You won't like this opinion -- I guarantee it.

Nonetheless its true.

Why did the King, in days of old, get out in front of his troops on his horse, with his superior barding and the best of swords? Why didn't he go hide in his castle while his army prosecuted the war?

He didn't do that out of valor.

He did it because he knew that if his army lost the other side would come to his rather-obvious place (its not like you can hide a castle!), kill him and every other person in his family line except perhaps the women and girls who would be raped and forced to bear the children of those who vanquished him.

He thus had every reason to do everything he could to prevent that, and if he was going to lose he might as well lose big right up front because the outcome for everyone else was not in doubt.

This also meant he didn't go to war in the first place unless he really had to because while you might have numerical and tactical superiority things go wrong in a war as soon as the first shot, sword or arrow is loosed.  Your intelligence gathering can be wrong, you can be flanked, the other side may have allies you don't know about or just plain old-fashioned bad luck, such as weather, can screw you and there's nothing you can do about any of that.

You want less war?

Then advocate for and accept that everyone on either side, especially any politician but also including all civilians are always and everywhere legitimate targets of the other side.  Fuck the laws of war and fuck anyone who says otherwise.

There has never been a war where civilians are not absolutely responsible for the waging of said war.  Even in times of old the horse had to be fed as did the soldier, the armor, arrows and swords had to be made, the ore or trees had to be dug, harvested, forged and worked, the tents and mess kit had to be created, maintained and tended and so on.

Every bullet, missile, bomb, tank, airplane, drone, communications device and similar in a modern military action was created and assembled by civilians either in whole or part.  Exactly zero tanks, planes or ships move a single millimeter without fuel, lubricants and parts and all of that is created by civilian infrastructure.

Every single one of those firms in the modern world is funded and operates as a result of the capital markets so each and every banker, every single institution of such and similar are all personally liable and responsible for each and every single act of war in every single case.

Every single person on both sides and any entity or nation that supplies them, every institution and especially every politician and all of their family members and property are all legitimate military targets when a conflict is underway in each and every case.

Would Biden and Congress commit funds and equipment to Ukraine if it was clearly understood that the Russians would consider every one of them, and their children and spouses along with their property to be legitimate military targets and if spies or other infiltrators could get into the United States they would be targeted and destroyed?

Would we have had an open border with Mexico for the last three years if this was the consequence of our involvement?

Would any of this have happened in the first place if back in 2014 McCain's entire family was slaughtered like pigs and all their homes and property burnt to ash for his advocacy ON THE GROUND at Maidan by members of the losing side who infiltrated (or worse, were already present) in the United States?

Is there anything wrong with Russia finding a way to get people into the United States and burning Zelenskyy's property here in the US?  No.  He is the chief belligerent in that conflict just like Putin is so yes, if the other side can do the same thing to Putin, well, that's the price of war.

You want less war then you want much more of this.

Today not one single member of the House, not one single member of the Executive, not one single executive in the Defense Industry or banking system fears being tied up, forced to watch their spouse and children be raped and/or murdered and then executed themselves with all their property burnt to ash.

Yet that was the penalty in days of old when you lost -- and often before you lost, if things went poorly and they could get to you.

The acts and decisions of old weren't really about "noble choices"; that is a convenient fantasy run in tales of old.

Knights and Kings of old in fact did what they did simply because they understood the risk and thus only if it was worth it did you undertake the action of going to war in the first place.  Sometimes you had to -- you judged that indeed it was worth it -- and thus you did so, damn the consequences.

War is as old as humankind and that will never change.

But what we can change is to force skin back into the game for those who actually are responsible for the capacity and actual waging of war by advocating for and fully understanding that if you commit to war that is the potential price for each and every person in the society involved and if that's not acceptable then you stop the government from waging said war no matter the personal cost since every single person can only die once, you will die anyway if you refuse to act and thus you might as well die for a just cause rather than an unjust one.

From CNN:

There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

You can look at this however you'd like but there is an underlying and very-seriously negative problem in here that nobody wants to acknowledge: If we do not address not only the rate but the balance of who's having kids and what they're inculcating in those kids we're screwed, and we do not have years or decades to do it either.

Simply put only the productive children -- that is, those who grow up and then produce more than they consume can keep a society going.  Some percentage of children are never going to be productive and for those who are unproductive simply due to bad luck its not their fault nor that of their parents -- fortune just is that way, and a just society doesn't treat them like a deformed puppy and cull them.

But you cannot make up for the lack of said productive children in your society by throwing open the borders and inviting "everyone" in.  Those who come here with their first act as a criminal one are demonstrably unfit right up front to fit into a social order that has "law-abiding" as any part of its requirement.  Oh sure, some will change their minds but their general mental position, which is "screw the law, I want mine" is not one you can permit on a mass-basis if you want to have a society at all.

