Author: Mark Noonan

We Need to Oppose Evil

Mark Noonan22 Comments

I happened to obtain a copy of Judgement at Nuremberg and, so, I naturally watched it. Who wouldn’t? Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Burt Lancaster, Maximilian Schell…and even a small role by an exceptionally young William Shatner. I had seen the movie once before, many years ago, and it was far better than I remembered. What I liked about it is that it didn’t just go for the easy take a movie like that could have. It showed the Germans as all too human. The speech by Schell portraying the German defense counsel pretty much summed up the attitudes of the War generation Germans who emerged from Nazism: boiled down, “if we’re guilty (but we’re really not), then everyone is guilty!”. At the end of the movie, with the Cold War dawning, Spencer Tracy’s character (he playing the chief judge) is urged by nearly everyone to just drop the matter – find the Nazis not guilty or, if guilty, impose mild sentences. None of that: they are all sentenced to life in prison. And he sentences them because evil must be opposed. Which is true. And in that is the real tragedy of the 20th century.

Because evil wasn’t really opposed. Not in any vigorous and consistent manner. The war against the Nazis was a spasm, not a determination. It was only because Hitler forced the issue that anyone fought him. Had he refrained from war in 1939, he would have lived on until his natural death. His regime would have continued. Everyone would have kept trading and negotiating with it. The internal inconsistencies of the Nazi regime might eventually have brought a crisis, but not for decades. Just as the internal inconsistencies of the Soviet Union yet allowed it to live 70 years. And even when Hitler forced the issue and the world went to war against him, it still wasn’t really opposing evil, because the USSR was in partnership in fighting Hitler. If you use one gangster to kill another, you really aren’t fighting against gangsterism.

It used to be that evil would be opposed. The Romans were bloody minded about the Carthaginians because the Carthaginians were evil. Cortez was in quest for gold and glory, but after he and his men found out what the Aztecs had been up to, it became war to the death, because the Aztecs were evil. These days, we barely recognize evil when we see it. Even in our use of the Nazis as the standard of evil, most of the people referring to the standard couldn’t tell you one thing about the Nazis – they couldn’t tell you why the Nazis were bad, that is.

But it is more than just Nazis. They are the exemplar of evil, and deservedly so, but its not like anyone is really trying to do Nazism again. I bring this up because right about the time I was watching Judgement, I saw this series of tweets from a Conservative hammering Tucker Carlson for pointing out that our Ruling Class is doing bad things. The basic thrust of the tweets is that if things are bad, it is because we, the people, made them bad. In response, I tweeted this out:

The outcomes we’ve been having for 60 years have not been the result of the free interplay of public actors. We’ve had things we never wanted imposed on us.

Did you ever vote to legalize abortion? To have millions of illegals here? To have big banks bailed out after they screwed the pooch? When did you pass judgement allowing functional illiterates to graduate high school?

You did none of these things. They happened without your permission. You were promised abortion would be rare: that we’d amnesty and that would end illegal immigration: you were told we’d get better education.

You think it was an accident that you got the opposite of what you wanted? An accident that you’ve got policies that are a negation of facts and logic? No: this sh** was intentional.

And now how do you propose to switch it back? To get a government that does what you tell it to do? By working with the people who, wink and nod, gave you what you specifically didn’t want? Wake the F up

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve long seen that Conservative on twitter and I think he’s probably a pretty good guy. Certainly very intelligent. But, like all too many, he doesn’t recognize evil when he sees it. Think about just one thing I said for a moment: functional illiterates are allowed to graduate high school. You know that shouldn’t happen, but have you realized that it is immoral to allow it to happen? That it shouldn’t have happened even one time? That anyone who allowed it to happen is worthy of severe punishment? And, yet, no one calls for the arrest of those who allow it to happen. We, in fact, have people who insist that we allow such people to continue to be in charge. No one would approve of an illiterate graduating…but, without any consent of anyone, it happens. How? I’ll tell you:

Because those in charge of the education system don’t have your priority in mind. To them, the education system isn’t to provide educated citizens. That takes effort and is a real pain in the neck. No: what those in charge have other priorities. First off, high pay for themselves. Hiring more people like themselves. Making sure no one ever gets rid of them. These are all far more important than making sure Johnny can read. Johnny is a gigantic problem. They’d like to not have him, at all; but that would rather expose the game. They used to flunk Johnny out, but that brought attention to the fact that Johnny isn’t reading. So, now, Johnny gets his diploma. Which action is evil – Johnny and the taxpayers are both being cheated. And the cheaters pass out the bogus diploma and collect the ill-gotten gains. This is what is traditionally known as fraud and theft.

