"Vic: Keep these mutts off planes!!!" (opens in separate window)

blitzkrieg through the institutions

friday, february 28th, 2024

For years now we’ve talked of the left’s Long March Through the Institutions. The metaphor comes from Mao’s conquest of China, but the process has been more similar to the creeping spread of an invasive fungus than it has been to military manoeuvres. Over the course of long decades during which it seemed that the left’s steady advance was absolutely inexorable, progressives slowly, patiently consolidated control over every organ of society. They took power job by job, appointment by appointment, sinecure by sinecure, board position by board position, department by department, committee by committee, Freedom of speech is a virus! And censorship is a vaccine

[FULL TITLE: "The Blitzkrieg Through the Institutions"]

There were those who noticed, and tried to do something about the infection – Senator McCarthy, for example. It is a symptom of the total control of the left over the popular consciousness that despite having known for years now that McCarthy was absolutely correct that the United States federal government was being infiltrated at every level by agents of the communist party, his name has remained a byword for hysterical, unjustified witch hunts.

By and large, however, absolutely nothing was done. We believed in merit, you see, and in the freedoms of speech and conscience. So what if an applicant for a position is an avowed leftist who is hostile to Western civilization down to his very marrow? He’s still the best man for the job, competent within the boundaries of his discipline, and it would be a great crime to blackball him on the basis of his political beliefs. As we saw during the Cancelled Years, such broad-minded tolerance only goes one way. Frank Herbert captured it well: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” Despair is the autocrats' tool.

As the enormity of the left’s totalitarian control began to sink in, we girded ourselves for a gruelling twilight struggle. It took the left many decades to slowly subvert the universities, the government agencies, the corporate boards rooms, the private foundations, the churches, the city halls, the school boards, the entertainment media, the hobby communities, and every other organ of civil society. We would have to do the same. Our young men would need to live like intelligence operatives under deep cover as they posed as good liberals in order to slowly climb the ranks of the corporate sector, the civil service, academia, or the military; to keep their heads down, say only the the right things in public, maintain Cold War levels of opsec regarding what they said in private, and be seen to support all the right causes. Then, many decades hence, with our guys in key positions, we would be able to reassert control over society.

But a counter-revolutionary long march through the institutions was always a doomed project.

The left understands the method quite well, having perfected it themselves, and its defences against counter-infiltration were well advanced. It was never enough merely to say the right things, and not say the wrong things – the left knows how easily such signals are faked, as these are mere words, and words have no meaning to an egregore which sees in discourse nothing but the currents and tokens of power. Much of the seeming insanity of the Cancelled Years is best understood as the imposition of elaborate, difficult to fake displays of loyalty: offering your child’s genitals to the hungry gender gorgon, opening your veins for the gene therapy injection. Then of course there is DEI, whose explicit intent was to simply deny opportunity to those most likely, on a demographic basis, to oppose the left. There is very little point, as a young white man, in keeping your mouth shut if you will be locked out simply because you are white, no matter what you say.

The psychological demands of stealthy infiltration are spiritually toxic. Anyone attempting this path finds himself embedded in a social context in which all of his friends and colleagues adhere to values which he privately despises, and moreover, he knows that the instant they discover his true beliefs he will be not only fired, but ostracized and isolated. Worse, he’s constantly placed in the position of betraying his own convictions, of going along with and even actively supporting things he knows are wrong, because failing to do so would be immediately suspicious. Since the left is a hive mind, he must ‘pretend’ to give up his agency ... and insofar as you are what you do, there is very little difference between pretending to give up your agency, and actually doing giving it up. Living like this is miserable. It requires iron discipline, and there is very little reward. Some of you doubtless have direct experience of this.

The most important reason that a long march was never viable, however, was that there was not enough time.

The West is in crisis. Public debt has broken up through the exosphere, its rise ever more vertical as the deficits fuelling it continue to expand, and we can all see in its meteoric rise that its inevitable descent will hit the land like rods from God. Third world invaders pour into our countries by their millions at the open invitation of seditious governments whose open aim is to reduce native white populations to second-class minorities in their own homelands within the space of a generation. These two crises of the Great Inflation and the Great Replacement could never be solved by the tactics the left used to bring them about. Even if such a long march could have succeeded in the face of the barriers the left so astutely erected, by the time it came to fruition the victors would preside over wreckage.

The left’s tactics were those of a chronic disease, gradually wasting the patient, leaching the strength from his limbs. You cannot cure a patient by becoming an opportunistic infection in your own right.

So what to do? Many, despairing, looked to civil war. A coup d’etats, likely followed by blue states separating from the Union. Battle lines would be drawn, brother would be set against brother, cities would be ruined, vast pits would be excavated and filled with the stinking dead. Such a war would never have been limited to continental United States. It would have dissolved the Pax Americana, with brushfire wars springing up across the globe as great powers sought to expand their territories by grabbing resources or strategic trade corridors. Those powers would have gotten involved in the Civil War themselves, backing one side or another, prolonging the conflict in order to ensure the Union remained shattered forever.

On J6, the American government teetered on a precipice. Had Trump applied so much as the gentlest pressure with his baby finger, it would have toppled over. The other side would then have screamed that he was a tyrant who had seized power by force; his own supporters would have rallied to the cause that the election had been stolen; America, and the world, would have been bathed in blood. So Trump pulled back, allowed the heroes of J6 to be imprisoned, and permitted the sclerocracy to impose four years of malevolent mismanagement on the American people.

Many were furious with Trump. He’d lost his nerve; he was a coward.

As it turned out, they were all wrong. It was a strategic withdrawal.

And now, instead of a Long March, we are getting a blitzkrieg.

