Tako?
Octavo, more likely…
– – – – – –
And in other news…
Hold on!
Is this even news?
“Its seeming more and more Colorado and Dominion voting machines got caught again – Nov 4th 2025 election…” https://instapundit.com/757890/
Is this?
“Grand jury properly voted on James Comey’s indictment, foreman claims in blow to defense: ‘Eliminates any doubt’”— https://instapundit.com/757916/
What about this?
“… Absolutely bonkers story about Somalian immigrant communities in Minnesota over-diagnosing their own kids with autism so that they can funnel billions of Medicaid dollars back to terrorist cells in Somalia…” https://instapundit.com/757794/
+ Grand Ole Bonus:
‘Democrat nominee, running to represent Nashville says,
“I hate the city, I hate the bachelorettes, I hate the pedal taverns, I hate country music, I hate all of the things that make Nashville. I hate it.”’— https://instapundit.com/757807/
“The February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken by the women textile workers of their own accord, demanding bread for the children.” – Trotsky
[not mamdani]
The Russian Revolution was the first in history to seek women’s emancipation as one of its central goals. The revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai, together with Vladimir Lenin’s advisor and mistress Inessa Armand, founded the Communist Party’s Zhenotdel or Women’s Department, and helped institute the right to free abortion on demand in 1919. Prior to this reform, rural women in Russia gave birth on average to nine children throughout their lifetimes, only half of whom survived to adulthood.
The Bolsheviks delinked marriage from the church, legalized divorce and homosexuality and gave equal rights to children born out of wedlock. Social insurance for all women, in and out of the workforce, became a guarantee of the state
“The capitalists are aware that the family of old, with the wife a slave and the man responsible for the support and well-being of the family, is the best weapon to stifle the proletarian effort toward liberty,” Kollontai argued [ and Naomi Goldstein agreed [Betty Friedan]]
“Soviet power meant you could study wherever you wanted for free,” stated one veteran of 1917. Unlike in previous generations, in which lower-class girls were commonly sent out from the home at twelve to work as domestic laborers, the revolution allowed millions of women to gain educational and employment opportunities.
…advancements made by women were never entirely unwound. In 1961, sexologists in Czechoslovak devoted an entire conference to the female orgasm.
Examining social and cultural constructs, it suggested that men should do childcare and housework to please their women. Dozens of modern researchers later concluded that women had better sex under socialism across the East Bloc, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
[mamdani secret purpose]
Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the deterioration of the social safety net resulted in increased violence against women. An international market for sex trafficking developed. By one estimate, 14,000 women were murdered by their husbands or lovers in 1993. Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian legislature approved a measure to decriminalize first offenses of domestic violence. To this day, however, Russians still have paid maternity and paternity leave.
AFTERWORD:
Russia’s demographic collapse refers to the long-running and multifaceted decline in the country’s population, driven by a combination of low birth rates, high mortality, emigration, and structural social and economic challenges that have accumulated over decades. The roots of the decline stretch back to the late Soviet period, when fertility began to fall below replacement levels and life expectancy—especially for men—plummeted due to alcoholism, cardiovascular disease, workplace accidents, and inadequate public health systems. The economic and social turmoil of the 1990s sharply accelerated these trends: living standards collapsed, birth rates shrank even further as families delayed or abandoned childbearing, and mortality surged amid poverty, stress, and the deterioration of healthcare. Although Russia experienced a partial demographic recovery in the 2000s—helped by economic growth, pro-natalist policies such as maternity capital payments, and a temporary rebound in births from the relatively large cohort of 1980s mothers—these improvements proved fragile. From the mid-2010s onward, the number of women of childbearing age declined sharply due to the small birth cohorts of the early 1990s, pushing fertility downward again despite government incentives. At the same time, life expectancy improvements stalled, while emigration, particularly among younger and highly educated Russians, intensified. The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a further severe blow, causing among the world’s highest excess mortality rates and erasing years of demographic gains. More recently, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has deepened demographic stress: hundreds of thousands of working-age men were mobilized or killed, hundreds of thousands more emigrated to avoid mobilization, and the climate of instability and economic uncertainty has further depressed birth rates. These overlapping forces—aging, shrinking cohorts, premature mortality, outward migration, and policy-induced shocks—have created a structural, long-term population decline that many demographers argue will be extremely difficult to reverse, leaving Russia facing labor shortages, fiscal strain, and profound social consequences for decades to come.
