Tonight We’re Going to Party Like its 399

Mark Noonan11 Comments

The other day I got into a minor Twitter tiff over a Tweet of mine. In it, I pointed out that my generation (and I’m nearly 58) as the last to be properly educated and that each succeeding year after I left school, education became more and more degraded. My point in this was a warning: we’re rapidly running out of people who know how to do things. They’re all getting rather long in the tooth and if we don’t raise up their replacements, we’ll enter a Dark Age as things simply stop working and nobody knows how to repair them, or make their replacements.

One of the comments I got back is that everything is just fine – youth knows what is doing! To that, I rejoined that it’ll be fun watching Tik Tok influencers wonder in 2040 why they only get 6 hours of electricity per day. And the response on that? “Hey, buddy, some of those influencers make more money than you ever will!”. Which is true, and kinda proved my point.

And it can all fall apart. Highly advanced, industrial civilization works very well when the people running it know what they’re doing. As soon as the people who know are gone, everything rather collapses.

I have a Twitter friend from South Africa and over the past few weeks he’s been without power on multiple occasions and sometimes for many hours. What happened? Well, South Africa’s electricity has for nearly a century been provided by a government-run enterprise – so, it started under British colonial rule, transitioned to fully independent South Africa and now is still there long into post-Apartheid South Africa. But the main thing was that after Apartheid, the thing became a patronage slush fund…friends and family of the ANC got jobs…and, of course, nobody would want to take orders from the white people who had been running it so out the door they went. As far as I can determine, since the end of Apartheid nearly nothing has been done to maintain or increase power generation and so now you’ve got an aging power system built for a much smaller population laboring to keep the lights on.

And my bet is that they still don’t know what to do. That is: those in charge of South Africa haven’t the foggiest notion of how power is generated and transmitted and since the end of Apartheid they made little or no effort to send black South Africans to school on these subjects. So, very soon South Africans will be able to celebrate thirty years since the end of Apartheid…they’ll just need candles to see it.

And that is how fast things can fall apart. The Durants, in their history of Rome, noted the life of an upper class Roman who lived in Gaul in the second half of the fourth century. It was an interesting look at life in that time but what was most striking is how everything seemed fine. The man had an interesting and useful life – nothing spectacular; just a life lived. He died about ten years before the barbarian flood. To him, in his time, all seemed well…sure, the government was sclerotic and corrupt; the roads and aqueducts weren’t being well maintained; taxes were too high…but nothing to worry about? Until, of course, there was something to worry about. As I’ve said before, things fall apart slowly and then all at once. The bell tolled in South Africa in 2007 when during an oddly high demand, it was found that the system couldn’t carry the load…15 years ago. Plenty of time to get it right…but nothing was done, because nobody knew how to do it. Just as in, say, 390 AD, nobody really knew how to maintain the Roman Empire. Everyone was sort of going through the motions…but at the first bit of pressure, it was revealed that there was nothing sustaining it.

And that is my point – we have in the USA the infrastructure of a major industrial power…but it is wearing down and it isn’t keeping pace with the continued growth of population. Prices are going up for two reasons: Uncle Sam printing trillions but, also, because we don’t have the ability to just swing into higher production when higher prices makes such production profitable. I did a little shopping trip with the Mrs this week and the thing which struck me the most is how at a glance everything seemed ok but when you looked a little closer, you could see the problem.

She was, of course, looking for stuff that girls look for but, with time to kill, I went to look for some things I needed: in this case, undershirts. I like a particular brand in a particular style. It isn’t fancy stuff – it is from a brand you’ve seen your whole life. And they did have some: the shelves were not bare. But where two years ago I would have seen a dozen packages of each size, I now saw one or two packages, and they didn’t have all sizes. Went to see about getting a couple new shirts: half a rack of men’s shirts where they used to be two or three full racks. Well, we need a new knife set for the kitchen as over the years two of our steak knives have gone missing and the carving knife is pretty banged up…so I go to the rack which would in the past have set after set of kitchen knives for you to ponder quality and price. There were a total of four knife sets. One a return which had been opened (after examination, I bought this one).

This is not the America I grew up in. We are no longer the Land of Plenty. We are the Land of We’ll See What They Got And I Hope It Will Do.

I do believe we can fix this – the bell has rung for us and we are on the precipice…but all we need are people who know how to do things. As we still have people who do know how to do things, the trick is to get them to tell some youngsters how to do it. In other words, if we start very soon and begin to genuinely educate people, then just about the time we’re set to collapse, we’ll have a young generation able to step up and keep things working. It’ll be irritating for them as the generation in front of them will be made up of mostly useless people, but they’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that civilization rides on their shoulders…and for all I care, they can send the Tik Tok Influencers to work camps.

