Tuesday it Rains, and other Observations

Knee pain persists but is minimal. We got to the gym yesterday for a weightlifting session. 

We are in the midst of nor'easter here in New Jersey. Lots of rain. We still haven't given the yard the last autumn mowing, damnit. 

Hmmm, we're getting some traffic from the Netherlands. Have we finally gotten some traction in the families' ancestral homeland? [Your nephew discovered you're Krauts-Ed]. Whatever.  Amazon reports no Netherlands sales. So bizarre. Why don't you guys leave a comment here or look us up on FB or Gab?

We wrote yesterday that we're thinking of showing the Australian/Japanese strike* from USS Long Beach's CiC. We've always liked events being conveyed through radio back and forth. This method also allows us to differentiate between strikes. It's also an out from doing a lot of fancy F-111 technical details. USS George Washington and her battlegroup will be joining in. 

As we suspected, Governor Murphy plans to impose vaccine mandates after the election. Project Veritas has the hidden camera footage. James O'Keefe promises more. This blog endorses Jack. Both Maryland and Massachusetts have Republican governors, and New Jersey had Chris Christie just four short years ago. Jack's a good candidate but his ideas aren't great for New Jersey and we think circumstances are a draw.  A Jack victory is not impossible. But this blog remains skeptical. 

We began re-watching Dune last night. Denis Villeneuve's Dune is a visual extravaganza that invokes a lot of science fiction mythology. We can't quite place it, but we know we've seen some of these visuals before in sci-fi art, book covers and magazines. Villeneuve's camera moves slowly across the desert, Caladan... This gives the film a sweeping, epic feel without being pretentious. In fact the visual style is grand but shows rather simple scenes, a spaceship or a bit of brutalist architecture, another important part of the film's visual feel. The background is enormous, threatening to swallow the humans on screen. 

That's a lot of critical gobbledygook for we like what we saw. 

We mentioned before this debate between Libertarian radio guy Scott Horton and Neocon carb guzzler William Kristol. We found Irving Kristol's son as insufferable as ever. He actually said the US didn't do as much as we could have in the 'Arab Spring'. Kristol has the hots for Assad. There's a reason why he, Wolfowitz, etc etc get more and more sinister in the World War 1990 series. But we were surprised to see Horton was a bore as well. His points came down to 'US foreign policy bad' and blamed us for millions of deaths. Horton was better than Kristol, but that's no mean feat. That said we enjoyed his total (and appropriate) contempt for the Neocon. 

*Targets are the SS-11 base at Svobodny and their nearby bomber base an Unkranka. 

Wither the Neocon, Wither Will?

We had the Milo Moment. We're coming out of the Jordan Peterson Moment. It seems we are entering the Tucker Carlson Moment. 

Tucker's been taking a rapier to conservative tropes, free trade, tax breaks for businesses, etc etc. Nowhere has he been more effective, or righteously vicious than in foreign policy.

Tucker Carlson wants to know why Max Boot and William Kristol are still on TV and what makes them so smart, anyway? He unloads upon the duo like a sinner reformed, which he is.

Carlson quotes Boot's words, written after 9/11:

“Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul,” Boot wrote. “To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt.”

That's certainly what we thought. We believed in 2003 that by say 2008 Iraq would be free, the Iranian Mullahs overthrown in a revolution and the PLO sidelined.

Carlson points out that after Iraq Boot called for regime change in Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, etc etc. 

William Stroock dot blogspot dotcom stands by our support for liberating Iraq. It was the right place and 2003-2008 was the right time to fight Islamic terror. Would Iraq or the world be better off with Saddam in power? And besides, we won.

The difference between ourselves and Boot, Kristol, etc is we've had enough.

[Yeah, but knowing what you know now would you still favor the 'liberation' of Iraq, as you say?-Ed]

Oh snap!....

Kristol Killed the Magazine Star

We saw the other day that Google determined the dread Russians* spent less than $5000 in ads trying to influence the 2016 election.

In case you're wondering, Millennial readers (you poor bastards), the Dems never feared Russia when it was Soviet Union and had five thousand nuclear missiles pointed at United States. In fact party of Democrats actively encourage, rooted for, and supported Kremlin during Cold War. See for example the letter of America's own Senator Edward M Kennedy to Brezhnev asking him to take it easy on Ronald Reagan. On side note, easiest way for mad-man Reagan to kill communists would have been, and still is, nuclear strike on San Francisco, UC Berkley, The New York Times...*

Anyway the 4700 or so rubles the Soviets, I mean Russians, spent on Election 2016 is less then we've spent to advertise some of our books, both successfully and unsuccessfully.

We don't need to advertise anymore. Through the magic of the internet when we publish a book the damn thing sells itself.

Selling books is easy. We've been talking about it here for a bit now, as alert reader(s) may have noticed: write what the audience wants. You people want more World War 1990, you get more World War 1990.