Chapter 2, How America wanted to be like their soviet heroes…
Looks like Somali immigrants in MN have decided to bring all their social pathologies – fraud, theft, dishonesty to the USA.
Check out the crime rates of N. African and Afghan immigrants to Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Norway, etc. The culture of these immigrant communities consider the law to be an obstacle (and to be ignored) to how they wish to conduct themselves.
Tom Sowell described in one of his books how ethnic groups bring their culture with them no matter where they settle, and explains to a great extent how successful (or not) ethnic groups are in their new land where they emigrate.
On Wed. before NVidia corp. reported earnings, some market guy expounded on his theory that if their earnings and sales were really superlative it could trigger a sell-off of the market and NVidia itself. The theory was roughly that the level and rapidity of the spending on their products and AI in general would then be stupendous, unprecedented, and thus highly suspect.
I suppose that if you are an investment banker who’s been around the block a dozen or two times, then you’ve seen this play before, and it always ends badly. Invariably, some of the players say, “This time it’s different.” and it never is.
Well, the AI revolution certainly seems like it is earning the term “revolution.” Is it different this time?
Thursday, the market opened up a lot as many figured the NVidia good news is good news, then by mid morning, those nay sayers clobbered the market. It didn’t end that far down, but the reversal was rather violent.
Today, I see this news item:
Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) didn’t just clear another quarter — it quietly staked out a claim far bigger than GPUs or guidance. CEO Jensen Huang spent the third-quarter earnings call describing a platform that now underpins every major AI model. And he didn’t need superlatives to make the point. He just described reality.
Track NVDA stock here.
“NVIDIA’s architecture, NVIDIA’s platform is the singular platform in the world that runs every AI model,” he told investors, before widening the aperture: “We’re now the only architecture in the world that runs every AI model, every frontier AI model… We run everything.”
For investors trying to understand what Nvidia becomes in the next decade, the message lands harder than any datapoint: this is no longer a chip vendor. This is the substrate for global intelligence.
Every Cloud. Every Model. Everywhere.
Huang didn’t leave room for misinterpretation when describing Nvidia’s reach: “We’re literally everywhere… We’re in every cloud.”
In the enterprise phase of AI adoption — where risk aversion beats experimentation — ubiquity becomes the moat. Companies don’t want five optimization stacks, five model paths, five hardware targets. They want one platform that already runs everything and keeps getting faster.
Ubiquity. That does tend to put a big bullseye target on you, in the marketplace.
I own a small holding in NVidia, thinking it’s not played out yet. Though it’s certainly volatile.
DOJ’s Arctic Frost probe: “We know they spied on President Trump, then we learned it was Senators, then the Speaker of the House, and now we’ve learned they were spying on me for two and a half years, all the way back to January 2020. This is the epitome of the weaponization of government against the other party.” – Jim Jordan
but but it was for a good cause.. us..
A vote to condemn the “horrors of socialism” passed on a mostly party-line vote Friday, with 98 Democrats voting against it and 199 Republicans voting for it.
The bill passed 285-98. No Republicans voted against the bill, although 20 Republicans did not vote.
On the Democrat side, it was far from unanimous, with 86 members voting in favor, and 98 against. Two Democrats voted “present” and 27 did not vote.
The resolution, sponsored by Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., reads “socialism has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide,” and recognizes “many of the greatest crimes in history were committed by socialist ideologues.”
Salazar is of a Cuban-American background and represents a Miami area district.
The resolution culminates in the commitment “that Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.”
