Tuesday, August 17, 2021

China

 If you aren't too distracted by the disaster in Afghanistan, China is still trying to dominate the world. The August 2nd National; Review has several good articles on China. I'll link to them below, but you may not be able to open some if you are past your limit of free articles with NR. ~bob


Beijing's Grand Strategy
https://www.aei.org/articles/beijings-grand-strategy/

Sun Tzu and Us
​https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/08/02/sun-tzu-and-us/

Why Taiwan Matters
​https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/08/02/why-taiwan-matters/

The War We Might Lose
​https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/08/02/why-we-might-lose-a-war-with-china/

Theft as Trade Policy​
​https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/08/02/the-rising-risk-of-chinas-intellectual-property-theft/

A China for the Han​
​https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/08/02/a-china-for-the-han/

Christians Under Xi​
​https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/08/02/christians-under-xi/

The Biden Illusion Crumbles to Dust

 

The Biden Illusion Crumbles to Dust

Hamas terrorists congratulate Taliban for ‘defeating American occupation’ in Afghanistan

 

Hamas terrorists congratulate Taliban for ‘defeating American occupation’ in Afghanistan

The fall of Afghanistan in 2021 is the result of years of American delusion

 The fall of Afghanistan in 2021 is the result of years of American delusion

Excerpt: The notion that the Afghan conflict looked the same in 2021 as it did in 2016 is downright hallucinatory. On Sunday morning, Taliban fighters captured Afghanistan's Bagram Airfield — the symbol and source of U.S. power projection in the region for 20 years — releasing thousands of prisoners. Within hours, Taliban fighters were trickling into the city center with little resistance. The Taliban had already swept in and captured the capital city of Kabul. By nightfall, President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country, and the Taliban's reconquest of Afghanistan was complete. [Wow, this opinion piece is from MSNBC and all but calls the Biden Administration a pack of fools. If the administration has lost MSNBC, sharpen the knives because the progressives are cooked. Of course, it may not matter much, depending on the costs we’ll pay over the coming years to keep the Russians, Chinese, Islamists of all stripes, North Koreans, and such at bay–assuming we can keep them at bay, which is not certain just now. Ron P.]

Sunday, August 15, 2021

Hunter Biden’s Russian Prostitute Videos Indict Both His Father And U.S. Intelligence Agencies

 Hunter Biden’s Russian Prostitute Videos Indict Both His Father And U.S. Intelligence Agencies

Excerpt: Late Wednesday, The Daily Mail published what it called “unearthed footage” of a naked Hunter Biden telling a prostitute that “the Russians have videos of me doing crazy f-cking sex!” According to The Daily Mail, “after filming himself having sex with the woman using his laptop in January 2019, Hunter left the camera rolling as he recounted a Vegas bender in which he spent ‘18 days going round from penthouse suite to penthouse suite,’ sometimes costing $10,000 a night.” The video then captured Hunter telling the prostitute that during the summer of 2018 he had nearly overdosed from drugs while partying in Las Vegas with his drug dealer and two other guys. When he came to later, “there was this Russian 35-year-old, really nice, pure brunette,” Hunter explained. He then discovered his laptop was missing. “I think he’s the one that stole my computer,” Hunter said on the tape, apparently referring to his drug dealer. “I think the three of them, the three guys that were like a little group. The dealer and his two guys, I took them everywhere,” Hunter explained. “They have videos of me doing this. They have videos of me doing crazy f-cking sex f-cking, you know,” Hunter added. “My computer, I had taken tons of like, just left like that cam on,” Hunter continued, “and somebody stole it during that period of time.” The prostitute is then heard asking Hunter if he worried the Russian thieves would try to “blackmail” him. “Yeah, in some way yeah,” Hunter replied, noting his father is “running for president,” and that “I talk about it all the time.” [If you thought it was incredibly convenient when “50 senior FBI officials said ”Hunter Biden’s recovered computer had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation,” guess what? It WAS incredible–incredible as in “untrue. Somehow, we need to wipe the ranks of our senior criminal justice and intelligence services clean of this crap and the scum that are dishing it out. Maybe sending a few dozen of them to jail would make the point, but it might be easier just to line them against a brick wall.... Incidentally, this story was written by Margot Cleveland, a well respected center-right journalist.  Ron P.]

Afghanistan

 Of course we've known for at least 12 years that we were going to abandon Afghanistan, and every politician in every Party went along with the refusal to face the fact that being incapable of fighting the Taliban with full, deadly intent, as we fought WW2 guaranteed their eventual victory.  You don't want to make the Pakistan border a total death trap for incoming Taliban using mines, seismic detectors, and nightflying IR vision choppers to kill every human within 20 miles of the border, you don't want to have ROE that will bring on more collateral damage but kill more Taliban and make people more afraid of you than of them?  Then you are playing by the rules the Taliban makes, and depending on a tribal culture with a high level of Muslim fundamentalists to decide to come over to you, which is going to happen right after you see the sky full of flying pigs.

