Monday, August 30, 2021

Taking Back September 11th and Taking Back The Republic

I was not, obviously, alive in 1776 when the United States was born.  I couldn’t be there when the 2nd Continental Congress was writing the Constitution.  I wasn’t part of the Union fighting to free the slaves or the troops who landed on the beaches of Normandy.  Nor was I a fireman running into the towers on September 11 or a soldier in Afghanistan routing out the people responsible for it.  But I’m here now.

There’s no way I’ll be able to accomplish in my life anything on the scale of greatness achieved by those men.  But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.  Just because one can’t aspire to be a saint doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t seek to do good works. 

We’re just a couple of weeks away from the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks that changed the course of our history.  America in 2021 is seemingly a universe away from America in 2001.  In almost every way, the country is far worse off.  Americans are divided like never before.  The basic notion of the United States as a positive force in the world, a fundamentally good, if flawed, nation is under attack in our schools on our airwaves and tellingly, in our military.  Our borders are nonexistent – unless you’re Cuban – allowing literally millions of people a year to simply walk into our country unfettered. Fundamental tenants of American life, free speech, freedom of religion, private property, and the notion of innocent until proven guilty are evaporating right in front of us.

And then of course there’s Afghanistan.  On the international stage we are watching the real time collapse of American prestige, honor, influence and power.  Joe Biden and his woke cabal have turned a debatable policy of leaving Afghanistan into a military, humanitarian and political disaster of epic proportions.  Somehow, they have figured out how to not only abandon Afghanistan, but do so while providing the Taliban with potentially thousands of American hostages, betraying tens of thousands of Afghans who helped us over the last two decades and provide the enemy with tens of billions of dollars of American military equipment, ammunition and buildings. 

In a word, America circa 2021 is in decline.  And the pace of her collapse is quickening.  Things have been coming apart for a while but started in earnest when the media turned on George Bush after the war in Iraq, picked up steam with Barack Obama and the fiction that opposition equaled racism, and came to a head with the hatred of Donald Trump and reached its peak with the theft of the 2020 election. 

As a result of all of this, the United States are not so united.  The country is coming apart at the seams and the only way to keep it together is to once again give Americans confidence that their legal votes count, that their voices count and that the man or woman governing the country was legitimately elected.  Citizens who feel like their government is corrupt look for extra legal ways to solve problems, they evade taxes and regulations and eventually establish their own shadow forms of government and coercion. (See Mexico just across the nonexistent border) In the simplest form, a nation where the citizens feel like the government is corrupt will find that those citizens don’t obey laws unless there’s a gun pointed at their heads, and in the case of the United States, with a citizenry built on two centuries of freedom and liberty, that is going to take a lot of guns. 

Tens of millions of Americans are asking themselves “What can we do about this?” or “What the hell happened?” or “How the hell can we save this country?”

According to the traditional way things have always been done, nothing.  We could wait for 2022 and 2024 to go back to the polls and think “Maybe we’ll win!”  Don’t count on it.  Should we start a revolution or try to overthrow the government?  Umm… no.  Not only would such an effort be doomed to fail, but that would open a Pandora’s box of chaos from which I doubt we’d emerge as “One nation, under God” or as one nation at all.  But by the same token, by doing nothing America is rapidly becoming a fascist state run by tyrants of the far left.  So can anything be done?  I don’t know, but I’ve got a suggestion.

On the twentieth anniversary of September 11th Americans should take back the date from the terrorists who put it on our calendar.  How? By making September 11 stand for something else.  Make September 11 the day Americans stood up and demanded their country back, stated that they would not accept their nation being stolen under the cover of night, that they would not accept that America has become a third world dictatorship where social media robber barons and corrupt officials manipulate the voting machines and install their leader of choice.  Make September 11, 2021 the modern equivalent of July 4, 1776 and declare that we will not be ruled by unjust leaders with no legitimate right to govern. 

How do patriots do that?  By showing up at the doorsteps of their state capitals on September 11th and demanding that their legislatures lend their voices to the fight.  Those voices should demand that states with a margin of victory in the 2020 election below 3% audit those elections and decertify their electors in the event fraud is discovered.  That voice is not a request.  It’s a demand. 

Now of course the legislatures could refuse.  And even if they didn’t and made that demand, Congress could – and probably would – simply ignore them. And lastly, even if Congress were on board, the Supreme Court might insert itself into the mix and claim it’s unconstitutional.  We understand all of that, but none of that obviates the necessity of making a stand in the first place.  Remember, the Declaration of Independence was not the opening salvo of the conflict with England.

