Buying a Sword

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

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I’ve often been accused of being incredibly optimistic.  And yes, it’s an accusation.  I find this very funny (in a dark way) since, as a chronic depressive I fight depression and despondence ALL the time.

But maybe it is because of that that I’ve grown used to giving myself reality checks.  If I trust my own internal clock, then I assume everything is going to rack and ruin and become too despondent to move or work, or really do anything.  Sometime in my mid-thirties, I learned to look at facts and test reality against facts.  Just like in my mid-forties I learned to check incipient paranoia born of having social anxiety and being forced into a public role by my profession.  (It runs like this, “No, Sarah, not everyone in that room hates you.  Most of them don’t know you yet.”)

So listen to me now as I repeat old words of wisdom: If you have a cloak, it is time to sell it and buy a sword.

No, I’m not calling for you to buy literal weapons.  That’s your business.  If you feel you need weapons get weapons.

No, I’m not saying we’re headed for a civil war, though I’ll admit that I was once more sure this time would pass without physical violence.  I still think physical violence will be regionalized, temporary, and not the norm.  This is a very large country.  Yes, violence will happen (has already happened) in pockets, but given the lack of clearly divided territories to go with the cold civil war, it can’t go hot in the conventional way.  It will go hot in spots, as the cold war did, and nasty in spots, too.

But it will go ideological and crazy all over.  It’s already doing so.  Those of us who hoped — not thought, but hoped — the left would find some sort of rationality when their great prophecy — the future is socialist/communist — was disproven, have been disappointed in stages.

Mostly we had hope after the fall of the soviet union, but it’s amazing how fast the left regrouped to claiming that the Soviet Union too, their paragon of “progressivism” for so many decades, was an example of “not real communism” and we would do it right next time.

Or perhaps it’s not amazing when you think about it.  After all, by the time the Soviet Union fell, the left had taken the heights of culture, from arts to social sciences, to academia, to opinion, to news, to even entertainment, including most genre writing (they were still rare in Romance, and that onslaught didn’t come till the late nineties, but mystery had had it — and plunged from the most widely read popular category to almost irrelevant — and science fiction was theirs except for a few, rare holdouts.)

People past middle age, as most boomers (most of the wave that crested into the heights of culture were boomers, for various demographic and cultural reasons) were then do not adapt quickly, and certainly they weren’t about to give up the leftist privilege that carried them to the heights sometimes in the absence of talent or even native intelligence.

So they reformed and proclaimed the gospel of Marx with twice as much fervor.  They worked on the image of “cool” more than anything.  The kids under their influence in the educational industrial complex never got to see the squalor, the sheer stupidity of the centrally controlled economy, only the icons of revolution.  And no one enlightened them on the true opinions of that photogenic mass murderer, Che Guevara.

But the kids aren’t as dedicated as you think.  Sure they parrot what they have to to get through, but those that remain true-believers into their thirties aren’t the brightest bulbs in the field (any field, and look at mine, will you?) and are usually either quite clearly “mean girls” and/or privileged into imbecilic incompetence.  Their vision isn’t going to set any field on fire.  It’s not going to reach the general public.  All they’re doing is attacking each other for the position of highest “virtue” and going down with the industries they’ve infested, as their model proves more and wrong in modelling reality.  (I keep thinking of the line in Independence Day, “They’re like locusts” because it’s true.  Because their philosophy can only stay intact by denying reality across the board, they destroy what they take, and as the divergence with reality becomes wider and wider, they’re destroying them faster and faster.)

But as it’s becoming more and more clear, the more they fail, the more they reach out to destroy us.  All they have are war tactics, and they’re going to play them to the end. Not against the enemies of the nation, not against those who truly threaten them, but against free men and women, and people who actually make things work.

Part of this is their philosophy of envy and the belief anyone successful is evil (because they know they’re not evil — ah! — and they can’t make anything work, so we must be using the power of evil for competence.)

Part of it is that if their philosophy is proven wrong, then everything they’ve been doing in the service of it — and some of it is like a demon’s resume — is obviously wrong.  They must look in the mirror and see the monster.  They’ll do anything to avoid that.

So the crazy is going to amp up.  The evil is going to amp up.  The wilful destruction of anything that works is going to amp up.  If free individuals can’t function, the collectivists don’t have to admit they;re wrong.

Sell your cloak and buy a sword.  Mere deflection will stop working.  I know I told all of you if you’re not comfortable coming out as conservative/libertarian, don’t do so, because I don’t want to jeopardize your livelihood, or your ability to make a difference.

