summer patriot, winter soldier

herding cats ... the mouse that roared at little green footballs *** ... the lizard wars on "personality" ... european nationalists and civil behavior

from my perspective there seems little in charles johnson’s “little green footballs” to get excited about, usually, one way or another.  the writing from johnson himself seems of little consequence, usually devoid of much content or intellectual fire, not very far sighted: it seems to me bland and rather pedestrian.  serviceable, but bland and pedestrian is a fair verdict.  johnson is not by any stretch of the imagination to be confused with caroline glick, or victor david hanson, or mark steyn, all of whom are wordsmiths distinguished by dynamic, vibrant, lucid, persuasive and powerful prose which finds its inspiration in the preservation of western society: it is hard to discern any similar fire in the big lizard’s belly.

the chief feature of little green footballs seems to be the legion of acolytes who submit endless comments on his sparse paragraphs trying with the utmost fervor to sit closest to the throne, aspiring to a quasi religious orthodoxy such as they divine from the meager flow of his pen.  this spectacle, the chief entertainment value of the blog, reminds me very much of a very funny t.v. advertisement from several years past, showing a couple of cowboys herding cats: in this johnson exhibits his chief talent, guiding his acolytes toward and revealing by terse hints the orthodoxy he sometimes uses them to enforce, as they slide in a chaotic group over the landscape of his thought, much as that cat herd.  there is a strict orthodoxy enforced there, that much is obvious from even a cursory view of the blog, but i will be hung if i can discern much of a coherent plan or world view in it.  it just seems to be what charles johnson wants to enforce: the game for his acolytes, apparently, is to follow it without being too transparent about it.

in sum, i have never but glanced at little green footballs and never sought it out to learn anything of substance there, because, in my assessment, there is nothing of any originality or insight to be gained there. there are opinions which i may happen to share with greater or lesser degrees of conviction, but hardly anything which ever provides much by way of an exegesis or exploration of how those opinions came to be or how best to validate them in real world discourse.  even in his most recognized triumphs, for which he does deserve credit, that being the exposure of rigged photos from al reuters and the outing of the fraud dan rather, there really wasn’t much that could be described as a triumph of intellect, merely the virtues of the good proof reader and copy editor on display.

so, to me, charles johnson is nothing more or less that a herder of acolyte cats, scratching and clawing one another for a show of favor from the font.  i do not, therefore, go to little green footballs expecting to learn anything, and for this attitude i have never been disappointed.  his writing fails to influence me because it fails to elucidate, explain or persuade: for a committed conservative, it serves little other purpose than to repeat and confirm perceptions perfectly obvious at least since the days i took my degree in political science.  it is the intellectual equivalent of looking at the bread recipe one knows by heart.

the blog has seemed simply pedestrian, and, while its tendency towards predictable orthodoxy has done very little to excite my sensibilities it has done nothing much to offend them, either.  it just wasn’t much worth paying attention to, in any particular.

that is, until recently.

lately, i am offended by the antics at little green footballs, and, as a result, i am declaring limited hostilities upon charles johnson, his acolyte crew of attack lizards, and a pernicious silliness which they insist upon trying to impose upon the rest of the conservative community much to the harm of our long term interests, as conservatives and as members of our great nation, as adherents to our civilization. when i was growing up, it was common to hear the expression, who needs enemies when you have friends like that, and i believe that may be said now of johnson and his followers: they are quite one and the same, sort of like the borg. as a matter of fact, the acolytes ought to rename themselves the borg, any semblance of their individual thought processes having been abandoned some time ago, from all indications.

my umbrage relates to the fight against the jihad and johnson’s hampering of the same upon the alter of doctrinal purity.

this is the part in the simpson’s where avery burns yells, to his little sycophant, you know, the little guy with the glasses, loose the hounds!!  i just know that somewhere in the pack of little green lizards who live at johnson’s feet, there is a guy just like avery burns’ assistant, wearing a bow tie and crew cut, glancing adoringly up at charles johnson as he slips the attack dogs, …, oh, excuse me, lizards, from their collars.  while another acolyte, who must look a lot like marty feldman in young frankenstein, sidles over to johnson and glances up with the same adoring expression and says, “who has such effrontery, master?”  this is said with the appropriate lisp, of course.

charles johnson and his minions, who seem legion, are offended that certain european nationalists, who they describe as ultra far right wing conservative nationalists, e.g., fascists, have the temerity to try and shoe horn their way into the fight against the jihad.  johnson and his minions in perpetual tow, and i can hardly describe him in any fashion other than that, because he apparently does not leave the house nor go anywhere without his little mob, apparently feel that no one can join the fight against the jihad without his approval, or, more precisely, without meeting the stringent requirements of the lizard orthodoxy, whatever it may be at the moment.

the problem is compounded by the fact that johnson also feels compelled to attack anyone who might have the temerity to associate with the europeans without his imprimatur of approval.

by so doing, johnson has set himself up as the sole arbiter of american conservative thought. ordinarily, one might limit that observation to the issue of “to whom do we associate,” but when he realizes the extent to which people are giving in to his frontal assaults on reputation and influence in the blog, it will not be long before he begins to be arbiter on all things else relating to orthodoxy.  he has chosen not to do so by the brilliance of his writing, because it has no such brilliance, nor the force of his persuasion and logic, for it has no such elements, but has decided that it is a fit and proper thing to do to enforce his edict on such matters by loosing as scurrilous an ad hominine attack upon the persons he disagrees with, through his web blog comments page, as i have ever witnessed.  these attacks have precisely nothing to do with content or merit of argument or position, but are simply smears and innuendo: and, they are painted with large and careless brushes from what i can see.

and, apparently this approach has given johnson an influence he does not deserve, as certain american thinkers have backed away from their initial association with this nascent european anti-islamic movement, and come to heel under johnson’s threat.

this i think horribly unfortunate, horribly stupid, and perhaps horribly fatal.

the implications are profoundly disturbing.

let us look at some of the more unfortunate aspects of this enforcement of the charles johnson bully boy orthodoxy.

in the first instance, the disputation undertaken by the lgf’ers is not in the form of a discussion of the merits of any political or historical or philosophical issues presented by american conservatives undertaking a cooperative stance with european nationalists in the fight against jihad, although the condemnatory conclusions against doing this are couched in language to that effect.  no, the disputation is precisely in the avery burns mode of losing the hounds upon those who darken the visage of charles johnson, who draw his ire and his wrath for daring to depart from his strictures.  the attacks so launched by the lizards, with an occasional and brief remark from johnson shaping the attack, suggesting the form of the battlefield and in an oozing sanctimony condoning the most scurrilous and unconscionable personal attacks, are a welter of unsupported accusations and arguments coming from every angle, with no form or substance or sustainable logic behind them, and in their tangle, impossible to defend against or refute.  they are, however, unified in one respect, and that is in the vehement, vitriolic and unrestrained fervor of their attacks upon personality: it is an ad hominine attack of the death of many small, insulting, puerile and cowardly cuts.

there is no dignity or substance to it, it is as though the personality of james carville has completely overtaken political discourse in this country: that johnson should treat people who in the main respect him is scurrilous.

in the second instance, the disputation ignores and obscures salient realities about the nature of the fight to be undertaken in europe against the ravages of the jihad, and just who is going to undertake the fight, if there is to be a fight.

in their zeal to denounce the association of any american conservative with european nationalists in the fight against the jihad, the blathering and slathering mob at little green footballs ignores the very real issue of just who the hell else there is in europe or england to rally with.  and, without consideration of this issue, it must also be observed that charles and his minions have given very short shrift of any consideration of what it means to loose europe to islam: of this issue, there is no consideration whatsoever that i can see.

let us consider for a moment, just who is going to rise to europe’s defense against the demographic conquest of islam.--  will the bureaucrats and advocates of universal sameness who wrote the legislative enactments opening europe up to almost unlimited muslim immigration and occupation, and who have made it illegal for europeans to even speak out against this, or to speak derogatorily about any aspects of islam, will they rise up against their legislative efforts?  will they speak out against islamic immigration?  will the socialist and communist politicians who find in these immigrants a ready voting block for their perpetuation in office be the first to speak to the defense of europe by islam?

well, we can engage in this series of rhetorical questions until we work our way well over to the right of the political spectrum, before we find any likely candidates to rise to the defense of europe from islam depredation.  the key point to be considered in this little exercise, and it seems entirely logical to me, is that we might very well expect european nationalists to be some of the very first people to rise up and vocally demonstrate that they have no liking for the prospect of having islam overrun europe.  is there something surprising about this, something so wholly sinister about this situation that i have missed?

more importantly, what is wrong with it? 

is charles johnson saying that it is per se unreasonable to be a nationalist?  i have read perhaps 300 or so of the comments at lgf pertaining to this subject, and i have seen perhaps one (1) comment that would suggest one of these nationalist political parties might pass ideological muster, and that person was quickly squelched. is there something inherently wrong or immoral about a frenchman or frenchwoman being proud of being french, and wanting to preserve the attributes of his or her ethnicity and heritage?  is there something inherently wrong or immoral about a frenchperson being proud of being a child of the reformation and the enlightenment and a civilization stretching back to greece, something wrong with being proud of being an adherent to western values and not giving a whit about the values of islam?  is there something wrong about taking pride in these things, even in a world where we are supposed to accept the worth of the other fellow?  and, if we cannot admire our own heritage, then why in the hell do we have to give a fig for the other fellow’s?

what harm can befall us from association with european nationalists, for it might be expected that as these people gain some influence with their fellows, and most likely to their left because there are just not a whole lot of them to their right, that a more centrist flavor, a more centrist hue, might attach itself to their attitudes, and that they might become indeed more acceptable to their fellow citizens and to us.

now, there are legitimate concerns that can attach to such a process, but i will be hung if i can discern any of these concerns attaching themselves to the cacophony and expressions of bile from charles and his lizards.  usually, the level of elegance in their observations about these matters is for someone to type the word “fascist” in a comment, to be followed by 50 other comments repeating the scandal to be followed by another 50 uttering uhs and ahs over the brilliance of the observations.  i am sorry for my recalcitrant attitude, but i see absolutely nothing impressive or logical or productive by this display of fawning obsequiousness. i can tell you, as a literal matter of fact, that i observed one of the lizards this morning describe as a prescribed departure of orthodoxy, apparently, the fact that someone who has been posting since christmas has chosen to criticize charles, twice: he counted.  my good g_d, when are morning vespers?

well, what in the hell is a european fascist?  before wwii the swedish parliament awarded one of the bastards a nobel prize in philosophy, or literature.  look it up.

the reflex tendency is for charles and his minions to look to the person or party in question, and call for their ostracism on the mere chance that they might have some unholy taint.  the sin of this knee jerk reaction is compounded by a totally ad hoc determination of the imposition of the banishment.  you would think given the long months that this has been going on, that some aspiring fellow from within the fold would draw up a list of parties which do pass the litmus of persons with whom it is o.k. for americans to associate, and to whom it would be wise to extend help, support and sympathy, if not the offer of a basement to stay in when and if islam does completely overrun the whole mess.  but, no, charles and his fellow bushwhackers lie in wait until some poor offending soul, on this continent or the next, makes the mistake of associating with someone who does not possess the requisite moral and doctrinal purity to meet charles’s “standard”, whatever it might be, and then the lynching proceeds again renewed fervor. it is not pretty to watch.

in this day and age, with the marvels of communication and demographic analysis that we have, with our sophisticated appreciation of history, might there not be some more sophisticated method of making an appraisal of the suitability of association with a european political party rising at least a modicum above the level of hysteria.  this reaction on the part of charles and his apprentices is like the old cartoons where the housewife sees a mouse and screams in utter terror, and jumps up on the chair.  at such times, the reactions grossly exceed that called for by simple prudence, and the same is true of the knee jerk reaction of those worthies over at little green footballs.

they scream like a room of frightened girls at the apprehension of a mouse.