But we don’t call it that. Because we don’t call anything by its proper name any more.

Part of the appeal, for me, of Donald Trump is his willingness to call things by their proper name. Even his gross insults are really no more than calling people what they are. It is this truth telling that makes him hated more than anything else. I remember how ballistic people went when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”. The phrase was strictly accurate – no one in possession of their senses could argue otherwise. But people were furious that Reagan had said it. Why? Because he was committing that horrible sin (in modern eyes) of calling something by its proper name. That had to be nipped in the bud. Same thing when Bush called our enemies an “axis of evil”; remember how much people hated that, too? But such things were rare until Trump: he calls things what they are 20 times a day.

But we do have to get back to it. To call wrong things, wrong. To call evil people, evil. To refuse to voluntarily provide any power or prestige to those who make and do the wrong things. Only if we see evil and oppose it can it be stopped. We’ve been blind and silent about it for a very long time and so it has eaten very deep into our civilization. We still have, I think, time to purge it – but only if we see it and say it, first.

Impeachment Talk

Mark Noonan50 Comments

New articles of impeachment have been filed in the House. I’m thinking that just about every two years someone files articles of impeachment against every President – but, most of the time, it is mere boilerplate. This time, it might have more to it. The Democrats will do everything they can to harm Trump, of course. They won’t hold back from impeachment based upon the facts of the case or simple decency: if they do it, then it is because they calculated it works best for them.

It won’t happen tomorrow. First, Mueller has to drop his report – which will have nothing, but will hint darkly at this and that horrible thing the President may have done. Then the House will hold well-televised hearings and MSNBC will have to talk shop it for a few news cycles. So, not before, say, April, at the earliest.

The Democrats have the votes to impeach – if Pelosi allows it to come to the floor, then the President will go on trial before the Senate. It is highly unlikely that Democrats will find 20 Republican Senators willing to commit political suicide by voting to remove the President. But, I don’t think that would be the Democrats real desire (they’d take it if they could get it, of course). All they’d really be hoping for is for 51 Senators to vote to convict. While that would not remove Trump from office, it would be devastating to him. The Democrat talking point would be “a majority wanted him removed from office”. Trouble is, I don’t think even Mitt Romney would go along with it. Susan Collins is up for re-election in 2020 and while she wins by attracting Democrats, she does need a united GOP to get over the top. Murkowski isn’t up until 2022, so she might be a possibility – but, once again, she’d risk a pretty ferocious backlash at home should she vote to convict Trump. Democrats would need to find four Republican Senators to get to that 51, and I just don’t see where they get the four.

And that, right there, might get Pelosi to spike any impeachment move. A Senate which voted by a majority to acquit Trump would work out to a vindication of the “witch hunt” accusation. It may boomerang very hard against Democrats – especially as they’ll have no legislative accomplishments to burnish their record heading into 2020. On the other hand, the Democrat base – which, according to polls, believes that Trump got elected because Russia switched votes in 2016 – would be quite furious if Trump isn’t impeached. The Democrats have dangled the red meat of Trump’s removal in front of their base for two years…will they be satisfied with anything less?

Personally, I think the Democrats made a strategic mistake when they followed along with the Team Hillary idea that Trump’s victory was illegitimate. They could have more effectively fought him on policy – what they’ve been fighting him on is his mere existence. His continued existence works out to defeat for the Democrats – and by not accepting him as legitimate, they’ve fairly well foreclosed any possibility of negotiating with him. They’ll have to go into 2020 without having gotten rid of Trump, and without having anything else to show for their efforts.

New Year Open Thread

Mark Noonan17 Comments

It does seem a bit weird to be in 2019. Even weirder will be next year when we enter the 20’s. Of course, less weird for the young.

