The Tank Museum
Published Jun 14, 2024Normandy, 1944: in the dense bocage countryside, two tanks, the US-built M4 Sherman and the German PzKpfw IV go head-to-head in the fighting around the Allied bridgehead. Both are similar in capabilities but which will prevail?
In this film, Chris Copson compares the armour protection, firepower and mobility of the two designs, and we recount the events of a specific engagement fought at Mouen near Caen on 28th June, 1944.
00:00 | Intro
01:45 | Meet the Tanks
03:08 | Armour
07:37 | Firepower
12:19 | Mobility & Operation
13:29 | Tank Crews
16:37 | Summary
17:15 | Mouen, Normandy, 28 June 1944
23:10 | ConclusionThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
#tankmuseum
October 14, 2024
Quality v Quantity? | Panzer IV v M4 Sherman | Tank V Tank – Normandy, 1944
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QotD: Americans and their cars
Given that, for “Americans”, cars are a pretty good proxy for personality. What you drive, and more importantly how you drive, shows everyone else on the road the state of your soul. There are entire models of car — Toyota Priuses (Prii?), Subaru Outbacks — that are only driven by SJWs. Karen drives a late-model SUV, almost universally, but if she’s forced to drive a minivan or, God help us all, a standard four-door, she’ll festoon it with a thousand of those “passive-aggressive” (or whatever we end up calling them) bumper stickers: My broomstick is in the shop. Stick-figure families in rainbow colors. Hate is not a family value (often juxtaposed, with brain-breaking obtuseness, next to one wishing that various “conservatives” would die in fires). And so on.
Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.
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October 13, 2024
Occupation of Germany, Plunder and Enslavement?
World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2024The Allies’ occupation of Germany was marked by competing visions for its future, ranging from France’s focus on security to the Soviet push for reparations. This episode dives into the complex negotiations that determined Germany’s borders, industrial disarmament, and economic management, all of which would shape Europe’s post-war order and fuel the East-West divide.
(more…)
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October 12, 2024
Government-mandated backdoor access – “weakening security for anybody weakens it for everybody”
After all this time, it’s no surprise to discover that unlike the police — who theoretically only use these government-required “backdoors” with a legal warrant — foreign hackers have been merrily using these “law enforcement tools” for their own purposes:
“I Hear You wiretapping poster, Mad Magazine, NYC” by gruntzooki is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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For as long as law enforcement has sought a way to monitor people’s conversations — though they’d only do so with a court order, we’re supposed to believe — privacy experts have warned that building backdoors into communications systems to ease government snooping is dangerous. A recent Chinese incursion into U.S. internet providers using infrastructure created to allow police easy wiretap access offers evidence, and not for the first time, that weakening security for anybody weakens it for everybody.
Subverted Wiretapping Systems
“A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week. “For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data.”
Among the companies breached by the hacker group, dubbed “Salt Typhoon” by investigators, are Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies. The group is just one of several linked to the Chinese government that has targeted data and communications systems in the West.
While the Journal report doesn’t specify, Joe Mullin and Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believe the wiretap-ready systems penetrated by the Chinese hackers were “likely created to facilitate smooth compliance with wrong-headed laws like CALEA”. CALEA, known in full as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, dates back to 1994 and “forced telephone companies to redesign their network architectures to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap digital telephone calls,” according to an EFF guide to the law. A decade later it was expanded to encompass internet service providers, who were targeted by Salt Typhoon.
“That’s right,” comment Mullin and Cohn. “The path for law enforcement access set up by these companies was apparently compromised and used by China-backed hackers.”
Ignored Precedents
This isn’t the first time that CALEA-mandated wiretapping backdoors have been exploited by hackers. As computer security expert Nicholas Weaver pointed out for Lawfare in 2015, “any phone switch sold in the US must include the ability to efficiently tap a large number of calls. And since the US represents such a major market, this means virtually every phone switch sold worldwide contains ‘lawful intercept’ functionality.”
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QotD: From conspicuous consumption to junk science
Buck Throckmorton, “Organic Food & Anti-Vaxxers – Does The Fear of Safe Food Lead to Fear of Safe Vaccines”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2019-12-08.
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October 11, 2024
“[T]he past is like a thriving civilization; they do things better there”
Another recommended link from the “Your Weekly Stack” set of links to interesting posts on Substack. This, like the previous post, is from an author I hadn’t read before and thought was worth sharing with you.