But I predict you won’t long be left alone.  The left has lost the plot and become a rabid beast with no sense or proportion.  See the snow flakes calling for the death of “climate deniers.”  (You stupid shits, we know there is climate.  We know climate changed a lot over the history of the Earth, long before the existence of man.  And we know that regardless of whether there’s warming and/or it’s human-caused (and no, it’s not proven.) socialism is not the answer.  Educating yourself on the environmental disasters in Russia, China and now Venezuela would help.)

Be ready for when you have to join the fight.  Buy a sword.  Study history, study philosophy, study civics and the constitution.  Be ready to defend yourselves. Start a side business if you can so your livelihood is not something the left can take away.

Most of the reconquering of society is and will be ideological, a war of ideas.  Moving out of places where the cold civil war will go hot, if you can, is also not a bad idea.

Get ready to stand your ground.  Get ready decloak.

In the end we win they lose, or civilization is done for.

And some of us will not go gently into the progressive night.

 

 

 

377 thoughts on “Buying a Sword”

  1. A sword is an awfully clumsy weapon, requiring considerable training to develop the upper body strength and skills to effectively use. I strongly recommend small arms firearms instead, especially as they offer the advantage of superior range.

    I will acknowledge that the care and maintenance of a sword is somewhat simpler and that they are less likely to jam in combat (but far more likely to get hung up in the bones of your foes.

        1. One of the books I have tosses the idea of trying to ID carriers. One of the techniques is to look for clipped knives. Thought being that it suggests the forethought and it’s a common edc.

          1. Given their noted inability to adjust to facts, staying inside their OODA loop is surprisingly easy. It is only massive social inertia which maintains them.

        3. A couple months ago we were doing low-level sparring at the Japanese martial art I take.

          My instructor indicated one of the students was to attack me.

          I had a cellphone in my pocket, where my hands were. I threw it at him (kyocera duraforce, my “spare” cellphone). It hit him in the chest and he not only watched it all the way down to the mat, he starred at it long enough that had I wanted to hurt him it would have gone VERY well for his dentist. New BMW well.

          1. There’s a reason I never mocked the “bad guy throws the gun at Superman after the bullets didn’t work” thing.

            1. In my experience it’s not the bad guy throwing the gun that gets mocked so much (after all, that could be simple frustration). It’s George Reeve ducking the thrown gun.

              1. I’ve seen that, and I can smile at it– not that it’s a bad reaction for Clark to hold on to, just like it’s GOOD for him to stand there and take the bullets so nobody else gets hit– but it usually goes on to the “what an idiot, bullets didn’t work, let’s throw the gun.”

        4. There are a *lot* of security cam videos on the U of Tubes. Something that becomes apparent quickly is how often an armed attacker drops everything and runs as soon as his target fights back, even if it’s an old lady wielding a mop, or a cashier throwing bags of potato chips.

              1. Fully agree that Shrek was delightful, but Shrek 2 fell flat for me when they decided that what a kids’ movie really needed was a bunch of cross-dressing jokes.

              2. Those were not Eddie Murphy movies, they were movies with Eddie Murphy playing a role. He didn’t write, nor direct, he just read his lines into a recorder. And he did that very very well.

            2. Probably. This film does show that a quality woman responds to a gentleman (who is willing to fight back).

          2. Most robbers like money more than they like fighting. They like the odds imbalanced in their favor.

            Of course, some muggers do like fighting better than money or their own safety, in which case you are unlucky. But it’s better luck than finding out that the mugger likes killing or raping or causing pain, which you are more likely to learn by not fighting back.

        5. I wanted to add to this and my flipping phone decided it and WP were not speaking any longer, and in the interim forgot what I was going to add.
          memory is the second thing to go

        7. A truly sincere kiai can do that. But you have to wash the chthonic off your soul after you access that. True story.

      2. It’s perfectly okay to bring a sword/knife to a gun fight so long as you also, you know, bring a gun and ammunition. Preferably more than one, and all your friends with guns as well.

        1. Or, you can successfully sneak up behind your enemy with said knife and eliminate the range advantage.

        2. First rule of a gun fight? Bring friends with guns and ammo. (Hopefully your friends are smart enough to bring the correct ammo, bonus points if they also bring ammo and pre-loaded magazines).

