Category: Current Events

Our Broken Military

There are no words for the disgusting and despicable political actions of our current military leadership. From a congresscritter using National Guard soldiers in uniform as a prop (and a threat) to the multiple attacks on Tucker Carlson because he dared criticize the current push to put SJW priorities before warfighting capabilities. While Ted Cruz has pushed back, and Kurt Schlichter has a good take on things, don’t expect anything to come of it. There may be a little show, but the politization will continue. This despite a series of war games in which the U.S. is defeated by China; and, the increasing military and nuclear threat from Russia that I’ve talked about before.

For those who wonder why I’ve said that if faced with an unlawful order, the best case is that the military shatters. Look at those who attacked Tucker Carlson for daring criticize their emphasis on SJW issues rather than training (note, Carlson did NOT criticize female troops): do you really think that they would not hesitate to obey an illegal order? Look at the NG troops in mentioned above who knowingly and willfully took part in a political event in uniform. If they disobey one illegal order, why would anyone thing that they would not obey another? I have to agree with Glenn’s take that they seem far more interested in domestic control than in successfully confronting our enemies.

Oh, before I forget: if you decide to look up the series of stories about our being beaten by China in the war games, you might note that in none of the stories do they discuss how badly we lost. That may, perhaps, speak volumes.

While it is with a heavy heart, I will also note that I am one of many who is no longer recommending joining the military to most who are interested. What you see above is but a shadow of what is to come (unless China and/or Russia act first).

Dear Resident Xiden

Your event last night was many things, most of which I will leave to others. However, I will address one part with the care and thoughtfulness it deserves.

You spent time telling American Citizens what they can or cannot do. Who they can spend time with, and who they can’t, and in what size of groups. What activities they can take part in, and those they can’t. The exhortations to obey were trite and wearisome.

Despite all that is going on, the avalanche of executive orders, the bills to eliminate our individual liberty and freedoms, we are still American Citizens. The government does not tell us what or what not to do. We tell the government what to do. You (you and your puppet masters) are supposed to be servants, not the civil masters you believe yourselves to be.

So, please feel free to **** off.

Sincerely,

LW

Happy Warrior 3: Finding the Happy in the Warrior

Today, we have another guest post by River, which I hope you enjoy. It is well worth the read.

The political news continues to be relentlessly bad. Our enemies domestic, the Democrats in power, now openly Socialist, are going down their wishlist with but little resistance to the policies that will fundamentally transform our Republic into a totalitarian state. Our enemies foreign are preparing for war; worldwide economic collapse is imminent (whether through runaway inflation or stagflation, take your pick).

 So how to find the happy in the warrior? First, I think we have to accept that the first Republic is gone. Denying reality is the specialty of the other side; let’s not fall into that hole in the sand ourselves. It’s going to be very hard to face the reality of the depth of the hole we’ve fallen into. Figuring out how and why is useful, if depressing. Figuring out how to get out of it is where the happy lies.

 The question is how do we get from where we are now to the Second Republic.  There was a joke when the Iron Curtain fell and the Eastern Bloc countries were reinventing themselves, and we were sending all sorts of political and economic consultants over there: Why not give them our Constitution, we’re not using it…. The Constitution can and should be the bedrock of the Second Republic. 

 Also still applicable are the battlecries of the first American Revolution: “Taxation with Representation.” “Give me liberty, or give me death!”  “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

 “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

 So the people who are framing the potential violence to come as a Civil War II are wrong. This is not about states rights, it’s not about continuing the vile practice of slavery. It’s about a return to the individual freedoms we as Americans have the right to enjoy. This is not CWII, it’s ARII.

 Of course, one of the reasons ARI worked was that it was a conservative revolution, that is, it wasn’t seeking to change the form of government, it was seeking to restore it from those who were changing the rules. So we have that on our side, because that’s what we’re trying to do, too.

 Another reason ARI succeeded was that the usurpers were, at that point, essentially foreigners. And another was that we were already self-governing, with all the machinery in place, and didn’t need control from afar.

 And that’s not quite the case for ARII. The people seeking to control us are homegrown, and all the machinery for governance is in their hands. However, we do have a perfectly good, if heretofore unreliable, antidote to their machinery, in the Republican party. The next step on the path is for as many of us as possible to join the party, support Trump’s efforts at reform, and provide some backbone and organization for the necessary changes to come.

