Open Thread

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.

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?

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.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan23 Comments

Been busy writing!

Shadow Army is now ready for pre-order on Kindle. The paperback will release June 15th. Around December 15th, Book 5 will come out – Kings and Queen, which completes the two-book set with Shadow Army. And then, in 2022, two more will come out, Book 6 and 7 which will complete the entire series.

I’ve been thinking about the slogan “black lives matter” and it works out to an egregious insult: it is a claim that black lives never mattered until a drug addict resisted arrest. Ain’t having it: black lives have always mattered.

They’re now admitting what Trump said at the start: Covid came out of the lab. Now there are two questions to answer:

  1. Was it a manufactured virus?
  2. Did the Chinese deliberately spread it around once it got out to ensure the whole world took the hit?

The government of the People’s Republic of China is a stain on the world and the enemy of human decency. We should break all trade relations and forbid travel between our countries.

Creepy Joe Biden remains creepy.

Senile Joe Biden also remains senile.

If you want to get good, solid, down the middle political analysis, you’re going to have to go on Twitter and follow Varad Mehta. I don’t always agree with him, but everything he says is worth listening to and you’ll always come away knowing more than you did before.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Getting close to release for Shadow Army!

We should have it ready for release in a few days – gotta rush it up as we’re going on vacation the 2nd week of June and the Mrs, already reading Battles, wants it for beach reading material!

I was talking to Matt the other day in connection with this and we did ponder the prospect of doing a follow-up on Worst President. We rejected the idea because we both found that we didn’t care about Joe Biden. He’s not worthy of anyone’s attention, really: a senile cipher for the Ruling Class.

The State-sanctioned racism the Left is trying to impose on us is getting a lot of pushback. This is just one of many such efforts. Critical Race Theory might be the hill the Left dies on – they are committed to it, now. They can’t back away and don’t want to – but it is a monstrous outrage against basic human decency. We can push them over the edge with it.

Teen Vogue had an article up about how you can use menstrual blood for your magic incantations. Think about that. It is 2021 and Teen Vogue is telling little girls that they can be witches. Party of Science, y’all.

Team Obama is putting out a nonsense story claiming that Michelle Obama was the target of racism all the time while she was First Lady. This is the sort of drivel they’re putting out these days to justify their White Supremacist Threat Narrative. But, do keep this in mind: the audience for this isn’t you and me. We know it’s bull as much as those putting it out do. The audience is urban/suburban wine mom Democrat voters. To keep them believing that they are engaged in a desperate battle to keep racism at bay.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan14 Comments

The DOJ has finally decided, four years later, that the attack on GOP Congresspeople which resulted in the wounding of Scalise was an act of domestic terrorism. Ace, though, points out that there are two things here:

  1. The DOJ carefully classifies things to ensure the lowest possible number of Leftist and Islamist terrorist attacks. Gotta keep that White Supremacist number looking good, right?
  2. The DOJ is probably getting ready to broaden the definition of terrorism to include you and me.

We’re heading towards the end game here: the time when we’ll either win and restore liberty, or lose and be destroyed.

Some people are saying they won’t give up masks even after being vaccinated. Then why the heck get vaccinated? I’ve seen threads on Social Media and it becomes clearer to me that some people simply don’t know what a vaccine does. The real problem here is that they get to vote.

I did not know we had a secret, undercover Army, nor that it is about 60,000 strong.

I’ve long had a bad taste in my mouth about Special Forces and I’ve despised the whole concept of espionage my whole life. The logic behind it is insane – because we have to engage in global skullduggery, we need our people to lie about who they are to keep their identities secret. And you just know they’re being used against American citizens. But, outside 4th Amendment concerns, the real problem is having secret agents and secret soldiers. The Law of War says that when you capture secret soldiers, you can pretty much shoot them out of hand. The Nazis we captured dressed up in American uniforms during the Battle of the Bulge were up against a wall about a week after being caught. That is what you do with people who sneak.

I know our Special Forces guys are brave and almost all are solid patriots – the man who recruited me into the Navy was a Seal and he was one of the wisest and nicest men I’ve ever met. But, end all this: no more spies, no more secret soldiers. When we fight, we come right at you and let you know it was us. As for gaining intelligence: when has that ever really helped us? Our intel agencies have routinely failed to get us vital, actionable intelligence. Dispense with all of them. Send the Special Forces back to the regular units. Train the regular units up to Special Forces standards. Call an end to secret government garbage. We’re a Republic; we do our business in the Forum, not the Divan.

Warrantless gun confiscation is illegal, per the Supreme Court. This is a real victory for liberty. And now the SC is picking up an abortion case and we’ll see if they can strike a blow for State’s rights.

