From The Get Go

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I had no clue what USAID was. Like perhaps most people, I thought it was a way for the US to do “charity” abroad.

I had a ton of philosophical problems with it, obviously. For one, I don’t know what the purpose of a government, which takes money from is own people via taxes, but foreign charity is not it. I mean, there’s nothing in our constitution that says the Federal government has the right to take our money and do stuff they consider good abroad, for any purpose, including because they think it someone obscurely benefits us.

For another, because I have noticed for a long time now, that everything the left does abroad is something that will benefit someone else, and preferably is bad for us. Everything including war, the left does for the benefit of someone else. And they like it better if it’s bad for us.

So, on those principles, I disapproved of USAID. But even I was shocked when the full can of worms was open, and they all came crawling out. First because I didn’t know the amounts of money they’d spent in the US and there are things like the fact they funded the Tides Foundation which in turn funded BLM — meaning in essence we paid in taxes to have our own cities burned — which just stick in my craw. But then…. then i found out how it was founded, and why.

Apparently having read The Ugly American JFK was so impressed by it, he started USAID to do good abroad and that way counter the efforts of the Soviet Union.

That sound you hear coming through the monitor is the sound of my hitting my head on the desk, really, really hard.

Note, I don’t have any proof of the theory I’m about to lay out. But at the same time knowing the people involved and the time involved I don’t think there is any way this didn’t go the way I deduce it went. In fact, it is almost inevitable.

So, when JFK funded USAID, I don’t think he intended as a slush fund for corruption.

I think he actually intended it as he said he did: as an agency that would do good abroad, and which would by showing how caring and respectful of other cultures they were, and well, giving them bunches of money.

Now please remember that while JFK was “anti-communist” for his time, that just meant he was against USSR type communism, but he was — EVERYONE IN POLITICS WAS AT THE TIME, including Republicans — convinced the victory of communism was inevitable, because planned economies were so much better and after all they had no poverty or unemployment or– excuse me, I need to pour mind cleaner into my ear. How could they not have realized that what they thought they knew about the USSR was just the cooked data of a totalitarian system. Sometimes I wonder what was going on in their heads.

Anyway given that, it is almost an inevitable step that the “causes” they were helping was what the USSR too would have viewed as needing to be helped.

In fact, I suspect — though I have no proof, but I wonder if some of you could get it? — that a lot of its early work amounted to “community organizing” for the leftists abroad. Guns and proto-revolutionary groups in South America given money. African groups fighting against “colonialism” and bringing in the Soviet Union. you know, that kind of thing.

Guys, if I am correct, not only did our tax money go to pay for people to burn our cities, but our parents and grandparents paid to subsidize the cause of international communism.

It makes one wonder how much less painful the cold war would have been if we hadn’t been financing it, doesn’t it?

(It also makes me wonder, because at this point I’m a suspicious b*tch if those two authors were incentivized to write that book about the ahem relative cultural sensitivity of the Soviets (coo-eee!) and how we needed this sort of thing, and how that book got hyper pushed to be so big. Of note, for something that was a smashing bestseller, I not only never read it, but it wasn’t even mentioned in my American Culture or American Literature classes abroad. In other words, was it a planted piece of propaganda to manipulate our Glitterati president? Maybe I’m too conspiracy minded, but having seen that kind of play in our day, I do wonder. Don’t you? Maybe one of you has read it and will tell me it’s a piece of transcendent prose, who knows?)

So when did we go from funding international communism to communism at home? I suspect we always funded some communism at home. Oh, sorry “progressive causes.” It is the nature of the beast that people who ran this were educated in the “best universities” where they drank deep of Marxist bullshit, so they’d see a crying need for it at home, in order to bring about the inevitable utopia a little sooner.

But my guess is when it became actively poisonous and turned against this country specifically was when the Soviet Union fell.

It’s the last time I remember seeing the left in as much disarray as the last three weeks They really had thought the Soviet Union was Wonnerful, you know, even if it wasn’t. What I mean is, even if it was less prosperous, they thought it was more just and its triumph was inevitable, and they’d get to be komissars, anyway. And then it fell and was revealed, as all communist nations, as an ugly, corrupt kleptocracy.

