News you can use

Worried if an EMP or solar flare hits that your car won't work?

StrategyPage says: Buy a Hummer.

why? it lacks a lot of the fancy electronics that make it hard to fix, and this also means no electronics for the EMP/Solar flare to fry.

and a lot more stuff about EMP survival at the link, including the bad news: You don't need an atomic bomb to get an EMP.

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How to kill a medieval Zombie.

chop it up and burn the pieces.

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Monsters are not real, you know.

But maybe they are.

Writing in the New York Times, Bret Stephens takes aim at the curious mix of indulgence, amnesia and ignorance that envelops the subject of Communism. 

How many know the name of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s principal henchmen in the [genocidal Ukrainian] famine [of 1932/33]?

 What about other chapters large and small in the history of Communist horror, from the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to the depredations of Peru’s Shining Path to the Brezhnev-era psychiatric wards that were used to torture and imprison political dissidents?
why is it that people who know all about the infamous prison on Robben Island in South Africa have never heard of the prison on Cuba’s Isle of Pines?
Why is Marxism still taken seriously on college campuses and in the progressive press?
Do the same people who rightly demand the removal of Confederate statues ever feel even a shiver of inner revulsion at hipsters in Lenin or Mao T-shirts?

youtube has the audiobook of the Gulag Archipeligo.




and only a lecture on the "catastrophe" of Mao's Great Famine.

Well it is WGBH after all: Can't call it genocide or mass murder in left wing Cambridge.



the article in the NYTimes hinted that since the Nazis were racial bigots, it was worse.

Tell that to the Tartars and other ethnic groups deported to Siberia, or the Ukrainians who were starved into submission.

I saw an article about the Ukrainian nationalists demonstrating last week... essentially celebrating those who joined the Nazis in WWII... but they did so because of the famine, and to a lot of people who saw the atrocities of Stalin close at hand, the theoretical evil of the Nazis was the better choice. Sigh.

and the persecution of the churches is also a blank page for historians.... which is ironic, since it was the churches that essentially caused the peaceful downfall of Russian communism.

Another non PC story.

when I was in college, the famine of the "Great Leap Forward" was going on and some of the kids would quote Mao's propaganda about how ordinary people could grow supercrops or how "barefoot doctors" with three months training could heal people by reading Mao's little red book...

UKGuardian story of how the evidence of the atrocity was ignored and is still under reported in China. But what is the excuse for it's lack of coverage in the west?

and we still here (mainly British) intellectuals who scoff at the "cold war" as if it were just an argument between two equally evil opponents.

Only Reagan was non PC enough to call it what it was" An evil empire.

But we Catholics knew from other sources about the starvation and atrocities that were happening, but we were ignored.