            1. I totally agree. Personally, I’m probably only going to call the friends I’ve been to the range with and know aren’t going to be more a danger to me than whoever we’re facing.

      3. I’m kinda disappointed at y’all that no one seems to have mentioned the Ur example (well, not Ur exactly): David killed Goliath with a sling.

    2. Now RES, there you go blaming the tool for the faults of the user. That’s nearly as bad as blaming guns for mass murderers. A sword is a tool. It’s not clumsy; but untrained users are. Even trained users can be clumsy if impaired somehow. I do not recommend fencing after downing 3 or 4 glasses of wine in an hour. You might hurt yourself.

      Swords are best used at about 3 arm’s length distance from your opponent (his arm, your arm, sword length ( about 1 arm’s length itself) in an open area. Really open areas for sabers, claymores, and oriental swords that are all hack and slash types. Use long skinny swords like rapiers for fighting in hallways. Shorter ones for fighting up or down stairs. You can’t effectively use a rapier or saber in a closet, or the under-the-sink cabinet, or inside your car. That’s when you use a knife.

      3. Panabas?
        (Fell in love with the thing when I saw it on “Forged in Fire”. No finesse, just a big hunk of sharp steel with a long handle able to go through a pig carcass like it wasn’t there).

          1. I had to look that one up too, although it looked familiar once I saw it so I’ve probably come across it, or it’s like, before.

            It looks like yet another “weapon” that evolved from a farm implement because lower classes weren’t allowed to own weapons. No idea if this is true or not, just how it looks to me. A good number of Chinese and Japanese martial arts weapons had similar origins.

              1. Well yea…. WE know a bit about the history of such things.

                Weapons are everywhere. The anti-liberty, anti-self defense among us don’t understand. A few thousand years ago, the rulers/upper class enforced a ban on the “lower classes” owning/using weapons. In order to defend themselves, the peasants turned themselves and their farming implements into the weapons that they needed to defend themselves from bandits and corrupt government. If/when the anti.* manages to create that ban here, I think we’ll see that old solution dusted off and revisited for the modern age. And WE have much better tools to work with.

                I get a kick out of reading about and seeing confiscated home-made weapons from some countries. Sub-machine guns made out of hammered sheet metal and plumbing parts etc. Some of them look like a death trap, but sometimes they can be quite nice.

                1. Note that the favored close-in weapon of the 20th century was the short spade issued for trench digging. Sharpen the sides, and you have a nice, inconspicuous battle axe.

                2. If you ever get a chance take a tour of a prison and see what ends up being made into weapons.

                  I know a few people that make guns as a hobby. They’ve made fully functional Uzis, .50 sniper rifles, and a whole host of other weapons.

              2. It does if you do it at the shoulder. Disarming them at the elbow leaves them too much to work with.

      4. Really open areas for … claymores
        Really, really open areas. You don’t want to be in a room with one when it goes off.

          1. Oh, that would ha’ been a claidheamh-mòr! Sure, and why didna’ ye say so!

            Gnarly Yankee spelling …

        2. A friend of mine got into a nerf sword fight with me. Then he complained when I used the pointy end instead of just hitting him with the “blade”.

          /sigh

            1. The point of fighting period is to win. Too many people don’t understand that.

            2. You really don’t want to get the point while fighting with a sword. (Not that the edge is much better.)

      6. Tomahawks are good for close in restricted area fighting. Always have a hammer in your car. With a pound of nails. And work gloves. A baseball bat is also a good thing to have. And always a have a well used glove and ball with it. Any tool you carry should have accessories with it so when you’re stopped for a license plate light being out they look like innocent tools, not weapons. The knife we keep in the car has that little pointy thing on the end supposedly good for breaking the glass out.

        1. Rock hammers can be nice. I like what we use in Finland, it’s pretty similar to some walling/mason’s hammers, just with the usually flat end a bit grooved and with a long handle. Most rocks here are of the harder varieties like granite, hard to get samples with the more normal types of rock hammers, you often need to be able to really swing the thing.

      7. Remember why the stairs in the castle towers coil that way: so as the attackers fight their way up, their swords are always colliding with the central column, where the defenders have a freer swing.

      8. “I do not recommend fencing after downing 3 or 4 glasses of wine in an hour. You might hurt yourself.”

        Well didn’t YOU just take all the fun right out of the Restoration and Renaissance, killjoy?