I had never heard of Hasan Minhaj until just today – and I heard about him because Netflix removed an episode of his show. That isn’t important. What is important is why they removed it: because Saudi Arabia requested they do so. It appears that Minhaj has been critical of the Saudi government and that government has the power, it would seem, to reach into an American corporate boardroom and make demands.

I’ve been saying for some years now that Big Corporation is the mere flip side of Big Government. They work hand in glove. They will not attack each other. They will defend each other. One side of the Coin merely pointed out to the other than there was this guy out there attacking the Coin. We need to really make some big changes – revolutionary changes. If we don’t, we’ll soon find that the only things we’re allowed to hear are things pre-approved by the corporate and government bureaucracies.

Kanye West opens 2019 by re-affirming his support for Trump. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. I know some black people who want Kanye’s black card revoked…but I’m betting that they feel far more comfortable saying that than any black person would voicing support.

We had our usual New Year’s Eve dinner with friends and during the conversation, it came out that we are all getting to be rather vigorous supporters of Trump. He’s the only guy not lying and he’s the only one looking out for us. 2020 could get very interesting.

Rod Dreher has some interesting comments about the Spanish Civil War. If we do have a Second Civil War here, it will be, in my view, far more like the Spanish Civil War than our first Civil War. Far more bloody; far more cruel; far more deeply changing to the national mind. As Dreher points out, the normal narrative you get about the Spanish Civil War is Good Republicans vs Bad Fascists…but it wasn’t like that, at all. There was some good – and a lot of bad – on both sides. Personally, you magically turn me into a 1936 Spaniard, and I’d likely be Carlist. I recommend the article, and that you read this book.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan41 Comments

The MSM was working up an anti-Trump “he hasn’t visited the troops this Christmas” meme. Until just recently.

Glen Reynolds talks up the prospects of war and how we might have a very lousy 21st century. It’d have to be pretty bad to exceed the 20th century, but there’s definitely a chance we could see that. It has been rolling around in my head that the existence of things like the UN and NATO have pretty much created this bad situation – alliances aren’t supposed to be permanent and a permanent, global talk-shop is a sure-fire way to make certain that cracks continue to be papered over. We do need alliances and we do need mechanisms for addressing international concerns…but the alliances and the talk-shop should be ad-hoc and set up for specific purposes.

Take, for instance, Russian aggression in Europe. NATO is pretty much a dead weight – the NATO “allies” are hoping that the United States will carry the load. On the other hand, if we had no NATO, we could craft an alliance with the nation’s most concerned and we’d likely get them fully willing to put the necessary muscle behind the effort. And as for something like peace in the Middle East, absent a UN – where Russia and China can veto any action which doesn’t 100% suit them – we could put together a group akin to, say, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to hammer out a settlement…something where no one can stop it from happening short of war, but with the Great Powers insisting, all the smaller fry would have to just fall in line. None of this would assure against war, but I think it would have a better chance than the current system where we’re slowly drifting to war and none of the mechanisms in place can stop the drift.

IQ scores are falling around the world and a prime suspect is the Boob Tube – TV or computer, doesn’t seem to matter which (my Dad was calling the TV the “idiot box” back in the 70’s). I can definitely see this. First off, a lot of the information provided on screen is just wrong: some of it quite stupidly wrong. But as its on a screen and people, especially young people, have been trained to believe the screen, they are believing some really dumb stuff. Secondly, it takes time to learn and digest information, especially complex information. The whole thing about TV – and even more so the internet – is speed. Quick bullet points with pre-determined conclusions are the norm. I don’t think anyone intended this to happen: but if what is wanted is a generation of stupid people dependent upon government, you couldn’t have planned it better.

A Chinese admiral thinks that if he can sink a couple ships and cause us 5,000 or 10,000 casualties, we’ll quit. This was tried before, and it didn’t work out well for those who tried it. But, I think China will try it, in the by and by.

