Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen - Timothy Norris/Kia Forum

You might think, like I do, that Bruce Springsteen is apparently suffering from a full blown case of TDS - Trump Derangement Syndrome. But now I am confused. I found this in a story on Variety:

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ‘n’ roll in dangerous times,” he said, in his now-familiar invocation and statement of intent that has opened every night on the tour. “Tonight, we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over division, and peace over —”

And the now 18-member E Street Band crashed into a cover of Edwin Starr’s Vietnam-era anthem “War,” which the group had originally covered on the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour some four decades ago.

Which sounds exactly like what everyone on the right has been saying. So I don't understand what Springsteen's problem is, other than he has lost his mind.

MiGs

Four MiG-17s
2025 Defenders of Liberty Air Show at Barksdale AF

From Wikipedia:

The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17 (NATO reporting name: Fresco) is a transonic fighter aircraft produced in the Soviet Union from 1952 and was operated by air forces internationally. The MiG-17 was license-built in China as the Shenyang J-5 and Poland as the PZL-Mielec Lim-6. The MiG-17 is still being used by North Korea's air force in the present day and has seen combat in the Middle East and Asia.

It wasn't used in the Korean War, but it was used in the Vietnam War. The Soviet Union built 10,000 of them. 

We've been trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty . . .

Stole this article about the Cambodia-Thailand conflict from The Geopolitics, mostly because their page is so loaded with ads that it's annoying to read. The reason I bothered with it is because of #4 in his list of reasons for the conflict:

4. Online Scams and the Criminal Economic Lifeline

We've watched a number of TV shows and movies, where large scale scam operations figure prominently in the storyline (The Beekeeper is one, The Black Swindler is another). It's one thing when you see it in a show, but how prevalent are they in the real world? I've heard about call centers in India that employ hundreds of people working for peanuts, calling people in America trying to sell extended warranties for cars. I was thinking that those operations are slimy, and sure, they will ensnare a few gullible fools, but how much damage are they really doing to society? And here we have a center in Cambodia that seems to be a crucial source of funds for the government.

It's not just gullible fools who get ensnared in these things. I suspect a good portion of their customers are people for whom the $29.95 a month for whatever-it-is is an insignificant expense, people who don't even bother to look at their credit card statement, and may not even pay their monthly bill. Someone with the gift of gab manages to get them on the phone and whatever their spiel is, it just happens to sound like a good idea, so they say sure, give up their credit card number and as soon as they hang up the phone they forget about it.

How many calls can a caller make in day? Given that half of the numbers they call don't go through (for any number of reasons) and maybe a tenth will connect them to a person willing to listen to their spiel, I'm thinking they can make a hundred calls an hour, or 800 calls a day, for which they get paid $20. If they manage to ensnare one client, that first months payment pays their wages for the day. But the operation might be able to collect that $30 a month for a year, so the operation is making bank.

If you have a hundred employees making a hundred calls a day, in a year they will have made roughly 3 million calls, which is only one percent of the population of the USA, so you will have barely tapped your market. Hiring staff for the call center is going to run you $60K a month, but when you add in the recurring payments, those calls will be generating $300K a month for a net profit of three million dollars a years. Shoot, you could afford to buy a Rolls, or a McLaren.

Here's the article:

Multiple Rocket Launcher (MRL), likely a BM-21 Grad or a similar Soviet-era system, being reloaded with rockets - Sima Rath

Regime Crises and Geopolitical Perspectives on the Cambodia-Thailand Conflict by Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s finance minister from 1993 to 1994, co-founder and acting leader of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP).

Since May 2025, Cambodia and Thailand have been engaged in an armed conflict of unprecedented intensity in recent decades. Officially triggered by border tensions in disputed areas, the conflict cannot be reduced to a simple territorial disagreement. It reflects a complex interplay of historical, political, economic, and personal factors.

The current Cambodian regime, dominated by Hun Sen’s family for over forty years, lies at the heart of this conflict dynamic. The war highlights the nature of power in Phnom Penh, while reviving age-old geopolitical logics in which Cambodia, throughout the centuries, has owed its survival to its role as a buffer state between rival powers. The crisis today raises a fundamental question: can Cambodia continue to cling to an authoritarian, dynastic mode of governance in a region undergoing profound transformation?

1. Historical Background: Cambodia Between Siam and Annam

For centuries, Cambodia’s very survival as a state depended on the antagonistic relations between its two powerful neighbors: Siam (modern-day Thailand) to the west and Annam (modern-day Vietnam) to the east. These two kingdoms/empires repeatedly sought to subjugate Cambodia, causing continuous fragmentation of its political authority.

A key episode is the Siamese expedition led by General Bodin in the 19th century, during which Cambodia, weakened and vulnerable, oscillated between competing hegemonies. It took French colonial intervention at the end of the 19th century to stabilize and preserve this small kingdom. Without the French protectorate established in 1863, Cambodia might have disappeared from the regional map.

2. Persistent Geopolitical Dependence Since Independence

The independence obtained in 1953 under King Norodom Sihanouk did not eliminate Cambodia’s geopolitical dependence. On the contrary, the Cold War turned the country into a proxy battleground for global and regional powers. Since then, Cambodia has constantly had to navigate the influence of Vietnam, Thailand, China, and the United States.

Hun Sen’s regime, installed by Hanoi in 1979 after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, gradually distanced itself from Vietnam and began a balancing act between Beijing, Washington, and Bangkok. However, these successive alignments never removed Cambodia’s fundamental vulnerability, as the country remains the region’s geopolitical weak link.