I’ve been silent for the last month partly for personal reasons that deprived me of the time and energy to write, which I won’t elaborate upon here save to note that it’s nothing anyone has to worry about. But I’ve also been silent because I haven’t been sure what to say. The last weeks have been one of those ‘weeks when decades happen’ periods, and that pace of change doesn’t appear to be letting up. Executive Orders flying off of the big man’s desk, birthright citizenship being struck down, entire government departments getting defunded, the J6 heroes being pardoned, trade wars starting and then stopping before they start, the military heading to the border, DOGE siccing broccoli-headed zoomers armed with large language models to rip through the sprawling financial records of acronym agencies like a cyclone of destruction.

As it turns out, you can just cut things.

These are all great, wonderful things. We are winning, and the pace of winning is dizzying. It’s like we’ve spent the last several years slamming again and again against a seemingly immovable wall, bashing our brains out upon it like an enraged tiger, only for that wall to suddenly turn to sand upon our final desperate push, leaving us sprawled and disoriented on the ground.

That is at least what it has felt like to me. The people on the inside of the Trump administration are not disoriented. Far from it. They are executing a detailed, thorough plan. They’ve identified the enemy nerve centres and are neutralizing them precisely, rapidly, and ruthlessly. Handpicked squads of very competent young men have been turned loose inside the Beltway. It is clear that they are not being micromanaged, but are being left to develop their own action plans on the fly as the tactical situation evolves. This is manoeuvre warfare, with small, nimble, lethal teams dropped into the heart of enemy territory and being given maximum latitude to pursue the campaign’s strategic objectives.

Describing administrative reform via auditing as a form of warfare might seem hyperbolic but that is, I think, precisely the correct metaphor. Armoured by iron-clad job security, the permanent bureaucracy has squatted for decades behind an impenetrable fortification built out of administrative, regulatory, and financial complexity, which they defended using procedural manipulation, slow-walking of unwelcome reforms, and diffusion of responsibility through opaque committee structures. Figuring out who made what decision or which dollar went where was simply impossible for outsiders. From this impregnable position they could then sally forth like feudal lords to loot the serfs using the IRS.

DOGE’s application of AI algorithms has cut through their castle walls like cannon shot, an ultima ratio regum that has left the deep state speechless. The networks are effortlessly mapped, the flows of capital are traced, the corruption is exposed, the swamp creatures left naked and shivering.

The enemy have been left disoriented, and far more so than those of us cheerleading from the cheap seats, and they are demoralized to boot. The Trump admin is so far inside the blob’s OODA loop that it’s flicking the unclean beast’s dangling tonsils with its insolent middle finger. In a matter of weeks the left’s entire world has cracked apart at its foundations. They did not just lose an election – they lost everything. Comfortable life-long sinecures, the gushing river of fedbux feeding their subversive projects at home and abroad, the sheltering concealment provided by bureaucratic obscurity ... all of it, abruptly, seemingly without warning, has evaporated. The pace of events has frozen them in shock, and indeed I sympathize, for just as their cognitive circuits have seized up with disbelieving despair, so have I felt my own overloaded with dreamlike elation.

It isn’t only the left whose world has come undone, practically overnight. Our world, too, has changed irrevocably. For long, desperate years we have been as hunted animals in the wilderness, partisans hiding in the badlands of the Internet, launching culture jamming raids to harry the enemy at his points of weakness. We have become accustomed to our role as outsiders locked in permanent guerrilla war with the Regime. We’ve taken horrific casualties, yes – careers destroyed, lives ruined, in some cases even lives lost: millions of young men have died deaths of despair, and while only a few of them were direct combatants in the meme war, the civilian casualties must be counted towards the enemy’s grim toll.

Infuriating as the meme war could often be, there was also a sense of comradeship within the Society of Frens. When your account got banned, or your friend got doxxed, people would come together, offering solidarity, even helping out financially. We were all in this together, after all. More, the meme war was fun, and over the years we became expert in our trade. There’s a thrill to piling into the replies of a hapless libtard, a fierce joy in dismantling their pseudo-intellectual paramoralisms to the point that they ragequit the interaction by blocking you, a grim pleasure in taking some piece of hackneyed focus-grouped public relations slop and reformatting it into counter-propaganda that leverages the system’s own words and imagery against it, a quiet satisfaction in seeing the ideas germinated in your anonymous shitpoasts being laundered through the mouths of high-profile personalities.

By and large that’s over now. The legacy media is simply irrelevant to the public discourse now. The libs are mostly shocked into silence. Our hungry frogs are so starved for prey that they’re falling on squishy centrist conservatives, who stupidly stepped into the role vacated by the shitlibs when they fled X for the great hugbox in the (blue)sky. We’ve won. We’re not partisan raiders, but an occupying force. We aren’t being hunted, but are the hunters. We are not at war with the Regime, because we are the Regime. It will take time to adjust to this, and many will not adjust well.

There was a Taliban soldier who, after the fall of Kabul, lamented that he missed the good old days of sleeping under the stars with his brothers in arms, playing a lethal game of hide and seek with the US military. Hard and uncomfortable as that was, in retrospect it had been a lot more fun than sitting in an air-conditioned office dealing with the administrative minutiae of parking regulations.

That’s us, now, and we haven’t really come to terms with it. The enemy has collapsed. Decades of preference falsification have come apart, as they always do, in a preference cascade – people admitting that they don’t actually believe the things they pretended to believe because everyone else was pretending to believe them and they didn’t realize everyone was pretending, only now they do know, so they’re saying what they really believed all along, and so is everyone else. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes moment, a Fall of the Berlin Wall moment. The invulnerability conferred by the appearance of monolithic consensus has been cracked; the illusion having been dispelled, the spell is impossible to cast again. They’re done.

