There was little visibility in either side’s trenches in Amiens at 4:20am on August 8th, 1918.  Between the last of the night sky and a thick fog that rolled into the battlefield in northern France, spotting any movement was at a premium.  Despite the distance between the trenches being larger than usual at nearly 500 yards (usually trenches were only 50 to 250 yards apart), the Germans felt they had a good understanding of the disposition of the British forces across from them.  While elsewhere on the newly established lines of the Western Front the Germans were either fortifying or retreating to more defensible positions following their Spring Offensive, at Amiens German troops sat largely in place.  Other than increased aerial bombing in the area, the Germans believed their intelligence that the Allies would counterattack elsewhere.  They had even held a raid that penetrated 800 yards into the Allied trenches just days earlier and had seen no evidence of an Allied build-up.

The crashing weight of 32 divisions of British, Canadian, Australian, French and American troops utterly broke the German line that morning.  Erich Ludendorff would call August 8th, 1918 “the black day of the German Army” and the Allies would eventually know the attack as the start of the “100 Days Offensive” – the last 100 days of the Great War.

British soldiers ride a tank at Amiens.  The battle saw the successful deployment of hundreds of tanks

As July of 1918 began to wind down, the positions of both the German and Allied armies were becoming clear.

German numerical superiority had vanished, with the Germans holding 207 divisions in France and Belgium and the Allies having 203 divisions to meet them.  Worse for Germany, an increasing number of these Allied divisions were Americans, meaning those divisions were typically twice as large as in any European army.  In terms of pure manpower, Germany was probably now in the minority in the West.  The German High Command estimated that they’d need at least 200,000 new soldiers a month just to make good on the rate of loss they were experiencing in France.  The next annual class of 18 year-old draftees was only 300,000 in total, and perhaps only 70,000 wounded German soldiers would be physically able to return to duty.  Germany was literally bleeding to death.  Read the rest of this entry »

…who read this bit, by race pimp and grifter Robin DiAngelo…”

Conclusion: “We must continuously educate ourselves through books, films, discussions, conferences, community groups, workbooks, and activism.” And she knows just the provider to help!

And thought about Hunter S. Thompson’s Samoan lawyer from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

It’s been 12 years since we last updated “The DFL Dictionary” – the official guide to translating from “leftist” to English.

And in today’s politics, that’s a couple of eternities, pureed to a fine sheen.

Looking back at the Second Edition, last updated in 2009, it almost looks like a trip back to a more innocent time, doesn’t it? Like an archaeological artifact when it seems like the languages were just a difference in argot, rather than rapidly diverging dialects of English?

It’s high time for an update.

I’ve got my suggestions. I welcome yours in the comments.

My Proposed Additions

Cancel Culture: It doesn’t exist, and never existed. And if you suggest otherwise, a mob will come after you, your employer and your family, as a consequence for saying things that aren’t and were never true.

Gender: (Noun) A social construct that is simultaneously dispositive on Intersectional matters, and doesn’t exist.

Hate: (noun). Any political thought that isn’t covered in the Democratic platform at the appropriate level of government.

Orwell, George: A British author who, despite his decades of activism on the left, and his own admissions, really wrote 1984 and Animal Farm about Republicans. Not leftists. Nosireebob.

Privilege: A set of class entitlements that one invokes in an argument against someone else to pre-empt them doing the same with your own class entitlements.

Racism: Systemic power. Not classism – no way, no how. And it has nothing to do with hating someone for having a different ethnicity.

Woke: The acceptable substitute for critical thought.

Need to hear someone not dragging on America, on this anniversary of the beginning of the American experience?

Well, here you go:

I am the product of the American Dream.

There was a time when that notion wasn’t soaked in cynicism and meant something to people. It must have meant something to my father, who left a budding career as an oral surgeon in the Dominican Republic and, rather than start dental school all over again, quickly got a technician’s license here so he could support us. It must have also meant something to my mother, who left the only home she’d ever known to emigrate to New York City, where she would give birth to me: their first-generation American son, born the day my father secured his visa to join us for good.

