My boy Kym is back to discuss the news and MMA.
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Violence Did Not Silence the Voice of Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk’s last word was “violence,” but his last act, before an act of violence took his life, was an act of non-violence: the act of speaking that word. He died doing what he did all his brief adult life: working to persuade others through peaceful, yet powerful, speech.
His efforts were not in vain. In fact, he was phenomenally successful. His words persuaded multitudes of young people. And his bitter critics could not defeat him in debate. The more they tried, the more he won, and the more audience members he won over. So, as a last resort, one of his opponents used violence to silence his speech. An assassin shot him in the throat to still his mighty voice.
But even that failed. The shot fired backfired. The shooter only made Charlie an immortal martyr for free speech. In the days since his murder, the world has heard his words more than ever before, as video clips of him speaking have gone viral. And his resounding voice will echo on.
So must his example. To honor his memory, we must emulate his means. We must remember how successful his methods were: how many hearts and minds he changed. We must build on his gains and not reverse them. We must persevere in wielding speech and reason, and only use force for defence and justice, not collectivist vengeance or “preventative” tyranny.
We must be strong, not weak. That means using our grief and anger as motivation to redouble our commitment to the good, not as an excuse to indulge in the evil ways of our persecutors. We must remember that, throughout history, the ways of Charlie have triumphed gloriously, while the ways of his killer have failed miserably. We must choose to pick up Charlie Kirk’s microphone, not his assassin’s rifle. We must speak the truth more bravely than before and adhere to justice more steadfastly than ever.
That is how we redeem, and not compound, this awful tragedy. That is how we defy, and not affirm, this atrocious crime. That is how we pay fitting tribute to the life and work of Charlie Kirk.
This was originally featured on Dan Sanchez’s Substack and is republished with permission.
Anti-War Blog – “Never Again”
“Never again.”
Those words were spoken in the wake of the second world war, the revelation and realisation that a sophisticated, educated and civilsed nation of people could commit atrocities of such a scale. Not merely a genocide, a regime of torture, slavery and human misery under the guise of scientific enquiry and chauvinistic supremacy. The victors of the Good war satisfied their sacrifice and accomplishments in knowing that they had conquered an evil. Myths were born. It was the feat of the greatest generation. All other wars and enemies would be judged by this one, the second world war. The enemy were known to be evil because of what they had done.
The first world war, was known as the Great War. It was also, promised to be ‘The War to End all Wars’. So great was it’s scale and the magnitude of it’s destruction, a global conflict that destroyed the old world, ended the long nineteenth century and gave birth to an endless twentieth century, which lingers on to this day. The war to end all wars, only birthed more. Not just the sequel but those to this day.
“Never again,” as empty as, “to end all wars.” The myths and supremacy gained from the second world war, created new empires and institutions that promised stability and an end to genocide and injustice. Instead, they allowed for it. Proxies and empires fought despite a United Nations. Unlike it’s predecessor, the League of Nations which had the good sense to dissolve into shame, it remains as a pathetic monolith. War never ended, it gained new definitions, legalese and branding re-defined it. “Police action”, “Intervention”, or “sanctions” all under the auspices of peace and beneath the umbrella of self righteousness born in the victories over evil, in world war two. Two super powers, and a world divided among the victors, both responsible for their own imperial ambitions and mass murders in foreign lands.
Nearly a century after, “Never Again,” was promised a genocide runs with the blood of innocent into the Earth. A dystopian tehcnowar like that which we saw glimmers of in the mid to late twentieth century. Robots fighting alongside men, automated as much as steered by distant human operators. It’s not human. It’s terribly human. The rationalisation to kill children as pragmatic as it has always been. “Ethnic cleansing”, is a pariah concept that only barbarians and the enemies of ‘good’ would deploy, we are lied to know. When conducted by allies, it’s omitted as an act on scale or the innocent, are not innocent. They are all tarred into a collective, guilty by birth, identity or proximity. To be starved, exterminated or ejected. When the Serbian nationalists did this in the 1990s, we the voyeurs were allowed to be repulsed. When the Israeli government continues to do it today, it’s ignored or phrased differently.
Those who proclaim world war two as the, ‘good’ war will ignore the very bad that has been done since. Or, during. The legal institutions and international organisations set up have done nothing to prevent genocides each decade, the world over. They have not deterred authoritarianism, despotism or infringements on human rights. Instead these organisations, work with the repressive and mass killers as partners, have them as members or massage the definitions of what a human right is, according to the ideological needs of power.
