Hallowed Ground

Posted on | May 26, 2020 | 1 Comment

Try to imagine a row of men, standing shoulder to shoulder, all of them armed with rifles. Picture those men standing on a hill, a few hundred yards in the distance, with their guns aimed at you. Now imagine yourself, standing amid a similar group of armed men, ordered to march across that distance in an attack on the hill: “Forward, march!”

Many times have I tried to imagine what that would be like, marching across that field with the minie balls whizzing past and artillery booming, hearing the sickening thud as some of the bullets found their mark in the men beside you, the cries of the wounded amid the horrible racket of rifle and cannon fire — an experience beyond imagination.

How in the world did men ever endure such an experience? Yet they did. They marched straight into the gates of Hell, and somehow — strange to say — some of those men survived to tell the tale.

Years ago, while I was researching my great-grandfather’s service in the Confederate army, I came across a biographical sketch of his commanding officer, Col. Birkett Davenport Fry. A veteran of the Mexican War, Fry had been a part of William Walker’s filibuster expedition to Nicaragua. He later moved to Alabama, where his wife’s family owned a mill, and was appointed colonel of the 13th Alabama Regiment. He was wounded in battle at Seven Pines, at Sharpsburg, and at Chancellorsville, where his regiment stormed a Union artillery position as part of Archer’s brigade. After Archer was captured in the first day’s fight at Gettysburg, Fry led the brigade on July 3 in what became known as Pickett’s Charge, where he was shot through the thigh near the Union line on Cemetery Ridge and was later captured. It was subsequently said of Colonel Fry that he was “a man of gunpowder reputation.”

Such men, and such reputations, are not to be insulted. Yet it seems that some people, who have never heard a shot fired in anger, have not been taught the proper attitude of respect:

Damned perfidious Yankee scoundrels! Readers will please excuse my strong language, and those of my countrymen residing north of the Mason-Dixon Line should not feel that their integrity is being impugned, because I speak specifically of the New York Times. It has long been my conviction that no honest person would ever wish their name to be associated with that disreputable publication, but over the weekend, the Times went far beyond their usual “fake news” with an unseemly attack on the United States armed forces. “Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy?” was the headline on a disgusting 1,800-word column, signed by the editorial board of the Times, its deliberately insulting theme summarized by a subhead: “It is time to rename bases for American heroes — not racist traitors.”
Of course, it would be a mistake to believe that the New York Times is against treason. They have spent decades heaping praise on America’s enemies, both foreign and domestic, a tradition dating back at least as far as the 1930s, when Walter Duranty was writing propaganda for Stalin. No one should imagine that the Times has developed a concern for the morale of U.S. military, and their attack on the tradition by which military installations in the South were named for Confederate generals is simply a further effort by A. G. Sulzberger’s publication to deserve the contempt of every patriotic American. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.

Category: American Spectator, History, Military

How to Ruin Your Life (or Down the Rabbit Hole With a Deer-Sexual)

Posted on | May 25, 2020 | 1 Comment

Stephan Robert Loehr was a promising young man from an affluent family. His maternal grandfather was a successful engineer, while his father was a cardiologist. Attending high school in Chapel Hill, N.C., young Stephan was tall and popular and seemed destined for a bright future, like his older brother, who followed in their father’s footsteps to become a physician. Unfortunately, Stephan was spoiled and lazy, and spent way too much time playing videogames, so he attended a rather obscure university where he was a member of their competitive videogame team, but didn’t accomplish much in the way of academics.

You’ll notice I’m using past-tense verbs to describe who Stephan Loehr was, and I’m sure you’re probably thinking, “Oh, he’s dead now?”

Not exactly. “Dead-named,” yes, but still alive. Because you see, he now insists on being referred to with the pronouns “she/her,” and is known by the online handle “FerociouslySteph.” Brace yourself before you go any further, because this situation is painful. Read more

Category: The Transgender Cult

Why Is Ann Coulter Doing This?

