Study War No More

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Okay guys, just checking, but I think this is a case of “We are not the same.” And I think most of y’all will be with me.

If you were adventuring throughout the galaxy and you landed on a planet where people told you “oh, we no longer have wars or violence. We evolved past that.”

Would you

a) assume they’re superior beings?

b) get the hell out of dodge as far as your spaceship can carry you, before whoever has farmed these sheep comes to collect?

Because my answer is B with an extra “make sure I can’t be traced from here.”

As you probably can deduce, reading of this week’s “legacy sf” book is not going well. My kindle estimated 2 1/2 hours to read it, and it’s probably been that, in five minute increments, because it’s that long between “pshaw!”s. Yes, there will be a post about it, but for now this is just about one thing I stumbled on this morning.

That was … well, the setup is ancient aliens guiding humans. More on that later. But anyway, as the ancient aliens turned their back, the humans created atomic bombs. And used them for peaceful (?????) stuff like leveling mountains for engineering purposes (just keep on going.) But then a scientist created a super-bomb and was made minister of war and decided to attack the neighbors with it… Which meant humans weren’t evolved enough to blah blah blah….

Wait, let me give you the quote because it exemplifies the thought pattern so well:

“A generation passed during which time this dangerous invention was used only as a controlled explosive for building dams, destroying mountains, to divert the flow of rivers, etc. But one day a scientist drunk on power built A-bombs with the agreement of his government, which appointed him War Minister, he started a dreadful conflict. The conquered under the supervision of the conquerors pursued their own research no less secretly. We do not know exactly how it happened, but the fact is that 20 years later a new atomic war broke out. This time the two antagonists each had their A bombs and even hydrogen bombs. It was a cataclysm of unheard of violence.”


Jimmy Guieu, The Time Spiral

That sound you heard across the miles between us was me hitting my head on my desk repeatedly.

Look, this book is full of many, many bad ideas of the Alien Civilizers suborder. And again, we’ll go into why those rankle later. Much later.

That paragraph above though really got under my skin because unlike, say, the idea that evolution leads to more perfect and moral forms which is also in the book, it is very much still an European attitude.

Some of you are in various off-blog groups with me and have been unlucky enough in recent weeks to trigger rants about Europe, specifically about what my European relatives think is happening here and their refusal to believe my lying eyes might be better than their “best source” news in Europe. (Which, let me tell you, having heard the news on CNN international while I was there, it makes our plain, old Communist News Network seem right wing.)

I keep getting this sense that this is what families spread across Germany and the US must have felt like in the 30s, but I also realize that’s bs. That was more or less a narrative imposed during the war. Actually given our own shitheads (I’m looking at Woodrow Wilson, FDR etc.) our beliefs about good governance and how to organize a country — at least as propagated from the top. I’m sure American citizens were always different to an extent — weren’t that different. The big difference was Germany going on an invading rampage and also their bizarrely massive extermination program and its ethnic/religious overtones. (Look, we also sterilized and euthanized people. Leftists always do.) And for various reasons most people didn’t believe that was actually going on in Germany, so it wasn’t a point of contention for families across the Atlantic.

But now, the international leftist media complex has the bit between its teeth. In a bid to save its project of making us own nothing and eat bugs, they’re painting a picture of us abroad that doesn’t even have a vague, coincidental resemblance to us.

Yes, I do realize that due to our movies and people thinking they depict reality Europeans always thought that we engage in a minimum of a firefight a day, that all our places are as dangerous as the most dangerous areas of Chicago, etc.

Famously etched in my mind is the picture of being in a store with my mom a few years ago — having left a house that since I moved has acquired industrial strength steel shutters on every window, and bars on the lower level one, and taken the wheel, the stereo, etc. out of the car we parked — and hearing the lady said America sounds great but she couldn’t live with the crime and the danger.

At the time I lived in Colorado Springs, downtown, where I not only routinely forgot to lock my car (or my house) sometimes for days at a running, but one particularly crazy week left my purse in the car for a week, with the car unlocked. (Yes, I am aware you couldn’t dot hat now. Even before open borders, the provision of better and more comprehensive services to “homeless” had made the city a vagrant addict paradise and frankly it was getting dicey to walk alone downtown early morning or after dark. HOWEVER even then it was better than the good neighborhood in Portugal my mom lives in.)

So, yeah, it’s been like that for a long time, but now it’s deliberate and fairly insane. From what I gather, they think anyone who tans is at risk, that there are people marching in the streets with swastika armbands, and the country might not be safe for me and mine because of our — fairly unremarkable — Mediterranean appearance.

Also of course, Orange Man Bad hates Europe and loves Putin, and he’s just going to give Europe to Putin, and–

I can’t. I can’t even. I’ve started answering with “I remember when you were smart enough not to buy commie lies.” (Look, dudes, they think MACRON is right wing. They probably think Castreau is a conservative.)

BUT at the bottom of it, at the bottom of their puerile rage at Vance for telling them they have to defend themselves, at the center of their anger that we are telling them we will no longer send American boys to bleed for them, is the attitude about war.

Now, if you look at that bizarre paragraph above, you’ll understand why Europe thinks the way to prevent violence is to forbid the weapons. Because first they build atom bombs, and then a SCIENTIST is mad with power and uses them. Look, dudes, dudettes and dudissimos, this is not how government works in any sane country. I really don’t know about France — see sane — but in the US the only weapons scientists mad with power are allowed to deploy are biological and information control, and that’s because idiots didn’t see it coming.

No scientist in a nuclear lab ever said “Hey, I have a bomb! I’m going to use it to nuke South Nostrillia.” And most people don’t research/create/keep weapons, whether private or public because they twirl their mustaches, cackle evilly and think they will now have the power to kill others.

Even the bad guys don’t get weapons for that reason. They get weapons because some force, either mental or practical, makes them think they need them to defend from something, be it either mental “They’re going to get me, I have to get them first” or practical “I need money, they have money.”

The hierarchy is “Wanting to do something” and then getting the weapon, not the other way around.

Sane nations, yes, develop and stockpile the scariest weapons they can think of (but not biological, because we’re all human and that’s just stupid. Yes, I’m looking at you, China. You might think you’re a completely different and superior type of humanity, but really you’re just like us, and what kills us kills you. What you are in fact is eating rocks dumb for thinking you’d found a cheap shortcut to world supremacy.) And they let other nations know they have them. Because that keeps you relatively safe, and if you’re lucky in relative peace. Until that one nation or group is dumb enough to try sh*t.

Which is why the whole evolved and above it all theory that if you don’t have weapons there will be no war does not work, and makes China’s eating-rocks-stupidity seem like a flash of brilliance in the dark.

What it is ultimately is “If only everyone,” but applied to nations. “If only everyone gave up all their weapons, we wouldn’t’ have war.”

This is bullshit, because war comes from competition for scarce resources, from illusions of cultural supremacy, from dictatorships not being able to feed their own serfs without it, etc. etc. ad nauseum, up to and including the actually righteous “Well, we have to go and exterminate the Northern Anklians because they eat babies alive.” (And the number of times they actually did is shocking. And yes, the only way to destroy a culture that perverse is to exterminate it root and limb, because cultures have a life of their own.)

For all those reasons and some I can’t think of right now, humans will have war. And if they gave up all more advanced weapons, they’d fight with spears and knives. And if they gave up those they’d fight with rocks. And in the bizarre instance they lacked even those, they’d fight with teeth and nails.

The other is a fable for maiden aunts, (as Heinlein put it) and not very smart maiden aunts at that.

(Which is why the instance in the Bible requires a spiritual transformative event. Not confiscation of all books about war.)

The problem is Europeans really, really, really believe that war is always evil, that having weapons and a will to fight CAUSES war, that the military is inherently evil. That even a liking for military history or uniforms will bring about war.

I’m not actually joking that I was taught this in school in the seventies. Patriotism, plus a military mind set causes war.

This utter bullshit must have been very comforting when they didn’t want to face the actual stew of bad ideas, bizarre utupianism and misguided centralization of government, not to mention scientism and worship of “experts” that caused the long war of the twentieth century.

It must have been super comforting to think that now they had evolved past it. And if they didn’t mention the bad things, or own weapons, they would be safe.

