Commenter Orr left a link to this,

had seen something on this the other day, this from Rebel News:

The communist government warned international airlines they can no longer refuel at its main airport in Havana for the next month after Donald Trump threatened tariffs on any nation that supplies Cuba with oil. A-1 jet fuel won’t be available at Jose Marti International Airport beginning Tuesday through March 11, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said in a notice Sunday.

The fuel supply situation on Cuba is critical, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday, according to news agency Interfax. However, he didn’t specify whether Moscow is planning to provide oil products to the island.

Russia’s largest airline, Aeroflot, cancelled its Monday commercial flight to Cuba and instead sent the empty plane to pick up stranded tourists, Russia’s tour operators association said in a statement. Aeroflot flights to Cuba have been suspended until late March, it added. The group estimates there are about 4,500 Russians vacationing on the island at present.

Nicaragua, meanwhile, altered its immigration rules to block Cuban citizens from entering the Central American country without a visa. Nearly one in five Cuban residents has fled the island over the past decade amid a worsening economic crisis.

Cuba, I once described to my kids as 'An island in a sea full of fish, with year-round growing seasons, and full of people not afraid to work, and they've made everyone except the Party faithful poor and hungry.'

That line about 'What can't last forever, won't' covers their mess nicely.

Tab clearing

One of the many disgusting examples of the Soviets breaking eggs for their omelette: the Katyn Forest massacre.


The actual reason for the Black Emergency Response Team: "There's not enough actual racism out there, so we'll drum something up!"


Julie Pascal's response to the Greta Thunberg worshipers:

A collection of "The climate changing is going to kill us!" predictions that didn't happen.


"The data from that period isn't complete, so we had to ignore it."  Says the same people who'll 'model' that data while apparently ignoring the actual numbers available.


"Only bona fide journalists get to ask the Governor questions."
"How are you defining 'bona fide' ?"
"People who'll only ask questions we want them to, and not ask ones we don't."  If the bastard were being honest.


Someone saying he's not a 'real' scientist in 3, 2, 1...
The iconoclast is Dr. Mototaka Nakamura. In June he put out a small book in Japanese on “the sorry state of climate science”. It’s titled Confessions of a climate scientist: the global warming hypothesis is an unproven hypothesis, and he is very much qualified to take a stand. From 1990 to 2014 he worked on cloud dynamics and forces mixing atmospheric and ocean flows on medium to planetary scales. His bases were MIT (for a Doctor of Science in meteorology), Georgia Institute of Technology, Goddard Space Flight Centre, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Duke and Hawaii Universities and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. He’s published about 20 climate papers on fluid dynamics.


From Sarah Hoyt on Fecesbook:
Ladies and gentlemen, there is a massive, unacknowledged mental health crisis in this country. And not all of the mad people are pooping it up in the streets of San Francisco. Some are sh*tting all over higher education.

Considering the past history of socialists/communists and declaring people mentally deficient,

every time some leftist starts calling opponents mentally ill or insane, it makes me want to buy another box of ammo.  In case they decide I need 'treatment'.

The warped thought process that led to the perversion and weaponization of psychiatry in the Soviet Union can be traced back to the communist icon and thought leader Karl Marx. Marx propounded a spurious doctrine known as “polylogism” to justify stifling dissent. According to Marx, different classes of people had different structures in their minds. Thus, Marx declared the bourgeoisie to be mentally defective because they were inherently unable to comprehend Marx’s (allegedly) revelatory and progressive theories. Since they were, in a sense, insane, there was no valid reason for communists to “waste time” arguing with them. On the contrary, communists were justified in not only ignoring or suppressing bourgeois ideas but in liquidating the entire bourgeois class.

The practice of categorizing one’s enemies as “insane” became a ready tool of suppression in the Soviet state founded by Lenin and developed under Stalin. The USSR’s infamous secret police energetically wielded quack psychiatry as a club with which to destroy political dissidents. If you want more information about how the Soviets kidnapped and misused psychiatry, here is a link to a document that describes what American agents of the USSR were taught about psycho-political techniques in the late 1930s. (The provenance of the booklet is murky, and Soviet apologists have long tried to discredit it, but in light of numerous psychiatric abuses known to have been committed with the approval of the USSR’s rulers, the content of the book is highly plausible.)

What people would do to get out of the communist paradise of East Germany

The formatting on this is awful, but the story is great.

How did Stalin hide the famines?

