"Purpose vs Passivity"
For some strange reason, I’m reminded of Confederate cavalryman JEB Stuart’s bluntly-put adage (often attributed to GEN George S Patton, who knows): A soldier who won’t fuck won’t fight.
Setting aside any "national security" concerns arising from letting The Atlantic's Russia-hoaxer Jeffrey Goldberg in on the Administration's Houthi-bombing call, I doubt that any creature more sentient than an amoeba can have been surprised to learn that US cabinet members "loathe" European "freeloading". If you're paying attention, you'll know that total contempt for the Euros appears to be entirely bipartisan. Are you shocked by Hegseth dismissing the Continent as "pathetic"? Well, you should have been around in the Obama era, when Victoria Nuland, She-Wolf of the Donbass, was rather pithier:
F**k the EU!
Or in the Bush era, when Ms Nuland's house-husband Robert Kagan summed up the relationship as:
Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus
Or a generation earlier, in the first Bush era. From General Norman Schwarzkopf, who certainly wore the uniform better than Admiral Levine, even if in terms of accomplishing strategic goals in the national interest it didn't ultimately make much difference:
Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.
I hasten to add that, when it comes to expeditionary soldiering in faraway countries of which we know little, I take neither side and nor should you. Pace Mr Kagan's butch-boy banter, US victory in war is slipping beyond living memory. Pace Stormin' Norman, American inability to use forty per cent of the planet's military budget to any strategic purpose is now so deeply ingrained that I'm seriously minded to try hunting with an accordion.
So forget foreign warmongering. As readers of my big-picture piece in the current issue of Quadrant Down Under will be aware, the entire west (America included) is now so demographically enfeebled, economically kaput and culturally self-loathing that it is no longer about Take Your Child-Bride To Work Day in Jalalabad or making a world safe for non-binary Houthis; it is about saving ourselves – and in that respect the old sneers still have some relevance.
Meanwhile, up north, the big political news this weekend was supposedly that the globalist apparatchik installed as PM by Tony Blair and his Davos chums has called a Canadian election for April 28th. That's the shortest possible campaign, because Mark Carney has a bit of a Kamala problem: he's not as stupid as she is, but he has to win before the voters wise up to how unlikeable he is. The opposition leader whose strategy was to sit on his lead and munch an apple while not being Justin Trudeau now has to figure out something different to do for the next month.
After prolonged study of the apple-muncher's manifesto, it seems clear that, even if he manages to reverse the poll slippage and secure a stonking Starmer-sized majority in the House of Commons, there is no prospect of Trump-scale pushback from the Canadian Tories. Albeit not on the ballot, the real choice for Canadian voters is whether to join Trump, Vance and their senior colleagues in a last-ditch effort to save their societies – or go down the Eurinal of history with the Continentals. Canada's "natural governing party" has made its choice: Justin's final act as PM was to fly to London as the token non-European in Sir Keir's "coalition of the willing", and Carney's first act as PM was to announce that he has no plans to meet with the orange bloke next door.
But they're the alternatives on offer when it comes to the future of the west: Trumpian energy or Euro-passivity.
If you want the perfect contrast between the new US administration's energy and wimpy suicidal Euro-passivity, skip the French and the Belgians and the Germans and go straight to "Trump's best friend": Trump is from Mars, Farage is from Uranus.
As I've mentioned before, upon the publication of America Alone, large numbers of princes, presidents and prime ministers called me in to chew over the general thesis ...and then they did nothing. So any political solution is a lot more difficult than it was twenty years ago – while the politico-media class is, especially across His Majesty's dominions, even squishier than it was.
And yet the last two months has been kind of inspiring. From Snow White to Adolescence, the corporate storytellers of Big Woke peddle the same cobwebbed drivel. Polls on either side of the Atlantic show that - after two decades of being force-fed the demonisation of straight white men - the young are moving rightward, if only because over on that side they're not outright hated. In America, a majority of young guys now identify with Trump and his determined pushback. Faced with picking and choosing from the suicidally passive Euro-Canadian establishment, where does that youthful energy go?
With any luck, all up in the grills of the (anti-)Western pseudo-“elites” who betrayed them, insulted them, and then tried to act as if they’d never even existed at all, that’s where. When the young white men Steyn refers to above seek vengeance against their longtime tormenters—and yes, I do mean PHYSICAL vengeance, including as much violence and/or bloodshed as they deem required to settle accounts—they shouldn’t balk or back down until THEY feel it’s time to say “enough, I’m satisfied.” By all rights that decision must be theirs—theirs alone, and absolutely no one else’s.
As for the Europeans, they're not entirely lame - Ukraine has forced the Russian Army into a stalemate for over the past three years - and taking back half the territory seized by Russia in their initial invasion, using junk US materiel and munitions, most of it otherwise headed to the junkyard after demilling. And the Ukrainians, using drone warfare, have redefined long range force projection - as witness this: https://mickryan.substack.com/p/ukraine-strikes-back-hard
As for Mike Waltz and our overfunded and incompetent "national security state", he got spoofed by Goldberg, and it was probably pretty simple:
I spoke with a friend who is familiar with Signal, and it turns out that you can change your screen name to anything you want - your phone number stays the same. So Waltz or his staffer accepts Goldberg into the group, thinking that it's someone who is legit - and he or his staffer doesn't check the phone number... So Goldberg spoofed Waltz - if this is the case - and after Goldberg is done with the chat, he can just change his name back to his real name - and he has plausible deniability. Waltz said at one point that one of the people in the group chat didn't receive any of the messages in the chat - and this would confirm the spoofing. And that means that Signal as it stands now is *very* insecure - for anyone who needs to maintain confidentiality - there needs to be some sort of code put in to stop this kind of spoofing.
Just thinking about it a bit more, and an easy means of prevention comes to mind: Create a whitelist of screen names and phone numbers - a dictionary in Python or the equivalent in Rust would do the trick - the screen names would be the keys and the phone numbers would be the values. So you input a screen name and phone number, you pull up the corresponding screen name and number from the dictionary, and compare the numbers. If the numbers match, then it's a go, if not, the number is excluded from the group chat, and then you could do a "whitepages" search on the number and find out who it really belongs to - and take appropriate action. Of course, there's the problem of "call forwarding" or the number could be hijacked in some other way - and you might be able to add code to deal with this, but otherwise, this should fix the spoofing problem. Signal is open source, so a fork could be done, and it's just using Xcode to create the iOS and desktop apps.
The fact that no one in the "national security" establishment thought about this - I figured it out in about 15 minutes after my call with my friend - means that Elon Musk ought to go after these guys with a real vengeance...