It’s Time The Gloves Came Off

534 thoughts on “It’s Time The Gloves Came Off”

1. Carter biography? I was there but not paying much attention back then. I always believed in the “nice guy” story of President Carter. What did you read?

   1. Oh, it was about ten years ago. I’ll try to find it. let’s just say that Southpark’s “History’s greatest monster” was not THAT far off the mark. (I mean, no comparison to Lenin, Stalin, etc, except in the sense that “born in America, wishes to put people in chains” but bad enough”)

      1. He is a Democrat of a certain age and rank. Not to mention the political machine he would have come from. He can probably wear off the rack the whole “Leftism, environmentalism, tyrant Lincolnism, and white supremacism are merely cosmetics applied to mask the otherwise naked will to power” thing a lot of them have going on.

      2. I know my Dad hated him for giving away the Panama Canal and revealing the SR71 and NSA. I’m ticked at him for “certifying” Chavez’s election when he KNEW it was fraudulent. I still thought he was naive not evil.

         1. No. He tried to make a deal with Russia, to stop Reagan winning the election. That’s evil.

            1. Keep in mind that Ted Kennedy also tried to make such a deal. The icons of the American Left are not ashamed at attempts to sell out their country to the Soviet Union because they’ve always believed the real enemy were the forces of American reactionarism — you know, those neanderthals who thought the words of the Constitution were binding rather than an inconvenient puzzle to be reworked as necessary.

               An anti-anti-communist is effectively a communist.

         2. The older I get the less slack I am willing to give Carter, BUT I’m not convinced that “giving away” the canal is something he deserves blame for. As I understand it, the oringinal agreement was due to expire. The canal was no longer of strategic importance, and hadn’t been since the United States started building core warships that could not pass through the canal. Expending political capitol on retaining a canal we did not need would not have made Carter a better President.

            Not sure what would have.

            1. Strategic importance lies not solely in force of arms. Given the rather predictable (it was predicted, at the time) effect of the Chinese influence in Panama filling the vacuum left by our retreat from the Canal, how long before our shipping can be stopped by the whim of those who would be our enemies? And if such shipping is high weight/bulk items, such as the transformers that will be needed asap in the event of Carrington events, or food that would be needed in the event of societal breakdowns predicted in this and other journals, is that not of strategic import?

               As you can tell, I wasn’t happy with the giving away of the canal, either.

               1. But even commercial shipping vessels are often too big for the canal these days. Oh, having the thing might be more convenient than not, absent other considerations. It’s just that IN THIS INSTANCE I’m not persuaded that Carter was a goddamned fool. To keep the canal we would have had to break out national word rather flagrantly, and the return doesn’t seem big enough.

                  He did enough abysmally stupid stuff without carrying on about decisions that aren’t clear cut facepalm fails.

                  1. *At the time* he was right, but future thinking was never his long suit. A “new” canal is under construction, for “Ultra Carriers.” Chinese financed, and under (basically) their control.

                     1. If the Chinese annoy the Panamanians, they will be gone. That’s the hazard of investing in foreign projects like this. The locals can always kick you out.

                        1. Actually, the new canal is in Guatemala, although the Panamanians are currently undergoing an expansion of the existing one.

                        2. “The locals can always kick you out.”

                           Can they?

               2. If we really needed the canal, how long do you think we would need to simply take it. If your answer is on any timescale longer than “hours” it is incorrect.

                  1. I’d guess that several days/weeks/months of preparation (no clue to the exact amount of time) would have to precede those hours of active operations, though.

                     1. I think Col. K might argue it would be a bit more difficult than “hours” — and would cite strong supporting evidence from the Noriega take-down.

                  2. Your question is incomplete. “How long would we need to take it INTACT.” Canals are pretty easy to wreck if you have demo experts on call… Which the Chinese do, since many if not most of the so-called private firms are tied to the People’s Liberation Army.

                     It would take hours to take…. and only seconds to push one or more buttons to render the canal unusable for years. Loner if the charges in question are nuclear.

            2. The original Canal deal was for “in perpetuity”, as long as we maintained it. Then it was changed to 99 years, which wouldn’t have expired until 2005. Carter was a typical leftist “anti-colonialist”, and viewed the Canal Zone as a colonial possession of the United States. It didn’t matter to him that the United States had built not only the canal, but also the rail line connecting Colon and Panama City, or that the US had built the only road connecting the two. It was a colonial possession, and it had to go. He tried equally hard to get the Puerto Ricans to become independent, but that didn’t work the way he’d hoped.

               I worked at the Washington Naval Yard, at the NPIC building, for more than six months in 1980. The office I worked in provided all the imagery intelligence materials requested by the commander of the Air Force and his staff. NO ONE in that building had a good word to say about the man. He wasn’t quite as conceited as Teh Won, but he was totally despised. Of course, he despised the CIA, and most of the military as well. He considered most of us “dumb hicks”, beneath his dignity to associate with. I’m glad the truth is coming out more and more.

               1. iirc, one of the reasons why McCain was respected was for his ability to keep some of the planes in his unit flying during the Carter years…

                  Yes, that was considered a *serious* accomplishment.

               2. A self identified peanut farmer thinking of others as dumb hicks there is enough irony in that to choke a horse.

                  1. A peanut farmer who iirc was a Navy qualified nuclear engineer. He knew he had made it through a tough school, and likely none of the people he grew up around had.

                     1. snelson134,

                        Don’t believe everything you here.

                        http://seekerblog.com/2009/08/27/resume-inflation-how-a-peanut-farmer-became-a-nuclear-engineer/

                        😉

                        The Irony is he plays at being a humble man of the people while being an arrogant prick.

                        1. A politician inflating his military service record? SAY IT AIN’T SO!!!

                           1. Yep! Who’d of thunk it?

                              🙂

                  2. You beat me to it.

               3. “The original Canal deal was for “in perpetuity”, as long as we maintained it. Then it was changed to 99 years, which wouldn’t have expired until 2005. ”

                  This. I’m not sure where the rumor that the deal was “due to expire” and Carter just “let it go” started; but I have been hearing it a lot lately. It is typical of the Left to attempt to rewrite history, but it seems I have been hearing that rumor more from the Right, possibly because the Left doesn’t talk about Carter at all.

      3. In somewhat related news, apparently Jimmy is saying Barry is lousy at Foreign Policy. (Apparently Barry waited too long to do something about ISIS.) How bad do you have to be to have Jimmy say you suck at foreign policy?

         1. To paraphrase Dogbert: “Actually being bad enough at foreign policy for the criticism to be valid?”

      4. It was 1976. I was 18. I was stupid. I … voted for him.

         I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since.

         1. It’s okay. I couldn’t vote RR in 80, but I could campaign for him. And I did.

            1. I was barely old enough to vote for RR.

         2. NP I was too young to vote then. And yes, we are allowed a few mistakes as young adults.

            1. My first presidential vote was for John Anderson. Do you realize what kind of percentile that puts me in?

               1. Ross Perot

                  1. Perot was my first as well

                     1. Oy. He made me SO mad.

                  2. I went for Buchanan in the primary but stuck with Bush in the general. It was before he revealed himself as a whackjob anti-Israel isolationist.

                     And I really didn’t expect him to win.

                  3. sigh.

                     George McGovern.

                     I don’t know who I would have voted for had I thought McGovern had a chance in Heck.

               2. Same as my husband’s? But he voted fro RR second go-round.

                  1. Same as my husband’s? But he voted fro RR second go-round.

                     Now, I don’t feel alone.

                     I voted for the Gipper the second time too. The last Democrat I voted for was Bob Casey Sr for governor.

                  2. Ah, for once a forum that makes me feel young! 1984 was my first, and I pulled the lever (Literally! Big gray metal box with all the levers and individual counters.) for Reagan.

               3. You’ll tell me?

               4. My first was for Nixon’s second term. Some because McGovern didn’t impress me much, more because it seriously annoyed the usual “intellectuals” attending the college I hadn’t quite quit at the time.

            2. My first vote was for George W. Bush. I turned 18 about two weeks after the Bush vs. Gore election and I was somewhat amused at how that dragged out.

         3. I was 30. I voted for Ford in 1976, and Reagan in 1980. I’d like to say I was older and wiser, but Carter just left a bitter taste in my mouth whenever I saw him on a campaign event. I’ve shaken hands with four presidents: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Shaking Carter’s hand was the only time I felt I needed to wash my hand immediately afterwards.

            1. With Carter it was probably only psychological, with Clinton I would highly recommend washing before you eat.

   2. Never did like him (I voted RR in high school’s mock election), then later my feelings were backed up on it with stories of his rants against jews and others for not getting him his second term, then his pandering to every tin-god tyrant who got “elected”.
      He needs to shut up, and go back to making furniture (he was quite good at that, actually)

      1. There is compelling evidence (read so long ago I have forgotten where) that the Camp David Accords (Carter’s primary claim to foreign policy competence) were achieved by the determined efforts of the Egyptian and Israeli leaders in spite of Carter more than because of him.

         1. I know Sadat wanted the accord. I’ve read that he basically started the Yom Kippur War with an eye toward getting a peace agreement with Israel. He knew that if he signed a peace agreement after Egypt’s unbroken string of military disasters against Israel, then he’d be strung up from the nearest lamp post. So he triggered the war with an eye toward giving the Egyptians something to feel good about. And while Egypt ultimately lost the war, the Egyptian army’s success during the initial stages ultimately did provide the morale boost that Sadat was looking for.

            So yeah, I can believe that Carter didn’t really provide anything to the peace talks.

            1. Junior, that makes sense. The Yom Kippur war has puzzled me, they held the opposite bank of the Suez Canal, and … where were they supposed to go from there? They held the bank till they were threatened with defeat.

            2. Except the location

         2. I’m still haunted by the coldness of Carter’s reaction to a reporter asking about President Anwar Sadat’s assassination. I know, Carter was no longer president, but the reporter thought, I’ll get his grief at the tragedy… that wasn’t what he got.

         3. I recall hearing that way way back, but forget where as well.

   3. Ehh, let’s be fair to Carter, here. The man had a very good reputation from his time in the Navy, including incurring great personal risk from irradiation stopping a reactor meltdown. He also was heavily involved with Habitat for Humanity, which makes the people they help build other peoples’ houses before they build one for them.
      That having been said, he was a very lousy president who understood virtually nothing about world politics, and, I think, saw everything from the perspective of a liberal who lived in the 1950s and 1960s South: White conservatives bad, dark poor people good. This carried over into his relations with Israel, and then spiraled down from there.
      (Note: I’ve heard rumors that his brother’s bank was prevented from going down the toilet by an infusion of cash from Arab sources. Can anyone verify this?)

      1. I knew a chap who had graduated Annapolis about five years after Carter whose opinion was not complimentary — but I don’t know to what extent events after his service affected my friend’s views. Given the bias in the media, a politician having a good reputation should probably constitute two and a half strikes against him … three strikes if the politician presents as conservative.

         I, too, have heard the bank rumours but cannot cite arguments. There should be investigations of the funding of presidential money laundries libraries and foundations, but I expect the MSM would only find issues on the Right (just as their concern over large fees for post-presidential speeches seemed to begin and end with Bush ’41.)

      2. about as far as I will go is agree he was a decent nukee, and as stated above, made some well built furniture. I don’t think everything he brought to HFH was for the better (their later work has been known to fall apart or make folks sick) but I really can’t say it was directly his fault, just an affect of his drawing so many more leftoids to the org.
         Other than that … waste of oxygen

      3. Hadn’t heard about the reactor incident, but lets put this in perspective. You’re on a ship, and you think you might know how to stop a meltdown, which is more personally dangerous? a) attempting to stop the meltdown, or b) jumping in the ocean and swimming for safety? How fast can you swim?

         1. T’wasn’t on a ship. It was on land, at the Chalk River Lab in Canada.

         2. Wasn’t the reactor meltdown from a Saturday Night Live skit about him touring Three Mile Island?

            1. http://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78ppepsi.phtml

               Yep.

   4. Not to countermand our hostess, but it’s entirely nice– maybe even very common– to be “nice” and be a total crapweasle.

      All depends on if the folks defining nice mean “doesn’t say nasty stuff about other folks, even if it’s totally true.”

      1. Prime example:
         Two southern ladies are sitting at the country club by the pool. The first southern lady says, “When I had my first child, my husband bought me a diamond ring.” The second lady says, “Well, isn’t that nice.”

         The first lady says, “When my second child was born, my husband took me on a cruise.” The second lady says,”well isn’t that nice The first lady continues, “When my third child was born, my husband took me on a trip around the world.” And the second lady says, once again, “Well, isn’t that nice.”

         The first lady asks, “Well, what did your husband get you when your first child was born?” The second lady repiles, “My husband sent me to finishing school.” The first lady asks, “Well why did he do that?” And the second lady says, “So I could learn to say ‘Well isn’t that nice,’ instead of ‘F**K YOU’!”

         1. Well, bless y’all’s little heart.

            1. You beat me to it, RES.

2. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

   Seriously it really ticks me off when even the so-called ‘shock jocks’ of the right, the talk radio hosts, etc. are unwilling to call a spade a spade. When will people figure out that the Left is the enemy? It is never a good idea to make excuses and apologize for your enemy.

   1. It’s a matter of appropriateness. The modern gods of the copybook headings seem to apply:
      – Tit-for-tat still seems to work best in most situations, at least in the long run – respond, hard, to provocation; then return to neutral.
      – Absolutely call a spade a spade, but there’s no need to call it a bloody shovel. I.e. don’t escalate the unpleasantness, but don’t hurt yourself trying to be nice.

      Also note: if the despised Journolist is seen as combat training rather than spin-collusion among independent reporters of fact, it make more sense – and is to some degree worthy of emulation: Let at least some of our discussions include dispassionate analysis of vileprog/SJW talking points and how best to counter them in publication and public argument, and how to make our own assertions harder for them to counter.

      1. I recall reading, years ago, about a study that found protesters outside of abortion clinics, when using normal voices, were perceived as shouting by those inside the clinics. Apparently it is a trick of human perception that things we do not wish to hear seem louder and more hostile.

         Thus even when we are “nice” we will offend. We must not allow our opponents to define niceness for us — we saw how well that worked for TEA Party protests.

         1. Yeah, noticed the same thing with my wife. 😉

3. I live in St. Louis, and we’ve had some riots recently. The responses to them has been chilling for me personally–the actual, physical destruction of property is described as “protests” while people who speak out against them are told that they are causing the problem with their “hate”.