I was an infant when we lived in someone’s attic and my parents worked to make ends meet. I was two when we moved into a New York City apartment and my father ran a dental laboratory out of the spare bedroom. I was five when he opened his business in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. And I was seven when we moved into a house in a New Jersey suburb, where we would enjoy a quiet street, a backyard pool, and endless possibility. Over the next twenty years, my father’s business thrived. My mother became a schoolteacher with a master’s in bilingual education. My siblings and I lived comfortable lives, privileged enough to entertain creative pursuits without worry. Things were far from perfect, but on just about anybody’s scorecard, my parents had won.

Through all of this, neither of them ever spoke a word about the American Dream, but they didn’t have to; they lived it with every move they made. Despite the struggle and the risk, they chose to try their luck because they believed in the possibility of building something better—and they succeeded.

I’m living proof of that.

And that’s just the introduction.

All is not lost.

Here’s the article on how narcissists and sociopaths dominate their families and social circles – and, let’s be honest, societies.

Michael Totten’s piece on the decline and fall of Portland.

Angus Fox’s series, “When Sons become Daughters“, on Quillette. It’s a seven part read, and not always easy, but very worth it.

Also – Genspect is amplifying the voices of parents of gender-questioning children against the bullying and gaslighting of modern society.

Hope you all have a happy and blessed weekend – and that you can help tell someone what the day really means, if you’re so inclined.

Mr D, First Ringer and I will be off today and Monday [1] enjoying a long weekend.

But we’ll get back in the saddle bright and early next week.

[1] Actually, I have no idea what the guys will or won’t write over the next couple days – for all I know, Ringer will actually finish that tome about Italians in Abyssynia – but I for one am taking a long weekend, and I hope you all can as well.

Bill Cosby is out of jail:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the indecent assault conviction of Bill Cosby on Wednesday and ordered his release from prison after finding that he was denied protection against self-incrimination.

The court said that a prosecutor’s decision not to charge Cosby, 83, in an earlier case opened the door for him to speak freely in a lawsuit against him, thinking he would not incriminate himself criminally. A second prosecutor later used the lawsuit testimony in a criminal trial, and that testimony was key in his conviction years later.

Cosby was convicted on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault in 2018 of drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004, and was serving a three- to 10-year sentence. He has served nearly three years of the sentence.

The state Supreme Court said Cosby cannot be retried on the same charges.

Let’s be clear from the outset — I hold no brief for Bill Cosby. Based on the available evidence, he’s a flat-out monster and richly deserved punishment for his misdeeds. I do hold a brief for due process, however, and there’s no question his prosecution was a violation of his rights. The right against self-incrimination is of paramount importance. All things being equal, I would rather not see Bill Cosby’s face in the future, once we get past this round of media attention.

So yeah, Bill Cosby as he is now carries little value, but what about Bill Cosby as he once was? He was one of the best comedians of the previous century, arriving on the scene around 1960, the same time as Bob Newhart (beloved), Jonathan Winters (much missed), Don Rickles (“problematic”), and Woody Allen (reviled, mostly on merit). Cosby first became famous for his “Noah” bit, which is still hilarious nearly 60 years on:

God: (standing on a chair behind Noah, he rings a bell once) NOAH.

Noah: (Looks up) Is someone calling me? (Shrugs and goes back to his work)

God: (Ding) NOAH!!

Noah: Who is that?

God: It’s the Lord, Noah.

Noah: Right … Where are ya? What do ya want? I’ve been good.

God: I want you to build an ark.

Noah: Right … What’s an ark?

God: Get some wood and build it 300 cubits by 80 cubits by 40 cubits.

Noah: Right … What’s a cubit?

I wouldn’t want to see Noah’s Menard’s bill — that much is certain.

Between the Noah bit, his Fat Albert routines, and the decade-long kids show based on those routines that was a staple of my childhood, Cosby was ubiquitous even before his 1980s era sitcom ruled the airwaves. He was America’s Dad. It was all a lie, yes — he is also a sexual predator and a hypocrite of the first order, but he was a wonderful interpreter of the human condition. What do we do with useful monsters? It’s a conversation worth having.

