Open Thread

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Nevada’s Attorney General – a Democrat – decided he wanted Nevada to be a sanctuary State. Nevada’s Governor – a sane person – said not so fast:

Aaron Ford – the aforementioned AG, Democrat and lunatic – is already running for Lombardo’s job in 2026. So you can understand why Ford would want to pick some fights with Lombardo…but, this fight? Seriously? Nobody outside the Leftist loony bins likes sanctuary policies. Even those who favor loose immigration policies don’t like the idea of State and local governments not cooperating with federal law enforcement on removing illegal aliens…and the more stories we see of illegals getting caught, released and then committing absolutely hideous crimes, the less people like the idea of sanctuary.

Nevada is a closely divided State (though registrations are trending GOP of late) but with 2026 being the mid-term year after a GOP win, you’d have to rate Ford’s chances out the gate as “has a solid shot at it”. Lombardo has been an effective and generally popular governor – and Democrats seem to have a really hard time winning the governorship – so it was never going to be an easy fight for Ford…things like this are going to make it impossible for him absent a complete GOP meltdown. But that is the Democrats right now, isn’t it? They are all-in on transing kids, protecting illegals and defending wasteful spending. Trump has picked a series of 70/30 issues, got himself on the side of 70 and has the Democrats digging in behind 30. Just amazing.

Jeff Bezos has decreed that the Washington Post will take a Libertarian line on personal and economic freedom. This did get his the opinion editor to step down – we’ll see if any further resignations occur. Best post on X about it:

We’ll see how this comes out – but if WaPo merely becomes a place where non-Left opinion can exist, that will be an improvement. A vast improvement – not least in getting a lot of the Ruling Class out of their bubble. The reason Democrats are tripling down on trans, illegals and waste is because all signals they receive indicate these as the popular positions. They never hear dissenting views. You will seriously find liberals out there who never even heard of Hunter’s laptop or that Trump-Russia was totally debunked…the MSM never told them.

And that is what Jake Tapper is counting on – he’s got a book coming out in May called Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, its Cover Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. I’m not kidding. Look it up. He really wrote a book called that. As if he wasn’t one of the people desperately covering it up! He’s naturally being scorched on X over it but it must be kept in mind that most people who actually pay attention to Tapper never heard about Biden being gaga until the debate. It was just a stutter!

When we ask ourselves how Kamala Harris got 75,017,613 votes, that’s why: these people never heard about her. The MSM hid her inability to string a coherent sentence together. They carefully edited the clips. They told the viewers that what she said was brilliant. Just at they told their viewers that the Orange Man is Bad while Harris is nothing but Joy. And even after Trump put full effort into showing this to be nonsense, more than 75 million people still hadn’t been reached on it. They still bought the MSM lies…and will buy Tapper’s book.

Greenpeace is going on trial in civil court – with the plaintiff asking $300 million. An amount that would effectively bankrupt Greenpeace. At issue was a series of protests orchestrated by Greenpeace against an oil pipeline (now completed). The plaintiff argues that Greenpeace encouraged illegal acts during the protests and then raised funds off the press coverage of the protests. This would be a criminal enterprise designed to enrich the perpetrators. It all came to a head in 2019 so I can see why federal prosecutors didn’t do anything…but I believe they should now on any charges still within the statute of limitations. It is a rather new thing to consider but as I think about it, I kick myself for not thinking it up years ago. I mean, think about the BLM/Antifa people who raked in huge donations…off of riots! That they encouraged and perhaps even directly participated in. RICO – its not just for Mobsters any more!

Open Thread

Mark Noonan23 Comments

The Official Word from the Progressive TV Chattering Class is that Trump has gone too far and now people are getting angry as Trump’s support collapses. How’s that working out? Well, lets check in with one of the most accurate pollsters of 2024:

The “Trump is going too far” message is orchestrated on the Left – it isn’t really directed at Trump but at week-kneed Congressional GOPers and the center-right people who are still all “well, I never” about things. The Left knows that Trump isn’t really controllable in that he doesn’t have to seek another term…but there is leverage over the Congressional GOP. But here’s the thing on that – the GOP House majority is so narrow that everyone in the GOP expects it to be lost in 2026…and that means if you want to get anything done, better get it done now. Absent a complete economic meltdown over the next 12 months or so, the Senate is probably safe for the GOP. So, a Dem House majority isn’t all that much a threat. Plus the Congressional GOP knows that going against Trump now is probably political suicide. There might be some time in 2026 to take a vote against Trump to provide a little separation in a swing district, but now isn’t the time for it.

