Category: Natural Disasters

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Apocalypse Not: The Fear of COVID-19 is Unwarranted

I started the Apocalypse Not series with this post on March 18, 2020 because I suspected the COVID 19 pandemic was total bullshit. The lack of bodies was the clue. If the disease had the IFR (infection fatality rate) that our “experts” said it had then our number one problem would have been the disposal of bodies, just like every other pandemic in history. Instead the homeless populations on the west coast were thriving while the main stream media focused on horror stories concocted byTony Fauci and Deborah Birx. My reward for alerting people to the COVID fraud was to loose friends, members of my family, and a book agent (I have yet to find another). I then doubled down and went on writing to point out the measures instituted to mitigate this non threat were in fact the threat. That resulted in the loss of more friends and family but I got to be this guy for a few months.

I’m re-posting the first post in preparation for revisiting the issue and the lessons learned from the disastrously incompetent reaction to the COVID 19 virus. My guess at the end of this post that there would be hell to pay when the public discovered they were duped has not happened yet but inshallah some day somebody will be held to account.

There is something about the current Wuhan virus response that is not adding up. The first case appeared in America on 17th of January, we then stopped direct flights from China on the 31st of January. From the time this pathogen surfaced in China last November until the end of January, there were daily flights from the Wuhan area to Seattle, LA, San Francisco, New York and Toledo, Ohio. This flu strain is unusually virulent and if that is true (which is not in doubt), by the time it surfaced in America it had already spread across the land.

Farr’s Law, named for British epidemiologist William Farr in 1840, states that epidemics, develop and recede according to a bell-shaped curve. This happens with or without human intervention. Farr’s Law undoubtedly is in play for the Wuhan virus.

Last Christmas my wife and several neighbors had a horrible flu bug that mimicked the Wuhan virus symptoms exactly.  She was miserable and did not respond to a Z-pack or a course of Levaquin our family doctor prescribed. The bug she had was no joke, and when she mentioned my theory that the Wuhan had already washed through the population last Christmas her friends saw it immediately. She started hearing other stories about the Christmas bug that ravaged the Rio Grande Valley for a good four weeks. The stories all matched up to the symptoms for Wuhan virus.

The President’s early attempts to calm the situation were ridiculed as was his suspension of air travel to China. Then the narrative changed on a dime and the cancelations started with the Ivy League Universities cancelling their basketball seasons. Once they did that every other major sports league (with the exception of the UFC) did the same. 

The Ivy League’s role in starting the current chain reaction of closing public venues is not a coincidence. The experts managing this crisis had just  attended a Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored Virtual Exercise Called Event 201 described as:

“a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic”.

The pathogen used for the exercise was a COVID virus with properties similar to COVID-19. The exercise predicted that the virus would overwhelm the medical systems in North America resulting in catastrophic loss of life. Tabletop exercises like Event 201 happen all the time, the fact that this one was played out a month before COVID-19 surfaced in Wuhan China is not that significant. What is significant is how different the current crisis is playing out compared to the one our experts war-gamed.

There were a seven recommendations made following the exercise (they can be found here). Every recommendation focused on the need for international cooperation with the free flow of information and people across national borders which is consistent with the ethos and vision of globalists like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other major donors, like Open Philanthropy .

But our response to the Wuhan virus has been the exact opposite of the “viruses know no borders” narrative of Event 201.  Instead we (and the rest of the world) have closed the borders, rebuffed international offers of help and turned to the private sector to fight the virus ourselves.

The Centers for Disease Control was not up to the task of testing for or tracking the Wuhan virus and they were rapidly sidelined by the President. This was the exact opposite of  Event 201 in which the CDC and every other similar international organization performed flawlessly. The ‘experts” may have been surprised the CDC failed so spectacularly but this is expected from those of us who know and understand government bureaucracies.

When the CDC failed the President  went straight to the private sector, suspended regulations inhibiting the development and production of test kits and protective wear, and solved the testing problem rapidly. He then held a press conference with these Titans of industry and did a good job of calming frayed nerves. After his poor start briefing the nation last Wednesday night watching him get back into the grove was gratifying.

This is not playing out as the experts who ran Event 201 thought. Then, in another move a blatant dishonesty, on the same day that China launches an IO campaign to deflect criticism from them our legacy media decides the Wuhan virus is now to be called COVID-19.  Any mention of the word Wuhan was now racist and news anchors were getting apoplectic about this new muh racism.