For a moment there, a year? two? It looked like the left would give up. Only they couldn’t. Too many years devoted to hating the West to admit they were wrong. Too much of their identities tied to their grand leftist plan which made them both “smarter” and “more caring” than their neighbors.

Since they were at the helm of USAID, I bet you they immediately turned to financing things like the green movement (watermelons all) and weaponized feminism, and racial division, and and– Basically all the things we now know they were funding and puppeteering.

Which is why communism didn’t die, but instead encysted itself in our intellectual institutions, our universities, our arts, our news.

I wonder how much will remain without it, and if we’ll finally see the de-communistification of the West which we should have seen when the Soviet Union fell.

It’s a hope, isn’t it?

And no, USAID is not the largest nor the greatest disbursement of our funds to the cause of leftist subversion and hatred of the West at home and abroad.

BUT it is the one I suspect has been fighting against us from day one of its implementation. No wonder the left is screaming like stuck pigs at the money flow being stopped.

Once more I wish to apologize to the young lady whose name I don’t even remember, who came to a Huns dinner at Pete’s and insisted that the left was mostly left for pay. I thought she was exaggerating. I was wrong.

Of course, I don’t know where this will end, but for now, for right now, it’s like watching the wall come down all over again. And I intend to be right here, and help bring it down. (Pass me the hammer, friend.)

At the same time we, all of us, need to turn our minds and hands to building over, building under and building around. Because you know d*mn well that these people have hidden the few worthy things they do — feeding the occasional child, or vaccinating against malaria, or what have you — amid flows of subversive and corrupt money.

Eric S. Raymond called it the Hostage Puppy strategy, in which you don’t dare cut the vast amounts of waste and fraud, because then you’ll hurt the little puppy they’re also providing for.

It’s not a valid strategy, besides being morally repugnant: the equivalent of what the Hamass does when they place terror tunnels and ammo depots underneath hospitals and kindergartens. But the puppies still need to be fed. And these evil people have strangled all the charities that used to do it.

So, there will be a great realignment and things will be taken care of, eventually, just in another shape. Meanwhile look after each other and those you can help.

And continue to break pieces off the wall of bullshit that has encased us all. At least in terms of explaining what’s actually going on for the public at large. The Doge guys can’t do it all.

Put your back into it. For the first time in my entire life victory is possible.

Be not afraid. In the end we win, they lose.

And how.

P.S. Website note from Holly the Assistant: Huns, we are quite aware that WPDE has been stupidly updating, and thank you for your efforts to inform us. There is not a darn thing the webmaster can do to fix commenting at this time: WPDE screwed up their code, and they are going to have to fix it. Sometimes it works on some browsers, sometimes it does not. Please possess your souls in patience, and we’ll look forward to seeing your insights when WPDE gets their code working again.

117 thoughts on “From The Get Go”

    1. F F F what? F USAID? F the commies? F it all? :-P

      I find that dragging text in from outside the reply window ‘primes’ it so that I can type more text in normally.

      Like

  4. OK, WP is still screwy. Works in private mode if I paste something.

    Kurt Schlichter with some encouraging words about the various bullshit court decisions and how he thinks the Supremes are going to deal with them.

    From The Get Go

    Like

  5. OK, WP is still screwy. Works in private mode if I paste something.

    Kurt Schlichter with some encouraging words about the various bullshit court decisions and how he thinks the Supremes are going to deal with them.

    From The Get Go

    Liked by 1 person

    1. “Double your pleasure, double your fun, double your flavor(?) with Doublemint gum.”

      Double posts courtesy WordPress (Delenda Est).

      Liked by 2 people

    2. “Double your pleasure, double your fun, double your flavor(?) with Doublemint gum.”

      Double posts courtesy WordPress (Delenda Est).

