Members of the German Parliament have been talking tough about Trumps tariffs.The tariffs will hurt Americans worse than Germans. America doesn’t make anything anymore. There’s nothing they need from us.
Excellent. High tariffs are gone. And so are our soldiers, airmen, Marines. Germany can have those empty bases to fill with their own soldiers to stare down the Russians.
Peace, friendship, and honest commerce with all; entangling alliances with none. Wise words from one of our founders. Glad we have the opportunity to get back them.
Joe Doakes
For whatever – I say, whatever– reason, the Euros always back away hard when we talk about bringing the rest of the troops home.
As a rule, I treat the axiom “government is the things we do together, stupidly” like a well-tested law of physics. Politics – which is what drives government – is the worst possible way to allocate limited resources of any kind.
And FEMA’s record is…checkered.
But some of the stories coming from the Carolinas, Georgia and Virginia seem…
…stretchy?
Here’s a POV.
As grandma used to day, “trusting anyone is always a sucker bet, especially online”. Since Grandma died 15 years before anyone but Algore had the internet, she was pretty savvy.
The BIden/Harris administration seems to be slowly figuring out something that most of the rest of the world knew last October 6: Hamas are evil people who don’t want a “deal”, except one that leaves them able to keep killing Jews.
They could not get Hamas on board, but that did not stop the president from retreating into what must be the comforting fiction that Benjamin Netanyahu is all that stands between Joe Biden and the Nobel Prize. “No,” Biden said simply when asked if, in the wake of the execution-style murder of six Hamas hostages, including an American citizen, Netanyahu was doing enough to secure a peace deal. And yet, not only had the Israeli government agreed to the conditions Biden floated for a temporary cease-fire back in June, it had agreed to the terms Biden outlined in January, March, April, and May in similar fashion. Know who didn’t? Hamas!
If there is a political strategy in the Biden administration’s performative exasperation, it’s hard to see its value. The White House has cast itself as an impotent, easily dismissed bit player in a drama over which it still maintains it has some control. Even now, the administration seems incapable of admitting to itself what most Americans already know: The terrorists who murder Americans without fear of U.S. reprisal are meting out near-daily embarrassments to the country and its president.
And yet, in her disastrous interview the week before last, Harris’s view was still “We support Israel but there has to be a cease-fire”.
“Over the last five years gangs have recruited more than 3000 members, a 51 percent increase. At the same time, we’ve seen a significant escalation in gang-related violence, public intimidation and shootings, with violent crime up 33 percent.” says Mr Goldsmith.
On the one hand, everything Jacinda Ardern touched turned to crap.
The United States had contact with Iran through Swiss intermediaries both before and after Tehran’s mass drone and missile attack on Israeli territory overnight, a senior Biden administration official said on Sunday.
The official declined to provide details on the contact, saying only that the US and Iran had “a series of direct communications through the Swiss channel.”
The theory: Iran needed to launch a face-saving attack after alleging Israel killed one of their terror leaders. Biden wants the mullahs to save that face.
Every time I think I couldn’t possibly be more ashamed to be an American, President Potato Obama digs the bottom of the barrel a little lower.
Inflation is gutting working families’ budgets – but illegal immigration is gutting their paychecks, so the budgets are becoming irrelevant.
The exploding national debt is unsustainable, in ways that could very well make our society unrecognizable sooner or later.
And since “tall tales” are the issue here, we are of cours, led by a President who, on top of being demonstrably senile and corrupt to the bone, is a serial fabulist – about his childhood, education, his first wife and child’s car accident, his career, “civil rights work”, and Beau’s death.
But this is what Tina “The Giggly Butcher” Smith is yapping about.
So does Tim Sheehy actually think Shoreview is farmland? Because I love my constituents in Shoreview but farmland it is not. https://t.co/xGfQzXSJwc
…in my career as a self-appointed political observer.
There are many candidates for the title of “dumbest thing I’ve ever seen”; the Kenilworth Tunnel, evacuating the Third Precinct, going logarithmic on the national debt, “shrinkflation” – I could go on.
A floating pier and causeway that will be used to deliver critical humanitarian aid by sea to Gaza is expected to take at least one month or possibly as long as two for the US military to build and become fully operational, Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said on Friday.
We’ll be counting on the Israelis to keep the huge fat juicy target for drones, rockets and suicide bombers…er, I mean the pier secure, on top of actually, y’know, carrying out their mission.
I’d say “I’ll never mock and taunt a government idea quite like this”, but Americans are going to get killed in pursuit of literally no national interest whatsoever.
In other words, it fits right in with the rest of Biden’s foreign policy.
