Before the Fall

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’m tired. And not just because I was cleaning the garage yesterday. The thing is, I’m sick and tired of nonsense and stupidity. I didn’t realize how cranky I’d gotten about it all, until older son told me, “Mom, people are people. They’re just people. Once you get a crowd and they’re frightened, and everyone is frightened these days, you’re going to get stupid stuff. I’d say we’ve done amazingly well, overall, for how stupid people get in crowds.”

I guess he’s right. He’s certainly nicer, more patient and more willing to listen to people than I am. Me? I’m just tired.

Maybe it’s being alive for half a century by which point you’ve seen the same politicians trot out the same discredited lie at least three times, and be believed every time even though the last time turned out disastrous and even though it’s turned out disastrous every time it’s been tried. Things like trying tos top people from leaving the country with their money. Things like claiming the man is hiding the stash and that the economy can be righted on the backs of one percent of the population. (Sure it can. Confiscate all their money and the country will be well of for three days. After which we all starve. Do the math.)

Catalina and Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Mao are dust in the dust (or really repulsive stuffed mannequins in the capitals of their countries. Comes to the same) and yet the same lies are listened to reverentially as though they were new stuff. And our press, our horrendous traitorous press promulgates these lies without thought, without bothering to investigate what the truth was, or what really happened. This is what they learned in school as the “smart thought” see, and most people don’t think at all, they just go through life bleating the things they learned as children.

I’m tired. I’m tired of the idea that if we take away people’s chance to start new businesses and benefit from them we’ll all be rich. Because, I guess, wealth comes from the air or from the withered teat of our meretricious government.

And our government – oh, h*ll – a group of whores would do better. At least whores understand business and that some control must be exerted over who gets the … ah… teat for free. They understand that the teat is not endless and neither is the other thing, which will get really unusable if you let the whole world use it. I say next time we elect a whore, not a skinny, duplicitous, indoctrinated red diaper baby with promises as thin as his addled intellect.

Because this plan of erasing our border and catering for the world is the plan to abolish the United States of America. Other countries can have borders, but we’re uniquely rich – apparently because we were born that way. Ignore the fact that almost every other land is naturally richer than us, and that the people who colonized this great nation were the dregs spit out by other lands: the lame, the odd, the strange, those who didn’t fit in. We’re rich and therefore we need to look after the entire world, yes, more than we’ve been doing. Now we’re to let them into our living room and feed them all personally.

And if I hear one more bleat about Christian charity someone is going to die screaming, and it ain’t gonna be me. Christian charity like Christian virtue is admirable, but it can only be practiced by the individual. Once you get nations involved, you have theocracy and theocracy always ends in tears, whether it’s Christian or Marxist or an unholy amalgam of the two. (Or Muslim, or presumably Hindi or Buddhist, before you ask. I just don’t know if the two ever established theocracies. I haven’t read as much history as I’d like to yet.) Also, once you have governments involved everything gets twisted. For instance, is it Christian charity to relieve the pressure on another land just enough that the people there continue to be oppressed by horrible governments rather than rebel? Does it not fall under making their lot worse? In the end, what is the calculation? What is good and what is evil when it comes to nations? Are we allowed to kill in order to save? Should we allow ourselves as a nation – including those who aren’t Christian – to be destroyed in order to give people a short term gain that will end up with everyone steeped in greater misery and nowhere to run to?

I’m tired. Some part of me suspects this is the tired before the storm, that if I actually stop cleaning and carrying and packing and writing, if I actually allow myself long enough to thing about everything, you’ll hear a scream rising from Colorado, and it will clear the birds off the trees all the way to DC.

I know that the end result of all these policies is always the same. Yeah, everyone ends up poorer, even those who will Lord it over them. But for the people who get to distribute the scarcity this is better than being rich under the present chaotic arrangement. Because they’ll get power. And that’s meat and drink to them. In the same way destroying the best healthcare in the world was worth it even if it reduces their own life expectancy because it means they get to say who lives and dies. And that’s worth it to them.

Me? I got over my urges to tell others what to do in elementary. If they obey you you have to look after them forever, and if they don’t obey you what’s the point?

And I look at this big game, and I’m just tired. Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe that’s what it is. Or maybe people are getting dumber. Or not getting smarter.

And trailing through the cleaning, the packing, the tiredness, is this feeling that something wicked this way comes.

I don’t know what it is or where it will come from, but there’s a feeling of the boot, suspended mid-air, already on the way to fall.

And I’m tired.

This is the moment before the worst happens. The moment you can grab the boot and set it gently down. But we’re creatures of history and lost in it. We’re looking up at the ceiling. Somewhere above is the floor onto which the boot is falling, but we can’t see through it. We can’t see the boot. It could be one of so many.

It could be whatever is coming over the border.  It could be our financial doom because of that and those printing presses which I understand are now as hot as the inside of some stars.  It could be an attack on us.  It could be a war in Europe.  It could be any two.  It could be any three.  It could be something else I’ve just not thought about, just like the days of waking up screaming in August gave me no hint that the horror would come in Benghazi, a place I hadn’t heard of. The horror and the total loss of faith in our current administration and their presstitutes.

And I’m tired, because being tired – and cleaning, and reading and writing, and packing and organizing – is better than sitting here, looking up and listening.

For the boot about to fall.

353 thoughts on “Before the Fall”

  4. I don’t know if this will help any, but the fatigue thing is working both ways. The left pushes on gun control, they’re getting pushed back using facts and statistics.

    The left pushes on immigration, and they’re getting pushed back on broken promises and the emergency at the border.

    The left is pushing on the “war on women” and are being laughed at.

    The left is using the race card, and are horrified to find that racism and the race card is being used back on them.

    The older left {like Hillary and Elizabeth} are talking about fighting the Establishment, and being horrified by the reminders that fight was won when first Johnson left office, then Tricky Dicky retired.

    The left is trying to misuse the levers of power, and are horrified when they’re discovered and are accused of corruption. The same corruption that the Johnson administration was accused of, ironically.

    Polls aren’t that indicative of where people’s real feelings are, a lot of people won’t answer their phone unless they recognize the incoming number, and refuse to answer polls at the grocery store.

    Who’s going to win in November? Don’t know. It depends on how many people will believe the same old tired lies, the new whitewashed lies, and/ or vote left because they always have.

    Interesting times we live in……

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    1. Who’s going to win in November? Don’t know. It depends on how many people will believe the same old tired lies, the new whitewashed lies, and/ or vote left because they always have.

      Or who buy the “they’re equally bad” line.

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        1. None of which may matter. In the immortal words of Boss Tweed, “I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.”

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          1. Ok so Stalin and Tweed on their side and Jefferson, Mason and Paine on ours, wonderful. How’s your rifle?

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            1. Got 4 of them.
              Two need glass, But otherwise they work fine.

              Oh, that was rhetorical. NM, carry on.

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  5. It gets a little worse all the time, because the sheep didn’t object to the last little encroachment – so they have convinced themselves people will put up with anything and they have free rein to do what they want. If they go past this line they don’t believe in any more it will be too late. You don’t say ‘Oh… excuse me.” and try to step back. I watched Nicolae Ceausescu dictator of Romania giving a speech and suddenly he realized the crowd he’d ordered gathered were out of control. They weren’t afraid of him anymore. But it was too late. They put him and his wife against a wall and shot them. There really was a line. He just didn’t see it.

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    1. Erm, as somebody actually from Romania, I’d like to point out that until it got to the point where they put Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena to the wall, the Romanian people went through a helluva lot.

      There was no more food. All the external debt of the country had been paid through exports, but there still wasn’t enough food. The queues were endless, you got sugar and eggs not just in exchange for money, but within certain monthly limits – if there were any. Food stores with a few jars here and there of something. It was cold in the winter, hot water for bathing was limited, at some point the electrical power went out for an hour every day. It got steadily worse until it got there, true, just a tiny bit worse all the time (but the hope that “the Americans will come” (to save us was) there for the longest time…)

      This was a sugar queue: http://timpulprezent.radiocultura.ro/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/ultima-coada-zahar.jpg

      It takes a lot to make a country revolt. America isn’t anywhere near that.

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        1. And where they started, look at Romania and how much freedom, electricity, food, wealth they had to start with. You can’t look at Romania and decide that they waited until they were this far gone before they revolted, so America will be about that far gone before they revolt also.

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          1. There may also be the idea of “this is getting fixed” persuading people not to break out with the pitchforks. If people see it is temporary and is getting fixed they try to be patient. If they see no solution they usually try to resolve it. If there is no mechanism to resolve it, that is when things get nasty.

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            1. Let me explain what I meant, because it came out wrong (I kept getting pestered while writing the comment and it looked good at the time): of course it takes different things for different people, and of course Romania wasn’t a wonder of technology and richness to start with. It was the end of the ’40s, after all, and it was a bit too early to have a lot of the things we have today.

              But Romania between the two world wars wasn’t that poor. It was doing okay, growing fast. The moment communism came in, nobody thought it could possibly last. As Bob puts it, “If people see it is temporary and is getting fixed they try to be patient.” People thought it *was* temporary and some were patient – year after year, waiting for things to change, until they got used to the fact that things wouldn’t change. The ideological apparatus was very strong, people from the lower classes were ‘converted’ to communism, people from the higher classes adapted… or went to jail. It took 40 years to get to severe hunger, step by step until it couldn’t be accepted anymore, despite the higher powers stomping on any opposition. (sending people off to work camps as political prisoners helped more with destroying the opposition than people not being used to good stuff)

              Americans don’t seem to be reaching that level of ‘we can’t take it’. Some people here might be reaching that, but it’s a long way from this to the type of revolt Mackey Chandler was describing.

              I’m hoping things will get fixed for you in ways other than people’s riots, because those take a big crash before they’re reached. And sometimes you can be shocked at just how much it takes.

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              1. I don’t know. The “not one more step back” contingent is growing. The country is polarizing around various issues. The mask is slipping off those who seek to rule us and the internet is stopping things from sliding down the memory hole. Texas has a secession movement stronger now than at any time since 1865. We are on a razor’s edge. It won’t take much to light the fuse I think.

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              2. No, but you don’t fully get what we mean either. Romania was okay between the wars, yeah. Look, Portugal was not third world when I was growing up, but in comparison to where the US is it is poor as job.
                Look, the first American revolution — we rebelled when the hand of the king on the colonies was much lighter than in Europe.
                It’s not how bad things got. France, the main country of its time, was still very well off when heads rolled. It’s what you’ve grown up with and consider normal. Americans are already hurting at that level, and it will soon be bad.