We’ll be dealing with the fallout for many years to come. There are so many secrets to be revealed, so many ugly little scandals to be uncovered, such a depth and variety of mendacious little conspiracies and corrupt petty grifts that have permeated our society at every level, paralyzing it so it could be parasitized. Clearing out the organizational, financial, cultural, and psychological wreckage will take decades. These people have been running their sick social engineering experiments for generations; we’ve all grown up in their MKULTRA world, and have no real idea just how fake and gay our kayfabe Truman Show society really is. But I think we’re going to find out, and it’s going to shock a lot of people – both those who, though ‘redpilled’, didn’t really know just how bad it really was, but especially those who, because bluepilled, had no idea that their entire identity is a psyop. People’s minds are going to shatter from that; many will never come back (how do you come back from surgically trooning yourself, or worse, your child?), and we’ll be carrying that burden of walking wounded for the rest of our lives.

Then there’s the physical world, the realm of bricks and mortar, steel and flesh. Tens of millions of migrants who need to be removed, and replacements found for their labour (personally, I advocate employing former USAID staff and DEI zampolit as fruit pickers and roofers). Cartels that need to be wiped out. Factories that need to be built. An economic system based on administrative makework and ZIRP plunder that needs to be reconfigured. School curricula that need to be redesigned. A military that needs to be revitalized. A sick-care system that needs to be turned into a healthcare system. A poisoning system that needs to be turned into a food system. Wherever you turn, things are in a desperate state.

All of this must be done while balancing the largest weight of public debt in the history of mankind, without dropping it and devastating the economy ... while at the same time heading off the inevitable challenges from foreign adversaries such as Russia or China, who will see the instability in Washington as a sign to go for it ... or, as N.S. Lyons suggested, view the potential rejuvenation of America with alarm, as a sign that waiting for it to slowly collapse in on itself is now a losing strategy, and that their best bet is therefore to move immediately, lest the window of opportunity close forever. Rather than the war in the Ukraine winding down, we may see its expansion to Taiwan.

And, here’s the annoying thing: it is you, yes, you, the person reading this right now, the rightist dissident that set himself against the powers of the Earth when the risk of doing so was greatest, who is responsible for doing all of this. Or at least whatever your small part in it is. You’re not on the outside looking in anymore: you’re the Regime, now. For years we’ve contented ourselves by pointing out the injustice, incompetence, and inefficiency of the demented ruling class and its army of flying rainbow butt monkeys. Mere critique is no longer enough. The worldsoul has heard us, and it has decided to give us exactly what we said we wanted: power. We have said for years that we know better than the fools in charge. Now we’re the fools in charge. We’ve talked the talk, now we have to walk the walk. It is put up or shut up time.

Maybe you read that and think, “Well hold on, I’m not in the government, I’m just a citizen (or maybe you’re not even a citizen, because you don’t even live in America). How am I the Regime?” What I mean by this is that the people in government now are people whose ideological makeup heavily samples the memetic space of the open source right (which I think is a better term than ‘dissident right’, given present realities). They believe in tradition and hierarchy, in strength and beauty, in health and truth, in personal responsibility and personal initiative, in great projects and national greatness. The Regime is not simply the people in elected office, but the entirety of the power structure, spread across all of the nodes of society – media, finance, academia, and so on.

Those who support the Regime, even if not individually in positions of power, still partake of its power: thus, the libtard could say ugly things about white people in social situations and expect you to nod and laugh. Now that shoe is on the other foot. The actions of the new administration have given you implicit permission to take action of your own, in your own personal life, in whatever way you can. Does your company have a DEI office? Has its HR department been discriminating against white male applicants? Does your university still force students to pretend the 1619 project is real? Does your open source project have a tendentious code of conduct on its github page? Does your town council still fly the prismatic pennant of pederasty? Does your local elementary school still bedeck its hallways with BLM fists? Does your sister-in-law demand that you respect your nephew’s (his name is not Luna) pronouns? Well huh, maybe you can do something about that. You don’t need to keep your head down any more. You don’t need to stay silent. You can just say things.

Two incidents over the last few days are worth mentioning here. The first was one of the DOGE boys, who goes by the handle Big Balls, was doxxed.

The enemy dredged up some edgy tweets he’d made about not marrying outside of his ethnicity and disliking Indians, and he was then forced to resign. The Internet immediately erupted in howls of betrayal and outrage. Musk polled X, asking if he should be brought back, and the overwhelming response was ‘hell yes’. Vance and Trump then supported this. Big Balls was then rehired. When some mealy-mouthed congressman tried to go after Vance for supporting the kid’s right to make edgy jokes, Vance raked him over the coals.

The Big Balls incident looks like it was stage-managed to me. Musk would certainly have known how his base on X would react, as would Trump and Vance. If they hadn’t fired the kid, the legacy media would have crowed that DOGE was harboring racists. They’ll still say that of course, but now it’s quite obvious that no one cares.

The next incident, while not as high-profile, was certainly organic. Devon Eriksen , the author of the truly excellent Theft of Fire, was kicked out of the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, which he didn’t know he’d entered, because he’d violated the Code of Conduct, which he hadn’t agreed to, first because he didn’t even know he was in the contest, and second because the CoC had only been inserted the day before after a rabid pack of gender botherers had kicked up a fuss about a ‘Nazi’ (Eriksen is a libertarian, for the record) being in the contest.

Just a few years ago, Eriksen would have been cancelled, quite possibly with cascading consequences such as having his social media accounts yanked and his book taken down off of Amazon. This time, the response from the science-fiction community was swift and decisive. Not only did Eriksen sell a whole lot of books, but a large number of other writers publicly pulled out of the competition themselves ...

As it’s in a fairly late stage, the roster of novels is mow much thinner. By trying to cancel Eriksen, the contest cancelled itself.

Between these two incidents, it is safe to say that the Cancelled Years have officially come to an unlamented and ignominious end. The reign of terror of emotionally unstable hysterics is over. You can just say things now.

And you should say things. The Trump admin is feeding the swamp creatures to its pet DOGE, but there’s a whole country that needs to be taken back. Politicians and their staffers can’t do that themselves. This is swarm warfare. You will not get direct orders telling you what specifically to do, you are expected to improvise, to figure out on your own the best way of advancing the global strategic objectives, and then act accordingly. This is the same tactical doctrine we refined during the Meme War, so you should know what you’re doing, by now. And since you know what you’re doing, you can just do things.

