Democrats--as much as Republicans--should be furious with their media and pollsters who fed them crap about the presidential election. There was no Biden-led landslide that the majority of pollsters confidently predicted. Heck, Republicans seem--although I'm worried--to have held the Senate despite having to defend a disproportionate amount of seats this election; and even gained about 10 seats give or take in the House, coming amazingly close to flipping control (!), plus another governor. And I've heard Republicans made gains in state legislatures. It's actually pretty impressive. But Democrats ate up the garbage like it was arugula. I suspect Democrats won't be mad because they will prefer their media to be wrong in the same way they are wrong rather than being right when they are wrong. Which is a universal problem, of course, and not a partisan problem. And God help us, the media and pollsters advocated for a barely self-aware meat sack as our president.
There are 600 of these entities in America: "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is deploying political warfare to covertly influence free societies around the world, a top State Department official has warned." Confucius Institutes are just one class of those CCP entities.
An expanded Navy is without a doubt needed to confront Chinese expansionist aims. But don't forget the threat that the Army could pose to China, as I wrote about in Military Review.
March 2020: “The fear, the panic is a bigger problem than the virus.” He told [his constituents] starving for reliable information that the “reality is reassuring,” that “the facts don’t merit the level of anxiety we are seeing.” He flippantly declared, “We have more people in this country dying from the flu” and “this is not the Ebola virus.”
Libya: divided with no end in sight for the chaos since 2011.
With the Senate still--apparently--in Republican hands blocking unreasonable Biden legislative initiatives, Antifa/BLM nutjobs and their leftist Congressional and cabinet allies will have no brake on further street violence. Why keep quiet to stay in a victorious coalition if the coalition is hamstrung despite victory? Let's hope the Senate is as cooperative with Biden appointments as much as the Senate was for Trump appointees (and even the Democratic minority was able to slow things down). And maybe there is hope that the Senate can get the Biden corruption scandal and Obama spying and fake Trump-Russia collusion scandal into the open. I've given up hope that Clinton family will face justice for their corruption or that Hillary will face legal repercussions for her private email server while secretary of state.
This looks like an organized jihadi assault on Vienna. Pray tell, what did Austria do to "incite" the murderous hatred? Are the jihadis still mad about this? It could be. They're an excitable lot. ISIL took "credit" for the terror assault. And it appears to be a single terrorist and not an organized group attack like Mumbai.
Much like our big cities, apparently our liberal-run universities are cesspools of rampant racism. Funny how that works.
Space Force now operates the X-37B. I did wonder about why it had remained with the Air Force. Now it is where it belongs.
Japan is buying the F-35 and plans to build their own stealth plane in the future.
Is the Green movement a religion? That has been obviously true for a long time. Now go and emit no more.
Will the gated Internet communities decline and see a revival of blogs? I've mentioned more than once that my traffic declined a lot--by about 75%--after social media rose. I was tempted to go to Facebook and Twitter in response but in the end was too repulsed by their ability to stoke hatred. Maybe I'll see a revival after enduring the dip. Or maybe I'll get tired of this, weary from the downturn. But I doubt social media will decline. People seem to like it too much. Perhaps just different social media will rise. Tip to Instapundit.
As a rule, I'm against routinely taking away voting rights of ex-felons. I feel that if you served your time, you've served your time. If you are out of prison and off probation, the presumption should be that you paid your debt to society and should be allowed to rejoin society. But you must admit that Democrats sure see former criminals as a natural constituency.
Doh! I forgot to watch a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Halloween episode for Halloween! I wanted to establish that tradition but forgot. I already have a tradition of watching the Thanksgiving "Pangs" episode. And there is the Die Hard Christmas tradition. Yeah, Excitement Central at Casa TDR, I know.
Preparing to defend the NATO cities in the east.
I have long worried that under pressure from China, South Korea might trend neutral. So far that hasn't happened. Well let's discuss that option again, I guess. I'm less worried about South Korean neutrality as North Korean conventional military power has rotted away. If the threat is China, alliance with Japan and America provides more security than South Korean neutrality--if they could keep it.
Growing unity of purpose in the Indo-Pacific region.
China is blocking WHO from investigating the origins of the Xi Jinping Flu (a.k.a. Wuhan Flue, a.k.a. China Virus) pandemic. Given that people are speculating that China will exploit this pandemic to increase their power, how different is this effect from a deliberate attack? Perhaps the world should tell China that until proven otherwise the world is going to assume this was a biological warfare attack on the rest of the world.