   It’s hard not to draw comparisons with Krystalnacht.

   1. I did like what the Cardinal fans did when the idiots tried to disrupt the playoff game like they did the St. Louis Symphony concert a couple of days earlier. I heard the lefties slithered out in shame……

      1. Wait, wait — what did they do?

         1. You can get a flavour of it by putting the phrase “Cardinal fans Ferguson protesters” into your search engine of choice, or just go to this at Breitbart:
            http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/10/07/Watch-Cardinals-Fans-Taunt-Ferguson-Protesters
            Monday night outside of St. Louis’ Busch Stadium after the third game of the National League Divisional Series playoff game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Los Angeles Dodgers, Cardinals fans departing from the game clashed with a group protesting events surrounding this year’s Ferguson, MO controversy.

            The 25-minute video is courtesy of Argus Streaming News.
            (h/t Mediaite via Deadspin)

   2. Democrats will be Democrats.

      It is a couple of worn pages in their playbook.

      You aren’t that far from a place where they were able to avoid official mention of several hundred in mass graves for decades.

      You can only ever hope to clean up local government in your own area. You can only ever keep government too closely watched and intimidated to pull this stuff by diligence.

      If your neighbors like their political victories and in groups more than they like not having factions unable to murder, well, you’ll be in the place a lot of Republicans have been in American history.

      1. Typo

         not having factions able to murder
         or
         having factions unable to murder

   3. A policeman just shot a man who was shooting at him with a pistol. and it’s starting again.

      1. Unfortunately, it took the cop 17-18 shots. I know, stress and adrenaline make for poor accuracy – but it makes the story sound like the cop was into major overreaction. Realistic tactical stress training is needed for all LEOs.

         1. Unfortunately, it took the cop 17-18 shots.

            Is that an absolute established fact? I remember feeling kind of sympathetic to — or at least open minded about — Michael Brown after the first few Ferguson stories.

         2. You shoot until you’re sure the threat is stopped or you’re out of ammunition. A 9mm Glock has 17 rounds in the magazine. Add one in the chamber, you have 18.

            1. First thing I thought when I read about the Amadou Diallo shooting was “four officers, 41 shots — they just emptied their mags.”

               I later thought “Springsteen is a pampered pillock who has forgotten his blue collar roots and now just poses as champion of the working man — comes of listening too much to Rolling Stone prats who hail you as Woody Guthrie reborn.” (Note: expletives deleted for purposes of conciseness … and to make me appear a far nicer person than I am.)

      2. The question is, what kind of projectiles were on the police cartridges used, and what muzzle velocity? The rule is, fire until the threat ceases. I know, there are cases of cops firing hundreds of rounds for no reason, but here, the cop was threatened with death, and who knows how many bullets it took to stop the threat. And yeah, they are as a rule very poorly trained, so some of the shots may have missed, or grazed. There was that suicide by cop case in which the police fire was totally justified, but they wounded nine innocent bystanders.

         1. There was a case in L.A. about fifteen years ago where LAPD fired more than 100 rounds at a suspect who subsequently died from a heart attack.
            The police don’t practice their marksmanship as much as most people think. They actually shoot less than the average firearms owner on average. There are exceptions but not many. Perhaps they should practice more.

            1. And, of course, there’s the famous case from several decades back involving FBI agents and criminals caught in a shoot-out at essentially point blank range. The criminals got away, and the mess caused an overhaul of the FBI’s rules regarding proficiency with guns.

            2. If you want the police to practice more, pay them. Offer a yearly prize for best marksman on your local force, prize not to be awarded if the best score is below a level set by the local police chief ahead of time (or perhaps some better, objective, well respected authority).

               1. Not a bad idea. Maybe the NRA could sponsor it. They have the organization to put it together.

                  OTH nobody else gets a prize or extra pay to maintain proficiency with the tools of their trade.

                  1. I can remember back a few years when the Air Force had to re-qualify every year (now every three or four years, I can’t remember). We used to jokingly say we were more qualified than the average cop, who only had to qualify every five years, I believe. I haven’t fired in ten years, but believe I can out-shoot most law enforcement types. Hunting squirrels with a 22 rifle in Louisiana when I was a kid paid off later.

                     1. I took a state patrolman out hunting last week and he managed to just graze a bear at approximately six feet (not totally his fault, he was using a scoped rifle which is a poor weapon choice at that range, but it wasn’t his choice, he started out with an open sighted carbine but switched with another guy when the other guy was expected to get the shot). I was later joking with his wife and told her that the safest place to be when a cop starts shooting, is their target.

                        I was joking, but he was only half joking when he agreed with me, he pointed out that many of his fellow officers are some of the poorer shots he knows.

                        1. Your average patrolman doesn’t particularly need to be a good shot, pistol or rifle. If they are shooting they’ve already lost control of the situation. Contra Television and movies, I doubt the typical cop very often needs to use a weapon other than for intimidation. That was one of the things Dragnet and Andy Griffith got right.

                           1. You are entirely right, which is of course why they don’t practice and have such spectacular results when they are required to use one (which most patrolmen are not, even if they spend their entire career in uniform).

                              Examples like Ruby Ridge however, where they bring in ‘specialist’ snipers who fail totally at ranges that would be a chip shot for your average deer hunter… well one has to wonder how much is utter incompetence, and how much is malicious intent.

                     2. Louisiana squirrels carry .22 rifles? Up on the Blue Ridge they lean toward a somewhat heavier round, like a .243 or a 6mm.

                  2. Your choice. If you want to target for professionalism, don’t do the prize. If you want to target for marksmanship, do the prize. Trying for both doesn’t seem to be working.

                     1. How about removing their arms altogether? They’ve proven they can’t use them. Require them to find an armed citizen if there’s shooting to be done. If this makes it too dangerous for some of the fearful little oiks, so be it.

                  3. OTH nobody else gets a prize or extra pay to maintain proficiency with the tools of their trade.

                     Cars, desks, paperwork and the law? They have guns, but they’re not tools of the trade– cops are not SUPPOSED to kill people. Sometimes they have to, but that’s because they’re dealing with Not Good People.

                     Such a prize would buildup the myth of the Awesome Shot Cops, though.

            3. The “problem” is that a) _Range time_ is in *their* time; b) It’s mostly their dollar as well. IIRC, they get _1_ hour, and about _20_ rounds *per year.* More than that, and it’s all their time and cost. It will change when somebody files a class action suit, over “inadequate training.”

               1. Walter,

                  You fight like you train. How many real world fire fights happen behind a bench and will allow you the time to center yourself and set yourself into a good solid shooting stance.

                  All bench/target shooting does is teach you how to bench/target shoot.

                  Quoted from Rory Miller’s blog:

                  http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2010/12/training-in-versus-training-for.html

                  US Marshal Jones said that in order for a technique to be valid it must have three elements. The list now has four, so I must have added one and I’m not sure which it was:

                  · Anything you teach must have a tactical use. Reholstering quickly doesn’t have a tactical use. Outside of handcuffing, breaking a turtle (the judo guys know what I mean) not only has no self-defense use but there’s no way to do it without being the bad guy, legally.

                  · It must work moving or standing still. If you can’t hit hard when both you and the threat are moving, you can’t hit hard. If you can’t put a bullet on target on a moving target while you, yourself are moving, for all tactical purposes you can’t shoot.

                  · It must work whether you can see or not (and this is likely the one I added, because JJ is primarily a shooter and there are lots of shooting skills that rely on sight… but at the same time he insisted that everything except target acquisition be done by touch.)

                  · The technique must work when you are scared, under an adrenaline dump. If the technique needs a clear head and pinpoint precision to work, it doesn’t work.

               2. Ps. Before you can adequately train you gave to defone what adequate training is.

               3. The real problem with that is “Qualified Immunity.” The legal get out of jail free card that means no class action suit will ever be heard.

   4. Just another reason to try to establish a situation in which you can withdraw from major urban centers. Too many feral humans getting popular cover by the vestigial media.

4. Every Democrat is either stupid or evil. Every single one from Barry the Feeble-minded to the 18 year-old valedictorian in Podunk.

   1. A mite over strong, Jeff. Many are simply ignorant, many are misinformed, many are both. Those conditions only resemble stupidity. Many are also victims of Social Proof and can be cured by shattering the dominant paradogma. Stupidity and evil are uncurable conditions for which we can only treat to ameliorate symptoms.

      1. They just know so much that isn’t so….

   2. That isn’t true. Way too many are just innocent victims of a concerted indoctrination attempt, and haven’t had their eyes opened to what’s going on around them yet.

      1. And it’s hard to have one’s eyes opened, unless one is of a disposition not to trust news that are too perfectly coordinated. Thank heavens I was raised reading Heinlein.

         1. That’s only true so long as news is consumed via channel. Once news is consumed via intelligent agent, the board changes, radically.

   3. Hey, I was registered as Democrat for most of my life (born, raised, grew up in California). If I wasn’t, I couldn’t have cast spoiler votes in the primaries.

      Not that it helped much, most of the time.

5. OK, so they’re armed with a broken bottle. That, dear Sarah, is why you have a sniper on overwatch. Figuratively, of course, at least for the moment.

   My fear is that it will get to the point where it will be forced to be literal. . .

   1. The media and academia provide Teh Left’s close air support.

   2. The problem is that too many on the Right think that having that sniper is out of bounds.

      1. Well, of course a sniper is out of bounds. What would be the point of having a sniper standing right next to you?

         1. +1!

         2. Remember, “if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.”

            1. Also remember, “If it’s not close, they can’t cheat.”

               1. Snipers have a whole ‘nuther definition of close.

6. OT but interesting: A virginia postrel article about how we view the world. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-08/peter-thiel-is-wrong-about-the-future

   1. That article sets my teeth on edge. Not because there’s not some decent points there, but because it just seems like he dug almost, but not quite, deep enough, and so missed the mark.

7. Somehow, the left has managed to set the rules, so we get to play with one leg and both hands tied behind our back and then wonder why we’re not winning.

   Personally, I’ve been playing with my own rules since I started blogging in 2009. Of course, that might also be part of why I didn’t get a little further up the mountain on that. Put me on a big enough platform, and I’m really going to stir up some crap.

   The thing is, it’s crap that needs to be stirred up.

   1. It can’t decompose into usable fertilizer without sunlight and air. Otherwise it just piles up and poisons the soil.

   2. They set the rules only so long as you agree to them. Each side gets to have a say. I’ve called enough leftists bloody handed, evil people when they were, in fact, bloody handed and evil to know that it’s perfectly possible to take the moral high ground from the right and also a good bit of fun.

8. People criticize Mitt Romney for saying that Obama was a good man. How could he have said otherwise. If he’d called the man the rabid crapweasel he is, half the right or more would have risen to dissociate themselves from him, because they’ve been trained to think it’s somehow not fair or impolite to expose the left.

   It’s not that half the right would have disassociated themselves, it’s that the Low Information Voters who don’t care about politics would be told by the “unbiased” media how mean Romney was. At this point, winning contested national elections requires winning voters that don’t care about politics and are swayed to vote for the popular candidate by the “unbiased media”. The playing field is tilted, and until we can untilt it, we have to fight around that weakness.

   What had happened was that leftism had become a positional good.

   One of the biggest psychological tricks of modern political culture is the way leftism culturally presents itself. Some people are naturally joiners that go along with the crowd, and some people are natural rebels that rebel against authority. By being a Leftist, you’re “standing up against the Man” and at the same time “all right-thinking people are doing it”.

   1. Orwell exposed this particular ploy with his “memory hole.” The Left denounces Mattera’s tricks and nobody recalls their joyous approval of Michael Moore’s harassment of Charlton Heston. Just as their expressions of dismay at the disloyalty that former members of an Administration should write a tell-all memoir omits their hailing of “Whistle-Blower” memoirs during the Bush Administration.

      1. Or their complaints about doxxing their trolls and attack dogs, when they’re more than happy to expose the locations of the people they hate.

         After all, the don’t consider anyone on the Right / disagrees with them ‘worth protecting.’

      2. Moore had an edit where he went from Heston speech #1, shot of an applauding crowd, Heston speech #2. As I understand it, Heston wasn’t even wearing the same clothes in the two speeches.

         But it took someone disposed to disagree with Moore to notice the discontinuity.

9. This must be why I got hit with a story idea this AM about space aliens making first contact with ranchers and buying up older dairy cattle and any scrub bulls the guys wanted to get rid of (the alines need methane-producing herbivores). A decade later the feds learn about the deal and have a hissy fit about why didn’t the aliens contact the best and brightest, the ranchers will corrupt the innocent, peaceful aliens, blah, blah. *evil grin*

   Back on topic Daniel Hannan (the quasi-libertarian Member of European Parliament from England) points out that the internet has been a massive disaster for the Euro-fans because it is so English-centric and it is connecting the Anglosphere tighter and tighter, and even drawing other people into the free market, individualistic world. Byte by byte from below, the Anointed are losing their grip.

   1. Write it.

      1. What we need is a dozen different angles/perspectives on it, do a Human Wave antho, and get it on the market.

         1. Well, I needed another idea for Worlds Of Wonder – September 1956′.

            I think I just found it… Now I’ll need to finish the serialized story from the first one. 😦

      2. Examine the Internet in India, too. Even before computers, nothing frustrated Indian nationalists and High Caste people more than the fact that English is the national language of India, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

         1. I’m in a large international company, which means a fair amount of our development work goes to Indian support divisions, and we get to know some of the people well. One, asked whether English was a resented cultural imperialism, responded “No, we’re happy about it. The English gave us a common language – before, we had thousands of dialects and couldn’t work together.” An insight I certainly hadn’t had!

            1. It has the added advantage of not favoring any one group, because you tend to hate your neighbor even more than those evil imperialists.

         2. Nit Pick. IIRC English is one of the National Languages of India. [Smile]

   2. That is an awesome story idea, you totally should run with it. Heck, I wish I’d thought of something like that.

   3. Dear Sweet Buddha in a Congolese Hand-basket, write that story. Write it now.

   4. Write it.

   5. Please write that book!

   6. Some very loosely related themes along the lines of your alien story can be found in a Brandon Sanderson short story. It’s called ‘Defending Elysium’, and it can be read here –

      http://brandonsanderson.com/defending-elysium/

      In short, aliens make contact with humanity, and the limit their direct interactions to one of the Baby Bell phone companies. It goes in a very different direction from what you’re looking for, but it does have some similarities.

