Under The Surface a blast from the past from December 6 2021
Last year, in our escape from lockdown Colorado, we visited a riverboat museum near Kansas City, and that was….. bizarre.
No, not the fact we went to the museum. Given how starved we were to see human beings, how addicted we are to museums, the weirder the better, and the fact I grew up on Mark Twain, it was almost guaranteed we’d go and poke about the museum.
The museum itself was also not bizarre. It was an interesting snapshot of life just before the civil war. (We incidentally found that one of my husband’s collateral ancestors (they were the only family of the name, in the town, but the name is not in his ancestry, so a brother or cousin of an ancestor) was bringing guns into slave states, in boxes marked “bibles.” Which frankly is no more than we expected. It’s rather annoying we have no idea what happened to that young man.) However, I grew up in a house that had been in the family for generations, and among people who never threw anything away that could still be used. So a lot of the dishes and the glassware looked like the stuff I used every day as a kid. Heck, a lot of the shoes and such looked like stuff you could find poking around the attics and outbuildings of the area in which I grew up. (And of COURSE we did. We were kids.)
I mean, it was interesting, but not startling or revelatory.
What was startling and revelatory was where the boat, which had sank some 150 (? I’m too lazy to look it up. Bear with me) before discovery was found: In the middle of a wheat field.
Apparently rivers, in the great flatlands of America have a tendency to meander wildly. Okay. I kind of get that. But the fascinating part is that no one had noticed. The boat sank in a time of newspapers, and reports, and writing and more importantly property records. And people have been looking for it pretty much since it sank. BUT THEY WEREN’T LOOKING IN THE RIGHT PLACE.
The family that owned the wheat field in which the riverboat was buried, had no clue it had ever been anything but a wheat field in living memory. A river deep enough that a floating palace was lost with all its contents (but no lives, save for a poor mule left tied up) just changed course slowly enough that…. well, it sort of became a wheat field.
Now, I understand that due to modern engineering this doesn’t happen anymore. Or at least it’s not supposed to. But all the same, bear with me a moment.
One of my favorite blogs was casting doubt that the republic still exists.
This is a little…. How do I put it? I love the blogger, but d*mn if you’re more depressive than I am you need to start reality-checking obsessively. (I do.)
The republic is sort of a schrodinger thing. If we’re going on “We only have a republic if it obeys the constitution as written”…. it probably ceased to exist twenty years in.
Of course it didn’t. There are…. meanderings and latitudes given and necessitated by the fact that we’re humans and that frankly tech innovation has thrown us a few curve balls that our founders, also being human and therefore fallible, no matter how amazing, could never have anticipated.
The biggest curve ball, though was mass production, mass communication and generally mass everything, which might have been a logical step in the industrial revolution, but the level to which it went was definitely had to see from centuries before.
The Mass Everything Age almost necessitated the antithesis of the constitution: centralization of power, power in the hands of an unelected bureaucracy, all of it aided and abetted by the press covering it up.
If the republic is gone, it has been gone since at least the 30s, probably the 20s. Sorry, but nothing we’re seeing, from political prisoners to outrageous treason of both the People and the Country in the seats of power is new. FDR did it. Woodrow Wilson did it.
What is new and revolutionary is that we’re no longer in the “Mass Everything” age.
The left, who are the natural people — hyper social, power-craving, etc — to ascend that type of hierarchy are in control of the commanding heights of mass communication and bureaucracy, etc.
Their problem is that this is increasingly less relevant. And every time they make a major power grab, like the psy-ops we call the Covidiocy (NOT the virus. Yeah, the virus exists. It’s a severe flu, that fortunately kills very few people under 80. BUT the measures taken around and supposedly because of it, and the fear mongering in the mass media) loses them power. I’m highly amused in the grocery store by the — I’m sure corporate-enforced — announcements coming over the loudspeaker thanking us for wearing masks for “everyone’s safety.” Mind you, there’s usually ONE person in the store in a mask. Someone whose eyes look perfectly deranged and who is often dragging a masked toddler (poor thing). The rest of us at this point are treating it as “Something only crazy people and corporate entities believe is needed, anymore.”
And it will be hard, if not impossible to gin up the next panic. (which is why I’m sure the next grab will be a world war. But that’s something else.)
At this point everything those who belong to the old structures and long for centralized, massed power and communication can do only turns us against them and their obsessions. It’s sort of like…. a vaccination.
Look, America is an idea so powerful that though honored mostly in the breach, it has changed the world. Granted the echo-revolutions abroad were mostly crazy. But the fact that even the worst regimes have to FAKE being elected tells you the power of the idea.
It won’t perish. And we have a chance to ah…. really …. I hate it to say this but we have a chance to build back better, closer to the infrastructure the founders gave us, one better suited to a world of fractured production and communication.
Look at the people who supposedly have power. Note the trail of flames from their hair. No one who is winning is that scared.
But Sarah, you say, then why haven’t we revolted already.
Well — ask anyone on the left — we are revolting. Okay, jokes aside, we are rebelling. In a hundred different ways, we are turning our backs on the idea that “the best people” have our interests in mind, or that even if they did they could be trusted to carry them out, or any of that.
It used to be the institutions no one would doubt were the medical establishment that flew under the flag of ‘public health’ and public schooling. I mean, we screamed, yelled and pointed to abuses (and slow ratcheting thereof) and got told it was still mostly good. Oh, yeah, and the collection of statistics. Even when it was obvious they were lying, they were still used to slap us into silence.
I won’t say that’s a thing of the past but it’s becoming so. And it will become more so faster, the more they struggle.
Most of this type of movement is invisible, until it isn’t.
Today someone shared a meme lamenting that the right doesn’t just have right wing stations, etc. but is creating their own separate structures for information and commerce. Well, duh. The fact this is a surprise for them is amusing. For most of us, though, it’s news. We know we need it, but the movement is as yet slow and if you’re not looking in the right place you’ll never see it.