Honestly, I suspect America too preferred they dreamed pacifist dreams so we didn’t have to come over and clean up their mess again.

But it was wrong. it was wrong for them, and it was wrong for us. Because it’s based on the “if only everyone” and never, in the history of ever, has everyone done something. If there were a shot invented tomorrow that made us perpetually healthy and young, not everyone would take it. If I tried to give away magic cornucopias that would be perpetually filled with whatever food you wanted to eat, not everyone would take them. If there was a button you could push that would ensure every child in the world was born healthy and beautiful, not everyone would push it.

Because never, in the history of ever, even in small groups has “everyone done x.”

Which means we’ve been protecting them from the bad actors, including those straddling their continent and Asia, while they made us their sin eaters and have lived in an idiot’s dream believing they’ve “evolved” past war and they’re naturally peaceful, not like us, the savages that we are.

Meanwhile their neighborhoods and cities turned into gangland, they were taken over by openly hostile invaders, and in response became more and more restrictive with the law abiding. I expect Great Britain to conduct a great search for nail files, and confiscate them next. (Oy, do you have a license for that nail file? You could put someone’s eye out with that, you could.) I’m only shocked they haven’t started declawing and de-teething their citizens. (Yet.)

However you need to understand they view their helpless state as superior, and look down on us as dangerous savages who live in a land of constant violence.

…. which is why they’re running in circles, trying to demonize Orange Man Bad to bring him down, because how very dare we say we won’t go die for them and protect them, and that it’s time they sharpen those nail files and buy some books about war.

Why do we want to make them savage barbarians like us? Don’t we know what they’re capable of? Think of all the wars they could start. Why, they might have to control themselves. Worse, they might have to face they are normal human beings and not some magical evolved species, beyond aggression, war and patriotism.

Meanwhile, we know very well what they’re capable of. We know what they do to their own citizens and expect announcements tomorrow that they’re serving live baby. We know that they might not embrace extreme nationalism, but their other extreme, non-functional isms, like socialism, are probably worse.

And we’re tired of abetting their dreams of superiority and their false Utopia.

And we found the most hurtful word in our vocabulary is “No.”

I’m a bad person. I want to keep saying it, over and over again.

222 thoughts on “Study War No More”

  1. Let’s not forget “Europe’s Greatest Hits.” Not in chronological order – the crusades, the inquisitions, two world wars, colonialisn, expansionism, and I haven’t even Googled yet. We could hit the character max.

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    1. Well, the crusades were a response to Islamic Holy Wars and Crimes against Christian Pilgrims in the Holy Land. [Wink]

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      1. The Crusades, the Reconquista, pretty much all the kinetic interactions between Christian Europe and The Religion of Submission up through to the Battle of Vienna, were the counterpoint actions in a thousand year long war of Religion of Submission aggression against Europe. If Charlie the Hammer had not stopped them at Tours in 732, they would have crunched through the Frankish kingdoms up to the channel and the Rhine. And those various Crusades were responses against the expansionist Islamic conquests of the longstanding (most 400 to 600 years) Christian kingdoms on that end of the Mediterranean.

        Sure, various things during various Crusades were badly done. The Sack of Constantinople being a glaring such thing. War is full of bad things, and dragging barely literate rural kniggets off in boats to strange foreign lands without robust adult supervision is a recipe for regret. But they were trying to stabilize the status quo that had been in place since the Romans stopped being pagan against a relentlessly expansionist implacable enemy, who had clearly demonstrated they didn’t;t just want Jerusalem, they wanted everything.

        The Crusades and all the other kinetically active interactions between Europe and the various caliphates have been blackwashed with an undeservedly bad rap.

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        1. I was surprised when I learned how LONG the Reconquista was. A 700 year long war? While I doubt it was constant (I know almost nothing about it), that’s still a very, very long time. The US is currently the oldest continuous government in the world at a mere 250 years. How does one sustain a war effort – even on-again/off-again – for 700 years?

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          1. Well, you start with a religion that literally classifies all non-believers as part of the “House of War”….

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          2. Oh yeah. Portugal was crusade land. They were taken back by FRENCH crusaders, who became the nobility.
            Incidentally this makes it impossible for me to read Dune. I grew up in too close a proximity to a knowledge of CULTURAL Islam. It’s not exotic or interesting. It’s “Nuke it from orbit.”

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          3. The US is currently the oldest continuous government in the world at a mere 250 years.

            The current US government was established in 1789; 236 years ago.

            It’s still the oldest government in the New World. I’m not sure about the Old World.

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    2. Of course, Europeans believe the nonsense about the Crusades which is why they’re willing to let the Muslims into Europe.

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    3. Please compare that to China, and South Asia/India, and the MesoAmericas. If you look at the rate of state-sponsored violence, you will see that it declines over time. And that the ideas of periods of truce, the value of the individual, not abusing power, and similar things grow stronger over time, something rarely found outside of Europe.

      China was colonialist. Islam is very colonialist, and both tended toward expansionism unless acted upon by outside forces or climatic slaps. Neither has decided that colonialism and expansionism are bad, yet.

      You are correct, European cultures were and are not perfect. Neither was nor is any culture that happens to have humans involved in it.

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      1. China had a civil war that was the second or third bloodiest war in human history, The Taipei rebellion. With estimated deaths of 20-30 million it overlaps with WW1’s estimated 15-22 million dead but both are well behind WW2’s 70-90 million.

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    4. The Thirty Year’s War should be on that list. It scared Europeans and not modern “oh noes” Europeans either but ones at the tail end of their wars of religion. A lot of modern “international law” and “rules of war” are a direct response to what was done in Germany during the fighting.

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      1. The 30 years’ War and the English Civil War were the nightmare memories of our Founding Fathers’ Grandsires. There are reasons the Founding Fathers eschewed religious tests and established State religion, and those two wars were strong amongst them. That there was a fair bit of ugliness in Connecticut/Massachusetts, which had Congregationalism as an established state religion, just added to the flames.

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        1. Yep. Odd fact, there are historical claims Cromwell made plans to leave for the American colonies in the 1630s but was prevented by the English government.

          If that is true the intervention might be one of the little, forgotten turning points of history.

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        2. The great antinomian controversy in Massachusetts was definitely influenced by how you needed to be a church member to vote.

          Then, after all, it was utopian in a way that the USSR did not even aspire to. They thought that they were literally the beginning of the millennium.

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      3. To me the 30 year war is merely the tail end of the 80 year war, which is the Dutch war of independence (1568 to 1648). One interesting tidbit is that the Dutch wrote a declaration of independence (look it up, “Act of Abjuration”) which looks in substance a whole lot like the US one, though in literary merit it can’t hold a candle to Jefferson’s amazing prose.

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  2. “The Aliens convinced Mankind to disarm and when Mankind did, the Aliens Conquered Earth. End Of Story.” [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]

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    2. Here’s a scenario that I would find more believable:

      The Aliens convinced Mankind to disarm and when Mankind did, the Aliens attacked. Mankind kicked the Aliens’ fourth point of contact from Earth to the Mutara Nebula. After the brief war, the prevailing sentiment on (and soon beyond) Earth was amusement at the Aliens’ gullibility:

      “How could a race intelligent enough to develop interstellar travel at useful speeds be so stupid that they thought that all of Mankind would disarm?”

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      2. Galactic Civilization is likely to discover that Humanity is somewhere between “Klingon” and “Posleen”, just more polite.

        …

        “The Terrieserfs did -WHAT-??”

        “Imperious One, The Terrieserfs saturation bombed Capitolus with near-C kinetic strikes. Converted small planetoid masses driven to high relativistic speeds by a primitive fission drive. None of our scanners look for such crudities. ….. The whole planet. Its absolutely wrecked. The mantle magma flows freely. …… The Sector Satraps are all in open rebellion.”

        “But, those softlings are almost servile in their politeness after we demonstrated our Might. They neither boast nor brag. They have no energy weapons beyond low rate antique lasers. They cannot possibly have the gonads for Sacred War.”

        “Imperious one, there are five billion cremated Kin-corpses on Capitolus, the ghosts of which will haunt our dreams for eternity, reminding us just how wrong we were. Well. Almost.”

        “Almost … wrong?”

        “They did say ‘Please surrender. We would prefer not to do the needful. so Please. At least negotiate.’ They said -that-.”