   7. And when will this be available for purchase?

   8. Sheesh! Ok, Ok, easy, down, down. I’ll see what I can do. I got called in this AM and just got home. (No, I didn’t try to write there. Never, ever turn your back on dodge ball or physics class. Just don’t.)

      1. Got it plotted out sort of and the first chunk written. The aliens pay in cash and diesel fuel (dyed to match highway diesel, so there’s not trouble if the Highway Patrol pulls you over for a tax check.)

         1. How did they get American cash that’ll pass muster? Did they steal it from a bank somewhere? (Those ranchers are going to get in trouble when they turn up in possession of stolen bills). Did they produce it themselves? (How did they get the serial numbers right?)

            My expectation when I read your first comment was that the aliens would be trading in commodities. Something they had in large amounts and therefore didn’t value, but which would be valuable on Earth. Gold, perhaps, depending on what minerals are available on their home planet. Or maybe they have some kind of industrial process using carbon that produces highly-compressed carbon crystals as waste products, and are amazed to find that these Earth natives are willing, even eager, to take those in trade. Meanwhile, the ranchers get together and plan out how they’re going to start selling high-quality diamonds without flooding the market.

            But aliens having American cash to trade with, I can immediately think of several obvious problems with, and that would probably throw me out of the story.

            1. I would guess that aliens would work for it, just like the rest of us. I’m assuming these are aliens with good computers and the ability to get on the Internet. These days that’s all you need for a good chunk of change. You can rent CPU cycles out and get a few million that way. They could pretend to be a large botnet (which stops most of the questions as to where this computing power is coming from) for bitcoins and convert that to anonymous cash. Aliens at McDonalds doing localbitcoins.com transactions would seem to have potential.

            2. 🙂 Easy Robin, I’m just sketching out the draft at this stage! I’ve got to get a few irons out of the fire before I can really tear into it and get all the details and relations sorted out.

   9. Ooooh, this sounds like a fascinating story. Yes please.

   10. Sounds like an interesting story, please do write it.

       As to the Euro-fans, what I have been seeing more and more on our internet forums are people who obviously read the same sites as I do. Especially when it comes to guns, and the right to use them for self-defense (which is something we don’t have here, legally). More and more commenters who argue with the hoplophobes with facts you can find on American pro-gun sites.

       Have to say I’m very happy with this trend. 🙂

       What I am somewhat less happy with, one reason why this is trending is probably because our streets are becoming less safe than they used to be. With open borders we get criminals from all over Europe, and something like attacks against old people – like somebody knocking an old man down and taking his wallet – have started to happen. When I was a kid those were almost unheard of. And while our immigration has been very restrained compared to some other European countries, bringing in people from very different cultures has negatives. Girls have been raped on the street – also something which very rarely happened before. And just during the last weeks the papers told of attacks some loose youth gangs (or gang, but the members do seem to be somewhat changeable, if you can trust the news) have done against people in Helsinki. Kids ganging up and attacking other kids and beating them up, possibly just for fun, and mostly teens in both groups. But most of the victims have been ethnic Finns, while there seems to be several immigrant kids in the gang (our newspapers do have a tendency to hide it if the criminal has an immigrant background – happens often enough that the usual supposition now is that if it is not specifically told that he was obviously an ethnic Finn then we are talking about an immigrant. Usually they do tell only at that point when it’s impossible to hide it because it’s all over the internet already anyway, or legal proceedings are at a point where anybody can find out the name).

       But, anyway, once you combine easy access to facts and people who are starting to feel much less secure than they used to… well, who knows. One can hope at least.

       1. Heh — here in America those of us who look for news (rather than reassurance that our understanding of the world is correct) have long since learned that a) if an assailant’s ethnicity is not reported, the assailant was minority b) if neither the assailant nor the victim’s ethnicity is reported, it is minority on minority attack c) if a politician’s party in a story on political corruption is not identified, the politician represents the dominant liberal party and d) hypocrisy is only a problem when practiced by a conservativ e politician.

          Reading between the lines becomes absurdly easy when the gaps between events and reporting become so large.

          1. Yeah. Pravda.

       2. If you haven’t already discovered it, find Oleg Volk’s website (olegvolk.net). He’s an outstanding photographer who does a lot of work on the right to be armed and self-defense. A fair chunk of his work is explicitly intended for non-US consumers (Europe, India, among others).

10. Ms Lerner richly deserved being doorstopped (metaphorically speaking) by representatives of the media – after all, hasn’t 60 Minutes been doing this for the last thirty years?
    Really – now we should be feeling bad because the shoe is on the other foot.
    My daughter watched the whole video, and noted how Ms. Lerner really didn’t seem to be popular with her neighbors. You’d think that anyone who was well-known and liked in a neighborhood would be given refuge instantly on being harassed by a camera crew…

    1. Didn’t Michael Moore start his career with a movie about ambushing the head of GM? It’s so–what’s the word?–delicious to see the new media using the tactics that put the old media into power.

       1. and the clue to the type of liar he was is in the knowledge he “pursued Roger and then when getting an interview, left that out of the movie so it looked like he was ignored, even when he wasn’t, and had most of his “questions” answered. Another of those who, if I ever meet in person, will very likely NOT enjoy the experience as much as I, and I certainly wont because some things are against the law.

          1. Yup. Moore’s entire career is founded on a lie, upon which he has continued to build even more lies. And now we have scores of “documentaries” trying to emulate his approach.

             1. I’ve an intense dislike for that being.

          2. Yep – always take your own camera to an interview. And publish the take on alternate media, to ensure availability vs. the edited version.

             1. Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt handles MSM interview requests by always agreeing, on the condition that the interview be conducted and broadcast live on his show. He then conducts his own interview of the interviewer, live, on-air. This prevents his words being distorted, his time being wasted and fills some portion of his fifteen weekly hours of broadcast commentary.

                1. Love that guy. I think Hugh is one of the best interviewers in the business. A little too party line for me sometimes, but other than that, a really enjoyable listen.

             2. that was one of the methods they used on Palin. Ask a question … play her listening to the question without the sound and then her answer so it looked like she was hesitating was one of the things they did.

             3. One of the Powerline guys was asked to be the Old Conservative for some TV host’s attempt to flip a seat democrat– college discussion with an old and a young of left and right– and he considered it, called up to say sure…as long as he got a copy of the video inside of 24 hours, so he could use clips at Powerline.

                Temperature dropped and they said nevermind.

                1. Never needlessly cede Home Court Advantage to the opposition (never doubt the MSM is the opposition.) This is an unforced error routinely made by GOP presidential candidates — particularly egregious is letting the MSM run your primary debates. Letting Chris Matthews moderate a GOP primary is as insane as Dems inviting Mark Levin Sean Hannity to moderate the Hillary/Warren/Biden debate.

                   1. I would PAY to watch Levin moderating a Dem debate. Especially if they gave him a list of questions. 😀

          3. In fact, he got the interview fairly early on in the process of making the movie.

             I’ve long maintained that the only difference between Michael Moore and a Colostomy Bag is capacity.

             1. And legs.

                1. That kinda ruins “Both full of sh*t” angle of the comparison…

             2. A colostomy bag holds more brain cells

                1. Sounds like you’re using it wrong. 🙂

             3. Oh come on. A colostomy bag is actually useful.

                1. Additionally, a colostomy bag is not always full.

                2. Not once it’s full.

    2. Is doorstopped roughly equivalent to being curbstoned? If so, I’ll sign off on it. (Yes, I AM a smash-mouth constitutionalist; why do you ask?)

       M

    3. I’m old enough to remember when the Miami Herald drew a lot of flak for exposing Gary Hart’s lies. They didn’t confront him directly. Instead, they did *exactly* what he himself had already suggested the media do, and followed him. When they saw him enter a home shortly before Donna Rice did, well…

       That was the end of the Gary Hart presidential campaign.

       1. Ther New York Times Sunday magazine recently featured an extensive apologia from Hart (I forget who the Times author was, but he was ever so sympathetic) about his failure to defeat Bush pars and thus save us from the evils of Bushfils. It was as full of mourning for the lost utopia as a JFK biography.

          1. Oh, brother. What an arrogant twit. It’s not even certain that he would have obtained the nomination that year, as the field was wide open with a lot of Dems running. Certainly, Hart was doing better than many of the other potential nominees. But it was too early in the season to determine who was going to win the thing.

             And, well, he would have been running against Reagan’s Vice President. Bush would have had to seriously screw things up in order to lose. Sure, Dukakis managed to shoot himself in the foot with things like the tank video. But that only made the loss worse than it otherwise would have been.

          2. YES!

11. The real reason(s) liberals are so fanatical is simple… They just aren’t competent (educational deficiency) enough to do the necessary math, logical enough to foresee even obvious consequences, or
    (most importantly) honest enough to SAY “I was wrong” instead of doubling down…
    Any, or all, of that would make them admit the irreparable harm they’ve done for the last century…
    To quote another ‘smarter-then-thou’ character “Inconceivable!”

    1. It’s not just honesty that keeps them from saying “I was wrong”; it’s that admitting imperfection would (in their minds) kick them out of the elite’s club. Talk about an existential threat!

    2. Ted, take this as coming from a friend, but I must disagree with your rexplanation – and also with Sarah, just a little bit.

       The real reason for this behavior is that they belong to a religion. It has its madrassas (universities), its secret societies driven by decentralized fatwas (SJW), its jihad, its identified heretics/ inflidels, and a Pharaonic god. The last bit is its major theological divergence from Islam. Grasp this, and the puzzling disconnect from reality makes complete sense as an EXPECTED feature.

       Its organization, BTW, is medieval: the 3 estates, and the Hollywood cutout status of the 4th Estate is a clue. Its has its annointed/ clerisy, its Entitled at the trough, and its Benighted. The last set within Il Casta are actually most susceptible to conversion, though they’re also the ones you’re most tempted to mock virulently. Christian charity in that one area will pay dividends – for the rest it’s Sarah Rules.

       When you grasp that SJW annointed = ISIS, you get both your own answer, and the argument which makes Sarah’s point here an “of course” slam-dunk.

12. If anyone here wants to learn more about the situation with gaming journalism, the mess so-called feminists are making of it and the attacks being made by SJWs I can try to explain a bit about it. As a gamer I’ve been watching the storm brew for years and as of late the cognitive dissonance I’ve seen has taken my breath away.

    1. I’ve been watching it through my younger kid, and all I have to say is you #gamergate folk have done us proud. About time those SJW scolds met with resistance.

       1. Yeah, and they’re getting into a fight that they can’t win. The only reason it’s still even a controversy is because people who don’t know the whole story keep jumping in to defend what they see as poor, harassed women from all of the angry, hate filled people attacking them, never once realizing that the backlash these women are getting stems from years of them abusing their audience. I’ve watched the gaming SJWs and pseudo feminists in action and they alienate others in the long run because of how blind they are. They rely on fresh, ignorant, individuals to keep them going because on their own they tend to “withdraw into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever “truth” suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.” to borrow a quote from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. You see, unlike many of the people involved in gaming journalism I actually play games and enjoy them.

          That being said, the Metal Gear Solid series is awesome and political in a way that gaming SJWs would hate if they actually played the games in it and thought about the messages in them.

          1. The news stories are distinctly — tilted.

          2. But SJWs aren’t gamers. Just like our SJWs aren’t readers.
             My take on this: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/09/26/book-plug-friday-bad-romance/

             1. SJWs and Gamers – looks like a good place to leave this little gem.

                They’re not just warriors any more:

                Social Justice Warrior character class badges. Proceeds go to Planned Parenthood. #SJW http://t.co/5TmHuZhvPY pic.twitter.com/dCZrITc5Rt

                — Boing Boing (@BoingBoing) October 6, 2014

                (RUN AWAY!!!)

                1. That’s a real thing? Those buttons are terrible. It looks like they were done with Paint in about ten minutes.

                   1. Now, whatever happened to your priorities? It shows that YOU CARE. that’s what’s important.

                      1. And the “cause” money goes to an evil NGO started by one of the most evil people to have ever existed.

                2. *snort*

                   The ultimate irony is that they’re appropriating the things that were once derided by the SJWs as unrealistic escapism and the pastime of pathetic nerds unable to live in ‘reality’… except that ‘pastime’ and all the stuff associated with it are now super popular because people LIKE to have fun and read/play/participate in fun things.

                   And SJWs hate it when people are having fun.

                   1. Well by the time the SJWs had discovered SF they had already wrecked just about all the other genres.

             2. I have come to the conclusion that SJW’s are the ultimate killjoys, literally. They are convince if that they can take anything and remove all the pleasure and joy that people get out of it they are making the world somehow, a better place.:
                http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/10/national_geographic_alleges_that_birdwatching_is_racist_an_urban_birdwatcher_responds.html

          3. I had the impression that MGS looks kinda of lefty, and has a lot of screwy bits that I can only assume are informed by Japanese culture.

             That said: I’ve never actually played Metal Gear. I’m also unsure if you’d want to call me a gamer.

             My favorite example of political art in a video game is from, IIRC, the GDI disk of the original Command and Conquer. That bit where Kane, terrorist mastermind, is directing the newscast complaining about ‘war crimes’ by the military fighting against him. Well predated the War on Terror.

             I don’t follow games journalism much, so there is a lot I might not know about the current scandal, and I am always ready to hear more.

             1. You’re right that the MGS series is very Japanese and can come across as being skewed to the left, but it’s more equal opportunity in terms of who it goes after, that and the whole setting is fairly over the top so characters tend to look like parodies of whatever ideas they represent/express. I’ve just found that my right leaning friends tend to enjoy the series and get a lot more out of it than left leaning individuals in my experience.

                As for the whole game journalism situation, it’s been brewing for a long time and boiled over when it it came to light that an indie game developer, Zoe Quinn, had relations with at least five individuals in the industry, including her own boss as well as a known gaming journalist. This information was posted by her boyfriend, who was outraged by her deceitful and manipulative nature. About a day later it was revealed that she faked being harassed to help draw attention to herself and the projects she was working on in an effort to make people favor her out of sympathy. As she came under fire she continued to fabricate stories about harassment and hacking of her accounts and each claim was debunked or vanished in turn. She’s also worked against other efforts by women in the gaming community who do not fit the narrative that she and others like her are working to create. During the whole ordeal her efforts revolved around keeping the focus on her rather than larger issues and making everything personal. Because she’s a woman she’s been able to count on SJWs to defend her without knowing what they’re arguing against. Of course, this in only what brought things to a head.