      9. Fencing after drinking is never a good idea. The wire is always crooked and never as tight as it should be.

    3. While I generally agree with you on the small arms front (like American Express I never leave home without one), there are significant advantages to developing the upper body strength, stamina and body-mind coordination required to use one.

      https://www.rmsguild.com is here in Denver, and it’s where my wife and I go play on Saturdays (the family that slays together stays together?)

      Of course they do more than sword work–there’s dagger and some grappling as well (at the novice and companion level). At the Scholar level they start in to spear and battle axe.

      That said, a 12 gauge to the face will often solve the problem irreparably.

      1. In my youth I fenced regularly, but loss of half the ligamenture in my lunging knee has put a real damper on such activity. While I am not indifferent to the utility of upper body strength, it is not as much of an option for all.

        1. I like the principles of fencing, but I soon found out that my temper was too bad to be safe when playing.

          The good thing is that I always know that I have a weapon, which apparently a lot of people don’t know.

      2. I took fencing in college and was painfully (pun intended) bad at it. Granted, it was only for one semester and I don’t doubt that if I’d stuck with it I could have become… decently good at it. I won’t say spectacular. But that was back when I was in reasonably good shape and could actually move relatively quickly (and I’m not that old – I seriously need to get back to the gym). I’ll take a 9mm or .45 over a sword any day of the week. Tellingly, our instructor (who also taught taekwondo as well as [I think] tai chi at the college, was a black belt in several martial arts, and was a lead instructor at a dedicated martial arts studio) shared the same sentiment, though IIRC his preferred carry piece was a Walther PPK in .380 ACP.

        Side note, that was probably my favorite college class, though I had to fight to take it: my hippy-dippy academic adviser (emphasis on hippy) hated violence and refused to sign off on my schedule unless I took tai-chi instead of fencing/kendo. It took some VERY creative scheduling on my part to make sure that all the tai-chi courses conflicted with major requirement courses that semester.

        1. I’m an E rated epee fencer. I’d be a D, except a couple of my club mates let me down in a tournament, got knocked out because they weren’t trying hard enough, which resulted in the tournament itself being downgraded. We’ll see how I do this weekend over in Vermont. Never surrender!

          1. She thought it was “peaceful” and “soothing” IIRC whereas fencing/kendo promoted violence. She wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.

            1. She wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.
              I’ve started using a new one: Not the sharpest flake in the flint pile. (I’d use “debitage” instead of “flint pile” but I’m not sure I’ll remember it, and it will get me looks. You know… *that* look.)

                1. I would say that they want everyone else to return to a Paleolithic lifestyle, but leave them with the fancy house, western tech & medicine, good restaurants, and so on.
                  Or, they get to play nomenklatura, and everyone else gets to be the serfs.

        3. The advantage to *any* fencing training is that you don’t really need to be all that great at it. Chances are that if you ever are forced to rely on it, the person you’re facing won’t have the training to deal with it. Either you’ll be outmatched (i.e. the other person has a gun), or you’ll outmatch them (i.e. the other person has a knife, at best; swords are pretty uncommon weapons these days). In the former situation, your training probably won’t help no matter how good you are. In the latter, a good lunge may likely win you the fight before it really even gets started.

          1. True story: someone decided to be cute and pester me while I was out walking. I carry a collapsible walking stick some days, when I might need a stick but am not 100% certain. So Dumbbunny starts being a little too aggressive. I switched hands and took up a fencer’s position, eyes locked on Dumbbunny’s chest, ready to go. Apparently the combination of unexpected + seriously strange + predator’s expression got the message across and Dumbbunny decided I wasn’t worth messing with.

        4. Yeah, I was a bruiser when I took 8 weeks of fencing in college—I bruised my opponent’s arms sometimes with the foil.

    4. Glock. I’ve put thousands of rounds down mine (without cleaning to stress test) and have not had any issues.

      AR platforms can be a bit finicky. Clean and oil fairly frequently. (Or go with an AK platform, ammo is dirt cheap and can be highly effective for self-defense).

      Get something you can afford to train with regularly, will enjoy shooting, and be effective if you should actually need it to stop a bad person.

      I got a rather humbling reminder last weekend that shooting is a perishable skill. Back to basics and back to shooting every other week until I’m back to ‘normal’.

      1. > Glock. I’ve put thousands of rounds down mine (without
        > cleaning to stress test) and have not had any issues.

        I didn’t clean mine because I was lazy (and usually tired). One went about 10k rounds before it’s first cleaning, the other about 5k. I used to shoot a LOT.