might not a prudent appreciation of the issue associated with trying to help european nationals and nationalists suggest the establishment of criteria to determine when it might be alright to link up with them, to offer them help, to work in league to establish policies and postures by which to oppose islamic expansion.  it would not be unreasonable to take a detailed look into the history and current status of party platforms and party goals be in order.  it would be prudent and cautious to see if the party recognizes the right of the state of israel to exist, to call for or extend complete diplomatic recognition, to spell out its commitments for its country or the european union to come to the aid of israel if israel is attacked.  to satisfy the reasonable concerns of persons worried about attitudes such parties or person have with regards to jews and judaism, it would be prudent to examine the pronouncements of parties and persons with regard to the holocaust.

we are smart people.  we understand how to perform these functions, as they are part and parcel of our procedural and institutional lives.  all of us know the “ins” and “outs” of advise and consent hearing, background checks and the like.

do we not have the ability to formulate a screening litmus to be applied in a logical and procedurally adept way to make these determinations, to come up with some methodology besides ad hoc panic and hysteria?  the damnable aspect of the ad hoc system used by charles at lgf, and remarkably similar to the structure of new england witch hunts, is the remarkable nature of the unsubstantiated and most probably unsubstantial hearsay accusation that someone has said this or that or associated with this or that person in the past: the assertion of these kinds of accusations becomes the unalterable proof of such things in the hysteria that governs the proceedings.  when i grew up there was a marvelous t.v. western called wagon train whose hero was major adams, the wagon train leader, played by ward bond, a regular in john ford movies.  every now and again the wagon train would be held up by someone, indians, rustlers, deserters, a crooked lawman, and they wanted the major to turn a person seeking refuge with the train back over to them.  the major would always talk it over with the wagon train members, and there was a lady who always played in scenes where things were tough, and people were going to have to stand together on principle and it would be hard, and always she screamed, turn ‘em over major, for the love of god, give ‘em up.  i loved that lady, she became mrs. olson in the m.j.b. coffee commercials later on in life, and she taught me more about morals and courage and rectitude than any college class I ever took, simply by her bad example.  watching charles’s minions call for blood is like watching 100 shrewish ladies in the wagon train yell, 100 mrs. olson’s in training, give ‘em up major, give ‘em up.

surely there must be some process that could be adopted by persons of good will that would be more orderly and procedurally gifted than a lynch mob mentality run roughshod.

if a political party is burdened by a spokesman who is a ring-tailed unrepentant lunatic, but the rest of the party seems reasonable enough, ought we not in the interests of garnering more people to our cause, allow the party some procedure whereby the offending person is excised from the midst?

surely if legitimate concerns are raised about the suitability of parties or persons, appropriate remedial measures can be crafted to address those concerns, and, if possible cure those concerns.

the point is, we ought to be looking for ways to be inclusive, rather than indulging in raucous ad hoc mob scenes whose preordained result is casting someone else out into the cold.  pretty soon, we will have no one to talk to in europe who is not a radical leftist or a communist or a nationalist who has been cast into charles’s system of ideological exile, and purgatory.

and, why, to address the matter head on, should american conservatives such as ourselves vest the authority to make the decisions as to who passes this litmus and who doesn’t, who passes muster, in terms of legitimate association, in charles johnson. 

and, why should we allow the authority to make and enforce that assessment to be abrogated by one person who is demonstrably fallible in regard to basic issues of fairness and process?  as the matter works right now, one man and his minions govern the determination of who the rest of us are allowed to deal with, govern the determination of who is a legitimate conservative consecrated to fight the jihad, in the estimation of little green footballs.  this is not a good situation

in the third instance, i take extreme umbrage in the utter failure of charles johnson and his lgf’ers to have the proper consideration of what is at stake here.  now, i don’t like the europeans very much, myself. but, has anybody noticed that europe, though decidedly not the europe that it used to be is still an economic and industrial colossus, possessed with and capable of manipulating and manufacturing the most complicated industrial machines and artifacts in the world?  has anybody given any thought to what an incredible prize this is for islam, and what a crippling loss it is to western civilization to have europe leave our column?  look, it was one thing for the muslims to be allowed the conquest of lebanon, as horrible in human terms as it was.  but, to be callous about it, given the arab and muslim presence in syria and iraq and jordon, the loss of lebanon was of very little geopolitical or strategic consequence.  and, I doubt very much if its gross national product was in the trillions.

the loss of europe to the economic, social and political control of islam, however, is entirely another matter.  has anybody at little green footballs given the slightest consideration to this factor?

right now, the muslims, after 60 years of economic bonanza, provided them absolutely free by the west in terms of cash and by the oil companies in terms of infrastructure, still have no industrial or economic or inventive capacity: they are as industrially inept and incompetent as the first day they stepped from camels to cadillacs.  the iranians cannot keep their aviation in the air because in sixty years they haven’t even figured out how to make spare parts.  to the same obtains for all the arab militaries, as the arabs have never bothered to figure out how to make anything.  have you ever seen one item of arab commerce in any store that you have ever shopped in, except something made with a rhino horn.  by contrast, the israelis stole the entire plans and blueprints to a french fighter, and had the thing in the air and operational in a short number of years.  by contrast, the israelis have one of the most modern and advanced computer industries in the world, and arms manufacturers, and so on.

by what virtue should the muslims succeed to the power and wealth of europe: in centuries, they have not risen above subsistence economies, and we are going to turn europe over to them without a struggle, or helping in a struggle to prevent it, because we cannot get our white patent leather gloves dirty associating with undesirables?

there is a moral inversion here, alright, and it is with the lgf’ers.

do charles and his munchkins at little green footballs contemplate turning the bonanza of europe over to islam without a fight?  i do not know, because to the best of my knowledge, charles and the minions have never really detailed just exactly who we deal with in europe if we chose not to deal with the nationalists, or how we deal with the islamic conquest of europe: it is quite one thing to observe that such conquest is regrettable, and it is quite another to figure out what to do about it and to take concrete steps to try to prevent it.  while they have been bashing the europeans for their perfidies, real and imagined, and while they have been savaging american conservatives for trying to establish some lines of communications, some bridges between people and parties, from what i can discern charles and the lgf’ers have said precisely bupkis about what is to be done.

the only thing they have said is that “we” at lgf are too good doctrinally to involve ourselves in this fray with any nasty old nationalists.  if i have missed their pronouncements on this, if they have something of value to offer as an alternative to the efforts of others, i fall all over myself in apology, but i am not aware of it.

this is totally unacceptable.  this cannot be tolerated or condoned or met with silence by the rest of the conservative movement.  if charles and the lgf’ers are going to use the cudgel to prevent the intervention of american conservatives in this european fight, then they had better be suggesting alternative means to join the fight.  they have not, insofar as i am aware.

this posture of supercilious moral aloofness and superiority is not defensible, and it is doubly flawed by the insistence of the morality police at little green footballs that americans not be allowed to help those who ask for it, in the fight against the jihad.

consider.--

france and england and germany make some of the best fighter planes in the world, and england makes one of the best fighter/attack bombers ever to take flight.  france and england and germany make tanks that are state of the art, and though they might not be quite the main battle tank that the m1 abrahams is, they are not that far behind, and in head to head battle they would inflict casualties on the abrahams, and given enough of them, they could perhaps come out ahead in a war of attrition.  france and england and germany and spain, given the airbus consortium, also have the capability of making airplanes with extremely heavy lift capabilities. does that mean anything to anybody in terms of the ability to manufacture strategic bombers?

france, germany, england, spain and the rest of the eu are an economic colossus; again not what they might be were they not staggering under the weight of eu social programming and taxes, but a still respectable economy.  think, if you will but for a moment, at the technological riches available to islam at the conquest of europe.

and, oh yes, that other little matter.

france and england have the ability to make nukes, and they have the ability to deliver them, either by air, or by nuclear submarine.

does that give anyone pause?

if you, gentle reader, are reading this and you have not stopped to consider this, than you are probably just a bit obtuse.

france and england have about 200-300 warheads apiece, and the ability to launch them, from off of our shores, from off the shores of israel.  given the distances involved in a sub-surface launch from the confines of the mediterranean, israeli citizens would not have a chance to finish their breakfast eggs before the arrival of a nuclear strike.

we cannot give this up to the muslims, not without helping those who would fight it.  if charles insists upon blocking efforts to help the only europeans to ask for help thus far, then he has a moral obligation to suggest alternatives, and thus far, he has proven morally bankrupt in this regard.

if i am wrong, i will apologize on this point, abjectly: all that is required by me is that i be provided substantial proof that charles has addressed these points.

let me ask this rhetorical question, for both your consideration gentle reader, and also for the consideration of mr. johnson and his minions.  what if it devolves that the european nationalists are the only ones in europe who have the stomach to stand up and fight the muslim demographic wave sweeping over the continent.

who do we deal with then?

we already know that a considerable segment of the social and political spectrum of those countries will not fight.  the left will not, as their intellectual blinders prevent them from seeing the problem, and will do so right up until the curved knives lie against their throats.  will the t.v. reporters who perpetuated the fraud of al dhura, will they fight islam?  will the leftists who lionized yasser arafat, will they fight the muslims?  the politicians and social elites will not, because they think they will ride the matter out: after all, they are saying to themselves in the dark corners and recesses of their minds, not all of us will be killed, some of us will survive.

in the immediately preceding post in this blog, i spoke of stupid choices, and the fallacy of supposing that someone would actually chose the dumber course of action when a better choice fell immediately and obviously to hand, right there for the taking.  i rather sharply rejected that possibility, saying it was nonsense.

but, here we have charles johnson, who has given pause to my previous position.

here are the choices, it seems to me, which mr. johnson seems to perceive as having been presented himself.

--be ideological pure and abandon europe to the tender ministration of islam.

--consort with people you wouldn’t invite home for dinner, but fight to save europe from islam.

he seems to have chosen ideological purity.

is this the best choice under the circumstances?

what is the worst conceivable thing that could happen by consorting with european nationalists?  another hitler?  give me a break, the chances of another hitler rising out of all of this is so remote as to be ridiculous.  it is preposterous.  even so, the chances of this are exacerbated by isolating the nationalist parties, offering them no other recourse than extremism: cooperation with american conservatives who will help them fight the jihad also serves to have persons in place, the americans, who will moderate any tendency towards extremism.  let me say it again, isolating the euro’s only increases the chance of fulfilling charles’s fear, and charles’s policy is ill designed to achieve its end of preventing euro nationalistic extremism: and, that is putting the matter quite charitably.

it might be conceivable that if europe were to be saved by the help of euro nationalists then european nationalism might be strengthened somewhat, that they would have more influence and take more legislative seats than they have right now, but it seems unlikely that they would be given real institutional influence.  what, for instance, has been the reward to french nationalists for supporting our hero sarkozy?  i would suggest, precisely nothing.

what is the worst thing that could happen if islam took control over europe?  then, my friends, the prospect of another holocaust looms not as an unlikely possibility, but as a scenario which takes on the magnitude of an eventuality.

what is the fate of israel if europe comes under the sway of islam?

well, in all probability, israel ceases to exist.  if italy and france go islamic, then almost of a certainty turkey has become a fundamentalist islamic state well before, and israel’s fate is sealed.  her strategic and tactical situation is absolutely untenable, and the only thing she can do is be destroyed where she sits.

to my way of thinking, the ideological myopia displayed by little green footballs if adopted as policy or attitude almost guarantees the demographic conquest of europe by islam, and of a certainty makes the continued existence of israel a very dim prospect.

charles johnson’s insistence on ideological purity, backed up by his little vociferous gang of bully boys, is an intellectual cul de sac.  it is a dead end.