We have a very short time remaining where we can transmit civilization to the next generation. If we do, it’ll be fine. If we don’t, it’ll all die…though like as not just after I die. So, this isn’t for me: this is for the grandkids.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Who blew up the Nordstream pipelines? Who in heck knows – if it was blown up, it could be an act of war. But by whom and against whom? Very murky situation – but also very bad as it will increase pressure on global energy supplies as we enter winter.

The main thing here is that we wouldn’t have to care if Pudding Brain wasn’t strangling American energy production.

A couple respectable pollsters (there are a few) are starting to get it together and showing us winning pretty handily in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada – and with good signs in Pennsylvania. The more “stretch” races are in places like Washington and New Mexico. The bottom line is that 25 House and 2 Senate seats are within very easy reach of the GOP and that puts an end to Pudding Brain’s legislative efforts…and if McConnell allows even five federal judgeships to be filled over the next two years, I’ll be surprised.

But some people are starting to see that very much underneath the radar, GOP turnout might come as a huge shock to everyone. Remember, the leadership of the United States is calling us Nazi terrorist threats to Democracy…polling has shown (or, I guess, failed to show: but you know what I mean) the “shy GOP voter” over the past few cycles. This partially explains the massive misses recently – like when the aggregate in Ohio the day before the 2020 election showed it either tied or Trump barely ahead before he went on to win the State by more than 8 points. But the increased hateful rhetoric against GOP voters is possibly making ever more “shy GOP voters”: people who won’t even pick up the phone when the pollster calls…but who are yet determined to vote GOP in November. We’ll see if that happens…but if it does, then November 8th could be a bloodbath. And one sign that it might be happening is that Democrats are spending money in the Washington Senate race…which should be a walkover even in a strong GOP year.

That video I linked to PM Meloni? YouTube has deleted it. Because they are terrified of her…and so a bit of fascism is necessary here, to “protect” people, you see? All just to Save Democracy.

As Hurricane Ian bears down on Florida, the Democrats and the MSM (BIRM) are praying for a catastrophe they can blame on DeSantis. These are very sick and twisted people.

Our Progressive friends would like us dead. For our own good, of course. And to prevent us from Democracy-ing the wrong way.

Gloria all’Italia

Mark Noonan74 Comments

Because I’m old and kinda stupid, I can’t figure out how to embed this video in the post – but if you haven’t seen PM-Elect Giorgia Meloni’s speech , it is all you need to know about why the Globalists hate her. More than anyone else I’ve seen, she gets it. She understand that dehumanization is the goal…to make us mere numbers who consume on command (but only what we’re permitted to consume!).

Watch it. Absorb it. Make it part of your worldview.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

The MSM is increasing the “Democrats are surging to victory” Narrative. Still, though, with the whispered “but not really” articles here and there. They know the Democrats are getting wiped out. Among other reasons, here’s why:

The Dow is down 18.5% so far in 2022. I haven’t even checked my 401K because I don’t need that negative energy in my life (plus I’m wedded to “dollar cost averaging” in my investment strategy).

Oh, and gas prices have started to rise in some areas. And I paid more than $8 for a 12 pack of Coke. And they were nearly out of avocados. And totally out of the Diet Pepsi the Mrs prefers.

Basically, things are bad and getting worse – and the only thing the Democrats have is abortion and they are running hard on it. Now, could there be a solid majority for abortion in America? People so committed to it that they’ll turn the election for the Democrats? I doubt it. We’ll find out November 8th.

Some people have pointed out that it would be strange for Democrats/MSM to lie about how things are going – in other words, if they spend the next 6 weeks lying about how it will be, they’ll look terribly bad when the results are 180 from their assertions. This is a lack of understanding about how lies work – first and foremost, they work. They always work. No lie has even been spoken that didn’t work.

What do I mean? Surely there have been failed lies.

Well, sure. In fact, all lies fail. They can’t do other than fail. But for the liar, that isn’t the point. No liar is good at long-term thinking. Liars lie because they want to wring whatever advantage they can out of the moment. The cheating husband isn’t thinking about how his lies to his wife will work a year from now – he just wants to get away with his adultery right now. For the liar, all lies work because at least for a second, at the bare minimum, you are spending time refuting the lie – you are not advancing your own cause. You are on defense…while the liar already has his next lie lined up…and is advancing his cause while you’re refuting his last lie.