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                1. ” It’s what you’ve grown up with and consider normal. Americans are already hurting at that level, and it will soon be bad.”

                  Yes, this was the point I was trying to make (poorly).

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              4. Thanks for posting about Romania. I’ve been reading up on the country’s history during World War 2, and read a little about Ceausescu as well. That guy was a piece of work. Hopefully things continue to improve. The country’s been through a lot.

                Speaking of that region and repression, Instapundit had a link yesterday about Hungary officially renouncing Western-style Democracy. Hopefully that doesn’t lead to renewed tension over the border. Repressive governments always seem to need to look for a foreign enemy, and the border with Romania provides both an “other”, and a casus belli.

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              5. To reiterate what I said before, this morning I got up, had a cup of (hot) tea, took a (hot) shower, got dressed in clean clothes and headed off to work.

                On the way I stopped at a auto parts store, got a bottle of injector cleaner (because my truck is an old diesel), and then filled the tank (18.5 gallons). At no point did I have to wait in line, much less a long one.

                I got on the highway, and it took a bit longer than usual because there was an accident on interchange ramp. There was a firetruck, a police officer and an ambulance there. That was the only (obviously) armed person I saw (well, other than myself, and I hope that’s not obvious)–the cop. No soldiers with automatic rifles, no tanks or APCs.

                On the way in I was listening to Talk Radio (Mandy Connell) and both the host and the guests were…impolite to Obama, and none of them will get rounded up or shot.

                I’ve got a (over) full belly, and have to go to the gym to keep from getting obese.

                It’s no where CLOSE to bad here. Heck, it’s better (in most regards) that almost anywhere in Europe and Australia. Diesel/Gas is cheaper. Food is cheaper (and from the *little* I saw over there nicer, but that was just Italy). We are a damn site better than most of Asia and Africa.

                Yeah, our political class su><0rs b@11z, but that's true everywhere.

                And yes, the wheels *are* going to come off. And yes, those of us who can see further than what's in front of our nose can see just how bad it's going to be, and some of us don't think the US is going to exist in any meaningful way after the crash, but we aren't there yet.

                We are so far out of the norm for the historical human condition that anyone talking of armed insurrection anytime soon needs to go to some place like El Salvador or Egypt for a "vacation".

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                1. Um… except I think it’s going to break out, William. people DON’T have any idea what the rest of the world is like, and about half the people I know are paying their visa with their mastercard.
                  What can’t go on, won’t.

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                  1. Alternately, something else will give us a nudge (for instance, an epidemic), and the carefully stacked house of cards that’s keeping everything together will collapse very, very quickly.

                    A lady I knew when I was in Washington a couple of decades ago (Tri-Cities area, for the curious) talked a bit about when Mt. St. Helens erupted in the ’80s. She told me that shipments into the region stopped completely because of all the ash in the sky. No new food at the supermarkets.

                    Imagine something like that on a much, much larger scale, and for a longer period of time.

                    And for the curious, the first two things to disappear off of the store shelves were beer and potato chips.

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                    1. Beer and potato chips? Really? Around here, when there are going to be severe weather events or such, people clear out the Milk, Bread, and Eggs. I’ve taken to calling it French Toast of the Apocalypse.

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                    5. “Don’t forget the sugar and maple syrup”
                      We make our own maple syrup. For that matter we make our own bread and have fresh eggs from our chickens.
                      No Apocalyptic French toast for us.

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                    6. Wayne,
                      You live in a really strange area if beer and potato chips lasts longer than milk, eggs, and bread. Oh and shipments only stopped for a week or two, and milk, eggs and bread were more likely to be locally produced and thus at least minimally shipped.
                      The ash in the air was extremely hard on motors, scoring cylinders and pistons, which is why shipping was put on hold until ash had settled, in areas that received rain this happened sooner, thus shipping was restored on the West side faster than over on the dry side (Tri-Cities area). And prevailing winds drifted ash to the dry side more so than the West side.

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                    7. I’m pretty sure our stores just carry more of the beer and chips than they do the others. :-) Plus, you have a lot more of those in separate liquor stores than there is milk and bread (forget eggs) in convenience stores.

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                    5. LOL I’m the Republican committee town chair and run the local Tea Party e-newsletter, but I know my limits.

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                  3. Those of us with guns and the ability to use them well are also those (generally) with the most to lose. I’ve got a wife and kid that I need to support. Most of the people I know who can and will fight back have homes and jobs and families.

                    Anyone who is mentally capable of fighting back effectively is the sort of person who’s going to do the calculus “is it worth losing my home and my family over this”.

                    As long as one *has* a home, and can feed their family, the answer is “no”.

                    When is the last time an armed revolution broke out in a country that had democratic institutions? Not the shame of elections that the Eastern Block had, but the ability to recall elected officials (here in CO we saw *two* elected officials recalled, and a 3rd step down IIRC) and the ability to run 3rd party candidates and even write in candidates?

                    Yeah, they’re generally the same worthless turds after a cycle or three, but that’s *our* fault.

                    Things won’t get to an *active* armed resistance in this country because at least 1/3rd of us are armed, and there’s an estimated 97 guns per 100 people. Heck, we’ve got a higher percentage of people with concealed carry permits than most countries do *armed citizens*, and right now the anti-gun types are having their hind quarters handed to them.

                    This means that certain actions the government *cannot* take or they KNOW they’ll get an armed backlash. They have to disarm us first, but they have to do one of two things before they disarm us, one is get the number of gun owners down below about 5 percent AND convince people that the constitution doesn’t mean what it says on it’s face.

                    The other thing would be to disenfranchise a significant percentage of the population, but they can’t do that because the disenfranchised would raise holy hell through the next election and the pols that passed it would be out on their asses.

                    As long as we can still vote, and we still have guns it will be a steady, slow degradation of the economy. Infrastructure will slowly crumble because it looks better to give money to schools and building new roads than to maintain the existing stuff. Our dollar will continue to lose value, energy will get (relatively) more expensive, we’ll be told that this is good for the environment (and about 1/2 of our population will believe and be good little bolsheviks and put on an extra sweater) and that we all just have to suffer a little bit.

                    But as long as we can still vote and still own guns they can’t turn the heat up fast enough to outpace the economic collapse.

                    Now, I’ll grant you that when the Feds fail to get the various entitlement checks out on time, or they aren’t honored things *might* get hot, but it’s not (generally) “our” side that will be marching (well, they might cut SS and Military pensions first, but that will be darwinian stupidity), so it’ll be a “blue on blue” attack.

                    Also you might see isolated incidents, but those won’t spread because those will be like that rancher in Nevada–people who are getting screwed over, but *also* did really stupid things along the way that put them outside the sympathy envelope for most of us who *did* do the right thing.

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                    2. Even if you did the right thing, the pravda media will find or invent something to put you outside the envelope

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                    4. The Battle of Athens (I was actually thinking of that as I was writing) was localized, and is essentially “the exception that proves the rule”. Athens would have completely failed had the national government decided to side with the local government.

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                    5. Anyone who is mentally capable of fighting back effectively is the sort of person who’s going to do the calculus “is it worth losing my home and my family over this”.

                      Sort of yes, but sort of no.

                      The people who are able to fight back effectively are also going to be able to look forward and identify if they will lose their family and children by not risking it now.

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    2. They seem to forget:
      Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
      (Hope that tag worked right.)

      I have very little faith in what will arise from that “throwing off such government” and not much more that the attempt will be successful, but I have a lot that the attempt will be made in the not too distant future.

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      2. That reminds me, I was listening to the song Silent Running earlier today and some of the lyrics brought to mind both Sarah’s Earth rebellion stories and the present situation:

        “Never hint at what you really feel
        Teach the children quietly
        For some day sons and daughters
        Will rise up and fight while we stood still”

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    3. Where I see the line being crossed is the government thinking they have gotten so entrenched and everyone so cowed that they can go after anyone they want, and start going after celebrities who have been criticizing them.

      Of course, I’m not a soothsayer, but they have been going further and further into doing things that no one would have believed even 10 years ago, let alone 20, and I can easily see trumped-up charges on people like Ted Nugent being a spark that ignites a conflagration.

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  6. Take care Sarah. It sounds like depression to me. Oh, often depression happens when there’s reasons to be depress. Don’t let it get you down. Easier to say than do of course. [Smile]

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    1. Yep, there is reason to be depressed. I know I am. I have lived through 7 decades and heading into another one, I have never seen, nor expected anything like this. A little like the saying, “is it really paranoia if someone is really after you?” Well, yes, I am paranoid too, and they are after me.

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  7. The horror and the total loss of faith in our current administration and their presstitutes.
    I remember during the run up to 08, a neighbor was commenting on my feelings of the coming disaster (I was for McCain but was vocally not happy about that) and how low my expectations were.
    Afterward, before he moved, he told me I was right, and he had thought that it wasn’t going to be as bad as I had warned, but knew “It was going to be bad, but not that bad.”
    I told him it was going to be worse. I held and hold no optimistic outlook with the current crop we have in office. This includes much of the people on “my side” of the spectrum. The Republicans earned the moniker “Stupid Party” from their base. The entrenched would prefer to be the opposition party not in charge over having the full support of their base. They seem to hate the base as much as the leftoids do, and work to undercut anyone with large support of that base.
    The “Alternatives” are not viable either. The Libertarian foreign policy would differ only slightly from what we have now, and would likely be worse than what we have now (sad thought that). The only upside is they’d be less likely to insult our allies openly. Obama has kept killing a few folks who deserve it, but is seemingly doing it as often to p.o. the Pakistanis as to bolster security.
    Benghazi didn’t fill me with horror. It didn’t surprise me at all. I had absolutely no faith in the administration so have none to lose. Little “my side” does fills me with faith, so the only form of faith I have for the other side is knowing they will continue to be a combination of incompetent and evil.

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  8. As I’ve said, Santayana was wrong. He who learns from history is STILL doomed to repeat it. Because the idiots will treat your warning like Cassandra’s Truth.

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    2. I recently saw a revision of this that was approximately “Those who learn history are doomed to facepalms while watching those who repeat history because they failed to learn it.”