it eschews a path, which while not risk free and which cannot completely foreclose the possibility of betrayal or disappointment, which offers at least some hope of preventing the conquest of europe by the crescent wave, in favor of a path amounting to a complete absence of american conservative action in europe, which is really more accurately described as the total abject abandonment of europe.  if charles johnson intends to fight the jihad, then he means to fight it on our shores, and without the cooperation and involvement of europeans, because by the time our fight comes here they will have experienced complete and entire vanquishment.

charles johnson, by forcibly doing everything he can to prevent american conservatives from helping european nationalists, is advocating the complete abandonment of the europeans.  who else, on the face of the planet, will help the euro nationalists?  and, rest assured, charles johnson is not using sweet reason to advance his argument, he is using the cudgel and threat of intellectual ostracism and loss of career and income, and the good company of other conservatives, to impose his will on this matter.

this is a plan of the abject surrender of europe to islam.

let us look at what his position really is, stripped of its hyperbole and the threat of incessant diatribe from his trained lizards.  what is comes down to is this.—

charles and his little ideological purists say that it is wrong for some blond haired blue eyed scandanavian, or for a green eyed auburn-tressed jewish lady, to extol the virtues and continued existence of their ethnic and cultural identities, and to try and preserve themselves and their kind, even at the cost of no harm to any other group or person on the face of the earth.  and, that it is wrong for them to organize peaceably and under the laws of the countries where he or she might live under the banner of a nationalistic party.  and, that it is wrong for them to associate with americans, and that it is wrong for american conservatives to associate with them unless it is under the sanctioning authority of charles johnson and his lizards (pleasant prospect, that?).

he says the prospects of anti-semitic and fascist leanings make it so, even in the absence of any concrete evidence to that effect.

yet charles and his ideological bully boys say that it is right to stand idly by, while islam by the use of law and the force of the arms of the state, carries out a scheme whose design is the imposition of multi-cultural mix and a pleasant hue of brown skin and brown eyes, and just coincidentally muslim, at the cost of the demographic extermination and extinction of the very diversity and tolerance which islam exploited to gain entry into those countries in the first place.  and that this idle posture is all in the name of avoiding the risk of racism and fascism.

johnson and he lgf’ers would condone the imposition of muslim conquest and all that such would entail, as opposed to recognizing the right of people to simply preserve who they are, their heritages and beliefs.

at the improbable risk of a resurgence of european fascism, charles johnson would idly witness the certain imposition of islamic fascism upon europe.  this makes no sense, pardon me, but this makes no sense.

to avoid a slight risk of the resurgence of european fascism he would impose muslim conquest upon europe, replete with every intellectual, religious, and social fanaticism now plaguing the middle east, including honor killings, fratricide, female genital mutilation, and all of the horrors and inanities of the sharia.

charles johnson and his minions are wrong.

it must be said, at every turn and at whatever personal cost, until in this silliness is stopped.

every blogger and every commentator who knuckles under to the threat of charles johnson and his thug’s cudgels is complicit in his totalitarian imposition of his view of the matter, by force and by threat; is cowardly in his or her submission to him; and is craven in his or her efforts to hide their moral turpitude.  that is harsh.  it is also true.  we cannot have the courage to stand against islam, if we haven’t the courage to stand against johnson and the lizards: a simple, hard fact.

there is, finally, a fourth aspect about this which is wrong, and must be opposed vociferously.

the behavior of charles johnson and his bully boys, calls into question the continued viability of the exchange of free information, values and argument on the internet.

what johnson has asserted here is his ability to determine and control conservative thought at first by the cudgel, and then by edict.

in johnson’s model of the blog universe he is the final authority on what may be thought, and who may be associated with.  in the past, he has demonstrated that he will ostracize and ban from his presence anyone who does not agree to him or who does not bow and scrape before him: he has banned his little lizards for being of an independent mind, and he has threatened banishment to others but held out the olive branch, on his terms, to reenter the fold.

in this he is a louse, but hey, even a lice can say who enters his abode: if charles and minions want their own little play pen that is fine with me.

in this latest contretemps, however, johnson has upped the ante, and he is now insisting that it is within his reach and prevue to determine who is respectable in the world, and with whom bloggers may associate without fear of reprisal, without the threat of his cudgel hanging over the determination and expression of their thought.  if he determines that you are wrong, he will unleash the hounds of hell, actually, a swarm of irritating gnats is a more accurate description, but hounds of hell has a nice ring to it, upon you in an effort to disparage you wit, your intelligence, to impugn your integrity, and to say any vile thing the protection and anonymity of a computer keyboard will afford them the security to say.  they are, quite simply, as a pack of ravenous dogs, when the scent of blood is upon them.

in a very real sense, johnson and his bully boys seek to become intellectual dictators.  he knows it and they know it, and they are smug about it.

will i be getting an email from mr. johnson and his minions, telling me which hand to use to wipe my ass, for the expression of my views?  i wonder which of his wally cox clones has sufficient sense of humor to make that suggestion to me.  at my doorstep?

--john jay

***  tully bascomb led the expeditionary forces of the duchy of grand fenwick in an invasion of the united states, to redress fenwickian grievances concerning the wine trade. (the novel was originally called “the wrath of grapes.”  pretty funny.) chosen for his incompetence bascomb bumbled to an unexpected victory, necessitating a lengthy diplomacy to set things right.  so goes the story of “the mouse that roared,” and the moral of picking fights that you might somehow inadvertently win, through no fault of your own.

this day little green footballs will have nearly 70,000 visits with 1,500 or so messages left behind: the little counter says lgf has had nearly 4,700,000 messages left at the blog.  by contrast, this blog has had nearly 2,500 visit total, and some 27 total messages left.  my blog has experienced one (1) track back, whatever that is.

i will remind you of what lord cromwell told the parliament that ordered his death by drawing, quartering and head chopping, if i remember correctly, “i beseech you in the bowels of christ, pray consider that you are wrong.”  i like that “… bowels of christ …” part, i always have.

now you have some idea of the sort of person who would advance into battle against charles and his horde of minions, my one tattered banner fluttering in the breeze.  it should be a good dust up.  for you see, i am right and charles johnson in wrong, in this particular instance.  he should redress and correct his wrongs, as recounted hereinabove.  he should just make a clean breast of it, admit his error, and we can be done with it.

i will go back to grand fenwick a happy person.  i hope i go back to fenwick whole, and not in quarters, guts in arms, or, arms in guts, whatever the case may be.  laughing.

“the mouse that roared,” by leonard wibberley.

correction ... [egg on my face] ... it was eli wallach who got the good line, not clint eastwood

friends:

reader marinetbryant wrote and said he thought it was eli wallach who got the wonderful line about shooting first talking later in "the good, the bad and the ugly," which sounds, oddly enough, just like the dating service g_d has consigned me to as of late.  oh, well, karma, i suppose.

at any rate, he sends the following transcription from the movie, and a description of the scene.   the following explains itself, as it were.--

[tuco is in a bubble bath. the one armed man enters the room]
one armed man: i've been looking for you for 8 months. whenever I should have had a gun in my right hand, i thought of you. now I find you in exactly the position that suits me. i had lots of time to learn to shoot with my left.
[tuco kills him with the gun he has hidden in the foam]
tuco: When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060196/quotes

reader marinetbryant goes on to explain that he doesn't miss very often on movies. i got a kick out of the transcription, and appreciated the trouble reader marinetbryant went to in order to bring this to my attention and correct me.  i don't want to be the source of error.  thanks "t".

--john jay

cowshit, three days of the condor, and the matrix ... and, oh yeah, saddam hussein ...

folks, there is always hope.  sooner or later, we understand things.

thirty-two years ago i watched a movie, “three days of the condor” with robert redford and max van sydow, and something has always bothered me about it, but i couldn’t figure it out.

now the “matrix” always bothered me, but i tumbled to that right away, being a farm boy and something of a nut about perpetual motion machines, which there ain’t any of.  you remember the “matrix,” our hero piano reeves is awakened from a computer induced reverie and taken out of his pod where he is producing energy, presumably electric, siphoned off and placed into a power grid to run a vast machine civilization. well he and others who have likewise escaped from the computer induced illusion intend to rescue human kind, from this fix: all the rest of humanity you see, are also imprisoned in these pods where they are having their energy siphoned off, likewise while being diverted from reality by this computer.

well, cowshit.

first off, who would want to be rescued?  72 virgins my ass, i will take saturday football games, a beer and chips while held in suspended animation where i don’t have to lift my finger, and no grass to mow any day of  the week.  i am going to complain?  give me a break?  isn’t that hillary’s platform: there isn’t a democrat or a socialist or a social leveler on the planet wouldn’t go for that, where all are given the fodder according to their need to produce the electricity for the machines according to their ability.  hey, you talk about an egalitarian mode of existence.

no, it’s cowshit, that’s what is wrong with the “matrix,” and if you weren’t raised in the city you would know precisely what i am talking about.  i would place a nickel bet that every kid living or having lived on a nebraska farm at any time is not scratching his head in puzzlement right now but laughing.

if you are a nebraska farmer you know full well that you have to run pretty close to 15 or so pounds of good quality feeds, lots of proteins, to put one pound of gain onto a feeder steer.  it is laconically called “the feed to gain ratio,” nebraskans not being able to speak except with a lacon, which is kind of like a lisp, only slower.

huh?  that means the machines never would have bothered with a hare brained scheme of harnessing energy from humans because they would have had perforce to put more energy into them then they ever could have got out of them.  remember the perpetual motion machine of which there ain’t any of?  well, you just can’t get more out of something, energy wise, then you put into it, just can’t be done.

so, the whole premise of the matrix is nonsense.  the machines simply would have extracted their energy in one way or another from the food they were feeding the humans.  it makes no difference is the machines were feeding their little human power plants whole grains, vegetables, filet mignon or coal dust and wood pellets, the result is the same.

the basic premise makes no sense, to choose an alternative means of energy production that works at a net loss over a means of production that will work with some degree of efficiency.  one does not choose the stupid choice over the smart choice, now, does one?

now, i have been reading united state army field manuals a good portion of the day, and planning to go to bed at a reasonable hour, when suddenly i figured out what the flaw in “three days of the condor” is.  i am kind of proud of myself, for my stick-to-itiveness, for it has only me some 32 years, more or less, to tumble to the trouble.

you remember the movie?  robert redford is noodling around with a whole house full of very nice looking people reading books, just like at college, except they all have desks and combed hair and sit up straight and seem to be genuinely interested in what they are doing.  as it turns out, they are cia employees reading novels, to see if anyone has used a potential intelligence operation as the basis of a plot for a novel, kind of getting a little money on the side, as it were?  do you suppose syrian domestic law would allow the government to recover for theft of intellectual and espionage property if one of its employees were moon lighting, or would they just cut off his head, or maybe a hand on one side and a foot on the other, like they do under sharia for minor transgressions, like missing the open man on a fast break?

at any rate, robert gets sent out for lunch, and when he comes back, he has the disquieting notion that something is wrong in the building, and then he notices that all of his colleagues have been shot, blood all over the place, in one of the wettest and most lurid examples of wet work in the movies. we know that, because we got to watch the “crew” go in and do the “wet work.”  (don’t you just love my command of the lingo?  laughing.)

the entire movie is the resultant chase of robert redford, because max van sydow who has orchestrated the whole assassination has to track robert redford down and kill him, a contract for so many people killed being a contract.  i would assume that there would be a liquidated damages clause in such a contract for not liquidating all the people called for, uh, liquidation.

well, it is a cracker jack movie as robert redford runs this way and runs that way escape capture and being liquidated himself, and there is a wonderful scene in which redford is on an elevator with max van sydow, but sydow does not kill him because of another person, this silly looking lady, is on the elevator with them.  i mean robert looks at max, and max looks at robert, and so on and so forth, and we all know what is going one and what they are thinking, and this silly lady is standing right behind them, and she hasn’t a damn clue.  i mean you talk about a foil.

thirty-two years later I tumble to the perfectly obvious.