 And at the same, we should be rooting out the influence of our foreign enemies. While the Republic’s usurpers are homegrown it will be a useful exercise for the revolutionaries of ARII to discover and make public the names of those who are subsidized (and/or controlled by threat of embarrassment or violence) by foreign influence. I’m talking hard proof, not rumors, but serious forensic accounting, serious investigative reporting. If it were easy, anybody could do it. We’ll need dedicated armchair warriors—in the most serious sense of the phrase–and we’ll need those who can protect them while they are at their work.

 This is a war that will be fought on many fronts, and almost assuredly the most important of them will not be the cartridge box, but the box that sits on your desk or in your pocket. This is a 21st century war, and information, and culture, will be just as important as brave men with guns. About which more later.

The Posts In Proper Order

Since I got guest poster River’s posting order wrong, I thought I should do a quick post to make it easy for you to read them in the proper order.

The proper first post is here.

The proper second post is here.

There is some good food for thought here, and I highly recommend you not only read River’s posts, but read them in the right order.

The Happy Warrior

Today features another guest post by “River” and it really should have been the first one up. So, when you finish reading it, go read The Happy Warrior Lives in All of Us. Sorry about that River…

Whether you believe the American Republic died on January 6th or January 20th (and I believe a case can be made for the death date being when the Roberts court failed to strike down Obamacare as unconstitutional), the Republic as we knew it is gone.

All that remains is to see what we—you and I—are going to do about it.

We believe in American Exceptionalism. But we also believed it couldn’t happen here. Yet all around us we see our countryman content with grotesque erosions of our freedoms. So we see that yes, indeed, it can happen here. (I refer you to Dennis Prager’s excellent essay “The Good German.”)

But American Exceptionalism isn’t some magic force that’s going to save us. American Exceptionalism is how we respond to tyranny.

Trump proved he was not the despot he was made out to be. Oh, not because he couldn’t have been—because it was clear, he could have been a Caesar, returning the country to a republican form of government by decree. But for better or worse, he declined to be that guy. Did not want to be remembered as that person. Instead, he insisted that we citizens use the forms of government and law laid down by the Founding Fathers to restore the Republic. We failed.

So Donald Trump will be remembered as the last lawfully elected President of the Republic, Joe Biden its first Socialist “Beloved Leader,” propped up by all the force of a corrupt bureaucracy, and with the collusion of Big Tech and other large “private” industries that need the protection of a government enforced monopoly to exist.

So we failed to overthrow a blatantly stolen presidential (and then senatorial) election. That’s on us. It’s going to be that much harder now to succeed. They think they’ve run the table, that there’s not stopping their every country-destroying move. But the one good piece of news is that we now can see, without a doubt, exactly where the enemy of the Republic lies, how deep the corruption is. Not just a few crazy representatives and Senators, but the FBI, local district attorneys, secretaries of state, election boards, the Supreme Court, the rulers of Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, CNN, and beyond. All those calling for purges, for jail time for the exercise of free speech and assembly.

It’s a big task. And the cockroaches are all over the kitchen.  (Not an anti-Semitic metaphor—just and anti-Socialist one!)

How do we clean house?

Well, we won’t do it with despair in our hearts. We know—and Trump’s 4 years proved—that if you return to first principles, you win. You can place America’s interests first, have  a strong defense, peace from your enemies, a thriving economy, and freedom for your citizens. So we must go forward knowing that the only reason the other side was driven to cheating is because they’d lost the war of ideas. Oh, they won the war of rhetoric, big time. But they didn’t win the war of reality. And reality counts.

We must go forward knowing that if we hold true to the Christian principles this country was founded on—and I say this as a nonbeliever—we will win over those who only have hatred to carry them through. Hatred of human life, hatred of Trump, fear of freedom, fear of making their own choices. We must love our neighbor, even as he is willing to betray us and our cause. Not an easy task. But as my brother reminds me—we hate the sin, not the sinner. We have to help them to the light.

And each one of us will have a part in this. Some of us will be writing under our own names. Others using pseudonyms. We will take our business away from those who would hurt us, and create new networks of those who adhere to the principles of freedom of conscience. We will do without—sometimes, and that’s okay.

And we must reform the only political party we can influence. About which more, next time.

The Happy Warrior Lives in All of Us

Today I’m glad to host what I hope will be the first of many posts by “River.” Enjoy and share!

Despite the failure to convict Trump, the news has been relentlessly bad since January 6th. The powers of totalitarianism have run the table. They control all three branches of the Federal government, the Army, the cities, the Federal intelligence forces, Big Tech, Big Media, and your local school board.

