It’s so cute

It’s always rather charming when New York Times reporters attempt to pose as political independents and pretend that they are somewhere in the middle between Republicans and Democrats:

In barely two weeks, Republicans will converge in Cleveland for the Trumpocalypse, a fact-free and hate-filled gathering likely to be as scary as it will be entertaining. A week later the Democrats will assemble in Philadelphia in a focus-group-tested pander fest, as tightly scripted as the visualize-world-peace answers at a Miss Universe contest.

If you feel left out, you have plenty of company. You can search across the fruited plain and nowhere will you find a political convention for the affiliation that more Americans identify with than any other — independents. According to Pew Research, the share of indies now stands at its highest point in more than 75 years of polling: 39 percent. And although other surveys slightly disagree, the point is the same: a plurality of voters has no place to call political home.

This large island of independents is a habitat of shruggers, doubters and contrarians. There’s room for nuance in their thinking. Millions of these middle-grounders are actually leaners who sorta, kinda, maybe like most of what one party stands for — and then find out that they share a label with Sarah Palin.

As someone who thinks Democrats are ossified on education and afraid to speak out against the P.C. censors in their midst, and who finds Republicans horrific on science, guns and nearly everything else, I went online looking for a party hookup. In one quiz, after answering a dozen questions, I was found to be a moderate Democrat.

A pox on both their houses! But mostly on the one that is horrific about everything and is nominating the younger son of Satan himself.

I don’t know about you, but I’m totally convinced that Tim Egan is just another “political orphan” who has no idea whether he’ll vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump at this early stage of the campaign. “We political orphans”. Oh, Timmy, what a scamp! Don’t you just want to pinch his cheeks?

“I just can’t decide who I like better. On the one hand, Trumpzilla the Thrice-Damned, who is stupid, smells bad, and raped his own daughter, whose tiny hands are dripping red with the blood of slaughtered women, children, and immigrants, isn’t afraid to speak his mind. On the other, St. Hillary the Pure-in-Heart is a brilliant and beautiful woman who has an amazing grasp on exactly what this country needs in order to move ahead, but I’m concerned that her ideas about charter schools on Indian reservations might be a little dated. Like every other political orphan out there, I’m still trying to make up my mind!”

I wonder which way he’ll lean in the end?

The 4GW challenge in America

What many people who were either upset about my observations concerning Dallas or are completely mystified by my assertion of the need for the US police to demilitarize and deescalate fail to grasp is that the current approach of intimidation and overwhelming force is absolutely doomed to failure in the situation in which they find themselves.

While Bill Lind’s perspective on the police is, understandably, outdated, it only underlines the vital importance of the police ceasing to act more like occupying military force and less like the traditional Officer Friendly.

Remember, this is the guy who literally wrote the book on USMC tactics, and if we apply his observations, it is eminently clear that the US police are doing nothing more than setting themselves up for defeat in the long term.

From “Understanding Fourth Generation War”, 4th Generation War Handbook.

In Fourth Generation warfare, the weak often have more moral power than the strong. One of the first people to employ the power of weakness was Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s insistence on non-violent tactics to defeat the British in India was and continues to be a classic strategy of Fourth Generation war. When the British responded to Indian independence rallies with violence, they immediately lost the moral war.

Operations David and Goliath show a strong military force, with almost no limits on the amount of violence it can apply to a situation, versus a very weak irregular force. The weaker force has the moral high ground because it is so weak. No one likes bullies using their physical superiority in order to win at anything, and unless we are extremely careful in how we apply our physical combat power, we soon come across as a bully, i.e. Goliath.

Most important, we see the central role of de-escalation. In most Fourth Generation situations, our best hope of winning lies not in escalation but in de-escalation (the “Hama model” discussed in the next chapter relies on escalation, but political factors will usually rule this approach out). De-escalation is how police are trained to handle confrontations. From a policeman’s perspective, escalation is almost always undesirable. If a police officer escalates a situation, he may even find himself charged with a crime. This reflects society’s desire for less, not more, violence. Most people in foreign societies share this desire. They will not welcome foreigners who increase the level of violence around them.