As events across the land started to close. Governors and DC mandarins ran to the TV cameras to announce the draconian measures they were going to take. These pronouncements have to moldy scent of Virtue Signalling. The men and women making these decisions have themselves, no skin in the game.  Regardless of how long this lasts or how bad it gets the people running Ivy League institutions, the federal legislatures, state governors and the media infotainment complex insiders – all of them will weather the storm just fine. In fact, most of them will make millions off  low interest rates while buying blue chip stock at a significant markdown.

You and your family? Not so much.

“I don’t claim to know what’s motivating the media, but, my God, their reporting is absolutely reprehensible. They should be ashamed of themselves. They are creating a panic that is far worse than the viral outbreak. The bottom line, everybody, is to listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC [Centers of Disease Control and Prevention]. Do what he tells you, and go about your business.… Stop listening to journalists! They don’t know what they are talking about!” Dr. Drew Pinsky commenting on the media yesterday (17 March 2020)

An anonymous  source quoted in The Spectator points out the only salient (and obvious) fact now which is:  “We know the numerator (the number of deaths), but we don’t know the denominator, which is the number of people who have been infected by COVID-19. And without the denominator, we have no way of estimating either the spread or the fatality rate of COVID-19.”

That bothers me and it should bother you too, but at the moment there is nothing to be done except hunker down, avoid panic shopping, and wait to see what happens. How long Americans will tolerate these measures will be interesting to see.

There is no reason to think that this time the experts warnings about a catastrophic event are correct. They have a perfect record of being wrong with every prediction in the past because their models are incapable of predicting complex events reliably.

When the people discover that once again, they were manipulated by a partisan press, compromised academic shills, and virtue signalling politicians there is going to be hell to pay.  When the dust settles maybe we will de-couple science from politics and even dismantle the narrative driving legacy media.

It is time to keep your head down, and your powder dry. Courage and cowardice are contagions and few of our elected leaders seem to operate with an abundance of courage. Their default is finger pointing, name calling, and blame shifting. The rest of us should refrain from that behavior and focus on helping, not panicking our neighbors. When this emergency passes we may be able to hold incompetents to account but for now all we can do is what we do best; refuse to panic.

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The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: The Junk Yard Bar Granjeno, Texas

Super Bowl Sunday is a big day for dive bars across the land, but none are closer to the crisis at our southern border than the Junk Yard Bar in Granjeno, Texas. The hamlet of Granjeno is located south of the Military Highway just east of the Anzalduas Bridge, outside Mission in the Rio Grande Valley. It’s a one-road town with a population of 303 people pinned between a string of industrial parks to the north and the Rio Grande River to the south. On Super Bowl Sunday, as you drive into the village, you can see dozens of vehicles spilling out of the Junk Yard parking lot onto the shoulder of the road because the Junk Yard always has a full house on Super Bowl Sunday.

A portion of the Border Wall is right behind the bar and there is a gate in the border defenses just to the left which is now in constant use by the Border Patrol.

The Junk Yard Bar caters to two easily identifiable subsets of the Rio Grande Valley population: Winter Texans and old bikers. Both groups are from the tail end of the boomer generation; the bikers live here year-round, and the Winter Texans flock into the gated retiree trailer parks that dot the Rio Grande Valley every winter. They are the remnants of a generation that expected a steady job would deliver them into the American middle class. They expected to own a home with two cars in the garage, kids who went to college, and annual vacations, and they were satisfied. The system worked for the American worker in the 70s and 80s, but that changed when our industrial elite moved their manufacturing plants overseas.

These Rust Belt refugees are primarily white and married and like to party. The elites hate them because they own recreational vehicles and guns they don’t want to register, and they’re prone to cluttering up the wilderness with dirt bikes or snowmobiles. They all smoked cigarettes for years, too, so now they look hard, flinty, and mean in their old age.

You can see the border wall behind the Junk Yard and a Border Patrol truck sitting on the levee in the upper right of the picture

There isn’t just one border wall along the McAllen section of the border fence but several bands of wall that appear designed to protect the valuable farmland adjacent to the river. Thousands of acres are under cultivation in this valley area, and it is susceptible to large groups of migrants trampling through them. It’s essential to realize the border wall is an obstacle that forces friction into the equation for illegals crossing the Rio Grande. There is no such thing as a wall that cannot be climbed; humans can climb up and over anything if they want to, so the border wall is not a magical, impenetrable barrier. It’s a practical obstacle that forces illegals to take the path of least resistance to areas where they can be collected for processing before they can trample planted crops or wander onto private property.