With the aid of lots of Professional Journalists.  And the first one who, being an actual reporter, blew the whistle?
The Moscow press corps was even angrier. Of course its members knew that what Jones had reported was true, and a few were looking for ways to tell the same story. Malcolm Muggeridge, at the time the correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, had just smuggled three articles about the famine out of the country via diplomatic bag. The Guardian published them anonymously, with heavy cuts made by editors who disapproved of his critique of the USSR, and, appearing at a moment when the news was dominated by Hitler’s rise to power, they were largely ignored. But the rest of the press corps, dependent on official goodwill, closed ranks against Jones. Lyons meticulously described what happened:

Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials. … There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take, under the effulgence of Umansky’s gilded smile, before a formal denial was worked out. We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski.

And, of course, politicians who probably didn't give a damn.
...As 1933 turned into 1934 and then 1935, Europeans grew even more worried about Hitler. By the end of 1933, the new Roosevelt administration was actively looking for reasons to ignore any bad news about the Soviet Union. The president’s team had concluded that developments in Germany and the need to limit Japanese expansion meant that it was time, finally, for the United States to open full diplomatic relations with Moscow. Roosevelt’s interest in central planning and in what he thought were the USSR’s great economic successes—the president read Duranty’s reporting carefully—encouraged him to believe that there might be a lucrative commercial relationship too. Eventually a deal was struck. Litvinov arrived in New York to sign it—accompanied by Duranty. At a lavish banquet for the Soviet foreign minister at the Waldorf Astoria, Duranty was introduced to the 1,500 guests. He stood up and bowed.

Why We Should Still Be Talking About Killing Communists

Tell us what you really think, Mike

I've seen that same stupid bumper sticker.  Pissed me off, too


Ok, so the accuser of Kavanaugh has said- through her lawyer- that "I'll show up under these conditions:

This is bullshit.  This is nothing but "Delay things as long as possible, then have it set up against the accused."


Democrats Do Not Want FISA Documents Made Public
Gee, I wonder why...


"Our school believes in a practices Diversity(as long as you think the right way)!"

From someone who grew up in the progressive Utopia of the Soviet Union*

With this background, I am—perhaps understandably—hypersensitive to the emerging far Left in Western politics. I can’t help noticing similarities in the rhetoric about “eradicating inequality,” “smashing the class system,” and a new age of “radical egalitarianism.” And when I do, I shudder.

I shudder because such people no longer appreciate what they have in the West: one of the most prosperous, free, fair, equal, tolerant, peaceful, and open societies not just in the world today but in the entire history of our species. This isn’t an abstract point about the ungrateful youth of today, it’s a reminder of the unforgiving reality that those who don’t realise how good they have it, or take their lives of plenty for granted, are vulnerable to demagogic ideologies that promise to tear it all down to build a ‘better tomorrow’ just as the founders of the Soviet Union did before them.

I shudder because I know that an environment in which anyone who does not hold the correct political views is ostracised can eat away at the heart of what makes Western society a beacon of hope to the rest of the world: the fact that we value free speech and individual autonomy above anything else, including material or practical considerations.

*And anyone who insists "That wasn't REAL Communism/Socialism" can go sit in a corner with a superglued-on dunce hat

Worst national socialists ever

Comparing Haley to Hitler for defending Jews. Yep, that's mainstream leftism alright.
It's also our crop of hysterical leftists.


It's not a question of whether Brennan and Clapper are liars; it's figuring out what they might not be lying about.


There is a stinking mess going on with a gaming convention called Origins.  Short version:
Origins advertised Larry Correia as a guest of honor.
A few SJBs screamed because "Makes me feel unsafe!  Bigot!  Racist!"
Idiot running con panics and uninvites Larry.
Fans react as you'd expect.
Con now deleting and blocking things, trying to act like he was never invited, and slandering fans.  A more complete rundown of this mess here.

As has been noted, this crap isn't just SJBs whining and bitching, it's a direct attack on the ability of some authors to make a living because they're guilty of Thought Crimes.  And, whether they realized it or not, this is going to hit vendors at the con because people DON'T come because they can't meet Larry(Or John Ringo at ConCarolinas, same kind of bullshit).

One more thing, as Michael Williamson has pointed out:
You must assume their intent is to lay groundwork to CREATE a scene they can attempt to blame the guest, or you, for.
And, considering the antics of Antifa and associates, they might well be trying to provoke a situation so they can assault someone and then cry "I'm a victim!"  And every time a con caves to "He makes me feel unsafe!" and such bullshit, they're going to escalate because "It worked!  Let's keep pushing!"

EVERYTHING is political with these asshats, including their tender feelings, and they truly believe* their feelings outweigh EVERYTHING else.  And they're going to keep pushing it until they hit a wall and the wall hits back.