This is from The American Tribune, making the case that modern Americans (and westerners in general) are in a similar situation to the white minority in Rhodesia:
We stand today in the ruins of civilization. Much as the 9th Century Anglo-Saxons looked at the stone works of the Romans and thought they must have been giants,1 or the Greeks of the post-Sea Peoples Dark Age saw the works of the Minoans and Myceneans and thought only Cyclopses could have constructed such structures,2 we stare at the achievements of the 19th and early 20th Centuries in near-disbelief.
The moon hasn’t been stepped upon since the 70s. Mars remains uncolonized. Municipal infrastructure like water treatment and provision is falling apart and the government either can’t or won’t respond to natural disasters.3 Whereas we once built beautiful buildings that lasted for centuries, structures such as Chatsworth and the Horse Guards Building of Whitehall, now we have ugly structures of concrete and steel that are falling apart already.4
The situation as regards crime and squalor is even worse. As Curtis Yarvin notes in “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives”:
If you read travel narratives of what is now the Third World from before World War II (I’ve just been enjoying Erna Fergusson’s Guatemala, for example), you simply don’t see anything like the misery, squalor and barbarism that is everywhere today. (Fergusson describes Guatemala City as “clean”. I kid you not.) What you do see is social and political structures, whether native or colonial, that are clearly not American in origin, and that are unacceptable not only by modern American standards but even by 1930s American standards.
So whereas Guatemala was once clean, now America’s cities are towers of concrete surrounded by piles of refuse, mobs of zombie-like drug addicts living on the streets,5 and infested with criminals of both the petty and highly violent variety. As Hartley put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. More accurately, the past is like a thriving civilization; they do things better there.
In short, we, like those in the Belgian Congo after the Belgians left, live in an “Empire of Dust” where much of what remains is the ruin of a prior civilization destroyed not because it didn’t work, but because the demented ideology of the present conflicted with its continued, functional existence.6
What happened? A sort of decolonization inflicted upon the Great Powers themselves — namely America, Germany, Britain, and France — after the outlying colonies had long been destroyed. The decay of law and order, the promotion of anti-white hatred, the decay of infrastructure, and the filling of positions with corrupt thugs rather than honorable gentlemen,7 all of it is more or less what happened to the colonies in the ’50s and ’60s. Further, it is similar to what happened later on in South Africa, where a collection of communists, leftists, and NGOs with like mindsets and funded by those like George Soros turned a formerly thriving civilization into what now amounts to a land like Mad Max but with more murder.8
But while the South Africanization of America is certainly an issue that we face,9 it’s not the most accurate comparison to our present problem. South Africa was, when it fell, filled with decades of racial hatred sparked by decades of apartheid that ended only then (though was somewhat overblown), something that Europe never had and nowhere in America has had in over half a century. That unique circumstance created a degree of hatred that was overpowering and, though one with which we largely disagree, understandable. We, then, are somewhat different in terms of where we are and what is happening.
1. https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_363155/s40110183_phd_final_thesis_copy.pdf
2. See The Glory that Was Greece by Stobart
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_crisis; https://nypost.com/2024/10/03/us-news/north-carolina-hurricane-victims-slam-biden-harris-admin-as-fema-response-sputters/
4. See, for example, https://www.vintagebuilding.com/houses-longer-houses/
5. See, for example: https://youtu.be/9iSkKkzabnM
6. This is what the phrase “empire of dust” comes from: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/
7. https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/the-death-of-the-gentleman-and-the
8. https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/george-soross-hand-in-south-africas
9. I wrote an article on this for Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/united-states-south-africa-racial-justice
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October 10, 2024
The malignant persistence of snotty Millennial slang into adult life
At The Upheaval, a guest post by Dudley Newright tries to decipher what the hell all of the permanently online Millennial snots are saying:
Back in May, a black studies professor – an academic of the type who writes dissertations about the semiotics of Beyonce – “clapped back” at one of her peers, a white man who had dared complain that all the jobs in his corner of academia had been given to minorities. Their grating exchange went viral, and the poor schmuck certainly won’t be finding work now.
Setting aside the content of the argument, I was struck by how these people spoke to one another:
“I mean, I’m sorry –“
“Let’s be *very* clear here”
“So true 🙄”
“You’re so right 🙄”
“This is an *extremely* bad look for you”
“Umm, frankly…”
These are middle-aged PhDs with prestigious careers, talking like snotty teenagers or sassy black drag queens. Note the overuse of sarcasm, emphasizing asterisks, exclamation points, and pregnant pause ellipses to denote how “over it” they are. They all speak in the dramatic tone of the mean girl.