In 1768 there was the Massachusetts Circular Letter which declared The Townsend Act taxes were unconstitutional because Massachusetts was not represented in Parliament.  In response the British sent troops to restore “order” and the result was the Boston Massacre in 1770.  From there more taxes and more resistance, culminating in the Boston Tea Party in 1773.  This defiance brought about the Coercive Acts which sought to essentially turn Massachusetts into a police state governed by the Crown.  From there the table was set for Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress and eventually the Declaration of Independence.  All along the way the British had opportunities to avert losing what would turn out to be the golden goose, but at each step they failed to do so. Will the states, Congress and the Supreme Court make the same mistake?

The state legislatures, Congress and the Supreme Court may indeed fail the American people once again, but it is up to us to make them understand that we take our Constitution and our democratic Republic very seriously and will no longer let them obscure what happened in 2020.  September 11th 2021 will be the first step in taking back the narrative, from the terrorists who struck at the heart of our nation 20 years ago and the country from the conspirators who struck at the heart of our Republic on the morning of November 4th. 

None of this is intended to take away from the courage and valor of those who ran into buildings on that fateful day.  Absolutely not. Their courage and bravery stand as beacons through the dark and will for ages...

In the end we may not be able to achieve the greatness of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or the soldiers of D-Day or the men of NYFD, or the men and women who fought so bravely in Afghanistan, but we can certainly plant our flag and say “No more! We’re taking back September 11th and taking back our Republic!”

Thursday, August 19, 2021

The Lesson of Afghanistan is a Simple One, But Probably Not What You Think

 Joe Biden is being roasted for his indefensible handling of the Afghanistan exit.  As well he should be.  Indeed, his incompetence is so legion that he’s actually getting roasted by a media whose only job appears to be to prop up the Biden regime.  Both the New York Times and the Washington Post pilloried him while over at CNN: 'the debacle of defeat and chaotic retreat in Afghanistan' is a 'political disaster' for President Biden. The Wall Street Journal suggested his statement 'washing hands' of Afghanistan 'is one of most shameful in US history'. 

They’re of course right.  This may be the most incompetent diplomatic / military exercise in American history… and it came straight from the Commander in Chief and his incompetent cabal of woke advisors. 

Given the tragedy unfolding today, one wonders if Americans will learn the real lesson of Afghanistan.  Sure, while one lesson would be to never put a senile incompetent leftist in the position of Commander in Chief, that’s not the real lesson to be learned…

American direct involvement in Afghanistan started out twenty years ago after the attacks of September 11th.  It didn’t take long to discover that the Taliban had been giving Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda training bases and a home from which to attack the US.  George W. Bush sent troops in to rout them, which was largely accomplished within months.  But of course the troops didn’t come home. They stayed, with the ostensible mission of helping Afghanistan craft a nation that would no longer be a haven for terrorists, and a government unwilling to protect them.  We – Americans, not me personally as I did not serve during that time nor in that theater – built roads, schools, bases, buildings, shepherded the writing of a constitution, facilitated elections and helped form a government with all the trappings of legitimacy.  One of the most laudable efforts was help to give girls and women opportunities that they had essentially never seen in Afghanistan.

Of course, the Taliban, while defeated in terms of running the country, never quite went away.  They hid in the hills. They hid in Pakistan and actually took parts of it over.  They operated under the cover of night and gave a constant reminder that they were never far away, having been funded and shielded by the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service.  

All of this “progress” cost a great deal, both in terms of money and the lives of brave servicemen.  When all is said and done, the United States will have spent somewhere between $1 and $2 trillion seeking to build Afghanistan into a democracy with a functioning military and government.  At the same time, 2,500 American servicemembers lost their lives executing that mission. 

All for what?  Not much, apparently.  In just a number of days the Taliban took over the entire country.  The president fled. Americans were airlifted from the roof of the embassy.  Girls are now being stolen from their families to be given as wives to Taliban fighters.  Those who assisted the Americans and local police are being rounded up and killed.  The Afghan military has essentially evaporated, leaving the Taliban in possession of tens of billions of dollars of American supplied weapons and equipment.  Soon the Taliban will bring Afghanistan back to the 7th century, from whence they came.  Sharia law.  Women in bondage. No freedom.  Economic backwater.

The lesson of Afghanistan is not that the United States couldn’t turn The Graveyard of Empires into a thriving democracy, such as our own. That was never in the cards.  The American colonies grew up as part of the British Empire and had been marching slowly towards a representative government with individual freedoms for centuries, culminating in the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution.  Of course neither of those was the final word and the United States has been evolving towards a More Perfect Union ever since. 