*That's not counting the ones who know it's bullshit, but very useful bullshit for the left.


Speaking of the left,
TODAY IS THE 52nd ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION: The consensus minimum death toll figure for that period in Chinese history is 400,000. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday place the number at up to three million in Mao: The Unknown Story.
The leftists think it was all justified and wonderful(possibly "It just didn't go far enough!").  The current problem being that it sounds a lot like many colleges:
In the coming months, things spun out of control. Red Guard students (often financed by the Party) were instructed to attack the “Four Olds”—old customs, cultures, habits and ideas. And attack they did. Entire libraries, temples, monasteries and mosques were destroyed. Clergy were arrested and sent off to camps. The national police chief declared that it was “no big deal” if Red Guards were beating “bad people” to death. Countless enemies of the people were denounced, humiliated, and made to confess their sins.
They haven't managed to burn many places yet, but the denouncing/humiliating/forced confessions have been common.  Along with assaults(then claiming them as 'defending ourselves against their badthoughts').  We've got the New Red Guard running around, it's just that most of them aren't honest enough to say outright what they are.

What South Africa wants to turn itself into

"If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we'd do it," said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. "Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job."

Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: "I want the white man's government to come back. Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today."

Like Zimbabwe, SA has had a chance to become better; this is what they're choosing instead, and it's going to become real nasty.

In chorus, now: "It'll work THIS time!"

Communism, then, was taken not as a political philosophy, but as a scientific discovery that only the irrational, the evil, or those blinded by bourgeois “false consciousness” would reject. Like science, communism was about progress, optimism for the future, and the liberation of humans from social and political bondage by improving the economic and social conditions of human life. It had “an inherent optimism for the future,” as one Times article gushed. This notion that humans can be shaped and improved by rational technique still remains a dominant sensibility in the West, which explains the continuing hold of leftist ideology. From Obama’s 2012 campaign slogan “Forward,” a traditional leftist motto, to the fads of “behavioral science” like “implicit bias,” our world is still enthralled to this superstition that “human sciences” can improve life and transcend the historical disorder and evil our ancestors attributed to a flawed and tragic human nature.

Which brings something to mind:
Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave.
Interesting that that came out of the mouth of a character created by a leftist jerk.  Wonder if he believes it, or just thought it fit the character?

MIT Press is out with a new book that teaches children the tenets of Karl Marx with fairy tales.

"Because REAL communism hasn't been tried yet(and all those troublesome dead bodies don't count), because REAL communism will be wonderful!"

Gods damn the shitbrained clowns doing this.  Nirvana is always just a few million more smashed eggs in the future.

"Once upon a time, people yearned to be free of the misery of capitalism. How could their dreams come true?" a plot synopsis for the book reads. "This little book proposes a different kind of communism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism."

The book is full of cartoon drawings of "lovable little revolutionaries" that help navigate kids through the "evils" of capitalism.

And a very fitting quote:
Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave. - Capt. Mal

More of the Joys of Socialism! in Venezuela

But this isn’t simple poaching, he said. Sibira and other investigators from Zulia University, a public university in Maracaibo, are convinced that the protected birds have become the latest victims of Venezuela's growing hunger crisis. People have become so desperate, he said, that they are butchering and eating flamingos.

There are other signs that food shortages have led to the slaughtering of animals not generally considered meat: giant anteaters, for one. The university investigators — biologists and biology students — say they have kept records to show that dozens of the slow-moving creatures, classified as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, also have been killed for food.

In the city’s dump, more evidence of hunger-driven desperation: dismembered dogs, cats, donkeys, horses and pigeons have been found since last year, all skinned or plucked, with signs of having been eaten, according to the city’s garbage teams.
...
In the past, it wasn't uncommon to see a homeless or mentally ill person searching through the garbage, but scavenging for food has become widespread. People are often seen looking for discarded eggs, cookies, milk, flour, breads, broccoli stems, beet leaves or expired butter, said Campos, a sociologist at Zulia.

For most families, healthy meals are simply out of reach. Two pounds of sugar or corn flour, for example, cost about 7,800 bolivares, or $2 dollars, on the black market. And two pounds of premium meat runs 10,000 bolivares. Those three items alone represent more than half the official monthly minimum wage of 40,000 bolivares, or $11 dollars.
I have no comments to make, I'm too pissed.

It's rare I have to do this, but.

Checked out a book called Tombstone  The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962.  I'm not quite a hundred pages in, and I may have to return it unfinished.  This... is one of the most depressing, horrifying things I've ever read.  Millions dead in the name of 'This plan came from Mao, therefore it will be!'  And people lying to keep Mao and the upper-level happy, no matter how much damage it did, and how many bodies it produced.

