Category Archives: Culture

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Democrisy! The party of more and more gun control are now buying themselves more guns.

We noted, 2½ years ago, that, in the aftermath of its bloodiest year on record — 562 homicides in 2021 — even Philadelphia Magazine’s Victor Fiorillo, who is so dramatically opposed to Fox 29 News Steve Keeley actually reporting on crime, told us about Philadelphians applying for concealed carry permits at a greatly increased rate.

Now it seems that significant numbers of the American left, who have been so vigorous in their demands to infringe upon our rights to keep and bear arms, have decided to keep and bear arms themselves. From The Wall Street Journal:

The Most Surprising New Gun Owners Are U.S. Liberals

After decades of decline, gun ownership is rising among Democrats

by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson | Thursday, September 19, 2024 | 9:22 PM EDT

Michael Ciemnoczolowski, a lifelong Democrat, supports stricter gun laws and contributes to Sandy Hook Promise, a gun-violence-prevention nonprofit.

But this summer, the liquor store clerk in Iowa City, Iowa, for the first time in his life bought a gun. Apprehension about street crime, armed right-wing extremists, and “whatever else the world could possibly throw at us,” drove his decision.

“Domestic politics have grown increasingly acrimonious,” says Ciemnoczolowski, 43.

This is kind of laughable. “(A)rmed right-wing extremists”? It wasn’t “right-wing extremists” who have tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump recently. It wasn’t “right-wing extremists” who shot up schools in Nashville or other places. And it certainly hasn’t been “right-wing extremists” who have been responsible for the “street crime” we’ve seen in Chicago, Philadelphia, and our other major cities.

American gun culture has long been dominated by conservative, white men. Now, in a marked change, a burgeoning number of liberals are buying firearms, according to surveys and fast-growing gun groups drawing minorities and progressives.

“It’s a group of people who five years ago would never have considered buying a gun,” says Jennifer Hubbert, an anthropology professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., who has researched liberal gun owners.

Historically, it wasn’t unusual for Democrats to own guns, with many more of them living in rural areas. Also, hunting was much more popular. But starting in the early ’90s, gun ownership among Democrats dropped significantly. Increasingly divisive political battles over the role of firearms in American society led the Democratic Party to become an advocate for gun regulation. Republicans became the party of gun rights.

Now, today’s Democrats are rediscovering guns.

There follow several paragraphs giving liberals’ reasons for increasing their firearm ownership percentages, up from an all-time low of 22.5% in 2010, to 29.2% in 2022, the last year one which information was available. That’s a 29.78% increase, and since this deals with percentages, it isn’t an increase due to population growth. The number was only 25.4% just the previous year, a 16.14% increase in just one year, the year after the murderous carnage of Joe Biden’s first year in office.

The Democrats interviewed for this article brought up all sorts of reasons, many of them political, which the Journal’s authors diligently reported, but 2021 and 2022 were years of Donald Trump losing voter fraud cases in courts, and the January 6th protesters being tried and jailed. The credentialed media tried drumming up fears about conservatives, but, for the very greatest part, the violence of 2021 and 2022 was perpetrated from the criminal classes in our major cities.

Four decades ago, Democratic gun owners were typically white men, including auto or steel union workers who grew up hunting.

That line is absolutely rotten reporting, something very unusual in the Journal. Four decades ago, Democrats in the South were far more rural than they are now. Four decades ago, Democrats controlled state legislatures and gubernatorial seats in most of the South, rather than being so heavily packed into urban areas as they are today. The Journal’s comparison of those numbers wasn’t even as close as apples and oranges, but more like apples and turnips.

Of course, today’s Democrats in general are not very much like the Democrats of “four decades ago.” The Democrats of forty years ago would have laughed at the notion of homosexual marriage, were pretty much anti-war as a holdover from Vietnam, were complete free speech supporters, and would have hauled off to the insane asylums anyone who held that a guy could simply declare himself to be a girl and compete in women’s sports.  The only Democrats who could have been called #woke forty years ago were the ones who had gotten up with the alarm clock to actually go to work. The urban Democrats of the 1980s who didn’t own firearms were the ones who lived in safer neighborhoods.

