Fred Reed is a man who has done things and
writes what he wants about whatever he wants. Here is a link
https://fredoneverything.net/ - At least some of
his articles
are among my favourites.
PS Now, in 2020 or a bit earlier Fred moved
his more recent output to www.unz.com - go there and search
for
fred; you don't need to use capital letters. Lots of his older articles are lost
to us, making the world a poorer place. Ron Unz publishes some
first rate writers and writing. Their political views are not those marketed by
the press prostitutes of the Mainstream Media.
From Courtship to Courtroom: What Divorce Law Is Doing To Marriage
by Jed Abraham
If you are male, and thinking about getting married, this book is the wisest
fifteen bucks you will ever spend. The divorce courts rape men consistently
and deliberately. You may think you know about this. I'll wager that you
don't. Find out just what they can do to you. The most you can lose is fifteen
bucks. You may save several hundred thousand and your children. (Jed, whom I
know slightly, is a divorce lawyer of enormous experience.)
Race, Sex, Things Incorrect
La Griffe du Leon
Has fascinating statistical analyses of things you aren't
supposed to analyze, such as measured intelligence in relation to sex and
race. La Griffe du Leon is a pseudonym, probably because he is an academic in
fear of being lynched. This presupposes that a mob of professors can tie a
knot. Griffe is unmistakably a first-rate statistician. He also writes
graceful English, and so can't be a statistician, first-rate or otherwise.
Maybe he's a pair of fraternal twins. Anyway, well worth reading.
PS A heavyweight mathematician disagrees with La Griffe's maths big time - see
Griffe du Lion on the point.
The Myths That Divide Us
by John Perazzo
A book about race relations, crime, and racial hucksters. It isn't pretty. My
friends usually come away from it in a state of mild shock. The title is
deceptively touch-feely, probably because his publisher forced the issue. I
spent six years as a police reporter, and can testify that whenever Perazzo
writes about things I know about, which is usually, he is deadly accurate. No
ranting, just cold reporting. Take with Valium.
Steve
Sailer
Odd but intelligent site with thoughtful and incorrect analysis of, well, lots
of things. It takes a little poking around, but repays the effort.
My mail often assumes that all American
blacks are thoughtless followers of Jesse Jackson.
Lashawn Barber might suggest
rather more intellectual, hmmm, diversity.
Will Powell, with whom I
occasionally attach ribs when in Washington, also doesn't fit the Jacksonian
mold.
Honky Tonk Confidential
Is my favorite country bar band as well as proof that at least somebody in
Washington can do something worthwhile. I prefer the album Honky Tonk
Confidential, though Your Trailer or Mine? is good. They write
their own songs, and they are good at it. Very good at it, actually.
Expatriation
Chapala.com
and MexConnect are useful for people who
think they might like to check out the expat community around Lake Chapala,
Mexico, an hour south of Guadalajara. Bear in mind that these sites often have
commercial aims, such as selling overpriced real estate, and that they chiefly
involve moneyed expats who have little real contact with Mexico. They can
still be of use.
The
US Consulate in Guadalajara is useful, but remember that the State
Department is highly politicized and frightened of everything. Mexico isn't
dangerous. For any who would like a competent guide to the area of Lake
Chapala, to see what they think of it, I recommend Ron Langley's
Mexican Central Expats. For legal
info on a variety of topics pertaining to immigration to Mexico, try
Adriana Perez Flores, my attorney here.
Media
If you aren't enthusiastic about the war in
Iraq, or just want to balance your sources,
Antiwar.com is a good read.
For those interested in Asia, which we are
all going to be interested in before too many years pass,
Asia Times is one I like.
For kind of techy daily coverage of the
world of computers, The Register
is fun. Characterized by a sense of humor and occasional lapses into English
grammar.
Simply nuts is
J. Orlin Grabbe . Make of
it what you will. I refuse responsibility. I read it daily.
Despite my reputation for misogyny, based
entirely on North American feminists (the other several billion women are fine
with me), I dislike porn sites because they make women look like such slatterns
and doxies. DOMAI, which I think stands for
Dirty Old Men's Association International, isn't that at all. The girls, though
naked as jaybirds, are pretty and likeable. Works for me.
This is a complete listing of Fred's articles apart from the police listing up to December 2009.
Now in 2023 they are lost to us; sad but true.
Fred Explains Diversity,
Hate, Crime, You Name It
[ 6 November 2021 ] Fred is a man who
found out about life the hard way. It started with an all expenses paid trip
to Viet Nam. They even gave him a rifle to fight
off nasty rough foreigners. Then there was a year in hospital, a better
option than the free funeral, which was also part of the deal.
Fred on Everything
by
Fred Reed
Scenes Unseen from
the Racial Landscape
Scenes
Unseen from the Racial Landscape
“A country deserves
what it tolerates, and will assuredly get more of it,” said my
favorite political commentator (me).
He has also asked,
“This is supposed to help blacks?”
Across the country the
rabble rampage, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and mobs sacking stores.
They are by no means all black. Whites participate in the vandalism,
blacks do the looting and beatings of whites. Both are out of
control. Anger over this quietly grows. A spring is being wound,
methinks, a hammer cocked, the scene set for a grisly outbreak of
racial bloodshed.
The backdrop will be
the hatred between Elites and Deplorables, exacerbated by a
declining economy, financial anxiety for the future, anger over
immigration, the epidemic, and so on. Yet it is race that will
provide the spark.
Does this sound like
unbalanced raving? If I had told you the day before the
Floyd
incident that in a few days cities across the country would be if
flames with looting and vandalism, would you have thought me
unbalanced?
For whatever reason,
catastrophic racial realities exist, disguised and hidden by the
White House and the media. Maybe these think they are preventing, or
postponing, and explosion that might occur if people knew what was
happening. Maybe they are stroking their voters.
This video, of actual events, catches the straits in which
America finds itself. The degree to which it shocks you is a measure
of the effectiveness of the journalistic suppression.
The political
landscape is of course complex. In a curious twist the white Elites
use blacks against their Deplorable enemies, claiming and perhaps
sometimes believing that they are opposing racism. To this end they
eliminate bail, defund the police, hide crime by blacks, order the
police not to use tear gas and rubber bullets. Police
resign in droves, not wanting to be the next Chauvin. Homicide rises
sharply. Looting flourishes.
Crime by blacks is now
barely restricted, and reported as little as the big media can
manage. For example,
Thirty-two Black on White Homicides, for October. These
typically appear for a couple of days in local papers but are never
picked up by the majors
The great majority of
blacks do not do these things, but the great majority of those who
do these things are black. The white and Asian victims will notice
this. People remember who did, not who didn’t. Anger will grow,
grows. This is a very bad thing.
We now see stores
selling expensive goods attacked by organized flash packs, windows
smashed and wares stolen, in minutes. The looters are not Japanese
school girls. In San Francisco, where shoplifting is virtually
legal, store after store leaves for friendlier climes, unable to
withstand the losses. Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, a region of stores
selling prestige goods, now has many empty stores because of
looting. Goodbye tax base. Shortly, goodbye middle class. There is
no reason for these robberies to end since they are profitable and
almost free of risk.
How can the spreading
lawlessness be stopped? Easily, but not nicely. Throwing a brick at
a policeman is at least ADW, assault with a deadly weapon, and
arguably attempted murder, twenty to life. Apply it. Lighting
buildings or cars is arson. So charge it and throw the book. Allow
store owners to shoot looters. But this we will not do, or at least
not yet, and nothing else will work.
The brighter among the
woke worry that if ever whites develop a racial consciousness like
that of blacks, things will get very, very ugly. Thus the hysteria
over White Supremacy. Unfortunately, the best way to promote white
consciousness is exactly what the woke are doing--to encourage crime
by blacks, allow the beatings, and endlessly pummel whites for
racism. The woke are working hard at getting exactly what they don’t
want. They are not doing blacks a favor. If an explosion comes, it
will be bad for whites but worse by far for blacks who, whether they
like to admit it or not, depend on whites for much. The country
would never recover.
Journalists, perhaps
lacking the wit to understand what they are doing, labor to
intensify racial hostility. In particular, they relentlessly tell
blacks that they are victims of whites, that they are being killed
in large numbers by white police, while suppressing the fact that
far more whites are killed by blacks. This understandably enrages
blacks who, emotional, less educated than whites, reading little,
believe it.
