Author Archives: Dana Pico

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In the end, hiding from your enemies just doesn’t work The way to fight anti-Semitism is not to let the anti-Semites win!

In February of 1896, long before the Nazis, just a couple of months before Adolf Hitler’s 7th birthday, Theoror Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, was published in Leipzig and Vienna by M. Breitenstein’s Verlags-Buchhandlung. Mr Herzl saw the persecution Jews were facing in Europe, where they had lived ever since their expulsion from the Holy Land by the Romans beginning in 70 AD. Jews, he believed, needed to live apart from the mostly Christian populations of Europe.

But even living apart, while in Europe, didn’t prove particularly safe. While the Jüdischer Wohnbezirk in Warschau, the Warsaw ghetto, was not formally established until November of 1940 by the Nazi occupation authorities, it contained those heavily Jewish neighborhoods which existed before the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

Now there’s this, from The Wall Street Journal:

Maybe It’s Time for Jewish Self-Segregation

The self-protective impulse is a healthy response to a wave of antisemitism.

By Joseph Epstein | Thursday, September 19, 2024 | 5:33 PM EDT

The recent and rampant rise in antisemitism is, to put it gently, disheartening. One finds it everywhere, much of it passing under the flag of anti-Zionism, criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and presumably sympathy for the Palestinians. Saddest of all is that antisemitism has cropped up so exuberantly among students in our elite universities. Apart from decrying it, calling it out for what it is, what are Jews to do to protect themselves from this recurring nightmare? Perhaps a jaunt down memory lane will help.

For those who don’t have my too-expensive subscription to the Journal, the OpEd can be accessed for free here.

I was 5 when I was first aware not only that I was Jewish but that being Jewish had consequences. My father asked me what I had learned in school one day, and I told him the poem “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe,” which I began to recite. When I came to the n-word—before “tiger” had been substituted as a more appropriate alternative—my father angrily stopped me and told me I was never to use the word again, especially since our people, like the Negroes (as they were called then), had been long persecuted and called all sorts of terrible names.

A few years later, returning with my father from a Bing Crosby movie, “Going My Way,” I asked if we might have a Christmas tree. “No,” he said. Why not? “Because you are Jewish.” Case closed. Not long after that, my mother pointed out various Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs—Sauganash, Kenilworth—that were “restricted,” which meant no Jews allowed. Not only did being Jewish carry responsibilities; it also apparently meant being despised, at least in certain quarters.

After several more paragraphs, in which Joseph Epstein, the author, describes his life growing up, and in college, in mostly Jewish enclaves, we get to the meat of the column:

No one saw the current wave of antisemitism coming. Who thought Hamas would find supporters at Harvard, Columbia, the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere? The country had known of this virus before, but it came not from crowds of thousands but from prominent people. Henry Ford was openly antisemitic. No Jew in those days drove his cars. Father Charles Coughlin, on his radio show in the 1930s, attacked what he termed “international bankers.” But those were largely isolated, the present strain more widespread.

Is self-chosen segregation among Jews a good thing? In one sense, it feels like taking a step backward toward a less open society. Yet when the politics of a country swing too far in either direction, antisemitism is almost certain to come in its train. The swing today is unmistakably and strongly leftist, and self-segregation strikes me as the first step in combating the attacks on Jews that attend it.

I am not Jewish, and I live in an area with very few, if any Jews, so perhaps I just don’t understand, but this seems to me to be an advocacy of surrender, and not even an effective one. If American Jews self-segregate, into small, mostly Jewish communities, are they not simply gathering in a smaller and more confined target area for any violently antiSemitic ‘mostly peaceful protests’? We have already seen ‘protests’ at synagogues and Hillel Centers on campuses. Self-segregation, self-isolation doesn’t work when those who hate you still know where you congregate and live.