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    1. I’m always confused by those who work so hard to remove our Judeo Christian and then use that heritage as a reason for the things they want to do. Or as a cudgel to guilt others into doing what they want them to do.

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      1. Your problem is expecting those “individuals” to make sense. [Sad Smile]

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    3. Don’t you remember the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the government bureaucrat found the beaten traveller on the side of the road, took him to an inn, and forced the people there at swordpoint to take care of him?

      Yeah, me either.

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      1. Some of them will blithely say that it’s because the government is how we act together.

        Yup, they think they are allowed to presuppose totalitarianism.

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  10. Yeah. I got this howler from your rep and mine, the egregious Diana DeGette: “The Fair Minimum Wage Act would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and raise the pay of at least 25 million workers. … By generating $22 billion in new economic activity and creating 85,000 jobs nationwide the benefits of this legislation go far beyond just helping those who earn the minimum wage.” She’s far too dumb to understand that a minimum wage hike is a zero sum game. And the people who vote for her are lemmings. Or maybe the Pied Piper’s children.

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    1. They really have no idea about what they don’t know. Getting elected to office means one thing – you’ve got a good enough spiel that you’ve fooled people into thinking you’re intelligent, perceptive, and problem-solving… none of which necessarily hold.

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      1. That is an unmitigated slur and I fully expect you to apologize to all of the morons, drooling and otherwise, who would never dream of forcing you to throw money down a thousand rat holes, nor condemn you for saying it is a bad idea.

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    4. I find it funny that the “Fair” Minimum Wage Act won’t index minimum wage to inflation, updated every year. It’s as if Democrats like having this issue come up every three years or something!

      Of course, it would be more accurate to say “The gap between the True Minimum Wage and the Forced Required Minimum Wage is $10.10/hr”, because the true minimum wage will always be $0.00/hr (ie, unemployment); thus, there is no guarantee that raising the minimum wage will spur activity.

      That, and it’s nice to know that all those part-time single high-school students can finally support their imaginary families! (Assuming they can find work, of course, and their jobs aren’t replaced with robots, etc.)

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  11. I’ve had the feeling of something horrific about to fall … most of this summer, I think. But I had a sense of bad things coming our way since about 2006. There was something coming that we would have to prepare for, not physically so much as mentally. We would have to stop and remember who we are … which is why I started to write HF, as a way of educating and putting heart into people.

    But I’m tired now, too.

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    1. Perhaps that’s why the Colplatschki books won’t stop jumping out at me. They are all about people left to rot and who refuse to roll over. Elizabeth von Sarmas, Capt. Mike Kidder, Matthew “Blackbird” Malatesta, Susannah “Basil” Peilov, Marguerite deSarm and Odile Rheinhart, none of them will go down without fighting as best they can. And those are the stories that seem to be selling, not just mine but other writers.

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        1. *evil yet sympathetic grin* I had to start the WWI book and a WWII short story this week just to buy time to try and get “Peaks of Grace” under control. And something is fluttering around the edges but I’m not certain if it is more of the WWI book or something totally off-the-wall. Since ideas attack while I’m on the way to the library (no idea why), I may have someone else return the books next week, just in case.

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          1. I may have someone else return the books next week, just in case.

            Because you’re eager to be accosted by ideas standing in line at the bakery?

            They’re gonna find ya.

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            1. *shakes finger* Look you, I’m going to be trapped with them for two trans-Atlantic flights next month. Do NOT be encouraging them. Especially on that second flight: I start getting really strange at the end of 30+ hour days.

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              1. Does your hair always bounce like that when you shake your finger? It’s — hypnotizing.

                Would I encourage such voices? You wound me.

                On another topic ( :twisted: ) have you every noticed how around about the 7th or 8th hour in the air, when your mouth is a little dry and your eyes a bit gritty (and lets not talk about the bum) while you realize that coming in to this or that airport is really incidental because there’s still 20 some hours of travel before you — have you ever noticed how the mind wanders? How susceptible you are to little voices in the shadowy corners of your own brain?

                Or is that just me?

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                1. Stop. That. *grits teeth* Just. Stop. That. Or I will NOT be held responsible for what comes out of my word processor this fall. I’m warning you. It’s bad enough that the cicadas’ drone led to three blog posts this afternoon. Ten hours of listening to the roar of Pratt and Whitney’s finest? Beware. Be very ware.

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                  1. Be nice to your teeth, they’re your friends.

                    And I’ll be nice to your brain.

                    As ware as I am, I shall be. But can I read whatever comes out of your word processor? I’ll just start with the three blog posts, shall I?

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                    3. Tomorrow. I’ve got four cued up. Unless people really want to read about predestinarian theological terminology and the arguments over infralapsarian and supralapsarian election. *watches people fleeing for the exits* That’s what I thought.

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                    6. I agreed to be prepared to cover some lessons on predestination in church history for a Protestant religion teacher so I’ve been reading up. The ghosts of Augustine, Calvin, Knox, and Edwards are all laughing at me. (And what is it with predestination and theologians named John, anyway?)

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                    7. As compelling as I’ve never found predestination, such a read-up sounds positively thrilling. :|

                      Maybe you should go to the bakery.

                      Like

                    8. “Unless people really want to read about predestinarian theological terminology and the arguments over infralapsarian and supralapsarian election”

                      At least those terms give the reader fair warning that the subject is going to be mind bending. By the time they figure out how to pronounce them, they have long since forgotten what they mean; which is good practice for following the arguments.

                      Like

                    10. http://www.albatrus.org/english/theology/soteriology/supralapsarianism_infralapsarianism.htm

                      Makes for interesting philosophical conversations when you are ‘ringy’ from lack of sleep. Such conversations without serious sleep deprivation, on the other hand, need to have a warning label with; crossed eyes, headache, nausea, and sudden drowsiness, listed as side effects. Do not engage in such conversations while operating motorized vehicles or heavy machinery.

                      Like

                    12. TXRed :
                      Unless people really want to read about predestinarian theological terminology and the arguments over infralapsarian and supralapsarian election.

                      URL?

                      No, really.

                      Like

                    14. I was using Bluetooth officer, honest! We were just discussing Theodore Beza’s supralapsarianism and next thing I knew I my car had made a personal acquaintance with the light pole.

                      Like

                2. This is why I took a sleeping pill as soon as I got through the gate when I was flying to Japan. I never made it more than an hour into the flight.

                  Like

              2. Eh gods. Me too. When I went to Portugal with younger son three years ago, on the way back, due to delays and what not, I was pushing 48 hours with only catnaps and no real meals when I arrived in Denver. Dan wanted to take me to Pete’s for dinner, but I was too tired to eat (and starving.) I asked him to stop at a convenience store and get me milk, drank it, got to the hotel (he knew by then he couldn’t drag us home) climbed into bed fully dressed, slept till five am (it was midnight when we arrived) when I got up, undressed, showered and put my nightclothes on before going back to bed.
                But the thing is, those last five hours the stories were a din in my mind, obscuring the real world.

                Like

                    2. no. Seems to be normal. The problem is if I go too long and am truly the walking dead I get entire trilogies what my friend Kate calls “Core dumped” into my head. With my schedule…

                      Like

                    3. Extreme tiredness brings out all the ideas… just sometimes, not the coherence necessary to bring them to words on text or screen. Once while I was working on about five different term papers (at the same time) I fell asleep while writing. Only I didn’t stop writing. I jolted awake to find about five pages of story text planted smack dab in the middle of a history paper. I cut the text out, saved my paper, and tried to open a new, empty doc and crashed the computer. *sigh* I don’t even remember what the story was about in plot, just that it involved fairies.

                      My professor thought it would have been interesting to read the story if I hadn’t noticed it was there and kept right on writing. She said it would have been a nice change of pace from the tedium.

                      Sometimes though, I wish I could plug in a cable to my head and have it record my brain’s rambling and the plots and music and ideas and cinematics – then I’d sort through those when I’m awake.

                      Like

                    4. Sounds a lot like the story I heard about the student who put the c-note in the middle of his term paper just to see if they got read at all.

                      Like

                    6. Not for next time something like that happens – save the document immediately, copy the file, and THEN remove the extra text. :-)

                      Like

                  2. I don’t know about with folks who already know how to write, but with me exhaustion brings the stories forward– but doesn’t let you capture them.

                    Like

                    3. I’d settle for that download you mentioned earlier. Push the button, brain-dump, sort later.

                      ‘Course, then I’d be drifting off to sleep with this empty brain and new things would creep in…

                      Like

                    5. I don’t have nightmares, as such, anymore. Not things that scare me, anyway. Eliciting any number of other disturbing emotions, yes, but…

                      The daytime stuff, though — that can shake out the terrors.

                      Like

                    6. I still get the kind where my husband has to shake me awake, and sometimes, slap and pinch my cheeks to wake me because I’m screaming and screaming and will not wake up. And waking up is not an indicator to me that I’m awake – because when I dream, it’s so vivid that it’s no different from reality. I can touch, taste, smell, feel, move, sense – all of it. Worse, I’ve done the ‘wake up into another dream’ thing they made fun of playing with in Inception. Except usually, if I started out a night with nightmares, it’ll be nightmares all the way. And they’re the kind of stuff where I watch my children being murdered, and such.

                      Like

                    7. Hm. No, I think I’ll take the bizarre and confusing I have now, thanks.

                      Yours don’t sound conducive to good sleep, really.

                      Like

                    8. Nor are they conducive to being sure you’re REALLY awake. The really bad ones, I hurt physically because my whole body’s been tensed up most of the night and even if I never woke up till the alarm goes off, I didn’t get a moment’s rest. There’s no reason for the bad dreams either – they’re likely to happen when I’ve had a spate of RL time where I’ve done a lot, feel content and happy. I spent the last week reading a book about paranormal investigations (which I’m sending off to my brother), and nope, not even the slightest hint of bad dream.

                      Like

                    9. For the inadequate response: Bummer.

                      It’s kinda odd, the absence of cause, no? But odd — well you’re in the right place.

                      Like

                    10. Bizarre and confusing? Oh, yeah, brother. Mine seem to come in little, 5-second to 5-minute subjective time clips, and are often really weird.

                      I DID have a couple of nightmares a few weeks ago. Don’t remember them now, but do remember waking up in a state of raw terror. And they weren’t “night terrors”. I remembered the dreams when I woke up, but they have faded now.