if max van sydow and his crew are willing to walk into a cia building and shoot everybody in it, and there must have been 7 or 8 people killed, including a nice looking older gentleman and a nice looking older lady if I remember correctly, and a perky young asian lady, why in the world would he not have shot the lady in the elevator along with redford?  a baker’s dozen?  hell, the people who hired max van sydow to kill the cia station off would not complain about getting an extra person for free, so long as they got the ones they paid for taken care of.

what is it that inhibits max van sydow from killing another innocent when he has just supervised and taken part in the killing of many innocents?  what is another innocent, or several more innocents to a professional assassin: my stars and garters, robert redford is an innocent and max wants to kill him? 

where is the dilemma? 

if i remember correctly, it is the book that redford is reading that has the dastardly plot as its, … , well plot, and he figures it out, and cliff robertson, who is in charge of the cia book of the month club operation is the villain.  well, it’s obvious, he is the dastardly cia boss, and we all know what skunks they are, now, don’t we?

my favorite scene in the movie is when robert redford shows up at max van sydow’s house unannounced,  and confronts van sydow indulging in his hobby, his toy soldier collection.  hey, no symbolism there, huh, a bookish professorial assassin playing with toy soldiers.  PAWNS.  PAWNS.  YOU THINK.  they talk, max van sydow confirms what robert redford has noodled out about cliff robertson, and then some lady yells at max about breakfast or lunch or dinner, and max says something like “coming dear” and then he and robert redford exchange a whole lot more meaningful glances and robert decides not to shoot him and max decides not to shoot robert.

it is a classic gentleman’s agreement, between assassin and intended victim, a no hard feelings, just business, sort of a deal.

what brings this on, you say?

today in newsmax, i think, i read this credulous bullshit article or precise of the same about some guy who interviewed saddam hussein for some time before they hung his sorry ass.  and he maintains, this fellow, that saddam maintained that he really didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, that he just pretended he did so that he could keep the iranians frm invading him, but tht he could not say that when it became apparent to him that the americans and the u.n. (oh, i know, you had forgotten all about the votes that the u.n. passed and the congress passed authorizing the invasion, but let’s not let that trouble your pretty little head) were serious about the invasion and imposing the u.n. sanctions, because if he told the truth then iran would invade iraq for reallies.  really, that is the article.

uh huh.

let me see if i have that straight.

he is sitting in one of his palaces in iraq and he is contemplating being invaded by one of the most awesome aggregations of military power ever plopped down into one little place in the world, and he doesn’t even have to try and figure out what he is looking at on his front porch, because nbc, cbs, abc, fox, and al jeezer are telling him every ten seconds what is being arrayed before him.

and he thinks to himself, well if only i tell them i can stop the invasion.

but, if i stop the u.n. sponsored invasion, the mightiest collection of combined arms ever assembled in the history of mankind, an invasion i cannot resist in the next 10,000 years, then get invaded by iran, which is not yet mobilized on my border and will not be for years, and which has a military force comprised of a whole mess of idiots who think the way to beat me is to mount human wave attacks against entrenched artillery, and army, and i get invaded by a tin pot dictatorship just like mine which has the military power of, let’s see, belgium, or is it luxenburg, and i have the fourth largest military force in the world.

and he thinks to himself, hell, I take the americans and the united nations any day of the week.

folks, if you believe that then you are stupid as i was for thirty two years about “three days of the condor.”  i thought for a long time if i could say it nicer than that, and thought to use the word “credulous” instead of the word “stupid,” but i could not, in the interest of intellectual honesty and candor bring myself to do it.  i tender my heartfelt apologies if you feel the least bit abused, but you will get over it soon enough.  and, in the opinion of the person who brought you this fairy tale about saddam and his thought processes, you will forget about the whole sordid mess soon enough, long enough, thoroughly enough, to serve the purpose intended by the article.

who knows, maybe thirty two years from now, you will sit bolt upright and say, … .

by the way, the article in newsmax ends, “saddam lied, people died.”  i believe that i will go have a beer before i go to bed.  it will do me some good.  say, would you like to buy a perpetual motion machine? some old movies?

failures of conception: alexander kerensky's "no enemy to the left" ... our media: the enablers of our enemies and our betrayers ... vipers at our bosoms ...

alexander kerensky, who in one sense may be viewed as the last popular leader of russia, though in fact he was decidedly not, was a lawyer by profession, and the son of a school head master who had educated vladimir lenin for a brief period.  for you see, kerensky and lenin were born in the same russian town, and were contemporaries of a sort, and, at least in kerensky’s view, some part colleagues.  kerensky was a radical socialist, who had done his obligatory exile, only to come back and defend revolutionaries before the russian courts, while, of course, lenin was a lawyer and revolutionary marxist.

so it was perhaps more than just an intellectual conceit when kerensky became the second prime minister of the provisional government that had deposed czar nicholas ii that he uttered probably the worst political assessment of any political epoch ever, “no enemy to the left.”  the realities of wwi would present a major test of this perception.

for you see, wwi presented a bit of an intellectual and practical muddle for the revolutionaries who had deposed nicholas ii.  they had promised the russian people and the radical workers that they would be out of the war, and they wanted out of the war, but the problem was how to get out of the war when the germans were still prosecuting the attack.  so, the revolutionaries tried to prosecute the war with reluctant and rebellious troops, who were deserting in droves, and to prevent the germans from taking even more russian territories.  they increased their popularity with the by now emboldened russian populace not one whit.

and, more importantly, kerensky, who had taken over the direction of the war effort from the czarist ministers and military command, made himself tremendously unpopular with the military command, and, at the same time, with the soldiers who wanted to go home and quit.

it came to pass that a military general, and who knows where his loyalties lay, presented himself before petrograd with a ragtag army, bent on capturing the town and probably deposing the provisional government, unloved and without loyal supporters.

kerensky turned to lenin for the defense of the city he himself could not mount or organize, and lenin obliged, putting another ragtag army comprised of deserters and those who had weapons together under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, who had begun to take over control of the local revolutionary soviet committees.  and, defend the city the bolsheviks did.  by the time october of 1917 rolled around, kerensky found himself in a pickle.

to his left, in the person of vladimir lenin, lay an enemy far more formidable than any retrograde or recalcitrant military, with an army at his command.  whatever remnant of hope kerensky had of retaining power disappeared an october night when the bolsheviks arrested and seized his cabinet while in session: by the time this came to pass, the only military force loyal to the provisional government in petrograd were the members of a girl’s military school, and they laid their arms down rather than fight the bolshevik forces, probably a prudent decision. 

this muddle on “what to do” with wwi continued under soviet rule, as did the war, and was never totally resolved.  when the soviets traveled to brest-litovsk to negotiate the end of the war, they were still at something of loss how to treat the matter.  on the one hand, they advocated a marxist doctrine of continuing revolution, which doctrinally demanded the continuation of hostilities until the defeat of capitalism.  on the other hand, continuing hostilities with the white russian movement demanded that they commit those military forces they hand under their control to tidying up things as home so as to perpetuate their rule.  the soviets handled this situation at the bargaining table by adopting the famous “no war, no peace” stance, much to the amusement of their german adversaries, who claimed and received much land from russia.

but, i digress.—

kerensky stood deposed by his father’s former student, now in the person of a fellow revolutionary to his left.  so much for formulations actually controlling events, or is that formulations controlling actual events?  at any rate, kerensky’s observation of “no enemy to the left” lay shattered.

“no enemy to the left” might have to the prudent person seemed a bit naïve in a time of violence and upheaval and political intrigue, but it did not bother kerensky, a great thinker.  and therein precisely lies the flaw with being a great thinker, or relying too much on mere ideas in the face of human experience, some of it extremely fresh, in kerensky’s particular circumstances.

he was wrong.

he was spectacularly wrong.

we ought not to criticize him too much in this, however, because we lie firmly entrenched within the error of our own catastrophically wrong world view, and equally ignorant and unrecognizing of it.

we suffer from a failure of conception of equal magnitude and monstrosity.

we view the mainstream media as perhaps blind to reality, perhaps smug and arrogant, but we fail to view the press and he institutions controlling them as inimically hostile to our values, we fail to view the press and the left as our betrayers, we fail to view the press as our would be conquerors. 

if kerensky were among us today, somewhere under a fevered brow, he would be penning a wrongheaded aphorism something to the effect of, “no enemy with a press pass.”  and he would be just as wrong today as he was in yesteryear.  just as fatally wrong.

kerensky was so spectacularly wrong because he paid more attention to his logic of things than he did the dictates of the day.  we are wrong in our view of the press, the mainstream media, because of our slavish and unthinking adherence to the great shibboleth of the “freedom of the press” and of “free speech,” this perception controls us to such an extent that we cannot conceive that those who wield the power of the press mean to defeat and enslave us.

for our purposes, we may consider the “press” and the radical “left” as coextensive, and their aims, as identical.

we must begin to understand and perceive the press and the mainstream media, and the left which controls them, as ineluctably, inimically, and irrevocably hostile to the right, personal freedoms and liberty, and we must understand that they mean to permanently institutionalize their grip on policy, power and thought.  we must recognize it as an international phenomenon.

it is just that simple.

the international press is leftist, and routinely publishes articles and broadcasts which support the goals and aim of the jihad.

the french channel, france 2, published a film provided to its resident editor in place of a young man and his father coming under Israelis automatic weapons fire, culminating in the purported murder of the young man.  this film was broadcast widely in france and around the world as proof of the oppressive and murderous occupation of arab and palestinian lands, and is widely regarded as stimulating a following murderous intifada against israel in which many israeli’s died in murderous bombings and other forms of assassination. 

the only trouble being, that the event was staged and fabricated, and no little boy killed as depicted in the film.  this has been established beyond any credible doubt.  is there any reasonable argument that can be interposed on behalf of the french editors who chose to publish this fabrication to immunize them for prosecution for aiding and abetting the intifada?

in another famous incident, reuters new services published numerous doctored images of the last israeli war against hezbollah in southern lebanon, and air attacks against hezbollah interests and positions in beirut.  it was conclusively established that these photos were doctored by a stringer who submitted them in proof sheets for purchase and publication by rueters, and shown that if rueters photo editors had been paying attention, some persons shown as victims in some photos were shown as rescuers in other photos, on the same proof sheets.

did these news organizations adopt a stance of trying to root out the truth of these incidents and rectify their perfidy?  they did not, rather they attempted to cover them up, and they resisted proper legal process and discovery efforts to get at the truth, france 2 apparently going so far as to destroy documents and film to hide their involvement in these frauds.  these actions show their continuing attempt to falsify information in an attempt to advance pro jihad and islamist positions and policies.

in this, they must be regarded as enemies of those who oppose the jihad.

the news media in this country is no less guilty of advancing leftist and jihadist goals.

dan rather rather famously tried to perpetrate a phony story on george bush’s service records in the air force reserve, to make the rather rather fabricated point that george bush was a shirker who received favorable consideration in order to avoid combat service in viet nam while he was in the reserve.  in that case, after bloggers pointed out that the documents “proving” this contention were forged, rather and his editors took a rather harsh tumble, rather rather deserved.  to this day he and his editors deny the fraud and say they were duped.  rather dubious they were duped, as even casual observers could see that a typeface not in existence contemporaneously with the generation of the document appeared upon the document purporting to establish the date of its generation, and hence, authenticity.

oddly enough, these attempts at falsification to establish a different historical record other than one based on fact have been a tool of the left for a long time.  joseph stalin, the murderous bastard, was a contemporary of lenin and kerensky in the events mentioned at the start of this post: not that lenin and kerensky were not murderous bastards in their own rights. although a contemporary, and although involved in the events around petrograd and involved in the activities of the soviets and the seizing of the kerensky cabinet, he was not nearly as prominent or influential as lenin.  not by a long shot.