The imbalance of concern for the innocent tends to satisfy the powerful. It’s with a disdain and omission of reality, that children are be obliterated, starved and murdered in plain sight. Photographs of burned Korean children consumed by Allied newspaper readers, who are taught to understand it’s is for ‘their’ own good, to stop communism. Vietnamese children naked, skin melting from napalm burns, the television viewer at home hears over the images, “we must burn the village, in order to save it.” It is a known truth. The CNN effect let’s the world watch with excitement a Neo-blitzkrieg, the enemy another Hitler. After the war, Iraqi children can die from starvation and an inability to get medicines because of ‘peace time’ embargoes, a fat woman of government can mutter on television, “eggs need to be broken to make an omelette.” Two decades later, what did that omelette taste like, was it even made, despite so many eggs smashed? We, the West clearly have eaten those omelettes, it’s reflected by our obesity.
Most recently, a fetus lay exposed, burned into death and the world’s voyeurs see it. Did it matter what ethnicity the baby was? Where they were born? What language the mother spoke? Should any of that matter? Because, we understand that it does matter. We have learned to know this. A Palestinian baby, mother are not important. They may as well be Biafran, doomed to the forgotten memory of newspaper clippings and history books, no longer read. Instead, now, they are lost in algorithms on screens of those scrolling for content. A mother, a child, their charred remains, forgotten to memes and content. Ever to be remembered by those nearby, who kissed them, held them, loved them, could smell them before and after, and who would go on to bury them.
It seems that we need narratives. Those born from an obedience to myth, the appeal to authority is all that matters, most depend upon it now. That baby, may, become a terrorist or is associated by proximity to terrorists. What is terrorism? If not the murder of children. Then again, the murder of children is apparently needed, reasoned to be an important outcome to achieve a goal. To make, omelettes. It’s not murder when the lawmakers of your land do so, otherwise their laws would become illegitimate. The babies, their ash and dirt mixed remains, collateral.
That declaration, “never again,” was Utopian. A sincere expression by people who mostly meant it. Cynically, it could also have meant that the victims of that genocide and oppression, would themselves as a group never suffer pogroms and mass death either. In becoming a truth. For the chauvinistic Zionists and their backers, this is true. When expressed however, it was meant for all human beings. Regardless of faith, race and culture. To assume supremacy because of nation, race, ideology and religion is wicked, vile. To see the innocent as an enemy because of nation, race and religion, is evil.
Piles of naked, lifeless bodies outside the death camps of Auschwitz may as well be those heaped masses of dead innocent at Dresden. Innocent murdered. Scorched, shadowy remnants of human life, lost in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, vaporised innocent people, the rationale of their guilt because of the deeds conducted by the government that coerces and rules them. Just the rationale that led to the terrorism of 2001, New York cities innocent as undeserving. Except inside the minds of mass murderers, political and ideological killers.
The world set forth with, again, again and again. The reasons always certain. The policy ambitions made sense for most of the generation involved. Until the attrition of extermination and war grew to be too much. Then, what was the original point. The invasion of Iraq was a mistake, Vietnam? In the case of settler colonialism, genocide is crucial, it is the bedrock of Manifest Destiny.
Ignorance is now, more than ever, a choice. Though, knowing seems as impotent as not knowing. The reality is that no matter how heinous, and unjust the outcomes turn out being. The ends, do seem to justify the means. The ends, are ever fluid. The ends, it turns out is endless power. More government, it’s avatar and identity may change. Though, it’s essence remains. The killers are retained. The appeal to authority is certain. The myths of the past, a skeleton that gives today a bloody shape.
The innocent must die. They will die. Those eggs will be smashed. The omelette, is power itself and those who are addicted to it, and love it. That’s how good people can do bad things. That’s why nice people, look the other way. That’s why most don’t care. They simply can’t care. Their world view, and living depend upon it.
For those that care, there will be an endless parade of innocent lives ruined and killed for us to witness with pornographic voyeurism, to be haunted by with impotent misery. Those who don’t care, the bliss it brings will only certainly ensure that it goes on. The innocent, they shall suffer ever more. The anguish, terrible, The laws and moral proclamations a disgusting epitaph to be spat across countless unmarked graves and graveyards full of those who should never again have been killed.
The promise of, “Never Again,” felt and still feels nice. Because it was uttered, unfortunately, it ensured, ever again and again and again, another murdered child, like a senseless rhyme spoken in bullets and bombs, again and again.
The F35 Follies: The Grift Keeps on Giving
I took months off to work on other projects and catch up on other business.
I’m back.
