May the reason for the season find a home in your hearts, and may we all remember precisely Who we are celebrating at this time of year.
This blog will go silent tomorrow in honor of the day. I'll be back on Friday.
And, for those who prefer a secular season, this kicked over my giggle-box!
Peter
The former Secretary-General of NATO, Lord Robertson of Britain, is not complacent about the danger of war in Europe. He warns that Britain, and by extension every other country in NATO, needs to better prepare its citizens for what might happen.
Robertson has a torch [flashlight] on his key ring, in case the lights go out, and some spare money, in case the ATMs stop working in London.
“We are under attack,” Robertson, 79, said. He is now a Labour peer and has met Putin nine times.
“He (Putin) is a very different individual to the one that I did business with.”
. . .
“I think we are being tested. They’re going to the edge of what they think is acceptable. They won’t go across that line, at this point,” Robertson said of Russia.
Targeted assassinations, cyberattacks, sabotage and disinformation campaigns are all examples of Moscow’s so-called grey zone activities.
“That’s the way in which you undermine western societies. There is no doubt at all, there is a challenge to the West,” he added.
. . .
“With our adversaries becoming bolder and our critical national infrastructure becoming more fragile and much more on a knife edge, we need to be much much better prepared than we are today,” he said “It won’t be enough to wait to until the lights go out and the hospitals shut and the data centres melt because the air conditioning has gone out and the traffic lights have stopped and the ATMs don’t work anymore.
“At that point, people will expect government to have done something,” he said.
. . .
Robertson was as “ready as I could be”, with torches [flashlights] in every room, a battery-powered radio and a stockpile of food and water.
He said it was also the case in the UK that the public needed to have “resilience” in case there were civil emergencies or financial disasters.
Following Knighton’s speech at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) this week, he suggested the government could start to engage the public by issuing booklets to prepare UK citizens for war, such as Sweden’s recent If Crisis or War Comes.
There's more at the link.
All the risks he highlights are likely to occur in the USA as well. We've already had concrete evidence of the dangers:
I'm not a doom, gloom and disaster merchant. I don't run around crying "Wolf!" However, the evidence of these dangers is all around us, and I don't have to make up a thing to justify improving our personal and family preparedness for the sorts of problems and disruptions that may occur. I daresay most American households could not survive serious shortages or systemic breakdowns for as little as a week; a month is probably out of the question for most of them - yet I (and many others) regard a month as a minimum period to be able to get by without outside assistance. Attitudes toward preparedness need to change, and change quickly, if we're to be able to withstand the sort of problems raised by Lord Robertson, the Swedish government, and so many others.
A timely reminder indeed.
Peter
From Eaton Rapids Joe:
Are more people carrying "crazy-genes" then they did in the past?
The short answer is "yes".
As recently as 1900 in developed countries like Ireland, England and Germany, if your mother was crazy you were probably not going to live to see your first birthday ... In total, crazy-genes had a high probability of "dead-ending". In those days the pool of crazy people resulted from random meetings of recessive genes or in new mutations.
Flash-forward to the permissive, Welfare-State.
... back when "crazy-genes" self-extinguished we experienced a rate of approximately 5% seriously crazy people. Now the crazy-people genes are subsidized rather than exposed to Darwinian selection and the numbers are growing much faster (due to high risk behaviors) than the numbers of not-crazy people.
There's more at the link, including examples. Recommended reading.
I hadn't made the connection in genetic terms. Like almost everybody, I've noted the increase in the number of crazy-behaving "street people": talking to themselves, gesticulating wildly even though they're not talking to anybody, behaving very oddly and sometimes self-destructively, and so on. However, without thinking about it much, I'd assumed that much of this was due to the lack of mental health care (after the closure of most sanatoriums and institutional mental health care facilities). I hadn't thought about the fact that the sheer survival rate of everyone, on average, also meant that more "crazy-genes" were also surviving, and therefore slowly increasing in proportion to the rest of the population.
So . . . if that's the case, how are we going to deal with the problem? We can't very well simply execute those with "crazy-genes" - not and still regard ourselves as human beings. On the other hand, we do them (and ourselves, and our society) no favors by allowing them to increasingly take over our streets. What next?
Peter
Most of my readers are doubtless aware of my ongoing medical issues, including the removal of a kidney back in September, and your generous response to my appeal for funds to help pay for previous expenses plus what lies ahead. I'm very grateful to you all for your ongoing support.
