VIDEO: America: always ready for war and golf (George Carlin)

It's been seven months and a day since President Trump signed an executive order changing the Defense Department's name to the Department of War as a "secondary title". Walt is not sure exactly what that means, but it does give some insight into the current administration's priorities... I guess.

The order — the 200th signed by POTUS since taking office — authorizes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and DOD subordinate officials to use secondary titles like "Department of War," "Secretary of War" and "Deputy Secretary of War" in public communications, official correspondence, ceremonial contexts and non-statutory documents within the executive branch. 

Additionally, the order directs all executive agencies and departments to "recognize and accommodate these secondary titles in internal and external communications," as well as instructing Secretary Hegseth to recommend actions — including executive and legislative actions — that would be required to permanently rename the department. 

"The name 'Department of War' conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve compared to 'Department of Defense,' which emphasizes only defensive capabilities," says the fact sheet issued by the White House last September 5th. "Restoring the name 'Department of War' will sharpen the focus of this department on our national interests and signal to adversaries America's readiness to wage war to secure its interests."

The usual suspects were quick to blame President Trump for suddenly making America warlike, as if this were not a pre-existing condition. That's George Carlin's point in the first minute or so of this video.

Well yeah, most of the video wasn't about America's unslakeable thirst for war. Most of it (as you'll find out by watching it if you haven't already done so) is about the crisis of homelessness, something else that the left blames on POTUS but which was growing exponentially as early as 1992, when this video was made.

I was struck, listening to this, by Mr Carlin's prescience. One of his recommendations was to change the name of the condition, because of the stigma attached to the word "homeless". The people sleeping in our streets (he says) are not "homeless". They don't have is not homes but houses! 

So the first thing to do (he says) is change the descriptor. And lo and behold, 33 years later, there are no homeless people. Listen to the lickspittle media. Those people defecating and otherwise befouling your neighbourhood parkette aren't "homeless". They are "unhoused"! Something should be done! Definitely!

UPDATED: VIDEO: Victor David Hanson on the demise of California

Two news stories related to the decline of America, particularly the Left Coast, and more particularly California, keep bubbling to the top of the tank from time to time.

Item: A number of counties in eastern Oregon and Washington states are thinking seriously about separating from the western parts of those states and joining Idaho. See "'Greater Idaho' movement to absorb rural counties from Oregon gains momentum" and "The Greatear Idaho Movement". (The second article includes insstructions on how to join!)   

Why do you suppose that is? [Suppose, hell! They know this. Ed.] That's right. They're tired of living in states where scabrous "homeless encampments" such as this Bidenville* are spreading across the landscape like great pus-filled cancer lesions, while the state governments -- misruled by Democrats -- stand [sit, shurely. Ed.] idly by.  

Item: Forbes Home reports in "10 States People Are Leaving" that, according to USPS change-of-address data, more people are fleeing than any other state. Not to be racist but let's call them "white flees". 

The Golden State [more like fool's gold. Ed.] saw a net loss of over 101,000 households despite a mostly pleasant climate and robust tech industry. Rising housing costs, rising taxes and politics seem to be driving many people to look for opportunities elsewhere. 

Other factors that emigrants have cited are the rising threat of wildfires and the constantly increasing cost of living. Forbes, being politically correct, passes over the fact that California's cities have become not just livable, but downright dangerous, thanks to the proliferation of Bidenvilles, like this one on Oakland's Wood Street. 

In this video, Victor Davis Hanson, an American classicist, historian, farmer, and political commentator, details the deliberate process by which the standard of living for Californians has deteriorated over the past decades, and points the bony finger of indignation toward those responsible.

 

* In America, in the Dirty Thirties, collections of shacks and shanties like today's "homeless encampments" were known as "Hoovervilles", after then President Hoover. Nowadays, in France and North Africa, they are called "bidonvilles". 

Wikipedia: Un bidonville est la partie défavorisée d'une ville caractérisée par des logements très insalubres et construits par les habitants avec des matériaux de récupération, une grande pauvreté et sans aucun droit ou sécurité foncière. 

In short (and in English) a shanty town built of oil drums or other metal containers, especially on the outskirts of a city, with great poverty and without right or basic security. In Europe and Africa, bidonville. The Electric Company's Letterman changes just one letter to get Bidenvilles, which is what they're called in Brandon's America.

