Posts Tagged → america
The Warrior Ethos
The warrior ethos, also known as “purity of one’s weaponry,” has defined humanity since humans began. Stronger humans dominate weaker humans, and weaker animals, whether people like it or not. This has been the established rule among humans until very recent times.
Western civilization’s unbelievable material success has bred complacency among us, and an assumption that America is too big to fail. A sense that we can experiment widely with hating ourselves, hating the civilization that feeds and clothes us, hating others who are smarter, stronger, more hard working, more successful. A resulting freak show array of faux self-martyrdom aka virtue signaling now delineates the political Left from Americans simply trying to do a job, feed their family etc.
Today’s virtue signaling public is especially repugnant, because its practitioners pretend that they are giving up things they need. Despite dramatic statements, tattoos, bumper stickers, aligning themselves with drug dealers and child traffickers and violent felonious illegal border crossers, they do not actually give up anything but their credibility. Their virtue signaling is empty, and costs nothing. It is done to make them feel good about themselves, at whatever cost to everyone else.
One of the things targeted by leftist virtue signalers is the warrior ethos. An enormous fabricated cultural Marxism house of cards social construct was created to try to eliminate/ cancel/ punish those Americans with the warrior ethos, aka “toxic masculinity”, so that the weaker, whinier, dumber, less productive and less useful people could do the dominating for once.
Yes, weak, whiny, annoying humans also want to dominate, bully, control, get their way over others. But until recent years, they could not do so. DEI, affirmative action, and political correctness were the government coercion-enforced means of unnaturally, artificially, unwholesomely overturning a million years of warrior ethos. Deliberately promoting fat, weak, stupid people over lean, fit, intelligent people was the very emblem of virtue signaling success.
And yet, despite the decades-long government bureaucrat utopian assault on men and boys and human nature, the warrior ethos slumbered in the bosom of millions of Americans. It roared back to life in defiance a year ago, electing an American president devoted to the tried and true old ways of being a wholesome human on this planet.
Yes, our military is seeing an enormous resurgence of popularity, and with it are higher recruitment numbers. National pride is back in style, instead of the anti American public flagellation commonly promoted in the establishment media and rejected by most Americans. But….
….last week the same Americans who elected a warrior ethos president in 2024 went back to sleep, and they did not ride the wave or take the fight to the enemy. Despite losing cultural standard bearer Charlie Kirk just a couple months ago, these American voters apparently forgot, also under the evil spell that America is too big to fail. They did not bother to vote.
These words are written on the backs of American military veterans, whose 250 years of sacrifice make possible every opportunity and happy moment Americans enjoy. Instead of being dominated by Russia, or Iran, Americans still self-rule, and, strangely, self-flagellate. I am unsure if America is able to educate and vote its way out of the cultural impasse we are in right now.
Obviously, I want peace and peaceful resolution to the stark political and cultural differences that divide us. But I also increasingly wonder if the old men, even the ancient men of American militaries past will one day have to fight our own spoiled brat children in American streets for control of this nation. These aging and old men are really the last vestige, the last memory we have of the old Warrior Ethos that won America its freedom from Britain 250 years ago, and held onto it until our own domestic enemies became strong enough to tear it all down from the inside.
These old Veterans may yet save America, just on her own shores next time. Happy Veterans Day, I suppose.
US Army Corps of Engineers: America’s Black Hole in Need of Cosmic Level Fixing
Because it is a relatively small part of our big military and kept in a dusty back room far from the shiny B-2 bombers, the US Army Corps of Engineers has been off the radar of legislators and commanders-in-chief alike since George Washington ended his presidency.
But in the intervening 250 years since its founding, the USACE has gone from building bridges for troops and cannons, to aggressively stealing private property rights and forcing a Marxist environmentalist agenda on domestic citizens under the guise of “civil works.” Of all the federal agencies I have dealt with professionally and personally, including USEPA where I worked for seven years, the USACE has had the biggest mission creep in the worst directions of all. So, for USACE’s 250th birthday this year, can we please give Americans a gift of freedom, and see this most hidebound, insular, destructive, over-reaching, and unaccountable agency finally get the keelhaul overhaul that Americans deserve?