 
Now we have super reinforced what the lesson of Viet Nam was for most of the world, which is just make the conflict long and messy and hang on, the Americans will go home and we win.  Doesn't matter how big their military,  how well equipped, if their leadership cannot commit deeply to doing whatever it takes to overcome some nasty, violent opposition, then we can do what we like and laugh at the diplomatic protests and sound bites of upset and frustration from the USA and pretty much everyone else.
 
The future is looking darker all the time.  Unless somehow things change a lot here and we get real leaders back in power, the age of US power ends.  And that's not good for us or the world.
 
Del
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Afghanistan’s End Portends a Darker U.S. Future

Friday, August 13, 2021

When The Ta-Li-Ban Come Back

 

When The Ta-Li-Ban Come Back

 

When the Ta-Li-Ban come back,

Then we girls will quit the school

For the acid they would throw

Would our faces burn away.

 

When the Ta-Li-Ban come back,

Women will not doctors be,

Jobs are not for such as us,

Worthless creatures owned by men,

They may beat us as they please.

 

When the Ta-Li-Ban come back,

I will marry old Rashid,

I must make a good third wife,

For I’m nine and just the age

Of the Prophet’s youngest bride

When she graced his marriage bed.

Peace should be upon his name,

He is perfect in all things.

Baby-wives obey and serve,

Keeping tears from off our cheeks.

 

When the Ta-Li-Ban come back,

Women then will know their place,

Mother must the burka wear,

Never show a man her face,

Father must go out with her,

Or they’ll whip her in the street.

 

When the Ta-Li-Ban come back,

Girls must not report a rape.

Lacking four Believers who

Testify it was by force,

They would scream beneath the stones,

Dying for adultery.

 

When America goes home,

And the Ta-Li-Ban come back,

We will know to thank you for

Living as our mothers lived,

All subservient to men,

Thirteen centuries ago.

 

~Robert A. Hall, Former SSgt, USMC

 

Permission to publish this blank-verse poem is granted to anyone with the courage. But remember Theo van Gogh and the Danish cartoonists.

 

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

How States Could Constitutionally Assume Abandoned Responsibilities of the National Government

 How States Could Constitutionally Assume Abandoned Responsibilities of the National Government

Excerpt: The doctrine of protective resumption offers a way to safeguard the rights of citizenship when the issue is not how powers are being exercised but how they are not. A government that doesn’t perform its core duties is, to that extent, not a government at all. Just like fallen banners, core powers left lying in the dust can be picked up by those next in command, assuming their own powers give them a good reason to do so. State police powers can’t be invoked to remedy every federal dereliction, but there may be areas other than immigration where they can, the case strengthening as federal abdications become more basic and done with mens rea. Potentially it could be invoked in any domain of federal authority so elemental as to put citizens at grave risk if left unattended. Two besides immigration jump to mind as possibilities: maintaining a stable national currency and securing equal protection of the law, though in both cases implementation of protective resumption would be more complex and difficult than with respect to border security. [Oh, my. What an interesting idea! This is REALLY worth reading and thinking about. Ron P.]

Oregon

 This is the stupidest thing you’ll read all day – and it’s from Oregon

Excerpt: Oregon Gov. Kate Brown quietly signed into law on July 14 a bill that allows high school students to graduate without proving they are proficient in reading, writing or arithmetic. According to the Oregonian, the governor has repeatedly denied a request for comment on the new law and why she supports ending proficiency requirements.

Thursday, August 5, 2021

Frederick Douglass takes on cancel culture

 I have read several of Mr. Douglass's lectures and some of the story of his life, and he was truly an outstanding figure of his time, or any time.  He was in some ways the MLK of his era, or perhaps it's more accurate to say he was the progenitor of MLK.  Lessons he spoke of over 160 years ago are as valid and important today as they were then.  Here is one of them.

 
Del
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Frederick Douglass takes on cancel culture

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

STOP THE SLAVERS

 

STOP THE SLAVERS by sarah Hoyt

Worth Reading. ~Bob

The Cake Is A Lie

 

Sarah Hoyt is a science fiction author and blogger.  She was born in Portugal.