“Socialism has never produced freedom or prosperity, only suffering and authoritarian control. Those of us in South Florida understand this better than most,” Salazar said of the resolution in a post on X. “With this failed ideology gaining ground in the United States and throughout the hemisphere, I’m proud to lead this resolution and call out its dangers without hesitation.”
An Illinois judge ignored a prosecutor’s warnings that a man who is now accused of setting a commuter on fire was likely to attack again and allowed him to walk free, court records show.
Lawrence Reed, 50, was released on an ankle monitor after assaulting a social worker in August, CBS News reported.
Despite the prosecutor warning Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez that Reed had a lengthy rap sheet and his next crime would ‘likely be violent,’ she allowed him to walk free.
Reed went on to be hit with a federal terrorism charge this week after he allegedly poured gasoline on a 26-year-old woman at random and set her ablaze on the Chicago transit system Monday night.
He approached the victim, who has not been identified, and repeatedly yelled ‘burn alive b***h,’ according to a criminal affidavit filed in federal court.
Was he related to the guy that set someone on fire in NYC subway?
‘Democrat nominee, running to represent Nashville says,
“I hate […] Nashville.“‘
Reminds me of B.O. “I’m running to be POTUS of USA. If you elect me, I will destroy USA and replace it with something better.”
the The Kessler Twins are gone…
Someone recently invoked John Spencer as someone they would trust about military history.
I ran across this interview with Spencer from a few months ago. It’s sad that our legacy media hasn’t pushed back more/a tiny bit on the propaganda that has defined the Gaza war.
Miss Salazar, also happens to have been one of the most honest Miami reporters, she was fired by several outlets, for being too honest for their own good, however she has blind spots, as with the DOGE funding and other matters, she won over the seat that Donna Shallala, clinton apparatchik briefly held, long held by pioneer Ileana Ros Lehtinen, I do call them how I see them, twenty GOP not voting for even this proforma measure is a little concerning,
the legacy press is decidedly on the side of the DSA/Brotherhood alliance, of which tjhe Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is one tentacle, Mamdani’s election is certainly a manifestation of same,
Seemed like about time for re-posting my review of Sebastian Haffner’s 1932 novel LIttle Man, What Now? Haffner’s story about a struggling young couple in late-Weimar Germany resonates disturbingly with certain phenomena in America today.
I read his memoir after reading your review of it. It was excellent.
Re: Octopus piano player
The octopus is my totem animal. (Don’t you have one? 🙂 ) Imagine my horror to discover that octopus is sold alive in Korean fish markets for dinner.
The octopus is a very intelligent, curious creature, which seems to recognize individual humans, solve puzzles and pull off pranks, like flooding an aquarium by disassembling a valve:
The octopus is a true alien intelligence compared to our own. In a different evolutionary timeline they might be running things today.
Cherish the octopus! In a decade or two selling octopus for food might well be like doing so with dolphins.
Of course, pigs are smart as well and it seems we like bacon too much.
I got the author wrong in my comment w the link to ‘Little Man, What Now?’ The author is not Sebastian Haffner but rather Hans Fallada.
I have started to view Ken Burns very well done TV series retelling of the events of the American Revolution.
Surprisingly, through years of genealogical research, I discovered that at least five of my maternal fifth great grand fathers—all German immigrant farmers living in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill county—actively fought in the Revolution, one of them actually serving in the 6th Pennsylvania Line for six and a half years, and fighting in the battle of the Brandywine.
Was it Jefferson who warned that we would not survive as a nation unless we were a moral people, and were not an ignorant one?
Today, I fear that far too many of us no longer fit Jefferson’s prescription.
In my advancing age, and viewing today’s United States, and the course we are on–I can’t help wondering if we are going to survive as a free and independent country, or are we going to fade into history; a noble experiment which ultimately failed.
