit the beach in a liberty port, party with the shipmates for 24 hours straight and then immediately go back to sea. We all had it. We were inexhaustible and indestructible. We could eat and drink all we wanted and it just fueled our ability to do more and more and more.

Do you remember being 35? You had stayed out until just a shade after midnight the night before and had that third drink and now, bleary eyed and exhausted, you faced the grim task of going to work and, dang it, why does my back hurt?

Question: which you was better suited to chasing around after a rambunctious 2 year old? Which of you could better deal with screaming kids, household chores and putting in a 50 hour week at work without complete mental and physical collapse?

Life is for youth, boys and girls. And we’ve been doing it all wrong. What we should have been doing is giving our kids 8 years of basic education, siphoning off the cream of the crop for higher education and sending the rest to trade school while positively encouraging early marriage and children. This is much more in line with human needs than our current model – and given our advances in production and medicine, it doesn’t preclude anything. Suppose at 45 you decide to move off from the construction job that paid for your house and raised your kids, now moved out, and take a stab at a college degree? You can do it. Nothing to stop you. And zero chance of regrets – you’ve already done the most important part of living. You took a man or woman’s place in the world. You already proved who and what you are.

I am open to dispute here – I don’t know if I’m completely right. I only know for certain that we’ve been doing it wrong. And if we want a healthy society, we are going to have to change how we’re doing it.

We Lost: Victory Beckons

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Nothing fails like success, you know? To take a couple examples from history:

Chancellorsville is rated as Lee’s greatest success as a general. Historians tend to use it as the justification for calling Lee a commander of genius and stand in awe of his decision to split his smaller army in the face of a larger enemy and slip around the Union flank to roll up a stunning victory. There’s only one problem with it: it was stupid.

It was only Hooker’s indecision which allowed Lee to pull it off. If the Union commander had pretty much just ordered his army forward any time during Lee’s movement to the flank, Lee would have been utterly crushed and his army totally destroyed. No really great commander gambles; great commanders rig the game so they can’t lose no matter what the enemy does. And if they can’t rig it at the moment, they don’t move. Lee’s move was daring – but reckless and no officer training school would ever teach a cadet to do that.

And it was also Lee’s eventual undoing: just two months later at Gettysburg, Lee, memory of Chancellorsville still fresh, sent his army into an attack which his primary subordinate told him was impossible. But his great victory gave him an entirely overinflated idea of what he and his army could do, and too high a level of contempt for what the Union army and its commanders were capable of. The doom of the Confederacy was sealed with Lee’s defeat: any chance of fighting the Union to a negotiated peace was lost when Lee’s foolhardy charge kicked the guts out of some of his best fighting units.

Next example: the German invasion of France in 1940. Once again, it is rated as a genius move by the Germans to send their main force through the Ardennes in a move to cut off the Anglo-French armies in Belgium. Manstein, the architect of it, is credited as a genius – and the fact that it worked tends to obscure the plain fact that it shouldn’t have worked. And I mean not at all. And while Manstein was the man who drew up the plan, he wasn’t the only general who noticed the Ardennes. In fact, nearly everyone did: German, French and English. And everyone discounted it: and not just because of the rough terrain. It also entailed sending a massive, mechanized force on a pencil thin drive supported by secondary roads. Any significant French of English drive against the flanks of such a force would quickly destroy it.

But, the Krauts got lucky. Very lucky. Half a dozen times. The French had plenty of opportunities, and forces in hand, to wreck the German plan. They unfortunately had generals who thought in terms of days rather than hours for response time. The German gamble worked only because a failure of French leadership. Especially in the first 48 hours of the breakthrough, just about any energetic French general at the Corps or Army level could have won the most stupendous French victory since Austerlitz had they just moved.

But it was also the German undoing. The success of their Ardennes gamble gave all of them, from Hitler down to the last Fritz, a massively overinflated idea of what they could accomplish. When Hitler turned his sights on Russia the following year, even the German generals who hated him figured six to eight weeks would be enough to finish off Russia. And it would have been – had the Russian leadership crumpled under pressure like the French leadership had. Stalin and his henchmen were rat bastards…but when the Germans were pounding at the gates, they stayed in Moscow and put up a fight rather than run away. And thus the Germans discovered that Luck isn’t on the side of the Master Race, but (as always) on the side with the biggest battalions.

So, why the history lesson?

