Author: VD

He Never Did Nothing to Nobody

If only Scotland Yard had been able to conclusively confirm the identity of Jack the Ripper at the time, we might have had an English Anti-Defamation League decades sooner than we did in the USA.

Kosminski was born on September 11, 1865, making him 22 and 23 at the time of the murders. He grew up in Klodawa, near Warsaw, the youngest of seven children, with his father dying when he was aged just eight.

During the murders investigation, Dr Robert Anderson, head of the London Criminal Investigation Department, had designated Kosminski as key suspect as the killer. Previously confidential police reports, that were published in 1894 as the Macnaghten Memorandum, recorded that detectives believed he had a “great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, and had strong homicidal tendencies”.

But even then political correctness made them reluctant to accuse a Jew, due to the potential fallout of antiSemitism.

Every single time isn’t just a meme. “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” Most people don’t understand the significance of that very literal statement. The religion is much older, and much more terrible, than many of its practitioners themselves realize. It’s absolutely not a coincidence that from the Irish Potato Famine to the Holodomor to the Great Leap Forward, there is always a man that will not be blamed for nothing to be found in the background.

This doesn’t bode well for either Argentina or Mexico. We’ve already seen what it’s done to Ukraine.

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Not Much News

You’d barely know there was an invasion of Lebanon at all based on the lack of media coverage of the ground war compared to the multiple big headlines of the continuing series of air strikes everywhere from Lebanon to Yemen, complete with the name and rank of the Hezbollah commander supposedly killed in the bombing. I don’t think we can necessarily read too much into that, except for two things.

  1. Where are the names and identities of all the Hezbollah commanders killed and captured on the ground?
  2. It’s usually not a good sign if one has to call in the reserves in the early stages of an offensive.
  3. The IDF has already committed more troops than it did in the 2006 war.

Israel has been conducting ground incursions into Lebanese territory. The Israeli military said a fourth division is now taking part in the incursion, which has expanded to the west, but operations still appear to be confined to a narrow strip along the border. The 146th Division, made up of reservists, had entered southern Lebanon, in an apparent escalation. 

The IDF committed five divisions to Gaza, where Hamas has been defeated but not pacified. The fact that it’s already committed four divisions to Lebanon, including a reserve division, in barely the first week of combat, doesn’t prove that things are not going well there, but does tend to suggest that they are not. I expect we’ll find out soon enough; if the IDF declares its limited objectives were achieved and withdraws before the end of October, that will imply that it was decisively defeated by Hezbollah.

On the other hand, if the IDF reserves rapidly proceed up to the Litani River and the missile barrages come to an end, we’ll know that it won the latest round. Everything else is just rhetoric.

UPDATE: Curiouser and curiouser. A conspiracy site was reporting that Israeli Defense Minister had been killed in the recent Iranian missile attack, along with a lot more people than Israel has admitted. I assumed it was the usual nonsense, but now I’m not so sure.

WASHINGTON, Oct 8 (Reuters) – Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has canceled a Wednesday visit to the Pentagon, the Pentagon said, as Israeli media reported Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted first to speak with U.S. President Joe Biden. The surprise cancellation on Tuesday comes amid soaring tensions between Israel and Iran as Israel weighs options to respond to Tehran’s missile attack last week, its second this year against Israel.

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No Flags for Lebanon

At 2-3, the Jets haven’t been great this year, but I really fail to see how losing 23-17 to an undefeated Vikings team is a reason to fire a man who hasn’t had a functional quarterback situation since he became their head coach:

“This morning, l informed Robert Saleh that he will no longer serve as the Head Coach of the Jets,” team owner Woody Johnson said. “I thanked him for his hard work these past three-and-a-half years and wished him and his family well moving forward. This was not an easy decision, but we are not where we should be given our expectations, and I believe now is the best time for us to move in a different direction.

It would appear that expressing support for a certain countries and organizations is now grounds for being fired. Which is why it is imperative for everyone to immediately alert Roger Gooden about the support that Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur has been seen expressing for Hamas.

UPDATE: Even Mike Florio is wondering what’s going on. But, of course, no one dares to observe the obvious.