It looks like our prayers for Pope Francis should be more for a holy death rather than recovery right now. Still some hope he’ll emerge from the hospital but an 88 year old with his maladies doesn’t have a lot of time left. As I’ve said pretty much from the start, Francis is theologically rock-solid but in the areas of politics and economics he is Left. He’s been an interesting Pope and probably what was needed at the time as the Church had become a bit ossified. Naturally, however, the Left elements in the Church took advantage of a kindly nature and tried to push actual heresy. That is for the next Pope to clear up. Cardinal Sarah is probably out of the running on account of age so I’m at a bit of a loss of who to pray for on it. Some are talking up Cardinal Pizzaballa – the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem – and while the man has guts (he offered himself as a Hamas hostage in return for release of the captive Israelis) he also seems (in my view) far too soft on Hamas, itself. Cardinal Besungu of the Democratic Republic of Congo is considered a very conservative alternative…and as the Church in Congo is horribly oppressed (a short while ago Islamists there beheaded 70 Christians in a Protestant church), he’d probably be a little bit…militant in defending Christ’s flock. But, in the end, we’re all just going to have to wait and see how this goes.

The German elections went about as expected – the socialist SPD was trounced, the center-right CDU emerged on top…and AfD came in second, about doubling their support from the previous election. Between the CDU and AfD and some small fry, there is a solid, Conservative majority for the Bundestag…and what this means is, naturally, that the CDU will coalition with the just-defeated SPD to keep AfD out. This is the Ruling Class Uniparty writ very large. But I think the CDU is making a huge mistake here – the German people rejected the Left but weren’t quite ready to go AfD…but if the CDU sees its mandate as something other than curbing migration, then there will be another election pretty quickly and the AfD might wind up the largest party in the Bundestag (they are second largest now). One curiosity about it – if you look at the election returns by district, what you see is that almost universally the old “West Germany” voted CDU while old “East Germany” voted AfD – with the SPD winning a few urban cores. A guy I know on X pointed out that old Germany was actually best preserved in the east because, in reaction to Communist occupation, they desperately clung on to their national identity. Looks like he was right. Additional observation: exit polls show that German youth resoundingly rejected both CDU and SPD, the two major post-WWII German political parties…they opted for the Right-Populist AfD or the Left-Populist Linke. The German Ruling Class is on borrowed time.

Bongino as Deputy Director of the FBI is a clear sign that Trump, Bondi and Patel are not about to put up with internal sabotage.

Among many senior officers fired after Hegseth took over Defense was the Chief of Naval Operations – Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to hold the post. And the Left has gone ballistic…”she highly rated! She’s a warfighter!”. The ships are rusty. I’ve seen video after video of US naval warships entering or leaving port absolutely covered in rust. She’s a bad officer, period. So are all other senior officers in the Navy. Civilians don’t fully understand the need for “spit and polish”…its not don’t just to look good but to internalize into serving sailors that they are sailors. This is the USS Aaron Ward after suffering repeated kamikaze attacks off Okinawa:

That crew fought off most attacks and got this hunk of junk back into port for repairs – because they were sailors. Meanwhile, in our modern, diverse and equitable Navy, USS Bonhomme Richard caught fire in port, San Diego, and burned to uselessness…because nobody on the ship or even in that whole naval installation was a sailor. Hegseth can’t fire the senior officers fast enough.

No, You Can’t Use my Morals to Kill Me

Mark Noonan37 Comments

The latest effort to derail DOGE has been to have moderate Right (not specifically Never Trump) people write despairing pieces about the failure of Conservatives to deplore Elon Musk’s serial adultery. He has 12 confirmed children, a social media influencer claiming number 13. They tie this into Trump’s sexual past and throw up their hands (a little dramatically) wondering just how we can do anything when those in charge of the movement are sinners? This effort is clearly orchestrated by the Left – which doesn’t care at all about morality but they will wipe their butt with their own flag if it helps them.

Rely on it, if we made an effort to codify morality into law, these same Right voices would rise in opposition to us on Libertarian grounds. The only people morality applies to, in their minds, is us: we have to be perfect and if we ain’t, then we don’t deserve to have power…or, indeed, anything.

To make it clear: adultery is a sin. Fornication is a sin. Horrible, bad sins which can destroy a human soul and condemn it to everlasting damnation.

But so, too, divorce and birth control. Working on the Sabbath. Not going to Mass on Sunday. Do you get what I’m saying? If we are to base our politics upon what is considered a sin in Christian theology, then we’re going to have a very different political organization. And one that won’t win anything. To be sure, winning in politics is not usually the most crucial consideration. We Christians are in the world but we are not supposed to be of it and we are supposed to, as far as possible, meekly live within the political structure trusting to God that things will work out. And for the most part, that is what Christians have done – it has been a long time since anyone really insisted upon any distinctly Christian policy in American politics. But things are different now. We’re not fighting for mere political power. We are fighting for our very lives.

We Christians are to accept martyrdom if it is thrust upon us. We aren’t to seek it out but if we are placed into the position where we can only live by denying God, then it is time for us to die – and joyfully so. But our prime duty here is escape if possible. Just as we are to avoid near occasions of sin, so we should avoid, if we can, situations where the choice becomes apostasy or death. That is what we’re trying to do here. I know it sounds perhaps a bit melodramatic, but it is win in politics right now, or die. If we lose and have to die, so be it – we trust in God. But let’s try not to lose.