John Lott talks about the hoax “online graduation” a gun control group produced.

The extraordinarily well-funded group that put on the hoax claims no edits were made – but they refuse to release the original video. Further proof, were any needed, that the typical Democrat voters is terminally gullible and incapable of critical thought.

Also proof that, when you are a conservative, you always record your own media and public appearances, so that when, not if, leftists try to yank you out of context, you can stuff it down their yappy little throats sideways.

(And if they balk at letting you record the session yourself – as “legitimate” media most often will? Walk away).

Democrats, especially their “progressive” wing, have for years claimed to be the party of the worker, the little guy/gal, the underdog.

This is posited, at least by the class that chants the chanting points, as in contrast to the GOP, the “party of big business”.

And what does Berg’s Seventh Law tell us about everything Democrats say about their contrast with Republicans?

That’s right – it’s covering for their own stances:

No one is paying much attention, but Washington is building up a vast new multitrillion-dollar welfare class: corporate America.

Deep inside President Joe Biden’s budget are hundreds of billions of dollars of loans, grants and loan guarantees for corporate America. This Aid to Dependent Corporations is most prevalent in the area of renewable energy. Despite more than $100 billion already doled out to wind and solar companies over the past 30 years, the Biden plan would enrich often-very wealthy investors in solar and wind plants with another $100 to $200 billion in the president’s green energy scheme.

Forty years after Ronald Reagan, the old lefty saw “the real welfare queens are the CEOs” is finally true.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Roe v. Wade, 1973 the Supreme Court case which legalized abortion, was wrongly decided.  The Court failed to include a necessary party in the case – the unborn child – and that failure renders the decision unconstitutional and unjust.

The Fourth Amendment say no person shall be deprived of liberty or property without due process.  Due process consists of notice of the intended action and an opportunity to be heard by a neutral decider.  Originally binding only on the federal government, due process rights were incorporated against the states by the 14th Amendment.

In Roe, the court was asked to declare that the right of the mother to end her unborn child’s life was superior to the right of the government to save that child’s life.  The Supreme Court agreed.  No lawyer appeared to argue for the rights of the unborn child.  No Guardian Ad Litem was heard.  The Court did not decide where on that spectrum the rights of the unborn child would fall. The Court held the mother could deprive the child of life, at whim.

Without explicitly saying so, the Court decided the unborn child was not a necessary party to the case because the unborn child was not a ‘person’ in the eyes of the law; therefore, the unborn child had no rights which could have been affected by the outcome of the case.  Well, but what else could the Court have done?  Either a person has rights, or they don’t.

Not so.  A person convicted of a crime loses the right to liberty when confined in prison, but not the right to life which the Warden.  A person suffering from mental disability may lose the right to control her own money because the Conservator manages it for her, but she might retain the right to vote or get married.  A minor child lacks the legal capacity to enter into contracts but is entitled to life, liberty, support, protection, and education. The Court could have determined an unborn child was a ‘person’ with diminished rights like any of those other ‘persons.’

Instead, the Court determined an unborn child has the same legal status as a Negro slave in The Old South.  The slave’s owner can kill the slave at whim.  The mother of the unborn child can, too.

We abolished slavery because it was unjust.  We should abolish abortion-on-demand on the same basis.

Joe Doakes

It’ll bve interesting to see what cases come to the SCOTUS on the subject in the next decade or so.

Governor Walz’s emergency powers ended last night.

Turns out that to the DFL it was all a bone to be thrown over budget money.

“Our agreement with our federal partners to extend [food assistancce] benefits for Minnesotans, coupled with the thoughtful plan outlined in the House Democrats’ amendment to wind down the emergency response in state government, means that we can close this chapter of our history and celebrate the brighter days ahead,” Walz said in a statement late Tuesday.

Anyone but me having a hard time buying the notion that the Governor moved his plan up a month, on a day’s notice, over some bureaucratic tittle-jotting at the USDA?