But it’s like that. This is how society changes. Not from above with fiats. That only distorts it. But slowly, from the bottom up. First almost imperceptibly and then all at once.
And then we forget that there was ever a wheat field there, and return to thinking that things are “as they ever were.” But they’re not. And you can see the signs if you look. The left is looking and getting scared. And scared people make stupid moves, which unfortunately affect us too.
Look, after a hundred years of psy-ops to make us feel isolated and small and like theirs was the inevitable future win, the surprising thing is that the worm is turning at all, not how slow it is.
Yes, we went along to get along, because we really thought we were small and isolated and because in the absence of alternate structures, we had to earn a living in their world.
For many of us it’s still that way. But the water is shifting. The silt is moving in to what was once river bed. Culture is on the move.
And there are far more of us than there ever were of them. And we’re an ornery bunch. Had to be to stand looking at mass-communication, mass-education, mass-entertainment and mass-bureaucracy, and plant our hands on our waists and say “No, you move.”
We’ve got this. It’s slow. Infuriatingly slow, because we’ve been standing (we thought) alone so long. And cold is the brotherless back, as our Dave Freer tells us.
But it’s changing. And it will heal over the break, and function again, at least for a while.
America is not dead. It is asleep. But it’s stirring. And it’s opened one eye. The rising will be swift and startling.
Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. And be not afraid.
According To Hoyt 
Sounds like you went to the Arabia Steamboat Museum. (A place I would definitely want to visit if I ever make it to KC.) The Arabia sank in the Missouri River in 1856. At that time the Missouri was notoriously hard to navigate and VERY muddy. I believe Mark Twain himself said its waters were “too thick to drink and too thin to plow”. Basically the boat got stuck in the mud at the bottom and the mud and sand kept piling up on it, then when the river shifted course it was left buried under all that dirt. Still, it astounds me that the boat was found a full half-mile away from the river and 45 feet below the surface.
things sink in places like that. New Madrid sank a whole town iirc. High water table and a bit of a shiver and lo, the terra in no firma. Got stuck in the Bonne Carré Spillway once due to that. Parked on dry ground near a rail road trestle. Train went by and my car sank to the bellypan.
Soil compaction and subsidence. One of the things I still remember from HIGH SCHOOL geology class.
Yep. I did. We would like to take younger (still future, but close) DIL to it.
‘Too thick to drink and too thin to plough’ was said by a lot of people about a lot of Western rivers, and the saying may have been in use before Mark Twain was born.
However, Twain did write this in an outtake from <i>Huckleberry Finn:</i>
<blockquote>The Child of Calamity said… there was nutritiousness in the mud, and that a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to. He says—
‘You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. Trees won’t grow worth shucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high. It’s all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up. A Cincinnati corpse don’t richen a soil any.’</blockquote>
And it appears that I can’t use HTML anymore in comments, and I can’t edit them either. Who came up with this stupid idea?
WPD. They are SO annoying.
But you can use the blog post interface so annoying that folks hacked their OWN blogs to avoid it!
You sure can sell that thing! LOL
OT but amusing: last night in the Wall Street Journal’s “Opinion,” section, Holman Jenkins said (approximately), “…what Boeing never grokked….”
Not the first time I’ve seen it there.
“Today someone shared a meme lamenting that the right doesn’t just have right wing stations, etc. but is creating their own separate structures for information and commerce.”
The funny part is the number of times the right was told, “If you don’t like it, build your own,” but when we started building our own the screaming started.
See the constant efforts needed by Archive Of Our Own to keep all kinds of fic available.
Have not been there in awhile. Whats going on?
Eh. The usual woke nonsense you’d expect. “End racism!” being one of the rallying cries of people trying to get the site shut down.
Would you believe someone tried to take me to task because I described Nightcrawler as “raised by gypsies”? Because that’s a “racial slur” – apparently so bad they had to use asterisks instead of the whole word!
To which I replied that 1) that is canon for Nightcrawler’s background, and 2) the so-called Romani I’ve met prefer that we outsiders call them gypsies… and what they call us is unprintable.
Such a hasty backing down in the comments I never did see….
There’s also been a big “pedophile” push.
….defined as any age gap, even a few years between middle-aged characters, as well as attraction to someone of a race they decided looks too young. So, marrying an Asian is always pedophilia.
They’ve also been trying to get folks to screw with the tag system by misspelling words, deliberately, so that folks cannot avoid their triggers. And they do this on the excuse of “helping” those folks.
Yes, all of this. It’s crazy.
…Which is of course par for the course for progressives.
Yep.
“We don’t like you, go away”.
We go away.
“Why are you trying to keep us out”? [Sarcastic Grin]
“Why are you trying to keep us out?”
Because you suck and we hate you.
“Haters!!!!!”
“You’ve given us reasons to hate you”.
Right now I am too busy laughing at them to hate them. AOC is living prof of the peter principle, Cameltoe as well. The more they open their mouths the dumber they sound. This is their best and brightest, Bwahahahahahaha.
It does make me wonder about how stupid our supposed side is if they keep losing to the likes of them?
Shakes head, rolls dice, damn a three.
Queijada Brown in the Supreme Court too….
It’s not that our side is stupid.
The Third Estate in France before the revolution was a great deal more intelligent, capable, and resourceful than the aristocracy. But the game was rigged, and the aristocrats held all the positions of official power.
Yep. They’ve conquered the high places, so–
Also they’re managing to lose fairly regularly.
Yeah, you hated us first!
Logic is so European.
…and Egyptian, and Greek, and Assyrian, and Oriental…
That’s colonialism, that is.
Progress on a waking dragon t-shirt?
I’m trying to figure out how to get paid. Will take a little time, because I’ve been kidnapped by a book.
Please continue to book. Tee-shirting can wait if you are committing fiction.
