More Tab Clearing, of the Donald Trump variety

Isegoria has a nifty definition of class structure in America.  Donald Trump is about the only one who has the first class in mind:

Rob Henderson explains social class through the example of where your name goes:

Working class: Your name on your uniform
Middle class: Your name on your desk
Upper middle class: Your name on your office door
Upper class: Your name on the building

You will notice that the folks who own the Media are all in the last class.  Gosh, I wonder why they hate Trump's guts? /sarc

Mike at Cold Fury thinks that Ron DeSantis is wimping out:

DeSantis, Abbott, and any other non-Vichy GOPe governors with stones enough to do so could render all Real Americans a great service, as well as etch their names with honor and glory in the annals of American liberty forevermore, by announcing their firm intention to end all cooperation and/or contact with FBI goon squads currently skulking about in their sovereign States—effective oh, say, five minutes ago or thereabouts.

Srlsy, Mike really thinks he's wimping out:

The Leftard camel has been allowed to poke its big, ugly snout way too far into the tent already for my liking, and I can’t even begin to imagine that DeSantis is in agreement with those assholes on this particular topic. Any and every time they can be dealt a defeat, regardless of its perceived import, they not only should be, they must be, just as a matter of principle.

I don't know that I agree.  DeSantis has been an astonishingly effective Governor and gets the daily dose of hate in the Florida newspapers as his reward.  He is particularly effective in dishing out punishment, not a bunch of hot air posturing.  This is what has made the Florida newspapers to melt down on a daily basis.  DeSantis is establishing a reputation as a doer, not a talker - at least with me.

Scott McKay at The American Spectator thinks it's not Trump or DeSantis, it's Trump and DeSantis:

The issue isn’t whether Trump or DeSantis is the GOP nominee in 2024. Both would be fine. Seriously. Trump is starting to get to the outer edge of what you’d look for age-wise in a president, but he’s also been through the wars and he’d be able to leverage that experience to hit the ground running and efficiently do the things that are controversial until they aren’t early in his second term.

And DeSantis is younger and smoother than Trump, having had a good deal more experience with politics and government.

But — and I’m going to harp on this, because it’s a point I make in my book The Revivalist Manifesto, which you should buy and read thoroughly — political eras are formed in America not on the basis of one election but rather five or six in a row. The Democrats kicked off the first era of our political history with Thomas Jefferson’s rout of John Adams in 1800, and they didn’t lose a presidential race until 1824, by which time Democratic politics was American politics. Ditto for the second era, which began with Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 victory; the GOP didn’t lose a presidential election until 1884. And the third era, which is coming to a miserable end, began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rout of Herbert Hoover in 1932; it was 1952 before a Republican again won a presidential race, and Dwight Eisenhower was necessarily so timid when it came to domestic policy that by the end of his tenure the John Birch Society was convinced he was a communist mole.

The point being, it takes a generation for the concrete of a new political era to cure. And that means it’s less important whether Trump or DeSantis wins in 2024 than that one of them does. And furthermore, what’s more important than that is the standard both of them set for Republican politicians up and down the governmental food chain.

Trump is a wrecking ball, and knows where and how to start disassembling the Imperial Bureaucracy.  DeSantis is the guy who can put it back together in a way to cause even more pain to The Right Sort Of Folks.  Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law.

Tab clearing

Here's a selection of what I've been looking at.  There's no connection other than I found each fascinating, even if I don't agree 100% with all points.

John Michael Greer (the artist formerly known as The Arch Druid) looks at the Georgia Guidestones (recently blown up) and connects them to Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset - and brings ancient Mycenae along for the ride.  Here's a flavor from a loong and thoughtful post recommending some modesty from today's "elites".  I expect he will be disappointed by their lack of humility moving forward:

Grant for a moment that modern American society crashes to ruin over the next few centuries, following the usual trajectory of civilizations on their way to history’s compost heap. Grant that the decline and fall has the usual effects: population drops to 5% or so of the precollapse peak, most technology and information resources are lost, literacy becomes a rare skill, and a long and bitter dark age settles over the land. The people of that future time will use storytelling the same way every other illiterate culture has done—it’s apparently hardwired into human brains at this point, after so many generations of evolutionary selection in its favor. What stories will they tell about us?

If you think the stories in question will be the sort of thing that would allow us to preen our egos if we happened to hear them, think again.