Afghanistan doesn’t have anything resembling the history we have.  Just the opposite.  The nation, to the degree that is actually a nation, exists largely on a map.  The people are far more tribal than they are Afghani, and most live lives like those their ancestors lived 1,000 years ago.  Nation building in Afghanistan was always likely to be a failure, whether the United States spent $2 trillion or $20. 

And therein lays the lesson of Afghanistan, through the words of Ronald Reagan.  Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Americans live in the greatest nation in the history of man, one that took literally centuries to get where it is today.  It’s far from perfect of course, and it’s always evolving, but the fundamental principles of limited government, individual freedom and free markets have been guides the entire journey. But because it’s not perfect, the left wants to destroy it.  Tear down our Founding Fathers because they didn’t think about 21st century mores when they were busy carving out a new nation.  Eliminate free speech because mean words offend vulnerable sensibilities.  Eliminate free markets because they do not provide for a perfectly equal distribution of wealth.  Divide the country by an endless array of hyphens so that professional victims can identify their “oppressors”. 

The freedom that Reagan spoke of, the prosperity the United States has created and the opportunities Americans enjoy are not predestined. They aren’t written into our DNA, not guaranteed by God and not irreversible.  Just as a generation of Afghanis who grew up in a relatively free nation are about to discover, what is here today is not guaranteed to still be here tomorrow.  History is important. Culture is important. Shared values are important.  Twenty years and $2 trillion dollars in Afghanistan prove that and demonstrate how quickly rights and freedoms can evaporate.  

To the degree that pampered leftists who, in a global sense were born on third and think they hit a triple, want to change the rules of the game called America, change the dimensions of the playing field and change the players in the lineup, they’re playing with fire. They think they know where those changes will lead.  They’re wrong.  Free speech, and the respect for the free exercise of such, once gone are almost impossible to regain.  Private property, once taken, almost never makes it back into the hands of the rightful owners and with it goes free markets and prosperity.  Government programs, once launched almost never end, and edicts, once written are almost never rescinded.  A government unleashed from the constraint of the Bill of Rights will never find its way back into the cage.    

Some people know that reality while others clearly don’t.  Compare a 25 year old Afghani woman who is now facing home detention, a burqa for life and a husband she didn’t choose to a 25 year old American grad student standing in $300 sneakers holding a $1,000 phone and barking “F the police”.  One clearly understands what freedom is while the other wallows in his utopian fantasy utterly clueless of how the world actually works.  There’s a reason millions of people risk their lives every year to come to America or literally cling to the wing of a flying plane in order to escape Taliban Afghanistan.  It’s called reality. 

It would be nice if the left would learn the simple lesson of Afghanistan, that freedom is fleeting and must be prized and protected, but sadly they are unlikely to allow machinations in the real world intrude on their delusional fantasies.   

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

The Mouse that Roared: Covid 19 and the Collapse of Freedom

Suggestions that Americans get the vaccine are endless.  That’s understandable.  The vaccines appear to work in helping to reduce the likelihood of contracting Covid.  People see that there is a possibility to stop the spread of a deadly virus and they want to encourage others to participate. 

What’s not understandable are the relentless demands and the push for vaccine mandates.  Do it for your fellow Americans!  Real patriotism is getting the vaccine!  Don’t you care about your family?  These are all intended to shame the unvaccinated into getting the shot.  And if those don’t work, there are the mandates.

We’ve been told that mandates are necessary because the unvaccinated are putting others at risk.  That of course makes no sense because anyone who is concerned with contracting Covid and wants to get the vaccine can, and for free.  Those in the high risk category can also take other measures to try and ameliorate the threat such as staying home or wearing masks. 

More recently we’re told that mandates are necessary to protect hospitals from being overwhelmed by Covid patients, most of whom apparently are unvaccinated.  That may indeed be true, but overall numbers are down substantially across the country.  To put this in perspective, on January 8th of this year new daily cases were 304,000 and deaths 3,995.  On August 10th the number of new cases was 144,635 yet deaths were 715.  The former is a decline of approximately 53% while the latter is a decline of 83%. So there may indeed be a surge, but it’s a far from what the nation and hospitals were facing just six months ago. It appears to be the case that the Delta variant may be more contagious than the original, but it’s also far less deadly as well.

One last element mandate advocates use is coercion.  “Any unvaccinated person who gets Covid will be turned away from hospitals to free up space for the vaccinated who might get it.”  Given that we’re told hospitals are overwhelmed, one can see how that might sound logical… Only those who have taken the vaccine should be treated with the limited valuable resources available. 