        “Madness. Geldings are polite. Rulers are not. I fed that one to our grounds sentries.”

        “Well, Great One, they sure gelded the Empire. And now they have captured our Capitolus orbital production centers intact. So their next fleet will be armed like ours. By the way….” ZORRRRRRCH! “You are relieved of duty, command, and rule. Say goodbye to your gonads. You may haunt me as you are able.”

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        1. There’s a whole genre of UTube called “Humans, Fuck Yeah!” devoted to readings of stories with picture backgrounds telling this same general story. My wife is addicted to them.

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          2. One of those types had an “interesting scene” where one of the Good Guy aliens trapped an assassin in his “Earth plants sealed greenhouse”.

            Apparently, what would give a human “hay fever” will kill most aliens.

            IE Even Earth plants are deadly. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

            Oh, the Good Guy alien only entered his “greenhouse” suited up.

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          3. I saw a story, pretty sure it was in Analog, where the Benevolent Aliens discovered that a star with a life-bearing planet was soon to go nova. They assembled a rescue fleet, warped into the system, and found the planet already evacuated. After a diligent search, they found the inhabitants — nearly a light-year away in a gigantic fleet of sublight ships.

            The B.A.s were highly impressed with these ‘humans’ determination and ingenuity, what they had achieved with such limited technology. One of them observed that “We’d better keep an eye on these guys.” Another one joked “Yeah, we only outnumber them a billion to one.”

            Last line of the story:

            A hundred years later, it wasn’t a joke any more.

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            1. IIRC, That was by Arthur C Clarke.

              Of course, before “Humans, Fuck Yeah!”, there was the “Humans Are Special” theme.

              But “Literary” Science Fiction (loved by the Left) got into “Humans Deserve Whatever Shit That Happens” territory. (IE Anti-Western Civilization nonsense).

              “Humans, Fuck Yeah!” was a major backlash to “Humans Deserve Whatever Shit That Happens”.

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      3. DESTROYER: “Pitiful. Can this world do no better than you as their champion?”

        BRIGADIER: “Probably. I just do the best I can.”[shoots alien with his revolver and it explodes]

        — Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, Dr. Who S25E01, “Battlefield”, 06 Sep 1989

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  3. My grandfather got sent there in WWI to clean up their mess. My father got sent there in WWII. I was sent in the opposite direction. My son isn’t going. Clean up your own messes.

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    1. There’s whole generations of warriors telling their sons not to enlist anymore in “defense” of the United States. Better off learning from the old men instead of dying overseas for the MIC and the Deep State.

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      1. If we go back, we go as conquerors this time. Any ground we take is -ours-. Let the troops marry the local girls worthy, and populate the territories with Americans, so the madness stops.

        (grin)

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          1. Given past behavior, and explicit written instructions from their founder, I expect them to make use of the locals.

            (approximate translation) “Your slaves are as your fields. Plow them as you will.”

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  5. Uh-huh. I had an adolescent reader’s affair with Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, because Poul Anderson excerpted part of it for an anthology of Venus-related stories and I wanted to read the rest of it. That turns out to be one of the better parts of the whole, which covers hundreds of millions of years and 18 different species of humanity. We are, of course, the First Men (because Olaf didn’t know or maybe count Neanderthals, but I digress).

    You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the Americans, suffering from inferiority feelings toward the more advanced Europeans (other than Russians; Olaf was surprisingly critical of Communism), gas the entire continent, killing all western Europeans. Yeah, right, tell me another one. Eventually the Americans and the Chinese create an alliance, American culture triumphs and degrades mankind, and civilization falls because we’ve used up all the oil and coal. Eventually, the Andean successor state destroys itself and almost the entire world in a nuclear disaster….but, surprisingly, it’s not war, it’s a chain-reaction industrial accident.

    So yeah, they’ve been wrong about us for a long time.

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    1. Well, we’re a mix of people they threw out and who wouldn’t bend the knee (often both at the same time).

      Of course they think they’re superior.

      It’s like the reason Canada is, at its core, an Anti-American nation and current diplomacy isn’t a reaction to Trump but the reversion to the mean. They are “the good son” who did what Daddy UK said and still came out behind the rebellious bastard to the South.

      And Canada (British Quebec) being the good son was a deliberate choice. There is an entire article in the Articles of Confederation about the fact a chair had been pulled out for Canada, Article 11. It is the only colony which was allowed admittance with a vote by the original 13.

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      1. And they pride themselves on their “civilized,” approach to gaining independence. As doew, in a way, Australia.

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      1. Worse? You say, ma’am, that it got worse somehow?

        There’s another option than your A and B choices in the World sans War scenario you opened with: burrow in, raise a resistance or even a Ministry of Defiance, and teach ’em how to fight!

        And if our VC has no way to execute Plan B in the first place (say, he crashed there), that’s perhaps the only morally tenable option.

        (If nothing else, it’s sure to provide enough plot action for a complete book.)

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      2. Imagine how much worse it would be without the curation and input of professional editors!

        [/sarc]

        James Blish wrote an entire book about science fiction, and how it was generally crude and failed his expectations for literary fiction. Oh, the horrors!

        What he completely missed was that SF readers didn’t care about Kingsley Amis or Harold Robbins. SF readers would read Mack Reynolds or Ron Goulart if it came down to it, because “SF” was what they wanted, not “literature.”

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        1. I’m very much behind science fiction. Literature MOSTLY (except for some outliers and one of them was pulp for his day) bores me to tears.
          BUT this was bad on all levels.

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  6. ThenGalactic culture in the Edward Hamilton story gave me the, “Oh, yeah, tell me another one,” feeling too. They’ve been at peace for millenia, but their ships still carry non-lethal weapons and they are adamantly enforcing their own dicta on all the people’s int he galaxy.

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    1. Well, Hamilton also had a “Super Advanced Alien Species” that visited the human controlled area of space after some humans set off an alarm at one of their abandoned bases. (The humans were looking for a Super-Weapon of theirs.)

      Those Aliens showed the humans what their Super-Weapon could do. The Aliens came, the humans were unable to attack them and the Aliens left with everything they had left at the abandoned base.

      IE The Super Aliens had a weapon that prevented others from attacking them. [Wink]

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      1. Cats care not a whit how the servant class presents itself as long as they/them don’t present they/themselves late with kibble and litter box cleaning. Besides, it’s easier to do crimes when the local staff believe in species supremacy.

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    3. Perhaps, but when you lock aunts or cat-ladies in the attic, the cats are smart enough to escape.

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    1. I had a similar thought: “We have evolved past war. We do, however, occasionally practice pest control.” Which is an even better reason to run while hiding the backtrail.

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    2. I thought the Euros were mad at Vance for telling them to lay off the censorship, and that they were mad at Trump for telling them that they needed to defend themselves.

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        1. I’m interpreting all of this as a big case of the sulks because they were told to get out of Mom and Dad’s basement and go get a job and start paying their way, and no more coddling :D

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          2. Europe is the trust-fund kid, living on prior generations work, who is always getting bailed out of trouble by the muscular types they are better than.

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        2. The Entitled Class tends to get that way when confronted with reality in the form of “NO!”.

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        3. I don’t think they were happy being told about their lack of free speech, either. Too bad, that claim was right on target. Europe doesn’t have free speech (though you certainly have the right to speak approved speech…).

          As for defense, many European countries haven’t had meaningful defense in centuries. I think Holland last had effective soldiers in the 1600s, before nation state armies. France? Not since 1870, if not earlier. The Swiss do ok mostly because everyone is armed. Taiwan should adopt that approach.

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          1. France had a downright impressive military in 1939, not to mention the Maginot Line and other defensive structures.

            Their problem was their military had only one plan: full mobilization. That was coupled with a rigid command structure and no real strategy other than “berserker mode.”

            On top of that, the French governments-of-the-week weren’t willing to authorize mobilization, so the Germans made a series of probes looking for reactions, then drove around the defensive line and into the heart of France with no effective opposition.

            France actually had the Germans outgunned and outnumbered, besides the home field advantages. But they lost the war in the classrooms of St. Cyr before they lost it on the battlefield.

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    3. See Ringo’s Darhel. They have been genetically altered so they go insane if they attempt violence, so instead they are ruthless bankers practicing debt peonage on all other species.

