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  • Scattershots – 8mar22 (updated 12mar22)

    George Rebane

    Probability is the measure of possibility.

    H&I fires.  The Russians are using an unusually insidious, deadly, and dastardly artillery tactic to kill fleeing civilians on negotiated evacuation routes.  The tactic is called Harassment and Interdiction fires, and are designed to deny the enemy free use of designated areas over extended periods.  H&I fires are conducted randomly with high explosive shells fired from one or two tubes, and set to denote at 50-150 feet above ground level.  This results in an anti-personnel ‘kill circle’ of at least 200-300 feet radius depending on shell size.  Historically artillery is the biggest killer on the battlefield, spraying shrapnel (extremely jagged and irregularly shaped pieces of steel ranging from bullet to tennis ball sizes) at extreme velocities around the detonation point.  And whereas small arms military bullets travel at around 3,000 ft/sec, shrapnel comes at you at over 20,000 ft/sec.  Targeting H&I fires on escape routes that are used only once by escapees is like shooting fish in a barrel – they never know whether or when its incoming, and they’re always out in the open.  I wonder what a Russian battery commander feels when ordered to schedule H&I fires that he knows will kill/maim only civilians?  Talk about war crimes.

    Minds that never will meet.  We have yet one more example of the Great Divide in progress.  In my recent ‘Pentagon teaches socialism’ post’s comment stream we have one of our longtime leftwing readers deny acceptance of this important piece of anti-American news, why? because he considers the cited Newsmax “hardly a credible news source”.  This reader is an established representative of this kind of progressive mentality – if the messenger is unfavorable, summarily reject the message.  He never even bothered to examine the further referenced links which would have taken him to the DoD website where the conference was announced, described, and additional links provided.  Instead, he and his consider CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, … and other lamestream news media as reliable, no matter that they don’t report news that doesn’t comport with the DNC narrative, and are unrepentant and uncontrite about most items they falsely report and/or spin.  People of the Right have no problem consuming leftwing news and progressive literature – we demand to know it.  However, those of the Left never lift the blinders they had carefully installed during their K-12 years.  Such news consumption practices of the Left and Right are but one of many asymmetries that have made meaningful communication between the sides a rapidly fading episode in our country’s history.

    [10mar22 update]  Re the restraining order on my daughter.  Nearly everything that has been admitted as evidence from the plaintiff at the hearing is a lie as corroborated by the available videos and the physics of the possible (e.g. see 1032am comment below).  The judgement was a preordained political act.

    [12mar22 update]  Putin’s Rasputin bubble?  Perhaps a little play on words, but a friend and reader sent me a link and asked whether I had ever heard of Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin.  It turns out that Dugin has been the political philosopher and intellectual ideologue of Putin’s inner circle for some time now, dishing out his esoteric views on neo-fascist ‘Eurasianism’. (more here)  Now I have never heard of Dugin or even that Putin has had an ‘inner circle’ of confidants.  From what has been reported it appears that Putin has used the Machiavellian structure of alternating advisor circles whose members are political enemies of adjacent circles, thereby making it hard for a court conspiracy to mature sufficiently to topple the prince.  But according to the referenced article, it appears that Putin’s Rasputin may have successfully implanted his ideas about the historical resurgence of a post-czarist Russia extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  “Gestated in anti-communist right-wing activism during the waning days of the Soviet Union, indebted to a specifically anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment philosophical embrace of authoritarianism, irrationalism, and hyper-nationalism, Dugin dreams of a reborn Orthodox Tsarist state surpassing the borders and spheres of influence as they existed before 1989, of a Novorossiya (New Russia) built not on socialist principles, but fascist ones.” 

