Open Thread

Mark NoonanLeave a comment

Vile anti-Semites have largely taken over many US colleges and in just a few areas, the authorities are moving against them – recently in Texas. Once this happened, quite a number of people on the Right got upset. You see, we’re suppressing free speech.

I am so very tired of this drivel – this Libertarian nonsense that I’m obligated to look after the rights of people who will have me shot at the first opportunity. There was a time when I believed that an open airing of ideas would lead, by and large, to the correct ideas being adopted. It doesn’t work that way. People lie – and liars lie because lies work.

Aging has-been Susan Sarandon was out there and when asked about the rapes on 10/7, she just flatly denied they happened. She’s lying. She knows they happened. We all know they happened. But she’ll bare face that out – because there’s no consequence to her for it. She’ll still be an honored person; the Left takes care of their own. And because people like her are willing to lie, the lies become commonplace…and young people, ill-equipped under the best of circumstances to detect a lie, fall for it. I’m supposed to let liars tell America’s youth that Israel is evil? That America is evil? That the Constitution I swore to defend has a built in mechanism for self destruction?

No. I won’t do it. I will not play by rules the other side rejects. Anything we can to do hamper the propagation of anti-American views and anything we can do to punish those who hold those views will be done. It has to be. Its either destroy these people or they’ll destroy us.

Polls are still going back and forth (though mostly favorable to Trump) but the official word from almost all Experts is that Biden has it in the bag. Maybe he does? Who knows? But with Trump stuck in NYC for his bogus trial what we’re seeing is outpouring of support from working class New Yorkers for Trump. Will Trump win New York City? Not a chance; the working class there is actually rather small – the connected rich and the welfare bums make up a majority of the population and they’ll keep voting Democrat. But I think it does show something…perhaps some sort of fundamental shift: the working class is turning to Trump. No to the GOP, but to Trump. So is the middle class outside of the government-supported middle class. The Democrats are the party of the richest and poorest Americans…Trump is the candidate for everyone else. We’ll see if that’s enough in November…and if it is enough, if the GOP is willing to see that their future is as a populist-conservative working/middle class party.

One thing that is an advantage for us is how utterly delusional the Left is becoming. One of the history accounts on X posted a video of Goering’s arrest in 1945 – where he’s turning in his weapon and about to have all his decorations and badges of rank stripped from his uniform. What struck me on that was the expression on Goering’s face: he was crestfallen. It was the moment when he knew that the game was up. Got to keep in mind that just before this, Georing was still working on the theory that the Allied leadership would want to talk to him. Himmler had similar delusions. That after all of WWII and the emerging evidence of the Holocaust, they’d still be players. Goering having his sidearm taken let him know that he was just another criminal being processed. He was a man who had completely separated himself for all human decency but who thought he was still human. Rely on it, not too long before that video was taken, he had hugged his daughter and told her he loved her…as if he was human. But, he wasn’t. Only repentance could have restored him to humanity. As far as we know, he never did. He play acted as a human being, but he wasn’t human. The plain fact of the matter is that he never loved his daughter…a man who can be instrumental in murdering millions can’t possibly love. But such a person can delude themselves into thinking they do.

So, too, with our Lefties. They think they’re human, but they’re really not. Once you’re at the point of nodding along with abortion to birth and having healthy body parts cut off of children, you’ve left your humanity very far behind. You’ll still play-act like a human, but you aren’t. As with Goering, only repentance can restore humanity. This is why we see the Left endlessly bemoaning the dead Palestinians while not even mentioning the dead Jews. They’re play acting. They don’t care about either. But the gambit for power is, at the moment, to support the Palestinians and hate the Jews…so one dead Palestinian brings forth tears…a Jewish baby burned alive brings forth nothing. This is also why as Christians are massacred by Muslims in Africa we don’t hear a peep…because the Left doesn’t care that they’re dead. It means nothing to them, not even in theory. Only if the deaths can help the Leftist gain wealth or power do they matter.

But this is not a strength. It is ultimately a fatal weakness. Just as it was for Goering in days gone by. When you get delusional you simply don’t understand how you look to sane people. You, in fact, start to think that the more delusional you are, the more admirable. You start doing increasingly stupid things to service your delusion…until it all comes crashing down. I think we’re at that point; we’ve tipped. Sure, the Left still has all the power, but its based upon people not figuring it out…and day by day, more and more people are figuring it out. The Left is just crazy…doing insane, stupid things. Think about this: the illegal immigration issue is simply killing Democrats in polling. They won’t even slow it down. They could easily do so; one crisp order from whomever is pulling Biden’s strings and border crossings will drop 90 percent. But insane people don’t respond to rational incentives. The Left is committed to the open border and believes that they are admired for it.

An Atomic Lie

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Got into a very long debate on X about the morality of the use of the Atomic Bomb. It is seriously gotta be the biggest engagement post I’ve ever had there: as of this moment, 56,600 views, 358 reposts, 3,100 likes and 474 comments. In strict X parlance, I have been “ratioed”. This means you have more comments than reposts and usually means you’ve said something ridiculous. Not in this case. If you clicked on it, you’ll see that my post was a picture of my Dad as a young Marine, the notation that he was waiting on Okinawa to invade Kyushu in November of 1945 and finishes up with a small, editorial comment about those who say that A Bomb was bad.

