Tag Archives: Freedom

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the best mercenary gig since December 25th, 1776

So pretend for a moment we know a dude in Damascus and let’s just say he’s a day labor construction worker.  Business is pretty good for him.  Much of his country has to rebuilt since his President, along with some Iranians, and some guy named Vlad utterly destroyed most of it.  But let’s face it, working in construction can be dull and repetitive.  So our bored Damascene (we’ll call him Fred) is looking for a little zest in his life.  Then one day he hears he can earn a few grand a month as a merc.  All he has to do is join a few thousand of his Syrian buddies and head off to Ukraine.  For you see, Fred’s heard that some guy named Vlad needs his help.

For you see, Vlad has a problem.  He needs an army to win a war.  But the problem is that when his troops aren’t looting gas stations, shooting rockets and artillery at apartment buildings, or getting main battle tank turrets blown clear into the stratosphere, they’re executing a total clusterfuck of an invasion.  This makes Vlad angry.  And everyone knows you don’t want to make Vlad angry.  But when 1/4 of the army has become casualties courtesy of brave, freedom fighting Ukrainians, then Vlad needs more bodies to feed into the inferno.  Or as ordinary average gentlemen titan badass Volodymyr Zelenskyy has termed it: “…throwing Russian soldiers like logs into a train’s furnace.”

We think Fred might have before him the best mercenary gig since December 25th, 1776.  After all, once Fred and his Syrian buddies are ambushed and most of them killed or captured, Fred will sure have a story he can tell his grandkids.  But in general, here’s why Fred should take this gig, hands down:

– Gets a firsthand view of the supposed second most powerful land army on Earth, only to wonder why they haven’t figured out how tires work

– Has the chance to remember his Damascus days when the civil war was at its height and he was starving, as he now starves again as the supposed second most powerful land army on Earth also apparently hasn’t figured out field rations

– Might get the chance to meet a real swell, beautiful young Ukrainian woman who he might imagine they could get married one day, right before she shoots him in the face

– Might get the chance to meet a real swell, beautiful old Ukrainian woman who might feed him a real meal, but who will likely tell him how her witchcraft will cause his dick to fall off or shine him on by giving him sunflower seeds so that when he dies his corpse can produce something useful

– Everyone loves explosions, even Fred.  And boy oh boy when a 46 ton main battle tank goes, it goes spectacularly.  Fred will have plenty of opportunities to marvel at just how high in the air a tank turret can actually fly

– Has the opportunity to realize just how wonderful the job of a day labor construction worker is

– Will remain puzzled how he never meets a Nazi, because Vlad kept telling him there were Nazis everywhere.  Fred just guesses it might be a cow he sees every now and then, but he’s not so sure

– Learns a valuable life lessons about avoiding con artists once he realizes Vlad has no intention of actually paying him the promised merc salary

– Can kindle a new interest in history as Fred becomes one with the spirit of an old Hessian dude as he’s likewise mopped up in an ambush by freedom fighters

– He gets to conduct the classic, ever memorable Tour of Europe after throwing away all his weapons, deserting, and trying to join a cousin he knows who lives in Bremen

give me more

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Cena likes money

John Cena likes money. That’s about all you need to say in conclusion after watching his forced, hostage video-like, confession of crimes that would make even the most jaded of Community Party goons proud and open to tears.

I mean, you could take it to extremes and be like: John Cena hates democracy, universal human rights, and supports genocide. That would probably be accurate, but still at least a little over the top for what’s actually inside his brain.

But the reality doesn’t really get past the hard goal of coin. John Cena likes money. China has money Hollywood wants China’s money. Hollywood will do as China tells it. John Cena will do as China tells him.

You need look no further for other examples than LeBron James / entire NBA (who worship BLM, but who also somehow apparently don’t believe in universal human rights, but also love money) or Zucky (who still has a copy of Xi’s book on the desk inside his heart, and who also loves money).