Not that I am rooting for Navy here, but our sacred Army has no business getting its good hands dirty with the USACE’s lawlessness. Big change must happen there, and with fresh new appointees from the Trump Administration, hope should be on the horizon. I hope these appointees are tough as nails, because they are facing a deeply entrenched bureaucracy as jealous of its ill-gotten power as any other federal agency has been, and they have the arrogant, dismissive staff culture to show for it.
USACE “manages” 12.5 million acres of formerly private land, much of it associated with water projects for hydropower, flood control, and public recreation. Sounds useful and wholesome enough: Waterskiing, fishing, hiking, families picnicking, with downstream communities protected from heavy rains up in the watersheds. Problem is, most of USACE’s flood control lakes are heavily silted in and barely functioning as advertised or designed. And probably 95% of this enormous land collection was obtained at gunpoint, through eminent domain against private American landowners, including the Seneca Nation, who still have a formal land treaty with the US government that was reached with George Washington himself, and which the USACE violated.
Absolutely nothing and no one is sacred to the USACE; not the US Constitution, not us citizens, not our property rights.
Anyone familiar with federal eminent domain knows it is rife with abuse and below-market values forced on private landowners for the most frivolous purposes. And while some federal agencies will attempt to reach willing-seller-willing-buyer agreements before going nuclear, the USACE just used legal sledgehammers against American landowners right from the get-go, because screwdrivers have never been in their toolbox.
But the situation is worse than just USACE’s rampant takings of privately owned lands that could have easily served the USACE’s goals while remaining in private ownership. Back in the 1950s-1970s good ol’ days of “Big Government Knows Best,” when the agency was most active, the USACE also stripped many of its condemned properties of their valuable subsurface oil, gas and or mineral rights, too, without paying for them. Not content with taking the surface rights for managing surface water, the agency simply took what it wanted and dared the beaten-down landowners to try to beat them in government courts. Today, millions of Americans are deprived of substantial and highly valuable subsurface private property rights at nearly every single USACE water resource project. These oil, gas, and mineral rights should be in their families’ private ownership, but are wasting away under USACE theft and neglect.
A group of military engineers and their civilian hangers-on have no business running public recreation facilities on American soil. The USACE’s job started as support of military combat troops in 1775, and it is incredible that we are having this discussion in 2025. The marrying of USACE hydroelectric dams and flood control facilities to public service recreation has not worked, because the agency’s staff developed a culture of untouchable bullies. The US military is not supposed to operate on American soil, for damned good reasons, but the USACE does so, with predictably bad results.
USACE is over-ripe for huge change. At the very least USACE needs the deep cleaning treatment of staff and structure that chief administrator Lee Zeldin is doing over at USEPA. USACE’s “civil works” must be spun off to actual civilian oversight and management in the agencies that have historically done this kind of public service and natural resource management. Nearly all of USACE’s physical assets should be moved to the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the US Forest Service, all of which have much better track records dealing with public service than the USACE. Which is saying a lot, because all of these federal agencies have had real rough patches in their public land management history and public service interface cultures, too.
Josh First wrote his 1991 master’s thesis on the USACE’s nationwide water resource projects, and, ironically, has randomly ended up owning substantial acreages adjoining two USACE water resource projects in Pennsylvania as an entrepreneur. He will write about his own related experiences with USACE in future essays.
This essay originally appeared at American Thinker.
Playin’ the Quatar in the quicksand
Past few weeks I have been overwhelmed with the fast pace of everything, including my work, and just let the last blog post stand as the latest word on things: America is badly divided, really like two different countries at this point. President Trump is about to declare the Insurrection Act in effect, something this blog advocated back in 2020. Lawless judges continue to try to play policy pro with legal cases that require a simple Yes or No ruling. It has been amazing to watch the “Blue” states and jurisdictions demand that the Feds stay out of their crime waves. They like their crime, and by God, they are gonna keep it…forgetting tha we Americans have a right to go anywhere in America without fear of being beaten to death.