Because our success was 1980 and 1984 and I think we sort of expect it to just happen again. That we have the right ideas and so we’ll just win if we get our ideas out there. We’re forever looking for the next Reagan to carry us to victory. We think that politics is just matter of finding the right message alchemy – instead of the hard work of getting voters to vote for us. Our too easy success against feckless opponents never prepared us for Clinton and Obama opponents…nor for the political machine they built and which elevated a senile degenerate to the White House in 2020.

To be sure, some get it: Scott Pressler is the most shining example of the youth of the GOP getting out there and doing the work. You should know: back around September when all of us were expecting a big win in 2022, he pointed out that while he was having some success in certain areas (most notably Florida), in lots of places there was little enthusiasm for the GOP…he was expecting what, in the end, we got: a small and incomplete GOP victory. We need more like Scott and we might just get them. People who are willing to do the hard work of registering voters and talking to them, to find out what might be on their minds.

We need to jettison Reagan. And it might be time to jettison Trump. Without for a moment elevating DeSantis or anyone else to demi-god status. Might RDS be our guy? He might. We’ll see. But if he turns out to not be the best tool to break down the Democrat door, then he gets discarded, quite ruthlessly, in favor of someone else. On and on like that – all the while working at the local level to shore up the real strength of the GOP. In each success is the seed of failure – but in each defeat there is the seed of victory. Our problem is that since 1984, we’ve only haltingly looked for the lessons our defeats are teaching us, and so we’ve lost all along…even during the times we officially came out on top of the vote. It is no good to simply get the office: we have to get all the offices, all at once, and with a firm commitment to certain actions. We can’t coast on Reagan, nor rely on a Trump to win our battle for us. It is time for us, all of us, to fight anew.

The Failure of the Dream

Mark Noonan35 Comments

Race: its a little bit of a contentious issue, huh?

This is mostly because of all the lying. Lying is really bad, by the way. Makes it very hard to get anything done. On the other hand, if you’re trying to steal money and power in a democratic system, lies are the way to go. They work very well. What happened with race in America after 1965 is that once the victory was won – and the Civil Rights Act won it decisively – the people who had invested in fighting against racism were faced with the stark and very frightening necessity of getting a job.

Unless, that is, they could find a way to milk it.

Which they did – and starting in 1966, what we got were people asserting stoutly that the nation which had fought a bloody civil war to end slavery and which had just enacted sweeping legal assurances of equality under law was still this evil nation which was so damned racist that they’d…dammit, I know they just passed a law assuring equality for blacks but that’s not important. What’s important is some yahoo in Alabama still flying the rebel flag! See!!!! Still racist! And the Civil Rights Act wasn’t a magic wand making everything perfect all at once! Racism!!!!

What the Civil Rights leaders found is that you could still play the game – and obtain a great deal of power and money – if you pretended that it was forever the day after Bull Connor took the firehose to the marchers. And the example was taken up by others – anyone non-white, non-male, non-Christian, non-straight could hop on that bandwagon. And, so, they did. Just a huge churn of unfounded accusations against the most tolerant and equitable society in human history…and all to grab a bit of unearned money and power. And all latched onto by Marxists to tear down what they hated most: America.

King’s dream was of a place where people would be judged by the content of their character. A noble dream. A very American statement, too. Not for us to place people by birth into their position. Not for us to bow down to money or raw power. Who did the right thing? Who did the hard work? That is who Americans wish to honor. But now, thanks to those who came after King, that dream has become a nightmare of everyone being judged by their skin color, their sexual orientation, their gender…with the privileged elite asserting a right to rule based on the credentials they awarded themselves. This is a very long way from the content of our character.

It is, for lack of a better word, disgusting. It fills me with loathing to see on Martin Luther King day the sort of people who wear his skin-suit and pretend to be his successors while rejecting everything he stood for. I want them punished – for, after all, stealing a dream must be the worst crime. To take what was beautiful and use it to cover a nauseating gang of race-baiters, hustlers and con artists is about the most vile thing a person can do. I do still have King’s dream in my heart. I pray that we will one day live it. But I know we can’t while we allow those who betrayed the dream to have power and position in our society.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan36 Comments

I had mentioned the other day that the latest Current Thing is fear-mongering over gas stoves – now that its been a couple days, it is all clear.

The initial fear-mongering was apparently a 2020 study out of UCLA and paid for by the Sierra Club (which advocates for the elimination of oil and gas). This study used a 10×8 room which had been sealed with plastic which they then ran an unlighted stove in for a while and, guess what?, if you have a sealed room and an open gas valve, the air will get toxic. Who knew?