The continued cost to local farmers from the massive influx of illegals may well explain why the RGV went from a dark blue democratic stronghold to riding the Trump Train during the last presidential election. And Trump will dominate the Rio Grande Valley this election cycle, too, in a landslide, which will trump the RGV democratic politiqueras who are paid big bucks to harvest Democratic votes.

Here is one of the white buses used to collect illegals and this one is heading for the gate behind the Junk Yard.

The Junk Yard Bar is not dangerous because of illegal immigrants; it’s risky because the clientele consists of old bikers and skinny, hard-drinking winter Texans. The locals mix well with the Winter Texans because everyone down here has a gun on them. An armed society is indeed a polite society, but the old boomers partying at the Junk Yard have a bigger nemesis—slips and falls.

Do you notice how clean and level the entrance is? It’s the same on the inside – craftily engineered to remove all slip and fall hazards that could cost one of these old coots a hip replacement. All of us Boomers know what happens once you get your hip replaced – you’re toast.

Do you notice how clean and level the entrance is? It’s the same on the inside – craftily engineered to remove all slip and fall hazards that could cost one of these old coots a hip replacement. All of us Boomers know what happens once you get your hip replaced – you’re toast.

The people filling this place hours before the Super Bowl don’t nurse their drinks because they’re afraid of all the law enforcement constantly driving by. They’re afraid of taking a hard spill and breaking a hip, so they watch the booze and tend not to get too rowdy. At their age, all the crazy bastards are long gone, and the survivors seem to prefer dive bars with level floors and packed full of people standing around, which reduces the chances of slipping and falling. And there is the added coolness of hanging in an outdoor dive bar right on the border with our friendly neighbors in Mexico.

Hanging out on the Mexican border was the original draw for the Winter Texans. They like to drink booze and smoke, and Mexico was a great place to do both on the cheap. Nobody crosses the border to party anymore, but the Junk Yard Bar remains open for the last of the boomers who love quirky, one-of-a-kind bars tucked in out-of-the-way places.

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We Are Being Oppressed

I was finishing up a post for the Freq about riot control and migrants when I suddenly discovered I was being oppressed, endnote just a little, but on all four recognized levels of oppression. This insight jumped out at me when I went looking for information on a topic I know something about. When I first saw it I didn’t think much of it but after spending hours on additional research and days thinking it through I decided it was time to write a post, an important one, free of F bombs (to show I’m serious)  in hopes of restoring a sense of calm. Calm is good when dealing with “isms”.

Let me set this up; the discussion was about the requirement to use overwhelming force to remove leaders, agitators and natural fighters from a rioting mob. I was writing about the Marine Corps experience with Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers in the early 90’s. The post on that topic can be found here on The Freq website that I contribute to weekly.

As I was describing how the SNCO’s managed their snatch teams I mentioned the “rule of opposites”, a term first coined by Gavin Debecker, in his world famous (should be mandatory reading) book The Gift of Fear.

The rule of oppisates is mentioned frequently in law enforcement and shooting publications, I searched FRI for that term and four articles with that phrase pop up.  I went to goggle to get a hyper link and guess what I found?

What are the chances there are more people looking for Native American counseling paradigms then the definition of the most common heuristic used in the law enforcement and firearms training industry? They are zero, the results from that phrase are being manipulated to present material considered, by the companies running the search engines,  more acceptable.

That has little impact on news consumers like myself who know what they are looking for. But what is the impact, over time, of this kind of deliberate manipulation of search engine results?

Keep in mind references to the “rule of opposites” in law enforcement journals appear just after the examples in the screen shot above. I’m not trafficking in conspiracy theories,  just pointing out an inconvenient fact when it comes to search engines.

I can promise you one thing about search engine manipulation; it will not work as planned and the unintended consequences could be significant. They always are when you launch a cleaver plan inside a complex system in the belief everything will work out exactly as you  think they will.

As I was milling this over while procrastinating (i.e. looking at facebook) I saw a post about Global Warming by my FB buddy and fellow IMOA Frank Gallagher; look what was inserted below it:

I challenge anyone to go through that cimatefeedback.org rebuttal and find one citation that backs the claims they are making in their report. It is difficult to decipher their academic speak, but I can sum up their point. It is an argument from authority and the authorities say that climate change is real therefore skepticism is wrong.