                      Like

                    11. :o{

                      I used to dream of flying. Now it’s just forgot my locker combination or forgot to punch the time card all week. I haven’t done either thing for a long time so I’m not sure whence they come.

                      Like

                    15. Ohhhhh yeah, same here. Occasionally with screwed up grammar (Think someone speaking English using German grammar. Or French. Or both) or a language that isn’t one he recognizes. He thinks it’s freaking adorable.

                      I’d really like the ‘record’ option to thoughtstreams. And rewind. And a little debugging to see where the ‘why did I think that? Why do you like to hurt me, brain?’ ones come from.

                      Like

                    16. I try to answer questions when I’m falling asleep and things come out of my mouth that I can tell are completely off the wall and unrelated to what I was asked, but I can never seem to concentrate hard enough to straighten it out.

                      Like

                    17. All muses, regardless of what sorts of ideas they bear, are comedians of the lowest sort, as witness the times they delight in ambushing us with ideas.

                      Like

                  3. That seemed to be me last night. Drifting off to sleep, the main plot of a novel of possibly book seven or eight in a series pounced on me. Result: Jolt awake, grab pad and pen next to bed usually used to keep track of blood pressure, and scribble down two and a half of back to back pages of notes, before head started bobbing downward again. By then it was two am and I was swearing because I needed to be up at seven…

                    The next day I grumped at the stories “Where the hell are books two to six!?”

                    Them: “Don’t worry. We’ll sort that out… When you least expect it. *evilgrin* “

                    Like

    2. I have been depressed about the country since I could see O was going to take us over. I never dreamed he could do so much damage in such a short time. I really think all this started with the Bush/Gore debacle.
      No I don’t blame Bush, I blame Gore and whoever it was that told him to stop that speech conceding the election. Our country was torn apart and I don’t know if it will ever come back from that.
      I’m tired and I am old, 77 +, so I doubt I will ever see our glory restored.

      Like

      1. I don’t think I’m so much astonished at what O wanted to do, as the Stupid Party just . . . letting him walk all over the Constitution. The checks and balances just . . . evaporated.

        Like

        1. Yes. And then the SP musters the temerity to ridicule and struggle to oust the few vibrant members of their coalition, those who’ve actually called on the .gov to abide by constitutional limits.

          Like

        2. The checks and balances did not just evaporate. The first round evaporated, uncovering the nasty, second round, the one that’s really poor at target discrimination and involves tar and feathers.

          That’s the real story of the Bundy ranch and the protesters turning away the immigrant buses. The left’s discovering if you neuter the other side, what’s also neutered is the oppositions filtering function, toning down the level of crazy that has naturally resided in the fever swamps on both sides.

          The left has no idea how to tell the difference between armed righties blowing off steam and dead serious warnings. That’s one of the things that the GOP used to do for them.

          Like

          1. Amusingly, I have a critter who is not going to get approved because posting under name of recently departed famous guy (Steve Jobs) is not something I encourage, saying it’s a pitty we’re all so afraid and he wishes us peace. Apparently “Clear and present danger” and “Not for us but for our country” are null words to these idiots. One despairs.

            Like

            1. I despair when they’re so boring. Really, the “all so afraid” bit is wearing terribly thin.

              And whysoever should we fear?

              Ukraine, Gaza, ISIS…

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                1. Ah, Detroit. How is it that the SP has failed to leverage Detroit in argument?

                  There ought be more photographers than remaining citizens in Detroit, documenting the results of unfettered prog rule. The SP ought be slapping pictures onto tabletops, desktops and airport stops every damned day.

                  Instead — let’s oust the Tea Party, noisy upstarts, daring to crowd my aristocracy.

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                  1. I’m afraid it can’t be fixed. This nation in its current configuration may have run its course. That does not mean that the grand experiment must perforce die. We may have to try again on a smaller scale. I’m sorry but do not let sentimentality cloud your vision. I will protect the constitution, even of that means taking it someplace safer to keep the flickering light of liberty alive.

                    Like

                    1. I’ve said it before, allow me to repeat:

                      I’ll not be giving up, nor abandoning any portion of 314 million Americans to a corrupt nation, merely to avoid the dark road.

                      Like

                    2. I understand you. Do you understand that they don’t want to be saved? Our Republic cannot stand unless every citizen is engaged. They don’t want to be. In this day of the internet their ignorance is willful. You can’t save everyone. Save who and what you can.

                      Like

                    3. You presume an understanding of the question by the majority, an understanding I’ve not seen demonstrated (for various legitimate reasons).

                      We are in a time of learning, some will see, some will not. But let’s not start abandoning territory and people based on shady metrics and inaccurate assumptions.

                      The true strength of this country is not a governing philosophy, political involvement or acuity, nor even the founding documents (though those are incredibly important in enabling the strength).

                      The strength of this country is its people. The purpose of those other concerns is to preserve the people and their freedoms. Abandoning the people to preserve the framework is antithetical to our success.

                      Should we fail, then what scattered people remain will have the opportunity to take up the torch, secure the philosophy and begin anew. Or not, as their mettle dictates.

                      But I’m not going to declare failure before the fight, and I’m not going to slip away from the advancement of a hopeless philosophy granting it ground so I can see what we held poisoned.

                      This isn’t about me and mine, it’s not about surviving the end. It’s about fighting to defend, preserve and restore America so that all that come after can stand free.

                      Perhaps it’s lofty, or maybe sadly optimistic. But the fight has not come to hand, and I already know which way I run at the sound of the guns.

                      So I shall stand.

                      Like

                    6. JSelvy, with due respect, poppycock. The republic started out with 3% engaged. We’re not a regime that wants to make everyone live and die for politics. The business of America is business, not politics.
                      Fix the voter fraud, and we’ll do.

                      Like

                    7. We’re not a regime that wants to make everyone live and die for politics.

                      This reminder needs to spread far and wide. Understanding voter disengagement is key to understanding why we can survive this morass.

                      Like

                    12. Then let us make our stand. Where and how?
                      How do we fix voter fraud when the DOJ won’t prosecute actual voter intimidation (NBPP)?
                      How do we divest ourselves and the body politic of the parasites?
                      How do we rid ourselves of the socialists and communists without resorting to Madame Guillotine?

                      I, too, am tired. When I am tired my aim is lousy. If I have missed my target and pasted any of this fine company, I most humbly apologize.

                      Like

                    13. I, too, am tired. When I am tired my aim is lousy. If I have missed my target and pasted any of this fine company, I most humbly apologize.

                      Nah. Man, we all despair. We all struggle with the how, and not infrequently the what. From here, the path is unknown.

                      I’m just of the mind that it is necessary to plant my standard and hold my ground.

                      Like

                    15. “I’m just of the mind that it is necessary to plant my standard and hold my ground.”

                      Yes!! That!

                      Like

                    16. “Then let us make our stand. Where and how?”
                      Hard to say. Except…, draw your line and enforce it. No matter what.
                      But then, that’s what we do, is it not?

                      Like

                    17. That’s exactly it. America is her people. They are her essence. I am American. My father was an immigrant who came through Ellis Island in 1923.

                      Like

                    18. It’s not a line on the map. It’s a line in the mind. We can’t all get together, life still goes on around this kind of mess. We just need to be immovable rocks in the tide. People are going to need something to cling to.

                      Like

                    24. Eamon said,
                      “I’ll not be giving up, nor abandoning any portion of 314 million Americans to a corrupt nation, merely to avoid the dark road.”

                      Problem is, I don’t believe there are near 314 million Americans in this country. I agree on not abandoning Americans (it may become necessary, just as leaving a Marine behind may be necessary, but it should be treated the same, and our philosophy should be the same) it is just that there are a number of residents on this great country who are not Americans.

                      Like

                2. I was talking to a guy from Michigan the other night, and describing Last Centurion to him. I was kind of diffident when outlined how Detroit got and how they had to send in the military to fix it, but he said, “Yeah, how’s that different from Detroit now?”

                  Like

              3. About the only ‘good’ for relative values of ‘good’ is that China seems to have stopped it’s rattling at the rest of Asia and since MH17 has turned it’s attention northward.

                Oh and who was it that mentioned sanctions from the US again? Russia beat ’em to it.

                http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/russia-sanctions-on-australian-exports-do-not-include-sheep-and-lamb/story-fnda1bsz-1227018453640

                (there’s an image of a tweet listing who Russia has leveled economic sanctions on…)

                Like

                1. Not exactly about China. Instapundit had a link up the other day about the Chinese wanting to build five lighthouses in the disputed areas. I think the Chinese are still testing, though I suspect that the Japanese response is giving them pause. iirc, the Japanese just announced that they’ll give half a dozen ships to the Vietnamese (who are also having China problems), and they’ve been shadowing Chinese planes in the disputed areas.

                  Like

            2. I wish that when we release the monsters from Gitmo, that we run them by Ground Zero at Hiroshima. Let them get at least a partial understanding of what can happen if they REALLY piss us off.

              Like

                1. It’s not even that. They know that we can do it. But they also know that we’re reluctant to do so. And they see that as a weakness that they can exploit.

                  Like

          2. Why liberals can’t get away with calling all conservatives ‘crazy’
            By Kyle Smith
            One of these words is not like the others (or maybe they’re all pretty much the same — you make the call): Loon, nutjob, crank, wingnut, whackjob, cuckoo, crackpot, dingbat, wacko, conservative.

            Can’t spot the outlier? You might be a liberal. Because even among the Very Serious and Highly Respected voices on the left, “conservative” and “crazy” are synonyms.
            [MORE: http://nypost.com/2014/08/09/why-liberals-cant-get-away-with-calling-all-conservatives-crazy/ ]

            Apropos nothing in particular.

            Like

            1. I’m tempted to start calling progressives “projectives” due to their habit of projecting their own faults upon others.

              Like

        3. The checks and balances just . . . evaporated.

          They spent decades, possibly almost a century, working to blow them up.

          They didn’t evaporate, they just have been pushed yet further back so that they’ll only be used when the cost (politically) meets with the risk from not acting.

          Right now, absolutely everything someone in the SP actually DOES gets met with wails of “you’re making it worse”/”You’re making us look bad.”