Israel is, of course, Mr Herzl’s dream, even if he never saw it; he died in 1904, at a very young 44 years of age, though he is now buried in Mt Herzl, on the west side of Jerusalem. But look at the situation today. Israel is the self-segregation of millions of Jews in the modern world, yet we see not just the Arabs — who can always be counted on for hate — but millions of people reared in Western civilization nations who don’t want the Jews to have even that small nation.

Self-segregation counts on the tolerance of others to allow your segregated communities, and we aren’t seeing much of that tolerance by the supporters of Hamas and the ‘Palestinians.’

In the end, hiding from your enemies just doesn’t work.

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#Hezbollah’s pagers go boom, #AntiSemites wax wroth

Israel launched one of the greatest covert action attacks ever yesterday, with some kind of operation that targeted the pagers that Hezbollah were using in Lebanon. Israel had the pager numbers of the Hezbollah operatives, including an Iranian representative to the group in Beirut, and sent a group page than caused the pagers to explode. As nearly as I can see, the only problem with the operation is that the explosions weren’t lethal enough!

Hezbollah had turned to pagers for communications because the Israel Defense Force, IDF, had been successful in tracking Hezbollah’s cell phones, and targeting drones to zero in and whack the terrorists. At least in theory, the pagers couldn’t be tracked.

This was a brilliant operation, because it targeted Hezbollah members specifically, as opposed to having to bomb particular buildings or streets to strike at the terrorists, thus including possibly significant ‘collateral’ casualties. There were a few, few! collateral injuries in this operation; that was unavoidable. Nevertheless, FrumTikTok — who is not Libs of TikTok! — found and tweeted out the frantic response of a pretty but nevertheless silly redhead — and redheads always get a break from me! — to the operation.

Click on the image and you can listen to her entire rant.

She was horrified, horrified, that Israel was able to strike Hezbollah so precisely. Would she have preferred that the IDF would have blown up entire blocks?

Also see: William Teach, “Funny: Hezbollah Pagers Explode“

No, of course not. Rather, she is horrified that Israel is fighting back at all against the terrorist group, who have been launching missiles and rockets against northern Israel. Nowhere in her rant did I see any mention that Hezbollah had been attacking Israel, or any condemnation of the terrorists’ actions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have greatly preferred that his country not have to deal with other Islamist enemies while the operation in Gaza was continuing, but Israel is not going to just sit back and take potentially lethal attacks, from anyone.

The odious Edward Snowden, who has had nothing to say about the Islamists attacking Israel, said that this precision attack was “terrorism.”

I will admit to being amused that some of these pagers detonated in ways that could have emasculated some of the terrorists. 🙂 They fully deserve it.

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Passenger rail in France

I see a lot of stuff on Twitter — I absolutely refuse to call it 𝕏 — from advocates of a high-speed passenger rail service in the United States. My position is simple: if one of the private railroad companies wishes to build that high-speed passenger railroad, I absolutely support their right to spend their own money to do so. But the federal and state governments should stay out of it.

A lady — or so I judge her to be by her Twitter bio pic — styling herself “Hunter” from the United Kingdom posted the tweet to the left concerning a proposal for high speed rail (HSR) service in the United States, and I thought that I should document my experiences with HSR in France.

It was Saturday, September 7th, when we took the train from Toulouse to Ville de Nice. The travel time is 7 hours and 31 minutes on average, more than twice as long as flying. Driving distance is 560.6 kilometers, or 348.3 miles.

How fast does the train run? At the points in which the rail line ran parallel with the highway, I could see that the train was moving faster than the cars on the road, and French highways have speed limits of 110 KPH (68.35 MPH) or 130 KPH (80.78 MPH), but I cannot say for certain what the speed limits were on the roads I saw. Doing the math, covering 560 kilometers in 7½ hours gives an average speed of 74.67 KPH, no faster than driving. In driving, you have your vehicle door-to-door, and are not left station-to-station.

The reason is obvious: like “Hunter’s” map above, the train between Toulouse and Ville de Nice had several stops along the route. I didn’t actually count them, but it seemed to have been around eight stops.

