LAUGHTER, STILL THE BEST MEDICINE

From the Instapundit comes this quick little article. The fun was in the first 18 comments which reflect another level of the underlying reality that still flows through the web today.

IT IS TO LAUGH

Just got home from an extended birthday bash 4 states away from here. It was fun and we enjoyed it. Tonight, after a long drive home I had a chance to see Amanpur and her hate on America show as they interviewed Anita Hill about what a sexist racist bigot that justice was back when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission where she was some kind of powerless slave totally in thrall to the Man and unable to forma coherent plan to deal with what she viewed as outrageous intrusions on her personal life. You get where the laughter comes from when you realize that everybody involved in producing this show totally supports the idea of grown men permitted to use women's rooms and teenage boys allowed to use the girls locker rooms anytime they feel like it.

How a nation of 'educated Americans' ever accepted this nonsense is beyond me. See? And now some of you are wondering which bit of nonsense I'm talking about. Is it the Anita Hill BS or the Blasey Ford assault on another Justice with her deranged obvious lies about a past that only exists between her ears and nowhere else? Or, is it the idiocy of letting men use the same facilities as teenage girls just because they feel like it?

UNHEARD IN AMERICA

This is pretty egregious.

Sixty-six percent of college students think shouting down a speaker they disagree with is acceptable to shut down their talk, and another 23 percent believe violence can be used to cancel a speech, according to a wide-scale survey released this week.

The 2021 College Free Speech Rankings, a follow-up on the first survey in 2020, asked over 37,000 students at 159 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities to share their views about free speech on campus. Published by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, RealClearEducation and College Pulse, the results show freedom of expression on campus remains a pressing concern. Not only do 66 percent of students say it is acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus, that result is up four percentage points from last year. Another key finding is that nearly one in four students say it’s acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech — up 5 percent over last year’s survey — with some elite colleges bringing that figure to as high as one in three students accepting of such violence.

Underscoring these findings, more students are keeping their mouths’ shut, even during a year when most campus activities and instruction moved online.

Eighty percent of students reported that they self-censor viewpoints at least some of the time on campus, and another one-fifth of students reported that they do it quite often.

There is something very wrong with education in this country. This kind of thinking and behavior was never allowed and should never have been allowed. It is pretty clear that it will not stop until administrators and faculty kick these kind of students out of the schools and universities and start again by emphasizing civility. Those that like violence and hating their enemies to death can just stick to antifag and BLM where they like an unfair fight as long as they hold the weapons and outnumber the people they are hating on.

CLEAR AND SIMPLE AS THE TRUTH

I'm beginning to think stupidity and ignorance are highly contagious.

STUPID AND REALLY REALLY STUPID

I have to admit I laughed out loud when I started reading about the CO2 gas shortage leading to an immediate and drastic crisis in the United Kingdom. You can find some of the background here. I have excerpted a few funny quotes:

Ministers are desperately trying to persuade the millionaire boss of a US fertiliser firm that produces 60 per cent of the UK's CO2 to restart production.

CF Industries, one of the biggest fertiliser businesses in the world, shut its two plants in Teesside and Cheshire after a large surge in gas prices meant continued production wouldn't be profitable.

"The plants produce 60 per cent of the UK's carbon dioxide with the decision to close them blamed for plunging Britain into a CO2 crisis set to decimate the food industry, leading to animals having to be culled and supermarket shelves being empty."

That's funny right there. The owner shut down production because the idiot government let the price of gas go up just a little bit.

It takes really stupid people to destroy an entire national economy over a completely fake manmade fictional tale of woe. It's not just the British policy elite, we got our own morons in government.

"Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is now holding fresh talks with CF Industries millionaire chief executive Tony Will, 55, in an attempt to persuade him to restart production.

Mr Kwarteng says No10 is considering 'temporarily' subsidising the company to get CO2 production back up and is 'very hopeful' a deal can be done soon.

However, he admitted 'it may come at some cost' after Mr Will is thought to have been unconvinced by the government's offers at an initial meeting on Sunday.

News that CF Industries controls so much of the UK's CO2 supply has prompted fury and disbelief from food industry bosses.

Richard Walker, managing director of Iceland, said yesterday: 'The thing that has shocked me is that 60% of [CO2] production is concentrated in two factories which are both owned by a foreign business.

'This is something that's clearly critical to national security - not just food but also healthcare as well. So it seems quite perplexing that it's at the whim of a private enterprise in terms of whether it's profitable or not and therefore whether they produce the stuff or not.'"

If the ministers were serious about getting the business restarted during the cost crisis all they have to do is offer the company energy at exactly the price it was before it went all pear shaped. I can't imagine any businessman turning that kind of offer down and it's fascinating that in this case, as in most others, the national authority can no longer appeal to the patriotism of the business class since they are rarely patriotic these days and with little reason to be so.

