In Their Time

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It is important to judge people and events in their own time. First, because that’s the only way we really can judge them.

You can’t judge people on actions they didn’t know were wrong, or on things that were hidden from them, which only time has revealed. Or rather, you can, but it’s deranged. What you are holding people guilty of is not being psychic. Not being able to foretell the future. Well, none of us can. Not with any accuracy, and never about things we want to. (Yeah, sometimes I get something like glimpses, but seriously? Do you see me among the lottery winners? No? That’s because I can’t see the future in a significant way.) Go ahead and despise people for that failing, but be aware you’re being deranged.

Also, unlike the people on the left, most of us are aware we, ourselves, are not infallible, and our time is not the pinnacle of knowledge and morality. Things that seem right to us now — or at least not markedly wrong — can and will be reviled by future lovers of liberty.

Already, in my time, I have taken positions and done things that I’m sorry for. I mean, voting for McCain was — maybe — the least of the bad choices. Maybe. Do we know what he might have done in the presidency? We do know he wasn’t a good man. And would either he or Palin been able to withstand the treatment that Trump endured and endures? Because it would have been visited upon them. And I have my doubts. As for Romney… well, I thought he was the least evil choice. As things turned out, G-d might have been looking out for the United States of America when it let the Light Bringer (oh, Lucifer, son of the morning…. What? Tell me you didn’t think of that! Okay, maybe not. Not everyone thinks in allusions and poetry.) cheat his way into a second term.

George W. Bush? I am divided. I mean, coming out of the presidency and announcing he is practically Clinton’s brother clarified much. But then again, the alternative was Al Gore. Or, heaven forfend, Jean le Kerry. Shrug. There might have been no good choice there. But the truth is I didn’t vote for what I thought I was voting. Not even the second time. And the results of his subtle actions have us more in the thrall of the left than we’d otherwise have been.

I have to judge in that time.

Why this? I’ve come to doubt the Cold War was needed. I’ve come to doubt the Soviet Union was ever the threat we believed. It’s almost sure it would have been unable to retaliate, had it come to nukes. It’s almost sure it would have been destroyed and not able to fire back.

Which makes the entire corrupt business of letting the Soviet Union swallow more than half the world and infiltrate the rest to avoid a nuclear exchange even more corrupt and criminal than it sounds. Sure, I’m speaking very glibly of maybe nuking to dust all of the Soviet Union’s major cities — 3? — which would mean the death of a couple three million people or so.

On the other hand, think of the misery around the globe. South America and Africa alone bled people and wealth thanks to the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union corrupted China, whose death count was much higher than…. well, anyone. And think of the horrors endured by Cuba and North Korea to this day. Think of what is happening in Venezuela. Think of the corruption and destruction caused by international Communism.

On the other hand–

The Soviet Union was good at one thing, and that was deception and lying. And whether driving long tubes around the country in trucks, or making up wholly fabricated numbers, it gave the impression to our, perhaps overly gullible, establishment that there was a credible threat of mutual annihilation.

This in turn means we let the Soviet Union get away with — literal — mass murder, destruction of wealth, imperialism, because we were convinced — partly because of Soviet propaganda and our corrupt science establishment — that any exchange would not only kill its targets, but cause nuclear winter and destroy the planet. (No, there is no reason to believe this. Seems to be another fable, of the kind Paul Ehrlich loves.)

Did anyone know? I’m sure there might have been a few people who knew. Probably a very few. And even they might not have been aware of the full scale of deception, of how much we were cowing to a non-existent threat.

Most people though, even when corrupt, even when lying about something, were corrupt in something minor that they thought insignificant, or even a white lie for good. Say, exaggerating the bad effects of a nuclear exchange. Some scientists might have known it was bullshit, but hey they were prevent bombs from flying and killing innocents. That’s to the good, right? I mean, can you blame them? (Yes, yes, I can. there is a reason Jordan Peterson says “Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.” Your piece of the lie might seem inconsequential, but added to other lies, it could destroy the world.)

Good people; people with a decent brain, and unconventional thinkers at that, like Robert A. Heinlein, did not see the Soviet lies. (Not even when he realized how much smaller Soviet population was. Even holding our spycraft in utter contempt, as he did.) That means a large number of people earnestly believed the lies. And given the lies, they were acting in the most ethical manner possible.

In fact, given the effect of the lies in the world, onto our day, most people believed the lies and were, at least to an extent, justified in believing the lies. The “War on Terror” and “Winning Hearts And Minds” or as it’s known in the real world, fighting with both feet tied together and your right hand strapped behind your back might have been stupid — was stupid — and carried on in a way that mostly enriched the various special interests that feed off big government.

On the other hand, it was the result of “lessons learned” and never questioned from the Cold War. That those lessons were wrong, and the threat largely one we enabled wasn’t obvious TO ME — and I’m, as you know, a very unconventional thinker — until I saw Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and started having reason to doubt they have any of their nuclear arsenal ready to fly. Most people here and elsewhere still view them as a credible nuclear threat (Pfui, I say onto you. Putin would have used a nuke by now, if he could. To stop dissent at home if nothing else.)

So, can you hold people during the Cold War responsible for not knowing? No.

You — to quote Mark Alger — go to war with the underwear you got on. Or if you prefer, you do what you can based on what you know then.

However, when that knowledge changes, when a complete outsider by accident and sideways becomes president and reveals that things like “War in the Middle East” are not inevitable, if we just don’t act according to things we now know are erroneous. If we act like everything we know is wrong (more or less) and consider it anew, it behooves us not to assume he’s crazy. It behooves us to consider the situation and change what we think. Because having been lied to is not a pact to continue acting like complete idiots forever.

In the same way, take the Covidiocy. No amnesty! Why no amnesty? Well, because with a very few exceptions, most of the people — particularly the doctors at the top — leading the charge to destroy your liberties knew very well what they were doing, and how exaggerated the threat was.

In fact, many of them, and politicians in the pay of China, might have been aware the “videos” leaking from China were fiction to rival anything that Pallywood dishes out.

