Posts Tagged ‘datechguy's magnificent seven’

Arming our enemies: From scrap metal being sold to Japan before World War II to $6 billion for Iran

Posted: October 8, 2023 by John Ruberry in Uncategorized
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By John Ruberry

Here’s an almost forgotten slice of history.

In 1939, Chinese Americans protested the loading of scrap iron in Oregon on a ship bound for Japan.

As you’ll see the link, there is a photograph of the protest “This iron is for bullets” and “Your wives and babies may be next,” are among the messages on the picketers’ signs.

The protesters were right.

As you of course know, two years later, Japan not only attacked Pearl Harbor, but also Guam and the Philippines, both US possessions.

Before those attacks, Japan seized Manchuria and invaded the rest of China in 1937. The Japanese committed numerous atrocities against the Chinese during the Second World War, most notoriously the Rape of Nanjing.

Last month, on September 11 no less, the Biden Administration announced it was releasing $6 billion in frozen funds to Iran, that was part of swap of American hostages held by the terrorist regime in exchange for some Iranian prisoners held here.

Swap? I call it a ransom payment.

The appeasement-minded Biden administration at the time claimed that the $6 billion can only be used for humanitarian reasons. Even if that is true, which I doubt it is, the definition of charity in the West is remarkably different than how jihadists define it.

In 2008, five former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation, which claimed to be a charity, were convicted of sending $12 million to Hamas.

Okay, yeah, I get it, the $6 billion probably isn’t in the hands of the radical mullahs in Iran yet, but like someone who knows he’s about to collect a huge inheritance, Iran is now financially confident–and it’s emboldened by Joe Biden’s weakness.

Yesterday, Hamas, the Iranian-funded terrorist group, attacked Israel in the deadliest strike against the Jewish state since the Yom Kippur War.

The Iranian mullahs call Israel “the little Satan” and America “the Big Satan.”

America may be next.

UPDATE 6:00pm EDT:

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Iran greenlit and helped plan Hamas’ attack on Israel.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Star Wars deserves better: an Ahsoka Analysis

Posted: October 7, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in short films/interviews
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Note: I haven’t watched the Season 1 finale yet.

The latest Star Wars movies and TV shows suck. I watched Episode 7 with my son on opening night, and while I gasped along with everyone when Han Solo died, I was left wanting. At the time, I said “Man, Rey seems a bit overpowered and kinda dull.”

Well, she only got more overpowered and dull as the series went on. The Ahsoka TV series is, sadly, the same way. Now I should mention I love the character of Ahsoka that was built up in the Clone Wars animated series. She started off as a kinda-snotty little kid, and I didn’t care for her attitude, but when she lost a bunch of clone troopers by not following orders, as a military officer, I felt very much in her shoes. She grew on me as the seasons went on, becoming a more interesting character that worked hard to overcome her flaws. When she went on trial and was kicked out of the Jedi Temple, only to be found innocent and eventually offered to be readmitted, I shed a tear when she rejected the offer and walked away. She was a cool character with believable motivations and a character arc I enjoyed following.

I liked her so much I purchased her light saber set while at Disney, and they hang up in my office. So when Disney announced an Ahsoka series, I was thrilled, and quite willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

And sadly, I wasn’t happy.

Ahsoka is nowhere near as interesting in the TV series as the Clone Wars. By far the best character is Baylan Shen, with Ahsoka a distant second, and almost everyone else far from that.

So I wondered, why is Ahsoka, a character I’m already primed to like, so bad? I think it boils down to two things:

  1. People taking dumb actions
  2. No consequences for the “good guys”
  3. Weak bad guys with poor motivations

Let’s start with dumb actions. The season opens with two dark jedi, Baylan Shen and Shin Hati, requesting to come aboard a New Republic jail vessel. The ships commander thinks their transmitter is fraudulent, so he personally plans to meet the ship with a security detachment and arrest them. Obviously, this goes horribly wrong, and Baylan and Shin lay waste to everyone and rescue a prisoner on the ship.

How many ways is this wrong? First, if you suspect a ship has ill intentions, why don’t you BLOW IT AWAY AT A DISTANCE??? Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the military wants to get close to the enemy if they have a safe way of killing them at a distance. This decision makes no sense and we’re only 10 minutes into the episode.

Then the captain brings a security detail with no armor and light weapons, which they don’t even have pointed at the ship. Baylan walks right up and gets within arms length of the captain, and nobody thinks this is a bad idea?? If you were to walk up to a military gate looking even remotely suspicious, you’d have at least one pistol trained on you. How are the guards not nervous and on-edge? Why would they let a potentially dangerous person, or at least a person that they don’t know anything about, get within choking distance of their captain?