We have to fully grasp what we’re up against. Remember, when the Palestinians sent in rape/murder squads to Israel, the global Left supported the Palestinians. They still do. Even today they are still out in the streets waving Hamas flags and calling Israel the bad guy. Think about that. They also sincerely believe that a human being can be born in the wrong body – and that anyone denying this is malevolent. They believe that punishing criminals is wrong. Not kidding about that: they are all in for “alternatives to punishment”…because they have internalized the idea that crime only happens because of injustice. We joke about saying “society made me do it”, but they really believe this to be the case…and so “society” needs to be punished. These are not reasoned, logical positions. They are not just false, but obviously false…and yet tens of millions of people in these United States of America believe it all and given that they further believe the world will die if they don’t get their way, we have the recipe for massacre.

Keep in mind that the whole basis of Nazism was stupidly wrong – ultimately based upon the belief that the Jews were an organized, malevolent force in the world deliberately out to destroy the civilized people – ie, the Aryans. This is no different from the modern Left believing that we are an organized, malevolent force deliberately out to destroy the planet. The Germans bought the Nazi argument and at least 40% of the American people have bought the Left argument. It won’t take much for a solid majority to get behind “born in the wrong body” and “that hamburger is killing the Earth!”. And people who think that the world will end if they don’t prevail are not noted for holding back…once you get that idea fixed in your head that only total destruction of the enemy allows you to survive, you’ll do anything to get your way.

I am not here in this year of 2025 trying to preserve Christian morality – we lost that fight decades ago when we didn’t oppose the completely insane idea of no-fault divorce…when we seriously went along with the idea that a promise made to God and Man can be annulled by a judge. At that point, the slide down into Elon Musk having 12 or 13 children from a large number of women was kinda baked in. And, on the whole, this is actually far more human than the Left which wants to trans kids they don’t abort…and suicide them if they wind up depressed teenagers. At least Musk is making babies and wanting them to get on a path towards a useful life. Better if he wasn’t nailing everything that will sit still for five minutes…but if I’ve got a choice between a world where people are bumping uglies with wild abandon and having buckets of children and another world where they lop off healthy body parts and then suicide the result…I know what I’m choosing. And I did just mention the suicide thing, didn’t I? Really think about that – the Left thinks it is good if people can have taxpayer funded “doctors” kill them if they’re feeling out of sorts. They don’t even call it a necessary evil any more – they call it good. Positive. A great outcome. Yay death!

For my own safety’s sake, I must defeat these people. Because I am not like them, I don’t want them jailed or killed. I will allow them to remain in their personal delusions…but I must do everything I can to remove them from all power and influence in the world. I will go pretty far here, including to eventual disenfranchisement and confiscation of their wealth if that proves necessary to stop these insane people. But for right now, I think that if we can de-fund them that will solve most of the problem…my conviction is that these insane beliefs are only given credence because subscription to them ensures well-paid sinecures for those willing to push the lunacy. Don’t ever downplay the power of a dollar sign in front of a morally and intellectually weak person. Much is written in the history books about how the German generals went along with Hitler even when it was clear his military commands were leading to disaster…much less is written about how Hitler secured and retained that compliance: money. He simply bribed his senior leaders to go along…and go along they did, only concerned about keeping their place at the trough. So, too, the modern American Left. And if we take away the money…if nobody is paying them to be insane, then there’s a strong chance they’ll stop being insane. And Musk is leading the charge in taking away their money.

Do I trust Musk? No. The default position on anyone with a great deal of money and/or power is mistrust. Trump gets trust now because he’s proven himself in the face of terrible odds to be on my side. Musk? Well, he’s doing some good things but so far the chips haven’t really been down…he hasn’t had to choose between his own happiness and the good of the people. The Left is pushing that way and he’s probably going to be forced to make that choice. We’ll see how that goes. But, meanwhile, he’s doing what I want – except too slowly and being far too nice to the Left. I want what he’s doing put on overdrive. Musk is a tool. He’s useful right now. If he remains useful then I’ll keep backing him – but the minute the tool is broken or proves ineffective, I’ll drop him like used chewing gum.

And here’s the kicker: once I defeat these insane people and restore a world where truth is the basis of action, then I can start to revive Christian morality – or, indeed, any moral code. People who think that abortion is good are not going to be converted to Christianity with ease. Heck, just getting them to stop being raving lunatics is a herculean task. But if they are no longer paid to believe that abortion is good then they might stop actually believing that abortion is good…and that will open them up to the prospect of understanding that being a good person requires a strict moral code enforced by law and custom. But this is all for after: after the Left is defeated. I can’t get there from here – I must first get rid of the lunatics. Then I can talk.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan17 Comments

That’s FBI Director Kash Patel to you, Liberals

Confirmed 51-49 because Collins chose this as her “I’m an independent” vote to retain electoral viability in Maine and Murkowski just hates the Republican party.

