Heading Back . . . if the World Doesn't End, That is . . .

Almost finished with my current stay in California. Tomorrow we head back to civilization, AKA North Carolina. Gotta see my dogs, Jeeps, and guns, and not to mention get some real BBQ. Today, however,  is another long marathon of lawyers, brokers, etc.

OK. No more whining. I am starting to sound like the editor of the New York Times.

Can you believe that guy? Please, Mr. President, stop calling us names and telling people we are promoters of the Fake. Please. Maybe you should stop being promoters of the Fake? How about that for a thought? The NYT and its cohorts have accused this President, on the basis of no evidence, of being a racist, xenophobe, anti-Semite, who has sold out the country to Russia, pushing us to the verge of a nuclear war with North Korea and Iran, and embroiling us in a "trade war" we cannot win--note to NYT, et al, up to now it's been a one-way "war" against us. They have derided his economic policies, refusing to recognize what is actually happening out in the real world of real Americans, to wit, jobs, rising wages, lower taxes, fewer regulations, industries being reborn, etc.

OK, off to see a man about a (tax) plan.

Back in LaLa Land

I am back for about a week in California working on estate issues and cleaning out my father's house and storage unit. Unbelievable the sort and amount of stuff that one keeps over a 94-year lifespan. Blogging will be light as I am spending a lot of time with lawyers, accountants, brokers, appraisers, junk men, movers, and on the freeways driving back and forth in my wife's little 2006 Jeep Liberty.

I look like like Hell. I have never looked good, but I look particularly bad right now. Quite aside from tired, sweaty, and dusty, I have a YUUUUGE black eye, gift of my dogs. In one of my last days in my beloved North Carolina, I was trying to go out the door of my son's house while shepherding four dogs--two of mine, two of his. Each of the four, of course, wanted to be the first one out the door. Well, you guessed it: running, pushing, backing up, going forward, left, right, underfoot, tangle of leashes and paws and my big clumsy size 12s, and . . . . BLAMMO! . . . down I went to meet the floor, my head hitting the door knob on that way down with a resounding thud. I lay on my back envying Cleopatra after the Asp bite with four dogs licking my face, climbing on my chest, and doing other doggie first responder assistance tactics on a downed human. I slowly got up and within minutes I had a YUUUUUGE hard-boiled egg on my forehead. I don't get it, but over the following three or four days, I guess, that as that swelling went down, blood travelled downward and encircled my left eye. I look like I just came out of a pub in South Boston after saying something nice about the Brits.

Anyhow, I have been only casually following the news and it seems to me that the world is about to end again, this time with a war with Iran. YAWN. Boring movie that.

I see--sorta through my bleary eye--that the story is starting to come out about the FISA abuse. It's only the beginning. A lot of progs are going to be eating crow . . . nah, you have to have a sense of shame for that, and they don't have it.

Hope to be back in action in a couple of days or so.

President Putin: How to Get the Progs to Love You

Dear President Putin:

I know you are very busy these days trying to maintain Russia as a major power on the world stage. You had it pretty easy for most of the past decade, as your biggest "rival"--we're not really in the same league, but never mind--the USA, was governed by "pajama boys," at best, and maybe even active enemies of the USA. I wrote some time back (here, for example) about you,

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the Shining Shooting Tsar of Eurasia-- [is] arguably the smartest national leader in the world. Let me back up. "Smartest" might be the wrong word. Yes, it definitely is the wrong one. That word is too loosely defined and too easily pinned on too many. What makes Putin successful and such a formidable geopolitical foe (thank you, Mitt Romney) is not that he is just "smart," but that he is a throw-back to a different era. He hunts and fishes, and doesn't care about the political fashion and sensitivities of the day; pajama boy has no place in Putin's cage fighter universe. Despite his upbringing as a Communist, he is now devoutly religious and wants to see religion restored to Russian life. As the jihadis have discovered, they have in Putin a rival as ruthless and religiously committed as they, and not bound by the conventions of political correctness.

So you see, I have a lot of respect for you as an actor on the world stage, and am full of genuine admiration at how you could play a pretty weak hand so very well against opponents much stronger than you, well, on paper. I also wrote that, sorry, I was glad not to be in a world where Russia was the dominant power (here) and even gave advice to my leaders on how to deal with Russia's big power ambitions (here). I have written a lot more which I am sure your world class hackers can retrieve with no difficulty, or they can just Google the stuff. As you can see, I am not a big fan of what you're trying to do, but . . . well, the situation in my country has gotten so absurd I turn to you.