      Liked by 1 person

  6. Hostage Puppies my purple buttuska! Ham-ass is holding people hostage and claiming that they can’t keep them safe while the Israeli army is there. Latest I saw was that they weren’t going to release anymore hostages unless Israel pulls back even further.

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      1. President Trump said during the co-press interview with the King of Jordon that “Hamas has until (this) Saturday to release all the surviving hostages,” implied “or face consequences”. He is done with the “slow releases”. Given the conditions of the released hostages, the remaining hostages are dying or dead. Quotes may not be entirely accurate, but close. Given this support, I doubt Israel will pull back more.

        Liked by 2 people

          1. They are being smart, too. Hegseth ordered renaming of Fort “Liberty” back to Ft. Bragg, but he renamed it after a different Bragg fellow, totally not the Civil War Confederate, but instead U.S. Army paratrooper Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, who did hero stuff during the Battle of the Bulge. Can’t whine about that, now, can one?

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  9. The Ugly American was not a transcendent piece of prose. But it did describe the behavior of a certain strain of Americans often found in countries where the US had a strong footprint. The Reader saw it first hand in the 1960s in Spain, where the US presence was far larger than most people realize (including B52s on nuclear alert at an Air Force base outside of Madrid). The Reader’s father was in charge of a field engineering group installing a comms system for the Navy near Alicante (http://www.navy-radio.com/commsta/guardamar.htm). At one point, 2 members of his staff had to be bailed out of a Spanish jail for being ugly Americans (the Reader knows this because he was taken along in the middle of the night because his father’s Spanish wasn’t that good). Dad promptly sent them home on the next plane. The Reader never took the moral of the book to be more than you’re a guest in another country. Behave like it.

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          1. “Better” was “getting better press”. JFK wanted counterprogramming for the “glorious gift from the generous Soviet people” stories the USSR was generating in the contested world, which The Foggy Bottom Boys were not giving him.

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    1. It did. So, the new trick from WP (DE) for WRITING posts is that if I try to backtrack by deleting a letter because I realized it needs to be capitalized, it deletes an arbitrary number of paragraphs. Sometimes, when control zing, I don’t get back all of it and don’t realize.

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        1. That’s why I always read the “check text” that shows when I have to give my password; I’ve caught some bizarre problems that way.

          BTW, this “compose in Notepad and copy/paste in the box” works, but I think it will get old real fast.😒

          Liked by 1 person

  11. If I am recalling correctly, the character of the “Ugly American” in the novel was actually just physically unattractive – he was actually a good guy, trying to do a good deed in a southeast Asian country with a strong resemblance to Vietnam.
    But it did become a kind of shorthand for “Americans Behaving Badly In A Foreign Country” – especially if they were there in some kind of official capacity.
    I’m not at all surprised that your guest at a dinner at Pete’s was convinced that lefty activists were paid-for-leftists. I will never forget the go round with another contributor on Open Salon who was absolutely convinced that the Tea Party local groups were all bought and paid for by some Big Daddy Conservative Warbucks – against everything that I told her, from personal observation of a local Tea Party organization.
    (Trying an experiment – writing this comment in Word, and copy-and-paste…)

    Liked by 1 person

    2. It worked, which sort of surprises me, Word not being a plain-text editor like Notepad. Maybe the processor formatting doesn’t affect the viewable text, and only happens on “Save”? I know if I try to open a Word document in Notepad it is not readable text.

      Like

  12. Random bits for a test

    ESR didn’t originate “hostage puppies,” he just gleefully adopted it on first sight.

    The State Department and its diplomacy did and does deserve a thorough skewering, but Keith Laumer did it better in his Retief stories. (Which he claimed were Not Exaggerations)

    There was a change in the Left in the late 1960s/early 1970s away from “Socialism, communism, and economic planning will give us a better brighter future!” to “Learn to live with less, you evil greedy bastards!” Because it was then beginning to sink in that socialism was better at producing poverty & misery – and therefore poverty & misery must be GOOD things, with the prosperity that old horse-and-buggy mostly-free markets produced being EVIL. But yeah, the “extra outrage” button was mashed by the Left after the fall of the USSR.
    apparently I can post – once – if I clear cache and cookies

    Liked by 1 person

      1. The idea that poverty is virtuous goes back a long way. Dante used it (he inserts a hagiography of St. Francis in his, “Paradise,” focuses almost completely on Francis’ life-long love of the Lady Poverty), and he cites classical sources in the process.

