Madison Avenue (You Know: Bullsh**) Governs America

Mark Noonan34 Comments

There are persistent rumors that the Beatles didn’t play their own instruments. I recall first hearing such in the 1980’s. Probably no way to every fully prove or disprove the rumors. One thing has always struck me about the Beatles – they stopped touring in 1965. The official reason was that it was a hassle and the stage equipment couldn’t reproduce the studio sound. I can understand the hassle part of it, but in 1967 Monterey Pop happened with Hendrix giving one of his best live performances. If Hendrix could do it, so could the Beatles. But they didn’t. Gigantic amounts of money were left on the table as any Beatles tour especially in the wake of Sgt Pepper’s would have been a monster of attendance.

And that gets me to thinking that maybe they weren’t all that good…and so the rumors of session musicians re-recording Beatles tracks after the boys went home for the day sound credible.

Don’t get me wrong: they had some very good things going on there. Some of the lyrics that they wrote are sublime. McCartney by accounts of other musicians is a top flight bass player. But everyone agrees that Ringo is a merely competent drummer while neither John nor George were very good guitar players. It could be that the difficulty of what was being produced from 1966 on simply stymied the Beatles‘ in any desire to tour and so expose their limited range of musical talent. Back then, a live performance required band members who could hit the notes precisely – they didn’t have the electronic tricks that allow modern live performances to go ahead even on the thinnest talent. And even very talented musicians like those in Rush used such tricks because, hey, there’s only three of them and if you wrote a song using six instruments at once, kinda hard to pull that off with just the three of you on stage.

I bring this up because it doesn’t matter and it also illustrates how a public face is manufactured in the modern world. We of a certain age all have a mental image of the Beatles…and some of it is probably true. But a lot of it is marketing. Lots and lots of marketing. Lots and lots, that is, of people spinning things for a certain effect.

And that brings me to my real point: they don’t just go it for rock stars. They do it for anyone they please. I was trolling through Netflix the other day looking for something that wouldn’t be actually bad to watch and up pops an ad for Mayor Pete. A bio-pic on Buttigieg. It looked nauseating because even from the few clips in the ad you could tell it was hagiography: what a wonderful guy! I bet in there are bits about his “struggle” growing up gay in Indiana (as if anyone cared) and his vision for America…which is cloudy as he was recently talking up racist roads while supplies piled up in ports. What are they doing? They are prepping him for 2028. Not 2024: that is Kamala’s. There’s a chance she gets so horribly unpopular that the Democrats opt for someone else, but absent a complete Team Pudding Brain meltdown, she’ll be the standard bearer in 2024. And they know she’s gonna lose. So, here’s Pete – the future! But, what a complete zero! From a well off family, he from infancy has been on The Track – the set of schools and accomplishments which are designed to provide credentials. He’s got his Kennedy prize, his degree and his Rhodes Scholarship. He’s been a product all along – and now they are trying to sell him to all of us.

But this is what we get, right? It is what we’ve gotten for a long time. It is how we got Bill Clinton and Barack Obama…and the Bushes. If you are favored by birth or the luck of who likes you, you get the process – you get to check off all the boxes and you get to rise ever higher. As long as you don’t upset the people guiding you along the path, your life is set. Only a very few of such will get to be President simply for space and time limitations…but all of them, rely on it, have that ambition. It is fed to them. They are called brilliant (they get awards that prove it!) and kind…and the MSM only speaks well of them. And they get to have absurd bio-pics made about their lives and they’ll get those cutesy interviews on daytime TV (Side note: in The Man in the High Castle – one of the few things worth watching on TV the past ten years, though it ended a little lame – the writers beautifully captured this in a scene where the wife of the Bad Guy gets such a TV spot and it is horrid cringe, on purpose…).

And it doesn’t matter how badly you screw up! Just like the packaged rock star will have things smoothed over, so, too, will you! David Bowie could go on a year long drug fueled bender where hundreds of people see him acting like a complete lunatic…and, hey, not a peep in the press about it while it was ongoing and only years later in some sort of retrospective is it brought up. Bowie was the product and the people who packaged him weren’t going to let something like massive drug use wreck the program. You’ll notice that the rock stars don’t often die of OD’s any longer…because they’ve got minders who make sure they don’t. Nobody is going to invest massive resources in another Hendrix, Joplin or Morrison again only to have it end with the product drowning in their own vomit. Someone like Buttigieg can louse things up six ways to Sunday (as, you know, he currently is with transportation) and that won’t matter. It’ll be smoothed over. He won’t be asked the difficult question which would expose the fact that Rhodes Scholarships are passed out on connections not smarts. The marketing program will continue…and if Buttigieg winds up as President and we then get to experience his complete incapacity on a nationwide scale, he’ll still be protected. After all, after he’s done destroying the nation in the White House he’s still useful for grifting book deals and providing a bit of star power.

Sure, every now and again someone on The Track has to be sacrificed for the greater good (ie, so the reality can continue be covered up as the proles are given a pre-selected victim to hate). Weinstein is the most recent example of this and he got it really bad in the form of a criminal prosecution. Former Governor Cuomo seems to be set to get that axe, as well: but you and I know how rare that is. Toobin is the more usual course: gets caught spanking the monkey on a Zoom call and in a couple months he’s back at it on CNN saying Trump is stupid (perhaps he is – but he wasn’t yanking the crank in a meeting, sport). Right now, former Senator Franken is rehabilitating his career. Doubt he’ll go for elective office again…but you can already see the future in that he’ll be back intoning solemnly how lousy we all are pretty quick.

Different careers have some slight differences in them for those on The Track, but its really all the same. For an Army officer hoping to be a general one day, getting the ticket punched as a combat vet is a crucial as the guy on the Tenure track to get published…that the combat might well have been a lost battle and the published article sub-literate drivel doesn’t matter. The Credential is “combat vet” or “published author”. The box has been checked…they are now absolutely better than everyone who hasn’t been in combat or published and they are just as good as the successful commander and the brilliant author. But, even better than that – if you’re on The Track, your credential is worth more than someone not on it. Your fellow Lt Colonel with his pesky ideas about combat readiness will be removed from the promotions list by those helping you along…and so his victory over the enemy will mean absolutely nothing while your bronze star for not getting more than 20 of your own soldiers killed will shine brightly.