There's an "interview" going around of a Biden advisor tying himself in knots verbally trying to explain the entire premise of government finance.  He makes the often-repeated claim that the government cannot go bankrupt because it can "print money."

Nobody can print money.  Not the government, not industry, not banks, not The Fed nor you.  NOT EVEN GOD can print money because money is the outcome of productive activity by humans.

But anyone can emit credit.  The only requirement to do that is the capacity to find someone else who believes you will produce something of value later worth at least as much as what is lent.  That's it.  You do it when you take a mortgage to buy a house or take out a loan to buy a car.  I do it when I take my Discover card out of my wallet to buy gasoline.  In days of old many taverns allowed you to do it for a drink, writing your name down and how many drinks you'd consumed.  They did that because they believed you would come settle the tab come payday, which you got in exchange for performing actual work of value for someone.

Today this is almost-all abstracted through a third party of some sort but the bottom line hasn't changed.  The same thing is true at a local, state or national level but of course the Federal Government (and State governments) are "more believed" than you as an individual because the Federal Government can tax you and nearly everyone pays those taxes without having to having to be threatened with being jailed or shot first.  That is in virtually every case you file and pay your taxes and for most they're withheld automatically so its actually somewhat of a pain in the ass not to pay.  This is the premise on which the government can issue bonds and thus borrow.

The abstraction layer, with you whipping out a credit card or the government issuing bonds, makes it all appear to be some sort of magic.  It is not.  The clowns running the "MMT" scam are lying and they know it, as I demonstrated on Lauren Lister's show quite-adequately in a two-up debate on air over a decade back, and for anyone who wants to take me on in this regard -- I'm up for a rematch anywhere, anytime, in any forum.  The truth is no different than the tavern 100 years ago.  You can print the credit for that drink because the owner of the bar believes you'll pay, and while he knows a few people won't because they can't the loss is small enough that he can absorb the occasional deadbeat and remain in business, and by allowing you to emit that credit you spend more than if you would have had to save it first.

In short money and credit both spend the same but they are not the same and governments can never create money because government is, by definition, a consumer of resources to provide common goods and services.  Government does not produce; it provides necessary functions (e.g. collective security, otherwise known as a "military") by distributing the production of individuals.

As you shift the percentage of people who will earn the money (by performing a useful task for someone at less renumeration than its value, which is of course necessary because otherwise they'd be stupid to hire you) toward those who do not and will not the percentage of losses goes up.  But this is not instantly apparent -- well, not unless you look, and in fact we do look and its reported all the time.

The national debt exists because there are more freeloaders in greater size than there are producers who provide more value than they extract. As with all exponential functions this looks like a free lunch when you start but if you don't cut it out the end is always disaster as the system in question collapses.  That this will occur if you keep at it is mathematical fact and mathematics are never false nor can they be voted upon or changed by political whim.

To fix this you have to change the incentives.

You have to cut off the freeloaders -- all who do not produce more than they consume -- and, those who are not citizens must be forced to leave -- right here, right now.

You have to incentivize citizens to form stable, bonded heterosexual pairs that, with only one of them working and the other raising children can do so with an economic surplus and demonstrate that such a surplus is possible to obtain in such a system so their children see that from their first moment of sentience forward.  No, not everyone will succeed, but a critical fraction must succeed because you must inculcate that in the next generation or you get the degenerate behavior we have now.  This in turn means that the cost of assets to do so must have their speculative premium reduced or entirely eliminated and thus collapse in price.  Yes, this means houses and other living units for openers.

If you demonstrate to children that you can blow up a two-parent home with kids and fuck up everyone's life for your own adult perversions, whatever they might be, why would those children go down that road when they don't believe it will work out?  Yes, some people do willingly smash their finger with a hammer, but a logical person calls such an individual mentally incompetent because they are!

In addition we had better roll back all of the things we've changed in terms of what go into children that have produced a fifteen percent educational disability rate.  That is either real and we did it and had better stop it right now under penalty of death for those who have and are doing it or its false and we're screwing both the kids and the parents -- and in the latter setting the example that your odds of being bankrupted by having a child are roughly one in seven!  Any middle-class couple would be nuts to produce kids with that set of odds and especially to have a second one when that second child has a one in seven chance of screwing not just the adults but the existing normal child!

There is no simple, one-answer prescription for all of this but all of these issues must be addressed right here, right now, with no excuses accepted.  The idea that banning abortion, for example, will "do it" is functionally insane.  A woman who chooses to abort a child obviously is in a position where she believes that having said child is a bad decision.  The "cheap and easy" answer is "ban the procedure" where the real problem is that you don't want to fix the underlying reason she thinks having the kid is a bad decision.

Well, here we are with a wide-open border and a crap-ton of people coming in -- and what's worse is that the vast majority of those currently having kids -- including those coming here through said open border are in fact not productive beyond their consumption and proof of this is found in the wildly-escalating National Debt.