Having worked in the
scrivener’s trade, I partly blame the joy of shared indignation and
a diminishment of the former belief in fact-checking. (It used to be
said, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” No more.)
Wild partisanship adds to the problem. The journalists of Washington
read each other, write for each other, talk to each other and,
finding that they all think the same things, assume that they must
be right, because they all think the same things.
Further, networks run
by people of a particular view hire people who agree with them.
Reporters too seem gripped by the free-floating anger that afflicts
America as a whole. Bingo.
Remember that the
strongest human proclivity, stronger than the sex drive, is to avoid
information working against ardently held beliefs. Liberals do not,
will not, read Fox News or American Renaissance, and conservatives
avoid Salon and NPR. It is curious that reporters, whose job is to
know what goes on in America, largely don’t.
Remember also that
that the networks have limited news-gathering ability compared to
freelance websites. During the Floyd riots, hundreds, maybe
thousands, of people with smartphones recorded video of looting,
vandalism, and beatings. These were posted, and circulated, freely
on the net, but not on CNN. They showed the looters to be almost
entirely black.The vandals no, but the looters,
yes. In my (now limited) acquaintance with the media in Washington,
they really don’t know what is happening.
The upshot? It would
be a very good idea to stop the lawlessness, the racial attacks, and
the mob robberies before those targeted decide to take things into
their own hands.
For the literarily
inclined, perhaps worth contemplation:
THE WRATH OF THE
AWAKENED SAXON by Rudyard Kipling
It was not part of
their blood, It came to them very late, With long arrears to
make good, When the Saxon began to hate.
They were not
easily moved, They were icy -- willing to wait Till every
count should be proved, Ere the Saxon began to hate.
Their
voices were even and low. Their eyes were level and straight. There was neither sign nor show When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not preached to the crowd. It was not taught by the
state. No man spoke it aloud When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not suddently bred. It will not swiftly abate. Through the chilled years ahead, When Time shall count from the
date That the Saxon began to hate.
Hardboiled is
back! (The exclamation point is to arouse wild enthusiasm in
the reader, a boiling literary lust.) Gritty crime fiction
by longtime police reporter for the Washington Times,
who knows the police from nine years of riding with them.
Guaranteed free of white wine and cheese, sensitivity, or
social justice.
Fred Is Explained by
Conservative Writers.org. He is perhaps my favourite author. He was being
published by Ron Unz but now, in November 2021
is publishing to his own email list. You can be on it too - just go to
Subscribe!
My earlier appreciation of the great man is at
Fred.
Here is his most recent piece and,
hopefully many more:-
Most of the profound anger
and apparent actual insanity afflicting the United States stem from
racial antagonism: The Floyd riots, the tearing down of statues,
affirmative action, the renaming of buildings, hostility to everything
Confederate, racial attacks on whites by blacks, critical race theory,
the fury over trials. Racial policy isn’t working and isn’t going to.
America had better find another approach before, one day, they guns come
out.
Sez I, a massive step
toward racial reconciliation could be achieved simply by deregulating
the schools. The races have very, very disparate cultures and want
different things. In the integrated schools, either blacks must be
forced to learn things of interest only to whites, or whites must be
prevented from learning these things. It is hard to see why black
students or their parents would have any interest in Jane Austin, Mark
Twain, Shakespeare, or Beowulf. Nor is it clear why whites, of either
generation, would care more than passingly about Africa. Why,
unworkably, force each to do something both alien and of no interest to
it?
Many object that the study
of mathematics constitutes racism, or is a means of oppressing blacks.
Why force math on blacks or, more importantly, prevent white kids from
learning them? Similarly, English grammar is now said to be racist. Why
should black young of a background having no interest in such things
have to be burdened with it?
These difficulties could
within an administrative district be remedied by allowing different
groups to establish such schools as they chose, for such students as
they chose, teaching such material as they chose. Charges of
discrimination could be avoided by requiring by law that all students be
subsidized at the same per-pupil rate. Further, allow schools to select
such students as they choose. If some schools wanted only white
students, or black, or racially mixed, so be it. As long as they were
given equal resource’s, it would be their business. If some parents
preferred schools of mixed race, it would be their business.Evangelical schools? Fine. Jewish? Equally so. Chinese? Equally.
The right of schools to
choose teachers without governmental bureaucracy—most importantly,
certification—would be crucial. Certified teachers are often of low
quality and always carriers of industrial-strength political
correctness. The teachers unions are just that—unions, interested
chiefly in the good of the membership, not the students. I would not be
allowed to teach either writing or journalism whereas a half-literate
political hire would be.
This would also allow
parents of very bright kids to use such tests as they chose to find the
extraordinarily smart and then to teach them at their level. Those
opposed to testing could avail themselves of schools not engaging in
testing. Forcing kids of IQ 140 or better to agonize in classes at the
level of Mommy Beaver had two sticks and Daddy Beaver had two, how many
di that have in all is child abuse. A child in that range in the second
grade is reading at the ninth-grade level and school is nothing but an
obstacle. Why do this?
In aggregate these
measures—we could call them “freedom”—might go far to reduce hostility.
Smaller and seemingly less
important matters count in racial relations. Blacks often deprecate
other blacks for “acting white.” This is not unreasonable. People
naturally want to be aroundothers who share their culture, manners, and
ideas of consideration and propriety. I don’t want my children, or
people around me, “acting black I don’t know what “acting white” means
and I don’t care. I don’t want my children wearing their pants below
their knees and saying “muggafugga” every second word. These practices
do no actual harm, but are extremely disagreeable to most whites. While
I do not want to dictate the culture of blacks—it isn’t my
business—neither do I want them transgressing mine. Would not separation
be the comfortable solution?
Housing is another matter
in which less government would be of use. Here again, policy is
disastrous. The races obviously do not want to live together. When
blacks move into white neighborhoods, the whites leave. When whites move
back into the city, “gentrifying,” blacks are enraged. Upon reaching
university, blacks often demand dormitories only for blacks, courses
only for blacks, student centers only for blacks, and graduations only
for blacks. If whites had the same privileges, friction would diminish.
By (again) providing these things on a rigid and transparent basis of
equal money per student, discrimination could be avoided.
Since the races usually
want to live apart, why not simply let them? Those who wanted to live in
mixed neighborhoods could, but if a black neighborhood wanted to avoid
gentrification, it could vote to do so.
The voluntary separation
of races would greatly reduce the very high rates of crime against
whites by blacks, and the fear and intensifying hostility caused by this
crime. I don’t know how to end crime, but reducing the fear of blacks
would go far to encourage racial reconciliation.
Blacks say that white
police discriminate against them.Whether this is
true would make no difference if blacks policed black neighborhoods and
whites, white. Cities typically burn because white policemen have beaten
or shot a black. The blindingly obvious solution is, in racially
homogeneous regions, to have the local race do the policing. Friction
might in some degree continue between police and policed, but at least
it would not be racial.
Further, though it will at
first sound strange, I suggest that black and white neighborhoods be
permitted to decide what laws to enforce, at least in those matters
affecting only the neighborhood. If blacks chose to ignore use of
marijuana, drinking in public, selling crack, or driving without a
license, why should they not? Do they not know their neighborhood, its
needs and problems, better that I? Why are these things my business
either way? The result would be vastly fewer arrests of blacks by whites
and fewer blacks in prison, both of these contributing greatly to
hostility between the races.
I am not recommending the
abandonment of black neighborhoods to crime, but rather letting those
affected decide. For example, blacks often hate stop-and-frisk policing.
Why not let those affected make the decision? This would reduce the
impression of the police as an occupying army, often white.
Nor am I suggesting the
subjection of blacks to a punitive regime. I believe that all citizens
should have access to good medical care, that providing schools with
textbooks of their choice is a proper function of government, as is
maintenance of streets, water supply, and electric supply. If a black
university wants
microscopes or a computer,
it should get them. And universities should be free to hire any staff
they choose, depending only on the willingness of the staff to be hired.
The various forms of welfare should be continued as there is no choice
other than causing great hardship even hunger. Since the races are in
America, and none is going to leave, finding a workable approach to
amity would seem a good idea. What we have hasn’t worked, is not
working, shows no sign that it ever will, and indeed things are getting
worse. A little distance might go a long way. If there is ever an
explosion of the very real, very deep anger in the country that the
media are hiding from themselves, it might make Floyd’s uprising seem
trivial. In the Floyd riots, the guns didn’t come out.