                Prior to the Quinn incident there was Anita Sarkeesian, who claims to be a gamer despite not having been interested in games and gaming before starting the notion that videogames discriminate against women. Anita frequently cites parts of games out of context, like saying you are rewarded for killing women in Grand Theft Auto games without mentioning that you get the same rewards for killing men. There’s also Jennifer Hepler, a game writer who expressed her distaste for playing videogames and went on to panic and call gamers hateful when they responded harshly to her opinions. To give you the idea, her comments about gameplay being the least interesting part of gaming would be like some saying that they’re an author but find that words are a pointless distraction from pictures in the kind of books they like and then acting surprised when avid readers express outrage that someone in ‘the industry’ thinks so little of such a vital part of said industry.

                Kotaku, a gaming publication, makes no attempt to be unbiased, actively supporting games and causes that large demographics of gamers have no interest and then expresses dismay that gamers are not interested, suggesting that it is a shortcoming on the part of the uninterested individuals rather than a valid opinion. They are the ones who generated the image of gamers as misogynistic, ill socialized bigots afraid of anything new and different because that’s how they regard any gamer who disagrees with them.

                Basically the controversy is that gamers are sick of being insulted and are starting to push back.

                1. The weirdest thing about Gamergate so far, imo?

                   4chan – the cesspool of the internet – has apparently banned support for those who would work against the SJWs.

                   What. The. Heck!?

                   1. 4chan isn’t as bad as people say it is in a lot of cases. They’ve been one of the big players in this from the start, especially /v which is their gaming subforum.

                      Like the rest of us, they hate being told that they’re horrible people and that what they think is fun is wrong. The folks at /v can be harsh, but they are very serious about the games they find fun. They also all hate SJWs and so-called feminists.

                      1. My understanding is that both statements are correct.

                         A lot of the 4chan users are as Ferric says.

                         But the folks who run/own the servers listen to a guy whose niece is apparently a SJW, who may have claimed to have been driven to a suicide attempt to get the leverage to cause a clampdown.

                   2. SJWs infiltrated and became mods. Now they rule 4chan with an iron fist.

                      Since a lot of the “quaint charm” of 4chan was how disturbing it could be, I figure it’s going to fade as rapidly as NOW did once _they_ decided their proper place was on their knees and servicing Bill Clinton.

                      1. Wonder if Anonymous will attack it and take it back over….

                2. When you put it that way, I can see where you might be coming from.

                   What I’ve seen of the MGS series has always seemed low enough on verisimilitude that I have trouble taking it seriously as Mil Sci Fi. Compare Dave Drake, Liz Moon or even LMB. So that naturally lead me to such a blind spot.

                   I was more heavily weighting my estimate by the implications of the feasibility of the Metal Gear as a nuclear weapons platform. Probably I’m a weirdo.

                   1. Yeah, we all know that a Metal Gear as a concept is a stupid thing when you try to look at it realistically, but at heart it’s a really over the top setting where rule of cool kind of dictates reality. The games really embrace that, poking fun of themselves whenever there’s an opportunity in a way that’s surprisingly lighthearted, all things considered. Then there’s all the detail that gets put into little things and the offhanded way the games address real issues without being overbearing.

                      1. *chuckle* Rule of Cool is the driving force for a great number of the j-games. Because, fun. Sengoku Basara is another one of the better examples. Vague nod towards historical characters, and Masamune Date as a multi-sword wielding gang leader spouting random Engrish whose freaking horse has multiple tail pipes… yeah.

                         Reality getting cheerfully defenestrated if it gets in the way of fun is one of the reasons why I turned to the j-related genres. I’m still endlessly amused by stuff I hear about the Front Mission series from friends. The Philippines as a terrifying world power?! With an empire that spans from the south end of Japan to Australia? Yeah… reality definitely got chucked out the window on that one.

                         1. Wait, don’t the Philippines dominate from the south edge of Japan to Australia?

                            For certain definitions of dominate?

                            1. *cackle* I see what you mean.

                               If we were going to use that as the definition we’re EVERYWHERE then.

                               There was a joke some time back that without the Filipino domestic help and labour, entire economies would collapse.

                         2. I’m currently infected by a project seed that I have no plot for, only some stuff I think is pretty neat. It involves a friendly alliance between Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. I’m aware that this last is probably the same as saying I have severe constipation, sufficient to block all mental function.

                            I’ve a strong liking for Super Robot Wars, despite well understanding the impossibilities and infeasibilities of mecha. Remember ‘nother Mike’s MGC post yesterday? I think mecha anime generally tells the truth that those who will not fight cannot win.

                            1. Add India and Vietnam and you get the budding alliance against China.

                            2. East Asia coprosperity sphere?

                            3. The interesting thing is, such an alliance would actually be plausible. That would make for an interesting sci-fi tale, IMO. Mecha could be involved, and China would not be happy.

                            4. …do you have idol singers singing over the enemy communication net? 😉

                            5. @Patrick: It really would depend on who the enemy would be in this story. But the recruitment ads for the Japanese Defense Forces could qualify for the idoru part.

                            6. Yeah, I’d figured that was my best justification.

                               I’d originally been thinking about a distant replica of the co-Prosperity sphere, then decided it would be funnier if it they were free, advanced countries, the alliance was consensual, and close enough that they’d stick together even without a major external threat.

                               I think I’m going to need to have India, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and South Africa split off into a rival power bloc.

                               Any pop idol singing and real mecha would have to wait on events I haven’t even really bothered thinking about. I had a different set of anime/manga/LN in mind.

                            7. Time to bring out the Republic of China’s military recruitment ad with transforming military equipment from a few years back –

                      2. If I let the Japanese saying stupid stuff about nuclear weapons, or whitewashing their history, stop me from reading one of their stories, I would essentially have to quit reading Japanese comics and watching Japanese cartoons.

                         I learned from the SJW how to sift out minute particles of such.

                         What I knew of MGS tended to make the pastiche aspects noticeable, and one of my early experiences was by way of a lefty that focused on the inferior recessive genes thing. No doubts why I’d have no clue of subtle aspects.

                3. One of the ongoing schticks I see regarding Zoe and Anita are “they received death threats”.

                   Hmmmm.. just tike other guys get death threats all the time? It’s not like opinionated guys and celebrities and political figures don’t get death threats and vitriol. (Fair is fair – vitriol directed at women usually is directed at the fact that they are a woman, but I personally figure it’s more because a person trying to get under your skin is aiming to push buttons that will piss you off that because they’re not guys)

                   Tell ya what, when her death threats get elevated to the level of “armed swat team on hair trigger actually sent to her house on a spoofed active shooter call, and she’s one badly timed sneeze or wrong move away from an itchy trigger finger and a hail of bullets” – I.E. – her life is put in immediate and actual deadly danger via the application of massive deadly force, I’ll give a fart.

                   It’s noted that the reasons for swatting are often “political” – conveniently failing to mention the persuasion of almost all, if not all, targets where politics is the issue. (HINT: “Not left”)

                   1. Part of the controversy is that there’s good reason to believe that the two of them have faked at least some of the threats against them to help keep people feeling bad for them and direct attention away from the real issues. They, especially Zoe, need to keep people thinking of them as victims when from the start they’ve been the aggressors, making the first attacks and getting caught up in all manner of dubious dealings. The start of it was the fact that Zoe cheated on her boyfriend and treated him badly enough that he revealed her actions, which involved having sex with multiple men in positions to give her the money or attention that she needed for her projects. That’s what she needs to keep attention away from.

                      1. I appreciate your clarifications on this because I’ve been very puzzled on the whole gamer gate thing.

                         1. Based on what I can tell, the whole thing basically started because Zoe Quinn got publicly slammed by her boyfriend for cheating on him with industry figures… and she attempted to deflect the resulting criticism by crying “Misogyny!” Because the criticism was legitimate (and included women), this ticked off enough people to start a general ground swell against some of the nonsense that Quinn has pulled in the past (including torpedoing a crowd-sourcing group that was attempting to boost female game developers called “The Fine Young Capitalists”), which caused a counter swell by the people who are generally aligned with Quinn, and the result was the furor that we now have.

                            Though I’ve only been marginally paying attention to this, and may have missed something important in there.

                      2. The need to be seen as the victim so their own persecutions of others is brushed over only holds as long as they have people who are willing to believe the narratives they spew. The truth shines the light on their crocodile tears.

                   2. Oh, h*ll, I get death threats. Sometimes even for the fiction.

                      1. *chuckle* I get them too, which tells me that’s a rather common thing for the conservative-ish (or at least, not lefty enough). Pretty much for the same sort of things I say here.

                         1. I feel left out… The only people who have threatened to kill me were the North Vietnamese (I wonder if the bounty is still being offered.). Even the KGB didn’t threaten to kill any of us. Maybe I haven’t made enough of a stink. I’ll try to remedy that in my new book. 8^)

                      2. Yeah, but everything they write is fiction, especially the claims that it is nonfiction.

                   3. Death threats? You mean like Sarah’s gotten, Larry’s gotten, or hell…even I have gotten?

                      Those two can cry me a freaking river. I didn’t get my panties in a bunch when a few hundred of Piers Morgan’s buddies did that to me. (I did, however, critique them)

                      Instead, I just soldiered on and kept fighting the good fight. Of course, I also know that I’m on the side of the angels. Them? Not so much.

                      1. Tsk. Be FAIR. They are too on the side of the angels: the fallen ones.

                         1. Fair enough.

                      2. Death threats, and worse, for me. Almost half a dozen years now.

                         Still here.

                         1. I’m still going to rate my death threats.

                            Honestly, bonus points for originality of concept. Too many people just fall on old cliches, and I really hate that.

                            1. I think you’ll find this entertaining.

                               http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/aaron-tan-wins-internet-by-spamming-spammers-with-gold-responses/story-fnixwvgh-1227078907319

                               Note the death threat at the very end… from the person who INITIATED the whole thing.

                            2. Saw it on Facebook a week or so back. Laughed my butt off.

                               Laughing even more now that I know the whole story. It’s awesome. 😀

                         2. I feel slighted. I haven’t received any. Of course, I’m not a blogger, so that may have something to do with it.

                            1. *eyes the calendar sourly* Six years of dealing with this. I don’t remember not being stalked any more.

                            2. I haven’t got any, either – what am I doing wrong?
                               I’ve been writing totally pro-traditional American values for six or seven years now, and my latest book has two young guys on the cover gleefully using guns! Really, what’s a gal supposed to do to get some liberal hatey-love around here?

                      3. *snif* I caused one of the biggest stinks in Furry Fandom in the late 90’s with one of my editorials (Slamming the various categories of people “Destroying the fandom” at the time). I got a stalker out of it, but no death threats.

                         I mean, among that crowd, the stakes are so low, they’d make death threats at the drop of a hat. (Weirdly, when I quit, my stalker waited in anticipation that I’d come back. It’s been over 13 years. He used to obsessively edit the WikiFur page on me until they finally had to block him.)

                         Yeah, I bugged out well after the getting was good, and it only got worse from there…. I won’t ever get back into that fandom.

                         1. Furry? I’m….

                            …well…

                            …I’m kind of terrified right now. 🙂

                            1. It’s okay, back then it was still a Comics and Animation fandom, but it was… “evolving” in some unfortunate directions. And I was one of the last fighting the tide.

                               I used to say to people to not abandon the village to the barbarians, but eventually I realized there was nobody in town BUT the barbarians.

                            2. Yeah, those “unfortunate directions” still have me cringing at the term “furry”.

                               Not particularly sure what the history of the fandom is. I just know where it’s at now, and like I said, terrifying. 😀

                               Good to know you weren’t one of “those” furries. 😀

                            3. Probably isn’t the time or place for it, but from what I understand it’s like now is actually different from what it was when I quit. What it is now was just an undercurrent at the time.

                               Weirdly, I hear there are actually growing numbers of girls showing up. But I guess it’s a safe space with the guys leaving them alone….

                               Nowadays, the furthest I go is watching anime babes with cat-ears.

                            4. You mean furry fandom wasn’t always a kinkfest?

                            5. I know. Who knew?

                            6. Well…. but at the time they were somewhat more normal kinks…. Then it all went horribly, horribly wrong.

                            7. Some furries are charming people. At a con there was a very sweet blue fox making up to me. He was MUCH too young for me, but it was amusing.

                            8. You had a pre-teen “making up to you”? [Very Big Grin While Flying Away Very Very Fast]

                            9. Er… I think in his late twenties…

                            10. Physical age =/= psychological age
                                Psychological age == maturity
                                Physical age =/= maturity

                                Some men remain lads no matter how long they live. It is one of the hazards of our era.

                            11. I blame Tom Lehrer and his all-too-successful scientific project to prolong adolescence beyond all previous limits.

                            12. Oh, certainly there are nice people there, some of my best friends are furries. 😉 I’ve noticed that it really seems to have settled in as a fandom for the mascot costumes (which holds no interest for me) but before that, well, they were the most broken of the broken toys.

                                (There were, and probably still are contingents there who are more unsavory than the rather distasteful “Diaper-Furrs” which is exactly as nasty as the name implies.)

                4. And here is the entitled Anita herself:
                   http://www.upworthy.com/they-gave-her-a-standing-ovation-before-she-started-talking-because-they-do-what-she-says-at-the-end?c=ufb1
                   I love how her whole take is for everybody to Submit to the SJWs.

                   1. The headline sounds almost like it’s non-supportive of Anita, but the rest of it seems to have swallowed it completely.

          4. Found this the other day – I think it fits…

             http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-lefts-religion-of-unhappiness/

             Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their creed is salvation through anger. Their governing philosophy is to make others miserable in order to teach them how they have overlooked the misery of others. They are forever spreading misery around the world for the sake of the greater good.

             If the left sees anyone being happy, it must immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous abuses that they are determined to make everyone else see. If it’s an object, it was made by oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s escapism from the misery the left creates.

             To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.

             Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.

             Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. These are just outrage fuel for the willfully outraged whose resentment is both culture and religion.

             ——-

             There’s more, of course – but it strikes me that the Gamergate SJWs don’t really give a damn about WHY people game, they just want something to be outraged about.