Which brings us to the now defunct Weekly Standard. William Kristol's magazine started as a policy and idea journal, the banner of Newt Gingrich's 104th Congress. I was a charter subscriber. Now The Standard is a Never Trump embarrassment with a shrinking subscriber base who's lost its sugar daddy. You see, these political magazines never make money and need a rich guy who doesn't mind losing a couple of million a year as a write-off.**

Someone will make excuses for The Standard- well in this day and age....digital media...since the Great Recession...Bullshit.

Write what readers what to read. Civil War Quarterly asked us tow write a piece about Sherman's March, to which we replied, 'Hasn't that already been done?' Maybe so, but voila! All of the military history magazines have expanded since the Great Recession. When one writes what readers want to read one can do that.

*We say nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

**We don't even know what a write-off is, but they do, and they're the ones writing it off.

Whither the Weekly Standard

Via Hotair, we learn that the once venerable Weekly Standard is about to get the axe, though pieces of the body may still run around like a chicken with its head cut off.

In recent years the standard, or its publisher, William Kristol- has gone insane. Trump has had that effect on lots of people.

The Weekly Standard got its start in the summer of 1995, the summer of Newt Gingrich. This was the high tide of post-Reagan conservatism, of Gingrichian policy ideas, wonkism, and dare we say neo-conservatism. I was there:

The Weekly Standard was linked to Newt, it even featured him on its inaugural cover. But Newt imploded, as is his want, in 1998 and we don't think the magazine ever really found its form again, at least not until the Iraq Campaign. Ever since the Weekly Standard has been in intellectual tatters, as was much of the right, a piece of the smoldering wreckage of Election 2008.

Oh well. The right has moved on from Neo-conservatism to Trumpism.

Alert reader(s) will recall that Kristol was Dan Quayle's chief of staff. He was the one standing in the classroom next to the veep saying, 'There's definitely an e at the end of Potato.'

Those same alert reader(s) will notice that Kristol has been getting more and more diabolical in the WW1990 series.

The Neo-Con in Print

The great, incomparable, First Sith Lord of all that is unholy in creation, Vox Day really unloads on William Kristol:

Ever wonder why (((certain neocons))) are always idiotically banging on about going to war with Russia? Read The Melting Pot and you'll know why. They're filled with an irrational historical hatred and seeking retroactive revenge upon Tsar Amalek. Apparently even the 70 years of communist slaughter, suffering, and deprivation to which the Russian people were subject isn't enough for them. Forget America. Forget Israel. Forget all the challenges that the modern world presently poses to Western civilization. What is really important is that Russia and Germany be destroyed!

Our First Sith Lord wrote this after Kristol's unfortunate remarks, at the link, about replacing Americans with new immigrants etc, etc. Now Jewish paranoia about Russia and Germany is well justified, but before one gets into an ethnic suffering pissing match here, let's just remember that Mr. Day is Native American, so there. Even hearing German gives me the creeps, but that has more to do with growing up watching WWII movies on TV every weekend. My own great grandfather was in the Luftwaffe during the Great War.

One of the sub-themes of A Line through the Desert is Jewish identity. Jake Bloom is a tall, long limned virile young man raised by stereotypical Jewish parents. In the army he's something of skirt chasing bad ass.

Of course, modern American Jews are pretty schizophrenic, 'Jewish...American...Jewish...American...oyyyyyy....' I think in this epic video Ezra Levant really nails it:

Many American Jews, millions really, are interested in 'Jewish Stuff' as Ezra said. There's  a gap opening between these secular, left Jews (see J-Street) and Israeli Jews.

Of course Kristol and the Neo-Cons and such are culturally conservative and very pro Israel. I'm one myself. Still Neo-Con and proud but I admit I'm fed up with Kristol. He's had a lot of bad ideas, Dan Quayle for example, military intervention in Iran in 2005 (look it up), Evan McMullin.

There's a reason why Kristol and his fell Neo-Cons have gotten progressively more sinister in the World War series.

Just wait till we get to the election '92.

Vehicles

Both William F. George and William Kristol have recently talked about Mr. Trump being the end of the GOP as a 'vehicle for conservatism'.

Whether or not that's true, I couldn't say. But the idea is endemic of the problem with modern conservatism.

We've talked about the problem in this space before but it deserves discussion again because its why we're in this mess.

Over the last twenty years conservatives have had this great ideology with ideas about school choice, enterprise zone, pro-growth tax rates, etc, etc...Works great in elections, right guys? This is why Mitt Romney is cruising to re-election and W. won a pair of landslides.

Look guys, no one cares about the ins and outs of public vs private garbage collection. William F. Buckley got that. Paraphrasing now, 'You guys worry about garbage collection, I'm going to save the world from communism.'

Now, the other fatal flaw we, not they, we, because I am certainly with George and Kristol, is the deification of Reagan. Hey, he was always president when I was a kid. So I tread lightly here. But you know what everyone remembers about Reagan? That's right, Morning in America and There's a Bear in the Woods. He had a few simple, strong ideas he conveyed. What were Romney's ideas? What about W's. Hey how about Bobdole?

Mr. Trump is doing the same thing. What do we remember? Crooked Hillary, Build a Wall...you know what your getting with Mr. Trump.