SUICIDE THEN

I caught this item from Ken Burns today who quoted a January 1838 speech by Abraham Lincoln.

It looks very much to me like successive American governments have opted for American suicide. There really can be no other explanation for continuing to let in an unending flood of economic migrants who have no skills at all and instantly go on the dole and turn to crime and get resettled all across small town and small city America. We have all the ignorant criminals we can handle and more every day turned out by our public schools unable to read, write, perform the simplest math and as ignorant of civics and history as a stone. No wonder we have morons clamoring about mythical made up crap like man made global warming and hating nuclear power at the same time. This isn't going to end well. Those apocalyptic movies from the 70s are looking more and more likely to come about.

THE RED CROSS WANTS ME

I received an urgent plea from the Red Cross to give blood. They declared that all donors must of course wear a face mask during the donation for the safety that's in it. It's an interesting take on risk management that something as useless as a paper mask is required but yet they are working day and night to eliminate all barriers to gay men donating blood and are therefore accepting whatever risks there are that some poor recipient downstream could get HIV contaminated blood. It makes for really weird reading as they blend pure ignorance and imbecility with a plea that also explains that they're taking steps to keep everyone safe.

I'll go back to my normal donation cycle when they return to normal and put behind them this ongoing idiocy about a disease so dangerous one has to get tested to know if one has it.

THE UNIMAGINABLE

I watched one of the Tucker Carlson clips about our drone strike on a van load of little children in Afghanistan and listened to the perps explain how it was righteous and done strictly in accordance with the established procedures we have used in Afghanistan since we launched Enduring Freedom and I think with 20 years of that kind of thing we have raised 2 generations of men who will die to kill Americans in any way possible and I can't say that I blame them. Even if we held the men who did these things accountable it would make no difference in the grand scheme of things since men who have lost their family and children to a "righteous" drone strike probably won't be fobbed off vengeance when we strongly resist giving the perps so much as a slap on the wrist.

Contrast the way the Army in both Iraq and Afghanistan treated "righteous" drone strikes or bombing/strafing runs that killed innocent civilians with how the same commanders treated soldiers, sailors and Marines who killed or injured civilians or even terrorists and you start to wonder at the amazing disconnect with reality suffered by officers wearing stars. They find it perfectly appropriate to torment and court-martial men for alleged misbehavior that might have led to a terrorist getting a fat lip but turn a blind eye to "righteous" killings via air strikes.

It was said that war makes monsters of us all. I heard that quote some years ago on a radio show and it was attributed to one of our bomber crew that flew missions with the 8th Air Force in World War II and dropped thousands of tons of bombs in a "righteous" sort of way on anything that moved in Germany and most of the things that didn't. Nobody on our side was ever charged with killing innocent civilians and if you look at the policy in place at the time, while the 8th Air Force conducted day-light precision bombing and paid dearly for it, the RAF and the Pacific Air Force set out to destroy entire cities and again, nobody was prosecuted because the winners don't have to sit through that kind of peak under the curtain. Only the losers get that treatment. Mind you, the 8th Air Force didn't bomb in daylight out of any concern about civilian casualties, the generals just thought they stood a much better chance of hitting the actual targets of the raids if they could see them.

I have the sense that civilization is coming to an end but not as projected by Fukuyama and not as Huntington proposed in his "Clash of Civilizations." The barbarians without and beyond The Pale are not the ones undermining civilization now, it is our own institutions that have repurposed and dedicated themselves to destroying Western civilization to the point that there can be no clash because Western civilization won't be around to show up for the clash. American civilization used to be bred in the bones of its citizens and I think Norman Rockwell reflected what it was like to be a white American as we entered the Cold War. Almost all of that sense of purpose and history is gone now. Only old people have any idea about civics, history, economics, thrift, industry, decency.

What 9/11 brought about, temporarily, was a return to a unity of purpose. All of that was frittered away and no place reflected that more than NYC as the moguls and politicians waged all out war over the replacement for the World Trade Center. It played out in the public eye and I think everyone was revolted by it. The government actions since then have repelled almost all the people who once believed in government as a positive force. Only fools believe that anymore. Government exists to exert awful pressure on citizens in order to turn them into subjects and criminals. It lets the connected insider elite such as Jamie Gorelick or Hillary Clinton get away with murder and it hastily proclaims that all those who have dirt on people like that commmitted suicide when they're found dead, even the ones in federal custody. And we the people, have let them get away with that.

