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."
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.
Who Judges The Judges?
15 replies
Let us start by saying that the US Constitution is very clear on the role of judges. A judge is not there to assume the powers of the executive. The US system is designed with a separation of the powers which is there to prevent tyranny and arbitrary and unaccountable rule.
Separation of powers is designed to prevent a Presidential tyranny. But it’s also designed to prevent a judicial tyranny, or an administrative or a bureaucratic tyranny. It exists so that nobody can be in the position of making up the rules as they go along and that nobody is drafting the law, enforcing the law, judging the law all
President Trump, according to reports, wants to go to Beijing in his first hundred days and reach a bargain with China. Unfortunately, an enduring accommodation with the Chinese regime is not possible.
China is not done killing with disease.
Driven by these beliefs [replacing the Westphalian order of sovereign states with the Chinese imperial-era system], the Chinese regime has always thought it had the right to do whatever it wanted to others.
Try as Americans might, they will never have amicable relations with China as long as it is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. There can be only one survivor, either the People's Republic
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.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has asked the US federal government for $40 billion (£31.6b) in funds to help rebuild areas of Los Angeles devastated by January fires. Newsom sent the request to congressional leaders in a letter on Friday. He said the funds would help both immediate and long-term recovery work. "I'm asking Congress to have the back of the American people and provide disaster funding to help Californians recover and rebuild as soon as possible," he wrote on social media.
‘We’re Mad as Hell’: Fuming Canadians
Nix U.S. Vacations to Protest President
Donald Trump’s Tariffs 35 replies
Nix U.S. Vacations to Protest President
Donald Trump’s Tariffs 35 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:
Wisconsin Democratic governor proposes
replacing 'mother' with 'inseminated person'
in state law 32 replies
replacing 'mother' with 'inseminated person'
in state law 32 replies
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, is facing backlash for introducing a budget recommendation that changes the word "mother" to "inseminated person," and "paternity" to "parentage" in certain parts of state law. The Evers administration's budget recommendation for the 2025-2027 fiscal period advises several other gendered terms be changed, as well. References to "wife" or "husband" are changed to "spouse" in the proposal. In other places, the word "father" is changed to "parent," and "mother" is swapped out for the phrase "parent who gave birth to the child.”
LGBTQ+ identification in the United States has spiked to 9.3 percent — an increase driven by Generation Z adults, a poll has found.
The percentage of U.S. adults who say they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or something other than heterosexual has nearly doubled from 2020 and is up from a mere 3.5 percent in 2012, according to the Gallup survey. “In the 12 years that Gallup has been tracking LGBTQ+ identification, it has nearly tripled, as those becoming adults during that period have been far more likely than their elders to say they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender,” Gallup “The recent increase is largely due to
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),
Pope Francis is in critical condition after suffering an asthmatic respiratory crisis that required doctors to administer oxygen, The Associated Press reported, citing the Vatican. [Snip] Vatican News reported that medical professionals say the pope is not "in danger of death," but is not completely "out of danger" and will need to be hospitalized for "at least" all of next week. ... Fox News senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel told "Fox News Live" that he is "looking very closely at the next 12 hours," as he says that time is critical.
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
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."
A majority of Americans agree with President Donald Trump’s embrace of biological truth in recognizing only two biological sexes — but most Democrats do not — a Quinnipiac survey found.
The survey — gauging sentiments on many of Trump’s early moves — asked respondents, “Do you support or oppose President Trump’s executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female, in the United States?” Most, 57 percent, support it, compared to 38 percent who oppose it. There are varying opinions on party lines, as over three-fourths of Democrats — 77 percent, oppose the executive order recognizing biological truth. Only 14 percent of Democrats support the order.
In a stunning move, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has announced plans for its largest mass firing of intelligence officers since 1977, over 50 years. This unprecedented decision marks a significant shift in the agency's operations as it seeks to streamline its workforce and refocus its efforts amid growing concerns over efficiency and accountability within the intelligence community. The move is expected to affect a substantial portion of the agency's personnel, with officials citing the need for modernization and a more agile approach to national security threats.
While many in corporate state media*, and even independent media, were at some point agnostic or even enthusiastic about the fruits of Operation Warp Speed, I am proud to have been on the ball from the very beginning.
*See: Sean “Sellout Supreme” Hannity, praised on the Senate floor by Dick Durbin for pimping the shots to his own audience, which presumably relies on his recommendations. Even if he knew who I was — recognizing that I am relatively small potatoes — Dick Durbin would never praise me for anything, and that's a badge of honor.Back in 2021, I am on record reporting that the COVID-19 “vaccines” destroy the recipient’s immune system.
Comments:
This should appeal to the bold trio of Trump, Musk, and Vance.