Here’s the really bad news: we’re on the third or fourth generation of people selected for advancement based on wealth and/or connections. It has been happening since the 1950’s. Dolt A begat Dolt B who begat Dolt C…who really likes the cut of the jib of that intern who got the gig because his Mom is friends with the person passing them out. It is a huge negative feedback loop and each generation is worse than the previous because the one thing the incompetent can’t stand to have around them is someone competent. These people don’t look for someone better than themselves…they’re forever on the look out for the most mindlessly pliable person available. This is why things progressively suck…why even very basic things are being done badly. Why, you know, cargo is piling up in ports when we’ve were moving cargo easily just a few months ago and the guys in charge haven’t the foggiest notion of what to do.

We make our jokes about burning it all down – but in a real sense we must do it. Any random 100 people pulled in off the streets and placed in charge of, say, the FBI will better ensure criminals are caught and justice is done than the people currently in there. They can’t possibly do worse…and as they would go in with the mindset of catching bad guys and protecting the innocent, you’d actually get at least some of that…unlike now, when we get none of it. If we win in 2024, we have to top to bottom start getting rid of the credentialed incompetents. We have to: if we don’t, these idiots will destroy the country and then insist that China give them a medal for it.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan43 Comments

Prices are rising and real wages are falling and the alleged President’s approval rating officially is in the low-40s. This is the sort of thing which causes political meltdowns. At this moment in time, any Democrat in a district or State D+10 or less should be running as if they’re losing.

Real problem for them: if the economic situation doesn’t change, then it won’t matter how they run: they’re going to lose. And even D+15 might not be enough.

The kicker: the only way to fix this is to kill inflation…but doing that causes a recession.

Looks like we won’t return to the Moon before 2025. I’m actually ok with that – I don’t want Pudding Brain’s name on the plaque.

Masked up California is having much more Covid than unmasked Florida. Meanwhile, Sweden which never masked is done with it. The initial “15 days to slow the spread” was, in the event, a mistake – but, an understandable one. Everything we’ve done since then – every last effort – has been useless or counterproductive. But the Democrats won’t let this go: they just extended the mask mandate here in Vegas. No reason. There’s no science behind it. It is just because. Saw a recent poll where Democrats believe that the hospitalization rate for unvaccinated Covid is 50%. It is less than 1%. But if you watch the MSM, that is what you believe because that is what they imply with their fear mongering.

Kyle Rittenhouse is, as we all know, completely innocent. But we’ll have to see what the jury says – from what I can glean from the trial, the prosecutor has no case. Remember: Rittenhouse is charged, among other things, with first degree murder – meaning the State is arguing that Rittenhouse had malice aforethought: that he went there intending to kill. Even the most negative reading of Rittenhouse’s actions don’t allow such an absurd view. But that is what they’re going for. But the reality is that rioters went after him and he merely defended himself. There is zero indication that he sought the situation where shooting might occur. The only thing they might have him on is a misdemeanor gun possession charge. So, we’ll see what happens. But even if convicted, expect that he’ll be released on appeal.

The usual weak sisters on the Right are arguing variously that Rittenhouse did wrong and/or that he shouldn’t have been there. My question on that is: why shouldn’t he have been there? Are we all supposed to just clear out when the DNC is paying Antifa to riot? Is that the rule? That when they are working up their riots we just have to let it all happen? Not even be on the streets we have a perfect right to be on? This is what, I think, irritates us most about the Right – their assumption that we have a responsibility to make life easy for the Left…that they are allowed to do whatever they damn well please, and we just have to let it happen.

Mayor Pete was out there grappling with our transportation crisis the other day by…complaining about racist bridges. Yes. You read that correctly. Seems that the Left claims that certain bridges around New York City were made deliberately low so that buses filled with blacks and Puerto Ricans couldn’t get to the beach. Of course that is all drivel – the bridges were built that way because back in those days that is how you did that particular sort of design. But it was interesting to see. The hook the Left had was that the designer was, indeed, a racist. No doubt about that. Plenty of contemporary documentary evidence that he disparaged non-white people on a regular basis. With that, a whole theory was crafted. But what the theory always lacked was any evidence that the designer – and everyone else involved in a massive highway project – was making design decisions based on race.

And that is how the Left always does it. They create a theory and then find some nugget of fact to hang the whole thing on. The idea, for instance, that the conquest of North America was a deliberate attempt at genocide is based upon a letter written by a British general in which he suggests delivering the blankets of smallpox victims to the Natives. That it was a frustrated general at his wits end on trying to defeat wily Native warriors is left entirely out of the fact. He wasn’t trying to kill all Natives – he was trying to win a war. And the kicker is that it wouldn’t have worked – because that isn’t how smallpox spreads. The idea was based upon the very flawed idea of disease transmission back in those days. And that then gets you to understand the crucial aspect of the European conquest: it was European diseases, carried unknowingly by Europeans, which did the most damage. Most Natives who died of European disease never even laid eyes on an European. And this massive die-off caused gigantic social disruption among the survivors. They started to question their own ancestral ways – and swiftly started to adopt European ways to the maximum amount possible. By the time Lewis and Clark carried out the first American expedition to the west, the Native tribes way of life was massively and irretrievably changed from pre-Columbian times. But there is goes – and now it is pretty much being taught as fact in America’s schools: we came here to kill. Because we’re just rat bastards. Because we’re white.

Is Evil Banal, or Fun?

Mark Noonan2 Comments

A Twitter friend of mine put up the famous Hannah Arendt quote about evil:

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

That is the quote written in relation to the trial of Eichmann. To Arendt, Eichmann seemed such a zero. Just this nobody of a man who, using first-rate bureaucratic methods, sent millions to their deaths. I’ve never fully accepted that view. I think that Arendt – and many others – wanted a simple explanation which also denigrated the evildoers. So, Eichmann wasn’t thinking – had he paused for a moment to think about what he was doing, he would have stopped. So the theory goes. And it might have been true, to a certain extent. It all depends on what the person thinks about.

I don’t believe in the mindless human being. Even the simplest among us are still capable of thought. Absent some serious physical malfunction in the brain, every human being can figure things out. Some obviously better than others, but everyone can. It is how we survive given how incapable we are of surviving on sheer physical strength. At some point in his life, Eichmann thought about things – perhaps he was stupid, but he still thought about them and came to the conclusion that having Jews and other “subhumans” around was bad for people. Real people, in his mind, being only Germans. His actions then flowed from that as did all of the Nazis.