As we’re constantly told, such valuable resources are frequently limited, so that logic should be extended. Hospitals should also begin turning away gay men who contracted AIDS from unprotected sex, IV users who contracted AIDS from sharing needles, drunk drivers who got into accidents, lung cancer patients who smoked, liver disease patients who drank alcohol, heart disease patients who ate too many burgers and wings and surfers bitten by sharks, among others.

But the mandate advocates would never go for any of those things.  It’s a “privacy” thing, of course.  Even though AIDS, heart disease and lung cancer are far more deadly than Covid, mandates to ameliorate them are verboten. 

And how deadly is Covid? According to the CDC, an estimated 120 million Americans have contracted Covid in the last year and a half with 6.2 million hospitalizations and 767,000 deaths.  That means that out of 120 million people infected with Covid, 99.36% of them survived.  And lest someone think Covid is striking down healthy Americans in their prime, 31.8% of Covid deaths occurred in Americans over 85 years of age, 60% over the age of 75 and fully 81% above 65 years.  Not only is it age, but health that correlate with Covid deaths… The CDC states that 94% of Covid deaths occurred in patients who had underlying medical conditions such as diabetes, respiratory failure, heart failure and obesity. 

So what we have is a virus that kills 0.63% of the people who contract it, 94% of whom had underlying conditions and the average age was 75 while the average American life expectancy is 79. And that assumes that 100% of the 767,000 people died OF Covid rather than just WITH Covid, which is very unlikely.

And this is where we find ourselves today… in a nation of almost 350 million people, where 2.8 million people die every year, where 7,600 people die every day of all causes, Americans are being forced to take an experimental vaccine for a virus for which they have a 99.36% chance of surviving if they catch it at all, and virtually 100% chance if they don’t have some potentially fatal underlying condition or are below 65. 

But we’re told the new danger is the Delta variant, which is more contagious.  Of course what we’re not told is that the Delta variant also seems to be less deadly although the vaccines are apparently less effective against it.  So now, because a virus that is less deadly than one that kills 0.63% of the people who contract it, Americans are now being forced to sacrifice their liberties and compelled to take an experimental vaccine or lose their jobs, lose their ability to go to school or their ability to essentially operate in normal society.

The mask mandates are nothing more than a power play by Democrats to control the nation and solidify their position for decades to come.  We saw what they were able to do in 2020 after a year of keeping Americans focused on a virus that fewer than 1 out of 450 might succumb to.  That hyperbole allowed them to crush small businesses, hook millions on the cancerous drug of government handouts and eviscerate the social fabric of communities via closed churches, shuttered schools and bankrupt businesses.  Of course the culmination of the control was the fraudulent election and the installation of Joe Biden as emperor. 

Now that the reality of the abject failure of the Biden administration is becoming clear and the negative consequences that disaster would logically have on Democrat candidates in 2022, the Delta variant – soon to be followed by the Lambda variant – will be the tool with which Democrats maintain their power.  The “danger” will be hyped to keep kids in masks, demand vaccinations, cripple businesses and potentially implement martial law like restrictions on those who refuse to comply.  Once the population is cowed into acquiescence, next will come a series of Rube Goldberg voting rules ostensibly intended to make voting safer, but in reality acting as Democrat vote replicators. 

Covid 19 may yet prove to be the single deadliest virus in history.  Not because it kills more people directly, but because it destroyed the greatest Republic in human history and with it went the freedom and opportunity that fueled everything from splitting the atom to men on the moon to a worldwide level of prosperity never before seen.  The absence of that Republic portends ill for much of the world that relied on it for security, trade and pursuit of freedom. In the 20th Century Communism and Fascism killed at least 125 million people, and that was with the United States acting as a contravening force.  One can’t help but wonder what the 21st century bodycount will be once the United States is no longer able to play that role. 

Monday, August 9, 2021

Skynet: Terminator Wasn't Fiction, It Was History - And We're Living It

Sometimes art imitates life and sometimes life imitates art.  Today we are living the latter… and it’s called The Terminator.  Little did we know when we first watched Arnold utter “I’ll be back” in 1984 that we were actually watching our real future. 

For those who don’t remember, Terminator was set in 1984 Los Angeles when a cyborg is sent back from 2029 to kill Sarah Connor. The premise is that at some point Skynet, an artificial intelligence defense system, had gained self awareness and launched a nuclear war in its effort to destroy civilization and the humans who built it.  A resistance had formed and John Connor was leading it to victory over Skynet.  In a last ditch attempt for victory Skynet sent the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor before her son, John, could be born. 