    The mentality of a Russian soldier has always been a puzzle to westerners since at least the 1905 Russo-Japanese War.  (Recall that my grandfather was a czarist conscript in that war, transported to and from Pacific rim battles on the trans-Siberian railroad in cattle cars which served as troop trains for Russian soldiers.)  The Russian soldier has been distinguished by his overall and abysmal ignorance of his mission, especially as it fits into the geo-strategic situation du jour, and his lack of what the western soldier knows as patriotism.  The Russian soldier always has found himself poorly led and poorly outfitted – his main goal is just to stay alive and go back home.  To achieve this, he will follow any orders and do anything that lets him survive the day.  Questioning authority is an unknown concept as long as it doesn’t put his life in immediate danger.  However, he has been known to sabotage his own equipment, and even his own body, in order to avoid being thrown into the next maelstrom from which retreat often means summary execution.  In this light one can understand Russia’s wanton shelling of Ukrainian civilians, be they in their apartments or fleeing on an open road.

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  • Pentagon teaches socialism

    George Rebane

    Promoting public benefits without including public costs is the hallmark of charlatans and evil politicians.  Accepting public benefits without inquiring about their public costs is the way of the useful idiot and the ignorant.

    More evidence pours in that our military under progressive federal governments no longer considers national security as its prime and overarching mission.  The latest comes from the Pentagon which recently sponsored and hosted ‘Responding to China: The Case for Global Justice and Democratic Socialism’. (more here)

    The event featured the French socialist economics professor Thomas Piketty whose widely panned ‘masterwork’, Capital in the 21st Century (2013), is still celebrated by progressives everywhere.  Most real economists and students of economics – certainly of the Austrian and Chicago schools – consider ‘socialist economist’ to be a demonstrated oxymoron.

    The Pentagon event was put on by DoD’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and featured Piketty’s ideas about how the west should reorganize its socio-economics for the remainder of the century, and specifically to successfully “meet the challenge of China”.  Piketty also wrote Time for Socialism (2021) in which he argues “that the right answer in addressing China's growth lies in ending Western arrogance and promoting a new emancipatory and egalitarian horizon on a global scale, a new form of democratic and participatory, ecological and post-colonial socialism," … "If they stick to their usual lecturing posture and a dated hyper-capitalist model, Western countries may find it extremely difficult to meet the Chinese challenge."

    The obvious thrust of what our Pentagon mavens now promote is that to counter communist China and its new approach to state-capitalism, the west must become a socialist society and also develop a form of state-capitalism on its road to a Marxist world. (here)  Most free-market economists and business leaders not yet in the embrace of corporatism see such nostrums as advising us to destroy our economy in order to save it.  (There’s more to be said about that as we consider what is happening under the aegis of the Great Reset.)

    In today’s military we take valuable hours from the training day to devote to ideologically indoctrinating our soldiers, sailors, and airmen to correct modes of collectivist groupthink. Since the Obama administration, we have increasingly started doing this instead of increasing and honing our troops’ warfighting skills with the ever newer and more complex technologies that already dominate today’s battlefields, and which demand a more highly trained warrior cohort to meet the enemy with modern weapon systems instead of ideological indoctrination.

    The new emphasis from such programs is not the continued maintenance of a secure and powerful America as a sovereign nation-state and world hegemon.

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  • The Oligarchs’ Fire Sale

    "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to …"  Sir Walter Scott

    George Rebane

    As an idle exercise I’ve thought of what most likely is going on with those Russian oligarchs who have had their financial plans upended by all the sanctions and who stand to lose more in the coming weeks/months.  Reports are that they’re selling their expatriate assets – land, estates, townhouses, yachts, airplanes, art, securities, … – that can be seized and/or confiscated.  So what do you do if you’re one of Putin’s pals worth a few billion dollars, with a good part of it spread around the world, and you find your name on the internationally published sanctions shit list (SSL).

    Well, I imagine that their objective is to survive in the post-Putin world with enough money to make their life comfortable wherever they may wind up once the dust settles and Russia regains some semblance of normalcy.  Now such a QoL does not require billions, a few tens of millions would do nicely, and even better with a few hundred million.  Time to have a couple of yard sales, one in Russia, and one in divers parts of the globe.  But now comes the tricky part.