          Like

    3. We’ve been having bad things since 2006. It’s just that the things keep getting worse and worse…

      In the ’70s, I’d never have thought to see a President like we have now. Carter was rather infamous for not being able to make a decision on hard choices – but he was a flippin’ piker compared to Obama, who’s every single decision seems to be on ‘How can this make me look good or bad’, and its the praise of his sycophants that determines what’s good or bad.

      Like

        1. Remember how outraged they were over George W Bush saying he didn’t watch the news, he read the presidential briefings and thus knew about things before they became news? Things generally become news only once our initial efforts to resolve the problem have failed.

          I don’t think president Mom Jeans reads the briefings — it would delay his tee time..

          Like

  12. From what I read about the Hindu nationalists in India, they’re just as rough on non-believers as other groups, when the opportunity and mood arises. And then there’s the whole caste system problem (which, interestingly, also exists in Muslim Pakistan. There have been honor killings of men and women who marry outside their caste even though they were very much not Hindu.)

    Like

    1. Can’t remember who it was, but was listening to a historian the other day who pointed out that the caste system lined up very strongly along what we’d call racial lines in the US– it was just old enough that people didn’t remember it being established.

      Like

    2. You are legally required to report that you want to be baptized to the police in India. The police published this info in the papers. The fundamentalists then go to murder the convert.

      Like

  13. Sarah,

    You ask these questions, “I just don’t know if the two ever established theocracies. I haven’t read as much history as I’d like to yet.) Also, once you have governments involved everything gets twisted. For instance, is it Christian charity to relieve the pressure on another land just enough that the people there continue to be oppressed by horrible governments rather than rebel? Does it not fall under making their lot worse? In the end, what is the calculation? What is good and what is evil when it comes to nations? Are we allowed to kill in order to save? Should we allow ourselves as a nation – including those who aren’t Christian – to be destroyed in order to give people a short term gain that will end up with everyone steeped in greater misery and nowhere to run to?”, but I can not give an answer at the moment.

    :(

    Like

  14. I’ve been playing Jeremiah for the past quarter century.
    People aren’t interested in listening.
    Heck, there are people who still won’t talk to me because of mean things I said about Obama back in ’08. Despite every single one of them being subsequently proven correct.

    Progressivism is the main problem. Its foundational assumption is that humanity is on an inevitable upward trend toward Utopia. Questioning this is heresy, and marks you as a dangerous kook.
    Worse, our public schools have been indoctrinating Dewey’s “secular religion” of Progressivism in impressionable young minds for some 6 generations now.
    The main political philosophy nowadays seems to be wishful thinking.

    Heck I live in what’s commonly considered one of the most Conservative state in the country. My Representative just won a brutal and underhanded campaign against a primary challenger. A paraphrased version of the platform he rode to victory (alongside many dishonest and inaccurate smears of his opponent) is “The pork, the whole pork, and nothing but the pork”. The contest wasn’t even close. (Of course, he’s now touting his desire for a smaller federal government. A desire that he’s never actually acted on in his decade+ in office.)

    Let it burn.
    We can’t stop it.
    We can only try to be prepared.

    Like

      3. I really want to be able to fix the little typo. Traitorous fingers, more comfortable with the contractive than the possessive…

        :mad:

        Like

        1. With any other word, the apostrophe would’ve been correct. Saying it’s different for “it” has always annoyed me>:-(.

          Like

          1. Where does the apostrophe go in “his”? Or “her”? Or “my”? It’s not just different for “it” — all possessive pronouns don’t get it.

            Like

            1. “His” is intrinsically possessive, “it” is not. “Mys” is not a word. “Hers” is the only example that compares to “its”, and is equally annoying. Should I refer to something you own as “Marys”? If something belongs to the U.S., is it “Americas”?

              I realize that English is a kludge, and a desire for consistency if futile, but that doesn’t mean I have to *like* all the inconsistencies.

              Like

        2. The Moving Finger types; and, having typt,
          Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
          Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
          Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

          Like

  15. Should we allow ourselves as a nation…to be destroyed in order to give people a short term gain that will end up with everyone steeped in greater misery and nowhere to run to?

    This is one of the sentiments that drove me from poli-sci in college, one that’s permeated the intellectual assumptions of the elite. They congratulate themselves on their perspective and rationality, they’re not confined by borders or blinded by nationalism.

    Which would be fine, I believe in healthy criticism, except — the only nationalism that doesn’t snooker them is their own. Reflexive criticism of the U.S. is of absolutely zero value when it occurs amidst blind adoration of every oppositional idea and country.

    ‘Tis why they’re a dead end, a withering branch. I wish them the best of their misplaced arrogance and misguided condescension. Maybe the denizens of hell give a damn what they have to say.

    I just have to remember that you and me, this guy over here, that gal, those folks over that way… I just have to remember that we are not taken in by disastrous rhetoric, we’re not fooled by the charisma of a man who’s perfected his reading skills and little else. We find no reason to extend respect to a mockery of a political class, or bow the head before a presumptive aristocracy.

    I just have to remember that we, you and I and these good people all around, will fight for a nation and an ideal we believe in. Stand, oppose and fight for the image of a nation that burns in our blood.

    I find I am tired, too. But the work is not done.

    Like

    1. “This is the midnight – let no star/ Delude us – dawn is very far.” “The Storm Cone” by Rudyard Kipling.
      BUT:
      “So when the world’s asleep and there seems no hope of her waking
      “Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan
      “Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,
      And every one smiles at his neighbor and tells him his soul is his own!”
      “The Dawn Wind (the Fifteenth Century)” R. Kipling.

      Like

    2. Fight the fire any way you can. Even if you’ve got to piss on the flames licking around your feet.

      My stories? People doing as best they can with what they’ve got. A ‘First Contact’ scenario where the humans’ first words to the aliens with an obviously damaged starship are “Hello, neighbor. Do you need a hand?” A genie who doesn’t know how to react when the people summoning him are actually nice to him.

      I’ve tried to be a good example to my son – helping people when I could and being unfailingly polite – even when hurting badly. Yes, I’m old fashioned. Yes, I’m not writing Nebula-award quality angst-ridden material. But maybe someone will read a story of mine, and instead of taking a snarky swipe they’ll think that the other person might have feelings and just for the moment refrain from trying to score points.

      I don’t know if it’ll help or not, but it’s something I can do.

      Like

      1. Excuse me, are those two stories still in progress, or finished and for sale? I would like to read them.

        Like

        1. The Genie story is in a collection – “Worlds of Wonder August 1956′ – which also has ‘The Squirrels of D-Day’ and ‘DIY’. The other one, I’m thinking about putting it up as a single novelette – it’s right about 16,000 words. I was thinking about using it as a centerpiece for another issue of Worlds of Wonder, since it’s got that nice pulpy feel to it, but I’m going to need to come up with at least five other short pieces to go with it.

          (Got three in process, but they’re kinda stalled right now. Anyone see where I left that can of ether starter fluid and the jumper cables?)

          I might just fake up a cover and put it out there to see what it gets.

          Like

  16. I can relate to ‘tired’ Facebook has got to be the joke of the century; but, it reflects the world very well. That is if you consider the world to be self indulgent snowflakes. I just moved my mother from assisted living (managed by nurses) in Texas to a Retirement center in Oklahoma. My mother had been the subject of a practical joker when she lived in New Mexico. Would break into her house (former locksmith) and rearrange things. Then neighbors (?) began taking things. She became paranoid. When we put her in the Texas home, it was and remained- Mom doesn’t play well with others. The nurses just ‘administered’ and she hid her scissors or false teeth because someone would steal them. (She thought)

    When I went to pick her up, I found more than one pair of scissors in some funny places. I began giving her her meds each morning and afternoon because as a retirement center they don’t have nursing staff. We had more than one verbal conflict about ‘scissors’ and teeth (she is 95) and someone taking them. I would find them and tell her that she is the one that hid them. That would lead to a fight- don’t think for a minute that a 95 year old can’t give and take either. But, I stressed that no one there would steal from her. Finally it occurred to her that being forgetful comes with age and she has stopped the paranoia.

    She would get lost more than once and someone would lead her back to her room. The activities director started dragging her into exercise classes, and stuff. One man stopped me in the hall one day and bragged about how mom played ‘bean bag baseball’ Everyone in the retirement center says ‘Hi’ or tells me how proud they are of helping her or how well she is doing.
    She turned 95, August 3, She received a Birthday Card signed by 45 members of the staff and community. At lunch (I was asked to be a guest) they reserved her a table in the dining room, and just before desert the staff came out and led the room in singing “Happy Birthday” to her. Surprise to me “Doesn’t play well with others” stood and told the residents that she appreciated how well they had accepted her and would try to be a good member of the community.

    This lengthy tome is written to show a micro-ism of this country at its base. The common people are wonderful and great people. Most of the Facebook or counterparts, and SJWs have no idea we exist. If they do, it’s only to call us names.
    I know Coloradans are not as open as Okies. Take a walk down any small town main street and someone will tell you the town’s history and what famous characters used to live there within a half hour. But, if you stop in a local mom and pop cafe for coffee, I can bet you will meet a whole lot of reasons to pull up the trousers and shrug off the ‘tired.’ Fly over country is worth fighting for.

    Like

      1. “the feeling of something I can’t stop is driving me nuts”

        It is stressful. I studied enough about search algorithms and about evolution by natural selection that I am very qualified to tell myself just-so stories about why Darwin doesn’t answer the Serenity Prayer. Disappointingly, that doesn’t really help make it unstressful. Maybe if I were more of an optimist I could expect to get a partial refund.

        There certainly are plausible grim futures in which dysfunctional trends are totally victorious. A new world war could truly end all wars by ending humanity. We could enjoy a 1970s-tech boots stomping on human faces on a vast industrial scale, or one Singularity-tech paperclip maximizer to rule them all. Even merely plummeting past Argentina in the nicest possible way would probably be pretty unpleasant. But there are also likely limiting trends that make more appealing alternatives plausible. Judging from the past, we can expect some of them to be hard to see at the moment. For the well-rounded Renaissance person, TXRed linked to Kipling’s version of this. For the Aspergery geek set, meditate on how the number of scientific journals was apparently doubling every two decades or so for quite some time before a similar doubling rate grew into everyday technology and dominated economic progress for more than a century, and ripple effects on military progress swept most of the old threats into near-irrelevance.

        Or for a more recent example, many of the problems that alarm me, and other readers here, have to do with takeovers of organizations at the cost of making them dysfunctional and/or liquidating their political capital. (Sometimes both, as in education and journalism.) That can be more self-limiting than almost anybody realizes until the moment the biteback happens: see USSR, The, Ex.