Posted on | May 25, 2020 | 1 Comment

An unnecessary conflict:

Former Donald Trump fan Ann Coulter yesterday went on an extraordinary Twitter rant, calling the president a ‘disloyal retard’ and a ‘blithering idiot.’
Coulter was incensed on Sunday after Trump tweeted ‘Alabama, do not trust Jeff Sessions’, the latest attack by the president on his former Attorney General.
The far-right pundit said Trump’s endorsement of Tommy Tuberville – Sessions’ opponent in the Republican primary – showed he was ‘the most disloyal human God ever created.’
The author of the 2016 book ‘In Trump We Trust’ went on to say: ‘I will never apologize for supporting the issues that candidate Trump advocated, but I am deeply sorry for thinking that this shallow and broken man would show even some remote fealty to the promises that got him elected.’
Coulter, 58, once one of the few people who Trump followed on Twitter, has gone after the president ever since she feels he betrayed his immigration pledges, particularly his failure to build the wall.
She defended Sessions in her tweets, saying he was ‘the ONE PERSON in the Trump administration who did anything about immigration.’
It comes amid a bitter war of words between Trump and Sessions which centers around the Alabamian’s time as AG and his infamous recusal in 2017.
Trump was furious Sessions recused himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Sessions ultimately resigned at Trump’s request.
Trump tweeted Saturday: ‘3 years ago, after Jeff Sessions recused himself, the Fraudulent Mueller Scam began. Alabama, do not trust Jeff Sessions. He let our Country down. That’s why I endorsed Coach Tommy Tuberville (@TTuberville), the true supporter of our #MAGA agenda!’
Coulter disagreed with the president’s analysis of how the ‘Mueller Scam’ came to pass, writing: ‘Sessions HAD to recuse himself, you complete blithering idiot.
‘YOU did not have to go on Lester Holt’s show and announce you fired Comey over the Russian investigation. That’s what got you a Special Prosecutor.’

Everyone wishes Trump would be more circumspect in his Twitter usage, but I don’t see the benefit of engaging in such public feuds. I am not an enemy of Jeff Sessions, but I think most conservatives see his recusal as a mistake, and I don’t see why Sessions believes he is owed a return to his former Senate seat. If you feel differently, of course, you have the right to your own opinion, but I won’t argue with you about it, because I don’t enjoy seeing conservatives lacerating each other in public this way.

Category: Ann Coulter, Donald Trump

Rule 5 Sunday: Kayleigh “Honey Badger” McEnany

Posted on | May 25, 2020 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

There’s a new Press Secretary at the White House, and like her namesake, she just doesn’t care about the bruised egos and outraged sensibilities of the White House Press Corps. She’s tearing them up on a daily basis, and the press just can’t deal. Too bad for them; it’s nice to have a Press Secretary who’s combative and hot. Here she is in 2018 shortly after her double mastectomy.

With the Lightning

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off as usual with Hot Pick Of The Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #993, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns; at Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Sixth Annual Commencement Speech Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s still on a major opera kick with Nabucco, Nadine Sierra, Turandot, Kristy Katzmann, Don Giovanni, Girls In Windows, Lohengrin, Sondra Radvanovsky, Kayleigh McEnany, and Faust.

A View From The Beach’s haul this week includes Morgan Fairchild, Chesapeake Crabs Doing OK, Not Great But OK, Aunt Becky is Headed to the Big House, Fish Pic Friday – Two for One Sale, Oyster Benefits Oversold, It’s Tattoo Thursday, Chesapeake Bay Barely Passes Bay Foundation Report Card, Your Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, Muddy Monday, Palm Sunday? and 70%? Really?

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe this week is Raquel Welch, Bacon Time has pole dancers, and Red Pilled Jew contributes Women on Boats as well as Women In Sun & Surf.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

May Is Mental Health Awareness Month, and Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | May 24, 2020 | Comments Off on May Is Mental Health Awareness Month, and Crazy People Are Dangerous

Last week, a shocking video went viral showing a young black man brutally beating an elderly white man. James Woods posted the video to his Twitter account, and even President Trump took notice. Online sleuths using face-recognition software quickly identified the suspect as 20-year-old Jaden Hayden, and linked him to social-media accounts with bizarre racial rants:

Content Hayden had previously uploaded to his YouTube channel suggested he holds black supremacist beliefs.
“The black race is the chosen race, the black race was supposed to rule the earth, but now…they have to go to the white man for everything and that’s not good,” Hayden says in one video.