I see Justice Breyer has resisted strong urgings from democrats that he retire right away and give Biden and his idiot Senate a chance to name a thoroughly corrupt creature of the elite such as our current Attorney General to his place on the Supreme Court. Breyer has so far declined and is not persuaded by the fact that Ginsburg also resisted the clarion howls that she resign on Obama's watch and spitefully died on when Trump was President leaving him to fill that seat on the Court. The democrats figure Breyer won't last as long as Biden and fear that the Republican Senate that comes to office next year will reject Merrick or any other communists from taking a seat on the Court. Breyer is a dead man walking. I expect him to turn up dead any day now from some nagging little cough that turned into Ebola or something worse. At any rate, I'm pretty sure they'll off him with Covid. I wonder how many strange men in coveralls have been seen in the Supreme Court building in the vicinity of the air conditioning system with odd little brief cases stuffed full of live covid virus. If the democrats accidently wipe out the entire Supreme Court it won't be any skin off their noses. They can appoint 9 new tame communists and move on with their plans to further wreck the country without any judicial restraint at all. Not that the Courts have really been known for judicial restraint since Roe v Wade.

It doesn't pay to see things like this when the whole Western world seems hellbent on recreating a fascist dictatorship of massive proportions again. Just looking at Australia turned into an entire nation of sheep over a virus that has a 99% survival rate is amazing. I'm appalled.

ON THE GRIPPING HAND

There is some well founded suspicion that this is a bunch of undercover feds looking for trouble at the bogus justice rally. wouldn't it have been amusing though to get some friends to dress like these guys and attend the bogus rally sure and certain that all the LEO types would assume your're undercover feds with absolutely no hint about proper disguise and leave you alone? OTGH, you're a fed ordered to perform undercover surveillance on those Trumpians but you voted for Trump and so did the other guys that look like you in federal LE...

CUE THE LAUGH TRACK

I see that dunderheaded elite foreign policy drones have been so successful in their ongoing diplomatic efforts they have made the French recall their Ambassador for consultations after some clever dicks got the Australians to pony up the dosh for U.S. nuclear submarines built in Australia in lieu of some cheapo French diesel boats. It takes a rare talent to make the French so angry they throw a hissy fit and stamp their little feet. On the other hand, those cheap diesel boats that were going to be built in France by the French were going to cost the Australians $90,000,000,000. Losing that kind of sale is a poke in the eye for anybody.

Now why would I laugh out loud when I read the news about this? Well, somehow there exists somewhere in America some really clever guy who convinced the powers-that-be in Australia that the U.S. really truly would sell nuclear propulsion technology to another country. The Australians will find themselves out $40 billion dollars on submarine production before some jackass here whips the rug out from under them and tells them they don't have the right clearances to see our nuclear stuff after all. We have proved faithless to all our European allies so it won't come as any surprise to them when this happens but won't the Aussies be surprised.

Another thing I find amusing is the Australian Navy. Right now they can only scrape up enough submariners to crew 3 of their existing 6 submarines. It is really unlikely they'll be able to find many more to crew nuclear powered boats. And then there is the school house that they're going to have to attend here in the U.S. one presumes. It will be interesting to see how we handle giving foreign students U.S. SECRET and TOP SECRET clearances. Not saying it cannot be done, it will just be interesting to see how they contort themselves to do it.

It will also be interesting to see if they throw themselves into designing a new boat or if we simply sell them Virginia class submarines. At any rate, I expect this to be a monumental disaster when all is said and done.

EDUCATION, RADICALIZATION, AVOIDANCE

I have been reading a number of articles over the last year or so that show that young white men are avoiding colleges and universities for some excellent reasons. Some of the articles posit that young white males feel under attack by the schools and the toxic racist environment they have created, nurtured and expanded over the last decade or so. There's room to appreciate that argument and I think it is true. There is also the speculation that not only are the colleges racist but they have also turned into enormous bastions of overt misandry and with the absurd and criminal degree that colleges and universities have abused Title IX it is not surprising that young men would prefer to avoid it altogether.

I have another hypothesis that explains young white men avoiding college and it really has little to do with either of the above reasons. Is it perhaps, I wonder, that they have figured out that there is little to no value in going to college anymore unless one is interested in a STEM degree? Why rack up enormous unforgivable student loans that will take years if not decades to pay off? Perhaps young white males are smarter than the average college student.....

MIXED FEELINGS

I liked this book when I read it and enjoy it just as much when I reread it.

"Perhaps the most macabre touch during the long trip was the “casualty pool.” For a five-rand bet, troopers pulled out numbers ranging from 0 percent to 100 percent. On the return trip, half the pot would go to the soldier whose number most closely approximated the percentage of casualties suffered during the operation; the remainder would go to charity.

A hulking farmer’s son in the Iceman’s Support Group, Superior Private Kobus Nicodemus, drew the ticket that equated to 100 percent casualties and observed, “Now I know what they mean by mixed feelings.”"