P.S. Actually, I believe that the two essential qualities Jefferson mentioned were our people being both “moral” and “educated.”
cdrslamander had a negative opinion of Ken Burns’ documentary about The American Revolution, first episode. He felt that Howard Zinn would be thoroughly pleased with Ken, infusing the oh so superior judgement and priorities of the present Acella corridor elite onto events and people of the late 1700s.
I’ll post a link to cdsalamander’s substack review and critique a bit later.
‘Real Time’ Crowd Roars for Bill Maher’s Brutal Message for Democrats – Video
So, I’ve watched the two episodes of Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, in spite of my stated zero desire to do so. Why? If you are not up to speed with the MSNBCification of Ken Burns over the last decade, catch up.
Anyway, as Mrs. Salamander knows more about the American Revolution than 99.7% of people out there, she insisted we watch it. I’ve been married for over three decades for a reason, so I sat down with her to watch.
FFS.
…and…it started with a land acknowledgement. ISYN.
om–For me, the American history I was taught as an undergraduate (and, thank God, not from a viewpoint heavy with leftist ideology) is almost 60 years back in my rear view mirror but, I remember being particularly stuck by the analysis in Bernard Bailyn’s book, “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” and the idea that Americans started out thinking of themselves as Englishmen, who were only pressing for the rights they thought, as Englishmen, they deserved, but that the Crown–misreading the crowd, trying to manage things from afar, and two months away by boat, kept pushing and pushing, made too many miscalculations, and uses of different kinds of compulsion and force until, finally, their formerly British subjects–many reluctantly, and wanting to keep the freedom that they had grown accustomed to in America–united against them as Americans.
Yeah, I’d heard about Burns, Howard Zinn type, leftist twist to his portrayal of the Revolution.
When I wrote that this first episode of the series was very well done, I was mostly talking about its pretty stunning cinematography, rather than the commentary which went along with it.
But, at first glance, only a few things jumped out at me, particularly how he portrayed Sam Adams.
But, then, there was also his general tone–the English authorities misjudged the temper of their American subjects, but some Americans were too eager for war.
I also noted that I had never heard of most of the talking head historians he chose to use as expert commentators.
When the credits rolled at the end of the first episode, my wife exclaimed at the whose who of Hollywood who were going to be in this series as a good thing.
I, on the other hand, thought that these Hollywood luminaries wouldn’t have signed onto this series if it didn’t fit into Hollywood’s obligatory totally leftist perspective, and that their participation was a tell tale sign about how things were going to be portrayed.
If somebody doesn’t own something, including land they temporarily live on, then taking it from them is not stealing.
The natives didn’t own the land, nor believe in land ownership. Most were nomadic, fighting & killing other natives over control, not ownership, of the land.
No land owned by natives was stolen, the new white tribes came & fought & won control in accordance with native law (of the jungle, might makes right).
A culture without land ownership cannot live on the land when it’s owned by others. Landless Jews became urban, mostly cosmopolitan “anywhere” people. Natives fought to the death, and died, or lived in reservations. In cases of treaties being violated by whites, which happened some, reservation lands taken could be called stolen, but that’s not most.
Most natives who died because of Europeans died because of disease, an inevitable amount of death due to globalization.
P.S. In terms of our survival, going forward, as a free, prosperous, and independent nation President Trump, for all of his possible faults–and against tremendous and widespread judicial, legislative, institutional, and other resistance–is trying to undue as much as he can of the damage done by Democrats, but the several decades long Gramscian march has been very thorough, and its results very widespread, and very deep.
So widespread and deep that I fear that, even if, say, Vice President J.D. Vance were to succeed Trump–and carry on his work–it would still not be enough to undo enough of the damage wrought by the Democrats, to set this country back on the right course.
Thus, I fear that Trump–and even a continuance of his policies and actions under Vance–are only like the Dutch boy’s finger in the dike, holding back the pressure of the leftist sea.
Moreover, isn’t the one prominent theory that all nations ultimately decline because of how they handle finance/money.
If that theory is true I ‘d say that we are already on the road to destruction.
Ultimately, though, isn’t it as Jefferson wrote, about the level of morality and education of our population–what they want–their understanding and mindset?