While in Hitler’s mind massacre may have always been in the cards, for most Nazis it wasn’t. Hans Frank spoke of the innocence he and his fellow Nazis had when the rose to power – claiming that had you told them in 1933 about 1945, they wouldn’t have believed it. For most of them, this was perhaps true.

But even in those supposed days of Frank’s innocence in 1933, he was ordering people arrested and putting his well trained legal mind to work providing quasi-legal justification for the actions. And that gets me to my view of why evil happens. It is fun. I take Chesterton’s view of evil:

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

I think Ms. Arednt was denying the cat. And I think this denial is because people who don’t believe in any real God still want to believe that there is objective right and wrong. That anyone who thinks will, you see, end up thinking as they do. Arednt, of course, was a secular, Socialist German Jew. Not much room for God in that worldview. But she had to figure out how the Nazis could happen. On the other hand, I doubt she spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the Communists could happen. But that isn’t what detains us here. I think Chesterton had it right. So right, in fact, that I used his insight in the upcoming Book VII of the Mirrors series. Set about twelve years after Book V: Kings and Queen (which I’ll be releasing next month), two of the main characters discuss how one of them used to be one of the bad guys (I’ve blanked out the names so there isn’t any spoiler here):

As they rode along, **** found himself right next to ****. For the first time, he didn’t feel angry about that.

“Thanks, again, for helping me,” **** said.

“You’re welcome, once again,” **** replied.They rode along again for a few minutes.

“You were with them, ****. What was it like?”

“Them?”

“The enemy. What was it like?”

“It was glorious,” **** said to ****’ surprise. **** noticed the look on ****’ face.

“You won’t have read him here, but there was a very wise man who wrote poetry and books back in my home world: he pointed out that there is an exquisite pleasure to be had in skinning a cat.”

“Cat?”

“Small animal. But, mainly, he wasn’t trying to horrify people: he was pointing out that in doing evil, there is great pleasure to be had. It is false pleasure and it leads to genuine death, but it is pleasure. If it wasn’t there, people would be evil far less often, if at all. It is in all of us, ****. Me. You. Even your mother. The capacity to do evil is there.”

“This I know from the priests,” **** said. “But what was it like while you were in it?”

“As I said, glorious. I had power and no limits and I could do as I wished and no one would ever call me to account. I took what I wanted and anyone who even looked crossways at me got the axe. It was fun, ****. It is like the most heady wine you’ve ever had and the more you have, the more you want. And the further you go down, the harder it is to come back.

That, I think, is the best explanation for evil. Not bad; evil. There’s a difference. A man who kills another because he caught him with his wife has done bad, but not evil. But the action of shoving a Jew into a gas chamber is no different in kind (though massively different in degree) than robbing a man of his wallet or forcing a woman into sex: it is the fun of being able to do something to someone who either cannot or dares not resist. Solzhenitsyn noted this as well: how it was clear that some interrogators, faced with a determined prisoner, just let themselves go and felt like real men when they had beaten a defenseless person to a pulp.

And as my character notes, the more you do it, the worse you get and the harder it is to crawl back. A Nazi scharfuhrer who beat up a Jew in Nuremberg in 1933 was probably just the sturmbannfuhrer to command an Einsatzcommando in 1941. And though there are plenty of stories of Nazi executioners having psychological problems, its not like they stopped killing…nor are there many recorded cases of Nazis even going easy on the people they had at their mercy. Indeed, it just seemed to get worse as time went on.

And I think it became almost a competition to see how utterly rotten you could be. A sort of game: “what if I did this to them?”. And then the fun of really going to town on those who finally had enough. Plenty of cases like this in Nazi Germany, and in Stalin’s camps. But, also, in our run of the mill criminals. They don’t start off being the most horrific things they did. Usually started small and then got hideous as time went on. And the key to that is to understand that the “rush” as it were gets harder to achieve. You forced the Jewish lawyer to clean the latrine with a toothbrush and that was a kick…but, once you’ve done that a few times, the rush fades. What else can we do to him? What else can you do to the man you’re robbing? What else can you do to the woman who’s house you broke into? On and on like that – and as noted, the further you go the worse and the harder to stop.

But it isn’t just the evil of physical brutality: there is also emotional evil. The ability to get people to lie on command. To make them say things which sh** all over their own beliefs. This is where our Social Justice Warriors get their fix. The mental torment they put people through is the point. You’ve seen it – like when some impeccably Liberal person is dragged through the mud because they have one opinion which is now decreed to be outside the Party Line. The author of the Harry Potter books is a prime example of this – good for her that she’s rich enough to survive it, but the bottom line is that because she refused to subscribe 100% to the Trans agenda (her objection was that it erased biological women), she was subjected to massive invective…and even though it didn’t get her, it still was very pleasant for those doing it…because it scared everyone on the Left who didn’t have her resources to toe the line. Imagine that – you’re a complete nobody of a purple haired xir…and now people are afraid to cross you because they’ll face social ruin if they do. That is a massive boost to the ego.

And I think this is why punishments used to be so savage. Or, at least, part of the reason. It was a mix of trying to beat civilization into people and to let evil people know that while there is a great pleasure to be had in evil, the end result is to be hung, drawn and quartered. If you’re not entirely familiar with that process, look it up: it was quite grisly. And these days we read about how the people cheered when it happened and we’re all supposed to feel that those cheering were more evil than the condemned. But, it wasn’t so: what the people were cheering was a complete rat-bastard who thought it was fun to do evil getting what he deserved.

Anyways, that is how I view the matter. That in order to stop evil, you have to take away the pleasure those who engage in it feel. That you have, in your turn, to make things so miserable for them that they’ll, possibly, at last understand why what they did was bad.

The Thirteen Must Go: Democrats Delenda Est

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Thirteen Republicans voted with the Democrats on the infrastructure bill. Some of them are people already on their way out, others hope to return in 2023. Those on the way out: who cares? But those who wish to stay should now be forced out. Better to lose their seats altogether than keep them. It must be this way because by voting for this bill they showed they either lack political understanding or have revealed themselves as de-facto Democrats – ie, people who picked the GOP label simply because that was their path to power. In either case, keeping them around works against our interests.

