Category Archives: History

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

We’re seeing hints of spring up here in the Great Land, with temps in the upper thirties and forties and quite a bit of melting.  That’s not to say that we won’t see some sub-zero temps yet; this is Alaska, after all, and we can see nighttime lows below zero into April, as we did only last year.  But for now, it’s pretty balmy for early March, and things are pretty drippy.

Still a lot of snow piled up, though.

With spring on the way, Mrs. Animal and yr. obdt. are thinking of booking a May halibut/Pacific cod/rockfish charter out of Seward or Valdez.  It’s not cheap, typically running over $300 per person, but that’s a whole day fishing for the delicious flatfish, cod and the rather odd-looking rocks.  There’s nothing like good homemade fish and chips.  Plus a (cold) day out on the water is good for what ails you.

And we had company the other day.

That’s how it is here, at any rate – spring comes to the land and all thoughts turn to fishing.  There are a bunch of wondrous lakes, rivers and streams close by where one can pull up fat trout, delicious salmon and delicate little grayling.  It’s a great place to be outdoors.

And so…

On To the Links!

It’s true:  Democrats are now “the Establishment.”

No shit, Sherlock.

Practice saying “President DeSantis.”

Biden(‘s handlers) have no chance at redemption.  They’ve fallen too far, too fast.

What do you do when the nuclear option is actually the nuclear option?  And Putin has his nuke forces on high alert.

Panache.  And more.

And on that note, the Blessings of Ste. Javelin.

No shit, Sherlock, Part Deux.

Seattle is nearing Third World Shithole status, and this guy has the film.

Trump is back.  Honestly I’d rather see DeSantis run in 2024, but I’ll take another Trump run, just for the lulz.  And honestly, who are the Dems going to run against him?  Biden will be drooling into a sippy-cup by 2024.  Kamala’s approvals ratings (and her IQ) are somewhere between dryer lint and verrucas.  Will Her Imperial Majesty Hillary I, First of That Name, Dowager Empress of Chappaqua, try for a third failed run?

The red wave is forming in Florida.

You can’t make this shit up.

When you’ve lost George Stephanopoulos…

Should we kill every mosquito on Earth?  Probably not possible, but get back to me in mid-June and I’ll be willing to give it a try.  Our Alaska mosquitoes are so big they show up on air-traffic radar.

Yeah, it’s probably too late.  Besides, by the time the mid-terms roll around, Biden(‘s handlers) will be looking at Jimmy Carter’s record with envy.

Tyrannosaurus rex may have been three species.

Stone Age totty:  The Venus of Willendorf revealed.

Exit question: Are voters as stupid as Democrats think they are?  Well, sure, enough them are.  Look at Congress right now.

This Week’s Idiots:

John “Lurch” Kerry is an idiot.

The Nation’s Elie Mystal (Repeat Offender Alert) is an idiot.

Idiot Eric Swalwell couldn’t even manage to kick a Chinese spy out of his bed, but wants to kick Russian students out of the United States.

The Guardian’s Moira Donegan is an idiot.

Paul Krugman (Repeat Offender Alert) remains a cheap partisan hack, and an idiot.

Politico’s John Harris is an idiot.

The American’s Erwin Chemerinsky is an idiot.

I saved the best for last:

Heels-Up Harris (Repeat Offender Alert) continues to prove she’s an idiot.  Best reply:  “Obama picked Biden because Biden was the only Senator dumber than him. Biden picked Harris because….” A heartbeat away, folks.  A heartbeat away.

This Week’s Cultural Edification:

Trains figure quite a bit into American folk and country music, more so back in the days when they were still a primary passenger service.  Probably (in my opinion, anyway) the best American train song ever written is Steve Goodman’s City of New Orleans, written in 1971 and recorded most famously by Arlo Guthrie in 1972.

My best friend from school (and still to this day) spent a career as a trainman, later a conductor, on the old Illinois Central.  One of his career goals had been to, one time, serve as conductor on the City of New Orleans, which ran from Chicago to New Orleans.  It’s not well known, and nobody ever wrote a song about it, but that same train, on its return trip, was known as the City of Chicago.