Wait. What? The Ford-class carrier was not designed to handle the F-35C? How is that possible?
In my view the proper response to an enemy fait accompli conquest is to make sure our forward forces survive, reinforce, them, and then counterattack--not to expose or rush forces and ensure defeat by enemy overwhelming numbers in a futile effort to stop the conquest. That applies to the Chinese and Russians.
Worst. Racist. Ever. I guess only white male Democrats hear dog whistles:
On a bright side, Portland chose slow destruction over fast destruction. Baby steps, people. Tip to Instapundit.
Interesting chart on how closely divided American presidential elections in the popular vote have been. The horizontal line in the center is the 50% vote threshold:
Division at the national level is normal. What is not normal is the vast expansion of the reach of federal power which makes control of the federal government more important. If states had more powers as they used to have for non-national issues, the national elections wouldn't be so divisive.
Related to the popular voting tightness, one advantage of the Electoral
College is that it magnifies the presidential victory by allowing an
Electoral College landslide to reward broad appeal across the country
even without a massive vote advantage--which is rare. That does improve
the ability to govern. That aspect isn't discussed much.
Chief Nutball Rouhani says it doesn't matter to Iran who wins the American presidential election. In one sense he's right. Iran's mullahs hate America regardless of who runs American foreign policy. But Iran knows that they'll get a lot more American help to kill more Americans in the long run if Biden wins.
The Pentagon wants the joint force to be on the same page for defeating the growing drone threat. That's good, to be sure. But I worry that ground troops will be distracted from ground combat missions by the need to fight small drone swarms, as I argued in Army magazine.
Russia's war in Syria isn't over yet: "Russia is directing more of its airstrikes to ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) targets in eastern Syria. This is in support of Syrian forces and the few Russian troops out there confronting American and Turkish forces. This is all about how ISIL raids continue to threaten traffic on the main road that goes through the Badia Desert."
The only real use Venezuela would have for anti-ship missiles is if Maduro wants to go to war with the Netherlands to rally his base around him.
"The United States on Wednesday formally left the Paris Agreement, a global pact forged five years ago to avert the threat of catastrophic climate change." So close to being accurate! the pact pretends to avert a claimed threat. It is amusing. Real global warming fanatics hammered the Paris agreement as a toothless Toobining until Trump came out against it. Only then did it become vital. Tip to Instapundit.
The closeness of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania reflect my pre-election prediction of a narrow Biden win. And I wanted Trump. But I thought that the polls would be accurate enough in their direction even though I suspected they over-stated Biden support. And that will be a good call whichever way the election goes. Which should add to my credibility for calling things as I see them.
Canada is looking for a new general purpose Navy warship.
ISIL attacks in Diyala province are going up. Another reason America should remain in Iraq. Do we really want to see another surge by ISIL as we did from 2012 to 2014 prior to Iraq War 2.0?
Jihadi terrorism is down in Europe. But is jihadi sympathy down? Or is the decline in terror a result of intensive European intelligence and police work?
Executive summary: Events trump 90% of foreign policy plans. That's my executive summary of someone else's far more elegant essay.
Is Mars towing a fragment of our moon? Interesting. But I want to know where Theia went.
A bit of light on the Iran-Israel shadow war.
The sea-based anti-piracy effort off of Somalia has succeeded in pushing back the threat. But it is poised to return at a sign of weakness. That's the problem with not solving the problem by controlling the ports that the pirates use.
The Army is studying the proper size of the infantry squad, long held at 9 soldiers. I hope the Army studies how the infantry squads operate with fewer soldiers than a fully manned squad, too. How often will that ideal squad be fully manned?
If Putin rigged our election in 2016 when Obama was president in order to get Trump--who allegedly colluded with Putin--elected, why didn't Putin rig our election when Trump is president? As I said from the beginning the "Putin rigged our election" charge was nonsense. Yes, Russia interfered--as they've long done--but it was trivial in its effect. Well, the Democrats made sure the secondary effects of stoking division went far beyond what Putin actually did.
Let's remember another advantage of electing the president by state electoral votes rather than by popular vote. If the latter was in effect instead of having a handful of states where lawyers are contesting the results, we'd see all fifty states with lawyers contesting the results--because getting 100,000 more votes even in a state you lost heavily could be decisive when you add them up across 50 states (and the District of Columbia).