Mary Monica


The Cake Is A Lie

There is no cake. The cake is a lie. What’s more, it always was and it always will be.
Last week I was treated second hand — not first, because I’ve blocked the individual’s delusional ass some time back — to the spectacle of a man 20 years older than I arguing in public that having to work for a living is a bad side effect of capitalism, and that “Wage slavery” is in fact slavery, which only exists because the evil capitalists want to step on the common man.
Holy shades of slither-shitting Jean Jacques Rousseau Batman! That is more actual stupid than should fit in a human cranium. In fact, any human brain crammed with that level of insanity should spontaneously explode creating a crater the size of the pacific ocean.
How is it possible to live over seventy years in the world, to read and write, to be in touch with people of various professions and different avocations, to have traveled and seen the world and still come away convinced of the infantile idea that whatever you wish will materialize because you wish it.
I would like to invite the distinguished idiot to go and lay down under Rousseau’s proverbial apple tree and open his mouth wide, until an apple falls in it and chokes him. Though to be fair, he’s more like to die of exposure, insect bites, or pneumonia. Oh, yeah, or of hunger, unless someone takes pity on his complete and utter insanity and feeds him and takes care of him. Which is what he’s counting on.
What he is counting on is a delusion partaken of by libertarians who subscribe to the voluntarianist brand of insanity: If people just do what they want to do with no compensation, everything will work out in the end. We’ll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And blessings and glory will be showered on everyone, without anyone having to do anything to receive them.
That is the cake. The beautiful illusory frosted cake that socialism and communism, and utopian philosophies hold out.
I bet you it was what the serpent whispered in the garden. (I find it hilarious that Rousseau used the apple tree as an example of the all-providing bounty of nature.) “Just do what you please, and the world will take care of you.”
Or as a long ago friend (who I think no longer speaks to me because I had an habit of being rude) used to put it “I worked very hard in other lives. In this life, the universe just wants to take care of me.”
Having watched her progression through life, the universe had many names and many faces. It was relatives, friends and casual acquaintances, and people who thought she was going through temporary inconvenience, which couldn’t possibly be permanent, because who wanted to live like that? …. until eventually it ran out.
We are born naked, mewling and weak, with no ability to stand or feed ourselves, or do pretty much anything. Those of us who survive our first week do so because others work for us.
There are pretty strong bonds and instincts, and impulses pushing us to care for a baby. (I read an article, must be 20 years now that said the cats evolved to mimic the signs of human babies, and the gestalt impression of a baby, which then caused humans to look after them.)
However, unless you’re extremely generous, or morally impelled to do so, no one is going to pick up a baby not their own and look after their every need because they like doing so.
Look, I’ve looked after babies not my own, human and cat and on a singular occasion, a rabbit. I did it because I believe life is precious and worth it. I did not do it because it was enjoyable, and I liked the process.
Looking after babies is bad smelling overflow at both ends, and unending drudgery. You do it for love, and you do it for conviction. No one does it for fun.
“But you see, Sarah, people do that for free.”
I waggle my hand at you. Sort of. In the case of human babies there is usually a non-verbal contract that you look after them and eventually they’ll look after you. But that’s neither here nor there.
This is exactly where these half-cocked lunatics get the idea that someone or something should look after them forever. That they’re entitled to have every need met, as they did when in their cradles.
Hell. In most cultures throughout the world until the Christian era, even babies might not get those needs met. Until people believed that each baby was specially created by the hand of the Most High and therefore precious in and of himself, they stood a good chance of being drowned in the slops pail and taken out with the trash, if the family already had all they wanted or simply was not at home to a baby girl.
The adult-infants shitting in civilization’s cradle and blaming “capitalism” for not getting the pacifier of their preference shoved in their greedy mouths need to grow up.
Until our rich, sassy and frankly stupid era, most people’s working life started at two or three. And before these reticulated imbeciles start talking about capitalism: that is through the extent of humanity as far back as we can tell, back to primitive tribes who had never heard of money; back to isolated communities where money did not apply.
We have letters written by colonials in the US (and btw, anyone who thinks colonialism is white supremacy and “easy” is invited to spend a month — just one — living as these people did) talking of their two, three and four year old children doing tasks that in our day and age we’d be hesitant to entrust to a ten or fifteen year old, from feeding the livestock to caring for cows.
I know in my mom’s day by the time you were five you were looking after your younger siblings, and might be making food (over an open fire) to free your mother to do enough work to keep the family afloat.
Yeah, I know, I know “Capitalism.” My sore ass.
Most of human history, since our species, metaphorically speaking, emerged naked and squalling onto the Earth there hasn’t been enough to go around: Not enough food, not enough time, nor enough strength, not enough covering against the cold, and certainly not enough rest. To keep a family fed, the entire family worked. And it was brutal and relentless work morning to night.
