Starvin Larry

Strike while the iron is hot.

There can be no better advertisement against Democrats, neoconservatives, and never-Trumpers than their display after the Helsinki summit. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

The Democrats’ destruction began long before Trump. They are wholly associated with government, their answer to all problems and the source of their identity and power. Where they once had a healthy hostility towards the military and the intelligence agencies, they are now among their stoutest defenders. Their ideology, such as it is, is simply more: more government, taxes, laws, regulations, revenues, power, surveillance, wars, and programs, in short, more blob.

Democrats and government is not just a marriage of convenience. They believe, to the core of their being, in its power with a fervor and conviction that surpasses most religious faith. Denied control of the government, they are fish on the bank, deprived of their element…

AmRRON (American Redoubt Radio Operator’s Network) holds an annual grid-down exercise, having its members relay traffic and reports for a disaster scenario. In my view its what the ARRL’s Field Day actually should be, but that’s another story. Mauser sends the following:

First, I'm not sure how familiar you are with AMRRON, so a quick run down of their SOI is as follows: Nationwide voice and digital traffic nets on 30min windows, every 6 hours upon activation. This is followed by a rolling regional net every 6 hours consisting of 30 min voice followed by 30 min digital comms windows, which is supposed to be followed by 2m local voice and digital nets and dissemination of relevant traffic to the unlicensed public by the Channel 3 project (FRS/GMRS, CB, MURS) and the Black Echo project (low power FM broadcast). I really don't think there is anything else like AMRRON in…

Continuing the theme of this sad day, I will share a story I just learned about.

In this video from the Library of Congress, Sarah Cameron summarizes her forthcoming book: “The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan“.

There are some similarities with the Holodomor (subject of Robert Conquest’s famous book, “The Harvest of Sorrow”) in that a forced collectivization campaign led to a massive man-made famine in a region that under normal circumstances was a major food exporter.  While you could say the Ukraine was the breadbasket of the USSR, Kazakhstan was its stockyard.

Unlike the Ukrainian peasants that fells victim to the dekulakization campaign, however, the Kazakhs were nomads, whose lifestyle was adapted to raising livestock in a vast territory of marginal land. Unlike in the case of the Ukraine SSR, a desire to stamp out Kazakh national identity and aspirations does not appear…