I realize much of this no doubt sounds triumphalist, and perhaps in a short period of time it will look like the delirious ravings of a man prematurely drunk on a victory that has not, in fact, manifested. Certainly it remains the case that the bad people are in power throughout the media, academia, and much of the private sector. The migrants have not actually been deported in anything like the necessary numbers. The cartels continue to pour fentanyl into the street. Virtually every other government in the West remains in the hands of the enemies of the Westman. Being from one of those globalist-controlled countries myself has made the experience of the last month almost dissociative, adding an extra frisson of dreamlike unreality as Americans celebrate a new and shocking victory over the forces of Mordor on an almost daily basis. It is like watching from afar as a single small point of light ignites in a sea of boiling darkness.

I do not think that light will remain isolated. What is happening in America now, this Second American Revolution, is inspiring patriots across the Western world. Furthermore, the rainbow totalitarianism that has swallowed the West is almost entirely an American political project, imposed by means fair and foul upon their imperial vassals. The funding spigot that nourishes the NGOs and ‘independent’ media outlets and activist human rights lawyers and all the rest of it has been choked off. The diplomatic support the loyal satraps of the GAE could count upon has been withdrawn. Domestic opponents of the comprador governments will find that the new sheriff in Washington is very interested in throwing his considerable weight behind them.

I suspect that the next few years will see very rapid political change across the West. Just as the fall of communism was not limited to the USR but spread like wildfire throughout the Warsaw Pact, the fall of gay race communism will not be an isolated event within the USSA, but will bring down governments all over the world. In most cases this will probably be fairly peaceful, achieved at the ballot box. In other cases things may become more turbulent. Brussels has signalled that it is prepared to nullify elections whose results it does not appreciate. They already did this in Romania, using some obscure judge to zero out the electoral victory of a nationalist candidate for the country’s presidency. They’ve said that they’re considering doing the same thing on a wider scale. If they do, I do not think it will end well for them. The American Regime – which, you must remember, no longer refers to our enemies – is in possession of a 5GW platform specifically designed for bringing down governments by inciting colour revolutions. The governments of Europe are weak and unpopular; should they cling to power, they will be removed the hard way. And the same will prove true, I think, of the governments of Britain and Canada.

In truth, those governments have no option. DOGE isn’t only going to be about rooting out corruption and firing leftists. It is a much more ambitious project, intended to reformat the American federal government: slimming it down, refocusing it on results, turning it into a machine for improving lives. It will be a massive upgrade in capabilities. Other governments will be forced to follow a similar path simply to remain competitive.

To quote the great orator many are now comfortable saying was the principal villain of the Second World War (because now, you can just say things): this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. The coming years will be very hard. Many things will come undone. There will almost certainly be violence, and wrenching economic pain is probably inevitable (particularly if you worked at USAID). But this is also a time of great opportunity, with great potential for adventure. The doors of the cage have been opened, and the only thing preventing you from walking through them is the learned helplessness of a dog that has been confined and shocked for its entire miserable life. Look, it’s scary out there, I get it, all you know is the cage ... but the people who shocked you are on the other side of that open door, there’s nothing between you and them, and you can just do things.

So get out there and do them.

A Day In The Life

Up at 6a on Friday, I went thru my finger stick to check my BSL (Blood Sugar Level) and recorded it on my Diabetes 2 chart, made coffee, skipped the two 50mg Tramadol and 300mg Gabapentin for various pains, fired-up the Win-7 Pentium HP Desktop to let 32 million lines of code load, had a couple smokes in the garage and called Wellspan Medical to reschedule the morning's 10:40a app't. I don't want to drive the partially-crippled Jeep anywhere until Monday, when I take it in to the dealer for analysis/repairs.

Peaceful coexistence with the Left is not possible. Stop pretending that it is.

It was a partially sunny, windy and very cold 19°F morning, but warmer weather is on the way, with mid/upper-50s forecast for next week. I had warm Apple Fritters for breakfast, and LOTS of Kona Coffee. I tuned into the "CP Show LIVE" for the morning, and just relaxed with coffee. By 12 noon, I was ready for the day, did a couple chores, had lunch, a short 2hr snooze, and watched FNC's recap of Trump/ Musk's DOGE, when some judges (all had ruled against DJT over the past 3-4yrs), halted State AGs from lawsuits against DOGE actions in rooting out waste, fraud and corruption, and another libtard judge went along with the injunction to stop State AGs.

The Dow plummeted by 748.63 points. By 4p, I was watching Discovery's "Gold Rush" and Fox News, and switched to TWC's "Weather Gone Viral" until 1a, and unplugged.

Up at 7a on Saturday, another bitter cold 17°, sunny, windless morning. I upped the heat, made fresh Kona Coffee, had a few smokes in the garage, fed the squirrels, scanned the news and tuned into some of last week's Chris Plant/WMAL Podcasts on iHeart Radio (iHeart.com), and tried to get a handle on what needed to be done this weekend.

How many useless FedGov Employees have been terminated, so far? All the firing, layoffs, and resignations' running list. Go DOGE, go!

What about local Democrats at the state, county, and township level? My quick hypothesis: If you see an elected Democrat, they are a thief. All Democrats steal…as much as they can at any level to which they are elected. Accept that premise , and state, counties, and townships become open hunting grounds for the “everyday” Americans. School boards are especially ripe for the Democrats. Start a movement at the local level to begin investigating the finances of EVERY Democrat in an elected position. Begin with the question…how exactly did they get elected? Honestly? I doubt it. Then move on to look at all the taxpayer money pots they have access to. They’re stealing. You know it. After that it’s a matter of catching them and putting them in prison.

