Excuse me, I must make a point. It might not be the most popular point in the world, but it is a point that must be done.
A lot of you seem to be running with “Well, even if Soviet propaganda made us unreasonably scared of nuclear war, this is to the good because it prevented a nuclear war.”
Um…. it sure did. Or at least it prevented us from doing a first strike… Which honestly given the presidents we had those years was probably not very likely.
On the other hand, it also prevented us from using conventional warfare for real, or pretty much do anything except oppose Soviet expansionism and adventurism — which was essential to their survival since socialism is always parasitic and extreme examples, the kind we call communism are parasitic and destructive, meaning the only way to avoid complete starvation is to devour other countries — in a token way, with our troops hemmed in by ridiculous ROE and not allowed to win. Though even then, most of the time, unless the thing was in our face, we just sent the Soviets sharp worded letters. And leftist presidents? They didn’t even do that.
While we were avoiding very hard offending the Soviets because after all they had the same arsenal we did or more, and they were on an hair trigger and if we said boo, they’d eliminate us.
But that’s okay, right? Because we didn’t send a first strike.
Look, this is nonsense. It’s fossilized “nukes will kill da urth” shite in the back of your brains.
Peace is lovely. War is always awful. But sometimes war is needed. Period. And peace is sometimes too costly.
Arguably the “cold” part of the cold war, that counterfeit peace, cost a lot of people all over the world. It cost the deaths of the “little wars”, the destruction of economies, wealth and ability to create and invent all over the world. It caused the deaths of American service men fighting with both legs in a sack of ROE. It cost us our overculture and academic integrity being infiltrated and corrupted by the soviets, because of course the intellectuals were so scared of the superior Soviet might (and just a little turned on, as they always are by despots) and hoping they’d been eaten last. It might in fact have cost us our country. I don’t think it will, because we’re still fighting. But except for a few lucky breaks, it could have, plunging the whole world in a morass of civilization (and population) destroying “socialism” for a while.
Is that worth it? Because we avoided the big bad nukes (largely non existent on the Soviet side. Oh, they had some, but nowhere near parity, and for a while at the beginning, they in fact had almost none) and deaths from hot war?
I don’t know. I don’t know and neither do you. And don’t go pretending you do because you can paint mind-pictures of little girls dying in nuclear explosions.
Do you know how many graves were filled all over the world by the Soviet expansionism that we allowed? I heartily advise you to read a history of Cuba since the Castros. I advise you to read the black book of communism. I don’t know if any books have been written about what the Soviets and their Cuban mercenaries did in Africa. What I know are mostly first person, eye witness accounts, but if you distill the worst of The Black Book Of Communism, then steep it in the juice of nightmares you’ll be there.
So, would it have been better if we’d realized how much stronger than the Soviets we were and had put an end to their blustery larceny and mass murder? Maybe. Or maybe, as I suggested on Monday’s post if our more “progressive” leftist presidents had realized they had the ability to remake the world to their crazier dreams, we might be in a worse position.
My husband likes to believe we’re living in the best of all possible worlds. And maybe we are. Maybe.
But here’s the thing: we don’t know. We can’t now. Even now, a lot of our thinking and still a lot of our war theory, a lot of our thought, a lot of our calculations of war and peace are polluted by the propaganda pounded into our heads.
It’s entirely possible that really, refraining from pounding the Soviet horror and letting it prance all over the world was the best result of a bad situation. Or possibly it could have been better and fewer people might have died.
But we have no way of knowing. And it’s irrational and stupid to pretend we do.
Look, to give a more recent example: perhaps locking down was the best thing that could have been done with COVID. Oh, not because the virus was terrible, but because the propaganda machine of the dems might have managed to start a civil war to set themselves up to steal the election. Maybe this is the best of all possible worlds, and it will presently rain ice-cream from a clear blue sky.
But the events happened because of massive propaganda. Not only didn’t we make the decision clear-eyed, we still don’t know what happened. And we might never know. And this burns me beyond what I can reasonably explain.
It is the same thing with the lies and pervasive propaganda by the Soviets. It caused us to do things in a way we might not even have considered if we knew the truth.
Is the result still the best?
I don’t know and neither do you.
This upsets me terribly, but not as much as people pretending that it was all worth it.
As though they could know.
According To Hoyt 
It’s human nature to accept what has happened and pretend it is acceptable or not ideal. This is beneficial to a point because it avoids expending time and energy on what can’t be changed. You might as well be locked in anguish over the fact that Rome passed from power. Applying lessons learned from the past to future actions would be beneficial, but I see no evidence that it’s a common human ability.
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My biggest issue is that I think we need the truth. A lot of what we think happened in recent history is in fact Soviet propaganda.
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Quite a bit of the truth (for values of “truth”; let’s call it “more accurate data”) is coming out about politics and corruption in the US. While it’s possible the same might be dredged out regarding international politics and corruption (sorry how I keep repeating myself), it’s not IMHO very likely, at least not in large part, and certainly not any time soon. All we can do is vow to not take any politician’s word for anything and soldier on, hopefully with clearer vision.
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it still startles me just how much that propaganda is still going on. That, and every institution was corrupted to some degree since we ended up on a war footing for 50+ years. And still the virus continues.
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Look at how the same words and phrases seem to show up, almost simultaneously, across a wide swath of the Establishment Media. Yep, the propaganda mill is up, well-oiled and running.
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yep
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…and from Media to ordinary, overheard speech. E.g. “about” has suddenly become “around” in most contexts. Somebody–maybe Steven Sailer?–suggested that “around” be awarded Preposition Of The Year.
For some reason it puts me in mind of that time Our Gummint sprayed Serratia marcescens in the NYC subways to see how a real bacterial weapon would spread.
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Dear niece my apologies I had not realized that you must have been out of the coountry or in a coma for the entirety of 2020. Otherwise you could not possibly have written this:
“Look, to give a more recent example: perhaps locking down was the best thing that could have been done with COVID. Oh, not because the virus was terrible, but because the propaganda machine of the dems might have managed to start a civil war to set themselves up to steal the election.
Sure they did not have to start a civil war because they did not need to. They took advantage of the American publics’ natural tendencies to go about their business and leave the operation of our country to the elected officials. And we are now paying the price with all these tell-all books and such about how we were so royally screwed over by the left. At least two years worth of school children permanently impaired, countless small businesses destroyed, and ‘the reasonable restrictions” necessary to fight that so called global pandemic which in fact rates the rough equivalent of a very bad influenza season.
They got away with it once, and in return we gave them back a second term of their worst nightmare. That and the realization that “fool me twice” really does not work in modern day America. I take my schadenfreude with a helping of popcorn as I watch the Dems scurry about like half drowned rats biting each other’s tails off.