The F35 continues to be the gift that keeps on grifting. The F35B and C models are the Marine Corps Short Takeoff/Vertical Landing (STOVL) and US Navy aircraft respectively. Both the B and C models have had their challenges due to the very different takeoff requirements and the concomitant engineering challenges to meet that. And keep in mind all of this expense and reduction in capability to have a stealth capability means nothing in modern peer combat for toose countries that have long wave radar which can detect stealth.
Low-frequency radars, operating in the VHF (30 to 300 MHz) and UHF (300 MHz to 1 GHz) bands, use wavelengths that are much longer than the size of fighter aircraft. In this range, geometric stealth loses its effectiveness.
***
A conventional radar is called monostatic: the transmitter and receiver are in the same place. Stealth aircraft are optimized for this geometry. The waves are reflected at precise angles to avoid direct return.
Multistatic or bistatic systems separate these components: the receiver is sometimes offset by several kilometers. This geometry eliminates the need to optimize the radar angle and allows secondary returns that are normally absorbed or deflected to be detected.
***
Doppler radar analyzes not only the returning wave, but also its frequency variation caused by the target’s movement (the Doppler effect). This method is effective for filtering out stationary targets (ground, clouds, mountains) and isolating moving ones.
The money spent for what is necessarily a very niche and boutique capability has rendered these aircraft extraordinarily expensive with severely reduced military efficacy.
If you look at the CBO report, there is a steep age gradient downgrade in availability and reliability for the very expensive bird.
What is very disturbing is this particular graph which shows the premature aging and lowered availability rates for USMC F35Bs. This does not bode well for future usage.
If interested in further explcation, check out the document cited below.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61482
Per radar vulnerability, see this: https://www.flyajetfighter.com/how-radars-detect-stealth-aircraft-today/
Trucking w/Gord
Gord is back to discuss the problems being exposed in the trucking industry.
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Capitalism Civilizes
“Participation in capitalist markets and bourgeois virtues has civilized the world. It has ‘civilized’ the world in more than one of the word’s root senses, that is, making it ‘citified,’ from the mere increase in a rich population. It has too, I claim, as many eighteenth-century European writers also claimed, made it courteous, that is, ‘civil.’ ‘The terrestrial paradise,’ said Voltaire, ‘is Paris.'”
—Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues
Hope for Gen Z w/J. Burden
J. Burden joined me to discuss the major problems conflicting Gen Z.
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My Fabric, My Choice: On Trump’s EO Banning Flag Burning
On August 25, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at people who burn or desecrate the American flag. The order instructs the U.S. attorney general to “vigorously prosecute” offenders, imposes a mandatory one‑year jail sentence for anyone who sets fire to the flag, and commands federal officials to refer cases to state authorities and to cancel visas and naturalization proceedings for foreigners who take part. Trump justified the directive by describing the flag as a sacred national symbol and by claiming that flag burning is “uniquely offensive” conduct likely to incite lawless action. Supporters saw the move as patriotic. Critics, however, recognised it as a direct challenge to the First Amendment’s protection of expression. This article explains why the executive order contradicts binding precedent, ignores the founders’ warnings about free speech, and diverts attention from a foreign policy that is itself fueling protest.
For more than three decades, the Supreme Court has been clear that burning an American flag, however distasteful, is protected expressive conduct. In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Court overturned the conviction of Gregory Lee Johnson, who had burned a flag outside the 1984 Republican National Convention. Writing for the majority, Justice William Brennan declared that “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” The justices rejected the argument that preserving the flag’s sanctity justified criminal penalties and dismissed the notion that symbolic protest qualifies as “fighting words” or incitement. In subsequent rulings, the Court reaffirmed that response to offensive speech should be more speech, not censorship. Trump’s executive order attempts to resurrect a legal theory already rejected by the nation’s highest tribunal and invites prosecutors to punish conduct that the Constitution protects.
To understand why punishing flag burning undermines the republic, one need only listen to the founders themselves. George Washington, addressing officers of the Continental Army at Newburgh in 1783, warned that when citizens are prevented from speaking their minds “reason is of no use to us—the freedom of Speech may be taken away—and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” Washington’s admonition came amid rumors of a mutiny and emphasised that public debate and criticism are necessary to prevent unchecked power from degenerating into tyranny. If military officers, at the height of war, needed to hear that warning, how much more must a peacetime president heed it today?