             As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if the game was developed by a properly diverse group. What I care about is if the game looks like it’s going to be FUN. If it’s not FUN, I’m not going to bother buying it or playing it.

             Don’t give me something some boring thing developed by a diversity committee and expect me to gleefully play it because ‘Hey, it was developed with all the check-boxes filled in on a diversity manning chart!’.

             1. Lots of Japanese games that don’t properly represent Koreans, or social justice for Eta, not to mention the way the Japanese history curriculum favors pro-Axis revisionist history narratives in any number of things.

             2. You know, that makes a lot of sense when you look at the games they like and consider how they’re so often boggled by people buying and enjoying fun games. Heh, on one forum I actually had one of them telling me that games don’t have to be fun. That boggles me of course, because why would I buy a game that I knew I wouldn’t enjoy? That would be the same as me reading a book that I knew I’d find boring and as far as I’m concerned the space on my bookshelves is to valuable to be taken up by anything that bores me.

                1. Yes, but they think you should do it for your edification. They’re bad girlfriends!
                   Someone over at Instapundit was arguing that escapism was wrong and infantile. no, seriously.

                   1. How’d that work out for them?

                      1. My friend Bill Reader took off after them. They made him swear for what I’m sure was the first time in his life. Well, in public, anyway.

                   2. If escapism is wrong then they’re in cahoots with our would-be jailers.

                   3. Isn’t the usual joke that the Puritans live in fear that somewhere, out there, someone is having fun?

                      (They probably got the Puritans wrong, but still, I think that’s how the joke goes.)

                2. Because if the games had to be Fun as well as Convey an Important Message, that would entail work.

                   Once had a co-worker tell me that his design was more important than whether his code worked. That was just pathological narcissism, but the principles are the same. They don’t have to do it right because that’s work.

                   1. Games can do that, it’s just that the ones that do all convey the wrong messages, things like the importance of thinking for yourself, not blindly trusting the government because they say a thing is good, bad people can have good ideas and good people can do bad things, that we’re who we chose to be not what other people say we are, that the media is easily manipulated for political gain, messages and themes along those lines.

                      It’s the messages that SJWs think are good that are hard to put into fun games on account of them being fundamentally not fun.

                   2. Any coder who says that should be shot. They are the triumph of Form over Function. Idiots like that cause Holy Wars.

                      1. I was a programmer and my code worked. I liked to make the code easy to follow for the next guy but the main thing was “make it work correctly”.

                      2. Yeah.

                         Consider the coding on vital things like flight control and plant safety.

                         Anyone who is involved in machinery relating to human welfare, who insists that the idea in their head is more important that how the thing works in practice ought not to be doing such work.

                         1. You mean you think it’s acceptable for frivolous things? No, unless it’s a hobby, it’s not acceptable.

                            1. Just about everything not a hobby is related to human welfare, and some stuff that is for hobbies. There are degrees of critical, and degrees of screw up that should not be near critical. Not all things are worth equal effort to prevent the screw ups from getting involved.

                      3. I’ve had the entertainment of listening to Housemate blast someone because of insanely shitty, overly, and unnecessarily complex code meant for security reasons some years ago. It started with “This crap doesn’t work, and can be penetrated by a script kiddy with a centimeter long dick” and went downhill from there.

                         Vent microphones ALWAYS got muted once he started on those rants, and we’d always head back to town to avoid dying from laughter.

             3. Winston Churchill said it (as he said so many things) quite concisely:
                “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

             4. You know the game Shadow of Mordor? The best LoTR-based video game ever, and a very nice piece of fan-fic withal?

                Saw a very silly poster on a video-game forum declare that it couldn’t _possibly_ play Shadow of Mordor, because the main characters were male and thus insufficiently inclusive.

                (Both main characters are also heterosexual and “breeders”, so I’m guessing that was another pair of strikes against them.)

                1. I’m totally hype for that game. I don’t want to spend the money on a new system right now, but that game is so tempting. And it’s from third person camera angle, which I still insist means that it’s geared towards women, since what straight guy would enjoy staring at the backside of some total beefcake dude for hours on end? Heh, that might be the reason I don’t get along with people like the poster you saw.

                   1. One of the available outfits is “Dark Ranger”, which puts him in a cloak, so beefcake backside has been a non-issue for me.

                      And, well, let’s put it this way. If you’re staring at Talion or his counterpart(depending on circumstances), you aren’t paying attention to the orcs. And you need to be doing that, if you want a proper honor guard for (REDACTED).

                      Like Aragorn, Talion is _very_ good at going without being seen, when he wishes. You can even _run_, in stealth. And it feels nicely badass when you slaughter your way through a column of orcs, and not a one of them noticed you until Acharn was slicing through their guts. If you need to, you can even stealth-run at an orc from the front, and you’ll have enough time to instakill him before he recovers from the shock of realizing that you’re an enemy.

                      (Speaking of which – enemies make muted sounds when you stealth kill them, but the other orcs can’t hear such sounds. I figure that’s because the game can’t actually deliver the tactile impact of grab-silence-stabbity, so you get the sounds as a visceral substitute. And Talion probably mimics orc movement patterns in stealth mode, so it takes that much extra time for them to realize you’re human.)

       2. BTW, Damien has stepped into GamerGate. And I do mean “stepped* in it.

          1. He’s SO hapless!

          2. Who is Damien? I’m not a gamer.

             1. He’s not a gamer either. he writes for the Guardian. The infamous “the future is queer” Damien Walters.

                1. He made a telling slip in his Twitter blow-up. He said, while smearing someone who objected to his rants: “You choose to be a “fan” of a culture made by giant corporations. You get what you choose.”

                   1. It’s true, you can chose to support Kotaku and the likes of Geoff Keighley, Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and the culture of toeing the line and paying to get ahead that they represent or you can chose to make up your own mind and…

                      Damien didn’t mean it that way, did he?

                      1. Considering Damien is the fan of various TV shows and movies, maybe someone should point out that giant corporations made *those*, too. But he’d block you in 30 seconds.

                         1. Isn’t the Guardian a corporation?

                   2. Isn’t The Guardian a giant corporation? Doesn’t that make him a tool of a giant corporation?

                      As much as I dislike giant corporations, it is not 1% of how much I dislike giant government.

                      1. “It is not 1% of how much I dislike giant government”.

                         I see what you did there.

                      2. *laughing* oh well done.

                   3. And he chooses to get his money from the government tit. I choose to drag him through the mud every chance I get. He brought it on himself.

                      1. Doesn’t he have a government grant for a book he can’t write? Nice work^h^h^h^hsetup if you can swing it, I suppose.

                         1. He should team up with Anita and Zoe and be the head non-writer for the much needed feminist games that they’re working so hard to not help develop.

                2. Should the International Lord of Hate be informed his favorite chew toy has provided more material? 😉

                   1. …Maaaaaaaaaaaaybe. Isn’t he working on a couple of books/a new series?

                      1. Now I’m wondering if he has a meditation chamber like Vader’s from The Empire Strikes Back.

                         1. *hums the theme*

                      2. He’s in New York, subverting and recruiting new minions at NYC Comic Con.

                         1. w00t~!

                   2. Nah. I’m waiting for something *really* big. This is small potatoes by Damien standards.

       3. Is it wrong to want them fitted with a Scold’s Bridle?

          1. Nope.

             1. What’s the equivalent for their hands? (I vaguely remember there’s something along that line but I can’t remember what it is.)

                1. I’ve never seen a name for it, other than say, mittens.

                   You’re thinking of the things they put on Elsa in Frozen? Kinkiest damn thing I’ve ever seen in a Disney movie….

                   1. Heh, something like that, actually but other than ‘cuffs’ I have no idea what they’re called.

                      1. And for some reason it reminded me of a very old quote.

                         Some days you wish they’d make a condom that was large enough to fit over a keyboard and thick enough to keep newbies from frobbing the keys.
                         — Blair P. Houghton

                         How old? I (search engined) it and found it in that version of Usenet that (search engine) coopted and put their brand on.

                         I found it in a post *I* made in 1995.

                         1. *cackle*

                            Forget condom. Just something that turns off the keys so they can’t abuse ’em.

                            1. Bluetooth Jammer.

                            2. Simpler: *unplug keyboard*

                               …I have to say that happens more often than a Certain Tech would like.

                            3. Fortunately, mine’s cordless.

    2. Daddy Warpig here. I’ve been in and around the front lines of #GamerGate for the last month or so. Here are a couple of things to get you up to speed. They’re mine, but they’re still good.

       (I got excerpted by Ed Driscoll on Pajamas Media, retweeted by Instapundit, Larry Correia, and Adam Baldwin, and sidebarred by Ace of Spades HQ. I’m not lying, they actually are good pieces. Not perfect, by any means, but I like them.)

       #GamerGate for Non-Gamers: http://daddywarpig.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/gamergate-achievement-unlocked-epic-shitstorm/

       An Anti-Gamer Defames, I Judo:
       http://daddywarpig.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/how-to-kill-gamergate-in-2-easy-steps-which-kotaku-polygon-and-the-verge-wont-even-try/

       And my #GamerGate tag, the index to the articles I’ve written:
       http://daddywarpig.wordpress.com/tag/gamergate/

       I’m @daddy_warpig on Twitter. Follow, if you like.

       And if you want to help, email the Boycott of The Day sponsors. We pressure them, so corrupt journalists feel the pain. @jayd3fox posts and reposts them. Anybody can email, anybody can help.

       When’s the last time you heard an SJW say “you’re hurting people’s jobs and magazines”? Exactly.

       We did it. Bit #GamerGate could still use your help.

       Cheers!

       1. Thanks Daddy W. Saw the link on PJM. You got a new follower.

          1. Thanks! 🙂

             Normally we’re a lot more light-hearted than the bare-knuckles brawling of the last few weeks, but… you gotta do what ya gotta do.

       2. I’m trying not to laugh so loud as I read the stupid of Tumblr trying to troll 4Ch. That’s… like a platoon of masochists walking up to an army of sadists and handing them cat’o’nine tails with barbs and worse attached and bending over. With no safeword.

          1. That was hilarious. The whole event, start to finish.

             O course, moot’s gone all SJW now, and lost a large number of readers? …dwellers? …inhabitants? to 8chan. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.

             People may not care about #GamerGate, but this is the World War 1 of the Internet. Old empires have already fallen, or are in the process of falling, and new ones are rising in their place. Others made their peace early on (Escapist), and so remained neutral and out of the fray.

             Nobody knows what the post-war period is going to look like, but the dominance of Kotaku-Polygon-Gamasutra is fading, and even if they survive they’ll be very much changed.

             Kotaku just announced they’ll no longer be writing reviews pre-release, to be posted as soon as the embargo is lifted. Which means (people are assuming) that major companies themselves are refusing to work with them. That is pretty much an official announcement that K. is no longer a legitimate gaming venue.

             Empires are rising and falling, and SJW fortresses are being stormed. They are hurting and crying about how unfair and Nazi-esque our tactics are, in public. We are winning. When’s the last time anyone could say that, ever?

             You can be a part of this. Send some boycott emails, to Dove, or Intel, or whatever advertiser Liz — @lizzyf620 on Twitter — announces.

             Anybody can, and remain safely out of the ugly trench combat (nobody sees or knows what you do). Consider yourself a B-24, bombing targets from above, and leave the brutal knife-fighting to us frontliners. Advertiser pressure is the most effective tool we have, and your participation matters.

             (Yes, I know the B-24 was the second WW. Pedants. )

             1. Daddy, that’s why the Amazon hate is rising. The current front is to complain that Amazon is an e-vile monopoly, and trying to convince Amazon that they should ban “h8rz” from being allowed to sell through Amazon.

                Of course, Google App Store and other outlets for content are already on board. The Left is trying to shut off the bypass.

             2. Sarah, I’ve got a reply to Daddy with a couple of links that went to moderation.

                1. I’ve approved Sorry, as out of the house.

                   1. No need to apologize; the commenters were made for the Blogmistress, and not the Blogmistress for the commenters….

             3. That’s sad, that Moot went the way of CJ of the blog that shall not be named here.

                1. It’s always sad to lose one of our own to conversion.

                   1. On the other hand, they did give birth to Anonymous there, and anon isn’t exactly noted for support of Conservative ideals.

                      1. IMO, the best argument for 4chan is that it kept all the 4channers in one place. Now who knows?

                         http://daddywarpig.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/tumblr-attacks-4chan-hilarity-ensues/

                         1. Considering how accurately Tumblr is described by this video, I can see how they were easily massed for the slaughter.

                      2. Not conservative, true, but certainly libertarian. Being violently adverse to governmental secrets ain’t really a bad thing.

                         1. Yeah…. until they out the people who co-operated against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

                            Doing it indiscriminately can be a worse sin.

                2. YES.

       3. One change: Boycotts are being handled by @lizzyf620 now. She was the “Lizzy F” interviewed for Cathy Young’s #GamerGate article over on RealClearPolitics, which is also worth reading.

13. I didn’t watch the whole video. I turned it off pretty soon.

    But I support Jason Mattera. He wasn’t persecuting her backed up by the power of the state, as she had done to others. She did much worse to many. This is a small but valuable step in deterring others from the same crimes, and the only tool available with no functioning justice system.

    I just don’t want to watch it unless I have to.

14. Totally off topic, but I’m going to leave this here because ya’ll enjoy it: http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf

    OTOH, massively hypergolic mixtures and politicians…

    1. Oh, that’s a great book! One of those things that you read and go “OMG! WTF! LOL!” in a continual loop.

       And he even survived. That’s amazing.

    2. It took 19 pages to hit chapter 1, but I already have some goodies to slip into Dr. Mauser: Red on Red if the chance presents itself.

    3. Thanks!

    4. I *loved* “Ignition”. And I’d really like to mess around with some of the more interesting compounds described therein.

       Well, watch someone else mess around with them. From a distance. Preferably by HD remote camera.

       Left me both regretting not continuing with chemistry as a career, and being glad at the same time that I didn’t.

15. You want massively hypergolic?

    Here:
    http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php

    1. Things I’m glad are not worked with in my general area. (~_^). All the chemicals I mess with are sugar and salt (actually some really Are) compared to that vile stuff.

    2. …it should be enough to make any sensible chemist turn around smartly and head down the hall in the other direction.

       Also:

       It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers…

       Sounds like awesome stuff.

