" Vic: Here We Go AGAIN!!!" (opens in separate window)

farther along

saturday, march 13th, 2026

Don’t lose the plot. Embrace the suck. This is the world’s hard time, for now. The birth of anything can be a bloody horror. It can even look like death. Don’t be too afraid to see what comes on the other side of this awful spectacle.

So many Americans are rooting and wishing for the Iran war to turn out badly for Western Civ. And why? Because Trump. And why? Because at the same time he is ending Iran’s long-running nuclear blackmail game, he is terminating the rackets of the Democratic Party. The incipient changes in operational order create new categories of winners and losers.

Now you know why Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists run on the same track as America’s Woke-Jacobin-Marxists, including the pitifully deluded wine ladies of posh West LA, Grosse Point, Beacon Hill, Fairfax County, et cetera, whose brains have been hijacked by the cable news demon factory (and their sponsors). Chaos does everything possible to avoid meeting order.

And this is why passing the SAVE Act is as consequential as ridding the Middle East of its chief chaos agent. Do you realize how perfectly insane our country’s election procedure has become? The fraud is titanic and right in your face, and the remedy is so plain and simple. What possible excuse is there to thwart it? Non-citizens have no right to vote. Mail-in ballots are patently subject to chicanery. Vote tabulation machines are demonstrably hackable. 80-percent of Americans know this is the truth. How is there controversy over this?

How? Because among all the broken institutions in our country, Congress is the worst. The Congress of our time is demonstrating that we might not be worthy of governing ourselves. We are at a cycle-low for public rectitude. Anything goes and nothing matters as long as the campaign contributions keep rolling in. You see how this has been going.

But mark this: we are going to get election reform one way or another. It’s that urgent, and failure to accomplish it by legislation will warrant a national emergency. And when the election machinery has been fixed, we had better do something about the plague of corporate money that runs like poison through our politics because of the Supreme Court’s foolish decision in the 2010 Citizens United case. They decided (by a slim 5-4 majority) that limitless campaign contributions by corporations amounted to free speech under the Constitution.

I will tell you concisely why this was tragically fallacious. Free speech in our country is a God-given right of sovereign citizens. Corporations are not citizens. Corporations don’t have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the public interest (a.k.a. the common good). Corporations explicitly, by law, have obligations, duties, and responsibilities solely to their share-holders. The interests of corporate share-holders and the nation’s public interest are manifestly oppositional. Perhaps now you can see why this was such a dreadful invitation to political chaos.

So, Mr. Trump, for all his flaws, attempts to bring order out of chaos at home and in global relations, and the agents of chaos mightily resent the shut-down of their precious chaos. With Iran, it has come to fighting fire with fire. It’s unlikely that most of the people in that country seek to become martyrs. The cult of martyrdom is strictly the business of the maniacs who seized power there in 1979, a reign of terror, extended by proxy around the whole Middle East and beyond.

Entwined with Iran’s oil business, and the energy security of many nations, the mullahs inflect the trade of this primary resource with their chaos. The world cannot cope with chaos in the oil trade. The collapsing regime of the mullahs wants to go out turning the entire world into a martyr. Just like the Democratic Party wants to martyr the founding principles of the USA to preserve its matrix of moneygrubbing and power-seeking. These are two forces that require the most severe discipline and Mr. Trump is acting to impose exactly that. It’s painful to witness, but it must happen if we want to continue the human project as a reality-based enterprise.

So, heed what is at stake in the events unspooling. This is a dark moment in a journey back to daylight. Have faith. As the old American hymn goes: Farther along we’ll know more about it; farther along we’ll understand why.

A Day In The Life.

Up at 9:45a on Saturday, a mild, 41°F, overcast, breezy morning, I upped the heat, made "co-fe-fe", fired-up the Win-7 Pentium HP Desktop to let its 32 million lines of code load, had breakfast, had a couple smokes in the garage and checked the leftover errands list. Clear. I scanned the weather -- Spring-like temps coming for a few days -- and the rapidly-breaking news, and relaxed for the rest of the morning.