Some of the comments are bad faith but most, in my view, simply betray ignorance. Some times well meaning ignorance, but ignorance nonetheless. And that actually has me a little worried. If you go through the comments you’ll see that several times I pointed out the four options available to Truman in July, 1945. They are, sometimes very briefly stated:

  1. Blanche at the cost of finishing off Japan either by nukes or invasion and agree to negotiate a peace which would force Japan to surrender their Empire, but leaves in place the Japanese Ruling Class which waged the war…and that Ruling Class now convinced that their suicidal fight to the death got us to blink. That they are our moral superiors and just need better material for Round II. In other words, this end almost certainly means another war – and maybe a nuclear war as Japan did have a nuclear weapons program. So Pearl Harbor Two might have been Los Angeles and San Francisco getting nuked.
  2. Starve Japan to death. The Japanese were incapable of feeding their population from domestic food production. Like Britain, it was import, or starve. Japan had no means of obtaining resources of any sort as our command of the sea was absolute. We could have just stood off and let starvation kill Japanese until they quit. This would have been up to tens of millions…and they might not have quit. Once their population dropped to sustainable levels, they might have still refused.
  3. Invade Japan. This is a very well known option and all post-War analysis indicates this would have been a horrific affair with maybe a million American casualties and untold millions of Japanese deaths.
  4. Drop the Atomic Bombs and so instruct the Japanese that we could kill them with no loss to ourselves; that any future dying would only be Japanese and to no avail.

As I also pointed out at various points, commanders in war, civil and military, are besieged by a host of information arriving all at once from every point of the compass. Some of it is false. Some irrelevant. Some flat contradictory with other information arriving at the same time. Out of this morass of data, the commander must tease out the correct information or lose. This is not an easy task. It is not a neat and tidy exercise as it can sometimes appear in a history book. This is why when looking back, caution must be taken. We weren’t there. We weren’t under those particular stresses. We benefit from hindsight no matter how much we try to set that aside. In my view, Truman made not just the best of a bad situation, but the correct moral decision. The intention was not to massacre Japanese, it was to end the war by the swiftest means…to end the effusion of blood, Japanese as well, as quickly as possible. And it was done; in the end, no matter what else, it worked. And if you want to call it wrong, you simply must come up with an obvious, superior option which was known to the decision makers at the time. There simply wasn’t any beyond these four. None of them were perfect, all of them posed risks: Truman chose the best one.

Do keep in mind that the comments condemning Truman as a monster issued from both Left and Right. People are getting united in a shared insistence that there was simply no justification at all for dropping the Bomb. What this tells you is that the general propaganda line has worked. And, of course, we know that propaganda does work. But this is doubly disturbing this propaganda issued to condemn the Bomb originated in the Soviet Union to denigrate our effort in WWII – to make out that we were bad, and so excuse Soviet actions. This line was picked up by Nazi-apologists as a means of getting around the Holocaust. But now it has morphed into a general belief that America is morally tainted. When added to slavery, it is being used to make out that America is the bad guy in the world. That we’re the nation that has to be destroyed. And the Right is participating in this – going along with it. And from what I can tell, they are doing it mindlessly…just so they can have something they agree with the Left on. A “see, I hate that, too” moment.

When we combine this with the “anti-colonialist” attitude of the Left and the increasing number of people on the Right who are condemning Israel’s war in Gaza, we can see our problem: basically, our entire civilization is in the dock and it is being found guilty. That it is ignorant people making the ruling is neither here nor there: ignorant jurors get a say. And the USA is being found guilty.

This is worrying not just for the fate of our nation, but for the fate of anything resembling civilization. Islamists savages went on a rape/murder spree and that’s in the Memory Hole while college kids riot on campus in favor of the savages. We’re being told we have to save Democracy in Ukraine even though elections have been suspended there. The Free World we defend with NATO arrests people for misgendering. China buys whatever influence it wants – and our open border and drug addiction may very well be a Chinese op. But we’re not allowed to fight against it because we’re the bad guys…the people who held slaves and who cruelly and needlessly nuked Japanese children. You see?

We really have to win this November. Not for Trump. Heck, he’s not even the guy we remotely need right now. He’s just massively the superior of the alternative. But we, the Americans – those of us who are left – have to take control of our country. Or we simply won’t have one – it’ll be falsified out of existence. We must find the ways and means of getting the liars out of all power and influence and simply re-instructing an ignorant population on what America actually was, and can be again.

The Anti-Semitic Moment

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Candace Owens made a splash a few years ago as black, female conservative but now is branching out – she’s taking up the cause of the Third Reich. Whether as a matter of conviction or because there’s lots of anti-Semitic clicks to be had from the Gaza war is unknown. Superficially, you might think that National Socialism is something black people can’t do but it is actually infinitely applicable. The key isn’t being German, or even white. The key is to be anti-Semitic. If we could dig up Zombie Hitler he’d probably still assert that black skinned people are inherently inferior, but that would only be until he got his bearings and realized there’s room for everyone, except Jews. Hitler, after all, made alliance with the Japanese…and for all his granting honorary Aryan status to the Japanese, this was a violation of strict Nazi ideology.

The first step to Nazism – the gateway drug – is blame Jews for something. Not a Jew, but Jews, as such. The Gaza war has provided ample opportunity for people to blame the Jews. There are now right and left people who have found that in spite of all other differences, a shared hatred of Jews can unite them. And once you start hating the Jews, all sorts of vistas open up for you. For Owens, it was the shocking revelation (to her, at any rate) that Germans in 1945 were treated very poorly. What she mainly found out about was the expulsion of the German population from central and eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWII.

Nobody knows for certain how many people were involved but it was certainly more than 10 million Germans forced from lands Germans had lived in for centuries. In the process, unknown numbers of Germans were robbed, raped, beaten and murdered. Poles and Czechs were especially notable in their brutality but nobody ever exceeded what the Russians did when they got into Germany. Over on the western side, the French unleashed their North African soldiers on the German population with the expected result. The Anglo-Americans were the most gentle but as we went into Germany we were quite savage is suppressing the least sign of resistance, we confiscated huge amounts of undamaged housing (giving the Germans literal minutes to clear out) and there were robberies, rapes and murders of Germans. Candace is shocked by all this. And on her posts about it, a huge raft of neo-Nazis have posted article after article making out that the Germans were the victims. That the whole war was orchestrated by the Jews to destroy Germany.