The Democrats of forty years ago were seeing the weakening of the Soviet Union, and calling that a good thing, rather than electing socialists. They remembered the ‘Palestinians’ as terrorists who attacked Israelis at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, rather than as somehow selfless martyrs and resistance fighters in Gaza.

Today we have the same party which has been screaming for more and more gun control buying more and more guns for themselves. They want to be able to defend themselves, not from evil reich-wing gangs, but criminals, criminals created and enabled by the Democrats own policy choices, but they have to mouth silliness about Republicans and conservatives to justify their own hypocrisy

 

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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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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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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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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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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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What did we achieve?

Captain Harry Wales in Afghanistan.

There was little choice for the United States to go into Afghanistan following the September 11th attacks. There were 2,459 American military deaths, along with 20,769 Americans wounded. Along with that were 1,822 civilian contractors and 18 Central Intelligence Agency operatives killed in the two months short of twenty years we were there. 457 British soldiers were killed there, and another 2,209 wounded seriously enough to be admitted to field hospitals.

Even His Royal Highness, Prince Henry of Wales, before he went bat guano insane over Meghan Markle, served in Afghanistan, as an Apache helicopter pilot.

Al Qaeda was routed reasonably quickly, although Osama bin Laden wasn’t killed until May 2, 2011, at a compound hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, lasted until July 31, 2022, after the United States had evacuated troops from the country, by an American drone strike at a villa in Kabul that he used.

Al Qaeda Is Back—and Thriving—in Afghanistan

The architects of 9/11 are profiting from gold and gem mines in the Taliban-led country.

By Lynne O’Donnell, a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. | March 22, 2024

Al Qaeda is back to its old tricks in Afghanistan. Much as it did before masterminding the 9/11 attacks, the terrorist group is running militant training camps; sharing the profits of the Taliban’s illicit drug, mining, and smuggling enterprises; and funneling the proceeds to affiliated jihadi groups worldwide.

An unpublished report circulating among Western diplomats and U.N. officials details how deeply embedded the group once run by Osama bin Laden is in the Taliban’s operations, as they loot Afghanistan’s natural wealth and steal international aid meant to alleviate the suffering of millions of Afghans.

The report was completed by a private, London-based threat analysis firm whose directors did not want to be identified. A copy was provided to Foreign Policy and its findings verified by independent sources. It is based on research conducted inside Afghanistan in recent months and includes a list of senior al Qaeda operatives and the roles they play in the Taliban’s administration.

To facilitate its ambitions, al Qaeda is raking in tens of millions of dollars a week from gold mines in Afghanistan’s northern Badakhshan and Takhar provinces that employ tens of thousands of workers and are protected by warlords friendly to the Taliban, the report says. The money represents a 25 percent share in proceeds from gold and gem mines; 11 gold mines are geolocated in the report. The money is shared with al Qaeda by the two Taliban factions: Sirajuddin Haqqani’s Kabul faction and Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada’s Kandahar faction, suggesting both leaders, widely regarded as archrivals, see a cozy relationship with al Qaeda as furthering their own interests as well as helping to entrench the group’s overall power.

There’s more at the original.

So, after going in and spending almost twenty years there, spending trillions of dollars and seeing over 2,000 American soldiers coming bad in body bags, all to destroy al Qaeda, the terrorist group are back.

The younger President George Bush included in the mission ousting and, supposedly, destroying the Taliban, the hardline Islamist faction which governed the country at the time. It wasn’t too difficult for American soldiers and Marines to kick the Taliban out of power, but, as we all know, the US, under President Donald Trump, negotiated a withdrawal from that abysmal place, though it wasn’t accomplished until August of 2021, under President Joe Biden. Naturally, under Mr Biden, the final departure was a complete mess and foul-up, in which 13 more Americans were killed, and the US handed power right back to the same Taliban President Bush swore would be driven from power.

