France

Open Thread

Mark Noonan41 Comments

So, now they’ll call witnesses…you know, the people who were supposed to be called when the House was considering whether or not to impeach. Our Ruling Class is total clown show. Ted Cruz opines – and he’s likely correct – that they were ready to wrap this thing up but last night Social Media bots exploded with demands for witnesses and the Blue Checks caught the fever and here we are. Who orchestrated this? That is what I’d like to know – who paid the army of bots to make calling for witnesses trend on social media? Someone had to think it was a good idea.

It could have been the Chinese or other foreign actors who simply want America embroiled in domestic squabbles.

I do wonder if the Democrats have considered that when you accuse the innocent of crimes and hound them mercilessly, they tend to become what you said they were: in other words, treat 74 million Americans like rebels and what you’ll eventually get is 74 million rebels.

The Lincoln Project has completely imploded and, seriously, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving set of creeps. Except for one thing: these people used to be our leaders. Respected voices! They didn’t just suddenly become garbage: they always were. Someone gave the go-ahead to remove the protection and here we are. But they all had to know. Especially the money bags. You might give $5 to a bum on the street without inquiring closely as to whether food or booze is to be purchased…you give millions and you’re going to find out every last thing about the guy. How many other groups – right and left – are run by garbage people warping our political debates, but they’re currently protected? I have a Twitter friend who is a complete Commie – he and I have had some interesting discussions about what we’d each like to see happen to the bosses of both parties.

France sent a nuclear attack sub to patrol the South China Sea. This is, interesting. I mean, that France is doing it. China lays claim to the entire South China sea, these claims being disputed by all other nations bordering that sea. Under Trump, we routinely sent ships in to enforce the fact that the South China Sea is international waters. Why France? I can only assume that France, taking note of America’s problems, has decided that if French interests in the area are to be protected, France will have to do it herself. This, long term, is a good thing. I am tired of the American Empire. I also don’t want us to go to war with China without allies having skin in the game. Japan and South Korea are making major increases to their naval power as a deterrent to China and that is also good. The bottom line is that no one is going to invade China – their vast population means they can just throw bodies at you until you’re exhausted. But in any war with China, it will be destroying China’s maritime trade which will be decisive. China requires not just massive exports to fund itself, but massive imports to sustain its internal life. This is why China is building a big navy. Anyone else adding anti-Chinese naval forces to the balance is a welcome thing.

I’ve seen various efforts afoot in Red States to terminate Critical Race Theory. Trump, of course, did this for the Executive branch but Biden has put it back in place. Nothing we can do about that right now – but where we have control, we should exercise that power. Critical Race Theory is a racist, Marxist philosophy which was cooked up as the economic justification for Marxism dried up in the1960’s and 70’s. As the poor and middle class in the capitalist countries became vastly wealthy by historic standards, the appeal of Marxism – that the poor can’t get ahead until they seize the means of production – was shown to be drivel, even if you ignored the manifest failure of the Communist countries to provide a decent standard of living. Latching on to race was the Marxist’s way out of the box: it wasn’t class, but race, which drove the cart. And until the inherent racism of American and Western society was destroyed, justice could not prevail. Anything we can do to get rid of this pernicious doctrine is justified; we cannot tolerate a philosophy which holds that white people are inherently racist and that America is evil. It has to go, or we go.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan50 Comments

I got into a gun control argument with a Brit on Twitter the other day – very unusual in that it wasn’t nasty. But, it also didn’t really have a conclusion…the guy simply stopped responding. This was after I pointed out something which most don’t think about these days:

To love someone is to do what is best for them – if I am to show love for my fellows then certain things are required of me. One is that I never permit someone to be unjustly attacked. Another is that I restrain the wrongdoer from carrying out his plans. The former is far more easily understood than the latter, but neither are really thought of these days.