This is all pure, unadulterated nonsense.

As I’ve noted before, the Germans got off light in World War Two. They started a war they had no cause to start. They behaved with inhuman savagery towards the people they conquered. Their plan was to massacre millions and settle Germans on the lands of the dead; any survivors among the conquered were to be reduced to slavery. As they retreated they gratuitously destroyed as much property in occupied countries as they could. And they did this because they thought they were superior. Hitler didn’t start the concept of Germanic superiority. Oddly, it was started by a Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau. He asserted that the more Aryan you were, the more superior. In his view, France was undone because the inferior, non-Aryan part of the nation had managed to overthrow the superior, Aryan part (of which he was a member). From Gobineau to Hitler is a whole raft of race theorists who built into the German mind this idea that they were superior and that superior people must rule the lesser. Bottom line: the Germans wanted Hitler and his war. They wanted him and it to be a success. They looked forward eagerly to being masters over slaves. Of course, Germans aren’t superior and all the Aryan blood in the world isn’t going to help you deal with 1,000 8th Air Force bombers overhead, Montgomery’s 21st Army Group crossing the Rhine or Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front staffed with men who had their whole families massacred by Germans. The Germans, in the end, were stupid. And what they got in 1945 was what was coming. The Jews had nothing to do with it: the Germans called down the wrath of God upon themselves.

But we also have a population of highly uneducated people. And thus Owens’ being shocked to find that the people who caused World War Two weren’t treated with kid gloves. That’s bad enough: the worst part of it is that its all being worked into blaming the Jews, and this as part of the larger Islamist/Western Leftist program to annul the State of Israel. We’re just a step away from a major portion of the Western world holding to the view that there is a Global Jewish Conspiracy. As noted, blaming Jews is the gateway drug to Nazism – but once you’re through that gate, then its increasingly easy to blame all problems on your target. That is what Owens is doing vis WWII. But you’ll find voices saying that the border invasion, the trans movement, child trafficking, drug addition and on and on are caused by the Jews. And if we could just get rid of these damned Jews, we could fix it all.

It can’t be emphasized enough that we must stamp on this. We cannot permit this line of thinking to grow. Those who are propagating it must have their ability to do so taken away. This isn’t a matter of free speech of anything trivial: the people propagating anti-Semitism are, knowing or not, preparing for a Holocaust. They have to be stopped before they get enough adherents to first massacre the Jews of Israel, then massacre the Jews of the world. We have found that “Never Again” is just words – just saying you won’t have a Holocaust isn’t enough to prevent it. You must stop it – and as we learned last time, it must be stopped early. There are some ideas so evil that they must be suppressed – and one of those ideas is that Jews, as a group, control things. Like your Jewish neighbor goes to the Jew Conspiracy Meeting once a month to make plans. It is just stupid – but just because it is stupid doesn’t mean it isn’t lethal. In fact, an argument can be made the more stupid the idea is, the more lethal it can be. Basically, once someone signs on to be stupid, they usually feel they can’t back away from it for fear of ridicule…so they just double and triple down on it. The SA guy who beat up a Jew in 1929 became the gas chamber operator in 1943.

We do have some means of stopping this. First off would be cutting of the anti-Semitic money. Huge amounts of Arab oil money flows into America’s schools, thus paying for anti-Semitism. Huge numbers of anti-Semitic Muslim students are enrolled in our colleges; expel and deport them. Cut off funding for UNWRA, the Red Cross/Red Crescent and a huge number of other NGO’s who have become overtly anti-Semitic over time. Fire the government and education bureaucrats and professors who have talked up drivel like “anti-colonialism”. Doing all of this might be sufficient to protect the American body politic from the anti-Semitic virus – but we must also keep in mind that an application of violence against the worst offenders might prove necessary. This is that crucial; the future of human decency is at stake. How a person views the Jews is the litmus test on whether or not they are sane, reasonable people. Those who hate them must be ostracized at a minimum, destroyed as a last resort.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan9 Comments

They got Trump on trial and so he goes and visits a bodega in NYC where the owner was persecuted by the DA for defending himself…large, friendly crowd. To be sure, Harlem is rapidly gentrifying so its not like Trump got popular in the ‘hood…but, still: it is NYC.

Do they get him convicted? Possibly, but I rate it at best 50/50 for them. It only takes on juror to have a mistrial…and the charges are so obviously politically bogus that even a NYC jury might refuse to play along. And it isn’t like the New York government is ragingly popular these days. Acquitting Trump is an excellent way to poke it in the eye. If they get a conviction it is over trivial charges which are likely unconstitutional…so, Trump doesn’t go to jail.

Democrats are crowing that while they have Trump in court he can’t campaign while Biden is free to hit the trail. That’s saying the quiet part out loud! But the fly in their ointment is that Biden can’t actually hit the trail. His latest mental breakdown had him claiming an uncle was eaten by cannibals in World War Two. That was before he warned Israel not to move on Haifa, a city that has been Israeli since 1948. Anyways, the cannibals thing stems from an uncle of his who was in the Army air corps in WWII. The poor man was a passenger and the plane went down in the ocean. One man survived but all others – including the plane – were never located. So, where Biden gets cannibals into this, I don’t know. And the man died before Biden was 2 years old, so its not actually a memory, just something Biden was told about and mangled by his desire that every story about him be the most interesting story there is.