        And besides that, there are the usual factors that are always known to be lurking out there, and generally smack the delusional even harder than they smack bystanders: Kipling’s gods of the copybook headings, or various geeky takes on force multipliers and game theory and capital accumulation/depletion and high trust cultures and whatnot.

        So go ahead and worry, and plan as best you can, and most of us can sympathize about being poorly wired for dealing with the uncertainty gracefully. But also remember that things are not necessarily as grim as they look, and while you might be helpful stopping them, you may not need to be as forceful as you think. There will almost certainly be some significant fraction of important factors that blindside us (and that will be slippery to assess even in hindsight); and duh, I do know most people realize that if they think about it. But what people often seem not to realize is that some significant fraction of those things will likely turn out to be at least partly helpful, and history suggests that it’s a serious mistake not to realize that.

        Like

            1. My mother had been the subject of a practical joker when she lived in New Mexico. Would break into her house (former locksmith) and rearrange things. Then neighbors (?) began taking things.

              Like

                  1. all who participated need to be severely punished, so that everyone knows the penalty for this crime is heavy and swift. To make sure that anyone contemplating this thinks twice and decides that the game is not worth the candle.

                    Like

      2. THAT’s what I was going to respond to….

        I’d kill him.

        Or I’d beat the snot out of him with a bat, and sue him if he survived.

        That’s not a practical joke, that’s psychological torture of the weak.

        He was breaking and entering to make someone think they were losing their mind. For a laugh.

        That’s some sick junk.

        Like

        2. how about hanging by the neck until dead? with the body left on the gallows all day. This is a great rent (rip) in our social fabric.

          Like

    1. yeah, and you are fighting more than just the stupid folk, who happen to be trying to make your other fight that much harder … for your own good (right, like we believe that).

      Like

  18. When you mentioned “Do the math” I was reminded of Bill Whittle’s excellent rendition of that.

    (Although at this point I’m debating whether or not to renew my PJTV subscription. I haven’t been liking the new shows, and often go weeks without watching Trifecta.)

    Like

      1. I’ve been a little disappointed at PJTV ever since Steven Green dropped (or was dropped) for The Week in Blogs and Hair of the Dog. I even missed Kruiser Control, although that was beginning to get a little tired. The B-team from the “Next Generation” just never impressed me.

        Like

  19. I’ve been wondering a lot lately which of the conflicts around the world are going to pop us into WWIII. It’s depressing to realize there are so many to choose from.

    I’ve also been looking from your recent posts, and all the comments, about how the current no-tolerance rules punish the victim, then at the “war crimes” that Israel is being blamed for, back and forth, back and forth.

    Like

    1. Oh gods, which one? The fact that Russian bombers have been testing the reaction to their popping into US airspace has gone unchecked at best over the last WEEK alone, that Russia put sanctions on everyone else based on their attempts to investigate MH17 (the Dutch and Aussies left only when a shell exploded about 20 meters from where they were – and surprise surprise the shelling and ‘fighting’ there stopped almost as soon as they left!)

      And I don’t think you’re going to have much of a military, sadly, thanks to the new changes to pension and veteran support that were put in and blindly signed by either your congress or senate – THAT had me screaming at the monitor late at night last night. One of the more hilarious reasons I read was ‘this made sense when people were dying at 65, not at 80 or 90 or more.’ Actually, not hilarious – make me want to punch the monitor rage-inducing more like it.

      Seriously, there are few things that get me ragingly mad like treating the people who are expected to DIE for their people and country being treated like absolute shit and worthless.

      Like

      1. I think the justification for the 20-year pensions is that warfighting is generally performed by the young, swift and strong, and even just practicing for it is brutally hard on the human body. Witness my daughter, the Marine, who was sidelined by a running collision with another Marine during a training exercise. They were both in full battle rattle, but he was one of those six-foot-tall half-back types, and she bounced off him like a Smart car colliding with a 18-wheeler. Wrecked some vertebrae in her back. I had active-duty friends who served as paratroops – and even in peacetime exercises, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes is hard on the knees and ankles. Even just ordinary tours of duty are long, very long. 60 hour weeks are about par, 80 and 100 hour weeks are expected for some tours. And in many cases, rising in the ranks means that you are never off duty. Even on leave, I’ve been called back because of some crisis or other – and my AFSC was not one of those front-line critical ones.
        I had read, somewhere or other – that by the time a military member retires at 20 years, they have actually put in 30 years-worth of work. Maybe more.

        Like

        1. Sea duty is 12 on, 12 off; we’ll pretend the half-day on Sunday actually happens, and that you never have to stand watch during your 12 off.

          That’s 78 hours a week.

          And it’s odd, but those “when you’re in port you just show up in the morning and then leave” days never materialized. (Apparently they’re always at the station someone just left, or the next one they’re headed to.) It was still at least 10 hour days, although we usually got the weekends off, unless we had duty. In that case, we were on ship for 24 hours. (Every four days.)

          This assumes that nobody did something dumb out on town, which results in everyone being stuck on the ship unless they have a pass to go to the store.

          Like

            1. There may have been alcohol involved. And strippers. I wasn’t there, you understand; I didn’t leave my shipmate hanging. Just, y’know, RumInt…

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                1. I can neither confirm nor deny ever being at Subic bay in particular or the Philippines in general.

                  Of course such things never occur in our new, kinder, gentler, PC America’s Navy™ right?

                  Like

        2. Yeah, but even peacetime exercises can result in life-crippling injuries. I find NO justification for that reduction. Just getting to and staying prepared for the worst – and given the outright hatred this administration has for the military, I have NO faith that the nation’s bravest and best will be taken care of if something horribly goes wrong.

          Like

        3. I ahve two of my four sons who are Marine infantry. One is a 0311, the other 0331. The oldest is a Sgt, just turned 29 and jokes that surgery has become his new hobby. All of his injuries have been from training – seperated shoulder, broken wrist, 3-4 severe knee sprains, 3 broken toes, and at least 2 concussions. The other one is a Corporal and has had several knee, groin, and shoulder sprains in only 4 years, all from training. it is tough being a Marine grunt and I do not begrudge any frontline serviceman a 20 year career with retirement pension, though I think those who are in more of a rear support function should have to serve longer. Most of them do not wear out their bodies carrying 80+ lbs of gear in a combat situation.

          He will have been in 10 years when he comes back from his latest deployment (11th MEU).

          Like

          2. Full Battle Rattle shifts the cg a bunch, and even the kids who played football in school aren’t really up to moving that kind of mass around and changing directions as fast as they think they can.

            People talk about medieval chain mail or renaissance full plate armor being heavy, but it’s well distributed. Modern armor is a lot worse just because it adds so much weight so high up on the body.

            Like

            1. This was a topic of discussion at my house a couple of nights ago, and Rhys flat out said they carry MORE than the weight of medieval armor, because ration packs, water, swag, gear… the stuff that would have gone on the damn pack mule or in the saddlebags and put on the horse, is now on people. That’s on TOP of the armor. Housemate laughed after boggling about it for a few seconds.

              Like

                  1. I remember talking to this gentleman — I think it was a fan letter? Or a question about perhaps making the shifters a shared universe? Something like that — and I thought “Rhys, that name is familiar.” Now I know why, so I can sleep :-P

                    Like

      2. I’m surprised it took this long. For the current liberal progressive leadership, calling returning veterans “baby killers” and worse comes natural.

        A little story from my past:

        January 1972, I’d separated from the army, and was in the Denver airport walking from one airplane to the next, sometime after midnight. i was travelling alone through a corridor when a couple approached from the other direction. I remember that they fit the stereotype of Hare Krishna’s {probably sp}.

        I was going on 36 hours since I’d slept, the excitement of separating was intoxicating to the say the least. I didn’t pay much attention to them, until we were close, she started screaming abuse “…. baby killer…” being a part of it. She spit a big glob onto my pants leg between my knee and ankle. I looked down at it, then at them. Her face was red, and the noise was still coming out of her mouth. The guy with her was horrified, and grabbed her by her long hair, and began dragging her in the direction I’d come from.

        I dropped my carry on bag, pulled my cap off and dropped that on the bag. I started unbuttoning my jacket, turned to keep my eye on them. She was still screaming at me, but he was motivating at a pretty good speed. I decided it wasn’t worth it, gathered my stuff, cleaned off the goober, and caught the plane to Sea-Tac.

        A couple of weeks later, I arrived at a party held partially in my honor for having arrived home in one piece {there were two of us, the other was a marine}. Bob, the gent throwing the party, had more females there than males. Terry and I were the only vets. I hadn’t started drinking or smoking yet, because I liked to make sure I was in comfortable surroundings before partaking. I already had had issues, probably because I was an adrenaline junkie.

        I saw a couple of girls sitting at a table that I remembered from the high school lit class. I thought I would try and get reacquainted. As I reintroduced myself, one of them told me she had no use for “baby killers”, and I should go find somewhere else to spend my time.

        I did. Walking out of the house, and climbing into the car, I decided that I wouldn’t let this prevent me from using my GI Bill education benefits. I would just be quiet about my service time. In Spades.

        I think of both instances when I hear either Hillary or Elizabeth talk about how they’re going to “fight”…..

        You can bet that all four are modern lib-progs thinking that they’re “winning” right now……

        Like

        1. My uncles on mom’s side all had similar stories to the loon in the airport.

          Imagine their amusement– and “gentle” correction– when they were informed it was an urban legend…… (For once, my crazy liberal cousin was NOT the one being foolish!)

          Like

          1. I am always astounded by the restraint of those returning soldiers and marines. I cannot say with any degree of certainty that I would be so well mannered.

            Like

            1. It wasn’t really restraint in my case in either incident. The first, I was too damn tired to chase them when it was evident the threat really didn’t exist.

              In the second case, it was two girls. I was conditioned from an early age to not strike a lady. And always to assume the female was a lady.

              Much better {but no smarter} to slam the shift into reverse, back out onto the street, put ‘er in low, and leave over 100 feet of rubber down through the first three gears. Definitely not smart, but I was a full blown adrenalin junkie at the time. It also released a little tension…..