But even assuming none of that was true, any of them — any of them at any time — could have looked at the Diamond Princess numbers and seen how the threat was not that big. Bad flu numbers, at most. Does this indict Donald Trump? I don’t know. As you guys know, I’ve been very angry at him since the two week lockdown. Should he have looked at the numbers? Sure. On the other hand, as a business man, he’s used to trusting engineers and other experts. I don’t think it occurred to him someone would perpetrate a lie of that magnitude. Time and again he showed that his big blind spot was his actual love of nation, and his inability to realize how many people are willing to sell this country out with nary a thought. In other words, it’s his Paladin qualities that betrayed him, not something I expected.

Should he still have checked? Aye. But note he’s not the one who locked you down indefinitely, and made you wear masks, and closed your churches. Hold the two weeks against him as much as you want to, but after that? Oh, hell no.

That was his refusal to trample regional rights. So, again, his Paladin qualities, curse them.

Note, still not happy with him, but he might have been the best we could get. He might still be, at that. I’ll hang loose and act as possible.

Now is it possible that some of the things we think we know now are wrong? Absolutely. In fact, I’d guarantee it.

Forgive yourself too, looking back. All you can do is all you can do. All you can know is all you can know.

Do your best with what you know at the time.

We are told that in the end of time, the truth of every heart will be laid bare. I’m not going to lie and say I’m looking forward to mine being laid bare. I know all of us have things we’d rather not admit. But– But at the same time, perhaps it needs to happen to set reality aright. And don’t we all wish we could know.

But the end of time is a long way off, or perhaps metaphorical. Until then, each of us knows what each of us knows. And we can’t be responsible for knowing more than we can find out.

Nor can we hold people who believed the lies of their times responsible for not being future-seers.

Most of the liars and the duped of the 20th century are dead.

What we can do is face what the lies were, and not compound them.

136 thoughts on “In Their Time”

  1. Only God knows counterfactuals. In the meantime, I carry this quote from Tolkien around with me:
    “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
    “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

    Liked by 3 people

  3. I’m often told “well, they didn’t know how bad COVID would be”

    My response? “Ok, but what was their excuse after June 2019?”

    Liked by 2 people

    1. 2020, not 2019.

      I often catch myself making the same mistake. It’s sometimes hard for me to remember that stupid mess was going on at the same time as the election campaigns.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. It was also a plundering scheme. Look at everything hedge funds bought cheap when people had to sell due to no income and that they financed at near zero rates.

          Now look at what they’re changing to sell it back.

          COVID was a soup to nuts plundering.

          Liked by 1 person

    2. This, to a degree.

      The issue is if what they claimed they feared was what they really feared, air travel would have been shutdown, not the ultimate face diaper parade (flying with those things was hell…did it once after the heart surgery).

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Yeah. We, right here, were talking about how China was underplaying the numbers according to the number of canceled cell phones.

      But once it was in the world, there was no escaping the knowledge.

      Liked by 1 person

  5. Did anyone know? I’m sure there might have been a few people who knew. Probably a very few. And even they might not have been aware of the full scale of deception, of how much we were cowing to a non-existent threat.

    Considering people… I bet folks had doubts.

    But they were scared, and they didn’t want to risk it, so they just… modified their reports a bit.
    To give a nudge.

    Just in case whoever was reading it wasn’t sensible enough to draw the same conclusion, and instead drew one they were scared of.

    ….

    Now pile that a few decades deep.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. This is where you’re more trusting than me.

      I doubt fear played a smaller role than knowing they’d get paid for the “right” statement, not the truthful one.

      And there were people by the early 80s at least pointing out the Soviets were a straw giant. I remember them being pilloried as “useful idiots” at best and “knowing Soviet tools” at worst.

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  6. They lie, because the press doesn’t do its job of exposing the lies. That’s right, none of this was/is possible without a SLAVISH and COWARDLY Press. May God Serve Upon Them the Punishment they so richly deserve. Burning in hell for all eternity is too good for them. They should all be made Hamyass’s Bitches for the rest of their lives replacing all the Goats.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. “And think of the horrors endured by Cuba and North Korea to this day. ”

    And perhaps most importantly, with no USSR, Vietnam’s bid for independence plays out very differently.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. To expand out on this –

      No Communist USSR probably means that Nationalist China survives. And that’s something that I’ve mulled over a bit in my head. But only a bit.

      In a “no Soviets” post-World War 2 order, the Vietnam stuff is still probably going to start out the same way that it did originally. France is going to want to reassert itself over its Indochina holdings, and Churchill is going to back him up. Uncle Ho and his associates are still going to want independence, but they don’t have the USSR to turn to for supplies and equipment.

      However, Chiang Kai-Shek fancied himself an anti-colonialist. With the national emergency posed by the IJA over, Chiang likely decides to act as benefactor for the anti-colonialist rebels across the border from him. Uncle Ho and his troops are supplied with surplus Nationalist arms. Truman would probably go along with Churchill’s view on who should be running Indochina (iirc, historically he didn’t really care either way, and so went along with Churchill’s wishes on the matter) in opposition to Chiang. But since that’s what happened historically, events would likely play out in a similar fashion. And so long as Truman doesn’t do more than he did historically, it’s probably not going to create a breach between the US and China.

      However, since the pro-independence army in Vietnam is backed by Nationalist China instead of the Communist USSR, it likely doesn’t remain communist as it did historically (Chiang Kai-Shek hated communists even before WW2; he was sometimes forced to rely on them due to his precarious situation, but then would turn on them the instant he felt he no longer needed the USSR’s support). As a result, the domino theory has nothing to do with Vietnam, and the US doesn’t start intervening in the country’s internal politics. Without a superpower proxy war providing support to both sides, Diem is compelled to cooperate with the national election, and the country reunites without (much) bloodshed.

      Well, depending on how things go with the minority groups in the South.

      No infiltration of the South means no Ho Chi Minh Trail that violates the sovereignty of Laos and Cambodia, which means that those countries don’t get destabilized due to the fighting as the US attempts to interdict the trail. And that means probably no Khmer Rouge.

      In the US, the Civil Rights movement still happens, but there’s no Peace Movement as there’s no war in Vietnam.

      Yes, there are probably holes in there wide enough to drive a truck through.

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      1. There might have been more action in South America or in Africa, without Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia to worry about. Either other Communists, or other political radicals.

        Maybe more ethnic or religious stuff, too, but they would have to pay more of their own bills.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. And all of that sounds like a good start on an alternate history series.