3. A Political and Familial Rivalry Between Phnom Penh and Bangkok

The current conflict is exacerbated by a personal rivalry between two political dynasties: the Hun family in Cambodia and the Shinawatra family in Thailand. Once close—Hun Sen once described Thaksin Shinawatra as his “adoptive brother”—the two clans are now bitter enemies.

On June 26, 2025, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra visited Sakaeo province and publicly labeled the Cambodian border town of Poipet a major hub for cross-border online scam networks. This comment directly targeted the Hun regime, widely accused of tolerating and even profiting from these operations.

The reaction from Phnom Penh was immediate. On June 27, Hun Sen delivered an unusually long and heated televised speech, accusing Thaksin of failing to “educate his daughter” and of disrespecting “the second most important person in Cambodia, after the King.” This verbal escalation laid bare the personal animosity driving interstate tensions.

For deeper analysis on this dynastic dimension, see my earlier article: Dynastic Politics and Governance Crisis in Southeast Asia: The Case of Thailand and Cambodia (The Geopolitics).

4. Online Scams and the Criminal Economic Lifeline

In recent years, the Thai-Cambodian border region has become the epicenter of online scam networks that defraud victims across Asia and other parts of the world. These scams are orchestrated from guarded compounds often operated with local protection, generating massive revenues.

For the Hun regime, this shadow economy has become an essential financial lifeline. In the face of international sanctions and declining aid, the illicit flow of money sustains Cambodia’s patronage system. Thailand’s efforts in 2025 to dismantle these networks have been interpreted in Phnom Penh as a direct economic and political threat.

Hun Sen’s regime has responded by reframing Thai enforcement measures as nationalist provocation, masking the real stakes of financial survival behind a rhetoric of sovereignty.

This connection between illicit economies and authoritarian survival was explored in my article: Criminal Networks, Not Patriotism: The True Source of Hun Sen’s Fury Toward Thailand (The Geopolitics).

5. Hun Sen’s Failed Strategy to Divide Thai Elites

In response to Thai pressure, Hun Sen has sought to exploit internal political divisions in Thailand. He has attempted to pit the royalist-military establishment against the Shinawatra-led Pheu Thai party, expressing hope for the return of General Prayuth Chan-o-cha as Prime Minister.

Hun Sen even began leaking alleged private criticisms of the Thai monarchy made by Thaksin during their past friendship. But rather than divide Thai elites, this maneuver backfired: it sparked rare unity among Thai political, military, and royalist factions, all now seeing Hun Sen as a vile and shared adversary.

6. A Conflict That Could Destabilize Hun Sen’s Regime

This conflict risks destabilizing the very foundations of the Hun regime. Built on dynastic control, personal loyalty, and entrenched corruption, the system in Phnom Penh is ill-equipped to manage a long-term crisis or negotiate a peaceful resolution.

The personalized nature of power in Cambodia, the use of public institutions for private enrichment, and the reliance on criminal revenues form a model that is increasingly out of sync with regional dynamics that favor rule-based cooperation.

Conclusion: Toward a New Regional and Political Equilibrium?

Regardless of the military outcome or peace negotiations, Cambodia cannot return to the status quo. A new political balance is inevitable. This will likely require the formation of a new government acceptable not only to Cambodians but also to regional powers—Vietnam, Thailand, China—and to the United States.

This scenario echoes the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, which envisioned Cambodia as a neutral, independent, and democratic state. Preserving the spirit of those accords remains essential for achieving a durable peace.

Ultimately, the war now raging on Cambodia’s borders is also a war for political transformation. The era of unaccountable personal power may be drawing to a close. Cambodia is entering a new historical phase in which it must redefine its role among neighbors and rediscover sovereignty through law, transparency, and peace.

The Failure of the Expert Class…Again

Stolen entire from American Greatness.

Archive Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

The Failure of the Expert Class…Again

David Zweig argues America's expert class failed during COVID, revealing a deeper flaw: the belief that expert opinion should always outweigh the will of the people.

By Stephen Soukup

April 19, 2025

This past week, The Atlantic ran an excellent, helpful, and important piece by David Zweig, excerpted from his forthcoming book An Abundance of Caution, which is, at least superficially, about the coronavirus pandemic and the school closures it prompted. Zweig denies that it is about the pandemic specifically, saying that it is, rather, about “the failure of the expert class.” Whatever the case, Zweig is unsparing in his criticism:

Without sufficient acknowledgment of the harms of school closures or adequate planning for unwinding this intervention, officials showed that their decisions to close were simply reactive rather than carefully considered. The decision makers set a radical project in motion with no plan on how to stop it. In effect, officials steered a car off the road, threw a cinder block on the accelerator, then jumped out of the vehicle with passengers still in the back. No one was in the front or even knew how to unstick the pedal.

The main point of Zweig’s case is that the so-called expert class was not particularly expert in this instance, which is to say that the damage it did was predictable and therefore preventable. Those in charge, whom we were all urged constantly to “trust,” were either ignorant of existing literature warning of the consequences of the actions they were taking or arrogant enough to think that they could produce outcomes different from those previously forecast. In the end, the “experts” failed the nation and especially its children, who suffered disproportionately from their arrogance.

Zweig is right, almost inarguably, and I look forward to reading his book. Nevertheless, I would take his case even a step further, suggesting that the problem is bigger than an arrogant and out-of-touch expert class. The problem, rather, is the largely unique American tradition that insists that expertise and politics must be distinct from one another, and that when they clash, the narrowness of expertise must take precedence over the girth and depth of the democratic crowd.

The COVID pandemic is not the first time that the American people have been let down and dragged down a dark road by their purportedly brilliant experts. Indeed, the defining event of the Baby Boom generation is, perhaps, the greatest (though hardly the only) example of previous “failures of the expert class.”