When we see a title like “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” it is probably a useful moment to pause and wonder if the people of the American Revolution themselves actually used the word “ideological” — whether at all (they didn’t of course, because it had hardly been invented yet), or used it in some early sense of the term we do not either know or use ourselves today (and there you may discover Thomas Jefferson in his post-French-ambassadorship as the champion and translator of Destutt de Tracy, inventor and expositor of the term!).
In general then, proceed with caution within our native tongue — for it’s a very trixie devil, particularly when it comes to political-philosophical expressions.
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
Tako?
Octavo, more likely…
– – – – – –
And in other news…
Hold on!
Is this even news?
“Its seeming more and more Colorado and Dominion voting machines got caught again – Nov 4th 2025 election…”
https://instapundit.com/757890/
Is this?
“Grand jury properly voted on James Comey’s indictment, foreman claims in blow to defense: ‘Eliminates any doubt’”—
https://instapundit.com/757916/
What about this?
“… Absolutely bonkers story about Somalian immigrant communities in Minnesota over-diagnosing their own kids with autism so that they can funnel billions of Medicaid dollars back to terrorist cells in Somalia…”
https://instapundit.com/757794/
+ Grand Ole Bonus:
‘Democrat nominee, running to represent Nashville says,
“I hate the city, I hate the bachelorettes, I hate the pedal taverns, I hate country music, I hate all of the things that make Nashville. I hate it.”’—
https://instapundit.com/757807/
The Soviet Union’s Forgotten Feminist Revolution
https://indypendent.org/2017/10/the-soviet-unions-forgotten-feminist-revolution/
Excerpts….
“The February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken by the women textile workers of their own accord, demanding bread for the children.” – Trotsky
[not mamdani]
The Bolsheviks delinked marriage from the church, legalized divorce and homosexuality and gave equal rights to children born out of wedlock. Social insurance for all women, in and out of the workforce, became a guarantee of the state
“The capitalists are aware that the family of old, with the wife a slave and the man responsible for the support and well-being of the family, is the best weapon to stifle the proletarian effort toward liberty,” Kollontai argued [ and Naomi Goldstein agreed [Betty Friedan]]
“Soviet power meant you could study wherever you wanted for free,” stated one veteran of 1917. Unlike in previous generations, in which lower-class girls were commonly sent out from the home at twelve to work as domestic laborers, the revolution allowed millions of women to gain educational and employment opportunities.
…advancements made by women were never entirely unwound. In 1961, sexologists in Czechoslovak devoted an entire conference to the female orgasm.
Examining social and cultural constructs, it suggested that men should do childcare and housework to please their women. Dozens of modern researchers later concluded that women had better sex under socialism across the East Bloc, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
[mamdani secret purpose]
AFTERWORD:
Russia’s demographic collapse refers to the long-running and multifaceted decline in the country’s population, driven by a combination of low birth rates, high mortality, emigration, and structural social and economic challenges that have accumulated over decades. The roots of the decline stretch back to the late Soviet period, when fertility began to fall below replacement levels and life expectancy—especially for men—plummeted due to alcoholism, cardiovascular disease, workplace accidents, and inadequate public health systems. The economic and social turmoil of the 1990s sharply accelerated these trends: living standards collapsed, birth rates shrank even further as families delayed or abandoned childbearing, and mortality surged amid poverty, stress, and the deterioration of healthcare. Although Russia experienced a partial demographic recovery in the 2000s—helped by economic growth, pro-natalist policies such as maternity capital payments, and a temporary rebound in births from the relatively large cohort of 1980s mothers—these improvements proved fragile. From the mid-2010s onward, the number of women of childbearing age declined sharply due to the small birth cohorts of the early 1990s, pushing fertility downward again despite government incentives. At the same time, life expectancy improvements stalled, while emigration, particularly among younger and highly educated Russians, intensified. The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a further severe blow, causing among the world’s highest excess mortality rates and erasing years of demographic gains. More recently, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has deepened demographic stress: hundreds of thousands of working-age men were mobilized or killed, hundreds of thousands more emigrated to avoid mobilization, and the climate of instability and economic uncertainty has further depressed birth rates. These overlapping forces—aging, shrinking cohorts, premature mortality, outward migration, and policy-induced shocks—have created a structural, long-term population decline that many demographers argue will be extremely difficult to reverse, leaving Russia facing labor shortages, fiscal strain, and profound social consequences for decades to come.
