31 January 2021



A. Pols

I've found that people who get in and stay in the military tend to be realistic people, not utopian dreamers the way academics and other leftists are. Those who've actually SERVED have this curious characteristic of viewing the world as it is instead of how they dreamt it might be when they were schoolchildren. Such people may be less than willing to obey the wishes of the commissars when crunch time comes.


They don't need blunt force.
If they can threaten your livelihood for having "bad" thoughts, they've got most of the population cowed.
Look how easy it has been to kill thousands of businesses and force millions of people into submission over a health threat which has a 2 % mortality rate.


The 2020 election was stolen.

Barbara Ann

Well Casey Michel (the author of the Politico article) seems like a nice young man.

I shall refrain for commenting on this orgiastic screed of ahistorical spleen-venting and merely categorize it under "Two Minutes Hate". The Leftists writing this sort of stuff appear to do so primarily in order to project their own unhinged extremist feelings. One must wonder how Mr Casey's own psyche came to be so consumed with animus towards his fellow citizens.

Mark Gaughan

2% mortality rate, if everyone gets infected, that's over six million dead.


re: mortality rate

covid-19 world-wide gross mortality rate (7 billion divided by 2.22 million) is 0.0317...

in comparison, the spanish flu world-wide gross mortality rate (1.8 billion divided by 50 million) was 2.777...

not really in the same ballpark. at all...

Muralidhar Rao

Mr. Gaughan your comment "2% mortality rate, if everyone gets infected, that's over six million dead." is patently false. 1) you will be no recovery of people infected by the virus 2) That all 350 odd million people of US have a comorbidity that is fatal to those who are infected. 3) That the current available treatments don't work, we are still in the stone ages. Thanks


Mark Gaughan:
That's on the ridiculous premise that EVERYONE
gets infected.

Dan Berg

IF my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bus.


Dan Berg

Trying to remember where I met her.



Thank you boomer for repeatng the propaganda.


That leaves 330 million survivors. Retention of office for politicians in power appears to be 100% .


Somewhat reminiscent of the Beltway Shootings of Oct 2002. The media was in a frenzy trying to associate it with "the culture of guns and violence in the south" ; that is until it was discovered that two black men were the perpetrators. Same with the rash of church burnings in the south (mid 90s). The white racists storyline was quickly dropped after the FBI report concluded that it was mainly the black pastors who were burning their own churches for the insurance money.


Col. Lang, What are the rules about using the National Guard out of state? I'm thinking along the lines of using out of state troops to put down local rebellion because they have less empathy with the locals. Examples - the Russian use of Cossacks, the CCP use of Western Chinese in Tianamen Square, etc.

Would it be possible assuming suitable propaganda preparation, to use for example Minnesota NG against "depraved" Floridians? New Mexico NG against "Fascist" Idaho? I hope this is too far fetched.


The writer appears to be obsessed with "ethonationalism", as though various strains of conservatism do not appeal to any racial/ethnic groups other than WASPs. This guy needs to klick his heels & return to the 21st Century for some updated data & constructs.


Colonel, Regarding your reference to the Guard being reluctant
to fire on their fellow citizens....I heard the Guards hands shook
as they fired on unarmed students @ Kent State, students who weren't
even protesting, just going to class. It's hard to forget.


As I recall last June at the West Point graduation ceremony President trump paid honor to Sam. He said to the Cadets: "We need you to carry on the spirit of the great Ulysses S Grant".

Mark Gaughan

That was TV's number.



You are living in a different world now. The NG at Kent State were almost all draft evaders. These Ohio Guardsmen were people filled with fear of violence. They were in Ohio and under state control. The student rioters had burned down a building and were throwing rocks at the Guardsmen. There is no draft today. There has not been for many years. These Guardsmen are people who belong from a sense of civic duty. Their part time active duty pay is not worth the trouble and interference with their civilian lives. How old were you in 1968?




" in the United States, National Guard units can “wear three different hats.” Hat #1 is “state active duty,” which Vladeck describes as “exercising state functions at the request of the state government.” And Hat #2, according to Vladeck, is “Title 32 status” in which “state National Guard troops remain subject to state command and control but are used for federal missions authorized by Congress — and, perhaps most importantly, are usually paid for by the federal government.”

Hat #3, Vladeck writes, is “Title 10 status” in which “state National Guard units are ‘federalized’ by the president of the United States pursuant to one of the specific statutory authorities for doing so. Once federalized, National Guard troops come under the full command and control of the Pentagon —specifically the secretary of defense. In essence, National Guard troops become part of the federal military until and unless they are returned to state status.”