What my interlocutor was on about is that my Christian faith – which he claims to share – is about mercy and turning the other cheek and so forth; so, it isn’t really right for me to have a gun to shoot the burglar. But the reality is that it is almost a moral requirement that I be armed – as I’m physically capable of bearing arms – because if I am unarmed I can neither defend my neighbor nor attempt to prevent the burglar from doing his evil deed. I can only sit helplessly by…while my neighbor is robbed and maybe killed and the burglar risks his immortal soul in the commission of his crime. How can I be said to be showing love to either of them by doing nothing? There is much we’ve lost: most importantly our sense that justice and mercy go together. Its not one or the other – and, in fact, if you try to do either in isolation, you’ll get neither.

Germany’s Populist-Conservative AfD did well in regional elections – so well, in fact, that Germany’s other major parties (CDU, SPD and Greens) are thinking of a partnership with the German Communist Party (now called Linke, because “Communist” sounds bad). This is the mask fully dropping: all the parties were simply about who gets to slice the pie, not about what the pie shall be. And the Ruling Class in Germany – and around the West – wants the pie to be about open borders and only the Elite getting to decide what happens. We’re all in this together, folks: as goes AfD goes Brexit goes Trump. Either we all win, or we’ll all be destroyed.

John Hindraker is probably like most of us these days – watching what’s happening and figuring the Democrats are completely out of touch with reality. Of course, he also notes that he could be the guy out to lunch. We’ll all find out next November – but, I’m betting it is the Democrats who are busily alienating 60% of the electorate.

France’s Macron is offering a $15 billion bribe to Iran to keep it in the nuke deal – which we’re out of and Iran never had the faintest idea of abiding by. I don’t really understand this: is Macron that stupid, or does Iran just have so much dirt on Europe’s Ruling Class that they have to play ball?

South Dakota Democrat Party closes its last two offices for lack of funds. One down, forty nine to go…

Thinking About the Ruling Class vs Everyone

Mark Noonan33 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Thread

Mark Noonan14 Comments

About that loss of the House…it might not have been as much a Democrat victory so much as a Democrat theft:

A new (California) state law allows third parties to pick up ballots and drop them off at polling locations on behalf of that person, a practice known as “ballot harvesting.”

In video footage that surfaced last month, a woman who identifies herself to a California resident as Lulu is seen knocking on someone’s door and offering to deliver their absentee ballot, but “only to, like, people who are supporting the Democratic Party.”

This is, to me, clearly legalized ballot box stuffing – there is no way to really know where the ballots came from…and as these votes flipped races days and weeks after election day, it is pretty obvious that Democrats just manufactured whatever votes were needed to win.

There is a chance the Democrats won the House fair and square (and I mean only a chance), but the padding of their victory seems to be to be the work of fraud – and in a lot of cases, fraud the Democrats have legalized. There is not much we can do about things like this – elections are controlled by the States and if a State is firmly under Democrat control, they’ll just do what they want. What I’d like is for Justice to investigate…while elections are controlled by the States, there are a host of federal laws against election fraud. Time to use them.

Bit of good news: this sort of thing only has a small chance of flipping the electoral college in 2020.

Its Aliens, I’m sure.

Seems the French might not be as in favor of Globalism as we’ve been lead to believe: massive riots against the French government. From what I’ve heard, even some of the police are indicating sympathy for the rioters. As for me, I happen to know that Louis XX is available, and it is way past time for France to correct the mistake of 1789.

Oldest and youngest Medal of Honor recipients meet. America still lives.

As the MSM lauds the late President Bush and uses him as a cudgel against Trump, always good to remember that the MSM despised Bush when he was alive.

Trump continues to win the Trade War with China. I told you he would – because all nations which trade with the US need our markets far more than we need theirs. That’s the thing – by putting up barriers to our products, all the foreigners do is make it a big nothing if we get into a tit for tat Trade War. Hopefully we’ll learn the lesson that all the leverage is ours. Now, to be sure, if we do get fair trade then, eventually, it’ll be a bad thing to have a Trade War…but only because that would risk our massively increased exports. That’s a problem I want us to have.