We took a HSR train from Firenze (Florence) to Venezia (Venice) in July of 2016. Unlike the train in France, which had older cars, the one in Italy was new, and had a speed indicator in the passenger cars. The highest I remember seeing was 225 KPH (139.81 MPH), which is a pretty good clip, but that train as well had stops along the route.

The HSR advocates are nice enough people, but let’s tell the truth here: they are all urbanites, with the concerns and cultures of densely populated urban areas. That the United States is physically different from Europe doesn’t seem to make much of an impact on their thinking, but we have vast, vast areas of land with very few people in it. Population densities west of the Mississippi River drop off dramatically until you get to the left coast, and even east of our great river, densities are not that high until you get close to the east coast. Here in the Bluegrass State, our third largest city, Bowling Green, has a population far below 100,000, estimated to be 76,212 in 2023. Eastern Kentucky, in the Appalachian Mountains, is populated by small farms and tiny towns. The high speed rail systems the advocate want, the systems they liked in Europe, are mostly inappropriate for a country which is as spread out as the United States.

 

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The #woke run amok Sometimes it's more than just silliness; sometimes far left ideology constitutes a danger to civilized society

My far too expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now.

Were it not for my website, I would not be wasting spending so much on newspaper subscriptions, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Lexington Herald-Leader, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Wall Street Journal. One thing on which I can always count is something silly from the Inquirer to give me inspiration!

Using a person’s preferred pronoun isn’t about being woke. It’s a sign of respect.

Before you groan and complain about how pronouns are an example of woke run amok, stop for a moment and think about how self-affirming it can be.

by Jenice Armstrong | Monday, September 16, 2024 | 9:01 AM EDT

Applicants vying for a job in Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign have the option of selecting from nine different combinations of preferred pronouns.

There’s the usual he/him, she/her, and even they/them/theirs. But some options are much more obscure — most I’ve never even heard of, such as fae/faer and hu/hu (which is derived from the word human). I was this week years old when I learned about some of these neopronouns, as they’re called.

I continued with Miss Armstrong’s column, and you know what I didn’t find? I didn’t find any mention of whether those people who chose not to use the “preferred pronouns” an applicant might select — unless the “preferred pronouns” selected were the normal ones — would be disciplined or fired under a Kamala Harris Emhoff administration.

The Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office of the National Institutes of Health stated:

Intentional refusal to use someone’s correct pronouns — by which them mean their preferred pronouns — DRP — is equivalent to harassment and a violation of one’s civil rights.

The Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 expressly prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Title VII’s prohibition against sex discrimination includes discrimination based on an employee’s gender identity or sexual orientation. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s technical assistance publication Protections Against Employment Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity considers the use of pronouns or names that are inconsistent with an individual’s gender identity as unlawful harassment. The EEOC guidance states, “intentionally and repeatedly using the wrong name and pronouns to refer to a transgender employee could contribute to an unlawful hostile work environment” and is a violation of Title VII.

Translation: use the “preferred pronouns,” or you’re history!

Back to Miss Armstrong’s column:

Before you groan and complain about how pronouns are an example of woke run amok, stop for a moment and think about how self-affirming it can be for people for whom the usual he/him, she/her, or even they/them don’t cut it.

I personally don’t mind referring to an individual by “they” if that’s what’s preferred. You shouldn’t, either. It doesn’t cost anything to show each other the kind of respect we all deserve.

Actually, it does. By using the non-standard “preferred pronouns,” or the newly assumed names, of the ‘transgendered’ or ‘non-binary’, one is, in effect, conceding their position that they are something other than their actual sex! Miss Armstrong is asking us to, in effect, lie to both others and ourselves, to keep from hurting their precious little feelings.