The Bitter Centurion echos this in a very personal way.  If the "elites" think that they will be remembered as Gods they don't understand just how much people hate them today:

I've never truly hated anyone the way I hate these 'elites'. These corrupt politicians, corporate oligarchs, and central bankers. The people who have gotten obscenely rich and powerful on the backs of the regular, common folks who are constantly forced to do more with less just to provide for their families.

The entire globe is on the cusp of a Third World War with the Russians, not to mention the internal strife and turmoil in several nations around the world we are seeing as a result of this 'Build Back Better/ESG' bullshit, cooked up at the World Economic Forum. All the major conflicts and problems we are seeing in the world today, every single one of them, is entirely THEIR fault. It is all their doing.

Why can't America build anything?  Basically elites and government bureaucrats.

What Edward Gibbon got wrong about the fall of the Roman Empire.  This is a good overview but Gibbon really needed someone to take him aside when he started blaming it on Christianity.  After all, the Eastern Roman Empire was much more devoutly Christian than the Western portion and survived the West by a thousand years.  A millennium isn't exactly a rounding error, Eddie.

Randoms

Yargb has a bunch of paintings of battles.  I expect a bunch of all y'all will appreciate them.  I'd add the famous mosaic of Alexander the Great at Pompeii to it.

T-Bolt explains why we don't have passenger trains in this country, and why we have the world's best freight rail system.

Robert Graham on how not to get caught in the Fed's Geofence requests to the courts.  This is good info on how to reduce your susceptibility to cell phone tracking by the Fed.Gov.

It seems that the FBI had the decryption key to some pretty nasty ransomeware that hit a lot of companies, but kept it secret because they had some sort of "operation" going on.  Thanks a million, guys.

How smoking can improve your firearms safety

Srlsy.  Well, smoking adverts. This is genius.

Apologies for the lack of posting.  Things are insanely busy, and by the end of the day I'm pretty wiped out.  The Queen Of The World has taken a hankering to "Downton Abby" on Netflix, and I've been enjoying it with her.  Until last night when Matthew was killed off (spoiler alert!).  It seems that ratings tanked after this; maybe people watched it because it was good escapist fun, and when you start killing off your most likable characters it's less fun?

But go read T-Bolt's suggestion.  It will horrify all the Right Sort of People®.

Randoms

One thing about living in Southwest Florida is that people come here from all over.  At the dog park this morning I was talking to one of the other owners who works at a very high end resort on the beach.  She said two things that were very interesting:

1. Even though we're past High Season, they are packed.  There's a high proportion of folks from Michigan, and a bunch are down here house hunting.  The common thread is that they're all sick of the Governor there and are looking to get out.  These are all high income types - the ones who can pay $6,000+ for a week at the beach.
2. One of the guests she was talking to is a doctor at a big Pennsylvania hospital.  He said that there are 40 babies in the NICU, and the prognosis for all of them is poor.  The common thread was that their mothers all got vaccinated.  He says that the Press won't touch this story but he hears from doctor buddies elsewhere that they see this too.

So California is facing another drought this year.  What the stories you will read in the Press won't tell you is that the California State Water Board is draining the reservoirs.  Why?  To "restore the fish".  Here's a quote you won't run across on CNN:

“In the last 14 days, 90% of Delta inflow went to sea. It’s equal to a year’s supply of water for 1 million people.#ManMadeDrought,” Central Valley farmer Kristi Diener said.

Will the last taxpayer to leave California please turn out the lights?  We're trying to be Green ...

Lastly (and probably most importantly), if you stop by Glen Filthie's place you might want to pass on the brownies ...

Tab clearing

Did you know that this past February is the coldest in US history since 1894?  This sure is some Global Warming.  Compare and contrast: media coverage of this vs. media coverage of (hypothetical) warmest February in 127 years.

44 climate doomsday predictions that haven't panned out.  Related: NYT said that US east coast beaches would all be under water by 2020.  "Paper of Record" ... (via)

Quite frankly, this sums up Global Warming prognostication quite well:

I've posted before about the record high temperatures that were seen in 1936.  As it turns out, that's only part of the story.  1936 was the year for "Climate Disruption" - and we've had 85 years of more carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere since then but haven't seen such record bad weather.  Hmmmm ...

In non-climate dumbness, here's a list of the top 150 intellectuals.  Color me unimpressed, although the biggest objection is the use of "intellectual" to apply non-perjoritively in this degraded age.  I would have expected Arnold Kling to not put Joe Rogan as high as #1, or Thomas Sowell as low as #71.  Hat tip: Chris Lynch who points out the list is silly.