The author of Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton, is a partner in the Litigation Department and Co-Chair of the Business Litigation Practice Group of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP in New York.  Mr. Menton specializes in complex and technical commercial litigation, and has a nationwide trial practice. Mr. Menton is not a climate scientist, he is a demonstrably competent man with a passion for analytics coupled with a refusal to be bullied by “experts”. That is a very American trait which is interesting because what is, or is not, an “American trait” is now a point of bitter partisan debate.

I don’t care what you believe about climate change. I find the argument from authority approach suspect after living through global cooling, the population bomb, the “running out of food” scare,  the  “you can’t drill your way out of energy dependence” fraud, AIDs, bird flu, acid rain, alar on apples, etc… All of these emerging global emergencies proved to be wrong; and not a little wrong; completely wrong.

This is why I self identify as a “public defense intellectual” during my weekly gig on All Marine Radio with my fellow expert Jeff Kenney. It’s an ironic dig at the pretensions of self identification validated through ‘lived experiences’. Mac, Jeff, and I aren’t experts on American foreign policy, we are victims of it, which is why our weekly podcast is so popular.

In a perfect trifecta of outrage I then stumbled upon the new trailer for Top Gun II. I even wrote an intemperate comment a friends FB page about the trailer I was so pissed, but it took me hours to figure out why. And it is not just this:

It’s the premise of the movie that I found so offensive. Cruise is a 30-year Maverick who refused promotion like the other corporate shills and stayed in the cockpit. He routinely flies along the southwestern desert mere feet off the deck and keeps his cat like reflexes sharp with some sort of vertical ascent high speed, low drag move used to inverted over a Mig. The admirals admonish him saying he should be in command like them, not bumming around navy fighter squadrons for 30 years, but Cruise knows better, he’s a singleton with his own creed. In the end he’ll show them all that he, the anti social, non-conformist, was right all along and is the true hero.

We have long known that China dictates to Hollywood what is and is not acceptable for new releases and Hollywood always complies. It does not work the other way around. The newest Chinese hit, Wolf Warrior II, pits elite Chinese Special Operators in Africa battling former US Marines turned corporate mercenaries for some international evil corporation that I assume is not Goggle.

Top Gun II is not a movie about naval aviators or naval aviation, it’s not about the American military – non conformists don’t last there and “mavericks” fly desks, not aircraft in the American armed forces. It’s not about traditional American military virtue or an accurate reflection of the military culture. It seems the Top Gun movie is about Tom Cruise and making big bucks off nostalgia for another re-boot.

The character in the Tom Cruise movie is an anti-American he is used to show that our traditional values, mores, and systems are corrupt. Read this description of Wolf Warrior 2 from the National Review article linked above:

“In Wolf II, China is the only powerful, responsible, and benevolent world power. Chinese workers help Africans build their economy. Chinese doctors work to discover a cure for a deadly endemic. And the film unabashedly takes several swipes at the U.S. When African and Chinese civilians inside a factory are under attack by rebels and mercenaries, the only good American in the movie, Rachel Smith, a Chinese-American volunteer, fanatically tries to contact the U.S. embassy for help. Leng asks her, “Why are you calling the Americans? Where are they? It is a waste of time.” After she tells him that she tried to reach American government by Twitter, Leng responds that “the Americans are good for nothing.”

Why do I care that Hollywood movies bash America just like Chinese movies?

Consider the following propositions:

  • There is no truth, only competing agendas.
  • All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
  • There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
  • The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
  • Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
  • The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
  • For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway, they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
  • When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

That was a list of objectives from Department V of the old Soviet KGB as distilled by the blogger esr on the Armed and Dangerous  blog. He goes on to note:

As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia

esr and the (actual) intellectuals he references in his writings may be spot on or they may be wrong. It does not matter how that list of propositions got here; it has been here, for decades.

What I know is that 50 years ago, on this very day, when I stayed up all day and night with my family to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon; the ideas listed above would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Joel Kotkin, in his post Age of Amniessia at Quillette, describes the consequences of progressive policies as they are manifesting today:

Liberals like Cass Sunstein suggest that students raised in an atmosphere of homogeneity “are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.” Yet too few university administrators counter these trends. One college President in Canada, for example, justified efforts to tamp down on “free speech” by arguing that doing so created “better speech.” At many schools, professors are now asked to sign “diversity” pledges that eerily reprise the kind of “loyalty” pledges common during the darkest days of the Cold War. This passion for thought control extends even to comments such as “America is the land of  opportunity” or professing to believe in a colorblind society, views which can now be categorized as punishable “microagressions.”