It has been a catastrophically bad six months for the Democrats and it was capped off by blowout losses in the elections this past Tuesday. Things are terrible and getting worse while the Democrats were flailing uselessly in favor of policies that nobody wants. Along comes thirteen Republicans to bail them out. It was an act of treason or idiocy and we must put an end to this sort of thing once for all.

The thing one must understand about Democrats is that, first and last ever since the party was founded, they are absolutely convinced that only with Democrats in power is America a decent place to live. They are certain that the health and safety of the Republic is only assured when they are in power. They do not believe there is a legitimate way for them to be removed from power. When they win, it is the holy expression of the people’s will. When they lose it is the result of a nefarious plot to thwart the will of the people. These days, they don’t even really concede elections. The last Presidential election they gracefully conceded was 1988.

Democrats fight to win all the time. They never give up their goals. If something new comes up, they merely add it to the list and they keep pushing their views no matter how strong the opposition or how many times they fail. Once a goal is announced, they never back down from it. And what was politically impossible ten years ago is now to be proclaimed the common sense, moderate opinion and if you don’t support it you are evil.

Democrats never help the GOP. When was the last time you saw thirteen Democrats join the GOP to pass a bill the GOP didn’t have 218 votes for? For the GOP, it is either have the votes or don’t get the law – for the Democrats, it is one of two things: either they have it and so will do it, or they’ll wait until some GOPers join them. And they always get their GOPers. Oh, sure, they’ll throw a little pork the GOP’s way…Congressman Dipsh** will get that bridge connecting his donor’s land to the Interstate. What does that matter to a Democrat? It not only doesn’t harm them to do it, it helps them – it is more government spending and thus more money flowing through their political base to wind up as donations for the Party. When does the GOP ever get anything for the nation when they don’t have 218 vote? Never.

Those thirteen would have been ok – and, in fact, would have been far more than thirteen – if the GOP – the Party and the people who make up the GOP – had got something. There wasn’t even an effort in that direction. Nancy didn’t have 218 votes. She needed GOP votes. Our best course of action was to let them twist in the wind…and then, when she was really desperate to get something passed, demand our pound of flesh. We could have got funding for the border wall. We could have got money for school choice. At bare minimum we should have got a prohibition against payouts for illegal immigrants who were separated at the border. We got nothing. Meanwhile, in that bill were all sorts of provisions which cement Progressive policy goals and provide a framework for even more Progressive advances in the future. Democrats didn’t get their whole wish-list, but they got some. And they’ll now wait for the next must-pass bill where just enough GOPers will be forthcoming to get it over the top.

We’re very likely to win a Congresional majority next year. What will happen then is that the Senate Democrats will use the filibuster to prevent any bill other than a Continuing Resolution from hitting Biden’s desk. In these CR’s, you can rely on it that Democrats will insert Progressive provisions. If we try to insert things like national CCW or a border wall, they’ll filibuster and wait for the MSM to scare just enough GOPers into going along with stripping out our provisions while keeping their provisions. We’ll be spinning our wheels as badly as we did after 2014.

And then we’ll likely win the White House in 2024. No assurances, but it is a 70/30 chance for us. And, then what? Same thing – nothing gets through the Senate except what the Democrats want. If it doesn’t do lots of things for them, they won’t let it through. They’ll go along with some silly corporate tax break that the GOP touts, but no reform of the FBI, no border security, no encouragement of American manufacturing, no strike back against CRT. All of those will be filibustered and so the GOP won’t even try…and there will always be just enough GOPers to help pass something the Democrats are ok with.

This is why we’re here in 2021 with a senile twit as President and debating pronouns.

It has to end. It must end. The survival of the Republic and our personal liberties requires that it end.

The Republican Party must become a Party of people who are absolutely certain that basic human decency requires the GOP to be in charge and that nothing a Democrat wants done is legitimate. In other words, we must act like we’re Democrats. The phrase “country over party” merely means “Democrats over Republicans.” We need to turn it about – “country over party” must now come to mean “Republicans over Democrats”. They are not legitimate. They have no moral right to govern. If they win, it is because of fraud overt or subtle. Only when we win is it legitimate. Only when we exercise power is it proper.

This is harsh: as harsh as the Democrats have been with us. It is a necessity. Being a free United States requires us to take this stance. No more must the Democrats be able to find GOPers who will help them advance the cause of the Democrat Party. In those rare instances where they wish to do something that actually has to be done, then the measure doing it must be larded up with things we want or it must not happen. Do not be afraid! The Ruling Class – with the MSM shouting – will tell us we are evil and they’ll produce polls showing that we’re doomed if we do it. Do it. We believe, right? We do believe that faith, family and property are the building blocks of a Republic, right? That limited government is the necessity, right? Well, then act like it. Fight for what we want. If we get what we want, everything will be better, right? Of course it will. So, why not fight?

Without GOP backstabbers, we’ll be able to do it. When we can rely on our people to be vigorous and pushing our policies and intransigent in opposing Democrat policies, we know that the sort of policies which will be enacted will favor our cause and, building one victory upon another over time, will restore American greatness. We’ll be free and safe and prosperous. And thus the voters will stick with us, because we’ll be the people who lead them out of the swamp and back into the sunlit uplands of the City Upon a Hill.

Life is Better When the GOP Wins

Mark Noonan32 Comments

That worked out pretty well. Virginia, I mean. Sure, the Dems were able to get Murphy into another term in NJ, but we all kinda know how that happened! The bottom line is that it was a bloodbath for the Democrats. The MSM, likely looking for people who would call the GOP racists, interviewed a Latino voter in VA and they didn’t get what they wanted! He was voting Youngkin…but here, to me, was the crucial thing: he was voting GOP for a variety of reasons but he finished up by saying, “everything is just terrible.” That’s the story.