The R/S Sciatica/buttock/leg/foot pain was so bad, that I bagged all projects and errands for the day. The pain was so bad that I laid down on the LR couch, and slept the rest thru of the morning, most of the afternoon and still had it half-as-bad, when I got up around 5:30p. Whole day gone. I closed the condo, had dinner, and watched the meager evening news on FNC, then switched to Discovery's "Filthy Fortunes", "Expedition Unknown" and bagged it at 1:30a (after time change). Did you get your clocks set ahead? I hate that ST/DST time crap. I missed the F1 Australian GP Race, but did post the F1 Thread on FR yesterday, Lights out.

I slept-in until 10:30a on Sunday, a windy, overcast, very warm 63° morning. I upped the heat, made coffee and scanned the news and weather. I still had the pain, but it lessened around 12noon, so I delayed shaving and showering and laundry, for 1-2hrs, and just relaxed. I started the first load of laundry, had a late lunch and did some small condo chores. The flies and other insects are hatching, and I saw a few today. No nap today; too nice outside. I closed the condo up around 5:15p, had dinner, watched the evening news and switched to History's "American Pickers" and "History's Greatest Picks", and to Discovery's "Filthy fortunes" until 12:40a, and quit for the night.

Up at 7a on Monday, a sunny, 39°, bird chirping morning. I upped the heat, made coffee, and scanned the news and weather. The pain was pronounced, but not yet debilitating. By 11a, it was 68° outside, and I left for my usual Monday 3 stop trip to south of York, since I had a Weis Market delivery coming between 2-4p. Traffic was heavy, probably due to the nice weather, but I made very good time on the 24 mile R/T. Back home by 2p, I unloaded, had some lunch and the grocery delivery came after 4p. I got all that put away, hit the LR couch for a "short" nap. Heh. 3½ hours later, I woke in the dark, at almost 7a. I fi5red-up the Ol' Samsung 82" Class Q6FN QLED Smart 4K UHD TV, and watched to "History's Greatest Mysteries" and "Iron Resurrection", until 1a. Lights out.

Not everyone who leaves your life is a loss. Some goodbyes are the best thing that ever happened to you.

Up at 7:30a on Tuesday, a sunny, Spring-like 53° morning. No heat needed, just coffee. And a couple smokes in the open garage. Beautiful outside. I scanned the news and weather, and then tuned into to the "CP Show" thru the morning. I had breakfast and got ready for the day. By 12:30noon, it was 72° outside and getting warmer. Nice.

Tornado Watch 5-8p for York County!

Sherry arrived around 1p, and we had our usual great time together, sitting on the back patio, in the beautiful weather. Lots to catch-up on, since we last had time together. Her Family plate is beginning to slowly empty and we might be able to get some more time together. Good weather is ahead, and we enjoy walking in the nearby park. Sherry left just before 6, with one stop on her way home. I had dinner, watched the evening news, and switched to History's "Curse of Oak Island", until 11:30, and bagged it for the day.

Up at 7:30a on Wednesday, an overcast, rainy, big storms forecast, 61° morning. No heat, I made coffee, scanned the weather and news, tuned into the "CP Show", and got ready for my 11a Dr's app't. I had breakfast and left at 11 for the 11:15 app't. That went well, and I headed home.

Dave and Cody from River Rock Landscape arrived around 12:30p, to get Spring clean-up done at my condo gardens, to prep for the CHCA to get their contracted mulching done, in a few weeks. I checked the news and weather. Wowzer! ***TORNADEO WATCH***, ***SEVERE THUNHDERSTORM WATCH***, ***FLASH FLOOD WATCH***. Well, those'll make my day. All the of the deadly weather horror show from the Midwest, Southeast and Southwest is coming this way. Usually, the Appalachian Mountains to our west will blow the storms apart, or lessen their impact, unless they have time to reconstitute after passing thru the mountains, and we're spared the brunt of it.

I had the condo open for the day, and the fresh air was very nice. Showers passed thru, but the real rain started around d 9p. I watched the evening news, had dinner and switched to "Expedition X" until 11:30. Lights out.

The t-storms and rain arrived overnight, waking me several times, and it felt like the whole condo was being sucked-up and blown to Kansas, with Dorothy and Toto. Hellish rain and wind.

Up at 8:30a on Thursday, a stormy, rainy, windy, 39° morning. I upped the heat, made coffee and scanned the weather and news. Temps were dropping quickly since last night, and the forecast was for sleet and snow, as the massive storm front moved thru the area. No errands today, so I'll start working on the 2025 Taxes to get to my CPA.