Americans’ faith in experts and the expert class likely hit its zenith in the 1950s, a decade in which almost anything seemed possible. America had defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. It had rescued Europe from its war and the post-war destruction. It was strong and tough and, of course, it possessed the brightest scientists and the mightiest weapons in all of human history.

On his best-known solo album, The Nightfly, Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen reminisced about those days and the promise they held. For example, in “I.G.Y.,” he muses:

Standing tough under stars and stripes

We can tell

This dream’s in sight

You’ve got to admit it

At this point in time that it’s clear

The future looks bright

On that train all graphite and glitter

Undersea by rail

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris

Well by seventy-six we’ll be A. O. K….

A just machine to make big decisions

Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision

We’ll be clean when their work is done

We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young….

The I, the G, and the Y in the title of Fagen’s song refer to the “International Geophysical Year,” which was an 18-month-long scientific exchange celebration that ran from July 1957 to December 1958. The project was meant to take advantage of a reprieve in Cold War tensions to demonstrate to the world how science could produce lasting peace and harmony. The Soviets spoiled the peace and harmony bit by launching Sputnik three months later, sooner than the Americans could launch their satellite propelled by the rockets of Project Vanguard. In a fitting twist to the utopian agitprop of the IGY project, in response to Sputnik and to Vanguard’s failures, the United States turned, at last, to one of its greatest “experts” on rocket design, the erstwhile Nazi Wernher von Braun.

Of course, most Americans didn’t know about Braun, and so their illusions about the “experts” remained unshattered. In 1960, they elected a man and an administration that would come to epitomize the hope and the faith they placed in their experts. David Halberstam put it as follows in his classic The Best and the Brightest:

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good… It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.

As the Fates and Nemesis would have it, however, it was the best and brightest who, in their arrogance and insularity, eventually shattered the expertise illusion with their debacle in Vietnam. Again, Halberstam wrote:

There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.”

The battle between the “rule of experts” and the rule of the people dates, like most of the dreadful battles in our society, to the dawn of the Progressive Era and the musings of Richard Ely and Woodrow Wilson. The expert class they envisioned proved to be a disaster, just as the Best and the Brightest did—and just as the health and education experts did during COVID.

As I say, the problem here isn’t expertise per se. Expertise is invaluable, obviously. Rather, the problem is the belief that expertise conveys both infallibility and moral superiority and, therefore, should—always and everywhere—be considered superior to the will of the people. Again, this is an artifact of Progressivism, and as important and insightful as books like David Zweig’s may be, they will not alter the dysfunctional operation of our system until we address this original sin.

Stephen R. Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)

WW3?

Vladimir Zelensky and Joe Biden. ©  Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Brothers in Grifterism

Stolen entire from RT.

Here’s why the West has so far failed to start World War III by Tarik Cyril Amar

The New York Times “exposé” on the US-Ukraine partnership contains no surprises, but the underlying revelation is stunning.

Under the title 'The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine', The New York Times has published a long expose that has made a splash. It is a long article advertised – with a lumbering clunkiness that betrays cramping politics – as the “untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.”

And it clearly aspires to be sensational: a revelation with a whiff of the famous Pentagon Papers that, when leaked to that same New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971, revealed what a mass-murderous fiasco America’s Vietnam War really was.

Yet, in reality, this time the New York Times is offering something less impressive by magnitudes. And the issue is not that the Pentagon Papers were longer. What really makes “The Partnership” so underwhelming are two features: It is embarrassingly conformist, reading like a long exercise in rooting for the home team, the US, by access journalism: Based on hundreds of interviews with movers and shakers, this is really the kind of “investigation” that boils down to giving everyone interviewed a platform for justifying themselves as good as they can and as much as they like.

With important exceptions. For the key strategy of exculpation is simple. Once you see through the rather silly group-therapy jargon of a tragic erosion of “trust” and sad misunderstandings, it is the Ukrainians that get the blame for the US not winning its war against Russia, in their country and over their dead bodies.

Because one fundamental conceit of “The Partnership” is that the war could have been won by the West, through Ukraine. What seems to never even have entered the author’s mind is the simple fact that this was always an absurd undertaking. Accordingly, the other thing that hardly makes it onto his radar screen is the crucial importance of Russia’s political and military actions and reactions.


This, hence, is an article that, in effect, explains losing a war against Russia without ever noticing that this may have happened because the Russians were winning it. In that sense, it stands in a long tradition: Regarding Napoleon’s failed campaign of 1812 and Hitler’s crash between 1941 and 1945, all too many contemporary and later Western observers have made the same mistake: For them it’s always the weather, the roads (or their absence), the timing, and the mistakes of Russia’s opponents. Yet it’s never – the Russians. This reflects old, persistent, and massive prejudices about Russia that the West cannot let go of. And, in the end, it is always the West which ends up suffering from them the most.

In the case of the Ukraine War, the main scapegoats, in the version of “The Partnership,” are now Vladimir Zelensky and his protégé and commander-in-chief General Aleksandr Syrsky, but there is room for devastating side swipes at Syrsky’s old rival Valery Zaluzhny and a few lesser lights as well.

Perhaps the only Ukrainian officer who looks consistently good in “The Partnership” is Mikhail Zabrodsky, that is, the one – surprise, surprise – who worked most closely with the Americans and even had a knack of flatteringly imitating their Civil War maneuvers. Another, less prominent recipient of condescending praise is General Yury Sodol. He is singled out as an “eager consumer” of American advice who, of course, ends up succeeding where less compliant pupils fail.

