Baldwin didn’t just win at Montgisard; he completely decimated Saladin’s elite Mamluk bodyguard, forcing the Sultan to flee into the desert on a racing camel. Modern commentators frequently dismiss this victory as a fluke caused by Saladin’s overconfidence and loose scouting, completely erasing the teenage king’s tactical exploitation of the terrain. Was Montgisard a masterclass in psychological warfare and heavy cavalry shock tactics, or did Saladin simply hand the kingdom to a dying boy through sheer, careless arrogance?
Caption: Baldwin IV
The kiss of peace…
GoFundMe
The aftermath of the Karmelo Anthony trial presents some interesting, critical – and dangerous – challenges for our society, and it also demonstrates a victory of sorts, albeit a Pyrrhic one, for those aligned with the forces of class warfare and the constant destruction of trust in any institution other than their own.
The sad thing is that I am not shocked in the least at the vitriol and the threats coming to whites and the judicial system. There is even a smattering of Biden’s proposition that “you ain’t black” unless you believe and vote for democrats, as blacks who agree with the guilty verdict are ostracized and called Uncle Toms. That we are here is a triumph for the Frankfurt School’s invention of Critical Theory, a narrative custom-designed to explain everything in terms of a class-based oppressor/oppressed dynamic, and of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others who mutated Critical Theory into Critical Race Theory – where everything is explained in terms of systemic racial discrimination.
The mechanism by which Critical Theory works is the systematic destruction of trust in disfavored organizations or institutions, casting them as oppressors who pursue only interests and outcomes that benefit the oppressor class at the expense of the oppressed.
That is simply a death sentence to any society, culture, institution, or governing system that depends upon trust to operate. Once trust is gone, impartiality and fairness are abolished as a consequence, and then the battle for control of the institutions begins because it is only through control of these institutions that “justice” is found, and justice is in quotes because, in Clintonian fashion, it depends on what the definition of “is” is.
I want to say that this is just another example of emotional reasoning, the process by which right or wrong is determined by how strongly a person feels about that thing, but it goes beyond that. It is a form of social and mental warfare. What we are observing is not simply emotional reasoning, but what some philosophers call motivated reasoning. The conclusion is selected first because it aligns with identity, tribe, ideology, moral commitments, or desired outcomes, and then the evidence is sorted and interpreted to support that conclusion.
Human beings are not naturally rational creatures who occasionally become emotional. We are emotional creatures who are capable of rational thought. The work of Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and others suggests that people typically arrive at conclusions intuitively and then construct rational justifications afterward. When a case becomes politically or culturally salient, this tendency intensifies. That does not mean only one side engages in emotional reasoning. People who are convinced the verdict proves systemic racism are probably motivated by emotion. People who are convinced the verdict proves the bankruptcy of progressive racial politics may also be motivated by emotion. Confirmation bias can cut both ways, but that is where the ability to reason breaks the cycle. I know that people say that nobody can turn off the emotional aspect of an event that took a human life, but that is what a jury trial is designed to do.
Sadly, events outside the courtroom have taken on a larger role in the judicial process and their inevitable outcomes. Protests, attacks on law enforcement, and racial ambulance-chasing lawyers getting way ahead of the process poison the jury pools and set a narrative for those who preemptively assume bias. A good example is now that OJ Simpson is dead, one of O.J. Simpson’s jurors revealed that 90% of them believed he was guilty, but they let him off as “payback” for Rodney King’s case.
Motivated reasoning often appears immune to contrary evidence. Facts that support the preferred narrative are amplified while facts that undermine it are ignored, discounted, or reinterpreted. Evidence doesn’t matter unless it fits the pre-established narrative; all else is discarded as biased, tools of the oppressor, or worse, treated as if it didn’t exist. Some people may fully understand the facts and still legitimately object to the verdict because they disagree with the law itself, the charging decision, sentencing practices, or broader criminal justice policies. In that situation, they are not rejecting reality; they are arguing about what justice ought to be rather than what the law presently is. That is common in immigration law these days.