For state militaries in Fourth Generation situations, the policeman is a more appropriate model than the soldier. Soldiers are taught that, if they are not achieving the result they want, they should escalate: call in more troops, more firepower, tanks, artillery, and air support. In this respect, men in state-armed forces may find their own training for war against other state-armed forces works against them. They must realize that in Fourth Generation war, escalation almost always works to the advantage of their opponents. We cannot stress this point too strongly. State militaries must develop a “de-escalation mindset,” along with supporting tactics and techniques.

There may be situations where escalation on the tactical level is necessary to obtain de-escalation on the operational and strategic levels. In such situations, state-armed forces may want to have a special unit, analogous to a police SWAT team, that appears quickly, uses the necessary violence, then quickly disappears. This helps the state servicemen with whom local people normally interact to maintain their image as helpful friends.

Proportionality is another requirement if state militaries want to avoid being seen as bullies. Using tanks, airpower, and artillery against lightly armed guerrillas not only injures and kills innocent civilians and destroys civilian property, it also works powerfully at the moral level of war to increase sympathy for the state’s opponents. That, in turn, helps our Fourth Generation enemies gain local and international support, funding and recruits.

De-escalation and proportionality in turn require state-armed forces to be able to empathize with the local people. If they regard the local population with contempt, this contempt will carry over into their actions. Empathy cannot simply be commanded; developing it must be part of training…. Each of these points touches a central characteristic of Fourth Generation war. If we fail to understand even one of them, and act so as to contradict it, we will set ourselves up for defeat.

Remember, for any state military, Fourth Generation wars are easy to lose and very challenging to win. This is true despite the state military’s great superiority over its Fourth Generation opponents at the physical level of war. Indeed, to a significant degree, it is true because of that superiority. In most Fourth Generation wars, state-armed forces end up defeating themselves.

What is very difficult for most people, even those with considerable military experience, to understand is that 4GW is a different type of war and it utilizes very different metrics. As Lind and LtCol Thiele point out, the central dilemma of 4GW is that what works for you on the physical level often works against you at the moral level.

“It is therefore very easy to win all the tactical engagements in a Fourth Generation conflict yet still lose the war.” 

The US police are in very much in the same position as a state military occupying a foreign nation. Therefore, 4GW principles and tactics very clearly apply to the situation.

One can summarize the core anti-4GW strategy in a single sentence: Either kill them all or don’t kill anyone.

Reason enough to vote for him

Ruth Ginsburg fears a President Trump:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believes “everything” will be up for grabs if Donald Trump is elected president and has the opportunity to appoint several justices to the high Court.

“I don’t want to think about that possibility, but if it should be, then everything is up for grabs,” Ginsburg said of the presumptive Republican nominee succeeding in his bid for the White House in an interview published Friday by The Associated Press.

The 83-year-old justice, who belongs to the court’s liberal wing, said it’s “likely that the next president, whoever she will be, will have a few appointments to make.” Ginsburg is the oldest of the eight justices currently on the bench, while two of her colleagues – Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer – are closing in on 80.

If the Left is more afraid of Trump than any Republican nominee since Reagan, isn’t that alone sufficient reason to support him? Trump isn’t a Good Republican like Chief Justice Roberts, who will fall in line when the global elite snaps its fingers.

What he is, we don’t really know, but at least he isn’t that.