Then again, the 1940s-1950s Democrat-run South was like this: Lawless, violent, in open revolt against the federal government’s effort to integrate public schools.
But President Trump stole the show with his effort to bring peace of some sort to Gaza and Israel. This looks like languidly playing a Quatar-guitar while also sinking into the Middle East quicksand. Because the people supposedly facilitating this momentary conclusion of hostilities with Trump are the very same people who have been stoking the same conflict for the past seventy years, including on our own American college campuses: Qatar.
For decades, Qatar has dumped billions of dollars into American college campuses to buy entire programs filled with far-Left Marxist pseudo professors who preach hatred of America, Christianity, Capitalism, Israel, and Western Civilization. Qatar is a tiny postage stamp of a country with more oil money than it can use at home, so it is very effectively using it to eat into America’s foundation with jihadism and faux journalism.
Maybe Trump is playing Qatar here, but it sure openly looks like Qatar is playing Trump, luring him in with unrealistic promises meant to further weaken America and Israel, bog down America in the Middle East quicksand, and stop the anti-jihad momentum that Israel and America have been successfully implementing the past six months.
For example, now American troops are supposedly going to be stationed in Gaza to enforce the ceasefire….a stupider idea cannot be invented, but here it is. Our own troops will be at the mercy of Hamas, and will serve as a block on Israel being able to get Hamas back in the genie bottle. Anything that happens to our troops will be blamed on Israel. A wedge will be further inserted between these two great natural allies, America and Israel, and the only people benefiting are the jihadis of Qatar, Hamas, Turkey, and Iran.
Maybe it will hold, and it will all work out great. I am no pessimist, but I am a realist. I admire President Trump’s willingness to take big chances for the right reasons, but I also worry that he tends to see everything in the world narrowly through his own lens of golf courses, resorts, and money-solves-all-problems. Including the flea-infested quicksands of the Middle East, which have historically eaten up and spit out the bones of many different great civilizations. Sometimes reality just has to be accepted, no matter how frustrating or painful: appeasement is not peace, and appeasing the jihadis only encourages them to do more damage.
America is not too big to fail in Gaza, and a lot is riding on the line. Good luck to America and Israel and to our entire Western Civilization.
A Tale of Two Men, Two Peoples
We have in the past couple weeks been able to observe the best and worst of human behavior in America. Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the outpouring of grief and love on the one side, and the mockery, cruelty and evil on the other, has stratified Americans like few other events.
Even the George Floyd response (before the resulting burning, looting, and murdering riots) had some basis in widespread earnest initial belief that Floyd had been unfairly killed by a policeman, which crossed all political and ideological boundaries.
Not the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Starting the day of his assassination until just a few days ago, I have spent a good deal of time with mainstream liberal Americans at different events, and I can tell you there is no sensitivity there, that I can detect. No sorrow, and no open animosity, either. Indifference mostly, as far as I can tell. Unless we scratch the surface…
Last week, at a mostly liberal soiree in a special place, a nice looking older woman approached me and chatted with me. Her name tag said she was from New Jersey, so I made some humorous quip about the unfavorable Pennsylvania view of New Jersey’s polluted environment and its erratic drivers.
“Oh no, I live in the center of the state, near Princeton,” the nice lady replied. “Though I have to admit I also live near HIS golf course, if you know what I mean. The TRUMP golf course.”
Her eyebrows arched up and down with implied meaning. Apparently rotten-to-the-core Princeton is just fine, but a pretty golf course has all sorts of problems for her.
Said I, using one of my standard golf-related quips, “I do not play golf, I hunt. Because there is not a golf course anywhere on this planet with sufficient liability insurance to allow me to pick up a club. I am safer to be around with a shotgun chasing after geese in the water hazards than swinging at a ball.”
She smiled wanly, un-used to meeting anyone at a posh soiree who does not at least pretend to like golf. When our pregnant quiet moment was at its ripest, I followed up with “Besides, I am a huge Trump fan. And I don’t think we should all be shooting at each other over these differences, because we are all Americans and can work out our differences with our words.”
