Author Archives: Dana Pico

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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!

 

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Blogging from France! This is how the good and noble 'Palestinians' treated the hostages they seized.

Ville de Nice, France (8:43 AM local time) — In the ‘First World,’ we at least feed even the worst of the prisoners.

One thing is certain: even if you do not particularly like Jews, or know any Jews, for those of us in the Western world, members of Western civilization, the Jews of Israel are the last, easternmost bastion of Western civilization.

That’s what happened to the six hostages murdered just before the Israel Defense Force got there. The reports from the autopsies found that they had attempted to defend themselves, bravely but futilely, at the end.

One of the female hostages, an adult woman, weighed less than 90 lb when her body was recovered. This is what the Arabs would do to you, if they had the power.

Click on the tweet to see the extension.

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Blogging from France! Freedom of speech for he, but not for thee, or me

Ville de Nice, France (4:08 PM local time) — My Twitter feed has recently been full of calls from people using their freedom of speech to stifle other people’s freedom of speech. Jay Michaelson, “author and journalist,” as he describes himself, wrote:

Like a pack of anguished Austrian nuns, progressives can’t stop singing this tune on talk shows and Twitter feeds. And for good reason: the world’s richest man has turned a once-essential social media platform into a far-right propaganda machine.

Despite his lofty libertarian claims of a year ago, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk has put his finger on the scale in countless ways to boost far-right posts and deprecate others — starting with his own posts.

There’s more at the MSNBC original.

Even though I do not follow many leftist sites and people at all, my Twitter feed is full of posts supporting the Communist from California, and the antiSemites wishing death upon Israel and total victory for the ‘Palestinians’ and Hamas. It’s pretty laughable when I read tweets by people in the United States whining about ‘stolen land’ and ‘white settler colonialists’ when that’s exactly how and why the US exists: white settler colonialists, white Christian settler colonialists, came to these shores and conquered the Indians who were here before them. If you are an American, if you live in the US, everything you have is something you owe to those white settler colonialists.

Somehow, some way, those opinions get expressed in my feed on Twitter. I am, of course, free to block them, but I haven’t.

Mr Michaelson wants us all to boycott Twitter, but it’s his self description as a journalist, paid and fed by MSNBC, which tells us something. The credentialed left have long hated that major thing about this internet thingy that Al Gore invented, that we commoners, we riff-raff, can extend our voices beyond local shouting distance, without the need to get approval by an editor of The New York Times or MSNBC. Their gatekeeping function has been lost.

Freedom of speech and of the press are, for people like Mr Michaelson, reserved for those who have been approved by the powers who control the media, and Elon Musk’s (mostly) libertarian attitude is just another, another very large, medium for the Little People to say things, sometimes things of which Our Betters disapprove. Freedom of speech and of the press for he, but not for thee, and me.

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Blogging from France! The only way the war can really end

Ville de Nice, 11:12 AM — I’m sitting in our airbnb balcony, French doors open this Sunday morning. The Mediterranean beach is just a couple of blocks away, but, alas! it’s raining this morning.

Even six hours away from the US, I’m still being inundated with social media messages — yes, I have Twitter on my phone — in support of the poor, poor ‘Palestinians,’ the Arabs who live in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Those mean ol’ Jooos stole their land, don’t you know!

Never mentioned, of course, is that the Jews were forced off their land starting in 70 AD by the Roman conquerers, pushed into Europe at the point of a sword. And never mentioned is that our good, Christian forebears in Europe, in all of Europe, hounded and persecuted the Jews living among them; Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were simply the last of the last and worst of the persecutions.

Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat well before the Nazis, in the last years of the 19th century, following a series of antiSemitic episodes, in which he posited that the only way Jews could truly be safe was to have their own nation. He died before the Nazis came to power, and never knew about the Holocaust.

Why is it, I have to ask, that the Jews returning to Israel is not something that today’s left see as just as much of a homecoming as they see the ‘Palestinians’ deserving what they laughably call ‘Palestine’?

Just as amusing is that so many of the things I see came from Americans, or at least people living in the United States. They whine about “white settler colonialism”, but if you are living in the United States, you are the beneficiary of “white settler colonialism,” the beneficiary of those primarily English settlers who expanded westward, conquering a continent, expelling and often exterminating the Indians, the weaker people who were here before them.

It isn’t just in the US. Every nation on earth, with the exception of Iceland, is ruled by the descendants of the last people to conquer the land. The Norman French conquered England, and imposed their rule, assimilating and in some instances killing the Anglo-Saxons, who themselves had conquered the Britons before them. Today’s Germans are not the people who lived there 2,000 years ago.

Today’s left are screaming for a ceasefire, but what they really want is for Hamas, the terrorists who started the war with a bloody attack last October 7th, to survive, so that they can regroup, rearm, and attack Israel again. Unthinkingly, they want this war to end, but the fighters to be able to start the next war.

Can you imagine today’s left, in January of 1944, advocating a ceasefire, since Germany was obviously beaten, instead of continuing on, to spare the lives of innocent Germans, don’t you know? That would have left Adolf Hitler and his minions alive and in power, to keep on oppressing the people and murdering the Jews.

World War II was the last war we actually won, and that ought to be a lesson: the demand was for unconditional surrender, and we continued on, bombing and burning and killing until that was achieved. Since those dark days of 1945, neither the Germans nor the Japanese nor the Italians have threatened world peace again, because we destroyed their ability to make war, and occupied those countries, installing decent governments and forcing changes in the militaristic cultures. That’s how you win wars!

Right now, Yahya Sinwar is sitting somewhere, in a tunnel, surrounded by his human shields hostages, like Hitler in his bunker, hoping for some kind of miracle to save him. In the end, he shot himself as the Red Army was a few blocks away. His miracle never happened.

Mr Sinwar is hoping for the same kind of miracle, and the lamebrained protesters in the West are trying to give it to him. But this war can only truly end when Mr Sinwar puts a bullet in his own head. Regrettably, he’ll kill his last hostages before he kills himself, because death, other than his own, is meaningless to him.

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Vacationating!

My good friend William Teach, the great(x 6) grandson of the infamous pirate Edward Teach, more famous as Blackbeard, proprietor of The Pirate’s Cove, will be pinch hitting for me on this poor site for the next two weeks, as our family are off to visit our English forebears for three days, and then it will be through the Chunnel to France! Here’s hoping that my American version of Freedom of Speech doesn’t get me thrown in an English gaol!

La Marseillaise below the fold. Continue reading →