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  9. Yes, I’m looking at you, China. You might think you’re a completely different and superior type of humanity, but really you’re just like us, and what kills us kills you.

    That’s why I always thought that the release of Covid19 was probably an accident. But once it was out in Wuhan, the Chinese PTB decided it was better for them if everybody in the world had to deal with it as well and accordingly they deliberately spread it worldwide.

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    1. The Reader is still in ‘the jury is still out on the accident part’ group. You are speaking of the PRC that violated every agreement they made with the Nationalists during WW II to ensure they were the only folks left standing when we nuked Japan, sent between 1 and 2 million men to their deaths in the Korean war and gained North Korea as a war prize, killed at least 100 million of their own people during the Cultural Revolution and run death camps for undesirables today. Given that record, a rational consideration of their behavior around Covid may fail Occam’s Razor.

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      1. At the beginning of Covid, when the genome was being dissected and indicators of engineering were being found, it was noted that the virus attacked a particular site on cells in the lungs….the de sity of these sites varies across genotypes. Subsaharan africans have the fewest, asians the most. So the engineer was engineered to kill their own people preferrentially. Only lack of ability kept it from being the death bug they envisioned.

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        1. what you are missing is how BAD they are at science. I have friends who read their scientific journals for ROFLOL. Look, they’re STILL confucianists at heart. Hence gluing on pieces of the aids virus to make it worse. In sites where they do nothing….
          I suspect they accidentally inverted that. And it was supposed to kill everyone, but the superior Asian race. (Sigh.)

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          1. In the guest column Galaxy Jane did on her experience with the original Covid, she said the course of steroids her doctors prescribed made all the difference. I’m thinking the Chinese “experts,” were saying, “No, no steroids!” As if they wanted to maximize the harm.

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          2. In theory, there is the ‘what if that is deliberate disinformation, and they are secretly competent and successfully hiding it’.

            tl; dr is that I have significant distrust for public US science, and think that sunshine is probably actually making public US science better.

            I also suspect that hard things may be hard.

            So, holistically, I have doubts about PRC being able to produce a biowarfare boom instead of a fizzle.

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              1. Yes. In theory.

                It does seem like, for example, that many Education majors actually do believe core claims of that field.

                1. That they can establish fine resolution effects along racial lines, likes ancient super conspiracies.

                2. That these are distinct from racially selective effects such as, for example, everyone in public school has been trained by at least one marxist nutjob who actually sincerely believes that the racially disadvantaged cannot do anything themselves in the face of the hypothetical racist conspiracy.

                3. That at the same time, students are basically similar enough for method studies to be statistically valid at the scale of teacher A’s five years of teaching social studies versus Teacher B’s.

                4. That the best methods/textbooks can be identified/established where making process uniform at the national scale is concerned.

                5. That efforts to do so have not obviously and clearly been a substantial disaster, albeit one maybe sabotaged.

                So I can believe that there are many groups optimistic about the limits of their own competence, and about the effects of what they are trying to do.

                But, if they are incorrect, it may not required that their attempt change my planning and expectations.

                Liked by 1 person

          3. Are we allowed to giggle when they screw up and create something East Asians are more susceptible to while Africans have pretty much absolute immunity.

            Yes, black Africans would be funnier than Europeans because China is racists enough to make Klansmen say “skip a bit, brother.”

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      2. Stupidity more likely than malice, but there was malice aplenty to go around. If they’d done it deliberately, they’d have done it less traceably and put the blame on somebody else if they could. China is very often the “let’s you and him fight” kind of country.

        My guess it that they would’ve done something like that eventually, but they f*cked it up and let it loose on accident right outside the lab they were researching it in. And I believe strongly in the human capacity for stupidity and fallibility.

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      3. The deployment was all wrong for a deliberate attack.

        If deliberate, there should have been a dozen to several score outbreaks all over the target, all at once. The UberVillain wants maximal early exposure of the entirety of the “naive” target population, to early replicants of the SuperVirus.

        This ensures almost all the early cases get the full-power bug, not the to-be-expected attenuated version tat comes from survivors and the bug ‘learning’ not to be so lethal, thus more infectious.

        Clancy demonstrates one such bio attack in his novel Executive Orders.

        The WuFlu got loose in China. At most, the CCP decided to let it spread normally. And I strongly believe it because of our long-standing policy: If attacked with Bio, we Nuke the attacker into glassy parking lots. And they -know- we can do it.

        We did observe natural flu-like propagation via travelers. We did not see a sudden near-perfect dispersal everywhere simultaneously. We never overwhelmed our medical facilities, with a few exceptions where local “leaders” were pumpkinhead fools.

        In a way, they probably did try to maximize travel-spread. But it was done in such a way as to be as natural looking as possible, so that we did not flip our collective lids and go genocidal Nuke-em-all maniac on anything remotely CCP.

        Plenty of opportunistic ass-hattery. Nothing so overt as to produce local sudden daybreak and Deserts of Peace.

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      4. I’m wondering if it is an “and”.

        The top didn’t order it but someone did thinking the top would like it, perhaps after a “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest” comment or six.

        Even if it was an accident it is clear they immediately moved to limit internal spread (intranational flights halted) while facilitating spread (no notice plus international flights allowed).

        The was an article in November of 2019 in a business mag about a lot of Chinese businessmen doing “screw you for an extra buck so openly it burns all future bridges”. When confronted about risking future business the answer was “there is no future”. This had been occuring in September and October so in 2020 I dismissed it as unrelated.

        Since late 2020/early 2021 I have stopped dismissing it and consider it the first COVID warning sign.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Hey now!! I will have you know they gave Fauci and his controllers a butt ton of money to declare it was a natural thing, nothing to see here, move on.

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      1. That was Fauci’s self-preservation instincts at play. HE funneled a bunch of money to Eco-Health to design the [censored] thing, and circumvented direct prohibitions from Obama regarding that kind of research so that the funding to Eco-Health could continue.

        As much as it infuriates me to say it, while the Chinese created COVID, the American taxpayers are the ones who funded it.

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      1. My money is on “both” and also a hefty dose of malice afterthought, with a dash of malice aforethought. *Especially* on the part of their collaborators–lookin’ at you, Fauci–on this side of the world.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. It seems the earliest cases were in the Wuhan Viral Institute. Looks like sloppy handling of BL2/BL3 material and trying to cover it up by the perps which gets it into the general Wuhan populace. From there it heads to Italy via Chinese expats in Italy doing cloth work. About the same time there is an international military olympics near Wuhan. Folks from that bring it back to US, Canada etc (healthy folks they think they only have a nasty Flu/Cold as for them thats all it is). Meanwhile folks from Italy come to New York and it starts spreading there (Surprise Surprise). There is a large Biotech (Irony anyone?) conference in New York. A few weeks later there is one in Boston and things spread more. At this point we’re at late Jan 2020 so the cat (or perhaps bat) is out of the bag.

          Why was WVI messing with Corona virus which are NOT local to Wuhan (suspected bat carrier for Corona viruses is from like 1500 Mi away). Two answers both probably true

          1. WVI is looking for potentially airborne Viruses for military uses. Coronavirus are notoriously easy spreaders and some variants (e.g MERS) are fairly lethal or very debilitating (SARS). if you chimerically give it capabilities based on say smallpox or one of the filoviruses it would be a very lethal weapon indeed.
          2. The CDC and NIH are (via Fauci and others) interested/concerned about Coronaviruses. They believe (Author only knows why) that gain of function is the way to go. But one B.H. Obama basically forbid Gain of function research as it was VERY dangerous due to potential escape issues(QED) AND it looks for all the world like Biowarfare research (If Obama sees something as morally questionable, perhaps you ought to think twice). WVI offers to do this research for the NIH for a price, thus getting their Biowarfare research paid for and backed by their enemy an excellent cover for it as China is (theoretically) a signatory of the Biowarfare treaty of 1972

          In all truth we may have dodged a nasty situation due to Chinese scientists’ laziness/incompetence. If this were more lethal or worse to healthy folks we’d have had a real mess. The over the top response just made things worse as did throwing money at the general populace several times, but Covid itself was only a small part of the issue.