when stalin assumed power in soviet russia he sought to rectify that.  the texts of histories were altered, giving stalin a much more prominent role.  and photographs in those books were crudely altered by the removal of the images of persons who were present and the substitution of images of joseph stalin.  this was done so crudely as to be laughable, but it was done.  it was a conscious effort to alter the truth of history to aggrandize the role of a person, to suit his ego and his ideological needs, however murky either of those things was.

is there any difference between what stalin did to alter fact and its reporting, and what the perpetrators of the frauds so famously discovered, revealed and proven as frauds as recounted above.  i would suggest the answer is no, there is no difference, nor is there any difference in the motives of these actions: they were done and continue to be done to advance the agenda of a movement intending to subvert, defeat and remove from contemporary life the heritage and influence of western bourgeois civilization and free market economics.

the left thinks it will prevail, islam thinks it knows it will prevail, and for now they choose, the left and islam, to march in lock step.  and, they do.

are you frustrated with the press coverage of politics, this bastardization of fact that poses as truth?

are you frustrated with the press coverage of the campaigns against terror in iraq and afghanistan, this slanted coverage that preaches defeatism even as american troops prevail day after day and campaign after campaign in the field, this vile coverage which disparages and libels our troops?

have you noticed that the mainstream media seeks to silence alternate views of these matters?

did you notice that when leftist politicians moved to regulate and silence the voice of the right on radio, and sought to stifle the voice of the blogs, not one major player, not one major “journalist” in the mainstream media thought to utter a critical word against this?  where was the rush to protect free speech on the part of the right, by these “journalists?”  the fact is, they supported the effort to muzzle the right, both for ideological reasons, and motivated by profit and desire to control an “entire” market.  rush limbaugh and his fellow commentators and bloggers saw the danger, and railed against the contemplated policy: did not you notice that any major organ of the mainstream media spoke against it, nor did one talking head anchor person or analyst?

the fact is, except for bloggers and radio talk show hosts, there is no “free press” in this country, only giant business and entertainment interests who seek to stifle competition in business and in ideas, and who advance a leftist political stance entirely supporting the aim of the jihad, and entirely against advancing the values or the interests of the united states, both of which the press despise.

the press may be our sons and daughters.

so were kerensky and lenin someone’s sons, and so were the women of the revolution daughters of someone.

the press pass does not immunize someone from treason, does not prevent them from being an implacable and determined enemy.

think for a moment.—

yesterday i read a dispatch from an msnbc bureau chief who detailed the exploits of a 17 year old bomb maker sought and ultimately killed by israeli security forces in the gaza.  this report glorified that boy.  this report temporized and refused to describe his acts of terror.  this reporter accompanied him night and day, and did not report him to the israeli authorities.

in the law, one who aids, abets, encourages or enables another in the commission of a criminal act, is an accomplice of the criminal, and is equally liable and at jeopardy for the crime.

how many times have you sat before a television screen and watched an american soldier killed in the explosion of an i.e.d., and thought absolutely nothing of the circumstance of this film being brought to you?  we have become so passive in receiving the “news” that we do not consider what it is that we are seeing, nor how it has come before us, we simply regard the damned cathode ray box as somehow presenting truth: well, it present “truth” all right, but carefully prepared and packaged truth.

do you think, gentle reader, that the explosion was caught on camera simply because a television broadcast camera just happened to be continuously filming the approach of a vehicle to the point of the explosion by accident?  are you so credulous and ignorant that you think cameras, which have a limited battery supply, just as your own video camera does, are simply left to film isolated spots along a road that just happen to have an artillery warhead buried along them?  do you point a camera at your backyard and film continuously to see if someone happens to hold a birthday party in front of it?

no, those film crews, and some of them are american stringers, are tipped off in advance by terrorists, and are there on purpose and on time to film our troops being killed, and then those films are sent to be broadcast on our television screens, or provided for viewing on the internet, precisely to weaken and defeat american foreign policy.

these films aid, abet, and encourage the efforts of our enemies, against whom we wage war.

what in g_d’s name do you think would have happened to a film crew in wwii that witnessed, filmed and broadcast a german ambush on an american tank crew, and then spoke against the american foreign policy of waging war on nazi germany.  such persons should have been drug into the street, and torn limb from limb, and that is the fitting fate of the news executives and broadcasters who do this today.

they are not reporting news.

they are aiding our enemies achieve their war aims against us.

they are trying to implement their goals to defeat american policy aims and military action because they are opposed to the same.

they commit treason.

they intend to control and to force social aims and policies upon us which are inimical to our freedoms.

they are, simply put, our enemies.

and so we must conceptualize them.

benazir bhutto’s mother was born to and lived in intrigue her whole life, and watched a political world in which it is quite likely that her daughter benazir engineered and authorized the assassination of her own younger brother for some political misdeed or another, the fact of filial relation not inhibiting her one bit.  when benazir’s mother learned of this perfidy, she wailed her regret over having nursed the viper who killed her son at her own mother’s breasts, with her own mother’s milk.

we need to be as hard in our assessment of our own vipers at our own breasts.  their “status” as press persons does not immunize them from being recognized as the betrayers and enemies that they are, and should not immunize them from the appropriate repercussions.

if we track down and kill those who kill our soldiers, then why do we not exact a similar penalty upon those who aid and advocate the cause of those killers?  few of us have any compunction about foreign press and propaganda organs taking one in through the bathroom windows, as ronald reagan was wont to say, what is there about our own press organs that should protect them from the same exacting of punishment.

if the government will not prosecute the offenders appropriately, then the people have the right and the duty to do so.

not long ago, some young thing breathlessly published photos of an iraqi sniper shooting at american troops from a bare room.  she did nothing, obviously, to warn the troops who were in danger, and we are only left to wonder if the miscreant bastard managed to kill our soldiers.

what we are not left to wonder about is that the photographer glorified the sniper, profited personally and professionally from her work, and proselytized and advanced the aims and goals of our enemy even while she sought to advance her “station” in life.

why would any thinking person do that?  could any such person be so guileless as to pursue that course without fully knowing what she was doing?  could any magazine editor or gallery owner be that free of guile?

the answer of course, is no.

these people are not ignorant of what they do, nor are they ignorant of their aims and objectives when they do them.

they seek the defeat of america, and they seek the overthrow of the democracy and free market systems which have generated our liberties for so long.  they seek control.  and, they seek power.

over us.

to gain it, they betray us.  they are our enemies.  they must be so conceived.

a most curious occupation of palestine (the west bank) ... my life, and the palestinian town of deir debwan, and seamless webs ... the "bust out" from grandview, washington ... and, how to make cairo, egypt work ...

in my line of work it is often remarked that life is a seamless web and upon reflection, so it seems to me.  years ago when first i read frank herbert's “the dune trilogy” i was struck by his sense of paths in life, kind of like a roadmap for one’s existence, but a very changeable path without a fixed destiny: determinism without fate, as it were.  even the most rational of intellects want a little mysticism, it seems.

at any rate, certain factors in my life caused me to take to google in search of information on deir debwan, palestine (the west bank) which is near ramallah.  in two very interesting posts, a young ingénues gushed favorably about deir debwan, http://www.fiqahira.blogspot.com/2007/05/unholy-land-part-2.html and http://www.fiqahira.blogspot.com/2007/05/unholy-land-part-3.html , seemingly most impressed with the wonderful food available there, as opposed to the food available to her in egypt.  she observed that egyptian food was quite bad in comparison to the fare available in homes, hotels and restaurants in the area of palestine she was visiting while on a lark from school in egypt.

i might add that it caused her no pause whatsoever to pass from the topic of food to the horrible deprivations in other areas of west bank existence, such as the inconveniences associated with taxi and bus trips, which were inconvenienced by having to travel around enclaves of Israeli settlement and “occupation:” she seemed to see no irony in the fact that food would be more plentiful in israeli occupied territories than in egypt, not under israeli occupation. nor did she find it strange that she could freely pass from egypt into israel “into” the “occupied” west bank with nary a hitch, nor that some israeli students she knew where to meet her in palestine: such is the life and perception of an ingénues, apparently not a bad gig if one can get it, as it seems totally un-preoccupied by such things as irony or subtlety.

that is why jihadists like to recruit from the ranks of young female peace corps volunteers who descend upon arabia as the locusts, only in reverse, to give and not consume.

twenty years ago as a young lawyer in grandview, washington i was untroubled by such concerns and observations.

thus i was totally nonplused when two dark, black mustachioed, rather burly fellows walked into my office looking for legal services.  oh, i admit to having been just a little disconcerted by their size, not because they tried in any sense to intimidate or bluster, but because i knew that they were two palestinian brothers recently arrived in town and, quite frankly, i expected them to be small and wiry and skinny.  i had met several arabs when in germany in school, and they were wiry and skinny and slight.

not these two men, recently in town with families in tow, and a full complement of uncles and cousins, or so it seemed.  they had secured residences, their kids were enrolled in school with no muss and fuss ever associated with that, they paid their bills on time and they had set up little shops selling used clothes and used electronic equipment, and seemed to deliver fair value.  no complaints were heard.

the first work i did for the brothers involved a daughter of one, a united states citizen born in california.  one complained and the other confirmed by gesticulation that the california authorities did not understand the intricacies of arabic/islamic word order in names, and had thus gotten the order of his daughter’s name mixed up, which the uncle confirmed with some enthusiasm.  in due course after securing a small retainer, a letter was sailed off to the california repository of vital statistic raising that same argument, and requesting an amended birth certificate: the old one was never demanded in exchange, no authority was ever demanded for our assertions about the customs governing arabic names, and the amended birth certificate arrived soon enough, greeted with less than the excitement i had expected.

time passed.

seems to be that way.

the brothers prospered.  they worked hard, and in a year or so the businesses had been built up and expanded, lines of credit secured, and the merchandising switched from selling used items to brand new items of clothing and electronics, brand name stuff if not exactly top of the line, but of good quality.  and, their inventories grew and the items turned over, and they profited from their enterprise.  to say that the town fathers were pleased was a tremendous understatement, because business took hold where empty store fronts had stood for years.

one morning they vanished.

pfft.

the family residences were empty.  the stores were empty, right down to the bare linoleum.  the fixtures were removed from the stores, down to the light bulbs, and the racks and display cases were gone.  the kids were gone from school, never officially withdrawn. 

the palestinians had simply left, taking everything, lock, stock and barrel with them.  i might add that my billings were paid in full, and i understood the abandoned dwellings had been left spotless, without light bulbs and curtains, but spotless.

but, as i noted, pfft.

time passed, again.  seems to have been that way in grandview, not unpleasantly but without much moment to the outside world.

ah, television

one night, baby at my side, i was watching television, one of those “60 minute” programming imitations the other networks would throw under the wheels of that juggernaut from time to time, almost sacrificially so it seemed.  but, this evening the broadcast was memorable.  it was about a little arab town on the west bank, and about some rather peculiar circumstances associated with a good number of its citizens. 

it seemed that a goodly number of those persons were american citizens and that almost all of them had lived in america from time to time, and quite a few of them had made repeated sojourns to live in our country, only to return once more to the friendly soils of palestine.

these american citizens were also distinguished in that they were mainly bunko artists and purveyors of business frauds.

one of the specialties of the business fraud types was to acquire a small business, build it line of credit and inventory up by the use of that credit, and then “bust out” of the town with the merchandise newly acquired on credit, plus any monies acquired on loan for improvements on store fronts and the like, taking the merchandise to flea markets in california and florida for sale leaving the store fronts empty, and then disembark to palestine to rest from their rigors, calm their excited breasts, and pick a town to do the whole thing all over again, with “new” identities.

the town the object of this t.v. news broadcast was deir debwan, palestine.  the proceeds from the business frauds perpetrated by these united states citizens on america’s town were being funneled into yasser arafat’s palestinian liberation organization.

that was deir debwan then.

