Memorial Day 2023

In pondering a holiday message each year, I go back and look at what I’ve posted for it in the past.  This year, on rereading the “Priorities, USA” article for 2022, I concluded that it’s still a timely message, and should be the bulk of what I advocate taking in this year.

As time passes, we are flicked more and more on the raw by the things we are having to face up to right now – epochal things, things of an entire age of the human journey.  We find we can’t flee them.  They come to find us.  They won’t rest unresolved.

The purchases of the blood shed for America, by the ones we remember on Memorial Day, still hang in the balance.

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Israel: Rumors of war in a world transformed

On 9 April 2023, Israeli Arabist scholar and former intelligence officer Mordechai Kedar published an article recounting information recently received from an associate he describes as a source he has “known for years – an expatriate from the Middle East, a supporter of Israel, who lives in Europe and is in continuous contact with people in Iran and Iraq.”

The article is in the outlet Makor Rishon (“Firsthand Source”), owned by Israel Hayom.  The information outlined by Kedar is from his source’s “assessment that Iran is planning to launch a combined attack on Israel in the foreseeable future that will include all the forces at its disposal in the Arab countries” – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

Kedar proceeds to describe missile and rocket barrages from all the implicated territories (including the more-distant nations), along with an unconventional ground attack from Lebanon and Gaza using motorcycles and ATVs, assisted by local Arab sabotage in Israel, Judea, and Samaria.

Three mindsets that need a reset if we want a return to constitutional governance

Fear not: this will be brief. I’ve actually written at considerable length on these topics before, but all I want to accomplish here is to lay down a few markers, as a season of what promises to be incredible silliness bears down on us.

We’ll need touchstones with which to think about what’s going off the rails.  The basic problem is always more fundamental than the details by which we tend to navigate.  We come up with shallow hypotheses and explanations, but they’re situational and ultimately unsatisfactory.  I don’t propose to dictate what people conclude about causes and effects here, so much as suggest ways to think about our problem that are more fruitful than what we usually do.

One of the good effects of this is to adjust our thinking to a level as profound as the one the American Founders operated on,

In a new geo-military landscape, Belarus’s Lukashenko goes to China

Just over six years ago, in January 2017, I noted in an article at Liberty Unyielding that China had recently closed a logistics gap eyed for some 200 years by military planners.  The gap had been felt as a hindrance for much longer than that, but it became especially significant to warfare and geopolitics in the age of rail.

China’s feat was completing a capable, reliable rail network all the way from China’s eastern coast to the UK, on the western edge of Europe.  On 1 January 2017, Beijing inaugurated the first freight train service from China to London.

Rail service all the way across Asia and Europe, and not operated by Russia to at least Eastern Europe, had never existed before.  The lack of such service was a key factor in every kind of geopolitical calculation about Asia:  economic and military as well as political.  The Soviet “iron curtain” had laid a long stasis

TOC Ready Room 7 Jan 2023: Border disorder, Project Censorship, Church redux

Back from a Christmas “break,” and I’m still tired of politics.  What a silly method of dealing with human affairs.

A few random updates for the TOC squadron.

Readers probably won’t be surprised to learn that in December, the House Democrats adopted a rule that the J6 Committee materials they were going to send to the National Archives must be sequestered from release for 30 years.

Sourced from Yahoo report below.
Yahoo refs LAT rpt (scroll down) that house Dems rule of Dec 2022 wd prevent Archives release of most J6 docs for 30 yrs (extra-sensitive up to 50).
Democracy so important it requires hiding J6 matl for decades?https://t.co/N96MACCRC9 https://t.co/TvSXEXA311

— J.E. Dyer ☘️ (@OptimisticCon) January 6, 2023

It’s now being reported,