In November 2016, we elected a President who has been the toughest on Russia since, since . . . well, at least since the USSR became Russia. You know all the things that Trump has done better than I, and am quite certain this man was not whom you wanted in the White House. Your folks poured a lot of money into the Bill and Hillary Clinton Crime Family, and I am sure you feel a bit burned by that pointless investment. The losers of that election have tried to play political jiu-jitsu by claiming that their opponent was actually in your pocket and that we should ignore all the collusion between your people and Hillary. Our media and "Deep State," which respond to DNC dictates much as did the old Pravda to the Kremlin's, have gone full Orwell. Well, you know all about that. No need for me to spell it out for you.

You are not getting good press here. Good press is important in the USA and West. You're not getting it. The Progs who control the bulk of the media, old and new, don't like you for a variety of reasons having more to do with Prog delusions than anything real. Let me give you some advice which is inspired by Francisco Franco and Josip Broz Tito. There you had two authoritarian European dictators who did not hesitate to sentence enemies to prison and to death. They were very similar in many ways, but Tito knew how to handle the international Progs and Franco did not. Franco talked about the Church, fighting Communism, and crushing the Masons. Tito, as much if not more dictatorial than Franco, talked about the Non-Aligned Movement (he helped found it, in fact), being anti-imperialist, belonging to no side in the great battle of the Cold War, just in favor of peace, anti-colonialism, etc. All themes from Progdam. Tito knew, as I wrote here, for example, that Progs love the FAKE. They adore the FAKE. You can go to my piece, and you will see what I mean.

So President Putin, my advice for you is to go Full Fake!

Tito and Franco, for example, both wore colorful military uniforms with lots of Goering-style medals, but Tito had a snazzy Red Star on his cap. He would wear the uniform of a bloody military dictator but talk about peace, non-alignment, freeing the poor, etc. Not Franco, no, the fool was too honest for that. He just wanted to talk about crushing the Communists and the Masons. In the end, of course, Spain turned out to be a much better place to live than did Yugoslavia (RIP), but Franco (and Pinochet in Chile vs Castro in Cuba) would get no credit for that.

If you go Full Fake, then it will be OK for our President to meet you. Nobody will object. Get on MSNBC and decry the evils of imperialism in Africa and Latin America; quote Marx; talk about Frantz Fanon. You can do it. The Progs in the West will eat it up!

Regards to Sergei Lavrov and tell him I think of him often and of our days at the UN. Ask him if he remembers being trapped in a car with me in a Swiss park . . . a funny story that . . . please don't have him shot because of it . . .

Go Fake!

Solving Russia for the Progs: A New "Blue Division"

OK, OK. We are on prog/DNC/MSNBC/CNN meltdown in utter OUTRAGE! over Trump number 375 umptillion, give or take a billion. Yes, the President misspoke in his press conference with Putin; yes, he conflated, as do the progs, the issues of Russian meddling and Russian collusion.

It does not matter, I guess, that this "gaffe" comes nowhere near, not even in the same league, as non-gaffe statements by Democrats in the past. It does not rank with FDR giving away Eastern Europe to the Soviets; Truman's bungling of the Korean War; JFK's acquiescence to Soviet rule in Cuba and the Berlin Wall; LBJ's bungling of the Vietnam War; Bill Clinton's hash in Somalia; Hillary Clinton's "what difference does it make"; Obama's open mic, "after the election I will have more flexibility"; and, of course, Obama's tacit allowance of massive Russian and Chinese espionage ops against the USA; Obama's allowance of massive Mexican interference in our elections; Obama's "Fast and Furious" disaster, etc. The list is long.

Doesn't matter.

You see, you gotta understand, Trump's gaffe MEANS THE END OF THE WORLD! It is TREASON! TREASON! I tell you! OUTRAGE!

And that's where I come in. You see, it's NOT treason because we are not at war with Russia. We are currently in a stance that's about as close to war as you can get--no President has been tougher on Russia and Putin than Trump--but we're not at war.

But, but, my faithful six readers, your Diplomad has a solution so that we can accurately call any dealing with Russia an act of TREASON!

War! Well, sorta .  . .

