Bye Bye Blue

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Sorry about the lateness. There were wedding dress fittings, and I was only person available to go with. Threw entire day off. Also Havelock cat is ill which ate the rest. – SAH*

The blue model is collapsing all over the world.

We’re calling it the blue model after the American colors. And no, you don’t need to tell me that the left manipulated those because post fall of the USSR they thought calling themselves reds was too on the nose.

Or perhaps because they tend to think in patterns, they thought the communists were defeated because they were red, and they could rub some of that on us. Who knows? The many many ways they avoid thinking are tiresome and hard to fathom.

But I’m using Blue model instead of Marxian because the blue model at its root is honestly more monarchist than anything else. It’s the idea that the government should take care of you. That you are dependent on it, and lesser-than.

Marxism simply highjacked the structures left over from monarchy. Which is why the blue model was much deeper all over Europe which still had leftover structures and mental categories from monarchy. The idea that someone in the power structure to a degree owns you and you owe them allegiance while they owe you protection/whatever else goes back as far as feudalism. The idea that individual rights trump that is alien in most of the world.

It isn’t alien in the US, and it is in fact, despite everything, the default. Which is why the blue model took a lot longer to penetrate fully here, and it’s still not really fully installed. Yes, I know what you hear on the TV and what recent college graduates spout, but really: In 16 we voted for the guy promising to bring back jobs, over the chick saying jobs were a thing of the past and she’d give everyone welfare. Americans still would rather take care of themselves, given half a choice, despite everything FDR and his ideological successors did to try to break that.

BTW and this is important later, the monarchical model in Europe had its roots in feudalism, which was a system that made sense for its time and place. Division of labor of a sort, under constant attack from outside (moors in Southern Europe, Huns in the East, Vikings in the North.) It is a system that works fabulously when one is under constant attack and short on resources.

It ran into problems as the pressure let up. Contrary to what you’ve been fed over and over in school, revolutions don’t happen when things are intolerable, but when things get better. Actually, revision on that: they can happen when things are intolerable, but then they are far far worse and can often flip totalitarian.

So, what is the blue model: A centralized, “strong” government, run by “experts” who possess some quality the “peasants” lack (this applies back to monarchy, where they were believed to have been installed by G-d. In our era it’s the “they’re so smart.” Kind of the same, said another way.) This allows them to allocate resources and make decisions for everyone. What decisions? Well, those you are too stupid to make, peasant!

No, on the serious side, the problem is that when the current form of the blue model was installed, it was believed that experts really had more knowledge and could see clearer than the average person, including into that person’s daily life.

No? Dudes: WHY THE HECK do we have a recommended daily nutrition? Particularly as we’re finding out how different people/metabolisms are, why do we have someone telling us what we should eat, every day? (And am I the only one who has found that a lot of our dietary diseases only showed up since we’ve had that?) Why is there someone telling you how much you, yes, you, should weigh, for that matter, when humans are completely different, and in the US we come from ethnic groups with widely varying body types? Why do we have regulations on what insulation your house must use, what type of stove you can use to cook your food, what your kids must learn, how your work must be performed, etc. etc. etc. etc. for everything you do every day, from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed.

Well, “experts say” and “they know better” of course.

If we cut the federal government back to what the funding fathers thought were the functions of the federal government, we’d get rid of 99% of it. Guard the borders. Negotiate with foreign powers. Prevent war between states. I believe that’s it, unless I’m forgetting something.

Everything else is the blue model. Everything else is “Experts say you should wipe your butt three times, using paper of this thickness, folded twice.” EVERYTHING.

And it’s double that abroad. And they give a lot more credence to experts than even our dunderheads do. I remember watching in awe as my parents allowed their electrical panel to be changed with one that would crash at a lower usage to “save the environment” because…. experts said, so there were the government goons going door to door, doing this. And everyone thought this was okay. (Head>desk.)

So, why is the blue model crashing? Well, first because they are now openly against their own countries. Took a while for that to actually sink in, but slowly it’s penetrated. And people will actually defend themselves when they keep getting attacked.

Second, because it never worked and it can never work, beyond a very small population under high pressure.

After all, its idea of the obligation to and from government is based on Feudalism, which was exactly that. Feudalism broke under the twin impacts of the Black Death which — not because it was smaller population, which is what the left took from it the ijits — because it was a massive population CRASH created a surplus in a society that never had it before; and a population explosion following, which caused people to fan out and colonize beyond the immediate reach of the Lords/government.

This type of model, where the government imposes all sorts of dictates on things it has no business touching, only works as long as the government, whether your local lord or your local kommissar can dictate what you believe/talk about and what you do/how you react.

This means it doesn’t work very well in a distributed, spread out society. It does even worse with a from-a-distance, ignorant-of-local-conditions society. It does even worse when the people running it are infected with Marxism and think both that people are widgets and that people will respond to laws as though they were laws of nature. And it does even worse if the people running it are utterly in thrall of “experts” and “Studies” in an era when most of those are falsified. (Because financed by the government.)

But most of all it doesn’t work because it’s centralized, top down ordering of everything. It is particularly clunky in our continent-sized country, but frankly it doesn’t work very well even in the kit-kat sized countries like Portugal, where you need a passport to swing anything above a newborn kitten. The central planners not only can’t see into the needs and desires of people who live distantly/differently from them, but also the bureaucracy itself is optimized for ass covering, so all failures are excused and all data fudged.

The end result is failures no one will acknowledge, which snowball into really big failures.

The central administrative state never works very well, but it gets worse each year, because failures roll bigger and bigger every time, like the dung pushed ahead by a dung beetle.

To make things worse, of course, the stupid fools are INTERNATIONALISTS and aiming for the largest possible of all states. I honestly don’t know if this is because they’re Marxist or because they’ve tweaked accountability and good information are harder the bigger the nation is, which gives them cover, or if they truly believe that the long war of the 20th century was due to nationalism. (If anything it was due to aggregating all the tiny principalities and satrapies of Europe into large nation states who then collided over their macro policies.) However they all want these big aggregates and ultimately a world state. Which is stupidly insane. But anyway, their internationalism and conviction that people are widgets is causing them to a) import vast masses of third worlders into the west b)try to enforce some form of racial social justice that means the natives of the West have no rights.

And to compound their problems, they no longer control the communications, so their failures are becoming impossible to hide. The internet, even faltering and hampered as it is outside the US makes their bias and hooliganism obvious.

So, the blue model is falling in plain sight. The world is on fire, with the people of every western country at all but open war (from what I gather from reading the increasingly panicky “Stop doing that” communiques) with their governments.

How long? I don’t know. I know even here we’re tap dancing on a powder keg, and our idiot Junta keeps playing the music faster and faster.

I know anything could set it off. Britain had had horrific events before without fighting breaking out. And the poor bastages aren’t even armed.

At the rate things are breaking down it’s going to get sporty all over, and accelerate.

Make your final selections before flight, and strap in.

We’re about to encounter turbulence.

167 thoughts on “Bye Bye Blue”

        1. Which large Western state do you intend to cover with a monument big enough for all those mistakes? Our Gracious Hostess might object out of nostalgia if you made it Colorado.

          Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

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          1. California.

            Carve the entire mid-state mountain range into a memorial wall covered in the mistakes of Marxism.