          Hell, it’s been done about every other recent war; Vietnam shouldn’t be an orphan… :-)

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  8. You make out a case about the Cold War, I’ll say that much. In addition to everything you noted, it made a lot of the Best People very wealthy and contributed mightily to the health of the State.

    Your description made me think about Charles Stross’s chilling and entertaining novelette A Colder War. While I enjoy his writing, I note that in A Colder War even though the Soviet Union was the one deploying shoggoths in Afghanistan and finally unleashing Project Koschei in lieu of Cobalt-Thorium G, Stross managed to villainize…Ronald Reagan, Col. North, and the United States in general. Stross seems to have it in for America and Americans.

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      1. I’ve enjoyed some of Stross’s fiction. I even used to enjoy his blog; I remember his lucid discussion of the Beige Dictatorship of people in all parties who went to the Right Schools and got on the political career track, and didn’t realize how much the general public despised them. And then he went into shock over Brexit and Trump and seemingly forgot his own diagnosis, defending the very oligarchy he had once condemned.
        I have to say, though, that in the Laundry novels that take place in the United States, or that even have American characters on stage, his vision of America never seems remotely credible to me. It’s as much cardboard villainy as Ursula Le Guin’s portrayal of A-Io in The Dispossessed, which is a major flaw in a novel whose other parts I still cherish (not least for their diagnosis of the natural failure modes of communist societies, even when they aren’t created by monsters like Lenin and Mao).

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      2. Stross, up until about Trump’s election, was pretty much your standard British/Scottish liberal. Not exactly liking America, but not too angry about it, either.
        Like far too many liberals, Trump’s victory over Hillary! definitely blew a few of his fuses, and they’d never been replaced. Combined that with BREXIT (I think I got banned on his blog because I pointed out “when you have that many people angry with you about something, maybe you should be checking your assumptions to see if you’re making a mistake”) and his parents dying in a tight and painful sequence…I can see him looking for someone to be angry with and about, and the Americans who denied the glory of the Lightbringer and failed to elect Hillary! became his new enemy.
        It didn’t help that a lot of his writing just fell off a cliff.
        His Laundry novels, post Rhesus Chart, are terribly written. It doesn’t help that he thinks that the main protagonist (Bob) is now just Yet Another White Male Power Fantasy character. Or that he thinks that the best way to survive the coming of the Old Ones is to choose which rapist attacks us. Or that when he has a female protagonist, she’s either a whiny shrew (Mo, which really pissed me off) or massively self-justifying (Mhari) in bad ways.
        …and I’ve had a few friends that met him in person and he’s not exactly high on the list of warm-and-fuzzy people.
        This frustrates me because I want to buy more books, and if the writers I like won’t write things that I want to read…

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    2. Stross really doesn’t like the US. In his Laundry novels, the British government is more or less the same as in real life. But the US is secretly run by a shadowy group nicknamed the “Nazgul”, and they’re suggested to be as evil as the originals of that name.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. I’ve met the man (worldcon 2007). He really, really does. He is also more than a bit of a jerk, which is why despite liking some of his stuff, I refuse to give him my money.

      Liked by 2 people

  9. Also, unlike the people on the left, most of us are aware we, ourselves, are not infallible, and our time is not the pinnacle of knowledge and morality. 

    I think it is less the Left thinks their infallible and more they know the dead cannot answer their slander. If there is one defining characteristic of the modern Left, after it’s inability to build things, it is cowardice. In fact, their cowardice is why they can’t build and why history will forget them.

    As for lying for a good cause, I’ll let this analysis of that great opponent of lying, Sam Harris, and what he is saying about Christianity with his actions and his Trump admission, say everything:

    Most of the liars and the duped of the 20th century are dead.

    Liars, yes. Duped? No. We still have the majority of a generation who were born under the Cold War and are only now coming to leadership positions (and late historically because the Baby Boom was so damned big).

    Even some Millenials, especially ones who went in debt for college, were actively deceived in the late 20th century. As are the, mostly GenX, people who are tired of being chumps and will stop any debt forgiveness (my fig leaf to idea them: zero out the interest but the principle is due with payment equal to 1% of the median income per year, adjusted annually, with the balance laid half to the estate and half to the schools they attended).

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  10. Less seriously, how many of us have read non-science fiction stories/books written 40-50 years ago and thought “why didn’t the characters use something that hadn’t been invented yet”?

    There was one Gothic Romance where the female character wondered why she hadn’t been met by her friend and I actually thought “why didn’t the character call her friend using her cell-phone”.

    Of course, this was a story written in the 1970s and cell-phones weren’t around. :grin:

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I find that less than screaming “that wasn’t invented yet”, mostly about modern, very modern, social attitudes.

      Tanya Huff, in the introduction to the omnibus reprinting of her first Vicki Nelson and Henry Fitzroy novels how many were dated less than 20 years later because the plots would unravel if the characters had cell phones.

      She also noted se got the contracts for those and the Quarters series at the same time and wrote the Nelson/Fitzroy novels first because one of the characters was a vampire. Vampire fans, she said, were loyal and she had a mortgage to pay. Fantasy fans, she said, were more fickle.

      I think of that now and the fantasy fans who “refuse to start a series until it is done” and contrast them to the founder of 20 books to $50k and his success with vampires in space novels. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. But note that in Heinlein’s Space Cadet, written in the 1940s, his characters not only HAVE cell phones but come up with ways of avoiding being called on them.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. Nod, but that’s why I said “non science fiction”.

        But talking about Science Fiction, there was H. Beam Piper’s Cosmic Computer where it took hours to translate a question into machine-language so that the Super-Computer Merlin could understand the question and hours to translate Merlin’s answer (answered in seconds) into something humans could understand.

        Mind you, even when Piper wrote that book, computers could produce human-readable results. :wink:

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        1. Yeah, Heinlein had that problem with the computers in Starman Jones.
          Heinlein’s predictions illustrate two different errors in extrapolation: when you’re on the relatively flat part of a logistic S curve, it’s easy to assume that progress will remain linear; when you’re on the steep part, it’s easy to assume that exponential growth will go on, rather than your running into an upper limit where the S curve flattens off again.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I still defend a lot of 50s starship computers.

            We use 20,000+ cores to run about 1400 interest rate scenarios based on a forward interest rate curve and volatility surface then prices several thousand products on them.

            End to end the process is about 14 hours.

            That’s multiple racks of storage, processes, and wiring to do a relatively straight forward calculation in 14 hours.