(Fun fiction, not the federal-budget kind of fiction).
It’s such a shame that writing fun fiction pays so much less than writing federal-budget fiction!
c4c
but but but
doomy doom doom doomed doom
it is impossible for anything good to happen if we mangle our assumptions enough
this is totally a completely knowable situation, and the state space is certain death
(Okay, strictly speaking, just about everyone so far has passed. However, the ways that we can observe this are much broader than simply the narrative pushed by the lying black dog.)
I’m gonna sing the doom song now!
You asked for it…
The rest of us didn’t! 😀
I don’t see Doomguy, or demons on Mars anywhere in that video. I feel cheated!
there is the actuary who wanted to be buried in Jerusalem because he would have a higher likelihood of rising from the dead.
There’s an old joke with a similar punchline involving Kruschev, a request to bury Stalin’s body in Israel, and Golda Meier’s polite rejection (which is the punchline).
Terror attack in Moscow. Targeted a crowd at a concert hall, and possibly other locations. Attackers described as men in combat fatigues with assault rifles.
Any other information I’ve seen is still in the hearsay stage, imo. The above seems to be fairly reliable.
My first guess would be Chechens, because 1) fits their earlier MO, and 2) it’s Ramadan.
I’m probably wrong.
Other rumors are it could also be ISIS (aka the other set of Islamic CIA windup toys…)
Whoever it is, the last thing us mere mortals need is more chaos and poop-stirring by TPTB playing gods.
BTW, has anyone seen Victoria Nuland recently??? Tell her we would really not like to die in WWIII because of shenanigins.
US Embassy Moscow sent out a heads-up last week warning of intel on a major attack in Russia.
And there are reports FSB arrested ISIS individuals just recently.
Were I to guess I’d guess that the US got intercepts and tipped off the Russians to try and get on Vlad’s good side.
Which means Vlad will publicly announce it was those NATO-backed NAZI Jews in Kiev, as he has no reason to say thank you to the CIA and the Foggy Bottom Boys.
We can pray that there are still enough sane people on both sides just trying to keep a lid on things.
There are reports that 4 of the shooters were detained (trying to get out of Russia via Ukraine). Not sure the shooters were supposed to survive the incident. (Cough Lee Harvey Oswald Cough)
This promises to be interesting, alas in the Chinese Curse sense. Arggh.
I believe where that reported detention took place near Bryansk is more the road to Belorussia rather than the non-open border across the active frontlines into Ukraine.
Since Daesh published photos of the four shooters while claiming responsibility, I’d look upon anything from the lying Russian liars who lie claiming otherwise with a bulk tanker of salt.
Current report is ISIS has claimed responsibility.
“Thanks Obama!”
Jerusalem Post article:
Islamic State releases photo of alleged attackers behind Russia terror attack
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-793326
No! Not ‘responsibility’! ADMITS GUILT!
They are not ‘responsible’ they are F*KING GUILTY!
Until there’s proof (and if ISIS really has released pictures of the shooters, that would fit the bill), it’s “claimed responsibility”. There have been instances in the past in which an Islamic organization claimed responsibility for an atrocity, only for conclusive proof to emerge that someone else was responsible. That includes instances in which two separate Islamic groups claimed responsibility for the same attack.
OK, so that was a false confession of guilt. STILL GUILT.
IMHO “claims responsibility” is OK, even if “admits guilt” is better. What is *not* OK, to put it mildly, is when the MSM evil idiots (BIRM) say/write “claims credit”. *CREDIT*, FFS?!? I’d like to “credit” them. Slowly, with feeling. Wrapped in razor wire. 😡
The biggest one of those that comes to my mind was that initially the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine initially claimed responsibility on 9/11. And then promptly withdrew it, probably when Yassir Arafat called them and screamed “ARE YOU FRIGGING SUICIDAL?”
Potential Darwin Award there if they hadn’t retracted it?
Well, let’s just say that Muammar Qadaffyduck was basically tripping over his clown shoes to get out there and express condolences and say how he would NEVER countenance such a thing and how horrible it was. He remembered Operation El Dorado Canyon and how close he came to getting a GBU-12 enema. Arafat was probably sitting at his undisclosed location on the West Bank and watching CNN and knew just enough about America to realize that this was a real Darwin moment. Plus, remember, back then all the liberal yapping dogs were saying Bush = Hitler anyway so there was no telling what insanity he might do. (Sadly, he didn’t.)
I remember Gadaffi was the first person to say, “Not me, didn’t do it, don’t know who did but it wasn’t me!”
I dearly wish we’d slagged Bin Laden while he was up in the mountains, and dearly wish that the government had hammered The New York Times for leaking so much information about our sig-int and how we were tracking people in Southwest Asia. Grrrrrr.
Why not wish Clinton had agreed when Sudan tried to hand Bin Laden over?
I am being reminded it is time to revisit Kipling. “Hymn of Breaking Strain” can be a helpful corrective.
Just the fact that we’re bitching up a storm is evidence that we are in revolt mode. And the fact that the Left is working overtime trying to sneak ways of censoring and silencing us shows just how terrified and aware of that so-far, peaceful, revolt. (Some of the more looney Left think if it goes violent then they can win with martial law and throwing the military at it. More fools they.)
Scotland just passed a bizarre “hate speech” law that is openly targeting JK Rowling and her doubleplusungood gender thoughtcrime.
The law isn’t what’s targeting Rowling (though she no doubt falls afoul of it). The sample suspect that is being used in training sessions is. The sample suspect apparently bears a striking number of similarities, including the same nickname she uses.
But arresting her over the law would not be a good idea…
I had some stray thoughts the other day…
Biden is almost certainly going to skip debating Trump. His advisors are already talking about finding an excuse to do so. Let’s say that he goes ahead and does that. And then RFK jr. announces that he’s willing to debate Trump.
