Let's Go Privateering!
Posted By: Judy W., 2/23/2025 6:53:21 AM
Time to go a’privateering? We’ve heard a bit about letters of marque and reprisal recently. Sen. Mike Lee has proposed bringing back letters of marque in a thread on X, suggesting them as a tool for going after Mexican drug cartels. Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater, the private security company (it’s rude to call them “mercenaries”) has also weighed in in favor of this approach. My own Congressman, Tim Burchett (R-TN) has introduced legislation allowing the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal against cartels, the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act of 2025, co-sponsored with Rep. Mark Messmer, (R-IN).
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Judy W."
The Lost Agrarian World
17 replies
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. (Snip) I want to talk about a lost agrarian world and what it was like before the rapid industrialization and suburbanization of America and the values.
I want to do that because we have all of these misconceptions and all of this indoctrination and all of this ideological bias about the past.
We talk about this white, monolithic, racist society that has to be overturned under DEI, but let me go back to 1960. I was born here, where I’m speaking, on 125-130 acres of a family farm that had been in my family since 1870.
Trump Is ‘Reclaiming Control’: Senior
White House Official Issues Warning to
Defiant Bureaucrats 8 replies
White House Official Issues Warning to
Defiant Bureaucrats 8 replies
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said President Donald Trump is “reclaiming control” of the federal government after four “painful” years.
“Every single day, the entire White House staff, the entire administration, the entire Cabinet on behalf of President Trump and his extraordinary leadership is getting the lies out of our schools, the men out of women’s sports, the poison out of our foods, the woke out of our military, the predators off our streets, and the illegal aliens the hell out of our country,” Miller said Saturday, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside of Washington, D.C. He said Trump has issued 70 executive orders
Let's Go Privateering!
8 replies
Time to go a’privateering?
We’ve heard a bit about letters of marque and reprisal recently. Sen. Mike Lee has proposed bringing back letters of marque in a thread on X, suggesting them as a tool for going after Mexican drug cartels. Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater, the private security company (it’s rude to call them “mercenaries”) has also weighed in in favor of this approach. My own Congressman, Tim Burchett (R-TN) has introduced legislation allowing the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal against cartels, the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act of 2025, co-sponsored with Rep. Mark Messmer, (R-IN).
Pete Hegseth’s Military
6 replies
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to speak a little bit today, very briefly, about the Pentagon under new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Did you notice that of all the controversial Trump nominees—Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, RFK, Tulsi Gabbard—the Left went after Pete Hegseth the most vehemently? And he required JD Vance to break that tie. There was a reason for that. He is proposing radical changes in the Pentagon.
(Snip)We spend $820 billion a year. It’s about 14% of the entire budget and it’s immune to criticism. And we are building $14 billion carriers.
Though it’s been just a month since his return to the White House, President Donald Trump is making his presence felt at home and abroad, from the Department of Government Efficiency to tariffs to setting the stage to negotiate the end of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Republican Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Eric Burlison of Missouri, Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, Andy Harris of Maryland, and others experienced just how Trump is shaking things up across Europe as they attended the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London this week.
“What’s loud and clear to me is that Europeans aren’t happy,” Norman said. “The people aren’t happy; the leaders are.”
Thank You and Goodnight
10 replies
I confess it's a wee bit demoralising to find JD Vance has stunned Europe with a speech that contains nothing that would be remotely surprising to any reader of this website for the last quarter-century. Of course, he's the Vice President of the United States and I'm a "niche Canadian". And in fairness JD was still in high school back when I started boring on about this stuff.
Nevertheless, the German defence minister Herr Großer von Wich ser spoke for the entire European establishment when he magisterially pronounced Mr Vance's remarks "not acceptable". Germany, France and the rest of Western Europe are dying before our eyes, but it remains "not acceptable"
Just a very short note on the circular money flow of pure corruption behind lawfare 2.0 and the judicial fight against the Trump administration spending freezes. (Snip)
It is the American Bar Association which sets the ethical rules for lawyers, the code lawyers are supposed to follow to remain within professional ethical guidelines.
But the American Bar Association is not a neutral guardian of ethics, especially when it comes to judicial lawfare waged in support of the vast fraud that is USAID.
The American Bar Association has itself been a major recipient of USAID funding then dutifully issued a scathing denunciation of DOGE activities and the USAID spending freeze.
The Zen Stage of Populism
3 replies
The other side liked to say that they were ‘the adults in the room’. For a long time we have known what a laughable inversion of reality that is, as divorced from objective reality as many of the sickest sexual fetishes they also support.