Watching the fascist ANTIFA thugs in action made me think of Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco. Once Franco took power in Madrid with Nazi help, Adolf Hitler began pressuring him to pay back German assistance with Spanish entry into WWII. At a minimum, Hitler wanted Spain to take Gibraltar or at least allow passage of German forces through Spain to do so. Franco kept stalling on Hitler's request for Spain to become an active belligerent. Cagey ol' Franco, you see, was never 100% certain that his pals Hitler and Mussolini would win the war. Franco, furthermore, had a lot of respect for the British Navy, and didn't want a redo of the Armada or Trafalgar. Franco, an ardent anti-Communist, was about as anti-Moscow as you could get--well, except maybe for Rachel Maddow--and was willing to help Germany against the USSR, but without unnecessarily antagonizing the British. His son-in-law, Foreign Minister Ramon Serrano Suñer, had the solution: Spanish "volunteers" to serve as a Spanish unit within the German Army against the USSR. As they used to say in the old days in Vegas, "Winner! Winner! Chicken dinner!" Off the (mostly) "volunteers" went to fight and die in Russia in the "Blue Division," called that because of the bright blue shirts of their snazzy dress uniforms. Nearly 50,000 Spaniards--and some Portuguese--fought in Russia for a couple of years or so until Franco ordered them home when it became obvious that the Nazis had an appointment with the dustbin.

There you go! No charge. It seems the progs want a war with Russia; we, therefore, should give them the opportunity to put their snowflake bodies where their mouths now reside. Let's put together a prog division to go fight the Russians! Let's give them a war to call their own. We can even--BONUS!--keep Franco's original name for the outfit, in honor of how they vote and the result of their political ideology, to wit, Blue and Division.

Our Blue Boys, Gals, and Others could have their own uniforms, too. Maybe something based on the ANTIFA costume? A face mask might prove quite useful in the Russian winter. Footwear designed by the holders of the San Francisco Pride parade? High heels could be a bit slippery on the ice, but, hey, it's worth it to fight the Russkies. Weapons? Well the progs are anti-gun, so maybe some sustainably grown bamboo poles? The Spanish Blue Division had regiments named for major Spanish cities--Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla--and ours could do likewise: you know, Blue prog wonderlands such as Chicago, Baltimore, San Francsico, Detroit, Flint, Gary, and even Londonistan for the British volunteers who undoubtedly would join. The Brits could fly their Trump balloon just to let the Russians know exactly where they are located!

Let the progs have their own little war against Russia. MSNBC could imbed with the Blue warriors, and keep us informed on the progress of the progressive march on Moscow.

It's a win-win.

You're welcome, America.

Progs: Lovers of the Fake

Dear readers, have you ever seen so much FAKE? It is breathtaking in its all encompassing nature. The Fakeness is almost everywhere you care to look.

None of this is new to my five or six faithful readers. They know about the scourge of the Fake. The progs revel in it; in fact, the Fake is essential to the whole prog weltanschauung.  As the Beatles would say, "Nothing is real." Well, a couple are, and we'll mention them at the end.

First, let's do a casual walk through the Fake fields of progressivism and examine some of its most prominent fruits.

So hard to pick just a few, there are so many.

In no particular order:

Hate crimes: Almost non-existent in the real America, but not in the Hollywood version that runs through the heads of the typical progs. Nooses on black profs office doors? "N-word" written on dorm doors? Hijabs ripped off innocent girls by nasty white men? Racist notes left black wait staff by nasty white men? So many more of this variety of fake fruit . . . don't get too full on just this one, we got lots more;

Climate change: A biggie this one. So much to gorge on. Weather is not climate, except when it is! It's man-made permanent winter; it's man-made permanent summer; it's man-made drought; it's man-made flooding; it's man-made dearth of hurricanes; no, no it's more hurricanes than ever! No snow! More snow! Fewer sharks! More sharks! Pant. Pant. Please, please go on without me . . .

We now run into fake fruits one after another, too fast to categorize.

Putin-Trump collusion!

Army purging immigrants!

Migrant children ripped away from their "parents"!

Universities are rape farms! Must suspend due process!

The progs love fake NATO! The progs love fake health insurance! Fake borders! "Undocumented" migrants need a pathway to citizenship so they can vote! Citizenship should not be required to vote! Progs love fake African-Americans and fake Native Americans! The progs decree that "hispanics" are a race, except when they do something progs don't like then they are "white hispanics"! Let's have fake women! Let's have fake science say there are no genders! No, no let's have fake science say that there are millions of genders and that we can each choose one! Let's have fake trade deals that wipe out whole chunks of the American working and middle class, all in the name of Gaia and the poor!