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All they had to do was take the election fraud they perpetrated in 2016 (that was almost enough) and crank it up to 11. Voila! The Zombie Pretendent!
Now the tell-all books admit “Biden wasn’t fit to be President, oops”
Lemme clue yuz, Biden wasn’t fit to be vice-prez either. Or Senator for at least the last 20 years. Biden has always been a puppet, obsessed with looting the government for personal gain.
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Fraud is the “what,” and Covid is the “how.” Without that excuse to unilaterally change/ignore the rules, they’d never have managed to deploy enough of it.
I hated the Democratic Party before…it’s gone beyond that now. (Not that I like the Republicans either; they suck; but first things first.)
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When I’m out in the mornings, about half the kids I see at the bus stops are still wearing masks.
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Well, considering it’s pollen season, that actually isn’t that alarming. Now excuse me while I go hose the yellow off my silver truck.
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Masks can be a Good Thing (TM); I always wear one when blowing the GD dust off my patio. I live in the desert south of Phoenix; Valley Fever is no joke, and the N95’s do a good job of filtering out dust. But viruses aren’t dust, and frolic in the weave of an N95 before continuing on.
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Virus isn’t dust, and a naked COVID-19 is about 1/4 the size of a blue light wavelength. A naked COVID-19 will go through an N-95 mask like a fly goes through chicken wire.
But there ain’t no naked COVID-19s.
Every virus is born in goo. It’s launched into the world in a droplet of goo–that dries into a microbooger–that an N-95 WILL filter out.
Of course, some of those will get around, or even through, those masks. Even under ideal conditions–that is, even if half the people involved weren’t Signalling Tribal Virtue by calling them “slave diapers”–they still wouldn’t be 100% effective.
And, of course, by the Rule of Rhetorical Math, 100% minus any amount equals Zero. Hence: “Masks don’t work!!!”–a statement that “isn’t even wrong.”
The Devil sends errors in pairs. Of all the quivering covidiocy imposed on us by Our Betters, the suggestion–not Karen-ish mandates, mind you, but the mere suggestion–that masks might have some mitigating effect on transmission (by catching at least some of those boogers, both coming and going) and severity (by reducing the number of incoming virus particles) was the closest the Lefties came to good sense.
That AntiMa became the Right’s battle cry is proof that the Devil was writing the script for both sides.
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Cheap cloth and paper masks, however, ARE utterly useless for reducing the spread of viruses. We’ve known that for more than 100 years. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg did a follow-up study on the 1918 flu epidemic and found, to his surprise, that masks had zero effect.
“But they didn’t know as much about viruses back in 1921!”
Maybe not, but they could count. How many cases with masks vs. without. No. Significant. Difference.
Masks also trap water vapor, dust, bacteria and mold spores, and provide an ideal environment for them to grow. I saw a woman at the grocery store after the ‘mask mandate!’ expired, with a nasty blotchy rash right where the mask used to be. And nowhere else. There’s a reason doctors and nurses put on new masks every hour or so.
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I picked up a couple of skin infections from mask wearing, and I wore them only when I absolutely had to.
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I couldn’t wear them, period, because asthmatic. half an hour and I’ll need ER.
Seriously. Requiring masks is a sadistic exercise.
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I wasn’t that bad off. Not asthmatic. But 5 minutes in a mask had me sneezing repeatably. Which got me glared at. In addition no one could hear me. My voice doesn’t carry as it is, the mask might as well have been just gagging me. I can’t imagine anyone with any kind of breathing problem wearing one; shudder.
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Oh, yeah. I’m deaf and read lips.
…. it was a form of h*ll.
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I saw a video of a track event in 2020. A girl wearing a mask while running a race passed out 2 steps from the finish line and fell across it.
When doctors and nurses take off old masks, they throw them in the bio-hazard waste bin. Because they’re contaminated!
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Right. The one and only place I actually honored mask mandates was when I was visiting someone in the hospital — and the hospital had a supply of brand-new masks they were handing out to people walking in the door. THERE, I figured hey, there are plenty of immunocompromised people in here, anything that can reduce the virus load is worth doing. But everywhere else? Where people were allowed to walk in wearing the same mask they’ve been wearing all day? Those were theater, and I knew it.
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Yup. That’s why I got a Medieval Plague Mask and wore it where masks were ‘mandated’. “Masks didn’t work 600 years ago, and they still don’t.”
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I’ve mentioned before that my daughter was in the NICU in El Paso for several weeks. Well before Kung Flu.
For lung issues, in fact.
We went in to visit, it was a full scrub down, twice, then put on a disposable space-suit.
You know what we didn’t have?
Masks. Had to wear hair nets, but not masks.
The only folks wearing a mask were doctors working directly on a baby for an extended period of time.
In El Paso, which means there are all the interesting lung diseases around.
And actual medical personnel did NOT do masking, NOR have visitors do so.
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masks don’t work by the ONLY objective that counts. They don’t prevent transmission. They didn’t in 1918 and they don’t now.
Period.
And yes, they’re slave emblems because they were enforced including on people they made ill,which was most people.
Stop it, just stop it. Covering a sneeze or a cough does NOT REQUIRE A MASK AND IS AN ABILITY THAT ANY HOUSEBROKEN TODDLER HAS.
Inventing the need for the mask went along with pretending no one covers their sneezes or coughs EVER. Like natural immunity had to be written out.
I’m not going along with your illusions. That’s crazy cakes. If you really believe that nonsense you are either a willing propagandizer or not thinking.
Yeah, sure, some people — VERY RUDE people — don’t cover when they sneeze/cough. The last time I saw one of those was…. years ago? Seriously.
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“Covering” coughs and sneezes with a hand (or the suggested “Dracula sneeze” when you sneeze into your elbow) probably just causes those boogerballs to bounce in all directions instead of a more directional plume.
Those epidemiological studies in 1918 had the same self-fulfilling failure mode as the Covidiocy: half the population refused to take them seriously enough to cooperate, and it doesn’t take that many Defecting Infectors to maintain the spread.
The metric to measure was how many people who masked properly got sick, and how severely, versus the “controls” who half-assed it or refused outright. It would have been real hard to get accurate (as opposed to self-reported) data on that.
I hope I was clear that I reject and resent the Karen-ish (and Gretchen-ish, and Gavin-ish) Mandates. But the unquantifiable, all-or-none insistence that masks don’t “work”–like, they’re made or neutrinos and dark matter? like they don’t stop a snot-spray at least as well as a hand over your mouth?–doesn’t pass the Intuition test.
I am neither a propagandizer nor a non-thinker. Neither am I an ideologically zealous pro- nor anti-masker. I gave, and give, not the faintest [bleep] who wore them or not. I did get kind of tired of wondering whether some self-appointed Mask Monitor was going to sucker punch me for wearing one, or for not.