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          1. I submit that ‘voluntary sacrifice’ is a contradiction in terms. That, given a choice, we always choose what we value the most. Since no one can have everything, we must pass up some things to obtain others we value more.

            Our choices may be constrained by external factors, but we always choose what we value most of those available.

            Donating to The Poor gives the donors something they value more than the money. Indulging their compassion, regard of their peers, public adulation, or, for Leftroids, virtue signaling and a smug sense of self-righteous satisfaction. “I gave to The Poor, so I’m a Good Person.” Problem is, they get the same high from donating other people’s money to The Poor, even if they have to take it by force.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Just because we like one thing doesn’t mean we don’t like another. It’s a sacrifice to give up something you want even for something better. It’s when you don’t like the other thing that it’s not a sacrifice.

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        2. The Franciscan idea was to maximize evangelism/preaching, minimize administration, and do a lot of begging for the benefit of the non-friar poor as well as for the friars. In exchange, donor benefactors could do good works and support evangelism/preaching.

          His other idea was that “Lady Poverty” helped Franciscans stay detached from the world and attached to God, because voluntary begging for subsistence was all about trusting God.

          St. Francis did not believe that everybody should live poor; it was part of the Franciscan vocation but not that of other people. He was okay with sleeping in rags in the grass; but he was also rebuilding and renovating churches and making sure that they had vessels and vestments of the best quality.

          Helping the involuntary poor climb out of poverty and other difficulties was part of the Franciscan mission, too. And those who have wealth were supposed to steward it wisely, using it to serve God who gave them the ability to be rich.

          Liked by 1 person

    2. “…Keith Laumer did it better in his Retief stories…”

      Yep, and Piper did it pretty well in “Lone Star Planet” (or “A Planet for Texans”). I especially liked the rules for whether killing a politician was murder… 😉

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    3. ESR didn’t originate “hostage puppies,” he just gleefully adopted it on first sight.

      It was Perry Metzger. With ESR and Sarah and others pushing it immediately as being an obviously good neologism.

      Liked by 1 person

  13. Random bits for a test

    ESR didn’t originate “hostage puppies,” he just gleefully adopted it on first sight.

    The State Department and its diplomacy did and does deserve a thorough skewering, but Keith Laumer did it better in his Retief stories. (Which he claimed were Not Exaggerations)

    There was a change in the Left in the late 1960s/early 1970s away from “Socialism, communism, and economic planning will give us a better brighter future!” to “Learn to live with less, you evil greedy bastards!” Because it was then beginning to sink in that socialism was better at producing poverty & misery – and therefore poverty & misery must be GOOD things, with the prosperity that old horse-and-buggy mostly-free markets produced being EVIL. But yeah, the “extra outrage” button was mashed by the Left after the fall of the USSR.
    apparently I can post – once – if I clear cache and cookies

    Like

  14. It makes one wonder how much less painful the cold war would have been if we hadn’t been financing it, doesn’t it?

    It reinforces my belief the Cold War was a fraud, especially post the death of Stalin.

    We kept our enemy afloat and expended treasure to help him fight us. Then we spent a ton on domestic industry that made a lot of people very rich to oppose what we were funding overseas.

    And tossed whole America lives in places like Vietnam away for that profit and the youths of even more Americans wasted poking holes in the Atlantic or digging holes in Germany and Korea.

    Not to mention not funding going to Mars and beyond.

    But the military industrial complex couldn’t figure out how to make millions going to Mars. They could figure out how to make millions on new fighters and tanks and ships because every year the Soviets had something better than anything we had then and we must have a crash program.

    Only to find every time that ship or plane or tank of the future was inferior to what the US already had.