There are also dishonest people, some with a dedicated, easily manipulable following of moral and ethical zombies, whose intent is not to ensure a just outcome but to hijack the process and the public mind for their own benefit. The question we should ask is this: Are the reactions we are seeing disputing the jury’s factual findings, disputing the legal standards applied by the court, using the case as a proxy battle for larger cultural and political conflicts, or simply enhancing their own visibility? Those arguments often get blended, and when they do, it can look like people are denying reality when they may be arguing about four entirely different things – but nobody in the media has the courage to ask them which one of the four they are advancing.
The difficulty is that once a criminal trial becomes a symbolic political event, the facts of the case frequently become secondary to the story that people decided to tell before the trial even began.
Interesting how his family threw him under the bus and are living high off the hog with the GoFundMe money gathered for his defense.
Maybe it’s Only Perspective
Why are the current USNS fleet oilers being named for dirtbags? Ok, to be fair, the War Department renamed T-AO-206 the Oscar V. Peterson and struck the name Harvey Milk, a murdered San Francisco homosexual and child molester (a hero to the political left). I swear, they’d name one the Fidel Castro, Bernie Sanders, George Floyd, Big Mike Obama, or the Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, if they could get away with it.
An Android Walks into a Bar
Rimshot! I’ll be here all night.
Bullet Points:
** Get ready to clutch your pearls. Who was behind the creation of American biolabs in Ukraine?
** Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) says he was the only Democrat on the Senate’s Fraud Exploratory Committee to vote in favor of opening an investigation into Malia Obama’s suspicious USAID grants when she was still living at the White House in 2007. “She was just a kid,” said Fetterman, “So shouldn’t we be looking at how a high school girl snatched $2.3 million for writing pen pal letters to a few dozen kids in Africa?” Fetterman says the party’s refusal to investigate its own people is the main reason he believes there will be a red wave in November. “Nobody sees it coming, but mark my words.”
** Brain-in-a-Box – is it the new A.I.? Or are we on the verge of a Butlerian Jihad (Dune)? See left
** Democrats keep ranting against the African American immigrant who became the first trillionaire in the West. (There are monarchs in the Middle East with equal or greater fortunes). Shouldn’t they be happy about it?
“We’re lost in Space”
RHT447 rallies the crew to decide what “lost in space” will mean to the crew of the Jupiter Two. (yes, it rhymes)
Yes, Mr. Thompson, it’s high time that you were mentioned in dispatches.
Bullet points continue:
** What happens when the Quad + UAE decide to offer a better plan without the PRC’s filthy hands all over it? (Radio Free Asia) “Fiji sits at the crossroads of the South Pacific and is the natural logistics hub for everything moving between Australia, New Zealand, and the wider island chain,” said Brown. “If you’re going to build one port that serves the whole Pacific, you build it where the shipping lanes converge—and that is Suva, the fulcrum for the region.” (h/t Claudio)
** CDRSAL chats about using grandpa’s gun. More like great grandpa, but I’m splitting hairs. The bottom line is that there is nothing wrong with it and we need more guns (with a slightly higher rate of fire). Range is important, so is cost, weight, and rate of fire. One day, when they put nuclear reactors back as standard fleet propulsion, we’ll end up with smaller, less expensive rail guns, but until then, we need an intermediate solution.
** War Department fly-over on Claw Night – USA 250. What did he say?
** Exploring the English language – with Jules.
** There are no urinals on the Ford-class aircraft carriers (CVN). In the real world, it’s much easier to build troughs for men to urinate in, and they don’t need to sit to handle that part of their business. Men make up approximately 79% to 80% of deployed and active-duty US Sailors. Am I being too subtle?
** LSP recounts his efforts as a cat wrangler. There is a market for those skill sets in the Asian community, LSP, there is nothing stopping you from opening your own Lee Ho Fook’s there in Texas Hill Country. You could cut your overhead by ranching your own protein – as it were.