            How many orders of magnitude larger will faster than light travel calculations take and how much closer to real time will they need to be?

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    3. I recall reading one story, at least twice, that involved a huge cathode ray tube. The first I read it, CRT’s were still common and other sort of display rare for any significant resolution. Thus it made perfect sense. The second time, a decade or three later, CRT’s were things I had to explain to some if I mentioned them and I tripped over that bit in the story myself. And then realized, “Oh yeah, that WAS the futuristic technology when the story was written.”

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      1. Was it by A. E. Van Vogt? I remember some of his stories featured hundred-foot-long slide rules, or vacuum tubes the size of zeppelins. How could he have known that future technology would get smaller, instead of bigger, before William Shockley invented the transistor?

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        1. No idea. The theme was about a society becoming more decadent and less resilient… and then being invaded by those able to. The huge CRT was a radar display (on the moon?) showing an invasion force approaching Earth.

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  11. One thing I discovered was just how terrified many people are to die. It was weird the numbers of formerly same individuals who went off the deep end.

    Grandma insisting that grandkids get shots of unproven efficacy, people losing their minds with fear and refusing to go out in public, others demanding students get shots or stay home, making infants wear masks, etc.

    I can’t imagine telling a grandchild that my elderly life is more important than their health or fertility.

    I was shocked, shocked at how very selfish the old people got.

    And the media did it’s worst to shove society off this cliff.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. It’s a product of an age with neither religion or explicit philosophy compounded by the destruction of rituals. You wind up with a population who can’t live outside the present in the pleasures or fears and unable to deal with transitions in life.

      I didn’t realize how common that was in Boomers and GenX, but if we were revealed as damaged by that during COVID thing of the kids behind us with two generations of lazy nihilism as their cultural foundation (yes, strong or active nihilism can work, but only the exceptional do it…most nihilist are like most humans: fundamentally lazy).

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I’ve speculated in the past that the fixation by so many politician-Boomers with “my legacy!!!” is that they have no children and don’t believe in an afterlife, so their “legacy” is the only thing that will survive them. Thus the screaming when Pres. Trump “erased Obama’s legacy!!!!!!”

        I find it very sad, as well as dangerous.

        Liked by 1 person

  12. One of the lessons I learned, partly from science fiction but partly from reading history, is that people fifty years in our future, or a hundred, or five hundred, will look back at our time and ask, “How could they have done that?” And not just at things people in our time are already a little uncomfortable with and ashamed of, but at things our time is proud of and thinks shows our superior knowledge or morality. It will be like the way our time looks back at the eugenics movement (and forgets that it was supported by leading scientific minds—helped by the scientific journals that long since changed their titles to something less embarrassing).
    I think I may have been helped in grasping this by Kipling’s “As Easy as A.B.C.,” written at a time when the idea of democracy as uniquely wonderful and the wave of the future was gaining traction—but envisioning a time when democracy is viewed with moral horror (its symbol is a statue of a black man being burned alive, inscribed “To the eternal memory of the justice of the people”), and its practice is all but forgotten, to the point where, when a man of the time hears about it from his era’s Lost Cause advocates, he can only say that they spoke “with the awful lucidity of the insane.”

    Liked by 1 person

    1. My illustration of that principle is by theorizing that people in the future are horrified that we eat chocolate. And enjoy it, without thinking it transgressive.

      The idea is we don’t know what’s going to seem horrifying to people in the future, so let’s pick something most people are utterly fine with. And once you get over your shock, think about how people “back then” would react to your disgust and horror.

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  13. Regarding President Trump. Not only was his Paladin qualities showing, but his own germ-phobia played a huge part.

    Regarding Soviet Union and nuclear arsenal availability, and reliability. If the soviet leaders believed the lies they were being told, who were the spies and other sources to believe? Not like they could check for themselves. We saw this play out in Iraq. Had Iraq had WMD (chemicals), yes, this was fact. Did Iraq PTB believe they still had WMD at their disposal based on the trickle up lies? 100% Why wouldn’t our spies and intelligence analysts believe otherwise? Did the troops find evidence of WMD, even if not reported to the public? Yes. Were the WMD’s at a level that they were suppose to be? Doubt it. 20/20 hindsight on what was found says that (although a little or a lot, whats the difference?)

    What I find incredible now are the non-Arab/Palestinian protestors terrorists taking the route of the Nazis 90 years ago now. What happened in 1930s – 1940s is living history. There are facts. There is in person written history. There are facts now. They are willingly treading a path to hell.

    I agree with one thing. Occupation of Gaza needs to end. It is part of Israel. If inhabitants do want to be part of Israel, they need to get out. Hamas, not all the inhabitants are Hamas, needs to be destroyed/alienated. Israel needs to level the ground, no buildings, no tunnels, no infrastructure, except fresh water to water the trees that should be planted.

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    1. “What I find incredible now are the non-Arab/Palestinian protestors terrorists taking the route of the Nazis 90 years ago now. What happened in 1930s – 1940s is living history. There are facts. There is in person written history. There are facts now. They are willingly treading a path to hell…”

      Agreed – I am boggled at how willfully Americans and Europeans are going all out in shouting “Juden Raus!” It’s as if they never cracked a history book, or a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or any account of the Nuremburg trials.

      And also agree – “Hamas, not all the inhabitants are Hamas, needs to be destroyed/alienated. Israel needs to level the ground, no buildings, no tunnels, no infrastructure, except fresh water to water the trees that should be planted.”

      Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Gaza strip could have been a Mediterranean Singapore, a beach resort and economic tiger. But instead of counting their blessings and making the most of it, they frittered away everything, in rage and resentment.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. It’s as if they never cracked a history book, or a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or any account of the Nuremburg trials.
        ………………………..

        Um … Given their apparent ages? Including the squad. Probably haven’t. The others, you know the alien snake lizards in human skin, they are in it for whatever keeps them in power. They know. They are part of the “living history”. OTOH would not surprise me in the least if they are Holocaust deniers.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Oh, I think some of them know about Hitler and the Holocaust, but really think that Hitler didn’t kill enough Jews.

          They just don’t think “what happened to Hitler” will happen to them. :sad:

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            2. Or all a lot of younger folks know is that the Nazis were “right wing,” so they were bad by definition.
              Yes, we know they weren’t “right wing,” but how many others do?