“History PhD here, and uh, this thread is…a lot!”
You see this language, and these people, everywhere today. You know them by the “fluent in sarcasm” in bio. The PhDs, the columnists, the policy wonks and Wonkettes, the assorted professional quippers and clappers back – public intellectuals did not talk this way twenty years ago. Lionel Trilling did not call things “brat”. This is new. Yet this bumptious patois is how our ascendant elites talk now.
I call it “Millennial Snot”.
It’s the defining feature of our degraded public discourse, and the apotheosis of secular enlightenment liberalism. The last 20 years of economic decline and consolidation of blue America into fake laptop work culminated in tweets like this:
What is Millennial Snot? Where did it come from? How did it become the prevailing liberal voice? What exactly is the matter with these people? And are we going to have to suffer this obnoxious style forever?
The nerds who never got over high schoolLiberals who have time to goof around on social media all day are probably nerds with more-or-less fake laptop jobs. They aren’t working class, otherwise they’d be working all day, but they aren’t terribly successful either, otherwise they’d have better things to do. The Bluesky-American sits awkwardly in the middle, and this feeds his resentment. He got good grades. He’s credentialed, and believes he’s smarter than his boss. He should be running things. If only society weren’t so dumb. If only society were fair, like when he was in school, when a kind teacher rewarded his intelligence and punished ne’erdowells.
Pity the “front row kid”, the wordcel who grinds his youth away for straight A’s only to find that the spoils of the market go to the back row goober who inherits his dad’s used car lot. If only there was some way to turn society upside down, so the front row kid could be on top. If only society could be more like grade school …
That would be a start, but the nerd doesn’t just want to be recognized for his intelligence. He also desperately wants to be cool. He wants to prove to the world that he won’t be shoved into a locker any more. He’s with it now, he uses the latest teen slang, he “understands the assignment”. This is how you get balding hetero professors saying stuff like “she ate and left no crumbs”, and “big mad” and other phrases that will sound embarrassingly dated in a few weeks.
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Trump’s tariff proposals will rival Smoot-Hawley for self-inflicted economic woes
J.D. Tuccille explains why Trump’s economic plans are very much a curate’s egg of good and bad ideas, but the proposed tariff plans would more than compensate for any good positive effects from the rest of his proposals:
Willis C. Hawley (left) and Reed Smoot in April 1929, shortly before the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act passed the House of Representatives.
Library of Congress photo via Wikipedia Commons.
Former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to extend the tax cuts passed when he was in the White House, which are due to expire next year. That would not just be welcomed by the many Americans who would benefit, it could boost economic activity. But there’s a big problem: The protectionist tariffs favored by Trump would undo the good done by his tax cuts, reducing rather than increasing prosperity.
Tariffs Not Seen Since the Great Depression
“Former President Donald Trump’s proposals to impose a universal tariff of 20 percent and an additional tariff on Chinese imports of at least 60 percent would spike the average tariff rate on all imports to highs not seen since the Great Depression,” warns Erica York of the Tax Foundation.
Trump has actually been a little vague on the size of his universal tariff, first floating it at 10 percent while allowing “it may be more than that”, and then upping the ante to 20 percent. Either way, it’s a cost that ends up being largely paid by Americans in terms of higher retail prices and more expensive imported parts and materials for domestic manufacturing.
The Trump administration’s 2018 “tariffs resulted in higher prices for a wide variety of goods that U.S. consumers and businesses purchase,” the Tax Foundation’s Alex Durante and Alex Muresianu concluded.
Even when tariffs don’t directly affect the cost of imported goods purchased by consumers, they still drive up the prices of many things made in the U.S. The Cato Institute’s Pierre Lemieux points out that “a tariff on an input (say, steel) is paid by the American importer who will typically pass it down the supply chain to his customers and eventually to the consumers of the final good (say, a car)”. Instead of boosting domestic production, that can do harm, instead.
“For manufacturing employment, a small boost from the import protection effect of tariffs is more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” Federal Reserve Board economists found when they researched the 2018 tariffs.
That’s not to say Trump is alone in his protectionism. Last month, Bob Davis noted for Foreign Policy that “the Biden administration is the first since at least President John F. Kennedy’s time to fail to negotiate a major free trade deal, instead embracing tariffs” while Trump pursued both tariffs and trade deals.