Page 31:
When thirteen children arrived at the commune begging for food, the commune's party secretary surnamed Jiang, along with others incited kitchen staff to drag them deep into the mountains, where the were left to die of hunger and exposure.

Page 50:
To prevent starving people from fleeing and spreading news of the disaster, county party committees deployed armed guards to patrol borders and access roads.  Sentry posts were set up on roadways, and checkpoints at every village.  Bus stops were manned by police officers, and long-distance buses could be driven only by party members.  Anyone discovered trying to leave had all his belongings confiscated and was beaten.  Xinyang's rail depots were monitored by the railway public security bureau.  The peasants could only stay home and await death.

That's about all of this I can excerpt.  I will add that anyone passing along unpleasant facts such as "People are starving to death by the thousands" and "There IS no grain to bring in" was subjected- when not just arrested and taken away- to 'struggle'.  Which meant being insulted, threatened, and beaten.  Often to the point of crippling and/or death.  Other tortures used as well.  All in the name of class struggle and socialism...

And we still have idiots whining that 'Oh, that wasn't REAL socialism!' and 'OURS is Democratic Socialism, it's completely different!'  And other things that, right now, cause me to consider homicide.

And the idiots who love the idea of socialism still say

it's somehow OUR fault Venezuela isn't Socialist Heaven, but instead a hellhole like every other country that's gone socialist.
He spent the day before foraging for food in an empty lot, because there was nothing to eat at home. Then in a hospital because what he found made him gravely ill.
Hours later, he was dead on a gurney, which doctors rolled by his mother as she watched helplessly. She said the hospital had lacked the simplest supplies needed to save him on that day last July.
...
Doctors have prepared to operate on bloody tables because they did not have enough water to clean them. Psychiatric patients have had to be tied to chairs in mental hospitals because there was no medication left to treat their delusions.

Hunger has driven some people to riot — and others into rickety fishing boats, fleeing Venezuela on reckless journeys by sea.

But it was the story of a boy with no food, who had gone searching for wild roots to eat but ended up poisoning himself instead, that seemed to embody everything that had gone wrong in Venezuela.
Damn the communist bastards who caused this.  And damn every brainless clown who insists it's not the fault of the socialists.

Why, if you have a .223 and a .300 Blackout, you'd better make sure

you don't get the wrong rifle & cartridge together

Some students who made false rape reports being prosecuted.

Good.  Every time some idiot does this it both takes LE resources away from real crime reports, and can destroy the life of the falsely accused.


Oh, this is wonderful, they couldn't even make sure the jeep for the FUNERAL would keep running?


Well, 'liberals' are cheering the fires in Tennessee, so I guess they'll say the old lady deserved being hit with a chair, because Trump! or something.


Government-run health care...
Four staff members have resigned from a southeastern Oklahoma veterans facility rather than face the possibility of getting fired, after a resident was found to have maggots in a wound.

Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs executive director Myles Deering said the maggots were discovered while the patient was alive at the facility in Talahina, about 130 miles southeast of Tulsa. Deering said the maggots were not the cause of his death.
...
The agency said a physician's assistant and three nurses, including the director of nursing, resigned after an investigation was conducted. Spokesman Shane Faulkner said all four chose to resign before the termination process began.
I refuse to comment on this, as my language is deteriorating into cursing before I even start typing.

"But Batista was a tyrant, so this doesn't count!" Or something.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported in 1966 that 166 Cuban prisoners were executed on a single day in May of that year. But before they were killed, they were forced to undergo the forced extraction of an average of seven pints of blood from their bodies. This blood was sold to Communist Vietnam at a rate of $50 per pint. Those who underwent the bloodletting suffered cerebral anemia and a state of unconsciousness and paralysis. But that didn’t stop the executions; the victims were carried on a stretcher to the killing field where they were then shot.

So Castro is finally a good communist

And the wailing on the left has commenced.  For everyone else,

It's like the idea of 'serving your customers' doesn't exist for idiots like Blanchfield.
He said that while he remains committed to his liberal clients, he “will no longer do business with any person that is a registered Republican or supports Donald Trump.”

“If you are a Republican, voted for Donald Trump or support Donald Trump, in any manner, you are not welcome at 1st In SEO and we ask you to leave our firm,” Mr. Blanchfield wrote in the letter, which he shared Wednesday with his 35,000 Twitter followers.
Here's hoping he loses every customer who doesn't meet his standards of leftism.