That Saudi “journalist” who got (apparently) whacked in Turkey? Pretty much a paid, Qatari agent. Important lesson here: the MSM is lying. It is lying all the time. It is lying about everything. It even lies when it doesn’t have to – I mean, come on: it was still bad this guy got killed. They didn’t have to make him out as some sort of heroic journalist truth-teller. Now, all fruit from this tree is poisoned.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan16 Comments

There are indications that Trump is getting ready to fold on the wall…which makes me freel pretty confident he won’t. Stay tuned.

Don Surber says don’t freak out about it.

Turns out that what we’ve long suspected was correct – Team McCain played a big role in getting the Trump-Russia thing started. McCain didn’t like Trump, but there’s more here than that: McCain and Team were 100% Establishment…they weren’t so much going after Trump, as protecting the Establishment. Most of the GOP has swung firmly behind Trump, but in the upper echelon of the party, probably a third of the GOPers there want Trump gone.

The Democrats are getting set for what may be a long, painful primary fight. There simply isn’t anyone on that side that commands the loyalty of sufficient people to be considered a real front runner (most polling of the candidates right now really just reflects name recognition). Be interesting if Hillary jumps in. OTOH, there may be a long GOP primary fight…I see a strong chance that various Democrat money bags will fund people like Flake and Kasich to challenge Trump.

Some liberals starting pitching a fit about Baby, It’s Cold Outside because, well, they’re jerks. It now sits at number 10 on the charts. Here’s the song because we like irritating snowflakes:

Senator Scott wants a bit more sunlight in police shootings. A good idea: the more we all know about all these shootings, the more we can determine which are done by bad cops, and which are being blown out of proportion by leftist activists.

Robert Stacy McCain talks up a commie rat…but what struck me is how the commie is employed at a tax-exempt organization and his mom is employed at a taxpayer funded university. I’ve been saying and saying that we’re funding the left…that without our tax dollars providing them sinecures, they simply wouldn’t be around to bother us.

California is America’s least educated State. This will grind the gears of liberals…it means they control a State of ill-educated morons who simply don’t know enough to vote GOP.

The baker in the gay wedding cake case? He’s now being attacked for not baking a cake celebrating a gender transition. Remember: the process is the punishment. If they can’t drive him out of business, they are still telling everyone else out there that adherence to personal morality comes with a high price. My thinking: this serial harassment amounts to a civil rights violation. If we ever get an AG with any guts, I hope he starts prosecuting the people making such complaints and the government officials acting upon such complaints.

Withdrawing from Syria: Why is War Not the Answer?

Mark Noonan8 Comments

President Trump announced today that we will be pulling our ground forces (from what I understand, about 2,000 troops) out of Syria. His stated reason is that ISIS is wrecked and that was the only reason we were there.

This announcement set off a great deal of fury from both the left and the right. Some, in keeping with their Trump-Russia delusions, claimed this was Trump selling out Syria to the Russians as part of Trump’s stooge requirements. Others left off that notion, but still claimed our withdrawal would be a foreign policy disaster for the United States…Iran and Russia will prevail in Syria; Turkey will be strengthened against the Kurds; allies around the world will mistrust our commitment. So on and so on. As for me, I agree with the President’s decision.

First and foremost, President Trump did only go into Syria to get rid of ISIS. That’s what he said in 2016 and that’s what he’s done as President. To be sure, you can still find ISIS groups floating around the maelstrom of Syria, but the bottom line is that the fierce, ISIS regime of 2016 is no more. They are now just another set of rag-tag Islamist rabble running around Syria, killing for Lord only knows what real reason. Unless we wanted to start going village to village and simply killing everyone we think is ISIS-related, we were never going to get entirely rid of every last bit of ISIS. And Trump never said we were there to settle the Syrian civil war, nor to rebuild Syria. The job Trump set, as far as we can do it, is done. Time to come home.

But beyond that there is something we must understand and it should govern our choice on whether or not to engage in war: we, the United States of America, are not allowed to win a war. Not under the current global and national political reality. Both at home and abroad, the people who set the pace for military affairs have decreed, perhaps without really knowing it (but maybe they do?), that when the United States engages in military action, final victory may not be achieved. We are not allowed to compel an enemy surrender. We are not allowed to kill them without remorse to compel their surrender. We are not allowed to punish them, post-conflict, for putting us through the trouble. We are allowed to fight, and to die, and to have our bravest hauled up on war crimes charges…but we are not allowed to win.