For like the 21st year in a row, I didn’t watch the State of the Union. I’ve joined the crowd that considers it a useless exercise at best, a nod to monarchy or worse at worst.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the Peoples Republic of China had, very nominally, the world’s largest “army”, listed at the time in the Guinness Book of World Records as being 200 million strong.
Of course, those were CCP numbers, ginned up by adding up the nominal numbers of the “Peoples Militia” – basically most of the nation’s able-bodied people impressed (dare we say, “Shanghaied”) into a putative “fighting force” armed with antiques, spears and dogma.
The reason, of course, was to project a mien of power, resolve and invincibility, at a time when China was three decades removed from subjugation, warlordism and indolence.
Today, China is none of those things (other than perhaps run by the modern warlords, the CCP’s regional apparatuses).
Chinese companies are doing something rarely seen since the 1970s: setting up their own volunteer armies. At least 16 major Chinese firms, including a privately-owned dairy giant, have established fighting forces over the past year, according to a CNN analysis of state media reports.
These units, known as the People’s Armed Forces Departments, are composed of civilians who retain their regular jobs. They act as a reserve and auxiliary force for China’s military, the world’s largest, and are available for missions ranging from responding to natural disasters and helping maintain “social order” to providing support during wartime.
The reason?
Arguably, because all is not well in China. The pandemic exposed some of the internal fault lines that are perking up the ears of some China watchers; social unrest that’d been repressed or satiated for decades came boiling up to the surface (although you’d have to talk with those China watchers to know it, since the US media will never cover it until it’s too late).
“The return of corporate militias reflects Xi’s rising focus on the need to better integrate economic development with national security as the country faces a more difficult future of slower growth and rising geopolitical competition,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow for Chinese politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.
“Corporate militias under military leadership could help the Communist Party more effectively quell incidents of social unrest such as consumer protests and employee strikes,” he said.
This being CNN, the audience needed to be reassured that this wasn’t anything associated with the big, bad American right:
Theforces, which do not currently operate outside China, have more in common with America’s National Guard than itsmilitia movement, which refers to private paramilitary organizations that usually have a right-wingpolitical focus.
Red China may or may not end up being a viable enterprise for purposes of governing itself, much less conquering the world. But given CNN’s performance, that ship may have left the docks.
As we’ve noted, Ilhan Omar gave a speech to a Somali audience last week that’s gotten some flak. It’s been in all the papers…
…Well, OK. It’s been in none of the Twin Cities papers. As usual.
Until now.
While “coverage” is out of the question, the Strib posted a “fact check” of the conservative response. There’s less in the fact check than meets the eye – but it hews closely to Rep. Omar’s claim that the translation is ambiguous, or just plain wrong.
The Strib’s claim (emphasis added, to return to later):
Omar’s office pointed to a more accurate translation of her speech posted online. A Star Tribune reporter who speaks Somali listened to the speech and reviewed the transcript, and found it matched Omar’s actual comments. It said:
“My answer was the U.S. government will do what we tell the U.S. government to do. We as Somalis should have that confidence in ourselves. We live in this country. We pay taxes in this country. It’s a country where one of your own sits in Congress. As long as I’m in Congress no one will take Somalia’s sea. And the United States will not support other people to rob us. Rest assured Minnesotans. The woman you sent to Congress is aware of you and has the same interest as you.”
The translation now under dispute characterized Omar’s comments this way: “The U.S. government will only do what Somalians in the U.S. tell them to do. They will do what we want and nothing else. They must follow our orders and that is how we will safeguard the interest of Somalia … together we will protect the interests of Somalia.”
As someone who knocks around in German and Norwegian, I know that translation begets ambiguity. It’s not unheard of for nuance to drift, or be yanked, in directions that weren’t intended.
We were profoundly surprised, even shocked on discovering the remarks made by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D) of Minnesota in a recent public forum, widely circulated on most social media platforms and attached below for your reference.
You will search the Strib in vain for any mention of the fallout from Ilhan Omar’s speech, in which she basically told a Somali audience that she was there to uphold their side’s interests in an ongoing squabble with Ethiopia.
Now, normally you need to go to the London Daily Mail.
So the fact that it’s in the NYPost must mean it’s serious. Tom Emmer called on her to resign:
“Ilhan Omar’s appalling, Somalia-first comments are a slap in the face to the Minnesotans she was elected to serve and a direct violation of her oath of office,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) wrote on X. “She should resign in disgrace.”
If you’re confused by the fracas? It does need some explaining:
Omar, the first Somali American in Congress, appeared to assure her Somali American constituents that she would do everything in her power to prevent the disputed, breakaway Republic of Somaliland from entering into a sea-access deal with landlocked Ethiopia.
A clip of the Minnesota lawmaker went viral with over 2.6 million views after it was posted on X, with a translation saying Omar had said: “As Somalis, one day we will go after our missing territories.”