              Like

            3. What astounds me is the restraint shown by the currently serving military over the VA scandal. I’m thinking a few bureaucrats frog marched out of their offices and put up against a handy wall might go a long way toward curing the problem…

              Like

              1. I think it’s due to the VA always having had a bad reputation … this latest round of malpractice is just more of what veterans have come to expect.

                Like

                1. This is exactly what I hear from veterans, the only difference they see is that it is in the news, there is no difference in care, it has always been that bad.

                  Like

                2. Or maybe they’re just too used to dealing with the usual CYA attitude. I watched a documentary over the weekend about the Maywand District Murders in Afghanistan. And the guy who eventually broke the thing wide open (over something unrelated) at one point basically said (paraphrasing), ‘If I had to do it all over again, I’d keep my mouth shut.’

                  Like

          2. That “urban legend” was in my nightmares along with some other memories for years. I don’t know what I was expecting when I got out of the service, but that wasn’t it…. *grin*

            Like

          3. Know a woman online who loftily declared that they, the peace activists, never attacked the troopers.

            Of course, the same woman will never ever ever forgive the Kent State National Guardsmen for defending themselves from lethal attack.

            Like

  20. The best advice I can offer is to read Juvenal and Mencken. Juvenal will remind you that governments were venal, corrupt, andinept 2000 years ago … And in the meantime we developed farming to the point where our poor are fat and we have modern dentistry. Mencken will, delightfully, demonstrate that it is possible to be broadly contemtuous of one’s fellows without losing either sense of humor or good cheer.

    Like

  21. It appears to me that we are at our most fragile and vulnerable point since 1860. The divide in this country used to be cordial, a sort of “loyal opposition” between the parties. This is no longer the case. There are those in positions of power who are openly advocating the destruction of the constitution and the interminable incarceration of any who disagree. As long as there is no consequences to these positions they will NOT stop.
    Don’t think you can vote your way out of it. In the last election there were some precincts in Michigan (I can’t remember specific ones) that came out 105% for Obama. As Stalin asserted, it is not the votes that count bug who counts them.
    I think that we’re in real trouble. I feel the ticking of the clock. I hope to see you all on the other side of the conflagration.

    Like

    1. It was a little tense in the late 60’s too. The 1960s. Vietnam, Kent State, and seemingly endless protests.

      You didn’t have the tensions in the politics, it was more a generational tension. The time period was also the beginning of the modern libprog movement.

      Like

    2. Part of the problem was that the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, decreed that you could slander public figures unless the figure could prove malice or gross negligence. What sort of people did that drive out?

      And, of course, the Court can’t rescind it. Why, we wouldn’t respect it!

      Like

    3. Not too many changes necessary to bring this up to date with current events …

      The New and Updated Immigrant Song

      We come from the land of the desert scrub,
      From the blazing sun where the hot winds blow.
      The hammer of the gods will drive our kids to new lands,
      To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!

      On we drive in tight-packed vans, Our only goal will be the northern lands.

      Ah, ah,
      We come from the land of the desert scrub,
      From the blazing sun where the hot winds blow.
      How soft your fields so green, can whisper tales of gore,
      Of how we calmed the tides of war. We are your overlords.

      On we drive in tight-packed vans, Our only goal will be the northern lands.

      So now you’d better stop and rebuild all your ruins,
      For peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing.

      Like

  23. I’m tired of stupid people. The problem is that there are so many stupid people, that they are leaving me staggering with exhaustion.

    The way things are going I strongly suspect that somebody is going to dump a good dose of chlorine in the gene pool. The question is who is going to do the dumping, and who is going to be cleansed.

    Like

    1. I’m tired of stupid people. The problem is that there are so many stupid people, that they are leaving me staggering with exhaustion.

      I know the feeling. Worse: I work on a help desk. Can’t escape them many times.

      Like

        1. Or “things I can’t put in the call ticket” though I think it sometimes slips through in other ways.

          “Asked customer to logoff and log back in. They restarted the computer.”

          (Which, if they’re using VPN does not help at all.)

          Like

            1. “I need my password reset.”
              “For which account?”
              “My password.”
              “For which account?”
              “I just need my password reset.”
              “For. Which. Account?!”

              Like

          2. “Okay, this program lets me control your computer remotely. That means when the mouse moves, it will be me controlling the mouse. Do you understand?”

            Customer: “Okay.”

            *mouse moves*

            Customer: “AAAAAAAAAAAH I’M BEING HACKED!” *yanks powercord from wall*

            *connection to remote computer has been lost*

            Like

            1. …okay, so there’s someone with worse experiences than my own.

              Though if this is the same friend who got that rather squicky Skype session you depicted in one of your drawings on Deviant Art, he wins the “Worst Support Calls Ever” contest. :-o

              Like

              1. Yeah, it’s poor David the Housemate aka Aff/Seda. He seems to be getting a lot of Stupid Customer calls out of Texas, which lead him alas, to ask me if there were more dumb people than normal there.

                I said “Not particularly… at least, no more than I’d expect the usual distribution of Idiot VS Someone With Common Sense.”

                Him: “So ‘lots’.”

                I drew a few comics of some of the customer help desk calls he’s done as well. There’s a reason why I titled the series “FML.”

                The above description, he says, accounts for about 85% of the calls he gets from Texas. Hence, the question. No offense to any Texans here, honest.

                He DID get a call once asking if it was okay to clean RAM with bourbon instead of methylated spirits. He told Rhys, who looked horrified. “Give me the bourbon, and I’ll clean his RAM for him!”

                Call went on with: “Are you sure? They’re both spirits, right?”

                Aff: “…I’m pretty sure you can’t drink methylated spirits without horrible things happening to you.” (Tempted to tell customer: please, go ahead and try.)

                Customer: “…Shucks. How about vodka?”

                Aff: *doublefacepalm Picard style* “…Anything you drink will be too weak for cleaning hardware.”

                Customer: “Ya sure? Used it to disinfect cuts once, worked fine.”

                AND SO ON….

                Like

                1. “Aff: *doublefacepalm Picard style* “…Anything you drink will be too weak for cleaning hardware.”

                  Everclear?

                  Like

                2. I’m in Texas, actually.

                  Since I work nights I don’t get many calls from Texas. Europe, Middle East… Australia. ;-)

                  Like

                  1. Er, I tend to get calls from Europe, Middle East and Australia. Plus other places in the Asia-Pacific region.

                    Like

                    1. Though some of the ones from Australia have American accents. Even Texan ones, so maybe we’re exporting them to you.

                      Like

                    2. …maybe. I vaguely recall him complaining about someone who’d just moved over here from the US, worked IT, and, as the description went, “Thought he was all that and a bag of chips.”

                      Couldn’t tell you how long though; these things tend to get filed as ‘Amusing Aff IT/helpdesk stories.’

                      Amusing to the listener. Not to him when he’s experiencing it.

                      Like

                    3. Of course, the customers don’t have a monopoly on dumb. Working second tier, we had a few guys we hated to hear from, because first, the couldn’t document worth a damn, second, they never gathered even all the basic information, and third, they passed the same issues on to us that we had shown them how to fix 5 times before.

                      Like

                    4. I’ve had to do something my fellow first tier coworkers should have done when the customer called. I’ve also come across tickets which were not dealt with by 2nd tier very well.
                      “Tried e-mailing customer but they never responded. Closing ticket.” -for someone having network connection problems. *facepalm*

                      Like

                4. Yeah, it’s poor David the Housemate aka Aff/Seda. He seems to be getting a lot of Stupid Customer calls out of Texas, which lead him alas, to ask me if there were more dumb people than normal there.

                  A lot of companies moving there, and higher employment, so the ones that are too dumb to stay hired where there aren’t many jobs are working.

                  Downside of employment. :D

                  Like

          3. You know, I spent an hour once, after my computer caught fire, with Indian tech support who clearly couldn’t understand either English or my accent. He kept telling me to turn the computer on. The computer wouldn’t turn on, it had caught fire. Rinse, repeat. (Motherboard made in mianmar (however you spell that) had moisture in it, under the seals. It caught fire. it wasn’t the only one.
            So, I feel your pain — and much prefer American tech support.

            Like

          1. Help desk people are taught to ask the user to unplug the machine and plug it in again. It gets better results than asking them to check whether it’s plugged in.

            Like

  24. Lemmings got a lot of bad press. Turned out they were not the suicidal rodents everyone said they were, but we grew up feeling superior to them — or at least I did.

    No longer. Ironic, isn’t it?

    Like

  25. I have to admit that I have waiting for the other shoe to drop since 2009. I suppose I could put in some self-facing snark that I was waiting for the Maya apocalypse, but later discovered it was all about bees (Maya the Bee, anyone? Anyone?), but the way things are going now makes me think about the chapter in A Tramp Abroad where Mark Twain states he was trying to sleep in a hotel and the occupant of the upstairs room started shuffling around doing some sort of dance, and then paused, and then there was the thump of a shoe hitting the floor. He then had to sit there listening to the upstairs neighbor do it again, waiting for the next shoe, and clearly the man would go to sleep. Then boom, the second shoe. Then, the shuffling started up again and was followed by a third shoe. This kept up for quite a while, one shoe after another. He found out in the morning that his room in the hotel was under the apartment that the boot-black used, who polished the shoes for the guests at night.

    Like

    1. (Maya the Bee, anyone? Anyone?)

      mmmm, nope. Are you thinking of Eric maybe? But he was only half a bee. Vis a vis some ancient injury.

      Like

  27. Most of my stress has started to turn to personal issues such as school starting next week and the fact that my semester is a mess and I still need to register for most of my classes, which are now all full of course.

    Told my husband that the recession ended *years* ago, so I didn’t know why we were so worried about me getting a job. grrrrr.

    The world? I am almost reassured by the way it’s blowing up. Sort of stinks for the people *dying* but a hot raging fire is harder to claim isn’t happening than the sort of slow burn and idiocy of the previous couple years.

    I might go read some John Ringo, just for the over-the-top end-of-the-world fantasy… maybe it would help the real world seem a little bit more sane? Worth a try anyway and would be fun even if it doesn’t work.

    Like

  28. I suspect that John Ringo’s “To Sail a Darkling Sea (Black Tide Rising) ” may turn out to be a best-case scenario. I fully expect the CDC to announce ebola in the border crossing multitude any day now.
    I just really hope it gets to the Haj first.
    We don’t need a Reichstag fire, just an excuse for martial law, and ebola will be a dilly.