The base of the Democrat party right now is white college educated women and black women (there is an exit poll which claims Youngkin took 13% of the black female vote but everyone – including me – is taking that with a grain of salt: the GOP usually does mid-single digits with black female voters…but, who knows? Things are just terrible!). Every other demographic in both VA and NJ showed huge swings to the GOP. And don’t think that Trump maxed out the rural vote! Nothing of the kind – it turned out in numbers people simply couldn’t believe. Matched with some suburbanites going back to the GOP, it was too much for McA to overcome, even with some attempted shenanigans in Fairfax County (with the VA GOP dropping on it like a ton of bricks – they were prepared: less so in NJ, which is how Murphy managed to pull it off…but that one caught everyone by surprise). The bottom line is if we get this sort of swing nationwide next year, Democrats will lose the Senate and at least 40 House seats. Fingers crossed!

Things can change a lot in a year, of course, so let’s not count our chickens just yet. But for us to do badly in 2022 will require the United States to do very well…and I just don’t think that Team Pudding Brain has our best interests at heart. But, more than that, I don’t think they even know what to do. They aren’t very bright people. They have very limited or non-existent real world experience. The supply chain problem continues – and you and I see it every time we go to the store – and I suspect that the people in charge simply don’t comprehend what it takes to move a ton of goods a mile. How could they? People in law and with “studies” degrees have always lived well, even when they aren’t financially rich: they still lived in tony urban and suburban areas where everything is done for them. For a huge number of them you’d probably have to go back to a great-grandparent before you found someone who actually had to do something. I mean, I’m not a working class hero kind of guy (my younger brother is, though): I work a physically non-demanding job and I’ve never had to earn my bread with my hands…but I’m familiar. In my youth, of course, I was in the Navy and jobs I’ve had include things like delivering furniture. I can change a tire. Fix a clogged drain. I’m not helpless…and I also have a conception of what it takes to actually get something physically accomplished. Our Ruling Class? No. They simply don’t know – and so when confronted with something like a shortage of food, they simply don’t know where to even begin.

The Democrats, naturally, went into meltdown mode. For at least a lot of them, the lesson from Tuesday is to quadruple down on calling us all stupid racists. I urge them to stay the course on this – the more they insult the people, the better it will work out for us. If they want to drive over the electoral cliff, I’m not only not going to stop them, I’m going to egg them on. They are very much letting the American people know just what they are – nasty, mean, power mad lunatics.

So, feel good! It was a tonic – good to win again and know that we still have a shot at righting the ship.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan40 Comments

What will happen in Virginia on Tuesday? Your guess is as good as mine – if I was confident that fraud was unlikely, I’d figure that Youngkin has it. All trends, polls and increasingly ridiculous actions by the Democrats indicate that Youngkin has the momentum. But, after 2020, none of us are going to be sure in any place Democrats have control over the vote count. At all events, if they manage to cheat to a narrow win, it is still a disaster for them. This should be a walk over for them…Virginia with its massive population of DC people living in Northern Virginia is a Blue State. It isn’t California Blue, but its just a couple steps away from it. And the Democrats are in trouble.

And they are in trouble because at the top of their heap sits a senile old crook who’s staff is made up of idiots. Add to this the complete failure by Democrat Congressional leadership and what we have is a nation spinning out of control into political and economic paralysis. My view is that Biden didn’t get close to 81 million votes in 2020 but even supposing he did, those votes are long gone, now. He’ll keep the partisan Dems on board but all indications are that he’s already lost Independents and absent a complete turn around where things are positively booming in November of 2022, the Democrat party is going to get wiped out everywhere they don’t have total control over. Its why they’re doing things like their absurd redistricting in Illinois which will result in 3 GOP House members in a State Trump got 43% percent in…these are desperate expedients to save as much as they can.

Kinzinger announced his retirement today – it looks like, at most, only 1 or 2 of the GOPer’s who voted to impeach Trump over 1/6 will return to Congress in 2023. Good riddance. They cast their action as a vote against political extremism but that’s only because they’re stupid and corrupt. Whatever 1/6 was, it wasn’t an insurrection. It wasn’t a threat to the Constitutional order. The only person killed was an unarmed protestor, shot by an incompetent cop. The impeachment of Trump over it was a crude and disgusting political ploy and no person of sense or honor could lend it credibility. They did: and now their careers are largely over and they’ll end their days as pathetic “Conservative” punching bags on MSNBC.

Some Conservatives have recently made the startling discovery that we should be gearing our economy so that one person working can support a spouse and kids. Glad to see the guys getting to where I was more than a decade ago.

What destroyed the Bonhomme Richard? It appears that what the ship lacked was sailors. Go ahead and read this article about it – and if you are an old sailor like me, weep. I wasn’t on my ship part of the Damage Control Party but I could have been grabbed at random to fight a fight or fix a leak because I was trained to do so – by actually fighting staged fires in training. I knew how to use the equipment and where it was stored. To this day, I would know exactly where to hit the fire with water or chemical retardants if I was aboard a ship on fire. It astonishes me that this basic sort of training is lacking. And, my goodness, the training, itself, is the most fun you’ll ever have in the Navy! They set steel buildings on fire for you and let you go put it out. For a bunch of 19 and 20 year old kids, it is a blast. But, I guess the kids are busy with other things these days.

One of the things that scares me about cruise ships is the knowledge that hardly any of the crew are sailors who know how to handle a ship in a crisis. I didn’t imagine in my wildest dreams that US naval warships had become heavily armed cruise ships. The report about the Bonhomme Richard shows that the ship wasn’t prepared for disaster and the crew was untrained in how to deal with disaster. It was a war ship! It is supposed to he shot at. It is supposed to experience life and ship threatening disaster…and everyone on board better know how to knock down a fire and plug a leak. The next President simply must clean house – drop all the intersectional pronoun drivel and get our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines back to doing their jobs.

The Lies That Bind Us

Mark Noonan35 Comments

I always recommend people read Samuel Eliott Morrison’s The Two Ocean War if you want a good run down on American naval operations in WWII. It was published in 1963 and still is a huge trove of good, historical information. OTOH, a few bits need to be taken with a grain of salt: most notably, the campaign against the U Boats.