The congresswoman claims her remarks were lost in translation.
Of course, as we noted yesterday, the Somali deputy foreign minister – presumably a Somali speaker – felt the need to disavow the speech in no uncertain terms:
We were profoundly surprised, even shocked on discovering the remarks made by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D) of Minnesota in a recent public forum, widely circulated on most social media platforms and attached below for your reference.
My fearless prediction: Omar will do her usual on-air slumber party with Esme Murphy this Sunday. They’ll paint each others toenails on the air as they commiserate about all the bigotry that strong powerful women face in the world today.
This video shows a Miao village (Miao are ethnic cousins of the H’mong) smacking down a group of local Communist Party thugs sent to enforce the party’s burial racket; locals are forced to bury the ashes of the dead in official, party-approved cemeteries, at immense expense.
The locals were having none of it.
This is part of a growing wave of unrest inside Red China, as the gap between “Have Nots” and “Have Lots” grows gapingly wide.
As to the locals beating the crap out of party thugs? It’s the kind of thing one hopes we see in Greater Minnesota the next time Keith Ellison sends his goons to enforce and unconstitutional lockdown…
So I’m going to say something that is considered racially rude, but I’m sick of the bullshit.
Conquest without morality was the rule of all peoples and nations until a couple of hundred years ago. Only in the very recent past has morality become a major consideration in warfare.
And the people most responsible for adding moral considerations to the law of conquest were… Europeans.
People pushing the Victim Narrative pretend that their ancestors were morally superior to their conquerors. In fact, they were not. Their ancestors conquered everyone they could conquer. The Comanche Empire conquered other Indian tribes, which is why Indian tribes allied with the American government to fight the Comanches.
If Indians had advanced shipbuilding, navigation, and steel-working, they would have conquered Europe.
Native Americans’ ancestors did not refuse to do this because they were more moral. They didn’t do it because they simply couldn’t do it. They were not superior in morality; they were simply inferior in technology.
And all of this endless bullshit whining about generations-old conquests is just a nasty cope.
You’ve heard of “Victor’s Justice,” in which the winner of a war can vindictively set the terms for peace…? Well we live now in an age of Loser’s Justice, when the losers of the war can, somehow, endlessly torment the great-great-great-grandchildren of the winners of their ancestors having won in war.
And we’re sick of it, and we’re done with it. We never point this out, because we don’t want to upset people who are clearly insecure about their ancestors’ failures. Who wants to pick on the fat kid?
But by not shutting this bullshit down, we have invited endless demands on us. Endless reparations and payoffs, endless “land acknowledgements,” endless affirmative action programs, endless demands for apologies (which are endlessly offered, and endlessly rejected as insufficient), endless demands we change our lives to “honor” people we don’t even fucking know, endless demands we “center” other people and endlessly think about what we owe complete fucking strangers.
Enough. Enough.
The fact that my ancestors were good at war is no credit to me. I can’t take racial credit for what people that lived 200 years ago did.
But neither do I have to take responsibility for the actions of ghosts.
And the fact that some people’s ancestors were bad at war is not a credit card with no limits entitling the bearers to make endless demands on others.
I’m done with walking around eggshells because some people just cannot get over their distant ancestors having been shit at fighting.
***
Could not agree more. The last man to have clear title to land was Adam, and he lost it when he got evicted for breaking the terms of his lease. Everyone after him has title-by-right-of-conquest (nowadays called “adverse possession” by lawyers and “colonizer” by activists) including Noah, who didn’t do his own slaying but moved into a world where his patron had slain everyone for him.
Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park
I would like to throw in a claim for my Viking ancestors and their history of fomenting what we now call democracy, along with their incredible facility at conquest.
But I can’t, because justice, the sins of the fathers are not visited on the sons, either their achievements.
As Don Surber notes, suddenly everyone’s an expert on Argentina.
We’ll come back to that.
Libertarian-Conservative Javier Milei crushed his center-left opponent, showing Argentina’s crushing dissatisfaction with over a decade of center-to-far-left politics.
“A radical libertarian and admirer of Donald Trump rode a wave of voter rage to win Argentina’s presidency on Sunday, crushing the political establishment and bringing the sharpest turn to the right in four decades of democracy in the country.
“Javier Milei, a 53-year-old far-right economist and former television pundit with no governing experience, claimed nearly 56% of the vote in a stunning upset over Sergio Massa, the center-left economy minister who has struggled to resolve the country’s worst economic crisis in two decades. Even before the official results had been announced Sunday night, Massa acknowledged defeat and congratulated Milei on his win.
“Trump also congratulated Milei. ‘I am very proud of you,’ Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. ‘You will turn your Country around and Make Argentina Great Again!’”