It’s intuitively obvious that a mask, be it N-95 or a dirty sock, will–as in “it can’t not”– screen out SOME of the boogers. It’s just as obvious that NOTHING is 100%, and that Rhetorical Math “is a thing.”
It’s also obvious that this topic is as hot-button crazy-making as the ACW or Catholic vs Protestant. I think I’ve made my position as clear as it needs to be, so I hereby drop it.
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Nope, that was debunked.
They tried it at the time, and complete with heavy handed “you idiots just need to get with the program,” then someone pointed out that the nurses were getting sick. And their masking was under supervision of the doctors setting the standards.
That’s why poor Kellogg got tasked with doing actual science after the fact.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1362677/
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Foxfier, thank you for that link. You do provide a lot of substantive content; much more than I. Respect! Truly.
Note the tables in the body of the article: in all cases, the bacterial counts were reduced, but not eliminated entirely, by layers of gauze. Here’s the study’s conclusion
amount of restraining influence on the
number of bacteria-laden droplets possible
of inhalation.
of layers and fineness of mesh of
the gauze.
in the mask is used to exercise a useful
filtering influence, breathing is difficult
and leakage takes place around the edge of
the mask.
mask and the forcible aspiration of droplet
laden air through the mask is sufficient
to make the possible reduction in dosage
of infection not more than 50 per cent
effective.
experiments in contagious disease hospitals
to determine whether the wearing of
masks of such texture as to be reasonably
comfortable are effective in diminishing
the incidence of infection.
to have a degree of efficiency that would
warrant their compulsory application for
the checking of epidemics.
(The formatting of the numbered list looks great in preview. We’ll see what “help” WP gives it…)
Their conclusion is the same as mine: a mask stops some of the bugs, but not all, and that making them compulsory isn’t justified. Their study was done in vitro; I didn’t see any mention of comparing morbidity among masked- vs unmasked nurses.
Remember that the severity of infections varies (roughly!) with the number of infectious particles in the inoculation; even a 50% reduction in the number of bugs is better than nothing.
Again, this has been too much of a flame war for me to want to continue it. Thanks again for the link.
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Also:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=R_o1AQAAMAAJ&rdid=book-R_o1AQAAMAAJ&rdot=1
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I can’t see that one without jumpng through more googlehoops than I’m willing to. But thank you again for the research.
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I cough into my shirt. But yes, your elbow is as effective as a mask, and has the advantage of NOT getting YOU sicker.
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Even the military gas masks aren’t 100%. They filter air, trapping particles and neutralizing most of the agents. The filters degrade rapidly in high chemical agent concentration areas. And the highest risk for exposure is when you’re removing the NBC gear.
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“Covering” coughs and sneezes with a hand (or the suggested “Dracula sneeze” when you sneeze into your elbow)
More people really need to start carry handkerchiefs again.
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I carry tissues. And discard them when used.
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Then masks are useless on the Everyone Will Not Just clause.
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Useless for the Everyone. Of some use to Whomsoever Will.
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If masks were of any use, there would be some correlation between mask wearing and reduced spread of viral disease, even if not Everyone wore them. They found none. If anything, people wearing masks were slightly more likely to get sick. Just not enough more to be statistically significant.
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Was there a controlled study comparing morbidity in otherwise matched populations; a Control set being mask-abstainers and an Experimental set comprising people reliably, consistently, properly masking (hard to do, because proper masking is a PITA, and hard to confirm with only self-reported behavior)? Getting a significant sample size for that group sounds a LOT harder than getting Controls.
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They compared “will be arrested for not having a mask” to “totally voluntary.”
With a higher rate of infection and death for the forced masking, though not statistically significant.
If masks worked, then there would be at the very least a slight decrease in those populations which were forced to mask, even if imperfectly.
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“Will be arrested for not masking” encourages “resentfully avoiding arrest by pretending”–look at the pushback against the damned Mandates during the Covidiocy–and “totally voluntary” includes well-meaning-but-ignorant/incompetent. Both sets end up being such mixed bags of overlapping behaviors that it would make it practically impossible to distinguish the two groups’ actual masking behavior–low signal-to-noise ratio in the data.
Getting clean data would require large numbers of maskees whose technique was repeatedly evaluated by surprise spot-checks–again, proper masking (and proper confirmation thereof) is a PITA. Sounds expensive and impractical. (Doing ANYTHING properly is more of a PITA than “doing it well enough to keep the Boss off my [neck].”)
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No, it does not.
Which is why the supporters of masking demanded the comparison. They “knew” that “obviously” it would support their way– then they went to the “idiots weren’t masking correctly,” and then had to deal with those who were the ones indicating what “correctly” was, were more likely to get ill.
Which is, again, why Kellogg had to do his study, and though I did not point out– go look at the masks where they found a cut-down of virus.
It’s the ones where the nurse’s head looks like a q-tip.
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Dear Lord. WHERE do you live? The only people I see in masks are deranged middle aged obviously liberal women. And they’re rare.
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I see people wearing masks locally. High percentage elderly. Others? Just figure they have allergies. The pollen has been flying lately. I’m won’t wear a mask, that is what is important to me.
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I know I wear one – a nice allergen mask from Japan – when I do yard work.
Grass clippings are a killer.
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I’ll wear the highly-rated N95s when doing sanding or other craft jobs that need it (like cutting into birdhouse gourds. Seriously, there’s something called “gourd flu” which is basically “you didn’t wear a mask when cutting into the thing that is literally rendered hard by various molds and got nasty particulates in your lungs.”) For dust or other things, I much prefer the traditional bandana that allows airflow around the sides and bottom.
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I wear an industrial filter mask in the attic. Something about attic dust is just exquisitely horrible. Causes hours of coughing and sneezing.
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Grass, Rhododendrons, Azeleas, Dogwood, Roses, and current bulbs, are flowering like crazy. Local honey bees and hummingbirds are loving it. But what is blowing pollen and laying it thick, is the evergreens. I am so glad I don’t get stuffy with allergies. Sneeze a lot. Some big sneezes. But I don’t get a stuffy head.
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The main place I see masks now is at the grocery store. It seems to be primarily the elderly, the black, or both.
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You probably won’t have to worry about masks soon anyway. You see in the news where some heavily degreed people with zero brains down at Fort Detrick thought it would be a good idea to perform gain of function research to see if they could develop an aerosolized form of Ebola? Gee, COVID was a bad cold and the shot for it was more dangerous than the disease. Let’s try to make an extinction-level event bioweapon! (And I won’t go into the story about the lover’s spat between two of the researchers where the woman decides to punch holes in her former lover’s containment suit.)
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Idiot children playing with nuclear weapons. Perpetually choosing “Can we?” and ignoring “Should we?”. Or, “Gee, I wonder what this button does?”