        The Beretta 92FS does pretty good when filthy too.

        1. Both the AR and the 92 like to be run wet, so be sure to use lots of lube…
          That didn’t come out right…

          1. I’ve witnessed the 92FS covered in dust so thick it looked pink still running. Slowly, but running.

        2. My father and grandfather were both ex-marines so it took effort NOT to clean it after every shooting.

          This week I’m blaming it on the weather, we went from 60s to 20s. I like having the windows open when I clean since the solvents have a powerful aroma.

          Same (well, for me, I’d shoot about 400 rounds a month on average). Last year I think I might have shot 400 rounds.

          1. Blued steel guns shooting corrosive ammo need regular cleaning. More modern guns with current ammo are far more forgiving.
            The late Todd Green proved he could go 2,000 rounds plus without needing to clean, even with a notoriously finicky 1911.

          2. You think that’s bad? I was trained shooting muzzle-loading arms…and my father was a national championship quality shooter. Which meant I scrubbed his guns and mine clean as a whistle, even if it took four hours to get all the guns cleaned.

    5. A good sword isn’t clumsy. As Heinlein said, “A sword never jams, never runs out of ammo.” But a good sword isn’t cheap, you’ll pay over $1K for a good one. And the minimum level of training is fairly high.

      1. The minimum level of training to go up against another swordsman effectively is high. The minimum level of training to go up against an untrained thug with a knife less so. Some practice against life size mannequins. And if rushing a gunman, get the slash in quick before the weapon is aimed. Edged weapons against projectile weapons requires closing the distance fast. Preferably from behind or the side coming from concealment.

        1. An experienced swordsman can take out an inexperienced thug with a gun if he’s within 20 feet. One of my coaches works as a dispatcher for the police department and demonstrated it to a couple of the cops and still beat them if they were going from a holstered weapon.

          1. “If they were going from holstered” being key there. If you meet the thug gun drawn already, that ‘rule’ could get you killed. Most thugs don’t approach without having their weapon of choice OUT of its holster. It’s more ‘drawn weapon beats not yet drawn weapon most of the time’ as far as I can tell.

            1. I think the key here is “don’t bring a gun to a knife fight, but if one comes to you and you only have a sword handy, it’s better than nothing!”

          2. I think the point was, if the bad guy doesn’t have the gun pointed at you already, and they’re that close, you stand a fighting chance to beat them.

          3. Yup. The Tueller Drill, IIRC. The point being that at 7 yards, a man with a knife in hand is an immediate lethal threat…and therefore can be legitimately shot if he’s a hostile.

    6. Yes, but a sword in action is so much prettier than a gun.

      Half of your opponents (in the modern age) would be too busy saying “ooh shiny!” to notice that you’re actually wielding a deadly weapon.

      1. Like with the guy at about 2:30 in this?

        (there is a MUCH more drool-worthy clip later on, but it involves spoilers and I squealed waaaaaay too much over it to spoil it for anybody else)

      2. Either that or they do recognize that you are attacking them and completely freak out.

        Getting chased by a swordsman isn’t exactly a typical occurrence these days after all.

      3. Also, you may be ignored.

        “That,” answered Eden, “is because educated and enlightened people never think. Your enlightened man is always taking away the number he first thought of. It seems to be a sign of education first to take a thing for granted and then to forget to see if it is still there. Weapons are a very good working example. The man says he won’t go on wearing a sword because it is no longer any good against a gun. Then he throws away all the guns as relics of barbarism; and then he is surprised when a barbarian sticks him through with a sword. You say that pikes and halberds are not weapons against modern conditions. I say pikes are excellent weapons against no pikes. You say it is all antiquated medieval armament. But I put my money on men who make medieval armament against men who only disapprove of modern armament. And what have any of these political parties ever done about armament except profess to disapprove of it? They renounce it and neglect it and never think of the part it played in political history; and yet they go about with a vague security as if they were girt about with invisible guns that would go off at the first hint of danger. — Chesterton

      4. “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side, kid.”

        There’s no *time* for showing off in a gunfight. Draw, fire, reholster, Miller Time.

        1. And later on, a practitioner of that “hokey religion” blocked with his hand a blaster blot and from across the room grabbed the blaster. 😈

          1. It takes a lot of skill to get good with a sword …

            “I said I never had much use for one. Never said I didn’t know how to use it.”