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                2. Socialist Realism can, in fact, be rather good looking. True, Sturgeon’s Law applied, but neither painting nor sculpture suffered the way novels did. And in fact, they avoided the horrors of modern art by insisting that art could not be esoteric. (Alas, Western artists then insisted their art had to be good because it was the opposite of totalitarian art. Ironic, in that many “revolutionary” artists were Communist because they assumed that all revolutions were the same.)

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  2. One other thing that is the responsibility of government that they are failing miserably in is arbitrating and enforcing the contracts that citizens and companies make with each other. It’s like contracts don’t exist in the blue model.

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        1. It’s worse, imo. Fuedalism had obligations both ways. It was actually in the king’s best interests to try and maintain good relations with the commoners as they acted as a check on the nobles. A king couldn’t count on the nobles, because most nobles had ambitions, and the only way for an ambitious noble to advance was to take the throne. But there were an awful lot of commoners, and they could create a lot of trouble for the nobles if they liked the king.

          Socialist autocracies don’t have this aspect. Grabbing the reigns of leadership (i.e. the throne) involves political games amongst the party elite (the nobles). The proletariat (commoners) are largely irrelevant unless things *really* get out of hand – in which case everyone in the party loses.

          Also, religion acted as a semi-independent outside force. Yes, in many cases the clergy were basically nobles. But they were semi-independent (how independent depended on the religion, and where in the world). If things got particularly off-kilter in the power structure, religion could act as an observer to critique the things that were happening. Marxism, however, doesn’t recognize any religion outside of Marxism itself, and Marxism is the government. As such, there’s no built-in option for a semi-independent group to offer critiques of government abuses.

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            1. Which had the very peculiar effect that just when feudal societies became settled and peaceable enough to develop formal feudal codes, they ceased to be feudal in fact.

              Bureaucracy, based on complex codes of written rules (and the unwritten rules that establish how things get done in spite of the written code), is the very antithesis of feudalism, where the whole system was based on a network of personal loyalties.

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      2. Only an absolute monarch. Typically monarchs did not have absolute power in feudal societies, and a monarch that was perceived as too willing to dump contracts (agreements) would likely end up with none of the nobles willing to work with him (because he’s untrustworthy). And if he dared to remove a noble from authority absent what the other nobles perceived as a good reason, then he would have a revolt on his hands. Said revolt would, of course, be led by the guys who actually commanded the professional troops in the monarchy.

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    2. Oh, you mean the lately lost and unlamented Chevron Doctrine?

      Good riddance!

      Any law or ruling g that spays the bureaucracies of the “Administrative State” is a victory to be toasted to.

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  3. When the mess of the Black Death and Little Ice Age 1.0 was settling out, a pattern of non-feudal governance already existed – the Hanse and Imperial Free Cities. Now, in the non-Germanic lands like Latvia, the merchants treated non-Germanic people like crud, and favored their own kind when it came to trading privileges and guild membership. However, the Hanse also stood up to nobles and church-nobles, and had some room for merit-based success and advancement.

    No, the Hanse didn’t last all that long – 300 years or so, thanks to the rise of centralized states, the reduced trade because of the Little Ice Age, and a few other things, but while it lasted it counterbalanced the feudal model that dominated Central Europe.

    The cities were run by the patricians, the most successful and wealthy of the merchants, but where did the rich and successful not run the show? Marx and his followers gave grudging recognition to the Hanse for standing up to the older aristos. Very grudging, of course.

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  4. I would add the Most Serene Republic of Venice, with its convoluted system of governance (including a lottery), was also responsible for the decline of the feudal model.

    Just my humble opinion.

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  5. One world government. That trope was all through old SF. In one of H Beam Pipers novels members of the interstellar empire were talking….one government for each world with nuclear weapons and one government for all the planets of mam so they wouldnt fight.

    One charwcter did mention that they didnt require a good government just one government. So you get China were there is constant rebellion and death and intrigue. Gruesome.

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    1. He presented a clearer view of government in ‘Space Viking’, showing how different types broke down when run by the corrupt or the merely lazy. Monarchy, constitutional monarchy, socialist, despotic or bureaucratic, they all developed problems.

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    2. IIRC, Heinlein had various flavors of world (or multi-world) governments, like in Double Star. It’s been too long since I’ve read Stranger, so don’t recall if it was world gummint or a UN variant. OTOH, he gave it up in the later novels, as after Time Enough for Love. (I’m not sure if Secundus had enough population to qualify as a world government.)

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      1. I got the impression that Secundus was run/ruled by the Howard Families. IE The Trustees of the Families was the government of Secundus.

        Apparently the Chairman Pro Tem of the Families had very few limits on his/her authority.

        Of course, dear old Lazarus Long was the actual Chairman and could over ride the Chairman Pro Tem.

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    3. One big element of Piper’s future history stories in particular was the Third World War in (maybe) about the 1970s or so. The whole double sided, full-out WW III “nuclear exchange” that left most of his Northern Hemisphere out of business for decades at least. (With many of the surviving people/institutions relocating to places like Buenos Aries and South Africa and assorted bits of Australia.) And if you ever want to see why and how that happened, see his story “The Answer” — likely it’ll not be what you think.

      So, easy to understand how that “one world, one government” idea got started, in-story; anything else would be strange. “A bad government is better than ashes everywhere the eye can see,” or some equivalent.

      But inside and outside the world of SF around that time, it’s stunning (at least retroactively) how hard that one-world-government idea took hold, out of sheer fear-based survival reflex (or whatever). Like the “over-population bomb” and “the marching morons” and “the next Ice Age / global warming” and assorted other ideas, it just seems to have come with the time, like the furniture in your new hotel room.

      So what weird-stuff is in our own heads, as unexamined, right now..?

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      1. There’s also the thing about SF having been incubated in a stew of crazy Leftist ideas in the 1930s, when a great many of the most famous writers formed their basic view of the world. The Futurians, in particular, were led by members of the Young Communist League, and several of them quickly became influential editors in the field. World governments of one Marxist stripe or another were both desirable and inevitable in the YCL model of the world. Besides, it was much easier for sheltered young American writers (which were most SF writers in the period of the late pulps) to wrap their heads around One Government To Rule Them All, because they had no real experience of anything but the U.S.

        Sometimes this took bizarre mutant forms. Cyril Kornbluth, in The Syndic, postulated a future where the U.S. was divided among various organized crime families; no other form of government existed, because Europe was burnt out and depopulated, and the rest of the world was dismissed as a horde of subhuman brown people incapable of anything but growing rice to feed themselves. Yes, the racism was really that blatant.

        You see the same kind of thing – One World Government, but a Tiny World – in The Hunger Games, where no mention (as far as I know) is ever made of any country but ‘Panem’. It’s a ridiculous trope, but a common one.

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        1. Post World War I seems to have been a particularly crazy time, in the U.S. and even worse in Europe — as if many people couldn’t quite come to terms with the fact the Great War had even happened.

          And the Great Depression seemed to make all that worse; the idea that economics itself had somehow come unglued (I’m trying to put in modern words a then-contemporary idea I don’t quite “get” myself). As if something fundamental had broken; and nobody was quite sure if it would ever be right again.

          So, it was a time ripe for all sorts of new, and… bizarre thought.