          Liked by 2 people

    4. I’m of the “accidental malice” theory of Crow Flu release, namely the issue that the big nexus of initial cases all came from a “wet” (meat) market in Wuhan. My theory runs along the lines of somebody had been selling pig remains that the lab techs were using for tests and experiments, because pork is a luxury meat item in China. Nobody had gotten sick before and you’re getting paid twice to dispose of the pork, so why not sell it on the street?

      And the hilarity ensues from there…

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      1. My “both” theory is the work was planned with malicious intent, but the inept lab let it out early. That’s why so much of the CCP response looked canned, as if long planned, while other parts were rushed and haphazard.

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  10. As I replied to some Leftroid bleating about the ‘extreme violence in the U.S.’ — “Does the French Army still patrol Paris in squads of 4, with submachine guns and battle armor?”

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I visited Salzburg and Munich in 2001-02 when I was doing business in Bavaria. I treasure those moments and refuse to consider any repeats.

        I also had occasion to visit Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry several times as a young’un, but the last time I was in the area (2014), it was a hard nope. And Chicago has gone downhill from there. From what I’ve read, the CPD doesn’t have permission to use the Paris options, but it would be a good idea.

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    2. Just got back from Rome. There is a noticeable Italian army presence around the tourist sites. They’re not armored up, but they are well armed. I didn’t really pay attention to the count, but thinking about it, they seemed to come in pairs.

      Given the hordes of tourists, I find it hard to believe they could fire without collateral damage. I wonder what the ROE are.

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        1. When we were at the Romanian-American University in Bucharest, they showed a cartoon about the various member nations using driving habits. The Germans, of course, drove their little blue rectangles (it was very crude animation) in precise patterns. The Italians’ vehicle meandered all over the screen like a drunken ant.

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        2. Read elsewhere on Easter Sunday:

          The Romans set a guard at Jesus tomb, thus starting a 1992 year tradition of being the worst soldiers in Europe.

          Liked by 1 person

  12. Deep, deep sigh.

    I read history. A lot of it.

    And I can’t recall who it was who said it first: “Peace is the dream of the wise … but wars are the history of men.” (Men being the generic phrase for humans.)

    There will always be people who want something nice that other people have … and who will take that something nice by violence, because they can. And if they can — they will, sooner or later.

    I’m shaking my head now, over the situation in (formerly) Great Britain, and in Western Europe. They are being swamped by Islam, and by African freeloaders, and their leadership appear to be unwilling to do anything about it, that is, when they are not handing over goodies to the invaders and repressing those natives who are indignant about being invaded and pushed out of their own country.

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      1. From what he can see, the Reader thinks ‘Mediocre’ is too high a bar for the current state of Britain. ‘Fallen’ might come closer.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. My dudes.

          Historic greater colonial America.

          Now unjustly occupied by foreign devils, like that red headed dude who idiotically married that stripper, and his relatives.

          Liked by 1 person

    2. It’s intentional. The Brits have been suciding for four generations with the encouragement of their so called “Elite” and ignorant do-gooders. Yeah, people have been sounding the alarms on this front my entire lifetime and before.

      Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech was in 1968.

      19-friking-68, folks.

      –

      Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. 

      There is no “Great” Britan anymore. It’s gone. There’s just a emerging Islamic country with nuclear weapons that hasn’t burned all the churches yet.

      Liked by 1 person

  13. What should scare the geeeeniuses in Foggy Bottom et cetera is Iran. The USSR did not believe that they had a mission from G-d to bring about the End Times by speeding up the chaos that precedes the revelation of the 12th Imam, the coming of the Mahdi, and the return of Issa bin Maryam. Enough of the Imams do that they will use nukes or dirty bombs to start a war, because it will lead to Paradise. The wisdom of trying to force the hand of a deity I leave to others to debate.

    Yes, there are some Christians and probably a few Messianic Jews who feel like they have a call to speed up the Eschaton. But they are not a government.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Yep. Which is why I’m all for glassing the place. Remember Iran in the 70s? Before the imams and the RGs and the utter nonsense?

      Yeah, I don’t like getting involved in other country’s messes. But that one’s a ticking bomb. Better it goes off in their faces, courtesy of Mossad’s helping hands perchance, than ours.

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        1. He may be functionally the Deciever, but they do not view him as such. Isha (their name for Jesus derived from y’shua or yeshua the aramaic/hebrew for “”he will save”) is a mortal and a prophet, greatest of all prophets in their view save Mohammed. Isha is NOT crucified nor is he resurrected as I think he is assumed bodily into heaven (this matching with Christian ascension although for us Jesus was in a glorified state though clearly human).

          As far as I can tell Islam seems to be a mish mash of some Adoptionist/Arianist Christian sect with judaizing tendencies (this gets us circumscision and the law following) meshed syncretistically with Middle east myths/religions (thus Djinns and Houris).

          Islam (Wahabist anyways) also has a rather nasty feature in its interpretation rules, later passages (sura) override earlier ones. Thus, the pretty peaceful passages MSM quotes us are null and void due to later Sura. But then MSM doesn’t think anyone actually believes ANY religion.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Well, he’s supposed to come back, break all the crosses, defeat the Christians and…. slaughter all pigs? (?????????) I’d say sounds like the other side, except for the last which just wounds zany.

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            1. Mother Jones recently published an article saying dogs are environmentally unsound and do great damage. I also saw a sign on Twitter allegedly in Britain asking locals to keep their dogs out of sight so as not to offend their Muslim neighbors. So, is this the beginning of a canine genocide plot, with, “save the planet, kill your dog!” meant to appeal to mush-minded progressives?

              Liked by 1 person

                1. Forgot the sarcasm tag, didn’t you.

                  Me thinks even the dog averse Americans will probably run them over the border. That or the mystical subject called the triple S. Oops. Probably ‘and’, otherwise they might come back.

                  If they come after the dogs. They’ll come after the cats next.

                  Liked by 2 people

                    1. If they want to live, running won’t be fast enough.

                      Better invent teleportation immediately.

                      There is a reason why their are patches that say:

                      “Me? I’m friendly. My handler OTOH, bites.”

                      “I don’t bite. My handler does.”

                      Liked by 1 person

            2. It’s a direct reflection of Revelations, with the army attacking Jerusalem as the good guys. Right down to Isa, Mohammad and the 12th Imam matching Revelations 16:13-14

              Liked by 1 person

        2. My wife has a theory about the depiction of Gabriel in the Koran. Appears in a blaze of beauty and light, no “fear not”, is cruel to Mohammed while still appealing to his pride.

          There *is* an angel traditionally associated with light and pride whose persona fits, and it ain’t Gabriel.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. In Holly Chism’s Modern Gods, it wasn’t Gabriel who appeared to Mohammed.

            It was the Greek god Ares. Ares in Holly’s universe “just loves to start wars/fights”. [Twisted Grin]

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            1. In Kate’s universe a certain archangel defected and is in the wind after being ordered to deliver the message. (No, he’s not in rebellion. Himself is amused and using him for his purposes.)

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          3. I remember reading someplace that when the messenger appeared in the cave to mohammed the first time he thought/felt it was evil, but then his wife of the time convinced him to go back.

            Bit on the nose, innit

            Liked by 2 people

      2. Yes, Jesus is a prophet or similar in the quran. IIRC the term they use for his birth actually refers to being sired by God. What they have is different from what is in the bible or even some of the recently discovered scrolls. But, they don’t view him as the final prophet. Their stories are much more Old Testament wrath style without the Good News.

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          1. Jordan Peterson had someone on his show awhile back, Sojourner? something like that, talking about getting together with middle eastern rulers to get deals done I think. And apparently the word used in the quran means something like impregnated with the spirit of God when speaking about Mary and Jesus. But that’s not how it gets translated or taught by the Imams. I could be wrong on the specifics he used, but I think that was the gist of it.

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            2. Can’t speak about Peterson’s guest.

              I have heard something similar from some missionaries – apparently there are Muslim groups that consider the Bible as Scripture, along with the Quran. So they will start with reading and comparing the two about the life and times of Jesus. The virgin birth, however, is not typically broached first, as without context and careful translation it can give Islamic audiences the impression that God the Father fathered Jesus in a more direct fashion, ala Zeus.