Remember, the Democrats have been mostly lock-step against our guys while Biden’s clowns almost all got significant GOP votes. That really has to stop. Until Democrats stop being vicious partisans, we have to be vicious partisans.

How does our Ruling Class view him? Well, they consider him a Conspiracy Theorist…mostly because Patel knows that 2020 was fraudulent, J6 was a set-up and he knows where the bodies are buried in the Trump-Russia op. In other words, he knows who the bad guys are – and the bad guys know he knows. And now he’s the director of the federal government’s most powerful law enforcement agency. A lot of people in DC are Googling defense attorneys today.

Reminder: the only good thing about Fetterman is that he’s not a raving anti-Semite. Other than that, he’s true-blue, fanatic Commie Left. He voted against Patel as he’s voted routinely against Trump’s other nominees.

The James Bond character has been signed over to Bezos…so, in keeping with the Rings of Power production, I now expect that while Bond remains a white male they add like 19 non-white and/or non-male characters to have 27 different story lines obscuring the main Narrative. That, by the way, is what was wrong with Rings of Power. I didn’t mind adding Hobbits though in Tolkien’s universe the played no role in the First or Second Ages. I don’t care about the black dwarfs and elves as its rather irrelevant (though the problem with the Elves in all of the Tolkien movies is that they don’t make them as god-like as they are in the story – these are tall, strong, beautiful people with no signs of aging at all…in the movies they just don’t capture this). But the story of the creation of the Rings of Power has one flaw for modern production codes: only one strong female in it, Galadriel…who I think they made into Feanor’s brother when she was actually his niece which is weird but I guess they needed that as they make her character into one driven by desire for revenge on Sauron when her actual motivation in life was dominion of her own outside control of the Valar…this motivation finally coming to an end when Frodo offers her the Ring and she refuses it (“I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel”). Anyways, what they tried to do with Rings of Power was simply too much so they could add one diversity hire after another so you barely get into Sauron and the making of the Rings. I expect the Bezos Bond will have at it with SPECTRE while his niece is doing the really important work of battling dead-naming at MI6.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan76 Comments

We’re approaching the denouement of the Russo-Ukraine War: Trump’s team will be meeting Putin’s team in Saudi Arabia soon in order to work out the preliminary deal. Many people are upset with this because it is clear that the USA will not insist upon Russia evacuating all Ukrainian territory and, further, that we are not interested in Ukraine joining NATO (that is, we’re not interested in committing to Ukraine’s defense and thus endless friction and hostility with Russia). What the final terms are remains to be seen but Zelenskyy and other European leaders have already said they reject whatever deal is made.

And that’s just too darn bad: they don’t get a say.

For the European leaders, the bottom line is that they don’t have significant military forces ready for action and there is a distinct lack of will on committing European youth to war. The European Ruling Class is barely hanging on via increasingly repressive measures against dissidents and telling European youth that its time to ruck up and enter the trenches would be immensely unpopular (can you imagine? “Ok, Nigel from Liverpool – you get to go to Ukraine to die for the Donbas while Abdul from Pakistan gets to stay on welfare here in Blighty grooming your younger sister!”. Not gonna work out). If you don’t have force on the table, you don’t get to decide how a war goes.

As for Ukraine: they’ve been bled white (those who stayed: looked like a couple million Ukrainian youths bailed out early) and they simply lack the power to expel the Russians. At this point, it doesn’t matter what weapons we give them: there just aren’t enough Ukrainians in uniform to get through what are by now multiple layers of Russian defensive positions against a Russian army which hasn’t even begun to really call on Russia’s manpower reserves. Ukraine’s chance to have a say in the war was the 8 years between Russian invasions – they could have built up a powerful, mobile army to strike at Russia just as (or, better, just before) the Russians came on. They didn’t. Zelenskyy staked his country on the moral character of the European leadership and Joe Biden. Bad call. While Ukraine retains sufficient force to make total Russian conquest prohibitively expensive, they don’t have enough to go beyond that. Exhausted military forces also don’t get much of a say in how a war ends.

And both the USA and Russia have bigger fish to fry. Our challenge is in China, Russia’s challenge is to rebuild their military force and industrial base as quickly as possible to keep China from getting froggy about Siberia (people forget that large parts of Russian Siberia were Chinese until the mid-19th century). Bottom line: there’s no will for the war to continue, and so it will end. And if by some chance Ukraine and Europe reject the deal and decide to fight on? Then it is no skin off our nose – and we’ll have no reason to help Ukraine further.