          There’s a movie, “The Petrified Forest” with Humphrey Bogart, from about that time; overtly it’s a crime drama, but beneath the surface it really does seem to get across a lot of the, let’s say, lost-ness of the time.

          Fertile ground for good things, maybe — and surely for bad.

          (Oh, and yes, I’ve heard of the Futurian Society. Oh, my, wow.)

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          1. Joy Davidman (better known to posterity as Mrs. C. S. Lewis) captured the spirit of the times in one perfect, appalling sentence:

            ‘In 1929 I believed in nothing but American prosperity; in 1930 I believed in nothing.’

            Few things in this world are so demoralizing as undeserved poverty that comes hard on the heels of unearned wealth. People like to ridicule Aristotle for saying that the youth of Athens in his time were degenerate (‘Oh, that’s how old people always talk, and they’re never right’); but in fact Athenian society was degenerating, economically and morally, thanks to the loss of the Athenian trading empire, the exhaustion of the Athenian silver mines, and the political violence that kept flaring up between factions that had no idea how to save the city, but desperately wanted someone to blame.

            The Great Depression had a similar effect in all industrialized societies, and I think historians will find that the idiotic global response to Covid – oppress the people and debase the currency – is having that effect today.

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        2. The districts in The Hunger Games don’t seem particularly large, which suggests that the government is not a world government. That suggested to me that the unnamed disaster in the past isolated the different countries. There are likely other countries out there. But for whatever reason, interactions with them (assuming that there even are any) are virtually unheard of.

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          1. They have a large enough territory to contain every single raw material needed to support an industrial civilization (which, by the way, is impossibly silly). They also have the ability to build monorails, for crying out loud, connecting all their territories.

            This is not the sort of situation where you lack the capacity to meet the neighbours. There has never been a time in human history when there were organized states but no contact between them.

            The worldbuilding is atrocious.

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      2. If only we put the right humans on the world throne, we will finally have paradise.

        We were warned.

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      3. Weber plays with it with both Haven and the Solarian League; one has overspent to the point it has to loot other systems to barely keep its welfare system running and the League…well, we eventually find out it was meant to be a trade federation and loosely held government, but the bureaucracy need to run it turned it into a corrupt mess.

        My, my, “world,” governments that *aren’t* the perfect solution to all men’s problems.

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        1. Haven even with its pseudo French Revolutionary model is pretty clearly modeled on a projection of the US from the ’90s when the Honor Harrington series started if the US kept it’s spending going for a few decades more. The Solarian League government feels more like an homage to issues with the deep state although most of those books come out of the 2000’s to 2010’s and the Obama period so maybe more based on the EU the the US. Both Haven and the Solarian league have enough cautionary predictive value that they are a touch creepy when viewed in that light.

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          1. David Weber has said that Haven was based on a “US Gone Wrong”.

            The Solarian League isn’t clearly based on any Earth government. Of course, it controlled IIRC 90% of the known galaxy in the Honorverse.

            Mind you, when I looked at the League, I reminded of Imperial China. It saw itself the Most Civilized Nation in the universe with the highest technology around. Of course, the rule of the bureaucrats in the League is a close match with Imperial China.

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            2. The Solarian League (obviously) reminds me of the EU and Like the EU it shares some serious problems with the US Articles of Confederation although both EU and Solarian League gave the Bureaucrats far more power than the Articles of Confederation.

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  6. I usually have one of two reactions when I see/read/hear “Experts say…” or “Studies show…”.

    Most commonly, the thought for both is, “Well, based on historical data and experience, that’s probably bullsnit”.

    Sometimes, but only if in 2-way communication: For the first, “What experts, and what are their qualifications? No, not credentials, qualifications.”. For the second, “Show me the raw data and the test/evaluation process used in the ‘study’ .”

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    1. “Experts say…” — what they are paid to say. Whatever fills their iron rice bowls and gets them invited to all the ‘best’ parties. Any ‘Experts’ that don’t play the approved tunes get defunded and canceled. We never hear from them.

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        3. The Golden Rule, The person with the Gold makes the Rules. Unfortunately, it holds stronger than you’d hope or think. The rot of the need to get funding for large to moderate science really distorts the scientific model. Between training that eschews the existence of absolute truth and the pablum that is fed to undergrads as history and similar it is all too obvious how easy it is for money to distort things.

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          1. I found out a number of years back that the Vatican science division—and yes, it’s mostly staffed by religious folk—is responsible for quite a bit of the bedrock science out there. I’m talking about the non-flashy, never-get-funded stuff like “let’s do an accurate survey of the species in this area, right down to the micro stuff.”

            IOW, all the stuff that you need for the basic assumptions you’re making in your high-ticket grant proposal.

            And this is because the Vatican funds the science to just get science done. They’re not looking for anything in particular (at least not at this point, though they’ll gladly take serendipity); they just need to be exploring the world.

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            1. Indeed there is Guy Consolmagno SJ who is well known as co author of Turn Left At Orion in the amateur astronomy world.

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      3. When someone cites unnamed “experts say”, especially without any details, and the gist is “this dangfool idea will actually work” or “these evil nincompoops need more power”, the cited item is typically someone’s asspull.

        No butts about it.

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  7. We need a song, like The Hanging Tree from the Hunger Games.

    “Are you, are you, watering the tree?…”

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  8. I believe that’s it, unless I’m forgetting something

    You missed a few. Postal service, uniforms weights and measures, and IP law (copyright and patents) are all enumerated in Article II.

    Point remains, however, if it isn’t in Article II or one of the amendments it needs to go last decade.

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    2. Also (an important one too often forgotten by landlubbers) keeping the shipping lanes open. Part of this function is exercised by the Navy, which is specifically enumerated as a function of the federal government; part by the maintenance of inland waterways, which is considered an integral part of the ‘interstate commerce’ powers ever since Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824.

      Mark Twain once pointed out that a shipment of coal or grain that could travel from Chicago to New Orleans in a couple of weeks by tugboat and barge, at a cost (in 1882 dollars) of $18,000, would have cost $180,000 to ship by rail and required a whole summer to put the necessary trains through.

      Most people don’t seem to know it, but this ratio has held fairly steady between land and water transport throughout human history. That’s why ancient Rome imported grain by sea from Egypt to feed the city: it was actually cheaper than shipping it by road from the interior of Italy!

      I forget which recent author it was that pointed out the almost invariable historical relationship between the industrial wealth of a country and its access to sea and river ports. You can see it in Germany and the Low Countries, you can see it in Britain, you can see it in Japan, and you can see it in the distribution of industry in the U.S. The factories go where the barges can land the raw materials.

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      1. David Weber has mentioned it a time or two.

        And if you want to reach back a tad, E.E. Smith used the idea in, “Subspace Explorers,” casually mentioning it had become as cheap to bring a cargo ship full of milk to Earth as it had been to ship a much smaller amount from Wisconsin to Minnesota (I think).

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      2. Thomas Sowell has noted in several places that one of the reasons that Africa, for all its natural resources, never took off economically while Europe did was the paucity of navigable waterways. You have all these rivers, sure, but to go any distance you end up having to spend far more time portaging past various impassible portions than you spend on the water itself. The Nile was a notable exception.