Hard to keep up a smile in those circumstances. Things will only get worse. We know from history the next steps. First, the economic geniuses making our fiscal policy decisions have led us to a point where either runaway inflation or a simple economic collapse are inevitable. You can only keep writing checks against future income so long as your creditors believe you are good for it. No one thinks that anymore. (Hamiliton knew that; these are not new problems.)  My prediction is that this will start within the next 6-18 months.

What do totalitarians do when that happens? They confiscate resources. Henry the VIII took the monasteries, the French took the artistos’ land, Hitler took the Jews’ . Our Democracy ™ if I may use a term from Michael Anton’s piece here: https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/23/why-do-the-elections-defenders-require-my-agreement/, is already telling us who they will target: businesses that are “racist.” How do they know you are racist? If you didn’t vote for them, or donate to them, q.e.d, you are a racist. Or they may target health care deniers—people who refuse to get vaccinations, wear masks, whatever the latest decree is that is for the good of Our Democracy TM. Or both. Why think small?

With Big Tech’s help, you are easy to identify.

What this means for anyone who actually remembers freedom—and this is people over 40, by the way; most of the younger generation has no problem philosophically with any of these measures—is that we will be fighting a guerilla civil war. We will be the “Underground” in our own country. And we won’t be getting support from outside the borders, like the successful undergrounds did in WWII and like we provided for people of Eastern Europe under the Soviets.

It’s going to get ugly, and it’s going to get ugly fast. The freedom lovers are completely unprepared for this. We don’t have the parallel systems in place we need to organize. We don’t have the banks, the server farms, the shadow government ready to take over.

This is going to take generations. And our children’s children are going to curse us for not heading this off before it came to bloodshed.

Where does the happy part come in? Don’t judge your freedom lovers. Most of us are going to have to conform, or lose everything. Especially the young people, who are trying to build careers, trying to raise children, who do not have a nest egg or the means to retreat to a more free State. People who need access to what remaining health care there is. They will have to knuckle under.

If anyone is to fight back, we will need many within the system to provide cover for them, to be an Underground Railroad, to keep them supplied, to provide havens.

Max Morton goes into more detail here: https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/23/the-last-stop-before-thermopylae/  about what is needed.

But my happy warrior message: don’t beat up on the people who agree with you,but must stay legal. And for those of us who can’t, either because their previous work makes them anathema, or who just can’t stand the tyrant, cut them some slack, too. The purges are coming. Let’s try to connect with and support each other as much as possible before that happens.

Enemies Foreign And Domestic

Current events are, to be honest, overwhelming. From the rule of executive order to open efforts to censor anything non-progressive, there is so much going on that it is hard to keep up with all of it, even for dedicated political/informational junkies. I do find it interesting (and a few other terms) that the noted right wing (cough, cough) author and Obama advisor Naomi Wolf was on Tucker Carlson warning that America is becoming a “totalitarian state) under Biden. Hate linking to Fox, but necessary in this instance.

Indeed, I could go on and on about all that is going on, from cancel culture to full-out assaults on the Constitution. I will note my own observation to the testimony of FORMER U.S. Capitol Police Chief Sund that if what happened was a “military style coordinated assault” and that those who took part came “prepared for war” that he knows as much about war and combat as he does fornicating, to borrow from Patton. For all that we are watching a massive “big lie” event in operation, those statements are laughable.

It is easy to get focused on the domestic, but don’t get tunnel vision. While most of what is going on domestically is indeed domestic, some is being driven and encouraged by other actors who do not have the best interest of the Citizens of the United States, or the Constituion, at heart. Russia remains a threat and between its activities here and at home, bears (all puns intended) considerable watching. The semi-recent nuclear exercise is but one part of the threat to the region and the world, especially given Putin’s continuing lowering of the nuclear threshold.

China, however, remains the largest threat. Keep in mind that China continues to use Iran as a catspaw, especially against the U.S. Yet more Iranians have been caught coming across the border, and I highly recommend reading this post. Chinese on the West Coast, Iranians on the Gulf Coast into Central. This is long-term, both encouraged by China, and I still ask what else besides people has been smuggled across the border? Also, don’t forget the SCS, Taiwan, and everything else China is doing to go after us.

There were things afoot well before the election that still are lurking out there in the dark. To be honest, I’m surprised (and pleased) that some of them did not take place as expected. That, however, doesn’t mean that they won’t still take place.

For all of that, I need to get back to Preparedness Pays as I think good, solid preparation is something we all need to be thinking about, for both domestic and foreign events.