Chapter 2, How America wanted to be like their soviet heroes…
Looks like Somali immigrants in MN have decided to bring all their social pathologies – fraud, theft, dishonesty to the USA.
Check out the crime rates of N. African and Afghan immigrants to Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Norway, etc. The culture of these immigrant communities consider the law to be an obstacle (and to be ignored) to how they wish to conduct themselves.
Tom Sowell described in one of his books how ethnic groups bring their culture with them no matter where they settle, and explains to a great extent how successful (or not) ethnic groups are in their new land where they emigrate.
On Wed. before NVidia corp. reported earnings, some market guy expounded on his theory that if their earnings and sales were really superlative it could trigger a sell-off of the market and NVidia itself. The theory was roughly that the level and rapidity of the spending on their products and AI in general would then be stupendous, unprecedented, and thus highly suspect.
I suppose that if you are an investment banker who’s been around the block a dozen or two times, then you’ve seen this play before, and it always ends badly. Invariably, some of the players say, “This time it’s different.” and it never is.
Well, the AI revolution certainly seems like it is earning the term “revolution.” Is it different this time?
Thursday, the market opened up a lot as many figured the NVidia good news is good news, then by mid morning, those nay sayers clobbered the market. It didn’t end that far down, but the reversal was rather violent.
Today, I see this news item:
Ubiquity. That does tend to put a big bullseye target on you, in the marketplace.
I own a small holding in NVidia, thinking it’s not played out yet. Though it’s certainly volatile.
Here is the link, but it has a paywall. I got it from my online brokerage.
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/25/11/49004667/nvidia-is-becoming-the-operating-system-of-ai-we-run-everything-jensen-says
DOJ’s Arctic Frost probe: “We know they spied on President Trump, then we learned it was Senators, then the Speaker of the House, and now we’ve learned they were spying on me for two and a half years, all the way back to January 2020. This is the epitome of the weaponization of government against the other party.” – Jim Jordan
but but it was for a good cause.. us..
A vote to condemn the “horrors of socialism” passed on a mostly party-line vote Friday, with 98 Democrats voting against it and 199 Republicans voting for it.
The bill passed 285-98. No Republicans voted against the bill, although 20 Republicans did not vote.
On the Democrat side, it was far from unanimous, with 86 members voting in favor, and 98 against. Two Democrats voted “present” and 27 did not vote.
The resolution, sponsored by Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., reads “socialism has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide,” and recognizes “many of the greatest crimes in history were committed by socialist ideologues.”
Salazar is of a Cuban-American background and represents a Miami area district.
The resolution culminates in the commitment “that Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.”
“Socialism has never produced freedom or prosperity, only suffering and authoritarian control. Those of us in South Florida understand this better than most,” Salazar said of the resolution in a post on X. “With this failed ideology gaining ground in the United States and throughout the hemisphere, I’m proud to lead this resolution and call out its dangers without hesitation.”
An Illinois judge ignored a prosecutor’s warnings that a man who is now accused of setting a commuter on fire was likely to attack again and allowed him to walk free, court records show.
Lawrence Reed, 50, was released on an ankle monitor after assaulting a social worker in August, CBS News reported.
Despite the prosecutor warning Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez that Reed had a lengthy rap sheet and his next crime would ‘likely be violent,’ she allowed him to walk free.
Reed went on to be hit with a federal terrorism charge this week after he allegedly poured gasoline on a 26-year-old woman at random and set her ablaze on the Chicago transit system Monday night.