We don't have 10, 20 or 30 years to reverse this.

We must reverse it right now because it takes about 20 years to grow a human from conception to adulthood and if we don't reverse it now there will be no ability to keep this crap up long enough to reverse what is about to happen at all.

We seem to have a view that courts, including the Supreme Court, have some delegated power to decide the Constitutionality of an action.

That's false, and in fact the Federal Court system itself admits they made it up.

The best-known power of the Supreme Court is judicial review, or the ability of the Court to declare a Legislative or Executive act in violation of the Constitution, is not found within the text of the Constitution itself. The Court established this doctrine in the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803).

Note clearly what they admit: They invented that as a "doctrine" in 1803; no component of the Constitution actually granted such a power.

Article VI establishes the Constitution as the Supreme Law of the land.  Nowhere is there an exception or "wordsmithing" allowed -- that is, no matter what some court might say, the Constitution, being Supreme, is declarative.

For instance the entire claimed "authority" to search communications of Americans without a warrant under FISA is per-se unconstitutional because the 4th Amendment contains no exceptions -- not for terrorism or any other reason, including even an active war.

It does not matter what Congress passes or the Supremes say: That law is void, period.

Now of course they will be happy to try to throw you in prison for it, but the fact remains that its void.

We, the people, are the ones charged with enforcement because per the Constitution any power not delegated to the Federal Government is held by the States or the People, depending on whether same would be constructed against one or the other.

The 14th Amendment incorporated the entirety of the Constitution against the States, which until that time had no such requirement; that is, a State could, until that time, under its own Constitution search without a warrant.  That went away in 1869.

Indeed of the Constitution's protections only habeas corpus can be suspended (Article I, Section 9, Clause 2) -- there is no other right that is held by the people that can abrogated by a mere act of Congress.

Yet here we are.

We have both "laws" that are wildly in violation of the Constitution (virtually all gun constraints other than those on interstate commerce, which is a delegated federal power), FISA and similar as it applies to "general warrants" or even warrantless searches which violate the 4th Amendment and blatant and outrageous refusal to execute existing laws whenever it suits the administration or Department of Justice's whims (e.g. 8 USC 1324 on illegal immigrants, 15 USC Ch 1 against virtually every medical and pharmaceutical provider in the nation and more) never mind the just-heard case of Sarbox being "uniquely" applied intentionally out-of-scope (on which I have a separate article.)

None of that is Constitutional and no decision of any court, including the Supremes, can make it so.  Indeed the 14th Amendment makes clear that unequal prosecution, which many defend as a "right of discretion" does not exist and that such an agency and all their employees are in fact committing felonies in each and every case which they willingly refuse to prosecute.

The last thirty or so years have shown conclusively that the Supremes are part of that problem -- but its not really their fault because they never had the power in the first place when it came to whether something is within the black letters of the page in the Constitution -- we did and still do.

The question becomes this: Are we willing to enforce it, or are we going to sit back and let our nation be overrun by scams and invaders as we have for the last three decades to the point that our entire economy and political system collapses?

No, the depravity wasn't that Trump filed and got heard an argument before the USSC that as President he has effective immunity from criminal statutes while in office, and to not uphold this means a future Administration can vindictively punish past acts.

The issue is that none of the "Justices" on either side of the alleged aisle asked the obvious and foundational question:

Why are we here in the first place when a full 20% of the US Economy rests on conduct that was criminalized over 100 years ago in 15 USC and which this Court has twice ruled unlawful 40 years ago yet not one indictment has been issued, and further over the last several Administrations, including both those of the Petitioner and Responding side, willfully and intentionally refused to bring millions of felony criminal charges under 8 USC §1324 relating to illegal immigration?

In the movies perhaps not but in the current world not only are Presidents routinely above the law without consequence (Biden giving the literal middle finger to the Supremes on College Debt) but executives routinely prosecute their political enemies for criminal offenses that their friends commit with impunity, and in many cases said friends are in fact found by both sides of the aisle to a degree that literal millions of said felonies are committed and deliberately ignored every single year and comprise one dollar in five, and likely one employee in five, in our economy.

So pardon me if I do not care about what has become a literal circus show including at the alleged "highest court in the land" which cannot be bothered to ask the seminal question that they of course know the answer to but which should color not only this case but any similar case until and unless the Executive actually honors the law they claim to uphold.

It would appear that, as I expected, the Supremes are looking to "split the baby" in this specific instance but doing that will not in any meaningful way resolve the issue.  Were I on the Court I would be inclined to write an opinion (and attempt to solicit consensus) delineating that such "immunity" only applies to matters of jurisdiction beyond the United States, such as claims before the ICC and similar, and that if Presidents past, present or future have an issue with Statutes applying to them and being enforced evenly without fear, favor or political bias, they need to start with their own Departments of Justice and, when States are implicated, use the incorporation clause of the 14th Amendment to compel compliance there as well.