Anyway.  Here, then, is the famous 1972 Arlo Guthrie recording of City of New Orleans, one of Guthrie’s best pieces and probably the best train song ever.  Enjoy.

Animal’s Daily Dog Trade News

My old bird dog, gone 22 years and I still miss her.

Before we get into doggie talk, go check out my latest advice column over at Glibertarians!

The relationship between humans and dogs is unique, and probably well worth an entire post on the topic.  Dogs were almost certainly the first domesticated animal; they are still the only animal that appears to have self-domesticated, as both sides gain from this special relationship.  Dogs truly are Man’s Best Friend, and it seems now that around 2,000 years ago in Scandinavia, they were a valued trade item.  Excerpt:

In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen show that even though ancient Siberian human populations remained genetically isolated for a very long time, their dogs interacted with outside dog populations at least 2,000 years ago, possibly even thousands of years earlier.

“By creating genetic records of the ancient dogs alongside other archeological findings, we were able to see a movement of dogs, potentially as goods that have been traded like a commodity. Possibly because of new human activities, and we believe the dogs could have been used and traded for hunting, herding or sledding. Dogs were vital to the way society was running, so it also tells the story of why they were domesticated in the first place,” explains postdoc at GLOBE Institute Tatiana Feuerborn, lead author the study.

“At the same time, it looks like the human populations were more or less genetically isolated and did not mix with outside populations. We do not see that with dogs, which indicates that dogs were traded rather than moving with people. So there definitely were interactions between populations in these areas of Siberia.”

What’s interesting about this is that the people evidently didn’t intermarry, but did trade one of their most valued assets – dogs.

That’s not all that unusual.  In the years after Commodore Perry forcibly opened up Japan for trade, there was growing commerce between the Land of the Rising Sun and the Western nations, but little if any interbreeding.  There are probably other examples.  Point is, the neat thing here is that, because of the DNA evidence from dogs, we know now that populations we thought had no interactions were actually engaged in trade.

It’s another data point showing that human behavior and human history is frequently more complex than we thought – and, as they have been doing for millennia, it was the dogs that showed us the way.

Rule Five H.L. Mencken Friday

Last Sunday was the birthday of Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken, a man whose written words I’ve read, pondered and quoted at length.  Here, from Issues & Insights, is a neat tribute to the man and his thoughts.  Excerpt:

Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, born Sept. 12, 1880, was a newspaperman, essayist, satirist, social critic and perhaps America’s most outspoken defender of liberty in the first half of the 20th century. Reflecting the difference between what was defensible as consistent with preserving our rights and what government did, a major theme of his writings was that “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

On his birthday, it is worth remembering some of the reasons Mencken offered to justify that shame, since, by his standards, our government is even more shameful today than when he wrote.

The basis justifying shame in our government lies in the appropriate role of government:

The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.

Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently – one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.

The problem is that our government has exploded in a torrent far beyond those proper bounds:

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

All government … is against liberty.

Here’s my favorite bit from Mencken:

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself … Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.

All government … is against liberty.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

All government is against liberty.  Some governments, of course, are wont to move harder against liberty than others; as far as the United States have fallen on the freedom scale, we’re still a long ways from North Korea.  But the arc of government always bends in that direction.

In spite of my usual optimism, I’m not sanguine about the future of the American republic.  Why?  Because I’ve read a lot of history.  It is in the nature of government to grow always larger and more intrusive.  And, as Mencken points out, all government is against liberty.  It’s a ratchet, not a dial, and thus only moves the one way.  I’m not saying that a return to traditional American liberty-based government is impossible, but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it happening.

What’s surprising these days is that it all seems to be happening so quickly.  Actions by government – mass lockdowns, imprisonment of political dissenters, corruption of the military, partisan prosecutions by Imperial law enforcement -just seem to be spinning out of control.

Maybe, given honest elections, we could hold the bad things at bay a little longer.  But we can’t rely on honest elections any more, either.  Meanwhile, we can look back on Mencken’s work, realize once again how prescient he was, and wait for the next shoe to drop.