It's amazing. In 2008 some portion of Pennsylvania's Democratic primary voters were "bitter clingers" unable to vote for Obama over Hillary. In 2016, Hillary said half of Trump voters were deplorable. And now in 2020 all Trump voters are despicable and un-American. I'll say it again. It is a crime against language to think "liberal minded" is a synonym for "open minded." The modern left is not a tolerant species.
I read a partisan saying the election result is a humiliation for Trump. While it is true he seems to have lost, he gained total votes from 2016, increased his support from all major groups except white males over 2016, and seems to have helped Republicans increase seats in the House rather than lose more, retained the Senate that was expected to flip, increased the percentage of Republicans voting for him, and increased Republican advantages at the state level. And nobody can ever take away his role in depriving Hillary Clinton the Iron Throne or his achievements the last four years in rolling back leftist policies at home and abroad. Humiliation? I don't think so. What should be humiliating is the willingness of Democrats to vote for Ham Sandwich (D) for the Oval Office.
Russia faces economic contraction and pandemic suffering. Will Putin go on foreign adventures to distract Russians? But how many more foreign adventures can Russia handle?
Antifa riots continue in Portland.
Well here's a symbol of and reaction to the craziness of the Democrats since 2016:
Germany plans a greater "peace and security role" in the Indo-Pacific region? For God's sake, why? They'd do more for securing the Indo-Pacific if they had greater peace and security role in the Baltic Sea region, freeing up American power for Asia!
Yeah:
Of course, optimist that I am, I'm just grateful that a leftist thinks Islamist jihadis are bad people.
Democrats are claiming a Biden mandate to mobilize trunalimunumaprzure:
A helicopter drone joins the Navy.
I took 18 credits to learn Russian in college. Last week I updated my iPhone operating system and it gave me a speaking translation app that does it automatically.
Okay, I owe you a purely funny one after this week:
And I literally laughed out loud over this one:
Bravo, gentlemen!
European countries are seeing record Xi Jinping Flu cases. That will receive more attention in the media as Biden's swearing in gets close.
I'm starting to think Trump deserves to lose the election for convincing the Big Ten to start its football season. We're getting darn close to forty years of suffering in the desert before Michigan gets to the Promised Land.
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a senior administration advisor asked the Army why it was planning on building up more forces in the Gulf: "We have a brigade on the ground. Why can’t we go now?" I wish that was a joke. How can you be advising the president and think a single brigade could invade a country and take down its government? The article isn't really about that and is an interesting read on campaign planning and execution. But good Lord.
If Trump's recounts and challenges fail, it could be an interesting battle between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the Democratic Party under the slight influence of Biden's reign. Will this battle be fought within Biden's cabinet? Antifa and BLM will riot and burn cities to oppose Biden and Pelosi as readily as they rioted against Trump.
"Super spreader" events are now safe if you are celebrating Biden's win. So we've got that going for us. Which is nice.
France vows to cut down on illegal immigration to battle jihadi terror. Like I said, start now because it doesn't get easier later.
Some leftists--including neo-leftist Jennifer Rubin--want a "list" of people who supported Trump to make sure they never work again and to ostracize them from society. I say a list isn't enough! Trump supporters should be forced to wear little orange triangles on their clothing so proper liberals can avoid Trump supporters trying to "pass" as decent folks. What is wrong with these people? I know. This is just big talk from a-holes. But nobody on their side calls them out for being a-holes. Let me start the ball rolling. They're a-holes.
It is not far-fetched to think that Democratic cities in swing states committed fraud sufficient to swing the election. I'm not saying I have seen proof of it. But there are opportunities in those cities and a record of cheating. And there are things that look ... odd. Perhaps there are good explanations. I'd like to hear them. As for motive, Democrats have been saying for four years that Trump is Hitler. Are you telling me that Democrats in the Resistance wouldn't rig an election count to stop Hitler? This is worth looking into. Remember, it took 37 days to resolve the outcome of the 2000 election. Patience.
Oh please, don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. I assumed she was just aiming for a sweet gig on MSNBC all along.
Azerbaijan seems to be making some significant gains in the war with Armenia: "Azerbaijani forces have taken control of the strategically key city of
Shushi in Nagorno-Karabakh where fighting with Armenia has raged for
more than a month, the country’s president said Sunday." Will Russia intervene more directly to help its ally Armenia? Then what does Turkey, which is helping Azerbaijan, do next?