This ideological rigidity has shaped a generation of progressive activists who also now represent the best educated, whitest,and most politically intolerant portion of the American polity. A common tendency among progressives is to designate certain conversations as “hate speech,” an approach to free speech recently endorsed by the California Democratic Party.

That doesn’t sound like trends that bode well for a free peoples. My considered opinion on the topic , and I am a self identified defense intellectual, is that the progressive experiment is creating an enormous backlash that will sweep it into the dust bin of history.

It will not happen soon, there are potential large setbacks that could derail progress against progressives. I am confident that a major political change is at least six years away but Trump could lose in 2020. If he does the promises being made by the current field of democrat candidates will spell doom for their party if attempted. My post at the Freq talks about the last time they did that (Clinton’s first inauguration) and the consequences that followed. Consequences the press did not report on extensively and that are hard to find in search engines today. But the consequences were real and we now have an internet full of reliable sources who are not connected with the media or government. The next time around burying the story will not work.

Change is coming because the one thing you can take to the bank is our political system is functioning on borrowed time in its current configuration. Reality is going to introduce this change, let us hope the lesson it inflicts is not too painful.

 

 

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Kill Shot – The Narrative Takes Two to the Chest

Last week Professor Jordan Peterson sat for a 30 minute live interview with journalist Cathy Newman on the BBC’s Chanel 4. The results were a stunning unmasking of the liberal narrative that dominates western culture today. It was the most important debate of my generation unmasking the hubris and fallacy of the left by a calm, collected, brilliant professor speaking substantive truth to privileged, dishonest power (hat tip to Paul Weston for the cleaver phrase).

If you are not one of the over 3 million people who have watched this interview on YouTube take the time to watch it now. It is remarkable.

Cathy Newman entered this debate without any idea on why Professor Peterson burst onto the YouTube scene just over a year ago. She expected to win this debate with the weak strengths of rhetoric and sophistry.  That is how the left always wins but winning has made them soft so she was unprepared for a concentrated dose of reality.

She walked into a buzzsaw of undeniable truth laid out by a man who has spent years thinking deeply about human motivations and interactions. Every time she tried to reframe a comment with one of her straw-men talking points Professor Peterson would respond with an argument she could not refute and, due to her liberal bias, could not accept. It is a beautiful thing to watch.

Here’a the Kill Shot:

Newman: Is gender equality desirable?

Peterson: “If you mean equality of outcome than almost certainly it’s undesirable…Men and women won’t sort themselves out into the same categories if you leave them alone to do it on their own accord. We’ve seen that in Scandinavia, it’s 20 to 1 female nurses to male nurses…and approximately the same male engineers to female engineers and that’s the consequences of free choice by men and women in the societies that have gone farther than any other societies to make to make gender equality the purpose of the law. Those are ineradicable differences. You can eradicate them with tremendous social pressure and tyranny but if you leave men and women to make their own choices you will not get equal outcomes.”

This answers, once and for all, both the how and why behind forcing women onto the infantry.

It is not bias against or animus for women that drives my insistence that they are unsuited for the role of direct combatant. It is love for and the respect of the role of women in society that makes the insanity of placing them in the infantry unpalatable. It is also love of and respect for the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) combined with (for men like myself) an intimate understanding of the physical, emotional and psychological toll infantry combat exacts on humans that makes the idea of subjecting women to the role abhorrent.

Think back to the senate confirmations of Secretary Jim Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joe Dunford. Do you remember the questioning from the distaff side of the chamber? Do you remember the concern of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand about the possibility of Secretary Mattis rolling back the recent policies forcing women onto the combat arms ? That was rhetoric and sophistry in action. It was the demand, by a clueless political class, for equal outcomes.

The Marine Corps, like all the branches of the armed forces, is helpless against the diktats of our ruling elites. They can’t sit down and spend 30 minutes dismantling liberal dogma on live TV. They fought back against Ash Carter and the idiot Ray Mabus the only way they could, by launching a detailed experiment on the performance of mixed gender infantry units. The results were unequivocal; mixed gender units performed poorly, women Marines were unable to meet the physical demands of infantry combat. Even if they could hack it the critical topic of how infantry Marines socialize to develop the cohesion required to sustain themselves in combat was ignored.