The predictive model

As William S. Lind predicted it would in his book ON WAR, 4GW has arrived in America and is targeting the police. Because the police have militarized and lost their moral authority, they are now deemed legitimate enemy targets by a growing number of armed individuals.
– December 20, 2014

Demilitarization is without question in the material interests of the police as well.  They have started a war of escalation and attrition that they cannot possibly win…. It does not take a master logician to observe that all the “whatever I need to do to get home safe” mentality guarantees is that abusive police homes will soon be unsafe.  And the growing Hispanic population means that there will likely be more Latin American-style infiltration, assassination, and terror directed at the lower levels of law enforcement. 
– July 20, 2013

I am not at all surprised that the police are now being targeted for murder due to nothing more than their membership in the Badge Gang. And there isn’t a soul in the country who can reasonably argue that the police haven’t collectively begged for such targeting, considering how many innocent Americans they have killed with shameless impunity in the last two decades…. Some protest, some shoot. If the police don’t abandon their present
path of violence and start prosecuting police killers instead of
protecting them, they can expect more of the latter and less of the
former.
– May 31, 2011

No doubt some readers will have the usual hissy fit that my utter lack
of regard for the police means that I’m some kind of liberal hippy. But
for those who are inclined to believe that, I’d merely ask: what is so
conservative, what is so very freedom-loving, about a police state? When
the police put down the machine guns, stop dressing like Darth Vader in
a Wehrmacht-style helmet and start behaving politely again instead of
knocking down doors and shooting pets, I’ll be happy to reconsider the
issue.
– February 21, 2007

In the aftermath of the Dallas police shooting, it is understandable that many Americans are shocked, scared, and upset. The post-Civil Rights Act America has not turned out to be the society they thought it was, indeed, it is becoming increasingly obvious that those terrible racist Southern segregationists were correct all along. Targeted assassinations of authority figures are not a sign of a stable, well-ordered society.

But I have neither patience nor sympathy for those who have been emailing, commenting, and Tweeting to say that they are shocked by my comments with regards to Dallas and the overly militarized US police. I have said nothing I have not said many times before. My position has not changed one iota on the subject for over a decade. I have repeatedly predicted such events would take place, nor am I alone in that, as William S. Lind repeatedly warned about it as a consequence of 4GW coming to America in his book of collected columns, On War.

I am neither shocked nor surprised that the events I predicted are taking place, any more than I am surprised that the post-1965 demographic changes have led to a less intelligent, less prosperous, and less stable country.

So, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not inclined to pay any attention to the emotionally incontinent ravings of people who are not only surprised, but observably shocked by what recently took place in Dallas. I told you this was going to happen and I even told you why. If you didn’t do the same, if you can’t point to ten years of correct predictions, then I suggest that you learn to shut up and listen when more perspicacious individuals are explaining the situation to you. Ask questions if you don’t understand something. But regardless, understand that your emotional reaction in the heat of the moment is simply not as relevant as the cold and logical analysis of those who have been thinking calmly about the subject for more than ten years.

Now, as for the binary-thinking idiots who think if you don’t support the cops means you are a murderous BLM-supporting Black Panther, let me explain something to you. Nothing the police do – nothing – is going to turn America’s blacks into whites. They cannot keep a nonexistent peace. History clearly teaches there are four ways to permanently resolve the current situation: amalgamation, segregation, deportation, and elimination.

Which of those do you support? If you don’t support one of them, you’re not serious and your opinion doesn’t count. Yes, they’re all terrible options. Yes, they’re all ugly and awful and horrific. So is history.

BLM is the proximate cause. But I didn’t predict that the police would become targets because I knew, back in 2007, that BLM would one day come to be. I predicted it because the police abandoned the moral authority that rendered them untouchable, and which protected them much better than any body armor, bigger guns, or “shoot when scared” rules of engagement.

If you want to virtue-signal or strike dramatic poses about how you’ll never read this blog again or buy any of my books, that’s fine. No one is going to try to convince you otherwise. But you should understand that it is completely apparent to everyone here that you were never paying very much attention in the first place.

The solution to police violence in America

I think I have stumbled upon the answer to US police committing unjustifiable homicides: have the FBI train them:

The F.B.I. Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings

After contradictory stories emerged about an F.B.I. agent’s killing last month of a Chechen man in Orlando, Fla., who was being questioned over ties to the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the bureau reassured the public that it would clear up the murky episode.

