One of the things that drives me insane — to be fair, it’s a short road and well paved — is when people bring out the old Soviet plan (or one of a hundred warning articles/books) and go “It’s working, it’s all working! They’re almost there!”
At some point there, halfway through the insanity, I start hitting my head on the desk and cursing in seven languages. (Which is difficult as I only really remember three, no, wait, four with some clarity. And that’s awarding me points for calling people things like “dishrag” in German. (Well, it’s German. It sounds threatening.)
Because when people are analyzing why “it’s working” they using “plotting logic.”
Look, in novels, you can give the impression of plans failing utterly, working perfectly or whatever, because you’re a writer. You pick which events to highlight. And you stop before the consequences come home to roost, or divide and have kittens and become incomprehensible.
In real life, things are more complicated. Certainly the left has been trying to follow the plan, and believes the plan is ‘working’. But the left has issues with the idea of unintended consequences, a hard on for power, and minds so willful they wouldn’t know they’re failing till it bites them in the nose. (As is starting to happen everywhere. Which is why, baffled, worried and scared, they’re acting like someone shoved active beehives up their behinds.)
Look, guys, the left’s plans never worked…. IN RUSSIA, which was a small, controlled, backward environment with early 20th century tech, (or worse) which did not permit peer to peer unfettered communication, and allowed the state to control the narrative utterly.
Worse, their plan hasn’t worked in Cuba: even smaller, more isolated, etc. etc. ditto.
It doesn’t work because planned economies, planned societies, planned progress and planned whatever the hell plain does NOT WORK. Not on humans. (It might work on yet undiscovered aliens. I can’t talk about undiscovered aliens. But I would assume if they’re intelligent and have individual minds, it doesn’t work on them EITHER.)
You can sort of plan your family’s future, or your budget, or what you’ll do provided two things: Your family is relatively small; you concentrate on the near future. After that, it all becomes subjected to the law of “oh, something happened.”
Because something always happens. The problem of statist planners, besides their absolute certainty that they know how the future should be, is that they can’t really even compute all the factors, much less take them all into account in the plan.
Sure, for instance, control all the means of communication. Meanwhile, a wild internet appears, and there are blogs, emails that span the globe in seconds, phone service becomes so cheap it’s virtually free and– why aren’t people believing the official narrative?
Or, take over the US, and then we stop the innovation and we can control the rest of the world. Except that one salient feature of communist economies is that they can’t feed themselves. For almost a century, the US surplus production has been feeding the world.
More importantly, emergent fascist (look it up) economies like China, need a big, prosperous and undiscriminating consumer. Without one, their economy collapses in a puddle of goo.
Of course, Xi is probably about as informed economically, as Occasional Cortex so he thinks if he takes us out, China gets all the money and all the control.
In point of fact, what China gets is complete bankruptcy and famine, followed by disintegration. And this is not if the US is even destroyed, btw. It’s just if we’re made very uncomfortable and stop spending. Which is already happening.
The best thing that could happen to Xi would be to actually succeed in taking out an American city with one of his missiles (I take every announcement of successful missile tests, etc. with a huge grain of salt. Statist economies don’t even KNOW they’ve failed. To this day we don’t know how many failures the Soviet space program had. And I doubt the Russians know, too. Or that the people at the top knew. In communism, Cover your Ass is the law of the land.) Because then with or without the Junta, the American people will destroy him and his cronies and a vast amount of their apparatus, which would at least be a quick and clean death.
But Sarah, you’ll say, you’re saying they can’t govern. But they can take over!
They could take over. Usually societies in such deep crisis that it makes our current state look like perfect order and prosperity.
These days, again, communication and hell even fabrication and selling having become…. fractured and the mass model losing hold by the day? Not so much. I mean, they’re trying. And in the US they’ve taken enough to make an unholy mess.
Which will blow up in their faces.
Ah, but it’s not blowing up!
Oh, please. You’re thinking movie and novel logic. This happens, and the glorious revolution arises.
I recommend reading history. A ton of history. Because real history doesn’t work like that.
Yes, we’re almost (but not absolutely certainly) going to get out of this through paying a massive butcher’s bill. But things (at least to the Junta’s incoherence and our seeing the idiotic commies behind the masks) are actually progressing faster than I expected.
Because there are factors going into it that you can’t see, I can’t see, and we’ll only notice when they spectacularly blow up n everyone’s face.
But Sarah–
Look, guys, not only are their plans not working, but they’re stuck in political quicksand. Everything they do to achieve a goal wields a ton contrary hits that they don’t want and will have trouble surviving.
The lockdowns? Sure. Pretty disheartening. But here’s the thing: what it’s actually doing is growing things they hate like homeschooling and working from home and city-shrinking, and people moving away from the big lefty centers. And the more they bear down, the more people realize it’s out of proportion and crazy.
And they have NO option but continuing bearing down. With increasingly stronger reactions in response, every time.
At this point, their best ending is the Romanian Christmas Gift. At least it’s quick. And no, they don’t see it, because they are doing the plan and plans must work! That’s at the center and core of their beliefs.
You, however, don’t have to believe it, just because they believe it. In fact, you’re required to keep an eye on reality, and therefore not be able to believe it.
In their minds humans and societies are neatly ordered spools of yarn, to be woven into any design they choose. In reality human societies and cultures are like several bits of yarn dropped into a basket and used as a play thing by your cats. Pull one end, and you’re actually creating a big mess elsewhere. If you’re lucky there’s no dead mice in the middle of it all.
There is a fatal disconnect. They’re champion planners. And they talk about their success, and therefore scare the living pants out of a lot of people.
But the only thing their plans have achieved is to destroy things that work and leave messes in their place. Their regimes don’t hold. Their longest-lived hold on anything is China’s fascist regime, and that only holds because we bought a lot of crap from them.
Don’t be afraid their plan is “all coming true.” Be afraid of the things they’re breaking as they lurch around with the beehives of panic and stupidity buzzing in their nether orifices.
In the end they can’t win. But we can lose.
We can lose by not being prepared. We can lose by falling to some better-sounding authoritarian regime that’s little better. We can lose by forgetting we’re Americans.
Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark, and be prepared for Chaos.
We’re Americans. Planning always goes weird around us. Chaos is our natural element.
They’re throwing us into that briar patch.
Be not afraid.
According To Hoyt 
I saw an article yesterday talking about Bezhmenev’s (sp?) warning interview. Interesting timing with this blog post.
There are a couple of things to note about the plan Bezhmenev warned about, though, one of which is noted by the article. The first is that the plan isn’t about governing. To the contrary, it’s about making the country such such a complete mess that the population will turn to extreme radical measures in desperation to bring back a semblance of stability. The second point – mentioned in the article – is that while things might appear to be progressing with the warned against plan, the possible counters to screw it up are wide, diverse, and readily available to Americans.
Yeah, I saw that article too. BUT the end result will not look at all like communism.
No, probably not. But what we know of the plan suggests that it’s primarily a “Break everything!” plan, and that is the full intent of it. The “Make Americans turn to communism” stage was presumably a follow-up plan that was waiting for the first plan to complete. Or perhaps the Soviets genuinely believed that communism would naturally result when the US had been wrecked. Communists can be delusional like that, particularly when in a self-reinforcing group.
The important bit is that breaking things is easy if not guarded against, even for communists.
I don’t think the Soviet leaders cared about text book communism. Rather a system tearing itself apart gives an opening for a dictator to move in a “restore order” and they figured they could be that dictator.
They won’t be.
The parlor pinks certainly won’t be.
I was originally going to argue, at least some one the ones in the past, Stalin and others, had proven they were able to do it, but you’re right. They were the snakes that bit the world. They each swallowed as much as they could, and could swallow no more. Even China apparently only exists as it does because of the geographical and agricultural realities of manual rice farming. And that may actually be broken by automation.
The weird thing with rice is that (according to a big Japanese study) it doesn’t grow well if it doesn’t get dark enough at night. So you can’t have streetlights overlooking your rice paddy.
That doesn’t mean that THEY don’t think that they will; whether they will be or not is really not relevant to their belief that they will be the dictator(s). Even if they don’t succeed, they can cause a lot of wreckage along the way.
I think the communists sincerely believed in Communism. Their beliefs were insane but I think, and I’ve studied the matter a little and number two son rather a lot, that they were sincerely held. Oddly, at least to me, saying they didn’t believe and that it was all a cynical ploy for power gives their intelligence too much credit. Don’t underestimate how many stupid people there are and how much damage stupidity can do. Yes, incompetence becomes indistinguishable from malice but incompetence is usually the better explanation. Evil is an absence after all.
Some of them, surely. But Communism is a great lie that rewards amoral ambitions far, far more than the empty headed ideals it was founded on. What do we see when the Revolution comes? First thing, the true believers are put up against the wall. Then the get to everyone else, eventually.
Communism acts as a virus, in a way, I suppose. It requires a healthy body to live. The US is that healthy body. Without our support, time and again, the USSR would have starved and died even more than they actually did *with* our help. The end result of world Communism isn’t Communism. It’s feudalism, at best.
LEnin wanted to emulate the French terror. The cluster that defines communism, as opposed to mere Marxist socialism, was founded to empower evil.
THIS.
Although it’s a direct, logical result of Marxism.
True.
And Marx probably understood to some extent that he was evil.
But, communism was very definitely created as a tool by those whose driving passion was harming others.
Not even feudalism. At least the medieval lords were soldiers. How many of the Ruling Class have ever trained for war, especially on the Left? How many of them have ever trained to do anything? They wasted years in Leftroid colleges getting degrees in Gender Studies, or Economics without learning anything about economics. They have to be Teh Authoriteez, because they’re useless for any other purpose.
Closest analogue. What it actually is, there’s not a word for. It’s like oligarchy, like feudalism, but with the working bits ripped out. In practice, it’s mass death, robbery on a grand scale, and the desperate hope the ones at the top can outrun the consequences.
The woke degrees aren’t going to be the ones at the top. They’ll be puppets, at best, of the actual masterminds. Cynical, manipulative bastards that can *actually* wield power with a cruel hand. It gets to that point, those rulers? They’re bandit lords, not soldiers. Think African military junta rather than Viscount AoC with guns.
Feudalism works for a certain tech and population base because it’s better than what came before. In this case, it will be because it comes after actual bandit lords writ large wreck everything.
like fuck it will be. Are you high? At our tech, and with the memory we have? No. sorry to be rude, but no. They can’t win.
We can lose only insofar we can end up with a super repressive, weird regime of say social control but complete economic freedom. But that’s the “worst” that will remain.
And the key insight for dealing with this is that every time someone spouts that sort of drivel and convinces someone of it the chance of one of the bad paths increases.
Yeah. Well, Dan is one of us, so I shouldn’t be rude. Blame lack of coffee.