Animal’s Daily Neolithic Partying News

Beer – is there anything it can’t do?

11,000 years ago, in what is now Turkey, a group of Neolithic folks gathered to hunt gazelles, feast, and get trashed on beer.  Excerpt:

Southern Anatolia is at the northern end of the Fertile Crescent, a region in the Middle East invigorated by the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where hunter-gatherers first settled down to farm. Göbekli Tepe was constructed sometime during this lifestyle transition, perhaps by different groups lured together through innate social desires. Exquisite carvings, decorated pillars, and animal-like figurines first suggested to researchers that this was a temple of some sort, intended for worship. Then, in 2012, archaeologists uncovered six large limestone troughs that could have each held up to 42 gallons of liquid. At the bottom of these structures were faint traces of oxalate, a compound which develops during the mashing and fermentation of cereals. To the researchers, this new evidence suggested that site’s previously modest narrative needed a rewrite.

“At the dawn of the Neolithic, hunter-gatherers congregating at Göbekli Tepe created social and ideological cohesion through the carving of decorated pillars, dancing, feasting—and, almost certainly, the drinking of beer made from fermented wild crops,” they wrote.

Whatever “worship” was going on at Göbekli Tepe, it was lively, to say the least.

Indeed, one wonders if beer goggles were already a thing in those days.

Think on this for a moment.  Human behavior, for the most part, doesn’t seem to change much, even over the span of 11,000 years.  I can easily picture these folks – a gazelle on a spit over the fire, a fired-clay jug of some foamy, alcoholic brew in their hands.  Teach them to speak English and they’d fit right in at any pig roast/kegger held in the Allamakee County hills of my youth.

It’s neat to know that people then, just liked people today, liked to unwind after a hard day with a mug of suds – and occasionally to let loose and get hammered.

Now, when did they get around to whiskey?

Animal’s Daily Historical News

If you’re interested in military history, like I am, you’d do well to check out the works of Dr. Mark Felton. He is a military historian who specializes in the Second World War, and has a knack for finding obscure bits of wartime lore that most folks have never heard of.  Here, for example, is a video (yes, I know, YouTube, but what can you do?) talking about the Dirlewanger Brigade, an SS unit formed of convicts, psychopaths and sociopaths that even most of the SS looked on with some horror:

Most of Dr. Felton’s videos take the same form; an in-depth, detailed presentation of some obscure happening that most people never heard of.  Ever wonder what became of the bodies of Nazi war criminals executed at Nuremberg?  Did you know about the first attempt by the Allies to invade Hitler’s Fortress Europe?  The Japanese copy of the infamous Tiger tank?  The last battle involving the WW2 German Panzer tank – in 1967?  You can find all that and a lot more.

I can’t recommend Dr. Felton’s work enough.  I have not yet started on his lengthy list of non-fiction books, but they’re on my list.  Speaking of which:  His written works include:

