Democracy Dies in Wokeness.
Who am I?
I'm a former nonpartisan research analyst who worked for politicians from both major political parties. There are good and bad in both parties. Because they're people and not gods or devils. I taught American history in a community college briefly. And I was in the Army National Guard. I have two great children who are adults now. I'm divorced. I'm retired. And I'm a freelance writer all too infrequently. My motivation ebbs and flows over time for that.
On the 22nd anniversary of writing The Dignified Rant, I opened a Substack account for The Dignified Rant: Evolved. I'll see how that goes.
I'm mostly conservative with a healthy libertarian streak that makes my conservatism totally unlike continental European conservatism. Really, I'm classical liberal. This is the result of my Political Compass test, if it is important to know:
Which can put me at odds with other forms of conservatives. And as the other side of the aisle has abandoned civil liberties and blue collar people for woke conformity, I find the things I admired about them fading. I think Progressives are really continental conservatism with better marketing.
I won't claim to be open-minded. I can totally judge people. I'm tolerant, however, of those who march to their own drummer. It's a free country. But I refuse to celebrate your path in life. Nor do I ask you to celebrate mine. I certainly expect tolerance despite however you judge me. Basically, I don't care how you judge me. And you probably shouldn't care how I judge you.
The TDR Categories
My main category on this online journal/blog is no category for the basic national security and defense posts.
I have separate tags for Global Warming, Home Front (mostly about my kids), Landfill for miscellaneous topics, Humor for what I intend to be humorous, and List of Annoying Things for things that annoy me. Those five are mostly dormant but migrated to Weekend Data Dump and And Now For Something Completely Different, reserved for memes I authored. I got tired of the pressure to meme so dropped the latter post category. What I really miss is making the song lyrics-based openings to each of the meme posts. Ah, First World problems. So sad, I know. And I vowed to stay in my lane in the former so that is almost entirely national security now. Home Front is now almost dormant as my children got older and I feared embarrassing them with posts!
Weekend Data Dump was an effort to combat my desire to comment
briefly on lots of things. I add things over the week that I want to
mention but don't want to devote a full post to addressing. So it may
seem rather stale in some cases much like a weekly news magazine is now.
It is more than a links list although it can include just that. And
sometimes I promote a paragraph and expand it to a post during
the week. I might actually be commenting on more things despite my
effort to keep my average posts per day down. It was getting ridiculous,
especially in a post-blog age of social media. But that's what the
category is.
There is a Basic Training category that collects my thoughts from a daily journal I kept in Army basic training. I also added the Die With Festering boils Die tag for things that redline my annoyance meter and a Winter War of 2022 tag for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I have a fleeting Banned by Google tag.
As of 2024, I only really use Winter War of 2022 and Weekend Data Dump routinely, with most posts untagged.
Research and Writing
Please keep in mind that these posts are basically all rough drafts. I don't get paid enough to review and edit like they are formal article submissions. And sometimes I do digress (because I can!).
I've meant to do this for a while. But let me describe the "krill flow" of news that I use for blogging. Sometimes people wonder where I get stuff as if it is from dark site that requires passwords and special access. It's all open source.
My basic sources are Yahoo News for the wire service reports (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP, and others). The removal of the regional categories of news really sucks. I used to roll through the regions in order of interest to see top stories. I miss the days not so long ago really when Europe stories centered on soccer and cheese regulations rather than terror attacks and Russian threats.
I like aggregator sources like Instapundit and the Real Clear sites for defense, world affairs, and politics. They spread a broader net that identifies topics of interest, and link to articles from the Washington Post, New York Times (funny enough, until they stopped doing it, I was in the set of blogs the Times would link to in relation to their stories), LA Times and other newspapers here and abroad that I then use, as well as material from think tanks. I also like PJ Media. And Jim Treacher.
Strategypage is a must read. Subscribing would be a help. Although I confess it recently lost some of its quality. I fear I know why.
Really, the wire services are my prime source.
Related are email-based notices like my Defense Industry Daily newsletters, Defense News Early Bird Brief, USNI News, Geopolitical Futures, and OSAC (the Overseas Security Advisory Council of the Department of State) newsletters (which rely on wire reports, too, but focus on security related news).
Global Security is a minor source via email because of its formatting.
I'm on the Department of Defense email list as well, so I get notices of some news and news conferences.
During a crisis I turn more to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty site and Radio Free Asia.
Obviously, for news breaking at that moment I go to YouTube for streaming news.
In August 2020 I canceled my YouTube TV. I resented their latest price increase. But I had little incentive to just pay or even replace it because the news has become completely insane with TDS in the run up to the election. And sports became too woke and friendly to Marxist agitators, and refused to just be sports. So went on a break from that nonsense, signing up only for football season after a couple years staying away. Go Blue and how about those Lions? I don't really miss broadcast TV.
I also have military journals and related publications both online and in paper versions.
So that's my basic open source intelligence network. On the whole, the basic news sources tilt left because of the
heavy emphasis on the wire services. But they have the advantage of
fewer opportunities for blatant slanting because of lack of word count. I
exclude the military-related sources in that judgment, although you
could fairly say they slant right just from their subject matter. But don't talk to me about the flag officers.
Trust But Verify
I try to keep in mind when I read sources the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, as coined by Michael Crichton:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
And note that Crichton made up the name to make it sound more authoritative--as he clearly admitted.