“The F.B.I. takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally,” a bureau spokesman said.

But if such internal investigations are time-tested, their outcomes are also predictable: from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 “subjects” and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings.

Considering its spotless record, I can only conclude that the FBI’s much higher standard of training is responsible for its agents incredible inability to avoid ever making a mistake when shooting citizens. I therefore recommend that its budget be enlarged sufficiently to permit all US state and local police to undergo rigorous FBI training.

This would not only save American lives and increase police professionalism, but also reduce the level of outrage in America evinced by Black Lives Matter and other groups of concerned citizens.

Mailvox: a police officer’s perspective

A former police officer writes in response to my post on the Dallas police shootings:

The short:

Good article and overall I agree with it.

The long:

In regards to the “Us Vs Them” mentality; unfortunately, it was ingrained in us from the beginning at the academy and if you do not guard against it you will find yourself moving in that direction after a short time working as a police officer.

Tribe was ingrained in us from comments such as “there are two kinds of people, those in jail and those that should be.”  “In God we trust all others we run through NCIC”.  NCIC is the national records database.

As you started working something happened to me that I was not prepared for one of those unintended consequences, everybody lied to you.  And I mean everybody, about everything.  It did not take long where you fell into “my tribe” mode.  When you make the call that you need help and all your tribe show up – that is a powerful feeling and reinforces, good or bad, my tribe.

Military affectation.  True.  When I joined, Desert Storm had just ended and the DOD was giving away the store.

As far as these current rash of shootings caught on camera – people do not want to see the bad side.  I believe that most people think that when a shooting goes down it is “Hollywood”.  Good vs Evil – clean – sanitized.  One thing people do not understand is how fast events can turn.  And I have been in situations where things went from mild or this aint’ so bad to someone did or was going to die in milliseconds.  People can not even begin to understand the violence that can happen in situations.  This is not an excuse I just offer and explanation into the mindset.

And if I can use NAPALT.  I only recall one instance of behavior that was wrong coming from a police officer.  I had a prisoner in cuffs and this officer came up to the prisoner and threatened to “kick his ass”.  If this officer would have laid a hand on my prisoner I would have protected my prisoner.  It did not get that far. Then again, I was being interviewed for the county sheriff’s department and was asked if I would take revenge on a person in cuffs if they had resisted arrest. I told her no, once cuffs are on and there is no resistance there is no reason. To this day I do not know if the look she gave me was one of disbelief or “this guy won’t fit in with us because that is how we roll”.

I agree with your statement “that being scared is insufficient justification for shooting a member of the public” and “start holding killer cops fully accountable for their actions”.  However, just because someone is unarmed does not mean they are not a danger.  In one situation I had a guy reach for a gun and as I was getting ready to shoot I saw he was reaching for a Maglite flashlight.  This guy’s intention was Suicide by Cop.  My intention was to save my life and my partner’s life. Unfortunately, my partner was shot and killed 6 months later.  He stopped an unarmed man, the man started fighting with him, took his gun, and killed him with it.

People see these videos and project their feelings, fears, biases into them.  Once the evidence starts to come out the story we end up with is usually different from what we began with.

As I mentioned in my response to him, my opinion is largely informed by my personal acquaintance with police officers in several countries. I get along quite well with cops, in fact, at a recent get-together I was the only male non-cop there. I’ve had cops for sparring partners and weightlifting partners and friends.

But that doesn’t make me blind to the institutional and structural problems with the police in America. Nor does it mean that the lessons of 4GW which Mr.  Lind and LtCol Thiele teach in 4GW Handbook don’t apply to them. Ironically, one of those lessons is that an occupying military should behave more like traditional street cops, while what we’re seeing is the traditional street cops being trained to behave more like an occupying military.