CBS News had the day yesterday – making some of the most stupid statements ever made by an alleged news organization. One thing they highlighted as how cool it is that Europe oppresses free speech…with the capper being a CBS news actor telling Rubio that the Nazis used free speech to create the Holocaust. We all had a good laugh at that but I used the opportunity to remind everyone that only one nation on Earth actually secures the rights of the people: the USA. It is only our Constitution which has the phrase “Congress shall make no law”. All other Constitutions, no matter how wonderfully written or how much they talk about human rights has that – and all of them have provisions which allow the government to suspend every human right when the government decides it needs to. There is only one free nation on Earth: the USA. There only ever has been one, and only ever will be one – no other nation’s Ruling Class is ever going to allow the people to write it into basic law “Parliament shall make no law”. Our Constitution kinda slipped into being almost by accident…nobody was paying attention to what we were doing and the powers that would want to stop us were too far away. The whole thrust of the Progressive Left in the USA, by the way, has been to annul “Congress shall make no law”. Via bureaucratic and judicial fiat the Left has tried everything it can to get around that…and they never will stop trying to. It is the final bulwark of human liberty.

Defending Law

Mark Noonan34 Comments

This is going to cause some controversy:

The quote is attributed to Napoleon and it is very much in line with his thinking. True enough even if he never uttered the exact phrase. But, what does it mean? That a leader should go off and be lawless and claim as justification that he’s saving the country? Well, we get that on the regular right now. The world has always been filled with such de-facto assertions. But Napoleon wasn’t asserting a national policy for his government – he of the Code Napoleon knew that law was crucial – but simply making an observation. Keeping in mind that he had turned out the Directory in a coup…to the immense joy of most French as they were, by 1799, sick to death of endless Revolution. I believe that this is the sense in which Trump is working.

The law, from the Constitution on down to the lowest county ordinance isn’t a suicide pact. We cannot, of course, have a civilized society if we don’t have laws. But the law can become destructive of its own ends – like, for instance, when we have people asserting that the 14th Amendment secured a right for foreigners to illegally enter our country and give birth to citizens. If the law explicitly said that, then only an insane person would abide by it – and everyone who violated it would be saving the country, and thus violating no law.

Another example – the law clearly states that Hunter Biden is pardoned for all violations of federal law from January 1st, 2014 until December 31st, 2024. And that, by law, ends that. But it isn’t at all just. It isn’t what the law is for – the power of pardon isn’t intended to get your drug-addicted son off from his serial violations of laws. And, so, while it would be a technical violation of the law to now rake over every action of Hunter’s starting on January 1st, 2025 (he will break the law again; there is no doubt about that) and then throwing the book at him, it would be just. You see how this works?

Personally, I think what Trump has done here is fire a shot across the bow of those in the country who are willing to go along with Democrat efforts to hamstring the Executive. We know what the Democrats are doing and why – and that is fine. But nobody else should be helping them at all. If, for instance, the Supreme Court decides not to intervene in these ridiculous lawfare cases against Trump’s Executive actions (or just delays action based on some absurd adherence to established judicial procedure), then Trump will wait a while…but then act. The laws we have on the books that are supposed to protect us from unjust government actions are not there to allow well-funded Leftwing activists to stymie via lawsuits actions by the duly elected Executive. You are not being oppressed if your federal meal ticket is taken away and no host of Leftwing judges can make it so.

And, in the end, if Trump does act against a court order after giving fair time for it to be worked out, then he will be saving Law. Keep in mind that if the Lawfare actually worked – if it actually prevented Trump from doing the legal things he was elected to do – then it would go into the public mind that the law is useless. Even downright evil. If working within the system and winning fair and square by the book gets you nothing, then you will seek other means of getting what you want. Trump won the election. The Republican Party won the election. The MAGA voters won. And when you win you get what you want. That is the rule. And they’d better darn well get it – or things will start to happen that nobody likes.

The Stupid Failure of Foreign Aid

Mark Noonan34 Comments

In an attempt to make us all feel bad about MAGA, a Democrat operative pointed out that a 71 year old Burmese refugee in Thailand died the other day because the NGO providing her oxygen ceased service because Trump shut off the USAID funds. There were a couple problems with this:

  1. @Oilfield_Rando pointed out that the CEO of the NGO makes $2.2 million per year. You’d think he could have kicked in for an oxygen tank or two.
  2. An American lady in North Carolina died of hypothermia on January 6th, 2025, after FEMA failed to help her. No Democrat rose to condemn Biden over this. Bottom line: they don’t care about people dying. They only care about political power and the dead lady in Thailand, they think, helps them gain power. Think of how hard they had to look to even find this out?
  3. The conflict in Burma (called Myanmar by the current pack of thugs running the place) has been ongoing since 1948. It is an entirely senseless ethnic conflict that no civilized people would tolerate – and we note, with great care, that under British rule these conflicts were suppressed because killing someone on account of their ethnicity is barbaric and stupid.

As we are now closely reviewing all the foreign aid, we must also address the underlying reason for foreign aid. Why, at the end of the day, do we do it? After all, outside sporadic international help in response to natural disasters, until the mid-20th century foreign aid just wasn’t a thing. A couple reasons are given for it:

  1. Humanitarian. Can’t let people die. This, of course, is true. If we can in any way prevent an unnecessary death, we should do so.
  2. Global power. If we don’t provide the aid, then someone else will and we’ll lose influence over crucial areas of the globe, placing ourselves at a disadvantage.