this is deir debwan now, from the ingénues blog:

deir debwan, known as the beverly hills of palestine, lived up to its name. bmw, four-story houses, blue tile roofs: it's not exactly what you picture when you think of palestine [no, because it is not generally as “palestine” is portrayed, is it?], and hammad was careful to remind us that this is not an accurate representation of what life is like in the occupied territories [i guess the good food in the homes and restaurants was not “real” either.  interesting, isn’t it.  reality]. most of the people who keep homes in deir debwan have spent significant time in the u.s., and keep palatial residences in their homeland as a token of their foreign success. hammad's maternal and paternal grandparents live close to each other, and we spent time at both of their homes. from the get-go, we were fed incredibly well. one of hammad's grandmothers had him running around her kitchen preparing snacks to serve us, while the other grandmother spent hours making delicacies like stuffed grape leaves. i could get used to a kind of hospitality that involves eating really good food all the time.

http://www.fiqahira.blogspot.com/2007/05/unholy-land-part-2.html

i wonder if my old clients own one of those four story buildings in deir debwan now.  twenty years ago i would not have conceived or imagined that my life could be such a seamless web as it now is.  twenty years ago i could not have conceived that i could personally be linked so closely to the islamic jihad.

oh, did i forget to mention that those two burly fellows that walked into my office twenty years ago, those two burly fellows and their families and their uncles and their children, were from deir debwan, palestine. is there any doubt that monies swindled, purloined, stolen, embezzled went into the coffers of the palestinian liberation organization, after a certain amount was withheld for the family building fund? 

is there any doubt in your mind?

perhaps this might remove it:

perched atop hills (strategically, he said) were some of the israeli settlements. below them, the streets of the refugee camp of jelazoon, through which we drove. in the middle of the camp there was a square with a monument dedicated to those from jelazoon who had died during the intifada.

refugees have a different political status than most palestinians, he said, explaining that refugees were not allowed to travel or to attend college, ensuring their social immobility. we visited arafat's grave and compound, where they are in the process of building a memorial to the former palestinian leader.

ramallah was, in a word, incredible. it's what cairo could be: a busy, bustling town that integrates modern culture but retains its arab character. we wandered through an open air produce market, where the vendors were calling out their prices instead of their pruriencies [sic.]. there were no mcdonalds, kfc’s or hardees, but there were modern coffee shops and fashionable clothing stores, right next to shwarma stands and falafel shops. the streets were clean, there were trashcans, and the bathrooms had toilet paper. in short, ramallah works, and it's under occupation.

http://www.fiqahira.blogspot.com/2007/05/unholy-land-part-2.html

i will not divert my attention from the main theme of this piece by dwelling too long on this ingénues almost infinite capacity for credulousness, except to note that perhaps cairo would work if it too enjoyed the good fortune to be occupied by israel; except to note the very odd form of israeli oppression in an “occupancy” that allows war memorials to its foes; and except to note that it is an odd form of israeli oppression that allows bustling fresh air produce markets and free enterprise.

ah, the trouble free, uncomplicated and infinitely credulous mind of the ingénue.  it is to be marveled at.  condi rice in the making.

yes, my friends, it is to this area that my clients from grandview, washington almost certainly fled when they “busted out” and went home, with the money they had swindled from americans.

do you know the thing that disturbs me the most about that?

the passport that i obtained for the little girl, that is what bothers me.  and the troubling conjecture with regard to how many she might hold, obtained by lawyers as credulous as any ingénue who have ever drawn breath.  what use has that passport been put to?

i know the use the money has been put to.  to sponsor and finance intifada.  bombings.  mutilations.  and all the other associated horrors of the jihad.

we have not yet come full circle, walked quite far enough around the seamless web of life, to complete my involvement in this story, though at this point it becomes markedly less prominent, but still significant to me. 

the very lovely pamela geller, proprietor of http://www.atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com very thoughtfully chose to link to several of my articles from this blog, a very generous thing of her to have done.  a reader of one of those articles took me to task in a comment to the links at atlasshrugs, suggesting in pointed terms that perhaps i did not understand quite what i was talking about and it might appear that perhaps i might never acquire the capacity to understand: as this was not the first time this has ever happened, i determined to contact him at his website and inquire as to the particulars of his criticisms.

it turns out that bill w., the fellow who took me to task over some of my opinions, is a nice man who maintains his own website at http://www.wbipi.com , and that his website seems to specialize in detailing consumer and business fraud carried on on a massive scale in florida.  at this point it should come as no surprise to any of you that the monies from these frauds are channeled into al queda.

i am waiting to hear from him again, to see if there is any connection with these activities to deir debwan, palestine, the little town on the west bank that has become part of the warf and weave of my life, pattern of the seamless web which is my life.

i will not be surprised in the slightest to find out that some of these people who are depicted at his website, criminals and thugs alike are denizens of that little palestinian town.  nor shall i be surprised in the slightest to find that their families and associates shop at open air markets, eat at expensive restaurants and buy fashionable clothes, drive bmw’s and live in four story houses, while others die at the hands of those they fund in this murder.

folks, wake up.

this pilfering of our pocket books was going on twenty years ago, and it thrives now.

it funds murder.

it funds war on our homeland.  which we pay for.

we cannot have these people in our midst.

ohwa taguu siam ... correction ... that is 5.56 x 45 mm nato ...

i must apologize for an error in a previos post.

i referred to the 5.56 x 45 mm nato cartridge (.223 remington) as the 5.56 x 41 mm nato, and did so a number of times.

the nato cartridge is referred to as the 5.56 x 45 mm nato.  (the actual case length is 44.70 mm.)

it was developed from the .222 remington (referred to as the "triple deuce" not surprisingly) which has a case length of 43.18 mm, and which should not ever be fired in a rifle chambered for the nato round. 

if that is not complicated enough, we have yet another cartridge based upon lenghtening the .222 remington round, called the .222 remington magnum, which has a case length of 46.99 mm, or, for ease of reference, 47 mm.  other rounds based upon this case use the 47 mm designation to distinguish such rounds from the nato cartrigge case.

and, if none of this is very clear, please be apprised that the bullets used in the .222 remington, the 5.56 x 45 mm nato (.223 remington), and the .222 remington magnum are all .224 inch in diameter.

there, i hope that all of that is "cleared up."

if this subject is of interest to you, please allow me to suggest:

--cartridges of the world, by frank c. barnes (deceased), edited by mic mcpherson (not deceased), dbi books

--the speer reloading manual, and

--pet loads, by ken waters.

i am sorry for any confusion i have caused.

how does one shoot somebody, anyway?

some may consider my continued emphasis on the tools of killing and attaining a mindset necessary to that task as excessively morbid, if not downright insane.

consider the following gentle reader, especially if you have followed events in the world for the past 20 years.--  have the leaders of the western world shown any indication to battle the effects of muslim immigration and demographics upon their societies that you can recall?  have the leaders of the western world made any pronouncements that western civilization is even worth saving?  have you seen any indication whatsoever from the political leadership, the social elites of the west, the mainstream media of the west, anything from any segment of what may be termed the intelligentsia that government is going to do anything to step up and preserve the religious, social and historical foundations of the western world?

where?

pray inform me, i have seen absolutely nothing of it.

that means, friends, if anyone is going to step up and defend the west, it is going to be the citizens of western countries, and, quite likely, they will face persecution and prosecution from “their” governments in doing so.

that means it will be you who is killing people.

that will be a startling revelation to some.

and you thought that coca cola commercial was so damned cute, didn’t you.  well, welcome to the world it contemplated, and welcome to the realization that if anyone is going to defend the world that you hold dear and precious, it is going to be you.

and, since no one yet has invented civil war, or civil affray as i like to describe it, that does not involve fatalities, you may reasonably contemplate that if you involve yourself in the festivities, you may have to try and kill someone.

i say “try,” because it is harder than it looks.

so, just how does one go about, in a mechanical sense, killing another human being?

i know from personal involvement in a case that a 40 ounces bottle of beer makes a fine bludgeon, suitable for inducing a fatal brain bleed on a drunken victim.  but wait, our anticipated foes will not present us with the opportunities to dispatch comatose adversaries.

and, unless you own your own fighter bombers or tanks or a field artillery battery or know how to make roadside i.e.d.s and the like, that likely leaves small arms fire as the likely tool of choice.  (i am not going to treat edged weapons in all of this, not because i do not consider such weapons as suitably lethal, but because the level of training and dedication to become sufficiently proficient is just too damned daunting.  in skillful hands knives kill quickly and surely, but the average person just makes a real hash of things, and is going to get himself killed in the process, most likely: it will be a horserace to see who dies first, as between victim and attacker.)

so, how do you kill someone with (preferably) a rifle?

well, starting from a suitable distance to insure that when you are done you can escape, you shoot them.  it all seems perfectly obvious, doesn’t it.

this presupposes that you are familiar with the rifle and load that you are using, that you have trained in and acquired some marksmanship skills, and that you can hit what you are shooting act from the distance you have chosen affords you the best chance of escape.

this presupposes that you can hit what you want to, and know how to point the rifle with suitable accuracy at whom and what you want to hit.

so, what do you shoot at?

in order to incapacitate someone very quickly with any degree of you have two routes, which are in fact very much related by can be separated conceptually: you either inflict massive neurological damage such as to cause a person to cease and desist any objectionable activities, or you inflict massive blood loss and damage to the circulatory system.  in practical terms, this means that you so severally damage the brain or the heart that the person you have shot stops whatever he is doing, and falls over, to become quickly dead.

o.k., where is the brain?

draw an oval shape to represent the head, and locate the brain within it.  if you cannot do so while snorting in derision at me for posing the problem, get a reasonably good anatomy source and find out where the brain is.  i believe that you will be surprised to find out that it is a little smaller target than you might have first appreciated, especially amongst democrats and socialists.

o.k., where is the heart?

i will give you a hint, and suggest that the tip of the heart lies a little more down and to the left than you might have expected, and that the aorta and aortic bundle, and the descending aorta lie s little more to a person right and upper chest region than you might have shot.

now, there are quite a few neurological structures and circulatory structures in the body that will produce death in a relatively quick manner if damaged, but they are difficult to hit, and may not produce death in the victim as fast as desired.  again, you do not want to leave someone a little bit of satisfaction in his own demise by letting him alive long enough to bring about your death.

hitting these areas means that each shot is the result of a disciplined process of aiming the rifle and maintaining that aim as you make a controlled trigger squeeze. you will be amazed to find out the first time that you take aim with a rifle that the images you see will not even remotely resemble the depiction of shooting that you have seen in the movies or on t.v.  the scope’s cross hairs do not remain fixed on the target: that is called a “special effect” in the movie business.  nor will the rifle shoot where you want it to unless you maintain your aim and control over the weapon.

if you are serious about these considerations, i would recommend that you acquire weaponry right now, and that you become proficient in its maintenance, care, use and in preparing ammunition for it.

and, understand, that the rifle is worthless unless aimed in a disciplined fashion, as the old notion of pointing it in a general direction and “praying and spraying” will work to absolutely no effect.

i dwell on these matters because it is necessary that you examine your own capacity to formulate the mindset and commitment to the defense of your society and heritage, to be capable of doing the things i will discuss.

optics ... field glasses ... scopes ... spotting scopes ... one name, one brand, one product ... leupold

leupold optics in located in portland, oregon and in my opinion designs, develops, manufactures and markets the finest products, dollar for dollar of any manufacturer in the world.

some of their products are superior regardless of price.

all are extremely well made and have a stellar reputation for ease of use and rugged durability.

their products are guaranteed unconditionally.

that's it.  that's all there is to it.

douglas maccarthur and the .276 pedersen ... the .308 winchester aka 7.62 nato ... the .223 remington aka 5.56 nato ... sierra bullets ... ar-15 variant rifles and rifle systems ...