1.) Do you think Trump would agree? Should he agree?
2.) If Trump agrees, that puts pressure on Biden. How should Biden’s campaign respond?
Just curious what everyone thinks.
“Biden is almost certainly going to skip debating Trump. His advisors are already talking about finding an excuse to do so.”
As if they have a choice. As Biden just proved at the SOTU, even if his handlers can drug him enough to keep him on his feet, they can’t keep him juiced enough to be coherent. And that “on his feet” came with enough unfocused anger to make it easy for Trump to needle him into a physical assault right there. And you can bet Trump knows this and will take advantage of it.
I think the Deep State will off Biden, and bring in martial Law as a response. Thereby allowing mail in ballots in all fifty states so they can mass cheat again. It also gets them the sympathy vote and the dumb ass liberal vote.
The media of course will blame it all on Trump. Even though it will most likely be a Muslim mad about the support for Israel that will do the offing. That’s how they got rid of Bobby Kennedy and they have no imagination, if it worked once, they will do it again.
Sirhan Sirhan was supposedly Christian Lebanese.
However, some Muslims lie and claim to be Christian if arrested, and I do not know anything about Sirhan’s background.
Sirhan Sirhan was supposedly Palestinian-Jordanian and Palestine was his cause and he felt betrayed by Kennedy.
Now the right side of brain wants Lebanese food. Darn you! ;)
They will not. They can’t. If they could they’d already have done it.
Why can’t they? I don’t know. But they obviously can’t.
I suspect that even the Woke Military Leadership has told them “we won’t obey such orders”.
That’s why the TLAs are importing their version of Hessians.
They’d have be Very Big Fools to use those “Hessians” in Red States as the State Guards and/or National Guards would easily “take care of them”.
But then, they are Very Big Fools. 😈
Also, honestly, the Hessians were disciplined and all worked with each other.
With this hodgepodge? it won’t work.
Agree.
One problem with that is, as shown by the recent performance of the Formerly Red Army, you can’t run an effective war with only masses of junior enlisted. You have to have either an experienced NCO cadre, or as a poor second best in the Soviet tradition, a somewhat experienced junior officer corps.
This New Hessian Army populated with all those military aged males will be all E-1s, so green they’ll all pick up banjos and start singing “Rainbow Connection”, and there’s nowhere that the three-letter-agencies can import any huge pile of multilingual and compliant experienced NCOs or even JOs.
I’m not saying this is not a TLA “Sir, I Have A Clever Plan!”, but if it is, it’s very full of turnips.
They’re civilians with a Guaranteed Foolproof Military Plan, and they’ll run it directly from their breakfast tables. Where have we heard *that* one before?😜
Why would they get rid of Biden? For the Deep State he’s been the most valuable Prezzy that money can buy. TPTB are making Bank with him as front man.
I truly think they can cheat as much as they need to to get him over the finish line. And if not, January 6th will look like a church picnic.
The guys in power aren’t worried. Their useful idiots are worried.
Of course they should be worried. The useful idiots are always first against the wall when TSHTF.
I will admit to finding some humor in lefties worrying about the election when I know they’re going “fortify” the election and drag Biden’s shambling corpse across the finish line.
yep. Me too.
Perhaps the supplications of the Special Forces Prayer Team from my church (as well, I am sure, those of countless others around the country) invoking protective angels around President Trump and his family are having some effect.
Or it could be the result of a *really* effective and dedicated security team.
Or yes . . .
Keep in mind that the states are responsible for setting guidelines for the voting process.
Laughs in Voting Rights Act.
We’ve had multiple examples of Federal courts (including SCOTUS) forcing district maps to be redrawn so that there are more Democrats.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-upholds-section-2-of-voting-rights-act/
Redrawing congressional districts, and the fashion in which the election is conducted, are two very different things.
Two different tentacles of the same octopus.
Only if you think that redrawing the very district lines determining who you get to even consider for office is separate from electing someone to office. How, exactly, do you square that circle?
SOTU was a scripted presentation. And Biden had handlers at both elbows the entire walk on and off.
Even drugged to the max, Biden would never be able to handle a free flow environment of a public debate.
No, it’s all fine, the campaign staff will just call early lids on his campaign days and have him take lots of vacations. No problem at all with events not starting until noon and a 2pm lid on the campaign trail, right?
No, he’s not. He’s just going to be on amphetamines and scream at Trump for two hours.
The left will LOVE it. They’ll lose their mind with loving it.
It won’t play well to the country, though.
Biden’s rage has all the hallmarks of alzheimer rage. Even hopped up on amphetamines, one of these days he is going to lose it physically attack someone. Will it be President Trump on state on live TV? IDK. But a physical is going to happen, if it hasn’t happened already. Targets Dr Biden, secret service protection detail.
Was it really General who attached the protection details? Or Biden? Inquiring minds want to know. Seems weird that now the dogs who were removed due to biting haven’t been declared “nonredeemable”. Normally dogs who have bitten as many times as the two have reported to have done, are put down. Not rehomed. Especially German Shepherds. Just saying.
If the dogs really were biting people, it might be due to being around an increasingly demented and high-strung Biden. If that’s the case, getting them away from Biden would probably calm them down.
And having to put down multiple dogs because they’re biting people would cause people to start asking questions about what’s going on in the White House.
Maybe that’s their endgame; Biden starts biting people and has to be put down. 😛
As if removing two reported aggressive dogs doesn’t?
There is a reason why German Shepherds it is recommended to not be used for PSTD service animals, or at least owner trained. German Shepherds are reported to be neurotic. Proper training, for a *job, is essential. In addition PSTD service animals in training, it is recommended they are not exposed to the PSTD triggers until mature. Both the pups, Major, and General, were exposed to Biden’s instability, from the time they were puppies.
Probably. One can hope. Their situation was not their fault.