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Quite the opposite. Nazis were evil, therefore they must have been ‘right wing’ because everybody ‘knows’ The Left Is Good and The Right Iz Eeevul.

                That’s what passes for logic with Leftroids, even as they run the entire Nazi playbook page for page. Although, even the Nazis never taught weird sex fetishes to first-graders.

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      2. One reason we homeschooled my daughter through high school was that the one and only thing she was taught about WW2 in middle school was the internment of Japanese Americans. This was over 15 years ago and in the South. I hate to imagine what goes on today.

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        1. While I agree that it’s sad if that really was the only thing taught about WW2 (internment), as the grandson of an attorney who tried to support and protect the interreds’ interests and was cancelled, defamed and financially destroyed, and I who also was NOT taught about this Federal abuse in school, it is an important subject lesson to learn from.

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          1. You seem to express doubt that my story is true (“if that really was…”) which is offensive. I will point out that I did not say anything to suggest that it was wrong that my daughter was taught about the internment. What I objected to was a disproportionate emphasis on that event in teaching about a war in which over 140,000 Americans died in Europe fighting Nazi Germany. That is also an important lesson to learn from. The school focused on presenting the US as a Bad Racist Nation and left the issues of the war obscure.

            In any event, the internment was not presented as a case of state overreach. It fit seamlessly into the overall message that the US is Bad because white people are Bad.

            In the context of recent events and the discussion in this thread about forgetting history, it seemed worth mentioning if not terribly important in itself.

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            1. If you are offended that someone was not willing to take a stranger’s (you, specifically) word for something on the Internet, I can only assume you haven’t spent much time in the comments section over at Instapundit. There are many good commenters there, which almost makes it worth going over there. But there are some whose word should never be taken for anything, because they will lie or shade the truth at the drop of a hat.

              In other words, don’t take it too personally when someone doubts you, at least when they don’t know you yet.

              As for the WW2 internment, I don’t blame America for that, I blame FDR. Personally.

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                1. Oh sure, he couldn’t have done it without collaborators. But I don’t blame China for being ruled by evil people, I blame the Chinese Communist Party. And I don’t blame America for FDR’s actions, I blame FDR and those who willingly went along with him.

                  Liked by 1 person

              2. I still see some of the after effects of the WW2 internment. Cities and towns within almost a hundred mile radius of the Tulelake, CA internment camp site seem to have few to no Japanese-ancestry residents. I think Medford has a (smallish) Japan town, but barring a Japan-American fusion place in downtown Flyover Falls (don’t know if it’s still around) and a short-lived traditional sushi place that was too expensive for the area, no evidence of Japanese influence.

                (F-Falls is a diner town; doesn’t have to be gourmet, just decent food and affordable to succeed under normal circumstances. I’ll skip the rant on Despicable Kate Brown’s restaurant shutdowns…)

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                1. They weren’t local in the first place; no matter how nice the locals were, why would someone hang around after release?

                  (My dad’s family is in the area, grandmother’s family was very big in the area; they organized going in and fixing up the nonsense setup folks who had no idea what local winters were like put together for the internment camp. I know there was letter writing that went on, but you are correct I don’t remember anybody settling in the area.)

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                2. Oh, and if folks are curious, there are several Japanese folks who married into the local area– just they got married to service members in Japan, and came home with him, not the family settled in. Their grandkids were too old for me to be in school with them, and with Italians and Basque and old-Spain folks all over, by that point they blend in anyways and I only remember because of some pretty stuff on their kids’ walls.

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            2. Sorry I triggered you. I’ve been overloaded with expansive misrepresentations and devious disinformation today. So was indeed rude to question your very clear statement. Sadly the South of old has been overrun with evil people and thought as well as social processes that make your story all too common. Given my Grandfather ended his life in despair I’m sorta sensitive on that particular subject. Please accept my apology, hell it’s even congruent with Sarah’s post.

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              1. Apology gladly accepted. I know that my nerves are raw these days so overreaction on my part is quite possible.

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    2. So, was reading the “A Spy’s Guide” books and one of the interesting things he mentioned was Saddam had a fake wmd program. Apparently he was playing a boss game with his local people and a zero sum game with Iran, and considered the US a distant threat. So he needed a WMD deterrent to keep Iran at bay, but didn’t want his local opponents to have them, so he had a program that didn’t have any.

      He was using it as an example of how you need to know which game and what end game the other players are playing for.

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        1. And he was shooting at us at the time, and actively blocking inspections of his projects at a time when we had someone running around who really wanted to pop a nuke off in one of our cities.

          And this isn’t the first time I’ve heard he had a mostly fake nuclear weapons program; this was just the first real explanation of why.

          And our left wing was more concerned with winning their boss game than they were that someone might actually try to turn one of their cities into confetti to gain position in one of their own boss games.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. And yet I recall the story that one part of nuclear program was recognized because someone was a bit of a historian and, “Wait, is that a calutron?!” or something on that order. Abandoned as there are more efficient enrichment methods… but “second best also goes boom” and they were proven.

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        2. This. People tend to think “WMD=Nukes”. Which is NOT true. Saddam Hussein had plenty of unfilled gas shells and bombs, a reasonably modern chemical industry with which to fill them, and no qualms about using chemical weapons.

          And there was a fear of him gifting Al Quaeda with a few 55-gallon barrels of VX or Sarin…with instructions to deliver to the USA with his compliments.

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  14. The Cold War was going before Stalin got his bomb. The initial threat was the largely un-demobilized Red Army facing the western armies streaming home after the war. Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech was given in March 1946. The calculus by the Truman administration was the containment policy, first publicly laid out in 1947, could stop communist expansion backed by U.S. atomic weapons to balance the Red Army tanks in that face off.

    After Stalin tested his bomb in 1949 and the news got out, the face off became nukes on both sides. From that point through about the “missile gap” fiction pushed by JFK in the 1960 campaign the nuclear delivery systems were basically bombers, and theirs and ours were roughly comparable, and really not very high tech, so both sides weapons would pretty much work if they got through.

    The transition to missiles, especially silo-based systems that basically sit there for years, the switch to fusion weapons which are more complex and have more ways to not work, and the gradual if actively hidden falling apart of the Soviet system from the inside out, together probably created that dividing line, but there were so many years of facing off and assumed functional parity at that point that anyone pointing out how complex weapons systems aging in silos and only receiving tractor-level maintenance would potentially not work just weren’t given any credence.