We can never know counter-factuals but it is my assertion that if the mere truth had been told in 2020, Trump would have won better than 60% of the vote and the GOP would have secured very large Congressional majorities. I’m not talking switching the MSM from anti- to pro-Trump: I’m saying that if the mere truth had been spoken, it would have been like that. That Biden was already in massive cognitive decline; that Hunter’s laptop and all the vileness on it was real; that the FBI has spent years lying about Trump/Russia; that Covid escaped from a Chinese lab and that lockdowns weren’t necessary; that VBM was obviously and only a method of voter fraud. On and on and on like that – the incumbent riding that wave of Truth would have crushed the hapless Democrats.

Lies work – even very stupid lies, such as Trump-Russia or the “very fine people” lie which Pudding Brain asserts was his reason for running. They have a corrosive effect – even the most wise are prey to them. Maybe there’s something to it? comes very much into play…but even with all those lies, Trump won more than 11 million more votes than in 2016: and so my assertion about how it would have gone if the truth had been told. So, the lies they’re using here in 2022 will also work…what should be a 50 seat House gain will probably be 30 or so. It’ll work – it’ll keep the Democrats in the game, and for the liars, that is all that matters.

Now, on to the really scary thing: the murder of Cayler Ellingson: this is a watershed moment in the life of our Republic. A kid was hunted down and murdered for his political beliefs. The last time this sort of thing happened the Freedom Riders were trying to end Jim Crow. But there’s a difference – back then, the Establishment was on the side of the hunted. Here in 2022, it is on the side of the hunters. Even the allegedly GOP AG is downplaying it – and the murderer was charged basically with leaving the scene of an accident and given bail…while J6 detainees are sitting in solitary for trespassing. Make no mistake about it – this is very bad. Joe Biden in his Hitlerian speech the other day gave permission for this…and if our Republican leaders don’t start punishing the Democrats for this sort of thing then people will start to defend themselves against perceived threats.

What Do We Really Know?

Mark Noonan32 Comments

A Twitter friend went into the way back machine and reminded me of the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s. I guess you’d have to be at least 50 to have any memory of it at all: so, a lot of the youngsters in the world wouldn’t know what it was about. Of course, you could Google it – but if you did that, you almost certainly won’t find out about it.

Oh, you’d read a lot about it. And what you read would be almost invariably praising it to the skies. But what you probably won’t read about it is that it was nothing more than a Soviet front organization. We were about to build and deploy a type of nuclear weapon the USSR (a) couldn’t build and (b) couldn’t defend against. Our having these weapons while the USSR didn’t would put us in the driver’s seat – the USSR would essentially be forced to throw in the towel on Cold War competition. So, the USSR did the one thing it was actually good at: call forth the Useful Idiots of the West to ensure the USA shot itself in the foot.

I remember it, now, very well. Especially one of the leading voices of it: Dr Helen Caldicott. She was just about everywhere during the time. Highly in demand for your Soviet inspired peace march and conferences around the world. And she was an Authority on it! She knew was she was talking about! After all, she’s a doctor.

Well, a pediatrician…who never had any experience dealing with either nuclear power or weapons…but she fit the bill: someone who seemed oh, so nice and had Smart credentials and how can you argue against her? You can’t hug your kid with nuclear arms!

The drivel almost worked – huge pressure was placed on Reagan and Thatcher to ditch the new weapons. But, they didn’t…and then the weapons (along with other Reagan tactics) did precisely what they were supposed to do: force the Soviets to the table at a disadvantage and eventually unravel their Empire in Europe (the fall of the USSR was really just a bonus that nobody could foresee).

But that isn’t our issue for the moment – the real issue is that a pack of ridiculous lies nearly sunk Reagan’s USSR policy and even though the lies failed at that, they still managed to implant into the public mind that nuclear power is somehow extra dangerous and that the only safe thing to do with nuclear power is have nothing to do with it. By this time in our history, almost all our electricity production should come from nuclear power. A whole series of plants all across America should be humming with cheap, clean nuclear energy providing far more than our greatest need. We’re not because of people like Caldicott got themselves fooled and then managed to fool enough other people.

And, heck, I have to admit – back there in the late 80s and early 90s, I was wary of nuclear power. I still figured we should go for it, but I had this mental image of it being extra dangerous and we had to take extra care around it…and this was after I got out of the Navy, when I had literally stood next to an operating nuclear power plant aboard a submarine. How could I have been so stupid?