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        1. Up to the First, or sometimes Second Cataracts. The northern dynasties had serious difficulties adding or holding anything beyond those to the Egyptian Empire. (Those dynasties that extended further were where the “Egyptians” were actually conquerors from the south.)

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      3. I think you’re referring to Peter Zeihan at the end there.

        And it is important, especially the details you pointed out about inland waterways. For the US in particular I’m not convinced the cost of maintaining all the world’s shipping lanes without meaningful support (where we are now) is worth the cost as opposed to specific nations we need but that’s a separate discussion.

        Also, we need to revisit the Jones Act the same way we revisited railway regulation in the late 70s. We do too little coastal shipping, relying in trucks and rail (even then we favor trucks too much IMHO).

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        1. I believe that the Interstate system of highways and the intercontinental railway systems were created especially to create artificial “waterways” to move goods, people, materiel, etc. across the country east/west because we have no waterways that traverse across the country in those directions. Getting across the various mountain ranges and over the Continental Divide was no easy task prior to their creation.

          Sure it’s cheap to get things port to port and up and down the coasts but that doesn’t help much if you need to get it to the actual customers. Hence the bottle neck of ships at various ports when they and the trucking and railway systems were shut down by the Global Pandemic of recent memory.

          Africa could absolutely do the same thing. Well they COULD, theoretically, but obviously it is much more difficult if you aren’t one large union of states as we are.

          IMHO, it’s the cost of fuel that’s wrecking shipping, not the lack of waterway use. But I may be biased as the nearest coast is 1500+ miles away and the nearest major waterway 300+ miles.

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          1. The commercial uses may have been drivers (ahem) but the sell during the Eisenhower administration for the interstate highway system was military use, rapid redeployment of heavy military formations across the country other than by easy-to-target rail.

            The Autobahn impressed the US military a lot, especially during the final run into Germany proper by allied armies where those freeways made things go a lot faster. The need was there for commerce, but the hook was military, which is why there are still rules about things like minimum overpass heights such that a main battle tank on a transporter truck can roll through underneath at convoy speed.

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      4. I once saw someone note that Israel occupies what should be a very valuable piece of real estate. It’s the furthest penetration of the ocean (including the Med, in this case) into the Eurasian and African super-landmass. If you could build a shipping terminal there and run rail lines through, it would be a very efficient transfer point.

        Unfortunately, actually trying to do that would be a mess due to the situation on the ground.

        And of course the existence of the Suez Canal changes things up.

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        1. Same argument for Lebanon, and a similar mess preventing Beirut from being the transshipment hub it should logically be.

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      5. Aye. Back when the US had a viable general steel industry (glares at the creatures who made it non-viable here), you had mines in central Minnesota. Truck or rail the taconite ore to pelletizing plants on Lake Superior. Finished pellets via ore carriers to steel plants on the Great Lakes (Gary, Indiana comes to mind first. I recall others on Lake Erie.)

        With care & good luck in placement, you could get from rock in the ground to steel shapes with less than a couple hundred miles overland travel.

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        1. Back in the day, a whole lot of that iron ore was shipped over the Great Lakes to Chicago, then down the Illinois River and Mississippi, up the Ohio to Pittsburgh where the coal mines were. Since steelmaking uses up more coal than iron ore, it’s cheaper than doing it the other way round.

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          1. I suspect some of that coal did the reverse trip and ended up at the plants along Lake Michigan. Inland Steel was big in Gary. Don’t know the others. (My father worked for Ryerson, a subsidiary of Inland, though things have changed a lot over the years.)

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              1. As does Illinois, though it’s not antracite. Bituminous, and a Chicago winter’s night complete with YELLOW(!!!111eleventy!!) moonlight says that some of the local coal has a bit too much sulfur in it.

                At least it’s not the stuff one step removed from peat.

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                1. Like the brown coal they’re burning in Germany to make up for shutting down most of their nuclear plants to appease the ‘Green’ wacktivists. When will they learn, there is no appeasing those MF’ers? Giving in to their loony demands just signals them to make even loonier demands.

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  9. We’re calling it the blue model after the American colors. And no, you don’t need to tell me that the left manipulated those because post fall of the USSR they thought calling themselves reds was too on the nose.

    Actually, I think it was before the fall of the USSR. Because the color scheme has been used as far back as I remember, which means the ’84 election more or less. So, very likely, the media flipped the colors during the Carter administration, or perhaps a bit earlier.

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    1. I seem to remember that the incumbent was frequently marked in blue, and the challenger was marked in red.

      My guess is that someone decided that the Left should always be the incumbent, and the Right should always be the challenger.

      Or someone decided that the election colors matched the wargame designations for “friendly” and “hostile” forces, and decided that the Left should be marked as friendlies, and the Right should be marked a hostiles, always.

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    2. It wasn’t standardized until the ’90s or later: I recall Dad flipping between CBS, NBC or ABC, and the local PBS station in November of ’92, and some maps had Bush in blue (with Clinton in red) and some the other way. I think the PBS map had the Democrats in red and the other networks used blue. They all had yellow for Perot, but his electoral sample was a goose egg.

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      1. I still remember seeing a map that was completely blue… except for Minnesota, which was red. That was the ’84 election map, of course.

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        1. Right – the 2000 election saga was when it froze, and the “red state” “blue state” phraseology began to be used by the media.

          Note that even the idiot marxists in control of Wikipedia argue with themselves about the history prior to 2000 in their article on the topic, noting that different networks used different non-coordinated-with-each-other color schemes before 2000, generally alternating which party got blue and red every Presidential election year on their TV maps. But the color assignment stopped changing and went lockstep in 2000.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. I wonder if there wasn’t also an element of, “blue is the color of serenity, spirituality and Life,” while, “red is the color or anger, aggression and blood,” mixed in. Yeah, it means totally dismissing the Communist use of red, but they do that.

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        1. Red is also, in one application I know, used for Charity and for “that Fervency which should motivate all who are engaged in the Service of Truth.”

          Color symbolism gets complicated.

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    1. Eminent Domain is provided for in the last clause of the fifth amendment

      Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

      To remove it would require an additional constitutional amendment. That said it has been deeply abused. Kelo vs New London (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London) set precedents in both what constituted public use and just compensation. To my taste that decision is as egregious Plessey v. Ferguson, Roe v. Wade, or Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. It allowed a use (granting to a corporate entity for development) that was NOT strictly public use, and provided for compensation that was NOT commensurate with existing real estate values. In addition many legal interpretations do not call many executive/legislative actions takings what they are and thus the property owners are not compensated. If compensated justly the takings might not be undertaken due to the cost (e.g. much limitation of the uses of non navigable intermittent bodies of water on privately owned lands amounts to unjustified taking).

      I suspect there ought to be an amendment to more tightly constrain what constitutes taking, what public uses are valid and what constitutes just compensation. I would normally want it just be a rider that lets the Legislative branch legislate on the subject, but they have shown themselves so incompetent and untrustworthy of late that I’d rather not see it left to future majority whims.

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    1. Fun, though it drives me bonkers that they’re slightly off level for several of the shots. Not deliberately, like with the tilts later on, but just off true.

      Such a ridiculous film. One of my best friends’ favorites. :D

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  12. Ah, New Feudalism. Our elite ‘betters’ want real actual feudalism, where they own everything and the peasants, serfs, wage and chattel slaves are tied to the land or business controlled by individual feudal elites.