      5. And a Sword is SO distracting. They never se you or your friend drawing a gun.
        On the distance thing, there is another point, criminals are normally really bad shots, they don’t go to the range much. And a person charging them with a sword is not exactly a calming experience. If you are prepared, except for unlucky shots YOU WILL reach him!

  2. I strongly recommend small arms firearms instead, especially as they offer the advantage of superior range.
    As a recommendation, this isn’t wrong, but for real range and flexibility, I say go for a sat radio and a friendly Carrier Battle Group offshore.

    But you go to the Crazy Wars with the cloak you’ve got. My own recommendation is to build skills first, then connections, then acquire stuff, as it’s easier to not lose the first two when needs drive.

    1. You need some tools to start building skills with.

      And the training to use those tools is where you start to make the connections.

    2. well, i managed to shoot out the center of a couple targets last week, does that count?

  3. Won’t set a field on fire? Hell, the ones I’m seeing and hearing about can’t mildly warm dry straw.

    My take is the we should remember, this isn’t the beginning, when they were at their peak. This is the endgame, when they’ve already squandered much of their advantage.

    Peak was Watergate. They’d changed the rules of the Democrat nomination process so that they could control it. They’d nominated an imbecile, who had lost, but managed to bring down the winner. There were only four TV networks (counting PBS), and they had a lock on all of them AND people did’t know it yet. It looked like handguns would be banned in most states within a decade.

    And then it started to fall apart. They pissed away the majority of the advantages of Watergate in four years of Jimmy Carter. Without opposition in the Media, their talking heads gradually got so sloppy that their narrative is crippled on arrival. Gun Control jever did really come together for them.

    Don’t get me wrong; they may still be able to pull off a Battle of the Bulge or two. But these aren’t the dark days of Dunkirk and the Blitz.

    1. I’m convinced that a large part of the reason that gun control faltered and almost ground to a halt on a national level is that the NRA was roped into supporting the Gun Control Act of 1968. One of the key elements of the GCA was to require that interstate transfer of firearms goes through an FFL. This was a direct slap at local and state NRA chapters that were traveling to the South, giving guns to poor blacks, and teaching them how to use them. (There is a long history of racism in gun control laws, but that’s a different rant.)

      Something that most of the board of the NRA at the time didn’t expect happened. The membership rebelled. The bulk of the board was swept away in the next series of elections, and the NRA began the conversion to the activist organization that we know today.

      The gun grabbers needed the support of the NRA to pass the Gun Control Act in 1968. But getting it cost them in the long run.

      1. There may be something in what you write, but I first started paying attention to this in the early 1970’s…and I clearly remember the expectation, even in Conservative outlets like The National Review, that handguns were going to be banned. They may have thought it was a bad idea, but they expected it.

        Of course, there’s the possibility that there was some serious lag in the narrative.

        1. The NRA change took a couple of board elections to begin to take hold, and changing course took time. Even after that, it took time to change hearts and minds. Ronald Reagan was in favor of the bill that revoked open carry in California in 1967. He made up his mind after seeing the Black Panthers drilling in the streets while carrying M1 Carbines with 30 round magazines within sight of the governor’s mansion. (Not weapons drills, drilling as in marching in formation.) But by the time he was President Reagan rather than Governor Reagan he refused to allow himself being shot be used as an excuse to ban firearms.

        2. The National Review was falling prey to the Good Little Loser syndrome even then. Fortunately, firearm owners are made of sterner stuff.

    2. Danger is that a hail Mary pass is still extremely doable. Help the idiots on right slow everything down to depress turnout and help Trump trip on his tongue like he did last week. Meanwhile rile up supporters, get them amped up and take Congress. The left is already very willing to kill to get power. And the .gov is already weaponized to attack anyone nonleft.

      1. For anyone who’s wondered about Trump’s ultimate 2A plan, here’s Steven Crowder’s analysis:

    3. When did we get an election system that this wouldn’t happen in, as it did in NH 2016?

    4. Sarah keeps pointing out that revolutions happen when stuff loosens up– doesn’t that rather go both ways, since the stand-ins for the “ruling class” here were screwing around with two groups? (minimum– conservatives and liberals- I doubt that there’s a group mind on their side, so the folks in charge….)

      1. That’s what happened to Syria. Assad loosened up, and his opposition went nutso, which is why he had to clamp back down on it; with the terrible mess that’s happened since.
        It’s a generality, and like all stereotypes, there can be exceptions to the rule.