One of China’s most effective weapons is not what it does, but what it makes money loving cowards do for them without prompting. China didn’t send a knife wielding goon to Cena’s house. Cena did this entirely on his own. It’s quite pathetic. Cena is a grown man allowing somebody he’s never met determine what he says.

You know I just watched Five Came Back by Netflix where it chronicles how Ford, Wyler, Capra, Huston, and Stevens basically left Hollywood to put their lives and careers on the line to defeat fascism. It cost them their bodies and their brains for the rest of their lives.

I guess if China invaded Taiwan, or China continues to exterminate an entire culture, or if China sank a few US aircraft carriers, Cena would have to apologize to China for all the trouble we caused them.

I think Cena, James, Zucky, and all these celebrities and tech goons think the rules are different now. That China is not Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia. And so taking China’s money is perfectly fine. That they will do as they’re told, cash that check, and there couldn’t possibly be consequences.

They should tell that to their Muslim neighbor, particularly if they’re Uighur. Or maybe they can go on record and explain to America why they think Communist China is awesome, and how Democratic Taiwan is full of losers. In the meantime, it completely exposes them as money loving hypocrites who society should ignore, but won’t.

There is a very clear choice. China is not shy of describing what kind of world they want the 21st Century to generate. They’re not lying, it’s all very clearly put out there by Xi and his people. But these dudes have made a choice, and the choice is money.

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a different flavor of coup

I feel quite comfortable in saying that if you’re a country’s leader, but guilty of genocide, that it’s not actually a coup if you get yourself overthrown. Aung San Suu Kyi rightly lost her darling status years ago. So she doesn’t merit the coup term if a bunch of folks put her back into house arrest with a bunch of tanks in the driveway. Her own people have suffered much worse, by the millions.

Plus, Burma isn’t a real democracy. Sure, there are now two full sets of elections in the past, but the Army never really gave up full power. The Army always maintained the interior and exterior security ministries, and rigged the game so the legislature was always at least minority controlled by them. So is a really a coup when the Army never actually gave up power? I suppose so, I guess, if you go by the dictionary.

But it doesn’t mean we have to care. Or do anything about it. Swapping Suu Kyi with an Army goon general is just swapping one form of evil from another. They deserve each other. Burma’s people don’t.

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Hong Kong’s fragile democracy was daggered today

If you want to get a good idea of just how viciously evil Chairman Xi is (and with what callousness he views hundreds-of-thousands of virus deaths) you need look no further than what’s been done to Hong Kong these last few months.

To Xi and the Communist Party a global catastrophe they caused is the chance to crush any remaining freedoms in Hong Kong for good.  Effective today Beijing basically just said they can rule by decree and override Hong Kong’s neutered legislature.

That’s it folks, there’s nothing left.  The executive, the business community, and certainly the police are already apparatchiks, without elected legislators who matter it’s over.  There’s nothing stopping Beijing from criminalizing anything that displeases them.

Kindly observe how the planet does not care.  America is lead by a guy who clearly doesn’t believe in universal human rights.  Britain only wants a trade deal from China.  The EU is so dysfunctional it couldn’t change the battery on a wall clock.

A lot of folks have made the case since 1989 that China was somehow a safer global power than the Soviet Union ever was because China wasn’t actively trying to export their system of governance to the world.  I disagreed then, I disagree now.

Xi and the Communist Party have a very clear idea of how they believe the entire human race should live.  Anybody who thinks they’re going to stop at Hong Kong is a fool.  If I was Taiwanese, I’d be terrified.

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Circa 2022, they’ll do the same thing to this guy, only at 1am and inside his home

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CDC turns, now Tory reactionaries

Hey I get it, fighting covid must be really hard and stressful, but how does that equate to the CDC trying to turn back the clock to 1775?  This poster was on the subway this morning, it’s asinine.  This is probably the first time since the Stamp Act that a British royal crown has existed on an official US government document.