I love the fact that the neo-Rousseauneans, primitive fantasist edition, look at the graves of the neolithic and tell us before agriculture these people lived wild and free. Each did what they wanted. And they had no disease, no–
No life. They died young and often brutally. At 58, I’d look to them like an impossibly ancient human. And not having scars, broken bones, and being relatively well fed, I’d look to them much younger than I am.
Shakespeare is estimated as having died at my age “old and full of years” and btw the Elizabethans were already, compared to the history of the human race, already living high off the hog.
This same idiot, btw, who thinks wage slavery is still slavery also is convinced that humans always lived about as long as they do now. Sure. In some very prosperous pockets. In certain places or classes in the world. It seems that the extent of our genetic longevity is somewhere around 120 if everything goes just right for us. But you know, those last twenty years you’ll be like the infants and depend on the love and kindness of those around you.
For most of human existence upon the Earth, reaching sixty was a fabled dream. Sure, the statistics we have include a lot of infant death, but dear bog, it wasn’t that long ago or faraway that, as a kid in a relatively (and by historic norms astonishingly) well off village in a not barbarous country, when someone died at sixty there was a shrug and a “he was old.” I was 14 before I met my first 80 year old. There simply were none around. (And that 80 year old looked worse than my dad who is now 90.)
Most people died relatively young, of horrible stuff. And remember I was born after the advent of antibiotics (without which I wouldn’t be here and writing this at you. In that universe I died somewhere around 6 of tuberculosis.)
Sure. “Everyone does what they want, and we will all be provided for.” We have it now. Or we did, before these mind-wiped gapeseeds came onto the landscape. It’s called free trade and a money economy.
Heck, it might be the greatest invention of the human mind.
Look, as anyone who has lived in a commune, or even gone on vacation with a handful of close friends knows, there are always people ready to eat. There might even be enough to cook (for a definition of cook) but no one ever wants to wash the dishes.
In the same way, while I know people who dig ditches (or furrows) for fun, or who enjoy fixing cars, I don’t know a single human being who cleans septic tanks for a lark, or who irons clothes for eight hours a day, or who–
Hell, even the things that are fun — I confess to a weird love for painting and fixing furniture — aren’t fun if you do them day in, day out, eight to ten hours a day. Look, I love writing. And I’m lucky enough to make enough from it that it constitutes “making a living.” It’s not a great living, mind you. And it’s insecure. Most years I make somewhere between 30 and 50k. I don’t remember what letter that makes me in the Correia author alphabet. But there is always a year or two, often when we can least afford it, that I make 10k. Or 5k. Or a few years ago 2k. So without a husband who has a regular income, I’d be in serious trouble.
Ah, but that’s the inherent issue of the capitalist system, idiots would bleat. I should have everything I want to live, and then if I felt like writing, I would.
There are only two problems with this: I might not feel like writing anything others wanted to read; and I certainly wouldn’t do it with any degree of assiduity. Certainly not enough to develop my craft so that what I produced was readable. And I don’t think I’m the exception. I’ve seen trust fund babies, and other fully-supported writers, and 99% of the time, they go nowhere.
And keep in mind what I do is only of value to a highly wealthy society that has leisure time to day-dream in other worlds.
But the incentives are the same as for the person who farms wheat or cows, or for that matter grows apple trees. If they had everything they needed, they wouldn’t work every day. Just when they felt like. Which means we rapidly, all of us would stop having everything we need.
You can say what you want about the inequities of wealth distribution. I have my own views on it. I’ll note that fields dominated by leftists are always the worst for exploiting workers.
However most of the time, when people complain about wealth distribution or disparate payment for work, they aren’t seeing the whole picture. Like the idiots who say doctors should be paid like teachers: they have no idea what’s involved in the training of a doctor, nor of the hours doctors work, when fully formed, nor of the responsibilities and pressures weighing on them. If they did, they might realize most doctors aren’t even particularly well paid (particularly when you take into account malpractice insurance. If teachers had to pay malpractice insurance, they’d have to pay to work. Particularly if we sued them for malpractice. (I have a list.))
Ultimately what those complaining of wage slavery are saying is “I want the world to look after me.” And when they get power they make everyone else slaves, and do away with those that require care, and take us all back to a brutal primitivism all so they can stay adult babies, mewling and puking their death cult philosophy.
The cake of communism/socialism is a lie. It’s stuffed with mass graves and worms and lives of misery, beneath the glittery frosting.
It put 100 million human beings in their graves in the 20th century alone. Let’s not give it another try. This has been tried, over and over. It’s impossible. The result is always death at the hands of the greedy psychopaths who resent us for not catering to their every need real and imagined.
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Fantastic video of a mother chewing CRT to bits

 Fantastic video of a mother chewing CRT to bits

This video should be seen by pretty much every American who has, or
should have, any concern about what goes on in schools.

Del

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9Ae55TlBdM&t=187s