Tag: RIP

Onward to Valhalla

The great Bud Grant has died at the age of 95:

Hall of Fame head coach Bud Grant, who led the Vikings to four Super Bowl, has died. He was 95.

Born May 20, 1927 in Superior Wisconsin, Harry Peter Grant Jr. played in the NBA, the NFL, and the CFL. He was the oldest living NBA champion, a member of the 1950 Minneapolis Lakers.

Grant later played for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. He coached the Blue Bombers from 1957 to 1966, taking the job at the age of 29. He won four Grey Cups with the Blue Bombers.

In 1967, Grant succeeded Norm Van Brocklin as head coach of the Vikings. Grant took the Vikings to Super Bowl IV, Super Bowl VIII, Super Bowl IX, and Super Bowl XI. He coached the team until 1983, retiring for a year and then returning after a disastrous 3-13 season under Les Steckel.

Grant, known for an always-stoic sideline demeanor, had a record of 168-108-5 in his NFL coaching career. He went 118-64-3 in the CFL. In all, he coached 466 games, winning 286 times.

For better or for worse, I owe my stoicism to Bud Grant. When asked once about my emotional imperturbability in the face of open hatred, I answered that as a lifelong Vikings fan, I no longer had any capacity for disappointment or tears in the face of defeat. I always admired how he could meet success or failure with stone cold equanimity, and how he refused to bow even before the bitter cold of the Minnesota winters.

One by one, our heroes are leaving us. May we be worthy of them.

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We Don’t Know…

But we know.

To be informed about how best to protect ourselves and our loved ones is the smartest thing we can do. I chose the vaccine.
— 12 March 2022, Lisa Marie Presley

Lisa Marie Presley, US singer and only child of Elvis Presley, has died at the age of 54, after suffering a ‘full cardiac arrest’.
— 12 January 2023

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The Greatest is Gone

Pelé, the Brazilian king of soccer who won a record three World Cups and became one of the most commanding sports figures of the last century, died Thursday. He was 82

Pelé was the epitome of the Beautiful Game. He was as gracious as he was graceful, and he was less beloved for his unparalleled athletic abilities than for his joyful and magnanimous spirit. He will not only be remembered by Brazilians, but by soccer fans around the world.

Requiscat in pace.

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A Comprehensive Failure

This quote from Gab effectively summarized my opinion on the second Elizabethan era:

“The worst Queen of England in history. The day she took the throne England was 99.7% White English. She leaves this world with White English a minority of the population in London.”

Queen Elizabeth II cannot be blamed for the winding-up of the British Empire, as that was already inevitable and well underway at the time she succeeded to the throne. But she can, and she should, be held responsible for her embrace of the Commonwealth, which proved to be the locus of the invasion of Great Britain by its former subjects.

In addition to her failure to protect her nation from invasion and loss of sovereignty, she also presided over the feminization and homosexualization of the Anglican Church, of which she was the head.

Of her three primary responsibilities, she completely failed two of them. She left both her nation and her Church worse off than she found them, and in dire straits. But she did succeed in a queen’s most important task; she secured the succession and has secured it for at least two more generations to come. Therefore, she cannot be described as a complete failure, merely a comprehensive one.

The decline of England on her watch wasn’t all her fault, of course. She was a constitutional monarch, not an absolute one. But it must be noted that not only did she do nothing to stop the decline, the very little that she did do made matters worse, such as when she intervened to convince a reluctant Margaret Thatcher to have Britain join the anti-apartheid sanctions regime against her own Commonwealth subjects in South Africa.

As a national figurehead, she did her duty remarkably well. Her personal comportment was admirable and she carried the weight of her public role with incredible grace and dignity. Her work ethic was unparalleled. But, as the new British Prime Minister said, “she was the rock on which modern Britain was founded,” and that is damning praise indeed.

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RIP Taylor Hawkins

Of course, we don’t KNOW it’s the vaxx… but it’s the vaxx.

The Foo Fighters longtime, charismatic drummer, Taylor Hawkins, has died at the age of 50.

Hawkins was found dead in a hotel room in the north of Bogota, Colombia where the band were due to play at a festival on Friday night. No cause of death was immediately announced.

Shortly after Hawkins’ death was announced, dozens of fans together with journalists and videographers began to gather outside the hotel where the band had been staying. Many appeared to be in complete shock at the news with some lighting candles.

Ambulances and police cars could be seen stationed outside of the property. Later on Friday night, Hawkins’ body was finally brought out of the hotel, placed into a coroner’s van and driven away.

The group had been scheduled to play at the Festival Estéreo Picnic in the Colombian capital where an announcement told concert-goers that the band would not be playing due to a ‘serious medical condition’.

I suspect there are going to be a lot of deaths attributed to overdoses and other factors that are actually the result of a heart weakened by the Covid vaccinations. Given the unreliability of the medical community, the only reliable statistic will be the sheer number of all-cause deaths, as that’s the one thing that can’t be easily hidden or redefined.

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We Don’t Know it’s the Vaxx

But it’s the vaxx. RIP Shane Warne.

Australian cricket hero and legendary leg-spinner, Shane Warne, has died, aged 52.