Of course it had to be operated properly – but so does any device. Operate a solar plant incorrectly and you’ll cause a lot of problems. We got into our minds, though, that nuke was Super Dangerous! Thousands of years must pass before it is clean! For goodness sake, at no point did people stop living in Hiroshima. A few days after the bomb went off and all the bodies were cleared away, the people were already starting to rebuild. It is a city of nearly 1.2 million people: far larger than it was when bombed in 1945. Here’s the photo of the iconic dome of Hiroshima. Tell me, what immediately leaps out here?

That is doesn’t quite look like the wasteland of 1945…the trees really take away from the whole End of the World vibe we’re supposed to get here.

Obviously, nuclear weapons are very destructive and nuclear power is something that you have to be careful with…but there is clearly a bit of a mental psychosis in the popular imagination about it which is not supported by things we can easily observe. Things we can know just by knowing them. I doesn’t take special knowledge or insight to know that Hiroshima is a thriving city…but we, in a sense, don’t know it…and so we fear nuclear power and think that using a nuclear weapon is unthinkable.

And then you start to ponder: what else are we refusing to know? How much of what we “know” are lies?

You can do this yourself: just take some subject and think about it. Think about what you know but then take the crucial step: pretend you don’t know it and think about it for a bit. Does what you “know” match up with what you think? Like this:

One of the things you’ll find asserted – in books, movies, documentaries, everywhere – is that the Anglo-American alliance could not have defeated Nazi Germany without the USSR. This is an article of faith. It is true and may not be questioned. If you do, you’re an idiot. I mean, think about it – at least 5 million German and Axis soldiers fell against the USSR. If the USSR hadn’t killed them, then they would have all been turned against us and we never could have won!

Makes sense, right? I mean, that is a lot of dead Krauts and it would have taken us a powerful long time to off them, ourselves. But when examined, it simply falls apart.

At the end of the war, more than 21 million Americans and Brits were in the armed forces. This does not count British Empire forces: even excluding Britain’s Indian Army, this probably worked out to two or three million more. But lets just go with the Yanks and the Limeys.

By 1945, the Brits were at maximum strength: 5 million was about what their population could sustain in the field. The USA could still call up three or four million more than we had, though that would be pushing it. The Germans, if they strained every nerve to the breaking point, could maybe get 10 million into uniform. Starting to see something here? Just the Anglo-Americans, alone, vastly outnumbered the Germans. Throw in the Italians and minor Axis allies and you still have a big advantage for the Anglo-Americans. When you add in that the UK/USA had vastly more economic capacity than the entire Axis (including Japan) and had open access to all the resources in the world what you conclude is that regardless of how any particular engagement went, the only question on defeating Germany was how long it was going to take? Having the USSR in got the job done in 1945, rather than 1946 or 1947. That’s it. Good thing, of course; but certainly far different from “we must be thankful because without the USSR we couldn’t have won the war.”

And who likely floated the idea that we had to have the USSR? The USSR – and their useful idiots in the United States. Starting with those who gave away the store at Yalta in order to get Russia into a war against Japan we had already won.

That is just one mental exercise which, once concluded, lays to rest a myth which is believed really for no other reason than it has been repeated over and over again. But I think we all have to start doing this – start thinking entirely fresh. Roll it around in your. They say this happened: well, does it make sense that it would happen, or happen that way? They say we must do this: why? They say we have retain this policy or alliance: are we sure?

Last night I posted a Tweet where I asserted that the US government must keep no secrets. That a Republic must do her business in the open for all the citizens to see as it is done. Very smart people said we can’t have that – even George Washington believed in keeping diplomatic secrets! Well, sure: if Washington was President today, I’d probably trust him to keep some things confidential. But we’ve got Pudding Brain and his merry band of morons running the show: you really want them to be able to keep what they’re doing secret from you?

But I came to this conclusion by a bit of a winding intellectual road and it just flashed in my mind that secrets are for con artists You don’t keep secret honest dealings – you keep a con secret because if your con gets out into the open, enough people will see it in time to warn your mark off. Heck, even God doesn’t really keep secrets from us – He’s got some Mysteries, but He has shown them to us: we just can’t fully understand God. Go figure. But secrets are just not good – and in government, they are downright bad. And so, the whole FBI/CIA/NSA “National Security” apparatus, in my view, has to be ditched. It is keeping secrets mostly to hide its incompetence. But I only got to this view by thinking anew about everything – by taking nothing for granted. I got here by thinking – and we really do have only two ways to live:

  1. By thought that has been thought out.
  2. By thought that hasn’t been thought out.

For nigh to a century, we’ve been going on “not thought out”. I think we need to change that. We need to find out what we really know.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan38 Comments

Of course sending the migrants to Martha’s Vineyard was a stunt – but it was a very good stunt. So was sending some to the VP’s official residence. Governor Abbot had been sending migrants to sanctuary cities for a while…but it took DeSantis to figure out how to make it really noticeable.