Further reading (added 21/8/23): "Actually, Joe, all your 'objectives' were failures", by Victor Davis Hanson, on the American Greatness site. 

Victor Davis Hanson on the sad state of America's cities... and society

 Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, and political commentator. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets. His clear thinking has been reposted on WWW; plug his name into the search window to find earlier posts. 

Yesterday, Mr Hanson's latest thoughts on the decline and fall of the Disunited States of America were published on the American Greatness website under the headline "America’s Decline?". Subhead: The remedies are agreed upon, but the needed medicine is feared more than the disease. Because today, the government is the cause of our many crises. Here's the first part of his commentary.

Now with the election of Joe Biden, what had been a fast-tracked decline has accelerated at such an astonishing rate we can scarcely recognize our country.

Our largest cities are becoming uninhabitable—dilapidated, dangerous, and dysfunctional. The challenge is not just rampant crime, but the realization that if you, the citizen, are stabbed, shot, or beaten up on the street, the perpetrators may well be exempt from most punishments. And the victim either will be forgotten in his misery or, indeed, blamed for bringing such violence upon himself.

Urban schools are not places of instruction anymore. That fact is accepted by teachers’ unions, whose operative principle seems to be that the more hopeless the idea of educating urban youth is understood to be, the less burdensome the workload, and the greater their hazardous duty pay.

Urban chain stores are closing down on the principle that if police cannot or will not stop consumer violence and theft, then consumers there should not have any store to buy anything, anyway. If there is no store, how can it be looted or shop-lifted? [That's called "reparations shopping"! Ed.]

The only mystery remaining is how long these Democrat-controlled, racially charged, and corrupt municipalities can sustain their budgets and pension commitments with increasingly declining revenue. One can tax the well off, and perhaps even gouge them as California does. But one cannot insult and ridicule them in the process. Being highly taxed is one thing, being highly taxed while hated is quite another.

How eerie that medievalism—defecting, urinating, fornicating, injecting in the street—is relabeled “homelessness—as if the problem is merely a shortage of apartments or tent cities. Somehow cities developed the notion that it was crueler to be told not to pull down one’s pants and defecate in the street than it was for a pedestrian to step into infectious human excrement.

In the next five years, either cities will seek new governance to reduce taxes, break up municipal unions, mandate charter schools, restore police funding and manpower, recalibrate pensions, and prosecute criminals and corrupt officials—or Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and a score of others will become Detroit. [And let's not forget Chicago! Ed.]

One of the strangest phenomena amid our current debility are the millions of affluent leftists and liberals who have fled their unworkable, now unlivable blue-run, but naturally beautiful cities like San Francisco or Portland. They seem to lack an abstract recognition why they are leaving, or why and how their new chosen destinations are so different and therefore so inviting to them. Is their motto, “I am fleeing what I created, but I still hate those who created what I want”?

Mr Hanson is not one to post a jeremiad without suggesting some solutions, and he does so in the latter part of this article. Click here to read the whole thing. But will Mr Hanson's sensible solutions be enacted? Walt says there are two chances... slim and none!

10 radical new rules that are changing America

Note from Ed.: We rarely repost entire columns from other sources, but this one, by Victor Davis Hanson, is so cogent, so urgent, that it deserves to be read in full. This appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, 3/4/21. 

There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently. 

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. 

As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution. 

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law. 

Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim's fault as the perpetrator's. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer. 

3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of "good" racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist. 

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America's founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social distancing, stay out of school and obey all the laws. 

Yet those entering the United States illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants more closely resemble the "founders" than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable. 

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. "Noble lies" by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect "Neanderthals" from themselves. 

Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing and normative rules of school behavior. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating and air conditioning. 

6) Hypocrisy is passe. Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate change activists fly on private jets. Social justice warriors live in gated communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism and homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. It is what you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live, that matters. 

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it. It is more humane to let thousands of homeless people live, eat, defecate and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill and create sufficient public shelter areas. 

8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence. Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act or look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke. 

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project requires any evidence or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs. Undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees reflect credentials, not knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters.

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter are the new gospels. 

 Americans privately fear these rules while publicly appearing to accept them. They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized. The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned or warps into something never imagined by those who created it.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, and The Case for Trump. You can contact him by email at authorvdh@gmail.com. Tell him Walt sent ya!