       As long as I’m not the one working with it. 🙂

    3. The quote at the bottom of that page is from the book/PDF I linked to.

    4. Yeah, it’s a hilarious column. There’s another on an even scarier substance called FOOF: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php.

       1. I’m not sure if FOOF is also in Clark’s Ignition!

          I don’t recall if Lowe has mentioned things like FLOX and liquid ozone, which Clark does mention.

    5. I am SO forwarding that to my hubby, because Science! Going Horribly Wrong can be both strangely horrifying and entertaining.

    6. Downloaded and saved. Wondering if this is going to contain any actually useful deadly information….

       1. (Missed, I meant Ignition….)

       2. My good man, you are a Mad Scientist. I’m sure you have plenty of good uses for it.

          Hell, I can think of a few entertaining ones, all by myself. I’m sure you’re more creative in that venue than I.

       3. Also, where’d you find a copy? O_O

          1. Root level comment above this sub-thread.

             1. ! How did I miss that?! Thank you! *snags!*

16. Yes! By all means expose, mock, and shame the thieving lying bastards for if we don’t who will? And if someone does not then it’s really not all that great a leap to this:
    “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? […] The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!” —Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

17. Also, my face is apparently glass fronted when it comes to my thoughts.

    You too? My friends can read my face so well, I hardly need to speak my opinions. It’s only when I’m providing information that I need to actually form words. I told someone about people reading my face so well once, and they asked me if I thought they were reading my mind.

18. Pingback: Beyond Binary Sanity — and a call to arms by Hoyt | John C. Wright's Journal

19. I ran out of “F’s to give” many years ago. In the LinkedIn group Guru’s and Thought leaders, I have “anti-groupies.” They complain that “I post links, which they don’t like having to follow.” (There’s a 4096 character limit to posts.) Apparently, if you can’t say it (nonsense and rebuttal) in that many characters, they don’t like it. (Some of my _rebuttals_ have exceeded 4K characters.) One “member” also complains about my “political rants.” I guess that he really hates that I’m: A) literate; B) Well educated; C) smarter(?) than he is.
    The last time the “owner” of the group took me to task for “posting links,” I said. “I often have to savagely edit, in order to present any of the info. I try to present both sides, as best I can.” If they get sufficiently irritated they will 1) kick me out (ask if I care), or 2) increase the character limit for the group.

    1. That group sounds like fun. I haven’t spent too much time posting to linked in. Maybe I should do more.

20. Your comment about things being so … bizarrely polite puts me in mind of the BBC Sherlock episode. “If you let me keep flicking your eye, your wife is safe.” And Sherlock has to tell John to let it happen, while Sherlock runs through the various responses he can think of, and waits for the situation to adjust so he can protect John and Mary.

    Given Sherlock’s eventual action … it seems an appropriate recollection for this article.

    1. “I’m not a hero, I’m a high functioning sociopath. Merry Christmas!”
       Loved that scene.

    2. The sheer amount of effort he made on behalf of John and Mary was absolutely heartbreaking, actually.

       “Why are they crying? John?! Did I do it wrong?”

       Damnit must go watch Sherlock again now.

21. Even I was shocked reading a biography of Carter – did you know he tried to sell us to the Russians in return for help with his second election? – because I too had been sold on the idea he was only ineffective because he was so nice.

    Do you remember the name of this book? Maybe it would break my wife’s conviction that Carter is awesome. It won’t fix her conviction that Reagan was evil, but small steps.

    1. Annnnnddd… Now that I get to the end of the article, I see that this was already asked, in the first comment. Never mind.

    2. This wasn’t it, but it was similar: http://www.amazon.com/The-Real-Jimmy-Carter-Ex-President/dp/0895260905

       1. Thanks

          1. You realize, of course, that the book is simply full of hateful lies and half-truths from people unable to admit the supreme wonderfulness that was the Carter Administration?

             It is generally easier to denounce the truth than to acknowledge our own failures.

             1. Well, certainly, but sometimes it can worm its way underneath, even while they’re denying.

    3. Wayne, it sounds like you are in the same boat I am. A right leaning person married to a left leaning person. Am I correct in this surmise?

       1. I was … once. And then we discussed and argued and well… in some thing he’s to the right of me.
          Unfortunately in our culture it’s easier to argue with a man than a woman. Men don’t give you the “are you patronizing me?” treatment.

          1. I keep getting, “You never believe me!” when I want evidence of something that’s 180 degrees off what I had learned.

       2. AND we’ve gotten further apart as we grow older. Probably mostly because I went further to the Right as I learned more and more about how the Left works, and how reality diverges from theory.

          1. I’ve been lucky. Even though my wife went to a Liberal university and is a member of the teachers union, she has a fair number of conservative views and listens to me on some things. Still, she didn’t understand when I got mad when they called the election in 2008 and when I said Barry was the second coming of Jimmy Carter. Election time is always fun around our house. Thank God we have a DVR and can fast forward over all the election commercials. (“Your candidate kicks puppies!” “Well your candidate slaps grandmothers!” 🙂 )

             1. “Your candidate kicks puppies”. Well, the Democrat’s last presidential candidate admitted to eating some. 😉

             2. My wife has the full-on mental dichotomy. She thinks and talks WAYYY more conservative in her personal interactions than in her opinions of public policies, because she takes THOSE from the mass media.

22. I stopped being civil some time back after being called a lyar, and a terrorist, and a nazi, and all other manner of villainous names by the said same group who call for civility … usually after being, again, proven wrong on a matter.
    Screw them. (and no, that certainly is not the thought in my head, but I’ll be more polite here at Mrs Sarah’s place) Give them a dose of Do unto others … they’ve been doing unto us for so long, there is no reason to ignore it any longer. Civil is a nice aimpoint, but eventually you kick the s.o.b. in the balls when they been trying to kick yours while also throwing crap at you and swinging for your head with a baseball bat.

    1. Winston Churchill (because when you look up one quote you always find more):
       “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

       1. My favorite of his is “There, but for the grace of god, goes … god”

          It is hard, today, to get good quality enemies …. one has to settle for quantity, instead.

          1. I look at the quantity as “More targets for everyone!” Especially the snipers and infantry. The latter can get grumpy if they don’t get a few kills here and there.

             I also look at the lack of quality in one’s foes to be something of a relief. Competent foes are not something we’d really want to have.

             1. I do like the way you think (~_^)

                1. Well, I reckon the friendly killcount is all well and good, y’know, like Legolas and Gimli in the movies. But still. Target practice is great.

    2. Don’t forget the #1 and #2 go-to argument shut-down tools of the American Left: “Raaaaaaaaaaaaacist!” “Seeeeeeeeeeeeeeexist!”

       1. Didn’t realize being an asshole was a race (or gender, though once, I was called both by the same person at the same time)

          1. I just got a mental image of President Zero and Eric Holder standing on the bridge of Spaceball One shouting, “Keep firing, assholes!”

             And the owners of the vestigial media were sitting at the firing controls. 😀

             1. well, apparently 0bama feels he is surrounded by nothing but Assholes.

                1. Well, he’s right, but he doesn’t understand that it’s because of flocking behavior. They’re ALL just a bunch of flocking assholes.

                   1. pretty much explains all of DC

                2. No, he’s only surrounded by one asshole. And if he got a glass navel he could see to walk…..

                   1. Well, he surrounded himself with like minds … then ignores what they have to say to come up with his own nonsense … then blames them for his failures.

       2. Go for the full Trifecta, #3 is “Homophobe!”

          1. Sir, I apologize, but I’m afraid I must disqualify your comment. While factually accurate, it was nowhere near shrill enough, nor was there adequate spittle mass flung from a gaping maw. After years of exposure to Leftist rants, your execution barely registered. Technique, sir. Technique. 😉

23. They are trying to make it sound like this woman was in danger or being attacked. The only attack was being pummeled by questions to which she has never had answers. To stand her ground she was going to be shown a tool since she had no answers that didn’t condemn her.
    She is too cowardly to stand and answer. Only in a setting where she feels the full protection of the political machine will she not run.
    She’s a disgusting cowardly liar.
    All of her sort think that can use the thugs for hire that are the police or the military to do their dirty work while they stay safe in gated communities and work places with security to exclude anyone considered offensive.
    They are going to have a problem PAYING the thugs soon. That will be sweet.

    1. Same with GamerGate. To object to the ridiculous over-the-top slanders and defend yourself is to be a “troll”. There is no way to defend yourself from the Left that they will ever consider legitimate. You have to do it anyhow.

       1. Honor and decency demand no less.

          1. Of which the opposition has neither, thus they cannot comprehend it nor see its’ necessity.

24. Glenn Reynolds keeps mentioning a revival of the tradition of tar and feathering. I’m becoming increasingly tempted.

    How exactly does one go about doing it. What kind of tar at what temp is recommended. . What feathers should be used. Which are itchiest?

    1. A bucket of superglue and acrylic stuffing. She’ll have to bathe in ammonia to remove it.

       1. Epoxy and fiberglass insulation.

          1. Fiberglass insulation? Dude, that’s evil.

             1. …Entertaining thought though.

                Hang on. We’re supposed to be part of the Evil League of Evil. So this is perfectly fine!

             2. Carbon fiber is worse….

          2. Gorilla glue and fiberglass insulation, I find that a lot of epoxy doesn’t stick to my skin that well*.

             *Normally I consider this a plus.

    2. Once the tar is applied, I don’t think the itchiness of the feathers matters. And as for which ones, I would choose simple: Buy used feather pillows.

       As for tar, I’m a little more merciful than our forefathers were (and, to be fair, partially simply because we can, because of newer materials): I would use driveway sealant.

    3. I would think the tar should be just barely hot enough to apply easily. Otherwise the “pupil” is not going to survive to learn the lesson and be an example to others. As to feathers, availability in the necessary quantities pretty much dictates either turkey or chicken.

       1. If the point is to educate him, then yes. If the point is to educate others to not emulate him, meh, go for the hot roofing tar. The lesson will leave a lasting impression on the students.

          1. Hot tar is how the Founders did it. There’s a scene in John Adams showing what a tarring and feathering involved, and it was pretty much death by torture. They weren’t playing at revolution.

             1. Most modern people have no idea what our founders had in mind when they put protection from cruel and unusual punishment down.

                1. We have this completely unwarranted image of the founding fathers as staid, frumpy old men. In reality they were the bomb throwing maniacs of their day. The revolution was bloody in the way that only fratricidal combat can be.

                2. Most modern people have no idea what our founders had in mind when they put protection from cruel and unusual punishment down.

                   Jefferson, himself, was OK with castration and branding. The whipping post was common — it was still on the books in Delaware through much of the 20th century IIRC. I think the debate over waterboarding would truly puzzle him.

                   FWIW, I don’t think tarring and feathering is something that ended in death.

                   1. Let’s just say, “didn’t always end in death”. Because the burns caused by the treatment would be extensive and likely to get infected.

                   2. That’s at least partly my point… Folk these days don’t have an idea of the kind of things that were normal much less the true nastiness that could be perpetuated as punishment. (Hung drawn and quartered comes to mind.) There were a lot of painful things out there that most people modernly don’t realize were realistically on the table for use in our founders’ life times.

                      1. LOL — think of how many twits think that the tortures and executions depicted in Game of Thrones represent some meme of fantasy. The real stuff has to be toned down for modern audiences.

                         1. Yeah… humans have been killing and maiming each other in inventive and painful ways for millenia. Death (sometimes embarrassing… saddle sore!) by mysterious causes has also been a national pass time in some places for millenia as well. *cough*Russia*cough*

                         2. I read with my own eyes an claim that Eddard Stark was obviously a raving sociopath for carrying out his own executions.

                            1. Funny, the importance of carrying out your own executions was carefully explained. When you hold a man’s life in your hand you must feel the weight of it.

                            2. Very clearly, whoever wrote that ignorant comment was too busy covering their eyes and plugging up their ears when that part of the show came along, including the part where Ned explains to his sons why it was important for them to be the ones to wield the blade for an execution they decided.

                               (I don’t expect that the twit would have bothered to read the book.)

                         3. Half the fun is finding the historical incidents that inspired the events in the books.

                   3. Excuse me. Put extremely hot tar (second to third degree burns) over a large portion of the body, with no antibiotics, and no antiseptics, and see what happens. Maybe not intending to cause death; more like don’t give much of a damn either way.

                      1. I’m no expert on it but the most famous example is in Huckleberry Finn and Mark Twain doesn’t equate it with death, in fact he uses it as comedy.

                         Anyway, here’s a Reddit discussion about it and there doesn’t seem to be an expectation or likelihood of death as a result of applying it: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16cjxn/how_injurious_was_tarring_and_feathering/

                         If you Google “tarring and feathering” you’ll end up at Wiki which describes the tar as pine tar and notes it has a much lower melting point than the petroleum-based stuff we associate with tar — and its use in tarring and feathering was not fatal.

                         1. Thanks — that was my recollection, and Twain likely witnessed more than one instance. But is has been forty plus years since I last read it, and I wasn’t sure whether the Duke and Dauphin had survived the experience or hot-footed out of town just ahead of the party.

                         2. Myself, I had an impression there were two different types of tarring and feathering. The one meant for humiliation and shaming, and the one meant for serious punishment. The former was more likely to be applied than the latter because there were easier ways of execution, like hanging, if the latter was warranted.

                            I’m not sure where I got that impression, but I’ve had it since I was a kid.

                            1. It seems like some forms of execution were selected for their painfulness and horror, though, and if one is trying to send a message, you are likely to choose one of the more terrible ones, so more people will hesitate before taking up the dead guy’s job.

                               Of course, this can backfire, by keeping out those who would be more considerate, and putting in ones who will be ruthless, because they will be less likely to be afraid.

                   4. Well I’ve heard that one aspect of “cruel and unusual punishment” was when the punishment didn’t match the crime and was from the English “Bill of Rights”.

                      From what I’ve heard, it was added to the English “Bill of Rights” after a case where a person had libeled several other people which resulted in their deaths. Basically his libel led to them being convicted of treason.

                      Everybody knew what the person had done but apparently nobody could go after him for those deaths.

                      However, the government was able to find him guilty of another lesser crime but his punishment was greater that the “lesser crime” deserved.

                      He was being “punished” the other deaths that he was responsible for but couldn’t be tried on.

                      Sometime after this person’s execution, it was believed that the government had set a dangerous precedence so the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was made.

