Author: Mark Noonan

Open Thread

Mark Noonan45 Comments

The FBI is now urging citizens to report their friends and family members if they suspect radicalization…which means, “if you suspect they voted for Trump”. The FBI is becoming a Gestapo; and we learned in 2020 that there are huge numbers of people who are willing to spy on and turn in their fellows…the mask mandates proved that. We get power, the FBI simply has to go. It is a bit of power that we can’t leave lying around.

And, aside: our rule must be Snitches Get Stitches.

Beyond that, as I warned before: be careful what you say and how you say it in any electronic media. They are spying.

A lot of people are agog over Branson…flying about as high as a U2 could fly. It is a vanity project designed to boost stock prices and maybe get some more corporate tax breaks for a man who already has far too much money.

11 year old kid in Belgium gets his degree in physics. Clearly a clever child – but as his goal is immortality, I suspect a great deal was left off his education. Mostly the bit about how if God doesn’t grant us eternal life, you shall not have it. Sorry, that’s just the way it is…if a new heaven and Earth are never to be created, then this heaven and Earth will simply die out. Amazing that they missed that bit in teaching physics. But, then again, most of our educated people don’t really know very much.

Interesting article on Robert E Lee and his place in America. Well worth the read. I have to say, I never felt any sympathy for Lee and I’ve long viewed his virtues under the lens of the fact that, in the end, he sent a hundred thousand men to their deaths to defend slavery. That he, himself, claimed to not like the system just makes it worse in my view: He said that he had no choice but to join Virginia’s (and thus the Confederacy’s) army once Virginia went out. But there was no law in Virginia binding him to serve…but, meanwhile, he had already given his oath, sworn so help him God, to defend the United States.

The bottom line is that we made a huge, national mistake in that we allowed the Confederate leaders – civil and military – to escape justice after the war. Clemency was a requirement, of course: we could not have reconciled without it. But what we did wasn’t clemency: it was letting the people who cause the war – without the slightest justification – to skate. Clemency comes after punishment, not instead of. By letting them all off the hook, we allowed them to very swiftly regain political control of the South and then impose Jim Crow, which made us a nation of liars until 1865.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan28 Comments

Gas prices are up 40% under Pudding Brain. It just gets worse from here – because the way to choke off this inflation is to stop spending and/or jack up interest rates, neither of which Team Senile can do as either or both would tumble the economy into steep recession just in front of the 2022 mid-terms. OTOH, rising prices might do as much damage to them as a recession. There’s nothing we can do about it because we have no control over any lever of power here – all we can do is endure it and at least know that the difficulties the Democrats get into here are richly deserved.

For years, we’ve been angry and frustrated as corrupt and incompetent teacher’s unions parlayed the respect people have for teachers into ever more money for a totally useless public education system. The pandemic may have changed that. The unions proved corrupt and many of the teacher’s revealed themselves as time servers. Parents are at long last starting to push back…and some are even trying to take over the local school boards. The bottom line, though, is that public education is the problem of public education. It can’t be other than an indoctrination system – it is just a matter of which ideology will turn the crank and indoctrinate the kids. The only way to get quality education in line with parental expectations is to let the money follow the students. Absolute school choice – the parents get a sum per kid which can be used in any education facility they deem proper. Sure, you’ll get some weird stuff in there on that…but what you’ll mostly get is kids learning to read and write. And only being taught what the parents want. There isn’t a huge market out there for having your kids taught they are evil because they are white.

China uses social media to control it’s citizens – and is now using it to control everyone. It can’t be emphasized enough that a lot of what drives debate these days are social media trends which are almost entirely manufactured by interested parties. If you’ve got the money and the manpower (xir-power, I guess these days) you can get anything trending on social media. China does this – and then gets the global MSM to tout it (that’s the easy part – the parent companies of the MSM are so invested in China that they’ll get their news actors to say whatever is demanded). We must break up the big social media platforms and we must also regulate them: forbidding them from blocking or banning speech except for specific incitement to physical violence. The days when we on the right could defend corporate independence are over – especially when what we’ve got in social media is government censorship one step removed.

Related: Facebook will ban criticism of institutions if the criticism is intended to cause harm. In practice, this will mean that if you say something bad but true about Islam, you’ll get banned – if you say the most monstrous lie against the Catholic Church, you’ll be fine. Just watch and see.

Haiti’s President was assassinated. You really do feel for that poor country – ever since independence, it has endured tyranny and chaos in succession. It isn’t the people, as such: Haitians in the United States are some of the most successful and law-abiding people we have. But something in that land just brings out the worst in some people. The only thing I can think of is making it a Trust Territory – of the US, of – heck, I don’t know – Brazil. Someone, anyone, has to take charge of the place and govern it in the interests of the Haitian people and likely for a century or so. Until, that is, several generations can be raised up to live under law. They do in the United States – they will in Haiti, if they are compelled to do so.