No worries. I freely admit to not being the brightest. Best know when it happens, so I can correct it. Himself knows this isn’t the first time, won’t be the last.
High? Not that I’m aware of. Sick as a damned dog, but I don’t think high. And yes, I’m aware I could be (and am, in places I’m still unaware of) wrong about a lot of stuff.
The only way what I was thinking about becomes reality is if we’re all dead. I mean the people that think like me, and would rather die than live under Communism. Or gone so far away we can’t smack them down from orbit.
My thought process is that if Communism ever *did* “win,” everyone loses. They can’t win as long as people like us exist, because we’re anathema to the system. The idea of freedom will forever seduce people. Because we exist, *it* exists. And because it exists, Communism will always lose. They can hurt us, sure. Have done so. Are. And will continue to, for a bit. But they can’t win as long as we live.
So the ultimate “end” of Communism, as in what they’re working toward but don’t realize, would be banditry, chaos, and feudalism at best, should there be no one left to stop it. So long as the US exists and has existed, it can’t get that bad. Someone, us, is always there to stop it, leech away the brave, the intelligent, and those yearning for freedom. Even if they only have a vague idea of freedom in that “America is better than my village.”
As things stand now (not in some hypothetical future), they’re losing already. Virginia is a symptom of a larger problem for the democrats. They play politics by pitching to the farthest freakiest left, the what, 3% of the country that lives on Twitter and goes nuts over stupid stuff. McAuliffe ran a dumb campaign, but not as dumb as Biden. They’ve got no back bench. If they go more moderate, they lose the far left. They very nearly did in 2020 already. If they go far left, they begin to lose the suburban housewives and default libs.
This doesn’t mean we win without a fight. It merely means we’re in a better position to *fix* things while we can than we’ve been since Reagan, provided we stick to our guns.
And yes, I could still be wrong about any and all of that. Not offended or upset, Himself knows I’ve played the fool in the past. I’d rather hear I’m being an idiot from a friend and correct myself than continue being an idiot in public!
As I said, I’m terribly sorry I was rude. I blame it on tired and mildly sick.
You weren’t terribly rude, Miss Sarah. I’ve heard and said worse, and been called worse with accurate reason. Hope you feel better soon, and get some rest. After all, if you don’t have your health…
I have my wedding to plan, my wife to kill, Gilda to blame for it….
We’re good.
NO. The end result of the world communism is the survivors hunting and killing the communists. Look, feudalism, the Lords had obligations. They weren’t parasites.
True. I was imagining a world where most of us left for the stars at that point, it looks like. If none but the woke, the commies, and the thugs are left, they’ll prey on each other.
Until it all collapses.
In about 20 minutes.
Whether we leave for the stars or not, I don’t think Communism will ever go away, nor do I think that Communists will ever “overcome” their weakness. In the stars there will always be those who fall for the siren call of idealism and power, and here on Earth, there will always be those who couldn’t go to the stars, or who were true believers that came to their senses.
It will always be a war wherever there are humans, because the desire to be free, and the desire to rule over others, are innate feelings of all humans, to one degree or another. (And it’s likely the innate feelings of anything that has free will, which exists, despite what “determinists” insist on.)
And the feudal lords who forgot that found themselves facing peasant uprisings and burnt-out manor homes.
There was a time I thought Communist “Socialism” withered away into Free Market Capitalism, and while Russia somewhat disabused me of that notion, Russia, China, Vietnam, et al also haven’t completely persuaded me against the notion, either. Unlike Communism (ignoring protests to the contrary) “Pure Capitalism” isn’t an idea that’s fully been tried — although Medieval Iceland and various stages of American History have come somewhat close. To the extent that “Free Market Individualism” — the idea that the fundamental role of government is to protect individuals and their rights — has, to some degree or another, been tried — and in Great Britain and the United States in particular, to the degree that it’s been practiced, it’s led to prosperity the world has never seen before.
The funny thing about Marx’s theory is that he saw what he considered “Robber Barons”, who, at the drop of a hat, would pass laws protecting their monopolies, while blind to the “Free Market Individualists” that make America and Great Britain what they are/were, and concluded that the only alternative was a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, which would somehow wither away into … well, the only way I could make sense of his “vision”, is to call it Anarcho-Capitalism, ie, Free Market Individualism.
What Marx was never able to figure out — and ironically, this was understood by people like Adam Smith and de Toqueville, among others — is that society can only be organized around a combination of “persuasion” and “force”. His “progression” cast a “persuasion” society as a “force” one, insisted that a “force” society needed to take its place, and promised that this “force” society would magically and willfully become a “persuasion” society, despite the fact that only rarely have “force” societies given up power willingly. To the degree that he’s been right, it’s only been because “force” societies have had the United States as a model to realize that it’s best to have at least a portion of society “persuasion” (and, indeed, the primary reason why Pinochet was ok for Chile — besides preventing outright Socialists from taking control — was a willingness to listen to Milton Freedman).
Also, as a final reminder to those who say that “True Communism has never been tried” — according to Marx, it’s tried every single day, in America and Great Britain. The “abuses” of “capitalists” are supposed to be so great that, any day now, these countries are supposed to collapse into a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Indeed, because these countries are so much further along in the Industrial Revolution than the rest of the world, they’re supposed to be the first to collapse. And they have yet to collapse, even after decades of sabotage from actual collapsed countries.
So, every day that the US or Great Britain exists without being outright “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is a day that Communism has been tried and found wanting.
Certainly not after Stalin purged them.
Frank Herbert stole it for “Dune,” which makes me wonder if it will get spelled out in the movie. “Make things as bad as possible, then send my darling Feyd-Rautha in as a savior.”
It didn’t work for the Baron, either.
But it did work for some of the rulers Machiavelli discussed, who pretended to be horrified by the damage created by their henchmen, and got on the populations good side by drawing and quartering those henchmen….
Smart rulers always keep a few scapegoats handy….Of course, “smart” is not a word you can apply to anyone in the Biden Administration…
Who’s to say they aren’t the goats?
Though I do think the plan was for Kamela to be a puppet. She’s just unbelievably bad at even being that, so yeah…
IIRC, it’s even used (in a much less severe form) in one of Shakespeare’s plays.
It’s debatable how well that actually worked for Cesare Borgia. He was “successful” only as long as he had the backing of his father the Pope. After Alessandro’s death he lost everything.
Now let’s argue about whether Machiavelli was being literal or ironic when he praised that particular act of brutality. I’ve never been able to decide,
Dang writers always being subtle and stuff.
And yes.
Kipling had some choice words for rulers (in this case Northern Ireland MPs) like that:
“Help for a patriot distressed, a spotless spirit hurt,
Help for an honourable clan sore trampled in the dirt!
From Queenstown Bay to Donegal, oh, listen to my song,
The honourable gentlemen have suffered grievous wrong.
Their noble names were mentioned — oh, the burning black disgrace! —
By a brutal Saxon paper in an Irish shooting-case;
They sat upon it for a year, then steeled their heart to brave it,
And “coruscating innocence” the learned Judges gave it.”
*********************************************************************
My soul! I’d sooner lie in jail for murder plain and straight,
Pure crime I’d done with my own hand for money, lust, or hate,
Than take a seat in Parliament by fellow-felons cheered,
While one of those “not provens” proved me cleared as you are cleared.
Cleared — you that “lost” the League accounts — go, guard our honour still,
Go, help to make our country’s laws that broke God’s law at will —
One hand stuck out behind the back, to signal “strike again”;
The other on your dress-shirt-front to show your heart is clane.
If black is black or white is white, in black and white it’s down,
You’re only traitors to the Queen and rebels to the Crown.
If print is print or words are words, the learned Court perpends: —
We are not ruled by murderers, but only — by their friends.”
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/cleared.html
Wait, what? It’s been a while, but IIRC Feyd-Rautha was sent in because Rabban had been making a hash of things and covering up the fact that the Fremen were eating the Sardaukar’s lunch. As pointed out to the Baron’s discomfiture by Thufir Hawat.
Nope, you’re right. I looked up Rabban in the wikipedia article and it says that was indeed the Baron’s plan.
However, Rabban also was making a hash of things and covering up etc.
The Baron expected him to. He was originally going to send in his Mantat, but when Leto killed him he was forced to use Rabban. In fact, he gave Rabban orders to squeeze all he could from the population.
In the first conversation that the Baron has with Rabban, he is constantly thinking about how great it’s going to be when he can get rid of Rabban and move Feyd-Rautha in, to be the destined messiah of Arrakis. The Baron actually gets worried when there are hints that Rabban isn’t all stupid or all evil.
Now, later on, Rabban does stuff that makes the Baron angry. But Rabban was always going to be blamed.
Short form:
https://bezmenov.net/
See also Bezmenov’s book:
Click to access love-letter-america.pdf
Hmm … I likely need to send out my own crystal ball for necessary recalibration, but I don’t see Americans turning to communism because of deliberately engineered chaos. I see something more like Kurt Schlicher’s split. Only perhaps messier, although his vision was certainly messy enough.
Sure, but you’re an American, so have a chance of understanding. The people who came up with the plan were not.
I see the result being a lot of highly pissed off people gunning for the engineers of that chaos. “Pour enourager les autres.”
Yup that’s our Hostesses “Hungarian Christmas present”. I suspect that if the SJW’s keep riding the middle (i.e. productive) class what the Ceaucescue’s got is going to look like a teddy bears picnic.
Romanian Christmas Present.
Any Hungarians or Romanians who saw it referred to by the wrong nationality would likely be insulted…
😛
(the two ethnicities have a long history of not liking each other; not quite Balkans level, but probably not far off)
Hungarians speak a non-IE language, Romanians speak a romance language, and Bulgarians have all the roses.
And all of them plus Former Yugoslavia but minus Hungary are “in the Balkans”.
But the actual Balkan Mountains are literally in Bulgaria.
When we were in Romania I commented that the Romanians see Bulgarians much the way Alabama sees Mississippi: “We might be bad, but thank God for the other guys!”
And how.
A colleague of mine married a Romanian-but-ethnic-Hungarian girl. This was back in the days of the Iron Curtain so the DOD was understandably concerned. At one point the Security people called him in and asked, “If Romania were to invade the United States would your wife be willing to take arms to defend this country?”
They were somewhat bewildered when he said, “Oh, she’d love to take up arms against Romania!”
Thank you, Margaret. You unwittingly gave me an image of someone asking me that.
The idea of Portugal invading the US is hilarious. You have no idea. By a mile in, they’d all be trying out different eateries, making idiots of themselves, a dozen would be asking “Where the white girls at?” and hte invasion would be done…..
Spouse has visions of the Russians trying to invade the US at Newark and all their tanks going up on blocks.
“Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to invade.”
Ever see Attack the Block?
I have indeed.
A true classic.