You see, when Morrison wrote the book, the Ultra Secret was still secret. It was more than 10 years later that the British and American governments fessed up to having been reading the German’s mail. The intel gained from Ultra wasn’t good in a fast moving situation (ie, when the battle was actually on going) but the knowledge it gave us of German strategy, tactics and material condition was invaluable. If we didn’t have it – and no A bomb was forthcoming – WWII in Europe might have lasted years longer. I bring this up because Morrison, in his book, lays all the credit for the victory over the U Boats to intrepid sailors and merchant mariners. Not to take anything away from them – they did, after all, actually have to go sea and fight the U Boats – but the fact that the allies generally knew (except in a few brief periods when the Krauts altered their coding machines) where the subs were going to be gave our side an overwhelming advantage. I mean, for the Germans to have a comparable advantage, they’d have to know the exact route and timing of the convoys. It was that valuable.

This is important to a full understanding of how history works: you really don’t know until all cards are on the table. You especially wont know if the events are recent (“recent” in historic terms in the previous 100-150 years) and people still have axes to grind. The first draft of history is usually riddled with falsehoods deliberate or otherwise. And some things never come out. When the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire committed suicide in 1889, it struck the world like a thunderbolt. A good looking man with all the possible advantages offs himself after murdering a young girl he talked into murder-suicide. As it was more than 130 years ago, very much is known about it. But not all. Some crucial information about what the heir was doing and saying in the immediate run up to the suicide is not known…but, we know that certain people had to know. They were close to the Imperial family and were in contact with the heir. But, as far as we can tell, the heirs of the people who knew – if they are still in possession of the letters and documents their ancestors had – still rate loyalty to the Hapsburgs above historic interest and so the secrets remain.

A great deal of what we all believe regarding events of the past 100 years is shot through with things that have been presented to us with crucial data missing, or are outright fabrications. To take it out of politics, think about the “rock n roll” rebel thing: these kids just aren’t gonna take it any more and they’re going to show you squares what’s what! That is the main thing about rock music…it is supposedly transgressive and something that all powers try to suppress. But, to believe this, you have to believe that a man with no professional musical training ( he can’t even read music) did Hey, Jude right out of his head.

Sorry, didn’t happen. Oh, to be sure, McCartney might have written the lyrics, but all of that gorgeous musical triumph was the result of highly skilled people turning McCartney’s scribble on a napkin into the Sistine Chapel. And so it was with almost all pop music and the entirety of the commercially successful pop music. A genuine musician like Mark Knopfler or the late Neal Peart can break through and be very successful, but the bottom line is that most popular music is made by and for corporate overlords who put massive efforts into finding out what will sell and then making what sells. And no matter what, the real musicians aren’t going to rake it in like Madonna. And do understand this: genius is rare. Very are. Once in half a thousand years a Mozart will pop up. But isn’t it funny that every freaking week there’s a new number one hit? Figure the odds that the music industry will hit the jackpot like that again and again. Nope: doesn’t happen. The hits aren’t from some guy or gal who through grit and determination rises to the top: the hits are manufactured. There is a joke meme out there with a faceless musician on it with the caption saying words to the effect of “Hi, I’m Celebrity 3297: I believe whatever is safe and popular for the 18-35 demographic, please like me on social media and buy my album”: that is pretty much it.

Of late the members of the band Rage Against the Machine have been dragged quite a bit on social media because they have been very firm in supporting mask and vaccine mandates. I mean, come on! But, then again, you had to know: once you see the backgrounds of the members, you know you’re not dealing with outcasts who are gonna tell us what’s what about the hypocrisies of our times. They’re middle to upper-middle class kids who never knew a minute of deprivation in their lives. They can’t really tell us about the hypocrisies of our society because they are the hypocrisies of our society…in this case, the Socialist hypocrite who talks a big game of Revolution before taking his new car back to his gated community. The boys of Rage were always mere tools of corporate salesmanship…and as the corporation still provides the money, these guys aren’t going to bite the hand that extremely lavishly feeds them.

But think of this: we really do, most of us, believe there was a grassroots rebellion against the squares which started in the 50’s with Elvis and culminated with the 60’s and 70’s. But Elvis was merely the first successful marketing effort. As far as music goes, Chuck Berry was better…it was just that back in those days, you couldn’t sell it with a black face. Additionally, we now know that a great deal of the post-WWII avant-guarde was initially promoted and funded by the CIA and other government-connected agencies. The official idea was to show the Communist world that we were more hip than they were. Personally, I think it was an op by KGB-controlled CIA agents to corrupt the West…I mean, the USSR wasn’t stupid enough to allow hippies; and the most brutal Stalinist art is still miles ahead of some of the absurdities we’ve placed in American art museums.

We were played. And we’ve been played again and again: a huge amount of effort has been placed into making us believe certain things about the past which all go in one direction: leaving the current Ruling Class in place. When you rage against the machine, you might say a couple tame things against corporations and government…but most of your fire is directed at the Church, the family…working for a living, being faithful, keeping your promise. See how it works? Think about what is really attacked in popular culture: Faith, Family and Property. You are to ridicule the belief in God; to despise mommy and daddy and not want that for yourself, you are to hate mommy and daddy’s middle class home in the ‘burbs. So, what does that leave you? An atom in a city without love or hope and no property. The perfect demographic for corporate and government overlords…who have convinced most people that this is what we wanted.

If you really start to ponder it, you can see more and more of the con emerge. The “Conservatism” which was about lower corporate taxes and no fight for border security. The heroes who aren’t intrepid warriors, but failures who need counseling. The digs against maintaining our individual dignity (wear the tube top and the pants around your knees! Look like a whore or a gangster!). It isn’t a Conspiracy in the sense that only one person or one small group is running it but it is every institution of government, media and major corporation all on the same page in desiring a compliant, ignorant, frightened population.

The good news – and this will be Trump’s greatest triumph for all time to come – is that between 2016 and 2020, the mask dropped. It can’t be put back on again. We saw them for what they were. To remain in favor of things as they are, one has to be either a moron, or paid off. Once you see the lie – the really broad lie – you can’t unsee it. Whether or no we’ll be able to beat it remains to be seen, but we can no longer be suckered by it. Day by day, those of us who had our minds freed can simply see more and more of the lies. They are now easy for us to detect and they no longer are binding upon us. What remains to be seen is if they can remain binding on enough people to stop us.

Let’s Go Brandon!

Mark Noonan18 Comments

“Let’s Go Brandon” is spreading not just all around the United States, but all around the world. In case you’ve been under a rock, that phrase is cover for “f*** Joe Biden”. It got started when an MSMer was interviewing a race car driver named Brandon and in the background you can hear the crowd chanting “f*** Joe Biden” and the MSMer tried to cover it up by saying their were cheering for Brandon.