Timing of firing of Robert Saleh makes no sense

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No Place for SJWs

No sooner had JDA re-launched his crowdfund for The Emerald Array yesterday after having his original campaign rejected by Kickstarter when one of the usual suspects sent the customary Did You Know emails in the hopes of having the new campaign similarly rejected by Fund My Comic. But unlike the other crowdfunding platforms, Fund My Comic showed no interest in buying their attempt at tortious interference:

Thank you for expressing your concern. However, we do not regulate or monitor creators’ behavior outside of our platform. Whether or not we agree with a creator’s conduct off-platform does not impact their ability to use our services. Our oversight is limited to the content that is posted and shared on our platform.

The campaign in question has been thoroughly reviewed by our administration and has not been found to violate our Terms of Service. The content provided is benign in nature and does not contain any material that we would consider offensive based on the campaign’s submissions.

We uphold three fundamental principles for all creators and artists who use our platform. First, we respect their freedom of expression. While some creators may produce content that we, or others, might not personally agree with or enjoy, as long as they adhere to our established guidelines, they have the right to express themselves freely and allow supporters to show their backing. Second, we believe in creators’ right to independence. This is why we do not engage in policing behavior beyond what is presented on the campaign page. Lastly, we are committed to building trust with both creators and backers. If a campaign passes our review process and is approved, it will remain active unless it violates our policies.

We respect your perspective and encourage you to use your own platform to share your views if you believe this creator poses a concern. However, we will adhere to our Terms of Service and will not take any action against this or any other creator based on conduct outside of our platform.

That’s one of the most polite and delications invitations to engage in self-fornication that I’ve ever read. There are dead English novelists of great reknown who are applauding that sensitive and well-measured response in their graves. And it’s definitely a reason that every creator, of every political stripe and creed, would do well to consider utilizing Fund My Comic for their next campaign.

That being said, the HYPERGAMOUSE campaign continues to do very well on Kickstarter. But it’s good to know there is an effective alternative should it become necessary.

And speaking of comics, a message from The Warehouse for the long-suffering AH:Q backers, whose patience is finally being rewarded.

The Alt Hero: Q omnibuses are starting to go out to the backers. Please check your shipping notifications when you get one and respond if an address update is needed. This is an older project and while we are doing our best to update everyone’s address if we have it on file, this is a big list. So, check your address, if it’s not correct, send me an email. Thanks!

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Hungary Opts Out

An object lesson in why government by treaty does not, and cannot, ever work:

Hungary has joined the Netherlands in seeking an opt-out from European Union rules on asylum, a minister has said, as the country’s nationalist leader Viktor Orban is expected to make waves at the European Parliament on Tuesday.

Last month, the Dutch government, which is dominated by Geert Wilders’ hard-right party, declared an ‘asylum crisis’ and requested an opt-out of the common asylum policy from Brussels. It said the move was justified so it can provide ‘housing, health care and education’ to its citizens, but the European Commission responded by saying that it expected no ‘immediate changes’.

The European treaties are binding agreements, and any exemptions can only be made with the agreement of all 27 EU member states.

“Binding agreements” are the way Satan tries to claim your soul. This is as true of nations as it is of individuals. The fact is that there are no agreements that can ever be regarded as permanently “binding” for sovereign nations. The sooner that the remaining EU member-states realize this and follow Great Britain’s lead in ridding themselves of their would-be rulers, the better.

No nation should ever sign any agreement that purports to be binding, permanent, or final.

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Mailvox: Surviving Helene

This is an email from a reader. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, so I’m presenting it here unedited except for the removal of a few sections since it was pretty long.

This is an attempt to capture my thoughts and first hand experiences over the last week having gone through hurricane Helene and the subsequent recovery effort. My goal is to get this all down while its fresh so i will not forget all the lessons learned 6 months from now. I will reference “the police” at various points. Unless otherwise stated, you can assume these are Sheriff’s Deputies from my local church community who I personally know and trust. This is categorized into topics and roughly follows the timeline as it developed.

My family and I live in Henderson County, NC. You have probably seen Henderson Co. in the news over the last week, from my home its only about 8 miles to what used to be Bat Cave and Chimney Rock, and little farther down the roads was the village of Lake Lure.