:madly jotting down notes:
This must happen in SOMETHING….
Ah-HA! I know, I’ll have it as the backstory for the Space America area! Multiple failed invasions, some of whom become locals….
“Nah, his great grandfather lead the 1745 invasion.”
“And he’s on your security team?”
“Of course! It was a very nice invasion, the guy married my great aunt’s aunt after stumbling into their bakery.”
LOL
Have you ever read (or seen) The Mouse That Roared? The Duchy of Grand Fenwick invading the U.S. comes to mind… though obviously with less unintentional success.
Both. We even did it as a high school play.
There are sequels, too.
Yup! “When the Tower of Jericho flies…”
No. But in the seventies friends and I broke our heads trying to figure out how to get invaded and occupied by the US.
Blinks. Aren’t the Portuguese white?
Okay, when I say the future comes from America? The crazy does too.
Growing up We were just “white” even those of us (coff) who got a tan and a perm and got called “the young lady of color.”
THEN America started talking about “Latin.”
Now the Portuguese in PORTUGAL consider themselves Latin/Hispanic.
Shakes head. Shrugs. Search me.
Such the glamour of America.
Ahhh. That’s too bad, no country deserves the crazy we have here. I thought perhaps you meant blondes or something.
:big grin:
Have you seen the range of colors that are identified as “blond”? Muwhahaha.
Romanian.
Indeed I had them in the wrong place and misrembered
Yep….
It’s immiseration, tied in to their theory of revolution.
Issue is, what they do on behalf of their theory of revolution is pants on head, legs tied around the neck, autoerotic asphyxiation stupid.
Random terrorism (as opposed to specific terrorism and genocidal terrorism).
They thought, makes people miserable and discredits the rightwing government when said government can’t stop it, we take over.
So, they did it a lot, and trained generations of terrorists to do it around the world.
Actual result? Poor people who don’t like a government run by a bunch of aristrocratic nincompoops get ticked of at kids being blown up in market places, and say ‘make it stop’. The government takes a secret police with murdering the communists, communists get murdered, and peace gets restored.
We aren’t rats, so despite it being beyond the imagination of the revolutionary vanguard, we can work out, if slowly, that it is them doing stuff like the ‘no enforcement for larceny under $1000’, that they are hurting us to make us scared and willing to give power to them, and they will not stop hurting us if they are given power.
They are into that stuff pretty much by definition because they believe their theoretical insanity, and take it seriously.
People who are not theorists, ordinary, common, etc., automatically see through it because they never got into the theory enough to understand why the communists thought random marketplace bombing was anything but an evil act. Those of us who are theorists and also not communist take a lot longer to see through things, because we don’t just by reflex ignore the theory babble.
Like the argument against gun control: If they’ll do that to us when we’re armed to the teeth, imagine what they’ll do once we’re disarmed.
Yeah, there is that. Very much that.
We don’t have to imagine it.
Australia and New Zealand.
———————————
The Democrats are willing to burn America to the ground, so long as they wind up squatting on top of the ashes.
This comment at Ace’s place really struck me:
“It’s not just that Antifa owns the streets (according to those people), it’s that they FEAR Kyle Rittenhouses. Kyle Rittenhouse (cast here as the wholesome, albeit naive do-gooder, who tries to step into the breach left open by corrupt government) actually poses a threat to Antifa. He puts the lie to the government authorities’ inability to control the streets. He mitigates — and eventually defeats — leftist political violence. (The Kenosha riots ended after Rittenhouse — Antifa quit the field).
They can’t have that. The Rittenhouses need to be demoralized and destroyed. ‘We’ll see if the jury lets them”
They are already threatening the jury. After the clown show that passes for prosecutors, it’s their only chance.
The prosecutors seem have have managed to prove that Rittenhouse was guilty of trying to stop a riot and acting in self-defense, and maybe a little bad jugdment from time to time. If those are crimes, please, put me on trial too, as a sympathizer.
That’s what worries me, the Chauvin jury was successfully intimidated by a howling mob impervious to facts and reason, this one might be too. If it is Antifa will think it has carte blanche, which it will in certain areas, eventually people are going to start shooting back. And they’ll try not to get caught this time.
Eventually? A given.
If there is no law enforcement provided, someones, somewhere will step up. They will not like the consequences.
It shouldn’t have to have been a child.
THIS.
ADA Littlebinger did mess things up rather badly.
I’m not sure he did. Any reasonably competent DA knew going in that these charges shouldn’t have been brought in the first place.
He was counting on an intimidated judge and jury to return a conviction regardless of the evidence, and still is. However, he’s realizing the judge, at least, isn’t intimidated, soo he’s trying to get a mistrial followed by a new trial under a guaranteed compliant judge with the same poisoned jury pool.
The point here isn’t whether the so-called “plan” was going to work to the effect of creating a Communist government in the US.
The point is that, as ESR pointed out in Gramscian Damage, our left is still unconsciously running a whole menagerie of memes (in the Dawkins sense, not the stupid “picture with caption” sense) implanted by the KGB up to a century ago.
He was writing in the context of Islamofascism, but it applies to Bezemovianism as well.
THIS THIS THIS.
I have noted in the past that the one thing the Soviet Union was actually good at producing was agitprop. Their agitprop was so good it has long outlived the Soviet Union itself.
The administration is siccing the FBI on suburban parents as “domestic terrorists.” That’s not only having no brains, that’s having negative brains. This may be the pivotal concept in stopping the takeover of the schools. Homeschooling is on the rise, but not everyone can do that. There will be a lot of very interesting school board elections in coming years.
AFTER having admitted to manufacturing the letter they used to justify it.
“Didn’t you know, Br’er Fox,” called Br’er Rabbit. “I was bred and born in the briar patch! Bred and born!”
One of the things that was pointed out about ADA Binger is, he is behaving like he is because he’s always been like this, but there haven’t been cameras on him before.
Now we see them, when before they were hidden, and many are appalled at what they see.
I think you’re right. They’ve gotten away with it before. I think it was on Rekieta I saw that first. You don’t pull crap like this in a very public jury trial without that. I’m pretty sure the prosecution is gunning for a mistrial, but even with that this is ridiculous. the Constitutional issue alone, never mind the procedural issues like questioning a defendants silence, i.e. use of the 5th.
We’ve seen this in other places, and it’s been coming for quite a while. These people are prosecutors, judges too. The bloody ninth circus. The Hawaiian judges. Smollett. Mattress girl. I could go on. These people don’t emerge from a vacuum. They’ve done crap like this before, and gotten away with it. Even been praised for it. You know that mental illnesses are trending on ticktok now? Turrette’s, I mean, not just leftism. Or wokism. Or gender tomfoolery, gah, there’s so many of them thase days.
It’s just that now there’s attention from a lot more people than a few tens of thousands of followers on socialism media. We see.
They’ve done crap like this before, and gotten away with it.
The twit that survived getting shot after running up to a kid who was laying on the ground, pulling a pistol on the kid, grabbing the barrel of the gun– he LIED UNDER OATH like six times, which we know because he gave at LEAST that many different versions of “what really happened” as each item was shown to be a lie.
Yeah, I know the tactic, folks here have heard me talk about how much I love the internet because you can SEE THAT HAPPENING– this guy has gotten away with gaslighting people his entire life. And now it’s on the legal record, and on national TV, and it’s obvious to everyone.
And there are many others like him. Not very bright, doing that under oath and on the stand. Some of them are smarter about it. Look at how the Durham investigation is going- they honestly thought they’d get away with it there, too.
And they very nearly did. If not for hubris on the part of 2016 democrats. If not for Trump’s stubborn unwillingness to bow. If not for thousands of citizens that voted for a thousand different reasons, as much against Hillary as for Trump.
We are lied to daily by those in power. Fauci. Biden. Schumer, Schiff, Pelosi, Newsome, et al. By and large, they get away with it, too. From the mask masquerade to Fast and Furious to Summers of Recovery to… Decades of it. Over and over again. I believe we only know a small portion, and that there are things we never will know for sure that they lied about. That irritates me. Greatly.
This. This so much.
I hate gaslighting. And I’ve run into it so bleeping often.
You saw That Smirk on the sadly-didn’t-die guy, right?
*sighs* While I doubt it is good for society, for Kyle, it’s a GOOD thing Gaslighter didn’t die, that testimony is massively powerful– you have the convicted pedophile, the convicted wife-beater, and the guy who’d just been released after being arrested doing terrorist prep on the local cops; of the three, Gaslighter would’ve been the easiest to make sympathetic, and instead we have him doing a full-bore Gollum moment on the stand. Complete with that nasty SMIRK.
If the third one had died, the media would’ve *successfully* claimed that HE was the guy out there acting as a medic, like they tried to do at first, to abuse Kyle– nevermind the kid was the one with a medical kit, that wandered away from the gas station he was helping keep from being set on fire because he was HELPING PEOPLE.
DARVO. Hadn’t heard the tactic before recently, but Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender makes things REALLY clear.
As more than one captioned image I’ve seen out there put it, “I’ve seen a lot of people asking what a 17 year old was doing there with an AR-15. How come no one’s asking what a convicted felon was doing with a gun?”
And yes. The smirk, the six different conflicting stories, the utter certainty that no one will ever give him consequences for anything…. graaaarrrrr.
…Someone once said it’s amazing how much moral behavior resembles simply being too tired. When I see The Smirk – #teamheadsonpikes
As long as someone carefully remains ignorant of every detonation and dismisses the ones they do know of as unimportant this is true.
Out here in the real world we are aware of such things as the complete culsterfuck with puget sound area services (for a hyperlocal blowup), and Let’s Go Brandon (for an international scale blowup).
puget sound area services
Explain? Is this a proper noun or are you talking about general King County incompetence?
And speaking of school boards, the Seattle school district sent an email blast to parents on Tuesday saying that there would be no school on Friday. Because somehow it never occurred to them that given a federal/school holiday on a Thursday, every single staff member with a PTO day would take it on that Friday so they could have a four-day weekend.
I work from home so having the kid here an extra day isn’t a hardship, but a whole lot of parents only had a couple days to make arrangements.
The big one is the ferry system, but I know it involves a bunch of other stuff like the fire department too.
Oh right. The ferry services seems to be due to the UI fiasco and the Great Resigning. The fire department is due to vaccine mandate opposition.
Apparently USA Today referenced, “the Great Resigning,” as related to teachers. People refusing to be vaccinated?
What kind of fiasco can a ferry service experience with its user interface?
The ferry schedule UI is messed up? It looks the same as it always has to me.
I mean, it’s a government web site so I don’t expect it to be very good, but as far as I can tell it’s not broken.
Every year, there’s supposed to be a school board meeting about the school year calendar. And then they print up the school year calendar. And you also have a contingency plan for unexpected school closings or disaster storms, etc.