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            1. They have serious issues with time. No, seriously. It’s a cultural thing. They also think the virgin Mary was Mary sister of Moses. So, you figure that one out.

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              1. I think I am remembering one of John Ringo’s essays about how mass innumeracy does weird things to the perception of history.

                Liked by 1 person

      4. I have literally seen a Muslim announce that all Christians will be horribly embarrassed when he returned and tells them he’s a Muslim.

        Why he expects us to not regard him as the anti-Christ.

        Liked by 2 people

      5. Where Christians see Jesus as the one true Savior and Lord and the Son of God, Muslims see Isa (Jesus) as a purely mortal prophet pointing toward Allah–a great prophet, yes, second to the Prophet of course, but just another mortal. Basically, if you read the eschatological parts of both the Bible and the Quran, I’m told, it’s pretty frightening how much they mirror each other on opposite sides.

        I tried to actually study the Quran once but gave up quickly. It’s bad enough that all I could find were, I dunno, I guess the KJV equivalents of the Quran (very stilted and difficult language) but the Quran itself is a mess when you compare it to the relative organization of the Bible. The chapters, or Surahs, are (if I remember) ordered longest to shortest, not chronologically or by topic. So it’s all over the place. And in Islam, chronologically later passages take precedence over earlier ones even if they seemingly contradict.

        Liked by 1 person

  14. Because my answer is B with an extra “make sure I can’t be traced from here.”

    Two other equally valid options:

    c. Sheer the sheep myself both because at some level they deserve it and because it’ll warn the other wolves disguised as sheppards there are other wolves who they shouldn’t dick with.

    d. Find a cozy spot in system to lie in wait for the wolves to ambush them and, hopefully, follow them home first. We’re going to have to fight them eventually. By surprise and at a time of our choosing are best.

    Also of course, Orange Man Bad hates Europe and loves Putin, and he’s just going to give Europe to Putin, and–

    They are already going to give Europe to Putin, the Caliphate, or China.

    Hell, I’d say its even odds they deliver themselves to China just to spite Trump. And part of me wants to be okay with that.

    Don’t we know what they’re capable of?

    We do, because we came from them and were their outcasts. We also invented the American way of war: “As nasty as possible as quickly as possible so people realize it’s a bad idea as soon as possible”. Hell, the first, and perhaps still nastiest application as that way of was was against our own by Sherman in Georgia and especially South Carolina (he really let the army have its head against the state that started it all).

    We even have a bunch of people who if Europe said, “We’ll show you nasty war” would respond “Don’t threaten me with a good time.” Some might even be reading this (note, I am not in that group).

    Liked by 1 person

    1. A part of me expects Europe to remember its heritage from the previous couple of centuries and flip that switch again. Industrial capacity “solutions” are not something I ever want to see, but I’m thinking that those Eurasion/North African folks might not realize that could happen again if they keep treating their hosts as if they’re just free range chattel.

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    2. Well, options C and D are spoken for, but I’m going with Option L: They’re lying about being evolved, if not deliberately to me, they’re lying to themselves. I’d bug out before the masks come off.

      (The option exercised in Cedar’s Jade Star might be too extreme. I’d let them destroy the planet themselves. No need for me to help.)

      Liked by 2 people

  15. Yeah, all of this. They are in for a very rude awakening. And I am past caring what they think.

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  16. There was a story. I haven’t seen it, only a reference to it, where aliens finally land on Earth. People talk to them, expecting them to teach us how to live in peace. Instead, they were coming to us for help. We’d developed nuclear weapons and only used them twice in anger and, actually, kept a relatively low level of warfare whereas they were always at each others throats.

    We may be the peaceful species in the interstellar community.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. It does, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t him. If it’s the one I remember, the last line, said by the alien as the Earth rep is looking down in horror at the alien’s planet, covered with the scars of war, (paraphrased, but close): “Please, can you show us how we can keep the peace as poorly as you do?”

        Liked by 2 people

  19. IIRC there actually was a plan to use nukes as a way to level mountains, but I don’t think it got real far. The problem with having everyone disarm is that humans aren’t perfect. There WILL be some people who don’t, and at least one of them will get the bright idea that they can rule over all.

    As for your first question, I’d probably take a very brief look around (because I’m always curious about the darkest things) and then hightail it out of there. HG Wells wrote a book about that sort of stuff, and I have no desire to end up as someone’s dinner.

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      1. I knew I wouldn’t be the first one to remember that here XD

        Somebody in the “Department of Naming Operations” thought he was really clever for coming up with that one, I’m sure.

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      2. I believe one of the proposals was to use them to dig an alternative to the Panama Canal. Me, I’d rather they’d use some for an Orion space ship.

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        1. I checked with the oh-so-reliable Wikipedia, and it confirms the canal plan; that’s what I remembered, too.

          I do like the Orion storyline in Pournelle/Niven Footfall.

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          1. Not looking anything up in w-pedia ever, but from memory wasn’t the nuke plan to do its deep detonations to collapse a trench across Nicaragua, to end up with a sea-level two-lock transit canal with only a tidal lock at each end for sea level difference-induced flow issues (the Pacific being about 8 inches higher than the Atlantic at the Panama Canal ends, and I assume about the same up the coast at Nicaragua, so there would be a nasty tidal flow through any open waterway).

            I see the Chinese have been making noises about and promising money towards a conventionally constructed Nicaraguan canal, I guess as a backup if they can’t successfully buy the Panama politicians and induce them to stay bought.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. As memory serves (damned poor service; can I get a refund?), you have the canal bit right.

              For another Orion craft, Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise uses the conventional take on the concept. Jerry Pournell’s King David’s Spaceship uses the concept, but with high explosives for the oomph. (Much smaller spacecraft, one woman as sole occupant.)

              Liked by 1 person

      3. Yeah, Plowshare. When I was in tech school at Ft. Belvoir there was a series of 50s-era artists renderings of potential nuclear excavation projects in the hallway outside our classroom. Fascinating stuff. The canal was one, but my favorite was probably the Insta-Harbor (one biggie to make the anchorage, a couple of smaller ones to cut a channel, and TaDa). Not feasible in current circumstances, but in a time of existential conflict things could change.

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    2. Also, humans are devilishly creative, and ANYTHING can be a weapon. (One of the genres of action movie I really enjoy is, in fact, the variety of “the protagonist makes ANYTHING and everything a weapon)

      Liked by 2 people

      2. Well, yeah. Humans brains see things almost always as tools. Tools are interpreted on a deep level as extensions of our body, in a way. If we are of a violent bent, or feel the need to be violent for some reason, and are also reasonably creative or experienced, then yeah, pretty much everything is a weapon when you are in a combat situation.

        The ability to use anything and everything as an effective weapon is another thing entirely. It also happens to help if you have a reasonably deep understanding of basic anatomy: where the big arteries are and so on.

        There’s also the psychology of combat, but that’s something we’re all probably aware of.

        Liked by 1 person

  20. “And the number of times they actually did is shocking. And yes, the only way to destroy a culture that perverse is to exterminate it root and limb, because cultures have a life of their own.”

    And it worked. Nothing else, far as I am aware, did.

    “The problem is Europeans really, really, really believe that war is always evil…”

    And if it is, then it is a necessary evil. Like government. Wars should be, from my perspective, prosecuted aggressively. With a will to end the will to fight. Killing all the males able to wield a weapon works, even if it is brutal in the extreme. So is beating down their entire industrial backbone, such that starvation and banditry run rampant.

    There are responses short of that which may work, too. But the threat of that sort of war will always be there. Other peoples wish that on us.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Well … the British Raj did cauterize suttee out of India’s culture. Not as gross a perversity as dining on infants, but a true disfigurement, which I fervently hope no Indians want to revive as an act of cultural restoration.

      Of course, had the British needed to commit an extermination to eliminate this or some horror of Indian culture, they couldn’t have done it. Probably not morally, and absolutely not physically. There weren’t remotely enough Britons for such a job.

      Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Alas, they have revived suttee. I had a guest prof in the 1990s. Her in-laws had tried to have her murdered several times because she refused to commit suttee. Dr. K hated the Brits, but allowed as how that was one good thing they had done for India.

        The tugee cult, however, remains extinct. To no one’s sorrow at all.