The Mars helicopter had an amazing flight. This is something that does surprise me – I figured with the very thin atmosphere, they could never get anything off the ground. So, impressed with the engineers who figured this out.

You Must Love America to Save America

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Yesterday ended up being a quiet day: we really didn’t have much to do. In the end, that worked out ok: a day relaxing is nice from time to time. Of course, “relaxing” to me is writing more of the books. So, I wasn’t entirely lazy. But I didn’t do much! And so I had some time to think.

One of my Twitter friends is an odd sort of person – generally of the right but no real love for the United States. He figures the concept was fundamentally flawed and that the jig is up. I don’t agree with him on either point, but it does lead to some interesting discussions. One we had yesterday brought up something that I have been thinking about for a while: the limits of liberty.

We on the right have always asserted there are limits to liberty: that there must be order, as well, or liberty-destroying chaos ensues. But something in the discussion yesterday got me rolling the concept over in my head. One of the points my friend asserted is that Americans learn a too rah-rah version of our history (don’t go thinking he’s talking about “stolen land” or such leftist drivel – he attacks it from the right). I rejoined that far from being too rah-rah, it wasn’t rah-rah enough. Even a hundred years ago, it wasn’t rah-rah enough.

Since 1776, there have been within the United States those who reject the concept. The Loyalists rejected it quite violently, but even among those who weren’t Loyalists there were those who felt we had got it all wrong, and from a variety of perspectives. Most famously, part of the Abolitionist movement called the Constitution a “covenant with death”, believing that because slavery was allowed to exist, the entirety of the United States was evil. In a sense, they welcomed the idea of Southern secession because that would allow them, in the North, to re-found a nation purified of the evils of the United States. So it has gone all along since we made our Declaration – now louder, now softer; now numerous, now few – people within the United States who have not loved the United States.

The problem is that if you do not love, you cannot help. It is as simple as that. What is really wrong with the Welfare State? Not the inefficient waste of resources and growing dependency among the poor. No: the failure of the Welfare State is that it is charity without love. The bureaucrat doesn’t see the poor person as a person. The bureaucrat doesn’t love the person. The bureaucrat eventually comes to hate poor people as they are in the way of the bureaucrat’s main end: doing as little work as possible for as much money as can be. If the bureaucracy was staffed with people who loved the poor, the Welfare State would work. Mostly because if the bureaucrats loved the poor they’d be putting in 80 hours a week trying to teach the poor how to not be poor any more. But even for those they couldn’t teach, it would still be better because love would insist that the money at least be spent in the wisest way possible. But there is no love. And so it doesn’t work.

It takes love. You can’t fix anything without it. Don’t like it? Don’t blame me. God set it up that way: go argue with Him. You must love if you are to offer any help. Let’s step back to the Abolitionists for a moment: the most Simon-pure of the Abolitionists was William Lloyd Garrison. He with his Liberator newspaper was insistent that the only proper thing to do was immediate, uncompensated abolition. He damned the United States again and again for having the foul sin of slavery within it. But, here’s the thing: if when the overtly anti-slavery Republican party had been formed they had adopted the Garrison view there was one thing certain not to happen: abolition. Garrison and those like him were far less motivated by love for the slave than hatred for slavery. And while it proved useful to have Garrison out there pointing out the evils of slavery, the bottom line is that if the North followed his lead, slavery wouldn’t have been abolished in 1865. It might never have been – because the only way to get to it was a coalition of people who ran from abolitionists to anti-abolition Unionists. As it turns out, we found just the sort of man to make that happen – Lincoln. And he was able to make it happen because he loved America. To him, the Constitution wasn’t a covenant with death, it was a ringing call to be better people in an ever more perfect union. Lincoln is damned by many these days – but without the love he had for this nation and her institutions, the whole thing would have run up on the rocks. It takes love.

And so my point about our education not providing a rah-rah enough version of our history. The thing isn’t to cover up sins, but to show why you should love. Sins, especially national sins, get out there into the public square. But it is far better if those who discover the sins deeply love the thing which committed the sin. Because without that love of the sinner, the likely desire once the sin is discovered is to destroy. And we all know this to be true: which of us would put up with some of our more difficult friends and family if we didn’t love them? Most families have that person who is simply a jerk. And that jerk is put up with and tolerated and helped and so on because the jerk is loved. If we didn’t love the jerk, we’d wash our hands and walk off. But, we don’t. We love, so we keep trying. See how it works?