in the early 1930’s as wwii loomed on the horizon, at least for anybody who cared to look to the horizon, the u.s. military feverishly sought a rifle to replace the bolt action springfields and enfields then in service, and for a cartridge to replace the 30-06 which had been adopted just after the spanish-american war.  the military sought to develop and adopt a semi-automatic rifle whose loading would be self actuated instead of requiring the conscious manipulation of the bolt as on the old rifles, and sought a cartridge not as powerful at the 30-06 yet lethal enough to reliably and surely kill men on the battlefield.

enter j.d. pedersen, a firearms designer of some renown.

he developed a reduced diameter cartridge measure .285 inch in diameter as opposed to the .308 diameter 30-06, with a cartridge case of reduced size and capacity, considerably less powerful than the 30-06 but deemed suitable for your basic 150 pound mammalian soldier.  the .276 pedersen (don’t ask, it is confusing and silly, as only cartridge nomenclature can be) shot a .285 inch diameter bullet weighing some 120 grains (app. ¼ ounce) at a nominal muzzle velocity of around 2550 feet per second.

the 30-06, by contrast, shot a .308 inch in diameter bullet weighing from 150 to 172 grains (app. 1/3 ounce)  at a nominal muzzle velocity of from 2750 feet per second to 2640 feet per second, the lighter bullet going a little faster, the heavier bullet being better for machine guns because it ranged farther.  the 30-06 cartridge, therefore, while having a distinct advantage in range and killing power, was disadvantaged by its increased recoil and by the increased strains upon manufacture caused by it greater materials consumption and shipping weight.

no less a personage than general douglas mccarther, then army chief of staff, put the kibosh on the pedersen cartridge development, more or less dictating in 1932 that no departure from the 30-06 cartridge was to occur, and the garand won out over mr. pedersen’s design and development work for a substitute rifle.  mr. garand became famous for his rifle, and also well known (well, to gun cranks like me) for the little eccentricities of his personality, which included putting a skating rink in the living room of his house: probably helped him relax.  mr. pedersen vanished to the dustbin of history, as did mr. garand’s other vanquished foe, one melvin johnson, a person discussed earlier in these dispatches.  oddly enough, just as melven johnson’s thinking behind his rifle which was dismissed from military trials has found vindication of sorts in his design genius living on in the current m-16 service rifle developed by armalite, so has mr. pedersen’s design genius been vindicated by the partial adoption, nearly 75 years later of a cartridge called the 6.8 mm remington spc, a cartridge shooting a bullet .277 inches in diameter, weight 115 grains and with a nominal muzzle velocity of some 2550 feet per second.

well, now you know.

after wwii the u.s. army still wanted to reduce the recoil, logistics and materials burdens imposed by the 30-06’s size and power, and sought to develop a smaller cartridge.

i introduce you to one of the heroes of our story, the cartridge known as the .308 winchester in civilian garb, and the 7.62 mm x 51 mm nato cartridge when it is in the service of the military.  it is a slightly shorter version of the 30-06, its case being app. ½ inch shorter in length than the 30-06, but very similar in other dimensions.  it shoots a 150 grain bullet about 2750 feet per second and a 168 grain bullet (app. 1/3 ounce) about 2680 feet per second.  it offers nearly identical ballistic performance to the older 30-06, while allowing weapons using it to be somewhat lighter and more compact because of the shorter dimensioned cartridge case.  the rifle built around the 7.62 x 51 mm, the m-14 semi-automatic selective fire weapon, saw some limited use early on in the viet nam war, and then was ushered out of service with the advent of the 5.56 x 45 mm nato cartridge in the m-16 genre of service rifles.

The m-14 and 7.62 mm natal combination refuse to die, however, and enjoy a continued popularity in the civilian rifle markets, and a continued viability within the military service, where the old war horses continue to find application in specific tactical climates and situations.  some users decry the m-16, and swear by the m-14 and the 7.62 mm nato for its greater striking energy, lethality, and quicker incapacitation of the enemy.  detractors of the m-16 have claimed it does not kill well enough, nor quickly enough.

the issue seems ammunition related.  while the m-16 experienced some teething problems as a weapons system even detractors of the system have to admit that the m-16 and variants such as the m-4 stand with the ak-47 as one of the most reliable and suitable main battle rifles extent.  the claims of insufficient lethality are recent, as the round was trumpeted as a marvel when first introduced, its 55 grain bullet (app. 1/8 ounce) displaying phenomenal killing power when considering how light the projectile.  this is because the 55 grain full metal jacket bullet was not very stable in flight, and when it hit tissue, this instability caused it immediately to tumble or fragment, thereby present a broader surface to the resisting tissue imparting a quicker transfer of kinetic energy to that surrounding tissue, making tremendous wound paths.  (like turning your hand to the wind, going down the road in a car, only looking at it from the other side, as we einsteinian creatures of the 20^th century are capable of doing.)

so, the response in the form of the 6.8 mm remington spc, an attempt to make a bullet of more lethality, which will still operate on the m-16 weapons platform, obviating the need for an entirely new weapons system.

thus has swung the pendulum in weapons and cartridge design over the last 75 years, from big (the 30-06) to smaller (the .276 pedersen), back to big (the 30-06 retained), to slightly smaller (the .308 winchester) to very small (the 5.56 x 41 mm nato) to slightly bigger (the 6.8 remington spc --  the functional equivalent of the .276 pedersen) back to bigger in the demand for the reinstatement of the 7.62 x 51 mm nato aka the .308 winchester.

do not be mistaken.  all of these rounds will kill an enemy, and with relative dispatch if vital zones are hit.  if you are an enemy soldier and you catch one of any of these rounds full in the kisser at 150 yards or so, you are dead before you knees buckle, and if you are hit in the aortic bundle, you time of this earth is severally restricted as well.

but, while the well hit enemy is a goner with whatever he is shot with, the marginally hit enemy combatant, or the one hit at extreme range with the smaller rounds, may have enough steam left in his system to get up off the ground and stay in combat, perhaps even surviving the wound.

in the meantime, the enemies of the west in the soviet bloc and their surrogates and satellites have found favor for the last 60 years or so with the 7.62 x 39 mm round, the m43, of ak-47 fame.  it shoots a 125 grain bullet (app. ¼ ounce) at a nominal muzzle velocity of 2350 feet per second.

sound familiar?  no one, however, casts aspersions on its lethality, and i have read accounts by men plenty tough enough who have been wounded by the round, and assert that it hurts and is extremely effective at either taking one out of the fight, or making one wish he were out of the fight.  those who have been hit in the extremities concede that if their lives had not been imperiled by quitting the fight, they just as soon would have sought a nice place to lie down.

it might do well to keep in mind that the 30-06 and the .308 are fully capable of taking game animals up to and including elk with prudently placed shots, while all of the smaller rounds discussed except for the 5.56 x 41 mm are considered entirely suitable for deer sized large game, e.g., from 150 to 200 pound mammalian types.  The 5.56 round, aka the .223 remington, finds its largest civilian application in target shooting and varmint hunting, shooting game such as squirrels and rock chucks for pest eradication.  i am not kidding.

which of these cartridges would i recommend that you acquire as a suitable round upon which to base a weapons system?  and, which rifle would i recommend that you use to fire this round?

i have shot an ar-15, the civilian variant of the m-16 extensively.  it is a fine rifle, and as far as pure accuracy goes, there probably has never been a more accurate battle rifle ever conceived.  it takes considerable effort to make the m-14 into a target rifle, one that will shoot accurately, and the involvement of a very, very skilled gunsmith or armorer.  It takes very little real effort to get an ar-15 in .223 caliber (5.56 mm) up and going, and they can be assembled right out of the box.  by almost anybody.  and, the ar-15/m-16 family of rifle seems to have an infinite number of sights, attachments and accessories that may be fitted to it, for almost any system

the m-14’s cannot be made to shoot as accurately as easily or as reliably as the ar-15/m-16s.  it just is not in the cards, and very skillful people with affinity for the rifle have tried. 

the proof is in the pudding.  the m-14 used to dominate the camp perry marksmanship shoot, held annually every summer, where the best military and civilian shooter from the united states compete in open classes in service rifle competition.  the m-16 variants no have completely displaced the m-14’s from the line.  there is no favoritism in competition.  military and civilian shooters alike dominate with the m-16’s.

let me tell you how accurate an ar-15 service rifle is with good ammunition.  i have personally witnessed two camp perry quality shooters each put shot after shot after shot into dimed sized circles on each's respective target, at 100 yards, while holding their rifles standing without external support or rest, with iron sights.  i cannot do as well, remotely as well, shooting from a bench rest with a scope sighted rifle, and i am a fair shot.

on the issue of accuracy the nod goes to the ar-15 system, and the 5.56 x 41 mm cartridge.

on the issue of durability and crawl in the mud, live in the mud, eat in the mud, wash in the mud the nod goes to the m-14, and the 7.62 x 51 mm nato cartridge.  and, it hits harder at all ranges, so an assailant hit at close range is going down right now, and an assailant hit at extended range is more likely killed or incapacitated somewhat quicker than with the smaller round.

now, there are many, many similar civilian rounds available which offer comparable power and versatility to the military rounds discussed above, and which are available in bolt action rifles which are as reliable if not more reliable, because of their comparative greater simplicity, in good conditions.

none of the civilian bolt action rifles, however, have the inborn versatility of the military rifles in accepting accessories, or in ease of modular repair of such things as trigger and fire control systems, or in availability of ammunition highly suitable for the task of quasi combat or insurgency suppression use.

in terms of acquisition of ammunition, the military rounds, in either the 5.56 x 41 mm (.223 remington) or the 7.62 x 51 mm (.308 winchester) are available by the bucket load, by the pickup load, and components for hand loading premium quality ammunition are readily available.  this ammunition has literally been loaded in armories the world over, including russia of all places, and foreign made ammunition of serviceable quality from all over the world is readily available on the market.

but, for me, the choice comes down to two things.

the first is the 168 grain sierra boat tail hollow point bullet, which is the standard choice for police and military marksmen and snipers the world over for lethal accuracy in the 7.62 mm nato cartridge, and the m-14/m1a1 springfield armory variant rifles, or the m-40/m-700 family of rifles used by marine and army snipers.

the second is the 69 grain sierra boat tail hollow point bullet, which is the standard choice for police and military marksmen and sniper the world over for lethal accuracy in the 5.56 mm nato cartridge, and the m-16/ar-15 variant rifles.

these loads can be bought from manufacturers like federal and black hills ammunition company in south dakota and they give any person shooting them match quality ammunition, plus ammunition which has proved its mettle on the battle field.

in addition, the components making up this ammunition are readily available on the market, and any person with a modicum of manual dexterity and the ability to read and perform simple measuring tasks can readily load his own ammo, and “tweak” it to the particular needs of his shooting or of his rifle.  the bullets making the best loads are known, and the powders and weights of powders and the types and brands and standards of primers are all well known and written about.  this is a bit arcane for our purposes, but the performance levels and dependability levels of this stuff is so widely known and so widely circulated, that people even can designated the varied lots of cartridge cases which produce the best target accuracy and function in certain types of rifles.

there is no guess work.  and, the continued loyalty of people to these standard components is based on one thing, and one thing only, and that is continued dominance at the firing line.  if something better came down the pike tomorrow, shooters would flock to it and leave the 5.56 mm nato and the 7.62 nato behind.

period.  end of discussion.  they want only to win competitions; they want only to live through combat.  they want to be able to eliminate any element of “fight” from the adversary, and kill him as quickly and efficiently and ruthlessly as possible, and these components are recognized for having the ability to do it.

so, while i shoot nosler ballistic tips and partitions in my hunting rifles, i shoot only the components mentioned in this article in my rifles set up for the sorts of things contemplated in world stemming from islamic expansion.

as for the rifle system, though i don’t think it is perfect, i would recommend either the ar-10 in 7.62 mm nato (.308 winchester) or the ar-15 variants in 5.56 x 41 mm (.223 remington).

on balance, for ease of reloading, and because it recoils less, i would choose the .223 remington (5.56 mm nato).  the ar-15 type rifle is lighter and smaller than its bigger brother in .308 winchester, and is easier to keep on target in recoil.  it is easier to reacquire a target for a follow up second shot, if need be.

i am reminded of the old joke amongst elephant hunters, which goes something along the line of why don’t you shoot a .700 nitro express, to which the answer goes, because they don’t make them.

there is no doubt but what the 7.62 mm nato hits hard, and kills marginally better, at all ranges, than the 5.56 mm nato. no doubt about it: mohammed ali always hit harder than sugar ray leonard, absolutely no question.  but, for the average fellow, sugar ray leonard was more than up to the task,  and possessed of enough power to handle any reasonable "civilian" foe he might have faced.

in my opinion, an enemy combatant or a religious fanatic hit squarely in the vitals with either cartridge is not going to stay in the fight very long.  an enemy combatant or a religious fanatics hit marginally in an extremity, is probably going to stay in the fight regardless of which round he has been struck with.  and, if someone doesn’t go down after being hit the first time with the 5.56 mm nato, there is no rule says that he cannot be shot again.

so, that is it.