Fred on Everything
by
Fred Reed
Veterans Day (Reposted) [ 2021-11-11 ]
He grew up in the woods
and rivers of the county, fishing and swimming and hunting under
sprawling blue skies and driving his rattletrap car insanely and lying
on the moss with his girl and watching the branches above groping the
sky and marveling as the young do at the strangeness of life, and the
war came in a far country. It doesn’t matter which. It was just a
country.
His father, an angry man
emitting the foul stench of patriotism, said his duty was to become a
soldier and kill whoever it was in the far country, wherever it was. His
father didn’t know or much care. It didn’t matter. Somebody would know.
A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. It would be a grand adventure,
an uncle said.
He enlisted. In the aching
humid heat of a hot state he drew toothpaste and seven-eighty-two gear
and green clothes from supply and learned to march in squares while a
sergeant said Lef-rye-lef-rye-lef. He felt the sense of power and
invincibility that comes of rhythmic camaraderie with thudding boots. He
learned to use grenades and flamethrowers and the proper placement of a
bayonet in a kidney. He learned obedience and various forms of likely
suicide, but it was for his country, dulce et decorum est, and he sang
fierce cadences on the march. If I die on the Russian front, bury me
with a Russian cunt, lef-rye-lef-rye-lef-rye-lef. It was a grand
adventure, calling to a young male’s desperation to defy existence, to
cross the mountains, to see the dragon, to overcome. The colonels at
Training Command had calculated this nicely.
He felt the romance and
variety and absurdity that men love in the military in time of peace,
and collected the stories that soldiers tell in bars. See, we was in TJ
at the Blue Fox, and Murphy was getting a lap dance from this senorita
with frigging water-melon tits, I mean those hangers just wouldn’t quit,
and this owl flies in, some kind of freaking bird anyway, and she
screams and falls on Murphy and… He felt the freedom of being away from
the county, in wild bars nobody back home had ever heard of. It was the
life.
Then he was on the
late-night tarmac of the airfield, staging out for the remote country of
which he knew nothing. Wind swirled and jet wash smelled of aviation
kerosene and he was fit and hardly noticed the weight of his pack.
Heavies roared in and out, taking troops. He savored a new phrase, FMF
WesPac. Fleet Marine Force Western Pacific, alive with hormonal appeals
of armies on the march, of foreign legions and Marcus Aurelius on the
Rhine-Danube line, though he had never heard of the man, and he was part
of huge events happening in the night.
On the first day
in-country he went to his posting in the remote land, in a convoy of
open six-bys. The heat and strange people along the road exhilarated him
and he was really, truly out of the county and he took it all in with
wide eyes and the mine went off under the lead truck and the driver
landed screaming by the road, his legs gone. Mines do that. Marines ran
to him and said Jesus, oh Jesus. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Get a corpsman.
Oh shit. Oh Jesus. The screaming stopped, that being the nature of
femoral arteries.
Three months passed. He
now hated the people of the remote country, though he still knew nothing
of it. Soldiers hate. He killed some enemy soldiers and some who may
have been enemy soldiers and then some he knew weren’t but who were in
the wrong place after his platoon took casualties from a sniper. It
didn’t affect him, not that he knew. Dead people were just dead people,
so what. He hated the scuttling cockroaches anyway. Light’em up.
Light’em all up. Let God sort’em out. He had never heard of the
Albigensians, but soldiers vary little.
One day the platoon
approached a town and a sniper fired at them. “Light’em up” said the
lieutenant, who hated the locals. Ten minutes later thirty-seven
villagers were dead and the reporter who had been there got pictures of
it all. They appeared around the world. The platoon didn’t know why they
were being picked on. If villagers didn’t want to get shot, they
shouldn’t let heavily armed insurgents come into their village. At a
thousand legion halls, members said war is war, people get hurt. You
gotta expect it. The press are wimps, comsymps, unrealistic idealists.
We need to unleash the troops, let them win.
Officers, knowing that
reporters were the most dangerous of their enemies, said that it hadn’t
happened, that the enemy had really done it, that it was an isolated
incident, and that there would be an investigation. The commanding
general in what interestingly was called “the theater” had presidential
aspirations, and so sacrificed the lieutenant, who eventually received
three months house arrest.
The soldier from the
county almost made it. He was approaching PCOD, Pussy Cut-off Date,
determined by the germination time of gonorrhea, when his truck hit the
mine. Nothing new here. Men in agony, exposed bone, crushed lungs, and
the dying crying out for the trinity of the badly wounded, mother wife,
and water. This time the soldier from the county was half gutted.
It was a grand adventure,
though..
On the ward where they
removed a length of his intestines, he saw many things. He saw the
soldier with his jaw shot away who fed through a tube in his nose. He
watched a high-school girl of seventeen from Tennessee as she saw her
betrothed, stone blind, his face a hideous porridge that would gag a
maggot.
Johnny…Johnny..oh Johnny.
He left the hospital with
a colostomy bag and instructions never to eat anything he liked. Women
do not like colostomy bags, so he had time on his hands. He read. He
thought. He came to hate, to hate with a shuddering intensity that
unnerved his friends, who learned not to talk about the war. Like
soldiers since before time existed, he learned that the war was not
about the noble things it was supposed to be about, God and country and
democracy, but about money, power, contracts, and the egos of the men
who, on the principle that shit floats, always rise to the top. For the
rest of his life, he would really, truly, want to kill.
He had come a long way
from the county. It had been a grand adventure.
Most of the profound anger and apparent actual
insanity afflicting the United States stem from racial antagonism: The
Floyd riots, the tearing down of statues, affirmative action, the
renaming of buildings, hostility to everything Confederate, racial
attacks on whites by blacks, critical race theory, the fury over trials.
Racial policy isn’t working and isn’t going to. America had better find
another approach before, one day, the guns come out.
Sez I, a massive step toward racial
reconciliation could be achieved simply by deregulating the schools. The
races have very, very disparate cultures and want different things. In
the integrated schools, either blacks must be forced to learn things of
interest only to whites, or whites must be prevented from learning these
things. It is hard to see why black students or their parents would have
any interest in Jane Austin, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or Beowulf. Nor is
it clear why whites, of either generation, would care more than
passingly about Africa. Why, unworkably, force each to do something both
alien and of no interest to it?
Many object that the study of mathematics
constitutes racism, or is a means of oppressing blacks. Why force math
on blacks or, more importantly, prevent white kids from learning them?
Similarly, English grammar is now said to be racist. Why should black
young of a background having no interest in such things have to be
burdened with it?
These difficulties could within an administrative
district be remedied by allowing different groups to establish such
schools as they chose, for such students as they chose, teaching such
material as they chose. Charges of discrimination could be avoided by
requiring by law that all students be subsidized at the same per-pupil
rate. Further, allow schools to select such students as they choose. If
some schools wanted only white students, or black, or racially mixed, so
be it. As long as they were given equal resources, it would be their
business. If some parents preferred schools of mixed race, it would be
their business.Evangelical schools? Fine.
Jewish? Equally so. Chinese? Equally.
The right of schools to choose teachers without
governmental bureaucracy—most importantly, certification—would be
crucial. Certified teachers are often of low quality and always carriers
of industrial-strength political correctness. The teachers unions are
just that—unions, interested chiefly in the good of the membership, not
the students. I would not be allowed to teach either writing or
journalism whereas a half-literate political hire would be.
This would also allow parents of very bright kids
to use such tests as they chose to find the extraordinarily smart and
then to teach them at their level. Those opposed to
testing could avail themselves of schools not engaging in testing.
Forcing kids of IQ 140 or better to agonize in classes at the level of
Mommy Beaver had two sticks and Daddy Beaver had two, how many did
that have in all is child abuse. A child in that range in the second
grade is reading at the ninth-grade level and school is nothing but an
obstacle. Why do this?
In aggregate these measures—we could call them
“freedom”—might go far to reduce hostility.