The Antifa and BLM types we see running around these days weren’t taught, first and foremost, to love America. In fact, it is far more likely that in school they were specifically taught to hate America. And in hating America, they can’t help fix America. All they can do is destroy America. And that, of course, is what those who provided the hate-filled education wanted from the get-go. You don’t spend time imparting hatred of a thing without a goal in mind. The goal has been to destroy – and now they’ve got an army of people out in the streets, ready to destroy. Keep that in mind: we all laughed when “panty-fa” first arose, but I saw it from the start: these are Communist shock troops and what they’ve been doing the last two years is getting intensive training in becoming America’s Viet Cong. But first had to come the hate: first what was needed was a segment of the population so well-schooled in hating America that they’d raise the red banner and urge her destruction.

And then it came to me: if we are to survive, we will have to change. Especially we on the right have held that you can say whatever you want. We felt that in a discussion of ideas, only the best ideas would triumph. We were wrong. In fact, rather stupidly wrong. It isn’t a discussion of ideas which matters – it is what ideas are implanted via education. This is blazingly obvious and I’m stunned that we never figured it out. Our minds come into the world blank slates. They will largely become what someone decides to put into them. Sure, independent thought comes in…when you’re in your mid to late 20s you start to have such things. If you’ve paid attention, then by 50 your mind isn’t owned by anyone. But when you’re 18 or 19? All you’ve got in there is what someone told you. What we’re confronted with in Antifa and BLM is people who were taught to hate from 1st grade. They’ve never been told why they should love America. Not by the schools, not by popular culture…not even by their suburban wine-mom parents, who themselves barely received any pro-American instruction. No wonder we’ve got what we’ve got – it is what we paid for via our taxes for schools. We created a manpower pool for a Bolshevik revolution. And now the Bolsheviks are training it for battle. Good job, guys!

Will we win? I don’t know. I think we can and will. But, only time will tell on that. I have seen some really good pushback of late and it appears that we on our side are getting “woke” in the rightwing sense. We’ll just have to see. But what happens if we win? That’s the thing to understand: if we win, we have to win it all. No half measures. We take over, we take over completely – and part of that take over means that we don’t blithely allow America-hating ideologies to be broadcast in the public square. That is, we don’t let those who hate be on an equal footing with those who love. We teach the most rah-rah version of America that we can so that when we screw up, millions of people who love the country will sacrifice their lives, if need be, to fix the problem. That is what we have to understand – that we did get some things wrong, even before the poison of Communism came to infect our body politic. If we don’t make loving America a requirement for being in America, then all we’d be doing is spinning our wheels. Maybe beating back this attempt at destroying us, but just waiting for the next one to come along.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan34 Comments

Ilhan Omar and the normalization of anti-Semitism on the Left. It already happened with Britain’s Labour Party. And it is a simple equation: there are vastly more votes and money on the side of anti-Semitism, if you can stomach it. Which, as it turns out, the Left can (and, yes, there are Jews going along with it – and it is nauseating. I can only imagine what it’s like for a Jew to see a fellow Jew go down that path). If you brief is that the West is inherently evil – and that is what the Left holds these days – then everything of the West is evil; and Israel – Judaism – is of the West. It is just that Jews, as always, are the easy target…a small minority is much easier to attack than anything else. Never Again has turned into “Not Until We Can Get Money For It”.

Football is Gay, says the NFL – Babylon Bee points out that it isn’t. Just the Cowboys.

The shredding of Kamala Harris in the MSM has to have a point. We can’t be sure what it is, but here’s what I suspect. Team Biden knows that Pudding Brain won’t make it to 2024 and, if he does, he won’t be in condition to run. But Team Biden wants the full ride: 8 years. What to do? If Joe dies or simply can’t hack it (well, he already can’t – but let’s just say if he can’t be kept awake for at least two hours a day), then Kamala gets in. Bye, bye Team Biden – all the perks of White House power flow to Team Harris. How would you – supposing you were lobotomized and placed on Team Biden – feel about that? Not good, folks. So, have to ace out Harris some way…so, pour filth all over her in the MSM. Of course, this doesn’t matter if Harris is the heir presumptive to a dead or failing Joe…so, they’ve got to have a substitute waiting in the wings who isn’t hated by everyone (like Harris is). Who is it? Well, I noticed that Jill Biden was reading briefing papers for Joe’s slipshod amble through Europe. Maybe they are setting it up so that, as much as we love Kamala, the best way to finish Joe’s work is with Jill Biden? Stay tuned.

Armed robbers held up journalists interviewing Oakland’s violence prevention chief. The worst thing about our Ruling Class is how utterly incompetent it is. Tyranny sucks, but can we at least get some first rate tyrants?