        Liked by 2 people

        2. I … wish I could say I was surprised. I can only claim to be horrified.

          I would ask where Western feminists are, when they should be campaigning vehemently against this, but I know where they are. Such a campaign might entail actual risk, of the kind your professor faced, so they are somewhere else, where they can feel good about their stances without actually deserving to feel good about them.

          Maybe that’s a little harsh. But not as harsh as the revival of suttee, to whatever degree it has occurred.

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  21. This subject reminds me of the 1950’s movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still“.

    Basically, the alien landed in Washington DC to warn Earth to “leave your wars here on Earth” (IE we don’t want you bringing your wars into our neighborhood)”.

    Of course, there was the stupidity of landing only in the US. (IE not having a second alien landing in Moscow.)

    Still that message “made some sense”. Unlike that other movie where the aliens were concerned about AGW.

    Of course, the humans of the first movie might have been careful to “not offend the aliens when we meet up with them in space”.

    But the humans of the second movie would visit the aliens and tell them “you made a big mistake, you left us alive”. [Very Big Nasty Grin]

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I don’t remember who it was, but one nice lady on Usenet had as a sigfile:

      “That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.”

      😉😁😁

      Liked by 4 people

    2. One of the funnest scenes in ST Enterprise mirror universe episode was the intro, a redo cut for the mirror universe of the “Vulcans land and make first contact” scene from the Star Trek: First Contact movie, where instead of reaching out and shaking the Vulcan’s hand when he can’t do the “live long a prosper” thingy with his hand, Zephram Cochrane pulls a gun and shoots the first Vulcan down the ramp, and the humans take and loot the ship:

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  22. Yeah, I very much concur on finding that European conclusion pattern irritating to enraging.

    I have been mellow this week, because I for the most part have not known anything about statemetns in Europeland.

    Okay, anti-Pope Frank is dead, and his actual last words did not involve a future promise of testimony against hillary clinton. And I think I accidently heard something about Zelensky.

    Beyond that, good times.

    I do sorta aspire to being a comic book mad scientist supervillain.

    But, even supposing that I was somehow competent at realizing machines, using them to kill people is an entirely different skillset, and requires more manpower.

    The additional skilled labor are largely people who are saner than I am, and even if they are also motivated by evil, are motivated by different things than I am. I figure if I build a doom ray on the moon, and the rest of America is willing to activate it for the purpose of irradiating the old world, then probably they would have done something to actually deserve it.

    PAthogens would be a much more productive path of solitary villainy for me. Except that I don’t have the mind for it, nor the calling.

    Anyhow, Europe land projecting their cargo cult ‘international cooperation’ on us, and getting mad at us for not respecting their sacred cows, not respecting their most holy rituals, is absurd, risible, and offensive. We were always an alien culture to their elite, and it was stupid of them to fail to account for that.

    Anyway, America is basically a Bizarro world version of Russia. Russia ‘has’ to invade other people because of being scared of foreign wars. America at times has to pay close attention to internal factors because we ‘know’, oral history, that internal factors have much more ability to actually kill Americans than western Europe does.

    So, Europe will at times find that we do not have any attention for them.

    I’ve come to the conclusion that communist totalitarians may actually not have any real supply of working nukes. But, even if I was sure that we could lose cities, I can be pretty callous about losses.

    If Ethiopia had nukes, and we genuinely had to fight Ethiopia, I would think that such reason might be important enough to take some losses from, for example.

    Anyhow, I am silly enough now to joke about counter-population targeting, and that, never having traveled to LA, Boston, or Chicago myself, I don’t actually know that Americans live in those places, so maybe we could tank a bunch of hits with no actual damage.

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  23. Mutual deterrence is like the patient in the dentist’s office. As the dentist is about to begin, the patient reaches over and gets a firm grip on the dentist’s testicles. “Now we’re not going to hurt each other are we Doc”?

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    1. One of the later spaghetti westerns, a comedy lacking Clint Eastwood, but it had Henry Fonda as the old gunfighter, and some blonde Italian actor as a young wannabe – title is “My Name is Nobody”. They have a gag at the beginning with Fonda sitting down for a shave, and as the barber eagerly moves towards him with the straight razor, the reward money dancing in his eyes, you hear the clickety-click of a pistol being cocked, and the barber looks down at his crotch at the barrel of Fonda’s pistol aimed there, as insurance of getting only the shave he paid for. At the end of the movie after the Fonda character manages to fake his death to retire wit the help of the kid, now the feared gunfighter in his place, they run the same gag with the kid getting a shave and making sure the barber has some stake in the shave’s outcome.

      Not much to recommend the movie overall, but those scenes always stuck with me as fairly clever.

      Liked by 1 person

  24. Europe is mad because Trump and Vance told them they have no clothes on, and Gasp, they looked in the mirror and realized they were right. Now if we could only get all the rancid Democrat politicians to go to El Salvador I am sure Buerkle could build a prison to put them in. Maybe they can join Rosie or Ellen overseas.

    Liked by 1 person

  26. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » I GOT A BIT EXERCISED: Study War No More.

  27. The problem is Europeans really, really, really believe that war is always evil…

    To be fairer than they deserve, Europeans, especially the French, Germans, and English, have good reason to believe this. Europe’s last major war was the Second World War, and the destruction wrought by that war was staggering. German bombings of London were devastating, and the British campaign against German cities was ten times worse. On top of that, the destruction wrought between D-Day and V-E day meant widespread crop failures in 1945 and famine for several years afterward. If I’d lived through all of that, I’d be rigidly anti-war too.

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      1. Because they assume that the Americans will actually fight it.

        Same as in the most recent civil war in the Balkans, when Yugoslavia broke up after the death of Tito. They were keen on us fighting that one, too.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. They have basically become overwhelmed by the failure of their previous magical thinking. IE, that Putin was not inevitably goign to try something, no matter how ‘effective’ their rituals were in preventing France from invading Spain and Spain from invading France.

        They are disoriented now, stressed in other ways, and have only the social manipulation games as something they personally know how to do. The American obvious things to do, are things that mentally they ‘cannot’ do.

        Their mental model of force is mostly magical thinking. Brussels is weak totemically, in their feeling, Moscow is strong, and the US historically has been strong and still seems to have some magical power. The Brussels elites think there is a choice between Bejing, Brussels, DC and Moscow as imperial centers, and right now would prefer to not have Moscow.

        Their mouthnoises right now are mostly the same as autistic stimming. May do nothing else, but it feels real to them, and like it brings control, so it helps them process a situation that is otherwise overwhelming.

        Liked by 1 person

  28. …Definitely option B with extra precautions. The whole basis of the mindset that can go to war comes from “I will protect what is mine from threats”. If you don’t have that, you don’t have parents protecting their own children, and that bodes ill for long-term survival.

    Very extra precautions. It might be contagious….

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  29. I’ve always had a difficult time understanding your contentions about European thought. Believed you, yes, but had no true understanding. Then I watched a video by a You-Tuber who had posted much enjoyable History content. Military History at that. So I thought, well, it can’t really be that bad. Then he posted “Shut up about Cultural Marxism”. Oh boy… it turns out I’ve been duped by Neo-Nazis. There is no Marxism creeping into our countries and ALL right wing and libertarian political parties were just Nazism under a new flag. Trump is a Putin mole and… well, just wow. The thing is, the video is pretty well thought out. Made me stop and do research and double think several of my long-held political beliefs. I came out of it with, I think, a better understanding of European thought. I’ll include a link to the video as I think you may quite enjoy it and (ulterior motive) I’d love to see a deconstruction of it. Of course, I understand if you don’t have time or think it wouldn’t make a good blog post. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfM-YtGqerw

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    1. Oh no, not Lazerpig. I LOVED his snarky video about the sinking of the Moskva and how much the Russian Navy sucks. Dang. I thought better of him than this.

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    2. The thing is, there’s never any real recognition about what Nazism really meant and stood for. Its values, if you can dignify it that way.

      They have been told that conservatives are evil, hate people who aren’t like them, and want to destroy the world (in a nutshell). Therefore…

      They never stop to think. And yes, they can have some very good arguments, but it’s all based on the idea that humans are easily definable widgets, and that anyone who is different from themselves is necessarily evil.

      They start from the conclusion and build theargument backward.