We’ll start with number 2 here: global power. If we don’t, someone else will, to our detriment. Ok. Between 2012 and 2022 the United States provided about $2.8 billion per year in aid to Tanzania. That’s equal to 3.4% of Tanzania’s annual GDP. They should love us, right? I mean, if someone handed us a sum equal to 3.4% of our GDP every year, we’d probably like that guy. I know if someone handed me a figure equal to 3.4% of my annual income, I’d be grateful. So, how has this love worked out?

Tanzania has signed a $2.2bn deal with two Chinese firms to build a standard gauge rail link between the port of Dar es Salaam and a nickel mine in Burundi, Business Insider Africa reports.

Looked into who owns that nickel mine in Burundi and it appears to be a company called East African Region Group which is headed up by some sheik from the United Arab Emirates. We gave Burundi $69.7 million in 2024.

To nutshell, in return for $28 billion to Tanzania over the past ten years and nearly $70 million to Burundi just in 2024 we got…nothing. China gets to build the railroad and the Emirates get to mine the nickel. Oh, I mean, sure: there are more healthy workers in Tanzania and Burundi than there would have been without US aid and that’s nice…helps the Chinese and Emiratis a lot. I’m sure they’re grateful.

But at least we did provide the humanitarian aid, right? We can feel good about that!

Well, maybe not.

Not trying to pick on Tanzania here – in fact, I literally picked the country at random for the example here, figuring in advance that any African nation would have the same basic arc over the past 60+ years – but the bottom line is that it became independent in 1961 and in 2024, 63 years later, got $2.8 billion in aid from us. And a lot more from elsewhere (though I suspect that a lot of the non-US aid is actually just more US aid funneled through non-US NGO’s). Just what the heck have the people of Tanzania been up to all this time? In 63 years of American post-colonial development we went from an agricultural backwater to a significant industrial power (that would be 1776 to 1839) about to break out into major power level. And we didn’t get a dime in foreign aid.

Oh, wait. Perhaps that is it?

Americans are no smarter than Africans – people is people. Genius is rare and the average run of us are…average. Americans are not harder working than Africans. Americans are not morally superior to Africans. On the grand scale of things, a space alien examining an African and an American wouldn’t find a dime’s worth of difference between them. So, what gives?

The basic African story: independence granted by an exhausted Imperial power which just didn’t want to bother any longer (though people pump up the leaders of independence movements in Africa into some sort of super-human heroes); a colonially-educated, socialist-minded strong-man takes over and rules for ages (Tanzania was run by Julius Nyerere from 1960 to 1985) suppressing political dissent and trying to graft Marxist twaddle onto a subsistence-agriculture, tribal society. Debt, inflation and general misery results (in the best cases – the worst go Rwanda and genocidal murder)…along with buckets of foreign aid money. And don’t get me wrong here, as far as post-colonial strong-men went, Nyerere was pretty good…at least he doesn’t appear to have looted his treasury and he did (eventually) give up power (though basically to the one-party State he created and which persists today via bogus elections). It should be noted that Nyerere the anti-colonialist firebrand who is hailed to this day as one of the Liberators of Africa…died in a London hospital. All that time in power all that money spent…couldn’t even build one first-rate hospital in his homeland.

All we can really say here is that the aid is the problem – that it actually props up what is wrong in the recipient countries. Think about it: Nyerere’s policies were basket-case bad right out the gate…what kept his people fed sufficient to prevent bloody revolution was the foreign aid. The gifts of the First World. And so it goes in one Third World nation after another – a lousy, stupid and usually corrupt post-colonial Ruling Class makes a mess of things and then begs for aid to put a band aid over the failure. And we give and give and give and nothing really ever improves and on top of all that, we here in the USA don’t even get to exploit the material resources and cheap labor…the Chinese get to do that. How is this good? How is this considered moral?

I don’t want us to leave people to just die – but if people are just dying then we can’t just pass out the cash. We have to address the underlying problem…and that problem is going to invariably be the Ruling Class of the country where people will die if they don’t get aid. They’re either too corrupt or too stupid (or a combination of same) to run their country. I don’t care about offended patriotic sensibilities…if you will starve without my food, then when I send the food, I send my control over you. Because I can’t trust you’ll fix the problem. If we send aid, it comes with strict instructions not just on how the aid is used, but how the recipient country will organize itself going forward. And, hey, they can refuse the conditions…and the food. Their choice. Let the local strong-man rant and rave about American imperialists…I don’t care. But if he wants food rather than his people rising up to kill him, then he’ll do as he’s told.