A List Of Lies

While I do wish he had not called it a riot (it was not, riots are what burned so many cities over the summer), Glenn Greenwald has done a great job of listing the major lies about what happened on January 6 at the Capitol. For all that I still wonder if I didn’t shift a reality or two because Glenn has been a voice of reason of late, it is a much needed post to counter the mainstream media narrative. Go read it.

Into The Light: Rush Limbaugh

The original Happy Warrior has passed. There are others posting more eloquent and detailed testimonials, but the man blazed a trail that has brought about opportunities for so many. He saved AM radio, revolutionized the talk radio field, and did so much more. Even when one disagreed with him, he made you think and was willing to take rational disagreement and consider new information.

Godspeed.

Disgusting Cancel Culture Attack on Baen Books

In some ways, I’m not surprised as there have been efforts to attack Baen and/or some of its authors before from the slime mold at the bottom of the science fiction sewer. This effort, however, has a very different and new twist that may well become the hallmark of all such efforts.

In what seems like a coordinated effort, complaints were filed with the ISPs behind Baen Books, in an effort to deplatform the publisher. Note, from the information I have right now, they not only wanted to take down the Bar, a forum that has been around for roughly 20 years now; but, to take down Baen Books so that it could not promote, sell, or give away (you have no idea how many free books and stories you can get there, but should).

I won’t link to the sleazy “author” (cough, choke, gasp, wheeze, yeah right) who is either behind this attack or fronting for it. I won’t link to the intellectually dishonest paetron story which is the public pretext for the attack on Baen. I especially won’t linke to Vile 770 which seems to be championing the effort (no surprise that slime mold central is so doing).

What I will do is link to the (as usual excellent) response from Larry Correia which now also includes responses from David Weber and Baen Publisher Toni Weisskopf. Please read them all.

Now, in the interest of transparency (something more in modern journalism should try) I do need to note a number of items.

While I am not published by Baen (yet), I have known Toni for more years than a gentleman (or cranky old wolf) should disclose. Indeed, Toni has edited my three photo books from Iraq as a friend. Toni has encouraged me for years (along with the late Jim Baen) to move from science writing to writing science fiction. She’s provided feedback on my efforts to do just that.

Second, I was (am?) a member of the Bar (Baen’s Bar). I haven’t been on in years, but in my time there the only thing of which it was a hotbed was geekery. The forums and posts were wide rangning, engaging, and quite often enlightening as you had posts from scientists in various fields on topics of interest (especially to writers), a forum on theology, and even a place to share recipes. The original “no hitting” rule was in place and rarely did anyone cross that line. Not to say that some discussions did not become intense, or even fractious, but people toed the line and showed respect for differing opinions and the people behind them. It was and is the mature way to handle things, and to learn in the process. I would also note that those who “ran” the Bar were all volunteers.

Sadly, the people behind cancel culture have an emotional maturity to shame a spoiled 4-year-old. I also have to wonder if this effort wasn’t just a way to try to shut down Baen because some of it’s authors are conservative, but to gain fame and fortune (maybe someone will buy/pay for his work) in the process.

Third, I know a number of the Baen authors and consider some of them good personal friends. For the record, Baen publishes books by authors who range from card-carrying socialists to those who go far right. Honestly, Toni doesn’t care about the politics, religion, etc. of the authors, artists, editors, etc. What matters is that they write good and engaging stories that sell. Nor does she care if the stories lean right, left, or any other way. Again, good stories that sell. It’s what real publishing is all about: good writing that sells rather than messaging crap that doesn’t.

Fourth, I will admit that Baen not only helped with arrangements but assisted in covering the costs for me to do a series of video interviews with some of their authors a while back. You can find those somewhere on the Baen site (at least I think you still can) or at the Blackfive YouTube Channel.

I suppose I should be furious about this dispicable effort to de-platform Baen by a group of philisophically and morally bankrupt people who’s intellect makes a cherrystone clam shake its head. The fact is, they are not worth that level of attention by me. In fact, I will simply say that I hope their actions bring them what they deserve.

So, what can you or I do? Save the outrage, they deserve only mocking laughter. What we can do is cheerfully go and buy from Baen books. Look at what they have available, and buy as many as you can.

Oh, and if you want to claim that Baen and its authors deserve this; or that Baen has caved by taking the Bar offline temporarily; or any other silly virtue signalling that actually only calls out your, ah, shortcomings to the world, take it elsewhere. If you do try to come here, I will savagely mock you and your physical and intellectual shortcomings. You are warned.

Laugh at the first group, and buy from the second. So easy anyone can do it.