Warne’s management released a brief statement in the early hours of Saturday, that he passed away in Thailand of a suspected heart attack. He is believed to have been in Ko Samui at the time of his death.

‘Shane was found unresponsive in his villa and despite the best efforts of medical staff, he could not be revived,’ the statement reads.

To put it in perspective for American readers, Warne’s death is the Anglo-Australian equivalent of Kobe Bryant’s death. But his position on requiring the vaxx certainly hasn’t aged well.

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RIP PJ

PJ O’Rourke, the funniest American political commentator since H.L. Mencken, and one of my youthful intellectual influences, has died at the age of 74. Requiescat in pace.

American satirist and political commentator, P.J. O’Rourke, has died of lung cancer at his home in Sharon, New Hampshire aged 74. He wrote more than 20 books and was best known for his two best-sellers: ‘A Parliament of Whores’ and ‘Give War a Chance’, which reached the top of the New York Times Best Seller list.

His last book ‘A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land’ was published in September 2020 and contained a number of essays on topics ranging from history to the political effects of social media and the ‘internet of things’.

Writing up to the the very end is a good way to go for a writer. Holidays in Hell was my favorite of his works, but most of his books were more than a little amusing. Some of his best quotes:

  • “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
  • “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”
  • “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
  • “Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power.”
  • “The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns.”
  • “No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal”
  • “God created a free universe. He could have created any kind of universe he wanted. But a universe without freedom would have been static and meaningless — the taxpayer-funded-art-in-public-places universe.”
  • “You can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That’s all you need to know about communism.”
  • “Foreigners may pretend otherwise, but if English is spoken loudly enough, anyone can understand it.“

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Broncos WR Dead at 33

A flurry of rumors and reports on Thursday night has resulted in official confirmation from the family of former NFL receiver Demaryius Thomas to Mike Klis of 9News.com that Thomas has passed away. He was 33.

According to TMZ.com, police in Roswell, Georgia say that Thomas was found dead in his home on Thursday night. Foul plays was not suspected; initial signs point to a medical issue.

A first-round pick in 2010, Thomas spent most of his career with the Denver Broncos. Thomas, a four-time Pro Bowler, was a member of Denver’s Super Bowl 50 championship team.

Thomas was a very good wide receiver in his prime and he was a pretty serious physical specimen. If the vaxx can kill him, it is more than capable of killing anyone.

UPDATE: “Cardiac arrest in shower.”

Angelo Codevilla R.I.P.

All of us in the Claremont Institute extended family were gutted this morning by the news of Angelo Codevilla’s death. He was on his way home yesterday to his beloved vineyard in Plymouth, California, when some kind of car accident occurred. The details remain thin, but the loss is deep.

“Some kind of car accident” sounds a little sketchy, although if he was driving at the age of 78, it’s quite possible that it was simply an accident. That being said, Codevilla was a well-connected and outspoken critic of the CIA and the US Deep State.

America’s Intelligence agencies are the deep state’s deepest part, and the most immediate threat to representative government. They are also not very good at what they are supposed to be doing. Protecting the Republic from them requires refocusing them on their proper jobs.

Intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield.

Pretenses of superior knowledge have always tempted the Administrative State’s officials to manipulate or override voters. Hence, as Justice Robert H. Jackson (who served as chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials) warned, they often turn their powers against whomever they dislike politically, socially, or personally and try to minimize the public’s access to the bases upon which they act.

But only the Intelligence agencies have the power to do that while claiming that scrutiny of their pretenses endangers national security. They have succeeded in restricting information about their misdeeds by “classifying” them under the Espionage Act of 1921. Thus covered, they misrepresent their opinions as knowledge and their preferences as logic. Thus acting as irresponsible arbiters of truth at the highest levels of American public life, they are the foremost jaws of the ruling class vise that is squeezing self-rule out of America.

As Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) truly told President Trump, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” As we shall see, Intelligence officials have proved Schumer correct.

What follows begins with an overview of the threats today’s intelligence agencies pose to self-government in America.

Next, it touches on U.S. intelligence’s dismal professional record, and suggests that the measures needed to refocus them on professional performance would also separate them from domestic politics.

His conclusions, which I tend to doubt made him very popular at the agency:

  • CIA is obsolete. Cables show agents’ intelligence takes are inferior to diplomats’. Agent networks are unprotected by counterintelligence. FBI success at counterintelligence ended when the Bureau was politicized and bureaucratized in the 1970s. CIA bottlenecks and incompetently controls strategic intelligence, while the Army and Marines show demonstrable tactical superiority.
  • As a result, CIA is ideologically partisan. Its strength is in leading or joining domestic campaigns to influence public opinion. FBI has followed suit.
  • Senior intelligence officials were the key element in the war on Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency. CIA used meetings that it manufactured as factual bases for lies about campaign advisors seeking Russian information to smear Hillary Clinton. Intelligence began formal investigation and surveillance without probable cause. Agents gained authorization to electronically surveil Trump and his campaign and defended their bureaucratic interests, sidelining Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and denying or delaying Trump appointments and security clearances.
  • Partisanship produces failure. FISA has incentivized political abuse. “Profiling” has failed repeatedly in high-profile cases like the Atlanta Olympics bombing and the anthrax mail attacks. Perjury trapping has become commonplace.