The chants – in both forms – are getting ever more common in public venues. All entirely spontaneous. I’m nearly 57 years old: I’ve never seen anything like this. Sure, Presidents have become unpopular and have been booed at events…but I’ve never seen a President nine months in getting spontaneously booed when he’s not even present. Meanwhile, the man he supposedly defeated less than a year previously is able to draw huge crowds of adoring supporters. We are in entirely uncharted political waters here.

The polls are also bad for Biden, but we’ve all learned never to put too much stock in them. Still, they are bad. A couple of them very bad, though the MSM, true to form, has also generated a few which are somewhat favorable to Pudding Brain. They had to, lest the poll aggregators show his overall support dropping towards 40%.

Here’s the deal, as Pudding Brain would say when he can concentrate on the teleprompter long enough: the fact that he’s this catastrophically unpopular while his opponent gets crowds any politician would envy just tells you the truth: Biden did not get 81 million votes in 2020. People do turn on people they vote for, but slowly. This is because people, by and large, are unwilling to admit error. If 81 million voted for him less than 12 months ago, you can be sure that he’d still have a level of support…more than sufficient to ensure against random crowds cursing his name.

It has gotten so bad that the GOP’s sure-loss in Virginia next month is in question. To be sure, they’ve already announced that the Dem stronghold of Fairfax county will report late so they can know how many ballots they need to insert…but the fact that they have to do that and bring in the big guns shows that all is not well for the Democrats right now. Things are bad; Joe didn’t have support to begin with…and people are getting into the mindset of punishment.

And, honestly, what is there to be happy about? We’re still suffering mask mandates and lockdowns of various severity. Prices are through the roof. Store shelves are getting empty. The border is out of control. China is testing advanced weaponry while the US military is concentrating on race and gender issues. It as all gone wrong: we’re in the most stunning “I Told You So” in history.

Still a long time between now and the end of this mess, but I think that we now do have the wind at our back.

The Edifice Commences to Crack

Mark Noonan47 Comments

Trends continue until they don’t. It is just the way things always have been. When you look at the broad sweep of human history and the story of cultures and civilizations it is actually easy to lose sight of the fact that, at some point, things stopped working. It all fell apart.

Think about a 20 year old Roman in 390 AD. Theodosius is on the throne. The Empire is unified. Sure, there are problems, but things seem ok. The administration rolls along. Taxes are collected. Laws enforced. Sure, there is a worrying drop in population and it is getting harder and harder to find recruits for the Army. And, yeah, there doesn’t seem to be enough money to fully maintain the roads and aqueducts, but things are patched up and held together. Life is fine.

Be the time that Roman turns 40, Alaric is sacking Rome. That quick. It was like a lightening flash to contemporary observers. It was unimaginable that the Eternal City, inviolate for 800 years, could fall to an enemy. But, fall it did…as a helpless Roman government looked on, and didn’t really care that Rome fell.

What we’re now experiencing is that sort of thing. It appears that all is fairly ok and none of us envision any sort of collapse…but the roads aren’t very well maintained and urban sanitation is in decline and we’re even having some trouble getting water to everyone and keeping all the lights on. It is not quite yet bad. It is all holding together. But the edifice sways and cracks and the keen ear can hear the foundations crumble.

Why is it like this? Well, to get into our current context: we have a massive transportation crisis. For a variety of reasons – mostly government actions in the United States and around the world – goods are not getting to market. We have, in our government, a Department of Transportation which is specifically charged with this issue: making sure transport runs smoothly. It is run by the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana who, as far as I can tell, has never been responsible for transporting anything. The kicker: he’s been on paternity leave for the past two months as this completely foreseen crisis emerged. What we have is a very complex system of living which requires continual attention from people well versed in how it all works. We don’t have that. And we likely, for the most part, don’t even know we don’t have it. We just assume that someone in there knows what to do. Just as, I’m sure, the average Gaius on the street in Rome assumed that someone would make sure an Army was available to stop Alaric.

NASA people were in their 20’s and 30’s when we went to the Moon. Now NASA people are in their 60’s. How many young structural engineers are there? How many 17 year olds being taught how to weld in an apprenticeship? How sure are you that if there was an explosion at your local power plant – caused by negligence at the plant as the people there weren’t well versed enough to see the problem coming – that there are sufficient people with knowledge on how to rebuild it? And what happens is such a disaster strikes two cities at once? What happens if the people who do know decide that they’ll look after their own and to hell with strangers?

We’re in a very bad way and worse – because not only do we lack sufficient people who know, we’re also deliberately creating things which weaken the resiliency of the system. Building windmills instead of nuke plants. Building high speed rail when what’s needed is a newer and better interstate. Telling people to stop watering their lawns when we need dams and aqueducts. And all systems can stand the strain right up until they can’t. The bridge rated for ten ton traffic is fine until that 10.01 ton vehicle arrives.

Can we stem the tide? We won’t know unless we do. We certainly can’t stem it with the current leadership. But will new leadership – even extremely Trumpist leadership – make a difference? I don’t know. I had a small back and forth on Twitter where a guy – and he’s a really good guy – was arguing that the squares should just chill while the out there do their thing. It immediately struck me as false and I pointed out that, no, you can’t do that. If you are one of the Bohemians, then your moral duty is to curb yourself so that the normal – who do the actual work of life – can get on with their business. That, in fact, a society is morally justified in banning and punishing odd behavior. Taking it further, I realized that allowing slums and bums to be as they are is a crime against humanity – because it is a crime against those who do. The man or woman who makes, mines or grows things needs order, cleanliness and public decency. They can’t function where bums are allowed to defecate on the streets while purple-haired weirdos smash windows for “justice”. Anything – even the slightest thing – which causes distress for those who make, mine and grow must be prohibited and maximum force must be applied to anyone who still wants to cause the doers a problem.

And, in the end, that is what will be applied to those who won’t do their duty: maximum force. It all turns on when it will happen – before or after our societal collapse. That is, and to put it crudely, will we bust heads as we insist everyone cuts their hair, pulls up their pants and get a job before or after things fall apart? It would be better if it was before – repairing what we have is a lot easier than rebuilding what used to be (last time we had to rebuild is was about a 500 year process). All this drivel about being genderfluid, an “influencer”, an aspiring transblack poet or what have you will be tossed aside. Society is for men and women and it functions because men and women do their duty…and everyone who won’t conform to the norm will find that nonconforming is no longer an option.