This is the Hill to Die On

Mark Noonan31 Comments

I think it is time for all of us to get rather declarative on what we will or won’t tolerate. There is risk in this – social, economic and legal. We already know that social media and the major corporations will punish dissent and now we see that Team Biden is tying to make the US Army into a Red Army willing to attack the American people for political dissent (the FBI long ago became an NKVD for the Ruling Class). But it is still the time to stand up – especially because I think we can win this.

Critical Race Theory, which I first came across in about 1990, is our opening. It completely infects higher education and has for some time – but now that they are trying to force it into primary school in a big way, there is starting to be some serious push back. The bottom line here is that a parent – aside from some upper class, white urban loons – doesn’t want their child taught that they are evil because of their skin color. This is our opportunity to leverage this Leftist overreach into a general campaign against the Left, as a whole.

In this, it is best not to get into deep discussions about CRT because that just lands you in the position the Left wants – arguing about it rather than destroying it. Keep in mind that CRT was developed staring in the 1970’s when it was clear that the working class was never going to become Communist and that the Civil Rights Movement was over, having won complete political victory. Sane people would look at this and reassess the Marxist ideology – but Leftists aren’t sane: they are power mad. That is the key to understanding the Left: they want power because they see themselves as morally and intellectually superior to everyone else. Marxism merely provided a philosophic patina to their lust for power…and when it proved false, they merely changed Marxism into something else. In this case, substituting a Race War for a Class War.

Ever since Lenin, especially, this is how the Left operates – simple rationalizing their desire for power at all costs. To give you an idea of how this works, think of the fact that Lenin demanded a Communist Revolution in Russia, which was 90% peasant. This was in direct contravention of Marx who held that it was the proletariat who would make the Revolution. How did Lenin get around this? He simply made up a story which “proved” that the peasants were actually proletarians and so could conduct the Revolution. With, of course, Lenin and his cohort as the vanguard of the proletariat to make certain they didn’t slip into some petite bourgeoisie error which would result in Lenin and his cohort not having absolute power. In order to justify their lust for power, the American left has simply made up a story saying that being color blind is racist and that unless we place them in charge to completely remake American society, we’ll remain an evil, racist nation. Convenient, huh?

So, don’t argue with them. If you defeat them on one point, they’ll just make up another point. Meanwhile, they are inserting this or that element of what they want into the government and corporate bureaucracies. Just oppose them – because we know that any idea which has even an ounce of Marx in it is evil. The key to our victory is absolute opposition to everything the Left wants to do. Because all the Left does is designed with the purpose of securing them absolute power – it really is give them an inch, and they’ll take the mile. So, don’t give them an inch. And this means we all have to get a bit vocal about it: we have to say, in public, what we believe and what we won’t tolerate. Saying we won’t tolerate CRT is critical – because it is forcing the Left to defend the indefensible. It is, after all, completely ridiculous. We know that America is not a white supremacist nation and that white people aren’t racist because if it were otherwise they wouldn’t be able to make the accusation. It is like the statement to gun control people pointing out that if gun owners were crazy, all the anti-gun people would already be dead.

So, this is the hill to die on. In fact, all of the hills are the hills to die on. There is no compromise. There can’t be. It is all or nothing for us and them. One side or the other is eventually going to win it all and remake America in its image. I want it to be us.

The Application of Mercy

Mark Noonan44 Comments

In Humbolt Park, Chicago, last night a couple was dragged from their car and shot. The man is dead and the woman is injured. It is entirely irrelevant why this particular event happened. The punishment of the criminals, if it happens, will also be entirely pointless because they won’t be punished properly.

I got into a good natured argument yesterday and today on Twitter about the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. I took the position that the main American mistake – our mistake of all mistakes – was that we allowed the Confederate leadership to live after the war. Not only allowed them to live, but allowed them to prosper and resume their power in the South. This is why we got Jim Crow. It wasn’t imposed by poor white farmers, but by the Ruling Class. The Ex-Confederates that we let off formed the KKK and used the most horrific violence imaginable against black Southerners as well as any white Southerners who wanted to take a stab at living in peace and justice with the freed slaves. And make no mistake about it, there were plenty of white Southerners who were willing to live in peace – I’m not saying they were ready, in 1865, to intermarry (though some did, in spite of huge pressure against it), but they were willing to live and let live. That was all very deliberately and maliciously suppressed by the Klan, under the control of people who had been Confederate generals, governors and other officials.

We have had the sense that Grant’s policy of letting them up easy was the correct way to go and in a certain sense, this can’t be argued against. As the historian Will Durant pointed out, the greatest military captains of history have shown that clemency is a mighty engine of war. But when we think about some of those past captains, we see it wasn’t exactly like it was after our Civil War.