    The classic example is the MiG-25 Foxbat which inspired crash programs to create the F-15 and F-16 only to be found when a pilot defected with one that flying at the advertised top speed shredded the engine, the avionics were two generations behind the US, and the huge winds that supposedly gave unprecedented maneuverability were to kept it aloft given its weight.

    I was defrauded out of my 20s and I am not amused.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. It reinforces my belief the Cold War was a fraud, especially post the death of Stalin.

      –

      Always was. Soviet Union got the bomb courtesy of FDR along with the tools to update their tech via Lend-Lease program. Plus that enable them to export their nasty world wide. With the encouragement of the Blob.

      And the Blob modernized China to their current state.

      And enabled the cartels.

      And funded dozens of color revolutions.

      And thousands of corrupt Ukrainians spend your money while avoiding war.

      Stuck 30 Trillion offshore.

      And so on and so on..

      Most everything currently bad or corrupted was encouraged or funded in some way or form through our tax payer dollars or TLAs.

      You do not want the details. It’s worse than you can imagined. You couldn’t make up this ordure if you overdosed on mushrooms while prompting an AI trained on the works of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

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      1. Not a fraud as in “they didn’t really want to kill us and take our stuff, it was all a lie to impugn the peace-loving Soviet people, if the west had just surrendered everything would all have been paradise”. We just had folks in our government actively working to help the other side.

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      2. Much of that – up to the 1964 publication date, anyway – was covered by John Stormer in “None Dare Call It Treason,” where he went into exhaustive detail, with references, about how the USA was supporting the USSR and its Warsaw Pact satellites. Food, steel mills, credit, technology… it just goes on and on.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. But… the F-15 is totally awesome! The F-16 is only moderately awesome. And even 50 years later, the only planes that can match the F-15 are also ours. So I wouldn’t call the money completely wasted.

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      1. No, but it stems from one of many “oh noes, the Soviets have leapfrogged us again that we must have a crash program” that were so common in the Cold War.

        If it had been a “thirty year fighter” project that would be one thing. That it was a panic project was something else.

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    3. The MiG-25 (NATO code name Foxbat) was a crash program reaction to the capabilities of the XB-70 Valkyrie as well as various programs to arm SR-71 variants, which the Soviets believed could use powerful onboard jamming to get past their existing SAMs, and were far to fast for MiG-21 or MiG-23 to catch. The -25 was fast enough (once) to intercept something penetrating Soviet airspace that fast, had monster-powerful tube-based radar to burn through that jamming, and four missiles, two radar guided and two IR, to kill one supersonic bomber each.

      It was just good enough.

      The fact that the Foxbat reveal at one of the Mayday parades was such a complete shock to western IC folks, and then the Foxbat reconnaissance version showed uninterceptable flying over Israel outrunning IAF Phantoms, led to the concept of “Air Superiority Fighter”, throwing away the “carries bombs too” stuff that the Phantom evolved into, and the result was the F-15.

      Intel that those Foxbats had to have both engines changed after they landed in Egypt was discounted.

      The fact that the F-15 eventually itself evolved into a solid bomb-hauler in the Strike Eagle was in spite of that initial design philosophy.

      But the back and forth, reaction and counter-reaction, was not solely a western thing.

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  15. It’s not a valid strategy, besides being morally repugnant: the equivalent of what the Hamass does when they place terror tunnels and ammo depots underneath hospitals and kindergartens. 

    You give them too much credit. They aren’t using the strategy of Hamass but of National Lampoon.

    Liked by 1 person

  16. WPDE fun this morning, as I currently can’t comment at all via any browser on the latest iPadOS. This is an attempt on Jetpack, so we’ll see if it goes through.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. The thing about urban heat island effects worked in the browser (Safari) but It Only Works Once. This is via the WP notifications page, and Jetpack is working as well.

        Like

    3. I’ve found a few variations of posting that work (for me, without a WP login).
      First, I grab some text (a few letters will do it), paste into the window, then backspace the gubbage out, at which point the envelope shows with previous data.