I try to read through the opinions in the areas I know from my education, reading, and experience, and focus on what they are saying and not on what they say it means.
While I am not immune to the G-MA effect, I do retain a healthy skepticism of what is said in non-defense and non-foreign affairs in the media and do not treat it as if it is inscribed in stone (see global warming, for example; or repeated descriptions of "far right" parties in Europe when the same media calls Republicans "Nazis").
In many ways, the recent abandonment of any pretense of being objective
by the nearly uniformly left-leaning media makes that filtering task
easier. Good Lord, they are awful now. One is safer assuming any news is
BS until proven otherwise. As I've often stated on TDR, you think you hate and distrust the media enough. You absolutely do not.
I Have Never Allowed Comments
You may wonder why I have an email posted but no comments. I've addressed this before so let me reproduce one post on this subject:
Whenever I am mildly tempted to enable comments, I always fire up the Yahoo! news site. That always cures me.
I rely on the Yahoo! site for the bulk of the krill flow of news that I
feed on. But reading the comments reminds me that there are a lot of
really stupid, hateful, and paranoid people out there. And I have no
desire to provide one more bit of real estate for them to spout on.
Relying on email for feedback has resulted in much higher quality comments.
Anyway, if you've wondered why I don't have comments, that's one big part of my reasoning.
The second is that I don't want the time suck of patrolling the comments
to respond to comments, delete for idiocy or hate, or watch for spam.
And third, I don't want to be trapped by commenters. Sure, I see lots of
idiot commenters on other sites, but that isn't the real danger of
comments. The real danger is from people who like what you write. I
think it is too easy to be seduced by positive commenters into
tailoring posts to appeal to commenters. I try to offer accurate
thoughts on events based on what I think, and I think that could be
endangered with comments.
So there you go. If you're curious.
And the comment issue has gotten worse, with paid human and computer trolls out there pushing the goals of others, including hostile states and groups. So no comments here. Ever.
Additional Stuff
As of the last quarter of 2021 I planned to try and focus more on non-blog writing for publication. Back in 2015 and 2016 I renewed my interest in writing and had a string of published articles. I want to do that again. And do different things.
While the defeat in Afghanistan was depressing, that isn't why I'm slowing down in my blog posts. I regrouped and continued the mission. But with family responsibilities falling away for good and bad reasons at the same time we needlessly lost a winnable war, I have more time on my hands.
I got over my funk over losing the Afghanistan War and the unrelenting vindictive craziness of the left that has infected the Democratic Party. I have scaled back with just one post per day, each illustrated with something, usually a meme. I have added computer-generated illustrations for some of the memes. Of course, one result is that I often post two or more weeks ahead. I used to only do that before going on vacation. Now it is SOP.
But at least I have a record of my thoughts on the war on Islamist terror era. That was a major part of why I started blogging in 2002 in the face of what I thought was media idiocy on war and military matters. The media never got better. I might as well have pissed in the ocean and expected the seas to noticeably rise. And when I consider that if Blogger ends its existence a lot of my work will simply disappear, that kind of depresses me. What good was it, in the end?
On the other hand, blogging forces me to keep up on events and pushes me to evaluate and synthesize news to organize it and draw conclusions. Without blogging, it would be easy to just say "That's interesting" and move on. In some ways TDR is an incubator for writing ideas. So this has value to me independent of anything else.
With a blog this old, link rot is unfortunately common. Including a number of my own links that went to the old Geocities site or the Yahoo!Geocities site before they died. Indeed, for a while a couple of places saved the old sites and I linked to them. Then they died. Just hover over the link to find what month and year that link covers and go directly to the archives sidebar on the site and look for it there. Those are all in Blogger. Don't trust those dead Geocities links, whether original or yahoo. And especially don't trust the sites that recovered the old Yahoo!Geocities sites for a while. They've been infiltrated by unsavory sorts that you do not want to click on. It is way too much work to go back and delete those links. Be warned. Do not click on them. I did once in 2023 hoping against hope something I'd written was somehow saved. It initially looked good and then things went sideways. I immediately did a thorough scanning of my computer. I didn't find anything. But it was not normal. I won't make that mistake again. Don't you make it once.
What especially frustrates me are links to publications of mine that were good when I used them but then changed. If you find a link to an article of mine is dead--or an older post that says the article is not online--go to my published works page where I hopefully have the best links to them. Or at least you will have citations to find them on your own through a library an online search.
One thing you don't have to worry about is TDR becoming AI-generated. You can trust that TDR will remain meat sack-authored.
Anyway, thanks for reading. After a long decline in once fairly healthy readership after Twitter hit the scene, traffic began a significant recovery in 2021. I have no idea why. But in 2023 that bump seems to have ended--but not fallen back to pre-2021 levels. I don't know why that is happening, either. But it seems to coincide with my banning issue by Google. Perhaps some of that episode lingers on. Maybe from Google squelching access or casual users going away and not coming back. I just don't know. Such is life. Still, posting on Substack on TDR:E has added volume without visibly cannibalizing from TDR. It's nice to have an escape hatch if Blogger dies. I'd have to save my archives if I fully switched, of course.
Oh, and while I try to add this when I think about it when there is a story involving them, I do have a small amount of Lockheed Martin stock. Not nearly enough to affect my comments on a story involving them, but consider this my mention if I forget in a post.
--Brian J. Dunn, Ann Arbor, Michigan