    It’s one of the reasons the elite are so intent on destroying religion. Just look at the stupidity of the Anglican faith and the Roman Catholic Church. Yikes, there.

    As to the US, we’ve effectively been a national socialist country for a very long time. National Socialism being government control of business, religion, health, education indirectly, through regulations and such.

    And we’re rapidly slipping into international socialism, government ownership and direct control of all aspects of our lives.

    Regarding the various nutritional regulations, most of those regulations came about during or after WWII when various companies and whole segments of business wanted to not lose their grasp upon America. Like studies showing the benefits of plant-based oils and denigrating butter, beef fat or lard. Or, as our host points out, the stupid food pyramid.

    Before and during WWII, horsemeat was commonly consumed. After? It became a big no-no because of Big Beef.

    Now, there are some good things about some of the health related dictats, like Riboflavin being put in baked bread, the origins of ‘fortified’ breads like Wonder Bread. But it comes at a cost to freedom.

    There’s a fine line between ‘suggested’ and ‘required’, especially when the force of big government is behind it.

    ‘

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    1. Not national socialist, no, because that kind of nationalism just doesn’t work here. I’m sure there are a few individuals and tiny groups that are blood-and-soil European-style nationalist, just because it sounds good, but it can’t work here on a large scale. Shared history? Kinda. Shared pedigree? Nope. Shared religion? Not really*. Shared language? Not the way the Romantic Nationalists meant. Shared place of ancestry, as in multi-generational ties to one bit of dirt? Oh heck no.

      Socialist as in having a too-mixed economy? That I’ll grant you in part.

      *Christian, broadly speaking, used to work, except then you get into Catholic vs. Protestant vs. other Protestant… (I mean, Wisconsin Synod Lutheran and Latter-day Saints are both Protestant, and the Dutch Reformed consider them heretics and probably reprobated [not that anyone can know the will of the Most High, of course {looks piously innocent}].)

      Liked by 2 people

        1. Walz is most assuredly a Blue Falcon.

          I cannot adequately crap on that despicable creature without wearing out the HONK! button.

          I cannot imagine just how much crap left-vets are going to eat to vote for that ticket. I suspect it costs the donks half or more of their reliable vets.

          It’s as if they know they are beat, so they really do not care who is on the ballot. They just hope for some Trump gaffs to make fodder for 2026 midterms.

          Or, that with 100 million early ballots already cast, ready to be counted at 2am, when the pipes break again, they are not worried about annoying any donkvoters.

          Then again, if it really was Biden’s crew that put together the fraud team, and given his well known epic spitefulness, and -Trump- of all people defending him, what if FICUS

          … shrugs.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. A variant of this could well explain Josh Shapiro’s rumored last-minute withdrawal from the Veepstakes. He finally got to spend a significant amount of time in a room with Kamala Harris …

              … extrapolated the experience out to eight years …

              … and had the quite understandable and sane reaction of running screaming into the night.

              Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

              Liked by 2 people

              1. And not necessarily exclusive to that, he could also have concluded after meeting her that she ain’t gonna win, and being the losing veep candidate never sets one up to be the next Presidential nominee.

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                1. Kackling Kamela is going to ‘win’ if the Democrats have to print up 400 million Totally Legitimate Ballots in the wee hours of Election Night. They’ve had lots of practice lately.

                  Liked by 2 people

                  2. Image, then, that Governor, knowing what he knows from the inside of the Dem machine, still concluding he’s not interested since she can’t win.

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                    1. Behold Gov. Shapiro. Rumor has it he backed out at the last instant (and he was definitely cozying up to Harris for that VP slot). Either he found it galling to deny his faith (meh – he had pretty much already denied as much as anyone could have) or he decided even WITH a win in PA (which wasn’t guaranteed, but he certainly would have made it easier and somewhat more “enhancement” free), or after meeting Harris and discussing things he knew he couldn’t work as her subordinate for 4 minutes let alone 4 (or shudder 8) years.

                      Liked by 1 person

                  3. So when Harris tries to cheat her way to a win in Pennsylvania, will the vote counters in Philly be loyal to her (the California harridan who has never done a single favour for them), or to Shapiro (the governor who gave them their phony-baloney jobs and doesn’t care if Harris turns into a penguin and explodes on top of the TV set)?

                    Ballot boxes don’t stuff themselves.

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                    1. Actually. That is one of the miracles that happens Nov 2024. Those that stuff the ballots hate the idea of Cackle in chief as much or more than Heiress Clinton. Thus no stuffing gets done. Which is what happened in 2016. President Trump didn’t cheat to win 2016. The cheating side had enough sidelined that the cheating failed in 2016. In 2020, President Trump didn’t have that going for him. Biden is an idiot, but he was their idiot. Dang it.

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                2. Good point. I could mention FDR’s losing VP candidacy in 1920, but he wasn’t the next Presidential nominee, waiting two more cycles. I could also mention Walter Mondale losing as VP candidate in ’80 only to take the nomination in ’84, but since he actually had been Vice-President that doesn’t quite work either. Maybe there’s a Whig someone could cite, but I think I’ll just say you’re right instead.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. And, of course, while Mondale managed to be the nominee in ’84, it’s not like his path is one that Shapiro would want to follow if he actually wanted to be president.

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              2. Somewhere, I saw rumors that 12 potential VP candidates politely declined the honor of being second fiddle to Nero Harris.

                Liked by 1 person

                  1. The snippet excluded names. Guessing Newsome and anybody else with major presidential ambitions.

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            2. The same people who insisted Brandon was “sharp as a tack!” Are insisting Kammy is “really smart”.

              If that is conceivably so (hah!) then it’s worse, she’s enormously lazy, which is why every time she speaks she’s like the kid giving a book report who didn’t read the book.

              And all reports by the masses of ex-staff say she’s spiteful too, blaming others for not properly Cliffs Notes-ing her so she could not look stupid, because she’s so smart.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. FM Said

                she’s like the kid giving a book report who didn’t read the book.

                Given her speeches she’s like the kid standing up with the bppk report on Charlottes Web only to find she’s in math class. She just doesn’t give a rats ass you should give her an A because she’s Kamala. Obummer was the same way, she’s a massive narcissist which is also probably why she has like a 97% plus staff turnover. If she wins probably one of her staff will brain here with the Churchill statue and we’ll end up with Sgt Blue Falcon…

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                1. My bet is the “Ukraine is a country in Europe, Russia is a bigger country in Europe…” thing was her quoting the dumbed down and then condensed 3 minute Cliffs Notes brief she had received on the war in Ukraine, not realizing it was Geopolitics for Dummies and was her staff insulting her.

                  Liked by 1 person

            3. More than her competence (gag) is showing. Her cowardice is showing too. President Trump has agreed to 3 debates with Harris, two by known biased against him networks, and one partly biased against him (Fox, because still blue per a lot comments here). Plus President Trump has interviews with hostile reporters at a drop of a hat (just stop him somewhere, ask him to come, he’ll be there). Harris has agreed to one of the 3 debates with one of the enabler networks (NBC) and has only started answering questions for 90 seconds only because forced.

              Conclusion. Harris is a coward.