After all that is allegedly the law of the land, and considering that the criminal and economic damage done by illegal immigration in this country today, never mind the one dollar in five which is almost entirely stolen through violations of 15 USC Chapter 1 I would absolutely decline to grant any President, irrespective of circumstance, any protection from said politically-driven harassment until and unless those acts of political harassment, financial harm, and even rape and murder are ended by actual enforcement of laws on the books for over 60 and 100 years, respective.

Until then I'd tell Trump and every other President past, present and future, to fuck off.

I'm done with --iggers of all descriptions.

No, the first letter is not singular; there are "niggers", "wiggers", "higgers", "aiggers", "jiggers" and more.  You can figure out what the first letters mean in each case but the issue is the same: A claim of special rights, not equal rights, and further, the capacity to violate other people's rights without consequence.

CNN — 
A Black-led running group is suing the organizers of the Boston Marathon as well as the city of Newton, Massachusetts, and the Newton police chief over alleged racial discrimination that took place in a cheer zone at last year’s race.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday by the all-women running group TrailblazHers, just days before the 2024 marathon, alleges the organizers, the city, and police violated the plaintiffs’ Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection under the law.

Bullshit.

Read this:

TrailblazHers had organized a specific “cheer zone” in Newton at Mile 21 and had invited other running groups led by people of color to join, says the complaint. Over a hundred spectators, “mostly people of color,” were gathered there.

So you organized a racist and sexist group by its very name.  Fine -- you have the right to do that -- but don't be pissed off if someone else does it for some other group.  That's not the problem as that's called "free association" and you know it -- the problem is this:

Shortly after the incident last year, Newton police said in a statement: “After being notified by the B.A.A. (Boston Athletic Association) three times about spectators traversing the rope barrier and impeding runners, the Newton Police Department responded respectfully and repeatedly requesting that spectators stay behind the rope and not encroach onto the course,” according to CNN affiliate WFXT. “When spectators continued to cross the rope, NPD with additional officers calmly used bicycles for a short period to demarcate the course and keep both the runners and spectators safe.”

In other words these -iggers claim the right to interfere in the race by entering the course and they refused to remain behind the line demarcating the spectator areas and the course itself when cautioned and asked to do so like any civilized person would if they accidentally incurred into the course and didn't realize they had done so.

These people demanded the right to be uncivilized jackasses with more rights than the runners who paid an entry fee to race so fuck them sideways.

I'm a runner -- but not good enough to qualify for Boston.  Nonetheless I've participated in a number of very large races with corral starts and others where they're not but should be (here's looking at you, Turkey Trot in downtown Knoxville!)  Incursions into the course are serious; runners are often quite-focused on the task at hand and disrupting someone in a competitive event who has no desire to be a part of whatever you're doing is an assault that in fact can bring actual even if not-monetarily-significant harm and could reasonably cause a collision and physical injury.

That Boston Athletic Association has stomped on that intentional and knowing misbehavior is laudable.  It is my view that anyone suing over any such action should be personally destroyed -- outed, named, fired, ostracized and everyone associated with them treated to the same including being fired and blackballed and such should extend to their entire immediate family as well.

Everyone wants to claim to be some sort of special snowflake based on some sort of affiliation -- in this case, skin color.  Fuck you; you're not a special snowflake and organizing a bunch of people under such and then acting in concert makes you a fucking mob.  Cheering en-masse is welcome; hell, if even one person cheers me on (or even were they to jeer at me!) during a tough race its a part of the bargain that I have no quarrel with -- but entering the course is out-of-bounds, period and you're an uncouth bunch of apes if you think you have a right to do that and then, when rebuffed, think you have cause to sue over it.

Newton Police Chief John Carmichael addressed the lawsuit in a Friday Facebook post, saying, “I stand by my decisions that day, and more importantly, I stand by our officers who acted appropriately, respectfully and as expected.”

Yep.

Were I BAA I'd cancel the race, publish the names of the plaintiffs and their attorneys telling the public they have a problem with it take it up with those persons individually and make clear in a public statement that we're not folding to a bunch of extortionists and we never will, we're tired of this bullshit being paraded throughout society, we intend to and will make an example of these douchebags personally and that the race is herewith canceled in perpetuity until and unless the plaintiffs disgorge all of our fees and costs, including legal, refund the entry fees of every runner for the canceled race, publicly admit there was no racial bias and that their conduct merited the actions taken because they were assholes, they impeded the course and are apologizing, all in writing, and accept a criminal Trespass for each person there so if they enter the course again they can be thrown in jail for said trespass.  Oh, by the way, we're countersuing and those are our terms to settle it and what we will take all the way to trial if you refuse.

Those would be my terms.

No, not acceptable?

Tough shit and go fuck yourselves.