  4. “Those of us who hoped … the left would find some sort of rationality when their great prophecy … was disproven, have been disappointed in stages.”

    History has demonstrated that when Doomsday Cults’ expectations fail to materialize there is always a significant segment who double down on their apocryphal dream.

    You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach by reason. Evidence suggests you cannot reason a woman out of (nor into) any position at all, as reason is a tool of the patriarchy. Attempts to reason with women are thus attempted acts of oppression and justify violent responses.

    Any woman responding to or (shudder) employing reason in their discourse is a gender traitor and must be shouted down with the solidarity inducing “Whreeeeeee” of disapproval.

    1. “Gender Traitor” – uhhh guilty? Naaaa. I know darn well who rules the rooster, who leads the herd (not the stallion), & who controls access to the executive suite (the “assistant” otherwise known as the secretary which is normally, but anymore not always, female); sure if I work it more I can come up with others. Anyone can do anything. All they have to do is work for it not expect it on a platter for showing up & whining. If the makes me a gender traitor, so be it; otherwise, get the heck out of my way. The ones whining are self traitors. Just to be clear. I. Did. Not. Vote. For. Her High Whiner Shillary.

  5. There is a fairly well-known acronym, TWANLOC. It stands for “Those Who Are No Longer Our Countymen.” The leftists are revealing themselves to be TWANLOC, unable to interact with normal Americans. The rationally unassailable failure of their political philosophy (which for them is also the very closest thing they have to a fundamentalist religion) is something they cannot admit, as doing so would cause a complete collapse of their worldview and senses of self-worth, since they don’t accept the validity of worth as an individual, only as worth as a member of an identity group. It’s no wonder they sympathize with Islam–the parallels between the two systems of belief are very great.

    1. I think you’ve hit on part of the reason they are so gung-ho to bring Muslims to this country. They are hoping they can outsource the killing and most especially the casualties of the war they seem to desperately want on them.

      Realistically, if ideas cause you to feel and seek a ‘safe space’, how effective to you think that person will be on the front lines when bullets, grenades, and other weapons are being fired with intent directly at them?

      1. I’m trying to recall how that worked out for the Angles’ bringing in Saxon mercenaries in Sixth Century England.

        1. Or the Romans? I can’t remember if it was here or another site that pointed out one of the big contributing factors in the fall of Rome was then they stopped integrating immigrants into society.

          I’m sure they assume that they can social engineer them as effectively as they have portions of the US.

  6. “All they’re doing is attacking each other for the position of highest “virtue” and going down with the industries they’ve infested”

    Case in point:

    LGBT Students Disrupt Duke Divinity School Proceedings, Present 15 Demands
    By Tom Knighton
    Student activists at many colleges aren’t content to allow anyone or anything to stand in opposition to them. They don’t want dialogue, they want subservience.

    Take, for example, the antics of campus LGBT activists during the Duke Divinity School’s State of the School address. The Duke Chronicle reports, “The group, which identified themselves as LGBTQIA+ Duke Divinity students and allies, was protesting the treatment of students with marginalized sexual orientations and gender identities in the school.”

    [SNIP]

    They are demanding a class on queer theology to be taught no later than next semester. They are demanding the school hire a “black trans woman or gender non-conforming theologian” and a tenure-track trans woman theologian.

    [END EXCERPT]

    Sweetie, when you claim to represent a faction that is, at best, five to seven percent of a population, you are “marginal” by definition. Only a brainlessly liberal academic institution (but I repeat myself) would grant you any credibility and even then it is at cost to their own claim to represent an intelligent, thoughtful population.

    1. So, was the school complicit in this, as Berkeley and others have sponsored disruption of proceedings, or did the school simply not bother to appoint sergeants at arms and provide for basic security?

        1. Oh, I imagine he’s compassionate enough. Queer? Thou shalt NOT be fruitful and multiply. Problem with that generation solved. Until the next one.

  7. “if their philosophy is proven wrong, then everything they’ve been doing in the service of it — and some of it is like a demon’s resume — is obviously wrong.”

    Beloved Spouse & I were discussing, just this morning, that one of the most pernicious effects of MSM reliance on “Teh Narrative” is that the narrative is formed in the immediate aftermath of an event, at a time when initial reports are all we have and, as all educated folk recognize, initial reports are almost always wrong. But the MSM, having committed to “Teh Narrative” cannot back away from it, must redouble efforts to push an interpretation of events that they know to be false (which is why we get such nonsense as “meta-truth”) because backing down from their perch would, in their minds, diminish their credibility.