And if you can’t win a war, you best not fight it.

I’m probably starting to bore most of you with this movie, but I just keep coming back to this clip from Breaker Morant about the problem we find ourselves in:

That is our problem in a nutshell: for a long while, now, we’ve been operating our warfare under the theory that some rules, first cooked up in the 19th century, govern the conduct of war while everyone we have fought in the past century has routinely ignored those rules. The rules were an attempt to humanize war – which is akin to an attempt to humanize hell. To be sure, there are rules to war and anyone familiar with military history knows that the greatest captains (Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon) all found clemency to be a mighty engine of war. But the bottom line is that even the most wise, kindly and far-seeing military commander knows that what he’s trying to do is compel people to do what they don’t wish to do. They also knew that while no good commander seeks to win via blood, a commander must still be willing to pour out blood in whatever amount proves necessary for victory.

Part of our problem is that we’re colored with our experiences of the Nazis. But, to me, there is a bit of a mistake in our perception. What the Nazis did to make themselves purely evil had nothing to do with war – we call them war crimes, but they were really just crimes, as such. In fact, the crimes they committed during the war directly harmed their own war effort. The actual war crimes committed by the Nazis were when they did things like shoot American POWs. What they did to the Jews, though, was only incidentally connected to the war. The Nazis did that because they adhered to evil and wanted to do bad things – whether or no there was a war, the Nazis still would have been inhuman garbage. Another aspect of this is that we put the Nazis on trial rather than just shooting them like the mad dogs they were. And we compounded that error by allowing Communist Russians to join us in trying the Nazis, as if a Communist had the least understanding of what law and justice entail. Since then, we’ve had lots of people refer to the rules and seek ever for another Nuremburg Trial…and as they can’t well put on trial Jihadist who would die rather than surrender themselves to a court, they just keep putting on trial our troops…accusing them of war crimes for what any historian knows are just the routine actions of a battlefield.

And, so, our inability to win – we are prevented from it. We could easily win in Syria – and by that I mean kill or disarm everyone there and dictate a settlement as we think best. It would take some years to do it. It would require an army of at least 100,000. And it would require, in the beginning, lots and lots of killing. What you might even consider massacres because if we really applied the full force of American might, then you would have battles where several thousand of the enemy die and only a few, perhaps no, American casualties. Think of it like this: suppose there was identified a town of 10,000 in Syria as a place where enemy forces are hiding/recruiting/training/what have you. Under the way we do things, today, we’d send in groups of men to root out the enemy house by house, always taking care to do as little physical damage as possible and only shooting when we have high confidence that there is an enemy. The way war is actually fought, we’d just surround the place and, depending on how much a hurry we were in, starve them into surrender or blow the place to pieces until the shell-shocked survivors came out with their hands in the air.

There would be children there who would be killed: not a war crime.
There would be non-combatants who would be killed: not a war crime.
There would be objects of cultural significance destroyed: not a war crime.

As I said, a war crime is something you done wrong in the conduct of the war. You know: shooting unarmed prisoners. A crime against humanity would be something along the lines of massacring the population of a town after it surrendered. But starving people into surrendering or blowing them to pieces if they don’t surrender quickly enough: that is just how war is fought. And if you capture a guy you suspect to be an irregular combatant – well, if getting him to talk requires some rather brutal treatment, then he should feel grateful if that’s all he suffers: an irregular combatant’s life is forfeit upon capture. That is a rule of war.

Now, you take all that and then add into the mix the fact that we have those in the United States who will seek to use any distasteful action, any failure, against their own country in order to advance their political fortunes, and you’ve got, well, what we have now…troops being sent to fight; getting them stuck in shooting galleries…and then having them hauled up on murder charges if they survive. No, thanks. If that is how war is to be, then count me a peace activist. Unless and until we get to a place where we can fight a war how it is supposed to be fought and have at least some reliance that no one back home will try to make partisan hay out of the blood of the dead, then I want no part of war. I don’t want our young men and women shoved into that. It isn’t worth their blood.

So, hats off to President Trump for just doing what he said he’d do.

And, now, it is high time we got out of Afghanistan, as well.