This came to me as I was looking at a picture of Austin Bay's input to Instapundit.

It is the highlight on a naval officer's career to command. As I look at the picture and imagine the life as CO of one of the LCS I imagine they view their lot much the way Superior Private Nicodemus did in the paragraph I quoted. Yay me! Selected for Commander Command! Oh woe, I get to command a little crappy ship instead of a guided missile destroyer like my peers. I think at that point you could say that your position has been established. It will be the guys that drew the DDG commands that go on to make captain and flag officer.

This then reminds me of a chat I had with the commanding officer of the Naval Brig at Miramar. He was a nice Marine lieutenant colonel who had gone through the same mood swing when he was selected for command. As he said, he thought he'd get an F-18 squadron command as a result. He didn't even know that the brig counted as a command. It does, along the same lines as command of USS Constitution.

Mixed feelings. I'm glad I dodged that bullet. As I came home today from the university I was struck by how the democrats pulled the same trick on the electorate with Biden that they did with Obama. They picked a complete buffoon and imbecile as their VP so the incumbent president would be bullet proof against impeachment. Obama got slow Joe and we got Harris. Isn't it odd how the candidate of fear and trepidation that was to limit attempts to oust Obama has ended up as the figurehead of his party and the country and has found someone even more awful and incompetent to be his #2?

To get rid of Biden we are forced to accept Harris as president.

SLOW MOTION SUICIDE OF THE WEST

One thing alone cannot be replaced by anything under the sun and that is the power that drives western civilization and yet it seems that Europe and the fools here in America are keen to whip that power away and replace it with little or nothing. How can anybody look at thisand not wonder what is going to happen come winter?

I lived in southern California back when ENRON and the ISO were raping their customers and shutting off the power in the north of the state. The only thing that saved us in San Diego from their rapacious greed was the complete lack of high energy transmission lines between our power sources in the south and the users in the north. They could not steal our power to send it away in order to line their pockets with yet more stolen money. It was all down to very bad government, greed, vile lawyers and the usual anti-civilization turds that careen around the world unchecked.

As the world watches, the wheels are coming off western civilization and the fools that live there still don't realize that winter is coming. Yeah, yeah, I read the first 3 books. With winter and darkness comes a drastic cut in solar power and a better than even chance that wind turbines will be braked to keep from over-revving with a resultant loss of power and then the shitkickers in the CDC will moan about upticks in the covid/flu/whatever it to destroy the economy some more.

On the gripping hand, I hear that Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia are screwing it up even more. They're not even waiting for disaster, they're busy making their own.

VERY IRRITATING

As you might guess. I have found almost everything over the last 10 days profoundly irritating. There's little point in rehashing it all here since it has been covered so well everywhere else. We decided to go to Pittsburgh and get away from it all. It's a nice drive which, if you had asked me when I was going to school in the middle of Pennsylvania 40 years ago could happen, I would have denied it. We used the interstate you see. Back then I-80 was ALWAYS torn to pieces and my family wouldn't use the I-76 because my mother hated all the little carve-outs PENDOT made to accommodate the thousands of State Police with their radars aimed at catching motorists and giving them $600 speeding tickets for going 5 mph over the speed limit. There was some animus there and it never faded. She still won't use I-76 to cross the state from Virginia to Ohio. It's a good thing they finished I-68 and Penn Alps doesn't hurt.

The nation suffered a wicked injury when Joe Biden took office and he and his "way smarter than you" cronies have been compounding that felony ever since in every way they can think of. As we wrote earlier, they fucked up and over the schools, higher education, teaching, meaningful infrastructure (roads, reservoirs, prisons, power generation and transmission, little things like that) and now they've screwed up all of that completely and destroyed the military as I knew it.

If only there was some sort of solution to this problem. Something final. Terminal. Angry. It really is the time to do all those things many of the smarter of us are doing. You know, buy ammo, food, medicine, ammo, blankets, ammo, food, tasty stuff that comes in bottles, ammo, etc. But perhaps it is more important now for GOOD PEOPLE to run for every level of office in the land from School Board to Mayor, City Council, Library Board, and yes, even Congress. This isn't going to be fixed until people get up and fix it. That means going out and working at the polls every election and working with the hated other party with cordiality and respect. They're not all evil monsters.

AN INTERESTING READ

An interesting read.

She missed one crucial point. Most guys in the US don't want to get married anymore. There are zero upsides to it now. 8 nephews, none have taken the bait and some are nearing 40. An interesting but unhealthy dynamic. OTGH, I married at 42.

TIME TO RE ENGAGE THE WORLD

There would be a party but I don't do that so much since I'd say she turned 18 but due mostly to out of control vengeance, I was never invited to a party after she turned 7.