Smaller and seemingly less important matters
count in racial relations. Blacks often deprecate other blacks for
“acting white.” This is not unreasonable. People naturally want to be
around others who share their culture, manners, and ideas of
consideration and propriety. I don’t want my children, or people around
me, “acting black I don’t know what “acting white” means and I don’t
care. I don’t want my children wearing their pants below their knees and
saying “muggafugga” every second word. These practices do no actual
harm, but are extremely disagreeable to most whites. While I do not want
to dictate the culture of blacks—it isn’t my business—neither do I want
them transgressing mine. Would not separation be the comfortable
solution?
Housing is another matter in which less
government would be of use. Here again, policy is disastrous. The races
obviously do not want to live together. When blacks move into white
neighborhoods, the whites leave. When whites move back into the city,
“gentrifying,” blacks are enraged. Upon reaching university, blacks
often demand dormitories only for blacks, courses only for blacks,
student centers only for blacks, and graduations only for blacks. If
whites had the same privileges, friction would diminish. By (again)
providing these things on a rigid and transparent basis of equal money
per student, discrimination could be avoided.
Since the races usually want to live apart, why
not simply let them? Those who wanted to live in mixed neighborhoods
could, but if a black neighborhood wanted to avoid gentrification, it
could vote to do so.
The voluntary separation of races would greatly
reduce the very high rates of crime against whites by blacks, and the
fear and intensifying hostility caused by this crime. I don’t know how
to end crime, but reducing the fear of blacks would go far to encourage
racial reconciliation.
Blacks say that white police discriminate against
them.Whether this is true would make no difference
if blacks policed black neighborhoods and whites, white. Cities
typically burn because white policemen have beaten or shot a black. The
blindingly obvious solution is, in racially homogeneous regions, to have
the local race do the policing. Friction might in some degree continue
between police and policed, but at least it would not be racial.
Further, though it will at first sound strange, I
suggest that black and white neighborhoods be permitted to decide what
laws to enforce, at least in those matters affecting only the
neighborhood. If blacks chose to ignore use of marijuana, drinking in
public, selling crack, or driving without a license, why should they
not? Do they not know their neighborhood, its needs and problems, better
that I? Why are these things my business either way? The result would be
vastly fewer arrests of blacks by whites and fewer blacks in prison,
both of these contributing greatly to hostility between the races.
I am not recommending the abandonment of black
neighborhoods to crime, but rather letting those affected decide. For
example, blacks often hate stop-and-frisk policing. Why not let those
affected make the decision? This would reduce the impression of the
police as an occupying army, often white.
Nor am I suggesting the subjection of blacks to a
punitive regime. I believe that all citizens should have access to good
medical care, that providing schools with textbooks of their choice is a
proper function of government, as is maintenance of streets, water
supply, and electric supply. If a black university wants
microscopes or a computer, it should get them.
And universities should be free to hire any staff they choose, depending
only on the willingness of the staff to be hired. The various forms of
welfare should be continued as there is no choice other than causing
great hardship even hunger. Since the races are in America, and none is
going to leave, finding a workable approach to amity would seem a good
idea. What we have hasn’t worked, is not working, shows no sign that it
ever will, and indeed things are getting worse. A little distance might
go a long way. If there is ever an explosion of the very real, very deep
anger in the country that the media are hiding from themselves, it might
make Floyd’s uprising seem trivial. In the Floyd riots, the guns didn’t
come out.
Hardboiled is
back! (The exclamation point is to arouse wild enthusiasm in the
reader, a boiling literary lust.) Gritty crime fiction by
longtime police reporter for the Washington Times, who
knows the police from nine years of riding with them. Guaranteed
free of white wine and cheese, sensitivity, or social justice.
As the sentient have
presumably noticed, the United States is in crisis, the
country’s problems are profound, intrinsic, without solution,
and worsening. When a population reaches the point of despair,
even desperation, when it sees a darkening future for itself and
its children, people yearn for a strong man who will forcibly
put things right. Yet it is unlikely that helicopters of Marines
from Quantico will descend on the White House and announce the
dictatorship of some general. Military officers are too well
paid and comfortable to worry about the country. It is hard to
imagine an American Mussolini. Trump is a caricature and no one
else comes to mind. Yet “unrest” --less euphemistically, “chaos”
on the order of Mr. Floyd’s massive riots, is possible. We have
seen it. We can see it again.
Consider America today.
By comparison with Japan, China, Korea, it is a barbarity, a
dumpster, an asylum, an abattoir, an astonishment. San Francisco
loses conventions because of needles and excrement on the
sidewalks. Almost weekly we see multiple shootings in stores,
high schools and, now, grade schools. Murders of whites by
blacks run at thirty a month, the news being suppressed. In
cities across the country crime is out of control, the tax bases
moving out, bail abolished so criminals are freed in hours.
stores leave to escape undiscouraged shoplifting and robbery.
Seven hundred homicides a year in Chicago, 300 in Baltimore, and
at least twice as many shot but survive, similar numbers in a
dozen cities. For practical purposes law does not exists in
these ungovernable enclaves. Sexual curiosities, once called
perversions, flourish with American embassies hoisting flags in
support of transsexualism Mobs topple historical statues. Many
tens of thousands live on sidewalks and a hundred thousand a
year die of opioid overdoses. The country drops math
requirements and English grammar in schools, AP courses, and
SATs as racist. The economy declines, jobs have left for other
climes, medical care in beyond most people’s means, government
is corrupt and incompetent, and wars are unending. There is
actual hatred between racial, political, and regional groups.
Ominously, gun sales are up.
How is this going to end
well? How did we get here?
America has never been a
nation in the correct sense of the word, a people sharing
values, language, a culture. Rather it has been, and is, a
collection of peoples having little and common and, often
disliking each other. West Virginia has nothing in common with
Massachusetts which has nothing in common with the Deep South
which has nothing in common with coastal California which has
nothing in common with Cavalier Virginia which has nothing in
common with Latinos who have nothing in common with blacks.
Until perhaps the early
Sixties, the regions got along with each other reasonably well
because there was little communication between them. Roads were
poor, the internet was not even on the horizon. Radio stations
and newspapers were local, reflecting the surrounding culture
and taste. The central government was remote and had little
influence locally. Each region lived as it wished.
Providing a degree of
commonalty was that the country was overwhelmingly white,
European, Anglophone and, at least nominally, Christian. It was
socially conservative, largely consisting of small towns.
The resulting culture was
unsophisticated but civilized. In the suburbs of Washington (I
was there) you really could leave your bike anywhere and it
would be there when you came back. In summer children really
could play great sprawling multi-block games of hide-and-seek
after dark and no one worried. In high school in rural Virginia
(I was there too) the boys had guns for hunting deer and
shooting varmints in the bean fields and you could leave your
.410 in the back seat of your jalopy in the school’s parking
lot. Nobody thought of shooting anyone. It wasn’t in the
culture. If a thing isn’t in the culture, it doesn’t happen. You
don’t need policemen. The boys didn’t use bad language around
the girls or vice versa and nobody even thought of disrespect
to teachers. There were class clowns (I may know somewhat of
this), but no real misbehavior. It wasn’t in white, technically
Christian, semi-rural culture.
Then many things
happened. In no particular order:
The reach
of the federal government grew and grew. Washington, which had
been a distant city concerning itself with foreign policy and
the economy, could now impose its values on remote society. It
did.
Washington
discovered the “separation of church and state,” which had lain
unnoticed in the Constitution since 1789. In regions of deep
religiousness, it became illegal to recite the Lord’s prayer, to
have crèches on the town square at Christmas, or two sing carols
on the public streets. It had nothing to do with meticulous
adherence to the Constitution, but everything to do with the
discovery by angry minorities that they could impose on
majorities. In short, like many movements to come, it was a
revenge operation. It has become a de facto program of de-Christianization,
weakening a source of social cohesion and leading to anger.
The federal government
began to dictate what could be taught in local schools. Teachers
were forbidden to mention Creationism because a judge in
Philadelphia, who appeared to have the scientific grasp of a
potato chip, said this transgressed the doctrine of separation.
The decision had little practical relevance as there was no
likelihood that hearing of Genesis would turn students away from
the study of biochemistry. It was, however, an early
manifestation of class snobbery against what was seen as
primitive Christianity that would later coalesce into hostility
toward the Deplorables.
Remote
anonymous
committees in New York wrote highly ideological textbooks
imposed on distant states which did not share those ideologies.
