Tucker Carlson released his third video on twitter. His focus is on the deep state's obsession with getting rid of Donald Trump. Tucker believes that the strongest reason they want to do so is to protect their rice bowl – foreign aid and military spending. Tucker says that all of official Washington, Democrats and Republicans, are behind getting this embarrassing character out of the way.
I played my role in a pointless war, Vietnam. I worked for several defense contractors: IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the Mitre Corporation. I had several others as clients when I was in business as a computer consultant.
I agree with him that official Washington has a penchant for getting into wars. So many paychecks depend on defending the country and on prosecuting the wars themselves. I have written about my experiences on my website. The most egregious was during my brief stint with Booz, Allen supporting their contract to build a navy for Saudi Arabia. I was brusquely pushed aside when I would not compromise myself to rip the Saudis off.
I agree that our Middle Eastern wars have been ill-advised. Vietnam was ill-advised. Not that any of our adversaries were model democracies. They were not great places for people to live. The question was whether it was any of our business. Lots of places have nasty, oppressive governments. However, it is generally wise to follow the advice of George Washington and avoid foreign entanglements. Russia, I argue, is a different story, uniquely so.
Russia has been an expansionist nation throughout its history. It has attacked and engulfed neighbors on all sides. It brought them no benefits, only suffering. Russia is rightly feared by every one of its neighbors except China, where the fears are in equal balance.
The United States has been historically wary of Russia. John Hay wrote despairingly of their diplomacy during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. We were apprehensive of the Bolsheviks during the 20s and 30s. That enmity took a pause as we joined forces against the Axis, but resumed shortly thereafter when the Iron Curtain fell, and Soviet expansionism engulfed the countries of central and eastern Europe.
There was another hiatus during the 90s, when an exhausted Russia, shorn of the former Soviet Socialist Republics, was quiescent as oligarchs, home-grown and American, plundered the country. With Putin's rise to power, it resumed its aggression in Chechnya, Transnistria, Georgia, Ukraine and now Ukraine again.
Russia has been constantly aggressive over the past several centuries. It threatens, and has always threatened, the free, democratic countries that neighbor it. No country has ever sought to join the Russian empire, and no nation has ever benefited from having been forcibly included in it. Moreover, Russia never stops. It continually attempts to compromise and absorb whatever countries border its empire. After World War II it supported communist parties throughout Europe, attempting to subvert their democracies. While it is not now a direct threat to the United States, it is such a threat to countries such as Poland with whom the Unites States has much in common and longstanding goodwill.
Tucker expresses a good general rule. United States involvement in foreign wars, continually pushed by the perennial war interests in Washington, has not been justified, beneficial or moral. He needs to recognize that Russia is the exception to that rule. He needs to recognize, moreover, that the people of Ukraine are genuinely European and share European values with its neighbors to the west. Ukraine is also an exception. It deserves our support.
Zooming in, here's a military affairs blogger with better credentials than mine, Anders Puck Nielson, coming to the same conclusion I did about the Nova Kakhovka dam.
You may remember Darkhorse, Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, who introduced us to Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch three years ago when Covid was new. Bret and Heather have maintained their broad focus, simply continuing to do what they do. They have peremptorily moved to Rumble to get out from under the sword of Damocles that hangs over any truth-teller on YouTube.
They circle back to Covid periodically. I happened to watch this one yesterday in which they discuss a brave soul named Rav Arora writing about the editor of a magazine that takes a very pro-VAX stance having experienced a severe adverse reaction. He can't talk about it because he would lose his job. That's how the powers that be maintain the illusion of consensus. If nobody out there seems to be saying otherwise, there must be consensus.
In the subsequent segment they talked up a 1977 book entitled Where There Is No Doctor, a handbook for people in Third World countries where doctors are simply not available.
They said that the book included a lot of common sense. Common sense is a useful thing to have in countries such as Ukraine. I bought the Kindle version of the book from Amazon. I was amazed at what I got – a few hundred pages of common sense, and then detailed information on all sorts of medications driving the page count up to 1500. I got my money's worth.
In the subsequent, 177th edition of their podcast they talked about their disappointment with the 2022 addition of Where There Is No Doctor. Most of the common sense remains, but in the very first part of the book there is this unsettling piece on how to deal with Covid. The number of childhood vaccine injections they recommend more than doubled. The publisher, Hesperian, has been totally compromised by the vaccine pushers.
I had not seen that in my copy of the book. It turns out that the Kindle version is the 2011 edition. Still pretty much the common sense of the 1977 book. However, if you go to the publisher's website you can download the new version of the book for free. At least chapter by chapter – it sounded as if you could get the whole thing at once, but I didn't figure out how.
Bret and Heather express their disgust at a world so corrupt that a useful volume like this could be compromised in favor of big Pharma. I wonder if this will be the cut that sends the sword of Damocles crashing down on their heads with regard to their YouTube channel, forcing them to exist only on rumble.
I'm allowing things like this to take me away from my two background tasks, a book review of Male-Female - The Evolution of Human Sex Differences and a long-promised video on how we evolved ourselves into this current mess. No eager humanity is pressuring me to finish either of them, and I think that obscurity serves me fairly well. I will let Bret and Heather fight the dragons of this day as I quietly prepare my children to carry humanity's torch in a decade or two when they come of age.
We got an email from Sasha and Victor, whom we visited a month ago in Uzhgorod, letting us know that the Russanovsky Lycée was going to be screening candidates for their seventh grade. This was odd news indeed. I had been there in person four weeks ago to ask, and the lady in the admissions office told me there would be no seventh grade. She didn't even take my contact information.
Oh, well, we're going through with it. Although I think we have been making great progress, Eddie would really like to study in a school with classmates and make some new friendships. I will let you know how it turns out.
Those are the musings from Lake WeBeGone, where the summer weather is stuck stubbornly in the high 60s. All the kids are busy studying, and we are getting ready to host a barbecue on Saturday.
At some point, the Congress must deal with the Google ad monopoly. The capture of nearly all on-line ads by one company with one point of view ought not to exist. Obviously bandwidth isn't free but we need a way to bring competition back.
I still find https://helendale.substack.com/p/feminisation-has-consequences-iii of interest. That along with https://unherd.com/thepost/why-feminists-should-fear-a-declining-birth-rate/ suggest it's still a topic of importance.
I of course notice the advertising, but had not delved into the mechanics. Thanks.