And that was the point of the exercise – to get the issue in front of the American people. Since Pudding Brain took office, our borders have been open and illegals have been flooding across…and Pudding Brain’s people were shipping these people all over the country…often at night and usually to Red States. Nobody really knows how many have come across since January 20th, 2021, but it has got to be in the multiple millions by now. And nobody is checking on who these people are – in and amongst the people just looking for a job and a better life are likely scores of thousands of hardened criminals and terrorists. And the MSM simply wasn’t covering it – the border States knew about it. Those of us on the Right knew about it…but the mass of the American people did not know about it. Now, they do.

It must be kept in mind that if we had a media – even a liberal media – which merely told the truth, then the whole world would be different. What is reported and how it is reported – even before you add in the outright lies – largely determines what is in the public mind and thus how the public decides. The mere truth and Trump would have won 70 percent of the vote in 2020. If people were really informed just what sort of utter scumbag Joe Biden has been his entire adult life – and if they hadn’t been fed a steady diet of lies about Trump – then only the most mindlessly partisan people in America would have voted for Pudding Brain. And not only would Trump have won in an epic landslide, but the GOP would have likely won Constitution-amending majorities in Congress.

The problem the GOP has is twofold:

  1. An unwillingness to point out what the other side is really like.
  2. A media system which has as its primary focus hiding what the other side is doing.

Take the abortion issue – supposedly, the GOP will now lose (or only barely win) because in getting the Dobbs decision, an infuriated mass of female voters will show up to smack the GOP down. This ignores that at least half of women are pro-Life. It ignores the tens of thousands who showed up every year, for forty years, in often freezing temperatures, to March for Life in DC since Roe came down. It ignores that when NARAL and PP get a mob together, it is paid, professional organizers renting a mob to shout for the cameras. It ignores the fact that as the overtly pro-Life party, the GOP has done better since Roe than before. The media says abortion is popular and they’ll produce an endless string of polls to buttress their assertion…but in actions and votes, the whole strength is on the pro-life side. And the GOP simply never pointed it out while the MSM was hiding that the Democrats position on abortion is federally funded on demand until the moment of birth.

So, too, on immigration. The Democrat position is open borders – and the MSM hides this by simply not reporting on what is going on at the border. When the MSM does talk about immigration, it is some pull-the-heartstrings story about some poor guy getting deported…not the tens of thousands flooding in at the hands of ruthless drug cartels. They don’t mention the illegals raped and murdered along the way. Fifty illegals show up in Martha’s Vineyard and the media is all over it, fifty suffocate in a truck because their coyote screwed them over…crickets. What DeSantis and Abbot did was to find the most effective way to point out the Democrat position…and show them up as hypocrites because when it became their community, they called in the Army and bounced those migrants in less than 24 hours.

With the possibility that DeSantis might be the GOP nominee in 2024 the MSM has now decided that DeSantis is worse than Trump. Because of course.

But we’re all worse than Trump, aren’t we? Essentially, to be in opposition to the Democrats is to be an Enemy of the State. The circle is complete – the Democrat party, infiltrated by Marxists since McGovern’s campaign in 1972, is now de-facto Bolshevik. This is very bad – because Enemies of the State are to be destroyed. We still have a window of opportunity to stop this, but only if we ruthlessly exercise power when we win it.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan75 Comments

Starting to see the hedge posts from the Pundit class – “although the Democrats stand a good chance in November, there are indicators that things may go badly”. This is just so that when their poll models come up short on November 8th, they’ll be able to refer back to these posts to show, “see? I told you it wasn’t in the bag!”. The grift must go on! And for each post injecting a little reality into the debate, they’ve got a hundred from fantasy-land.

The bottom line is that the fundamentals still favor the GOP – if it is just a normal first mid-term, the Democrats will certainly lose the House and will likely lose the Senate (the sleeper elections here, for me, are New Hampshire and Colorado: outside chance we can win them). When you add into these fundamentals still high prices (including for gas! They want us to be grateful that it went from, here in Las Vegas, $5.25 a gallon to $4.45 – gee, thanks Joe!), the recession, the border crisis, rising crime and a general sense of incompetence and failure at the top, we could see some very strange results on November 8th. It is hold on to your hats: let’s see what happens. But Joe Biden’s term ends on November 8th…with the House, if nothing else, his legislative agenda is finished.