My guess – and it is a guess – is that the DFL is starting to see that Covid is eating political capital they can’t waste as they try to get ahead of the urban crime problem they’ve created.

The NYTimes tweet re the recent cheating scandal at Dartmouth Medical School:

So, the school taking radical and dubiously ethical means to root out cheating at a medical school is “sowing mistrust”.

One guess as to where else “trust” is going to be a little dodgy…?

MInneapolis City Councilor Andrea Jenkins, presumably feeling herself swaddled in Urban Progressive Privilege and Intersectional Armor, went to a demonstration.

And was promptly out-lefted:

“BLM” blocked her car, demanding she sign a list of their demands:

Which, naturally, happened.

Let’s assume for a moment that this whole spiel isn’t staged, to give Jenkins’a whiff of the intersectional activist’s most important commodity, victimhood – and the fact that “BLM” put a dorky white kid in front of the car, allowing Jenkins to bellow about “white suprmacy” just loudly enough for the camera to pick it up, lends at least casual credence to the theory…

…and the more I think about it, the more I think “staged”.

But let’s pump the brakes. What if it was legitimate and organic?

Remember – if anyone replaces the clown car that is running Minneapolis – Frey, Jenkins, Cunningham, Alondra Cano, Jeremiah Ellison – it’s going to be someone to their left.

“The Moth Radio Hour” – a public radio production featuring the modern version of “storytelling” – is an often-insufferable bit of radio, featuring stories by people who are just not especially compelling. And yes, I”m stereotyping very broadly here, but prove me wrong.

No – I’ll prove myself wrong. This story – by one Victor Levenstein, who was 94 when he was recorded for the program – told the story of his arrest and interrogation by the KGB in 1944, before a New York audience…

…which, one must imagine, is largely composed of people who unironically think The Right is the “side” in modern politics who’d bring that sort of thing back.

It was barely after midnight on July 17, 1918 when the former royal family of Russia had been disturbed from their sleep.  Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, children, and a handful of members of the royal entourage had made their home in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains just a couple of months earlier, all under the intense and abusive watch of Bolshevik guards.  After the abdication in February of 1917, Nicholas II had lived in relative comfort as the Provisional Government allowed them a standard of living comparable to their former reign, even attempting to negotiate the Tsar’s relocation to Britain.  But with the rise of the Bolsheviks, Nicholas II and his family were now prisoners of the State; their fates a topic of debate at the highest levels of the Soviet government.

In Yekaterinburg, the Romanovs lived in rooms with sealed and painted over windows, and were given two half-hour periods outside the house where they sat in a tiny garden surrounded by 14-foot walls.  “Luxuries” like butter and coffee had been cut out of their meals.  No visitors or newspapers were allowed, nor was any conversation allowed with the 300 guards assigned to watch them, all under the threat of being shot and other verbal abuse.  Surviving diary entries from the family show a slow realization towards their eventual fate.

As the family and their remaining servants gathered in the basement of home, ostensibly to be evacuated due to the advancing Czechoslovak Legion, the head guard read from a letter:

“Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.”

Before the family could react beyond Nicholas II asking “What?”, the guards opened fire.  The tiny basement quickly filled with smoke, ricochets and screams.  When the gunshots stopped, the guards realized how poor their aim had been – outside of the Tsar and his wife, most of the family and others were still alive.  Over the next 20 minutes, the guards shot and stabbed the children and servants, mutilating and sexually abusing the bodies.  The remains were stripped, covered in Sulphuric acid, lye, then burned and buried.  Such was the level of concern over giving the advancing Czechoslovaks and the burgeoning White Army any standard bearer upon which to rally – even a royal corpse.

The last act of the House of Romanov was among the first acts of the Russian Civil War.