There’s more to it than that. The left in general, and Miss Armstrong specifically, wish to control language, in an attempt to control the argument. If someone concedes that Bruce Jenner is actually ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner, then one is concomitantly conceding that a person can actually change his sex. Mr Jenner has had his “gender confirmation surgery”, but he is still biologically male. He has the standard XY chromosomes which determine sex, and has to “dilate” his faux “vagina” frequently, because, being biologically male, his body sees that “vagina” as an open wound, and tries to close it up to heal it. That, in itself, tells you that while Mr Jenner has had extensive plastic and urologic surgery to attempt to appear female, he’s still male.

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

If someone concedes the narrative that a person can change his sex simply to be nice and kind and polite to a specific person who has claimed that he[1]As specified in The First Street Journal‘s Stylebook, “In English, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine. This means that, in cases in which the sex of the person to … Continue reading has done so, then he has also conceded, in his language, that changing sex is possible in general. It’s pretty difficult to argue that you don’t believe that changing sex is possible if you are already referring to Bradley Manning as “Chelsea.”

That, of course, leads to all kinds of stupidity, such as Will Thomas claiming that he is a female called “Lia,” and other males pushing themselves into women’s sports, in which they have dominated. As we have previously reported, Miss Armstrong’s newspaper has gone all-in on referring to Mr Thomas as a woman, even though, at the time of his competition on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team, he was a fully intact male.

We have already seen some of the results of placing “transgender women” who are convicted felons in women’s prisons, and girls’ teams choosing to forfeit a game rather than play against biological males, because bigger males were injuring the girls.

If the ‘transgendered’ were content to just try to live their lives quietly, this wouldn’t be an issue. But no, at least some of them seem determined to use the force of law to compel you to confirm their delusions, and that constitutes a danger to individuals, to girls and women — there doesn’t seem to be a similar danger from females claiming that they are male, though Audrey Hale is an obvious exception — and to society in general. Miss Armstrong’s subtitle said that we shouldn’t think of it as being #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading run amok, but it clearly is an assault on science and common sense, on things human beings have known ever since human beings became self-aware.

References

References
↑1 As specified in The First Street Journal‘s Stylebook, “In English, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine. This means that, in cases in which the sex of the person to whom a pronoun refers is unknown, the masculine is properly used, and does not indicate that that person is male, nor is it biased in favor of such an assumption. The feminine pronouns, on the other hand, do specify that the person to whom they refer is female, and not male.” We do not use the silly and ungrammatical formulation “he or she.” We do not, however, change the direct quotes of others.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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World War III watch: We have a President sinking into dementia taking these decisions!

I saw the hints of this story on Twitter, but it seemed so insane that I was determined to find a credentialed media, a liberal credentialed media source before I would comment on or believe it. Well, the Grey Lady certainly fits the definition of a liberal credentialed media source, and the idea is simply appalling. From The New York Times:

Meeting With Biden, British Leader Hints at Ukraine Weapon Decision Soon

As the president deliberated with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the question of whether to let Ukraine use long-range weapons in Russia was a rare point of contention between allied nations.

By Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger

President Biden’s deliberations with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain about whether to allow Ukraine to attack Russia with long-range Western weapons were fresh evidence that the president remains deeply fearful of setting off a dangerous, wider conflict.

But the decision now facing Mr. Biden after Friday’s closed-door meeting at the White House — whether to sign off on the use of long-range missiles made by Britain and France — could be far more consequential than previous concessions by the president that delivered largely defensive weapons to Ukraine during the past two and a half years.

In remarks at the start of his meeting with Mr. Starmer, the president underscored his support for helping Ukraine defend itself but did not say whether he was willing to do more to allow for long-range strikes deep into Russia.

“We’re going to discuss that now,” the president told reporters.

For his part, the prime minister noted that “the next few weeks and months could be crucial — very, very important that we support Ukraine in this vital war of freedom.”

Let’s be clear here: the Prime Minister is very concerned that Joe Biden will not be President after January 20th, and that, if former President Donald Trump is elected, that’ll be it: no more aid to Ukraine. And while Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff has supported Mr Biden’s policies on Ukraine, she pretty much had to do so, because he is boss, and she isn’t. If she wins the election, she becomes boss, and perhaps, just perhaps, she won’t be as eager to set off World War III keep sending money and equipment to Ukraine.