      This evening’s version is on standard Pale Moon. If I haven’t gotten beyond the popup for the follow/subscription offer, I’ll skip it. I think hitting the “continue reading” generates the double post. We’ll see.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. No popup (disappears after some number of comments, and I never counted), and apparently no double post. Ta dah!

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  17. You can probably place the start of communism between the end of the First American Civil War and the Haymarket Bombing in Chicago in 1886 by various pro-labor groups. Certainly that’s enough time for the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, to make its way into America. The American labor movements in the late 19th century were ripe for grabbing Marxist concepts.

    And you can basically say the Anarchist movement of the early 1900s was joined with them at the hip. (The McKinley assassin, while interested in anarchism, was also highly influenced by his loss of a job in a labor dispute.) Now labor and academia didn’t exactly hobnob together in 1901, but you can pretty much guarantee that communism was making major inroads in colleges and universities by the time the October Revolution occurred in 1917; which is where I’d put a pin in for the latest date that it started.

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    1. Good of them to self-identify as idiots, I suppose. :-P

      Unfortunately, they project an impenetrable assumption that they’re smarter than everybody else, which has subliminal effects on people who don’t consider themselves ‘intellectual’. They doubt themselves. “If those Really Smart People Believe in communism, maybe it’s not the utter rot it seems to be?”

      Liked by 1 person

        1. If I had a time machine, I would gladly put a bullet in every one of them. They kidnapped and murdered a great uncle, tried to do the same (with a little rape along the way) to a great aunt, knifed and beat my great grandfather for denouncing them after McKinley’s assassination. Come to think of it, they were obviously listening to the same devil/demon that Hamas has been obeying.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. They still identify as anarchists; look at the “anarchists” who trashed cities like Seattle and Portland in the 1990s protesting economic conferences. They are the people who became “Antifa” which was the actual name used by German Communists battling the Nazis in the 1930. Antifa’s actual ideology is of course outright communist.

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  19. American academia was deeply infected with Marxism (both CPUSA and its “heretical” offshoots, like Trotskyism) between about 1920 and 1947 or so. After WWI, a lot of people desperately wanted to believe in “something better,” and the USSR seemed (from the outside, or to people on carefully chaperoned guided tours, with no knowledge of the language) to be that “something better.”

    Liked by 1 person

  20. I read “The Ugly American” as a teen, and was vaguely ashamed at our loud, crass American culture.

    Then I visited South Korea as a young adult, and while contemplating a beautiful temple, I heard a whole flock of Americans coming up the path behind me. They were noisy. They commented on everything. They conversed about the terrain, the flowers, the rusted metal hoops set in the stone where prisoners would await their fate. They were glorious. They didn’t have to be quiet and hushed. They were free Americans, and they acted like it.

    I reject the “Ugly American,” and all the globalists who want us to be bowed, beaten, gunless, and quiet. HA! I say, very loudly and boisterously. NOPE!

    Liked by 3 people

    1. “Carefully guided tours” and Potemkin villages were firmly embedded in Russian culture before the best part of Marx was wiped off on the sheet.

      BTW, WP accepted typing in the comment block; no copy/paste required! Woo-hoo!

      Liked by 1 person

      2. Not just villages. IIRC, after leaving the Continental Navy, John Paul Jones was hired by the Russians to serve as the admiral of a potemkin fleet.

        I don’t know the details. AFAIK, the hiring was legitimate. I suspect the money that was supposed to have been spent on warships was embezzled, instead, without notifying the Imperial government.

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        1. A-a-a-nd we’re back to the “compose and copy/paste” routine. I also have to reload the page, then click “Leave Page” in the box that pops up, after a failed attempt to type in the box or even copy/paste doesn’t work.

          Aarggghhh!

          That said, I vaguely recall that about John Paul Jones. But my intended point was that “faking it” has a long history in Russia; I suspect it’s even longer in China.