After lunch, I started reading my CPA's tax prep instructions for the 4pg questionnaire form his firm sends out every year, in the (electronic) tax packet, and got interrupted by a neighbor needing some help with her garage door, and after getting batteries replaced in the door opener, closed down the condo when temps dropped from the low-40s into the upper-20s. I had dinner, watched the evening news,and then switched to Discovery's "Expedition Unknown" until 11:30p. Lights out.

Up at 8:15a on Sunday, a bright, sunny, 29°, forecast to get to 47° w/ 3-4 days of mid-50s coming. Nice respite from Winter. I fired-up the furnace, made coffee, scanned the news and weather, and went into the usual laundry/chores routine. After the late morning shave/shower, I got ready for the day, and started the first of two loads of laundry. No F1 GP or IMSA-WEC Endurance races on yet, so I tried to watch Fox, but it was the idiotic panel of 4 chattering idiots, and no news. I switched to NEWSMAX. After lunch, I had some usual weekend chores to do, when laundry finally finished.

After lunch, I worked on the ever-growing pile of paperwork on my desk, took out the recycle bin and my garbage bag for p/u tomorrow, had a nice 90min nap on the LR couch, and closed the place down around 6p, as temps dropped. A high of 48° today made me seriously antsy for Spring. I skipped dinner, watched the news and switched to Discovery's "Homestead Rescue" until 10:30, and because I have to get up at 5a, I bagged it at 11p.

Up at 5a on Monday with the alarm, I heard the Republic Services Garbage Truck come thru at 6:15a, had a quick breakfast and made sure I had the necessary 2019 Jeep folder, some snacks, extra smokes etc for the morning ahead, plus my errands list for the day, while waiting at the Jeep dealership's Service Center Complex to open at 8a. They took me in for my 8a app't, right away, found 13 wires, belts and hoses chewed on and/or thru, replaced everything and my bill was $962.88 for REPAIRS. DAMN. They were amazed that I made the 15mile drive south from my condo. NO MORE FEE3DING SQUIRRELS OR OTHER CRITTERS! I had 4 other errands to do on the way home, and was finally back by 1:30p, unpacked and had some lunch. I gave away 20 x 3lb bags of in-the-shell peanuts to Pam down the street for her daughter's use with her squirrels, garaged the Jeep, and had a 2½hr nap. So much for 5a.

I closed down around 6p, caught the news, and switched to Motor Trend's "Iron Resurrection" for the evening. Lights out at 1:30a.

Up at 8:15a on Tuesday, a cloudy, not-so-cold 45°, forecast to be near 63° today. Rain's coming, but no snow. OK, I'm officially sick of Winter. I upped the heat, made the first carafe of the new Columbian Supremo Coffee, tuned into the "CP Show LIVE", called Sherry (after 10) to make some plans, finally had some breakfast/lunch, and worked on sorting 2024 Income Tax paperwork into categories/piles. The DR table looks like it was "snowed" upon (with paper), but about half of what it was last year.

By late afternoon, I quit the tax prep ~~crap~~ work for the day, finished a final half-carafe of coffee, had an early dinner and watched the news. I switched to History's "Curse of Oak Island" and TWC's "Weather Gone Viral" until 11:30p, and unplugged.

Up at 7:30a on Wednesday, a bright, sunny, cold 32°, forecast to hit 60°, I fired-up the furnace to 75°, made coffee, had a smoke in the "crowded" garage, and checked the news and weather. I tuned into the "CP Show LIVE" until 11a, then went out to run 3 errands before a scheduled delivery 2-4p. Back at 1p, I had lunch, scanned the news and weather, and checked the rescheduled upcoming 2 Drs' app'ts. I also made an app't for next week, with Ryley at MBIT Group, to help me with recovering some backed-up computer files, something I DON'T want to screw-up, alone. I did some much-needed condo front porch/walk, garden and yard clean-up, and has a short 1hr snooze.

By 6p, it was getting dark and temps were dropping, so I closed the condo, had some Chinese Lo Mein for dinner, and watched the news. A meager NBC (Nothing But Crap) night for TV, I watched Discovery's "Expedition X" on-and-off, until 1a, and bagged it for the night.

Up at 8:45a on Thursday, an overcast, rainy, 45° start to the morning, forecast to hit 60°. I scanned the weather and news, and if the Epstein flight logs are released, it should be a truly "newsy" day. Like it or don't, here's one of the best assessments of the Russia-Ukraine War, so far. I had a few condo chores to get done, made more Chinese Vegs & Noodles, for lunch, and actually listened to the "Dan Bongino Show LIVE", although I ~~despise and loathe~~ don't like the bonehead moron.

Wow, here comes the "Phase 1" of the Epstein Docs Release, and AG Bondi promised much more to come". Be sure to have plenty of popcorn on hand, and in reserve for the coming revelations!

The sun broke thru the cloud cover, temps hit a balmy 58°, and life was good, once again. Daylight saving time (DST) is set to begin on Sunday, March 9, 2025. Woo-Hoo! S[ring's not topo far down the road, but Winter's not finished yet, by a long shot. I tried taking a snooze after lunch, but couldn't, so I did some more work on the 2024 taxes' receipts. By 6:30p, temps were dropping as evening arrived, I closed the place and tuned into the news. Another NBC Night, so I ran Fox in the background while working on some cvomputer files. By 11p, I was nodding-off, cleaned the computer's cookies/cache/misc files & images, and shut down. Sherry's here tomorrow, so I need to get some sleep tonite.

Tomorrow starts a new week here in the "Journal", and other than my housecleaner and a computer tech service app't, it a clear week. The next 3 weeks are busy w/ Dr's app'ts. (((SIGH))).

Trump, Musk, and the Deep State: The Battle Over Transparency Begins.