  • Yanagi: The Secret Underwater Trade between Germany and Japan 1942–1945 (Pen & Sword: 2005)
  • The Fujita Plan: Japanese Attacks on the United States and Australia during the Second World War (Pen & Sword: 2006)
  • The Coolie Generals: Britain’s Far Eastern Military Leaders in Japanese Captivity (Pen & Sword: 2008)
  • Japan’s Gestapo: Murder, Mayhem & Torture in Wartime Asia (Pen & Sword, 2009)
  • Today is a Good Day to Fight: The Indian Wars and the Conquest of the West (The History Press, 2009)
  • The Real Tenko: Extraordinary True Stories of Women Prisoners of the Japanese (Pen & Sword: 2009)
  • The Final Betrayal: Mountbatten, MacArthur and the Tragedy of Japanese POWs (Pen & Sword: 2010)
  • 21st Century Courage: Stirring Stories of Modern British Heroes (Pen & Sword, 2010)
  • Children of the Camps: Japan’s Last Forgotten Victims (Pen & Sword: 2011)
  • The Last Nazis: The Hunt for Hitler’s Henchmen (Pen & Sword: 2011)
  • The Devil’s Doctors: Japanese Human Experiments on Allied Prisoners-of-War (Pen & Sword: 2012)
  • Never Surrender: Dramatic Escapes from Japanese Prison Camps (Pen & Sword: 2013)
  • China Station: The British Military in the Middle Kingdom 1839–1997 (Pen & Sword: 2013)
  • Guarding Hitler: The Secret World of the Fuhrer (Pen & Sword: 2014)
  • Zero Night: The Untold Story of World War Two’s Most Daring Great Escape (Icon Books: 2014)
  • The Sea Devils: Operation Struggle and the Last Great Raid of World War Two (Icon Books: 2015)
  • Holocaust Heroes: Resistance to Hitler’s Final Solution (Pen & Sword: 2016)
  • Castle of the Eagles: Escape from Mussolini’s Colditz (Icon Books: 2017)
  • Ghost Riders: When US and German Soldiers Fought Together to Save the World’s Most Famous Horses in the Last Desperate Days of World War II, (Da Capo: 2018)
  • Operation Swallow: American Soldiers Remarkable Escape from Berga Concentration Camp (Center Street: 2019)
  • Chapter 8: The Perfect Storm: Japanese Military Brutality in World War II, Routledge History of Genocide, Ed. C. Carmichael & R. Maguire, (Routledge, 2015)

Check out books and videos both.  Dr. Felton has a real gift for uncovering these little bits of military history, and his work rewards the viewer.

Rule Five Failure Of The Law Friday

I found this an interesting read; from the Law & Liberty blog, here is Law On the RangeIt’s an interesting theme, and one that speaks to current events; what do we do when the law fails us?  Excerpts, with my comments, follow.

The western is a deeply American genre, full of themes intimately bound up with American history and Americans’ images of ourselves. It has fallen on hard times in recent years, partly because westerns often center around narratives that are now thought of as politically incorrect. This makes it all the more exciting that the Library of America has published a single-volume collection of four classic westerns: Walter Van Tillburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949), Alan Le May’s The Searchers (1954), and Oakley Hall’s Warlock (1958). All were made into films (also terrific), but the novels are more complex and nuanced. They are also a pleasure to read, although the historically accurate renderings of the language of the frontier may soon render them vulnerable to cancellation.

The novels are at least loosely based on real events, although all portray the West as far more violent and less ‘lawful’ than it was. An invaluable source on the history of the West is Terry L. Anderson and P.J. Hill’s The Not So, Wild, Wild West (Stanford 2004). The novels’ focus on atypical events helps provoke us to think about the role of law in a free society. Their settings share the absence of the formal rule of law, and the struggle of communities’ and individuals’ to establish law to protect their lives, families, and property.

It’s important to note that these novels are set in a time when civilization was expanding into a wilderness, and the rule of law had not yet been fully established, requiring the people to take matters into their own hands.  How is this relevant today?  Because arguably, in several of our major cities in particular, the rule of law is collapsing and eventually, if there is to be any order, the citizens may again have to take matters into their own hands.

The law fails in Warlock, Shane, and The Searchers; only in Ox-Bow can we see alternative paths by which the law could have been successfully invoked and only in that book are the representatives of the law portrayed as anything less than failures. In Warlock, the chief authority is the literally insane General Peach, who lives in his own reality obsessed the perhaps mythical Mexican bandit. The country sheriff is a day’s ride away but refuses to do more than appoint a helpless deputy for Warlock, explicitly telling the citizens that the town is too far away for him to concern himself with. The voice of the law is a disreputable “judge,” who has no official status, who is never depicted without his whiskey bottle, and who is sleeping off a bender when the fateful decision to send for Blaisedell is taken and therefore unable to even attempt to stop the Citizens Committee (of which he is a member). In Shane, the homesteaders at first want to wait out the attacks on them by the cattlemen, in hopes that their growing numbers will lead to the establishment of a local sheriff, who will be responsive to the more numerous homesteader-voters rather than to the cattlemen. In The Searchers, the Rangers show no interest in Debbie’s fate or the men Amos and Mart kill when the two are ambushed. They only become involved once the searchers’ activities threaten to stir up trouble with the Comanches.