The effectiveness of this relied on the principle that outraged
parents in Arkansas would have no idea how to oppose distant
bureaucracies of whose existence they were unaware and whose
phone numbers they could not find. American government is
democratic while not allowing the people to exercise power. It
is a brilliant system, until it explodes.
Compulsory
racial integration,
as distinct from desegregation, was an untarnished disaster. Few
wanted it, and few want it. The people who imposed it did not,
and do not, send their children to black schools. The races
transparently do not want to live together. If blacks move into
white neighborhoods, “white flight” occurs and if whites move
into black neighborhoods, blacks furiously complain of
gentrification.
When two cultures have
utterly different views of acceptable language, dress, behavior,
study, and curricula, mixing them does not work. In the schools,
academic standards fell. Discipline became a problem. Across
America, cities burned because of conflict between black
populations and white police. Euro-white culture, it turned out,
was incompatible with Negro culture. The potential for yet
greater disaster seems great, and no one has a solution. There
probably isn’t a solution.
The
Constitution,
which once political stability, withered, being ignored or
interpreted into unrecognizability by judges or made irrelevant
by changes in technology and society. Freedom of speech, which
meant that I could say that the President was a fool and should
be removed from office, became freedom of expression, meaning
that porn sites, accessible to children of nine years, could
upload videos of a German Shepherd copulating with a beautiful
blonde tied down to a bed. Some doubted that the writers of the
Constitution had this in mind when providing the Bill of Rights,
but none could gainsay the Supreme Court or the federal power.
The
behemoths
of the electronic media imposed political censorship. Being
private enterprises, they could not be disciplined. They became
more and more an arm of the central government, which became
more and more the property of the Northeastern coastal elites.
Entities with names like Google, Twitter, and Facebook cleansed
themselves of content thought inappropriate, websites delisted,
credit card accounts closed. People disappeared by the
electronic media were almost as disappeared as those disappeared
in Latin America, though less bloodily. The intention and effect
are the same.
An unexpected effect of
censorship was that those doing the censoring also censored
themselves. The media, talking to each other, reading each
other, having no contact with or interest in the silenced and
deplorable, had no idea of the anger out there. This brought us
Floyd and Trump as deep wells of undetected anger exploded. The
media are doing it again.
The current
regime in
Washington appears deliberately and intensely divisive. Biden
has attacked the South, supporting renaming of military bases in
deliberate affront. A thorough racist, he frequently denounces
whites. He denounces Trump and his supporters, nearly half of
America. He has ostentatiously chosen black women as justice of
the Supreme Court, member of Federal Reserve, Vice President,
and White House spokeswoman. While these may or may not be
competent, he announced them as diversity hires. He is poised to
assault owners of guns, sure to provoke fury, has involved
America in another war, and wants a federal Ministry of Truth to
prohibit ideas he doesn’t like. Profoundly partisan, he makes no
attempt to calm things or promote tranquility.
The
universality
of the internet made difficult or impossible the maintenance of
distinct values or mores. It became impossible for the
cultivated to inculcate in their children manners, good English,
and appreciation of learning when the electronics bathed them in
not only the traditionally low culture of America but also the
anti-civilization of the ghetto. America undergoes both enforced
peasantrification and homogenization. Anger grows.
Congress
and the Constitution
largely ceased to function, leaving Presidents to rule by
executive order, this not being entirely distinguishable from
dictatorship. This included the making of war, which became both
common and beyond public influence. The legislature no longer
governed but was the storefront for special interests of immense
power. There remained no body interested in the wellbeing of the
country. This led to offshoring of jobs, poverty in Appalachia,
the Rust Belt and rural Deep South, the impoverishing influx of
cheap Mexican labor, Donald Trump, and intense regional hatred.
Here we are.
This can’t last. The
hatreds are intense, the guns everywhere, anger growing at
crime, something akin to economic desperation appearing.
Washington will leave nowhere alone, will not address national
problems, will always give priority to its military, its wars
and its empire over domestic needs. The hostility that fueled
the Floyd riots, the burning cities, the looting and vengeful
vandalism, are still there. She’s going to blow. Watch.
America is fragile. The
country can handle normal and regional catastrophes. But nuclear
war is neither normal nor regional. Very few warheads
would serve to wreck the United States beyond recovery for
decades.
By Fred Reed
Pleasurable excitement ripples through the usual boredom of
Washington, and the resident curiosities enjoy exquisite
frissons, over the possibility of nuclear war over the Ukraine.
Some official of the EU, or maybe it was the mediocrity in the White
House with the truculence problem, but anyway one of the geniuses
ruling the planet’s fate has said that if Russia used nukes, the
Russian army would be destroyed, grrr, bowwow, woof.
Exactly how it would be destroyed, the sayer didn’t say. Anyway, the
threats and counterthreats swirl around the idea that a nuke war
between Russia and the West might occur. Maybe, with tactical nukes
in the Ukraine, about which nobody gives a rat’s nether region. The
world is full of damned fools.
But:
The general staffs of both Russia and China are, whatever else
you may think of them, sane. They know of America’s massive nuclear
forces. They are not going to launch an atomic war. Sane behavior
cannot be relied on with Washington’s second-rate lawyers, but the
generals in the Pentagon are not crazy. They like hobbyist wars and
big budgets, but if Biden ordered a nuclear strike, they would be
likely to suddenly remember that Congress has to declare war and,
seeing that their radar screens were empty of incoming missiles, and
say, “Mr. President, we are not authorized to do that.” And
recommend a committee.
What would such a war be like? Let’s guess.
America is fragile. We don’t notice because it works smoothly and
because when a local catastrophe occurs—earthquake, hurricane,
tornado—the rest of the country steps in to remedy things. The
country can handle normal and regional catastrophes. But nuclear war
is neither normal nor regional. Very few warheads would serve
to wreck the United States beyond recovery for decades. This should
be clear to anyone who actually thinks about it.
Defense is impossible. Missile defenses are meaningless except as
money funnels to the arms industry. This is not the place to go into
decoys, hypersonics, Poseidon, maneuvering glide vehicles, bastion
stationing, MIRV, just plain boring old cruise missiles, and so on.
Coastal cities are particularly easy targets, being vulnerable to
submarine-launched sea-skimming missiles. Washington, New York,
Boston, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle for starters,
all gone.
A modern country is a system of systems of systems,
interdependent and interconnected—water, electricity, manufacturing,
energy, telecommunications, transportation, pipelines, and complex
supply chains. These are interconnected, interdependent, and
rely on large numbers of trained people showing up for work. Modern
warheads are not the popgun squibs of Hiroshima. Talking of repair
any time soon after the nuclear bombing of a conurbation is foolish
because the city would have many hundreds of thousand of dead,
housing destroyed, massive fires, horrendously burned people with no
hope of medical care, and, in general, populations too focused on
staying alive to worry about abstractions like supply chains.
The elimination of transportation might cause more death than the
bombs. Cities, suburbs, and towns cannot feed themselves. They rely
on a constant, heavy influx of food grown in remote regions. This
food is shipped by rail or truck to distribution centers, as for
example Chicago, whence it is transshipped to cities like New York.
Heavy megatonnage on Chicago would disrupt rail lines and trucking
firms. Trains and trucks need gasoline and diesel which come from
somewhere, presumably in pipelines. These, broken by the blast,
burning furiously, would take time to repair. Time is what cities
would not have.
What would happen in, say, New York City even if, improbably, it
were not bombed? Here we will ignore the likelihood of sheer,
boiling panic and resultant chaos on learning that much of the
country had been flattened. In the first few days there would be
panic buying with shelves at supermarkets being emptied. Hunger
would soon become serious. By day four, people would be hunting each
other with knives to get their food. By the end of the second week,
people would be eating each other. Literally. This happens in
famines.
Most things in America rely on electricity. This comes from
generating plants which burn stuff, usually natural gas or coal.
These arrive on trains, which would not be running, or in trucks,
not likely to be running. They depend on oil fields, refineries, and
pipelines unlikely to function. All of the foregoing depend on
employees continuing to go to work instead of trying to save their
families. So—no electricity in New York, which goes dark.
This means no telephones, no internet, no lighting, and no
elevators. How would this work out in a city of high rises? Most
people would be nearly incommunicado in a lightless city. Huge
traffic jams would form as people with cars tried to leave—to go
where?—as long as gasoline in the tank lasted.