The Flynn Injustice

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Somewhere during the travesty which was the Flynn hearing today, something broke inside me. I’ve now had a real change in how I’m looking at things – and I think some very hard times are coming for our country. In fact, our country may not survive the times that our coming.

A lot can be said about Flynn and what he did or may have done – but the struck me is that even if he’s guilty not just of a crime, but of intending to do wrong (there is a difference), there are probably a thousand other people infesting DC who are worse. Our nation is the most powerful nation, ever. And as the most powerful nation, every other nation on Earth, great or small, has a vested interest in moving US policy in a manner favorable to themselves. The only thing that stops a nation from trying to influence the United States is lack of cash. It probably is true that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (population, 84 million) would like to have as much pull in DC as, say, Saudi Arabia (population, 33 million), but the pragmatic facts of life are that Saudi has cash, Congo doesn’t. And, so, we’re always talking about Saudi Arabia while most Americans are probably unaware of the existence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And, for all we know, the Congo might have more useful stuff, and a more friendly-to-us population, than Saudi does. But, money talks…everything else walks. There are buckets of Americans – right and left – who are influenced by this foreign cash. But Flynn isn’t being punished for taking the foreign cash – the taking of the foreign cash is being used against Flynn because he picked the wrong guy to support for President.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the proof this provides of our two-tiered justice system, just how much of the foreign cash flowing through DC do you think might want to hamper or remove Trump? After all, there’s only one way that foreign cash can actually work to shape US policy: if that policy is not strictly America First. You won’t find foreign cash lobbying DC to protect American industries; you won’t find foreign cash lobbying for an American defense build up; you won’t find foreign cash, per se, lobbying to have American forces withdrawn from foreign countries (it does lobby to have Americans forces withdrawn from, or sent to, particular foreign countries in service of foreign policy desires); foreign cash certainly won’t lobby DC for a border wall, nor a reduction in immigration to the United States. Foreign cash is all for making the United States carry out the wishes of foreign powers – and it stands to reason that, outside Israel and a couple other places, no one is interested in having an American President who tells everyone to pound sand and looks after strictly American interests.

It is a huge amount of money – to take it out of today’s partisan atmosphere, this report from 2014 indicates that in 2013, the United Arab Emirates spent $14.2 million dollars influencing American policy. And, remember, this is what is reported because it has to be: when you are directly lobbying for a foreign power, you have to report it. But, if you’re not, you don’t. Money flows very easily through all cracks in the law. And $14.2 million doesn’t sound like a lot – but it is only one country, and if someone had just a million to spare for 2019, The Weekly Standard would have stayed in business. Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, so there’s more than one way to spread cash around to people you want to control. You can give them speaking fees. Sinecure jobs. Help market things like books. On and on and on it can go…and no one really pays attention, but at the end of the day a large number of people with influence are pushing policies which may only incidentally be in our favor, but are definitely desired by foreign powers.

All of this came into my head in a flash as I watched Twitter reactions to the Flynn hearing – and a rage boiled inside me. My nation is bought and sold and those who are pledged to Justice are perverting the very concept in order to punish those who picked Trump. Which means, of course, that if they ever feel the need to direct that power against me, they will. And their pious intonations of patriotism while they are doing this nauseating hit job just made me even madder. The people going after Flynn – or delighting in his destruction – are, for the most part, not made up of people who deployed for six months to the Persian Gulf; nor hiked through the mountains of Afghanistan wearing our uniform; nor are they people who work our farms and ranches; they don’t man our factories; they don’t fix leaking pipes or drive trucks…they are just money-grubbers on the make. Their money tells them that Trump is a threat (their money is right about that) and so they go after the target picked by the money. They don’t give a sh** about what happens to America – all they want is their pay.

And how do we get rid of them? I had hoped that Trump would, indeed, drain the swamp…but can it be drained? For it to be drained, quite a large number of people (and at least 35% of them GOPers, by my guess) would have to go to jail. Who is going to prosecute them? And even if you found a prosecutor willing to do it, how are you going to get a jury in DC – where almost everyone who isn’t already on the take, wants to be – to convict? Trump can pardon Flynn (I hope he does, and soon) – and he can also pardon everyone associated with his campaign. But that doesn’t get rid of the crooks. And, meanwhile, at the State level (especially in New York) Democrats under the cloak of office are determined to use State law to punish Trump people in a way that Trump can’t stop. What are we to do? Roll over for them?