There are some less-bad polls for Biden out there, keeping in mind that to get past 270, he’ll have to get atop Trump by more than 3 percentage points (and anything below 5 is dicey). Other polls show Trump lead steady. Doesn’t really matter. The Mrs paid $4.88 for gas today. If Biden wins in spite of that, we never had a chance. That is, we lost our country ages ago and have just been going through the motions. But those gas prices, those food prices, Biden’s bizarre mental ramblings and increasing physical breakdown, the open border, the crimes committed by illegals, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine (which is tipping towards disaster, by the way; the MSM isn’t covering it because nothing good for Biden is about to happen there), the sense that nobody is in charge…all of that, and more, is making Trump 2017-2019 shine in retrospect. He’s not nearly as hated as some think.

And if you drill down into the “Biden wins” analysis, it is all based upon a low-turnout election where Democrat GOTV swamps Trump just enough to give Biden 4 more years. Maybe it will be that way. But if its a high turnout election, then it looks like the higher the number of voters, the more Trump is going to get (in some polls of people who didn’t vote in 2020, Trump is up by double digits). Nobody can really know this – there’s no way to know, for certain, who will actually show up. Sure, we can know that a certain number almost certainly will show…but even among the most consistent voters there is some up and down election to election. For those who are occasional voters, its a crap shoot. And as GOP voter registrations continue to improve, we’re getting a class of voters who rarely or never vote. Absolutely no way to know how many of them show – can’t even take a guess at it. The “good” polls for Biden are all D+5 to D+7, predicated upon the GOP just staying home out of disgust for Trump. But if the electorate is R+1, the polls showing it good for Biden are worthless. R+2 or 3? Political earthquake.

More trouble in the House. MAGA blames RINOs, RINOs blame MAGA. There is blame to go around – and MAGA does need to get a larger sense of the possible here, especially with a razor thin majority. But most of the blame must lay at the Speaker’s feet. The Speaker has immense power in the House – Democrats made sure of that over the years. You’ll note that when Nancy was running the show, nothing good for GOPers ever got to the floor. Johnson can do that, too. Democrats can pass whatever they want through the Senate given their majority and our RINOs, but Johnson can pretty much spike anything unless he gets what he wants. And his job was to get us something. We know with a Democrat Senate and White House we’re going to have to put up with huge amounts of Commie garbage. Way of the world, GOP. Do better at the next election. But we did win the House…and that means every bit of Commie garbage should have something MAGA attached to it – if Democrats get money for an NGO to send migrants to the border, then we get money to pay for Texas to build a fifty foot high wall. Like that – and so on and so on. But we got nothing. We always get nothing. And Johnson and the RINOs are smart enough to know that if we don’t get something, there will be trouble. If Johnson falls – and even if we get a Democrat Speaker – then let the lesson be learned: don’t betray the GOP base. Make certain to stroke us. This is the growing pains of a new GOP, guys. Don’t get too upset about it. In the 1850’s the House was a complete mess because the new GOP also hadn’t figured itself out and so essentially handed power to Democrats. It takes time to change.

Punish the Barbarians

Mark Noonan19 Comments

I wrote not too long ago about the need to punish – that is, if we want to have civil society then we are going to have to start punishing the miscreants who are increasingly making civil life intolerable. And this wasn’t a call to jail criminals – it was a call to punish. To physically harm these people. And often for what we have been conditioned to call relatively trivial offenses these days. It is necessary to do this – and we will as a society eventually do it – because human beings, because we’re Fallen or just perverse, take your pick based on theological/philosophical beliefs, can only be made civilized. You can’t politely ask a barbarian to behave – you have to whip him into compliance. As we learned over a thousand years, after a while force is reduced to habit and hides its claws. That is once you’ve punished enough people become polite and transmit this moral code to their children on the regular and so barbarism largely vanishes. Unless you do something stupid like think that people are naturally nice and so you can put away the whip forever.

This is also necessary in the realm of international affairs. States are made up of people and so have all the inherent weaknesses people have. But a bit worse in that there is no cop you can call on a nation that has decided to become outlaw. Only other nations can bring it to heel, often at high cost and a lot of bother; war being a fearsome thing, most nations prefer to avoid it as long as possible and often for far too long, allowing the outlaw nations to gain quite a lot before their avarice awakens their enemies to the peril. And that is just for the more conventional nation trying to grab land and resources. At other times, especially in the modern world, the outlaw nation isn’t merely trying for a bit of larceny (though that is always at the bottom of any aggressor’s actions), but are also imposing inhuman cruelty as a part of national policy. The Nazis are, of course, the prime example of this: not only wanting to conquer the world, but also enslaving or murdering everyone they deemed non-Aryan.

The Nazis to a large degree did get what was coming to them. Not enough, in my view: the Germans (as well as the Japanese and Italians) got off far too lightly for putting the world through the Second World War. But it was still sufficient punishment to ensure that no German, Japanese or Italian would decide that a program of conquest and massacre is the way to go. We’re now approaching 80 years since the end of the war and such sentiments in all three nations are only held by tiny numbers of kooks who have no chance of national power. But what was done to the Axis powers during and after WWII also shows the necessity of doing it.

Think about World War One; we are taught that the harsh peace of Versailles caused German resentment and so led to World War Two. Drivel! The reparations were, relatively, no different from what Germany had imposed on France after the Franco-Prussian war. The territories sliced off from Germany were territories the Germans had taken in unjust wars of conquest in the past. And then you really have to think about Belgium and France: they literally did absolutely nothing to bring on the war. They were minding their own business, not offering any threat to anyone in 1914 when the Germans demanded their abject surrender with the threat of invasion if not complied with. It took both of those countries massive blood drain to expel the Germans. Huge amounts of their territory was ruined by war. And, remember: they were completely innocent! And all the French demanded post-war was the return of stolen land and cash compensation for all the death and destruction. That was reasonable. The Germans were unreasonable to so much as resent it. A Germany which had been far more severely punished for WWI would never have started WWII…just as the severely punished Germany of 1945 has not and will not start WWIII.