So basically, they didn’t do their darned job.
“It’s working, it’s all working! They’re almost there!”
Reminds me of a “legendary” (as in I don’t know if it actually existed) computer team project. Several months into the project, management was getting reports of “80% Done, we almost have it licked” but the problem was that there were several months of that message and the project deadline had passed.
The story was that Management finally decided “to heck with this project, we can live without it”. 😈
You assume it was just a single project…
That’s kind of like renewable energy. It’s only about ten years away from being affordable, just like it’s been for decades.
Renewable energy works great if you live in the Middle Ages, and never travel more than 15 miles from where you were born! Which is what the billionaires intend for the rest of us….
Doesn’t even work then. You’re probably thinking of EVs, which still largely rely on coal-power.
…Amazing how many people don’t seem to realize the Middle Ages made serious use of coal and natural gas.
I’ve been trying to say this for months to anyone who would listen…most seem to prefer despair and defeatism.
Some of that is shock, I think.
But I also suspect that at least some of it is trolls attempting to demoralize any possible resistance.
I’ve seen that take on other black-pilled people on other sites. At the very least, “Despair is a sin” should be tattooed on the inside of their eyelids (for those actually despairing) while for the trolls, I suspect more energetic (2000 fps) means of attitude adjustment might be appropriate.
well, it absolves you from doing anything
It is suicidal depression as a political stance.
Note that it not only doesn’t care about leaving a better world for one’s kids; it actively mocks the idea.
Please to explain: Romanian Christmas gift? I can’t seem to find that slang anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae_and_Elena_Ceau%C8%99escu
The reasons FB tried to ban the Romanian flag for a while.
The best part of it is that the overthrow of the Ceausescus was pretty much an “out of the blue” event that no one could have predicted quite literally until it happened. The immediate hint appears to have been a live speech where the audience didn’t applaud on cue. Instead, they stayed completely silent.
And not long after, the Ceausescus were dead.
The downside of it all was a brief period of confused fighting between army units, largely because no unit commander could be sure that other unit commanders were on the same side.
…like the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. The CIA locals found out about it on the TV, same as the KGB guys.
“Surprise, surprise, surprise!”
Apparently the revolutionaries weren’t attending the same black-tie dinners the spooks were monitoring.
To be fair to the CIA guys, they weren’t allowed to make contact with the revolutionaries, because that would look like the US expected the Shah to fall and that would offend our ally.
Stupid, but mostly the State Department’s fault, so…
Read “Legacy of Ashes” about the history of the CIA way back to when it was the OSS. They’ve done stuff in direct contravention of presidential orders many times before, never mind just flat out illegal. All along it’s been run by people who “know better.”
From what I understand, everyone understood that there was anti-regime stuff going on against the Shah of Iran. It’s just that no one realized how much strength it had. In Iran, you had organized illegal opposition groups. In Romania, there was no such thing. There was some political unrest over some recent government actions, but it was largely disorganized. When the overthrow happened, it was as if someone suddenly flipped a switch and caused pretty much the entire country to immediately realize en masse that they no longer needed to put up with Ceaucescu.
It was a rather bizarre event – albeit very fortunate for the country.
And when you say, “live speech,” visualize an area wider than a football field, stretching back at least a quarter of a mile, which would have been absolutely packed with people. Ceausescus was very fond of standing in the balcony of the legislative building and looking out over the masses. Now they take tourists up there and let them have the experience of looking down that long , long street.
Ceausescus was wearing the same clothes from that speech when they shot him, that’s how fast it went. And the Army didn’t have ammunition,
It’s amazing how snooty wikipedia can sound in a bare recital of the details. Tutt tutt how dare the unwashed masses act in such an immoral and illegal manner.
Yes, strip away the supports for law & justice and you end up with something much, much uglier.
yep
And how. Man in his natural, untrained and uneducated form *is* barbaric. We train and educate our young to be moral, intelligent, and skilled adults. But beneath the thin veneer of civilization is raw, unrepentant fury. And desperation.
Laws exist not just for the model citizen, but the guilty themselves. Vigilante justice is rough, brutal, and quick. At best.
Nicolae Ceaușescu, Dictator of Romania, was executed on December 25th, 1989.
One of the key examples of a particular failure mode of communist and totalitarian regimes.
So, Warsaw Pact Era Romania had a bit of preference falsification, because communisms try to force everyone to lie, especially about things working better under the regime, and about level of personal opposition to the regime. And, Totalitarianism is inherently trying to force the ‘state space’ of a society to conform to the leadership’s theoretical model of the society.
Thing is, at scale, a central body could not decide something so theoretically tractable as deciding meals, meal times and bathroom times for everyone.
So, it works badly, the oversights are somewhat patched by people too frightened not to patch them, people lie even to themselves, and eventually the ‘natural vibration’ joggles the ‘state space’ enough to trigger a preference cascade. Dictatorship is secure to dictator is hung in /nine days/. Because even if people don’t admit it to themselves, they hate the regime, and are angry enough to murder.
Probably the opposition has not been effective enough at being evil to everyone for the post preference cascade environment to be quite so extreme.
I gather that’s what happened to a lot of bronze age civilizations as well, and why their cultures more or less vanished over night. They were nearly all top down despotisms that ran on human sacrifice and a good enough army to quell revolts.
But the minute the system cracked, every high priest of every god went to the table to get flayed.
As near as I can tell, Egypt and China were the only real exceptions. I think Egypt because itostly went in for building eternal tombs, and China because instead of feeding people to gods, they went all in on rules lawyering instead.
China fractured repeatedly. I suspect that in China’s case, much of it’s “survival” has to do with the geographical isolation of that region, which kept out competing settled cultures, and that some of the early Chinese philosophers were able to get their ideas adopted in a way that helped to generate a common culture.
The dynasty might fail. But the people left behind would still be Chinese.
“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”
— Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 14th Century (China, obvs)
True. It did fracture a lpt, but as near as I can tell, they never had an uprising that hunted down every single member of the ruling, priest and scribe class to kill them and erase their memory from the earth. As I understand it, the Aztecs did.
It’s somewhat complicated.
China – even back then – is really, really big. It’s much easier to arrange for something like what you describe when you’re dealing with a smaller geographical area. Otherwise you miss someone important who comes back and stomps all over your rebellion after rallying the backwater forces. The Yellow Turban Rebellion overtook huge chunks of the country. It was reportedly active pretty much everywhere east of the capitol, and in most countries a rebellion that covered that much geographical territory would have effectively won. But since it was China, there was still plenty of territory left from which to raise up armies to put down the rebellion. And that rebellion might very well have lead to the destruction of entire (often corrupt) classes of citizenry had it succeeded.
Or the ruling dynasty might manage to hold onto half of the country (which is what happened with the Jin Dynasty), while ceding the rest. If you’re going to wipe out entire classes, then you have to get the entire country involved. And that’s *very* difficult to pull off in an area the size of China, especially without modern transportation and communication methods to speed things up.
Having said that, China did often inflict bloody punishments on extended families. The entire clan of the first Empress of the Han Dynasty was killed down to the last member after she died (she’d gotten greedy, and her clan’s lock on power was threatening to discredit the new dynasty in the eyes of the general population). Another form of punishment called for killing everyone within ten generations of the guilty individual. That means horizontally as well as vertically. That’s a *lot* of people. And it was apparently popular during the Ming Dynasty.
Plus, there’s the sheer carnage that the constant civil wars in China inflicted on the population. I’d have to double-check the numbers to be sure, but iirc when the Three Kingdoms period finally ended decades after it had started, the total population of China was roughly one-quarter of what it had been at the start. And remember that’s not just a few years of killing. That’s constant deaths for so long that even decades worth of new births hadn’t been enough to get the population any higher than that.
???
China is kind of famous for TRYING to wipe out all memory of That Which Came Before, burning both books and scholars.
Yes, but that’s always been a top down, not bottom up thing. I.e. “New God Emperor decrees,” not, “the garbage man is out hunting the city council down for squishy time”.
By comparison, the Hitties are *gone*. Even the Aztecs, who were around during written langauge, and and were conquered by a nation with the printing press had their memory was so cursed and thoroughly erased that we’re still not sure about large parts of their religion.
That speaks to a pantheon that was not so much cast aside, but reviled and thrown into outer darkness by pretty much everyone who knew them. When grandbaby asked Abuela what all those winged snake things were, they didn’t get a “ah let me tell you the stories of our ancestors” they got a “something aweful you should have no truck with.”
Even in Europe where many of the pagan myths got mixed in with Christianity, they tended to stick around. We know who Thor and Loki were, and the main question is what are the post pagan add-ons instead of wondering if those geometric carvings represented a hammer or an axe, and not even knowing the real names of which gods they were associated with.
I almost wonder if the “Imperial Year Zero” campaigns are an attempt to imitate those true purges?
Even the Aztecs, who were around during written langauge, and and were conquered by a nation with the printing press had their memory was so cursed and thoroughly erased that we’re still not sure about large parts of their religion.
Remember that part of that assurance is based on the assumption that the reports we DO have must have been lies.
…
And then the physical evidence we can now gather suggests that no, if anything, they were being conservative in what they reported…..
There is that…
But there is also a large part of their mythos that is simply just gone. Quetzacoatl apparently had a whole cast of stories and myths around him that it seems like everyone just knew, and are referenced in other surviving writings, but never directly described. And after the conquest, people would have still known them, yet no one wrote them down, even then.
That’s what tells me those gods were hated by even their own followers.
Yeah, they demanded EVERYTHING, and when push came to shove…they gave nothing.
All of that was for *nothing*.
I’d wish them banished forever, too.
>> “Yeah, they demanded EVERYTHING, and when push came to shove…they gave nothing.”
Pray your gods who ask you for your blood
For they are strong and angry jealous ones…
“something aweful you should have no truck with.”
Keep in mind, the NICE guys did things like “drug and murder young girl” or “drown children so it’s a bloodless sacrifice and the can go talk to the gods” and the normal, yearly things were stuff like “fillet a living virgin and wear her skin as a robe”…..
When it was ‘working’ they could win by terror.
Once it stopped working, and they’d LOST, and the MOTHER OF THE GOD WHO BEAT THEM had shown up in suitable costume to say “We accept YOU, and YOU are not THAT”?
Of course even the relatively nice ones were “nasty evil things KEEP IT FAR AWAY.”
It’s only being revived now because of 1) evil morons who don’t see much wrong with child sacrifice, and 2) evil people who LIKE the horrifying evil, such as various cartels, supposedly to scare people but probably because they like it.
People are attempting to revive the Aztec religion? That’s horrifying.
There’s a reason many people are unhappy about the southern security situation.
Frankly, it is even an explanation why I was so deep into crazy when it came to the question of what to do about it. Which notion would have been entirely unnecessary if it had even been possible.