If there was anything ‘adult’ about them it wasn’t the adult that means mature, experienced, responsible and informed. It was the ‘adult’ used in the porn shop sense. What they invoked to convey that they were more responsible, more informed, more wise than the rest of us, was actually a flickering neon light in a seedy backstreet.
But for some people this didn’t fully register.
What the hell is this? I get why Ohio Democrats are doing this, trying to be cute with the whole ‘regulate our bodies’ narrative that no one cared about in 2024. Abortion and female voters did not save Democrats, who obsess over the weirdest issues that will keep this party in the political wilderness.
(Snip) A bill proposed to the Ohio statehouse will make male ejaculation without intent to have a baby, a fineable offense of up to $10,000.
The bill has been proposed by State Representatives Anita Somani and Tristan Rader, who wrote it to point out what they see as the absurdity of rules that control women's bodies
The dismantling of a malevolent empire
7 replies
In the past couple of weeks, devastating information has erupted into the public domain detailing the malign activities of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Trump administration has effectively shut USAID down by freezing its existing foreign assistance programs (Snip)
Far more alarming information has now surfaced suggesting that USAID has been a major contributor to extremist and subversive activity. The Washington Free Beacon reports current and former US officials who worked closely with the aid group, saying they watched for years as it funnelled millions of dollars to bodies engaged in anti-Israel advocacy and that were linked to terrorism.
J.D. Vance In Munich: A Lesson To Elites
2 replies
Nearly one year ago, I met my friend at a table streetside at Andechser am Dom, a restaurant in the heart of Munich, for beer and conversation. (Snip)
We had had dinner the night before. My friend, J.D., skipped out a dinner at the event he was in town attending — the Munich Security Conference, the annual gathering of military heavyweights that bills itself as the “world’s leading forum” to discuss security policy. What was the point, he had told me? He was a first-term US Senator from Ohio who was getting cold-shouldered by the Good and the Great at the conference. Why? His views on the Ukraine War
Swamp Apocalypse
7 replies
The Trump Team fooled everybody, including me. As last week’s various lawsuits sprouted restraining orders like early buds emerging all over the willow trees in springtime, most commenters expected Trump to take a necessary pause for defensive retrenchment.Surely, we all thought, it would take Trump’s anti-bureaucrats some time to clear the judicial logjam. (Snip)
Instead, yesterday Trump tripled down, jamming the battle tank’s accelerator into overdrive and smashing ahead in a whole different direction.His new battlefield banner unfurled yesterday afternoon in the form of one executive order plus three separate press conferences, which together sent a just-relaxing Deep State enemy racing for the bunkers with its trousers still half off.
Most Active Articles (last 48 hours)
MSNBC liberal mainstay Joy Reid’s show has been canceled as part of a major overhaul by the network’s new president Rebecca Kutler, according to a report.
The 7 p.m. program hosted by ardent Trump critic Reid, 56, will be replaced by a new panel show featuring co-hosts Alicia Menendez, Michael Steele, and Symone Sanders Townsend, the New York Times reported, citing insiders.
‘We’re Mad as Hell’: Fuming Canadians
Nix U.S. Vacations to Protest President
Donald Trump’s Tariffs 40 replies
Nix U.S. Vacations to Protest President
Donald Trump’s Tariffs 40 replies
Miffed Canadians are opting out of American vacations as President Donald Trump imposes tariffs on their country to protect his own nation and its people.
The Canadians’ decision not to visit America is having an effect on air and land travel as they push back against the tariffs levied against their nation, the New York Post reported on Saturday. (X) On January 31, the White House confirmed that Trump was preparing to impose fresh tariffs on major U.S. trading partners in an effort to shield American industry and national security, per Breitbart News’s John Carney:
She lost the election, but she’ll always have the NAACP Chairman’s Award.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris reemerged in the public limelight for her first major speech since departing the White House Saturday night and took not-so-subtle shots at both President Trump and tech mogul Elon Musk.
During an acceptance speech at the 56th annual NAACP Image Awards, Harris painted a bleak picture of the state of the country and urged attendees not to lose hope as her own party struggles over its direction amid Trump’s return. (Photo) “While we have no illusions about what we are up against in this chapter in our American story, this chapter will be written
Actress Jane Fonda won the SAG life achievement honor at the SAG Awards on Sunday night and used her speech to defend woke and encourage Hollywood to pursue an anti-Trump agenda.