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October 9, 2024
The Korean War 016 – South Koreans Invade the North! – October 8, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 8 Oct 2024This week the KPA continue to grapple with the hole made by the landings at Incheon, as South Korean forces push past the 38th Parallel. MacArthur’s attention, however, is already on his next big gambit: a landing at Wonsan. South Korean forces may very well beat him to the punch, though, as their drive north continues. Beyond the Yalu River, Mao Zedong watches these developments closely, and plans his response.
Chapters
00:51 Recap
01:12 Seoul Aftermath
03:50 ROK Enters North Korea
05:28 The UN Resolution
07:36 Crossing the Parallel
14:25 The Wonsan Plan
16:38 Conclusion
(more…)
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October 8, 2024
Hats off to the brilliant negotiators of the Mauritian government
At The Critic, Yuan Yi Zhu salutes the negotiators who managed to get an amazing deal from the British government for the Chagos Islands (which contain the strategic US naval base of Diego Garcia):
In the middle of that map is Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory and home to one of the most strategic airfields and anchorages on the planet. […] The red circle is 2,000 nautical miles from the island. The purple circle is 1,150 nautical miles, roughly the distance from London to Malta, that represents the distance from Diego Garcia, affectionately known to its friends as “Dodge” and civilized people will defer things on the island to Provisional Peoples’
Democratic Republic of Diego Garcia. That circle is also the distance from Diego Garcia to the island of Mauritius.
Caption and image from CDR Salamander.
Donald Trump likes to brag about his prowess as a negotiator, but he has nothing on the government of Mauritius, which pulled one of history’s great diplomatic heists yesterday, when it announced that the British government had agreed to give it the Chagos Islands, which have been sovereign British territory without interruption since 1814.
To add insult to injury, not only will Mauritius gain a new colony, but it will collect large rents from the Americans for the military base on Diego Garcia, while the British government will pay hefty financial support to Mauritius (Africa’s third richest country on a per capita basis) for the honour of handing over to Mauritius one of the world’s most strategically valuable territories.
In other words, not only is Mauritius having its cake and eating it too, it has also extracted from the British taxpayer a new cake, to be savoured while it smugly lectures the world about the importance of decolonisation.
Never mind that Mauritius sold the Chagos Islands to the United Kingdom in 1965 for the-then astronomical sum of £3 million and a valuable British security guarantee. Its prime minister had described the islands as “a portion of our territory of which very few people knew … which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”, so it was no big loss.
In the 1980s, a new government changed its mind and decided to get the islands back. It alleged the British had threatened to withhold independence from Mauritius unless it agreed to sell the territory. The small problem was that every single surviving Mauritian negotiator cheerfully admitted that they didn’t care about the Chagos, whose inhabitants they regarded as half-civilised savages.
And the blackmail thesis suffered from the fact that Britain in the 1960s could not get rid of its remaining colonies fast enough — Mauritius had to wait a few more years for independence because part of its population wanted it to remain a British territory.
Mauritius then decided to wave the bloody shirt of the Chagossians, who had been callously expelled by the British to make way for the air base and dumped on Mauritius. The fact that the Mauritian treated them terribly — so terribly, in fact, that thousands of them left for the UK, the country which had deported them in the first place — was but a minor detail.
In 2019, Mauritius managed to get the International Court of Justice to say that the islands should be given to Mauritius. The ruling was not even legally binding, but Mauritius was somehow able to convince gullible Whitehall functionaries that Britain had no choice but to give the islands to Mauritius.
So far as I am aware, there is no truth to the rumour that Spain and Argentina are in negotiation with Mauritius to take over their respective territorial claims on Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.
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For progressives, “freedom” means getting to choose who rules over you
Chris Bray reacts to an Anne Applebaum podcast hosted at The Atlantic which certainly demonstrates that progressives have a very different definition of the word “freedom” than most people:
Opening the discussion, Applebaum and co-host Peter Pomerantsev “explain” that there are two competing models of freedom in the American past. One model is adherence to American political norms, centered on submission to the authority of the federal government. Read this carefully:
Pomerantsev: Anne, the common conception — the one that I have, anyway — is that freedom is meant to be a good thing. Freedom is meant to be the same thing as democracy. Those two words — I hear them used interchangeably. Freedom means the Bill of Rights, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the freedom to choose who rules you.
Freedom is choosing who rules you. “Freedom is meant to be a good thing.”