Caesar was famously magnanimous with the defeated Gauls. He treated the defeated so well that during the ensuing Roman Civil War the Gauls didn’t rise in revolt when they could have easily thrown off Roman rule. Its not like the Gauls didn’t have people who could fight. They did: Caesar had let quite a lot of them off to return to their homes. But they didn’t rise. Why not? Probably had something to do with Caesar having their main leader strangled in Rome after his defeat. In other words, Caesar was merciful, but he wasn’t stupid enough to leave a strong, intelligent and clearly brave enemy alive.

Another example of this sort of thing was what the Austrians under Prince Schwarzenberg did to the Hungarians after their revolt was crushed in the 1840’s. Once the Hungarians were down, the operatives of the Austrian Monarchy went to work hunting down the leaders of the Hungarian revolt and hanging them in large numbers. The Prince was urged to mercy by a friend who, like many in Austria and around the world, was horrified at the operation of vengeance. Schwarzenberg said that he quite agreed that mercy was necessary – but, first, they had to have some hangings. Did this make him a hypocrite? Not at all. Cruel? Nope. He was merely being wise and ultimately merciful. Another observer of the same events, the still young Bismarck still more than a decade away from fame, responded to a friend complaining about the repression in Hungary by asking why no tears were shed for all the people who had been made widows and orphans by the rebels? People were acting as if the rebels must certainly have been in the right and that their actions were immaculate. This, to Bismarck (and to any fair observer) was drivel. The Hungarians had their complaints about the Austrian Monarchy, but so did everyone – but the Hungarians had no particular justification for going into revolt…especially as for each Austrian act of repression against Hungarians, there had been Hungarian acts of repression against non-Magyars in Hungary. Very rare will there be the person who is totally in the right!

Now, how did this work out? Well, once the hangman’s noose was put away (and it was, fairly quickly), order and justice were restored and some years after it was all over, Gyula Andrássy – a Hungarian rebel who had been condemned to death in absentia and actually hung in effigy – was appointed Prime Minister of Hungary and Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Funny how things can work out? But it likely would not have worked out had the Austrians simply allowed the rebels to resume their position in the Hungarian Ruling Class as if nothing had happened. What we did in 1865 was allow the defeated enemy to resume his position. This got us a century of Jim Crow and, ultimately, played a huge role in the subordination of State governments to the Feds. Think about it – a modicum of justice in the South and there never would have been a Plessy vs Ferguson leading to a Brown vs Board of Education. No consent decrees. No gerrymandering minority-majority house districts. No “one man, one vote” destruction of the State Senates, which was a body blow to the very concept of Republican government. A few more hangings and we wouldn’t have had Jefferson Davis spinning his Lost Cause drivel while Forrest created the KKK to be a mafia-like muscle to re-impose Confederate rule in the South (and, yes, I realize that Forrest seems to have had a change of heart years later, but by then the damage was done – he’d have been far more useful to peace and justice dying at the end of a rope in 1865 than dying with lots of black friends in 1877).

Mercy must always triumph over Justice. But Justice must have her due. It can’t be otherwise. To get back to the start of this piece, the reason savages dragged two people out of a car and shot them is because we developed an entirely mistaken idea of what mercy is. We have it in our minds that Mercy means you skate. It can’t. If you do wrong, you must pay. A price is demanded for everything. Even God’s mercy had a price, after all. What will be done wrong about the people in Chicago is that they won’t be forced to the real atonement necessary. Even if they spend some time in jail, it still can’t possibly balance the books. For goodness sake, they dragged people out of their car and shot them! How is 20 years in jail going to make up for that? How will that deter the next barbarian? But before you go “death penalty” I’ll also ask: what will killing the shooters accomplish? To their fellow barbarians, they are still heroes who showed The Man. Dying from lethal injection won’t balance the books.

No, there has to be more – it isn’t enough to jail or kill: the perpetrators must be revealed for what they are: very stupid barbarians who will find out that Civilization can be one real son of a bitch when necessary. The reason our civilization used to hang, draw and quarter people wasn’t to be cruel. No, it had a very specific purpose: it was to show everyone, especially the barbarians, that Civilization wasn’t to be trifled with. That if you’ll live in peace with your neighbors, you’ll be fine: but if you won’t, then you’ll be made to curse your mother for giving you birth.