Tab clearing

Lots going on and so I don't have time to flesh these out much, but still worth your time:

German farmers block roads in Germany protesting environmental laws.

Everywhere it seems that the public is rebelling against the Greens, who seemingly cannot regulate their demands to the "moderately sane" level and appear determined to ruin everyone's lives.  Protests in Chile and in the UK and The Netherlands are really an inversion of 1970s and 1980s radicalism - now it's the "revolutionaries" that have triggered mass, spontaneous protests.  File this under "Environmentalists are stupid and everyone hates them now."

Hilarious retro computer goofs.

A simple typing mistake led to an IBM S/370 mainframe getting wiped out, and IBM coding a check to prevent this from happening again.  That story reminded me of how Back In The Day we took our security scanner to a Big Government Agency to test it.  The scanner excelled at guessing usernames and passwords (this was back in the day before the operating system stopped you from trying eleventy million passwords).  There was a big row of Unix servers in the data center; some Einstein had wanted to be able to remotely shut them down without having to walk all the way to the room and so had set up accounts with a username of "SHUTDOWN" a password of "SHUTDOWN" and which executed the login shell /sbin/shutdown.  As the consoles all started flashing the message "THE SYSTEM IS GOING DOWN IMMEDIATELY", one after another, the wide-eyed Admin said something along the lines of "Make it stop! Make it stop!"  Good times, good times.

It's been ten years since ClimateGate and climate science is worse now than it was then:

Scientists on the ‘warm’ side of the spectrum think that IPCC is old hat and too conservative/cautious (see esp Naomi Oreskes’ new book); in short, insufficiently alarming.  The ‘alarmed’ scientists are focused on attributing extreme weather to AGW (heeding Steve Schneider’s ‘wisdom’), and also in generating implausible scenarios of huge amounts of sea level rise. As a result, consensus of the 97% is less frequently invoked.

Such alarmism by the climate scientists has spawned doomsterism, to the dismay of these same climate scientists – things are so bad that we are all doomed, so why should we bother.

This is kind of depressing and is really a eulogy for Science in today's society.

Today is the 154th anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  I covered that here.  Propaganda isn't just a recent phenomenon.  It was par for the course with "Honest Abe", which is why he is undoubtably the worst President in this Republic's history.  Of course, the history of that war as it's taught today is retarded.

And after all this (mostly) bad news, here's a palate sweetener courtesy of Gorges:

Around the blogs

Here are a bunch of pages that are worth your while today.

Google is evil.  Comrade Misfit points out how to keep them from collecting (and selling, or giving to the police and/or the TV News) your location data.

Tacitus has been blogging for 8 years, and muses on how the blogosphere has changed over that time.  Not sure how I found his blog, but I've been linking to him for most of that time.  ER doctor, Battlebot coach, and amateur archaeologist who sometimes goes spelunking in old beer caves, there's always something interesting over there.

This is the smartest analysis of the Julian Assange case that I've seen.

I don't follow basket ball very much, but Old NFO has something that shows that greatness of the soul is sometimes best measured off the court, by the number of lives you touch.  Highly, highly recommended.

Link Dump

Here are some things that are all interesting, but none of which tipped the scales for a stand alone post.

Uber will not face criminal charges for Elaine Herzberg's death.  The DA is still deciding about charges for the driver, who seems to have been streaming TV to her phone instead of looking at the road when the fatal crash happened.  Uber has already settled for an undisclosed sum with Herzberg's family.

The pull quote from that article?  An email from an Uber developer: "We shouldn't be hitting things every 15,000 miles."  Gee, ya think?

I'm not a prepper but I now that some of you are.  This is an interesting post on someone starting a garden with a view to long term SHTF survivability.  Seed storage lifetime and time from planting to harvest are covered, along with how squash will cross into new types that may or may not be long term productive.  It's probably not a lot of new info for hard core preppers but is a good quick introduction.

Did you ever wonder how the Internet works?  How do messages get delivered?  This is a quite accessible (although slightly technical) overview.

The great unpublished story about how oil exploration has been revolutionized (and killed "peak oil") has an unlikely angle: gravity.  This is simply fascinating.  It appears that we can "see" oil deposits wherever they are on the planet.  Now this is the 21st Century that I had been promised.

And an update to yesterday's post about NSA discontinuing its mass surveillance program (maybe):

pic.twitter.com/C1skicjyQh

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) March 6, 2019

Linky, not Thinky

Several items are worth your time.

I hadn't known that not only could you actually go into King Tut's tomb, but that it had been restored.

