Author: VD

The Old Guard Sees NATO’s Defeat

When the Special Military Operation began, both Messrs. Lind and van Creveld were inclined to viewing it as a Russian mistake. However, unlike NATO’s military strategists, both of the old lions are still capable of changing their minds on the basis of the facts on the ground, as William S. Lind’s recent commentary on the situation demonstrates:

Kiev’s defeat need not shatter world peace. But NATO’s response to defeat in Ukraine may do so. Panic is already showing its head in Paris, where French President Macron is suggesting NATO might send in troops to fight Russia directly. Berlin says no, but the traffic-light coalition government is weak and can be pushed around. London is in a belligerent mood and Warsaw is always eager to launch a cavalry charge against Russian tanks. The decisive voice will be Washington’s. That is not good news, because the Dead Inca has no idea what he’s doing and his advisors will be terrified of the charge of “losing Ukraine” in an election year. Can NATO just swallow hard and say, “We lost?” If not, the alternative is escalation in a war against nuclear power.

In Gaza, Israel has destroyed itself at the moral level of war, which is what states usually do against non-state opponents. Martin van Creveld’s “power of weakness” is triumphing again. Hamas will emerge from the war physically diminished but not destroyed, while most of the world sees it as “the good guys” because the massacres on October 7 have been overshadowed by Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Hamas will rebuild quickly, and not only in Gaza. Recruits and money will flow to it in a veritable Niagara.

The threat of a wider war lies to Israel’s north, not its south. While Hezbollah’s operations have been restrained, they have nonetheless driven 80,000 Israelis from their homes, along with tens of thousands of Lebanese who have fled Israeli airstrikes. The latter don’t matter strategically, but the former do because Netanyahu needs their votes. As always, he will put himself above his country’s interests. That suggests he is likely to launch a ground invasion of Lebanon, which Hezbollah apparently is anticipating and ready for. Hezbollah is much stronger than Hamas, and recent events suggest Iran will also be forced to get involved directly.

On a philosophical, but not-unrelated note, Martin van Creveld provides some important advice:

– Prepare to change your mind when new evidence arrives. As has been said, too often it is not old opinions that die; it is those who hold them, still clinging to their antiquated views, who do. This is not a fate you want for yourself and for your work.

It’s remarkable that both of these great military historians can still accomplish, in their eighties, what so few of their successors have been able to do.

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Always Listening, All the Time

The mother of Hunter Biden’s illegitimate child was under active surveillance at the time she realized she was pregnant:

Lunden Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s daughter, Navy, claimed Friday her phones “crashed” and “just about everything” with Hunter Biden on the device was “gone” after she discovered she was pregnant.

Roberts claimed to Sirius XM’s Megyn Kelly that both of her cellphone screens “crashed” at the same time in front of both she and her friends the night she learned she was pregnant with Navy.

“You know how the little, like, black, with those lines and stuff across them? The green and the purplish looking lines?” Roberts described.

“Yes. It looks like a total meltdown,” Kelly said.

Roberts said “a lot of stuff” involving Hunter Biden was missing from her iCloud when she got a new phone the next day.

“Just about everything with Hunter was gone,” Roberts said.

All the corpocracy’s claims about technology and privacy are nonsense. If you have an electronic device in your home or around your person, understand that you have absolutely zero privacy. Don’t kid yourself.

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Not-Vaxx Never Mandatory

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California’s attempt to mandate the Covid-19 shots was illegal and that Jacobson v. Massachusetts did not apply because the not-vaxx is not a vaccine and the state could not claim a legitimate state interest in forcing medical treatments that do not provide immunity.

Health Freedom Defense Fund et. al have won a significant victory in the Ninth Circuit, which reversed dismissal of their lawsuit challenging the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (“LAUSD”) mandatory vaccination policy for all employees.

Reversing the decision of the Central District of California in Los Angeles, the Ninth Circuit majority held that, first, the case was not mooted by LAUSD’s rescission of the mandate after oral argument last September, 2023. The majority called out LAUSD’s gamesmanship for what it was – a bald-faced attempt at avoiding an adverse ruling by trying to create an issue of mootness. On the merits, the majority ruled that the district court had misapplied the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts when it dismissed LAUSD’s lawsuit on grounds that the mandate was rationally related to a legitimate state interest. In Jacobson, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a smallpox vaccination mandate because it related to “preventing the spread” of smallpox.