Better watch out fellow patriots, the CDC is out to slit your throats at night in order to restore QE2 to her rightful throne.  A new castle shall be built for her, on the grounds of the Washington Monument after it’s brutally razed by CDC funded bulldozers crewed by drunken EPL hooligans.

I won’t stand for it.  I shall fight!  To start my struggle, I shall ignore the poster’s instructions that I wash my hands.  Only Tory scum wash their hands.  How could this possibility go wrong for me?!

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go get some tar and feathers

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poison own body, gas fellow humans, earn minimum wage

This weekend democracy protestors in Hong Kong were sighted singing the Star Spangled Banner while asking Trump for help against the Giant Octopus that is the Chinese Communist Party and its turncoat Hong Kong underlings.

I’m not entirely sure this the best move.  I even wonder if the Commies inserted these people as a fifth column to make the protestors look like foreign agents instead of shopkeepers and airport baggage handlers who don’t relish the idea of being black bagged to Beijing on a dark night’s moment’s notice.

But if these folks are legitimate, they might do well to look at Afghanistan, or Syria, or Iraq, and wonder if America might perhaps not make the best of allies to ask for help at this current moment in world history.

In any event, our plucky freedom lovers were promptly tear gassed for their trouble.  Guess what, the gas canisters are Made in America.  Here’s a shot of an expended canister lying on the Hong Kong streets.

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Here’s the BuzzFeed article on the background of dirt poor folks struggling to make a living on minimum wage in rural Pennsylvania as they poison their own bodies so the stuff they make can poison others in various foreign lands.  If you’re a dictator, nothing says quality in the misery tools you employ like Made in America!  Just ask your Yemini neighbor.

Gee, thank God BuzzFeed is on the case, otherwise nobody would know.  I guess the New York Times and Washington Post are too busy looking at Twitter and admiring themselves in the mirror.  We gotta rely on BuzzFeed for help here, geez.  Gee wiz.

I think this tale is quite the perfect encapsulation with just about everything that’s wrong in America right now.  Of course, at the end of the article it says Congress is on the case.  There’s gonna get it fixed!  [cue laugh track]

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Cheers!  From our country, to yours.

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75 years into what?

One of the most striking things I find from D Day commemorations is the implicit understanding among most who attend that victory was not inevitable. I think it’s what makes the drama of D Day still so compelling after all these years. The letter of failure prewritten by Eisenhower, how Hitler slept late while panzers sat idle, the blinding courage that seized Omaha Beach before the day ended with elite Nazi infantry separating the Allied beachheads. It all could have gone very differently.

This (and the Eurocentric mindset that permeates a war that essentially began in 1914) makes D Day something more than say, the invasion of Okinawa. Depending on how you count troop or ship numbers, the Allied invasion of Okinawa can be considered the larger and certainly far bloodier affair. But victory in Okinawa was essentially inevitable. It was simply a matter of how many Allied and Japanese would die in battle (alongside a near tragic 50% fatality rate of Okinawan civilians).

D Day is different, a great gambit, one of the most consequential risks in the history of war. Without it, it’s conceivable to consider the ideas of a separate peace with Germany, something less than total victory. A Europe and a world that would look very different. A massive failure of democracy against the worst of totalitarianism.

But to me, the seeds of victory lie in the differing systems at war, the different visions of humanity. Put in the bluntest of military of terms, the Allies win because democracy allows the battlefield flexibility of thought, leadership, and initiative required. Conversely, Rommel has to wait for a dictator to give him the most basic and common sense of tactical orders. One system was doomed to fail, to fall apart under its own contradictions. Something similar happens in the political realm with the Soviets Circa 1989.

So it’s a victory rightly celebrated, honored, and remembered. But I’m always given pause when considering these sorts of events. That was then, a generation guided by a singular purpose to keep their societies free. My own family was among them. How does that stack up with today?