What she said surprised the hell out of me: “No, we shouldn’t.” And then she was gone, a scowl on her attractive visage. As if anyone on the Trump side of things has been shooting anyone, anywhere. Or maybe she meant that we shouldn’t be using our words…?
There are two different peoples here right now, inhabiting our country. Each one orbiting two different men, Christian activist Charlie Kirk, on the one hand, and once-humorist pagan Hollywooder Jimmy Kimmel, now fired and late of late night TV, on the other hand.
While some Americans oppose Charlie Kirk’s policy preferences on intellectual grounds, I guess, a lot of them also seem to be seething with hatred or animosity about him and anyone associated with him. This is strange to me, because Charlie Kirk never hurt anyone. He was a gentle person, civil, generous, a listener, he asked questions. He did politics the right way: He talked. What on earth about him would make people filled with hate?
Yes, he had some strong opinions based on his Biblical values, the same values that founded America. And….guess what? His political opponents also have strong views, based on God only knows what, because I do not know. Does having strong opinions simply make a person a bad person? If so, then the hate should flow both ways. But it does not.
It appears that the ever-angry, lying, mis-informing, wildly partisan Jimmy Kimmel is fully representative of the political Left and the Democrat Party partisans right now. When faced with consequences for his poor behavior (mocking the assassination of Kirk and lying about who did it), Kimmel is defiant and petulant. People losing their TV and radio shows in the cancel culture war was fine for Kimmel when they had different opinions than he. However, when the shoe is on his foot, and his words fail in the marketplace, suddenly he is aggrieved, and foot stomping, and like a spoiled child demanding demanding demanding.
Never mind that Kimmel was in essence telling leftists that they could murder their political opponents for disagreeing, and that TV personalities would cover for them. Kimmel was violating the basic conditions on which his employer, ABC, had been granted an FCC public broadcast license decades ago. We can debate whether the FCC should even exist, but it does right now, and if one has a broadcast license from the FCC right now, then one must meet its “public benefit” requirement, or let go of it. Kimmel’s lies placed his employer’s FCC license at risk, and so his employer cut him loose and with him the liability.
When we compare and contrast Kirk vs Kimmel, we see two totally opposite men, and totally opposite ways of conducting one’s self in public and in private. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has brought out a lot of good people, and also a lot of troubled people. We now have a tale of two different men, and the two very different peoples surrounding them.
I hope you, dear reader, choose the gentle one. America needs this, not the hate.
Memes
War is hell
To best understand the world around us, we employ the science of math. And not just any math, but statistics and graphs. Using even just a little bit of good data, we can accurately plot on the basic X-Y graph the trajectory of a national economy, the sales of cars, or the increase in public violence. Well should we do the last first, because all the rest rely upon its resolution.
Today is 9-11, the September 11, 2001 modern day of infamy, when Muslim terrorists hijacked American planes and used them as guided missiles to destroy or damage important symbols of American success. Curiously, 20-some years later, America has more problems associated with more Muslim problem makers than we did in 2001. Almost as if we have failed to learn a lesson from that day, which we will call our first data point.
Yesterday, gentle, kind, civil Charlie Kirk was murdered while he engaged in peaceful dialogue about political issues of the day in America. His killer appears to be a “trans” person or “trans” ally, or maybe a foreign hitman. Whatever, the act is representative of a catch-all of ever increasing political violence committed by far-left allies of West-hating Muslims, including many who actually live here, as naturalized citizens, no less. So, with Charlie’s murder we have data point number two.
Now, let’s connect these two data points by drawing a line on the graph. We see a nice straight line going straight up, showing that as time has gone forward from 2001 to 2025, domestic acts of political violence against Americans and America have increased. A lot. Sure looks like we are headed toward a war, because with a climb that steep who knows what else it could indicate?
Bigger numbers!
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the Confederate South in his “total war” effort. He famously quipped that “War is hell,” and added a lot of other valuable words in various formats and times around that simple phrase, even as he remarked that mangling the bodies of a couple thousand fighting men in a morning was like dashing water against his face. Sherman didn’t balk and he did not back down.