As early as 1722, Benjamin Franklin—writing under the pseudonym Silence Dogood—argued that free inquiry and free speech are inseparable from liberty. In one of his essays he observed, “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the Right of another.” Franklin explained that a government secure in its virtue has nothing to fear from criticism. He warned that whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. Criminalizing protest against the state’s policies therefore betrays the very ideas the flag is meant to represent.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, drafted by George Mason and adopted by the revolutionary convention, declared that “the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.” This revolutionary charter predated the federal Bill of Rights and influenced several state constitutions. It recognised that a free press and, by extension, free expression are safeguards against arbitrary power. When a modern executive asserts the authority to imprison citizens for burning a flag, he invites the very despotism Mason warned against.
In Federalist No. 84, Alexander Hamilton cautioned against criminalising conduct that was not previously illegal and warned that “the practice of arbitrary imprisonments…have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.” Hamilton stressed that confining people for offenses unknown to the law, or hurrying them to jail where their suffering is hidden, is a more dangerous engine of oppression than overt acts of despotism. Imprisoning protestors for burning a piece of cloth — an act the Supreme Court has held to be constitutionally protected—would constitute precisely the sort of arbitrary punishment that the framers feared.
Thomas Jefferson reminded his friend James Currie in 1786 that “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Though written long before the Bill of Rights, Jefferson’s warning underscores a consistent theme: the founders believed that open dissent is the guardian of all other rights. A government secure in its legitimacy does not fear the speech of its citizens; it embraces it as the measure of its health.
Punishing flag burning is misguided for reasons that extend beyond case law. The act is dramatic but non‑violent; conflating a symbolic gesture with violence collapses the distinction between protest and harm. The flag represents the ideals of liberty and equality; compelling people to revere it under threat of imprisonment turns patriotism into a coerced ritual and trivializes the flag’s meaning. History shows that suppressing dissent galvanizes opposition. Efforts to ban flag desecration during the Vietnam era, the civil‑rights movement, and the leadup to the Iraq war did not quash those protests; they underscored the protesters’ point that the government cares more about symbols than about justice. Jailing protestors creates martyrs and signals a government insecure in its legitimacy. A confident republic meets offensive ideas with argument and persuasion, not with punishment.
The timing of the executive order is not incidental. Since October 2024, the United States has supplied Israel with billions of dollars in weapons and provided unwavering diplomatic cover for its assault on Gaza. An Al Jazeera report notes that Washington’s support “has been unwavering” and that both President Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden have backed Israel’s assault on Gaza, which human‑rights groups describe as a genocide. These facts have fuelled protests across the country. Flag burning has become a symbol of disgust with U.S. complicity in mass violence; protesters argue that the flag no longer stands for freedom when it is draped over bombs used in Gaza. Instead of addressing these critiques, the order criminalizes protest and diverts attention from questions about national priorities.
Critics of the Gaza war point out that Madison’s warnings about tyranny are especially relevant when a nation wages war abroad while curtailing liberty at home. War concentrates power in the executive and normalizes exceptional measures. Criminalizing protest during wartime multiplies the danger. History provides ample examples: the suppression of anti‑war speech during World War I, internment of Japanese‑Americans during World War II, and the mass surveillance authorized after the September 11 attacks. The current order continues this pattern, punishing those who would call attention to civilian suffering and government complicity. It reflects a government more concerned with preserving its image than with living up to the values the flag symbolizes.
Donald Trump’s flag‑burning order is a symbolic gesture meant to placate a base that equates patriotism with unquestioning loyalty. But the United States was founded on a different ethos. The First Amendment exists because the framers understood that freedom of expression is the lifeblood of a republic. When James Madison cautioned that suppressing communication about public officials attacks the very guardian of all other rights, he was not merely theorizing; he was warning future generations against exactly the sort of overreach embodied by the current order. George Washington feared that a nation deprived of free speech would be led dumb and silent like sheep to the slaughter, Benjamin Franklin insisted that liberty cannot exist without freedom of thought and expression, and George Mason reminded us that only despotic governments restrain the press. Together, these warnings point to the same conclusion: any government that imprisons citizens for symbolic protest betrays the very foundations on which it claims to stand.
America’s strength lies not in enforcing reverence for symbols but in tolerating dissent that tests our commitments. The flag is powerful precisely because it stands for the freedom to disagree with those in power. To punish people for burning it is to empty it of meaning. Instead of prosecuting dissenters, the government should address the grievances that drive them—whether that be unchecked executive power, abuses of civil liberties, or complicity in foreign conflicts. In a republic worthy of its founding documents, citizens do not fear their government, and the government does not fear its citizens. If the flag is to continue inspiring respect, it must remain a symbol of a nation that protects liberty even when doing so is uncomfortable.
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