Because, in hindsight, the center of gravity is enemies domestic.
Yes, it is.
That’s why the cartels decorate the Saint Jude statues with tribal gear–he, and the One that he serves, are a major threat.
There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t get reported up here exactly because there is no way to report on it that doesn’t sound like a bad novel, and no way to convey detail that isn’t horrifying.
IN SCHOOLS
https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-schools-aztec-gods
It is.
One anthropologist was surprised to find that tribes in Mexico, watching a play about the Spanish paladins and the paynim, identified entirely with the paladins.
Another historical oddity is that the Emperors of China demanded a written language that could adapt to any spoken language. So a diplomat at one end of the Empire could send information to the Emperor and be understood even through a language barrier.
Egypt did the same, although less deliberately.
In an odd way, written language created lasting empires.
One thing communism does well is create alternatives.
You live in a socialist republic, you find ways around it else you starve. Clandestine barter and trade systems of goods and skills develop in socialist countries as there is no other way to get by day to day.
For example friends of mine in the Saka Autonomous Republic ( Read part of the Russian Far East.) would go hunting. They’d go in my buddy’s Russian military jeep. which he’d traded welding services on the QT for, fuel it with distillate drained from the natural gas pipeline. “Hey buddy, trade you a hind quarter for 40 gallons.”), hunt with rifles they’d stored in the university’s 3rd department (KGB office, government officials like fresh game too.) safe.
Good people, good times in spite of it all, with a system and skill set we need develop.
The problem is that this develops into a disrespect for law that makes it very hard to restore capitalism, which requires at least tolerable law.
Yep. Some of that malicious compliance can exist at the margins. But once it begins to effect the overculture, things get messy.
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. If the law doesn’t work, needs must you find a way around the law.
Nah, it’s a vicious cycle.
OT, but doubt anyone will mind: a happy Veterans’ Day to all our vets.
Was shocked to see Google actually have a header for it.
It is very much on topic. I’ve just felt a little bit inappropriate saying it.
We are the dead. Short days ago
we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from our flailing hands we throw
The Torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
This year, more than many other years, it is very broadly topical.
We aren’t certain to see peace, we aren’t certain to see victory. Each of us may find ourselves among the dead, or the ‘dead’. Each of us may find ourselves among the living, carrying the torch, over the wire, into dead man’s land, when the whistle blows for us.
Also on topic:
Five Finger Death Punch, Living the Dream (music video)
Turisas, Stand Up and Fight
Iron Maiden, Paschendale
Cruxshadows, Eye of the Storm
Survivor, Eye of the Tiger
Sabaton, The Last Stand
Ichiro Mizuki, Now is the Time (Ima ga Sono Toki Da, first opening to Getter Robo Armageddon)
Otherwise, We Are Soldiers
Kipling, The Dykes
William Blake, Jerusalem
Isao Sasaki, Uchuu Senkan Yamato (opening song)
Within Temptation, Stand My Ground
Hammerfall, Bushido
Hohei no Honryo (specialty of infantry)
Battle Hymn of the Republic
Marching Through Georgia
Johny Horton, Sink the Bismark
Currently using “Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” as my work commute audiobook. Seems appropriate both to the topic, and the holiday.
Yamato – the most powerful battleship in the world, and the second largest ever after her slightly larger sister – just got chased out of the battle by torpedoes from the destroyer USS Heerman that missed their intended target (Haruna).
That is a fantastic book. The battle it describes is analogous to a SF space battle with 8 planetary defense corvettes beating 40 invading battle cruisers. Seems fictional, but it actually occurred.
There’s an awesome audio presentation on the battle on YouTube which I used as a supplement to “Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors”. Favoriteline about the Johnston on seeing a Cruiser attacking the Gambier Bay “promptly shoots up this ship as well…because of course it does.”
One of the most impressive naval battles ever.
Drach is an international treasure.
That is a fantastic book. The battle it describes is analogous to a SF space battle with 8 planetary defense corvettes beating 40 invading battle cruisers. Seems fictional, but it actually occurred.
WP Delenda Est
Fascinating thing. I think it was my old man who came up with the theory that in combat, the captain will default to the core message of their navy, even if it wouldn’t be the tactically sound message.
That’s why the Royal Navy in the Pacific (No captain can do much wrong who pays his ship along side his foe) mixed it up with the IJN carrier groups when they needed to stay a fleet in being. Or the Germans (Preserve your ships against all threats) disengage from an opportunity to knock out the most advanced ship in the British Fleet.
Or why the Americans (I have not yet begun to fight!) responce to facing down the most powerful surface fleet then assembled with escort destroyers, was “You might go through me like a hot knife through butter, but by God you’ll have to go through me first!”
And posssibly why the IJN (Find the single strategic moment to strike!) had no clue how to deal with that…
Well, keep in mind that Taffy 3 was doing its darnedest to *not* fight the Japanese Center Force. But Admiral Kurita, who was in charge, mistakenly thought he’d stumbled across some of Halsey’s fast fleet carriers, escorted by cruisers. Those were the striking arm of the USN in the Pacific, and there was no way that he was going to give up an opportunity to sink them.
Except, of course, it wasn’t actually them. And Center Force has since become synonymous with “naval laughing stock”.
Ironically, if the ships in question *had* been fast fleet carriers, then Kurita’s battleships (even the two fast Kongo-class ships present) wouldn’t have been able to keep up, and Kurita’s cruisers and destroyers would have posed much less of a threat to the Baltimore-class cruisers that Kurita believed he was facing (instead of destroyers).
The actions of the American destroyers and destroyer escorts in that battle was an acceptance of the relative values of the ships that were present. The escort carriers were the reason why the formation existed. The surface combatants, on the other hand, essentially had no real purpose beyond safeguarding their carriers. They were (as they had been told, though it hadn’t sunk in until that battle) expendable, so long as the carriers survived. And so, they acted accordingly. The same logic applied to the aviators, who continued to make attack runs on the Japanese ships even after the planes in question had run out of ammo and bombs. Spooking the Japanese was better than nothing, and might stall them long enough for something to change.
I agree that is the rational argument and rational choice given the odds. But his argument is, if you look at the sum of major naval encounters, the captains do not act rationally: they act in the spirit of their fleet. What enabled them to do that, in the teeth of death was not a cold rational mind, but mythos of the US Navy. “Not for Self, but for Country” “I have not yet begun to fight” and the others that make up the spirit of what it means to be US Navy.
I think without those legends of desperate last stands against impossible odds standing with them, that they could have charged into the teeth of the worse their enemy could hope to throw at them, no matter how rational or strategically correct that decision was. That’s the real power of legends, and why the stories we embed within us matter, because when it matters most, and all other sources run dry, that is the well we have left to draw on.
Misidentifying the ships meant that they were getting the range wrong, and using armor-piercing shells that would go in one side and out the other of an unarmored ship before they exploded.
The Battle off Samar is arguably the blackest mark on the U.S. Navy….
……..Brass
Because it was caused by multiple screwups at the top, and then they proceeded to treat it as an embarrassment to be quietly not talked about much.
The world wonders.
There’s a great video on Lee at Drachinfel that goes into some of this
Bingo. Halsey screwed the pooch (he is not solely to blame, but it was his lack of clear orders that allowed the situation to occur in the first place and then, when informed of the situation, threw a temper tantrum and continued to chase the Japanese decoy force for another hour before turning around), but Halsey was the Navy’s media darling, so the Navy covered up his failures to preserve both Halsey’s and the Navy’s spotless reputations. It wasn’t until Halsey did something so monumentally stupid that the Navy couldn’t cover it up – sailed his fleet through a raging typhoon… twice! – that his reputation was finally allowed to become “controversial.”
Well, sort of. Perhaps the finest hour for the O-(1 through 7), ratings, and WO. As far as the higher brass goes, I think you can pin that one pretty solidly on Halsey’s particular weaknesses. There were plenty of brass that warned him about the risk he was taking.
We wish you a merry kulterkampf and a happy new boog!
I always find this Kipling appropriate on Veteran’s Day:
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/last_of_brigade.html
“There were thirty million English who talked of England’s might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.
They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four!
They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, “Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites.”
They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant’s order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.
They strove to stand to attention, to straighten the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.
The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and “Beggin’ your pardon,” he said,
“You wrote o’ the Light Brigade, sir. Here’s all that isn’t dead.
An’ it’s all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin’ the mouth of hell;
For we’re all of us nigh to the workhouse, an’ we thought we’d call an’ tell.
“No, thank you, we don’t want food, sir; but couldn’t you take an’ write
A sort of ‘to be continued’ and ‘see next page’ o’the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an’ couldn’t you tell’em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now.”
The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with “the scorn of scorn.”
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.
O thirty million English that babble of England’s might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children’s children are lisping to “honour the charge they made –”
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!
Few more, here to make the numbers even.
… I doubt the Russians know, too. Or that the people at the top knew.
One of the more plausible reasons I’ve seen for the CIA failing to predict the fall of the Soviet Union was that they had a source providing the reports the top leadership was getting. Which, of course, did not reflect reality after each layer of bureaucracy adjusted the figures to cover their behinds. And no one at the CIA (at least not at the top level) considered the possibility that the leadership was being played.
This effect is happening now with China, in a major way. I talk regularly with people who get a birds-eye view and also with people who get a worms-eye view of China. The people who work primarily with higher-ups in China paint them as all-conquering, strategically-minded, clear-eyed and far-sighted. People who actually try to get stuff out of China or get things done in China have a very, very different view.
Example: We’ll get rid of cash to prevent drug deals and illegal arms sales. Forcing everybody use credit cards allows us to track criminals and prevent crime. It’s good for sociey.
It’s all going according to plan until some North Korean hacker places a massive Sell order of financial stocks which forces a credit card company to shut off every credit card reader in the city on the third of the month, just when Social Security and welfare debit cards should be refilled, after which desperate people commit food thefts that erupt into store-clearing riots and morph into city-burning celebrations.
Politicians blame wreckers, saboteurs and hoarders. The police and National Guard can’t keep order – they’ve all quit to avoid the vax – so the Governor suspends the Constitution and authorizes armed citizen militias to keep order in their neighborhoods including the authority to shoot on sight . . . but only in historically disadvantaged communities of color. White neighborhoods are ordered to open their doors to free-lance property redistributors whose efforts will produce a more equitable distribution of goods thoughout society, thus ending the need for desperate people to riot.
And that’s just in Minneapolis.
And the Politicians will be completely blindsided when the Privileged repel (maybe successfully, maybe not) the Freelance Property Redistributors with bullet and bayonet (reminds me, need to get a bayonet for Kindness) and then (hopefully) come and give the Politicians some Romanian Christmas Presents.
“The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.”