Hayden had also reportedly uploaded other videos showing him attacking elderly white people and, according to his father, was being treated for mental health problems in Washtenaw County — the Ann Arbor area — before being diagnosed with COVID-19, and being transferred to the Detroit-area nursing home where the attack occurred:

The suspect’s father, who asked not to be named, said his son has mental health issues and a pending assault case in Washtenaw County and should never have been placed in the nursing home.
“He has issues and for them to put him in a facility like that, nothing good was going to happen,” the suspect’s father told 7 Action News.
He said his son was recently moved to the nursing center because the 20-year-old was diagnosed with COVID-19 at the University of Michigan Hospital.
The father said he’s been working with Washtenaw County Mental Health Services to get his son the help he needs and that he was placed in a group home in Chelsea. But, recently, he said his son began hearing voices and that’s when he was taken to the hospital and it was there he says that his son was diagnosed with COVID-19.
“He never should have been housed… quarantined with the victim that he eventually assaulted. That should have never happened,” he said. “Someone dropped the ball.”

Why am I thinking about the title of a 1974 Richard Pryor album?

Never mind — the point made by many people on Twitter was that, if something like this had happened with the races reversed, CNN would be in 24/7 coverage mode, and the liberal media wouldn’t be satisfied until they had whipped up enough anger to spark a deadly riot. As it is, of course, most of the media are ignoring this incident, and certainly none of them are suggesting that the actions of Jaden Hayden represent any widespread danger. Whereas, by contrast, we are told by the media that incidents like the death of Ahmaud Arbery are socially significant, as if no black person is safe from such violence. The media’s distortions of reality — white on black violence is actually rather rare — probably play a part in inciting the kind of paranoid racial resentments that may have inspired Jaden Hayden’s crime. His posting of hateful video rants suggest that Hayden’s mental illness had a racial aspect, and it is fortunate that he is now in custody. Just imagine what might have happened if someone like that had gotten his hands on a firearm. It’s scary.

Meanwhile, we can report that the victim in this attack, 75-year-old Army veteran Norman Bledsoe, is recovering from his injuries, and Hayden has been charged with assault and larceny.

Category: Crime, Michigan, Racism

‘A Team of Editors’

Posted on | May 24, 2020 | 1 Comment

This is going to become the stuff of legend, so I wanted to take note of it: The New York Times decided to devote the entirety of its front page to a list of 1,000 names of COVID-19 victims. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and we are at or near the 100,000 mark in terms of nationwide death toll from the virus so . . . Well, there was some rationale for this, anyway, and the New York Times staff devoted hours to the project:

Simone Landon, assistant editor of the Graphics desk, wanted to represent the number in a way that conveyed both the vastness and the variety of lives lost. . . .
“We knew we were approaching this milestone,” she added. “We knew that there should be some way to try to reckon with that number.”
Putting 100,000 dots or stick figures on a page “doesn’t really tell you very much about who these people were, the lives that they lived, what it means for us as a country,” Ms. Landon said. So, she came up with the idea of compiling obituaries and death notices of Covid-19 victims from newspapers large and small across the country, and culling vivid passages from them.
Alain Delaquérière, a researcher, combed through various sources online for obituaries and death notices with Covid-19 written as the cause of death. He compiled a list of nearly a thousand names from hundreds of newspapers. A team of editors from across the newsroom, in addition to three graduate student journalists, read them and gleaned phrases that depicted the uniqueness of each life lost . . .

Scarcely five minutes after their list was published, people on Twitter began pointing out an obvious error: Jordan Haynes, 27, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was the sixth name on the Times list, but he did not die of COVID-19. He was a homicide victim, whose body was found in a car in a wooded area near Interstate 380. Exactly how the “team of editors” made such a colossal blunder, we don’t know, but they’ve deleted Haynes’ name from the list and promised to publish a correction tomorrow.

