The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1700

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside? 

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific, 

from the beautiful to the repugnant, 

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed, 

you could be inspired, you could be appalled. 

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. 

You have been warned.

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Visage à trois #200

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #374

 

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #372

Our Spanish Civil War?

Deep and brutal strife in 1930s Spain was a prelude to the barbarity of World War II. Now with the war in Ukraine, we’re reminded that the veneer of civilization is very thin.

rom 1936 to 1939, the civil war in Spain became a European laboratory of new tactics, strategies, logistics, wartime morality, and weapons. Right-wing nationalists under General Francisco Franco finally defeated loyal supporters of an evolutionary socialist republic—but only after much of the Western world had variously weighed in.

The cost to the Spanish people of such brutal and vicious strife was horrific. Over 500,000 Spaniards would die in a little over two-and-a-half years. The country was left in shambles.

Dictatorships in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and autocratic Portugal poured millions of dollars in military aid and money for Franco’s efforts to seize power. In turn, the Soviet Union often matched that aid with shipments to various communists, socialists, and anarchists of the Popular Front forces.

Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.

The relatively new regime of Nazi Germany sent to Spain hundreds of tanks and “volunteer” troops, pilots, dive bombers, and transport planes of the Condor Legion.

But Germany’s intervention was not always quite what it seemed. Behind the scenes, Adolf Hitler provided enough aid to ensure Franco’s likely eventual victory. But he did not send quite enough immediate help either to antagonize his European democratic rivals, or to ensure a quick victory for the Nationalists that might have created a powerful and independent Iberian fascist rival bloc to his own.

The Soviet Union ostensibly countered fascist supply chains. But Joseph Stalin had even more strings attached to his aid. He systematically favored communist recipients and harassed and often eliminated their socialist and anarchist allies in the Popular Front.

Stranger still, even before the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of 1939, Hitler and Stalin were already secretly aiding each other’s rearmament in their shared hatred of Western European democracies. It would take years of research to fathom all of the subtexts and agendas behind the great powers’ interventions in the Spanish Civil war.

The same labyrinth of plots and twists will likely prove true in the present Ukrainian war. Ostensibly NATO and the EU are staunch Ukrainian allies. But powerful German interests remain worried about their tenuous energy supply lines from Russia and are not so ready to...

The Plot To Undermine America’s Institutions

Less than a decade ago, my high school hosted a naturalization ceremony. Each time a new citizen, donned in red, white, and blue apparel, approached the stage to receive his certificate of citizenship, the rowdy crowd of hundreds of teenagers—myself among them—broke into irreverent but welcoming and patriotic chants of "USA! USA!"

Those days are long gone. National pride fell to an all-time low in 2020, with just 20 percent of American adults ages 18 to 29 saying they were "extremely proud" to be an American, according to a Gallup poll. And though the coronavirus pandemic and protests following the death of George Floyd factored into that number, the poll marked the sixth consecutive year of decline in patriotism.

The right blames this trend on progressivism and, more recently, critical race theory. But is CRT really to blame for this drastic shift in anti-American sentiment? Jonathan Butcher offers a guidebook on the subject in Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth.

Splintered presents critical theory as a pedagogy, or a framework through which one understands the world around him. From its origins in the 19th century German academy to its application in American kindergartens, Butcher, an education fellow at the Heritage Foundation, spells out what critical pedagogy means for the future of American education.

He begins with the German Marxists, including Felix Weil, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer, who laid the foundation for critical theory by fusing Marx’s anticapitalism and understanding of history as a persistent class struggle with the postmodernist concept of subjective truth. As a "worldview," Butcher writes, critical theory is "meant to criticize the traditional uses of language and reason to describe the world around us."

Critical theory found its way into American law during the 20th century. Critical legal theory claims "America’s laws are systemically oppressive and...

Visage à trois #194

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #373

 

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #372

Why Is the Biden Administration Determined to Help Terrorist Iran Get a Bomb?

Why would any administration in its right mind permit an official state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to have nuclear weapons, as well as billions of dollars that will assuredly not be used for a "GI Bill for returning members of the Revolutionary Guard"?

Just this week, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called Iran, a "sponsor of terrorism."

With Biden's deal, restrictions on the regime's nuclear program would be lifted only two years after the agreement is signed, permitting the regime to enrich uranium at any level it desires and spin as many uranium enrichment centrifuges as it wants.

Astonishingly, Russia will be trusted to be the country that stores Iran's enriched uranium, and Moscow will get paid for this mission. More uranium for Russia? How nifty: maybe Putin can use it for his next "Ukraine" -- in Poland, Sweden or France?

The new deal will not address Iran's ballistic missile program, meaning that the Tehran regime will continue attacking other nations with its ballistic missiles, provide missiles to its proxy militias in other countries, and advance the range of its intercontinental ballistic missiles to reach the US territories. Iran could even use shorter-range ballistic missiles to reach the US, perhaps launched from Venezuela or Cuba, where Iran is already deeply entrenched.

To meet the Iranian leaders' demands, the new deal will most likely include removal from the terrorist list of the IRGC, which has killed countless Americans, both on American soil and off.

The Islamic Republic of Iran began murdering Americans in Beirut in 1983, and also had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.

The Biden administration, if it actually cares about peace in the region -- a subject that seems open to question -- would do well to listen to the warnings of these many US military leaders and Congressmen, and refuse to revive the disastrous nuclear deal. It will only a make even more dangerous a country that the US State Department itself has called "the world's worst sponsor of state terrorism," as well as frankly creating an unnecessary security threat in the region, Europe and the US.

Why would any administration in its right mind permit an official state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to have nuclear weapons, as well as billions of dollars that will assuredly not be used for a "GI Bill for returning members of the Revolutionary Guard"?

Just this week, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called Iran, a "sponsor of terrorism."

Calls and warnings against reviving the 2015 nuclear, however, seem to be falling on deaf ears, as the Biden administration appears determined to reach a deal that would enable a state that has been trying to take over the entire Middle East for decades -- and already controls Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq -- to have nuclear weapons, the ballistic missiles to deliver them, and billions of dollars to further its well-documented terrorism.

Last week, 45 retired US Generals and Admirals sent an entreaty, titled "Open Letter from U.S. Military Leaders Opposing Iran Nuclear Deal", to the Biden administration, warning against reviving of...

Morning Mistress