And now we have this:

Taliban publish vice laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public

The Taliban say it’s mandatory for Afghan women to conceal their voices and bare faces in public

by The Associated Press | Thursday, August 22, 2024 | 12:19 PM EDT

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have issued a ban on women’s voices and bare faces in public under new laws approved by the supreme leader in efforts to combat vice and promote virtue.

The laws were issued Wednesday after they were approved by supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, a government spokesman said. The Taliban had set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” after seizing power in 2021.

The ministry published its vice and virtue laws on Wednesday that cover aspects of everyday life like public transportation, music, shaving and celebrations.

They are set out in a 114-page, 35-article document seen by The Associated Press and are the first formal declaration of vice and virtue laws in Afghanistan since the takeover.

“Inshallah we assure you that this Islamic law will be of great help in the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice,” said ministry spokesman Maulvi Abdul Ghafar Farooq on Thursday.

There’s more at the original

Al Qaeda are back and the Taliban are back, returning to the same basic Islamist and authoritarian principles they imposed in their previous regime. And that, along with the failure of democracy in Iraq, raises the obvious question: what the f(ornicate) did we gain from all of the blood spilled and all of the treasure burned up and blown up?

President Bush was seduced by Natan Sharansky’s and Ron Dermer’s book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, in which the authors argued that the only moral foreign policy is to expand democracy across the world, and that once a people experience democracy, they will want to keep it. More, democracies will never be aggressors against their neighbors. Mr Bush tried to impose democracy on Iraq and Afghanistan — remember the purple-stained ‘I voted’ fingers? — but once American soldiers were not there to enforce democracy, it just never took.

Democracy is an artifact of Western civilization, a development of northern European and American culture. We managed to impose democracy on Japan and South Korea, but only after they had been completely devastated by war, and much of their military aged male population were killed or wounded. Those nations have copied and assimilated Western culture to the extent that they could. Israel is a Western democracy because it was resettled by Jews fleeing from Europe.

But let’s tell the truth here: We will never see true democracy or Western civilization in the Muslim Middle East, and we should not be naïve enough to waste our money and our blood on trying to push it. Iraq and Afghanistan are abject lessons in this.

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Once again, the left want to restrict our choices It's all for our own good, right?

I have said it many times before: today’s left are pro-choice on exactly one thing, prenatal infanticide. In everything else, they want the government to take control of your lives. William Teach noted that the Biden Administration are trying to shut down existing coal-fired electricity generation plants through emissions regulations which would force them out of business. The Democrats tried to force every American to take an experimental and long-term untested ‘vaccine’ against COVID-19, punishing those who refused with loss of their jobs. They have put in regulations designed to ban the sales of new gasoline-or-diesel-powered trucks and automobiles by 2035, even as the Administration threaten to shut down the coal-fired generation plants, even though 16.2% of our electricity is produced from burning coal. I’m not quite sure how the math works out in trying to push plug-in electric vehicles and concomitantly reducing our electric generating capacity.

Not only do they want to force people into plug-in electric vehicles, the government also wants to regulate the choices we have in those vehicles:

As cars and trucks get bigger and taller, lawmakers look to protect pedestrians

by Joel Rose | Friday, August 23, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

RUCKERSVILLE, Va. — In a cavernous white room full of bright lights, video cameras and microphones, a driverless cart hurtles at 37 miles per hour into the side of a large SUV.

Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have crash-tested thousands of cars and trucks like this one over the past three decades at their facility in central Virginia.

But a few years ago, they noticed that those vehicles were getting bigger and heavier. So they decided to make the cart that crashes into them larger, too.

“It was meant to represent a small pickup or a midsize SUV, and those vehicles have gotten heavier and heavier over time,” says Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at IIHS. “So it’s 500 kilograms more weight because that’s what the vehicle fleet now reflects.”

Americans’ cars and trucks are getting bigger and taller, while roadway fatalities have also climbed sharply over the past decade.

Why have cars and trucks gotten bigger and taller? Because those are the vehicles that the car-buying public have chosen to buy. American automobile manufacturers have moved to produce the vehicles that their customers want to buy. Article continues below the fold, because it contains an embedded video. Continue reading →