    Certainly by the time Reagan was challenging the “detent forever / lose slowly gracefully” religion within Foggy Bottom with the sacrilegious “we win, they lose” strategic goal, the threat was very likely getting pretty hollow. And absolutely certainly the widespread deference granted to Russia as a “strategic nuclear power” by the time GWB was elected, after ten years of looting by KGB-turned-organized-crime, was unearned, but there were still careers at stake continuing processes like strategic arms reduction treaty negotiations.

    But identifying when that bright line between “their stuff likely will work well enough” and “their stuff will likely not even make it out of the silo”, especially before there was any ABM defense at all in the U.S., would have been a pretty risky assessment.

    And don’t disregard China’s nuclear and ICBM buildup, which basically is all using stolen plans from someone, as those will still have that “new nuclear weapon smell” and thus the probability of their working would still be pretty high, and Chinese technical maintenance just in general is orders of magnitude better than Russia’s.

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      1. The Chinese have a hard time with really modern stuff, and struggle a bit copying 1990s tech Soviet jet engine designs to get long term reliability. But solid fuel missiles and basic fusion weapons are at most 1960s tech, and China can do 1960s tech, especially when they steal all the technical plans and details so they don’t have to innovate at all, just fine.

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        1. And don’t disregard the help the U.S. aerospace industry giants gave China, essentially fixing their launch reliability problems for them.

          And the tech transfers of all the hypersonic research that the U.S. stopped researching because of the end of history, that are behind all the new Chinese hypersonic vehicle tests recently.

          As usual the commies are parasitic on the clueless capitalists.

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          1. Look, research transfer or not, it’s going to a society where “science” is still largely Confucianism with a thin veneer.
            You’re making the mistake people made on the USSR during the Cold War. Precisely.

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            1. I could be. I’m wrong a lot.

              But I know a lot of Chinese engineers who are completely adept at engineering, and they tell me US-educated friends of theirs get jobs back in China with no problems if they want to move back, and sometimes if they don’t want to they have to go back for “family issues” and they magically get a job.

              The only Russian “engineers” I’ve met were, well, let’s term it as “highly theoretical” and found it difficult to produce anything of actual current usefulness. Kind of like US PhDs. Very smart, but also very averse to practical value, as theoretical stuff put them higher on the totem pole back in Russia, both academia and “industry”.

              No doubt China has a major R&D problem. That’s why Chinese State Security has an entire massive division tasked with stealing foreign technology – spending money on that pays off better than opening another twelve universities. ANd that’s why when there’s a data breach at a US defense contractor it’s always China.

              And they lie, so there’s that – I doubt their carrier-killer magic missiles will work worth a darn, and the hypersonic stuff is a classic science project instead of a practical weapons project.

              But their jets fly, and the jet engines work for a while, and the radars are good enough to let them f around with US P-8s in international airspace, and to get spicey with the Japanese fighters out over the deep blue.

              And ICBMs accurate enough to hit a city, with all the guidance problems helpfully solved for them, thanks RayLockBoe, and plain old fusion nukes, while not trivial, are also old enough tech that they were able to just throw engineers at the stolen plans for a couple decades.

              One proper response is to get rid of the political constraints on US ABM system capability – no more “Only enough interceptors to stop Lil’ Kim’s or the Ayatollah’s rockets – don’t worry, we’re still open-kimono to a major strike, because being safer would be destabilizing.”

              Build the system out with enough capability to deal with anyone lobbing anything at the US, or at our allies, with enough reloads to deal with second-strike stuff. Safer is better, no mater what the “arms control ‘experts’” from Foggy Bottom say.

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          1. Yep.

            Note that China has a vested interest in not giving lil’Kim too many toys. After all, Beijing is a lot closer to the Norks launch sites than any US target, and China’s has thousands of years of experience being an empire, so it knows all about how vassals can suddenly change their allegiance.

            A loyal vassal state, strong enough to scare the neighbors but not strong enough to get uppity, is what they want.

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      2. Just last night, I saw some really freaky (for the Chinese) stuff about the home-built engines on the PLAAF’s new J-20 fighters (claimed to be counters to the F-35 and F-22). Unfortunately, the source didn’t provide any info about its source, so…

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      3. China can put things into orbit.

        That is sufficient for city busting nukes to be delivered by missile. High accuracy destruction of hardened target, not so much…more to do there, but launching and recovering a crew capsule, which they have done, are enough to nuke New York.

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              1. Nah, there’s plenty of people in the Marvel world (comics or movies) who could do that to Loki besides Hulk :wink:

                Mind you, I think comic book Loki would have been smart enough to keep out of Hulk’s reach. He’s arrogant but smart enough to keep out of reach of somebody who could give Thor a good fight. :grin:

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    2. RE: China –

      When the PRC developed it’s first missile that could carry a nuclear warhead, apparently Mao got it into his head to conduct a test launch… with a live nuclear warhead. Everyone involved with the test assumed that they were going to die, from the general charged with watching the target site, to the guys at the launch location. They all believed that the missile was going to fail spectacularly at their respective locations, and they would die in a nuclear fireball.

      As it turns out, that test went off without a hitch. The missile launched, flew to the target location, and detonated it’s warhead at the designated location. But that turned out to be the only time a test flight of that missile worked as expected.

      I wouldn’t trust China’s military equipment to work as advertised.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. I don’t know how many they’d launch, but Long March 5 is human rayed and used. I would assume they have half dozen or so aimed at US major cities.

        Then again, knowing what I know of US “testing” to prove a missile “straight from the silo” will fire and recent USN maintenance issues, I doubt we’d have more than 50% launch success.

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        1. The most important question on the Chinese missiles is probably whether the warhead would work. In theory, yeah, I agree it should. In practice, well…

          Liked by 1 person

    3. The Soviets had faked their 1950s bomber force – but we didn’t know how much of an edge we had until the U-2 overflights.

      And we had problems of our own. The much-vaunted Polaris A1 missile had a W47 warhead…which would almost certainly have not produced a thermonuclear yield. I recollect Dr. Pournelle mentioning on his blog that they anticipated a 50% dud rate for Soviet weapons in the mid-60s…and I suspect this implies about a 30% overall dud rate for American arms. I’m convinced that the only thing really keeping the peace in the 1970s was the uncertainty about failure rates.