― Admiral Karl Dönitz
The reason why trying to “plan” your way past America is truly a peril-fraught enterprise.
See also: “Little groups of paratroopers.”
Though that one has the added “advantage” of being the pretty much natural result of giving bored eighteen-year-old US males a gun, and vague instructions.
A major indicator this past week was Gov. Newsome being down for a week with vaccine side effects (unless you believe his story that he skipped the global wine-and-cheese affair in Glasgow to go trick-or-treating). If someone as well-connected as he is actually got the vaccine, that ought to put an end to speculation that it’s some kind of conspiracy to commit mass murder. Of course, mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is still nonsense on stilts, especially if the vaccine is leaky. They’ll create a real pandemic, and it won’t be targeted against the people they’d prefer.
There are other things, too. China has a fuel shortage, and it’s become difficult to get orders placed for anything there–not because they can’t be shipped but because we can’t get hold of people. I don’t know what’s happening there, but something not-good is going on. It’s gotten near-impossible to hire people, and it’s not because of unemployment benefits–Texas already deep-sixed the COVID bennies. Supposedly, we’ve got at least hundreds of thousands of new illegal immigrants running around the state, so why can’t restaurants find dish washers? Most of the restaurants I go to have the owners working every shift because they can’t get anyone to show up.
Much of this points to real problems, but it doesn’t look like things are going according to plan.
I read (can’t remember where) that one of the reasons why employers can’t find jobs is that the big resume vetting programs/services (or one of them, at least) was either outright rejecting all candidates, even the well-qualified ones, or else not forwarding their resumes/credentials/whatever to employers.
Pretty sure that’s not going to be the problem when it comes to finding kitchen help.
You have noticed that those places have websites for applying, right?
I’ve heard of multiple folks who applied to every place in town, had to be talked into going in to a direct-hiring place– fastfood and grocery workers, here– and were hired on the spot, because they’d had zero applications.
In one case, the just-hired guy pointed out he’d applied before, twice. And the guy doing interviews grimaced and said that he’d been told that REPEATEDLY today.
Hmmm. I had not noticed that. Next time I’m someplace that is short-staffed, I will check the help wanted sign for a website. Still–how can that problem take more than a week to fix? This has been going on for months now.
I have no freaking clue, just know it has the people at the pointy end pissed off, too.
It seems to be *worse* at places where you buy in to the company, but it’s not exclusive to them– all I can figure is they must be letting through some small amount of applications, or the in-person hiring *IS* the fix.
I know our local Burger King got rid of the web site sign and have a sign that says something like “Walk-in job interviews available any time the store is open.”
It almost makes one think it might be worth it to find out who owns the hiring software and whether they’re taking money from the Maladministration to not forward the applications.
Happened to a Huns son. She talked about it in the MeWe chat.
Someone (I think in the comments at Ace’s blog) mentioned that something like that happened to a relative. And it was for a big chain company at a store the person in question had worked at before (which was how this store found out about it; the would-be rehire mentioned sending in applications that the store never received). But that was at least a couple of months ago, if not longer. I would think that either the problem got fixed by now, or corporate clients moved to a different vetting service that actually worked.
I saw the same story. Yes, any software issue should have been fixed.
SHOULD.
The conspiracy-theorist would claim that Gov. Hairgel was given the wrong vaccine by mistake. 😛
On a more serious note…
There’s a lot of stuff going on. I don’t think anyone on Earth gets all of it. We’ll see how it works out.
In related news, I saw that Evergrande has apparently finally declared bankruptcy. Everyone knew it already, but it wasn’t official until now.
There were reports that said 5% of the lots of not-Vax have had 100% of the fatal adverse reactions. I’ll take the numbers with several grains of salt, but there have been some curious quality control issues that have been noted.
And all this is aside from the known (but ignored) problems with the previous trials of mRNA therapies several years ago. There are also indications that if the shot hits a vein, adverse reactions are much more likely to occur.
I have a hypothesis that the “if the shot hits a vein” effects account for the higher risk of excessive adverse reactions in young men/boys and atheletes. It’s also one of the reasons I’m avoiding it–I lift weights, and I’ve often been told by nurses that it’s really easy to hit a vein in my arms (or difficult NOT to hit one, depending on the procedure in question).
Still the biggest concern should be the VAERS frprts of 18,000 deaths and 800,000 adverse reactions (IIRC.) No medical treatment in history with that death and reaction rate has ever been approved. This gets ignored.
and VAERS is a low-ball number as it is a voluntary report. Actual numbers of reactions are higher than reported.
As I mentions the other day, some quick math on US VAERS reports and deaths from WuFlu ( a over-reported number that is actually lower in reality) and the chances of having a VAERS reportable serious reaction is about the same as deaths from CCP Lung Rot. and worse, the younger one is, the more likely the Vax issue, while the less likely to die, so the Vax is more likely to cause an issue in someone under 35 or so than WuFlu is to kill them.
Semi-voluntary. Patients, parents, and medical staff are able to voluntarily enter reports, yes. But there are types of reactions medical personnel are mandated to enter into VAERS, and some types that medical personnel are “strongly encouraged” to enter into VAERS. IIRC vaccine manufacturers are mandated to enter all adverse reactions they’re aware of into VAERS.
And folks on Twitter dismissing VAERS because, “it’s voluntary and that means the cranks are reporting every little sniffle and claiming it’s a bad reaction. Pay no attention.”
Still, it is lower than the actual number and a often enough a complication is not seen as one.
I was reading a news item about the (former) CEO of an outfit that was doing the initial tests. They found that the adverse reactions (normal quitting point is 5%, this was running 16%) were getting deleted after they had been transferred to the feds. The CEO quit in a) disgust, and b) (my guess) to try to avoid
ballistic repercussionsbeing the fall-guy as the not-Vax results played out.No, what’s concerning is the cases where medical personnel are being encouraged not to report cases to VAERS, under threat of censure / termination, including in the military. USAF Flight Surgeon.
The version I saw was using VAERS numbers, and mapped it, with some 75-90% from that 5% not including the very first push. (First batch had a LOT more, like dominate-the-chart more.)
The map of the reports was pretty solidly “places where you won’t be fired for misinformation if you admit there are a lot of complications.”
That suggests to my eyes that the initial report spike is accurate, and the drop after that is no time/being discouraged from reporting complications.
Usually, there is a LOT of noise in VAERS reports, that’s the POINT. You get all the stuff, and then look for patterns. Like, above average rate of heart attacks, whatever. Yes, that means you get things like “Associated with broken arms.” (Which can sometimes trace to, oh, dizziness as a side-effect, that’s WHY you collect All The Things, we don’t know.)
We have bee in hiring mode for months preparing for our seasonal shifts. A little successful early on, but now for every 5 interviews we set up we get ghosted by 3 of them. If we hire they do not show up for orientation. Happened twice today alone. Getting ridiculous.
On top of that supply issues have made our stock levels very dicey. Not able to make our sales plan without the merch.
We also have the theft issue. So brazen. So frustrating.
Two possibilities. The first – and hopeful one – is that the job market is good enough that the people ghosting you are finding jobs elsewhere after already agreeing to your interview. The second, and not so good one, is that the people ghosting you agreed to an interview only for some sort of unemployment requirement, but aren’t interested in actually having to go back to work.
With 1a being that the people ghosting you don’t have the basic business savvy to call and let you know.
Those bridges aren’t going to burn themselves, you know.
Son’s work is having the same issues hiring and with inventory. People who do not show up for the interview, people who show up, get hired, but don’t show up for work. The latter to the point that they are starting to have people start immediately after the interview … Only to have the individual go to move their vehicle to the employee secure parking area and have them just drive off. Inventory, they can’t get hardware, which comes from China. When asked if they are trying to source from somewhere else, his response is IDK (to be fair, he’s not that high in the hierarchy).
But then today California began promoting booster shots for everyone. All ages, all health statuses. Plus they are moving forward with shots in 5-11 year-olds.
If he really had half of his face paralyzed, it’s sick to me how the day after he resurfaces in public that a booster roll-out begins. Wouldn’t a normal person want to wait and ask some questions? No other state is pushing boosters like this.
Off topic, but given how many of us serve as staff to cats, thought this would be of interst:
https://nypost.com/2021/11/11/cats-mentally-map-owners-location-using-their-voice/
Anyone who has served as staff for cat(s) already knew this 🙂 One major gripe about the article; it keeps referring to cat “owners”, when there is no such thing. 🙂 🙂
I can easily believe that when it comes to my kitties. All I have to do is mention R or C’s name, especially followed by the word “snuggles” and they come running! R goes full-force while C paws at my legs for a bit before letting me pick him up for lap time.
The problem with Xi, Pelosi, HarrisBiden, etc., is that they don’t care if the masses starve or suffer, as long as they themselves have all their perks and goodies. There is a reason why the Democrats keep insisting everyone must give up flying and cars in the name of “saving the Earth from climate catastrophe” while they continue to buy and build mega multi-million dollar beach homes that would be the first things to be washed away if their claims were remotely true.
They are quite happy to rule over the ashes of civilization as long as they are the rules.
Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, where have I heard that before 🙂 .
At least if you go by the Old Testament, Lucifer actually serves a purpose by tempting people who then choose whether to do/be good or evil; Leftists serve no such purpose.
Our Hostess said
” working from home and city-shrinking, and people moving away from the big lefty centers”
Lots of this, Middle class have been leaving the cities since suburbs started showing up after WWII. Various riots in the 60’s accelerated that trend. There’s been folks working in the cities and the businesses centered there as there was some advantage to it. But the massive exodus to avoid winnie the flu made it clear to many businesses that were knowledge based (i.e. NOT manufacturing) that the workers AND the business could be almost anywhere. Not all business management accept or like this but other things (e.g. off shoring in the ’90s) also helped make this clear. So the cities have lots of folks dependent on the graces of the SJW plus a patina of VERY high end folks. The high end folks also tend to the SJW side although they’re probably more like the lords and ladies of yore, without the Noblesse Oblige that almost made some of the lords and ladies tolerable. With the business gone the High end folks leave too. Just look at what happened to little New England cities like Hartford. It doesn’t have the draw of bigger cities in the form of high end amenities and so what upper class were there went to NYC or Boston. Hartford is essentially dead once the Insurance companies vacated when CT politics started to go deeply insane late 80’s early 90’s. Hartford is dependent on the rest of the state to stay alive. But bigger cities are bleeding too, its just going to take longer for them to actually die.
Manufacturing has been leaving the cities for decades, too.
Manufacturing had been leaving the cities for a LONG time. Much of manufacturing was northern cities and much of that bailed to Southern areas to rid itself of Labor rules and get right to work and reduce labor costs in the 60s and early 70s (e.g. Furniture and clothing/shoes in the Northeast) . Only where there was either a LARGE local production base (e.g. cars and car parts) and/or a large capital overhead for the factory itself did it stay in place. and as the nature of manufacturing change some of those plants moved or were replaced by foreign suppliers (e.g. Steel) into the early 80’s.
