Posts Tagged → america
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.
Traitor Tehran Tucker Carlson Gleefully Leaps Off Cliff
Tucker Carlson has been a fixture on the political middle and right for about six or seven years. For years he slowly built a real following while he was at FOX News, where he did journalism stuff. He earned his following because he asked good questions, he dug into people’s political backgrounds and background information on political and cultural issues of the day. He challenged all kinds of political blind spots and taboos and unhealthy “bipartisan” spaces where taxpayers and American citizens always seem to lose and corrupt political careerists always seem to make out incredibly well.
After Tucker Carlson left FOX, he seemed emboldened to break even more artificial constraints, to ask even tougher questions, and to promote more individual freedom in the face of an increasingly constitutionally questionable government apparatus. He was the quintessential “independent investigative journalist” that Americans want so badly.
Without question, the Biden Administration was his foil in his new independent role, and also probably his brightest time. With so much brazen Biden family corruption, protected and enforced by a brazenly weaponized federal bureaucracy, and so much more related stuff to chase down, Tucker Carlson found himself ever more squaring off against the entire estabalishment media enterprise. This “mainstream media” conglomerate made then and very openly today makes no bones about being completely aligned and in bed with just one political party.
So this was the boxing ring in which Tucker Carlson found himself. He then got a ton of money from Iranian businessman Omeed Malik, and if the Foreign Agent Registration Act documents dug up by ace investigative reporter Laura Loomer are true, Tucker also got substantial money from Qatar. And then he bought himself a classic hunting and fishing ranch in Montana, and started interviewing people in his flyfishing man cave.
Bit by bit, aspects of Tucker Carlson’s raging hatred began to seep through, then shine through, and then eventually poured out in these interviews. Probably due to open pressure to at least try to appear not to hate all Jews, Tucker hosted an interesting guy named Bret Weinstein. And throughout the entire interview, Tucker’s hostile face set barely changed an iota. Despite receiving fascinating new information from Weinstein that corroborated a great deal of conclusions that Tucker had come to on certain political issues, he never smiled or showed any warmth toward his guest.
Check out the photo below that I screenshotted from that otherwise excellent interview.
Contrast Tucker’s demeanor towards fellow Israel hater Rep. Thomas Massie, where they are all chummy, laughing, easy going during that interview. Which is also a fascinating interview, and were Massie not a hater of Israel and Jews, and not such a theoretician and purist, I could then see why his presence in Congress was so useful.
Anyhow, Tucker started racking up interviews with professional Jew haters, for whom publicly breaking this Western taboo is a source of professional income. People like US Lt. Col. Douglas Macgregor, and history-dabbler Darryl Cooper, neither of whom have anyting positive to say about Jews or Israel, and who make a living saying nonsense about them. Not even the Nobel prize winners, the leaders in economic, medical, or technological areas. Nothing good to say, period, which indicates they have a problem.
In his many hours interviewing them, and others like an Arab Christian in Israel, Tucker never challenges them. He does not ask them to more fully explain their questionable ideas. Rather, Tucker just lets them say whatever they want about Jews, the European Holocaust, and Israel, and then after encouraging them, agreeing with them, he moves on to the next thing.
And then Tucker himself became an open antagonist towards Jews and Israel. He recently sat interview-style across from US Senator Ted Cruz with cameras running, and instead of an interview, Tucker went on the attack, including the bizarre assertion that the Jews of today are unrelated to the Jews of the Bible and ancient Israel.
As an aside, if today’s Jews are not descended from the ancient Jews, then why does their DNA show them to be from the Near East, despite at least a thousand years living in white Europe? Why are they the only people on Earth who speak Hebrew, study Scripture in Hebrew and Aramaic, and practice Judaism? If not them, then who and where the heck are the Jews? Tucker does not bother to answer this simple question, as casting doubt on Jews is his only goal.
The final straw for a lot of former Tucker Carlson admirers like me just happened, days ago. If you thought the man had an atom of Christian belief, human decency, American loyalty, or even just some integrity inside of him, Tucker Carlson has aggressively, even wantonly, dispelled that notion. Tucker conducted a ridiculous, puffball questions, friendly “interview” with one of the most evil, violent, cruelly despotic autocrats on Earth today.
Yes, from his Montana man cave, Tucker Carlson interviewed the hand puppet “president” of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, who reports directly to Ayatollah Khameini, the “Supreme Leader” of Iran, on July 4th, American Independence Day. In his time with Pezeshkian, a true monster, Tucker has no interest in asking real questions, like can we go inside Evin Prison and interview some of the women your forces are raping and torturing right now. Nor did Tucker go to Iran and do a “man on the street” tour, where the journalist just asks random citizens their opinions on things. Of course, Iran is oppressive and is run like North Korea, where one small mis-step costs you your family, your home, your wife, your life, so even if Tucker would insist, he would encounter stone faces.
Instead, Tucker Carlson willingly, and occasionally with outbursts of that weird fake glee he has, served as an airbrushed mouthpiece for the mullahs who rule Iran with a brutal and unjust fist, and who threaten the world with their genocidal, homicidal death cult. Tucker makes excuses for them, he aided and abetted them, he gave aid and comfort to them, he put lipstock on their pig faces, he made common cause with them.
One utterly contemptible example: “Has Iran tried to assassinate President Trump?” To which Pezeshkian answers that this is an Israeli lie meant to rope America into forever wars. And Tucker Carlson simply nods in agreement and moves on! No second question, no aw c’mon ya can’t blame everything on Israel.
Apparently Tucker Carlson really meant it when he wrote in 2020 that he never liked Trump anyhow. Yeah, no kidding. You won’t even challenge this bold faced lie by your Iranian buddy.
They, the Iran of “Death to America!” since their 1979 revolution. They of at least a thousand Americans killed through Iranian terrorism in Lebanon, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, elsewhere. They of known attempted assassinations against President Trump and election hacking in 2020, documented by the FBI.
There is speculation that Tucker Carlson must have been paid a lot of Iranian money to do this, and that seems reasonable. Whether Tucker just sold out America for the symbolic thirty silver Shekels, or whether he was paid directly into a Swiss bank account, or whether he gets some syndication rights income from this, any way we cut this last horrendous act, “Tehran Tucker” Carlson is a traitor to America.

Bret Weinstein maintained his composure despite Carlson’s open hostility on a subject Carlson would normally be animated about

His face hardly changed from this unfriendly grimace the entire interview. Tucker just does not like Jews, not even Dr. Bret Weinstein, a conservative and risk-taking researcher willing to help Carlson

How much money was Carlson paid to be the airbrusher mouthpiece foreign agent for the evil Iranian empire that seeks to nuke America? What a traitor