He approached the victim, who has not been identified, and repeatedly yelled ‘burn alive b***h,’ according to a criminal affidavit filed in federal court.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15313271/chicago-judge-released-lawrence-reed-fire-train-terrorism.html
Was he related to the guy that set someone on fire in NYC subway?
‘Democrat nominee, running to represent Nashville says,
“I hate […] Nashville.“‘
Reminds me of B.O. “I’m running to be POTUS of USA. If you elect me, I will destroy USA and replace it with something better.”
the The Kessler Twins are gone…
Someone recently invoked John Spencer as someone they would trust about military history.
I ran across this interview with Spencer from a few months ago. It’s sad that our legacy media hasn’t pushed back more/a tiny bit on the propaganda that has defined the Gaza war.
War Expert Debunks Gaza Lies – John Spencer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3liXH3ekmsI&t=456s
Hmm. Should they have called it “Invidious”?
Miss Salazar, also happens to have been one of the most honest Miami reporters, she was fired by several outlets, for being too honest for their own good, however she has blind spots, as with the DOGE funding and other matters, she won over the seat that Donna Shallala, clinton apparatchik briefly held, long held by pioneer Ileana Ros Lehtinen, I do call them how I see them, twenty GOP not voting for even this proforma measure is a little concerning,
the legacy press is decidedly on the side of the DSA/Brotherhood alliance, of which tjhe Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is one tentacle, Mamdani’s election is certainly a manifestation of same,
in other news
https://x.com/ChadGilmartinCA/status/1991696568349856194
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAJCJfddxqM
Seemed like about time for re-posting my review of Sebastian Haffner’s 1932 novel LIttle Man, What Now? Haffner’s story about a struggling young couple in late-Weimar Germany resonates disturbingly with certain phenomena in America today.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/75482.html
the latter corrects the record re the comey indictment, perhaps, the swamp does protect it’s own,
https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Kabul-Afghanistan-Dangerous-World/dp/0008171521
the tome I referred to earlier,
David Foster:
I read his memoir after reading your review of it. It was excellent.
Re: Octopus piano player
The octopus is my totem animal. (Don’t you have one? 🙂 ) Imagine my horror to discover that octopus is sold alive in Korean fish markets for dinner.
The octopus is a very intelligent, curious creature, which seems to recognize individual humans, solve puzzles and pull off pranks, like flooding an aquarium by disassembling a valve:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/curious-octopus-floods-aquarium
The octopus is a true alien intelligence compared to our own. In a different evolutionary timeline they might be running things today.
Cherish the octopus! In a decade or two selling octopus for food might well be like doing so with dolphins.
Of course, pigs are smart as well and it seems we like bacon too much.
I got the author wrong in my comment w the link to ‘Little Man, What Now?’ The author is not Sebastian Haffner but rather Hans Fallada.
I have started to view Ken Burns very well done TV series retelling of the events of the American Revolution.
Surprisingly, through years of genealogical research, I discovered that at least five of my maternal fifth great grand fathers—all German immigrant farmers living in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill county—actively fought in the Revolution, one of them actually serving in the 6th Pennsylvania Line for six and a half years, and fighting in the battle of the Brandywine.
Was it Jefferson who warned that we would not survive as a nation unless we were a moral people, and were not an ignorant one?
Today, I fear that far too many of us no longer fit Jefferson’s prescription.
In my advancing age, and viewing today’s United States, and the course we are on–I can’t help wondering if we are going to survive as a free and independent country, or are we going to fade into history; a noble experiment which ultimately failed.
P.S. Actually, I believe that the two essential qualities Jefferson mentioned were our people being both “moral” and “educated.”
cdrslamander had a negative opinion of Ken Burns’ documentary about The American Revolution, first episode. He felt that Howard Zinn would be thoroughly pleased with Ken, infusing the oh so superior judgement and priorities of the present Acella corridor elite onto events and people of the late 1700s.
I’ll post a link to cdsalamander’s substack review and critique a bit later.