Zabrodsky and Sodol may very well be decent officers who do not deserve this offensively patronizing praise. Zelensky, Syrsky, and Zaluzhny certainly deserve plenty of very harsh criticism. Indeed, they deserve being tried. But constructing a stab-in-the-back legend around them, in which Ukrainians get blamed the most for making the US lose a war that the West provoked is perverse. As perverse as the latest attempts by Washington to turn Ukraine into a raw materials colony, as a reward for being such an obedient proxy.

With all its fundamental flaws, there are intriguing details in “The Partnership.” They include, for instance, a European intelligence chief openly acknowledging – as early as spring 2022 – that NATO officers had become “part of the kill chain,” that is, of killing Russians who they were not, actually, officially at war with.

Or that, contrary to what some believe, Westerners did not overestimate but underestimate Russian abilities from the beginning of the war: In the spring of 2022, Russia rapidly surged “additional forces east and south” in less than three weeks, while American officers had assumed they would need months. In a similar spirit of blinding arrogance, General Christopher Cavoli – in essence, Washington’s military viceroy in Europe and a key figure in boosting the war against Russia – felt that Ukrainian troops did not have to be as good as the British and Americans, just better than Russians. Those daft, self-damaging prejudices again.

The New York Times’s “untold story” is also extremely predictable. Despite all the detail, nothing in “The Partnership” is surprising, at least nothing important. What this sensationally unsensational investigation really does is confirm what everyone not fully sedated by Western information warfare already knew: In the Ukraine War, Russia has not merely – if that is the word – been fighting Ukraine supported by the West but Ukraine and the West.

Some may think the above is a distinction that doesn’t make a difference. But that would be a mistake. Indeed, it’s the kind of distinction that can make a to-be-or-not-to-be difference, even on a planetary scale.

That’s because Moscow fighting Ukraine, while the latter is receiving Western support, means Russia having to overcome a Western attempt to defeat it by proxy war. But fighting Ukraine and the West means Russia has been at war with an international coalition, whose members have all attacked it directly. And the logical and legitimate response to that would have been to attack them all in return. That scenario would have been called World War Three.

“The Partnership” shows in detail that the West did not merely support Ukraine indirectly. Instead, again and again, it helped not only with intelligence Ukraine could not have gathered on its own but with direct involvement in not only supplying arms but planning campaigns and firing weapons that produced massive Russian casualties. Again, Moscow has said this was the case for a long time. And Moscow was right.

This is why, by the way, the British Telegraph has definitely gotten one thing very wrong in its coverage of “The Partnership”: The details of American involvement now revealed are not, actually, “likely to anger the Kremlin.” At least, they are not going to make it angrier than before, because Russia is certain to have long known about just how much the US and others – first of all Britain, France, Poland, and the Baltics – have contributed, directly and hands-on, to killing Russians.

Indeed, if there is one most important take-away point from the New York Times proud expose of the extremely unsurprising, then it is that the term “proxy war” is both fundamentally correct and insufficient. On one side, it perfectly fits the relationship between Ukraine and its Western “supporters”: The Zelensky regime has sold the country as a whole and hundreds of thousands, if not more, Ukrainian lives to the West. The West has used them to wage war on Russia in pursuit of one overarching geopolitical aim of its own: to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia, that is, a permanent demotion to second-rate, de facto non-sovereign status.

The above is not news, except perhaps for the many brainwashed by Western information warriors from historian-turned-war-apostle Tim Snyder to lowlier X agitators with Ukrainian flags and sunflowers in their profiles.

What is also less than stunning but a little more interesting is that, on the other side, the term “proxy war” is still misleadingly benign. The key criterion for a war being by proxy – and not its opposite, which is, of course, direct – is, after all, that major powers using proxies limit themselves to indirect support. It is true that in theory and historical practice that does not entirely rule out adding some limited direct action as well.

And yet: In the case of the ongoing Ukraine War, the US and other Western nations – and don’t overlook that “The Partnership” hardly addresses all the black ops also conducted by them and their mercenaries – have clearly, blatantly gone beyond proxy war. In reality, the West has been waging war on Russia for years now.

That means that two things are true: The West has almost started World War III. And the reason it has not – not yet, at least – is Moscow’s unusual restraint, which, believe it or not, has actually saved the world.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine the US fighting Canada and Mexico (and maybe Greenland) and learning that Russian officers are crucial in firing devastating mass-casualty strikes at its troops. What do you think would happen? Exactly. And that it has not happened during the Ukraine War is due to Moscow being the adult in the room. This should make you think.

I've linked to several other stories by Tarik Cyril Amar. Today I thought I'd just steal the whole thing.

Convergence Calling by James Howard Kunstler is another well written post that talks about The New York Times story.

Tariffs Versus Free Trade

U.S. President Donald Trump signs executive orders on the first day of his second term, Jan. 20, 2025. Credit: White House. - Daniel Torok

Lots of fuming and teeth gnashing over tariffs these days. This professor from Missouri argues tariffs can beneficial. Makes sense to me.

Raising Wages and Preserving Social Cohesion: President Trump and the Unseen Benefits of Tariffs - Emir J. Phillips

Though sometimes dismissed as antiquated economic measures, tariffs have great advantages when seen holistically. Critics point out possible rising consumer prices, but a closer look shows that tariffs not only boost wages but also conserve vital skills, support social stability, and help to offset the negative consequences of unemployment. In a close-call cost-benefit study, tariffs are indispensable even if the consumer cost matches wage gains since their long-term social and economic advantages exceed their negatives.

Strategic use of tariffs allows countries to not only attain economic resilience but also achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth—a concept firmly anchored in the background of American economic policy. Under leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, the Whig Party accepted tariffs as a pillar of national progress. Lincoln’s advocacy of protective tariffs served to finance infrastructure, boost industrial development, and guarantee young, aspirational America’s economic independence—not to mention win the Civil War.