Yet our political elites, using the blunt tools of rhetoric and sophistry, ignored the Marines findings. They chose to use tyranny to force their preferences on the military because there have been no consequences (at least ones visible to us) from their contemptuous treatment of Marine leaders and ignorance of historical precedents. That has all changed now. Every day a million more people watch the video linked above. Every day dozens of YouTubers critique this remarkable debate and they are uniform in their admiration for the remarkable Jordan Peterson.

This is what a kill shot looks like on the internet

The media minders of the narrative reacted to this devastating defeat exactly as one would suspect. The rolled out the victim card claiming, without any evidence whatsoever, that Cathy Newman had been subjected to such ‘vicious misogynistic abuse and nastiness,’ that Channel 4  hired a “security specialist” to “review the threats”.  A careful analysis of twitter comments by the blogger hequal showed the following:

Non-sexist violence aimed at Newman or her supporters: 2

Sexist violence aimed at Newman or her supporters: 0

Non-sexist violence aimed at Peterson or his supporters: 8

Sexist violence aimed at Peterson or his supporters: 55

As media critic Stephen Knight pointed out “these findings raise some inconvenient questions for those who like to play victimhood Olympics in order to detract from genuine criticism”.

Will this debate change the trajectory of the politically correct dogma which infuses our political class? It might but that could be little more than wishful thinking on my part. I can accurately predict what will put a nail in the ‘women in the infantry’ coffin. A real shooting war with a near peer adversary. And history tells us those kinds of events happen when you least expect them to.

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Self Inflicted Wounds: Dogs and Hurricanes

In a blunder too stupid to contemplate let alone explain the US Special Forces Information Operation (IO) team in Afghanistan designed leaflets that contained the Shahada  “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet” printed on the side of a dog.  Dogs are considered unclean to adherents of the Islamic faith; placing a Shahada on the picture of a dog is a grave insult to the faithful. In fact it is so grave that there will be no way any Afghan will believe this to be a simple mistake. This is an amateur hour self inflicted wound that for which we will pay a stiff price….take that to the bank.

The leaflets were dropped over Parwan province (I’ve also seen stories that it was dropped in the northern provinces) which has a literacy rate of 27% and most of those Afghans are Dari speakers. The leaflet is in Pashto – the language of the southern provinces.  The Taliban were quick to respond sending a suicide bomber to one of the entry control gates at the Bagram airbase yesterday where he detonated his vest and wounded six soldiers (there of them Americans) and killed an interpreter.

The American military had this to say about the incident:

I sincerely apologize. We have the deepest respect for Islam and our Muslim partners worldwide,” said Maj. Gen. James Linder. “There is no excuse for this mistake. I am reviewing our procedures to determine the cause of this incident and to hold the responsible party accountable. Furthermore, I will make appropriate changes so this never happens again.”

Regardless of what the review of procedures reveals there is no way to explain such a reckless mistake after 16 years of fighting in Afghanistan. All this incident does is to reaffirm the wisdom of the Prince plan which focused on getting knowledgeable trainer/mentors into the country for the duration. What general Linder is going to find is someone on his/her first deployment thought this leaflet a good idea. Which is to say someone doesn’t know a damn thing about the country of Afghanistan yet is running IO ops there. The Prince plan specifically avoided putting inexperienced people in country to avoid self inflicted wounds of this nature.

Why dropping leaflets in a province where a vast majority of the population in illiterate seems a good idea at this late stage is a bigger issue than the content. It speaks to another component of the Prince plan and that is not having people in country who do not complement the mission which we have been told is training the Afghanistan National Security Forces. This is the problem with the American military today; it is a gigantic bureaucracy designed to fight the military forces of other nation states. After 16 years of fighting in Afghanistan it is still unable to task organize into a force that reflects it’s stated mission.

Adding insult to injury former Afghanistan president Karzai took to the press accusing the U.S. of launching “a psychological war against the Afghan people”. He is correct; that is what exactly what information operations are designed to do and there is no reason for us to be doing them in Afghanistan.

Misfires of this nature are part of “a cyclic pattern to the erosion of faith in government, in which politics saps the state’s capacity to protect people, and so people put their trust in other institutions”. That quote comes from an article in the New Yorker about Hurricane Harvey yet explains well the reason Private Military Companies (PMC’s) remain a viable business model in the face of unanimous condemnation by international elites.