And it works, guys. The reason that we used to live in a world where even in big cities we didn’t have to lock our doors at night is because for centuries before, the most harsh punishments had been meted out to those who broke the rules. In the long run, it was a mercy to do it – because it eventually deterred people from being savages. Yes, provide mercy – and I mean in the sense of letting someone eventually off. But first, to put it bluntly, there must be a little hanging. We don’t have to do it to everyone who drags a person out of their car – just a few. The rest will get the message. And then we’ll have the crowning mercy of nobody being dragged from their cars and shot requiring us then to brutally punish the perpetrators. Because that is what you’re doing – you’re not trying to be cruel: you’re trying to get to a point where you don’t have to punish very much because there’s hardly anyone to punish. That is real Mercy.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

I did a bit on the Barrett Brief this morning, talking politics and Shadow Army and as we discussed things, I went on a little mini-rant about what needs to be done with popular culture. What I said, boiled down, is that we can’t win unless we win the culture. Win all the elections you want, but if the culture is far left, far left will be the country. What I urged in response to that was this: if you’ve got an idea for a book, a movie, a song or a piece of art – DO IT. Don’t be afraid. I was terrified of putting out Mirrors. Afraid that people wouldn’t like it. Forget that. Just put it out there: give people what you have. Maybe you aren’t the great artist…but if you’ve got something to say, in whatever medium, say it. We need to flood the zone.

As those who have read so far know, what I’ve written is a story about normal, good people thrust into strange circumstances – but the key to it all is that they are normal, good people. Not perfect people, but not tortured super heroes with shameful pasts they are unable to come to terms with. Even when I set a character on a path to sin (Jerome, most especially – for a bit of a spoiler to those who have read only to, say, Battles at this time, he keeps on living; he’s in Book 7), the prospect of redemption is always there. The good guys are believers in God and in doing what is right even when it is hard. The books are family friendly (I’d say 12 and up); there is a tiny bit of salty language, but not much. No gross sexual scenes and even in the battle scenes, I don’t try to gross people out with gore. There is no woke SJW preaching. This is the sort of thing which we need to produce and keep producing until it starts to make its way into the general public. Maybe my books will mostly stay on shelves. No problem. But that its out there might inspire the next guy and maybe that will be the blockbuster which opens up the dam and allows a flood of socially conservative popular culture to flow.

Related: they are making a 5th Indiana Jones movie. With 78 year old Harrison Ford as the star. It is ridiculous. And this is really our opportunity. Not only is the Left out of ideas, but even when the recycle their old ideas, they are now injecting them with whatever is fashionable. I’ve finally binge-watched The Walking Dead and I’m on the last season…where we’ve now got a deaf character. I mean, seriously: how could a deaf person survive a Zombie apocalypse? The only way you can survive, at minimum, is hearing them coming so you can kill them or move away before they bite you. But you gotta have it, along with the gay and lesbian couples because, sure as heck, as the world ends what people will care about is making sure the last fads of the dead world keep going. I’m expecting the upcoming final season to add a few more SJW box-check characters. All we need at the start is something that is merely fun.

Joe Biden went to meet Putin for Lord only knows what reason – the whole world knows that Biden is senile and feeble and thus there is no hard center to American government. We’re getting bad policy, but that is more by accident…Biden’s aides are running the country, turning the crank at different times and at different speeds and what flows out was a mish-mash of liberal twaddle but even in that, there is no direction.

Inflation is rising fast and the Fed is saying they’ll jack up rate in 2023. It’ll be sooner than that, I bet, though 2023 would be best for us as it would create a 2024 recession just about assuring a GOP landslide. They get to pick their poison – jack up rates and send us into a tailspin, or hold off and watch inflation spike to 10% or more per year. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of useless clowns.

Cocaine Mitch promises to block Biden’s judicial appointments if he becomes Majority Leader. Never get too mad at Mitch. Sure, he’s Deep State and Establishment…but he knows how to play hardball on the things which matter to us.

Hungary bans LGBT content for minors. This is fighting the Culture War.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan42 Comments

I detect a slight note of panic among Never Trump – and both parts of it: that which rejected the GOP and joined the Democrats and that which merely rejected Trump. They are in a fright because Trump isn’t going away. Things are not working out the way they hoped…their hope having been that once he was defeated, the Trumpsters would, one way or another, agree to allow Never Trump to resume power in the GOP. That isn’t happening.

This is because they fundamentally misunderstand Trump and his supporters – with the crucial thing being that it is Trump supporters who are driving the cart. These Trump supporters may, indeed, swing behind DeSantis or someone else in 2024, but only in so far as DeSantis or whomever prove themselves Trumpist. What Never Trump still doesn’t get – though some come very close to understanding – that we’d really rather lose on MAGA than win on anything else, because to win on anything else is to lose, anyway. We’re all in. Do or die.