Consumer Costs vs. Worker Gains: A Socio-Economic Calculation

A common argument against tariffs is that they raise prices for consumers, eroding disposable income. While this is partially true, research suggests that the wage increases resulting from tariffs often offset the additional consumer costs. A study in The Review of Economics and Statistics (Autor et al., 2020) found that U.S. manufacturing tariffs implemented between 2018 and 2019 resulted in measurable wage increases for domestic workers, even as they marginally increased consumer prices. Crucially, these wage increases helped stabilize industries that might otherwise have collapsed under foreign competition oftentimes where unions are illegal (Communist China and Communist Vietnam) and these workers in “Worker Soviet States” have tawdry labor rights.

In industries protected by tariffs, workers are more likely to retain and hone their skills, which would otherwise atrophy due to job displacement. The loss of employment in skilled trades leads to a deterioration of the workforce’s capabilities, creating long-term structural weaknesses in the economy. A displaced worker may never regain their previous earning potential, as demonstrated in research published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics (Jacobson, LaLonde, & Sullivan, 1993), which found that displaced workers often experience persistent earnings losses, even after re-employment.

Truth is, tariffs effectively act as a counterbalance to the “race to the bottom” in global labor markets, where corporations exploit cheap overseas labor at the expense of domestic workers. By imposing a cost on imported goods, tariffs incentivize companies to invest locally, fostering a virtuous cycle of job creation and wage increases. This dynamic is particularly critical in sectors like manufacturing, where wages have historically supported middle-class stability.

That's just the introduction. You can read the whole thing here.

Note - the photo was included in the linked article, but I couldn't copy it from there, so I asked Google. Google turned up multiple copies, so I copied it from a site that would let me. The story on that site has nothing to do with tariffs, but I linked to it anyway, just to give them credit for posting the image.

P. S. I wonder who the guy standing next to the Donald is. He's not getting enough credit for his role in keeping the mob under control.

Age of Majority

He didn’t stutter once.
Case

Still trying to figure out who this guy is. I posted about this earlier:

Seems that Ukraine has lowered the age for drafting men into the military has been lowered from 27 to 25. When we were fighting in Vietnam the draft age was 18. I haven't heard anyone explain this discrepancy, and I have no explanation myself. I just find it very odd.

 

Anyway, got me to wondering about why we use the age of 21 to mark when a person becomes an adult. Didn't find much, but I did find a couple of things.

Why 21?: A brief look into the history of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) - talking about the 19th and 20th century in the USA and Protestant religion.

THE ORIGINS OF THE 21ST BIRTHDAY
The origin of the 21st birthday actually came from a boy being groomed for knighthood. In medieval times, there were 3 stages to becoming a knight, all of which were 7 years apart;

• 7 years old – The boy’s training begins as he becomes a page. Essentially a Knight’s servant, the boy would learn what was required to become a Knight while acting as a messenger and performing other basic servant duties.
• 14 years old – The boy would become a Squire. The Squire’s primary duties would be as an armour and shield carrier, caretaker of the weapons and armour, and tasks like saddling the Knight’s horse. This was also the first time that the boy would be taken into battle with the Knight. Often acting as a flagbearer, the Squire would be given a chance to prove himself in battle. A Squire’s role would also involve ensuring the Knight had an honourable burial should he be felled in one of these battles.
• 21 years old – Providing the boy succeeding in his two previous posts, he was officially dubbed a Knight at the age of 21. The Knight was a form of lower nobility and a trusted agent of a Monarch and a skilled fighter bound by a code of chivalric conduct. 

Lessons From The Drinking Age Experiment

For 600 years of English common law and throughout most of U.S. legal history, the age of 21 was regarded as the age of full adult status. Until 1971 the legal minimum voting age was 21 and many states maintained age 21 as their legal drinking age. It was not until the Vietnam War with the unpopular, forcible draft of disenfranchised 18-year-olds, that the age to vote in the U.S. was shifted downward to 18 by the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Update - dude in the video is Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, former professional wrestler and governor of Minnesota. Thanks to ColdSoldier.

 

Jane Fonda versus LBJ

Mr Garibaldi posts about Los Angeles County declaring Jane Fonda Day to be April 30th, the same day Saigon fell back in 1975. Seems 'members of the Vietnamese community' there are not happy about it.

I was opposed to the war, mostly because I didn't want to get drafted. There wasn't a whole lot patriotic blather around my house. Mostly what I heard was that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt and the bureaucrats in Washington were micromanaging the war effort which was hamstringing our efforts to get the job done. LBJ was the president at the time and I haven't heard anything good about him since, so mostly I blame him for the disaster. Jane Fonda is an actress, so her actions should be regarded as a publicity stunt. Her visit to Vietnam earned her a boatload of vitriol. Well, live by celebrity, die by celebrity. But I got to wondering who is worse, so I asked ChapGPT: 

Is Jane Fonda worse than LBJ?

ChatGPT responds:

It's not particularly productive or fair to compare individuals in terms of being "worse" or "better" without specifying a context or criteria for comparison. Jane Fonda and Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) are two very different figures, each with their own complexities and contributions.

LBJ was the 36th President of the United States, serving during a tumultuous time in American history, particularly with regard to the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. His presidency is often evaluated based on his domestic policies, including the passage of significant civil rights legislation, as well as his handling of the Vietnam War, which remains a subject of intense debate and criticism.

Jane Fonda, on the other hand, is an actress and activist who became known for her opposition to the Vietnam War. She famously visited North Vietnam during the war, leading to controversy and criticism, especially among those who viewed her actions as unpatriotic or disrespectful to American soldiers.