So, a common theme is that the official representatives of the law are either absent or disinterested.  Sound familiar?  In many of our cities (I’m looking at you, Portland) while the street-level law enforcement is present, they have been hobbled by their political leadership to the point of helplessness.  So, what will happen?

The failure of the rule of law is most dramatic in Warlock. When the army finally comes to Warlock, albeit for the illegitimate purpose of chasing the striking miners out of town to help  the mine owner crush the strike, Blaisedell takes a stand in front of the boarding house (ironically named for the General), protecting some sick miners within. At first, he appears successful in persuading the soldiers surrounding the building to go away. Then the General suddenly assaults Blaisedell, beating him furiously with a stick, marking his face with welts and knocking him to the ground, roaring “I am! I am!” The troops enter the hotel and seize the wanted men. Just as the mine owner’s victory appears complete, the General suddenly receives word that the quasi-mythical Mexican bandit has been sighted. The army charges off, allowing the miners to be escape. The General dies while leading the pursuit, in ambiguous circumstances. The rule of law collapses as a result of his unhinged and unfinished quest.

One could argue that the rule of law is collapsing now, not in small towns still in the process of being carved out of the wilderness, but in American cities, some of which were formerly some of the greatest cities in the world but are now quagmires of crime and corruption.  But it’s not just the collapse of the rule of law; it is also the corruption of the rule of law by those ostensibly charged with maintaining it.

The article concludes:

These four novels serve that purpose well by enabling us to think through how we would act when the formal legal system is absent or fails, as it does in each of these stories. There are dangers in acting too hastily (Ox-Bow) or for the wrong motive (Searchers). Using force to solve a problem risks both the enforcer we turn to (Shane) and the soul of the community (Warlock). None of these books offer easy answers, which is why they are still worth reading more than half a century after they were written. All of them will provoke the reader to think, which is why we should be glad the Library of America has combined them into this excellent edition.

But here’s the bit that’s missing from the analysis:  The cultural values of the people themselves.  A large portion of the trouble in our inner cities have derived from a combination of things:  The failure of the education system to teach people how (not what) to think, a toxic, malignant ‘thug’ culture that has captured too many young people, and an increasing tendency to disregard the established political process in favor of riots and looting.

So what do the regular folks do?

It’s important to note that an organized police force is not necessary to maintain public order.  Here, in the locale of our rural Alaska home, there is no local police force, no sheriff’s office; the nearest badged law enforcement establishment is the Alaska State Police barracks in Wasilla, some thirty-odd miles away.  But robberies and home invasions are unknown here, because of an aspect of the frontier culture that is still Alaska:  One of the best ways I can think of to get shot, probably by an accomplished marksman, is to kick in someone’s door in the middle of the night.  Alaskans are accustomed to looking after themselves, and in general do a pretty fair job of it.

The four novels described all, to some extent or another, describe the failure of the rule of law and the necessity of the citizenry handling injustice, unrest and disorder themselves.

Now, think on that for a moment.  Why does the rule of law exist?  To protect the liberty and property of the citizens.

Is it doing so now?

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

I swear, you can’t make this shit up.  Take a look:

I distinctly remember Ronald Reagan meeting Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland.  Reagan landed first, and was waiting when Gorbachev’s Aeroflot airliner landed – in the Icelandic wind.  Gorbachev deplaned in a typically Russian heavy overcoat and fur hat (say what you will about the Russians, they know how to dress for cold weather) and Reagan was outside waiting for him in a regular business suit.

As Gorbachev approached, he slipped on a patch of ice.  He did not fall, but before his aides could react, the older Reagan ran to his side and steadied him, as though he was the younger, stronger man, representing his younger, stronger country.

It was a great visual.  Now we have doddering, senile old Joe Biden, sending the world just the opposite message.

Great.  Just great.

With that…

On To the Links!

Yeah, that’s not going to work out the way you think.

And that’s not likely to work out at all the way you think.

The epidemic that wasn’t.

Well, this is embarrassing.  If you’re not feeling like this, you should be.

No shit, Sherlock.