Today speech laws in Britain can get you jailed if you publicly quote the “wrong” words of Churchill. Since that day the vaunted Allied coalition has lost more wars than it’s won, it will soon be in Afghanistan five times longer than it took to win World War II. 75 years after a war to preserve freedom across the globe, very few bat an eye when the Sudanese military guns down over 100 unarmed protestors; because they can, because they know nobody cares.

So D Day into what? I think a much narrower purpose than one would wish for. Perhaps less about freedom or democracy for the globe, but rather the very narrow goal for the planet’s Western powers to defeat the Imperial Japanese and Nazi threat that sought to supplant them. And then immediately after, to confront a Soviet threat that sought to do the same. If you don’t have nuclear weapons, eventually the very opposite Soviet and Western visions would have had to resolve their conflict in battle. But, the threat of mutual destruction left the Soviets to fall politically in 1989, albeit with a miserly amount of proxy wars that broke dozens of the planet’s other nations.

One out of every nine Americans wore a military uniform during this war. The equivalent number is if 30 million Americans were in the military today. Instead, there are more Americans in jail or prison at this very moment than are on active duty service. More Americans are likely to know their smartphone in greater detail than the most basic considerations of D Day. Whole sections of the modern culture think history has nothing to offer us at all, that it needs revision, or even destruction to rebuild society into something new.

It gives one pause, and a wonder about what D Day bought the world 75 years ago. A journey, into what? Toward victory, yes. But then what? That still, even today, is for us to decide. They bought us the chance we all have today. Today, as then, it’s up to us what we do with it.

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jury duty – CNN, inspiration, and the grand escape

No sane person wants jury duty.  But unless you recently ran into a car, know a judge to bribe, or are willing to give the state another reason to claw you, you’re going.  And so I did.

I got in there bright and early with several hundred of my fellow citizens.  My first impression walking in the door?  They’ve got seven televisions in the room.  All of them have CNN on, fucking CNN.  One of the most solemn and important duties in somebody’s civic life and they’ve got garbage television on the walls.  Man, just put some camels and giraffes on there so people’s blood and mental lunacy isn’t fired up by stupid CNN before they go play with somebody’s life in court.

The jury duty leader gives the introductory speech about how she knows nobody wants to be there, but how important it is to freedom, democracy, and justice that we be there.  She inserts humor and the crowd is eating out of her hand the entire time.

She’s graded on a curve because she gives the same speech every day, but still, it says something about the state of our political leadership that the most inspirational and motivating political speech I’ve heard in years was given by a jury duty director at a random county courthouse.

They call out the names by the dozen assigning to each case.  It’s great to hear the breadth of unique America, name by name.  We’re doing just fine people [gives finger to haters on each political side using both hands].

I get picked with 49 others to sit the panel for a criminal trial.  This didn’t sound fun.  I’d have probably gotten struck anyways because of my day job and second job categories (moving that sweet, sweet Columbian pure across the International Date Line) [sips coffee], but still, even if you know you’ll get struck you wonder.

Lawyers and judges are crazy people.  Who only knows what they’ll do with you once they’ve got you.  But apparently, most criminal trials they said are quick and easy.  It’s the medical malpractice trial you don’t want to get.  Four to six weeks.  Six weeks?  Man, modern medicine is a shithouse apparently.

The 50 of us sit, waiting to be called back to the courtroom.  But after sitting in there for five hours they finally start to dismiss everybody.  I mean everybody who showed up that day.  My case got continued, another one they cut a deal, etc, etc.  They sent everybody home.  Nobody got selected that day.  Everybody was off the hook for three years of jury duty.

Sitting at the bus stop on the way out was like emerging from a hospital delivery room where people got to hold the baby.  Everybody was gleeful and talking.  Such a release for everybody.  Courthouses suck.  They’re necessary for modern society, but almost everything that happens in there destroys somebody’s life.  So nobody wants to be in there, certainly not to sit a jury for days or weeks.

Would we have done it?  Yes, all of us.  And I hope we would have served with honor and wisdom.  But for yesterday, all of us were making our grand escape.  Even the cold rain couldn’t dampen anybody’s spirit.