The Red Sox and the New York Yankees are perhaps the greatest rivalry in Baseball.  It's cats and dogs, oil and water.  So it's a pretty strong statement of character when a died in the wool Sox fan meets Mariano Rivera.  As a Sox fan, I have to agree - Rivera has always been 100% class.

The EPA's newest science advisor is John Christy.  He runs the UAH satellite climate database - in my opinion the gold standard of temperature accuracy.  This seems like a very good sign.

Short takes, including why does Google no longer love Borepatch?

R. Lee Ermey is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.  Rest in peace, Gunny.

Global Temperature measurement is getting a lot better in some ways, although you won't read any of this is the newspaper:

Between 2005 and 2017, the global network of thousands of Argo floats have measured an average temperature increase of the upper half of the ocean of 0.04 deg. C. That’s less than 0.004 C/year, an inconceiveably small number.

I like the Argo system because it's automated and global (and doesn't look like it's been massively adjusted; I guess we'll have to watch that).  But while the measurements look pretty darn good the data look like they're tossed into the maw of the Government-Academia Complex:

Significantly, it represents an imbalance in energy flows in and out of the climate system of only 1 part in 260. That’s less than 0.5%, and climate science does not know any of the NATURAL flows of energy to that level of accuracy.

Plus or minus 0.5% leads us straight back to the Uncertainty Monster.

Lawrence finds that Google is screwing around with search results.  He has the goods, with screenshots, of them hiding inconvenient truths.

He's not the only one.  Youtube is doing it too. (Google owns Youtube)

Of course, we've known for years and years that Google is doing this, and is not a reliable search engine for anything important.  The only thing that's changed for me since this post is that I like DuckDuckGo as my search engine.  Not only do they not play these sorts of SJW reindeer games, they also protect my privacy (in stark contrast to Google).  It's too bad - the end of an era:

By the way, in looking into all this it looks like Google may have noticed this little blog and put in some downranking - I used to reliably be the #1 search result for "How to hack a classified network" but now don't seem to be anywhere to be seen.  Interestingly, DuckDuckGo still has me at the top of the search results.

And because it's Friday, George has some fun.  I like this one about the Clemson football team visit to the White House:

Tab clearing

Here's a grab bag of items that are only related by the fact that they're in this grab bag.

B alerts us to the fact that a huge amount of what is reported as "Science" is in fact a scam.  The Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies to Department Heads and University Presidents as much (or maybe more) as any bureaucrat.  I would go so far as to say that today's scientific bureaucracy essentially ensures that there will be a crisis of reproduceability.

I don't almost ever go on Facebook, because they're simply evil - they sell your data to anyone who will pony up.  So what, you say?  Here's what:

A lot of people probably don’t care if Netflix or Microsoft have access to their “private” messages. But technology companies aren’t the only kids on the block with big bucks. Do you really want your health insurance company having access to your “private” messages? That medical issue that grandma messaged you about may be hereditary and the fact that you might face it at some point may convince your health insurance company to up your premium. Would Facebook provide access to your “private” messages to health insurance companies? You have no way of knowing.

Related: this cannot be said often enough:

Reality is starting to catch up to (and overwhelm) the hype about self-driving cars.  It's about time, but this quote from the article is pretty pathetic:

"I've been seeing an increasing recognition from everybody—OEMs down to various startups—that this is all a lot tougher than anybody anticipated two or three years ago," industry analyst Sam Abuelsamid told Ars. "The farther along they get in the process, the more they learn how much they don't understand."

We have Top Men working on it.  Top.  Men.  They obviously don't read this blog because I've been talking about this for years.

Once again I must point out that the cyber security job market is red hot and you don't need a college degree to get in to it.  You can study on your own and take certification tests for small money (a few grand, max) and find yourself making big bucks without a huge amount of college debt - and without all the Snowflake indoctrination that goes with it.  Some companies even offer scholarships.  If you are (or know) a young man who's smart and has some get up and go, this might be their ticket.

Philip emails in response to my post about Sidecarcross racing (Motocross with sidecars):

If you think dirt bike side car racing is as mad as a box of frogs, try looking at some Isle of Man TT side car road racing. 150 MPH at times on a flat platform with no hand holds and not strapped in is a bit too hirsute for me to do, methinks!

I'm with him 100%.  In my 20s I might have thought that Sidecarcross was cool enough to try out (heck I did dirt biking, so it's just a short step from that).  But even the 22 year old me would never have tried this - which as he says is indeed madder than a box of frogs:

Can Donald Trump end birthright citizenship for illegal aliens?