None of this makes sense. It’s totally illogical and used to drive the plot forward. It would be more believable if Baylan snuck onboard, or boarded stealthily, or hired a band of pirates to hijack the ship. You’d still get a cool fight scene, and it would make far more sense. We get illogical decisions all throughout Ahsoka: stormtroopers don’t shoot at Ezra on site, robots trying to steal a map decide to try and blow it up instead, etc. etc. etc. None of these actions make sense, and it makes the show feel cheap.

There are never consequences for the good guys. Sabine runs off with the mystical map and eventually takes a lightsaber to the gut, but then she’s fine at the beginning of the next episode. Somehow a magic laser sword that CUTS THROUGH HARDENED STEEL only leave a tiny mark when its rammed into your stomach. Like, really? I don’t believe that at all.

Protagonists have to suffer consequences or else the audience doesn’t get invested in them. Look at Tony Stark in Iron Man. He’s a playboy millionaire in the beginning of the movie, banging hot chicks while riding around in limousines. And then in the first half hour of the movie, he gets captured, tortured, hooked up to a battery, and has to build his way out of a mess. Along the way, he loses a friend that is a far more ethical and moral person than him, all because Tony wasn’t strong or fast enough to save him. It’s heart wrenching. We got from thinking Tony’s a total loser to rooting for the guy to punch terrorists on his way out of a cave.

More importantly, consequences have to be permanent. Tony Stark has metal shards that must be held outside of his heart. He turns this otherwise bad turn of events into a power source for a suit to do good. He uses his bad consequences to grow and become a better person in the end. But Sabine, Ahsoka and Ezra never do. Nothing is permanent. Lightsaber gut stabs, isolation in another galaxy, getting knocked off a cliff…nothing permanently damages our heroes. They are never in danger, and thus they never need a reason to grow.

Lastly, our bad guys are weak. Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Timothy Zahn books is amazing. He’s cunning and smart. He takes over planets through trickery. He rebuilds the Empire. He defeats enemies by studying their art and understanding them as a person. Thrawn always has a plan B. He’s like Bismark, always scheming, always taking advantage of the situation, always one step ahead.

Thrawn in Ahsoka? Not imposing at all. Why even be scared of him? He lays mines for space whales…that fail. He uses some mystical Night Sister magic to try and ambush Ahsoka…which fails. He sends his troops to kill Sabine Wren and Ezra…fails (why didn’t he kill Ezra earlier, btw??). He’s not imposing. None of this plans come off.

In less than 15 minutes in Star Wars: A New Hope, Darth Vader lifts a dude in the air and chokes him to death. He is imposing and downright frightening. He never loses his cool, and he ALWAYS wins, right up till his last fight with Luke and the Emperor. He’s imposing, intimidating, and when he is finally defeated, we all sigh in relief at how HARD he was.

Thrawn in Ahsoka? Or even Thrawn in Rebels? Lame. It’s not significant when our heroes beat him because he’s just not imposing.

I wish Disney would stop focusing on “ooooo oooo we’ve got a female character!!” and instead build us cool protagonists and scary villains that interact in a cool setting with an intriguing story. That’s what we need now more than ever.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

To win future elections Republicans must fight the Culture War

Posted: October 5, 2023 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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For far too long members of the Republican Party stood on the sidelines while the Democratic Party waged an all-out war on all aspects of tradition American culture.  The Republican establishment did not believe this was a war worth fighting.  They did not believe the culture war mattered at all.  They believed that it was a war they could not win. 

The sorry state our society is in is proof that that the culture war was most definitely worth fighting.

This article is proof that standing up for traditional American values against the Cultural Marxism of the Democratic Party will be a winning issue in 2024: Trans Mania, Culture Issues Top Concerns In New GOP Voter Poll (thefederalist.com)

A new poll out Wednesday reveals a major shift in Republican voters’ attitudes, emphasizing “culture war” issues such as the transgender craze instead of the “Old Right” consensus prioritizing taxes and trade.

According to an American Compass/YouGov survey of 1,000 Republicans who voted in the 2022 midterms, respondents overwhelmingly emphasized cultural issues as the most important challenges to face the nation. When asked to select at least two and up to five topics from a list as the most pressing problems of the day, voters were by far most concerned with cultural issues such as transgenderism, woke capitalism, and critical race theory, in addition to the border crisis and globalism. “Transgender activism” was selected the most, at 69 percent. 

Previous surveys this year have revealed a shift in opinion among the broader American public away from transgenderism. A Gallup poll in June found 55 percent of Americans believe it is “morally wrong” to attempt to “change” one’s sex, up from 51 percent two years ago. Overwhelming majorities opposed bending sex requirements for athletic competitions.

