Missive #114

Read Will Rogers column 88 years ago: August 25, 1935

“Conservative Insurgency takes the form of an oral history of a successful struggle against progressive dominance from the perspective of the year 2041. It is not a novel; instead, it is a rallying cry and a battle plan for constitutional conservatives who feel outnumbered and outgunned by a liberal establishment that wants to make them extinct and Republican moderates who are more than happy to lose if it means they keep getting invitations to all the right parties.I liked the subject matter of this book but did not like the style. To use ‘an oral history form’ for a speculative alternative history just didn’t work for me. the author has written a series of novels that I’m going to give a try and hope he uses a more conventional style.

Conservative Insurgency lays out the history of this struggle from the point of view of various participants as America inaugurates a new president and fully re-commits to the conservative vision of the Founders. The testimonies of the characters – politicians, academics, activist, soldiers and even a gender-indefinite performance artist who finds that liberalism is more constraining than conservatism ever could be – describe a multi-front, long-term political, social, and cultural war designed to seize society’s high ground in order to restore the Founders’ vision.

It is not a war of violence but one of persuasion and action. The weapons are not arms but arguments – though the transition is not entirely peaceful as progressives refuse to honor basic rights when it means they must give up power.

Why an insurgency? Because conservatives won’t win a stand up fight today – the enemy is too powerful, and to do so risks allowing them to destroy us forever in detail. Military history provides many useful analogies for this peaceful struggle. Remember the Vietnamese insurgents during Tet in 1968? They came out of the jungles during that holiday season in an attempt to take over the South in one fell swoop. They were annihilated, despite the best efforts of a liberal United States media to portray it to the contrary. They simply made their move far too soon. They went back underground and, seven years later, they took Saigon.
How does a force that is always “losing” end up winning? That’s the key question, and one the oral histories of the 30+ characters answers.

Author Kurt Schlichter is uniquely suited to write this book. A Townhall,com featured columnist and conservative media commentator, he was personally recruited by Andrew Breitbart to write for the conservative legend’s “Big” websites. Kurt has a large Twitter following and four consecutive Amazon kindle bestselling “Political Humor” e-books, but he is also a trial lawyer who served in the Army infantry from Operation Desert Storm to Operation Enduring Freedom in Kosovo. His background, including a masters of strategic studies from the United States Army War College, give him a unique perspective on politics, government and the strategy and tactics of an insurgent movement. His work as a stand-up comic helps give this serious subject a humorous edge.

Conservative Insurgency shows how we need to engage the enemy everywhere – politics, the media, the law, academia and, as Andrew Breitbart taught us, popular culture. From the faculty lounge to the news room to the recording studio to the boardroom, we will never again simply write-off anywhere in our society to the progressives. There can be no safe havens for those who reject the basic freedoms our Founders enshrined in the Constitution.

Conservative Insurgency is not about losing gloriously but about winning gloriously. Through the experiences of its many vivid characters, it lays out some general concepts and ideas about how to do it. They say the Tea Party is dead. Nonsense. We’re still here. We’re still ready to fight. And we’re going to fight, each in our own way, and take America back.” Book promo @ goodreads.com

I have been doing what I can to reduce chronic inflammation that should reduce my psoriasis flares. I think it has helped; not eliminated them all but reduced the number and severity. As a beneficial side effect I think I may have also done something else.

Coronary artery disease is a chronic inflammatory disease and it can be reduced effectively by walking 22 min a day and eating real food. There is no business model or market to help spread this simple yet powerful intervention. — Saturated fat does not clog the arteries: coronary heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition, the risk of which can be effectively reduced from healthy lifestyle interventions

Hard times are coming folks.  You’ve voted for it and so have many others, and it matters little which side of the paper you punched at the voting booth…  Odds are we will get beyond this but not before it gets a lot worse than it is now. If we don’t get beyond it then it doesn’t matter; that’s a 2% problem and spending any time or effort on it is a fool’s errand. Getting beyond it will mean ejecting some of those in elected office, more in appointed offices, and those who do not get replaced recognizing that we all die equally easily and if the course we’re on is not changed there will be no civil society at all and everyone will be equally screwed, up to and including being screwed dead. Improvement will come only when that recognition takes place and gets turned into policy and as things sit right now we’re in the “getting the lessons from our stupidity good and hard” phase. Sanity has yet to show up — but it will. Your task is to get through it in one piece without losing your mind or worse. — To Younger People by Karl Denninger

Paul Craig Roberts has a good post, Realistically, How Strong Is America?. A suggested read.