By the way, if the Times wished the list to be representative of the U.S. coronavirus toll, at least three-quarters would be over 65 years of age, and about 52 percent would be from four states — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Michigan — with the highest death tolls. Iowa? With only 449 reported coronavirus deaths, the Hawkeye State is not even a full percentage point of the death toll, but 0.45%. If the “team of editors” needed the names of four or five dead Iowans to represent this, in a list of a thousand names, how was it that they chose this homicide victim? And if they can blunder so badly in this, what else do they get wrong?

Category: Iowa, New York Times

The Early Summer Book Post

Posted on | May 24, 2020 | Comments Off on The Early Summer Book Post

— by Wombat-socho

Since the end of tax season, I’ve been making up for lost time. I’m a little behind on my Kindle Lending Library borrows, but on the other hand, I had some spare cash this month after paying bills, and I spent it wisely. On books. For my Kindle, because I’m still not in my own space – yet. SOON.

Going to start with an oldie but a goodie – Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which used to be a technothriller but is now an alternate history thank to the Great Politics Mess-Up. On the off-chance you haven’t read this, it’s a great recounting of the Third World War that never was, sparked by a massive act of jihadi sabotage against a major Soviet oil refinery. While Larry Bond’s name isn’t on the cover, Clancy gave him (and Bond’s game Harpoon) a ton of credit in the foreword, and rightly so. Clancy manages to keep several plot lines on both sides moving all through the book, and foreshadows the great work he’d later do on the best books from the Ryanverse. Highly recommended.

Kurt Schlichter’s Kelly Turnbull novels remind me somewhat of Clancy’s tales of John Clark, if Clark had less empathy and more of a tendency to get shot up…anyhow, I binged Wildfire and Collapse last weekend, and they’re both good reads. Turnbull’s mission in the former is to stop a bunch of jihadis from releasing a particularly nasty variant of Ebola Marburg in the People’s Republic while pretending to be a PBI agent. Bonus points for the many humorous parts where Turnbull turns the genderfluid transracial & transsexual craziness of the PR against its bureaucrats. The latter reads uncomfortably like a near-future technothriller in which the corrupt rulers of the PR’s Pacific States are selling out to Red China to save their own hides from the starving masses; initially, Turnbull’s mission is to smuggle in an ace hacker to trash the control systems for the reactor aboard the former USS Theodore Roosevelt, but as so often happens, he and the very unwilling hacker find themselves headed for San Francisco along with a team of Rangers and a somewhat demented demo expert whose dream of blowing up the Golden Gate Bridge is about to come true.

Jerry Pournelle’s heirs are getting his last works finished up and on the market. The last third of the Heorot trilogy, Starborn & Godsons, co-written with Larry Niven & Steven Barnes, is out (and on my reading list), and the long-awaited Mamelukes (finished by David Weber & Philip Pournelle) is due out next month. In the meantime, there is John Carr’s memorial anthology for Jerry, The Best Of Jerry Pournelle, which contains some of the best of Jerry’s short work, some of it in collaboration with Larry Niven (“Reflex” and “Spirals”) and some of it previously uncollected – there’s a Wade Curtis story that somehow didn’t get picked up before, and Jerry’s contribution to The Last Dangerous Visions, which is still going to be published Real Soon Now. This is an excellent collection just on the basis of the stories, but there’s also a lot of tributes from Steven Barnes, Larry Niven, and others. Highly recommended.

I am unenthused about the release of Uncle Bob’s The Pursuit of the Pankera. I thought the original version (The Number of the Beast) was terrible and was glad I’d just borrowed it from the library. However, if someone wants to shell out the $10 (or loan me the book) so they can get my opinion, I’m willing to tackle it.

On a more positive note, a bunch of authors I respect are having a Memorial Day Weekend sale. I’ve reviewed a fair number of these books over the last few years, and you could easily pick up a lot of good reads for five bucks without even trying hard. Go forth and browse!

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