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        1. No, it’s just comparative: The ex-Soviet stuff is really old, which means it needs a lot more high quality maintenance to not fizzle, or even to not get spicy on the ground. The Chinese stuff is a lot newer, so a larger fraction will still work as well as when new even given I-can-get-paid-anyway not-maintenance.

          Our own nukes are needing more and more maintenance, enough that the cheaper path for a lot of them is to take them apart and use the materials to remanufacture them from scratch. And even then some fraction of ours would not go boom, at least at full expected yield.
          My concern is just there are so many – for a long time the CCP keeps a very small arsenal of launchers and warheads, but in the past 15 years they really added to that pile. A fraction of a lot is a concern to me, enough that I think the U.S. ABM system should be upgraded to cope.

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  15. “You — to quote Mark Alger — go to war with the underwear you got on. Or if you prefer, you do what you can based on what you know then.”

    There’s a scene in Jim Butcher’s The Aeronaut’s Windlass where this is discussed. A female character, a newly minted guard, talks to a more experienced male captain about a man she shot and killed under the impression she had no choice, since she didn’t know rescue was on its way. She starts down the track of blaming herself but the captain stops her with the pointed question: “Did you know that at the time you pulled the trigger?”

    “No, of course not,” she replies. “But -”

    “No. No buts,” he tells her plainly. “You did the best you knew at the time. Going back and fussing about what you should have done now, when you know the larger situation, is just going to drive you crazy.” (And, by implication, depressive or suicidal.) “You made the best decision you could at the time with the information you had. Leave it at that. That’s all ANY of us can do.”

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  16. Looks at book on stack Do NOT get me started on historians who belabor people from the 1800s and earlier about “they should have felt guilty/they should have known/didn’t they ever think about the slaves who labored to gather the cotton” et cetera.

    The past is another country, they did things differently there (to paraphrase a much better historian).

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  18. Ended up reading an interesting trio of books, called the “A Spy’s Guide to X”. In the book on strategy, he pointed out we didn’t understand Bin Ladin’s endgame and made a bunch of poor decisions because of it.

    Basically, Bin Ladin wanted to be Calif. To do that he had to win the Calif boss-game, which meant doing big flashy things that only a king could pull off. And splitting us off from other countries in the middle east. Hitting the Two Towers worked for that because it was big flashy and difficult. But hitting a bunch of soft targets in the US would not, because anyone could do that.

    That did not mean he did not want to attack the US, rather it needed to be something even flashier like a nuke on a big city.

    But the up shot was, or policy should never have been a “war of terror” rather it should have been focused on punative expeditions to convince any calif wanna-be that starting a fight with the US was how you ended up out of the running, permanently, one way or the other.

    And watching defense analysts talk about China… Look, China is big and is dangerous, and does have a lot of really clever people, but I swear, they talk like every chinaman is twenty feet tall and puts their pants on both legs at a time.

    There is no way a society that couldn’t manage the Wuhan bio hazard lab without dropping vials is going to build a world class 4nm+ semiconductor fab that actually works. Even if they find the minimum required geniuses to set it up, some janitor who either doesn’t know better, or doesn’t care is going to get their hand or their head stuck in one of the vacuum chambers and contaminate the entire facility by day 3.

    But if we did not have enemies like giants, what use would we have for all the giant killers?

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    1. Not giants. Also not smart to discount ignore their nuclear buildup.

      The actual worst case is if the demographic crash it’s going into causes China to fracture – fractured warlord state with loose nukes is bad juju.

      We got pretty lucky with the Soviet empire fell on the nuclear weapons front. As Sarah notes lots would not have worked in 1991, plus by now most of what they have can’t work because the KGB-turned-russian-mafia took the expensive electronics bits and sold them, then they took the rare metal bits and sold them, then they took the hydraulic fluid and copper wiring and sold them too.

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      1. Note that the Chinese might be doing the same thing as the KGB-turned-Russian-mafia. Anyone with any sort of authority in China is pretty much guaranteed to be corrupt. Of course, the key word is might, since we don’t know for sure. And if it’s happening, we don’t know how many of them it’s happened to.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. China is utterly corrupt. At one point, and I don’t recall the details, the CCP allocated a huge sum to bring China’s chip makers up to the cutting edge. Responsibility for the task was delegated to Jiang Zemin’s son. The upshot is that he had a lot of great parties and the chip making factories were reduced to making chips two generations out of date. They were buying chips from Taiwan and slapping Made in China labels on them. China’s claims to cutting edge technological sophistication are, depending on your point of view, either laughable or embarrassing; pathetic either way. Smoke and mirrors and chest thumping is the extent of their tech.

        What they excel at is espionage, lying and bullying. They are praying to the ghost of Mousie Dung that they can collapse America and the West before they implode. Not flaming likely. Less and less so all the time.

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          1. This. When people on the outside like Peter Zeihan put out vids based on available stats saying they drank the overpopulation coolaid and kept going with 1-child far too long, and thus are obviously in big trouble, what do the internal stats only the CCP can see show?

            Zeihan’s take is that Xi has purged or killed everyone who ever brought him any bad news, so he never gets told any bad news anymore. The entire CCP is being run in an unconstrained positive feedback loop.

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              1. Sorry, I keep generating these wot posts. I apologize in advance. I’ll curb it after this one I promise.

                Fear. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of the Department of State Security.

                It’s not that Xi can’t be told his fly is open. I am worried that Chinese State Security is not the Russian Mafia/ex-KGB/FSB, and the Chinese Communist Party true believers that work at CCP State Security appear to be actually fairly good, or at least apparently conscientious, at their jobs. That’s what I am worried could keep things honest enough for some stuff to work.

                See the roll-up of the entire US asset network in China a few years back – yes, CIA was muy stupido technically, big surprise there, but the Chinese did nevertheless turn someone, get into the CIA (web browser-based!?!) system, and vacuum up all the identities and addresses for every individual the CIA was working all across China. Those people no longer draw breath.

                On the other hand, their actual in-person spies keep getting found here all the time (Hi Fang Fang!), and I cannot be convinced we catch them all. I mean, counterespionage is the FBI, fer crissakes. And their state hackers get into everything.