Is it just me or is the trend for large scale manufacturing more and more ‘build away from cities, and develop the transportation infrastructure etc yourself’? It’s not that often I have seen any large company move in to a downtown area for more than office space — which seems to me to be the biggest thing that’s come under attack during the pandemic. So cities no longer exist to support manufacturing, and now their office / service based supports are crumbling . . . what benefit, exactly, do cities give again?
They allow services to be concentrated where people are living. Historically, that butcher in Podunkville has maybe 10 clients because everybody does their own butchering. In the “big city” he has access to thousands of people who need his service.
Of course, the modern JIT system has pretty much eliminated those specialized trades that cities grew up around. When Amazon can deliver those designer shoes to podunkville and the butcher can send his wares halfway across the world, the city is pretty much just a concentrated warehouse for service workers.
There are a lot of “robotic factory, operated by two guys” in the wilds of the country, too.
Before WWII, heavy manufacturing was mostly located in cities because that was where the labor force was, and the plants needed to be located within walking distance and/or along streetcar routes and along a rail line for freight service. But that also meant land in the city was expensive, because it was in demand. That dependency had started to lessen by the late 20’s, but then the Great Depression hit.
During WWII, some wartime plants were sometimes built away from city centers but with government-involved transit from the nearest city to the plant. In the post-WWII boom, with automobiles becoming readily available, building plants outside a city and letting workers drive became viable, though a few also provided a transit option of some sort.
There were also, notoriously, company towns.
Not all of which were abusive. Milton Hershey had a ‘company town’ built outside his chocolate factory with the objective of giving his workers a good place to live.
When the C.I.O. tried to unionize Hershey’s, the workers and local dairy farmers fought them off.
Part of the issue is costs. Land costs a boat load in or near the cities, taxes are higher than in the cities, As noted the blue collar folks got up and left when cars became easily available so you have to pay better to get folks back to the city.
To some degree the SJW seem to want to go back to somewhere about 1910 with their light rail and apartments vs free standing homes and cars, it’s part of why they hate vehicles, independence for the “proletariot” means it can get up and leave unlike the serfs that they want us to be. They all seem to want to be the Bellamy’s from Upstairs Downstairs or the Crawley’s from Downton Abbey. They’ve watch far too much Masterpiece Theatre…
The amenities I was thinking of were things like museums, zoos, symphonies, Opera, Live Theater, Ballet, etc mostly cultural stuff. You also used to find lots of specialty shops, but as someone else noted that kind of thing can now be shipped to your door even out in East Overshoe. The high end stuff does attract the “moneyed class” who often are showing their wealth by consuming some of these things. Of course some of us just like the symphony or a good museum 😉
Reported to me yesterday evening; hearsay evidence, but believable:
Starbucks, nationwide, can no longer make frappes. The supply chain for their mix has apparently completely collapsed. Being the leftists they are, of course, they had no alternative plan. (The recipe for making one at home is dead simple, BTW, with ingredients that are still in good stock, at least hereabouts.)
Knowing a little about how Tim Hortons (Canadian coffee chain) works — it’s likely the store chains are *not allowed* to make their own recipe. Everything is run through the central office & the stores just receive boxes of the approved coffee / mix etc.
Yes, that’s how it works for every chain. Which normally does work, if just barely, with Just In Time supply chains. Those break when something major occurs (not just one train derailment, or a bridge over the Mississippi being down).
They had a very long time to realize that something major was occurring, develop contingency plans, and roll them out before getting caught with their pants down because THE PLAN that they were riding down in flames wasn’t going to work.
Son has been keeping in touch with the people he knows at Amazon. He tells me that things have been chaotic there – but still working for the most part. More shipments coming in from Texas, not California. More indie truckers showing up at the loading docks, because they shifted their company owned fleet to pick up in California (they are mostly of the newer CARB compliant models, and their drivers already have the benefits that AB5 mandates). Lot more of transfers between distribution centers, too, some going by air freight. Larger than normal warehousing of some items, apparently they buy when they can get it, not when they need it.
In other words, Amazon had a plan – and a second plan – and a third plan – and a fourth… Which has allowed them to mostly keep up their service expectations, at the expense of a lowered profit margin. Starbucks obviously had nothing.
Yep, definitely. Just underlines that central planning means you’re dependent on the one or two people who make the decisions, and franchises like Starbucks are notorious for making (poor) corporate decisions the franchisees have no hand in.
Amazon’s AWS offers backup and failover plans for whole regions going dark all at once, so I’m not surprised that their logistics people are similarly equipped.
Smart global businesses do this. Well, smart guys that work for said global business with any interest and/or knowledge of logistics and supply chain management do. Supply chain disruptions on that scale are *constant* and *ongoing.* You’re constantly juggling things unless you have plans in place to counteract said issues.
The current logistics… er, “mess” is the absolute kindest word I can use for it- is abnormal, but not completely out of the bounds of possibility. And there has been warning, for those plugged in. California’s port issues are and were completely preventable. They are completely man made. I highly suspect when those monitoring the issue saw what was coming they made even more plans.
While they might not have known just how *bad* the eff up was, the container issue alone could be seen from friggen’ orbit. I don’t have any kind words to say for those responsible for this mess. Which was, I must reiterate, completely and I mean 100% PREVENTABLE.
Kalifornia’s ‘port issues’ are entirely left-wing government made. Stupid regulations imposed to appease certain special interests and punish others. So what if they tie the entire country’s economy up in knots? The Ruling Classes don’t suffer.
Not yet.
———————————
‘Progressives’ believe everybody else is even stupider than they are. This explains a lot.
Yep.
So, due to weird WordPress clicks and so on I ended up on your blog, bought a copy of Unfair Advantage, consumed it . . . Just thought I would pass on that your review prompted at least one sale 🙂
Welcome, Pawz! Pull up a chair and sit a spell. 🙂
Harumph! At least that dang thing that I’ve not been keeping up at all has done somebody some good.
Seriously, though, I think that you’ll enjoy Phantom’s book more than my current offerings. And maybe I’ve added one more to the mob poking him to get the next one done.
That’s how it was when I worked in The Supermarket. At the prepared foods counter, everything either came in pre-made or had a Corporate Approved Recipe that you had to use and were not allowed to deviate from in the slightest. And woe unto you if you made something that wasn’t a Corporate Approved Recipe or substituted an authorized ingredient for an unauthorized one.
That would be hilarious, especially given this last summer I’ve basically been running off of grappled made of Walmart brand instant coffee, sucralose artificial sweetener, LorAnn flavor oils, cold water and Walmart heavy cream.
I use the Walmart brand instant coffee for the frappes because it dissolves easily in cold water, and actually tastes pretty good for it. Not so great hot, but it was 78F in my office nest, so hot was not the objective…
Making coffee beverages is like cooking with booze; it doesn’t matter all that much if it’s the (almost) cheapest you can find. Taken straight – you want King Harv’s or better.
That could be me, and my son, and it would’ve been here or on Huns media somewhere. If at Ace, then has hit someone else as well, because I have never commented there.
And no, because corporate is stupid, they have not trashed the super expensive hiring software because people have to be able to apply online.
And that’s awarding me points for calling people things like “dishrag” in German. (Well, it’s German. It sounds threatening.)
My husband has taken to saying “Merry Christmas” with a really SNARLY Russian accent.
He sounds like he’s offering to maim them….
*************
The thing that annoys me with these plans and predictions and stuff is that they use the horoscope and prophecy trick: they always end up being right because YOU ALWAYS SAY THE SAME THING and then FREAKING IGNORE ALL THE TIMES IT DOESN’T APPLY.
See also, That One Relative who always predicts Something Going Wrong, and then when ANYTHING goes wrong: “I told you it would happen!”
…yes, my traveling alone and being delayed for a day and a half with a lost wallet (returned, mostly intact) TOTALLY JUSTIFIES the last several decades of you insisting a woman traveling alone will be in Dire Trouble. Nevermind that male relatives had worse things happen more often, by hours traveled– yep, totally and for sure. (K, his wife shouldn’t be alone, but that’s HER, same as the guy-cousins really should have their keepers….)
What’s that line, this time for sure?
A bit like ZeroHedge and similar predicting 26 of the last 1 economic downturns.
Or the Globull Wormening Chicken Littles predicting all 18 of the last 0 ‘Climate Catastrophe In 10 Years!!’
AOC: “The sky is falling! In 10 years!!”
The sky has been falling in 10 years since 1990, if not before. Take a number.
At least 223 years.
I’ll see your 223, and add 308, 45 and 12.
Hut, hut, hike!
I see what you did there…. 😉
“Fine then, I can replace you with a dollar store 8-ball toy.”
Russian and German are really good languages for snarling in. French, on the other hand…
French is good for Sneering
Even if you don’t intend to.
Which is why I refer to someone being snooty as Tres En Fon Fon. With Fon Fon pronounced up your nose. It means nothing, but it gives the idea clearly.
En Francais!
I’m tired.
me too.
I’m not sure if it is 60 or if I just need rest
*Hugs* Hang in there.
America and the West in general is absolutely, insanely, incredibly wealthy. I suspect this is why, even though our host has considered a ‘butchers bill’ arriving, it’s been delayed and may not happen at all. People are reacting to protect their wealth (property, business, family), our media covers *none* of it, and even alternative media manages to capture at best a tiny fraction of what’s going on. I think there is immense damage being done to the wealth / future prospects of the western nations, but the buffer is larger than we think. And it takes time for it to be affected, time for people to react.
Related to that, distributed decision making seems to be the most effective economic /political system, but it’s also the hardest one for people to understand or collate centralized reports about. Or predict. Just In Time supply systems as a concept don’t account for the whole supply system falling apart, and securing reliable supply is a risk that is going to be factored into future company decision making. These are all systems based on central planning, industrial revolution era thinking – everything is a predictable, well defined widget, everyone wants the same thing. I believe we are going to see a larger push away from this sort of idea in the future.
Nah. It also takes much longer for a society to break the “bias of normalcy” than you expect. Seriously. If you read good historical analysis, you’ll see it.
Got any recommendations? The book club might be interested in reading such an analysis. Assuming we survive reading Edmund Burke.
Unfortunately they’re packed, and I have a weird thing I do with titles….
Now I’m curious to know what that thing is, because I haven’t noticed it.
Also: I did offer to maintain a hun/hoyden-recommended reading list for you, you know.
I don’t remember titles. Normally I poke around till I find the right one.
For instance I want to say one of the books is “The long road to revolution” but I think that’s the subtitle. It’s about the American Revolution.