And you know why I’m bringing this up – the Iranian attack on Israel. While it was ongoing the leaders of the West – from Pudding Brain on down – were calling on Israel to show restraint. Not calling on Iran to show restraint: Israel. And more than likely Israel will show restraint, just as they have in Gaza. Just as they have with their Arab/Muslim enemies since 1948. And that’s the problem: the restraint. As we see in American streets that allowing barbarism just gets you more barbarism, so it is in international affairs. When a savage attacks and you let him live, that just means he’ll attack again…and probably more nasty each time as he figures out new ways to be a son of a bitch.

How should Israel punish? Ideally with their nuclear arsenal. I know: we’re not supposed to say things like that. How could you! The Ultimate Weapon can never be used! Whatever; its just a big bomb. And if Israel really wants to make a point, they’d target Iran’s primary nuclear facilities with nuclear weapons. It would get the Mullahs attention. It would let them know they are outclassed and facing an enemy unafraid to push the button. It is, in fact, the only way for Israel to really punish Iran as Israel is too far away and has too small a population to go toe to toe in a ground war. Sure it would cause outrage – but only among the people who really just want Israel to die already so they can get on with living off Arab oil money in peace and quiet.

In the larger context, if we want to end this international anarchy where States use lunatic proxies to wage war against us – and infiltrate our societies with Islamists committed to our destruction – then we’re going to have to start punishing the nations causing the trouble. To nutshell it: there are no innocent Palestinians. No innocent Iranians. Point blank: if a nation uses its own or irregular forces to attack us – any of us, anywhere at any time – then that nation and its people are outlaws. And outlaws must feel pain. Lots and lots of pain. So much pain that no matter how much they hate us, they’ll never dare look crossways at us again. Our mistake post-9/11 was our assumption (and I did share it at the time) that there was a separate part of the Muslim population causing the trouble and if we could just isolate that part and destroy it, all would be well. Doesn’t work that way. Just as the SS doesn’t work without Fritz delivering the mail, so Islamists don’t work without Abdul milking the goat. All Germans were collectively responsible for Auschwitz. All Muslims were collectively responsible for 9/11. And the only way a German in WWII got out of his responsibility was by actively working for the downfall of the German regime – so, too, the Muslim on the street: he’s guilty unless he actively joins the fight against the Islamists. Want me to make it clear: all Muslims were responsible for 10/7 and Israel has a right to punish all Muslims any way they see fit until such time as all Muslims stop 10/7 from ever happening again.

If we don’t start to see it this way, then we’ll never get out of this mess – and that is bad for Muslims as well as for us. Had we spent WWII just trying to hit SS infrastructure, we would have lost. The SS would have remained in control – and along with killing and oppressing non-Germans, the SS would to this day be killing and oppressing Germans. The Islamic world must learn a harsh lesson; in this case, that they can’t harbor Islamist supremacist thoughts and remain safe. That just allowing it to be means eventually a bomb is coming for you and your family. The only way to safety for Islam must be surrender of all dreams of Islamist conquest – just as the only way to safety for Germans in 1945 was to give up the Nazi dream.

What, then, is punishment? Aside from direct military action there must be surrenders of territories. Removals of populations. Trials of criminals. Occupation by victorious enemies. In other words, what happened to Germany in 1945 must happen to Islam.

We are in no way physically or mentally ready for any such thing; but we’re going to have to get ready. Because they won’t quit. Israel will respond in some military fashion to Iran – and maybe even hit some pretty important targets. But the Iranians are expecting that. It won’t alter the game as far as they are concerned; just a bump on the road to their ultimate victory is how they’ll view the matter. In fact, that Israel won’t use nuclear weapons will likely be seen in Tehran as proof of Israeli cowardice and will actually encourage them to try more attacks. Until we steel ourselves to some very harsh actions, this just goes on and on.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan14 Comments

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is rock solid on most things, but like most GOP Senators he’s still fully committed to the post-WWII “rules based international order”. You know, the thing that got us to lose 58,000 men in Vietnam, as just the highlight of the military and foreign policy disasters since WWII. Today he was doing a bit of saber rattling vis Iran. I pointed out that this is foolish given that our current political and military leaders are incapable of mounting a successful military effort. Our leaders are cowards and traitors, our military is worn out, we’re not getting enough recruits, training and maintenance have been let slide. To risk a major American military force against even a second rate enemy is folly and should only be done at the most extreme need…Israel’s possible conflict with Iran is insufficient cause. Israel has subs with cruise missiles. These missiles are almost certainly nuclear tipped. Israel will be fine.

Supposedly abortion was going to put Florida in play. Well, the latest poll – taken after abortion got on the ballot – shows Trump with a 12 point lead…and that support for adding abortion rights to the Florida Constitution is at 42%. That’s not all that much. We can rely on it that Democrats will go 24/7 abortion as we head towards November and it may, indeed, affect some votes. But I suspect that the post-Dobbs effect is starting to fade. As I’ve said before, for the pro-abortion people and areas, absolutely nothing changed. Here in Nevada we put abortion rights into the State Constitution decades ago. I don’t think we should have, but we did – and the only way that is going to change is if the people of Nevada vote to remove it. Twice (each amendment requires a majority vote in two consecutive elections). That just isn’t going to happen in any time line you care to think about. Maybe in a generation of two after the Culture of Life imparts itself to the people it’ll be repealed as a sad relic like some vestigial Jim Crow laws are these days. But not right now. How can you keep people outraged over something that doesn’t matter? All Dobbs did was restore the proper Constitutional position and if you live in a pro-abortion area you got what you wanted.