Here we go again. At the beginning of his first term as president, Donald Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning travel from several countries—Yemen, for example, Sudan, Libya, and four others—that had been identified as major exporters of terrorism. The left went nuts, excoriating Trump for his “racist” “Muslim travel ban.”

It wasn’t a “Muslim travel ban,” but try telling that to Seattle District Court judge James Robart. He sniffed the air, sensed the pleasing hysteria and press coverage, and issued a cursory restraining order against Trump’s executive order. The humorous part of Robart’s order came towards the end. As I wrote at the time, Robart insisted that the “declaratory and injunctive relief” outlined in his order be applied immediately and on a “nationwide basis” (my emphasis).

Seattle has spoken, Comrades! Judge Robarts finds (where? how?) that his court has jurisdiction over … well, over just about everything: the president and the head of the Department of Homeland Security, for starters, but also “the United States of America (collectively).”

So all across the fruited plain, “Federal Defendants and all their respective officers, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, and persons acting in concert or participation with them are hereby ENJOINED and RESTRAINED” from enforcing the President’s executive order.

This may be the best place to pause and point out that Donald Trump, acting as the president of the United States, was perfectly within his rights to issue an executive order to suspend travel from particular countries.

And so it is now with Trump’s deputies in the Department of Government Efficiency. Tasked with the Herculean labor of unscrambling the byzantine Rube Goldberg device that is the 21st-century administrative state for furthering corruption, illegal payments, and partisan influence at home and abroad, DOGE commander Elon Musk and his laptop-and-algorithm-toting lieutenants have been patiently uncovering the pyramid of waste, fraud, and abuse that is the foundation of the United States government in its twenty-first-century incarnation.

Trump and Musk are unraveling the deep state’s secrets at record speed, and the left is panicking — wielding emergency orders, judicial overreach, and legal theatrics to stop the exposure.

In a remarkable piece called “Override: Inside The Revolution Rewiring American Power,” a blogger known as EKO showed how it worked. Four young coders arrive at the Treasury Department in the wee hours of January 21. Within hours they have succeeded in tracing long-hidden payment directions.

No committees. No approvals. No red tape. Just four coders with unprecedented access and algorithms ready to run.

“The beautiful thing about payment systems,” noted a transition official watching their screens, “is that they don’t lie. You can spin policy all day long, but money leaves a trail.”

That trail led to staggering discoveries. Programs marked as independent revealed coordinated funding streams. Grants labeled as humanitarian aid showed curious detours through complex networks. Black budgets once shrouded in secrecy began to unravel under algorithmic scrutiny.

The difference between Trump’s first term and his second (acknowledged) term can be explained in two words: velocity and preparedness. In 2017, Trump’s initiatives were hampered, blindsided, litigated, and smothered in red tape. This time the Leviathan’s usual expedients are impotent. “Their traditional defenses—slow-walking decisions, leaking damaging stories, stonewalling requests—proved useless against an opponent moving faster than their systems could react. By the time they drafted their first memo objecting to this breach, three more systems had already been mapped.” And here’s the point:

“Pull this thread,” a senior official warned, watching patterns emerge across DOGE’s screens, “and the whole sweater unravels.”

He wasn’t wrong. But he misunderstood something crucial: That was exactly the point.

The left gets it. And their heads are exploding. So far, their biggest gun was the creaky cannon Judge Robart wheeled out: the emergency injunction with immediate “nationwide effect.”

The New York Times, a house organ for anti-Trump hysteria, has a long hand-wringing column about the latest wheeze. Paul A. Engelmayer, a U.S. District Judge appointed by Barrack Obama, just issued an “emergency order” to restrict Elon Musk’s and DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment and data system. He also insisted that anyone who had access to those systems after January 20 “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.” Fun part: even Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury, is prohibited from looking into the corrupt structures of his own department.

Engelmayer’s order came in response to a lawsuit filed on Friday by Letitia James, Attorney General of New York and professional scourge of all things Trump, along with 18 other Democratic state attorneys general. What was the charge? The stated predicate was that by authorizing the investigation, Trump had failed in his Constitutional duty to “faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress.” The real predicate was that Musk’s beavers were uncovering the inner mechanism of the deep state and the resulting truths were unbearable.

“Humankind,” said T. S. Eliot, in “Burnt Norton,” “cannot bear very much reality.” Similarly, Bureaucrats cannot bear very much transparency. Like vampires, the sunlight is fatal to them.

How will Trump respond? We do not know yet. I hope it will be at least partly as Andrew Jackson is said to have responded in his contretemps with Chief Justice John Marshall. In 1834, the Supreme Court determined that the Cherokee Indians owned Northern Georgia. Nevertheless, Andrew Jackson evicted the Indians, reputedly observing that Marshall “has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Lincoln responded in a similar fashion to Chief Justice Roger Taney in 1861. In April of that year, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. This allowed military commanders to imprison suspected saboteurs without indictment. Taney said (in “Ex Parte Merryman”) that Lincoln did not have the authority to do this. Lincoln basically ignored him, invoking the novel doctrine of “nonacquiesence.”

As usual, Lincoln demonstrated his deep understanding of the issues involved. “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted,” he asked Taney, “and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?”

In my view, Trump’s actions to expose the partisan corruption of the administrative state are in response to an existential threat is as grave, if less bloody, than the Civil War. The permanent bureaucracy that rules us has for decades been erecting and fortifying a nearly impenetrable edifice from which to preserve its privileges and power, stifle criticism, and export its globalist agenda. Donald Trump was elected to deconstruct that edifice. Elon Musk is one of his most potent aides in accomplishing that task. Of course, the left is hysterical. Their gravy train is being derailed before their eyes. The people who elected Trump are delighted.

I suspect that the squeals and tantrums of the ruling party and its minions will amount to no more than theater. I further suspect that Trump will resort not only to “nonacquiesence” but also to non-payment. In 2022, New York received $383 billion in federal spending. There are many ways in which Trump could stanch the flow of federal dollars to obstreperous states. I think he should consider them all. I am also happy to see some official pushback. Rep. Darrell Issa, for example, just announced that he is “immediately introducing legislation next week to stop these rogue judges and allow Trump and DOGE to tell you where government is spending your money.” Good for him.