.223 remington (5.56 x 41 mm nato) is my round of preference, with the 69 grain sierra hollow point boat tail bullet.  it has been adjudged by the united states military and by the attorney general of the united states to be in conformity with the requirements of the geneva convention on frangible bullet standards, though why one would care about this is beyond me. (as has been found the .308 caliber 169 grain sierra bullets brand hollow point boat tailed bullet.  quite legal, according to the attorneys general attached to the pentagon, and who "rule" on these issues in setting legal and administrative policy.)

fired in the ar-15/m-16 variant line of rifles, as made by many, many manufacturers.  (they are in reality firearms assemblers.  the basic components, including the upper and lower receivers are made by a few government contractors and then distributed out over the market by various jobbers and suppliers.  this is how easy they are to make.  literally anyone can do it: any local gun smith with a $70.00 toolkit can build one of these things, and, do so legally.)

(until the government shuts off the supply of upper and lower receivers, which are complicated aluminum castings.)

enough of this.

goodnight. 

what you can learn about surviving a "gun fight" from james coburn .... what is a firearm for? .... what should should be your resolve when you take up a firearm? .... go back and read the about john "40 second" boyd at ejectejecteject .... think

in the opening scene of waterhole #3 we find out hero james coburn plying his hobby, perhaps vocation, playing a game of poker at a table in a old west saloon, replete with bartender, spittoons and thin cigars, and it seems a dance hall girl, if memory serves me correctly, apparently behind her quota as it is broad daylight.  (by the way, i grew up with horsey people, and coburn makes almost as good a cowboy as sam elliot, sort of a poor man’s same elliot as it were: both have the casual slouch down perfectly, the sly insouciance, but elliot has that soft hardness of a cow hand down just a little better.)

at any rate some ill tempered lout calls coburn into the dusty streets for a gun fight, a duel, mano a mano, no second place finishing money on the line.  we can see from coburn’s face (that is what actor’s get paid for, is it not?) that some danger is involved, but, reluctantly, he decides to face it.

he is not, clearly, enthusiastic about the prospect of a gun fight.

coburn emerges from the saloon into the harsh light through the swinging doors at the front, and onto the board side walk above the street in which his horse is tied to the hitching wrack, and essays the situation, his adversary standing in the street, pistol holstered, apparently confident that the gun play will go for him.

and, we see in coburn’s face the clarity of revelation, of resolution that tells us that he has seen the way clear, and we see him apply this insight to the situation at hand, just as john “40 second” body would have approved.

coburn strides to his horse, interposing it between him and his adversary, pulls a rifle from the saddle scabbard (to you tender feet, that is the leather thingies on the side of the saddle thingies where he sits on the horse thingies), lays the rifle over his saddle from behind the cover of the horse, and shoots his adversary dead in the street, puts the rifle back in its scabbard, and rides calmly off, a matter of fact look on his face.

this scene, folks, accurately depicts the use that guns are to be put, which is killing people, not getting involved in “fights.”  If you want to use firearms with the concomitant motivation of surviving such use, then you should understand clearly the difference between killing, and fighting: you can get killed fighting.

the word fighting implies contest, and a contest, by definition, implies variable outcomes.  coburn’s character understands the difference: he is a card player, who expects to win, and not a gambler, who hasn’t got a damned idea in the world how all is to come out.

if you take to weapons, avoid fights like the plague, because you can get quite seriously killed fighting with guns.

and this scene folks accurately depicts the mind set of anyone that reaches for a gun before it comes to his grasp, that being the conviction that he will survive the use of the gun, and that someone else will not.  when you take a firearm in your hands, you should be determined that you are going to live and someone else is going to die.

there is no other conceivable or justifiable reason for using a firearm against another person, from either a moral or a tactical or strategic standpoint, unless taking a gun to hand is the only chance of survival that you have.  from previous discussions you know my view that this is a particularly bad situation to be in.

what can we learn from coburn?

first, he determined to live.  he did not determine that he wanted to live, as that is a question for poets and persons taking ethics classes: such a question is a philosophical matter.  he did not question his right to make that choice.

second, he determined that in order to live, someone else had to die: he recognized that his challenger placed that choice upon him, and he did not relieve his challenger from that responsibility.  he did not dither on whether the path he had chosen was fair, or whether it was moral, or whether it was justified.  he was not, to continue a theme, presented with a problem in situational ethics in a situational ethics class, nor a poetic question for the ages, nor the task of writing a soliloquy on the brutal nature of existence.

third, he eschewed a fair fight in the street, armed with a sidearm as was his adversary, the nature of the fight being dictated by the ethos of the day and by his adversary.  he chose a fight that he would survive. remember, coburn was a card player, not a gambler, and he did not choose to expose himself to risk by following the dictates or the game plan of the fellow who had determined to kill him.

fourth, once committed to killing his adversary, he chose the superior strategic and tactical means by which to preserve himself.  He chose the use of the rifle over the pistol, given his knowledge that the rifle in his scabbard was a superior killing tool over the pistol in his holster.  he gave himself superior cover by hiding behind the body and bulk of his horse.  he chose, given the choice to use the rifle, to act at a distance where his exposure to harm was at a minimum, and not to act up close, where his exposure to harm was greatest. and, when he acted, he acted swiftly and with resolution, and killed his adversary as surely and decisively as he could.

fifth, once committed and having decided, he did not question his action nor think about it, but executed his plan and his adversary with dispatch.

sixth, he did not warn his adversary, and did not engage in diplomacy.  in one of the early spaghetti westerns, clint eastwood is accosted by a person bent on killing him while eastwood sits in a bubble bath.  his would be killer verbalizes his rage in a rant to do a blogger justice, while clint says nothing, just regarding his opponent through the haze of his long, thin cigar.  clint w/ glint shoots his assailant from beneath the bubble bath, stands (fully clothed if memory serves me correct), and utters, mutters through teeth and lips securing the cigar, something along the line of “shoot first, talk later” with complete disdain for the verbal fellow lying dead at his feet.

dear, gentle reader, understand the following proposition full well.—

firearms are for killing your enemy; they are not for fighting your enemy and especially not for fighting "fairly", if you are to survive the struggle.

do not take guns in hand, unless you mean to do harm with them.

and, just as james coburn, when you do take firearm to hand to defend yourself, your way of life, your ethos and civilization, your political liberties, do so with a firearm and a tactical solution, a strategic stance, which maximizes your chance of living and prevailing. please understand the redundancy in that statement for if you live, you will prevail.  and, please understand the finality of defeat if you lose, for if you die in this struggle, if we die in this struggle, our beliefs die with us for perhaps 1,000 years.

please go back and read my post about john “40 second” boyd, and please go to http://www.ejectejecteject.com about the nature of battle, and the decision making and mind set necessary to survive armed conflict.  think about this excellent article, and distill its lessons. 

i am now going to tell you a story, which is not based on make believe.  it happened to a county sheriff who did everything wrong with his weapon that can be done, and who created every opportunity in the world to make his wife a widow, and only narrowly survived a whole series of very bad decisions and lack of resolve. 

it started and proceeded uneventfully enough, with the arrest of an erratic driver for dwi.  the deputy sheriff took the driver from his car and placed him in the back of his patrol car without restraining the suspect any further, whereupon the fellow lay over and seemingly passed to sleep.  as the deputy stood by his car, suspect in “custody,” he made arrangements to have the suspect’s car towed to impound.

the man roused from his seeming stupor to ask the deputy what was going on, and the deputy replied that he was having the guy’s car impounded.  the fellow erupted, enraged over that seemingly minor detail.  he tried to open the car doors, but he could not, and he could not crawl into the front seat, because of a stout expanded metal screen between the seats. 

he then screamed at the deputy that he was going to kill him, turned on his back in the seat, and began to kick the rear window out.  the deputy advised his dispatch of the situation, but otherwise did nothing.  the guy kicked the window out.  as he crawled from the back window to accost the deputy, the deputy pulled his sidearm, a .357 magnum revolver, and told the suspect to halt or that he would shoot.  this really enraged the fellow, and he told the deputy, well, shoot if you have the balls for it, but i am going to take that gun from you and shove it up your ass and kill you with it.  the deputy threatened him again, and did nothing else except hold the gun at the ready.  the guy came off the trunk, approached the deputy at a steady walk, and in a struggle for the weapon, knocked the deputy to the ground and wrested the revolver from him, and, with the deputy flat on his back, pointed the gun to the deputies face and pulled the trigger, which would have killed the deputy except that at the last moment the deputy turned from his killer in a violent twisting motion.  the bullet from the .357 grazed his neck, and another struck him full in the chest, on his armored vest.  the deputy somehow rose to his feet, another struggle ensued for control of the weapon, and during the struggle the gun went off, the bullet striking the bad guy in the abdomen, whereupon he ran and staggered into a nearby corn field to take refuge.

in this country, every year, a surprisingly large number of police officers are killed by antagonists who take the officers’ own weapons from them, and use them to kill the police officers.

this is reflective of poor weapon’s doctrine, but mostly it is reflective of a casual and lackadaisical mindset on the part of police officers who have not thought the matter through in any disciplined sense, and of a similar casual and slipshod approach to the weapon’s doctrine on the part of command.

this incidence reflects the stupidity of gun fights, and the risk of fatal harm that comes by letting one’s control of the tactical situation slip away.  if you are to take up the gun, you had best become proficient in its use as an offensive weapon, and not just count on shithouse luck and a divine beneficence to get you through the fray.  otherwise, you are going to be killed most unpleasantly.

you have to learn how to kill with it, without exposing yourself to risk. 

the forces arrayed against you may be numerically superior, and you cannot afford to let your life be wasted by your intellectual naiveté, or your lack of emotional and personal commitment, or your lack of technical and weapons proficiency.

you must understand what you are about.

i will leave you with a rhetorical question, which will lead into further discussions?

what in god’s name is a firearm for?

the very most precise answer and observation, is so that you do not have to kill an adversary with either your bare hands or your teeth, and so that he does not get close enough to kill you with his bare hands or his teeth.  do you understand?

it has been, during the entire history of the gun, so that you can kill from a distance. if you understand and accept that basic proposition, then all else that follows will be simple.  if you cannot accept that, then everything else i say will seem elusive.

yes, it is just like cold blooded murder, isn’t it.  if you cannot work your way past this, you may as well convert to islam right now, because you haven’t the stuff to assert your own right to self preservation, nor have you the stuff to protect your values or your civilization, or your religion or your society.

you are simply redundant biomass.  or, more prosaically and perhaps less prejudicially, just grist for the mill.  you just don’t count for much, because you really won’t ever be able to bring yourself to stand for very much, at least not at any expenditure of effort or cost to yourself.

in my humble opinion, of course, as you may feel quite a bit differently on the subject.

insulting bastard, aren’t i?  you wait until you meet that jihadi terrorist on your front porch.