Zerohedge still has the best record because the mainline press never predicts any at all. Just sayin
“We’re Americans. Planning always goes weird around us. Chaos is our natural element.”
Our WWII enemies complained that they had our military regulations, manuals, and procedures… but we weren’t following them.
I’m hoping that “This too shall pass” turns out to be accurate once again…
It’s sad that both of these quotes are apocryphal and can’t be sourced before the ’70s at the earliest, because they’re so wonderful. One is the supposedly-Dönitz quote above, or as I heard it “a German general after the war”:
“The reason the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices it on a daily basis.”
And this one, supposedly from a Soviet Army general:
“A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.”
The first is new to me; the second I’ve been laughing at for a long time.
We’re Americans. For Europe, it’s chaos; for us, it was Tuesday.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButForMeItWasTuesday
Something to look out for– a lot of the debunkings on “cannot be found before the 70s” weren’t doing a very good job. Like that college professor guy who insisted there was never a case of “No Irish Need Apply” and got pwned by a kid who knew how to use newspaper archives.
More likely for this case, it’s a rural myth– many people identified that “problem” with Americans. I helped source the “ancient Greek proverb” about countries growing great when old men planting trees in whose shade they would never sit, which was a reasonable paraphrasing of a solid observation.
You can find the same pattern in quotes from Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis and Fulton Sheen– they were frequently drawing from similar philosophies, inspirations, threats, and sources.
>> “You can find the same pattern in quotes from Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis and Fulton Sheen– they were frequently drawing from similar philosophies, inspirations, threats, and sources.”
[blink]
Drawing from similar THREATS? People were going around making near-identical threats to famous authors?
Man, writing’s an even tougher gig than I thought.
Drawing from similar THREATS? People were going around making near-identical threats to famous authors?
Not directly– to the civilization that they love, and the souls of those in it.
Chesterton accurately described dynamics of WWII, and he was dead before it started– reading him does help make it clear that the various totalitarian groups, even if they are only *soft* totalitarian and focused on economics, share the same toxic assumptions.
Looks like Americans not reading the manual was a complaint BY US during WWII. To the point of there being a cartoon about why you should at least know what’s in them.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/PrivateSnafu
Which means that it’s very, very likely the Germans, and then the Russians, noticed it.
*giggle* I show a Private SNAFU cartoon in class, sometimes, when we do WWII propaganda. It depends on the kids. I have to be very, very careful which cartoon, since they were not intended for a young audience.
>> “A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.”
I think the REAL American doctrine is “Do what works.” Of course, for some activities – like fighting a war – what works can be fluid from situation to situation. So there IS a guiding principle and we do follow it, it just looks like chaos from the outside.
…And from the inside too sometimes, to be fair. America: we even confuse the Hell out of ourselves, so what chance do our enemies have? 😉
Looking like chaos from the outside is High Grade What Works in warfare.
“We can plan everything out! I mean, think about how they were able to make everything work out in Dune!”
This is where I laugh in author and reader.
Dune as an example of good, well-done leadership? What drugs are you smoking?
EVERYONE in that novel fucked the pony by the numbers, and got fucked in return. Everyone. Nobody escaped. Nobody succeeded. It’s the Venture Brothers if it wasn’t being played as comedy.
The myth of the man on the white horse is one of those stories that has far too much traction in the human mind…and, it’s just too easy to use.
I’m still hopeful that we’re going to hit the point where the idiots get run out. I think just doing that alone is going to make things work a lot better. We’ve gotten good at fixing things…and we’ll fix them again.
Except the Democrats are pushing for the government to ‘fix’ everything, and the more the government ‘fixes’ things, the more broke they get.
Which they take as a need for even more government fixin’.
Again, I think we should send them to China. They’ll eat anything.
…whatever did the Chinese do to us that deserved those locusts? Even ground into a fine mush…
Their land is also over worked. Could use fertilizer.
…okay, I can see that and it makes sense. Considering what kind of crap they’ve dumped on us over the years, maybe we should return the favor.
Um. (Points at everything.)
Fair point. Though they had some aid from our domestic enemies in creating SARS-CoV-2 and making sure it did as much damage as possible to Western civilizations.
That was one of Herbert’s points: or as Liet- Kynes father put it, “The worst thing that could happen to your people is to fall into the hands of a Hero.”
Another factor, that I think Herbert was only able to talk about tangentially, was that all of these planners…were parts of another, larger plan. The biggest thing near the end that Paul realized that the Jihad was going to happen, no matter what he did. At the very most, he might be able to aim it properly, but he couldn’t stop it. And, in one of the appendix in the novel, they noted how the Bene Gesseret and later the Spacing Guild had many indications that Something Weird Was Going On, but they missed them all.
Thanks for the post as always! It was just what I needed with my anxieties about the big picture with the country flaring up. I’ve been keeping the people choosing to leave rather than obey jab mandates in mind and it’s hard not to feel good about “Let’s go Brandon” becoming a thing, too. Now if the serious craziness can just hold off long enough for me to get in a better position geographically, among other areas…
I remember reading somewhere the number of instances of “plan” vs. “prepare” in the KJV. It was instructive.
Solzhenitsyn taught me of the horrors done by a communist system of governance. However Victor Suvorov in just the first chapter of “The Liberators” taught me the idiocy and studied ignorance of the planners.
Apparently the real purpose of the FBI raid on Project Veritas was to get a hold of privileged attorney-client communications and to provide that to the HarrisBiden cronies at the NY Times so they could leak the info. It is very clear that the FBI was used as a weapon to silence Project Veritas because they expose the rampant abuse of power and criminal misconduct of the Democrats and their enablers.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/11/11/breaking-judge-orders-fbi-to-stop-search-of-project-veritas-founder-okeefes-phone-following-raid-n1532173
~I’m dreaming of a Romanian Christmas, just like the ones I used to know…
In time, plans necessarily break down due to events beyond the planning forecasting horizon.
In distance, keeping plans from breaking down due to lack of information requires work to gather information. Scope has similar issues.
Plans involving numbers of humans break down on information, communication, and control/leadership. Fooling people has limits, force has limits.
People will always do what you never expected.
As one of my characters says to a Congressional committee:
“We are smart enough to know we can’t micro-manage the lives of 325 million people. You are stupid enough to believe you can.”
“I’m dreaming… of Ceausescu Christmas,
With Commies lined up in a row….”
Happiness is a warm gun, an empty belt (or plates if using an old Hotchkiss), and commies no longer standing in a row
You just know it’s going to be a bad day when the nightmare that catapults you from bed is conducting an emergency reading of the Rituale Romanum because Hilary Clinton has manifested in your living room.
And I only remember about 10% of my dreams…..
I think the actions in that nightmare are perfectly justified – there’s no way she could get into the living room without evaporating through the locks!
(Or having someone else break the door down, in which case more mundane measures might suffice.)
Dear Lord. Light a candle and say a prayer or something. Shudder.
Em said she knew I was having a bad dream, but the CPAP smothered the details.
Just sipping my coffee this morning and reading all the comments. Needed a spit-take warning on the “I’m dreaming of a Ceausescu Christmas” though…
Cross-posted from FB:
This I believe…
The fall of western civilization began on the day Mercedes-Benz lowered the price of their cars to make them affordable to the middle class. This set off a class-wide panic among the uppers. How would they display their status and superiority to “those people” If just anyone could look superficially like them? Casting about desperately, they came on a novel idea: To espouse the most ridiculous, ludicrous ideas that anyone with half a brain would reject out of hand as the stupidest thing they had ever heard. “That’ll show those smelly Walmart shoppers!” they exclaimed, “We Sneeches now have RED stars upon thars!” And so they have.
finis
With addenda: Communism in the US gets traction because it simultaneously plays on the insecurities of the upper class, while promising them they will rule in the hell they create. (Pro tip: They won’t survive to rule anything.)
Finally: Procrustes never quite got the concept of “One size fits all…”
I don’t believe it. But it’s funny.
Well of course it’s just a supposition. I rarely miss a chance to trot out the Sneeches though. I know, I know, Geisel was a comm/symp, but it was a valid critique of how people act in groups. I’ve been plain-bellied all my life, and know how dark that outter-darkness can get.
I hope you have taken the money out of your GoFundMe account and moved into an account from which it cannot be taken back. They have screwed other people based on their political opinions and we don’t want that to happen to you.
we did. BUT the gofundme is up till the 16th because people asked. I’ll remind people over the weekend, I guess.
I just feel blessed it went double + because the house isn’t even getting SHOWINGS. Sigh.
Good, as long as you have the main portion out then we don’t have to worry about that.
Thanks!
When a Political Science (sic) professor told us how the Soviets planned their economy, it became immediately obvious to me that it was ludicrous. They had a spreadsheet (hand-written or hand-drawn of course, this was before PCs). Each cell had an industry, and each row had a “raw” material (some weren’t necessarily raw but outputs from the other industries). Each industry would get all the outputs from the raw material suppliers that they needed to produce their own outputs. Even a naive 20-year-old like me could see that a 100X100 spreadsheet with every cell dependent on each other cell could not possibly work.
Well, akshully…
A matrix is basically a system of equations.
A lot of numerical work these days involves matrices or systems of equations.
There are probably cases where a 100 by 100 doesn’t explode. When dealing with real things even.
But, there is no reason to think that the soviets knew or cared what they were doing mathematically, nor that their matrices had anything to do with reality.
C4c
It’s like 1934 in Spain when the right wing CEDA became part of the Government. The commies who had been in control decided to riot and strike and kill priests and landowners. The rebellion was put down by moderates but was the first spark in igniting the Civil War. The commies are rioting here but people are fed up. I expect to see squads of Rittenhauses the next time a city burns. Only a matter of time.
Orwell was astounded and furious that people would not admit there had a Revolution in Spain during the civil war. Apparently he didn’t notice that if there had been, the Republic had lost its claim to legitimacy because it had lost continuity.
c4c
Sarah?
Would you be open to an anthology of select blog posts of yours?
I just realized that a book …a treatise on the changing political tides in the collected posts you’ve been honing over the past few years might prove invaluable …eh …to people who haven’t been following along since the beginning.
The mere babes as it were?
Of course, after your “nay” or “yaay”, the rest would just be the usual details.
What say you?
Let us know.
…”us because I’m guessing that the idea once floated would find some other enthusiasts lol.
yes, I am, I just haven’t had the time to select/collate and edit. I have probably 3 collections and have one selected and printed to edit (remove every day notes, etc.) Called My Country ‘Tis of Thee about immigrating and acculturating, etc.
I just literally am buried in editing reverted fiction books every free moment.
Ah. Good, that. (Well, not as regards being buried in work, of course.)
It’s kind’a obvious that your time is at a premium lol.
I’ll see what I can do and run it by you when I have something concrete?
No harm, no foul. Labor of love and all that.