((*)) That “job” can be a little as fetching. But a German Shepherd without a job, is a German Shepherd inventing it’s own job. Not something any responsible owner wants. We already know the Biden’s are not responsible German Shepherd owners.
“As if removing two reported aggressive dogs doesn’t?”
It was a quick news item, nothing more. As far as most people are concerned, the dogs were sent home. In many cases I don’t think the media even mentioned why the dogs were sent home. Most people probably don’t even remember that it happened.
Putting the dogs down is something else entirely. That would get people talking in ways that sending them home did not. If nothing else, the innate American sympathy toward dogs would have it become a topic of water cooler conversation.
I noticed.
OTOH animals being mistreated. Not properly training German Shepherds is mistreating them. Not properly training them is flat out abuse.
Considering Joe and his condition, I would not be surprised if he is the kind of person who will pet a dog one moment, and kick it the next, all without provocation by the dog. You know, like far too many children have been raised in the past 60 years.
He has always been that person, I think.
It’s possible. But the administration has made statements that suggest it’s figuring out which excuse to skip the debates will play the best.
Terror attack in Moscow. Targeted a crowd at a concert hall, and possibly other locations. Attackers described as men in combat fatigues with assault rifles.
Any other information I’ve seen is still in the hearsay stage, imo. The above seems to be fairly reliable.
…
Meant this to be its own comment, not attached to one of my comment threads.
Breitbart says FSB reporting 40+ dead, 100+ injured, and the building is on fire. It’s a rapidly evolving story, as they say, so take with truckload of salt, but it’s starting to give off Moscow theater siege vibes except the terrorists didn’t take hostages, just started shooting. And no fentanyl through the vents.
How long will it take the Leftroids to blame it on ‘Right-Wing Extremists’ and ‘White Supremacists’?
Or ‘transphobia’. All I know is, they’ll find something that fits their delusions.
Russia’s blaming Ukraine. Ukraine’s blaming Russia for a false flag on their own people. They haven’t even put the fire out yet. We may never know for sure at this rate because I doubt there are any reliable trustworthy reporters on any side.
Reuters:
CBS News:
From the JPost:
So as predicted, Vlad naturally has blamed the Ukrainians.
Two links post stuck in mod. WPDE.
Actually that’s me, to prevent spammers.
No, I get it, I just hate having to remember. Besides it’s more fun to blame WP than you…
And I can blame WP for not popping up a warning when I click go on a comment that is going to break your rules and go into mod. That would be an “oh, right” reminder so I could break it into two comments.
That’s a simpler change than the goofy reformatting change they dropped in.
So WPDE.
The Chechens have a history of similar atrocities. Not saying for sure they did it, but when there’s a dog known for biting, and somebody gets bit by a dog, suspicions naturally turn in that direction.
And it’s Ramadan. Muslim terror attacks seem to go up during Ramadan.
Darn, where was that article that spoke of Muslim atrocities being balm for the Muslim soul?
Something have a Snickers something
Snickers bars are made with a variety of ingredients, and whether or not these ingredients are haram (forbidden) depends on an individual’s interpretation of Islamic dietary laws.
Some common Snickers bar ingredients like sugar, milk, cocoa butter, wheat flour, and soy lecithin are not generally considered haram by most interpretations of Islamic dietary laws. However, some versions of the Snickers bar may contain other ingredients that are considered haram by some interpretations, such as pork gelatin and alcohol-based flavours.
I think the empirical limit is just under 60 minutes, with the effects falling off rapidly near the end. If DJT manages to get him to show up for a two hour debate, the 61st through 120th minutes will be the fun part.
I would mandate they both give a blood sample midway through on stage, but that would just make Joe not show up.
He’s not going to show up in any case, even if his body does.
“Mandate both give blood samples, and searched for hidden receiving mics, on stage, in front of the cameras, as the first question. Again, at any break if either are away from the cameras.” FIFY.
Won’t happen. One can dream.
Trump “No problem.”
Biden “No.”
A debate seems a good place for appropriate EW efforts.
They could turn off Biden’s mike and pipe in a mashup from his previous speeches while his lips are moving.
And the press would rave about the resulting speech.
That would mean the venue and hosts are in on the fix ………
Um. Wait. They were. (Pre giving one candidate’s staff the questions is election interference.)
I wonder how they control the dose so his head doesn’t blow “Scanners” style. Remote control pharmacy under the clothing?
Keep waiting for him to go “Great Cornholio” and proclaim “I am DARK BRANDON! I need pubescent flesh!”
Yuck
Tricky, that dosing thing. Recall the blood dripping from Joe’s eye in one of the debates with DJT last campaign season, and that was when basement-Joe was in a lot better condition than now..
Wow. Scanners. That’s an old movie I haven’t seen in a long time.
Before my zen years, I shared a house with friends that watched “everything” action, fantasy or science fiction related or adjacent. There was always a television on… So Scanners was one of the many flicks I was exposed to.
I escaped, living solo in an apartment that was walking distance from work, the gym, two book stores and the library.
Do the bookstores still exist? About two decades back, when I moved to the part of town I live now, I had a Barnes & Noble, a Media Play, two Borders, two Half Price Books, two mall book stores, and an independent used book store within about six miles. One Half Price Books remains, everything else is gone.
All we have locally are used bookstores. A Half Price Books in town and Recycled Books in the county seat, both which get picked over.
There are other bookstores in the DWF metro-mess, but not like the peak times of the ’80s and ’90s. Amazon and digital price lookup have killed the joy of physical browsing and bargain discovery.
I don’t have much space for more physical books so the largest part of the collection and recent purchases are digital and backed up in multiple locations.
Flyover Falls (population 22K, in a county of 70K) has one commercial used book store that concentrates on late model used books. County libraries have a few other options, ranging from rummage sales to a dedicated space in the Main.