    Like

  29. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”

    Once one is reconciled to that, life contains a larger proportion of pleasant surprises rather than unpleasant ones.

    Like

  31. Oddly enough, I wrote about this last night on my blog:

    http://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2014/08/to-every-action-there-is-equal-and.html

    A lot of people are feeling extremely worried about the State Of The Union right now.

    My response:

    – Have at least six months worth of money in the bank (if you don’t have it yet, work towards that);
    – Have at least 30 days food supply stored ready for emergencies (three months is better, but I’m not one of those who believes a year’s food is required – I don’t think I’d survive that long if things really went bad);
    – Have water containers available to hold at least a week’s water, preferably two, for everyone in your household at 2 gallons per person per day (forget the 1 gallon standard – that allows nothing for hygiene);
    – Have emergency gasoline supplies (with fuel stabilizer, of course) for at least one tank of fuel for every vehicle you own, in case of interruptions in supply;
    – Have sufficient weapons, ammunition and training to defend yourselves and your home and your supplies in the event of need. Think that can’t happen? Cut off welfare benefits for a week and just watch . . .
    – Finally, network with friends, so that if push comes to shove you can form a team with them, come together at a central point, and work together to ‘adapt and overcome’.

    I truly believe these things are going to be necessities, not options, in the years to come. I hope I’m wrong.

    Like

    1. – Finally, network with friends, so that if push comes to shove you can form a team with them, come together at a central point, and work together to ‘adapt and overcome’.

      That’s what I meant by Tribe up and rally point.

      Like

    2. I wouldn’t keep very much money in the bank. Not after the thing where they take accounts over a certain amount, or parts of all accounts, or whatever it is, that they were doing over in Europe. After all, everyone with more than $X in the bank (where $X is no more than the minimum wage guy’s most recent paycheck) must be wealthy–since they have bank balances rather than payday loans and credit card debt. (And I have tried to explain countless times to my parents that the fact that their mortgage is paid off means they are part of the ‘rich’ by a certain definition.)

      Like

      2. The way its going, if you own your home you are the 1%.
        And you don’t really own it anyway. If you think you do try not paying the rent (taxes) on it. You’ll find out shortly who really is the owner.

        Like

      3. Comparisons of how much more the 1% own than some percentage of the American population ring kind of hollow once you realize that anyone with positive balance — even two cents — owns more than most Americans, who have negative net worth.

        Like

    3. I recommend three months worth of money on hand NOT in the bank. There is a history of governments either confiscating money in the bank, or shutting the banks down and blocking access to it. Not to mention bank failures.

      I know this isn’t feasible for a lot of people, but work towards everything on the list as much as you can. Being partially prepared is better than being unprepared. Oh and collecting a minimum of weapons, ammo and training should be one of the FIRST things done on the list. After all it does you no good to have money, food, and fuel; if you can’t keep it long enough to use it.

      Like

      1. My brother found $1000 in 1960’s currency in an envelope stuck behind a beam in a crawlspace when he was fixing his house. The house had been in his wife’s family since before then, so they knew where it came from. Her grandfather was a hoarder. :) The family, bless them, said they could keep it… so that was nice.

        I would suggest one of those fireproof document safes over a beam in a crawlspace.

        *Sigh*… the thing about what people might term “paranoia” is that there actually are a lot of very possible and very rational, nearly *predictable*, reasons for having emergency stores. Sure, maybe people are scoffing about ebola walking over the border (I’ve seen them), but we have a CDC making plans for large scale pandemics *as I type* because it’s simply prudent to do so. How much less severe would any such outbreak be if *all* the people had enough food set by to avoid the grocery store for a month? Avoiding person-person contact on a large scale would halt the spread of most diseases in their tracks.

        Natural disasters happen every single day. Hurricanes and earthquakes and snowstorms. Having enough gas to drive out of the disaster impacted area, (and cash money to live), or enough food to wait it out and water to stay clean and avoid disease… flush the toilet!.. and an alternate heat source to stay warm if your power goes out… These are normal, expectable, things.

        And if you’re just a little bit *extra* prepared??? What’s the harm in that? :)

        Like

        1. People keep saying pandemics are unlikely. As an amateur historian I remember 1917. The flu killed more people that year than WWI. These pandemics show up regularly in history and with our world tighter knit than ever before, it should hit harder than ever before.

          Like

          2. I laugh at any moron who thinks ‘pandemics are unlikely.’ They’re even more likely now; and the fact that there are idiots who are refusing to immunize then go and travel to places where the diseases still exist, then take it home as carriers… well, we’re seeing how that’s going now. The only disease we have eradicated is, as far as I know, smallpox. It’s not the only disease in the world.

            I was in a taxi a few days ago and the taxi driver, when he found out I was from the Philippines, mentioned he owned a weight loss clinic over there. He started giving forth on how fat and unhealthy Filipinos and Mexicans tended to be, drinking soft drinks with every meal! He started talking about how unhealthy it is, and why couldn’t they eat healthier food, and drink healthier, like fruit juices and water?

            My reply: “Because drinkable water comes in a bottle, and is more expensive than soft drinks.” Fruits, veggies, fruit juices – all more expensive than soft drinks. Guy was stunned to hear that water wasn’t safe to drink. Couldn’t imagine it. I said there were some places where it was safe to drink after boiling, but many other places where you got water and it was brownish in color. Cholera’s still a problem in many places, and that’s not the only disease you have to worry about. We regularly have problems with amoebiasis, and it still kills people whenever there’s an outbreak.

            Like

        2. No harm whatsoever, speaking as someone who was able to get her family to start bringing up food, water, belongings, etc to the second story when the 2009 floods happened – we paid attention and noticed when the floodwater started to climb faster than usual, and climbed up to the first porch steps. We had plenty of out of date cans that, when opened, were perfectly fine for eating. We had eating utensils and plates, and while it was not comfortable, we were safe and had drinking water for some days, milk for the baby. The only thing we were not prepared for was if the floods got higher – though the children had those inflatable vests meant for the pool.

          Like

      2. Remembering the fate of other fiat currencies, maybe that reserve should be in precious metals. Like gold or lead and brass (hard currency of Mozambique).

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        1. You’d be surprised. I saw an article on preparedness by a Mormon blogger a while back that mentioned that even if you’re teetotal, or don’t drink coffee, or don’t smoke, if there is anyone in your circle of family and friends you might be supporting who does use those things, you should have a supply of them on hand, because a disaster is a terrible time to try to go cold turkey, especially if they’re a full-blown alcoholic – withdrawal can occasionally kill them.

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          2. I don’t know what the Mormon view of sin is, but if someone is a secret alcoholic it would also be good to make sure that drama gets squashed in the case of Major Disaster. (Pretty sure it would fall into prudential judgement for Catholicism.)

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            1. Drinking to the total suspension of reason is a mortal sin, and to the partial, a venial one. However, drinking enough to prevent withdrawal probably doesn’t even require the partial suspension of reason, especially given that an addict will have decreased sensitivity to alcohol.

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              1. I’m thinking more along the lines of enabling someone in their sin, rather than assuming that I’ll be able to help them have control and wean themselves off of it. A worst case scenario type thing.

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  32. I apologize for contributing to your aggravation and fatigue and will buy some of your books as soon as I can, to help make up for it.

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  33. I know that the end result of all these policies is always the same. Yeah, everyone ends up poorer, even those who will Lord it over them. But for the people who get to distribute the scarcity this is better than being rich under the present chaotic arrangement. Because they’ll get power. And that’s meat and drink to them. In the same way destroying the best healthcare in the world was worth it even if it reduces their own life expectancy because it means they get to say who lives and dies. And that’s worth it to them.

    I long ago realized Leftism was Satanism. No, not that silly Devil Worship we see from LeVay and in early 70s horror movies (when witchcraft/devil worship was the standard trope). If it was that kind it wouldn’t really be scary.

    Not, Leftism is Satanism in the sense of imitating Satan, specifically Satan as seen by Milton. Faced with the choice of ruling in Hell or serving us Heaven they create Hell so they have a place to rule. That they do it while promising Heaven probably amuses them as well.

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          2. What Sarah said:

            “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very
            first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to
            know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which),
            the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and
            did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”
            —SAUL ALINSKY, epigraph to Rules for Radicals

            And like most other “revolutionaries”, he did it merely to make himself a tyrant. (The American Revolution really is terribly atypical.)

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            1. “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
              —King George III, on Washington’s intention to retire to his farm after the war ended

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  34. I thought of this in reply to something above but now I can’t find it so I’ll just leave this here. I follow some science newsletters just to keep track of what the enemy is pushing next.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140807104313.htm
    U.S. medical schools urged to increase enrollment of undocumented immigrants
    Medical schools should increase their enrollment of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. under the federal DACA program who are seeking access to the medical professions. These students are often highly motivated and qualified and can help alleviate the nationwide shortage of primary care physicians, experts say.

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    1. The shortage is due to the fact that admissions and places at medical schools are insanely tight. Robert is heading into his second round of trying to get in, with top grades, mcats, etc.
      So… now they’re going to give these places to illiterates who can’t speak English. Good to know.

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      1. The AMA has a very strong incentive to limit the number of physicians, and so the available slots are kept as low as possible. I can’t imagine they’d be terribly happy with an influx.

        While I have zero interest in seeing slots going to illegal immigrants, I would like to see the stranglehold lessened. Which is why These students are often highly motivated and qualified and can help alleviate the nationwide shortage of primary care physicians, experts say pisses me off so much. Because we don’t have any highly motivated and qualified individuals in the citizenry.

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        1. We’ve got precious perfumed princesses who can’t hack the science because they get to pre-med and discover that they never learned basic chemistry and arithmetic. So they import students who sort-of can, but who don’t speak American English and some of whom have, shall we say, non-western attitudes toward females. (A close relative used to teach at a medical school. The stories . . .)

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  35. from the Blogfather:
    MORE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT THUGGERY: Meet Four Business Owners Squeezed by Operation Choke Point
    http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/12/meet-four-business-owners-squeezed-by-operation-choke-point/

    Obama’s DOJ has an “enemies list” aka Operation Choke Point. He is using the power of federal agencies to put lawful businesses out of business.

    http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/08/choking-off-disfavored-businesses-and-their-clients-how-operation-choke-point-undermines-the-rule-of-law-and-harms-the-economy

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