America is back in hell, right now, as a civil war is engulfing us. Sucks to say it, but it is a fact. We did not start it, we have begged for it to stop, but it keeps being brought to us. Might as well be honest about it, say we don’t like it, but by God, the Union is gonna survive and prevail once again.
So, repeat after me… War is hell.
Now let’s win it, and be done with it.
Memes, memes, memes
Show us the Epstein files, dammit
Jeffrey Epstein is known to be a convicted pedophile, at least. He had a private plane and a private island in the Caribbean, where illegal and horrible things happened to young women. How he afforded his wealthy high flying child molesting lifestyle is a mystery. No one knows where he got all his money.
Somehow, mysteriously, high school drop-out Epstein got all wound up with all kinds of high flying socialites and politicians, the wealthy “elites” who run the biggest companies and American politics. Why these elite people kept company with a creepy child trafficker is a black hole that a lot of Americans want to see into.
We deserve to see into this black hole and all other official black holes, because we suspect there are a lot of ugly official secrets hiding in there. And in our constitutional republic, those ugly official secrets belong to us, We, The People. Knowing those secrets will help us steer our own ship of state, and not be subject to mysterious tides, hidden currents, and unexpected winds that push us off course.
When Epstein died mysteriously in prison with a wire ligature mark on his neck, impossible to make with his paper bed sheets, while his guards were mysteriously out of the room, and the security cameras focused on his cell were mysteriously off, every person with a brain asked “Why?”
It sure looked like Epstein was murdered by an inside job, to shut him up to keep him from talking about who and what he knew.
Candidate Round 1 and Round 2 Donald Trump promised to open up all of the Epstein files so that we could see what the hell this guy was all about. But last week President Trump curiously decided to just let the Epstein Black Hole spin off back into the far corners of the universe. No peeky, no knowy. Tehran Tucker Carlson the pro Iran traitor says this was done to “protect Israel.” Of course Shmucker Qatarlson says this, because he blames Jews and Israel for everything, because he hates Jews. We can dispense with Tucker, simply because he cries “Jew wolf!” all the damned time.
Other people are blaming FBI director Kash Patel and FBI DD Dan Bongino, two stalwarts we MAGA people trust absolutely, President Trump, as well as DOJ AG Pam Bondi, who really does have her fingerprints all over the decision to suddenly shut the curtains on the Epstein Show & Tell. And this is bad, because now we are into the personal credibility realm of our beloved Donald Trump.
A couple theories hover over Epstein & Co. like a bad stink that just won’t leave a grisly murder scene. One is that Epstein was a Mossad and – or CIA and – or MI6 agent who blackmailed his guests, or who collected blackmail type information (videos, photos) on powerful people, so they could be manipulated and bent to do certain things, or not do certain things, by people in the various intelligence services. I forget what the other theory is, but even if it was a good one, the first one above is pretty much all that anyone is talking about. It is all that matters, and until we actually get to see what Epstein was all about, this theory is going to ooze and fester, spreading gross pus all over innocents and guilty alike.
It is clear that President Trump’s base is not happy with the decision to re-hide the Epstein files, despite President Trump himself suddenly publicly asking everyone to just let it go already and move along. But no one is letting it go, because there are already too many official secrets and too many un-arrested elites, and MAGA wants justice, and President Trump, beloved by his supporters, now runs the risk of alienating the people who love him and trust him the most.
The possibility of President Trump actually losing the confidence of his wildly supportive base would be an even greater tragic outcome from the Epstein files than the Epstein files themselves are or could be.
Imagine wrecking your beautiful yacht America on the Epstein rocks that everyone is telling you to watch out for, because everyone can see them jutting up out of the water. You just tell everyone to have a nice day and keep sailing straight into the disaster zone.
For the good of the country, for the good of this rare presidency, for your own good, please President Trump, let us see the damned Epstein files. We ask you out of love for you and for our one and only America.

































































































