From there, it made it into the MSM and then on to the regulatory agencies and legislatures. That is where we are now – with a few places (NYC most prominent) banning new residential gas installation and various federal agencies looking into the “threat” of natural gas and how it is to be addressed. The initial blowback once the proposal to ban gas stoves was made public caused what seemed like a step back – a claim that, no, nobody is coming for your gas stove. This is just as convincing as the claim that we could keep our doctor. The plan is now proceeding and taking the next, crucial step: reports in local news outlets. You know the type of report: “Is your gas stove killing you?!?!?!? Tune in tonight and find out!”. All of it is still based on that 2020 study, which is pure garbage because there never will be a situation where someone turns on a gas range in a sealed room. It is the same sort of study, though, which was used to ban indoor smoking (they seriously claimed that second hand smoke was just as deadly as the guy huffing three packs of grits a day), rework your gas can into ineffectiveness and a host of other changes imposed by regulation in the name of safety. They are now inducing fear in the sort of person who still watched the news and thinks they are telling the truth – you know: halfwits who vote Democrat. Rely on it, by 2028, at the latest, it will be obligatory dogma among Democrats to call for banning of gas stoves.

Of course, it isn’t about the stove.

The bottom line is a ban on the use of natural gas – it has to go. Not because natural gas isn’t clean but because it is clean and vastly more efficient than solar or wind. It provides cheap and efficient energy which makes life better for humanity. And I’m not kidding: that is why it has to go. They want us to suffer. They need us to suffer. We have to pay for our sins of being rich. Of being American. And for us to suffer all cheap and efficient energy must go…we must depend on solar and wind. Which will leave us eventually with daily blackouts, but that is good…it will be us suffering.

Are they throwing Pudding Brain under the bus due to the classified docs? I doubt it. It could happen, but more than likely, in my view, they’re just clearing out old business. Getting it out into the open before the House GOP finds it so it can either be dismissed as old news or kept silent about due to “ongoing investigations”. Like Hillary, though, Biden violated the laws governing classified documents. And just like Hillary, nothing will be done about it…unless they really are giving Joe the heave ho.

The Russians are having some recent success in Ukraine and so it looks like everyone is going to start sending first rate military equipment to Ukraine…which is really not such a good idea as the time it would take to train the Ukrainians in their use and maintenance is probably insufficient before the predicted Russian Spring offensive. To the untrained eye, the T64/T72 tanks Ukraine use look a lot like a German Leopard tank…but they ain’t the same. You can’t just hand the keys off like a guy switching from a Volvo to a Chevy. And there isn’t a mechanic in Ukraine who knows how to so much as change the oil on a Leopard. So, unless training and maintenance personnel are being sent, all we might be sending to Ukraine is a collection of paper weights. And if we send the support personnel…that means that NATO soldiers will be in a combat zone, very specifically in places the Russians will want to hit very hard.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan85 Comments

Turns out that Pudding Brain, back when he was VP, mishandled classified documents. The MSM says that this is (D)ifferent and is of no concern. Naturally they say that, because China Joe actually broke the law – he was VP and didn’t have classification authority, unlike Trump who could declassify anything on a whim and didn’t even have to write down that he did so.

But, it doesn’t really matter: the law only applies to us, not to the Democrats. Even if we got an AG at some point willing to enforce the law against Democrats, they’d go before a DC jury which would vote to acquit no matter the facts. This is why I’ve suggested randomly assigning federal cases to different areas of federal jurisdiction…and/or moving most major agencies of the government out of DC. Put Justice in Yuma, AZ. Defense in Boise, ID. Treasury in Mobile, AL. This would also make it a lot harder for lobbyists.

The newest Current Thing is that gas stoves are a threat – and they’ve really worked this thing up. I hadn’t even heard of it until this morning and by the end of the day I was being referred to “studies” that allege NO2 from gas ranges causes a range of health and cognitive issues. They are doing this, of course, to get us all on 100% electricity, eventually controlled by a “smart thermostat” which will be able to ration our power as the Ruling Class sees fit. But, that aside, I’m amazed at the number of people who are acting as if they are convinced of the dangers of natural gas – as if we hadn’t been cooking with natural gas since the 1880’s with no ill effects. Are they really convinced? Are they really that stupid that they’ll set aside a lifetime’s experience and just believe it because the Experts say so? Or is it that they are really that dishonest? In either case, the result is the same: now we have to defend the use of natural gas.