That is, of course, why the Democrats keep claiming that Trump has a double secret probation plan to ban abortion after he gets back in. But, he can’t. It almost certainly wouldn’t get through Congress even if the GOP has a trifecta and, per Dobbs, such a thing would likely be struck down as unconstitutional. Abortion is immoral but Roe was just bad law – there was not the slightest warrant in the Constitution to make that ruling. The Justices just made it up because they wanted abortion legal. Democrats will try mighty hard to scare urban/suburban white women about Trump’s Secret Plan to Make You all Handmaids, but I suspect it won’t work.

The GOP is knuckling under for a renewal of FISA. Of course. Speaker Johnson says he changed his mind once he got the Super Secret Briefings about it. So now his position is “trust me, bro”. Too late for that. We can’t possibly trust the government. Our assumption is that Johnson caved because the FBI, using FISA, found something on him. We’d like very much to trust Speaker Johnson – and there is a way he can get us to do that. Tell us what FISA is finding. That’s it. Keeping everything under a veil of secrecy is the problem – we can’t possibly trust the government to operate the program as its advertised as it was used to spy on Trump. But we can agree to keep it – with modifications – if we are told what it does other than spy on Trump. Not asking for nitty gritty details…but if this program is so great, then you should be able to point out a couple things it did. Plots foiled. Terrorists caught. Things like that. Let us know; you work for us, after all.

But even then if we do keep it, I think we’ll need to have a provision in there saying that the federal government can’t use FISA information to so much as investigate an American for actions inside the USA – let alone prosecute or jail them. That is, if you find Joe Smith is talking with Terror Fanatic Abdul in Syria…kill Abdul; you can’t touch Joe Smith. Not with FISA information. Not even with information you were able to dig up because you had FISA information. If its FISA, then as far as American citizens saying and doing things in the USA, it doesn’t exist.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan41 Comments

The polls are tightening! Biden is surging!

Or, so goes the conventional wisdom. And, hey, there might be some tightening as the primaries end and everyone sorts themselves out on partisan lines. But, there also seems to be in the latest raft of polls some significant oversampling of Democrats. Maybe the earlier polls oversampled Republicans? Could be. But as we’ve said here for years now, don’t put your faith in polls. 2016 was the definitive year on that – wasn’t it something like a 97% chance Hillary would win based on polls? This, I think, is far more decisive:

Except for a very slight uptick in Colorado (which was probably out of reach for us all along), this is a catastrophic collapse for the Democrats. And keep in mind that this shift happened while the GOP was largely run by anti-Trump GOPers who were diligently trying to finish off the whole MAGA movement. This is registration gains in spite of deliberate RNC incompetence. This is people looking at their nation and saying, “we’ve got to do something!”. Not that the GOP is great, but it is the only way to stop the increasingly insane Democrats.

I think that the Biden vs Trump rematch will revolve around the fact that here in 2024 there is no longer any mystery about Biden. Even discounting cheating to get him into the White House, the thing about him was supposedly boring and conventional. That there would be no massive policy changes and we’d coast along in peace and quiet after the alarms of the Trump years. That might have been the plan – in his lucid moments, it was probably what Biden wanted – but given that he is increasingly senile, his aides are running wild, imposing ever more far Left lunacy without a shred of legal power to do so. Biden can’t hide behind a Narrative any longer – he sucks. And the price of food and gas are through the roof. I expect at this moment a 49% to 47% Trump victory. Keep in mind, of course, that anything less than a 3+ point Biden win in the popular vote works out to a Trump electoral victory. Basically, Biden has to get above 50% to win because I can’t see Trump getting less than 47%.

Team Pudding Brain has pretty much abandoned Israel. They tried for a while to triangulate support for Hamas and Israel but the Muslim voters they count on aren’t having it – they demanded abandoning Israel and that’s what they’re going to get. Nothing matters to the Democrats more than winning and if they have to hate Israel to get a win, they’ll do it. Don’t put too much stock into this for us as a Party – most Liberal Jews are Liberals first and last…they are just Jews by descent for the most part; they’ll swallow the insult. Orthodox Jews were already moving towards us. This will accelerate that and it might mean a House seat or two but nothing decisive for 2024.

And it is just disgusting what they are doing. Hamas already has a plan written up for what comes after they kill all the Jews of Israel. Plans for what happens to Jewish property. All neatly typed up and ready to go. There are genocidal maniacs in this conflict; its just that they’re all Muslims. I do worry that Israel is losing the will to finish the job. Anything short of the total destruction of Hamas will be an Israeli defeat, and perhaps an ultimately fatal one. A nation can’t afford to have something like Hamas as a living enemy. I did hear the theory that they are just hunkering down and waiting for November’s result. This could be true. Biden’s people do have a lot of control over deliveries of war materials to Israel and so can exert a lot of pressure…pressure the Israeli’s know will end with Trump’s victory. But that is also a long time from now. Its all very murky at the moment.

Did you notice that the MSM was 24/7 eclipse for a while? I did. Lots of people did. Personally, I think it was to deflect attention away from Trump’s statement on the abortion issue. This is crucial. What he said did upset some pro-Lifers but the pragmatic facts of life are that a majority of Americans currently want abortion legal, at least through the first trimester. We just can’t get around that. Took 50 years of relentless pro-abortion propaganda to get us here and we won’t undo that in a day. It will take decades for us to build a culture of life – and we can’t do that if for purity’s sake we turn all power over to the fanatic pro-abortion Democrats. We have to take what we can get – that was Trump’s essential message. And it is a message Democrats want to bury because their whole Fall campaign is going to be “Trump wants to ban abortion” as a means of scaring upper class urban/suburban white women. Trump does need to get out in front of this – my view is that our failure to do so in 2022 cost us at least 3 Senate and a dozen House seats. Failure to address abortion squarely turned a Red Wave into a Red Trickle. Trump is doing the right thing here; nobody likes a coward so lets be a bit brave and say what we want.