Comparing the actions or impact of these two individuals requires careful consideration of the specific contexts in which they operated and the consequences of their actions. It's also worth noting that perspectives on historical figures can vary widely depending on individual beliefs, values, and interpretations of history.

'intense debate and criticism'. Hmm, imagine that. 

One Toke Over The Line

One Toke Over The Line - Lawrence Welk - WTF! (1971)
clotho98

This song came out in 1970. The Vietnam War was going on and hippies were running wild. I remember hearing one story that this song was about pitching pennies, and 'one toke over the line' meant a coin had gone too far. That was a fairy tale from some fool journalist. Wikipedia has a better version:

Mike Brewer gives this account of the origin of the song, "One day we were pretty much stoned and all and Tom says, “Man, I’m one toke over the line tonight.” I liked the way that sounded and so I wrote a song around it."

The song gained popular acclaim while the band was touring as an opening act for Melanie, after they received an encore but had run out of other songs to play.

In a 2012 interview, Brewer said "The president of the record company we were with at the time came backstage and said, “Oh man, you gotta record that and add it to the LP.” We were kind of like, “Really? Oh well, OK.” We didn’t even take the song seriously. Needless to say it came as a big surprise to us that they released it and not only that it was a big hit but it received so much controversy. The government came down on us."

In 1971, the Federal Communications Commission issued guidance to radio station operators: "Whether a particular record depicts the dangers of drug abuse, or, to the contrary, promotes such illegal drug usage is a question for the judgment of the licensee.... Such a pattern of operation is clearly a violation of the basic principle of the licensee's responsibility for, and duty to exercise adequate control over, the broadcast material presented over his station. It raises serious questions as to whether continued operation of the station is in the public interest."

This had a chilling effect and some radio stations stopped playing popular songs like "One Toke Over the Line." Other stations played the songs even more frequently in protest.

 Via Jay

Economy

The news is full of stories about people with non-traditional sexual orientations, the wars in Israel and Ukraine. I am tired of those stories. Ukraine looks like another Forever War much like our adventures in Afghanistan and Vietnam. Israel seems to be dealing with their neighborhood terrorists, and the combatants in the gender wars will continue to provide fodder for social media.

But all that is small potatoes compared to our national debt. Some people don't think it's a problem, they think things will continue to sail smoothly along just like they have been. I am not one of them. I think  the whole thing is going to run off the cliff and we will plunge into the abyss. I suspect that more and more people are getting pushed into poverty. Poverty can lead to desperation, and desperation can cause things to turn very ugly.

But I don't see many stories about that, so I was gratified to find one on RT today:

Tsunami of Dollars

Drowning in debt: The paralysis at the heart of the US fiscal crisis by Henry Johnston

Washington is doing nothing about its deteriorating finances because there is nothing it can do without risking major upheaval

It can appear puzzling why at certain times in history a government facing a looming crisis simply does not address it. The problems accumulate in plain view while little is done to actually solve them. The human imagination being what it is, this inaction is inevitably attributed to some mix of corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence. And certainly the road to any system-level crisis is strewn with missteps and short-sighted policies. But there comes a point when the horizon of possibility has closed and there is simply nothing a government can do without unleashing forces that could easily overwhelm it.

In the strange and torpid final years of Tsarist rule in Russia, the unfolding crisis that would eventually result in the Russian Revolution seemed immobilized in a state of suspension as the country’s major actors recoiled from taking decisive actions for fear of detonating the very cataclysm they had sought to avoid. Much has been made of the weakness and indecision of Nicholas II, but by those fateful last years the anachronistic Romanoff dynasty was collapsing and little could be done to stop it. 

Henry goes on for a couple of pages. It's the best description of our situation I have read.

P. S. Wikipedia has a page about Perpetual War.

Ukraine

Everyday there is a tsunami of news about Ukraine, most of it is drivel - one side or the other claiming some kind of success in combat, big shots calling for peace, or more war. Nothing really substantial, mostly it just goes on, day after day, money flows from the US into Ukraine and more bodies go into the ground. It does seem that we (the US) are getting tired of this disaster, but with Biden in charge, who knows when things will actually change.

Keretsk

Meanwhile, we have this disturbing report from RT. Seem some dude walked into a town council meeting in western Ukraine, that would be the part of the country that isn't overrun with tanks and artillery. He walks into this meeting and drops a couple of grenades that blow up and cause massive injuries. Seems he wasn't happy about council members stuffing their pockets with cash when the rest of the people suffering.

What makes this unusual is that the dude isn't just some terrorist shouting Allah Akbar, he's an MP (Minister of Parliament?) and a member of the same party as Zelenskyy. Of course, given that normal people don't normally try to kill themselves, maybe he's just nuts. But I remember hearing about monks who set themselves on fire during the Vietnam war. I think the rationale then was that the country was so corrupt they just couldn't stand living there anymore.

P. S. I just came across a story where Russia claimed that 400,000 Ukrainians have died in this war. Zelenskyy claims more like 40,000 casualties. That's the fog of war for you - number of deaths? Somewhere between one and a zillion. Ukraine has just over 40 million people, if we take the 400,000 figure, that's one percent of the population, and since most of the war dead are going to be men, which are only half of the population, and they are adults, which means roughly half of that, it means that 4% of the men have been killed. Maybe that's enough for people to start thinking that's enough. Maybe that was the goal of this war in the first place, just smack the shit out of Ukraine.