    Assuming you do have some trusted agents (relatives?) living in different parts of the world, how do you sell your stuff?  Let’s dispense with ill-gotten assets; all your foreign stuff has been legitimately obtained and held in their host countries, with above-board purchase monies paid and transferred through the then world banking systems.  But now you cannot sell any of it without payments going through the post-sanctioned banking systems.  Any sums entering those conduits of finance could and will be confiscated/frozen; in short, you wouldn’t be able to spend such monies even after a legal transfer of title to the buyers.  So what to do?

    Well, you would have to sell your $200M yacht to someone for say an above-board $1,000, with your agent having negotiated a sub-rosa payment of $20M consisting of fungible tangibles like precious stones or gold bullion that can be squirreled away out of sight.  We’re assuming here that such buyers with ready access to fungible tangibles can be found in the world’s markets.  So let’s postulate that you can sell enough of your expatriate assets for stashes of valuable commodities that await your emigration from mother Russia.  (I assume that those on the SSL will not be welcome in a post-Putin Russia for all the obvious political reasons.)

    After the dust settles, you see yourself ensconced in a luxurious townhouse in Buenos Aires or Santiago.  But will you be living the life of ease that you had planned and carefully endowed through a sufficient cadre of trusted agents?  You must know that now-expatriate former oligarchs on the SSL will be tracked and monitored by everyone from various intelligence services and Interpol on down.  On the more sinister side, you can expect that criminals of various stature will also track and know the whereabouts of SSL graduates.  And they all know that you still have considerable wealth in untrackable but readily transportable forms stashed away here and there.

    Since SSL members will forever remain exposable pariahs, no matter where they settle, starting with the local authorities, no one will show any great concern if suddenly your wife or one of your children is kidnapped and quietly held for ransom.  For now you are a marked man for the rest of your born days.  I’ll end this little fantasy by wondering how an oligarch would fare if he decided to sign his in-country assets, or his overseas stashes, to Putin’s Russian state to provide much needed foreign exchange.  Would this generate survivable goodwill into post-Putin years?  We can dissect this another time or in the comment stream.  But we can all depart these musings with the conclusion that today it probably is not much fun being a known Putin toady and an oligarch on the SSL.

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  • Sandbox – 28feb22

    [A lot of folks can't understand how we came to have an oil shortage here in our country.  Well, there's a very simple answer.  Nobody bothered to check the oil.  We just didn't know we were getting low.  The reason for that is purely geographical.  Our OIL is located in: ALASKA, California, Coastal Florida, Coastal Louisiana, Coastal Alabama, Coastal Mississippi, Coastal Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas.  But our dipstick is located in the White House! (H/T to correspondent)]

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  • The Adulation of a Murderous Thug

    George Rebane

    With the horrendous historical preambles of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the world now knows that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a murderous thug.  What our Left misses or means to misinform is the manner in which many of us on the Right assess Putin’s geo-strategic actions, especially when compared in the same arena to the sophomoric efforts of Team Bumblebrain.

    To assess Putin’s strategy, concerning his latest effort to expand Russia’s borders and sphere of influence, with attributes such as clever, shrewd, adroit, and even brilliant has no bearing on the man’s character, values, mores, or any other trait laudable by the international community.  A scoundrel can be all these things without ever being mistaken for a person of high principles and moral character.  To the discerning, assessment can be and has always been received and rendered as independent of adulation.

    It is in their political desperation that the Democrats have revived their fabricated Russia Collusion hoax to again paint Trump as a Putin toady.  Their dumb-as-doorknobs lamestream trumpets have dutifully picked up the chorus, and when reporting on the matter, even FN has had trouble always making the distinction between assessment and adulation.  But Democrats can count on their lightly-read minions to lap up the ‘new evidence’ that Trump has always been subservient to the Slav with dirty pictures of him.  Lakoff (q.v.) would approve of such posturing as maintenance of the established TDS frame.