There’s a scene in The Forty Year-Old Virgin in which a bunch of young men sit around drinking beers and talking about sex with their slightly odd older co-worker, and he starts trying to agree with them about how hot it is to touch a woman. “Yeah, man,” he says, fidgeting in his chair. “It’s so hot! It’s like … touching a … bag of sand.” They instantly realize that he’s never done the thing he’s describing.
So. Just a few days ago, I argued that whole layers of high-status American political and cultural figures are “no longer culturally American”. They don’t see the country, they don’t like the country, and they don’t have the most basic American instincts. Peter Pomerantsev thinks that living in America is like touching a bag of sand.
If freedom is “the Bill of Rights” and “the freedom to choose who rules you”, then no human being on the planet was ever free before the Bill of Rights was ratified, and no one outside the United States currently has freedom. You become free only with the promulgation of formal governmental rules on the existence of your freedom. Freedom is a federal document. “Freedom is meant to be democracy”, and those words are interchangeable. Freedom is voting. A stateless society without authorities who rule over the people is unfree: they don’t vote. You have to be ruled to become free.
This man is a dangerous idiot.
But then, incredibly, Anne Applebaum outdoes him:
Applebaum: Not quite. There’s another equally old American version of freedom, which is freedom to defy the federal government — you know, the freedom to go out into the Wild West and make up your own rules.
Applebaum begins a discussion with a history professor, Jefferson Cowie, who “explains” that this sick and dangerous idea of American freedom centers on the freedom to dominate others. “He describes how white settlers in the 1830s refused to abide by treaties that the federal government had signed with Native Americans and, instead, would repeatedly steal their land.”
Cowie: And so you have this really explosive moment where white settlers were promised, in some broad sense, access to land. They were denied it. And they took their claims of freedom against the federal government that was denying them the ability to take the land of other people — their freedom to steal land, basically.
Applebaum and Cowie go on to make other comparisons in which, for example, George Wallace argued for the freedom to impose racial segregation against the federal insistence on equal rights. Cowie winds up for the big finish:
We allow the word freedom to work in the political discourse because it appears to be a kind of liberal value, but underneath it is actually a very powerful ideology of domination. And that’s what he’s really talking about there, because it’s at that moment that the federal government is coming in to take away their freedom to control the political power of Black people.
So in every conflict over this model of freedom, a relentlessly emancipatory federal government — benevolent, respectful of minority rights, committed to justice for all — slams into state and local knuckle-draggers who say they want freedom, but are only using that word to mean that they want to hurt and dominate other people. The federal government is social rules, fairness, decency; resistance to federal authority manifests a sick conception of freedom at the inherently unfair lower levels of American society. State officials are mean; communities are vicious; the federal government is nice. Unclear how the mean locals turn into angels when they move to hold office in the District of Columbia, but there’s somehow a magic process of transformation in which a cruel people have a wise and decent central government. Power always makes people much kinder and more restrained.
This is derangement, and an assault on the most basic American history. It’s madness, but deliberate madness.
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QotD: The competitive instinct
One thing chicks of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to genders don’t realize these days is how competitive men — actual biological males — are hardwired to be. Things like World of Warcraft and fantasy football only exist because the genius who invented those figured out a way to tap into that heretofore-unexpressed male competitiveness. And indeed, it’s the guy who’d never even dream of putting on shoulder pads who’s the most insanely competitive guy in a fantasy football league or (I’m certain) a whatever-they’re-called in World of Warcraft. Even the uber-dorks in the Math Club and the Speech and Debate Society went after each other like Mickey Ward and Arturo Gatti. It’s just how guys are … or, at least, how guys used to be.
[…]
When it comes right down to it, that’s why men of a certain age simply don’t get “women’s sports”. Few will be as crustily chauvinistic as yer ‘umble narrator, and come right out and say it, but here goes: Women’s “sports” are just a shoddy knockoff of the real thing, because women just aren’t wired that way. That’s not to say that there aren’t competitive women, or athletic women — obviously there are, some very athletic and very competitive — but the female of the species just isn’t wired to put in the work the way males are. When faced with the prospect of three straight hours in the batting cage, swinging at curve after curve until your blisters have blisters and your shoulders feel like they’re falling out of their sockets, most women will quite sensibly ask “why bother?” Competition-for-competition’s-sake, even when it’s only against yourself in those long, long, looooong hours in the cage, just doesn’t motivate them the way it does us.