The rain came, temps dropping, snow, sleet and then a sunny day. Winter's not finished with us just yet. As I've said for many years, "Mother Nature's In Charge; We're Just Along For The Ride."

Four muslim(SPIT!)terror attacks in the last 13 days here? Virginia, Michigan, New York City, but at least this time, the subhuman muzzies are either going to prison (and a liberal judge will likely release them early), or are dead.

I took a 2hr nap, closed the condo, had dinner, watched part of the news, and switched to "History's Greatest Mysteries" and The Weather Channel for updates and forecasts, as I worked on paperwork for 2025 taxes. By 12:30a, I was nodding-off, and bagged it for the day.

Up at 7:30a on Friday, a sunny/cloudy, breezy, cold 29° morning. I fired-up the furnace, made coffee, scanned the weather and news, and tuned into the "CP Show". I had breakfast, worked on sorting the 6 piles of receipts for tax prep, to make my CPA's life more palatable, had lunch, took a nap and went out to get the mail, and a short walk.

I watched the evening news, had some dinner, and switched to Discovery's "Gold Rush" and "Gold Rush: Mine Rescue" until 12:30a, while nodding-off several times in the comfy leather recliner TV chair. Lights out.

Tomorrow starts a new week, here in the "Journal", and it's a clear week for me. Sherry's stopping by tomorrow, and will update me on her ongoing Family plate's happenings. We'll also try to get some time set aside for us, in the coming week.

The Democrat Party Is A Domestic Terrorist Organization

After a long history of condoning, advocating, and participating in political violence, it is time to designate the Democrat Party a domestic terrorist organization.

Decades of extreme language, calling conservatives “Nazis,” claiming existential threats are around the corner in order to feed an assassination culture, and justifying the aftermath has brought a level of violence that is only one-sided: The left tries to murder or maim their political enemies.

On Wednesday afternoon, a shooter took the life of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, just as he was answering a question about left-wing violence in the United States.

Left-wing commentators at corporate media outlets — the mouthpieces of the Democrat Party — were quick to justify the violence, suggesting it was justified or that Kirk brought it on himself, even going as far as to suggest it was really a Trump supporter firing a gun in “celebration.”

Democrats have a long history of calling conservatives the most vile things our culture can think of, and their friends in the media spread the message to anyone who watches them.

Democrats have recently been saying they “cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore.”

Just yesterday, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in an interview, “Our only opportunity, our only chance to save our democracy, is to fight fire with fire.”

In the world we live in now, there is no time to try to convince the left to ‘tone down’ their extreme rhetoric. They need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are.

Murphy brushed off “the fact that we’re blowing up norms,” adding that if you spend any more than “two seconds … being sorry for the fact that the old world doesn’t exist, then your democracy is gone.”

“We’re in a war right now to save this country, and so you have to be willing to do whatever is necessary in order to save the country,” he said. Murphy’s media pal salivated over the sentiment, wondering if there were enough people who believe it.

What do Democrats think is “necessary?” Well, perhaps it is bringing a knife to a “knife fight,” in the words of Democrat National Committee head Ken Martin.

After all, as Kirk pointed out earlier this year, 48 percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justifiable to assassinate Elon Musk, and 55 percent say the same about President Donald Trump.

“The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response,” Kirk said at the time. “This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb.”

The left-wing penchant for egging on and justifying violence has long been a staple of their political movement.

Democrats did everything they could to make Trump seem like the most evil person on the planet for years, so it was no surprise when Trump was shot last year and a second gunman attempted to shoot him only weeks later.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill., said recently that “Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” and then in the aftermath of Kirk’s death blamed Trump for the assassination.

All the way back in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson suggested that if Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater were to win, American families would be annihilated by nuclear weapons. He ran an extraordinarily on-the-nose campaign ad saying as much.

The 1960s was full of left-wing political violence.

President Bill Clinton granted clemency to Puerto Rican FALN terrorists who bombed and murdered their way across America, and President Barack Obama pardoned them. President Joe Biden granted clemency to those convicted of murdering police officers.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., threatened Supreme Court justices, and a man with a gun showed up outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house intent on murdering him.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-Vt., existential threat language led one of his supporters to shoot at the Republican members of Congress practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game in 2017, nearly ending the life of now-House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.

In 2013, a man intent in killing as many people as possible at the conservative organization Media Research Council went there with a gun and killed a security officer after disagreeing with the group’s stance on gay “marriage.”