‘Real Time’ Crowd Roars for Bill Maher’s Brutal Message for Democrats – Video
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/11/real-time-crowd-roars-for-bill-mahers.html
CDR Salamander
The link
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com
om–For me, the American history I was taught as an undergraduate (and, thank God, not from a viewpoint heavy with leftist ideology) is almost 60 years back in my rear view mirror but, I remember being particularly stuck by the analysis in Bernard Bailyn’s book, “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” and the idea that Americans started out thinking of themselves as Englishmen, who were only pressing for the rights they thought, as Englishmen, they deserved, but that the Crown–misreading the crowd, trying to manage things from afar, and two months away by boat, kept pushing and pushing, made too many miscalculations, and uses of different kinds of compulsion and force until, finally, their formerly British subjects–many reluctantly, and wanting to keep the freedom that they had grown accustomed to in America–united against them as Americans.
Yeah, I’d heard about Burns, Howard Zinn type, leftist twist to his portrayal of the Revolution.
When I wrote that this first episode of the series was very well done, I was mostly talking about its pretty stunning cinematography, rather than the commentary which went along with it.
But, at first glance, only a few things jumped out at me, particularly how he portrayed Sam Adams.
But, then, there was also his general tone–the English authorities misjudged the temper of their American subjects, but some Americans were too eager for war.
I also noted that I had never heard of most of the talking head historians he chose to use as expert commentators.
When the credits rolled at the end of the first episode, my wife exclaimed at the whose who of Hollywood who were going to be in this series as a good thing.
I, on the other hand, thought that these Hollywood luminaries wouldn’t have signed onto this series if it didn’t fit into Hollywood’s obligatory totally leftist perspective, and that their participation was a tell tale sign about how things were going to be portrayed.
If somebody doesn’t own something, including land they temporarily live on, then taking it from them is not stealing.
The natives didn’t own the land, nor believe in land ownership. Most were nomadic, fighting & killing other natives over control, not ownership, of the land.
No land owned by natives was stolen, the new white tribes came & fought & won control in accordance with native law (of the jungle, might makes right).
A culture without land ownership cannot live on the land when it’s owned by others. Landless Jews became urban, mostly cosmopolitan “anywhere” people. Natives fought to the death, and died, or lived in reservations. In cases of treaties being violated by whites, which happened some, reservation lands taken could be called stolen, but that’s not most.
Most natives who died because of Europeans died because of disease, an inevitable amount of death due to globalization.
P.S. In terms of our survival, going forward, as a free, prosperous, and independent nation President Trump, for all of his possible faults–and against tremendous and widespread judicial, legislative, institutional, and other resistance–is trying to undue as much as he can of the damage done by Democrats, but the several decades long Gramscian march has been very thorough, and its results very widespread, and very deep.
So widespread and deep that I fear that, even if, say, Vice President J.D. Vance were to succeed Trump–and carry on his work–it would still not be enough to undo enough of the damage wrought by the Democrats, to set this country back on the right course.
Thus, I fear that Trump–and even a continuance of his policies and actions under Vance–are only like the Dutch boy’s finger in the dike, holding back the pressure of the leftist sea.
Moreover, isn’t the one prominent theory that all nations ultimately decline because of how they handle finance/money.
If that theory is true I ‘d say that we are already on the road to destruction.
Ultimately, though, isn’t it as Jefferson wrote, about the level of morality and education of our population–what they want–their understanding and mindset?
When we see a title like “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” it is probably a useful moment to pause and wonder if the people of the American Revolution themselves actually used the word “ideological” — whether at all (they didn’t of course, because it had hardly been invented yet), or used it in some early sense of the term we do not either know or use ourselves today (and there you may discover Thomas Jefferson in his post-French-ambassadorship as the champion and translator of Destutt de Tracy, inventor and expositor of the term!).
In general then, proceed with caution within our native tongue — for it’s a very trixie devil, particularly when it comes to political-philosophical expressions.