A quick summary of what happened: from Tuesday night (24 Sep) to Thursday night, the greater Asheville area received 20 inches of rainfall. Late Thursday night is when we saw the first of the hurricane weather and it dropped another 12 inches of rain over the next 8 hours. All told, Henderson County saw nearly 3 feet of rain in about a 72 hour period. This obviously contributed to historic levels of flooding, but it also prevented the trees from being able to withstand the hurricane force winds. Trees fell everywhere. every single yard that had trees before the storm had at least some of them blown over by Friday morning. This led to the largest impact of the whole experience: catastrophic damage to the power grid. Between flooding and mud slides, nearly all power substations were damaged or completely destroyed. the first 3 days of recovery was completely devoted to fixing or rebuilding all of these substations. People started voicing frustration because for a while you didnt see power crews working on the roads as they were forced to start with all the damaged substations. Once the substations were back online, the power company and tree crews shifted to clearing the lines. A “good” road would only have a tree rip down the power lines on 1 out of every 5 sections of line between poles. the higher up a mountain you went, the more that ratio would inverse with the narrow roads and thick mountain vegetation. Duke energy would estimate they had thousands of down lines and hundreds of broken poles in Henson County alone. this total failure of the power grid let to an immediate “shortage” of supplies, specifically food, water, and gasoline, because literally no one anywhere had power to run their store or gas station.

Preparedness

I, like most people in my area, did not prepare specifically for this event ahead of time. The volume of rain took everyone by surprise. I remember being at Ingles early Thursday morning and grabbing an extra loaf of bread on a whim because it seemed like a good idea. that’s all. sadly, this was more forethought than a lot of people in our area. What carried us through was our general level of preparedness. We have food for 4-6 months and several weeks worth of drinking water. I cant express the amount of peace i felt knowing we were never in desperate straight and had the means to provide for and defend ourselves. Winning the psychological battle is a real thing and should not be underestimated. The biggest hole we found in our preps was gray water. our only means of flushing the toilet was our 50 gallon rain barrel and that was getting very low by the end of day two. the only other option was a creek about 400 yards down a steep hill behind our house that would have been a tremendous amount of time and energy cost in collection… Another interesting note is the loss of faith in our Berkey filter for this specific event. It was no fault of the Berkey, but every single water supply, be it creek, stream, river, or pond flooded to historic levels and was left cluttered with all manner of God knows what from who knows where. Unless i was able to collect it coming directly out of a spring (i know people who have springs on their property and were just fine drinking from it), i would have used a nature water source only as a last resort. Lifting weights paid off big time. I lift 3 days a week and doing a 5×5 squats and deadlifts had me ready to go when it came to 3 days of moving trees.