While the world and broader culture has been seeking to leave woke behind, Jane Fonda came to its defense at the SAG Awards on Sunday night, defining it as simply giving “a damn about other people.” “What we, actors, create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls,” said Fonda. “And make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. By the way, woke just means
Top officials of President Donald Trump’s administration — including newly-confirmed FBI director Kash Patel — are instructing their employees not to respond to an email sent late Saturday from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) which asked them to justify their jobs. Trump senior advisor Elon Musk has warned that failure to respond to the email will be considered a resignation.
Sent late Saturday with the subject line “What did you do last week?”, the email — which was sent to staff at multiple federal agencies — demanded federal employees justify their jobs.
I’ve written about how the left uses language to (often falsely) shape political and social narratives. Abortion is “health care.” Illegal aliens are “undocumented citizens.” The homeless are the “unhoused,” or recently and more and more ridiculously, “people experiencing homelessness,” while people who have ties to Latin America are “Latinx” (although most Latinos in reality want nothing to do with the term).
One the silliest arguments they regularly bring forth, though, is regarding the term “woman”—what does it mean? Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t know; meanwhile, many leftists define it as “anyone who identifies as one.” Right.
Enter Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D, but you probably already knew that),
Starbucks is laying off workers and paring
back the menu as it tries to turn the
business around 28 replies
back the menu as it tries to turn the
business around 28 replies
New York — Starbucks announced Monday it will lay off over 1,000 corporate workers and cut complex and unpopular drinks from its menu in an effort to turn around lagging sales and revamp the coffee chain.
Starbucks is cutting some Frappuccino blended drinks, Royal English Breakfast Latte and White Hot Chocolate as part of its effort to simplify operations and shrink its menu.
“These items aren’t commonly purchased, can be complex to make, or are like other beverages on our menu,” the company said in a release announcing the menu change. Starbucks is cutting 30% of its menu in an effort to simplify its processes.
Renowned Democratic strategist James Carville has delivered a stunning prediction that the Trump administration is in the “midst of a collapse” and will crumble within four to six weeks.
Carville, 80, on Friday urged his fellow Democrats to play “possum,” clear out of the way and let Republicans implode as President Trump plows ahead with his dramatic overhaul of the federal government.
“What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing,” Carville mused to Mediaite founder Dan Abrams.
The elderly Dem guru was the top strategist in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, when Democrats soared back into the White House after 12 years
On Saturday's edition of MSNBC's The Weekend, former CIA Director and current MSNBC analyst John Brennan claimed it was "absurd" to suggest that President Trump fired C.Q. Brown, who Biden had appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because he had a woke agenda.
Absurd? Really? After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Brown put out a video in which he focused on his own trials and tribulations as an African-American, and concluded by saying that he wanted "to lead and listen to necessary conversations on racism, diversity, and inclusion."
Democrats are anxious to rebuild their party on the heels of President Trump’s victory in November. But they have a major problem as they try to refashion their brand: The money isn’t there. Democratic donors — from bundlers to small dollar donors — say they are still angry about the election results and uninspired by anything their side has put forward since then. (Snip) Much of the consternation among the donor community stems from the unprecedented 2024 election cycle, where many felt misled by the party and former President Biden’s reelection campaign. Until the Democratic debate in June, donors and
Unfixable cars? Enough already!
22 replies
I am old enough to have owned a half-dozen cars or trucks with no computers, including a 1941 Ford coup, a 1956 Chevrolet two-door sedan, and a 1966 Chevrolet Malibu. Fixing these vehicles to make them run correctly took some rudimentary skills and a Motors Manual. The electrical system comprised wires, fuses, and a fuse box. The fuel system was simple as well. Diagnosing the problems was simple, and I could fix it all myself. Even the carburetor was not that hard to rebuild. [snip]Under the guise of helping to clean up the environment, the program all but eliminated all cars and parts
Jane Fonda takes aim at Trump administration
during SAG Lifetime Achievement Award speech 21 replies
during SAG Lifetime Achievement Award speech 21 replies
Jane Fonda is getting on her soapbox at the SAG Awards. The SAG-nominated actress was recognized for her decadeslong career with the Lifetime Achievement Award at Sunday's ceremony. Fonda was presented with the honor by fellow actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus. (Snip) Fonda's fiery speech couldn't even be derailed by a malfunction in the SAG Awards teleprompter. "I can conjure up voices," she joked. The actress also took a shot at President Donald Trump's attack on diversity, equity and inclusion while discussing the importance of empathy in acting. Fonda briefly referenced Sebastian Stan's portrayal of Trump in the 2024 biopic "The Apprentice."
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This should appeal to the bold trio of Trump, Musk, and Vance.