              (I would sympathize with Harris because I never want to be interviewed, ever. But, I’m not running for President. Harris does not get that reprieve. Reporters can kiss my … Actually no they can’t. Not allowed that close.)

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              1. Conclusion 2: Harris (or her handlers makes little difference) knows she is out of her depth at least at some level. She doesn’t want to admit it but as you suggest she is afraid to fail. Another sign of fairly advanced Narcissism. I suspect her Mom was/is a real piece of work and feelings of inadequacy rule Vice President Harris’ behavior. Yet another reason not to want her running the joint. If it weren’t a life or death issue I could almost feel sorry for her, but no.

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  14. The problem is that a lot of what the Blue model does, at the lower levels, is needed.

    We’re seeing what happens when you have mission creep, the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, and far too many people with credentials but not educated let loose in the workplace.

    (Mental note, no GI Bill benefits if you’re trying to get a degree in the “soft” sciences or anything ending in “studies” or similar things.)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Perhaps you did not intend to give offense. But give it you did.

      They earned it. They get to decide what sort of education benefits them. It’s deferred pay, earned income, not welfare.

      And they damn well earned it.

      Going to tell them what else they can’t buy with their pay? No booze or dip?

      C’mon. Did you really think that one through?

      Liked by 1 person

  15. “…feudalism, which was a system that made sense for its time and place. Division of labor of a sort… a system that works fabulously when one is under constant attack and short on resources.”

    This is even more true than it might seem at first blush, if you have the additional “magic ingredient” of an “elite warrior class.” And by that last I mean, particularly, that the state of the art of war then-and-there is such that (1) really good warriors take a long, hard time to train, and (2) their really-good weapons are also really expensive to make.

    It’s not just that, say, “the flower of knighthood” has to be selected and trained for much of their adult (or pre-adult) lives; it’s not just that they need (say) both arms and armor that are (by our terms) more like a house than a car to create (see: ancestral weapons). It’s the additional fact they can basically kick the stuffing out of any non-professional, not as lavishly equipped force. Even accounting for the far greater numbers possibly available of the second.

    Now add the additional factor of “under constant attack” and you have a context that (with enough of the above) not only does not favor any “American style” or “equalitarian” society, but actively and ruthlessly punishes it — likely right out of existence. You have to have a (small) “elite” of warriors, to survive; you have to have a (large) class of lower status herders, ranchers, peasants, serfs, and/or slaves to produce the “surplus” necessary to “run” the war machine that keeps “your” land and peasants from turning into “somebody else’s property.”

    Example: imagine a British colony in North America, with (say) 1500s technology, or even 1400s. Now imagine an attempted rebellion; even if it succeeds, the result will likely look very very different from our own history. (And never even mind those “Enlightenment” advances in politics and philosophy that haven’t happened yet either, here.)

    It’s not a perfect statement, by any means, in any time. But politics and political structure is made by economics is made by technology.

    Let’s be thankful ours, that made us as we are here and now, was up to the challenge of producing our United States of America.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Properly employed, yahoos with longbows slaughtered the “flower of chivalry”.

      See also the mostly amateur Americans defeating the mostly professional British.

      Lots more examples. Morale and motivation, and very much “stubborn”, often defeat professionals, even supposedly “elite” ones.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The problem with the longbow is that it takes a very long time to be proficient at using one. IIRC years of training.

        By contrast, it takes much less time to be proficient with muskets & rifles.

        Even in our war for independence, it took some time for our Armies to gain the discipline needed to face the British Armies.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. But many Adult Englishmen avoided the training.

            They believed that there were better things to do with their time and it was difficult to enforce that law.

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            1. Nevertheless, the English army was solidly based upon those yeomen who did put in the training. It is no accident that the English parliamentary system was established, and the rights of Englishmen per se were first definitely codified, during the era of the longbow.

              You could not have a country governed exclusively by knights and nobles when the peasants could pick them off with arrows from a hundred yards away.

              Liked by 2 people

          2. Oh yes. And it takes very little time, given decent instructors, to produce decent rifle shooters.

            Sticking around when the other side fixes bayonets, is somewhat harder and slower to train.

            The moral is to the physical 10 to 1.

            Highly motivated irregulars can, and often do, defeat insufficiently motivated professionals.

            Pros are a way to grow and maintain institutional morale and knowledge, but there are other ways, and arguably better ones for a free society.

            When its pleasure, not business, look out world.

            (grin) Off to the range I go. After gym.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. The American military model is still a bit confused these days.

              It used to be based on the cadre concept, with small active forces intended to train up hordes of draftees rapidly enough to get places and break things in a reasonable time, but that meant many months, not days.

              The U.S. post-Vietnam All Volunteer Force means we have moved to a fully professional military, whether full time active or part time reserve or NG, intended to be wafted off to exotic locales able to kill people and break things much more quickly than the old draft model allowed. The plan, with prepositioned equipment in certain places and also on ships chocked full of stuff around the world, is for the people to arrive, drive their stuff off of the boat, and immediately go to work.

              But the train-the-farmboys mindset is still embedded in a fair amount of institutional structure. The collisions if ever a full mobilization is needed will be interesting.

              Liked by 1 person

            2. Even holding the line and and reloading muzzle loaders as another group advances firing into your formation takes MUCH training. Isolated soldiers on a field would soon be overrun by light cavalry or massed light or heavy infantry. There was a reason battles were fought with large formations in the matchlock/flintlock musket world. Even the rifled Minie ball of the War that shall not be named didn’t change that much. You have to stand to reload a muzzle loader. It is not until you can reload prone or kneeling with a breech loader that the world changes radically. The initial battles of the revolutionary war were fought in a skirmishing style in more wooded areas and used some rifled muskets ( primarily to aim at high value targets not considered cricket mind you…). But ultimately we needed Von Steuben and Lafayette to drill and train our folks, and even then without French naval aid we’d have been up the creek without a paddle.

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              1. The biggest reason for maintaining formations was volume of fire. Most guns of the era weren’t all that accurate at range. So packing a large number of guns into a tight formation made it more likely that you could score enough hits on whatever you were shooting at to make a difference.

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                1. Right – mass and volley fire meant you’d hit something. If it was Brave but Dim General Whositski standing alone on the field shaking his sword at your formation, a volley meant somebody’s lead slug would hit him just from the percentages and random chance. Besides a guy on his lonesome would get run down by cavalry. You needed massed volley fire to fight back against infantry, and massed bayonets to discourage the opposing cavalry mounts.

                  That said, everyone, including the redcoats, also used skirmishers, light infantry scouts bopping about between the armies and out to the edges, generally shooting from other than upstandingness, trying to sharpshoot anyone of interest, in spite of the redcoats bitching about the damn Yankees with their rifles. “Sharpe’s Rifles” 95th Regiment of Foot (Rifles) were Napoleonic war skirmishers and scouts.

                  Such generally got out of the way, however, when the big formations started towards each other, at least when they didn’t have to stand in ranks and volley fire like regular infantry because troops were so thin on the ground in Portugal.

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                  1. As you note, skirmishers were there in part to shoot particularly noteworthy targets (and when technology advanced enough to permit, usually had more accurate guns). But they were also there just to perform general harassment of the enemy formations. If the enemy had skirmishers in front of your line infantry, that meant that your line infantry couldn’t even fully rest as they never knew when a bullet might smack them or one of their buddies. The counter to that, obviously, was for a unit to deploy its own skirmish line, and keep the enemy skirmishers at bay.

