November 10, 2021
Donut holes; or, Orphaned observations
October 12, 2021
Cromwell, MacArthur, Hamlet: Words from times past for the present crisis
"This war will not be won by ... old, decaying serving men. We need men with fire in their bowels, who fear the Lord but not the enemy!"
"By their reluctance to pursue this war with the intensity it demands, they have proved themselves treacherous, both to our cause and to this nation. ... Honest men have served us faithfully, and many have died, that this House may sit in freedom, and this nation live in liberty. In the name of God I beseech you, do not desert them now."
"Anarchy, corruption, division, and dissatisfaction. I say that the enemies of this nation have flourished under your protection. You were from the beginning a ... government not truly representative of the people, for have the people elected you? ... You are ... godless, self-seeking, ambitious tricksters! You are no more capable of conducting the affairs of this nation than you are of running a brothel! ... You are scum, sir, and not truly elected scum, at that!"
-- Oliver Cromwell, circa 1644-'53, per Ken Hughes with Ronald Harwood in Cromwell, 1970
"I want you to remove all officers who won't fight. If necessary, put sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies -- anyone who will fight."
-- General Douglas MacArthur, circa 1943, per Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins in MacArthur, 1977
"Then sit still, my soul: foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes."
"Hold, my heart;
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. -- Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!"
-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, circa 1603
July 18, 2021
Fin de siècle
July 13, 2021
The late, last godly power
Six little months; half a year of war and rumors of war.
Three acts of war on the United States, crippling cyberattacks on the economic infrastructure, without consequence to the attackers. Something like 50 attacks on Americans in Iraq, one by drone. War anew in Iraq and Syria. War also in Israel and Gaza, after the Abraham Accords and the greatest peace in the Mideast since the founding of Israel in '48. A third of Afghanistan is reclaimed by the Taliban. In Haiti the president is assassinated. And South Africa descends into low-grade civil war with corpses "lining the roads".
Offensive mobilization of China against Taiwan, and Russia against Ukraine; diplomatic coordination between China and Russia, against the United States; and a warning from Japan that China and Russia are coordinating also militarily, and that it would behoove the United States to be watchful for a second Pearl Harbor.
What it all comes to, this half-year of war and rumors of war, in my reckoning, is that the world America has borne on its shoulders, is crashing down around us: America is not America, not in 2021, and in 2021 America is collapsed, past-tense; America was the last godly power on earth, but as of 2021 America is not godly and neither is it a power.
June 14, 2021
New Old Hollywood
May 25, 2021
Automat Revival
Bring back the Automat, I say:
Retro-Midcentury Modern design combining the Howard Johnson and the chrome diner and the Automat. Every table a booth. And on every table a miniature jukebox, glowing with the menu and corresponding buttons, and on the side of the juke a card-swiper. Ranks of clear plastic tubing lining the ceiling and walls, table-level model-train tracks discreetly ringing the restaurant: the tubes to convey the drinks, and the tracks the dishes. Jets of pop streaking overhead; watch your drink zipping and twisting to your cup over the length of the restaurant. And proceeding from the mysterious, unseen kitchen, a procession of 30" scale characters shuttling along the tracks bearing trays and dishes: a lovely fat Jersey cow; a plump, pink pig; a two-tone-with-chrome '56 Chevy in turquoise; a rocket from science fiction before the Moonshot, with fins and needle-nose and aerodynamic bulge, in unpainted aluminum alloy; an outsized Coke bottle and an outsized Heinz ketchup bottle; and the popular favorite, the classical 1950s "tin can on legs" robot -- pronounced "RO-but" after the Midcentury fashion -- waving his dryer-hose arms mechanically and superfluously.
The dumb-waiter trundles along the tracks to the table that placed its order, where it slows and halts, and waits patiently until a sensor detects that it's been relieved of the last of its order, whereupon it trundles off, around the loop until finally it vanishes into that inner sanctum which is the kitchen. And at the end a punchline: depress the "BUS TABLE" button at the bottom of the miniature jukebox and a caricature of a Midcentury garbage man materializes from the kitchen, proceeding along the tracks to the table in question and shaking his head judgmentally. Deposit your detritus on the tray mounted atop his scale classical aluminum trash can, tap his head twice, and away he goes, shaking his head at the mess you've made. "No substitutions. No cash or checks. No waiters, no tips. Take it as you find it, or take off. This is an automat. Thank you for your cooperation and your custom."
April 14, 2021
Communism comes to America and hell comes to earth: The case of Felicia Konold
March 12, 2021
Communism comes to America and hell comes to earth: The case of Joshua James
February 7, 2021
Communism comes to America and hell comes to earth
January 23, 2021
Two and a half days of post-democracy
Never mind the declaration of war or the authorization of force, never mind the national debate or the campaign promises; now that The Party need not fear the press or the law or the people, they've dispensed even with announcing the war: among the Establishment's first orders of business for the fraud Joe Biden, signing whatever it is they place onto his desk and repeating whatever it is they whisper into his earpiece, was the ordering of hundreds of troops into Syria. The forces were rolled in and choppered in all of 24 hours after the inauguration, and the people were left to discover our latest war effort days after its ordering, second-hand from Syrian and other Mideastern press. Lest it be doubted that this is a Mideastern entanglement wanted by no-one but the Establishment, they never let on about it before the election, then the instant the inauguration is past them, they give the order and don't trouble themselves even to acknowledge it to the country and the world.