Under new management…
Identify the Aircraft
1
In active service until 1940
2
3
Two photos – famous choppa that never made it to prime time
Parting Shot
End
Identify the Aircraft
1 – Keystone B-4A
2 – Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero
3 – Hiller HJ-1/YH-32 Hornet
Outstanding
Every US auxiliary should have a pair of 76mm SuperRapids, a pair of Bofors (or those 57s)
and a SeaRam or two, at least. Every commercial ship 10,000 tons+ should have at least one
SuperRapid and one Bofors. Pirate, low-end drone, small boat swarm solved. Disarming
the world’s merchant fleets was one of the most imbecilic decisions, ever.
– Kle.
Kle – maybe we US flag the world’s merchant fleet (except for communist countries) and somehow license the weapons systems (I agree to your layout) to authorized operators.
An excellent commentary today all around
**
GoFundMe – You have covered this and conveyed my thoughts more eloquently by far than I could have. I believe we started down the slippery slope of societal collapse a generation or more ago with massive pushing by the left that is accelerating in the current political environment. Do they do this all just for power? Does the left truly believe that this is the pathway to their Nirvana? Is this their plan that they are executing or are they just taking advantage of the current situation?
***
Cat in the Kettle – Long time no hear – Thanks for the laugh
MLT,
“GoFundMe”
Dumb Question of the Day (really dumb, but not meant to be too irritating)
Is it a certain class/section of people (those who substituted BHO for Jesus) who are pushing us (our country/our culture) down this slippery slope or is it the Left (another word for the Marxists) who are pushing using these people or am I looking at this with my usual wry vision?
There is a lunatic fringe of elites (all of whom feel oppressed) that pushes insanity as normal, and though most of them are wealthy by all objective standards, they are Marxists who believe in redistributing OTHER PEOPLE’S money, which is not Marxism – maybe it’s neomarxism or something else – a term that a university professor made up, perhaps. If you don’t have enough hair to dye it blue, a blue wig will suffice. They claim not to know what a woman is – a man can give birth, for example – but they’re sure that Michelle Obama IS a woman, and there you go.
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In another time and place, they’d be placed in lunatic asylums.
I give you the portmanteau: confixtortion (confiscation+extortion)
confiscation: To use one’s authority to lay claim to and separate a possession from its holder.
extortion: To take or seize from an unwilling person by physical force, menace, duress, torture, or any undue or illegal exercise of power or ingenuity.
(above from wiktionary.org)
I do not consider “lawful” to necessarily be “legal”, therefore a law such as income tax may be lawful, but I think it’s awful to take a man’s earnings to pay my representative’s salary for sitting on his donkey in an assemblage of other donkeys.
Exactly. The Founders tried to safeguard against what has metastasized into today’s DC Rathole, they wanted the smart successful folks from communities across the nation to give up their positions, businesses, etc. for a few years and use their unique skills to guide the country at a Federal level. Pretty simple. Career politicians on the public confiscatory dole was not their design. Same goes with The Ten Commandments; man has worked for millennia to shade what are straight forward ‘rules’ in all manner of ways to allow themselves a clear conscience when being immoral.
Identify the Aircraft:
1. Keystone B-6
2. Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero
3. Hiller YH-32A Hornet
#1 was correctly identified as a B-6. Excellent, Surly.
The Karmelo trial was the second major modern trial in the last few months in NorthTexas. In both cases the killer was known. The murder of Athena Strand totally gripped the local community. The trial was broadcast live on the local news every day. I watched most of it. The video and audio of the slow incompetent killing with the killer singing was on TV. It shook the community’s trust.
Karmelo was just another boring Black on White killing. The only thing more boring is Black on Black killings. BLM with its greedy fraud has become expected and boring. Boring intimidation is a losing formula to taking over the world.
70+ percent of black children are born without a father in the home. The numbers have been steady for the last 40 years. Obama, a gay man, was a bad example. There are a number of good examples of black fathers, but they, by their nature, are referred to by the elite media as “Uncle Tom”- sell-outs to society. The truth is that grandmothers bear the yoke in the black community for raising children, and it’s not an ideal situation.
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I grew up in a dysfunctional family, and my grandparents raised me, so I’m not blaming children or grandparents. But the numbers are telling.