Above all, let's have outrage 24/7/365!

A couple of things are not fake, however. The progs love power. All of these fake "crises" and "issues" require intervention by the state to resolve. Guess who controls most of the levers of state power? One guess. As I have written before about progressives and their "targets,"

The idea is to create turmoil, chaos; keep society and its institutions reeling from one punch to the next. The only solution to this turmoil? Why, naturally, more progressive government and regulation.

The other thing that is not fake is the hatred for Donald Trump. He's not fake. In fact, he relishes identifying the progs fakeness. He knows that as they now stand NATO, NAFTA, the EU, the Paris Climate Change Treaty, and the Iran Deal are all fake institutions and agreements meant to cover up the prog drive for power, the drive to disrupt the real world. Trump has the guts to say so. Unforgivable in prog world!

Trump Heads to a Melting Europe

President Trump continues to dominate the media, both traditional and new. No other politician has done this so consistently and for so long. One cannot switch on the ol' tube, the even older radio, or engage in a little internet or social media surfing without seeing the Trumpian dominance. It's absolutely amazing.

Trump announced his pick for a new justice on the SCOTUS, a really rather uncontroversial one which the left is making into a controversy, and, once again, having a melt-down. Brett Kavanaugh seems like a perfectly qualified and experienced judge, certainly much more so than, say, Justice Sotomayor, a progressive darling who sits on the SCOTUS these days. But, of course, the fake outrage machine has been put into high gear, once again, assuring all who would listen and even those who do not, that, once again, the WORLD IS COMING TO AN END! Yawn. I am so tired of the END OF THE WORLD . . . I have seen this movie so many times. Anyhow, I hope the Republicans in the Senate and a couple of sane of Democrats--Surely, they must exist?--can rouse themselves to putting Kavenaugh on the SCOTUS quickly, and spare us all the drama. I know, too much to hope for . . .

Well, The Donald heads off for the Old World. It's an Old World witnessing a melt-down of the elites who have misgoverned that place since the end of WWII. The NATO meeting in Brussels is being attended by some key zombies of that elite. I refer, in the main, to Merkel and May. Both of these ladies are in severe political trouble, and facing an end to their careers thanks to messes of their own making. Merkel, of course, is the mother of the current invasion of Europe by Muslim and African "refugees" who have ripped apart what was left of the continent's social fabric and traditions. Her decision to admit over one million "refugees" has plunged Germany and the EU into an existential crisis with no easy end in sight. Merkel's days are numbered, let's just hope Germany's aren't, too.

Theresa May must be one of the most incompetent and clueless politicians on the scene. May has no business being the PM of a major country. She just can't get on the right side of history no matter how many times that side is pointed out to her. She insists on making a series of "own goals." She is a classic pro-EU drudge. When her own country rejected the EU in a referendum, which the elites opposed holding for years and years, May just didn't know what to do (see here and here for example). She could not understand how the ground had shifted. As I wrote back in April, 2016,

At the risk of being reprimanded and corrected by this blog's one or two British readers, I offer that the force driving the pro-Brexit movement is not solely or even mostly about economics, or finance, or currency exchange rates. It is about something much, much more important. It is about reclaiming the soul of Britain; preserving and restoring that which made Britain, notably England, one of the world's greatest countries, a nation of stunning consequence. It is about deciding whether the great British traditions and innovations that have made our modern world are worth saving or should be discarded . . . For me as an outsider, a person with zero British blood, and no family ties to the UK (although I do like British cheese), what's driving the anti-EU movement in Britain is the need to save the country, or what's left of it. Perhaps without the EU and its courts and mandates, British common sense can prevail, and the UK be saved, or at least England--and if the Scots want to stay in the EU, they should have another referendum and swap London's "rule" for that of Brussels, that'll teach 'em.

What's happening in the UK now re Brexit, is exactly what I wrote about here,

Literally within hours of the "Leave" victory in the Brexit referendum, the elite counterattack began. First, lots of stories in British and other media that, well, there is no rush to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty that would start the clock on the British exit from the EU, that Scotland--of course-- doesn't accept leaving the EU and would rather leave the United Kingdom (and tie itself to the mast of the sinking EU ship), and, of course, the ol' lefty/elite standby, my favorite, the people are too stupid to know what they want. Yeah, yeah . . .