Where does water come from in New York? I don’t know, but it
doesn’t flow spontaneously to the thirtieth floor. It needs to be
pumped, which involves electricity, from wherever it comes from to
wherever it has to go. No electricity, no pump. No pump, no water.
And no flushing of toilets. River water could be drunk, of course.
Think of the crowds.
In all likelihood, civil society would collapse by the end of the
fourth day. The more virile ethnics would surge from the ghettos
with guns and clubs to feed. Police would have disappeared or be
either looking after their families or themselves looting.
Civilization is a thin veneer. The streets and subways are not safe
even without a nuclear war. The majority would be unarmed and unable
to defend themselves. People who had never touched a gun would
suddenly understand the appeal. If you think this would not happen,
give my best to Tinker Belle.
Thus it would not be necessary to bomb a city to destroy it, only
to cut it off from transport hubs for a couple of weeks. An attacker
would of course destroy many cities in addition to necessary
infrastructure. Those who plan nuclear wars may be psychopaths, or
just insular geeks fiddling with bloodless abstractions, but they
are not fools. They have carefully calculated how to most seriously
damage a target country. In no more than a couple of months, perhaps
two hundred million people would starve to death. Do you think this
fantastic? Tell me why it is fantastic.
Parenthetically, in my days of walking the E-ring in the
Pentagon, I read manuals on how to keep soldiers fighting after they
had received lethal doses of radiation. They don’t die immediately
and, depending on dosage, might be administered stimulants to keep
them on their feet, or so the manuals said. These manuals also
discussed whether these walking dead should be told that they were
about to die. The authors used the evocative phrase “terrain
alteration” to describe landscapes with all the trees lying on their
sides, and we have all heard of “overkill.” After a nuclear war,
millions would slowly die of radiation—read up on Nagasaki and
Hiroshima—and burned corpses would rot in the streets, too numerous
for burial by survivors with other things on their minds.
How would the next season’s crops be planted? Answer: they
wouldn’t be. Where would fertilizer come from? Parts for tractors,
trucks, harvesters? Making these requires functioning factories
which require electricity, raw materials, and workers. If the
attacker chose to hit agricultural lands with radiation-dirty cobalt
bombs, these regions would be lethal for years. Nuclear planners
think about these things.
Among “defense intellectuals,” there is, or was when I covered
such things, insane talk of how America could “absorb” a Russian
first strike and have enough missiles in reserve to destroy Russia.
These people should be locked in sealed boxes and kept in abandoned
coal mines.
Note also that Biden, Blinken, and Bolton, bibbety bobbety boo,
and their families, live in DC, the priority target. While the rats
are aboard the ship, they won’t sink it. If they are discovered
boarding a Greyhound out of Washington at three a.m., dressed as
washerwomen, it will be time to worry.
FRED REEDdescribes himself as [previously]
a “Washington police reporter, former Washington editor for Harper’s
and staff writer for Soldier of Fortune magazine, Marine combat vet
from Viet Nam, and former long-haul hitchhiker, part-time sociopath,
who once lived in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from
the Yankee Capital.” His essays “on the collapse of
America” Mr. Reed calls “wildly funny, sometimes wacky, always
provocative.” “Fred is the Hunter Thompson of the
right,”
seconds Thomas E. Ricks in Foreign Policy magazine. His
commentary is “well-written, pungent political incorrectness mixed
with smart military commentary and libertarian impulses, topped off
with a splash of Third World sunshine and tequila.”
Hardboiled is back! (The exclamation point is to arouse wild
enthusiasm in the reader, a boiling literary lust.) Gritty crime
fiction by longtime police reporter for the Washington Times,
who knows the police from nine years of riding with them.
Guaranteed free of white wine and cheese, sensitivity, or social
justice.
20 thoughts on “FRED REED: America’s Unable
To ‘Absorb’ A Russian First Nuclear Strike”
RICHARD
Fred,
NYC water comes mostly from a series of reservoirs in upstate
New York. The water flows to NYC mostly from gravity however of
course electricity is needed for pumping.
As you said it would be a disaster.
You did not mention the effects of a US counterstrike against
Russia or China who would face the same disaster.
On Long Island we use ground water that needs to be pumped
out.
Peasants at end of Empire
Won’t the serfs get a vote on Doomsday as part of muh
democracy? Ohh, it isn’t on the ballot. (sad trombone)
Ian
Hi Fred. While I think the probability of the Generals’
and their families’ own deaths is a powerful deterrent (unlike
sending off some stupid hayseed to die, good riddance, they
think), the path to nuclear war is not only via intentional
executive/legislative decision. There are more than one step
between non-nuclear and strategic nuclear conflicts, and these
steps can happen gradually. Witness the alleged intention by
Kyiv to use dirty bombs. Let’s say Zelenskyy goes ahead. With
the fog of war and the deliberate twisting of facts for
propaganda reasons, how hard would it be for that to be turned
into a purported false-flag attack by Moscow? Piece of cake. CIA
does it all the effing time, so they presume everything is a
false-flag op until proven otherwise (and not even then, if it
suits the narrative, see Washington’s destruction of NS1&2).
So there has to be some retaliation, right? Otherwise precedents
and all that. Ok, so non-nuclear attack by NATO on Russian
materiel, troops or even soil. Moscow cannot hope to beat
NATO in a symmetrical war. Russia would prefer not to be
dismembered and handed out in pieces to Epstein’s client list.
So Moscow goes tactical nuke on NATO base/s that launched the
attack. The escalation from that point needs to inference.
Tom O'Neill
An effective cyber attack on the grid would accomplish the
same chaos. We are a fragile society today. In past wars tens of
millions were killed and the world recovered quickly and the
balance of power changed. Let’s try hundreds of millions this
time. What could go wrong? God’s on our side.
All will happen soon after the church is raptured……….
brzo
Surprise! Facebook won’t allow me to link your post!
Gordon K. Shumway
Voting for any Democrat or RINO is voting for what this essay
describes.
'Frenchy'
Fred, Both you and I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As a 14 year old boy with 6 younger siblings we all knew that
the sun we were so use to may not rise, in an orbital arc, a
mushroom cloud a very real maybe.
To let Putin threaten the world with strategic nuclear
weapons, then say, ‘welp, maybe only use tac-nuke’s on Ukraine’,
is a logical absurdity.
Still I appreciated your view however skewed it seems
You are a f*cking genius. So am I, but not in your league.
Live long and prosper.
John Gilmer
Well, if you want to talk about nukes, address your concerns
to Russia using “tactical nukes” in Ukraine. Until the US built
up the military under RR, it was policy that were the Warsaw
Pact to attack, NATO & and the US would use “tactical nukes”
again Russia & company. The hope was that it wouldn’t start
WWIII.
If Putin does the same thing in 2022 that the US threated to
do in 1985, would the US start WWIII?
I don’t know but the question should be addressed.
youre, John Gilmer
james
Just a note: lady-cops are more likely to resort to guns and
these girly-men have overseen the great feminization of the US
Military As they poison their troops with a jab that they must
know is toxic, maybe the generals used to be rational
Yes, “brzo,” all hyperlinks originating in ilanaMercer.com,
including BarelyABlog.com, are banned by Facef-ck. Readers can
always try to petition these scum bags.
JoeBlow
You can use bit.ly to post to FB, though you get some
warnings.
Politicians need a strong dose of reality…at least those
pondering the use of nukes. Your summary is likely the scenario
we’d see. I read articles by some survivors of the Balkan war.
They were generally what you have written here. A wealthy couple
barricaded in their home meant nothing in those apocalyptic
times. An extended family banded together for mutual security
often survived. The couple in their barricaded home did not last
a week. As Biden continues to arm the various departments in the
bureaucracy, he likely believes this “augmentation of force” has
meaning. What a laugh, because placing a firearm in the hands of
an accountant will only mean they are more of a threat to
themselves and their peers than to Biden’s foes. From what I
remember from the Balkans, arms/ammunition, food, hard currency
(silver and gold), and alcohol were of the most value in the
now-barter economy.
Too bad the mainstream news liars do not have scribes like
you as well as a realistic view of the times rather than their
foolish dreams of molding America through their socialist
throne.
dearieme
“In a vast part of the globe, stretching from the Canadian
Arctic to Tierra del Fuego and from Greenland to Guam, the U.S.
will not tolerate another great power’s interference. Certainly
America’s security wouldn’t be jeopardized if other great powers
enjoy their own (and for that matter, smaller) spheres of
influence.