Don Surber’s response – “don’t anoint him yet, but the vote matters more than the candidate – isn’t wrong at all.
But he adds:
I don’t recall Argentina being great before but diplomacy requires a certain suspension of reality. It’s the 1970s chant of I’m OK, You’re OK updated for international relations. I’m Great Again, You’re Great Again.
Thing is, Argentina was, if not “great”, at least doing really, really well not that terribly long ago:
Reminder that Argentina was once one of the richest nations on Earth and a rival of the U.S. – hence the well-known phrase, "as rich as an Argentine".
Incredible facts about the Argentinian economy in the early 20th century:
As Paul Johnson pointed out in Modern Times, socialism – in this case, populist socialism in the form of Juan and Eva Peron – happened. Argentina went from relative wealth to decay and authoritarianism, and all it got was a lousy musical.
Huh – a great political entity that got sucked into a vortex of authoritarianism, stagnancy and decay by leftists who just kept winning elections?
While allowing that the Germans have a tighter definition of free speech than we do – when you let the depraved speak out loud, you can see what they’re doing in a way you can’t in Europe, and I vastly prefer the American way – this would still be considered pretty daring in the US.
And he’s a Green.o. Talking like a classical liberal, on this issue at least.
This is apposed to the avatar of modern left-liberal left-center-leftism, President Obama…
Someone walks up to you with a baseball bat. They say they want to kill you.
Your response is “no, I don’t want to get beaten to death with a baseball bat”.
Looks like you have a standoff. A controversy. A conundrum.
Someone else steps in and asks “How about we compromise? Will you settle for a traumatic brain injury?”
It’s the middle way, after all. The guy with the bat might even say “sure, I just wanna hit you, hard!“
You might respond “No – in fact, I don’t want anyone hurting me in any way. At all”
And the buttinski responds “Why won’t yiou compromise?”
Who’s right?
You?
The guy with the bat?
Or the person striving to find the middle ground between the two of you?
If your response is “I’m putting my foot down; nobody is hitting me with a bat for any reason at all“, and the other to ask “why do you hate the guy with the bat?“, does that change anybody’s mind?
Point being, sometimes the middle path, the compromise, is not the most moral path forward.
I know a few people with contacts in the Chinese diasporic and dissident communities. They’ve been telling me for the past few years – even before the pandemic – to watch out for what’s going on in China.
To Americans inured to rioting in Minneapolis and Portland, the news of riots in Shanghai, not long after rioting in formerly-free Hong King, might elicit an ignorant shrug.
So it may not be immediately apparent how striking it is to see scenes like this in China: a man, yelling “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” (at 3:08), is dragged away by police and militia…
…and then dragged back by the passersby.
Chinese subjects, forcefully re-capturing someone arrested by the cops.
That’s a little like the famous Tienanmen Square guy putting down his groceries, pulling a Molotov Cocktail out of the bag, and setting the tank on fire.
Lest you feel too happy, it gets much worse.
Around 7:15, the story follows a fire call at a large apartment in Xinjiang. Firemen have a hard time reaching the building at all, due to Covid lockdown restrictions. Since the building is locked down, the fire escapes are locked shut – and the death toll was horrific (as the cell phone conversation captured around 7:30 shows).
Around 8:35: residents unblock a neighborhood that had been sealed off for over three months, and send the police running.
I know – don’t give Tim Walz any ideas, right?
But the people were not amused.
Various whispers from the dissident community – which you can credit or not, as the attribution is pretty much all underground – is that a whooole lot of Chinese students and emigres are the children of party members who are trying to get their families ensconced somewhere safe before things blow up. Whether that’s wishful thinking or prescience, time will tell.
On the one hand, totalitarian dictators are generally very good at seeing to their own survival (until they’re not).
On the other? In 1980, the record shows Ronald Reagan was just about the only person who could see the USSR collapsing. In historical scale, it all happened so quickly after that – almost too quickly for the left to claim they’d predicted it all along.
Check this out: a computer application slowly, insidiously saps the compassion, perspectivel, moral equilibrium and finally, intelligence from millions of unwitting people.
It’s a shame, too. Given Hollywood’s constricted sense of imagination these days, it’d likely become a franchise spawning sequels and reboots for decades).
The media is referring to her as “Far Right” – or, in moments of revelatory candor, “Fascist”.
Check out the speech. You be the judge – while you still can.
And remember – if William F. Buckley, Jack Kemp, Barry Goldwater, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Wałęsa and Newt Gingrich were coming onto the scene today, they’d all be called “fascists” too.
sometimes it feels like the world is in a race between those who are inventing fusion Power too cheap to be metered, and those who are trying to send us back to the 1600s as serfs to the progressive nobility.