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  • Scattershots – 22feb22 (updated 24feb22)

    George Rebane

    Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  As of tonight, our weak and incompetent president has done nothing to deter Putin from re-establishing dominion over Russia’s “near abroad”.  The Biden administration’s much-touted ‘prompt and severe’ sanctions are clearly neither, as they are revealed to be low-grade-ore that even now hang fire.  Contrary to the administration’s abysmally ignorant and hesitant assessment of Putin’s strategy, the Russian president’s image as the post-Stalinist incarnation of Russia’s next strong-man leader continues to grow in the eyes of his adoring people, and also in the calculations of the growing cohort of our geo-strategic enemies led by China and Iran.  We are still looking for that single thing that President Biden has accomplished for the benefit of the United States and its citizens.  Unchallenged, he solidly occupies one of the historical performance bookends of our presidency.

    [23feb22 update] Many in the West saw the end of the Cold War as proof that free markets and the rule of law were universal values. When the EU began admitting eastern European and Baltic states, a few of its officials thought this was not a geopolitical ploy aimed at Russia but the product of “inevitable globalization,” said Adam Tooze, a historian at Columbia University.  Eastern Europeans didn’t share that view. Mr. Tooze said  accession to the EU, like NATO, was “a way of securing themselves against Russia, full stop,” while Russia similarly “refused to see NATO and the EU as separate entities.” He said the EU may be a bigger threat because while Russia can compete militarily with NATO, it can’t compete with the social, cultural and economic appeal of Europe. … Economic integration didn’t make Russia or China more liberal; they doubled down on autocracy and state capitalism.  (more here)

    [24feb22 update]  It appears that the west’s day-late and dollar-short sanctions, advertised for weeks by Team Biden as a “deterrent” to Russian invasion, have gone over like a warm bucket of spit.  Today even Bumblebrain was forced to admit to the world that his invasion deterrent won’t kick in until about four weeks after the Russian invasion started.  That is an excellent example of this idiot’s ‘foreign policy expertise’, much vaunted by Democrats during the 2020 election campaign.  Every day continues to pour in more evidence that this administration, in its entirety, has no idea what are America’s interests and how to marshal the west to resist Putin, and Xi waiting in the wings.  Our front line offense seems to consist of cancelling the credit cards belonging to the kids of Russian oligarchs, and then threatening to really get tough and cancel their debit cards.  That should get Putin to order his armor out of the Ukraine and send in Russian contractors to fix the Ukrainian buildings that got damaged in the last 48 hours.  Then again, maybe not.

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  • Sandbox – 21feb22

    [Still no internet, and ATT can’t figure out why.  Three tech teams have worked on the problem to date, and one is here now.  Bear with me, and spare prayers gratefully accepted.  gjr

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  • Reunification? Fuhgettaboudit!

    George Rebane

    A dear friend of more than half century who insists he is a middle-roader and considers both sides before coming to conclusions had an extremely revealing but unsurprising email exchange with me minutes ago.  We had just finished watching the news, a great part of which was the coverage of Durham’s announcement and court filing last Friday concerning the Clinton Russiagate scandal.  Now my friend is very well educated and seeks not to be identified as a polarized American.  He is even an active member of No Labels as confirmation of his claim of being politically independent.  (No Labels is patently leftwing.)

    For any conservetarian and most right-leaning readers of my many years’ experience who might examine the writings and opinions of my friend, they would immediately identify him as a dyed-in-the-wool leftist cum progressive.  One who is even insular along with run-of-the-mill Democrats who drastically limit themselves only to lamestream sources – all others are considered suspect political propaganda from the Right.  So here is our little email exchange less than an hour ago.

    George: What's your take on the latest Durham finding and court filing that came out last Friday? 

    Friend: Durham as in NC? I have followed that. Is it on gerrymandering or something else?

    More conservative outlets such as the WSJ, FN, Washington Times, Newsmax, … have had wall-to-wall coverage of this latest revelation which in itself is much more devastating and sheds light on the illegal subterfuge in our corrupt government than Watergate ever was.  And from the reports this evening on media coverage, we find that more than half of the country is totally ignorant of Durham’s latest findings and filings.  (more here)

    Someone out there with a keener mind than mine, please find us some hope.