Beats me,  I'm not a lawyer.  But Gettoputer is, and has some interesting thoughts about how this might play out.

Tab clearing

Lots of good stuff that is worth your attention:

Epic rant is epic.  Aesop brings it.  Long - almost Borepatchian in length - but is a must read.

The "Opiod Epidemic" explained.  The stupid War On Drugs is killing more Americans than the Nazis did in that war.  And since it enriches police departments and gives idiot Congresscritters tons of chances to mug for the cameras, we'll never get a sane policy.

Funeral of 92 year old Bletchley Park codebreaker.  She married an American and lived out her life in Nebraska, keeping her part in the "Ultra Secret" Enigma decoding project secret.  Good on the UK for giving her Military Honors at her funeral.  (Hat tip: Chris Lynch)

Home Owner's Association doesn't like man's Sherman Tank.  Man tells them "Come and tow it, bitches!"  'Murica!

Around the blogs

Rather than having to actually, you know, think and work, I'll highlight some posts that struck me as important and well worth your time.

OldNFO posts about how College is a waste for many kids and they would be much better off financially learning a high paying trade.  The comments are all pack full of smart, too.

The Czar of Muscovy writes about how when an organization loudly trumpets what appears to be nothing short of lunacy, you should follow the money.

Speaking of lunacy, Lawrence Person writes on how the establishment simply can't get their heads around how Trump accomplishes what he does - even though it is as simple as simple.  Smartest kids in class, right there.

Peter writes disturbingly about how the lunacy is being dialed up past 11 to 12 or beyond, and that a coup or assassination may be the logical outcome.  Quite frankly, I don't expect the 50% of Americans who voted for Trump to go along quietly with this if it happens.

Odds and Ends

There's a bunch of good history blogging going on over at Cat Rotator's Quarterly.  For example, how has the civilizing process worked in the past:

Why did the Franks, Saxons, and others work so hard to copy Rome and to adopt chunks of Roman culture (as transmitted through the Christian church?) At first, they didn’t. The Franks of Charlemagne and the Franks that ran the last Romans out of what is now northern Germany and the Netherlands were 350 years apart and very different in some ways. In others, well, it took a great deal of unceasing, patient (and not so patient) work by people who still believed that the old ways were good, and that they had a mission to save the souls of the pagans, which also meant teaching them to read and write. And the pagans came to believe that the old ways could give them power and authority.

There's an interesting question posed at the end, about the assimilation of modern immigrants into their host cultures.  Very interesting reading.

Skeptical Eye has a video made by some Swedes who visited New York City in 1911.  It's a little eerie watching it to see how much has changed - and how much hasn't.

I ran across a photographer named Steven Sklifas who has some amazing pictures of ancient sites around the Mediterranean.  Like this one:

I lost rather a lot of time browsing his site which has not only pictures, but very nice descriptions of the locations as well.  Recommended.

Odds and Ends

Here are a bunch of interesting things that might interest you.

I just ran across Total Survivalist Libertarian Bitchfest, which may be the greatest name for a blog ever.  Added to the blogroll.

Alexander the Great and how he beat the Persians at Arbella.  Ancient Military History FTW!

Good tip on what it means when you see a service dog without a handler (hat tip: A Large Regular):

[UPDATE 20 June 2018 16:56: IMPORTANT! A contrary view is here. Thanks to Unknown in the comments for this pointer.]

Via Ann Althouse, this is a brutal line of questioning of the FBI Inspector General about what bias in the FBI really means:



And via American Digest, this is hilarious:

I lauged and laughed

Biker chicks.  Grrrr, Baby!  Very grrr!

The best reason ever to not have antivirus software.

The theological reason to drink during Lent.  I mean, you can't argue with theology.

If you have to be on a plane that's about to crash ...

... it should be a skydiving plane.  Pilot and 12 skydivers bail out of stricken plane and survive.

Link dump

Can you "hunker down" until the police arrive, or outrun an active shooter?  No.

European Union agrees to cut carbon emissions by 40% in 15 years.  Expect more European companies to build factories here in the USA.

UK police overestimate number of firearms lost or stolen:

The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has claimed that more legally owned firearms were lost or stolen over the last few years than appears to be the case, according to an exclusive analysis by The Register.

The discrepancy casts doubt on a new initiative pillorying gun owners for being careless about gun security.

Security is so bad on "keyless entry" automobiles that they are uninsurable in the UK.  Oops.