Florida bans Critical Race Theory in public schools – this is a growing trend on the right and it is the first sign of real health in our body politic in decades. As I’ve said before: CRT is evil and it must go. The Republic is incompatible with people believing CRT. This is, to be sure, causing some breach among black Conservatives – because there are some who hold that CRT, though flawed, has some real truth to impart. I reject this notion. And it must be rejected because the ultimate basis of CRT is Marxism, which is inherently wrong and an intrinsic evil. Nothing which uses Marx in any way can be good or true.

AG Garland is going to investigate the audit of the 2020 election in Arizona. This is proof that fraud decided the 2020 contest. They are terrified of the truth coming out.

Democrats are in a fury against Manchin (D-WV). I really did expect him to cave long before this – if he runs for re-election in 2024, it is better than even money he loses. He can’t ever get the Democrat nomination for President or VP, so his only political future if a cabinet post, and he only gets that if he plays ball with the national Democrats. But, he’s still not playing ball. Maybe, at the end of the day, he just doesn’t want any political future? After all, he’s got the Senate pension sowed and he’s going to make bank as a lobbyist (if he wants). It might be that he’s simply uninterested in wrecking the Republic just to please people in New York and Los Angeles who despise him.

Inflation is rising, fast. The only good news here is that a repeat of Carter might give us a repeat of 1980.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan14 Comments

Over the years, I’ve written a bit about how I hold one of the most decisive moments for civilization was the French quitting in Algeria. I’m just reading a book about it – A Savage War of Peace, highly recommended – and I’m just past the part where DeGaulle is returned to power (very much due to the political stresses caused in France by the war in Algeria) and he’s reforming France and sent out a first-rate military commander to Algeria who pretty much whacked the Algerian rebels from pillar to post. That is now the end of 1959. The bottom line is that France had won the war – the Algerian rebels were still here and there in the interior, but only in small, hunted groups and even many Algerians were tired of it all. And then, over the next two years, DeGaulle just gave it all away to the rebels. This has been held as wisdom: France had to get out of Algeria and DeGaulle cleverly played up to those who didn’t want out until he was strong enough to dispense with them and make a deal with the rebels. This, to the Ruling Class in the West, was the only way to go. But, was it?

First off, it involved the betrayal of more than a million French citizens in Algeria; about 10% of the total Algerian population. It also involved the betrayal of at least 100,000 Harkis – these were Muslim Algerians who fought for France. Their numbers may have been even higher. This was more active fighters than the rebel ALN army had. By a lot. And you figure that for the 100k fighters, gotta be at least some family/friends who were supportive, so that might work out to another million people there who clearly preferred to remain part of France. They were completely screwed over by the French government. The French citizens were evacuated (though some were killed on the way out) while the Harkis, considered traitors by Algeria’s new masters, were killed, imprisoned or otherwise made to suffer for many years after the war.

Now, why bring this up? Because what France did was cross a bright, red line. At the end of the day, they passed power over to a group of people who, in the course of the war, routinely targeted unarmed non-combatants for death…and not just death, but often quite horrible and cruel death. In the end, Algeria did have to be independent: their current population is 44 million against France’s 67 million and it is just about impossible for that to be a colonial relationship. But recognizing the inevitable doesn’t get one off the hook for basic morality. It was a crime – a French crime – to turn the people of Algeria over to a pack of brutes, which is all the ALN ever was. The correct course of action was to simply state that this would never happen – that the future of Algeria was going to be decided by decent people, not by those who set bombs in stores or tortured people to death. The Ruling Class holds that you simply make the deal with whomever is fighting you – end the war by any means necessary. Decency requires that you only give into brutes if they are so strong there’s no way to stop them. France had won. All they had to do was keep up the pressure until the rebels quit and then – only then – would it have been time for France to work with those Algerians who weren’t brutes about what came after French rule.

And so it has gone over and over again since the end of World War Two: repeated fights between civilization and barbarism where civilization – massively restricting its use of power – still comes out first against the barbarians and then civilization just hands things over to the defeated savages. No wonder they keep at it. If you wonder why, say, the Palestinian leadership keeps it up it is because of this: they know, from nearly a century’s experience, that if you just keep being savages and merely manage to survive the retaliation, you’ll eventually be handed all you wanted. This has to change if we are to save civilization. The barbarians have to be taught that the wages of savagery is death and nothing else but death.

Fauci helped create the Coronavirus and then, from his perch, pretty much ensured our response to it would be counter productive. He’s either stupid or a traitor: I go with stupid. I recall that he’s only famous because he stood athwart Reagan during the AIDS epidemic.