Turns Out We Can’t Beat the Russians

Mark Noonan51 Comments

Anyone thinking that Obama might find his backbone and actually stand up to Putin’s imperialism better think again:

“Our question was: Would NATO be able to defend those countries {the Baltic states}?” Ochmanek recalls.

The results were dispiriting. Given the recent reductions in the defense budgets of NATO member countries and American pullback from the region, Ochmanek says the blue team was outnumbered 2-to-1 in terms of manpower, even if all the U.S. and NATO troops stationed in Europe were dispatched to the Baltics — including the 82nd Airborne, which is supposed to be ready to go on 24 hours’ notice and is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

“We just don’t have those forces in Europe,” Ochmanek explains. Then there’s the fact that the Russians have the world’s best surface-to-air missiles and are not afraid to use heavy artillery.

After eight hours of gaming out various scenarios, the blue team went home depressed. “The conclusion,” Ochmanek says, “was that we are unable to defend the Baltics.”

The active Russian Army is stated at 395,000 – Poland, the closest nation with a large military force has 120,000 troops. Germany, next closest, has just under 61,000. The French army, a little further off, has 115,000. That works out to 99,000 less than the Russian army, when you combine them all together. Small wonder that even with the US Army in Europe augmented by the 82nd Airborne that we can’t get the job done – and this probably supposes that we could get the French and Germans to go along (getting the Poles to go along wouldn’t be difficult).

The thing about an army is that you just never know when you’re going to need one – which is why you’re supposed to keep a top-notch one in being at all times, even when it doesn’t seem particularly necessary. For decades now the Europeans have continually reduced the size of their military force – they got it into their heads that there would never be another major European war. Now we’ve got the Russian bear trying to rebuild the Russian Empire and no one has an army in being capable of stopping the Russians. The only way to actually stop Putin if, say, he decided to occupy Estonia is to declare war on Russia, build up a massive army, and then invade. This is not something which is going to recommend itself to European and American politicians.

Welcome back to the real world, folks. We’re in quite a pickle, right now. Not only does no one respect of fear us, but we simply do not have the military power to make anyone respect or fear us. On the other hand, our military is now almost perfectly politically correct – with only a few Marines still to be forced into line. Great, huh?

This Time, the Jews Aren’t Sticking Around

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Instructed by what happened after 1933 in Germany, modern Jews, it appears, are not waiting around to see what the New New Order will be like:

Some fifty years ago, a mass migration transformed Judaism in France and in other countries of Western Europe. Algeria, a French colony in North Africa, was granted independence in 1962. Over one million French residents — European settlers and natives that had opted for French citizenship and culture — had no choice but to flee across the Mediterranean to the mother country, and ten percent of them were Jewish. Overnight, the Jewish community in Metropolitan France grew from 300,000 to over 400,000 souls…

…Now, a reversal is taking place. Today Jews are migrating out of France, and this is occurring in increasingly larger numbers.

This migration starts within France, as a mere change of locations. In Greater Paris, middle-class Jewish families are deserting neighborhoods that have been engulfed by more recent immigrants from Africa and the Near East. These new immigrant populations have proven prone to violence, and as radical Muslims, many entertain negative views about Jews and Judaism. Harassment, arson, and assault are frequent. There have been several murders. Even the liberal-minded Imam Hassan Chalghoumi of Drancy, who advocates friendly relations with Christians and Jews, was threatened and assaulted.

“I did not leave Morocco for France to be confronted by Morocco again in France,” a Casablanca-born Jewish physician confided to me…

Get out while the getting is good.  As the Muslim population surges in Europe the Muslim radicals grow in number and strength and start making demands – demands which are, for the most part, immediately accepted by the Ruling Class of Europe.  This acceptance is because the Ruling Class of Europe (like the Ruling Class everywhere in the West, including the United States) is cowardly – cowardly because they are not Christian, not Jewish, not anything…just rulers with lots of money and power and a determination to hang on to both as long as they can…and if they can buy a little peace for themselves by grovelling to Islamists, they’ll do it.  The Jews, though, are seeing the writing on the wall and aren’t sticking around until the cattle cars come ’round to pick them up.