Russia isn’t advancing, at least not in Ukraine. In 2½ years of war, the Russian advance has been mostly stymied. But it’s also true that, in 2½ years of war, the Ukrainians have been unable to reconquer anything, haven’t been able to defeat and expel the Russians. The United States and European NATO nations have sent billions of dollars in money, economic aid and military equipment to Ukraine, and it hasn’t been enough to defeat Russia. Prime Minister Starmer’s purported advocacy of deeper strikes into Russia is simply more evidence that what the West have provided Ukraine is not enough to defeat Russia. I have said it before: it doesn’t matter how much money and military aid we send to Ukraine, they cannot defeat Russia absent the US and NATO sending actual ground troops to fight Russia, and fighter aircraft and pilots to gain air superiority. That would mean the US and NATO in direct combat with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal. We have had our ‘proxy wars’ with the Soviet Union, in Korea, in Vietnam, and in Afghanistan, but those things were very different from direct combat against the USSR in the USSR.

The article noted that Mr Starmer is talking about “the use of long-range missiles made by Britain and France,” which would mean that the President of the United States does not have direct authority to authorize their use, but the US is the largest, most powerful, and wealthiest member of NATO, and it isn’t even close. If His Majesty’s Government approved the use of those long-range British missiles without American consent, it would create a major split in NATO, something Mr Starmer definitely does not want with Mr Trump possibly taking office again in four months, because the former President is not all that thrilled with an alliance which would require the United States to declare war on Russia if Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion on one of the small Baltic states, which are NATO members.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO.

European officials said earlier in the week that Mr. Biden appeared ready to approve the use of British and French long-range missiles, a move that Mr. Starmer and officials in France have said they want to provide a united front in the conflict with Russia. But Mr. Biden has hesitated to allow Ukraine to use arms provided by the United States in the same way over fears that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would see it as a major escalation.

On Thursday, Mr. Putin responded to reports that America and its allies were considering such a move by declaring that it would “mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia,” according to a report by the Kremlin.

There was a fine gentleman named Jake Broe, whose Twitter profile tells us that he is a “Fmr. Nuclear & Missile Operations Officer US Air Force”. Mr Broe tweeted:

If Russia uses a nuclear weapon against a NATO country, then this is what will happen to Russia in response.

About 45 million Russians will be vaporized in the first hour. Not much of a life remaining for the other 100 million.

Maybe the people of Russia should stop supporting Putin and deescalate the conflict?

He included a nasty World War III scenario video showing hundreds of nuclear warheads devastating Russia, but think about exactly what he said: “If Russia uses a nuclear weapon against a NATO country, then this is what will happen to Russia in response.” Ukraine is not a NATO nation!

Vladimir Putin might be a bit crazy, but he’s not stupid. He could respond to any NATO escalation of allowing longer-range weapons to be used to attack Russian military sites in Russia — and I’m old enough to remember President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia to attack Viet Cong bases there, and just how well that worked — with the use of ‘tactical’ or ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons against Ukrainian military sites of troop concentrations inside Ukraine, and it would not be a nuclear attack against a NATO country. That would leave President Biden and Prime Minister Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron of France absolutely defecating in their drawers — and yes, I contemplated writing that in more vulgar terms — over how to respond. Ukraine has no nuclear weapons, and no one has been stupid enough to give them any, so any nuclear response, even if it is ‘just’ a small, tactical weapon, would have to be a direct attack by the US, UK, or France, the only NATO members which have nuclear weapons, and that would be a declaration of war against Russia.

That we have a President who’s clearly sinking into dementia taking this decision is appalling.

Let me be clear about this: I do not want President Putin and Russia to win this war, and so far, they haven’t. But I also do not want the United States involved in this war; the potential consequences are too dire. How many Americans am I willing to sacrifice to preserve Ukraine’s independence? The answer to that is: zero!