This is how the Left wins: they are always on the offensive and are forever opening up new fronts. Any attack helps the overall push…and they don’t care how stupid the attack is. That it is made is the criteria for success because even if we manage to beat back the assault on gas stoves, it just means we didn’t have time for something else.

Like, for instance, in Minnesota to teach in public school you’ll have to be licensed and to be licensed you’ll have to positively affirm CRT and transitioning kids. The lives of thousands of children in Minnesota are about to sacrificed on the altar of Woke and we’re going to be overt there somewhere, trying to argue against a gas stove ban…

Joe went to a carefully cleaned up section of the border near El Paso for a photo op and a few remarks about how there is nothing wrong. You and I know it was all quite ridiculous but the Independent voters who will decide who wins the next election will just see it on CNN and it’ll be, for most of them, the first bit of border reporting they’ve seen in years and it’ll all look great. Do keep in mind that lying propaganda works. It works very well. Until everything falls apart.

McCarthy and the new GOP House majority are making some base-pleasing early moves but the proof will be in the pudding. What sort of investigations are done? What sort of bills are sent to the Senate. What is done to bills emerging from the Senate. That’s where we’ll find out of McCarthy and the GOPe have leaned any lessons. Fight and we win: it is as simple as that. Roll over and we’ll lose. We’ll know in a few months.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan8 Comments

Word is that the Russkies are calling up 500,000 reservists for a major Spring offensive. They’d just enough time to do that before the ground gets dry and hard in June. There is some dispute out there as to whether or not the Russians can equip that many but the Russians have massive stockpiles of arms and munitions – older stuff, but it’ll get the job done when your plan is to simply overwhelm with numbers, which is the invariable Russian plan after their initial effort falls flat. That many troops in the wide, flat lands of Ukraine are going to be tough to stop, as the Krauts discovered during the Battle of the Dnieper in 1943.

The Ukrainians can beat this horde but they’ll need to trade space for time and have in hand sufficient mobile reserves to strike hard at Russian flanks. We’ll see if they’re up to it.

The Regime Media is pointing out that time is not on the Ukrainian’s side – it never has been. Absent Putin quitting, unless the Ukrainians can destroy Russian military capability fairly quickly, it becomes a matter of who can call up the most and the Russians have vastly more military-aged males and material resources than Ukraine. This is why at the start I said that Ukraine needed mobile strike forces to go deep into Russian lines and, if possible, into Russia, itself. A positional slugging match – which is what we’ve had for months now – only ends in Russian victory.

Democrats in the States they control are, as per usual, enacting a host of new gun control laws to start 2023 – but I do suspect this will backfire on them. We already have two SC decisions noting that the right to bear arms is an individual right…what we don’t have, so far, is the actually correct Constitutional ruling: the right of the people to keep and bear arms is a very simple statement and it is the law we live under…all restrictions on the people keeping and bearing arms are unconstitutional. I don’t even think a law which says a felon (once out of jail, of course) can’t own a firearm passes muster (and it shouldn’t – once you serve your sentence, you’re square with the house and you should be treated no differently from other citizens…and anyone rated too dangerous to have a pistol after committing a crime is likely someone who should be serving life…reform the law that way, not towards gun restrictions). These attempts to backdoor gun control might eventually get a decision which simply enforces the law as written – and if anyone wants to restrict the keeping and bearing of arms, they’ll have to amend the Constitution.

Been a lot of attacks on US power stations of late. Someone is organizing and paying for it. I can only suspect that it is a dress rehearsal for an asymetric warfare attack on us at a later date.

Hundreds of Chicago teachers had sex with students. The more we see, the more we can’t escape thinking the world is run by a pedo ring trying to normalize it before they get caught.

Speaker of Open Threads

Mark Noonan67 Comments

Who gets to be the Speaker? The world holds its breath.

Or goes, ‘meh’ and watches some hockey.

Your mileage may vary.

But the battle is important. So far, the rebels have not put forward a solid set of demands upon which they will come back into the fold. That is a strategic error. But Chip Roy and a few others have hit the nail on the head: it is about making the House a legislative body. This might seem small – changes to the rules to make amendment and debate possible, but it is what has been missing. Since 2016, there has been no such thing…and for a couple decades before that, it was highly attenuated. It is why we just passed a 4,000 page, $1.7 trillion Democrat Christmas list. It was an up or down vote.

But if Representatives have the power to propose amendments and force debate, you can’t do that. That is, you can’t have a bill written by lobbyists and staffers, agreed to by a few leaders and then just handed off to the House for an up or down vote. Representatives would have to do their jobs…and go on record with votes on amendments. This is how you stop our remorseless slide into tyranny and bankruptcy…because, rely on it, most of the stuff in these huge bills would not survive a recorded vote…the Michelle Obama Trail doesn’t have a constituency.