White Cossacks charge – the Cossacks were the initial backbone of the White Army

The historic descriptor of the loose confederacy of activists, politicians and generals that opposed the Bolsheviks as the “White” Russian movement could be seen as truly apt.  If “white” as a color is often seen as formless, bland, lacking contours and definition, so to was the nature of the “White” Russian resistance to the “Red” Bolsheviks that took power in the fall of 1917.  While later definitions of the Whites would oversimplify them as a conservative, reactionary force, the White movement constituted political leaders ranging from Mensheviks, to Social Democrats, Monarchists, and ultra-nationalist militias.  The Whites were a movement without philosophical grounding or even consistent political leadership, with most efforts to organize failing and leading to dictatorial control from former Tsarist generals and local warlords.  At their core, to be a “White” often simply meant to stand in opposition to the Bolsheviks. Read the rest of this entry »

…when using crosshairs in political messaging was an incitement to terrorism?

Either does the DFL.

A few weeks ago, when the “city of Minneapolis” first “tried” to “Clear” George Floyd Square, at 38th and Chicago, they spun it (with the willing connivance of our media) to try to make it appear that a community group had somehow gotten a bunch of city trucks and their unionized employees out to one of the edgiest flashpoints in America without the mayor knowing about it.

As if it just…happened. Spontaneously.

Go ahead. Get your community group to try it.

It’s apparently spreading. Lisa Bender seems to think city crews are out wildcatting.

After city employees went to clean graffiti off the streets of Minneapolis, City Council President Lisa Bender allegedly stopped the process. When Bender first heard about the cleanup work being done, she wrote that she assumed the city employees “were talked into this [cleaning up the graffiti] by the business association.”

In a later tweet, she said that the public works employees “mistook the drive aisle” at the location of the Winston Smith memorial for a “public space.”

I remember the good old days, when Minneapolils just competed with Portland and Seattle for “miles of bike lanes per capita”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Two weeks ago, Joe Biden declared the greatest threat facing America is global warming.  He has now announced his plan to deal with it: take away your guns. 

No plans to take criminals off the streets with aggressive crime prevention tactics, more cops, longer sentences.  But plenty of federal money for programs to keep teens out of trouble which means Midnight Basketball may be coming back, so that’s something.

Joe Doakes

And y’know, intervening with at-risk kids isn’t the dumbest idea for dealing with crime.

Naturally, most of the programs to which “intervention” money will be transferred will be shams, the usual crap from the non-=profit/industrial complex, at least in the “Blue” cities most affected.

But as Joe said, that’s true of pretty much all the areas where they’re spending. It’s all a wealth transfer.

Back in 1987, the Guardian Angels short-lived Twin Cities chapter “closed down” the Cecil Newman housing project in North Minneapolis – basically blockading it from criminals, keeping everyone out but the residents.

Legal? No less so than the CHAZ in south Minneapolis today is. Make of that what you will.

Needed. Pffft, yeah. Newman was a hotbed of drug dealing and crime, as the Twin Cities first wave of gang violence was just getting started, still years before “Murderapolis”. .

I was producing the “Geoff Charles Show” at the time. As we covered the story on day, Geoff said – one of the clear blue, live on the air, as he was wont to do, “Get me Curt Sliwa”, the fouorn2run

So I called the Guardian Angels in New York. “He’s in Minneapolis”.

I called the Guardian Angels at their Minneapolis number. “He’s at Cecil Newman”.

I called Cecil Newman. The phone rang a couple times. A New York accent said “Hello”.

“I’m looking for Curt Sliwa”.

“Tha’ts me”.

It was one of my favorite moments of that part of my career.

34 years later, he’s got the GOP endorsement for Mayor of New York. And he’s talking sense:

I mean, I’ll be realistic; a Republican has about as much chance of winning in New York as one does in Chicago, these days; I doubt Giuliani could make a dent these days.

But it’s sure fun to think about.

From Minneapolis Crime Watch – one of the tiny fringe of feeds that make Twitter worthwhile – yesterday:

That’s right – if you’re a 98 pound woman, and you get bodily tossed from y our car by a coulpe of 250 pound White Supremacists who theaten to curb stomp you to death, and you don’t report a gun, the MPD isn’t nallowed to pursue.

The other side of the Looking Glass called, and asked Minneapolis to dial back the crazy.