No shit, Sherlock II.

From the time of dinosaurs, and before.  Cool.

Holy shit!  Watch the embedded video – there was sure as hell automatic weapons fire on the Mexico side of the river.  Believe me, I’ve heard it before – and not an automatic rifle.  That was an M-60 or something of that sort, a crew-served machine gun.  (But they have such strict gun control in Mexico!)

Neandertals took good care of their teeth.

Well, you bought a house in loony California, so…

Fuck you, China.  Right in the neck.

This is actually racist.

1.  Read riot act.  2.  Order rioters to disperse.  3. Open fire.

Another one bites the dust.

Baghdad Bob at the southern border.

Meanwhile, immigrant facilities are apparently full of giant baked potatoes.

Joe Biden(‘s handlers) can’t keep covering this shit up.

The Navy is still looking into fusion.  Not surprising, the Navy operates a lot of reactors and has plenty of nuke experts.

This Week’s Idiots:

CNN’s Stephen Collinson is an idiot.

Newsweek‘s Michael Dyson is an idiot.

The Guardian‘s David Smith is an idiot.

USA Today‘s Nicole Carroll is an idiot.

Notorious blowpig Michael Moore is still an idiot.

Colorado farmers and ranchers respond to Gov. Polis’s idiocy.

Slate‘s Pedro Gerson is an idiot.

Slate’s Jane Hu is an idiot.  I’m sensing a pattern here.

Everyone involved with this bill is an idiot.

The Week‘s Ryan Cooper is an idiot.

The Nation‘s Elie Mystal is an idiot.

And So:

Boy, this one brings back some memories.  I remember going to the Ben Franklin’s Five and Dime when I was a little kid.  They had bins of little plastic toys, dinosaurs, birds and the like.  My Mom would give me a nickel each trip, if I had behaved myself, so I could buy one.

Later, as a teenager, I worked at the Woolco in Cedar Falls, selling guns and fishing gear.  Woolco was, of course, a branch of the famous Woolworth chain of five and dime stores.  I never fell in love with a co-worker there, although I did date one of the girls from the Garden Center for a while.  Nanci Griffith did a wonderful song about that happening, however; this is Love at the Five and Dime.  And (let’s say this softly) compare this marvelous display of talent, class and skill with what passes for music today, say, for example, at the recent Emmy Awards.  Anyway.  Enjoy.

Rule Five Stumbling Into War Friday

National treasure Dr. Victor Davis Hanson wonders if President Biden(‘s handlers) might be about to blunder into another war due to incompetence.  Excerpt:

If, even unwittingly, President Biden projects the image that the Pentagon is more concerned about ferreting out wayward internal enemies than in seeking unity by deterring aggressors, then belligerents such as China, North Korea, and Iran and others will likely—even if falsely and unwisely—wager that the United States will not or cannot react to provocations, as it has done in the past. And accordingly, they will be emboldened to provoke their neighbors with less worry about consequences. 

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 on the false assumption that Stalin had been too busy purging his military elite, starving his own people, or executing both rivals and friends. He certainly did all that and more. 

Yet despite Soviet cannibalism, nonetheless, Hitler was apparently unaware that the chaotic Russians could still field an army twice the size of his own. Stalin’s tanks and artillery were just as or more deadly than Hitler’s—and soon far more numerous than the assets of Blitzkrieg. A spirited, defiant and, yes, united populace was determined to protect Mother Russia from the invader. The British Empire and America were far more potent allies than Hitler’s Mussolini and Tojo. 

So wars are deterred when all the potential players know the relative strengths of each and the relative willingness to use such power in defense of a nation’s interests. Lack of such knowledge leads to dangerous misjudgments. And war then becomes a grotesque foreordained laboratory experiment to confirm what should have been known in advance.

Wars begin when aggressive powers believe that their targets are weaker, or give the false impression that they are weaker, or at least stay inert in the face of provocation. What were Argentina’s generals or Saddam Hussein thinking when they provoked the United Kingdom or the United States during the Falkland War and First Gulf War? No doubt, they assumed that their more powerful targets were too busy elsewhere, played out, or insufficiently concerned to react. In aggregate, a lot of damage and death followed in those two respective brief wars of 1982 and 1991—and all to prove what should have been obvious.