War Dead

Hamas Chairman Ismail Haniyeh (left) meets with Syrian President Bashar Assad 
(AP Photo/Sana)

Richard Fernandez has a post up talking about siege warfare and how it applies to Gaza. Not particularly edifying, but it does contain this bit of information:

The standard metric for estimating collateral damage is the civilian casualty ratio, defined as the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties. For WWI, it was 3:5, WWII 1:2, Korea 2:1, Vietnam 1:1, Chechen Wars 7:1, Afghanistan 2:5, Iraq War 1:2, WOT [War On Terror] drone strikes brought the number as low as 1:50, Israeli airstrikes Gaza dipped to 1:30. But in Israel’s last incursion into Gaza in 2014, it rose again between 1:1 to 5:2, depending on whose figures are cited.

 

Skycrane

Sikorsky CH-54 Tarhe

Skycranes are kind of odd ducks - really big, funny looking, capable of carrying big loads, they are basically a stick with a couple of jet engines connected to a giant truck transmission connected to a giant fan. They were originally produced for the Army and were extensively used in the Vietnam War. They fell out of favor and were supplanted by the Chinook and the Sea Stallion. Some of them, like this one, are in use in the civilian sector.

Early on, the type had demonstrated itself to possess unrivaled performance in some aspects. As of 2014, it continues to hold the helicopter record for highest altitude in level flight at 36,000 ft, which it set in 1971, as well at the fastest climb to 10,000, 20,000, and 30,000 ft. - per Wikipedia

This one has been busy. In the last two weeks it flew from Sacramento way up north to middle-of-nowhere Canada, spent a week there, and then flew down to Missoula, Montana.

Skycrane Flightpath

Total distance is 2,000 miles. The Skycrane cruises at 100 MPH, so it would have taken 20 hours of flying time to make the entire trip.

MiG-17 - Tumbling Goose showing off his 17’s burners.

Wikipedia, as usual, has plenty to say about this antique:

The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17 (Russian: Микоян и Гуревич МиГ-17; NATO reporting name: Fresco) is a high-subsonic fighter aircraft produced in the Soviet Union from 1952 and was operated by air forces internationally. The MiG-17 was license-built in China as the Shenyang J-5 and Poland as the PZL-Mielec Lim-6. The MiG-17 is still being used by the North Korean air force in the present day and has seen combat in the Middle East and Asia.

The MiG-17 was an advanced modification of the MiG-15 aircraft produced by the Soviet Union during the Korean War. Production of the MiG-17 was too late for use in that conflict and was first used in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958. While the MiG-17 was designed to shoot down slower American bombers, it showed surprising success when used by North Vietnamese pilots to combat American fighters and fighter-bombers during the Vietnam War, nearly a decade after its initial design. This was due to the MiG-17 being more agile and maneuverable than the American F-4 Phantom and F-105 Thunderchief, which were focused on speed and long range combat, as well as the fact that MiG-17 was armed with a gun, which initial models of the F-4 Phantom lacked.

I've been wanting to put together a timeline of Russian jet fighters. I have a hard time keeping all the various model numbers straight. I mean, what are we up to now? 23? 55?

What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?

Blood Sweat & Tears - And when I die
whatiship73

Variety has a review of What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?, a documentary about the band's 1970 tour of eastern Europe. Owen Gleiberman fills us in: 

As the documentary explains, David Clayton-Thomas [BS&T lead singer] was from Canada, where he had grown up as a delinquent troublemaker. As a star, he still had traces of his wild ways; when he was arrested for allegedly threatening a girlfriend with a gun, the U.S. officials decided to deny him his green card. He was going to be kicked out of the country — which meant, in a pop-music landscape even more America-centric than it is now, that the band, in effect, would be finished.

Rather than accept this fate, Blood, Sweat & Tears cut a deal. In an arrangement brokered by the lawyer Larry Greenblatt, they agreed to become the first rock band to play in countries behind the Iron Curtain, in a cultural-exchange tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Why would a government headed by Richard Nixon make this offer, even as it was threatening to deny Clayton-Thomas his green card? It was a form of blackmail. The reason that the State Department felt like it needed Blood, Sweat & Tears — maybe more than the band needed them — relates to the special place the group occupied.

In 1970, the revolution was still officially on. (All those middle-class kids hadn’t quite realized yet that they were just…middle-class kids. That would take until about 1971.) Rock ‘n’ roll was still the voice of the revolution, and the counterculture, enraged by the atrocities of Vietnam, despised anything to do with the Nixon establishment. To play ball with the State Department was to make a deal with the devil.

Yet the success of a band like Blood, Sweat & Tears was already knocking down those kinds of perceptions. The band’s members were against the war, but except for the guitarist Steve Katz (who we see in one clip sounding like Dustin Hoffman playing Tom Hayden), they weren’t really political. Offered the chance to salvage their success by spending June and July of 1970 touring Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland, they thought, “Why not?”

The footage we see makes the case that there was actually a powerful moral reason to do the tour. The State Department, in its blunderbuss way, wanted to open up a kind of détente with the citizens of Communist Eastern Europe. This sort of exchange had actually begun in 1954, but with classical and jazz musicians. So why not rock ‘n’ roll — or more to the point, a rock band that straddled categories in a way that could bridge the free West and the oppressed Eastern Bloc?

I graduated from high school in 1969, so I was aware of Nixon, the Vietnam war and Blood, Sweat and Tears, but I don't remember hearing anything about this tour.

Update April 2024 replaced missing video.

The Age of Conspiracy

Pyramids

This post on PJ Media is so great I just had to steal the whole thing.

The Age of Conspiracy by Richard Fernandez

Perhaps the reason there are so many “conspiracy theories” is because individuals are seeking to explain phenomena that they find difficult to understand or accept. The tide of homelessness, the perceived betrayal of the institutions etc. are like Egyptian pyramids risen suddenly on the plain. Conspiracy requires two essential ingredients to exist: mystery and mistrust. If you see a familiar kind of deer in the woods it doesn’t set your mind churning. But if you see something you never saw before — or didn’t even think possible — when no existing theory of causation seems to fit, then you get to thinking up new ones.