What we’re not seeing from the GOP leadership is a full understanding of what the Base is expecting supposing the GOP wins both houses – we’re not looking for ways to work with Democrats. We want unrelenting war. Hearings. Investigations. Government shut-downs. If necessary, bust the filibuster and just send popular bill after popular bill to Joe’s desk for him to veto. McConnell, as I’ve noted before, is just not the man for this hour – and I honestly don’t think he wants to be the leader of a MAGA GOP. Hopefully, he can be eased out. McCarthy is on a little firmer ground…but if he gives us “compromise” on things like guns and border security, there will be a revolt in the GOP Caucus which will be more MAGA than ever before come January.

It is time for lines to be drawn – we’re the party of freedom and we’re going to prove it.

Youngsters are finding that hooking up with people on Tinder isn’t working out too well. We could have told them that – but, kids don’t listen much on that score. What will be cool is that those who survive this will carefully instruct their sons and daughters on right conduct.

Turns out that it has been Federal law since 1960 that election records – every last scrap of paper related to them – are supposed to be preserved by the election officials. This will not surprise you: of the 100 largest counties, 94 did not keep such records. As most large counties are Democrat-run, there ya go. It has been my contention really since about 2003 that in the deepest Blue areas, nobody has the foggiest notion of how many votes are cast and for who. Given what I’ve seen since then, I’m more and more of the conviction that the votes are just made up – whatever is needed to produce the desired results, that is what is announced. We’ve got to think about this: in the deepest Blue areas illiteracy is common as is welfare dependency…illiterate welfare bums do not have a high propensity to turn out. Especially as on the local level, the result is pre-determined (like there is any chance a GOPer – or even an anti-Establishment Democrat – can win in places like Chicago and San Francisco…no matter how bad things get). The attempted recount of Michigan in 2016 was another eye-opener. It was quickly shut down as they started opening ballot boxes marked “500 ballots” only to find, say, 20 or so in there: that is something which didn’t get a lot of MSM airplay!

What keeps us afloat right now is that Democrats don’t have total control of the process – and the reason they are trying to impose federal law on all voting is because they want that control. What we have to do is ensure that where we do get power, we implement Florida-style rules to ensure Democrats can’t cheat. And when we have federal power, send federal agents into the deep Blue areas to monitor the elections…the first step being to simply count how many people show up and compare that to reported votes. The Democrats have always cheated – and they never, not even once, cheated just a little bit. They are always looking to alter the result in their favor. They just put the cheating into overdrive in 2020 to get Trump out. They will continue to cheat, on an ever grander scale, unless we stop them.

9/11 at 21

Mark Noonan6 Comments

I’ve been puzzled about what to write regarding 9/11. It has been a long while and a lot has happened.

The horror of it all still lives in the mind, but we must keep in mind that unless you’re over 30, you don’t have any real memory of it. A very large portion of the American population already views 9/11 as, say, I viewed Pearl Harbor…only through the eyes of older people.

However one views the event of 9/11, the basic result for the United States has been unmitigated disaster. We are weaker and far more divided than we were on that September morning.

First off, many of us complain about the Deep State and our complaints started to surface as Trump took office in 2017 – but now, with hindsight, we realize the Deep State has been screwing things up for a long while. We can’t escape the fact that the hijackers were let in by the Deep State. Allowed to train by the Deep State. Allowed to board the planes by the Deep State. All our military, intelligence and law enforcement, combined, couldn’t stop a few idiots with box cutters from killing 3,000 of us. And then not a single person in the Deep State paid for it.

In an honest, healthy society a lot of people would have been shot or imprisoned for that failure…as it is, I don’t recall anyone getting so much as a reprimand. We all had to come together, right? And we did – and we let them skate. Because we thought their failure was just bad luck. It wasn’t. No, I’m not saying they deliberately allowed it to happen – but I am saying they made the conscious choice to not see what was coming. Seeing what was coming meant having to take action to stop it…and it was much easier to just look the other way. And, so, they did.