I’ve observed, with tongue half-heartedly about a quarter of the way into my cheek, that you could tell there not a significant number of “white supremacists” in last year’s riots, because as the Midway burned, vandalized and/or caked with graffiti, Allianz Field, the playground of upper-middle-class white progressive Europhiles and, we were once told, immigrants, protected by not so much as a row of barberry bushes, had not so much as a squiggle of Sharpie on it.

So the notion that “white supremacists” were behind the riots seems…far-fetched.

But it’s interesting that the owners of Allianz Field and “Minnesota United” would seem to be the only people who stand to profit, maybe immensely, from the riots.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Usurper says people cannot Resist without Eagles and Fat Men.

One chick with a cardboard sign – in the right place at the right time – can cause utter chaos costing millions of dollars of damage. And she didn’t even have a ‘ghost gun.’

Imagine what 80 million insurrectionists can do.

Joe Doakes

Leaving aside for a moment that the United States was founded in an insurrection against, proportionally, the greatest, most powerful empire the world has ever known? Tending to indicate the Harris administration isn’t very literate about history, to say nothing of mass movement?

Bidens jeep was not the first time some “progressive“ has tried that line. “What, you’re going to go after a tank with an AR 15?“

They forget that The American military is exceedingly disproportionately drawn from the same parts of society that “gun culture“ exist soon. An 18-year-old kid from East Texas is 32 times as likely to join the military as an 18-year-old in New York City (and even that kid is most likely a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, or someone from Staten Island, not the children of Manhattan hedge fund trash).

So the battle is not going to be between the putative “Fat, angry white man“ and a tank. It’s most likely to be between that guy, and his son with his tank, and his niece with her drone, against a bunch of non-profiteers with pre-printed protest signs and pink knit “pussy“ hats.

Which is, I expect, why the administration is putting so much effort into trying to “wokify” the military.

When people can’t trust the “Justice” system, they create their own.

From Irish cops to legends of The Godfather and Goodfellas and The Sopranos to the various warlords and cartels of Central America (and what is a cartel but a warlord with a product people want to buy?), the long legacy of people, even in a place that’s prided itself on this justice system, who find themselves needing to turn to their own communities (read: the elements of their communities with the fewest scruples about applying force to gain power) to get, if not “justice”, at least a order they as a group can live with, albeit at a cost.

The trick? Get the locals to fear you, and the erstwhile authorities at least to give you some room out of mutual convenience, if not outright getting on your payroll. And/or both.

So – can we, the people, trust our institutions?

• Our “elite” media is a joke. They are nothing but propaganda shills, and they only pay lip service to the contrary to gull the gullible.
• The FBI and the Justice Department are thoroughly politicized.
• So are academia and education and the bureaucracy.
• While lefist groups get the run of major cities without even the formality of a slap on the wrist, those perceived as “right of center” come in for, let’s not mince words, oppression.

And when the Normals color inside the lines, as we did during the Tea Party, we get both sides sliming us; when they learn the lesson and elect a candidate who doesn’t play by the K Street rules, they get slandered as a group. Oh, yeah – and told they’re defectives who are wired to hate from birth, and are just waiting to blow up.

It seems like Big Left is a bully kicking sand in the Normals’ faces, trying to provoke a fight.

Am I the only one who can’t possibly think it’s a coincidence?

Keith Ellison’s Attorney General’s Office is soliciting “victim impact statements”…

…from, literally, everybody.

Community impact statements are statements submitted by those who have been impacted by a crime. Those statements then may be read at the sentencing hearing.

On a form on Ellison’s website, people can submit their own community impact statement describing “how Mr. Chauvin’s offenses have had a social or economic impact” on their lives and community. When submitting, people must select whether they reside in Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota, the United States, or elsewhere.

“It is not common to facilitate the submission of community-impact statements in this way, but this is not a common case,” a spokesman for Ellison’s office told FOX 9.

Reading between the lines: the DFL has to keep the outrage stoked, since none of the other Democrat issues are polling well at all.