New books: Beyond book sections in GenericMarts, there’s maybe one specialty shop, that run by the Jews for Jesus group. Great selection of bibles, with Pick Your Translation on hand. Need to get there sooner or later. My RSV is *really* old and deserves honorable retirement. ‘Sides, some(?) new copies have the Apocrypha.
Especially since he’s had two brain aneurysms repaired that we know about.
speaking of under the surface. China Yuan devaluation? Soon? They let the closing 7.2 peg slip. They’re supposed to have these huge surpluses, or is that a lie like Evergrande’s revenue? All the world wonders. Interesting times indeed.
I think it’s been clear for a while that Beijing doesn’t have surpluses. The central government has been quietly shifting responsibility for the costs of certain programs onto the local governments, which is why many of the local governments are suddenly having cash flow problems. Why would the central government suddenly do this? The most likely explanation is that the central government is running out of money.
Bingo.
They have been buying gold and stocking up on food. For whom?
China isn’t stocking up on food. It doesn’t grow enough to support it’s population in normal years. And based on what I’ve been hearing, the last couple of years have been worse than normal for China’s farmers.
Or in other words, China’s buying what it needs in order to avoid mass starvation.
Or keep it low.
We are talking about a Marxist regime here.
China is buying what it needs to avoid unintentional mass starvation. As long as the Communist Party can choose which people starve and which ones do not, starvation remains their own weapon and they are well pleased.
Communist Chinese accounting makes Hollywood accountants stop and say, “WTF, O?” 😛
The more I learn of recent history (recent, because I normally bounce around in history not much younger than late Western Roman Empire), the more I tend to think that the Republic was shattered in 1861. When force of arms was resorted to, to decide whether it was a voluntary marriage, or a set of unbreakable chains.
The cracks were carved into the Constitution – but were widened (by both sides), first with economic warfare, and eventually knocked wide open with kinetic.
Not that I think the Republic is gone, but it will take quite a bit of careful piecing together, with rather strong adhesives, to recover it.
(Oh, that reminded me to get the signed copy of “Maxentius: Postremus Romulus” – which, of course, I will want the Latin edition of…)
(Link for that, if anyone else is interested – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/originespictae/maxentius-postremus-romulus)
Maxentius was a baddie. Galerius was also terrible. A lot of people at the time were terrible, which is part of why people thought so highly of Constantine and his dad Constantius.
Lactantius wrote a very interesting Christian history, based on eyewitness testimony and his own recollections about how unfun it was to live under the various Diocletian-ish and later persecutions, and how pagans also suffered from various draconian tax (and other) policies and the punishments for not ponying up.
It is called On the Deaths of the Persecutors (because that was the moral of the history), but there is a TON of info in it. The section on the imperial weaving factory, and the fate of the women who worked there,.for instance. I didn’t even know the emperors had a weaving manufactory.
The only source that had good things to say about Maxentius was the medieval Welsh Maxen story. So if he did anything goodish that will be in the graphic novel, that is nice to know.
There’s always the point that the victors write the histories…
Realistically, none of the Roman TPTB, right back to the semi-mythical Romulus, were nice people. Many of them, Constantine among them, did do things that were good for the Empire, or the Republic – but always, always also for themselves.
Galerius wasn’t quite so bad – he is the one that decreed tolerance for Christians on his death bed – Constantine only built on that to return church property and some other reparations.
(One thing that irks the Catholic Church – both of them, Roman and Orthodox – is that he was baptized by an Arian bishop. They worked vigorously to cover that inconvenient fact up, but didn’t quite succeed.)
The victors don’t necessarily write the histories. Some pretty important periods of human history are known only from histories written by the losers. The history of the breakup of the Western Roman Empire was written exclusively by Romans, not by Goths, Vandals, Franks, Saxons, or Huns. I could give numerous other examples.
By the way, it does not ‘irk the Catholic Church’ that Constantine was baptized by an Arian bishop. It was a valid baptism according to canon law both then and now.
As I pointed out. Sorry. I didn’t read this far before commenting.
De nada. It’s nice to have you confirm what I said.
Which is why they claim it was Sylvester I? (Rereading, noted that I should clarify it is the Coptic Orthodox that also does not recognize that the baptism was by Eusebius. I don’t have a reference for what the Greek Orthodox and descendants think about the dispute.)
The legend that Pope Sylvester baptized Constantine only arose a century after the fact. It was obviously false, as Constantine died in Nicomedia and the bishop of Rome had no call to be there just when the emperor expired. The ‘Acts of Sylvester’, in which the story is recorded, was accepted by the Church as a supporting document to the supposed ‘Donation of Constantine’. But once those documents were conclusively proved to be forgeries, the Church repudiated them, with no loss at all to either its spiritual or temporal authority.
The Church accepts that it was, in all probability, Eusebius of Nicomedia who baptized Constantine. Eusebius had accepted the conclusions of the Council of Nicaea and signed the Nicene Creed, and was restored to office and influence only because he made a case to the emperor that Arianism did not actually conflict with the Creed. He ‘came out’ as fully Arian, and openly rejected the Creed, only after Constantine’s death.
If Eusebius did baptize Constantine, that is by no means proof that Constantine himself was an Arian. Eusebius was connected by blood to the imperial family, and was in any case the bishop of Nicomedia at the time.
I wonder if Nicholas slapped him too? Probably not.
Yeah, you don’t go around slapping the Emperor’s cousin, even if you are a saint.
Note to readers – Tom is absolutely correct here.
We could go back and forth quite a bit more here (whether history or Church history geeks, we’re irrepressible…).
Wandered a bit away from the topic, though – almost no figure in ancient history really can be viewed as a saint or a demon – we don’t have enough information.
Closer history is a different matter. Although another 1,500 to 2,000 years from now, there’s no guarantee that our current evils or goods will be recognized clearly. Something to think about for writers setting stories in far away times.
actually it doesn’t matter? A bishop provided the line to Peter is intact, whatever crazy thing they believe in, or nothing, doesn’t matter. The sacrament is valid.