Secondly, we went to war – and we expended thousands of lives and trillions of dollars…and killed untold numbers of foreigners. And, for what? For the Taliban being back in Kabul and the Mullahs in Iran now about to get massively rewarded by us for…for I really can’t tell why we’re rewarding them. But, mark it, we’re about to give the store away to them allegedly to stop a nuclear program but we all now it won’t…but the store will still be given even though, on balance, it would be better for us to just give them nothing and let them build their nuke because they won’t use it…not against us or Israel because in either case the retaliation will be far worse for them than any damage they do to us, if they can even successfully launch a nuke at Israel with her Iron Dome.

And now the Patriot Act created supposedly to fight the enemy is being turned on us – as our own government tells us that we’re worse than the perpetrators of 9/11 and that some white, Christian guy is worse than a child-trafficking Taliban terrorist.

So, what am I supposed to think? Am I supposed to get misty eyed. Raise high the flag?

I just don’t know – there’s a sickness in our nation and I’m coming around to thinking that curing it is more important than anything else.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan46 Comments

The assertion about the mid-terms is that the Dobbs decision is motivating female voters to turn out for Democrats. Is there any truth to this claim? Only in polling. But, as I’ve pointed out before, polling is the political metric most open to manipulation.

This also leaves out the fact that not all women back abortion. I know the the MSM will never cover such a thing, but the bottom line is that women have been leading the charge against Roe ever since the decision was handed down. Would not their victory against overwhelming odds and after so many years of struggle motivate them to cement their achievement into a pro-life Congress?

For me, I just don’t see abortion as being that great a motivator for the Democrats outside of the urban and suburban upper class white women who were going to vote for them anyway. Might get a few more of them to actually show up in November, but not in any numbers necessary to save Democrat bacon.

I stand by my prediction – made months ago – that the GOP is heading for a blowout win on November 8th. Could I be wrong? Of course I could. I’m human! But we’re in a recession. Food prices are high. Crime is rising. Foreign affairs are a mess. Its the first midterm for the Democrats since their victory. The GOP gained House seats in 2020. They only need a few to claim a majority. Voter registration and primary participation numbers (even after Dobbs) clearly favor the GOP all around the country (it won’t matter because the State is so Democrat, but in Hawaii the GOP primary turnout was up like 125% or some such).

And lets think about something – if you’re a Democrat you sure in heck don’t want to talk about the economy or crime or foreign affairs. But you have to talk about something. Sure, you’re talking Trump…but you can’t just talk about him, right? So, what? How about abortion? That’s the ticket – talk abortion. Maybe frame it to scare our halfwit female voters (something like 36% of college educated white women agree with the sentence “some men can get pregnant”; rely on it, the number of GOP women included in that 36% is next to zero)? Goose that turnout and maybe turn a few narrow, suburban losses into holds? And then, hey preseto, here comes a bunch of polls saying that women are talking 24/7 about abortion and, buddy let me tell you, they’re gonna make the GOP pay for it! Convenient how everything in the Establishment comes together just the way the Democrats would want, right?

Now, maybe women are fired up to save Roe? Could be. I guess. If so, then we on the right have a far larger problem than we suspected. We’ll find out for sure on November 8th…but I’m sticking with my prediction.

Over in Pennsylvania Dr Oz is doing all he can to win – he’s barnstorming the State while Fetterman apparently still has a long way to go on recovery from his recent stroke. As I’ve been saying for a while, Pennsylvania is the next Florida. Voter registration trends have been massive for the GOP year after year. It might seem like the State is still favorable to Democrats, but that is an illusion mostly brought about by habit and really, really bad polling. Remember, in 2018 4 of the last 5 polls in Florida showed a substantial lead in the governors race for Gillum…only to have DeSantis win. And it wasn’t like the polls were close – the day before the election Quinninpiac had Gillum up by 7. So, I take those polls showing Fetterman (who can barely speak) up by 10 over Oz with a truckload of salt. Same, too, with the governors race in PA. Some people got mad the other day when Oz said he would have voted to certify the 2020 results…but I didn’t. I pointed out early on that Oz will have to go off-MAGA on at least some issues to be electorally viable in a State trending Red but not quite there yet. Taking a contrary position on the 2020 election result is the most meaningless off-MAGA gesture he could make.

Latinos are trending GOP. Hard. And Democrats are starting to notice and it is really pissing them off. So, what do you think they’re doing about it? Reassessing how they approach the community? Reconsidering things like Latinx and telling school kids they can change gender? Maybe concentrate on policies which will provide the sort of well-paid, blue collar jobs which sustain most Latino families these days? Oh, heck no! What made you think they’d do anything like that?