Make America Disco Again

Mark Noonan17 Comments

War in the Middle East. Gas shortages. All we need is a bit of inflation (which is coming) and for Biden’s brother to make beer and we’re back in the 1970’s.

At least we might get some cool music again:

Sorry I didn’t write for a week! Was just finishing the final draft of Shadow Army. Have that out in a couple weeks. It picks up our heroes 6 years after Battles.

As to that war in the Middle East – it is happening because the Palestinian leadership was ordered to do it by Iran. Iran, in turn, ordered it done because they want our attention on that while they take Team Biden to the cleaners in return for a revived Iran Deal, which will be even worse than the last one. The Iranians are able to do this, I think, partially with the active connivance of part of Team Biden, partially because the rest of Team Biden is simply too stupid to see the game.

For those who know what they’re doing, I really have no explanation for their fervent desire to appease Iran. It doesn’t even make bad sense as our wartime alliance with Stalin did. The Iranian regime long ago forfeited the support of the Iranian people. Iran is a basket case of a nation. Let them fall apart – and then once the Mullahs are out, work a deal with their successors. But the foreign policy elite has it in their mind that we must sustain the Mullahs. Even outright bribery doesn’t explain thinking this is something to do (the Saudis – Iran’s deadly enemies – would pay more for a different policy line).

CDC says you can drop the masks if vaccinated (I am – first shot, bit of a sore arm; second shot, crying like a little girl my arm hurt so much…but in 36 hours I was fine). This whole thing has been drivel from start to finish. It was a bad flu, nothing more.

They are doing an audit of Maricopa County, AZ – and they are finding discrepancies. I doubt, though, they’ll find enough to be decisive: those who conducted the steal have had more than enough time to destroy evidence. And its not like Biden’s DOJ will be coming after anyone who broke the law. I honestly have my doubts that Biden even topped 65 million votes. They really stuffed the ballot boxes this time – they wanted to be sure he got over 50%. But, even then, they underestimated how big Trump’s vote would be, especially in the Battlegrounds – that’s why they had to stop counting for a bit, manufacture some more ballots, and then stuff them in to shove Biden over the EC top by 42,000 votes. That is how close a shave it was – just that many votes the other way, and Trump would still be in.

I know this makes some people certain we can never win again – but the bottom line is that in the GOP controlled areas, reforms are being enacted which will make it vastly harder to cheat. Remember, in 2000 Gore’s attempt to steal Florida led to weeks of controversy. In 2020, the State was called for Trump 17 minutes after the polls closed in the panhandle (not, though, by the major networks – they delayed that call for a long time because they needed to call AZ for Biden before or right around same time to give the impression of a Biden win). That is the difference between a State where Dems can stuff a ballot box and a State where they can’t. There has been much hang wringing about the future of the GOP in Texas – but not from me. The reason it has gotten closer is not because Latinos have been moving in (TX hasn’t had a white majority in ages) but because in the deep blue areas of Texas (and there are some big ones, like Austin), the Democrats have been stuffing the ballot box. But that will now become harder. As I’ve been saying for ages, the best defense against fraud isn’t voter ID (though that helps), but requiring precincts to report their total number of votes within 30 minutes of closure. Once that number is locked in, you can’t stuff…puts a huge handicap because no matter how much data is crunched, no Democrat really knows what turnout will be in the deep Red areas until the vote comes in.

The GOP nominee for Virginia’s Lt Governor is a black woman who rips to shreds Critical Race Theory. More of this, please. My view: CRT must become illegal in the United States. Yes, I know this would take an Amendment…but it is such a poison that the Republic must vomit it out entirely.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan36 Comments

The Democrats are trying to keep the focus on Liz Cheney, and thus Trump, in order to distract from the massive disaster which is Biden. Prices are going through the roof, the border is back in chaos and our foreign enemies are being kowtowed to. Can’t really talk about that – so, let’s get another interview with Liz who will tell us how horrible January 6th was.

The good news is that most GOPers aren’t playing the game. We know that talking about the “insurrection” is just a dodge…and an attempt to split the GOP. Won’t happen. We’re woke to that.

Texas move to ban “urban camping”. Better known as bums defecating in the streets. Make no mistake about it – the Democrats, and especially the hard Left, wants quality of life to collapse and for chaos to increase – they feel, likely correctly, that people harassed to distraction won’t pay attention to what the Democrats are actually doing.

America is still not having kids. It is a problem all around the world – even the high birth rate countries are dropping like a rock. Just for the record: we don’t have a future if people don’t have kids.