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Could Daniel Pearson be a conservative? His politics are straight Democrat, but every once in a while he expresses sentiments which are in line with civilized behavior

Daniel Pearson is the chief editorial writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and of course he favors Kamala Harris Emhoff and the Democrats in every election. Yet I have asked previously if Mr Pearson could actually be a conservative. He just mocked the entitled current generation in a Twitter thread, the first of which is illustrated to the right, and the rest of which reads:

The median American right now Tells pollsters they are so broke and are living paycheck to paycheck Also bought three Taylor Swift tickets in another city that requires travel and accommodations on top of the high cost of admission.

It is really hard not to think folks like this are just incredibly entitled. If you can afford to travel to watch a show you are wealthier than almost everyone else in human history. Have the dignity to accept that instead of pretending your are poor.

This economy is brutal I can barely afford my 2000 sq ft house and my 3 financed cars and my trip to Disney and my Taylor Swift tickets and my 6 streaming services and my $400 weekly doordash bill I can’t believe Joe Biden did this to me.

The same people are also mocking poor Haitians for eating dirt pies. They disdain those who actually struggle.

As it happens, my older daughter, a Staff Sergeant in the United States Army Reserve, was telling us Tuesday night about ‘Swifties’ who travel to foreign countries for Taylor Swift concerts to escape the extremely high prices of her concerts in the US, driven by scalper companies. I didn’t challenge what SSG Pico said, because I know nothing about the topic, or Miss Swift, other than she’s been dating Travis Kelce of the hated Kansas City Chiefs.

All Oakland — never Las Vegas! — Raiders fans hate the Chiefs! The only time I want to see the Chiefs win is when they’re playing the Dallas Cowboys!

There have been a few clues as to how Mr Pearson thinks. Inky columnist Will Bunch, who puts the far in far left, wanted Helen Gym Flaherty to become Philly’s mayor, but the newspaper instead endorsed Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff, who was at least somewhat more moderate, and the Editorial Board further trashed Mr Flaherty for her inability to tell voters from where the money would come to implement her quite frankly socialist plans.

In my previous article on Mr Pearson, I noted that he was supporting people acting civilly responsibly and not cutting any slack to SEPTA fare jumpers, and that he pointed out that enforcing the law against small offenses has had the effect of reducing the number of ‘bigger’ crimes.

Broken windows policing, anyone?

People like Mr Pearson give me some hope for a more sane Democratic Party, like we used to have. Right now, the Dems seem beholden to the extreme left of their party, but when the voters have their say, some of the more moderate — or at least more moderate-sounding — candidates, like Cherelle Parker Mullins and yes, even Joe Biden — though he has governed, at least when he’s been lucid, further to the left than he campaigned — have won primaries. Democrats in local and state campaigns have infrequently been as far to the left as those running for Congress, though I suppose that I have to exclude California from that statement. Democratic primary voters have dumped anti-Semitic Representatives Jamal Bowman (D-NY 16) and Cori Bush Merritts (D-MO 1) in favor of somewhat more moderate candidates, though Ilhan Omar Mynett (D-MN 5) unfortunately survived a primary challenge.

Many conservatives would have been fine with the Democratic candidate winning the 2020 presidential election had somewhat libertarian Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI 4) won the nomination!

That said, we still need Mr Trump to win in November, and for the GOP to capture the Senate, so that Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who is 76 years old, can safely retire and be replaced by the same type of strongly conservative Justice that President Trump nominated during his first term!

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Bernie Sanders tells us the truth.

Senator Bernie Sanders (S-VT)[1]Technically, Mr Sanders is listed as an Independent, who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, but I believe that S, for ‘Socialist,’ is far more accurate. is many unsavory things, but he does, on occasion, tell the truth. From USA Today:

Bernie Sanders told the truth about Kamala Harris trying to fool voters. Believe him.