Thanks to Ryan’s cowardly leadership (which I believe was intentional: he wanted Trump to fail), we now no longer have the ability to legislate any changes. Certainly not any changes which would put any Democrat at risk. Can Trump get an AG who will find the (quite possibly few) people at Justice who are willing to enforce the law? I don’t know. But I hope he can – because if he can’t, then Civil War will come. I won’t want it to come. I’ll hate it when it comes. But it will come – because one thing people on our side are learning is that there is no justice for us. Unless at least some major Democrats are set in Flynn’s position, we’ll know that there is zero chance of a fair outcome…and people who are convinced that all outcomes will be unfair to them will start to take vigorous and direct action against their oppressors.

There is still a small window of opportunity for justice to prevail – I hope it does. But if Injustice is our fate, then I do believe that enough Americans will draw the logical conclusion from that.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan44 Comments

Its been busy the last few days. Lots of stuff happening. Let’s take a glance:

California is considering a tax on texting.

No, really. They are.

Congressman Ted Lieu (D-People’s Republic of California) wants to ban free speech.

No, I’m not kidding.

Trump cancels the White House Christmas party for the press. Seriously: would you want to hang out with them for a couple hours? Could you be polite to people who know are not merely stupid, but wicked?

Mueller’s office scrubbed the cell phones of Strzok and Page. Why would he do that except to cover up crimes? The only question I have: did Mueller know about the crimes before they happened? Mueller is a corrupt, Deep State hack and his real purpose is to cover up the crimes – he’d like to get Trump, too; but he’s far more set upon making sure no one finds out how this Trump/Russia thing got started.

We’re pulling out of the INF nuclear weapons treaty because the Russians are breaking it. They’ve been breaking it for a while, of course, but only Trump – the Russian stooge – has had the guts to do anything about it. More and more, you really start to wonder if Trump’s critics are stupid, or just too embarrassed to admit they were wrong?

Netanyahu points out that the Khashoggi killing is horrible, but given the realities of the Middle East, better to let it slide. This is all that really needs be said of the matter – the ME is a binary choice between Iranian dominance and no Iranian dominance. Pick which result you want and act accordingly.

The defense being offered for the FBI entrapping Flynn is that they do it all the time. I don’t think the FBI’s defenders realize how bad that sounds.

Study indicates that millennial men are kinda, well, weak. My view: this is the result of so many men being raised in female-headed households. And, don’t get me wrong, there might be a little upside in here as it is good that men care more about others…but, on the other hand, we still need someone to change tires and carry a rifle from time to time.

Trump is going to cut funds for UN peacekeeping missions in Africa. This is good. First off, it treats the Africans like children who can’t manage their own affairs. I, for one, think they are fully capable of settling matters on their own – and only if they directly ask us for assistance do I think we should offer them any. Secondly, UN peacekeepers are, well, kinda creepy.

Gary Sinise continues to prove he’s one heck of a good guy.

Keith Richards says he’s giving up drinking. Now the guy will live to 120.

Boy Scouts face bankruptcy.

Twitter users start to switch to Parler to get away from Twitter’s rather Maoist actions. Gab tried to be the alternative to Twitter, but it really hasn’t taken off. The cool thing about Twitter is that when you follow a few hundred people, you start to get a TL that is constantly updating…you’re getting, news, jokes, remarks, links coming at you in rapid succession. Gab just gets people posting one or two things a day…and it became heavily infested with genuine Nazis which were disgusting to come across. I’m still on it, but only a few times a day. We’ll see if Parler pans out. Something will eventually replace Twitter and Facebook…because no one wants to be on a site where you have to worry about what you say.