          Liked by 1 person

      3. La Russie en 1839 by the Marquis de Custine can be instructive in this regard. He rejoiced on his return to the level of freedom found in Prussia.

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    3. In Florence 40+ years ago, on my own though part of a tour. Saw a tour group of Japanese tourists. When the guide pointed out the church of St. John (Dante’s church, but I wasn’t a Dante fan then. Darn it), every member of the group raised his or her camera to exactly the same angle and took exactly the same photo. Then they were off to the next spot.

      I’m still amused.

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  21. JFK had the hots for all sorts of “unconventional warfare” – he really liked the OSS-descended operations side of CIA, well, before they burned him with the Bay of Pigs (which by all accounts he thought was them being too “conventional” with the large scale invasion – he liked the little covert stuff even afterwards), he set up the U.S. Army Green Beanies to do the hearts-and-minds thing contra “Big Army”, and he set up USAID in contrast to the already-existent foreign aid structure that the Foggy Bottom Boys ran.

    Not sure any of those ever had any huge successes after 1961ish.

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  22.  How could they not have realized that what they thought they knew about the USSR was just the cooked data of a totalitarian system. Sometimes I wonder what was going on in their heads.

    Because it was science.

    I’m aware that’s a stupid reason, but that’s the concise reason why they didn’t question the numbers.

    It’s like how we get startled and horrified when a study comes out and we realize they just flat made up numbers. Not even, like, manipulated them– but flat out made stuff up.

    We still have this problem, where “I have numbers” stats just get trusted, without figuring where they were collected or by whom or… anything.

    Heck, part of why I don’t trust the anthro theory of global warming is because I know they use the forest service fire spotter records. As a scientist, I know they were using standard thermometers, probably mercury given the dates.

    As someone whose mom did smoke-watch, and most of her friends did smoke-watch, I know that one of the reasons mom would go visit on specific days was to go help fill out the temperature records. They absolutely did not accurately record the data, even to the plus or minus five degree accuracy of a standard weather thermometer.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I suspect there is also a layer to it that honest people don’t really look for the lies, normally. If the world you operate in is fundamentally trustworthy, spending all your time testing everything for falsehoods just wasted everyone’s time and energy.

      Condition Yellow has cost.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. Add on “urban heat island” effects, where the environment of the temperature shelter box was once out in the rural countryside in open fields over dirt and is now an asphalt parking lot surrounded by buildings and parked cars, and hey presto it’s warmer now.

      There’s an effort online to document current measurement site surroundings where the original placement records are available, and look at the effects of changes, and oddly the sites that are more roughly similar show the least warmening over time.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Did they only record temperatures they directly observed, or did they ‘pencil-whip’ the days they weren’t there, too? “Gee, yesterday was about the same as today, maybe a little warmer, so I’ll just fill in my best guess.”

      “Trust The Science! Trust the Experts!” we are told all our lives; they never mention that most of The Experts! either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are flat-out lying to us. “They only sound stupid to you because you’re not as Educated as they are!” with a bit of “Nobody would tell such outrageous lies, would they?”

      But they do. They do.

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      1. They were there all the days recorded, they just didn’t actually write it down, because it was stupid make-work that did nothing but generate paperwork.
        You might even have stuff that was your actual job to do at the time you supposedly were taking temperatures.

        So… a lot of days got missed, and had to be made up.

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      2. “Trust The Science! Trust the Experts!” we are told all our lives; they never mention that most of The Experts! either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are flat-out lying to us.

        That’s not usually the problem.

        It’s that garbage in gives garbage out, and a lot of the data doesn’t have degree of accuracy calculated in.

        Liked by 1 person

  23. Here richly with ridiculous display

    The politician’s corpse was laid away.

    While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged

    I wept; for I had longed to see him hanged

    Hilliare Belloc

    Liked by 1 person

  24. I have just learned my retirement paperwork is stored 230 feet underground in a Pennsylvania limestone mine, in a Manila folder stored in a cardboard box.

    What the ever-loving–?