Friend told me the Atwoods in Lawton had Henry lever-action .22 rifles, the blued-steel, for about $230 the other day.  Damn.  Good thing I had the restraint not to take that drive.


When protesters are setting bombs, they're not 'protesters' anymore.  And when they damage themselves, it's their own damned fault, but they're sure to blame the LE at the site.


Since I opened this with a dead commie, I'll close with one of the results of communism: it's Holodomor Remembrance Day.
During the Holodomor millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by the independent Ukraine and 24 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet Union.

Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly; anywhere from 1.8 to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine. Recent research has since narrowed the estimates to between 2.4 and 7.5 million. The exact number of deaths is hard to determine, due to a lack of records, but the number increases significantly when the deaths inside heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban are included. Older estimates are still often cited in political commentary. According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kyiv in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficit.

Something on the origins of this PC idiocy

and the crap behind it.

Yeah, Cuba's just a friggin' socialist paradise, isn't it?

Much like Venezuela, but with a bit better press.
Those who do have laptops, smart phones and tablets only managed to acquire them because their relatives who escaped bought them in Florida. The government doesn’t mind too much since only a handful of wi-fi hotspots even exist, and using them is prohibitively expensive for just about everybody.

The Castro government is under relentless pressure from both inside and outside the country to lighten up, so it promises to boost access to the Internet by creating 35 wi-fi hotspots around the country. Stop for a second and ponder that sentence. Think about all it implies and you’ll understand why Cuba is so far behind almost every other country on earth and why, Castro propaganda to the contrary, it is not because of the US embargo.
...
The United States has a minimum wage. Cuba has a maximum wage, and it’s just 20 dollars a month. Cubans are required by law to be poor. Prosperity is a crime. And when I visited the island in 2013, it cost 15 dollars an hour access the Internet on a shared dial-up connection in a hotel lobby. It goes without saying that nobody who ekes out a meager existence on the state-imposed maximum wage and a ration card could afford that. Those hotspots were strictly for tourists.

The government recently dropped the price to $2.25 an hour. That sounds almost reasonable, except for two things. It’s still vastly more expensive than using the Internet in America—which is free at most public hotspots and only costs a few dozen dollars per month to use at home. Cuba’s new “low” price still costs more than ten percent of a person’s monthly salary, and that’s just to use the Internet for an hour.
But don't worry, idiots will still wear Che shirts and proclaim any problems in Cuba are the fault of the evil United States.

Why most of the left won't criticize communism:

it really is what they want.
“We will destroy each and every enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!” Even when the tsars imprisoned or executed revolutionaries, they never thought of arresting their spouses, children, grandparents, and cousins as well. And note Stalin’s insistence that not just wrong actions but improper thoughts merit “destruction.” Georgy Arbatov, adviser to five general secretaries of the Soviet Communist Party, observed that “the main code of behavior” was “to be afraid of your own thoughts.”

It's a good article.  It's a terrifying article of what communism has done, and just what the left is prepared to ignore or defend in the name of 'nudging' us in the 'right' direction.
I first grasped what Stalinist life was like during a course I took with Wolfgang Leonhard, the child of German communists who was brought up in the ussr, defected to Yugoslavia, and wound up teaching Russian history at Yale. His autobiography, Child of the Revolution, tells a story, set during the Great Purges, about some families in a communal apartment who are awakened at 4 a.m. (the usual time for arrests) by a peremptory banging at the door. Finally one old man, with less life left to lose, answers, disappears into the corridor, and at last returns. “Comrades, relax!” he explains. “The house is on fire!”
Can you imagine living in that kind of fear, every day and night?

Apologists also suggest that there really were a lot of enemies of socialism. But people were arrested not just for conspiring against (or thinking negatively about) the regime. Quotas were issued for each region—Baberowski concludes that more than a million people were killed by quota—and local officials often filled them either arbitrarily or with the homeless, the blind, and amputees. In March 1938 the nkvd (the secret police) executed 1,160 people in Moscow with physical disabilities. Kliment Voroshilov, who occupied many top positions, argued for arresting abandoned children. “Why don’t we have these rascals shot?” he asked. “Should we wait for them to become grown-up criminals?” What’s more, two dozen whole ethnic groups were forcibly deported to Central Asia. After Stalin ordered the arrest of all Poles, the Polish section of the Comintern and the Polish Communist party had to be disbanded since they had no members.

Death was not the worst of it.
Insty once said something like  'People who make excuses for communism are just as disgusting as people who make excuses for the nazis, and should be treated as such'.  Sounds about right.