Read the whole thing, of course.  Dr. Hanson’s insights in this arena, as with so many others, are invaluable.

But as an old soldier myself, I have some insights as well.  The hard truth is that the United States is weaker than it was in 1991, when we fielded the largest expeditionary force the U.S. military had produced since World War II.  A generation of “peace dividends” followed up with even reservists dealing exhaustively with deployment after deployment after deployment in some of the worst shit-holes in the world have brought us to this pass.  Now the Biden(‘s handlers) Administration’s Top Men seem more concerned to wring their hands about “white supremacists” in the military than they are with making sure that the armed forces are able to carry out their primary purpose – to kill people and break things – or that they are only sent out to do so when there is a vital, compelling national interest in doing so.

We now have soldiers, Marines and airmen in some of the worst places in the world with no clear mission, no exit strategy, and serving no defined national interest.  It’s no wonder the armed forces are having retention problems.  But that’s OK – we can just keep lowering standards for new recruits, right?

Dr. Hanson concludes:

Biden would do better to apprise quietly his friends and enemies of America’s force and determination. He should resist comprehensive deals with China and Iran that have unrealistic chances of success given their agendas. And he could claim Trump’s successes as his own and continue their current trajectories, rather than court favor abroad by distancing himself from a largely successful foreign policy guided by Secretary of State Pompeo. 

Otherwise, the alternatives will become increasingly dangerous.

President Biden(‘s handlers) will, of course, do none of those things.  And yes, they are very likely to blunder into some kind of conflict.  And, yes, young soldiers will pay the price for this administration’s incompetence.

Animal’s Daily Truthiness News

National treasure Dr. Thomas Sowell, one of my personal heroes, weighs in on the current state of affairs.  Excerpt:

It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong — when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year.

For too many people, especially in the media, what is right and wrong, true or false, depends on who it helps or hurts politically. Too many media people who are supposed to be reporters act as if they are combatants in political wars.

Someone once said that, in a war, truth is the first casualty. That has certainly been so in the media — and in much of academia as well.

One of the most grotesque distortions growing out of this carelessness with the facts has been a removal of Abraham Lincoln’s name and statues from various places, on grounds that he saw black people only as property.

Such criticisms betray an incredible ignorance of history — or else a complete disregard of truth.

I suspect it’s some of both, but there is plenty of complete disregard for the truth going around.  Take, for example, last week’s events at the Capitol.

The legacy media would have you believe this event, which was for the most part better defined as hooliganism than terrorism, was some kind of historic first; when in fact the Hart Senate Office Building was invaded only in 2018 by anti-Kavanaugh protestors, Senators were confronted in elevators and all this was accepted as “free speech.”  Not to mention that only earlier this year D.C. was literally on fire, and this was described as a “mostly peaceful protest,” in one case by a reporter who literally had a burning car in frame behind him.

So to answer Dr. Sowell’s question:  No, the truth does not matter any more.  To pols in both parties, honestly, The Narrative is what matters.  But the actions of the Democrats and their supporters in the legacy media have been, for some time now, particularly egregious.

Rule Five Options Friday

It’s increasingly looking like President Trump’s legal challenges are sputtering out, and that next month we’ll have an arguably senile old C-lister inaugurated as the (figurehead) President.  But that’s not what’s really significant about all this – the number one takeaway from this 2020 event is that we no longer have an honest and effective election system in this country.  The Presidential election process has descended into banana-republic territory, and at this point it’s hard to see what we can do to fix it – given that it would take action by the very people who allowed it to be broken and, indeed, who benefit from it being broken.

So what options remain for our tottering Republic?  As I see them, there are three:  Submission, secession or civil war.  Let’s look at them one by one.

Submission.

This is, sadly, the most likely option.  I’m not saying it’s the best option, mind you; just the most likely one.  A great deal of the electorate is not engaged much in the process, while a strong plurality was in favor of the “whatever it takes” approach to removing President Trump and doesn’t give much of a damn that it took electoral fraud to do it.