Policing is a serious and important societal role and it ought to be treated as such. Police officers should be valued and respected, but they, in turn, must always behave in a respectable manner. They should never be deemed above the law or unaccountable, to the contrary, they should be held more accountable for their actions than the average untrained individual.

And no free man should ever descend to licking a boot or a badge.

And if you want to know what a badge-licker looks like, this is it:

John Sanders ‏@Platniumblum
@voxday outed himself as a closeted SJW. Blacks have no agency, no responsibility. The cops had it coming. #Dallas #disavowBLM

So virtuous! I expect he’s preening in anticipation of all the likes and retweets from noble police officers ever so grateful for his support.

SJW-convergence in Star Trek

Who would have thought that Star Trek, which has always been at the forefront of SJWism, could be further converged?

In the summer of 1968, George Takei attended a pool party at the Hollywood Hills home of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The actor, then 31 and famous for his role as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, swam up to his boss and “had a conversation with him, a very private one. I was still closeted, so I did not want to come out to him.”

Nevertheless, Takei — who announced he was gay in 2005  — was fully attuned to the gay equality conversation gaining momentum at the time. He felt it was a topic worth exploring on the socially minded science-fiction series, which had previously tackled issues like the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War through keenly observed allegory.

But the show had recently seen its lowest ratings ever, with an episode featuring TV’s first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, which NBC affiliates in the South refused to air. While sympathetic to his star’s pitch, Roddenberry felt he was in no position to take those kinds of risks.

“He was a strong supporter of LGBT equality,” recalls Takei, now 79. “But he said he has been pushing the envelope and walking a very tight rope — and if he pushed too hard, the show would not be on the air.” Alas, the show was canceled the following season anyway.

But Star Trek has lived long and prospered for studio home Paramount, spawning six TV series and 13 feature films. True to its title, the latest big-screen outing, Star Trek Beyond, has gone where none have gone before: Star John Cho — who assumes the Sulu mantle for the third time in the reboots — has told Australia’s Herald Sun that the character is revealed to be gay….

Except Takei wasn’t overjoyed. He had never asked for Sulu to be gay. In fact, he’d much prefer that he stay straight. “I’m delighted that there’s a gay character,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.”

Takei explains that Roddenberry was exhaustive in conceiving his Star Trek characters. (The name Sulu, for example, was based on the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines, so as to render his Asian nationality indeterminate.) And Roddenberry had always envisioned Sulu as heterosexual.

Straights attempting to virtue-signal on behalf of gays do their best, but they never get it right. I don’t know a single gay man who likes the Saint Gay couples that pervade Hollywood entertainment or think they are anything but dressed-up suburban married couples, about as convincing as urban fantasy’s kick-ass kung fu waifs, science fiction’s men with tits, and the Magic Negroes who like nothing better than to defy gangbangers and help out white folk in distress when they aren’t busy philosophizing, providing moral instruction, or being President.

One would think, at some point, someone would have asked George Takei, or at least understood that there is an insult implicit in the idea that he could not act.

4GW in Dallas

11 police shot at Black Lives Matter in Dallas:

Eleven police officers were shot ambush-style, including five fatally, in Dallas Thursday night by at least two snipers, amid a protest against the recent police shootings of two black men, Alton Sterling in Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Minnesota, according to the Dallas Police.

The condition of the six wounded officers remains unknown. One civilian was also injured.

Officials said the gunmen aimed to kill as many officers as possible.

U.S. police have had this sort of response coming for a long time. Spacebunny and I were just talking yesterday about the shooting in Falcon Heights, which is very close to where we used to spend our Friday nights wandering the stacks at the Barnes & Noble, and how the police are never held accountable for lethally shooting people.