While the names may have been changed to protect the not so innocent and while we may not be in 1984, make no mistake, we are very much in the throes of the apocalypse that Linda Hamilton was driving off into the sunset to face.

Our Skynet is called Silicon Valley and its comrades of the American left.  Unlike Skynet, which gained self awareness, Silicon Valley, is full of people who seem to have no self awareness at all.  They proffer ideas that normal people recognize as ludicrous such as men can give birth, America is systemically racist and defunding police leads to safer streets, yet they think they are correct about everything.  Just look at the world they exist in. The Bay Area is overrun with homelessness, drug addicts literally sprawled out on the sidewalks, the streets are covered with human feces and hypodermic needles, violence is raging out of control and so many criminals shoplift with impunity in full view of employees and cameras that national chains and mom & pop shops alike are having to close their doors because they’re losing so much money. What’s more, their calls for defunding police persist, despite extraordinary spikes of violence. 

The left is anything but self aware.  They push insane policies that lead to the literal destruction of society and somehow believe they are standing up for the oppressed.  They claim that America is racist while in fact the United States may be the least racist nation on the planet.

Of course none of this would matter if Silicon Valley were today just the sleepy erstwhile farmland it was when Hewlett & Packard launched their company in 1939, or even as late as 1976 when Apple was launched.  But Silicon Valley is no longer that tranquil, serene suburb, but rather it has become the hub of our Skynet.  Silicon Valley, between social media, information hosting and communications, has gained a stranglehold on virtually every American citizen.  Privacy no longer exists.  Free exchange of ideas no longer exists.  Opinions that differ from the approved script are no longer allowed and are banned from the public square. 

Silicon Valley in general and social media in particular have set Americans against one another every bit as much as Skynet set humans against one another via nuclear war.  The truth is, social media is even more insidious than Skynet.  At least with nuclear war you understand the enemy is indeed an enemy and you recognize that mortal danger that lies ahead. Social media creates enemies where there used to be friendship, it creates victim oppressor relationships where none exist, it provides tools for groups to attack individuals with unapproved ideas and do so both online and off, usually with impunity. 

Like Skynet, which started out as a useful tool to game out various scenarios and ended up bastardizing itself into a tool to conduct actual war, social media started out as a useful tool to connect with friends and ended up as a tool allowed citizens to go to war against one another.

In addition to turning people against one another, the other aspect of The Terminator that rings far too true in 2021 America is the erasure of history. Schwarzenegger went back in history to try and eliminate Sarah Connor in order to stop John Connor from ever existing.  In a similar way, social media, BLM, Antifa and Democrats writ large are actively erasing American history.  First it was statues of Confederate generals, then it was the Founding Fathers followed in short order by Aunt Jemima and Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss.  Half of history is erased and the other half is rewritten.  No longer was America born in 1776, but rather 1619.  No longer was America founded on freedom, but instead on slavery.  America was never a land of opportunity but a land of oppression. 

The last, and perhaps most disturbing element of The Terminator documentary is the fact that Skynet never gave up.  Although the movie ended with the cyborg crushed to death in a press, we all know that that was not the real end of the story.  Not only did the cyborg survive, but Skynet kept sending newer and better assassins to kill Sarah or John or somehow destroy the past to prevent the future.  Donald Trump is our John Connor and his tenure in the White House was the perfect demonstration of this unbridled attack machine:  Four years of the Russia hoax, even after it was proven demonstrably false… Kids in Cages… “Suckers and losers”… “Good people on both sides”…  Trump’s a racist… Trump’s a sexist… Trump hates immigrants… Trump’s a fascist… Obstruction of justice… Not to mention the impeachment.  And when all of that fails, they blatantly steal an election under the cover of night and then attack the people who point out the theft as racists. And then another impeachment!

The left was and is simply relentless.  Like Skynet, they literally never, ever give up. Even when you think they are defeated, when you win the highest office in the land, they find novel ways to thwart your victory. Get elected on the platform of building a wall they engage a dozen different ways to thwart it.  When one element of the Skynet swamp is eliminated three more simply arrive to take its place.

At the end of the day, Silicon Valley, the Media and the Democrat party are what Skynet was: an existential threat to civilization and everything we hold dear.  A threat to common sense, rational thought, individual freedom, the Constitution, and most of all, the Republic.  America has been the bulwark against tyranny in the world for almost a century.  When our Skynet succeeds in eliminating the United States, the entire world will be less safe and eventually civilization will collapse just as it did when 2029’s Skynet launched its war. 

Reece’s characterization of Skynet couldn’t be more accurate today:  Listen and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.  That is the future we are facing.  Unless Americans can figure out how to stop it.