In practical terms, as Churchill pointed out about a century ago, no potentate on Earth has more power than the President of the United States with one limitation – and it is massive. That is the Power of the Purse. The President can’t spend a nickle on a piece of gum unless Congress appropriates the money. This Power has largely atrophied as both parties have preferred to just give the President a blank check in return for various pork goodies. But if Congress actually asserts it’s power, the President will find that he can’t buy a pen or phone to issue an Executive Order. We must get back to that – no more rubber stamp. Make the House matter again – make the Executive come, hat in hand, to beg for money…and extract legislative benefits for our policies in return for funds. Like this: if Pudding Brain’s people want to provide money for diversity training in Zimbabwe, then we get something in return…like, say, a border wall. That is how it is supposed to work. And that is how it must work or the Republic will die.

You already know that science is twisted by propagandists to support the Left’s Narratives. Now you have proof.

The climate alarmists may revive nuclear power – it is, after all, clean and efficient. Of course, most Greens despise it, mostly because most Greens are morons (the believe your barbecue is heating up the planet, after all): but the bottom line is that business needs reliable power and wind and solar just don’t cut it, so some money bags are investing in nuclear. I don’t care how we get it, but that we get it is good – by this year, almost all electricity in the USA should have been provided by nuclear power. We should have so many nuke plants that I could run my AC at 50 degrees all day in July here in Vegas for $5.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan83 Comments

Lets get 2023 rolling the way you expect it!

We’ve got a couple “firsts” here. Over here in the USA we might be executing our firstly openly transgender person – the reality is that this murderer was looking for his way to dodge the hangman and “transgender” is, actually, a fairly clever ruse given how much attention it is getting…but as it looks like he really did cruelly murder his girlfriend (a real girl, btw) he’s likely to get whacked. As you know, I’m opposed to the death penalty – but this is an obvious dodge.

Our other first is the first openly non-binary vicar in the Church of England. The main thing about this story is that it at long last answers the question as to just why the Catholic Church used to burn heretics. That aside, what we’ve got is a guy who likely just found out that he liked homosexuality but only made this discovery after being married, having three kids and being about half way through vicar training…and this was his means of combining flying the freak flag, keeping the Missus to look after the kids and also stay employed as a vicar. The Church of England has long been a joke and this just kinda finishes it off.

We must stop treating obvious insanity or obvious cowardly dodges as other than what they are. Stop pretending that this is other than sick jokes. Now, don’t get me wrong: I have encountered some trans people who say they are perfectly happy as they are, don’t demand anyone change their views and are also opposed to things like drag queen story time. To me, they are adults who decided that that’s how they want to live and I have no reason to stick my nose into their business. This isn’t about being anti-trans…or anti anything except anti lunacy…and anti-con artist. The man saying “hey, I’m non-binary” because he wants to get with a guy while also staying married is a liar. A con artist. Someone working an angle. And if he’s not that, then he’s just insane. In neither case can we afford to bow to it…we start tolerating lies and insanity, and we’ll really be doomed. Call things what they are.

CBS’s 60 Minutes dredged up Paul Ehrlich – you know, the Population Bomb con artist – as an expert on how we’re all gonna die if we don’t give Commies all our money and liberty to appease the Weather God. They can do this because most people – especially young people – simply don’t know about the Population Bomb and how it was wrong in every particular. The MSM, you see, is never helpful in providing the track record of their approved Experts. So, now we’ll see a whole bunch of 20-somethings and we’ll have to spend weeks just telling them to look up the Population Bomb.

Looks like the Ukrainians whacked a significant number of Russians in the first major action of 2023. This war drags on – I doubt the Ukrainians can win an outright victory which pushes the Russians out of all Ukrainian territory. I doubt the Russians can take all of Ukraine. Part of it has to be the general feebleness of Europe. They’ve been breeding from the milksops since 1945, after all. The most physically and mentally energetic Europeans were largely killed between 1914 and 1945 – those left were those who were most determined to survive, rather than win. You know: cowards. But, hey, still not my problem: I hope they do make peace.

Why is Woke around? Because we’re paying 500k grand for a “equal outcomes” consultant. You get what you pay for: and what we pay for is what lobbyists get inserted into bills. Until we make a conscious effort to de-fund the Left, we’ll never stop this.