Team Pudding Brain is also cooking up more illegal plans to annul student debt. You can get mad about it, if you like, but it is what it is. They’re playing to win. Those on our side who are all “pay your bills” are simply not getting it. In 2024, some votes have to be purchased. As I said years ago we should have been out in front on this one – and casting it as “Democrats enslaved you to college debt and we freed you from it”. If not cancellation, then at least make it dischargable in bankruptcy. And put the colleges on the hook for at least some of it. Tax college endowments to pay for low income college. So much we could have done and we just blew it. I’m hopeful that Trump comes up with something along these lines. There’s already indicators that youth is prepared to abandon the Democrats…we just need something to tip them.

Just Some Thoughts on Government

Mark Noonan4 Comments

I’ve always been a Monarchist at heart. Ever since I was a kid and I read things like The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights and The Lord of the Rings, the concept of the Lord’s anointed has appealed to me as the most logical method of human government. Anyone who reads my books can easily tell that there is Monarchism deep at the heart of it all. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, Christ is King, right? Heaven isn’t a Democracy; and Heaven is hierarchical. It is said that there will be greatest and least in Heaven…of course, even the least in Heaven has it better than the greatest on Earth; and given that it is Heaven, there isn’t a matter of jealousy or ambition. The least will be pleased that the greatest in Heaven are the greatest. I can imagine myself – certainly not the greatest – living in one of the very small mansions in my Father’s house, and gladly serving the greatest. I honestly can see in my mind’s eye a heavenly abode for me; it is made of stone and set in a meadow. With eternity, imagine the stories I could eventually tell? My joy would be complete.

There have been many kings and queens, good and bad, in history. Descent does have a bit of the luck of the draw in it. But if you look at the royal lines over time, what you see is that for the most part, most monarchs were trying to do the right thing. Sometimes ably, sometimes less so. Only rarely was a real idiot or criminal raised to the throne. Democracy is far more apt to raise the unfit on the simple fact that anyone who aspires to power is predisposed to be an idiot or criminal. What fool, after all, would really want to be in charge? To seriously have the fate of a nation in your hands? The wise person flees from such a burden, if he can. A good example of this wisdom is a scene in the 1956 movie of War and Peace. Natasha (Audrey Hepburn) tells Pierre (Henry Fonda) that she would give him absolute power over Russia because his heart is pure…Pierre is asked what he’d do and his answer is, “I’d hesitate”. That is wisdom, as such.

To be sure, as I’ve said before, I am also the last democrat left on Earth. Maybe not exactly the last, but certainly there aren’t many like me. That is, people who really do trust the people. But one must keep in mind what “trust the people” means. It isn’t taking a public opinion poll of dependent people who have been relentlessly lied to by an overwhelming popular culture. It is simply accepting the decision of people who are free and as independent as society can make them. A mature man or woman who owes nobody making a decision: I ratify it, even if I think its wrong. I do think that voting is crucial, even in the most venerable of a Monarchy. The king does need to know the desires of the people; and the only way to really assess that is to ask them. But just as Monarchy is highly dependent upon the quality of the Monarch, so Democracy is highly dependent upon the quality of the People. Garbage in, garbage out is ineluctable.

We are, as we all know, in a complete mess right now. I saw a video clip of a young lady wrapped in a Palestine flag saying she was terrified that climate change would kill her. Just think of the amount of lies she had to be fed over years to get to such a pathetic state. And in our current system, she gets a vote. That is, she gets to cancel me out – not that I’m any great person, but I have at least some knowledge and so I’m not supporting the massacre of Jews nor am I afraid of the temperature rising a couple degrees over the next 100 years. The bottom line is that getting out of the current mess is going to be a problem as long as people like that poor girl get a say. She’s simply incapable of making a valid decision – even about her own life (though we will always remain wary of interfering in the personal choices of even the greatest fool). We must find a method to nullify the votes of fools – because if we don’t, then we’ll never be able to get at the liars who make the fools.

Because that is the crux of the matter: the lies. If we didn’t have quite so many liars, we wouldn’t have nearly so many problems. But the liars lie because lies work – and in a system where only voting matters, then the best liar is going to usually prevail. Only rarely will someone even partially moored to truth rise to the top in a Democratic system. Our riddle is how to preserve freedom while making sure fools serving liars can’t destroy freedom.

The Cowardly West

Mark Noonan12 Comments

Team Pudding Brain is putting massive pressure on Israel to let Hamas survive. They feel Michigan and maybe even Minnesota slipping away – they want this war to end quickly. They don’t, of course, care about the lives involved. Israeli or Palestinian. Lives invariably mean nothing to Leftists. Power is the only thing that matters and Israel’s campaign in Gaza places at risk Leftist power, so it must stop. The bottom line here is that the Democrat base – poisoned by a couple decades of anti-Israel/Zionist propaganda – has become overtly anti-Semitic. Democrats can’t pivot away from this because it would turn possible 2024 defeat into catastrophic loss. They got on the Der Sturmer train and they can’t get off.

Now, will the effort by Biden work? It might. The Israeli people still seem pretty determined to see this thing through but there is starting to emerge domestic opposition; naturally from the Israeli Left who are starting to see in the horror of burned babies and raped women a path back to power in Israel. Around the globe, opposition to Israel has become rather ferocious. The world has also decided that hundreds of murdered Jews are simply not worth it: better to condemn Israel so that sweet, sweet Arab oil money continues to flow (you’d be surprised at how much influence the Arab States have bought…just a few million in grants can get people who will practically join the SS to keep the cash flowing). In the end, I’m going to fault Israel here. I know, that seems unfair: but in matters crucial to national survival, it is up to the nation to take care of business.