Which is why the sacraments of the church of England re considered valid by Catholics.
Always thought the line to Peter thing was a political power move between the Bishops.
It can lend to some interesting friendly conversations when my Orthodox cousin and my Catholic SIL show up at family parties, but most times we avoid that.
The Catholic Church, the various Orthodox Churches, and several other denominations all accept the apostolic succession of bishops. It’s not a ‘political power move’; it’s how bishops have been invested from the beginning. It is not required, even by the Catholic Church, to be a line going back to Peter; any of the apostles will do.
Thanks for explaining that to me. I haven’t delved too deep into early church history. I do know a few Peter = Pope and Rome is Supreme Ruler of Christians pundits that get annoying at times. I’m fine with the bishops.
Yeah, they can be a bit much.
It’s often been pointed out that the see of Rome was founded, not by the most faithful of the apostles, or the most learned, or the most zealous – but by the one who denied knowing Jesus three times in one night. Popes may happen to be cowards, or liars, or embezzlers, or the worst kind of sexual sinners; but the Church was built to survive its own leaders and carry on. If the Church had been ordered so that only a saint could run it, it would have died out within a century.
“the sacraments of the church of England are considered valid by Catholics”
I’m not so sure about that, but Orthodox sacraments definitely are considered valid.
The sacraments are valid. The sermons….
I’ll take the local Orthodox sermons over squishy liberal evangelical Kumbaya folk love movement or prosperity gospel drivel.
And not all Orthodox churches are the same, there’s a variety. Same with Lutheran, Baptist, etc…
Which reminds me depending on which family is in town, I may get to celebrate Easter twice. And Passover too!
I’m not fasting for Ramabomb, no matter how much my stupidest niece pleads.
Dude. I mean like Episcopal.
My MIL’s funeral had NO reference to G-d. But the female rector talked a lot about BLM and social justice.
Good Lord. I suppose what your MIL wanted was nowhere on her horizon.
TBF my MIL was just as bad. BUT it was bad for my FIL and the rest of us. Ah Well. There’s a reason FIL specified “NO funeral service.”
Oh, that sucks big time. :(
Best friend’s father was a Episcopal priest that retired before the crazy hit hard preceding the split. The son converted to Roman Catholic since his spouse and her family belong and they wanted their child raised in the Church, not a alphabet cult wearing the vestments.
Took a long afternoon at the lake while he poured his heart out to me about the loss of fellowship and the feeling of betrayal. (I’d had that with issue with a different churches and other organizations, a theme that runs through my life.)
Watching Christian congregations either fade out, struggle, or succumb to the evil over the decades has been hard. Finding a good church can be equally hard in these times.
We did independent bible study in various homes during Covid lockdown since our former church freaked out and almost completely shut down for 6 months then went hard for the Clot Shot. They forgot that evil exists and how to recognize it.
Latin? That’s greek to me. 😛
I ended up focusing on technology and computers, so I do know a couple of dozen dead programming languages.
All was not lost since my aunt let me peruse her huge library of literature and history.
The Republic is dead and the Constitution is serving as the body bag.
remind me, had the Russian/Ukraine conflict started in ’21? It seems to be the setup fir ww3 and Sarah called it.
With internet access it’s trivial to find out that the current invasion started on February 24 2022.
The trouble has been brewing a lot longer, though. Putin has occupied Crimea since 2014 after 0bama did nothing about that invasion. They counted on Biden doing nothing about this invasion. They were wrong, but only because Biden(‘s ventriloquists) wanted to take advantage of the situation and play domestic power politics, while embezzling vast sums from the military aid sent to Ukraine.
And Biden publicly okayed a “minor” Russian incursion shortly before Russia invaded.
TBF I expected something in the middle east, not Russia.
And now you’ve got both.
Be happy, I guess?
grrr. Not happiness inducing, no.
Then you probably want to stay away from TikTok. Apparently there are people on there telling illegal aliens, specifically, how to break into places and squat there so they can’t be evicted. This has already led to at least one murder in NYC.
Augh.
It may yet happen. I saw today that the US attempt to get a UN vote in favor of an immediate cease-fire in Gaza only failed because the RUSSIANS and the CHINESE vetoed it.
I’m glad they did. But…. HUH!?
I would have given the Russians only a slight chance of blocking it. And I can’t even begin to imagine why the Chinese supported Israel on it. Long story short, I suspect that neither country is a long-term stable ally for Israel, and the tiny nation might soon have the entire world turned against it as it tries to do what it ought to be able to do.
The Russians have had a lot of trouble from Moslem terrorists, mostly Chechens. They probably see Ham-Ass as another head of the same hydra. I’d say they’re not so much supporting Israel as staying out of the way while an ‘enemy of our enemy’ takes care of business.
The Russians had a lot of trouble with wahhabist Chechens and managed to make a truce with the moderates. Didn’t help that the usual suspects from Langley have been adding fuel to the fire by arming and funding the more radical Islam types.
Some of the most effective forces of Russia earlier in the Ukraine CF were the Chechen units. There’s interesting footage on line if you look for it.
I heard that why they vetoed it was because the Biden White House insisted that the Cease Fire be tied to Hamas releasing the hostages.
IE Russia and China vetoed it because they support Hamas and wanted a Cease Fire that didn’t include forcing Hamas to release the hostages.
Israel will still have the vast majority of the PEOPLE on their side, in America at least. And that means we’d need to overcome our stupid governments somehow.
Russis invaded in 2/22.
We should probably be glad that the Left doesn’t “touch grass” more often, or they’d realize that everyone else is finding ways out/around their attempts at control. Internet jokes, car wraps, barter and cash economy, the #tradwife controversy on Twit-X, heck, Space-X doing Wrongspace and having Wrongfun. We route around them whenever we can, and point and snicker behind their backs when we can’t (buzzword bingo, anyone?)