We’ll find out soon which way we go.

The Lies We Contend With

Mark Noonan71 Comments

When Andrew Yang announced he was leaving the Democrat party, I commented to him that nearly everything he believed was a lie, but also noting that huge amounts of what I used to believe were lies as well. That I now could see the whole system of lies, right and left, which have been used to keep we, the people compliant. Then someone asked me when did the lies start?

To be sure, there have been lies since the Garden. But I do believe what we’ve dealt with these past decades is unique in human history: a whole series of lies maintained at all costs by people who do know better. And while it grew out of a host of factors, I pinpoint the need for a system of lies to the Korean War, specifically to the Truman Administration decision to not seek victory.

We were all told – and we all believed – that when Truman fired MacArthur it was the right and brave thing to do. That MacArthur was off the ranch and threatened not merely a Third World War, but the very Constitutional structure of the United States. Like all good lies, this had a kernel of truth: as a military officer, MacArthur was bound to obey the orders of his civilian Commander in Chief. But that bit of truth was used to blind us to the fact that in a cold blooded and cruel manner, Truman and his Administration had decided that people would continue to die, with no hope of victory, until the Communists decided to end the killing. That was the issue. It always was the issue. And it isn’t even mentioned, for the most part. When it is, it is quickly passed over. No one wants to really consider this. Most of the people who died in the Korean War – Koreans, Chinese and Americans – died after Truman made his decision. They died fighting it out on an arbitrary line of no moral or strategic value. Truman did this. And then slept soundly at night. So did the Defense officials and the generals. The soldiers on the line slept less soundly. And they died. Truman’s decision wasn’t made to spare lives, but merely to sustain the decision he had made to enter the war when he had lost the will to win the war. He lied to the American people in order to save his political prospects.

Sound familiar?

When the Chinese intervened we had two morally acceptable courses open to us: fight it out to victory, or to capitulate. We chose the immoral path: keep fighting, but only to provide cover for a coward’s decision to neither win nor quit. Rely on it: they sized it up. They knew that with our absolute command of the sea and our aerial superiority that the Chinese could not force us all the way out of Korea. They could calculate: this many dead and wounded per month, this large a pool of draftees to send: presto, we could sustain the line indefinitely. All it would take is lots of people – mostly poorer people the leaders never met – dying. The Western Front is held up as the immoral waste of lives, but it wasn’t: as many mistakes as the Allies made, their goal was always total victory. The lives weren’t to be expended to no point. In Korea, they were to be expended pointlessly. And to do this, they had to lie. They had to tell us that if we went for victory, it would lead to WWIII as the Russians would go to war with us and we’d all be nuked. End of the world! If we don’t have Johnny from Akron and Li from Shanghai blow each other to bits over and over again, we’re all gonna die!!!!

Too bad for Johnny and Li: but, hey, at least 24 hour round the clock nuclear holocaust was avoided.

Flaw in the theory: Russia only exploded her first nuke in 1949 and the best they had for a strategic bombing was the TU-4, a reverse engineered B-29 which was incapable of reaching most of the United States from Soviet air bases. Even we didn’t have a real nuclear bomber until the introduction of the B-36 in 1948. Nuclear war as in total wipe of humanity simply wasn’t in the cards during any point of the Korean War. Additionally, there was very little chance that an aging Stalin would bring his country into another World War as Russia was still rebuilding from WWII (it would be the mid-60’s before Russia was fully recovered from the destruction of WWII).

In short, a cruel calculation was made to not win as that seemed more difficult and then a series of lies were generated to explain why we wouldn’t win but the dying would keep going. That, in my view, is when our government became a web of lies…and when all sides of the political spectrum (except a few put down as kooks) became wedded to the web of lies.

In the end, we built up a massive, national security State in service to this concept that at any moment now the Russians would nuke us and so we had to have a massive nuclear force on hair trigger alert, a gigantic Army ready to fight (but not win!) anywhere in the world and a whole bunch of what we were doing kept secret from the people, who were to be monitored and manipulated. By the 1960’s, in my view, the thing was feeding on itself. Just getting ever more crazy and using ever larger amounts of BS to justify itself. Because after a while, people were invested in it. Defense contractors, think tanks, universities, media companies: a whole host of individuals and institutions essentially made their living by sustaining the fiction that we can’t win a war, but we needed a massive military and secret police (FBI, CIA, NSA) to fend off defeat. Nobody was ever allowed to do two things which would cut to the chase:

Drive the Marxists out of America

Directly confront the USSR with a “war or quit” ultimatum.

We couldn’t do these things because they would solve the problem. Getting rid of the American Marxists would end the internal threat and challenging the Soviets to fight or back off would either get them to back off, or get them to fight (they would have backed off: the balance of forces all through the Cold War was overwhelmingly in our favor – they knew it, and so did we).

We had to pretend that having Che Guevara wanna-bees in our schools and bureaucracies was just the price of freedom. Even so-called Conservatives said we had no right to push such people out. We had to allow America to be flooded with a series of corrosive, anti-human Marxist ideologies which sapped our will and warped our sense of right and wrong. And we had to do this simply to sustain lies. In this case, the lie that if we didn’t let our enemies subvert us, our enemies would win. And still all based on the first lie: the Korea Lie – that we can’t win a stand up fight to simply end this once and for all.

Here in 2021, it is all self-sustained. We’re not even allowed to win a fight with rag tag Islamist militias. And we’re appointing Marxist economists to positions in our government.

Reject it all: reject all the lies. You don’t have to fund your enemies. You don’t have to sustain the National Security State. You don’t have to protect those who hate you and want you enslaved. You are sane. You want law and order, sound economics, your people come first: these are normal, sane attitudes and anything against them has to go down. Your laws are for you: for sanity. Not for them, the insane. The liars. The laws do not protect evil. They do not foster insanity. Anyone who says they do is lying to you. Ignore them and take what is yours by right: take back, that is, your citizenship in the Republic and insist that the Republic exist for you, not for those who hate you and lie to you and wish to plunder you.