                   5. Not always, though sometimes it did. The LEFT claims it always ended in death. heaven knows why

                      1. As I recall, if you got boiling tar dumped on you, you died. If you got lots of hot tar poured on you, you might have died. If you got brushed with warmed tar (or pitch) and dusted with feathers, you took it for the warning it was and 1) started behaving or 2) departed the neighborhood posthaste. I suspect brushing and limited hot tarring were far more common than the fatal version.

                         1. Much more common. It happened on multiple occasions to LDS church leaders back before the Mormons relocated to Utah. To the best of my knowledge, none of the incidents were fatal, or resulted in permanent injury as a result of the tar.

                            1. Far as I know, it happened to Joseph Smith on a couple of occasions. Although in his case, he broke a tooth because someone was trying to force a vial of nitric acid in his mouth at the same time, but that’s unrelated.
                               IIRC, the painful part is trying to get the stuff off, as it’ll usually take a layer or two of skin with it. So, it’s enough to humiliate, and to hurt like the dickens for a good long time, but not enough to kill absent aggravating circumstances.

                         2. I was intrigued enough to look it up – apparently the tar of choice was pine tar (not asphalt tar) – which was sticky as all get-out, but liquid at room-temperature to warm. The object was abject humiliation of the tar-feathering, not torturing them physically.

                            1. Pine tar. Hrm.

                               Stickier than standard epoxy. Coats *everything* it touches. Irrationally, it can itch like all heck, too.

                               Spend a week clearing brush in the pine barrens sometime. Kerosene will clean pine tar. Anything else takes a layer of skin with it, seems like.

                            2. Diesel, gas or ATF all work to clean pitch or pine tar. Of course like anything else that actually accomplishes something useful, they are known to the state of California to cause cancer.

                            3. I grew up in California. I barely escaped with my life. I had repeated exposures over the course of my childhood to dihydrous monoxide, airborne oxygen and (when especially young), a product known as ‘mother’s milk.’ It’s a wonder I escaped without ending up a walking tumor. I’m sweating and trembling as I write this.

                            4. I understand the food and drug administration doesn’t even TRY to inspect mother’s milk!

                            5. Don’t give them ideas!

                            6. I understand that recent research has found significant contaminants in mother’s milk which can affect the health of the infant. Inspection of this craft-produced product might offer multiple benefits. For example, if there were available jobs as mother’s milk inspectors such people as Bill Clinton, Teddy Chappaquiddick and Chris Dodd might have never developed ambition for higher office.

                            7. The TSA has no such inhibitions…..

                            8. RES dear, as someone who has donated mother’s milk to premature babies, your suggestion gives me nightmares.

                            9. I confess, sometimes my tongue gets so far in cheek that the opposite side dimples.

                               I have been cautioned that “on the internet, no one can see your eyes twinkle.”

                               OTOH, think how much more incentive that would give mothers to mind who gets elected?

                            10. I know, heh.

                                On one hand I was amused, and on the other, I remembered that there was that less than delightful ‘adult man must nurse from the breast of lactating mother in order to be considered part of the family’ ruling by imams and the knowledge that the Left is quite cheerful about their ‘multiculturalism.’

                                Yeah, my brain went jumping in different places. Bill Clinton being included in that list reaaaally didn’t help.

                            11. Mothers h-ll! The .gov will want to inspect every female to confirm who is or is not subject to lactate quality certification.

                            12. I figure the job of ‘mother’s milk inspector’ is like polygamy: any man stupid enough to ask for the job deserves to get it.

                      2. The LEFT claims it always ended in death.

                         On a quasi-related note, (i.e. leftist projecting things and why we must not let them get in charge) I remember after (I think) the 2004 election a story about how some Dem activist got nailed for abusing his girlfriend. What did he do? He WATERBOARDED HER!!!

                         If the left got their way we’d all be tarred and feathered and with the asphalt stuff not the traditional pine tar stuff.

                         1. My father, as a young man, had hot roofing tar (asphalt based) accidentally poured down his boots while at work. I’m sure it was short of boiling, but they had to cut the boots off of him at the hospital. He survived without any ill effects, though I’m sure it was an unpleasant experience. Granted, modern medicine likely handles tarring better than the revolutionary period.

                            1. Different kinds of tar. The pine tar used back in Colonial times had a very low melting point and didn’t do that kind of damage.

          2. It could be that their purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

             http://www.despair.com/mistakes.html

25. I believe that Sean Connery said it best.

    1. Love that movie.

       1. The screenplay was by David Mamet, author also of Hoffa (1992), Ronin (1998), Wag The Dog (1997) and “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.”

26. For amusement value I offer the winner of the Cussin’ Contest from the Brother’s O’Toole movie. How to win a cussin’ contest without really trying.

    (hopefully the link works)

    https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DeVb_pwi8JfI&ei=-q42VIKwKpORyAT3toL4Cg&usg=AFQjCNGXtTjxkRx2Qaod3gN5Mz2HjKwEZw&sig2=Ksx-mDirhFcuj2rWCpAxNg&bvm=bv.76943099,d.aWw

    1. And trying again to get the link right. (the fun really starts around 1:10 on the video.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVb_pwi8JfI

       1. Did MaryBeDamned eventually change its name to Detroit?

27. I tell you three times, they are not only wrong, they are very, very wrong.

    Well put. I’ve been told time and time again that “this isn’t the hill to die on”, which statement is followed by surrendering more territory. Funny thing though: if you keep giving up land, eventually you have none left to stand on to fight. So I decided some years back to let loose my naturally combative nature. I will fight the left on everything, big and/or small. They might defeat me during each battle, but they will no longer get anything for free from me. I plan to make each victory for them as costly as possible.

    1. we will SELL them victories very expensively.

28. Jason Mattera and Timothy O’Keefe are heroes and give hope that journalism remains alive.

    The proper response to those who say Mattera was mean is to ask why they think it acceptable for a government official to arbitrarily use power to punish opponents.

29. I was going to ask what part of my home state of NC you were in, but if they didn’t love Reagan in the ’80s, you were probably near Chapel Hill. When the NC Zoo was proposed, the tight-fisted Jesse Helms (then a commentator on TV, later a US Senator) said that the legislator should just fence in Chapel Hill.

    1. Charlotte.

       1. Oops, off about a hundred miles or so.

30. It’s been hard of late. On one hand, I don’t want to get overtly politicized online. On the other hand, it’s getting hard to keep quiet in the face of such aggravating idiocy.

    1. This is why I eventually came out. I had to.

       1. It is easy to overlook the fact that by not demurring at the first sign of impropriety you are actively encouraging such people’s aggressions (nothing micro about them.) A good hard stare and a frosty “I don’t think I agree, and I doubt you can support that position” can save a knock-down drag-out fight, and convey the boundaries.

          Think of it in parlor parlance: the time to object is when the fella puts his hand on yours; if you wait until it is on your knee you’ve already signified that he may take liberties. Appropriate response is to slap them, loudly, and if they persist, do it again — hard.

          1. Do you think it will send the right message about “wandering fingers” if my daughter nails a guy’s hand to a table with a ka-bar? Or should she be content with merely breaking collarbones? Just checking; they’re about to get to dating age. [SHUDDERS] Glad they’re winning their divisions in MMA. 😀

             1. I hear you. I’ve got a few years to go. I’m thinking of doing the “I’ll probably be here all night, still cleaning this gun” routine (as per the song).

                1. If you have enough guns, you don’t have to pace yourself. If you don’t have enough guns, get more guns.
                   If she gets serious, take the boy shooting. A real man bonding moment. Easy to arrange an accident there if he fails the exam.

                2. That IS a good song. 😀

             2. Would just like to point out that some teenage guys can metaphorically keep their hands in their pockets. (I was one of them, and many of my colleagues fit the bill as well.) Confidence, the ability to give a good death glare, and the ability to recognize young lechers make for a great pre-screening process.
                And the K-Bar is disproportionate for low-level jerkery. Just use a fist as the hammer and the table as an anvil. Gets the point across and doesn’t lead to assault charges.

                1. My wife had a good chuckle recently. She was talking with her aunt, who said something along the lines of, “You know how when you’re dating, and guys start getting wandering fingers…”
                   My wife gave her a blank stare.
                   “You mean your husband…? Wow. He’s a good guy.”
                   I did THREE things in high school. Watch Star Trek, read books, and work on cars. I figured that once I found a top-notch woman who was not only willing to tolerate me, but actually enjoyed spending time with me, I’d BETTER NOT MESS THIS UP. Her standards were clear, and I was good with that. And I was in it for the long haul. Plus I figured I’d have daughters someday, so I’d better not have a double-standard between what I said and what I did. It’s working out pretty well. 😀

             3. Both our daughters are well past the initial dating age. Successfully.

                One artfully played on her tae kwon do black belt and a firm and consistent setting of boundaries. She’s been married 13 years now, her husband is the chief of police of a tiny local community, and we love him dearly.

                Her younger sister, if some young man looked near to bumping around the edges of acceptable conduct, simply stated “dad has a .45 and a shovel, and none of the neighbors will complain”. Only one would-be suitor laughed it off, until her brother and sister both backed up her statement. He didn’t show up much after. None of the others misbehaved either, come to think on it.

                I only found out about all this later. The neighbors *never* did hear about it, fortunately.

                1. “You see these weapons on the wall, young man? They’re not mine. They’re HERS.” [EVIL GRIN]

                   1. Yeah, that has long been my attitude: any young man (or woman) taking an interest in the Daughtorial Unit does so at his(her) own risk. I am not on this Earth to protect anybody (but Beloved Spouse) from her.

                      1. “I don ‘t want to get a call to come help dispose of the body, so behave yourself.”

31. I maintain that I am VERY civil. I don’t lie about the Left.

    On the other hand, I hardly need to.

    1. It is telling the truth about them that the Left deems uncivil. You see, mostly they believe their lies, and like the author of the Ten Commandments, they will abide no other god before theirs.

32. I always thought that the power and brains behind Carter’s climb was his wife.

    1. Nah. He’s not stupid. He’s evil.

       1. I agree with that–

33. Just as a minor point of trivial fact: Boxing gloves were not originally intended to soften the blows delivered, they were meant to protect the fists of the puncher.

    1. And I’ve heard that, because of the increase in padding over the years, boxers now hit harder, resulting in more head trauma injuries.

       1. By adding to the mass of the punching fist without reducing* the velocity, gloves increase the force of the blow.

          *A key assumption which I can neither prove nor disprove

       2. It’s not that they hit harder so much as they go for the head more.
          Why?
          Because it doesn’t hurt their hands as much as it did when boxing was bare-knuckle.

    2. I didn’t mean boxing gloves. I meant these white gloves everyone is wearing to be “civilized”

       1. Like the archivists gloves that we wear to keep our dirt off the history (or to keep the history from soiling us, which for the Carters of the world may be the more accurate view).

          1. Yes — by the time I had gotten to that comment I had forgotten the gloves pictured atop the post. Still, gloves coming off is usually used for fist fight references.

             As one with some familiarity with antecedent generations, I have been advised that the reason for such white gloves was that, in a civilization largely dependent on the combustion of wood and coal, there tended to be a layer of soot and ash over everything, and white gloves served to protect one’s hands from the filth. People today tend to misunderestimate the grunge levels back when homes were heated with fires and any serious transport involved manure or soot.

             1. *chuckle* You city folk. My house still has a fireplace, and I grew up where coal furnaces and potbelly stoves were still common.

                Coffee with steak and eggs and bacon cooked on a wood or coal stove on a cold morning is something well worth having. *grin*

                1. Oddly, what works for rural environs can be o’erwhelming a bit much in an urban setting, with several million households doing it.

                   1. It still perplexes me as to why you;d want neighbors you can walk to in less than half a day. *grin* Spread ’em out a bit, and that little problem goes right away!

                      1. I confess, at one time my ambition was to own a high-powered sniper’s rifle and sufficient property to post signs advising “if I can hear you I can shoot you.”

                         All such marking signs appropriately ranged, of course. Like Alton Brown, I believe in making my tools multitask.

             2. Which reminds me that the paste used to clean the soot and other assorted crap off the wallpaper became play dough after the shift to natural gas.

       2. I say we put bricks in our white gloves … like Bugs Bunny.

          1. I like how you think. 😀

       3. Aren’t those white gloves, silk? The original boxing gloves were a somewhat similar silk glove, designed to protect the boxers hand, they did that while at the same time producing a fist that was tighter and solider. Resulting in much harder punching, so no, I think we should be putting the gloves on, not taking them off.

34. The problem is, the other guy is holding a broken bottle and making threats in THIS crowd. [EVIL LAUGH]
    “You don’t get it, son, do you? EVERYBODY here is packing shooting irons. The only reason you’re still alive is that nobody here wants to be bothered with the paperwork that the cops will make us fill out after we throw your carcass in a ditch and cave a dirt bank over it.”
    Bwa ha ha ha haaaaaa…

    1. Or be out our favorite firearm (as evidence) for the time it takes to clear the case!

    2. As was pointed out above, Sean Connery says it best.

35. There’s now video of one of Harry Reid’s bodyguards roughing up Mattera after Mattera asked Reid how the latter earned his fortune while working for the government.

    1. Imagine if it was a bodyguard for Mitch McConnell doing that to some guy from Mother Jones.

       When the left accuses us of H8 & intolerance they are projecting.

       1. Washingtonian magazine’s annual confidential survey of Congressional staffers is a fascinating, if not always reliable, take on who they view as their best and worst bosses in a host of categories.

          Harry Reid, who may be the outgoing Senate majority leader, was voted both “worst speaker” and “most partisan” in that body. He came in second to Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski as “meanest.” Reid’s GOP counterpart Mitch McConnell was labeled the greatest “workhorse” and the “wisest” senator.</

          >
          http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/389938/best-and-worst-congressional-bosses-john-fund

          Use link embedded in the Corner blog post after reading it (Fund provides valuable interpretive context) and you will discover:
          MEANEST
          Senate
          1. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.)
          2. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

          House
          1. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.)
          2. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.)