The majority, however, noted that HFDF had alleged in the lawsuit that the COVID jabs are not “traditional” vaccines because they do not prevent the spread of COVID-19 but only purport to mitigate COVID symptoms in the recipient. This, HFDF had alleged in its complaint, makes the COVID jab a medical treatment, not a vaccine.

The court recognized that mitigating symptoms rather than preventing the spread of disease “distinguishes Jacobson, thus presenting a different government interest.” Based on this reasoning, the majority disapproved the trial court’s contention that, even if the jabs do not prevent the spread, “Jacobson still dictates that the vaccine mandate is subject to, and survives, the rational basis test.”

The court held that “[t]his misapplies Jacobson,” which “did not involve a claim in which the compelled vaccine was ‘designed to reduce symptoms in the infected vaccine recipient rather than to prevent transmission and infection.”’ Jacobson does not, the majority concluded, extend to “forced medical treatment” for the benefit of the recipient.

The court declined to give any deference to pronouncements by the CDC that the “COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.” As the court asked rhetorically, “safe and effective” for what? The majority pointed to HFDF’s allegation that CDC had changed the definition of “vaccine” in September 2021, striking the word “immunity” from that definition. The court also noted HFDF’s citations to CDC statements that the vaccines do not prevent transmission, and that natural immunity is superior to the vaccines.

In a separate concurrence, Judge Collins wrote that the district court “further erred by failing to realize that [HFDF’s] allegations directly implicate a distinct and more recent line of Supreme Court authority” for the proposition that “a competent person has a constitutionally protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment[.]” Citing the Supreme Court’s decision in Washington v. Glucksberg, Judge Collins noted that the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment is “entirely consistent with this Nation’s history and constitutional traditions,” and that HFDF’s allegations in this case “are sufficient to invoke that fundamental right.”

It’s important to note, since this will not be the last attempt to at global depopulation, that most of the pragmatic appeals to getting vaxxed have turned out to have been based on false assumptions and illegal actions by corporations and various levels of government.

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The Congressional Police

Apparently the US Congress is now the global antisemitism police force:

US lawmakers are outraged at the Maldives for its recent decision to ban Israeli passport holders from entering the country due to war crimes connected with Israel’s controversial military operations in Gaza. The Indian Ocean archipelago state is known for its luxury resorts and high-end travel in scenic, paradise beach locations. The president’s office announced Sunday that the cabinet is moving to update national entry laws in order to bar Israeli passport holders’ entry.

But US Congress members are working punish the Maldives over the controversial move, with Representative Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) drafting legislation that could slash all aid to the Muslim-majority nation… There are 27 other Muslim-majority countries in the world which currently have a ban on Israeli passport holders – many of them located in the Middle East and North Africa.

Now, I think the USA should end all foreign aid to every country. So, refusing to send money to the Maldives is not exactly an action that merits criticism. However, it does raise the interesting question of why these US lawmakers are so “outraged” at a sovereign nation controlling who is, and who is not, allowed to enter its borders.

These US lawmakers wouldn’t happen to be Israeli passport holders, would they?

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Leather at NDM Express

If you’re not a Castalia Library or Castalia History subscriber, but you’re looking to pick up a single leather book, you can now do so at NDM Express. This includes PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, which is now available in stock, as well as the second edition of THE MISSIONARIES.

Subscribers should continue to buy any additional leather books at the Arkhaven store, as they will be able to apply a subscriber’s discount there.

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The Thumb on the Scale

The search engines are observably compromised:

The three major search engines—Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing—have already been set up to favor Joe Biden.

The simple search queries “How to donate to Joe Biden” and “How to donate to Donald Trump” prove this bias. While some of the first place results can be excused by the fact that Trump’s results may have been obfuscated by current events, how is this not the case with Joe Biden, the President of the United States? He’s in the headlines, too.

It’s clear that these companies are putting their thumbs on the scales, but none is worse than Bing, which may as well call itself “Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters.”

The following screenshots exemplify the problem, but, again, none more so than Bing. All failed miserably when it came to Trump. How bad are these results when you ask for a donation page and instead get a news story about Trump being found guilty in NYC?