(Update to paragraph hereunder, December 2024: Of course by now we know, the object of this re-occupation of Syria was more sinister than the cover-story I had consumed; evidently we're in Syria to kick up a new Syrian War, for "regime change", and to open another front in the globalists' war on Russia.)
This new Syrian entanglement is a war without an enemy or a point. The question had been settled by Trump diplomatically, with the scantiest of deployments and not a shot fired -- Trump who is the only commander-in-chief in 40 years to not launch a new war. The object of American intervention in Syria as it was claimed to be at the time of Trump's withdrawal from Syria, is that the United States Armed Forces occupy the middle of some territorial dispute between the Turks our allies and the Kurds our friends: tell me who I'm supposed to shoot at. There is no threat in this to the United States, no fear of terrorism or nuclear proliferation or Islamist fascism, and not even is there a shooting war to pacify, making it maybe the most pointless military effort in memory. Not to mention, America just now is in the middle of a civilizational collapse and losing a cold war against China -- China which has only just deliberately demolished 188 countries and come out the other end with scarcely a cross word against them.
And it gets worse. Also among those first orders of business for Biden was re-cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta; there's tens of thousands of jobs wiped, direct and indirect, and the United States left to import instead from Russia and Venezuela. A moratorium on leases and permits for oil and gas on federal lands. Then there was the re-commitment of the United States to the Paris Climate Suicide Pact, notwithstanding that the global temperature has risen all of 0.9 of a degree Celsius in a century, that CO2 is the innocuous stuff we exhale and oxygen to the plant kingdom, and that the principal producer of CO2 in the world is exempt from the accord, namely China. So there's that much more manufacturing packed up and shipped away to China, and America that much more hobbled, for a lie. And Biden's press secretary added helpfully on Inauguration Day that the abolition of fracking is to follow, fracking being the single greatest technological advancement making for America's exporting more energy than we import for only the first time since the 1950s, under Trump.
Of course the puppeteers behind Biden's big chair in the Oval Office ordered an end to construction on the border wall, wiping another 10,000 jobs in a stroke, suspended deportations of illegal aliens, ordered the 14,000 mostly convicted-criminal illegals in federal custody released into society and in toto, and commanded that illegal aliens shall be counted in the 2020 Census, which not coincidentally has the effect of piling up Congressional seats and electoral votes for Democrats. And the promise was renewed, of a "path to citizenship" for the estimated 20-million-plus illegal aliens, with expedited voting rights inasmuch as that's the object of the exercise, packing the electorate with tens of millions of spare Democrat votes to rescue The Party from the murderous rage of the people coming for it at the next scheduled election and to reduce the republic ever after to one-party state. Lest it be doubted that they fixed the last election, they're fixing the next one while we watch, complete with a scheme to forbid Trump from standing again for president and even from holding rallies.
Biden mandated masks on federal property, and a matter of hours later broke his own darn mask law. Thereafter Biden read a speech shrugging that as it turns out, there's not a lot he can do about "COVID". Also there was an executive order on "racial equity"; I've no notion of what that means but I know well enough it's a declaration of war on whites. And among the very most pressing business for Biden, he somehow took onto himself the authority to compel school sports for girls to admit boys who claim to be girls, onto the field and into the locker room, swinging the wrecking ball of leftism now into girls' sports, in the name of "transgender rights".
No element of this Bidenian program is popular or makes the country independent or self-sufficient, or strong or safe, or rich or free. The country repudiated all this on Election Day, before the visitation late Election Night by the Vote Fairy, and even a great many of the ones who did vote Biden -- and there is such a thing as a living, legal voter who really and truly did pull the lever for Joe Biden -- never signed on for this. The Democrat skews in the polling can't rescue Biden's job approval, and he walks into the White House at sub-fifty.
The Biden inaugural was a sham and an abortion. Looking like some North Korean observation of the founding of the dynasty, and about as democratic: tens of thousands of troops and maybe a couple thousand people, with mass ranks of uniform flags where the people ought to have been. The most memorable bit of Biden's address may've been Bill Clinton's dozing off in the middle of it, then as if to enact a screenplay about a doddering old buffoon installed in power as a puppet, Biden said out loud "Salute the Marines," instead of saluting the Marines, mistaking the direction in his earpiece for dialogue.
And then the inauguration developed into a disgusting scandal and outrage: Democrats first accused the white males who constitute something on the order of 90% of the National Guard, of plotting an "insider attack" on the sham inauguration they were ordered to secure, and subjected them to three layers of investigation on suspicion of conspiracy; then it turns out the Democrats provided for no accommodation for the Guard, reducing the men to sleeping on a cafeteria floor. These would be the same Democrats who when the National Guard rescued Washington from smashing up and burning down last summer in the Black Lives Matter riots, turned Guardsmen out of their hotels. Now it turns out that 5,000 troops ordered to stay on after the inauguration for no good reason, were left by the Democrats to sleep on the floor of an unheated parking garage with one bathroom and as many electrical outlets.