Thinking About the Ruling Class vs Everyone

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Over in Britain, the Brexit vote in Parliament has been delayed – because it probably would have gone down to crushing defeat and forced PM May’s ouster. I have no sympathy – she negotiated a deal which essentially kept the EU in power over Britain…except that, now, Britain wouldn’t even have a say in the EU. This, to me, was a feature, not a bug: the idea being, I’m guessing, that eventually the British people could be convinced that they must rejoin the EU. The plain fact of the matter is that no “deal” needs to be negotiated. All the British government has to do is say, “we’re out” and they’d be done. But that would only have happened if anyone in the British Ruling Class gave a damn about the will of the British people.

Meanwhile, over in France, les Deplorables have been conducting some pretty impressive riots. Seems that the French people have also had it with their Ruling Class selling them down the river. We’ll see how this comes out – personally, I’m hoping it develops into a genuine revolution.

Naturally, the Ruling Class is saying that the Russians are behind the French protests.

Still seeing lots of people speaking in favor of Experts. Ross Douthat has an interesting thing to say on that:

…meritocrats are often educated to be bad leaders, and bad people, in a very specific way — a way of arrogant intelligence unmoored from historical experience, ambition untempered by self-sacrifice. The way of the “best and the brightest” at the dawn of the technocratic era and the “smartest guys in the room” decades later, the way of the arsonists of late-2000s Wall Street and the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley…

Do read the whole thing. Mostly because you won’t agree with all of it. The bottom line is a fundamental irresponsibility. That they really lack merit and are often wrong isn’t the biggest problem: the biggest problem is that they never have to pay a price. Sowell often points this out in his books: those who propose to do all sorts of odd things are never the people who have to suffer the consequences. I came across a sorta-Conservative guy on Twitter (I’m guess he’s at least modestly famous, but I had never heard of him before) and he was arguing that America must take charge of the world! Be strong! Get out there and fight…and then I looked at his picture and saw a fairly fit, young man but his bio didn’t seem to include anything about military service. I suggested “you, first” to him: that if he wants America to flex her muscles in the world, that he go out and be that muscle…and get back to us once he was deployed.

Mixed right in with that was a small debate with a much beloved (and extremely liberal) friend where he was sort of on the side of Experts. I rejoined that the more stupid a person is, the more vital it is that they be consulted on the major issues. Experts build atomic bombs: morons drink beer and eat chips. On the whole, the more beer-drinking and chip-eating we do, the better off we are.

Chesterton once opined that it was disturbing how few politicians are hanged. And there is more in that than the mere healthy desire to kill those in charge from time to time. The larger issue is that a price must be paid for our follies…and every now and again, it would be salubrious to have those who promoted the follies be first up the scaffold. FDR, George C. Marshall and Ernest King are honored in the United States these days…you can find out all sorts of details about them and stand in rapt admiration over their deeds…but, you’ll find out less about the guys who were buried after dying of dysentery in a squalid, Japanese POW camp, even though the people ultimately responsible for those deaths were, precisely, FDR, George C. Marshall and Ernest King. You know: they made horrible, stupid mistakes…and then got other people, less famous, to pay the blood price to repair their errors. It would be simple justice if, every now and again, the FDR’s, Marshall’s and King’s swung from lamp posts.

But getting that done is very difficult. The problem is that you need people who can have a say but who don’t want to say much. Once upon a time, the Catholic Church tried it – at the peak, they managed to have King Henry II of England flogged for murdering St. Thomas Becket. To tell you how that came out, long term, one only needs say that Henry VIII had St Thomas’ bones scattered. The trouble is that people who care deeply about politics are those who tend to rise in politics…and they’re never terribly interested in fixing things; nor can they be relied upon to hang themselves are regular intervals.

So, Revolution is the only way out of this mess. We here in the United States are fortunate in that we have built in mechanisms which allows us alter or to abolish our government without the necessity of engaging in bloody revolution. Unless, of course, we get a situation where the Ruling Class tries an end run around the Constitution by, say, removing a popularly elected President on bogus charges. We’ll see how that plays out.

But make no mistake about it – we are entering, globally, a revolutionary time. It is a complex battle which pits those who make and do against those who consider themselves smarter than those who make and do. It is your local plumber against the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, if you want it in a nutshell. The victory for our side comes when we successfully demonstrate that the Ruling Class is both corrupt and illegitimate – that is when they’ll be turned out of power.