One final suggestion. If left-wing regime-party judges can issue emergency restraining orders with “immediate nationwide effect,” why couldn’t a politically mature district judge in, say, Alabama do the same, overturning the order issued by his left-wing colleague on an “immediate, nationwide basis?” I offer the idea free and for nothing.

Tribalism: The Key to Understanding Islam.

Despite its religious veneer, Islam can easily be defined and understood by one non-religious word: tribalism.

This is key. The entire appeal of Muhammad’s call to the Arabs of his time lay in its perfect compatibility with their tribal mores, three in particular: loyalty to one’s tribe; enmity for other tribes; and raids on the latter to enrich and empower the former.

For seventh-century Arabs—and later tribal and pastoral peoples, such as the Turks and Tatars, or Mongols, who also found natural appeal in, and converted to, Islam—the tribe was what humanity is to modern people: to be part of the tribe was to be treated humanely; to be outside the tribe was to be treated inhumanely.

Muhammad reinforced this ancient dichotomy of tribalism, but by prioritizing religion over relatives. Thus, in his “Constitution of Medina,” which he promulgated with various non-Muslim tribes in 622, he asserted that “a believer shall not slay a believer for the sake of an unbeliever, nor shall he aid an unbeliever against a believer.” Moreover, all Muslims were to become “friends one to the other to the exclusion of outsiders.”

Hence the umma, which is often translated as “Muslim nation,” was born. Etymologically connected to the word “mother,” (umm) the umma came to signify the Islamic “Super-Tribe,” a universal tribe that transcends racial, national, and linguistic barriers, encompassing any and all who identify as Muslims.

And, its natural enemies remained everyone outside of it.

Again, this is basic tribalism 1.0, though, as mentioned, with religious dressing.

Or consider the Islamic doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ (translated as “loyalty and enmity,” or “love and hate”). Muhammad preached it, and the Koran commands. Taken together, for example, Koran 58:22 and 60:4 call on all Muslims to “renounce” and “disown” their non-Muslim relatives—“even if they be their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred”—and to feel only “enmity and hatred” for them, until they “believe in Allah alone,” that is, until they become Muslim.

Those two verses (58:22 and 60:4) are referring to a number of Muhammad’s close companions, who, according to Islamic history, renounced and in some cases slaughtered their own non-Muslim relatives as a show of their loyalty to Allah and the believers: one slew his father, another his brother, a third—Abu Bakr, the first righteous caliph—tried to slay his own son, and Omar, the second righteous caliph, slaughtered his relatives.

(For more, see my 60-page English translation of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Arabic treatise on the doctrine of al-wala’ w’al bara’, in my 2007 book, The Al Qaeda Reader.)

At any rate, from here we come to the natural origin of jihad: tribalistic blood ties were exchanged for religious ones, thereby dividing the world into two mega tribes: the believers in one tent, and their natural enemies, the non-believers, or infidels, in another. And, as we’ve seen, the essence of tribalism is warring and preying on other tribes in order to empower your own.

This dichotomized worldview is actually enshrined in Islamic law’s, or sharia’s, mandate that Dar al-Islam (the “Abode of Islam,” or the world of Islam) must battle Dar al-Kufr (the “Abode or world of non-Islam”) in perpetuity until the former subjugates the latter.

In, for example, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, we read under the entry for “jihad” that the “spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad can be eliminated.”

In other words, the doctrine of jihad—warfare on the other—is so pivotal to Islam that without it Islam ceases to be.

Islam’s apotheosis, or deification, of tribalism also explains why tribal societies other than the Arabs also gravitated to and found Islam appealing.

Consider the Turkic peoples’ oldest epic, The Book of Dede Korkut. Although newly converted to Islam, the Turks of the epic regularly engage in pagan practices banned by Islam: they eat horse meat and drink wine and other fermented drinks; and their women are, in comparison to Muslim women, relatively free. It is only in the context of raids on the “infidel”—a smooth and easy transition from raids on the “tribal outsider”—that Islam finally becomes evident in their lives.

Here, for example, is a typical pre-battle boast from the Turks of the epic: “I shall raid the bloody infidels’ land, I shall cut off heads and spill blood, I shall make the infidel vomit blood, I shall bring back slaves and slave-girls.”

Here is another typical account these new Turkish converts’ pious exploits:

They destroyed the infidels’ church, they killed its priests and made a mosque in its place. They had the call to prayer proclaimed, they had the invocation [or shahada] recited in the name of Allah Almighty. The best of the hunting-birds, the purest of stuffs, the loveliest of girls … they selected.

Aside from preying on the infidel-other, which already came natural to the pre-Islamic Turks, any and all non-violent aspects of Islam—fasting, zakat, pilgrimage—are totally absent from the lives of these earliest Turkic converts as portrayed in the Book of Dede Korkut.

Even so, the older Muslim peoples, the Arabs and Persians, praised the new converts simply because they “fight in the way of Allah, waging jihad against the infidels,” to quote one source.

(Being committed to the jihad has always gone a long way to exonerate otherwise un-Islamic behavior among Muslims, as if to say, “Well, at least they’re doing the hard part—war on infidels—so give them a break).

It was the same for those Mongols who embraced Islam. As the Dominican friar Ricoldo (d. 1320), who spent a decade in the Muslim world, once observed, “the Tartars had adopted Islam because it was the easy religion, as Christianity was the hard one.”

In other words, whereas Islam complemented their preexisting tribal way of living, including by giving them license to prey on all outsiders, Christianity only challenged it.