"This is how Joe Biden's America treats soldiers," pronounced the source in the Guard who smuggled out the truth and accompanying photos. Trump saw the outrage and at once he opened his luxury Trump Hotel in Washington to the troops; they've forbidden Trump from tweeting to the world and from e-mailing his supporters or raising funds, and somehow they've even closed his personal bank accounts, among other "depersoning" of the Last Elected President by the unelected Establishment, but they haven't yet confiscated his properties.
And that is an accounting of but the first two and a half days in our Age of Biden. But these are democratic arguments in a post-democratic age, arguments like we might've made in the holiday-from-history Clinton '90s or in the punishing and brutalizing, bleak and grim barrenness that was the the Age of Obama, persuading the people to vote Republican in the midterms. 2020, as the advertisers say of it, changed everything: in 2020 we won the argument and won the votes, but lost the election. Already we're winning 2021; Democrats aren't winning the argument but neither are they trying. The Party in 2021 have transcended politics and persuasion: anymore they only cram it down our throats, and fix it to where we can't say peep about it.
January 16, 2021
"If you need all this to protect your inauguration from the people, maybe the f'ing people didn't f'ing elect you!"
I can't improve on those, the words of a bluecollar worker in the national capital on the weekend before the first post-democratic presidential inauguration. For the first time in 53 years the Democrat Party have discovered an application for armed force that meets with their approval: enforcing against the civilian population their seizure of total power for remaking America into Venezuela, and playing a part in the party pantomime to impress on us all that those people who dissent from The Party are dangerous and murderous "insurrectionists" and "seditionists".
25,000 National Guard complemented by hundreds of specialized regulars, plus city and Capitol police -- several times the numbers deployed today to Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria put together -- licensed to kill civilians at their discretion. A Green Zone and a Red Zone as in wartime Baghdad, military checkpoints for entry to and exit from the downtown, bridges to the capital closed, and the perimeter secured by twelve-foot razor-wired fencing. And still The Party blame "security threats" for the abortion that is their inaugural ceremonies, and the dirty FBI "vet" the patriot National Guard. The commander of the Guard for the District of Columbia subjects his men to three layers of investigation, on suspicion of plotting an "insider attack", and a senior Democrat helpfully explains that it's the white male Guardsmen who are suspect, which is to say something like nine Guardsmen in ten.
Mass censorship and mass criminalization of the political opposition are well along even before The Party assume total power formally, and the "depersoning" of the opposition already is complete. The Last Elected President is to depart the capital on the morning of Inauguration Day without attending the ceremony or meeting the successor as was the custom of the republic, when it was a republic: the outgoing president cannot concede defeat because manifestly he won a historic landslide, and he cannot congratulate or acknowledge the incoming president who can't make second in a two-man race, even in an establishment poll, for most-admired. Secession is under discussion already, and language like "civil war" is common enough. And the theme of the inauguration: "America united", as if to plop the cherry on top of the fiction, and for all the world to see.
January 8, 2021
The Sixth of January
First they censored us; then they stole our votes; thereafter they denied us our day in court; next they dismissed our thousand sworn witnesses and whistleblowers and The Law pronounced that there was "no evidence of fraud" and would be no investigation; and finally they refused us even a stay of ten days, to audit and reconsider for only the first time the most spectacularly obviously stolen election in the history of the free world.
And then when we did all that they had left to us to do, confronting our national legislature unarmed to shake awake the country and the world, at the business end of what was among the largest peaceful political demonstrations in the history of the republic, conspicuously unreported by the press, they clubbed us and gassed and maced us and shot us, preemptively and without a declaration of unlawful assembly or so much as a warning. By the end four of our number were dead* including a small, unarmed woman 14 years in the service of the United States Air Force, she having bled to death where she fell from a bullet to the neck. Within hours they declared us enemies of the state and determined to "cleanse" the country of us, "cleanse" being the prescription of a network news director. But we are the country, 84% of it.
A revolution is an uprising of the people against the powerful; 2020 was a coup d'etat, by the powerful against the people. The Sixth of January in 2021 was the completion of that coup, and time will tell if it was also the Boston Massacre for a Second Declaration of Independence.
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* - Four patriots rallying for Trump and the Republic dead, one known to have been shot unarmed by police; one Capitol policeman dead, not as claimed by The Party by violence with a fire extinguisher but evidently from heart failure; then two Capitol police in the days after the 6th dead by suicide, and I leave it to the reader to infer from that. That accounts for the Big Lie of the "seven dead" promulgated by The Party, who would have you imagine Trump supporters as murderers with the blood of seven against their souls, when not one died of deliberate violence by Trump's patriots, and the patriots themselves accounted for four of the five dead on the day.