Harris is tiptoeing around the positions on issues that won her elections in California and cautiously testing what voters will grab onto and what they will reject.

by Nicole Russell | Tuesday, September 10, 2024 | 5:11 AM EDT | Updated: Thursday, September 12, 2024 | 2:35 PM EDT

You may have heard Maya Angelou’s powerful saying, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Sometimes, when other people tell you who a person is, you should believe them, too. Especially if the person in question doesn’t want to tell you who they really are.

That is the case with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In an interview Sunday on “Meet the Press,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive independent from Vermont, said something about the Democratic presidential nominee that she isn’t willing to admit to voters.

NBC News host Kristen Welker asked: “She has previously supported Medicare for All, now she does not. She’s previously supported a ban on fracking, now she does not. These, Senator, are ideas that you have campaigned on. Do you think that she is abandoning her progressive ideals?”

Sanders: “No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals. I think she is trying to be pragmatic and do what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

You have to give the seasoned senator kudos for saying it like it is, especially because Harris has yet to describe her own campaign with such clarity.

There’s more at the original. If you get stopped by a paywall, you can also read the original here.

Also see: William Teach, in “Biden-Harris Admin Upset Over ‘False’ Pets Eating Stories“

Opinion author Nicole Russell stopped short of writing the unvarnished truth, but I will not: what the Distinguished Gentleman from Vermont was saying is that he believes that Kamala Harris Emhoff — just because the Vice President hasn’t shown enough respect for her husband to have taken his last name does not mean that I shall show him similar disrespect — has been lying to us! Mr Sanders told us, in effect, that he understands that the hard left policies that he has long advocated are not popular enough nationwide to win elections, and that he thinks that the Democratic presidential nominee knows the same thing.

Did Mrs Emhoff tell Mr Sanders thus? Was there a quiet conversation in which she whispered, “Don’t worry, Bernie, I can be my authentic self after the election?,” or is it simply something that the Bolshevik from Burlington believes to be the case? We don’t know the answer to that, but one thing has been pretty clear: a lot of the Vice President’s supporters believe just what Mr Sanders stated.

As it happens, I certainly believe that she would move harder to the left were Americans foolish enough to elect her.

Many voters also got caught up in all the laughter and joy. But when they started to look around to see what the frenzy was about, they found a record of flip-flopping on really progressive policies, running mate Tim Walz’s fabulism and a bunch of vague promises.

Sanders is right, of course. Harris’ pattern of flip-flopping on policies − like favoring a ban on fracking for oil and gas before opposing it now, or supporting mandatory gun buybacks in 2019 but opposing them now − isn’t about her growth as a leader or the evolution of her thinking.

It’s really about her campaign’s recognition that far-left ideas that played well in California won’t sell in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.

At least her policy proposals didn’t play well enough, among Democrats, for her to make any headway in her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and she dropped out in December of 2019, before the first contest in Iowa. It didn’t help her that then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI) demolished her in a previous debate.

Gaslighting is not just bad form; it’s bad news for voters because it violates the principle of informed consent. Politicians have long tried to fool voters into believing they stand for one thing while they quietly support something else − as Sanders says Harris is doing now − but they deserve to be called on it as well.

The Democrats believe that as well, as they continually try to link former President Donald Trump to the so-called Project 2025, even though Mr Trump had nothing to do with writing or approving it, and has politically distanced himself from it.

At a certain point, it becomes laughable. Comedian (?) Kathy Griffin whined that if Mr Trump is re-elected, he’ll throw comedians like her in jail, even though he never tried to do so during his first term, despite the fact she posted a photo of her holding a Trump mask dripping with fake blood, as though he had been beheaded. The Philadelphia Inquirer and columnist Will Bunch in particular keep telling us that if Mr Trump wins, democracy is finished, while Salon writer Amanda Marcotte has gone just bat guano insane with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.