First 3 Days

We spend the wee hours of Friday morning in our basement to protects us from the falling trees. I was able to go outside and look around in the steady but windless rain by about noon. It was obvious there would be significant clean up based on all the down trees around us. walking out to the road I could see several snapped and hanging power poles and the road was impassible in both directions from huge oak trees. Cell service was still available to us until Friday evening so i was able to text pictures to family and even spoke to out of area family on the phone to let then know we were ok. By Friday evening cell service started going in and out. we would later find out that some towers have generators damaged or destroyed from mud slides and other worked for a while until they ran out of fuel. The latter would remain down for the next several days until crews could cut their way to them with more fuel. This significantly limited our ability to communicate until people were able to identify places where service was usable, and were able to actually get there. In these first 3 days it was more or less you and your neighbors just trying to cut everyone out. first cars and driveways had to be cleared, then your road, then the main road would get you back into town. If a road was lined with trees would would average a significantly sized down tree about once every couple hundred yards. Its about a mile from our house back to the main road and I would bet more than 20 trees had to be cut and moved to clear a path big enough for a car to get through. Luckily there is lots of farming equipment around here so you could cut it into fairly large pieces and someone would push it with a backhoe into the ditch or at least out of the middle of the road. On Saturday afternoon one of our deputy friends that lives nearby stopped to check on us. That’s when we got the first news that Bat Cave and Chimney Rocks were unknown as all the bridges washed out as well as the scope of the down trees. The police were critical in these first few days with spreading the word on what roads were passible and what areas had to be avoided. One friend is a long time dispatcher and said the previous record was a bad storm years ago and the call tracker got to 87 active reports in the stack. by Saturday afternoon it topped 900. It certainly would have been higher if cell services wasn’t down for most people. It was also Saturday night that all the issues with panicked and desperate people started popping up. there were two gas stations in the whole southern half of the county who had their pumps running on a generator. starting Saturday morning these stations were grid locked by people who were caught transiting through Hendersonville, plus anyone else who didn’t top off their tank before the storm. hundreds of cars were waiting at pumps around the clock. I was finally able to gas up Tuesday morning at 1am. There were multiple fights and at a rest stop on I-26 some lunatic even climbed up on a tanker truck and tried to force the driver at gun point to give him fuel. The police said it was insane how many people were out driving around on Saturday looking for food because they only procure food one day at a time. The looting was limited to closed gas stations and convivence stores but generator theft was a big problem. I didn’t get much sleep those first 3 nights as we had to keep the windows open to try and fight the now growing mold in the basement. Monday was a big mile stone for my family, we were able to make it over to the other side of town to link up with extended family. they lived right outside town and never lost natural gas and just had their municipal water restored earlier on Sunday. I moved my wife and kids in with them for the rest of the week and i would spend the night at our house with the animals and all our long term preps.

Logistics Considerations

Tuesday marked the shift out of immediate survival mode and into coordinated recovery mode. Enough men from our church had cut them self out that we were able to organize chainsaw crews to start helping church members, mainly the elderly. By this point you had a decent idea of how to could get from here to there, but you only knew for sure one route that was clear. As Duke Energy and all the other out of state (and even out of country) power crews started restoring lines, previously passible roads would be found closed so crews could cut trees and fix lines. this would lead to a game of find your way around, and often the first 2 or 3 alternate routes you knew would be blocked and unusable as well. A trip that would normally take 15 minutes might take 30 minutes or 2.5 hours. This lead to EDC on steroids. if you left the house you had a gun with spare mags, flashlight, headlamp, water, food, chainsaw + tools, cash, and extra water to give out.

Community

Even as i write this Monday morning October 7th, its still mostly a community driven recovery effort. neighbors helped each other in the beginning, then we were able to start organizing and effectively getting around to places on Tuesday. I didn’t see a FEMA person until Thursday morning, and all they have done is make sure all the previously homeless drug addicts and illegals have what they need at the large shelters. There is no way i would send a woman or child to any of the temporary shelters run by FEMA or the Red Cross. It was incredible to see how man good people there are around us. everyone was helpful and gracious. a specific thing i noted was how little power multiple homes really need to keep afloat in something like this. our extended family’s neighbor had a natural gas whole-home generator that operated the entire time. they ran extension cords to the 3 houses in the immediate vicinity so everyone in that little nook of homes had a charging station inside their house, could run their deep freezer, and have a box fan. it was a huge morale boost to say the least.

Operational Logistics

The recover effort leverages the network of churches, and specifically the pastors of those churches. out of area pastors would coordinate supply drop offs with our pastor and get it packed and shipped up to our church. (by this point I-26 was open heading south into SC and that allowed trucks and trailers to get stuff in to us). We converted our fellowship hall into a receiving area and small aid station. We worked about 10 hours a day unloading trucks and sorting supplies. lesson learned here, timely supplies are nice but we would have taken them several hours later if it was a little more organized. A lot of small items, like toothpaste or bottles of water, would come in large palatized produce box but would be completely loose inside it. it would take a lot of time to dig them all out while you were trying to empty a truck and get it out of the way for the next truck. The best way to go about it would be to throw everything in boxes that can be carried by a single person. Supplies were then loaded onto pickup trucks (using trailers was a hard no-go as the more remote roads were barely passible and there would be no room to maneuver them) and taken deeper into the worse hit areas where they would be left with a local church as a forward staging area. From there either pickups or ATVs would take out for distribution to work crews or families still in the area. Local men would form into unofficially official chainsaw teams or search and rescue teams and would get a police escort into and out of the worst areas. This leads into the final topic.