    Liked by 2 people

          1. It’s nice that they have a surface location to resolve all the retirement disputes.

            Perhaps they use boat races as the mechanism. Of bass fishing contests.

            Like

          2. No longer accurate – Elan has the Stargate down in Boca Chica, in the building with the big “Stargate” sign on it:

            Like

            2. And for doubters: Starship (second stage) is 29.5 feet (9 meters in the obscure French system) in diameter, while a Stargate is only 22 feet (6.7056m) outside diameter, so it will fit nicely on board.

              Coincidence? I think not.

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              1. Sounds like that old scifi board game “Web and Starship”. Foe#1 has FTL but no portals. Foe#2 has STL ships but portals with unlimited transfer. Earth is primitive, expands rapidly, and can use both.

                I recall it being a fairly decent 3 player game, too.

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          3. Iron Mountain – They took over an old mined-out limestone quarry and turned it into super secure storage. You can vault old fashioned backup tapes with them, or rent bunker space. The place is effectively bombproof, below muti-megaton repeat hits for excavation. At one early point, key parts of Congress would have evacuated there. Neat firm. They now have storage facilities all over the place for what amounts to safety deposit box storage or tape vaulting.

            Federal pensions all process through filing cabinets there. Retirement throughput is limited by the speed of seeker and elevator in the old mine. Three were several badly-failed attempts to upgrade.

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  25. > So when did we go from funding international communism to communism at home? I suspect we always funded some communism at home.

    FDR’s administration enacted most of Lenin’s Communist platform.

    My personal theory is “maybe they will let us rule as puppets after they take over.”

    Liked by 1 person

  26. > So when did we go from funding international communism to communism at home? I suspect we always funded some communism at home.

    FDR’s administration enacted most of Lenin’s Communist platform.

    My personal theory is “maybe they will let us rule as puppets after they take over.”

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Let us see. Typed in normally. Reply button turned on. I’m not going to trigger the popup.

      If this looks normal, it’s working even on Pale Moon.

      Like

  28. My father hated practicing law, so he joined the new agency of USAID in 1966, and our family spent the next 9 years living in interesting Third World places at a level of luxury we could never have afforded in these United States (admittedly, without access to certain consumer goods and entertainments). But at the time, the USAID mission was always about sponsoring industry and medicine in poor countries, even though too often the medical focus was on popularizing birth control. Basically, Dad and his team were bribing Brazil, Pakistan, and Peru not to become Soviet allies. (More recently, his successors were bribing Brazil to go Communist. Things change.) I used to understand what was going on….

    Liked by 1 person

    1. There was a time when US aid (not USAID) made one feel good to be American. Remember in the 1950s the hospital ship Hope pulling into ports with teams of doctors and surgeons treating anyone they could in each too brief stay.

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  31. Reminder that people whining about the age of the people working on Musk’s DOGE team are the same ones demanding that the world bow to the demands of a 13 year old on climate:

    Liked by 1 person

  33. Off topic. Apparently I’ve finally made it. First Sarah gives me an instalanche, now I get trolled for a post mocking the “anybody we don’t like who raises his hand is doing a Nazi salute” crowd. 11K views and lots of silly comments and counting.

    Like

  34. Counterpoint book to “The Ugly American” is “The Ugly Russian” by Victor Lasky, 1966, which lists quite a few examples of Soviet bungling as they were “saving” the world. Read this as a teenager, and it was one of the beginnings of my escape from hard Left upbringing.

    Liked by 1 person

  35. “Eric S. Raymond called it the Hostage Puppy strategy, in which you don’t dare cut the vast amounts of waste and fraud, because then you’ll hurt the little puppy they’re also providing for.”

    I’ve been hearing this often here in Canaduh. “You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater” is the common refrain, along with “but what about all the GOOD things government does?”

    This is what criminals say when you’ve caught them with their hand in the till to the shoulder. “But what about all the good work I do for you, boss?!”

    I’m willing to take the risk. If there is something worth saving, which I doubt, we can build it back later with all the money we’ll have that didn’t get stolen.

    Liked by 1 person

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