This esoteric strategizing — this misplaced obsession with
credibility, this dangerously expansive concept of what
constitutes security — … is the antithesis of statecraft, which
requires discernment based on power, interest, and circumstance.
It is a stance toward the world that can easily doom the United
States to military commitments and interventions in
strategically insignificant places over intrinsically trivial
issues. It is a stance that can engender a foreign policy
approximating paranoia in an obdurately chaotic world abounding
in states, personalities, and ideologies that are unsavory and
uncongenial—but not necessarily mortally hazardous.”
That was published in 2013 by Benjamin Schwarz: pretty
prescient, I’d say.
David Parry
My guess is that Putin is bluffing, and if he actually
decides to use the nuclear football, it is highly likely that a
fellow in a uniform with lottsa lottsa braid will say to him,
“Uh, Vlad, NATO have always said that one nuke will bring a
response, of the mushroom cloud variety, so I really, really
advise you to think again.” NATO knows that one nuke as a trial
balloon could mean mushroom clouds over Europe. And the UK and
France have nukes of their own. Nobody here wants a nuclear war,
but giving in to Putin’s bluster is not the way to handle the
situation.
There is also the little question as to whether Putin’s
nuclear arsenal actually works. The rockets and the warheads
need constant and very expensive maintenance, Russia’s budget
could not possibly have covered that, and we know for a fact
that things just came to a stop for about a decade. Ergo, the
nukes are probably a bigger danger to Russia than the erstwhile
targets, but we really don’t want to find out, nor do we want
another large area contaminated with radiation.
Jokem
DAVID PARRY – That is the problem with nuclear threats, it
is a high stakes game where no one wins. I think Putin is on
very thin ice with the power brokers in Russia, I would not be
surprised if Russia had its own version of Operation Valkyrie.
Garland Remington III
Believe it or not this is what I do to make sure anything I
want to go on that piece of shit rag call Fascist—book, I
will format everything in pictures using my iPad Pro 12.9 and
screen shot a picture of any and all. And then I will post the
pictures on that rag of a website so everybody can read it. And
they do. Believe you me, they do. Many of them let me know and
this is how they first discover anything, about ILANA MERCER.
Entirely misplaced is all of this talk of nuclear bombs
(“nucler,” as Jimmy Carter would say).
As Fred points out, the dense interconnectivity of modern
life makes it extremely fragile – so you DON’T NEED a nuke to
inflict civilization-crippling damage. As Tom O’Neill mentioned,
cyber warfare is one beggar’s option.
But, upping the game a bit, there’s smorgasbord of
non-nuclear civ-snuffers. For example, electromagnetic pulse
weapons (EMPs) do not need nuclear apparatus. And how ’bout flux
compression generator bombs (FCGs), which date back to the
1950s, or other non-nuclear e-bombs?
A nuclear ending for this world came within one man’s
decision on 27 Oct 1962. Google “Vasily Arkhipov” for the
details. There was another near miss in 1983. There are so
many ways things could go wrong. An all out nuclear exchange is
just one of them. Here’s a scenario for you all to ponder. A low
yield nuclear explosion takes place underwater in the North
Atlantic. A US and a Russian submarine operating in the area are
never heard from again. Now what?
Fred Explained by Conservative Writers.org
QUOTE
a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for
Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week,
and The Washington Times.
He has been published in Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, The Wall Street
Journal, The Washington Post, Harper's, National Review, Signal, Air &
Space, and suchlike. He has worked as a police writer, technology editor,
military specialist, and authority on mercenary soldiers. He is by all
accounts as looney as a tune.
I was born in 1945 in Crumpler, West Virginia, a coal camp near
Bluefield. My father was a mathematician then serving in the Pacific aboard
the destroyer USS Franks, which he described as a wallowing and bovine
antique with absolutely no women aboard, but the best the Navy had at the
time.
My paternal grandfather was dean and professor of mathematics at
Hampden-Sydney College, a small and (then, and perhaps now) quite good
liberal arts school in southwest Virginia. My maternal grandfather was a
doctor in Crumpler. (When someone got sick on the other side of the
mountain, the miners would put my grandfather in a coal car and take him
under the mountain. He had a fairly robust conception of a house call.) In
general my family for many generations were among the most literate, the
most productive, and the dullest people in the South. Presbyterians.
After the war I lived as a navy brat here and there--San Diego,
Mississippi, the Virginia suburbs of Washington, Alabama, what have you, and
briefly in Farmville, Virginia, while my father went on active duty for the
Korean War as an artillery spotter. I was an absorptive and voracious
reader, a terrible student, and had by age eleven an eye for elevation and
windage with a BB gun that would have awed a missile engineer. I was also
was a bit of a mad scientist. For example, I think I was ten when I
discovered the formula for thermite in the Britannica at Athens College in
Athens, Alabama, stole the ingredients from the college chemistry
laboratory, and ignited a mound of perfectly adequate thermite in the prize
frying pan of the mother of my friend Perry, whose father was the college
president. The resulting six-inch hole in the frying pan was hard to
explain.
I went to high school in King George County, Virginia, while living on
Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory (my father was always a
weapons-development sort of mathematician, although civilian by this time),
where I was the kid other kids weren't supposed to play with. My time was
spent canoeing, shooting, drinking unwise but memorable amounts of beer with
the local country boys, attempting to be a French rake with only indifferent
success, and driving in a manner that, if you are a country boy, I don't
have to describe, and if you aren't, you wouldn't believe anyway. I remember
trying to explain to my father why his station wagon was upside down at
three in the morning after flipping it at seventy on a hairpin turn that
would have intimidated an Alpine goat.
As usual I was a woeful student--if my friend Butch and I hadn't found
the mimeograph stencil for the senior Government exam in the school's
Dempster Dumpster, I wouldn't have graduated--but was a National Merit
Finalist, and in the 99th percentile on the SATs.
After two years at Hampden-Sydney, where I worked on a split major in
chemistry and biology with an eye to oceanography, I decided I was bored.
After spending the summer thumbing across the continent and down into
Mexico, hopping freight trains up and down the eastern seaboard, and
generally confusing myself with Jack Kerouac, I enlisted in the Marines, in
the belief that it would be more interesting than stirring unpleasant glops
in laboratories and pulling apart innocent frogs. It certainly was. On
returning from Vietnam with a lot of stories, as well as a Purple Heart and
more shrapnel in my eyes than I really wanted, I graduated from
Hampden-Sydney with lousy grades and a bachelor-of-science degree with a
major in history and a minor in computers. Really. My GREs were in the 99th
percentile.
The years from 1970 to 1973 I spent in largely disreputable pursuits, a
variety that has always come naturally to me. I wandered around Europe,
Asia, and Mexico, and acquired the usual stock of implausible but true
stories about odd back alleys and odder people.
When the 1973 war broke out in the Mid-East, I decided I ought to do
something respectable, thought that journalism was, and told the editor of
my home-town paper, "Hi! I want to be a war correspondent." This was a
sufficiently damn-fool thing to do that he let me go, probably to see what
would happen. Writing, it turned out, was the only thing I was good for. My
clips from Israel were good enough that when I argued to the editors of Army
Times that they needed my services to cover the war in Vietnam, they too let
me do it.
I spent the last year of the war between Phnom Penh and Saigon, leaving
each with the evacuation. Those were heady days in which I lived in slums
that would have horrified a New York alley cat, but they appealed to the
Steinbeck in me, of which there is a lot. After the fall of Saigon I
returned to Asia, resumed residence for six months in my old haunts in
Taipei, and studied Chinese while waiting for the next war, which didn't
come. Returning overland, I took up a career of magazine free-lancing, a
colorful route to starvation, with stints on various staffs interspersed.
For a year I worked in Boulder, Colorado, on the staff of Soldier of Fortune
magazine, half zoo and half asylum, with the intention of writing a book
about it. Publishing houses said, yes, Fred, this is great stuff, but you
are obviously making it up. I wasn't. Playboy eventually published it,
making me extremely persona non grata at Soldier of Fortune.