I'm in the middle of a series of follow-up consultations on what the various tests have discovered. Briefly, my lower spine has deteriorated rather more than anticipated, partly due to the injury I suffered in 2004 and its treatment at that time, and partly due to my advancing age. There's no doubt that further surgery will be needed. One "side" of the medical fraternity thinks that it will be best to extend my existing spinal fusion to take in two adjacent vertebrae. The other "side" says that won't be enough, and instead wants to remove the existing fusion altogether and encase my lower (lumbar) spine in a sort of cage or mesh, supporting the whole thing in all directions. Both sides agree that surgery is necessary, but not what surgery, or how to go about it. Me, I'm the "piggy-in-the-middle", a playing-ground for neurosurgeons who are having a fine old time arguing with each other about what they (rather than I!) want to do next. It's . . . frustrating - and while all the arguing is going on, I'm paying for their discussions. That's even more frustrating!
There are trade-offs to be considered as well. It seems that whatever surgical solution is adopted, my lumbar vertebrae are likely to end up pretty solidly fixed together. That's going to make bending and twisting a lot harder than it already is (even though pain levels should improve). The mesh solution will be more restrictive than extending the fusion, but will offer greater long-term support. Which to choose, and why? I'm a layman. I can't answer that - but the doctors won't give me a single, straightforward answer. They simply tell me the alternatives, then say "It's up to you which one you want to choose." Since I'm not an expert, and I can't predict the future or its challenges, how am I supposed to know which to choose? I may as well glue some gears on my spine and call it steampunk!
So, here's what's going to happen over the next six months to a year.
Ongoing care at this level will continue to be a drain on the funds I've saved up (and you've donated) for hospital treatment, but it's unavoidable right now. As I recover from the loss of a kidney, I find I'm able to write more easily, so I'll try to get a new book (perhaps a new series?) out during 2026. God willing, that will help to fund more medical misadventures.
Thank you all for your prayers, support and understanding. I'll continue to "fight the good fight" as long and as hard as I can.
Peter
Gathered from around the Internet over the past week. Click any image for a larger view.
'Tis the season for Christmas music - but not the ghastly commercialized muzak that bombards us from every direction. Let's go back to 1912, and Vaughn Williams' "Fantasia on Christmas Carols".
Much more seasonal (not to mention spiritual!).
Peter
former British Secretary of Defense Liam Fox points out that debt is the single greatest security threat facing the Western world.
Against a background of increasing cooperation between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, the threat to the free world and its values – the rule of law, democracy and human rights – has never been greater in living memory. Yet a much more subtle and sadly self induced crisis corrodes our ability to confront our enemies.
Debt levels in the West, driven up by consumption and welfare that we cannot afford, means that our ability to raise defence and security spending to meet the level of the threat is seriously, if not yet fatally, compromised.
Last year the UK spent £105 billion on debt interest compared to just £65 billion on defending our country. We are not alone. In 2024 the United States spent around $882 billion on interest payments, overtaking the world’s largest defence budget of $874 billion. Recent policy decisions will likely drive the gap higher. This may explain the selective deafness in parts of Washington to the alarm call of the Russian threat. Given the huge potential cost of carrying on a new Cold War alongside Western allies, who for years have talked a great game with minimal action on defence spending, the US seems to have made a historically wrong call for partially understandable reasons.
. . .
The bigger threat ... is to the long-term stability of our financial system whose largest members are either unwilling to live within their means or incapable of it. In the UK, despite having a huge parliamentary majority, the Starmer Labour government has made it clear to international markets that they neither have the ambition nor the ability to reduce welfare spending and that, despite historically high tax levels, the debt will continue to increase. In France, the merest hint of financial restraint brings large sections of the population onto the streets making effective financial rebalancing almost impossible, while in the US President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is projected to increase the US federal deficit and national debt by around US$3.4 trillion over the 2025 to 2034 period.
The bottom line is clear. Living on the “never never” and pretending we have a right to an unearned standard of living is creating a level of national debt that not only threatens the next generation with a scorched earth economic legacy but is creating a national security emergency. The silent and deadly defence crisis unfolding because of our addiction to debt leaves us in a historically vulnerable position.
There's more at the link.
He makes a very strong case, IMHO. In command economies such as Russia, China, Iran, etc. the authorities can - by force if necessary - divert the resources of the economy to war production, and dragoon young men and women into uniform (shooting those who don't want to cooperate, to "encourage the others", as Voltaire put it). In the free world, we can't. If the public doesn't support the military, resistance would be largely non-viable. If we stripped bare health care, pensions, power generation, food distribution, etc. in order to prioritize military expenditure, our populations would revolt, particularly those who've become dependent on government handouts to survive. Even the prospect, not yet implemented, of military conscription has led to unrest in Germany and other European countries.
We are no longer a disciplined, united society. We are fragmented, divided, opinionated, each faction demanding that its interests be satisfied but no faction willing to subordinate its interests to the more imperative needs that confront us as a nation. That's what's caused our national debt in the first place, catering to special interests and voting blocs. Unless we change our attitudes as citizens and as a nation, nothing's going to change.
There's another question. Given the behavior and attitudes of so many Americans in "blue" states and cities, why should our armed forces die to defend them? They don't deserve it.
Peter