I remember a comment made by a character in a story I read long ago: “Our curiosity is still rather apelike; stick your arm in a gopher hole to see if there’s a rattlesnake inside.” Add multiple advanced degrees and substitute a dfifferent body part and voila!, many of today’s “researchers”. :-x
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per Sir Pterry:
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry. It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die.
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Aside from the fact that I don’t know who Sir Pterry is, sounds about right. Wisdom is everywhere.😉
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Terry Pratchett
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Aha! OK, that ‘splains it; I never got into his work. IIRC I read his first Discworld novel when it came out, and reacted “Meh. OK, but there are other authors I like far more”.
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Yeah. Now try Night Watch. Do it for me.
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Is Night Watch really accessible without Guards Guards, Men at Arms, and Feet of Clay?
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without feet of Clay, yes. I THINK also without guard guards, to be fair.
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You need Men at Arms, though. That book builds Vimes’ character like nothing else.
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I don’t think you need it. You can read it after.
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This. Also, I’m pretty sure I read Night Watch before the earlier Vimes books (but maybe after Thud) and loved it, so I’d say it’s accessible.
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I’m a smarter ape. Have someone else put their arm in a gopher hole to see if there’s a rattlesnake inside. Preferably someone the entire band wouldn’t be unhappy to see lose the natural selection race.
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People don’t know and most don’t care until it’s too late.
It’s hard enough to make choices when you have to filter all the MSM propa-slander and dig through alternative media to find original sources of facts that aren’t total lies and half-truths.
But most people don’t even try to figure out what is going on. Even spending a few hours a month reading or voting in local elections is beyond them.
Many on the right are still trusting of MSM/academia’s current or past performances. And they don’t realize that the forces shaping the world, creating wars, encouraging socialism, and profiting off the chaos have been at this for generations.
Follow the money, trace the relationships. War is a racket, so is socialism.
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Amen Sister Sarah!
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It’s not so much that intellectuals are turned on by despots (although perhaps they are, to an uncomfortable degree (as if any degree would be comfortable) ). It’s that they are turned on by Marxism. Marxism claims to be the final distillation of philosophy, of science, of intelligence itself. And people fell (fall) for it, for the notion that if you believe in Marxism, that identifies you as intelligent. It even works in reverse, that someone obviously intelligent is assumed to be a socialist. (C.f. Mr. Spock, though of course Leonard Nimoy has some culpability in this, painful as it may be to say.)
How do you break that generations-old mindset? Exposing the realities of Communism doesn’t penetrate too far, and it isn’t as if there are tours of the Gulag or the Killing Fields the way there are tours of Dachau and Auschwitz.
Maybe this is why we need to get to Mars: so we can leave all those entrenched assumptions tens of millions of miles away. I don’t know.
Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.
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On whether we live in the best of all possible worlds, a few weeks ago I wrote a piece for a writing challenge, in which the POV character, a transtemporal clairvoyant, is musing that perhaps we live in the least bad of all possible worlds, a minimax world, if you will. This character uses the example of a world in which an Austrian customs inspector is fired, unjustly in his mind, and is so angry that he abandons Emperor and country to immigrate to the US, thus butterflying away his infamous son. But instead of rainbows and unicorns, what we get in the aftermath of the Great War and Germany’s humiliation is a leader who isn’t hobbled by the Failed Painter’s obsessions and hatred of the Chosen People.
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The lockdowns, and particularly zoom school.letting parents see what was happening, may have destroyed them in the longterm.
that said, if I could send one whisper back in time, it would be to Harry Truman in mid-May 1945. “Cut off all aid to the Soviets “
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The democratic administrations of FDR and Truman were riddled with communists. It was too late.
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Plus, “Remember, Harry, they lie.”
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yep.
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“My husband likes to believe we’re living in the best of all possible worlds. And maybe we are. Maybe.”
We might be in the best of likely outcomes, but certainly not the best possible.
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If you dig deeper, much of the socialism and cultural chaos, especially that in the United States is funded by a group of billionaires and foundations setup by the billionaires.
Socialism requires deep pockets just to get started. Somebody has to sponsor the cannon fodder roits and the bartenders.
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Yep. And don’t forget that we now know our own government also was and probably still is funding it with our tax money. (If there was a time when I thought that I hated Democrats and the government enough, it’s way back in the rear view mirror by now.)
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The book “None Dare Call It Treason” was written in the early 1960s. It starts off listing all the US aid to the USSR and the Combloc countries. Everything from cash to complete factories, with tediously extensive sources and footnotes.
It also talks about how the Soviet “acquisitors” had access to and priority over, apparently, everything except the Manhattan Project. And they had thoroughly infiltrated that anyway.
Someone(s) wanted a new Big Bad after Germany and Japan were defeated, and were willing expend vast amounts of US tax dollars to make it happen.
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started earlier than that. US business and banks kept Bolsheviks going all through Lenin and Stalin.
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On the other hand, it maintained an awesome bullet sponge for use in WW2 (best use of Russian forces)
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No Bolsheviks, no WWII. One cannot underestimate just how much fear of the commies played a role in the rise of the Nazis.
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and the Fascisti, and– a yup
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…which ought to put a stake through the heart of that “enemy of my enemy” nonsense. But it won’t.
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MAD was US policy only. Post collapse, we find in the Soviet archives that their war plans were ‘Nuke early and often’ – this is why the BMP class of personnel carriers had more NCBR controls than armor – they were meant to roll through the wasteland after nuking our front lines in Europe.
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Interesting. But I guess mutually assured destruction still worked, because they never followed through on the big war plans. They surely knew we had more than enough nukes to kill literally every human being in Russia…and when your enemy keeps telling you that they’ll do a Samson on the entire world if you start the nuclear ball…and they demonstrably can…it’s probably wise to avoid doing it. The Soviets were evil, not crazy. :)
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They knew we had more than they did, yes. BUT they still felt free to stomp, because we let them.
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The thing that probably held the Soviets (and other countries) back from starting a nuclear conflict is the fact that the U.S. is the only country that has demonstrated it will use its nuclear weapons in a major war. As for Soviet adventurism, I place the blame on that not being nipped in the bud at the feet of the “progressives” in the Presidency and Congress. They wanted world wide Soviet style government.
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I think what held them back more is that for most of the 60’s-80’s they were winning via “soft” power. Why nuke the hell out of somewhere you want for its material values when it was looking like in 10-20 years they’d join you anyways?