In a similar vein, we saw a story in the Washington Post that claimed, "The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it." Those poor, poor dumb Brits. After having run about half the world, founding the greatest countries on earth, creating modern democracy, saving the world from the Nazis, fighting the Communists and other assorted evil-mongers, and, by the way, having spent over four decades in the EU, the great unwashed British masses didn't know what the EU is when they voted on whether to leave it! Tsk! Tsk! Shame! Shame! The problem, of course, is, as is the case with so much progressive narrative these days, that story is false . . . The best most robust and thorough example of the sort of elitist thinking that has produced Brexit and Trump comes, once again, from the Washington Post. In an incredibly tone deaf, snobbish, and just plain wrong piece, a previously unknown guest columnist by the name of Emily Badger, tells us that, "Brexit is a reminder that some things just shouldn’t be decided by referendum."

In other words, the people got it wrong. May has never quite given that up, and has, at best, dragged her feet in getting the UK out of the EU. She has engaged in an absurd negotiating tactic with the EU, one in which she would have the UK leave the EU but remain subject to its rules and regulations--WHAT? Well, now her cabinet is melting, with Trump look alike Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, resigning with a Trumpian resignation letter signature ceremony.  May is going to NATO and later dealing one-on-one with Trump in London in a greatly weakened state. I doubt Trump will take her too seriously, no matter how many "baby Trump" blimps fill the UK skies.

On that blimp and the protests against Trump, a few parting words. What we are seeing, in essence, is the old "Ban the Bomb" folks back on the streets. They call themselves something like the "No War Coalition" but can't quite name the war they oppose, you know, the one that Trump started. He, of course, gets no credit for trying to end the Korean war and its nuclear threat, or for dismantling ISIS and its war machine. Dopey British actors, such as Mark Rylance, are involved in the protests which include some nonsense about abuse of migrants in the US, and which they assure us are being done for the benefit of people in America. Ah, the "elites." The last remaining comics left.

Trump will dominate. A safe prediction.

July 4, 2018, or 242 with 45

Another USA birthday, number 242, is coming up. Do not pay attention to the prog news mongers of the MSM. Contrary to all the dire news they run and (mostly) invent, things for ol' Uncle Sam aren't going too badly at all. The old codger has shown he's got quite a bit of life and spirit left. If anybody doubted it, they should not: the USA is back, back from that slimy, dank dungeon into which the progs and their nominal leader Obama were dragging us.

As readers know, my usual state is one of cynical pessimism, but I am having to tweak that mood just a bit.  The Anglo-Saxon creation that began in the late 16th century is till going and growing in strength. As I would habitually do back when I was somebody (sorta, just sorta) and played host at 4th of July receptions in the Far Abroad, on this July 4, I once again express my thanks to England. We were exceedingly fortunate in that it was hardy, ill-tempered, no-nonsense, humorless, unpleasant, and straight-talking and straight-shooting Englishmen and their acolytes (Scots, Irish, Welsh) who undertook the Great Experiment in North America. Look around at the rest of the world where others established colonies and their non-English rule; compare the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to them, and decide where you'd rather live. The Anglosphere is the best--and this verdict comes from somebody with not a touch of British, much less English blood or heritage.

Happy July 4, America! Remember the date on which two sets of Englishmen decided to fight over who was truer to what it meant to be English, and the English won.

Now, we have some weirdness in our midsts, of that there is no doubt. We have let our universities, once the most amazing institutions of learning on earth, drift away from our proud roots and become nurseries (in all senses of the word) for some of the stupidest, most self-destructive thought and behavior imaginable.

If 90% of university professors were suddenly to stop going to work, would ordinary, decent people even notice? What if our kids could not study "Gender Studies"? What if they were not lectured non-stop about the patriarchy and the need to destroy it? What if they no longer heard non-stop, again, about the evils of Western (white) civilization? Would the engines of the economy shut down? Would rampant hunger and chaos break out? Would we be bereft of Starbucks baristas?

Let me take this opportunity to thank President Trump, ol' Number 45. Never in my life have I seen a person more equipped to be President. He was the right person at the right time, in fact, just in time. He has made the prog crazies show their craziness in its full Rainbow flag glory. Had Hillary become president, the craziness would have been there, but it would have been in power and much more stealthy. Thanks to Trump we have a chance to see, examine, and stop the insanity and save the country. I hope we take that shot. God bless the electoral college.

To the grill!

I also need to try out my brand new Ruger Mini-14 chambered in .223/5.56 Nato. A wickedly beautiful weapon which reminds me of my old M-1 carbine, but scarier.