    As a coda to this bleeding artery, consider conservative pundits like FN’s Brit Hume sonorously informing us that with this latest finding the lamestream cannot help avoiding an ample helping of egg on their face.  Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.  The lamestream doesn’t give a big rat’s ass about what rightwing journalists, pundits, and commentators know or think.  Their focus is on the great unwashed.  As long as they know that they control what that cohort of Americans knows and believes, the rest makes no never mind.  We confirm that at every election

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  • DHS ratchets free speech (addended)

    George Rebane

    The source of any problem you encounter in the public forum is more than likely due to some institution, agency, or bureau of government; bet on it.

    Political commentator Kim Iverson writes ‘Disagree with government policy?  Homeland security says you’re a ‘terrorist’ if you speak out’.  The Dept of Homeland Security is on the lookout for people, including unconnected individuals, who spread “misinformation, disinformation or malinformation (MDM)”.  Of course, there is no rigorous, let alone broadly accepted, definitions of MDM; they are to be used to proscribe speech unacceptable to government bureaucrats in the manner of Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty – ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’

    Your iniquities of government convenience are spelled out in the just released 7feb22 Bulletin of the National Terrorism Advisory System.  According to this document, you are guilty of such domestic terrorism, if according to the DHS or any of its cooperating agencies, your communications “sow discord or undermine public trust in US Government institutions.”  The internet and blogosphere is therefore chock full of MDM and an easy picking for any progressive politician or bureaucrat.

    And Iverson reports that it doesn’t matter if things change.  “It was originally a conspiracy theory that there would be vaccine mandates.  It was misinformation to say the vaccine doesn’t prevent spread.”  Tomorrow Humpty Dumpty can change its federal mind and get you coming or going.  “By issuing this bulletin they’ve effectively given themselves the freedom to halt any dissent they don’t like under the guise of ‘it could lead to violence.’”

    And for those who want to confirm which political side is ALWAYS in favor of more autocracy, keep an eye on the sound of silence emanating on this from our progressives and their lamestream media.  (H/T to reader)

    [Addendum]  One of our astute readers notified us of the latest bombshell in our president’s rush to destroy America and relegate it into a second-world socialist country (here) compliant to the establishment of the new global world order.  The Heritage Foundation publishes the much read and respected ‘Index of Economic Freedom’.  This year the US has descended to a new low on the index.  In the categorical rankings ‘Free’ consists of the top seven countries.  The next category is ‘Mostly Free’ in which the US resides at rank 25. (more here)

    The more backward nations that would benefit most from increasing their economic freedoms do exactly the opposite.  Their populations, ruled by autocrats and tyrants, are composed of overwhelmingly ignorant and under-educated people who have never had the opportunity to bloom and make their way in the world.  It is a foreboding picture of what America will become as our electorate becomes increasingly ignorant and votes for politicians and policies that demonstrably lower our country’s quality of life – and the doofuses have no clue where they are taking the country.  California, of course, is the poster child.

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  • Ideology and a nitpick with VDH

    George Rebane

    Readers know that I am a longtime admirer and student of Victor Davis Hanson.  I have met him and spent time talking with him (here).  But when he writes ‘Why Ideology is the Ancient Enemy of Civilization’, I have to pick a nit with him because there he uses a too narrow of a semantical brush to condemn a perfectly good and useful word.  Most dictionaries define –

    Ideology – “a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy – e.g. "the ideology of democracy".  The science of ideas; the study of their origin and nature.” (dictionary.com) 

    Here on RR I have refined the definition somewhat to ‘A structured and communicable belief system that in its best expression is composed of tenets defendable by and malleable to reason. Ideologue – a person who is willing to communicate and defend his ideology.’

    In his referenced essay VDH goes through a litany of current ideologues and historical ideologies, the practice of which devastated the populations under which they were forced to live.  But limiting the definition to only those dark ideologies and their hypocritical ideologues does a disservice to the correct and comprehensive semantics for which these terms were originally fashioned, and have correctly been used over the years.  Peremptorily cutting off the good parts of both is another example of amputating the language and thereby reducing its ability to efficiently convey information.

    There is no need for this kind of surgery.  Learning to live with such disabled terms, how then would one describe salutary and beneficial belief systems along with their adherents and practitioners?  

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118 comments on Scattershots – 8mar22 (updated 12mar22)