As Spacebunny tweeted:

  • I called Dallas last week.  Not in Dallas, but the retaliation. 
  • They created the climate by constantly and systematically protecting their own.
  • Everyone should be held accountable for their mistakes.  Especially when it costs someone their life.
  • If you don’t fix the general problem of cops literally getting away with murder, people will be sniping them all over. 
  • The problem is very obviously systemic. Everyone knows nothing is going to happen to a cop who kills someone

As of November, 1024 people were killed by police in 2015, 204 of them unarmed. For all that the police almost uniformly claimed to have been fearing for their lives, only 34 police were shot and killed during the same period. The public may be collectively stupid, but they’re not incapable of recognizing that statistical imbalance or that the police are trained to lie, obfuscate, and pretend that they are in danger when they are not.

Unless and until the police give up their military-style affectations, “us vs them” mentality, and most of all, their legal unaccountability, they’re going to find themselves fighting a war against the American people. And it is a war they simply cannot win.

What happened in Dallas may be shocking, but it isn’t even remotely surprising. Many people have seen it coming; what will likely prove the most surprising aspect of this incident is how many people will remain utterly unsympathetic to the Dallas police and their bereaved families. The police may consider themselves above the law, but they are not beyond the reach of an increasingly outraged public.

Is it a tragedy? Of course. Even worse, it is an unnecessary one. Did these specific police officers deserve to die? Almost certainly not. But no amount of moral posturing or striking ferocious pro-police poses is going to change the fact that the only way to avoid more attacks like this is for the police departments of America to stop pretending that being scared is sufficient justification for shooting a member of the public and start holding their killer cops fully accountable for their actions every single time an unarmed or non-aggressive person is shot.

The present situation is not one that any sane individual would celebrate, but it is one that many, including me, have been predicting for a long time. I’m only surprised that it didn’t happen sooner, especially in light of how many innocent military veterans have been shot and killed by police in recent years.

This is the heart of the problem. BLM may be the proximate cause, but until the causal problem of a lack of police accountability is addressed, the situation is only going to get worse.

UPDATE: “The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people – especially white officers.” – #Dallas Police Chief David Brown

As Bill Lind writes, 4GW is nothing if not messy. Forget your binary lines and single-cause simplicities.

The real championship

This has easily been the most entertaining Euro since I’ve lived in Europe. But as fun as it was to see Wales make their historic run that finally came to a sudden end in two minutes of brilliance by Portugal, it was hard to imagine either team being able to beat the winner of France vs Germany.

The French team is basically a talented African team with a pair of French attackers, plus the most dangerous shooter from outside the box, Payet. They’re very good, but even during the group stage I felt that neither of the highly disciplined major teams, Germany or Italy, would not have much problem with them when they got careless and broke down.

Germany, on the other hand, is still the team that destroyed Brazil, although their inability to score against Italy showed that they miss Miroslav Klose and their three penalty failures demonstrate that they are not the clinical Germans of the Klinsman and Bierhof eras. They also have the best keeper in the world, Neuer, which tends to be an advantage.

I expect whoever wins to win the Euro. And I tend to expect it will be Germany.

The first black woman on the Court

In other news:

Investigation Into Clinton’s Email Is Over, Lynch Says

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR 7:43 PM ET
In a statement, Attorney General Loretta Lynch accepted the F.B.I.’s recommendation against charges for Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

In other Justice Department news, Attorney General Lynch announced that Bill Clinton has asked her to stay on as Attorney General, while also being the next nominee for the Supreme Court, and that she signed a ten year contract with the Clinton Foundation with unspecified duties and an unlimited expense account. Her favorite niece will become ambassador to Monaco, her favorite nephew an astronaut, and Ms. Lynch will serve with Mrs. and Mr. Clinton on a new Semi-Unofficial Committee of Three that will oversee the FBI, NSA, and Navy Seals and choose targets of drone strikes (each member gets “one free one per year, no questions asked”). Also, the highest priority legislation of the New Clinton Administration will be “Shoulders & Up Only” hate crime legislation making it illegal to tweet a full body photo of a clothed female federal official.

Actually, I think we all know who would win if the media would give the lower body of Ms Clinton McCankles a miss. And that would be America.