And until the late 50’s the USSR’s nuclear response was very limited. They could (and would have) nuked the heck out of most of Europe where the US had airbases. But their bombers had crap for range so continental US was beyond easy reach. Their bomber mainstay was the TU4 essentially a monkey copy of B29/B50 (TU4) for most of that period. Even one way they were reaching little of the US. They could reach parts of Alaska, Maybe Vancouver and Seattle and bits and bobs of northern Maine. The Tu4 would be meat on the table for Century class fighters, the TU16 Badger was showing up and would be better but even one way its range tops out at about 4k nautical miles. Their status changes changes as defenses improve (SA 2 grail comes online in ’57) and both sides start to get Ballistic missiles. By the early 60’s (Cuban missile crisis) things get worse ( I spent time in 2023 analyzing it here in excruciating detail https://tregonsee.blogspot.com/2023/06/counterfactual-part-3-ussrusa-conflict.html). Executive summary it is bad for the US, we end up hit hard on the coasts and are probably back to early 20th/late 19th century tech in large parts of the county. The USSR ceases to exist for all practical purposes. Europe in particular the UK, Italy and Turkey get hammered, Warsaw pact countries are also hammered. MAYBE Japan and the Philipines get hammered, and perhaps Australia. I have a similar look at a 70’s exchange that gets MUCH worse pretty much the whole Northern Hemisphere gets sent back to early 19th century capabilities (at best). I’ve been working on a Reagan era exchange for over a year now. its really the ’73 results squared. and there are three spots late ’83 which were likely far more critical than Cuban Missile Crisis and are worse because we didn’t know at the time the Soviets were skating on the edge of launching because at that time their policy was launch on warning, or even preemptive strike.
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The Soviets had intermediate-range missiles in range of the front lines during most of the Cold War. The US did not.
No comment on the French and Brits, of course.
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Talking of timelines reminds me –
Orson Scott Card’s novel Pastwatch posits that Christopher Columbus was influenced by time travelers from the future to travel West to the Americas, and stop what would have resulted in a horrific invasion of Europe by a Meso-American nation that had already survived the Western diseases (via random European explorers they’d captured), and made the Aztecs look downright nice when comparing religious practices.
The timeline in question is never shown. But after finding evidence of the timeline tampering, one of the characters is able to figure it out. A physical record that the time travelers intentionally left behind is subsequently found that confirms the character’s theory
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This. Thank you. I keep telling people this and they refuse to believe it.
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Another curious aspect, the idea that nukes made all other forms of war obsolete enabled the Bomber Mafia, the same folks who very nearly lost us WWII, to take over US air doctrine in the aftermath, especially for the Air Force.
They were a large reason the air war in Vietnam was such a fiasco. They’d ‘proven’ that all air ware was nuclear strategic war, and had built an airforce strictly to do that, and nothing else.
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They did eventually force the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. And word from the North’s own leadership revealed they waited as long as they did to re-invade the South after the Paris Accords was because they were afraid Nixon would resume bombing.
But that was after several years of war.
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That is true, but it is also true they went in equipped with the wrong systems and wrong doctrine and lost a lot of planes and men because the brass refused to learn the lessons they had already paid for in blood in WWII and then paid again in Korea.
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Though the effectiveness of the bombing raids has been argued heatedly, the point remains that the bombers could, and did, make it through enemy air defenses to strike at the enemy, and most of them returned.
They did this regularly, eventually twice a day, when the invasion armies were being assembled and staged for a couple *years* before D-Day, sitting safe and comfy in England and Ireland waiting for their big day.
That’s also where Churchill butted heads with Marshall so often; Marshall wanted giant decisive battles. Churchill wanted to strike wherever the German defenses looked weak, wherever it looked like they might win without too many losses, even if there wasn’t any particular military advantage to doing so. Marshall couldn’t see any point to wasting effort on anything not directly contributing to the overall plan.
Under the terms of their Grand Alliance agreement, Marshall outranked Churchill on military matters. But Churchill was still a head of state, and not in the least reluctant to make himself a giant pain in the ass to get his way. The early actions in Africa, and eventually Torch, were largely at his urging. But by late 1943 he lost most of his influence as the plans for fighting the war were finalized, and Marshall wasn’t willing to change plans Churchill had already agreed to.
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The ETO daylight bombing campaign was taking unacceptable losses because the bomber mafia refused to do proper escort, when the same aircraft were being used to do even longer escort runs in Papa New Guinea of all places. After the losses of the two un-escorted ball-bearing raids they had to stop entirely. The only reason they were able to resume was they were able to find the fig leaf of the Mustang to justify their prior failure to use escort tactics.
Then after WWII they systematically dismantled all USAF tactical and close support strike capability. The new P-51 pilots going to Korea have never even been instructed on how to drop bombs, at all. It was a complete failure of leadership to remove close support from training, especially after the hard lessons of WWII. The only branches that retained close support skills were the Marine Corps and the US Navy. (And the USAF still hasn’t entirely forgiven the Army for falling the Marines before they called the USAF)
Going into the Vietnam War, the USAF had again effectively jettisoned the lessons they’d had to relearn in Korea, and entered, again, with aircraft and training largely* unsuited to the mission. The F-105, for example was a nuclear bomber, and was designed without extensive redundancy, because it wasn’t expected to make more than a few trips.
*The F-4 is an exception, mostly in that it was not designed to a USAF contract. Rather it was a privately developed aircraft intended from the start to be multi-configuration and capable of whatever mission buyers would want to use it for. Even there, USAF inter-branch political rivalries initially knee-capped it, because rather than use a Navy Air to Air missile, the USAF decided they would use half of a USAF missile system instead. They took the missile from the Convair Deltas, and left the launch control computer behind. And, surprise, when you tell a pilot to do all the math in their head that you built a computer to do, while under G’s in a dogfight, they’re not going to do it right, and the missile is not going to work
Sorry, I’ve been an aircraft nut for most of my life, and the more I dig up about how most of the Allies high brass ran, the more convinced I am that we won in spite of them, rather than because of them.
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It’s been a long time (25 years?) since I read my P-38 book, but one of the stated reasons for not using it in Europe was abysmal cockpit heating. Not having the Merlin engine might have caused issues, too. When they were deployed to the Pacific, one Charles Lindburgh volunteered (or was volentold, dunno) to guide the pilots for best practices.
My father was in the 8th Air Force, but never saw Europe, instead traveling to Okinawa in preparation in case the 509th didn’t succeed.
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It was an issue. But the larger strategic reasons it didn’t work well in the ETO were the total cockpit ergonomics were terrible and demanded a highly practiced aviator to go from cruise to combat quickly without a potential engine failure and its really bad mach limit meant that the majority of the LW fighters could easily disengage by diving away.
One of the goals of the 8th was to destroy the LW as a fighting force, and the P-38 did have some significant problems in doing that.
In the PTO that was less of a factor because the battle areas tended to be more separate from the cruising areas, and the IJ aircraft had generally weak dive performance.