                But If General Xiǎotōu decides to build a few hundred warheads filled with heavy rocks and cardboard instead of plutonium and high explosives to pocket the unspent budget, everyone that is in on it, all the way down the production chain and through to the military units that receive the warheads, all need to never pick up the phone or send an email or text internal security. One whiff of any corruption in defense and they’ll descend like locusts, no matter who is who’s cousin.

                When ratting out your boss who just made fun of your shirt means said boss will disappear, ratting out your boss is a real possibility. And once they have something they’ll bulldoze through and roll it all up and make it gone, just like they did in Wuhan.

                The ratting out would even deal with corruption in internal security. The tipper would just have to get the tip to a parallel division in another district. There’s always another faction in everything in China.

                Do I think everything in their arsenal will work the way their propaganda boasts? No way. Do I think their space program is a deathtrap waiting to happen? Oh yeah. I mean, they regularly kill their own people with boosters falling on Chinese villages. That’s not a failure, it’s a system design decision.

                I get your points about the corruption and the intrinsic dishonesty of the entire system, and I agree with you. And for certain there will be corruption and incompetence that impact what works and what’s full of sand if the balloon goes up.

                But they have that big internal hammer which, by all the evidence I have seen, actually works against the CCPs enemies, and getting on that list appears to be really easy.

                And Xi doesn’t have to be told about anything until it’s good news, so they can report “State Security successfully rooted out General Xiǎotōu’s scheme and executed everyone involved, including wives and children, here Comrade Emperor Xi, please sign these postdated death warrants.”

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          2. This is the core of one of the stories that I’m working on. China decides to Do Something about the demographic crash…and when you have a mad scientist on your payroll that can promise you a solution, you don’t look too far behind the curtain as long as it gets results…

            (The “results”-take that massive overpopulation of males and turn enough of them into actual reproductive-capable females via Mad Science (TM) to hopefully keep the country from going off a demographic cliff…)

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  20. The big issue is that 20/20 hindsight is a cheap commodity. And sanctimonious hypocrisy cheaper still. People today are terribly willing to decry their elders, with little understanding of why their forefathers made the decisions they did, or the conditions under which they were made.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. You also didn’t hear about a “gas leak” that shut down Louisville KY voting.

      “The state of Kentucky pulled a play from Georgia’s 2020 election (recall the phantom “pipe break”incident) and it cleared out a precinct due to a supposed “gas leak.” A Jefferson County circuit judge ordered the entire voting precinct of Louisville to be shut down — because somebody reported a “leak” at Highland Baptist Church.”

      https://www.emerald.tv/p/the-voting-machines-just-failed-in

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  23. “You can’t judge people on actions they didn’t know were wrong”

    Watch me.

    Picking something easy: I should have listened to Mrs. Hoyt about the Diamond Princess data. I was wrong. I let fear rule me. Mea culpa.

    All the worst bits of modern history are people justifying evil because Reasons. “How could I have known?” Bah.

    Most of the moderns judging history are applying their foolish, half-baked or outright corrupt standards to it.

    In other words, Aztec and Carthagian child sacrifices aren’t acceptable because Racism; or evil because Sexism. Torturing innocents to death on purpose for profit is vile. Full stop.

    And yes, they should have known better. They were human, as much as you or I.

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  24. How many Soviet submarines sunk themselves? I can think of three, the Komsomolets, the Kursk, and the one we built the Glomar Explorer to retrieve. The reaction of the US and Soviets to their subs sinking demonstrates the difference between the US and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, they said, “Ehh, oh well.” In the US, they figured out why and we got SUBSAFE. Soviet subs demonstrated a remarkable tendency for unwanted sinking in peacetime. How would they do at war?

    Then…nuclear reactors. Their nuclear reactors had a remarkable tendency to melt down. K-19, Leningrad, Chernobyl, Chernobyl again…

    Then of course they could barely feed themselves, if even that. When you have to use your spy satellites to monitor crops in your country, there’s a problem. China does similar things and gets similar garbage in. There are videos of people planting fields with rocks on rebar to look like crops so that they can fool the inspectors. So, how real is their economy? How real is their population?

    Frankly, I wish we would not have given so much Lend-Lease to the Soviets. Without our help, I don’t think that the Germans and the Soviet would not have been able to do more than claw each other to a bloody stalemate on the Eastern Front because they could not logistics. Without that, you can’t fight a very effective war.

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  25. One thing that helped the Communist movement a lot was the number of sympathizers it had in the West. Between 1929 and the late 1940s it was quite chic to be a communist or the next thing to one, at least if you were a fashionable thinker. Anti-Communists were dismissed as a bunch of uncultured rubes from the country who could have posed for that painting American Gothic. This is part of why Ayn Rand was the way she was…she never got over the shock of escaping Lenin’s prison-country and coming to the country she had always thought was the fountain of freedom, only to find all the fashionable thinkers loudly praising “the future that works.”

    Even after the 1940s, this lingered on, particularly in the entertainment and academic industries.

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  26. “this is part of why Ayn Rand was the way she was…she never got over the shock of escaping Lenin’s prison-country”

    I agree, and it also explains why she went (IMO) overboard in the other direction by insisting that there was no such thing as “common good”, that selfishness was a virtue and sacrifice was bad, that you had no obligation to anyone but yourself, etc. Having seen how the Soviets twisted the concepts of altruism, sacrifice and common good to justify their totalitarianism, she made the mistake of throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak.

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    1. She merely insisted that any contributions to ‘the common good’ must be voluntary. The minute somebody can legally steal your money and give it to somebody else, the ‘common good’ has gone out the window. See the 16th Amendment, and all the corruption it has enabled. 90% of what government is doing today, at every level, amounts to taking money from people who earned it and giving it to those that did not. Buying votes with that stolen money.

      And when they can’t steal enough money to keep up with their delusions, they steal from the future by borrowing $32 trillion (so far) and demanding that WE pay it back. I didn’t vote for that — but I was never given any opportunity to vote against it. The whole political system is rigged to present us with only the choices the elitists want us to have. Look what they’re doing to prevent us from voting for Trump.
      ———————————
      The U.S. Capitol is OUR house. Congresscritters are just the help.

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      1. Must be voluntary, and ignore any implicit commitments either for exchange or term way….which it brought over from communism, and which poisoned the idea just as much as its source.

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