          THE MEAN TEAM
          In a Congress in which the GOP is portrayed as uncaring and inarticulate, these two heavyweight Dems, who placed one-two for meanest in the upper chamber, provide a hint of balance. It may be that meanness is in the Senate majority leader’s job description—herding 100 nearly evenly split, millionaire egomaniacs isn’t patty-cake, after all. And wielding the hammer on Appropriations is unlikely to earn Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski a reputation for warmth. Even so, Harry Reid’s appetite for a fight, compounded by the Nevadan’s sneering, reedy delivery—he was also voted worst speaker—seems to come naturally, and Mikulski arrived in the capital “frumpy, loud and sometimes rude,” according to a 1986 People magazine story. The real question is: Would we want them any other way? Reid’s recent attempt at lightheartedness, telling an Asian audience he had a problem “keeping my Wongs straight,” suggests the answer is no.

          1. The most vicious and uncaring and indifferent to “the little guy” are invariably the ones who scream the most in defense of him.

             Everybody I know who got burned the most by O-care have been the ones who can least afford it (and have pre-existing conditions.)

          2. Yeah, Reid is apparently not well-liked even by his own party. But he’s the boss, for whatever reason, and the Dems don’t want to remove him.

             On a more positive note, it looks like Pelosi might finally be on the way out as Dem leader in the House.

             1. He’s certainly not well liked by the people of Nevada. Of course, we do have the most corrupt election process outside of Chicago. So what the people want doesn’t matter.

       2. Yeah, well, this is how one knows what they have in mind for us. Then they wonder why we KNOW.

36. Yes this! A thousand times yes! I’ve also mentioned on several forums that Jason was right and that the people complaining about his ‘behavior’ were part of the problem! Public servants who break the law and then run away have NO RIGHT to not be accosted in public about their felonious behavior

37. The 4th Estate is supposed to be the body that keep the government honest by holding there feet to the fire, by holding them accountable for what they say and do.

    Sarah that you had to write this post and that we’re even having this discussion pisses me off to no end.

    1. Oh, it pisses me off too, Josh. It has since (if I have your age right) before you were born.

       1. FYI: Turned 41 in August.

          1. Okay, then not quite as long. For some reason I thought you were still south of thirty.

             1. I kind of figured. The quality of my writing and being socially awkward (Odd). People often think I’m younger than I am.

                🙂

                1. Nah. I was under the impression you’d mentioned it at some point.

                   1. 🙂

                      Nope I’m working on sliding into middle age.

                      🙂

                      1. Sliding or skidding? 😉

                         1. Slip sliding away…. You know the nearer your destination the more you slip ‘n slide away.

                            1. I think Ranger UP had a tee shirt about sliding into the grave.

                      2. Dangit, there’s GOT to be some way to get some traction and stop that sliding!

                         1. There is Crossfit & Paleo.

                            😉

                            1. Ah, you are a vampire hunter.

          2. Ah. My oldest niece’s age.

             1. Are you trying to set him up?

                1. That was my thought too. “Shouldn’t we enquire his marital status, first?”

                2. Nah, I just make comments about random information match-ups sometimes. She’s married with her fourth child on the way, so I don’t think that would work.

                   I think of her in connection with ages a lot, because she’s only 9 years younger than me, and that much only because my siblings were late getting started on their families.

                   1. I thought so too; which is why, I didn’t make any offhand comments like, “Is she cute?”

                      Father – “That there is a bear trap. Don’t put your foot in it!”

                      😉

38. For those who want to know more about GamerGate without the BS: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/10/09/the_gender_games_sex_lies_and_videogames_124244.html

    1. Thank you for the link.

       1. Wilkommen.

39. What does it take to lie like this? Not telling the lie, but telling it over and over, even as he HAD to know what the bill was going to do.
    sometimes every day for weeks. To continue to lie, to reassure as he and his minions were planning to destroy people’s lives. By any rights the Democrats should have trouble running for sewer inspectors. How deep into believing in magic to continue to want to vote for people that lie to you, in your face, about things that really matter, over and over.:

    1. Theirs are innocuous lies, like the ones you tell children to get them to go to the doctor or to bed on time.

       And yes, that means they view us as unruly children who need to be managed for our own good. It wearies them terribly to do it, but really, what is the alternative — allow people to run with scissors?

       1. And what they did with the lies was to turn what was once a benefit, a reward for good work and a blessing to your family into a burden, a tax and something to destroy your house.
          It takes a special mind to turn a blessing into a curse, and force you to live it over and over.

40. This showed up on my Facebook page today. Being a Democrat means you can get away with being a sexist jerk?
    http://www.bizpacreview.com/2014/10/09/dem-candidate-delivers-scathing-sexist-insult-to-female-gop-opponents-very-white-collar-life-151144
    I looked at NY21 and it’s the upper East side of the state where, for decades the enviros have been killing the logging industry. So this race is a classic race of elitist liberal POS vs small business woman. I hope she wins.

    1. Republican women are not authentic women and therefore may be abused without apology. It is the same principle as allows them to engage in homophobic slurs against the TEA Party by calling them tea-baggers.

       This is a handy mental loophole allowing their viciousness while legitimizing its expression.

41. You know, of course, that O’s supporters KNOW he’s lying, they just hope you don’t. It’s the progressive version of hudna an allowable deception for the greater good. They, naturally, understand this because of their greater brain power. The light worker would NEVER lie to them. They hug themselves tightly and chortle quietly as the ignorant accept the lies because intensions matter so much more than results. The Stupid, it is strong in these folks, as evidenced by the California denizen, aghast at the cost of his spanking new Ocare policy, “I wanted everyone to have free healthcare, but I never thought I’d have to pay for it”.

    1. *delurk*
       I think you meant takkiya (sp?) not hudna. Takkiya is the right (or expectation) to lie to infidels to advance Islam. Hudna is the false peace while you rearm (up to 10 years IIRC).
       *relurk*

42. Ya know, I had a complete thought-out little thought for this, but I’ll just keep it short and sweet.

    Of *course* it’s right to hold accountable those we trust with power. Honor and decency demand we do so. Lest we forget, the former has historically included beating the living tar out of another human being with a mace for serious intractables.

    I shake my head in wonder that “good folk” means “weak willed” in some folks’ minds.

43. Reblogged this on The Worlds of Tarien Cole and commented:
    There is nothing nice in the Social Justice Warriors tactics. Nothing civil. Nothing JUST in the proper sense of the word. And only social in the sensee they have co-conspirators.

    Most people do not understand how deep-seated the hatred in these self-appointed prophets of ‘tolerance’ and ‘coexistence’ truly is. But ask yourself this question: Do you really think the Politically Correct believe that their opponents have the right to be wrong? A right they will defend?

    There is the accumulation of power, and their own bloated self-interest. Nothing else matters.

    1. Reblogged this on The Worlds of Tarien Cole and commented:
       There is nothing nice in the Social Justice Warriors tactics. Nothing civil. Nothing JUST in the proper sense of the word. And only social in the sensee they have co-conspirators.

       I like the wording and the description is dead on.

       1. Thank you. I don’t doubt there are still a handful of Liberals among the Left. People who sincerely believe in Big Government, but do not wish to take freedoms and rights with them.

          They are a distinct minority.

44. Apparently James Pethokoukis thinks cosplay is a sign of a bad economy. Twitchy has the usual array of responses to stupidity such as this.

    http://twitchy.com/2014/10/09/pethokoukis-cites-cosplay-as-a-bad-economic-sign-angers-nerdom/

    1. GAH

    2. I wish I could say that he’s totally wrong. Unfortunately even a casual google of the word “otaku” will show that in many ways he’s right. But He’s looking at the forest and missing the trees. The reason the Japanese kid go into things like Otaku culture is that these sort of things are the only thing allowed them. They have to grow outside the system because the system itself is broken in many ways. The kids are doing these things to stay sane. I’ve been to Japan and I’ve seen it. This is, unfortunately the Progressive end game. they don’t seem to care how many eggs(people) get broken as long as they get the omelet.:
       http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-empire-of-progressive-poverty.html

45. It must be a slow news week. Japanese have been doing cosplay forever. Before the computer, they used to dress up like 1950s Rock and Rollers and have sock hops every weekend. They are just natural party animals. Oh, and I respect them for that.

    1. Pethokoukis’s claim is apparently (I haven’t read the article myself) that since the Japanese like cosplay, and their economy is doing bad…

       No, I’m not joking.

       1. The moron clearly doesn’t know what the costs of making a costume for cosplay are like. Or that it’s gone and helped create businesses for people.

       2. Maybe you should take the ten minutes to read something before commenting on what somebody else said. That’s not what he was talking about at all.

          1. sometimes one doesn’t need to read things to know they are ignorant… Pethokoukis is one of those
             Let someone else do a synopsis on it first to save killing braincells from the stupid.

             1. Mmm, good point. We need those braincells, especially if they’re working. I hear they’re a rapidly precious resource.

                1. I’m getting to where I could use a few more in the short term memory areas …wait, what was I talking about?

             2. Not reading things just insures that you ARE ignorant, and will remain so. That just makes anything you say a parroting of the things the SJW types at media matters and so on just lie dump into the memesphere.
                They don’t want to deal with this stuff because it’s an indictment of their worldview and exposes the failure of the blue model.
                Not reading also means that you don’t know anything about the real problems Mr. Pethokoukis is talking and just resorting to stupid ad hominum attacks based on something that posted on Reddit or Facebook. It’s better to read and learn than to just be the SJW’s tool:
                http://theweek.com/article/index/269570/why-the-rise-of-cosplay-is-a-bad-sign-for-the-us-economy

                1. So, are Civil War re-enactors, D&D Players, or the SCA also bad signs for the economy? They’ve been around for a long time.

                   No, he’s making connections that aren’t in large enough proportion to be significant. People do CosPlay because it’s FUN, not because it’s the only release they have. Hell, he talks about, “escaping to virtual worlds,” but if that’s a sign of economic doom, then what about readers of SciFi and Fantasy? Or hell, readers of any kind of fiction?

                   He’s mistaking correlation with causation, and it’s crap.

                2. it isn’t the real problems that are the issue here, it is the poor reasoning of cause and effect he goes into. Too often you start reading his stuff and get the a WTF moment that makes all the rest not worth reading.
                   After a while it becomes not worth ones time to more than glance at it as with reading climate by Mann, Politics by Mattews, or Econ by Krugman. He has nothing to teach in this but a few odd jumps to conclusion. All else even that which is on point is now overcome by the nonsense portions. A bit like a RonPaul speech he went from “Yeah, that makes sense” to “What is it you are smoking?” in a short period of time.

46. One more point about Carter: I think I remember the asinine ban on nuclear fuel reprocessing, or entire categories of breeder reactors was due to his administration. Apparently, it was justified as an anti-proliferation measure. Yes.

    Apparently we are to use just 1% of the available energy in a rod of fuel, and restrict ourselves to burning *only* U-235 (as opposed to U-238 and Thorium) because we want to keep ourselves from producing Plutonium for bombs. (Nevermind that unless you design the reactors to do that, they don’t produce the right isotope. Head-desk.)

    One of the continual frustrations that I have is that the nuclear revolution was strangled in it’s cradle by ginned up panic by the very people who complain about an energy crisis. Also, the rocket equation suggests that we’re never going to get off this rock in any serious way without the use of nuclear propulsion (nuclear-thermal, nuclear-whatever, something better than chemical).

    1. Y’know, I actually vaguely remember that part about the panic about nuclear energy. I wish I remember from when, but it was a source of vast annoyance for people who actually knew what was involved.

       I think it was brought up a number of years ago, when there was a proposed nuclear energy plant being discussed in the Philippines. It was a great example of ‘facts versus feels,’ and ‘feels’ winning.

       1. If global warming was really the crisis caused by energy emissions that the left claims it to be, then we can credit Jane Fonda for destroying the world.

          Bruce Springsteen too for that matter.

    2. Dittos to that. If it was allowed to evolve as it should have been we really might have meterless electricity today.

       And electric cars would actually make sense.

47. Does this count as taking the gloves off?
    http://www.news.com.au/national/states-and-territories-will-introduce-new-laws-in-effort-to-catch-homegrown-extremists/story-fncynjr2-1227086850310

48. Regarding Carter the nuc eng, I had to do a bit of work on Rickover’s personal little nuc research boat(not kidding here) up at Groton, CT. (SIdebar: that’s where Clancy launched his first book “Hunt for…”.) Anyhow I got to talking to the old guys up there they said that Rickover wouldn’t let Carter set foot on a one of HIS boats while jimma was there.

49. Reblogged this on I Was Misinformed and commented:
    I find myself with the same dilemma “Stoop to their level” should really be defined as “direct action” in the Leftist vernacular. Let’s do it.

    1. If we refuse to “stoop to their level,” isn’t the alternative getting knee-capped?

50. Statist Josh, the comment about “I don’t want a call to help get rid of a body,” is what I would expect for MadMike’s daughter’s dates. Except that I’m not sure my Loveable and beautiful adopted granddaughter, would actually _need_ help. 🙂 IIRC, Sarah’s actually met her. Like her mother, she doesn’t *look* dangerous. LOL.

    1. Sarah has met her. For a while there it looked like she and younger son were going to be a thing. And trust me, if there’s two people you don’t want together…
       He doesn’t look dangerous either. (Although as he gets older he looks more and more like MadMike. Which is WEIRD. that I know we’re not related.)

       1. *That* would be a terrible thing. I Love L&B granddaughter, but she needs a “moderating” influence.:-) She’s entirely too smart (Intellectually, _&_ emotionally) already. She’s already more mature than most adults.=8-0

51. The article started with the ex IRS crap **** running away from an interview and the comments took on a life of their own about Carter.
    When are the gloves going to come off and the focus remain where it ought to be ????
    The left is imposing their SOCIAL VIEWS on the right and using government, which is supposed to be neutral, as the enforcer! The left respects not one iota about the right.
    Ms Hoyt, I sincerely thank you for giving this urgent matter some attention but it appears many are not willing to confront the problem head on. Its called denial in pyscho babble land. Until we have 2 million people in the streets, demanding OUR social views be respected the left is just going to thumb their noses at the right and calmly state that there is nothing to get excited about.

52. Pingback: Blog Watch: Kothar, Sadistic Pleasure, B2 Diplomacy, 8 Bit Box Art, and Cosplay as Economic Indicator | Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog

53. My opinion is that the fundamental transformation of the USA requires the USA’s economic destruction in present form. So leftist social views do not consider the slowing of the economy a bad thing.
    Velocity of money here: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2V and I would suggest to one and all to spend your money directly with people who share the same social views as yourself. 😉

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