Mistrust has been rising for a long time. A UN study found that “In the United States, trust in the national government has declined from 73 per cent in 1958 to 24 per cent in 2021. Western Europe has seen a similar steady decline in public trust since the 1970s. However current European levels of trust are not as low as in the United States.” Social mistrust is often correlated with hard times. Economic decline reduces confidence in institutions; lower confidence reduces the public’s participation in those very same institutions and the downward spiral continues. Once mistrust starts, it keeps going.

It’s fair to say that the “conspiracy theories” go both ways. Many Democrats think Republicans are working for the Russians. And didn’t you know?

• Nixon: Sabotaged the Vietnam War peace talks to win in 1968.
• Reagan: Encouraged Iran to hold on to US hostages to win in 1980.
• Trump: Aided and abetted Putin’s covert attack on the US election to win in 2016.

This kind of thinking is understandable for exactly the same reasons of mystery and mistrust. The Democrats remember the good old days of FDR’s fireside chats, or the times when Walter Cronkite could say something and everyone would believe him. The present mistrust of the media, in this context, fills them with incredulity. To progressives, seeing Donald Trump in the Oval Office is like seeing a bipedal cryptid, nine feet tall and crowned with horns, in the woodlot behind your house. None of the regular explanations fit; they had to make up a new one. It must be the Nazis. It must be the Russians.

It must be the Other. Both sides are now bristling with extreme explanations.

But in a manner of speaking the rise of conspiracies mean that the current paradigm is now inadequate, because the Internet and social media explosion has created observables that can’t be explained away in the old manner any more. Just as the invention of telescopes revealed moons orbiting other planets,  what were once far-fetched ideas have to be incorporated into a new political orthodoxy, to reconcile them with the facts. They will eventually be resolved.

Going forward there are likely to be three kinds of conspiracies history must deal with: 1) the cons, 2) the heresies that turn out to be wrong and 3) the heresies that turn out to be right. The way to spot the “cons” is to follow the money. From this point of view it is actually climate change ironically that looks most vulnerable. Heresies that turn out to be wrong tend to get empirically weaker over time, while heresies that are ultimately right become gradually more accepted. The lab leak Covid origin theory may prove an example of a conspiracy that eventually proves true.

What used to be called “conspiracy theories” now characterize the way left/right, democrat/republican sides routinely regard each other. What’s worrisome is that both sides have hung up the phone. In a sense nobody cares about fixing the model any more, just getting even. And in the silence each side is thinking: “I tried, really tried to be reasonable. Gave you the chance to say sorry and you didn’t. Was even willing to include some of your points in the plan. I really tried. What happens next is your effin fault. Die MF. Die.”

Iran F-4 Phantoms

Iran’s Army chief, Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi and Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Major General Mohammad Bagheri visit the first underground air force base, called “Eagle 44” at an undisclosed location in Iran, in this handout image obtained on February 7, 2023. Photo: Iranian Army/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

Looking over the pictures I had saved recently I came across this one and I wondered who is still flying F-4 Phantoms? I mean these things are ancient. The first one flew back in 1958, they were a big deal during the Vietnam war. We sold a bunch (200+) to the Shah before he was overthrown.

We also sold some F-14 Tomcats to Iran.

Bronco Gets New Life

North American Rockwell OV-10 Bronco

Bronco repurposed as a CalFire spotter plane. The Bronco was originally developed as a ground attack aircraft during the Vietnam war.

Biden and Bolton, War Mongers of the First Water

I've got a new theory about why Joe Biden is such a mad dog. To me, the war in the Ukraine doesn't make any sense. The story the Russians tell is that eastern Ukraine is mostly populated by Russians, Ukraine was picking on them and so they wanted to break with Ukraine and when Russia kindly offered to take them in they accepted. Okay, that's what the Russians say. The Ukrainians scream about evil Vlad picking on them and maybe he is. I tend to think they deserve it. But none of this explains why the Joe Biden faction cares.

My theory is that by continually waging war, the USA is ensuring that the dollar is the supreme currency in the world. Not sure how that works. Maybe if you dare to think about conducting any foreign trade using a different currency, you will bring down the wrath of the USA and we will fuck you over. 

It's kind of weird because can't all currencies be traded on the open market? If you have rubles and you want to trade them for dollars, or yen, or a bag of African talking sticks, you can. The only thing I can think of is that by somehow being the top dog of the currency pile, we can skim a little something off the top and maybe that's enough to keep the war mongers enthusiastic about war mongering.

War mongering is the one thing we seem to do really well. Korea was like our last big success. The Vietnam war seems to have been a disaster, though maybe it kept the communists from taking over all of southeast Asia. Since then it seems to have been just one disaster after another. Sure, we took down some despots, but look at those countries now. I don't know if Iraq is any worse, but Libya and Syria are definitely much worse off now than they were before the glorious 'color revolution'. I am beginning to think that hot, desert climates go hand-in-hand with Islam and tyrannical despots. There just isn't any other way to keep those places from spontaneously exploding.

Then there's my other, more basic theory, and that is that the war mongers have big investments in the armaments business, so more war just means more money for them. Any talk about principles and freedom are just window dressing to convince the taxpayers that they are doing the right thing while they are getting fleeced.

The Joker and the Thief

The Joker and the Thief
Via The Feral Irishman (NSFW)

Now, where have I heard that line before? Oh yeah, now I remember:

Jimi Hendrix ~ All Along The Watchtower ~ US Navy & Marine Fleet Air ~ Vietnam War
Aurora Borealis