Payback for Rodney King, as if his settlement of 3.8 million plus his attorney’s fees, 60-odd deaths in the LA riots and Reginald Denny’s pain, suffering and permanent medical disabilities which greatly exceeded King’s weren’t enough. And all the rest of it so quaintly enumerated by L-L. “There we are then.”
Anthony Trial: Watching the street anarchists, all black per proper media outlets, who have convinced themselves they are the arbiters of righteous justice, spout off about the case to rile themselves up further, including Ms. Crockett from her elevated seat, when presented with the actual facts, went even further with their garbage rhetoric instead of backing off.
No fixing tribal-level derangement pushed by 15% of the national population…who always seem to be at the center of this type of unrest.
– in that vein, saw a Matt Walsh short on Rosa Parks, everything we were taught about this heroin was a flat out lie, she was used to advance the lawsuit as a sympathetic face for the cause. Nothing we are being told is true…so…stay put of cities and areas of stupidity best one can, and live your life away from these idiots who want to harm you.
***
Ukraine Labs (bioweapon culling centers): We joke about the ugliness of his ‘library’ but maybe it’s really a lab…looks like one.
***
Jules and Words: Saying it again, it’s like the Brits have a different word for everything…and no ice for sweet tea.
***
Sidebar: Prayers for Jeremy Clarkson, The Greatest Living Englishman…after having recovered last Fall from a couple of blocked heart arteries it was revealed on Clarkson’s Farm in the last episodes that he has prostate cancer that is apparently ‘aggressive’. Hopefully his cash on hand will buy him premium medical care and not that death knell garbage the Socialists here think is medical nirvana that affords patients waiting years for emergency care only to die on the gurney in the hospital hall.
I’ve been watching Clarkson’s Farm. Aggressive prostate cancer is a tough one to beat. He has the means to be treated anywhere, but he might not beat the clock. I’ve enjoyed the Clarkson’s Farm series and hope he can do shows for the next forty years. He’s 66 years old.
Timelines are critical, and this is no different, technically it is ‘old news’…and we have some hope as he is still with us: S5Ep1 was late Fall 2024, which places the last two episodes around July and August 2025, maybe even September…haven’t watched those two yet. That was 10 months ago +/-, and I have not heard of his failing health or death. And it does matter with their lousy NHS to have the funds to bypass crappy Socialist healthcare and, as you and others have mentioned, get the best he can anywhere in the world. It is beatable if caught and treated early (RIP Scott Adams, who’s PC that went to his bones was advanced when diagnosed in May 2025…oddly similar timeline to Clarkson).
**Democrats keep ranting against the African American immigrant who became the first trillionaire in the West.**
Democrats are racist.
Obviously.
I would say it’s beyond that, I just think they are galactically stupid therefore are immune to truth and facts (Anthony trial ‘street protesters’ – all black – literally screamed false facts about the case, in public…shamelessly). Musk makes the oft used ‘African-American’ moniker look bad to the envious crowd of grifters and the lazy, so they have to hate him. Used to be able to ignore those types…not anymore.
–
John Wayne: “Life is tough, but it’s tougher if you are stupid”…and that brilliant Gump-ism, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
In the land of the blind, the one eye-d man should be king. Sometimes yes, but sometimes no.
Cat Wrangling-When trying to thin out barn cats, porcupines, armadillos and other clawed creatures, I’ve always found that once they were trapped, my welder’s gloves were satisfactory protection. However, there is the odd occasion where a full body welder’s glove would have come in handy.
Use a welding APRON or a tree-cutting apron, in addition to gloves and a lumberjack face guard, if you plan to give a cat a bath.
Trap it in the grill, turn the gas on for a minute, then hit the sparker. Rancher neighbor tried that with a skunk…didn’t work. I was laughing so hard at his wife’s telling the story one Taco Tuesday I almost lost my [very good] fajita out my nose.
How to wash a cat.
—
1. Cage cat.
—
2. Raise toilet lid and leave up.
—
3. Open front door and leave open.
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4. In one smooth motion, drop cat in toilet and slam lid shut. Hold lid shut.
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5. Flush. Hearing protection recommended.