                    In short, it was the same basic role that light infantry had been performing for thousands of years, just with guns instead of slings, javelins, or short bows.

                    It’s somewhat ironic that those same skirmishers are essentially the queen of the battlefield now. Large formations make very nice targets for explosive shells and fully automatic weapons. So they’ve gone by the wayside until someone figures out a way to protect them. That leaves the skirmish formation as the primary infantry formation nowadays, to the point where no one really thinks about it anymore.

                    Liked by 1 person

          2. And even with the selectivity about longbow wood, crossbows remained way more expensive, so equipping an army with such was a lot of precious metal out of a treasury.

            I have read mostly mercenary companies equipped with crossbows, given their cashflow and their tendency to not fight to the death for their employers.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Crossbow production scaled up a lot better than longbows. It cost a lot of money to equip enough crossbowmen to support an army (they were never a primary infantry weapon), but you could at least do it. The supply of longbows was always severely limited by the availability of suitable wood. By the end of the longbow era, if memory serves, the English were importing yew wood from as far away as Bohemia, because all the closer sources had been depleted.

              Liked by 1 person

        1. The bigger game changer was gunpowder weapons, both cannons and muskets.

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          2. Cannons changed how battles were fought, but not how societies were organized. Artillery is expensive to build and operate, valuable only to a fairly large army, and tends to increase the central power of the state that possesses it.

            Muskets, on the other hand, turned peasants into freemen in every country that adopted them – and the countries that did not adopt them were sooner or later turned into colonies of those that did.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. And muskets required better metallurgy. Cannons in brass, cast like bells, work okay, but you can’t do muskets in brass.

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        2. Longbows didn’t work well against men armored in plate. Most arrowheads were iron and would just bend. It would annoy the horses sure, and cause annoyance and a few casualties, but men at arms on foot could deal with it. Agincourt was a fluke and the English being driven out of France was not.

          Further, the longbow required the same strength and lengthy training that men at arms did. the musket, now, the musket changed everything. Didn’t require massive strength, didn’t require lengthy training, and did work very well on plate. when Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?

          Liked by 1 person

          1. What you say is true, but ‘When Adam delved and Eve span’ was a slogan from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – right in the heyday of the longbow, and over a century before the development of the musket.

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    2. 3- They need better food from childhood, so they can use those weapons and undergo that training. hence the division, and the birth lineage, etc.
      (Ancestor who was a fighting man in the 11th century was massive. His statue made within living memory bears more than a passing resemblance to Larry Correia. I must get a picture next time I’m over.)

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Yes, this. Sometimes food is/was abundant enough for that not to matter; but so often, “peasant’s diet” and “only the lord has meat.”

        Now apply to: Weird Elitist Fantasies of “you will live in sewer pipe and eat bugs and we will use vaccines to make you allergic to meat” and all the (frankly-evil) rest.

        (Do I even need overtly to add) Spit!

        Liked by 1 person

      2. This is also true; and it is also a reason why the English developed a functioning parliamentary system and recognized the rights of commoners sooner than most other places.

        Adam Smith devotes an entire chapter in The Wealth of Nations to the relative prices of grain and meat, and the conditions under which one or the other will be the staple food of the people. For the greater part of the Middle Ages, the population density of the British Isles was low enough to make meat widely available to common people; as also to the Germanic ‘barbarians’ of Roman times. (The longbow, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, requires a tall and muscular operator to be an effective weapon. You don’t get good archers on a vegetarian diet!)

        There’s a reason why France was the prototype and model of feudal societies. It was by a considerable margin the most densely populated country in Europe, and the common people lived on bread and vegetables – which left them physically vulnerable to the better-fed knights and nobles.

        Liked by 2 people

      3. And as my husband puts it (not the first to do so) by the time he’s 40, if he lives so long, the knight is pretty crippled up with arthritis, old injuries, etc.

        Even if he’s not the sort of, ahem, “overly enthused,” sort who won’t take a blow unless it makes him throw up in his helm. (We knew one of those in the SCA. I have no idea how many, if any, of his brain cells survived to retirement).

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    3. And, yes, the yeoman (longbow) archer and the citizen (firearms) soldier are two really good and important counterexamples to that “iron law of the warrior elite” situation. (Suddenly I wonder if the fact they’re both distance, not melee, weapons has any deeper meaning.)

      Yes, it takes a lot longer to get both the skills and the muscles to bend and aim a true longbow — but (IIRC) British law made that obligatory for every male over a certain (adolescent) age, for potential bowmen.

      And American culture and context, from the pre-1770s till now, made and make it possible and encouraged for people to learn to shoot, and shoot very well. (See: Kentucky Long Rifle and the “jaeger” rifle).

      Either way, the “yeoman warrior” is a true dual-use social and cultural technology; able to produce in peacetime and fight in wartime, both.

      Still half a miracle, historically, that our proto-Americans did not end up in some equivalent of classical Japan, no technological or social foundation for the kind of successful, innovative uprising we had.

      And still have.

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      1. I wouldn’t call it a miracle. They had to have a technological foundation to establish the colonies in the first place: you can’t build seagoing ships without plenty of skilled tradesmen, or navigate them without some fairly involved mathematics and astronomy. The English were a seafaring people, and bequeathed those arts to the colonies.

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  16. Ma’am, I would put a finer point on the whole question, and speak of the Prussian model. The centralized, militarized state, the regimentation of the people, the close regulation of all industry and commerce, the public schools to propagandize the young and make them into good cogs for the national machine – you will find all these things in the Prussian kingdom of Frederick the so-called Great, and the French revolutionaries were early admirers of the Prussian methods. Almost the whole of Progressivism can be described as a policy of turning other countries into copies of Prussia.

    Of course, the colour historically associated with Prussia, and worn by its soldiers in Napoleonic times, was blue…

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    2. Ah, Prussian blue. I’ve been learning about that while taking lessons in oil painting. It looks beautiful on the canvas, but…well, let’s just say that after a full week of soaking in water for nine hours a day, I think I’ve finally gotten the last of the Prussian blue off my fingernails.

      I feel like there’s a analogy to be drawn there, but I’m far too tired to make it, so someone else will have to be clever in my place.

      Liked by 1 person

  17. Keep a close eye on the Australian state of Victoria , for the equivalent story Down Under. Like California, they had (and still have) oil, gas, and an amazing amount of gold, a benign climate and an intelligent and industrious people. They have thrown it all away in a few years with the usual Blue insanities. Australia, like the US, has become a dual economy nation.

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    1. I was reading someone recently trying to come up with any fedgov agency that actually works competently. They proposed the US mint and the folks that print the currency – coins get made properly, and the printed bills are not slapdash and printed wrong on substandard paper with runny ink. That was all they came up with.

      Boeing is completely self inflicted – they decided to stop being a company that makes airplanes and spaceships while continuing to manufacture airplanes and spaceships. Airbus has its issues, but they are a company that makes airplanes. And obviously SpaceX is totally and completely a company that makes spaceships, with Starlink as a sideline that not only lets them iterate the launcher designs for reliability, but it also will generate simply enormous cashflow to fund the spaceship-making part.