So it is that Muhammad’s most enduring contribution to world history is that, in repackaging the tribal mores of seventh-century Arabia through a theological paradigm, he also deified tribalism into a sort of hyper-tribalism, causing it to outlive its historic setting and dramatically spill into the modern era.

Hence the notorious resistance to assimilation in the West; the creation of enclaves and clannish no-go zones; and the constant flare outs of terrorism and hate crimes.

Whereas many world civilizations have been able to break away from, or at least temper their historic tribalism, this has not been, and cannot be, so easy for Islam. For Muslims to break away from tribalism, is for them to break away from Allah’s laws—laws which, as seen, are logical and gratifying, at least from a primordial, or, if you like, primitive, point of view.

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4296385/posts

Why Elon Musk and DOGE Terrify Democrats.

You may have noticed the absolute meltdown of the left over the existence of Elon Musk and the DOGE team doing exactly what Donald Trump was elected to do. I phrased it that way because that’s exactly what is happening – someone is finally going through the government’s books and records to figure out what people do, how much it costs, where the rest of the money is going and whether or not we can live without it since we’re more than $36 trillion in debt. Why would anyone meltdown over that? There’s a very simple reason: Democrats cannot afford for the American people realizing how much government they can live without. More than that, they can’t have the public recognize how much the government was actually getting in their way and impeding their success. The public doing either of those two things would be the end of the Democratic Party.

Not one single person in the Democratic Party, either elected or in journalism, has commented positively on anything the Department of Government Efficiency has uncovered and ended so far, nothing. No matter how wasteful, no matter how absurd, no matter how insane or stupid, Democrats are angry that DOGE exists, not that we taxpayers are being ripped off. That tells you something.

The most amazing part of all of it is how these people, who’ve spent decades milking taxpayers for their pet causes, for money to fund organizations that employ their children and fund their campaigns, that hire and pay them exorbitant amounts of money for no-show or symbolic jobs when they retire, that use insider information that make them more successful at stock trading than people who do it for a living, have the audacity to refer to what Musk and the crew are doing as somehow motivated by “greed.”

Under what circumstances would the richest man in the world risk prison for a little more? He’s not Mr. Burns, he’s an OCD kind of guy obsessed with determining what is absolutely essential to the operations of something and eliminating everything else involved in its creation and production. Read Walter Isaacson’s biography of him, for crying out loud.

The “kids,” as the left likes to belittlingly call them, who work with him are not in it for the money, either. Most have founded companies, won massive investments in their ideas, and don’t need anything to be more successful than anyone whining about them. What they want, what they crave is a challenge.

People who’ve risked and accomplished nothing have no understanding of how successful people, at any level, need a challenge. Standing on top of a mountain is boring, climbing to the top of it is what life is all about. Get there, conquer, then move on to the next things.

We all know people who love to have a good time all the time, to the serial entrepreneur class the good time doesn’t involve booze, drugs, sex or money – all of which will come and are available – it’s the creation; the defying of expectations to bring about something new or a better way to do something old.

Musk can buy literally anything on the planet, but he doesn’t. His largest purchase was a headache with Twitter – he bought a challenge and beat it.

The biggest challenges we face as a species, he’s taken on: space, the brain, communicating with one another. The only challenges bigger are government and existence.

But the idea of a smaller, better run government that does not get ripped off or lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year not only doesn’t interest Democrats, the very idea seems to scare them.

There are only two conclusions that can be drawn from that fact: either Democrats do not care – they put their political power ahead of what is in the best interest of the American people – or they benefit, financially or otherwise, from the inefficient and corrupt management of government. Personally, I’ve always found it to be a lot from column A and a dash of column B, but that’s just me.

Whatever the case, the work of Musk and DOGE must continue. They are the financial intervention the drunken sailors who’ve been running up the credit cards need, whether they like it or not. It’s just an important side effect that the reaction to their work is exposing how paranoid the left is that their house of cards can come crumbling down if transparency and fiscal responsibility were to become a part of how the government operates.

A Mississippi judge ordered a newspaper to remove an editorial. Press advocates are outraged.

A Mississippi judge ordered a newspaper to remove an editorial criticizing the mayor and city leaders after the officials sued, sparking complaints from press advocates that it violates the First Amendment.

Chancery Judge Crystal Wise Martin issued the restraining order against the Clarksdale Press Register on Tuesday in connection with a Feb. 8 editorial titled “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust.” The piece criticized the city for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.

“I think it’s dangerous that a judge would issue a temporary restraining order without a hearing,” said Wyatt Emmerich, president of the paper’s parent company, Emmerich Newspapers. “We’ll fight it and see where it goes.”

The city’s lawsuit called the editorial libelous and said it “chilled and hindered” the city’s efforts to lobby for the tax with state legislators.

The editorial was no longer available on the newspaper’s website by Wednesday afternoon. Martin scheduled a Feb. 27 hearing in the case.

Mayor Chuck Espy said the editorial unfairly implied that the city had broken the law with its meeting and cited another portion that questioned, “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kick-backs from the community?”

“We’re all for the press doing their job. We’re all for as much transparency as possible,” he said. “Just tell the truth. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.”

Clarksdale is about 71 miles (115 kilometers) south of Memphis. The order drew complaints from press advocates in Mississippi and nationwide.

“This is a rather astounding order and we feel it is egregious and chilling,” said Layne Bruce, executive director of the Mississippi Press Association. “It clearly runs afoul of the First Amendment and we fully support the Press Register’s right to report and offer commentary on the business of Clarksdale’s city government.”

Lisa Zycherman, vice president of legal programs at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the order “constitutes censorship and is unquestionably a serious First Amendment violation.”

There have been other attempts to silence news outlets in recent years. In 2023, a Kansas police department raided a newspaper’s office and the home of its owner and publisher after claiming the paper and a reporter potentially committed identity theft and other computer crimes in obtaining and verifying information about a local business owner’s driving record. The raid was later investigated and the former police chief who led it was charged last year with obstruction of justice.