If Mrs Emhoff really knows what she wants to do if elected, and that’s a very big “if,” she’s keeping it down to vague, broad-stroke proposals, trying not to offend anyone, but, in doing that, she’s concomitantly telling us that it will be the bureaucrats and functionaries who will be doing the governing. That’s not really a surprise, because that’s what happens in every modern administration, with the President setting a policy, and then the ‘experts’ trying to figure out how to make it work.

And that’s the real danger of a victory for the Vice President: the people she would bring into office with her will be uniformly hard-left, and they would be the ones who would destroy our society and economy, with proposals written in ways the voters would never approve. Mr Sanders knows this, and knows that the candidate has to temper what she says, but he strongly believes that he would get most, if not all, of what he would want were he the President.

I suspect that a lot of the further left people in the United States believe the same thing.

References

References
↑1 Technically, Mr Sanders is listed as an Independent, who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, but I believe that S, for ‘Socialist,’ is far more accurate.
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The blinding brilliance of the United States Navy

Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero

The United States Navy is a hugely expensive, and believed to be an extremely capable fighting force, able to project American power around the world, but sometimes things happen which are just do f(ornicating) stupid as to make me wonder just what we actually have for defense in this country. With the build up of China’s navy, and the increasing threats to Taiwan, all while the US has sent tons of military supplies to Ukraine, just what capabilities do we really have?

How Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi

By Diana Stancy | Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Today’s Navy sailors are likely familiar with the jarring loss of internet connectivity that can come with a ship’s deployment.

For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.

But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.

As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.

So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.

There’s more at the Navy Times original, about how then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero arranged for the purchase of the Starlink system, got it covertly installed, and distributed the system among the ‘chief’s mess,’ the grouping of the chief petty officers on a ship.

I first saw this story, from another source, while I was in France, and thought about how stupid it was, but then I got more on it Wednesday evening, and I marveled at the utter stupidity of it all. Chief Marrero was the Chief of the Boat on the USS Manchester (LCS-14), the senior enlisted person on the ship, and is expected to advise the commanding officer and executive officer on all subjects.

That’s the part which really caught my eye: the COB simply can’t be stupid, but Chief Marrero apparently is, as are all of the other chief petty officers aboard the Manchester. All of the chiefs knew of the wifi system, and attempted to keep it a secret, but, as is the case in any small and closed community, the secret didn’t stay secret. Rumors started floating around, the CO called in the COB to question her about it, and Chief Marrero did what so many do when caught with their hand in the cookie jar: she lied through her scummy teeth!

You can read the sordid details in the Navy Times original, and I’ve no reason to repeat them here. The COB and her fellow conspirators conspired to keep the secret once they heard of rumors about it, when the real thing to do, if they’d had any sense at all — that is: assuming some sense other than installing the stupid thing in the first place — would have been to toss any evidence of it overboard. But no, they changed the name of the system to that of a wireless printer to try to conceal it, but kept the thing running. What a great way to get yourself caught!

In the end, Chief Marrero was court martialed, while the other chiefs underwent administrative punishment via a Commodore’s Mast. Chief Marrero? She was sentenced to a reduction in rank, all the way down to E-7, just one grade lower.

She’s still a chief petty officer!

The news stories about this don’t tell us much about what happened to the other chiefs who were in on the deal, but non-judicial punishment is still a limited thing. Chief Marrero loses the rocker above the chevrons, but a top enlisted person, charged with advising her CO and XO, will still be a top non-commissioned officer, and entrusted with duties requiring trust and good judgement. To me, this calls into question not just the intelligence of Chief Marrero and her fellows in the chiefs’ mess aboard the Manchester, but that of the Navy brass, who were tolerant enough to allow her to stay in the Navy, and retain a responsible position. If the Navy brass are that stupid, how can we ever expect them to carry out their duties the way we expect if they ever find themselves in a war again?

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My thanks to William Teach!

Ville de Nice, France (8:49 AM local time) — He kept this site going while my family and I are in France, and I appreciate it. Monday is our last full day here, and Tuesday will be the long, long flight back to the United States.

Our last day here, and the sun is shining and the birds are singing; we’ll be headed to the beach!