Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields
By John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Poppies grow in Flanders Fields. And beyond.

Whatabout

Arnold Kling on Substack.
I Condemn. . .But

You say “I condemn. . .but” and then play the whataboutism card. What about “open-air prison? apartheid? occupation?”

Let’s turn around this whataboutism. Did you ever use “open-air prison” to describe a country that is surrounded on all sides by enemies who periodically have launched unprovoked wars? Did you ever use “apartheid” to describe the way that Jews were treated by Arab countries before Israel became a state? Did you ever use “occupation” while making it clear to Arabs and Muslims that it only refers to land acquired in 1967? Or did you let them indulge in drawing maps without Israel, to teach Jew-hatred to their schoolchildren, to chant “from Jordan to the sea,” and to use “occupation” to refer to every square inch of land claimed by the Jewish state?

RTWT

Einsatzgruppen ≡ Hamas?

Started following MEMRI on Twitter today: @MEMRIReports
A Statement By The President And Founder Of MEMRI On The Hamas Einsatzgruppen Attack

Excerpt, but read the whole short thing.

Now to another matter. The Hamas attack cannot be compared to the ’73 war, which is a war that we now miss. Not even to the massacres of the Islamic State. The comparison to animals made by Israel Defense Minister Gallant is also not appropriate, since no animal commits murder out of sheer cruelty. The only appropriate comparison is to the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary death squads of the SS of the Nazi Germany, who were attached to the 4th Wehrmacht Army groups that invaded Poland and Russia in the outbreak of World War II. Their one and only mission was to murder Jews wherever they found them. That is the only relevant comparison, and I propose to anyone that has a heart to stick to this comparison.

I made that same point about animals yesterday in a Xeet.

Einsatzgruppen is almost exactly right. There are many differences, of course, Einsatzgruppen spoke German, had different uniforms, and… uh… … didn’t have paragliders.

That’s it. That’s the list.

The existential threat of the Perfumed Princes

Our President has lately been fear mongering about climate change as “a clear and present danger.” A “threat to national security.”

He wouldn’t recognize such a threat even if his handlers wrote it on his mentalprompter. And stamped it on his palm with a branding iron.

He seeks to invoke emergency powers to accomplish AOC’s Green New Deal. That ‘deal’ our Federal legislators will not countenance.

Joe Biden is valorizing higher energy costs (and the consequent disproportionate suffering from food and goods shortages, employment shrinkage, and lessened government ability to respond)… as a defense of democracy.

He is playing the race/transphobe/climate-catastrophe cards all at once.

‘Climate change’ is the magic intersectional trump card – it’s claimed to disproportionately affect people of color, the 51% of our people who are actually female, the shrinking proportion of our population who are children. A group the President has abused in person, over decades, with his sniffing fetish; and now generally via his promotion of puberty blockers.

An actual threat to national security posed by the President’s governance (and I use the term loosely) is the cadre of Perfumed Princes in the Pentagon

General Mark “Thoroughly Modern” Milley is the Patchouli poster child for those military CNN gig seeking, poseurs, wokies, stalwarts the President encourages to focus on proper pronoun usage, critical theory, and free transgender transition surgery for service members. If you missed the ‘member’ pun, assume it wasn’t intended.

Salon, a lefty rag, noticed the trend as long as long ago as 1999:
How the grunts are betrayed by the U.S. Army’s “perfumed princes”

Our ability to maintain a volunteer military has suffered since.

America’s woke Army is facing a recruiting nightmare

No one wants to join the military anymore

US Army Abandons Recruitment Goals, But Not Its Woke Policies

The Great American Military Rebrand

The Next Republican President Must Fix the Military First

Priorities: U.S. Military Base Is Hosting a Drag Show

West Point is going woke, alumnus warns

That is all.

Bees, fish, lions, corn, masking toddlers, women, and Marine Corps readiness

We are all socialists fish now. If the Babylon Bee identified as a fish, could it get its Twitter account back?

It’s OK: It identifies as a bee. Err… fish.

Taco Bell hardest hit. Or maybe movie theaters.
Archer Daniels Midland will be fine. So I bought a little.

Face swaddling. Follow the science.

Speaking of science: What is a woman? Apparently it’s complicated.

But not as complicated as a newly minted SCOTUS Justice who is female, but is not a biologist, thinks. A woman who IS a biologist and a woman has an answer.

Looks like tactical lipstick.

Corruptarky

Charles Murray reviews a leftwing tome on the topic in the Claremont Review of Books: Meritocracy’s Cost

Check it out and come back.

Jordan Peterson frequently points out that hierarchies are natural and inevitable, from lobster fights to human IQ, and that hierarchies tend to corruption. This is the framework for “absolute power corrupts…”

The question is not how we eliminate the inevitable, but how we control the consequences.

Harrison Bergeron is an example of what happens when a corrupt hierarchy is put in charge of eliminating hierarchies.

Freedom of conscience is the fundamental human method of hierarchical control. Which is why corrupt hierarchies attack free speech and institute thought police. You can’t say “All Lives Matter,” “Trans males are not women,” or “Let’s try ivermectin.”

The corruption in our governing meritocracies, by which I mean the academic, military, political, economic, and cultural Anointed* – concentrated in, and supported by, our major population centers – threatens to bring down the Republic.

What is to be Done?
-V. Lenin, 1902

*Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, 1996

“…the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?”

“Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.”

“. . ideology. . . is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure. —Jean-François Revel1”

“What is seldom part of the vision of the anointed is a concept of ordinary people as autonomous decision makers free to reject any vision and to seek their own well-being through whatever social processes they choose. Thus, when those with the prevailing vision speak of the family—if only to defuse their adversaries’ emphasis on family values—they tend to conceive of the family as a recipient institution for government largess or guidance, rather than as a decision-making institution determining for itself how children shall be raised and with what values.”

“The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from ‘society,’ rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by ‘society.”