Having gotten married somewhere along the way for reasons that escape me
at the moment, though my wife was an extraordinary woman who deserved
better, I am now the happily divorced father of the World's Finest
Daughters. Until recently I worked as, among other things, a law-enforcement
columnist for the Washington Times. It allowed me to take trips to big
cities and to ride around in police cars with the siren going woowoowoo and
kick in doors of drug dealers. Recently I changed the column from law
enforcement to technology, and now live in Mexico near Guadalajara, having
found burros preferable to bureaucrats. My hobbies are wind surfing, scuba,
listening to blues, swing-dancing in dirt bars, associating with colorful
maniacs, weight-lifting, and people of the other sex. (Update: I married
Violeta, my Spanish teacher, and, as so often happens with men, married up.)
My principal accomplishment in life, aside from my children, is the
discovery that it is possible to jitterbug to the Brandenburgs.
Errors & omissions,
broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever;
if you find any I am open to comment.
Email me at Mike
Emery.
All financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want to keep it
private, use my PGP Key.
Home Page
Fred,
NYC water comes mostly from a series of reservoirs in upstate New York. The water flows to NYC mostly from gravity however of course electricity is needed for pumping.
As you said it would be a disaster.
You did not mention the effects of a US counterstrike against Russia or China who would face the same disaster.
On Long Island we use ground water that needs to be pumped out.
Won’t the serfs get a vote on Doomsday as part of muh democracy?
Ohh, it isn’t on the ballot. (sad trombone)
Hi Fred.
While I think the probability of the Generals’ and their families’ own deaths is a powerful deterrent (unlike sending off some stupid hayseed to die, good riddance, they think), the path to nuclear war is not only via intentional executive/legislative decision. There are more than one step between non-nuclear and strategic nuclear conflicts, and these steps can happen gradually. Witness the alleged intention by Kyiv to use dirty bombs.
Let’s say Zelenskyy goes ahead. With the fog of war and the deliberate twisting of facts for propaganda reasons, how hard would it be for that to be turned into a purported false-flag attack by Moscow? Piece of cake. CIA does it all the effing time, so they presume everything is a false-flag op until proven otherwise (and not even then, if it suits the narrative, see Washington’s destruction of NS1&2).
So there has to be some retaliation, right? Otherwise precedents and all that.
Ok, so non-nuclear attack by NATO on Russian materiel, troops or even soil.
Moscow cannot hope to beat NATO in a symmetrical war. Russia would prefer not to be dismembered and handed out in pieces to Epstein’s client list.
So Moscow goes tactical nuke on NATO base/s that launched the attack.
The escalation from that point needs to inference.
An effective cyber attack on the grid would accomplish the same chaos. We are a fragile society today. In past wars tens of millions were killed and the world recovered quickly and the balance of power changed. Let’s try hundreds of millions this time. What could go wrong? God’s on our side.
All will happen soon after the church is raptured……….
Surprise! Facebook won’t allow me to link your post!
Voting for any Democrat or RINO is voting for what this essay describes.
Fred, Both you and I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a 14 year old boy with 6 younger siblings we all knew that the sun we were so use to may not rise, in an orbital arc, a mushroom cloud a very real maybe.
To let Putin threaten the world with strategic nuclear weapons, then say, ‘welp, maybe only use tac-nuke’s on Ukraine’, is a logical absurdity.
Still I appreciated your view however skewed it seems
You are a f*cking genius. So am I, but not in your league. Live long and prosper.
Well, if you want to talk about nukes, address your concerns to Russia using “tactical nukes” in Ukraine. Until the US built up the military under RR, it was policy that were the Warsaw Pact to attack, NATO & and the US would use “tactical nukes” again Russia & company. The hope was that it wouldn’t start WWIII.
If Putin does the same thing in 2022 that the US threated to do in 1985, would the US start WWIII?
I don’t know but the question should be addressed.
youre, John Gilmer
Just a note: lady-cops are more likely to resort to guns and these girly-men have overseen the great feminization of the US Military As they poison their troops with a jab that they must know is toxic, maybe the generals used to be rational
Yes, “brzo,” all hyperlinks originating in ilanaMercer.com, including BarelyABlog.com, are banned by Facef-ck. Readers can always try to petition these scum bags.
You can use bit.ly to post to FB, though you get some warnings.
Hey Fred-
Politicians need a strong dose of reality…at least those pondering the use of nukes. Your summary is likely the scenario we’d see. I read articles by some survivors of the Balkan war. They were generally what you have written here. A wealthy couple barricaded in their home meant nothing in those apocalyptic times. An extended family banded together for mutual security often survived. The couple in their barricaded home did not last a week. As Biden continues to arm the various departments in the bureaucracy, he likely believes this “augmentation of force” has meaning. What a laugh, because placing a firearm in the hands of an accountant will only mean they are more of a threat to themselves and their peers than to Biden’s foes. From what I remember from the Balkans, arms/ammunition, food, hard currency (silver and gold), and alcohol were of the most value in the now-barter economy.
Too bad the mainstream news liars do not have scribes like you as well as a realistic view of the times rather than their foolish dreams of molding America through their socialist throne.
“In a vast part of the globe, stretching from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego and from Greenland to Guam, the U.S. will not tolerate another great power’s interference. Certainly America’s security wouldn’t be jeopardized if other great powers enjoy their own (and for that matter, smaller) spheres of influence.
This esoteric strategizing — this misplaced obsession with credibility, this dangerously expansive concept of what constitutes security — … is the antithesis of statecraft, which requires discernment based on power, interest, and circumstance. It is a stance toward the world that can easily doom the United States to military commitments and interventions in strategically insignificant places over intrinsically trivial issues. It is a stance that can engender a foreign policy approximating paranoia in an obdurately chaotic world abounding in states, personalities, and ideologies that are unsavory and uncongenial—but not necessarily mortally hazardous.”
That was published in 2013 by Benjamin Schwarz: pretty prescient, I’d say.
My guess is that Putin is bluffing, and if he actually decides to use the nuclear football, it is highly likely that a fellow in a uniform with lottsa lottsa braid will say to him, “Uh, Vlad, NATO have always said that one nuke will bring a response, of the mushroom cloud variety, so I really, really advise you to think again.” NATO knows that one nuke as a trial balloon could mean mushroom clouds over Europe. And the UK and France have nukes of their own. Nobody here wants a nuclear war, but giving in to Putin’s bluster is not the way to handle the situation.
There is also the little question as to whether Putin’s nuclear arsenal actually works. The rockets and the warheads need constant and very expensive maintenance, Russia’s budget could not possibly have covered that, and we know for a fact that things just came to a stop for about a decade. Ergo, the nukes are probably a bigger danger to Russia than the erstwhile targets, but we really don’t want to find out, nor do we want another large area contaminated with radiation.
DAVID PARRY –
That is the problem with nuclear threats, it is a high stakes game where no one wins.
I think Putin is on very thin ice with the power brokers in Russia, I would not be surprised if Russia had its own version of Operation Valkyrie.
Believe it or not this is what I do to make sure anything I want to go on that piece of shit rag call Fascist—book,
I will format everything in pictures using my iPad Pro 12.9 and screen shot a picture of any and all. And then I will post the pictures on that rag of a website so everybody can read it. And they do. Believe you me, they do. Many of them let me know and this is how they first discover anything, about ILANA MERCER.
Entirely misplaced is all of this talk of nuclear bombs (“nucler,” as Jimmy Carter would say).
As Fred points out, the dense interconnectivity of modern life makes it extremely fragile – so you DON’T NEED a nuke to inflict civilization-crippling damage. As Tom O’Neill mentioned, cyber warfare is one beggar’s option.
But, upping the game a bit, there’s smorgasbord of non-nuclear civ-snuffers. For example, electromagnetic pulse weapons (EMPs) do not need nuclear apparatus. And how ’bout flux compression generator bombs (FCGs), which date back to the 1950s, or other non-nuclear e-bombs?
Fred, you’re already drooling over the techs of this, so here ya go:
https://science.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb3.htm
A nuclear ending for this world came within one man’s decision on 27 Oct 1962. Google “Vasily Arkhipov” for the details. There was another near miss in 1983.
There are so many ways things could go wrong. An all out nuclear exchange is just one of them. Here’s a scenario for you all to ponder. A low yield nuclear explosion takes place underwater in the North Atlantic. A US and a Russian submarine operating in the area are never heard from again. Now what?