I also sort of suspect while the P-38 may have had poor cockpit ergonomics for combat, it may have had excellent cockpit ergo for long range cruise and navigation, due to Lockheed’s extensive experience with twin engine airliners prior to the P-38. The Lightning was actually Lockeed’s first combat design, from what I can recall, and its cockpit was built more like an Electora than a fighter.
That long range cruising ability is one of those under-reported X-factors in the Pacific. The Corsair, from what I’ve flown of it in sims, is a very hands on plane, that demands a lot of hands on attention. It is very capable and manuverable, but if you are on a 3h patrol, that’s just exhausting.
By contrast, the Hellcat is a docile, almost cheerful plane that feels like it just wants to relax and fly. It is the sort of plane that, if you’re having a problem with the Navigate part, you feel like you can take your eyes off of it for a bit and it will still be where you left it when you get back. When you are one guy, alone, with ocean as far as the eye can see, that can be rather important.
All that said, it would have been comparatively trivial to add extra heating elements to the cockpit and use it as a stop gap while they figured out something better.
On a side note, the Allison engines with the turbo chargers were better high altitude engines than the early float carb Merlins were. The issue was the Turbo adds a 4th lever (boost) to the throttle mix, and they need to be pulled in a specific order or you can blow the engine up: Mixture then pitch then throttle, then Boost. Do it in the wrong order and you can detonate the engine, stall the turbo, or get a wonderful feedback surge going that requires you to dump all boost and maybe restart the engine to get out of.
Most USAAF fighters had these all in one throttle block, laid out inside to out. Just start and the inner lever and work your way out and your fine. Or even grab all of them at once and do it all at the same time.
The P-38 had them scattered all over the cockpit. Add in a complex and finely grained fuel management system, which could let you pump any tank into any other tank or engine, or seal any tank off from the system entirely, and you have a fountain of potential ways to screw things up.
(There is a theory that the reason MacGuire did not drop his tanks after he ended up in a turn fight with a Ki-43 Oscar, was even he was concerned there was a very real possibility he would make a mistake during the fairly intricate process.)
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And WP(DE) put me in moderation. Sigh.
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Yeah, it’s a fickle system.
And I’ll admit, it’s a subject I get spun up hard on. When one digs deep enough into the mechanics of a thing, it seems one finds that one’s heroes weren’t, and vast swaths of what made it to the history books were just a politicians rear covering.
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I’m going to try a repost:
It’s been a long time (25 years?) since I read my P-38 book, but one of the stated reasons for not using it in Europe was abysmal cockpit heating. Not having the Merlin engine might have caused issues, too. When they were deployed to the Pacific, one Charles Lindburgh volunteered (or was volentold, dunno) to guide the pilots for best practices.
My father was in the 8th Air Force, but never saw Europe, instead traveling to Okinawa in preparation in case the 509th didn’t succeed.
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The P-38 suffered from poor dive performance and poor cockpit ergonomics so had issues in the ETO, and issues engaging LW aircraft. But above all else, the ETO commanders did not want it there.
Further, the P-47 had the hard points to take a belly tank that gave it the range to reach (but not breach) the flak ring over Schweinfurt, but the 8th made zero effort to implement it, preferring instead to run with silly schemes like loading special escort B-17s down with tons of guns instead, while at the same time the 5th Air Force in Guinea had simply contracted local producers to make a tank. That was the Brisbane tank, a flat pan 200 gallon belly tank that meant they were basically able to do the Berlin run at the same time the 8th were saying it was impossible.
Which would seem like an honest mistake at first, until one finds out General Kennedy was there in part because he had been ostracized from the wider Army Air Force for questioning the idea that unescorted massed high altitude bombing was the optimal solution to all problems.
It’s like that transition from knowing the Spitfire had a float carburator, and that’s why it’s engine cut out in negative G’s to the discovery that it had a float carburator because one guy in the British Air Ministry had a vendetta against fuel injection and appears to have falsified test results to ensure they were never used, and the technical knowledge that the ‘carburator’ used in American aviation engines really was a form of fuel injection where you find that its not just a small technical detail, but rather a serious design defect that only happened because of one man’s idiot obsession, and everyone else had engines that didn’t have that flaw.
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Lindburg strong-armed his way into flying. He wanted to go into combat, but had resigned his commission prior to the war, and hadn’t been able to get it back.
So he volunteered to ‘help’. And finagled his way into a combat squadron, and when on a bunch of combat flights, and may have actually gotten a kill, before he got caught and informed he was not allowed to do that again or he was going to get kicked out of theater so hard he’d bounce. Politely, mind you, but very firmly.
Greg’s talk on it is absolutely a stitch. He has a very matter of fact delivery style that’s just perfect for the completely off the hook stuff Lindburg was doing. And he is also an experienced pilot himself so he knows just how off the hook some of that stuff was.
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Lindbergh also provided the ‘lean burn’ supercharger and fuel settings that gave the P-38 much greater cruising range. Not appropriate for combat, but great for getting there and back.
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Lindbergh was, unfortunately, a bit overly sympathetic toward Germany before the War. But no one should ever question that the man was 100% patriotic and loved the USA.
He and his wife were apparently also good friends with the Coolidges when the latter was in the White House.
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WP doesn’t like my post. Moderation again. Sigh.
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I tried a reply, but it’s stuck in moderation gulag. Let’s go short:
One of the “official” reasons why the P-38 wasn’t used for European escort was abysmal cockpit heating. The South Pacific was more friendly to the pilots.
FWIW, one of the volunteers (or maybe Volentold) who guided the pilots in the SP was one Charles “Lucky Lindy” of transAtlantic fame. (Maybe WP didn’t like the name?)
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Yes. Thing was the Thunderbolt was also plumbed and stressed for a 200 gallon belly tank*, so even the first models that went the ETO were capable of reaching the flak ring around Schweinfurt. And in the PTO, the USAAF general in charge of that theatre commissioned just such a drop tank, and had them in service by then.
About the only way the ETO commanders could have not been aware of that is by either actively ignoring it or discounting the value of it. Given the ton of time and effort they spent trying to make escort bombers, I can only assume they simply disregarded it.
What we see, I’m the ETO repeatedly are the command puffing justifications as to why they cannot do fighter escort, and rather than attempting to solve any of those problems, they instead focus on weird and unsuccessful things to make the bombers escort themselves. As you point out, they talk about insufficient cockpit heating on the P-38. Did they ever attempt to fix it? As near as I can tell, not once. Surely installing a bunch of field expedient heaters cannot be more complicated than developing and building two dozen ‘gunship’ B-17’s stateside and flying them in for a grand total of 14 missions? Heck, they had to design an entirely new turret for the chin guns.