The implications of that are serious.  No matter the outcome of any election, anywhere in the country, both sides will presume that any outcome they don’t like was due to fraud, and in many cases they’ll be correct.  The Left in particular has now taken the mask off.  They have shown that they will do whatever it takes to gain power and retain power.  That’s not a recipe for maintaining the liberty of the people. 

But if the ordinary people of the nation accept this, then the United States as we know it will gradually devolve into an authoritarian state.  End result:  The U.S. ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Secession.

Let’s assume for a moment that we’re not talking about an 1861, South Carolina-style secession, but rather the “peaceful divorce” option already being floated in Texas and other places.  Take a look at the map of states that supported the Texas-initiated lawsuit that was just struck down a week ago today; most of the states are contiguous, excepting our own soon-to-be home state of Alaska.  A peaceful divorce of some sort would leave a nation on the northeast coast, one around the upper Midwest (call it Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan) and the West Coast. 

The free states would have good ports at Galveston, Corpus Christi, Mobile and Savannah on the golf and east coasts, and Anchorage on the Pacific.  (I may have missed a few, or maybe a few dozen ports there, but you get the point.)  The free states would also have most of the continent’s agricultural land, energy production and a lot of the manufacturing capacity.  The not-so-free states in the East would have… well… the legacy media, a fair amount of the old academia institutions, and the peripatetic victim classes.  The West Coast states would be set up a little better with some agricultural lands – assuming the new national governments allowed farming – and some industry, along with several good Pacific ports.

But how would the military be divided up?  Would there be any mutual defense pacts?  The new Blue nations would almost certainly devote little or nothing to defense; how long before China looks with envy at the undefended West Coast?  There are a million things that would have to be worked out.  Even so, I see this as probably the best way out of the current predicament, even as it is not a very likely one.  The down side is a global power vacuum, as the superpower that once stood astride North America like a Colossus would be gone for good.  End result:  Two, three or more nations where one once stood, the sum of those parts being rather less than the whole had once been.

Civil War.

This is by far the worst, and fortunately least likely, option.

Any such conflict would be, unlike the 1861-1865 war, a true civil war.  It would not be uniformed armies maneuvering in open country and fighting conventional battles; it would be much more like the various third world conflicts of the last century.  It would be a conflict involving atrocity piled upon atrocity; it would be fought on the streets of the cities, and spilled out into the countryside and the small towns.

This event would see the rise of local warlords; a partial or complete collapse of conventional authority would likely result.  Some percentage of the military would go to each side, likely – depending on actions of commanders – taking some military equipment and vehicles along with them.  The cities would be cut off, and as starvation set in, the urban cohorts would head into the country, assuming there was food there, but having no idea how to obtain or produce that food for themselves, and running into armed landowners when they try to appropriate that food.

And no matter which faction managed to wrest out some local victories, the United States, in this option, ends with a bang, not a whimper.

The Odds?

I’m engaging in pure guesswork here, but my estimate of the odds of each of the above scenarios, right now, are as follows:

  • Submission – 75%
  • Secession – 20%
  • Civil War – 5%

I’m probably pegging the odds of civil war a little too high.  My first gut reaction is to place that probability at 1% or less, but I’ve spent the last week watching reactions, and I have to say in my almost-sixty years I’ve never seen such a reaction to an election.  The primary reason I place the odds this high is that it’s arguably already started, with the Profa thugs of the Democratic Party’s brown-shirt enforcement wing already rioting in the streets. 

The main reason I don’t put the odds higher is that Profa has shown themselves to be rather egg-like; externally they have a hard shell, but when confronted and the shell cracked, they are pretty squishy and runny inside.  Things could well spiral out of control even so, and while I still think it’s unlikely to devolve to that point, I wouldn’t rule out some kind of preference cascade leading to the unthinkable becoming thinkable, and one thing that could lead to that is the ordinary citizenry realizing that their municipal governments aren’t going to do anything about the brown-shirts, and taking matters into their own hands.

So.  Thoughts?