As I’ve said on many occasions of late, it is time for us to enter the real world. To take things as they actually are, not as we might wish them to be. It is the only way anything is going to get fixed.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan38 Comments

The court orders against Trump are simply absurd. If they aren’t quickly disposed of on the appellate level, then Trump should start to ignore them. Perhaps first by quietly informing Chief Justice Roberts that he’d better put his judges on a leash or he’ll make it a pure Executive vs Judiciary conflict…such a conflict the Judiciary, being un-elected, is bound to lose. That is, if Roberts wants to retain Executive deference to Judicial rulings, then this nonsense of one federal judge issuing a nation-wide TRO simply has to stop. Forever. Side note: the Constitution gives Congress the right to regulate how cases are brought before the Courts…I recommend we enact legislation stating that only a Supreme Court Justice can issue a nation-wide TRO…and that TRO can be voided if three Justices decide to do so.

Do keep in mind why the Left is fighting Trump tooth and nail rather than picking it’s fights: it has to. It can’t concede an inch here. My Mrs – mostly non-political – asked me why don’t the Democrats just get on board with stopping the worst of the waste? Answer: because the worst of the waste is why Democrats get into power. Its why we see people entering the system poor and quickly getting rich far beyond what their official salary can justify. I’m not talking about the ideologically committed – they only make up a small percentage of all Democrats (though they rule absolutely as far as policy and messaging go): I’m talking about 90% of the Democrats from Senator down to associate professor at your community college. Its all about stealing – about getting well paid for doing nothing useful. While one individual $5 million grant might seem to you and me like something not worth fighting for, the people who were getting paid with it are up in arms…as is everyone else who lives off such grift. If one part of it goes down, all of it will go down…so they fight for each part of it, no matter how stupid and corrupt it looks.

Here’s my view: Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot. It is highly likely that all of the laws which restrict Executive discretion over personnel and discretionary spending are unconstitutional…and we do have a Court which may very well rule exactly that way. Democrats might be setting themselves up for a catastrophe. After all:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Article II, section 1, paragraph one. There are no modifiers here. There is one person – and one person, alone – who has executive power, and that is the President. The President, and only the President, can give orders and/or delegate executive power. To say that some part of the Executive branch, or some executive function, is outside the control of the President is a clear violation of the Constitution. The Congress does not have the power to reach into the Executive and make it do things – the Congress’ power here is of the purse: the means to make the Executive bend to Legislative wishes is by refusing to appropriate funds for the Executive. This concept that the Legislative can tell the Executive whom can be hired and fired – that is, who the President may delegate authority to – flies in the face of the Constitution. So, too, does the concept that the Judiciary can interfere in Executive actions.

The Pope issued a statement which is being hailed by the global Left as an assertion that Trump is evil for his deportation program. It is always, however, necessary that one read statements of Pope Francis rather than blindly accept what someone says he said. In the statement:

…one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival.

To be sure, the Pope clearly doesn’t like the idea of mass deportations based solely on the fact of immigration status. But after he goes on a bit on that subject, he is forced (because Catholicism requires it) to concede:

This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal immigration.

So, if you really want to sum up the Pope’s views:

Nations must remain open to immigrants.

Immigration should be orderly and legal.

Criminals must be controlled.

Deportation should not be based simply on the legal status of the foreigner in country.

The last bit most Americans are going to disagree with – the Pope is getting into a little bit of a gray area here in saying we can develop an orderly and legal immigration system but if someone jumps the line we can’t send them back into the line just based on that. The schizophrenia required to take any Left position rears its head here. In my view, I am not in any way in violation of the Pope’s statement – even though I favor a 20 year moratorium on all immigration (as per usual, unless an actual life is at stake). You see, to have an orderly and legal immigration system, I first must gain control of the situation – and this means I better not let anyone else in for a while as I sort out those who have come in over the past few years. Essentially, in order to be compliant with Church teaching on the matter of welcoming the stranger, I have to go through a process to ensure that I may welcome the stranger. The Pope might take exception and get very angry with me, but nothing I would do on immigration – and nothing Trump is doing – actually violates the inherent dignity of the migrants.

Think. Change.

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Elon Musk, the other day, opined that our Navy is living in the past and wasting money on weapons systems which will not be effective in the next war. He’s right.

I’m not of the school that holds the aircraft carrier to be obsolete in the face of modern anti-ship missiles but I am of the opinion that the Carrier Battle Group as the primary expression of naval power is not what it needs to be. Today it is, of course, the carrier and escorts – the carrier to be the strike force, the escorts there just to protect the carrier. I favor a more balanced approach – and I said some years ago that we need to revive the battleship concept (or at least the battle cruiser). In my view, the carrier might remain the primary strike force but we’d be foolish to rely only on piloted planes when we can fill the sky with missiles and drones. My revived battleship would fulfill that role.