*There are people who argue that Republic never intended it to support a belly tank of that size. Nearly all of Republis’s design documents were destroyed rather than declassified when Fairchild shut down, but the early pilot manuals describe how to handle a drop tank in that range. Given that was removed from later manuals, and just such a tank was developed and used in theater, one can only presume it was not an accidental inclusion.
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OK, one got through. #headdesk
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Yep, the F-4 was a very fast brick. With a top speed of over Mach 2.2(1600+mph at sea level). Unfortunately, with their usual stupidity the USAF brains(the original customer) decided it wouldn’t/didn’t need a gun.
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Well, turns out it was stupider than that. The USAF didn’t want the AIM-9 Sidewinder, so they put the AIM-4 on it but didn’t use the launch computer it was supposed to come with.
The Delta Dart and Dagger both had the computer and apparently it gave the pilot a bucket they had to stay in while it handled all the weapon prep and launch. Works way better than having the pilot handle all of that in the middle of a fight. That’s also why whenever they tested it, it performed fine: they were testing it on planes with the whole system, not just the missile.
The Navy did pretty well with their short nose models with the Sidewinders, and at least one of the aces preferred the short nose because it was more manuverable.
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For more on the Vietnam air war, I recommend Clashes: Air Combat over North Vietnam, by Marshall Michell III. I own a copy and it’s an excellent book.
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The point I’m talking is how the USAF specified aircraft only intended for strategic nuclear war. Things like the F-105 lacking redundancy or armor protection because it was designed to be a nuclear penetration bomber, not a strike craft, and removing all air-to ground training from the pilot syllabus after WWII, and again after Korea.
If you look at the successful strike aircraft of Vietnam they are all either from US Marine Corps requirements (hello A-1 and A-4) or private designs that were then sold to the USAF, like the F-4.
The F-4’s design history is, frankly, wild. It really was designed to be a modular jack of all trades platform, and McDonnell really nailed it.
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The Marines have made a religion of close air support since before I enlisted in ’63; I’ve seen no indication that’s changed. (I was disappointed that they chose the Harrier over the A-10, but overall requirements apparently dictated that, not pure ground-strike capability. And it worked out pretty well.)
As for the F4, we got our first squadron(s) of them at MCAS Beaufort in ’65 or ’66 (we had A4’s and F8’s until then); one thing I remember that the “Phantom Phixer” maintenance crews said was “If they aren’t leaking they’re empty”; I’ve read that the SR-71 had the same issue of fuel leakage, but it went away for the SR-71 at speed when it grew a foot or so in length and sealed the gaps.
The F4 was one helluva a plane, though. Good times, good times.😉
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ah the F4. As my Grumman friends used to say “apply enough thrust and even a brick will fly.”
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The way I heard it: “You can fly a brick if you put big enough engines on it.”
Back in World War 2 speed was the Holy Grail of fighter tactics. Well, speed and altitude. So Grumman made sure the F-4 could hit Mach 2.
Actual pilots soon discovered that going twice as fast as the enemy wasn’t much use. Except to run away when the enemy turned inside you and locked you up.
They did learn the lessons, though. Which is why they put big-ass wings and control surfaces on the F-14, to go with the big-ass engines.
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You have friends at Grumman? I’m sorry.
Sorry again. I had a fairly long and thoroughly frustrating relationship with Grumman when I worked for the Army. Very much, “We’ll take your money and give you as little as we possibly can.”
The worker bees were OK. It was management that were pains.
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It is. I still find it a bit wild that it exists at least inn part because Westinghouse dropped the ball so hard on the J40 that it sunk the F3D.
I honestly don’t know if the F-4 would have been nearly so flexible if it had started as a Navy contract follow on to the Demon, instead of a mad dash to make something they could sell.
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Four of us college boys were doing a Christmas road trip from U of Redacted to California. Towards afternoon in New Mexico, we were overflown by a low altitude F4. Seriously cool plane.
A co-worker at HP flew the U2 as a civilian during the Viet Nam excitement, but managed to avoid serious injury. (His plane got shot but the miss was enough so he could get out of Dodge and land safely.) He showed me pics of his stepson preparing to fly “his” plane, a SR-71. I guess the spy-flight bug was contagious. :)
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c4c
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The Intel deep state kept Russia alive to keep their power. They lied about Russia’s capabilities to keep their funding and power, they joined with the commies in our government not because they agreed with them but because they found them to be useful idiots. The problem being they didn’t realize just how big of idiots they really were.
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One more book for the list –
Tombstone – The Great Chinese Famine
A veteran party-approved journalist went around the country and tricked the various provincial authorities in granting him access to their records (aside from one province that got suspicious and started asking auestions). The result was a fairly comprehensive book on Mao’s famine that was published (as most books critical of the CCP were) in Hong Kong.
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Frank Dikötter’s books about China, starting with the Civil War. I lean on him a lot when I teach modern Chinese history. I don’t entirely agree with some stuff, but 1) he did the research, and 2) it fits what I’ve read elsewhere about the Nationalists not being incompetent, corrupt, and totally in the pocket of “the large land owners.”
But oh, the subject is sooooo depressing.
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I’m reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang which is a three generation female family biography starting from 1909 through 1980. And, near as I can tell China started from $%^&ed. At some point they might learn about rule of law and equal opportunity and stuff but they didn’t have any more concept of such things than horses did back in those days.
IMO and I’m sourcing off of one book.
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I think that’s the author of “Mao: The Untold Story”. It’s a good and informative book, but the author seems to be too eager to blame Mao for anything and everything. As an example, the author lays blame for the attack on the Japanese area in Shanghai on a particular KMT division commander that was apparently secretly working for Mao. Other sources indicate that there was a broad push for the attack, including by the German officer that was training the KMT troops used in the battle.
Still, it was a good listen (I have it as an audio book).
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I can’t speak for incompetence and being in the pocket of the “large land owners”. But there is evidence of corruption. For example, there was a famine in at least one province in ’41 or ’42 (the latter, I think). This should have been avoidable because the local officials were required to store grain to be used in the event of a bad harvest.
But when it came time to produce the grain, instead most of the silos suffered mysterious fires that destroyed them and any evidence of how much rice was actually being stored there.
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True. The textbook implies that the corruption was worse than during the late Imperial period (“pretend the Tai Ping Rebellion didn’t happen and that the Dynasty totally reformed … just trust us.”) The textbook gives students the impression that there was nothing at all good about the Nationalists, and that the Communists should have been allowed to take over and make things better. Although the authors sort of liked Sun Yat-Sen, because of his socialist writings.
Alas, “accidental” fires like that seem to be a loooong tradition, going back to [tries to recall where the reference was] at least the end of the Ming, in the early 1600s? Probably back even to the Tang-Song/Sung transition? Finding good sources is hard, because the officials didn’t write down bad stuff, lest they get blamed for it, going back to the oracle bones, and not recording possible bad events, lest they come true. (Which makes you wonder just how much the mandarins falsified travel expenses and entertainment costs when they submitted them for reembursement. [some things never change]).