Social Media / Cellphone Culture

90% of all the reports of “police kept me out and refused to let me save people!!!” are all nonsense and are actually examples of police exercising good judgment. Right now DoT contractors are trying to reconstruct roads so large recovery teams can get into places like Chimney Rock but have to constantly avoid killing GoPro Bros on 4 wheelers and dirt bikes. One equipment operator at church yesterday said they had to double back to re-repair a stretch of road that was rutted out and left unusable by a group on ATVs, no one knows who they were. There are hundreds of local, able bodied men that know the lay of the land and exactly who they are looking for. Do not bring your lifted jeep to NC to try and save people because TikTok said you should. Its really hard to believe how much disaster rubber necking is happening out there right now.

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A New Wave of Censorship

There have recently been a new wave of creator bans at BackerKit, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter:

This weekend, in an unprecedented move, Kickstarter banned me after I submitted my military science fiction space marine comic, The Emerald Array, for approval. I’ve seen projects declined before, but never an outright creator ban like this where it’s stripped me of the ability to communicate with the current backers of my last campaign, some asking questions via message or comment, which I have no way to answer.

JDA isn’t the only one to have a crowdfunding campaign shut down before it started of late. Lacey and I were banned by BackerKit for some unidentified “associations” and Comicsgate’s Cecil was banned by Indiegogo. Fortunately, a less censorious gentleman has prepared an alternative platform that is open to all and sundry, as JDA notes:

I’m not going to take this lying down, however. I’ve decided to fight, fight, fight, moving up the timetable of The Emerald Array space marine graphic novel campaign. We’re moving to Fund My Comic, a site run by a Christian creator committed to free speech.

Although we haven’t had any problems with Kickstarter, it’s good to know that there are other options that are available to us; while we have the right to use a certain alternative with whom the Cavalry are very familiar, we prefer not to use them and thereby generate revenue for them. One victory lap was sufficient to prove the point.

In the meantime, the HYPERGAMOUSE campaign is going well, moving steadily toward the next stretch goal. We’re contemplating the addition of a) a leatherbound edition of Sigma Game and b) foreign language editions of Hypergamouse.

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Don’t Tell Them About the Helmets

Apparently it is now a “huge controversy” to display your nationality:

New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh sparked controversy during the team’s NFL game against the Minnesota Vikings in London on Sunday. The 45-year-old was spotted on the sidelines at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium wearing a Lebanese flag below the Nike logo on the sleeve of his team hoodie.

The night before Sunday’s game – the first of the NFL’s international fixtures this season – Israeli bombing continued on Beirut, the Lebanese capital, amid the Israel-Hezbollah war. The Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut was hit by more than 30 strikes overnight, which were heard across the city, with smoke still seen billowing from the site after dawn, Lebanon’s official National News Agency said.

Saleh, who is of Lebanese heritage, previously wore a similar patch last October but his decision to bear the flag Sunday raised eyebrows as the anniversary of the beginning of the war in Gaza approaches.

Saleh is Lebanese. Naturally, he doesn’t support Israel invading and attacking his homeland. But he’s not doing anything more than EVERY SINGLE NFL PLAYER is doing; look at the back of their helmets. Most players have US flag stickers because they are US citizens, but foreign players wear the flags of their countries; there is a German tight end – I don’t recall which team – but he has a German flag on the back of his helmet.

If the NFL is smart, they’ll leave this one alone. Because you know Robert Kraft is just itching to turn every Sunday into a massive advertisement for supporting Israel’s wars against a) Palestine, b) Syria, c) Lebanon, d) Iran, and now e) Pakistan? I have to admit, I’m lost on the latter.

It’s too bad Martin van Creveld felt the need to suspend his blog in August, as it would be very good to get his thoughts on the matter as a military historian. I’ve been reading his intriguing history of Israel, The Land of Blood and Honey, and I suspect he might not be very optimistic about the way in which the Netanyahu regime has gone about waging its wars, which appears to be based upon a strategy of escalate, then escalate again.

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