Not only are they piling more and more burdens on people, but they wring fun out of everything in the name of [whatever]. They’ve become The Man that they are trying to make fun of, overthrow, or whatever.
Our local friends took us to Steamboat Arabia for Christmas in 2023, and it was quite interesting. I was amazed by what a huge variety of household goods on what was then the American frontier were not made by local handymen, but shipped up the Mississippi and originally manufactured in places like New England. The US was already clearly a commercial economy back then.
The business of America is business, which is why these born-again-commies are so annoying.
We’re doing our part for American business. Spent the entire day at Indiana Comic Con, finalizing our setup and then doing business. However, after the initial rush when the doors opened, the crowd was down and sales with it. I’m just hoping tomorrow seriously picks up, because right now we’re so far behind our sales targets that it’s not even funny — and this is a hometown convention, where we don’t have the gas and hotel expenses of our other conventions. If it doesn’t pick up, and if the promoter raises booth prices again, we’re going to have to cut that convention.
I really feel like the crowd is uneasy, which is making them less willing to spend, even if they have the money. I’ll admit that I’m uneasy too — and over the past few weeks it’s become increasingly focused on the total solar eclipse. Why are towns in the path of totality declaring emergencies in advance, and especially telling locals to stay inside? An eclipse isn’t dangerous as long as you don’t look at it directly — which makes me wonder if they know something else is happening, but can’t tell the people what, because Reasons.
All kinds of possibilities are going through my mind, from the reasonable (increased risk of infection from all those out-of-towners bringing their germ biomes that locals don’t have as good of immunity to) through the unlikely (high altitude nuke for an EMP attack, which could injure even if you’re not looking directly at it?) to the wildly improbable (alien invasion or some kind of supernatural event). But it just feels like something is in the offing, and it’s a lot worse than just traffic jams and overloaded phone and broadband circuits from an influx of outsiders.
We’ve just moved out of winter storm season and are moving into tornado season, so we have stuff laid in for emergencies. But I may go ahead and buy some of our supplies for our next convention (an out of town trip) a little early, just in case. If nothing happens, I have one fewer thing to do the day before.
it’s a lot worse than just traffic jams and overloaded phone and broadband circuits from an influx of outsiders.
… Isn’t that bad enough? I’d certainly want to stay inside for that if my town were unlucky enough to be on an eclipse tourism route.
Though I suppose declaring an emergency is… it does seem like in normal times cities would probably advise businesses to schedule more deliveries of food and stuff, so as to make money off the influx of outsiders, but maybe the emergency thing allows cities to have more people available for directing traffic?
Safety! We must stay Safe! This might be Dangerous!
Imhave had one (eccentric?) reposted on my Twitter feed suggesting the path for “this” eclipse is on some kind of planetary energy circuit and therefore the path of totality will muck up the circuit. He seems to be suggesting trouble with the New Madrid Fault.
On a more mundane paranoid point, a roup of terrorists might think attacking when there are lots of cameras and crowds of people in the open, all distracted by totality (which has interesting effects on people- I started jumping up and down like a lunatic and babbling), could be a Good Thing. Assuming totality doesn’t mess them over…
Those independent, alone, trailblaizing trappers and explorers often toted whole PALLETS of canned beans with them as supplies, knowing that, with the state of canning at the time that HALF of them would go bad before they could use them… They were closer to civilization than the Indians they were living amongst. The independence-minded Western world has ALWAYs been highly interdependent. No Robinson Crusoe we (unless you consider all those things from the ship he lived on …).
Here’s a howler — Mexico’s president refuses calls to fight the drug cartels, saying that doing nothing and allowing the cartels to run half the country is a ‘Mexico First’ policy.
At any rate it’s a ‘Me First’ policy. If he doesn’t fight the cartels, they won’t bump him off.
Just once, I would like to hear our president say to the President of Mexico “Your country is your yard, and if you want to let your rabid dogs run loose in it, terrorizing your people, that one matter. When your rabid dogs get loose and into my country, which is my yard, then we have a problem, that you need to stop before I am forced to shoot them all.”
And… Here…. We… Go…
https://twitchy.com/dougp/2024/03/23/what-the-hell-is-this-evil-dojs-red-flag-announcement-on-guns-sets-off-2a-red-flags-n2394305
Back on the original subject, I agree that the buried steamboat in the wheat field, coming to light as a complete surprise, is a perfect analogy for what I suspect is happening in American society today. And the fact that it happened in that deplorable, benighted “flyover country” is just icing on the cake. 🙂
I can remember working as a clerk typist/reporter a The Leader in Corning, NY, in the late 1980s early 1990s and seeing a regular history column by a former Managing Editor of the paper who had made a name for himself and wrote a regular column, from retirement, about local history, etc. One column in particular earned a vehement protest from my paternal grandmother, herself born in 1895.
The column talked about the community of Little Flats (adjacent to Big Flats, a well-known community east of Corning) which appeared nowhere on modern maps. The editor was making the claim that Little Flats was actually another name for the community of South Corning.
This led to a very inflamed, scorching, non-obscenity loaded response from my gracious, gorgeous (UPS men still flirted with her when she was in her 90s), proper one-room school teacher Grandmother when she saw it. Little Flats doesn’t exist anymore, she said, it used to be south of the Chemung River, right across from Big Flats, until the river moved south against that rock cliff where the River Road Bridge crosses the river at Bottcher’s Garden’s and Little Flats is now part of Bottcher’s Gardens.
That is a force of nature, but man can change things too, and then those who follow after don’t know. Until my dad told me, I never knew that Route 17 (Now Interstate 86) passes Painted Post in what was once the riverbed of the Conhocton River, which they moved south to put in the highway.
If it was that way when we first knew it, that is how it always was before, is the standard default of the human mind to observed experiences.