The World Turned Upside Down

SCANALYZER The Happening World
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In 1781 as Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, effectively ending England’s effort to stamp down upon the freedom-seeking American colonists, the story is that Cornwallis had the English band play “The World Turned Upside Down” – which incidentally was apparently an English song from the 1640s protesting certain acts of the English parliament.

In the supposedly democratic Land of the Free, President Joe “Where’s the money?” Biden is incapable of answering any question more difficult than his preferred ice cream flavor. Worse, our bought & paid for media have assumed the responsibility for sheltering Biden from the people’s scrutiny, and will certainly not ask him any penetrating questions – no “telling truth to power” as far as our supposedly free & constitutionally-protected media is concerned.

On Tuesday, in supposedly autocratic Russia, President Putin sat down for a televised interview with multiple Russian correspondents and answered direct questions – without a teleprompter or any apparent pre-screening of questions. Questioners were reporters and bloggers, including individuals who have been critical of President Putin’s direction of the fighting in the Ukraine. The supposedly-tame Russian media asked tough questions.

Does this not suggest that the world has turned upside down, with the modern US now more like the old USSR and today’s Russia more like what the US was in its prime?

Blogger Simplicius has a report on the proceedings. (Trigger warning: Simplicius is clearly pro-Slav, pro-Russian, although he appears to try to be objective).

One of the particularly interesting lines of questioning was about weaknesses in the Russian military command. President Putin acknowledged the criticism, and asserted steps were being taken:

“In the army environment as well, very quickly it began to be understood that there were a lot of such parquet generals everywhere, but people who had been sitting in the shadows began to appear, and it turned out that they were effective and very necessary. Such people should be sought out and dragged to the top.”

Apparently, Russia is facing the same problem that seems to have afflicted most nations in recent history – the kind of person who rises to the top ranks in a bureaucratic peacetime army is not a person capable of fighting a real war.

The threat to start removing such people must send shivers down the spines of our Perfumed Princes in the Pentagon.

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Puts me in mind of something I was told once:

‘What you condemn you become.’

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It is hardly a secret that the Pentagon looks at actual combat as a secondary role, since they consistently remove what they see as the best and brightest from line command and put them, instead, into “finishing schools” - aide to Congress, some general in the Pentagon, etc, liaison with (fill in the expected bureaucratic organization). Thus the troops are “led” by what the Pentagon sees as “the bottom of the barrel”. So the truth of the matter vis a vis American fighting forces is that they are de facto led by senior enlisted - the better NCO’s. Officers are slowly becoming unimportant and perhaps even useless. Look at the incident involving the skipper of the TR over rampant outbreak of WuFlu on board while docked in Guam. HE got relieved of command just for putting the welfare of his crew - not in a time of war - ahead of stupid, and slow, bureaucratic machinations. Because he “pushed”, the TR only had ONE casualty in a crew of 5,000 during the outbreak. But he was forced to retire as a Captain (O-6) because of this. What he should have gotten was a medal.

One can see a similar process executing in medicine, where doctors are no longer of much value. it’s the bureaucrats that are running medicine.

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