Vladeck notes, “It’s long been understood that the Posse Comitatus Act — which prohibits ‘(using) any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws’ — does not apply to National Guard units in either SAD or Title 32 status, because they are not, at that point, part of the Army or the Air Force. By contrast, when National Guard troops are federalized, the Posse Comitatus Act does apply — and requires ‘express’ statutory authorization before those troops can be used to “execute the laws.’”

Vladeck concludes his article by weighing two possible scenarios.

“Ultimately, one of two things is true: either § 502(f) does allow the federal government to use out-of-state National Guard troops as it did last week in Washington — for any purpose and under federal control — which is deeply concerning and crying out for some kind of legislative reform,” Vladeck asserts. “Or it doesn’t, and upward of 5000 out-of-state National Guard troops were unlawfully deployed to Washington last week. Either answer is unsettling, to say the least.”

I agree with the author that this is very disturbing. The Section 502 situation at least leaves the Guard under state control with governors able to withdraw their troops. This happened in DC when the governors of Texas, Florida and NH withdrew their people. Nevertheless the potential exists for a Title 10 federalization of NG units and their use in other states. If that happened, the Posse Comitatus Act would then apply to these federalized units and they could not be used for law enforcement unless the president claimed that the Insurrection Act applied. In that eventuality he/she would be equally free to use Regular Army or USMC units. We are talking civil war if these scenarios applied and I continue to think the troops would become unreliable once they thought about the situaion.



Good luck trying that.

Barbara Ann


Re the discussion of NG use, I don't know if you saw Miller's remarks to Vanity Fair which were published immediately after he stepped down as SECDEF. They are alarming to say the least. I have left Miller's strong language in the first quote:

“This fucking place [DoD] is rotten. It’s rotten.” Miller’s gravest concern, he said, involved a bedrock principle of American democracy: civilian control of the military. “When the system is weighted towards the Joint Staff and the geographic combatant commanders against civilian control, you know, we’ve got to rethink this.” He expressed a belief that by “idolizing and fetishizing” the top brass, members of Congress had ignored an erosion over time in the chain of command.
Miller also had this to say:
“The entire system,” Miller stated, “the intelligence community [included], is complicit in setting up all these compartments—so that only very select people actually have perspective and access to the entire picture. And then your question is, ‘Well, who are these people that have the complete picture?’ I felt like I finally did as acting SECDEF—to a point. I’m sure there’s still some stuff that was being compartmented. But I don’t know that for a fact.”
Taken together with the unprecedented intervention of the Joint Chiefs' open memo of January 12th - which parroted the highly politicized accusation of "sedition and insurrection" re the Capitol incident - one is forced to consider the relevance of the official chain of command. Does Milley consider himself head of a de facto junta?


English Outsider

TV - can't stress how much we should regard the old lockdown arguments as dead. If B117 or other variants gets a hold before the vaccination programme has started to bite it'll be an entirely different picture.

If they don't, that's great and the slow process of economic recovery can, one hopes, roll on. But if they do - then judging by the Irish and Portuguese experience, not to mention ours here, it'll be chaos in the hospitals unless some sort of measures are adopted to stop spread.



Sam grant was a great fighting general. His ability to harden his heart to his own massive casualties was an impressive piece of self mastery. IMO he was not a great president unless you like crony corruption and the kind of Occupation policy described in the article.

Steve G

Posted a few years ago about the
Deployment of regular troops to a
Civilian riot situation.
Upon returning from VN mid summer
70 was assigned to 5th comm Camp
Pendleton at Las Pulgas area.
The US was experiencing increasingly
Violent anti war protests. LA was
Apparently getting much worse as the
Local law enforcement and NG units
We’re being overwhelmed by sheer
Numbers of protesters. A company of
50 to 75 mixed MOS members were
Organized for back up deployment to
LA if conditions worsened. We had no
In barracks teevee (HT Col. Lang).
LA Times or San Diego papers our
Only news source. We practiced
Multiple crowd control maneuvers
Including different wedge dispersal
Formations with gas masks and
Fixed bayonets with scabbard attached.
No live ammunition was to be issued.
Deployment was called off at the last
Moment. No reason given.
This was after the Kent State situation.
We were all aware of that. Most junior
Enlisted didn’t like the idea of being
Sent but all would have obeyed the order
To go.


Colonel, I was young in 1968 & was nowhere near the above mentioned incident, nonetheless it's hard to forget it happened. I understand
back in that time frame there were numerous antiwar protests,
however as I recall the students targeted were not protestors.

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