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6. When flush is complete, let go of lid and step well to the side.
—
7. Close front door. Allow cat to air dry.
It truly warms one’s heart to be considered worthy. Thank you. Will do my best for the crew of Jupiter Two. To quote an old mountain man, “Nope, never been lost. But there was that time up on the Wasatch when I was powerful confused”. Had a similar experience last week in the condiments aisle. At least I think it was the condiments aisle. Also, the ECR (Environmental Control Robot) is due for some upgrades. It likes the jet pack idea, but is balking at the Espresso machine.
You have a high bar and once mentioned, there is always the possibility of “Spaceflight with RHT” or some such.
Sadly, the “black family” is becoming an oxymoron.
I wish the first black president had been an honorable man, with an honorable family, setting the sort of example that Clarence Thomas’ grandfather set for him, as a standard.
I wish that
the first black president had truly been
BLACK.
nd American.
my thoughts
Juan
You mean African negro rather than an ‘American’ mulatto from Hawaii, child and grandchild of communists? I tend to go with content of character and examining Obama’s past reveals a lack of character, whether he was half black/half white or not. He grew up being a closeted homosexual, a druggie and a scammer and that played out during his presidency. He could NEVER have passed a security clearance check, yet he could be president. Either our security clearance process should be based on different criteria or our presidents should be. Even if he passed a background investigation (red flags notwithstanding), his significant other (chick with a stick or just a nasty human) would not have. He’s a sociopath, so maybe he’d have passed a polygraph, but likely not, and nether would the Clintons. Barack’s communist associations, his homosexuality, drug use and foreign associations would each have been disqualifying – and none of them have anything to do with being a mulatto.
.
Was he born in Hawaii? I have no idea. Maybe. All of the “sealed” records need to be unsealed if somebody wants to be president. Did he attend college as a “foreign student” on an Indonesian passport? I think that’s likely. Are the children he claims to be his blood children related to him? The problem is the claim that they are. Nobody cares if he and Michael adopted. Is it important to know what his spouse’s gender is (blood test)? Only because truthfulness matters. If the public elects a homo with a tranny husband – it’s legal.
Your essay on the watermelon felon was great and spot on. Having been born, raised, worked and played in the jungle until age 32, I never gave the ghetto rats any quarter. Still won’t today even though I very seldom if ever come in contact anymore. The 8% of the 13% just need to be put down like the feral cats. Anyone for Chinese???
Anyone for Chinese?
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The food tastes good so you don’t complain, etc. Maybe LSP can supplement the cash coming in from the plate at church?
There are no urinals on the Ford-class aircraft carriers
Does this mean everyone needs to squat to piss?
Still in the memory bank is the 1964 all inclusive cruise on the General Maurice Rose T-AP-126. The ‘commodes’ were of a constant flush design that acted as a secondary bidet. The constant stream of cold sea water discouraged lingering.
I would hope not.
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The secondary bidet feature was also a problem on the old USS New Orleans (LPH)
The Anthony trial was an attention getter in that the perp ‘thought’ he would walk because he was black and there was an outcry. The problem is, he did the murder in red state Texas, so he was actually held accountable. Personally, I think he got off light, because of the women on the jury, who wouldn’t give him the max punishment. Re the biolabs, remember, a LOT of the funding and direction was run through Fauci and NIH, even with DOD being ‘in charge’. That way, the funding didn’t get questioned closely…
The Dems/Obummer were large and in charge when the USNS ships came up for a naming scheme. That’s the answer as to who/why/and the names selected.
X2 on both accounts.
Yes, I know as to naming, but it wounds my naval pride that scumbags have their names on proud and important ships. It’s like naming a ship the Benedict Arnold and expecting that it would somehow be acceptable.
Target ship.
You could re-name a hulk before you punch missiles or torpedoes into it.
Quite a few folks in NAVSEA got told to shut up if they wanted to keep working, including the admirals…
Excellent Cult. Marx. takedown, right on.
Then there’s the restaurant.
Open the restaurant. There’s a cat in the kettle at Lee Ho Fook’s.