Which is why a person’s reaction to Simone Biles, or the USA Women’s soccer team, or the WNBA, or what have you is an almost perfect predictor of their age, not just their “gender”. I judge sports as sports. I don’t care about soccer, but if I did, I’d care about it as soccer — meaning, I’d want to see the best possible players, playing at the highest possible level. Women’s Olympic teams — that is to say, all star teams, the very best players — routinely get smoked by teams of 15 year old boys. Sir Charles is pushing sixty, but he could dominate the WNBA right now, in street clothes. Obviously this doesn’t apply to Pee Wee or rec leagues, but if you’re going to take a paycheck for doing it, then I want to see exactly what I paid for.
In estrogen-drenched, synchronized-ovulation Clown World, it’s all about appearances. Sure, she let her team down and wussed out (while still talking up how great she is), but can’t you see that it gave her the sadz? Sure, Megan Rapinoe et al keep getting smoked by 14 year old boys, then choking in international competition, but can’t you see her out there, with her pink hair and her tats and her Strong, Confident Empowerment? The “competition”, such as it is, is an excuse for the display. Michael Jordan ought to give baseball another shot. We know he can cry. These days, that’d get him a first-class ticket to Cooperstown.
Severian, “On Competition”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-02.
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October 7, 2024
Handguns in the US Army in World War Two
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jun 28, 2024Was the 1911 an emotional support totem or a viable combat weapon? Or both? American soldiers had a bit different take on handguns than soldiers of many other armies, and I think it stems from the American identity with the frontier — the Wild West was well within memory for many people when World War Two broke out. So today, let’s look at the American take on handguns during that war …
https://utreon.com/c/forgottenweapons/
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October 5, 2024
Scary words of 2024 – “Luckily, FEMA is on the case”
As I recounted a few days back, I was relieved to hear from my friend in the Asheville NC area after the region absorbed the damage from Hurricane Helene. Tom Knighton had a similar experience:
A friend of mine lives at the edge of where Helene did her worst. He just got power back on yesterday and was finally able to let me know he was OK. I was worried for obvious reasons.
In the deepest, worst parts of where the storm ripped things to shreds, they’re trying to just make it to the next day. They’re struggling to find clean drinking water, food, shelter, the works.
Luckily, FEMA is on the case.
They took to social media yesterday and posted this crap.
That’s right. People who don’t have internet, phone service, or electricity should call, download an app, or log onto the FEMA website.
I won’t ask how stupid can the federal government be, but I’m worried they’d take it as a challenge.
Back in the day, FEMA would roll into a disaster area with paper applications and facilitate all of that right there. While the internet and smartphones are glorious things, this is a prime example of when they’re a terrible option for people.
Right now, American citizens are struggling. They’re thankful to be alive and are working their butts off to keep themselves alive. They’ve paid taxes their entire lives, and now that they need some of theirs back, their federal government is telling them to do what is physically impossible for many of them.
I can’t help but see this and think that their claims of having enough money in spite of spending hundreds of billions on illegal immigrants ring a tad hollow.
If they have the money, why not put boots on the ground getting people signed up for any assistance they may be entitled to?
Honestly, while I’ve commented before about the gross incompetence of the government in disaster response — and I’ll agree that maliciousness is most definitely a possibility, if not a probability in these instances — this is just weapons-grade … whatever, be it stupidity, meanness, or a combination of both.
Heads should roll.
Update: David Warren notes that it’s not merely FEMA incompetence, it’s active deterrence for private relief efforts by all federal agencies.
From the Internet (for instance updates from Elon Musk), we note that non-governmental charitable efforts are not merely “discouraged”. The government is seizing and impounding desperately-needed local goods and services. The rest of the federal bureaucracy is also “chipping in”, to stifle relief efforts. The FAA, for instance, is restricting private aircraft with supplies, and making it almost impossible to fly drones, demanding that flights be individually approved by their slothful trolls. Those who wish to bring help to the survivors have both the wreckage of the storm, and government agents to block them.
This is how things work in this world, and have worked, since the Reformation, when the state took over welfare, hospitals, schools, and all other eleemosynary institutions. Rather than allow inspiring expressions of Christian charity, they became the means for cynical political posturing and control. And with “democracy”, we have detailed laws and policies, to prevent the people from helping themselves — as they would do, by laws of nature.
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Did South Korea Provoke the Korean War?
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 4 Oct 2024Was South Korea on the verge of invading North Korea in 1949? Today Indy looks at the bloody fighting across the Korean border in the years leading up to war. Then he asks the question, why did Kim finally decide to invade South Korea in the early months of 1950?
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