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      1. George Orwell attempted to define Fascism was unable to do so especially since even in his time Fascism was “what you call people you don’t like”.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Benito Mussolini, the first to implement Fascism, declined to define exactly what Fascism was, choosing to remain politically flexible instead of tying the Fascisti to an rigid ideology.

          Adolf adopted Mussolini’s Fascist platform for the NSDAP, but the NSDAP preferred “rigid and inflexible” over the NFP’s loosey-goosey definitions.

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          1. Interestingly, Mussolini started out as a Socialist but realized that Italians weren’t interested in the “Workers of the World unite” thing that European Socialism pushed at the time.

            He understood that Italians were more loyal to Italy and other Italians.

            On the other hand, while Franco of Spain was called a Fascist, he was more anti-communist and pro-Spain than anything else.

            Of course, while not a nice guy, Franco was a Master of not doing what Hitler wanted him to do and surviving. 😉

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Indeed – Franco was for Spain, first and always. He took aid from anti-communists when it was offered – but don’t think for a moment he bought into what Hitler and Mussolini were selling. I also believe that Franco was canny enough and experienced as a professional soldier to know that Hitler was waaaaaay out of his depth.

              There were also a lot of lefty Spanish intellectual sorts who whined to us, after WWII – why didn’t we unseat Franco, whilst we were going about defeating fascists? Well – I suspect that it was pure gratitude on our part – that Franco was smart enough not to have cast in his lot with the Axis, and remained neutral during the war. A good few people at the time rather expected that Franco would join the Axis, on the principle of birds of a perceived feather flocking together. But he didn’t; it would have made allied control of the Med almost impossible if he had — and his government turned a blind eye when it came to Jewish refugees getting to safety in Spain, as well as escaping Allied POWs. He did the Allies a solid, and we were quietly grateful afterwards.

              Liked by 1 person

            2. Same with Salazar. Yes, he was a National Socialist. He copied his program from FDR with a heavy dose of nationalism. But most people who say he was a fascist dictator think FDR was “progressive.” So, you know…..

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      2. No, conservatives aren’t evil but we’ve been manipulated by actual Neo-Nazi parties. Based on the desire to eliminate people of alternative religions and colors. Yes, truly. we have been manipulated by our dependence on alternative media and laziness in not researching on the presented facts. Right now, “they” are moving the line of what we find normal and

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        1. NONE of us wants to eliminate people of other races. Illegal invaders, yes.
          They are fairly insane and stupid.
          social/alternative media involves MORE research.

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          1. Ah, the video doesn’t imply or state that we are genocidal. Merely that we have been duped by groups that DO want this. And “they”( always gotta be a “they”) are starting to move the line of what is normal and right so “they” can eventually get to that point.

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            1. I’m not estranged from mom. With her being 95, I don’t want to be. But the politics are getting WEIRD. I used to be able to say “nope. Not discussing this” but now she’s acting like lefties in 2004, and I’m at my ropes end.

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    3. Nazi is a label that when used in a discussion between certain groups makes communication impossible.

      The expedient political narrative in Europe is eternal tainting, as in the opponents of the current regime are eternally tainted, because some of their ideas or symbols were once used by bad people.

      In US politics, it was extremely expedient to suppose that ‘the parties switched places’.

      The thing is, a lot of the people pushing ‘eternal taint’ in Europe, have preferred factions in US politics. And there are only really two major parties in US politics.

      So, option A, eternal taint holds, and that the symbols used by their preferred US political faction, having been previously tainted, thereby taint the Euro in question by association.

      Option B, is ‘akshully, those were not bad things’, which is not entirely an expedient way to position themselves for current US politics.

      Option C, eternal tainting does not hold, and Euros in Euro land can be NSDAP members for all the difference it makes to me. (Which is to say ‘curing’ Down’s, AGW, triumph of the academics, etc., do not sit well with me.)

      They don’t want to cross their own neighbors on matters of their own local peace consensus, and what opinions Americans have about American politics matter not at all to them. And, well, I don’t exactly disagree with that sort of nationalist sentiment. What I disagree with is them not realizing that they don’t really have a basis for cutting deals with Americans about American politics, and that we are alien to them, and will not behave in easily predictable ways.

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  30. I just spoke to a woman who is absolutely convinced that when she retires in two years SS will have been eliminated. Under the circumstances I couldn’t address her concerns, but I’m certain that when she does retire and gets her first SS check, her first thought will not be “Wait, I thought Trump was going to gut SS! Was I wrong?”

    No, she’ll still be listening to the Lame Stream Media and be terrified that he’s going to take away her new benefit.

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    1. …which is sooo much worse than just letting it implode by pretending there’s not a problem. As has been the default ‘policy’ of both sides for the last 50 years.

      “Relax, everything is fine. Nothing to see here!”

      Liked by 1 person

    2. To be fair, back in 1975, the Social Security Administration itself was saying they would be out of money by 1980, and that most living Americans would never collect unless Congress started shoveling vast amounts of money into the system.

      Between that, and the various media, and “experts”, I certainly never expected to collect any SS benefits. But somehow the Fed managed to keep kicking that can down the road.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. Yes. ^This.

        There have been “minor” changes.

        Mine taken at age 62, was discounted a lot more than before the change. Instead of being discounted from age 65, it is now discounted from age 68. Yet still required to enroll in medicare at age 65. Whether you take it full depends on health (not the reason), additional/alternative income and do you want to preserve those funds or not. Sister and BIL chose to wait (he just started SS at age 68, sister has a few years). We, and for that matter, the other sister and BIL, chose to preserve our retirement savings. In addition hubby and I do have a little pension coming in (mine is $121/month, no did not drop zeros off of it). Neither of my sisters or their spouses do.

        The other change was the elimination of the ability of one spouse to take spousal SS, half of spouses, then collect own SS at full qualification (other restrictions apply but if you could swing it, was a great benefit). What changed was if you qualify on your own SS and it is higher than half of spouses, that is what you have to take at that time, or wait until non discount benefit.

        The first change really takes away from the benefit of waiting until age 70 to take SS (max age for benefit growth). Know more than a few people who still worked until age 70 because they did not have pensions, and did not establish 401(k)s (even without matching, why?) or IRA/Roths.

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        1. The problem with 401(k)s (and most other IRAs) is they require you have some spare income that you can put into them. Those of us who suffer through frequent bouts of unemployment, and who barely make enough to cover all bills even when we are working, don’t always have that luxury.

          I don’t have a 401(k) for exactly that reason, and I have assumed for a long time that Social Security won’t be there for me when I reach “retirement age”. I don’t know what I’m going to do about money when I can’t work anymore. I have tried many, many times to build up some kind of savings, only to see some unexpected major expense come along and take it all, almost but not quite down to the last dollar.

          Every

          God

          Damned

          Time.

          So be glad you have a retirement account. But don’t judge those of us who don’t.

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          1. IRA or Roth, understandable. There were years it was a huge stretch to fund either one of ours.

            401(k)/Simple IRA? At least fund it to any match percentage. That is a 100% guarantied return (harder if no matching, know that one too). It comes out of paycheck before seeing it. In theory when used the tax on the same dollars will be less (wags hands on that one, we’re in the same tax bracket. I think earning tax bracket has to near highest for retirement tax bracket to be lower. We were never in the higher tax brackets.)

            It isn’t easy. We were where you are. But the advice was “pay yourself first, live on the rest.” Even when “the rest” is down to that last dollar, even that change saved out of pockets.

            It doesn’t take much of that retirement account to make a difference to supplement SS.

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  31. Ever since 1945, a lot of Europeans have reminded me of nothing so much as alcoholics I’ve known who’ve been on one bender too many, nearly died of it…and are now clinging to sobriety with every bit of strength they’ve got. They react to even the proximity of alcohol like vampires to hot-cross buns, holy water, or sunlight.

    I can understand their reaction. And after 1945, I can kind-of understand European polemophobia, but considering how much more dangerous the Communists were than the Nazis, I cannot excuse it. Unlike the Nazis, the Communists had an ideology that transcended national barriers. Bad as Hitler was, bad as Mussolini was (Bad Hitler! Bad Mussolini! You sit in the corner and think about what you did!) neither of them had covens of followers with no national or cultural connection to their countries plotting to ensure their takeover, all over the world.

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