This is hardly a surprise, but it demonstrates how convergence is inevitable, particularly in tech. Unfortunately, none of the individuals with significant resources on the Right ever seem to place any value in providing non-converged alternatives, focusing instead on commentary and complaints about how unfair life is.

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Immigration is Always Invasion

Canada belatedly discovers that two countries halfway around the world are its primary existential threats:

India is the “second biggest foreign threat” to Canadian democracy after China, a high-level parliamentary panel has claimed. Russia, which had occupied the second position in a 2019 report, now occupies the third spot in the list.

The report was released by Canada’s National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), comprising MPs and senators with top security clearances. The committee named two more Asian nations – Pakistan and Iran – that it claims threaten to undermine the country’s democracy.

The NSICOP explained that New Delhi has been moved to the top-three on the list as it had targeted “Canadian politicians, ethnic media and Indo-Canadian ethnocultural communities.”

The development comes amid an ongoing diplomatic row between Ottawa and New Delhi that erupted last year after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged the government of India was involved in the killing near Vancouver of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist activist and supporter of the ‘Khalistan’ movement.

Neither China nor India should reasonably or historically be considered any sort of threat to Canada, not even economic competitors given Canada’s reliance upon natural resources instead of manufacturing and exporting products. But now that there are more than 1.8 million Chinese and 2 million Pajeets living in Canada, making up around 10 percent of the “Canadian” population, both giant countries are a serious existential threat.

Either China and India can, with great ease, take over Canada by simply continuing their migrations at the current rate. If the current migration patterns are not reversed, Canada will have a Pajeet majority within 30 years. And regardless of what one happens to think of India and its peoples, the inarguable fact will be that whatever the country that lies to the north of the United States is called, it will not be Canada.

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D-Day, 80 Years Later

It just lands a lot differently than it did even 20 years ago. What, exactly, are we supposed to be celebrating these days? Clown World didn’t even preserve democracy or the rule of law.

But at least our grandfathers paid the price to bring them freedom…

German police search 70 homes of people who posted hateful comments online.

Never mind.

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When Piracy is Mandatory

Even if one accepts the idea that an action that leaves the owner in possession of his property is somehow tantamount to theft, the concept of being spied upon and only being allowed to use your own property so long as your purposes align with the previous owners is more than sufficient justification for not paying for software:

Photoshop is SPYING on you now. This is nuts. @Photoshop has new terms that require you allow them to view everything you create, and reserves the right to deactivate your @Adobe software if you make stuff they don’t like. Of course they say “for legal purposes” but we all know it is to feed their machine AI and keep you from making wrong-think.

It’s disappointing that the open source teams for projects like GIMP still just haven’t quite been able to replicate the basic utility of Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator the way they have with Microsoft Office products.

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The War in the North

Despite having failed to finish off Hamas, Israel is seriously contemplating launching a war with Hezbollah, which Simplicius expects will have serious ramifications for Ukraine:

A biblical red glow torments the skies of northern Israel, which now burns with a Zionist’s zeal for Palestinian land, after a series of Hezbollah strikes. The gods of war are smiling favorably on the coming summer, as flashpoints all across the globe heat up. And the mother of all of them threatens to engulf the region in even more flame with the announcement that Israel could launch the long-awaited war against Hezbollah by mid-June, with rumor claiming the Knesset may vote to take action as early as tonight.

This happens to convolve with a host of other ponderous developments, which include Russia’s slow buildup for a large-scale escalation in the north. If Israel truly kicks off another massive war to its own north, it could be the final nail in Ukraine’s coffin.

Recall that in a short 4 months, we will have reached the 1 year anniversary of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and its meandering war against Hamas. If in almost a full year of fighting, Israel can make no real headway against the comparatively tiny Hamas, how long would it take for them to tame Hezbollah in what can only be expected to be a far more ‘high intensity’ conflict?

You can be sure that every available Western munition—particularly of the artillery variety—will be routed to Israel and Ukraine will be historically screwed at the key moment of Russia’s largest scale maneuvers. It would be the ultimate irony should Ukraine fall as consequence of Israel’s actions—but alas, Zelensky and Netanyahu appear locked into parallel fates: both require the continuation of war to survive their political crises.

And the big question remains: when will China – or in its delusions of military supremacy, the USA – elect to open the Asian front.

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