The Battle of Okinawa pitted the US military against the 100,000 men of the Japanese 32nd Army – who were dug in, well supplied with munitions and determined to die to the last man. It took us 12 weeks of very hard fighting to exterminate the 32nd Army. Cost us 12,500 deaths to do it. It was a very tough fight; the Marines Golgotha as one writer (who was there) described it. Units engaged suffered up to 70 percent casualties. But the job got done. It was one of the most vicious battles in history.

Gaza is most emphatically not Okinawa.

At most, Hamas started with 20,000 active fighters. They were not dug in (hiding in hospital basements is not “dug in”). The Israeli Army, fully mobilized, is about 525,000 troops; fully equipped with the very best weapons available and having absolute command of the air and sea. Leaving sufficient troops to guard the West Bank and against an unlikely thrust from Lebanon, the Israels could have easily disposed a force against Gaza that would have outnumbered Hamas 10 to 1. In ground forces at Okinawa we had about 3 to 1 superiority; the usual disposition for the attacking force. They could have totally overwhelmed Hamas with superior numbers and firepower. This campaign should have been over in 30 days, tops. And no matter how many died in a completely ruthless application of power, no matter how many complaints would have been made about it…it all would be over now. It would have faded from the public mind. Of course the Islamists would still be shouting “war crime!” at every turn…but nobody cares about what isn’t happening at the moment.

And Hamas would be destroyed.

Israel has dithered. Worried about the hostages (they should have been presumed dead on 10/7). Fussed about with negotiations for a ceasefire which would only be a breather for Hamas to plan their next 10/7. Nothing fails like success. Israel is too rich and too infected with the Leftist mind virus to really take care of business here. You’d think Israeli women being raped to death and babies being burned alive would wake every inch of Israeli manhood…but it clearly hasn’t. Just as 9/11 didn’t really wake it in us. Nor has Russia knocking on the door in Ukraine gotten a rise out of the Europeans.

We’re in a lot of trouble here – in two areas.

First, of course, the lack of will to survive among our people and the peoples of the larger West. The life has gone out of us. We just want to be left alone. Peace is preferable to war, we all know that: but peace is only preserved by people who are willing to pour out gallons of blood to defeat an enemy. Unless you have a people and military willing to literally wade in blood to secure peace and freedom, you’ll soon have neither. Foreigners who are willing to kill are now going to be vastly more encouraged.

Secondly, this supine population is ripe for a dictator. For a Caesar. Pretty much all we’re waiting for here is someone to simply have the guts to seize power. Wouldn’t take much. Ten or twenty thousand armed followers and a willingness to kill would do the trick. Far less in the European nations. You think the people who sit by while a woman is beaten on a subway will rise up in defense of the government? Ain’t gonna happen.

And it will be a right thing to do. Cowards deserve to be slaves. The only free people there have ever been are people who can kill with a steady stomach. Who don’t fuss over a dead enemy. Who defy tyrants with a clear mind and stout heart. My guess is not twenty percent of the American people will really fight for liberty – that is, fight for it like the Founders where lives and fortunes were 100% at risk and defeat meant losing everything. I hope I’m wrong…but I fear I’m right.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan44 Comments

We were all wondering when it first came out if it were an April Fool’s joke, but it does appear that Biden is denying he proclaimed trans visibility for Easter. Now, to be sure, one must think carefully about this: the Party Line on it now is that the day has been around since 2009 and it just happened to fall on Easter…and, hey, isn’t this just as important as the observation of the resurrection? So, it might be just on that level that Biden is denying he made it happen – that he was just rote doing what you’re supposed to do on national observations that we all participate in. Because, you know, we all can’t wait for trans day of visibility to roll around each year.

That, of course, is actually damage control: someone decided that Biden and the rest of the Democrats would make a to do about trans on Easter as a malicious insult…and they thought that our outrage would get blowback that would work to Democrat advantage. When it was actually done – when the thing was in the public square – they suddenly realized how absolutely hideous it was and now they’re trying to back and fill.

My advice: forget the polls. They are going to fluctuate a bit back and forth. Carter had a 7 point lead in Gallup in April of 1980. Dukakis was down 2 in April of 1988, up 16 in May. On and on like that. This is what I think is the real dynamic of 2024: that people are just getting sick of it all. The trans on Easter thing is just another element in a large tapestry of things people just don’t like about the Biden years. The biggest thing will remain the price of gas and groceries but in all respects, just nothing is going right. That is why Democrats are now pinning their hopes on abortion: they just managed to get a pro-abortion amendment on the Florida ballot. They’ll do that in as many States as they can. Trust me on this: by September it’ll be 24/7 abortion. It did work partially in 2022. Will it work again? I doubt it. If it does then it means we never had a chance, anyway: if America returns Biden to office just to make sure children can be killed, then we’re out of the political market altogether. But outside a desperation move like that, there’s nothing Biden and the Democrats can do – any policy that would actually fix the problems they’ve created (notably reducing spending to cut inflation and closing the border to stop illegal immigration) is opposed by too large a part of the Democrat base. They are caught in a bind and can only hope that something else gets them out of it. Abortion is something else. So, too, things like trans day of visibility…but that has already backfired.

People are tired. Biden was supposed to be a placeholder. The Not Trump. He wasn’t supposed to do anything but end Covid and then let things coast until someone else got in. But they forgot he is senile – and when not senile, stupid. He isn’t running the show. He lacks the wit or will to ride herd on the far left like Obama and Clinton did. Thus the far left is setting the policy – but nobody ever voted for the far left. The more they do, the worse it gets for Biden.

Louis Conter, the last survivor of the USS Arizona, passed away. He was 102. God bless the man. Almost all the WWII vets are gone. Korean vets, too. The old soldier you see these days is likely a former 19 year old Marine from Vietnam, 1967.