Because the Republicans have let the Democrats run the table on cultural issues Democrats have become emboldened.  They have used these cultural issues to amass massive amounts of political power.  Because the Democratic party has been taken over by radical Marxists, they seek to achieve complete control over the American people.  The culture war is the perfect vehicle for this, Almost Like Metaphysics: Democrats Use Issues to Push for Total Control – American Thinker

Climate change is useful because it is a planet-threatening problem that requires systemic change enforced by the government, requiring ever-greater government control over our lives, like the Covid pandemic. Transgenderism is another power play, an attempt to override reality by government fiat. It places the state in the middle of the family, giving the state the last word on the question of the human person, fracturing the natural power structure of the family, and establishing the state as a competing authority with parents.

Transgenderism is a step towards creating a competing power center within the family. If it succeeds, other “children’s rights” issues will emerge. The radical international left wants all people, beginning as children, to have their principal relationship with the state, which they are determined to control. Pitting children against parents or a parent against a parent is an attack on our civilization. Civilization is founded upon interlocking communities of mutual support. The family is the ur-community of civil society.

Unless Republicans take up the fight in earnest in time for the 2024 House and Senate elections it will be too late, Democrats Have Become The Party Of Authoritarianism (thefederalist.com)

Despite the outdated moniker of “social justice warrior,” leftist Democrats aren’t interested in real justice. They’re interested in gaining and using power. Once they have it, they’ll use it against their enemies. Appealing to their desire for civil comity is futile. They have no use for comity so long as they have power.

Six months that shook the marketing world: Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney debacle and killing a cash cow

Posted: October 1, 2023 by John Ruberry in business, culture, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics, Sports
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By John Ruberry

It was six months ago today–April Fool’s Day no less–when Dylan Mulvaney, to cap off his 365 Days of Girlhood series, did his first of two social media posts hawking Bud Light. Previously, in the words of Alissa Heinerscheid, who was in charge of marketing the brew, it was a “fratty” beer. The effect on Bud Light sales was immediate–a consistent and sustained 30-percent sales drop.

Immediately, the “experts” in the business world and the media, who are in fact narrative-driven morons with crisp, broadcast-friendly speaking voices, immediately ran to defend InBev, the parent company of Anheuser-Bush, with a consistent refrain, as if they were reading the same script, declaring “Boycotts don’t work.”

While that’s generally correct, the sales drop for Bud Light, a brew that tastes the same as Coor Light and Miller Lite, was in fact a walkaway. “Joe Sixpack,” the typical Bud Light drinker who believes that men are men and women are women–despite mutilation surgeries and hormone injections–found a way to scream “F*ck you” to the elites who say otherwise. 

Bill Maher said on his HBO show that the average American is furious because “they’ve had an agenda shoved down their throat.” When one of his guests, US Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) objected to Maher’s truth, he struck back, “You have to accept everything they say or you’re a bigot.”

So true. 

The plummet in Bud Light sales is a major victory for conservatives, as well as the majority of Americans who have known the difference between males and females since they were two years old.

And gender, despite the claims of now former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, is not “a spectrum.”

Mulvaney, whose ditzy faux female social media posts are about as pleasant as loud audio feedback, as well as the rest of the Anheueser-Busch marketing staff, did what was deemed impossible: killing a cash cow. I had a couple of marketing classes in college. Cash cows were revered by my professors, they are product lines that sell well with minimal advertising support. Heinz Ketchup, Ivory Soap, and Kellog’s Corn Flakes come to mind. The bountiful profits from cash cows are “milked” to support struggling brands. It’s a marketing circle of life.

One of those professors, in a lecture decried the use of celebrity endorsements in advertising, calling it “lazy marketing,” He also warned that celebrities, particularly those from the entertainment world, are known to do things morally objectionable, or get involved with unpopular political causes.

Now Anheuser-Busch is now spending a lot of money on its Bud Light “Easy to Sunday” campaign tied to the NFL as well as producing, again, commemorative cans, but this time with the logos of popular NCAA football programs, instead of a one-off Mulvaney can that was not sold to the public.

Too little too late. 

As sales continue to lag for Bud Light, it’s likely that scarce shelf space in supermarkets and liquor stores will soon be allocated to better selling brews. Modelo Especial this summer surpassed Bud Light as America’s bestselling beer.

The Bud Light cash cow has gone dry.

As I predicted here at Da Tech Guy months ago, using transgendered people to hawk mainstream products, while not completely dead, is now close to it. 

We have witnessed six months that shook the marketing world. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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