Titled Why Does America Need a Cajun Navy? the article, in the words of Richard Fernandez, expressed alarm that “the Texas disaster instead of emphasizing the importance of Climate Change and greater government funding has perversely glorified community volunteerism with deleterious effect”.

What the New Yorker was describing and what the world witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey was the high degree of social capitol resident in America’s fly over country. The Cajun navy is a reflection of that social capitol as was the hundreds of people who launched their boats onto the flooded roadways and started saving people.

Texas also enjoys the advantage of their own giant grocery store chain HEB. HEB is legendary for its disaster relief response. Instead of doing typical corporate IO buys on TV and radio which claim the company is doing this or that for the community HEB goes out and helps the community. They fly in truck drivers to keep stores open, forge letters to get clean up crews past police roadblocks to get stores open; even plead with national suppliers: from the linked article:

I called Frito-Lay and said, rather than manufacturing your entire product line, manufacture your bestsellers. I need Lay’s, I need Doritos, I need Fritos. I need a variety pack. I don’t need Funyons and I don’t need Munchos. Just make your best sellers. I won’t turn down any delivery. We’ll take it as fast as we can.

I don’t need Funuons….that’s hysterical…anyway the point is that the response to Hurricane Harvey demonstrated that Americans, despite years of racially polarizing IO operations from our politicians, academia, elite media and even the damn NFL we remain Americans. We’re a big country with people of every variation of color and ethnicity you can imagine who come together in times of strife to take care of each other because it’s the right thing to do.  Listen to some of the Zello calls to the Cajun navy to get an idea of what I’m talking about

https://youtu.be/vuJK6SkBL74

We are about to see how much social capitol remains in the state of Florida. Florida has more cowboys (and cows) than Texas; but it has also seen a huge influx of life long democrats moving into the state from frigid northern blue states. This is why we have odious, ethically challenged congress persons like Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the national stage. She is a second rate hack who has the audacity to claim her support for the Awan brothers (the biggest political scandal of my life that is being studiously ignored by legacy media) is a victory of diversity and a blow against racism. Unhinged lunacy of that nature is why I suspect Florida is lacking in the human capitol department. People who elect the Wasserman Schultz’s of the world are not the kind of people to risk their lives or property helping strangers.

Diversity has never been a strength to any society at any time in history. As Victor Davis Hanson points out:

America’s melting pot is history’s sole exception of E pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language and values.

Is Florida a successful melting pot or a dangerous salad-bowl of politically sanctioned, envy driven separatism? We shall soon see.

Right now the evacuation efforts in Florida are being stymied by a lack of fuel. The governor has been brow beating suppliers about getting more and is urging citizens to not top off their fuel tanks if they don’t need to drive that far to local shelters. Does anyone on planet earth believe that will happen? He can hammer away at fuel suppliers all he wants but he won’t get far. The Colonial Pipeline that carries 100 million gallons of gasoline, aviation fuel and heating oil a day from Texas refineries to the east coast is closed.

Map of current fuel pipeline in America

Wait…a pipeline carries 100 million gallons of gas a day from Texas to New York? Doesn’t that make all the drama surrounding the Keystone pipeline rather moot? Yes it does and it illustrates the disservice being done to our national discourse by the legacy media and virtue signalling politicians rather obvious. America can and should be energy independent; for years the oil and gas industry has been asking to expand both pipelines and refinery capacity yet congressional democrats, blue state politicians and climate alarmists have worked in tandem to prevent those investments to our energy infrastructure. That is another self inflicted wound that is already impacting Florida and may well impact the other states in the south who are in the path of Hurricane Irma.

As the cheerleaders for climate alarmism take to the airwaves to tell you how ‘climate change’ is responsible for the intensity of the current hurricane season remember the graph below. Climate models that have their inputs artificially tweaked are not reliable. Legitimate scientific observation is as are your own two eyes.

Most Americans, just like most people in other parts of the world, do not like to wait for the government to swing into action when a natural disaster strikes. The effectiveness of the help they can provide to their fellow citizens is a direct reflection of the social capitol that resides within the affected areas. Let us hope and pray that the citizens of Florida are able to put aside petty politics and rise to the occasion. Their test is at hand; the rest of the world is watching and we will soon know if the blue state model can match the red states in human decency and real (vice virtue signaling) compassion.

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