What they’re doing in response to the GOP gains in the Latino community is figuring that the GOP is lying to them and that Latinos are too stupid to figure this out:

There is nobody quite so racist as a white liberal – they simply cannot believe that any POC would disagree with them and if they do, it is because they’re stupid…and so need white liberals to speak for them.

I do believe – and it is one of the reasons for my prediction of a GOP blowout win – that Latinos will show that they want something different in November. This vote will not necessarily be an endorsement of the GOP: it will be far more, in my view, a rejection of the Left than anything else. To secure the long term loyalty of Latino voters, the GOP will have to do the concrete things necessary to show them we’re serious – a strong economy; low crime; good schools. That sort of thing. As for the Democrats, their party strength is in upper class white women and black women in general. This is not enough to sustain them in power. If they lose Latinos (and they are) and if support among black males starts to crumble (there is some indication of this) then Democrats will be reduced to an urban rump incapable of winning national power.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan64 Comments

They’re burning candles for light and shutting down trains in Europe because they lack sufficient power supplies…last I read was some places were experiencing a 500% increase in power bills: this is unofficial rationing as most power companies in Europe are either government owned or functionally government controlled. And it is just amazing. Europe sits on vast coal supplies – British coal, especially, is high quality. They’ve got overflowing buckets of the stuff…now just sitting in the ground (read an article about how a French coal town, its mines long shut down, was building a coal mining museum…which was just pathetic). They also have nuclear capability – with French nuclear plant designs arguably the best and cleanest in the world, but they’re all shutting down their nuke plants. They’re now sitting in the dark because to be “green” they had to outsource their energy supplies to Russia…and then they decided to fight a proxy war with Russia, who has now said, “hey, turns out the gas pipeline doesn’t work. Don’t call us, we’ll call you when we’ve got it up and running again”.

Europe, by the way, is cold in winter. About half of Europe is north of the 49th parallel…which is our northern border (absent Alaska). We think of Juneau of being way the heck up there by the North Pole…for Europeans, that is just Stockholm and St Petersburg. The glorious weather of September is going to lead into the cold, dark and wet times of October to March. Unless Europe rapidly gets a grip on this, people are going to freeze to death this winter all over Europe.

This is the future the Ruling Class wants for us – remember, we’re the carbon they want to reduce.

A couple former Department of Homeland Security employees developed a way to use our cell phones to track our movements…and they then sell the resultant data to law enforcement. You can rely on it that if you’re trying to track a murder suspect, this is great…but it is also surveillance without a warrant, with law enforcement (so far) getting away with it by saying, “hey, we just bought the data”. This is totalitarian – this is a step towards applying China’s social credit system here in the USA. This practice, and anything like it, needs to be legislatively banned. The United States government must not be able to collect data on us without a warrant.

Gonna need some common sense knife control in Canada, I guess.

The Irish Times doesn’t like The Rings of Power, the Lord of the Rings spinoff on Amazon. Their complaint; the proto-hobbits are made out like low-rent Irish peasants. To me, as the descendant of low-rent Irish peasants, that is the least complaint. My gripe is that it is boring. I get that they had to make a lot of strong female characters because Girrlllll Power of modern times. I have no complaints about Middle Earth now becoming multi-ethnic (totes cool with black Hobbits and dwarves). But what I don’t get is how they couldn’t write an exciting story based on Tolkien’s works.

For those of you not fully versed in Tolkien, I’ll nutshell:

First Age: mostly revolved around the war between the Elves and Morgoth, who is a Satan-like fallen angel who wishes to rule the created world. He is finally defeated by other, non-fallen angels after centuries of war and defeat and the instrument of his defeat is a man who makes the perilous journey to seek aid against Morgoth.

Second Age: The men who aided the Elves are given a home removed from Middle Earth; they are granted long life and great power and over time build themselves up a magnificent civilization only slightly lower than that of the Elves. Meanwhile, in Middle Earth, Elves, men and dwarves live a much more perilous existence and over time come under attack from Sauron, the lieutenant of Morgoth who eventually forges the Ring of Power to exert control over all of Middle Earth. Over long years, Sauron is finally defeated but not destroyed.

Third Age: that is the bit with the Hobbits and finally getting rid of the Ring.

So, if you want to make some new stuff, you’re going to go with First or Second Age – Rings of Power goes with Second Age but it appears to take almost nothing from Tolkien save some character and place names. It is, as I said, dull – the action sequences are too dependent upon CGI, the acting is two dimensional and the writing just terrible. I’m going to give it a couple more episodes to see if there is an improvement – the Elrond character seems ok so far and the mysterious man Galadriel meets has some promise. So, we’ll see.