Left-wing violence in Nashville, Tennessee, saw Covenant Christian School attacked by someone claiming to be “transgender,” and the Biden administration attempted to cover up the shooter’s writings, which exposed her motive.

More recently, children at Annunciation Catholic School were gunned down while they were praying by another person claiming to be “transgender” with a similarly demonic motivation.

But the left celebrated when Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down a healthcare CEO, and they cheered even harder when Black Lives Matter brought death and destruction to America’s streets.

In the world we live in now, there is no time to try to convince the left to “tone down” their extreme rhetoric. They need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are.

Our Long Road to War With Iran.

Until last year, for some 46 years, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: always unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, inevitably to be nuclear, self-destructive, and nihilistic.

All that said, was it really ever all that formidable?

The mullahs came into power after the removal of the Shah and, subsequently, the interim secular socialists. They did so by taking American hostages, murdering opponents, executing former supporters, and transforming the most secular and modern of the Middle East Muslim nations into the most medieval that routinely hung homosexuals, adulterers, and almost anyone who questioned the authority of the ayatollahs. In other words, these were gruesome people, but they didn’t necessarily have a competent military. For decades, Iran cultivated a myth of invincibility through terror and proxies—until war exposed the regime as weaker, poorer, and far more fragile than the world had feared.

The theocracy’s only constant with the prior monarchical Iran was that it inherited near limitless oil and natural gas reserves, sophisticated arms, and the Shah’s modernized cities. It controlled the key strategic chokepoint at the Strait of Hormuz and enjoyed a geostrategically critical location between Asia and the Middle East. It fueled Iran’s historical chauvinism and pique that the millennia-long historical preeminence of Middle Eastern Persia was not fully appreciated by its Arab neighbors. So there were lots of natural advantages—and all for the most part squandered.

Under the camouflage of Shiite puritanism and otherworldliness, the ayatollahs proved even more corrupt (and far more incompetent) than the Shah’s entourage. They fought a destructive eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s overrated Iraqi dictatorship and showed they were mostly just as militarily incompetent.

Over decades, they killed and wounded thousands of Americans by bombing U.S. embassies, barracks, and bases in the Middle East—without directly confronting the American military. For years, they sent lethal shaped charge IEDs to the Shiite insurgents to slaughter and maim thousands of Americans in Iraq and to the Taliban to do the same in Afghanistan.

At the first sign of popular protests, the regime never hesitated to gun down thousands of unarmed protesters. And, of course, they were abject hypocrites—hating the West, damning the Great Satan—and sending their pampered children to universities in America. The apparat proved quite earthly in its desire for money, estates, foreign travel, and the good life.

Their general strategies were never hard to follow.

One, the theocrats’ prior familiarity with Americans under the Shah and in exile in Europe bred an irrational fixation with and hatred of the West in general that made them useful proxies for the grand designs of communist and then later oligarchic Russia, and later ascendant communist China.

Iranian realpolitik alliances with secular communists were based on the quid pro quo of granting Russia and China access to the Gulf, selling oil to China, and buying arms from both.

Two, they were endlessly chagrined that the Persian Shiites had been overshadowed by more populous Sunni Arab neighbors that supposedly lacked their own historical sophistication and more legitimate claims of embodying and speaking for global Islam.

So they would correct that historical travesty by doing their best to mobilize their clients and proxies to bully, isolate, and weaken Arab autocracies, especially those that are pro-Western.

Three, their planned eventual destruction of Israel would ensure that theocratic and Shiite Iran regained its lost prestige and honor by finally accomplishing what the Sunni world had failed to do. By arming murderous clients in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen, they fashioned a global network of death that compromised European foreign policy toward the Middle East and terrified Western leaders and many of their Arab neighbors.

Fourth and finally, they sought to diminish the role of the United States in the Muslim world, drive it from the Middle East, and wage a virtual 47-year opportunistic war against American citizens and soldiers, with help from their terrorist surrogates.

Iran’s zenith in power and prestige came during Obama’s presidency (2009–17), and the so-called “Iran Deal” that they believed would guarantee them eventual nuclear power status.

But far more importantly, their massive acquisitions of air, land, and sea weapons and the empowering of terrorists, coupled with their passive-aggressive claims to victimhood, both scared and enticed President Obama into dropping sanctions. Soon, he was apologizing for supposed past sins and nocturnally sending them millions of dollars in Danegeld.