Yesterday was Tank Man day: the anniversary of when that guy stood in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square. What was entirely unsurprising was China’s efforts to censor references to it. The tech giants got caught and had to quickly re-adjust their algorithms, but for a while there a search of “Tank Man” brought nothing related to China up. Meanwhile, Facebook banned Trump for two years while China’s accounts were up and running, spewing out lies all the time. Our large corporations are owned by China: they have to go. If it takes confiscation, they have to go.

In the deep blue cities, the long term result of Floyd’s death has been a massive spike in crime, and a lot more black deaths. But, hey, at least they weren’t killed by cops.

Tyranny is Our Future

Mark Noonan27 Comments

One way or another, the end of freedom as we’ve known it is coming – the only question before us is what sort of tyranny will replace the freedom we used to enjoy. And I mean “used to” in the sense that what you think of as freedom – what older folks, especially, grew up understanding as freedom – is already gone. You already can’t say or do quite a lot of things that you or our parents and grandparents used to do.

This is in the nature of things, after all: freedom always breeds license and license creates a chaos which begs an end to liberty. Human being are very bad at keeping an even keel over the long term. It isn’t that most of us tend to an extreme but that enough of us do that a corrective has to be applied to everyone. This time is a little different from the historical precedent, though, in that some of the chaos-generators are doing it precisely to make freedom intolerable as preparation for the imposition of the tyranny they prefer. These are the people of the Left.

And our choices will be a Left tyranny, or a Right tyranny. The possibility of returning to the level of freedom we had in, say, 1960, is extremely low. I actually believe it is impossible – mostly because that level of liberty was only possible because most people alive in 1960 were still keeping to the old moral code: they tolerated those pushing the boundaries in 1960. They shouldn’t have, as it turns out – but, there you go: it happened. Because in the 60 years since the old moral code has been discarded by nearly everyone (most especially those charged with maintaining it), we simply can’t get back to that level of liberty. There’s no basis for it: there is, that is, no stable, moral society as a base from which the experimenters can dare to stretch out.

Naturally, I prefer a Right tyranny. Not least because Right tyranny normally develops into ordered liberty. Left tyranny, especially now, looks to be both permanent and increasingly insane in it’s demands. We’ve seen the rapid trajectory these past ten years where what was completely out-there stuff is now being enforced in our institutions as the most ancient and settled dogma. They won’t stop: the whole thing of the Left is that it must always go further Left, mostly because the Left always fails and the Leftist cannot conceive of any reason for failure other than they didn’t go far enough. Attached to this – and sometimes dominating it – is the need for enemies. You have to go ever further Left so that you can have someone around who didn’t go there fast enough and so can now be built up as an enemy to be destroyed. So, I want a Right tyranny not because it is better than freedom, but because I can’t have freedom and so I’ll pick the least offensive poison.

And part of the reason we can’t have freedom (for a while: a right tyranny will eventually produce freedom, though it may take a while) is because we made one very crucial mistake, as a civilization: we presumed that liberty was an end. It isn’t. It is a means to an end: the end being a just society. Our trouble on the right has been our assumption that if we just defend liberty and give people an example of the happiness and prosperity that freedom generates, they would naturally drop their non-liberty ideologies and join us. It didn’t work out that way because we didn’t realize the most crucial aspect of human nature: we are Fallen. Rather astounding that those on the Right could forget this, but it was forgotten. I mostly put it down to those on the Right since, say, WWII, not being true Rightists. They were really Liberals who were in a rearguard defense of the 19th century. Be that as it may, the fact that humanity is Fallen was forgotten and left out of all calculations and so we weren’t prepared for people who can see, with their own eyes, the happiness and prosperity and reject it in favor of something else. Not because the something else was superior, but simply because it was something else…and most importantly, something else that they would be in charge of.

We always needed a corrective to unfettered liberty. We needed a way of stopping those with an evil idea from suckering the ill-informed into joining their evil idea. We needed, in the end, something like the Inquisition to root out heresy (in this case, political heresy) to simply make sure that when a Maoist came to town, he was run out of town on a rail before he could use slick marketing to convince the citizen of a free and prosperous Republic that what was needed was a bit of murderous Cultural Revolution. If we get a Right tyranny, this will be the main mark of it: a complete assault on all Left ideas to expunge them from the public square. That is what will actually justify the Right tyranny and what will cause it to cling to power beyond it’s time: the necessity of excising from the polity the idea that the ideas of a 19th century lunatic German are superior to 2,000 years of Western, Christian civilization.

We’ll see how this comes out. I will still work as if we can preserve freedom and maybe by some miracle we are able to do so…but the most likely outcome is one side or the other scoring a big victory, and then simply imposing itself on the other side. Both sides will be forced to this: because they cannot coexist. One or the other will eventually have to go.