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The assumption that the Soviets could not deliver a decisive nuclear strike 1970-1989 is simply not valid. Their stuff may not have been as good as ours, but the AK series rifles, T-34 tank, Mig-21, and various other items work “good enough”. (Example, Vietnam. “Good enough”.) The Russians do artillery rather well, class of the world, really, and in vastly greater volume than the USA. We call it “King of Battle” because it remains the primary casualty-inducing arm. Russia often uses the term “God of War”. Because they apparently don’t think “Tzar” is sufficient. We never fielded an “artillery division”. They do.
Our ICBMs were under the Bomber-focused Strategic Air Command.
Soviet ICBMs were organized as, and thought of as, -Artillery-. That is a key difference. And I think most folks completely miss the implications of it.
They had -enough- working warheads to gut us. They lacked the ability to prevent our reply-in-kind. We had more than enough, usually. If they had known with some clarity that one series of sub-launched missiles were mostly dud warheads (More than 50%, possibly 90%), due to a disastrously defective “safeing” system (they were -totally- safe), they may have rolled the dice.
And note that by a vote of two to one, a sub command crew decided -not- to start a nuclear war off Cuba in 1962. They were rather confident in reliability of that nuclear torpedo. Ands they well understood Soviet reliability. Hmm. Then again, we deployed Davy Crockett, a tactical nuclear bazooka that theoretically gave a thee man team of junior EMs in a Jeep nuclear capability…..
…..that close……
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L. Neil.Smith kept writing that the US government was the real enemy. He was correct, though at the time it had more to do with up front aid to the soviets such as grain. Turns outnit was all the subrosa stuff that was the serious problem.
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c4c
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I was a beta reader for a friend’s Master’s thesis on the Korean War. So I asked my friend, (especially with our 2020 hindsight about the chicomms) if we should have pushed back hard against the North Koreans and by extension the Chicomms.
Well it’s a really good question.
I never did ask my dad while he was alive but I knew what he said about Vietnam (he flew in that war) so I’m going to take an educated guess as to what he would have said about Korea.
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Oh. Crud.
You guys know how we complain about how the rest of the world is, well, painfully communist?
That’s…probably because we let them go around killing people.
Side with America, good chance you’ll die. Possibly from radioactive tea, or stabbed with an umbrella.
Yeah, some places got loose. At least mostly. But look at Ukraine– they got loose, got success, and Russia decided to go kill them and take their stuff, and would have gotten away with it if they hadn’t come back for seconds.
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Oh yeah. under Carter the horse America backed in Portugal was well to the left of the socialists. heck, they were to the left of the REGULAR communists.
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At least when President Trump visits a foreign country, and a girl hands him flowers, he doesn’t sniff her hair. :-P
Somebody said Trump should get a Nobel Peace Prize for putting a lid on the Middle East. Won’t happen. Trump could achieve world peace, cure cancer, end famine, and establish a colony in another star system and they’d never give him a Nobel prize.
0bama got a Nobel prize for being half-black.
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I’m pretty sure Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for being *not* GWBush.
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The Davy Crockett was a deranged weapon system. It was more Crazy Ivan than Crazy Ivan. I think it kept the Russians from coming through the Fulda Gap.
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11B E-4 Mafia, with nukes.
(Grin)
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Trump could achieve world peace, cure cancer, end famine, and establish a colony in another star system and they would give Obama another Nobel Peace Prize.
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Meanwhile, James Comey (did you know he’s a “New York Times best-selling author,”?) has a new crime thriller coming out about a female Hispanic prosecutor going after a “right-wing podcaster,” who is naming his enemies and his fans are then going out and killing them. So original! So exciting! I could swear I saw a variation on this theme in Funky Winkerbean back in the 80s. (No mention of a ghostwriter, just his name on the fashionably dark cover).
Well, purely coincidentally no doubt, he saw a message spelled put in seashells while walking on the beach, so he photographed it and posted it on Instagram. The seashells spelled out, “86 47.”
But it’s ok, really! He just thought it was a political message, he had no idea anyone could possibly think “86” was an incitement to violence! He abhors violence! So he deleted the post after it got spread all over Twitter.
Message from Kash Patel suggests the FBI is more than willing to help out the Secret Service look into this.
Me, I’m disgusted.
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There is absolutely no question that Comey was calling for, and outright inciting, the assassination of Trump, and he needs to be arrested, prosecuted, and put in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.
https://nypost.com/2025/05/15/us-news/ex-fbi-chief-james-comey-accused-of-threatening-trump-in-since-deleted-8647-instagram-post-deeply-concerning/
This kind of stuff is the direct result of the coup conspirators from the Russia Collusion Hoax not being punished, and instead being rewarded, for their first effort to destroy Trump.
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So much this.
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couple of people last night were suggesting a publicity stunt to flog his book and get attention. If so, it’s astonishingly…well….poorly thought out.
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I am guessing Dear Madame, that you know more about communist atrocities because you are originally Portuguese, and we, most of us, are not. Also, a treatise by the Puritan, Thomas Watson, All Things for Good, persuaded me that we do live in the best possible creation. You can find it at Amazon, where the current cover shows medicine being poured in a spoon. You can find it at ThriftBooks for cheaper. Watson, like most Puritan writers, makes a lot out of every single word of scripture that he cites, and he cites scripture plentifully. It might not be to your taste, but he makes a convincing case, at least for me.
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Yea, and amen.
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Why did Dante call it The Divine Comedy? Because it has a happy ending after all.
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Only God knows counterfactuals. As an individual, I am much better at imagining how things could be worse than how things could be better. The tragic view of life makes sense to me.
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This. Pessimism is win-win: You either get a Knew-It point* or a joyous surprise gift from the Lord!
*Bets on those points can pay big.
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“Pessimists are right more often than optimists, but optimists have more fun.”Lazarus Long.
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Adjusting your med’s sucks, parts of my mind are coming back, just not all the parts I want. The anger and short temper I could do without, parts I thought left behind in my youth, but no they were just suppressed by the drugs. Now it is interesting trying to discover which parts are the real me, and which parts were the drugs. Not really liking what I see, not the mirrors fault, entirely mine. At 60+ I feel like I am fourteen again, and I am not one to self identify as anything I am not. If I could I’d be a petite teenage Asian Lesbian with a Katana fixation and a desire to liquidate corruption. In truth I look like the big Labowski only older and with a cane. I do need me some Foster Grants though to hide my baby blues…
No I won’t be one of those arrested for hanging around Middle schools, too far up the hill to walk with my bad knees and back. sarc.
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