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      1. The air-traffic control portion of the FAA. And the forecasting side of the Department of Commerce (both the weather.gov part and the Severe Storms Prediction Center.) Note that those are hands-on, specialized sections with real-world, life-and-death considerations. And even then, there’s some slack once you get into management.

        So that makes … three small sub-sections out of hundreds if not thousands?

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        1. Well, there are some places that I know mostly because they haven’t given me any money.

          I think that not giving me money might be the competent thing to do.

          So, perhaps they are competent.

          Federal government has a lot of slices, and it would be very difficult to have really reliable information about all of them.

          Forex, stuff like NARA and LOC, I haven’t dealt with beyond website.

          There are a lot of little military museums on various military bases, and it would actually be difficult to be familiar with all of those, as they are currently operated. At most, it might be feasible to be all ‘well, X years ago, when I visited Y…’

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  19. “It’s the idea that the government should take care of you. That you are dependent on it, and lesser-than.”

    Ah yes, the fundamental assumption of the modern elite and their sycophants. People are stupid. They must be controlled.

    In the modern era this principle has (inevitably) advanced to being people are so stupid they can’t even be told the truth, they must be fed a comforting lie lest they riot and burn civilization to the ground. Hence the modern media.

    And this is one of the reasons you see our little Nebula/Hugo friends getting SO upset by us Puppies -daring- to depart from the Narrative. To them, any departure means a Normie might read a heroic story and wake up next morning Off Narrative. Mr Normie might be displeased and take out his temper on a visible minority! Because we Puppies disrupted the thing that was CONTROLLING that fool.

    When you talk to them, this is what they say. It is why they freak the f- out when you say the words “self defense.” People are STUPID! You can’t trust them with self defense! Are you insane?!

    Sadly for our poor little friends of the Left, the modern elites have moved on from lying for fun and profit as they did in the 19th Century and perfected in the mid-20th Century with radio and later television. Now the lies are a Greater Truth you know. Unless you put a trans character in your SF story a child will die somewhere. Or a puppy. They don’t really care much about children at this point, dogs get more sympathy.

    What’s sad is that the lies can’t be supported anymore. They’ve gone too far. Way too far. I’m going to say the sweet-spot for lying was roughly the Korean War. After that, Vietnam, the Normies started to wander off-script. But not too far off, as witnessed by the rich continuing to get richer. That kept working, but resentment began to build.

    Now we have a smartphone in everybody’s pocket that is nothing less than a tiny little television studio that can broadcast world-wide. We get to see Thomas Crooks -running- across the roof of the building in plain sight, visible as a lady bug on a white tablecloth. So, now we -know- that the reason we’re seeing nothing but Thomas Crooks’ fricking high school class photo all over internet search is that The Elites, whoever they are, are lying. About everything. Really just flat lying, and doing it badly.

    In England they have a bigger problem even than that, their two-tier police response is being broadcast to the world. The Prime Minister of the UK is literally threatening people publicly for calling his government’s response Two-Tier Policing, while there are hundreds of videos of the cops pounding whites and arresting them while -allowing- migrants to attack passersby with machetes. Even the bought-and-paid-for media are forced to mention it.

    In the kingdom of lies, the truth is most dangerous thing imaginable. You take a video of what happened, you post it unedited, and the freakin’ Prime Minister threatens you on the news. Like, you personally.

    What’s going to happen when the Normies break out the bouncy castles I wonder? “Hi, we’re having a traditional English breakfast downtown in Trafalgar Square, all of us, and we’re not leaving. Oh, and we’re filming the machete attacks as well. Your move, elites.”

    In Canada the response was an illegal application of the War Measures Act, conveniently re-named the “Emergencies Act” for propaganda purposes, and conveniently not declared illegal until several years later. The fallout from that farce has not stopped falling even now, half the pickup trucks around here have a “F*CK TRUDEAU!” sticker on them.

    Even the people who still believe in The Experts and still love Big Brother are being forced to accept that they’re being lied to high, wide and handsome, and obviously not for their own good. I expect they don’t like it. How long will they eat the poisoned pablum without complaint, I wonder?

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    2. Two-Tier Keir was a brilliant coinage. Herr Starmer, and calling the English police “Starntroopers,” are both too close to other things and might get a reflexive “that’s too far,” but Two-Tier Keir just points out the truth.

      Which is why he’s fighting it so rabidly. As are some of the police leadership. (I used to read English police bloggers, back before everything really went to [BLEEP], and watched as the good ones closed shop and retired, emigrated, or yes.)

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    3. And news can be recorded and released on a cell phone via X in seconds.

      Gruesomely confirmed by cellphone footage of a plane crash in Brazil. Plane just fell out of the sky. Probably no survivors.

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      1. No survivors. Confirmed 61, entire plane, died. No news on any ground deaths given plane flat spin into the ground in a neighborhood.

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      2. Voepass ATR-72, 62 onboard, all dead. Spun in from 17,000 feet. Initial thoughts as to the cause are icing, apparently there was a warning for severe icing in the area from 12,000 to 21,000 feet altitude and the ATR-72 has had at least one fatal crash before (American Eagle 4184) due to icing causing a loss of control and spin with inability to recover.

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  20. I see the blue model in my wife … she is French and is very much a self made woman … pulled herself up from nothing … but she is always saying things like “well I went to very good schools, but if I ever wanted to be in Government I would have needed to go to school X” … everytime there is the slightest problem she just assumes that its becasue the “government” just didn’t have a law in place to prevent it … even when its the Government that is creating the problem … the French claim to be all about freedom but you soon realize its defined as “the freedom to do whatever the government says you can do” …

    She has constantly been shocked by the “lack of rules” in the US (right … she looks at me sideways when I say we have TOO MANY rules)

    even during Covid when I would point out that the French Government was lying you her face she would say “it must be worse than we think and they are protecting us by lying” … wouldn’t want people to panic …

    The funny thing is, while she voted for Marcon she has always said “there is not something right in his eyes, I don’t really trust him” …

    and because the French are FAMOUS for complaining it gives the Government tons of opportunities to “promise” to fix everything and run your life for you … its sad really …

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  21. California is at the point that they are no trying to undue what they have done and facing backlash from their own radicals. People went from cheering for a mandatory higher wage to not having any restaurants open and no place to buy food at a store that hasn’t been looted at least once. That is if you don’t get carjacked on the way to the grocery store, and the food is still good because the power grid failed, again. Your rent just doubled and your kid get can’t get a job because everyone knows only Mexicans want to work. Besides it’s easy to not have to pay all the health benefits and other taxes involved with employment. You are afraid to leave the house because you fear nothing will be left when you return. And God help it if you go to a hospital because they are full of illegals and you’re getting charged four times what you should be because illegals don’t pay their bills. It is the same in most blue cities, I once heard a lefty complain that ‘Gun Nuts” wanted to turn the city streets into Dodge city’. I love it, because Bitch, your liberal policies have already done that. Chicago alone in one year has more shooting then every year in Dodge City, ever. It is the same in every Liberal Enclave anywhere. And we can see it, and the Liberals lie and lie all the while the minorities and the illegals they consider their slaves Die in droves to keep them in power. A pox on their ghastly souls, and a prayer for the innocent, and innocent victims.
    Keep your powder dry.

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