But worse by far, Obama thought he had squared the circle of neutralizing the supposed Middle Eastern Iranian juggernaut by envisioning it as an empathetic victim—and eventual friend if not ally.

Iran was to be rebooted as the Persian and Shiite righteously aggrieved underdog—bullied unfairly by Western imperialists and their surrogate corrupt Arab petro-kingdom clients for its asceticism and courage in fighting the West since its own birth in 1979.

Obama would remedy this “injustice” by bolstering Iran as a counterweight to not just the Sunni Arab world but to Israel itself. The reset would include an American détente with the murderous pro-Iranian Assad regime in Syria, the supposedly benign neglect of Hezbollah’s takeover of Lebanon, and the championing of the “Palestinians,” which de facto had insidiously become indistinct from Hamas terrorists.

Such creative tension between the Iranian Shiite crescent and a diminished Arab world would be adjudicated from time to time by Obama himself, whose America would go from oppressor to ally of the oppressed.

So by 2017, Iran, for some reason, was considered all-powerful in the Middle East with its missiles, soon-to-be nuclear status, and Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi killers who would murder Westerners and Israelis year after year. For the last seven American presidents, the very thought of challenging Iran militarily had been considered taboo, all the more so after the American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

No one, perhaps not even the Israelis, actually calibrated the true status of Iranian arms or diplomacy. Despite its huge advantages in population, Iran could not defeat Iraq and was reduced to sending 10-year-olds as human pawns to clear minefields. It never directly confronted Israel but always used surrogates to murder Jews, either abroad, as in the slaughter in Argentina, or through its “ring of fire” terrorist cliques that surrounded the borders of the Jewish state.

In sum, no one apparently realized—with the exception of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu—that beneath its rough, ugly shell, theocratic Iran was rotten and decayed inside. Its corruption and the hatred of its own people ensured that even its huge revenues and sophisticated Chinese and Russian weapons could never translate into a modern, lethal military.

And in summer 2025, the Israelis and Americans first proved that Iran was indeed hollow.

Its Arab partner in Syria imploded in weeks. The supposedly goose-stepping Hezbollah shock troops were decimated.

The scary subterranean Hamas may have proved deadly in surprise attacks against unarmed women, children, and the aged, but they were nearly obliterated by the IDF.

The Houthis mimicked Iran’s madness as they sent drones and missiles to shut down the Red Sea and hit Israel. But the U.S. and Israel finally taught them that while the Houthis had no power to harm their enemies’ interior, their Western opponents easily could destroy their airports, ports, power generation, and modern economy in days, and would happily do so if the terror continued.

So here we are, in March 2026, watching the systematic destruction of the entire five-decade façade of a supposedly invincible Iranian military, the systematic elimination of its theocratic leaders, and the dismantling of the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard terrorists.

The regime has no military ability to ensure its survival. Instead, its rope-a-dope strategy assumes that the U.S. will be attuned to domestic criticism, the looming midterms, the price of gas, and pressure from allies to end the war before the global economy sinks into recession.

We are left somewhat confused. Why did prior presidents not hold Iran accountable for its killing, thus nourishing the myth of Iranian invincibility? Why did Israel not respond earlier to Iran itself rather than just its terrorist clients?

And what now are the surviving theocrats thinking? What is their strategy of survival?

The remnants of the theocracy intend to ride out the bombings and, at some point in extremis, expect an armistice from “negotiations.” Their ultimate strategy is to wait out the tenures of both Trump and Netanyahu and hope for another sympathetic president like Obama, or a non compos mentis Biden, or someone ideologically akin to Mamdani or AOC.

When Trump and Netanyahu are out of office, they dream of using their oil to rearm and resume their role as Chinese and Russian proxies, eventually getting the bomb, and the second time around, perhaps using it.

Theocratic Iran, in its fantasies, still believes that if it ever destroyed Israel with a bomb or two, the world, especially given the recrudescence of Western antisemitism, would be appalled—for a day or two.

Then it would resume business with it. And with a dozen or so deterrent nuclear-tipped missiles, the Iranian ritual boilerplate of crazed pronouncements would follow of supposedly welcoming a nuclear pathway to an eternal virginal Paradise.

And thus, we would go full circle back again to a “crazy” Iran, its murderous clients, and its unhinged—but effective—threats.