The Burke class destroyer is 9,700 tons and it carries 96 Vertical Launch System cells. Imagine what a 50,000 ton ship could carry. Plus, that new battleship could be heavily armored (no modern ship carries anything like the Iowa’s 307mm thick armor – do keep in mind that the Nevada was missed by an atomic bomb by 1,600 yards and survived the blast – and she was built in 1916). It could initially carry a pair of 8 inch guns for shore bombardment and thus have space for the Rail Gun if that is ever worked out. With nuclear power it can cruise along at the carrier’s speed. With automation its crew would probably be about 300. It would incorporate all the modern stealth tech we can think of. And between missiles and drones it could put an overwhelming amount of ordnance in the air – and be a big enough ship that we might fit two or three reloads inside her.

It is important to always be thinking about things. We’re seeing on the battlefields of Ukraine that the tank is no longer Queen of the Battlefield. She can still do a lot of things, but she must be careful and stay hidden most of the time. Modern aerial tech means at least for now we won’t see anything the Operation Barbarossa with this 6,000 armored vehicles flooding across the open country. Not until tank tech takes a step forward as well (which we should also be looking into). If we sit tight with our Cold War-era military ideas, we’re going to get beaten.

But it isn’t enough to just change the material – the people must change, as well. I’ve often brought up Jacky Fisher as the exemplar of the Change Agent. Came into command of the Royal Navy and pretty much presented the United Kingdom with an entirely new Navy in about 5 years. And it was the Navy the Brits needed – fast battleships with big guns, no messing about with ships that, in Fisher’s words, “could neither run nor fight”. But even he had a little fail in this: he didn’t really change the people. Oh, he had people he favored and advanced – but they were favored because they agreed with his ideas on material changes. He neglected to look into whether or not they were changing their minds while changing their clothes.

Fisher presented his admirals with a fleet of battleships which were faster and better armed than the German ships they’d face. The whole concept was to move faster than the enemy, keeping just out of range of his smaller guns and then proceed to blow him to pieces. Unfortunately, his admirals just charged ahead into range of the Germans and got the bad end of the German concept of ships…slower, lesser-armed ships which could take immense punishment. At Jutland this resulted in the Brits losing 3 battle cruisers to the German’s 1…and the Brits, must less armored, were literally blown to pieces. So, a bit of attention to the detail: ask your people just what they plan to do with the fancy, new stuff you’re providing to them.

But change is the constant – and as Conservatives, it is our job to embrace change after we’ve done our “parable of the fence” review of the problem. That is, once we have actually identified the problem which will prevent our Conservation of something we love, have at it – even if it means revolutionary change. We hope that Trump and Team will continue to get the ball rolling. First in gutting the Deep State, then starting the process of reform. But our job is to not only sustain this, but to demand it go the right way. We can’t just latch on to anyone who puts “MAGA” in his bio…we need people who will actually do what needs to be done…and that is going to take us putting on pressure, getting involved in local politics and that sort of thing. And then, of course, defending the innovators. The whole Global Elite is going after Musk now – and I’ve always said that Musk is not my cup of tea. But I have to defend him…he’s on the side of the angels right now and if I let them get Musk’s scalp, it just moves me up the line.

It is Like the Sun After the Storm

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Things are changing so fast we can’t keep up with them all. On the matter of South Africa, my go-to has been an account on X, @ConCaracal. He’s a South African who has been grinding away trying to reform the increasingly racist South African government. Over the past few years, especially, the South African government has become increasingly strident in its hatred of whites. There are now more race-based laws on the books than under Apartheid. This shows that the primary complaint the ANC really had with Apartheid is that they didn’t have that power for themselves. It has been a fairly bleak battle for white South Africans and, indeed, South Africa recently enacted an entirely unconstitutional law to confiscate white-owned farms without compensation. This is the path Zimbabwe went down and so we all knew where it was going. And then, Trump.

Did you ever imagine you’d see the day that the American Secretary of State would call out Third World racism? We’re not supposed to mention this, guys. Remember, we’re the bad guys and we have to allow tin pot Third World tyrants do whatever they want. This was a gigantic earthquake in foreign affairs…and while it has caused little notice in the USA, it has been noticed in South Africa – as Conscious Caracal said:

The key take away here is the same for everything – we didn’t have to do what we were doing. All this time we’ve been bending the knee to Third World tyrant-thieves and we could have just called them out on it. Now, this doesn’t solve South Africa’s problem – the country is in horrid shape and the ANC does need it’s enemy (white people) to justify continued power. Its not like they can stop stealing from the Treasury, right? Keep in mind that the whole farm confiscation thing is absurd – the government of South Africa is the largest landowner in South Africa…if they want to pass out land to black farmers, they’ve got millions of acres to spare. But that doesn’t generate race-hatred. But pressure from the Trump Administration will be crucial in the fight to turn South Africa into a rule of law nation.

And on and on and on like that. We’ve been essentially destroying ourselves for decades, internally and externally, in service of some mythic belief that the US is the bad guy. That white people are the bad guy. That Christians (and, recently, Jews) are the bad guy. That the very creation of our nation is an unforgivable sin. And now it just stops…because we’ve got a President who doesn’t want to play that game. And it is glorious.