As in all forms of descent, momentum takes over – from a mere fearful desire to appease the Islamists comes a desire to be as anti-Semitic as the Islamists.  There are moves afoot in Europe to ban the kosher preparation of food as well as circumcision of children (no, not much effort to ban the Islamic preparation of food).  Its easier, you see?  To stand up for the Rights of Man (which France, once upon a time, claimed loyalty to) takes courage and, in the end, a willingness to kill or die for the cause.  That can disturb the sweet deal you’ve got where the money pours in and you get to attend swank conferences on the taxpayer’s dime.

For the moment, Jews can find refuge – in Israel and the United States.  But even the United States is not absolutely secure, because if the American left does emerge completely triumphant in our current battle, if they are able to marginalize us and thus obtain full power to do as they wish, then it will become uncomfortable for Jews in the United States, as well (which just makes it even more amazing that so many American Jews vote for the people who are already turning on them).  We already see in the more liberal areas of the United States a kowtowing to Islam, which is just how it started in Europe…but kowtowing isn’t enough.  Eventually, such actions lead a person to joining the other side…to become anti-Semitic (some on the left have already made this journey).  And, so, in the end, if I were to advise a foreign Jew where to go, I’d say Israel…and pray the IDF is, indeed, up to the task of taking out Iran’s nuclear weapons program (American Jews, you’re not off the hook – you have to stick around and help us defeat this nonsense).

And, of course, it isn’t just Jews under threat.  In Europe there are also plenty of Christians who no longer feel that Europe is safe for them.  While Europe is ostensibly filled with Christians, my guess is that the number of Europeans who actually live as Christians is in the 10% range (some countries have a higher number – Ireland and Poland, for instance; but even in those places, it is probably just a bare majority…in some places of Europe, especially the power centers, there are hardly any Christians, at all).  I’ve read stories of Europeans emigrating to the United States simply because they feel they can’t raise their children to be Christians in Europe – the whole of society is weighted against them.  A two-track destruction of European civilization is going on – hammering the Christians who built it, welcoming in the Muslims who wish to end it.

Say what you will, but this is a fight to the finish – Western, Christian civilization has been under attack for centuries (I’d date it to the misbegotten – and entirely misnamed, as it’s proponents were amazingly ignorant – so-called Enlightenment of the mid 18th century).  Point blank, we are already living in what amounts to a post-Christian era, but which is still a Christian framework of society (such concepts as individual liberty, the worth of the individual, etc, are Christian concepts alien to all other civilizations on Earth).  Now, it seems, the ignorant and cowardly heirs of the so-called Enlightenment are essentially calling in Islam to finish the job.  It makes more sense than you might think – Enlightenment thinking is very Determinist in view; fatalistic, as it were: and so is Islam.  The modern, Western Determinist figures everything happens because of what has happened before, no human free will.  The Islamist figures everything happened because of God’s will, no human free will.  It is Christians (and Jews) who actually hold that humans have a part to play independent of God’s will…that we can choose our fate.  This conception built our civilization, and the end of our civilization is built around the end of such a concept.

How it will come out remains to be seen – though, as a Christian, I’m absolutely assured that my side wins, in the end.  But this doesn’t mean we have no role to play – that we cannot or must not fight.  The only question is: will we fight?  The Jews are (wisely) starting to flee an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe – but you can only flee so far.  And there is no place for the (at least) 150 million Americans who believe in the Judeo-Christian West to flee to.

UPDATE:  The left goes to ever more extreme lengths to attack Israel – now the fact that IDF soldiers don’t rape Muslim women is “proof” that IDF soldiers don’t think of Muslim women as human beings.  On the flip side, this must mean that the Muslim men who rape Christian women are paying them a compliment those nasty IDF soldiers never could…