    That they no longer have the ability to control and impose their narrative means their efforts to do such further undermine their credibility. It is a degenerative spiral and the eventual crash as they auger into the abyss will be terrible.

    Somebody needs to craft a meme combining Dan Rather and Captain Queeg, rattling his ball bearings and muttering about “the fake but accurate documents.”

    1. Along with The Narrative comes The Usual Suggestions. After all, everybody KNOWS that an AR-15 has those great big honkin’ magazines that carry anywhere from thirty to a gazillion bullets, right?

      Oops. The Parkland shooter used ten round magazines. He just carried a bunch of them, just like the shooters at Columbine carried a whole bunch of ten round magazines. Amazing how little mention that has gotten in the news, isn’t it?

      1. Side note: The Parkland shooter dropped his weapon and snuck out with other students after his gun jammed. Apparently, he didn’t know how to clear a jam. Alternately, he had one of those jams that require disassembly, a brass rod, and a hammer to clear because the heat of repeated firing has caused the lacquer from Russian steel-cased ammo to melt, deposit in the chamber till the chamber size shrinks, then when the gun gets hot again the lacquer on the current round melts and bonds with that lining the chamber. (Don’t ask how I learned that this can happen, nor about the extractor that was entirely torn off of the gun and had to be replaced.)

        There have been several mass shootings where the primary weapon jammed. I can’t help but speculate about how many lives cheap Russian steel-cased ammo has saved.

        2. It’s a strange state of affairs, that AR-15s are now about half the price of Avtomat Kalashnikovs.

          The supply of cheap surplus Combloc AK parts dried up, and then everyone and his dog devoted excess machining capacity to making AR parts before the election.

              1. Palmetto State Armory. My Lower was $189 and my upper was $299, on sale. They go on sale about one week a month. I of course then put a $130 stock and a $60 gas port and a $150 free float tube on it but anyway…

        3. It’s been said that if you wouldn’t drink the water, you shouldn’t use the ammo.

        4. Has the jamming been officially confirmed?

          All I’ve been able to track it back to is a “sources say” his gun may have jammed, because witnesses saw him having difficulty with the weapon, but they couldn’t tell if it was jammed or if he fumbled reloading.

          1. A local reporter had three sources who reported that his gun jammed during a reload. The obvious question is whether he just fumbled it and got frustrated, an ordinary malfunction that he wasn’t trained to clear, or if there was some greater malfunction that he couldn’t have dealt with in the middle of the action. But the local reporter also thinks an AR uses “clips,” so who really knows? http://miami.cbslocal.com/2018/02/27/sources-carnage-could-have-been-worse-florida-school-massacre/

            Before the AR-style pistol I was shooting (I was a fairly new gun owner and hadn’t yet realized that an AR-style pistol is a solution forever in search of a problem) did the major seize-up it had more conventional-seeming jams a couple of times. I swapped out the magazine in the course of clearing the second one. That was something I had practiced, as I had with each firearm I owned. But practicing magazine changes under pressure (even if that pressure is nothing more than a stopwatch) is something some mass shooters seemingly never consider. This is clear from the way some of the shootings progressed.

            The guy who shot Gabby Giffords was stopped as he was reloading. (That he was trying to load one of those 33-round Glock 18 magazines into a compact Glock 19 probably didn’t help. Those magazines are awkward to use for anything but a carbine. Awkward for the carbine too, if you want to shoot from a prone position.) The Aurora shooter had a jam and while trying to clear it dropped the big hundred round snail magazine. He then dropped the AR-style rifle and went to the pistols that he had brought.

            1. A 9mm AR pistol with a brace is both fun to shoot and excellent for home defense,

              1. 9 mm might be a different deal. When you put a full mag of 5.56 in one it gets awkward in a hurry. (This was an early Carbon 15 pistol from Professional Ordinance. No brace, no swing swivel, and enough non-standard parts that they became virtually impossible to maintain after Professional Ordinance went out of business. When Bushmaster picked up the design they rectified those problems.)

            2. *grumble, grumble* TWO WEEKS later, and they can’t figure out if the gun was jammed? And there’s NOTHING newer? (Well, that I can find.)

              What, did someone pick it up and slap in a new magazine?

              Thank you.

              1. Five months later, and LVMPD still doesn’t know how many shots Pollock fired, even though all they have to do is count the empty brass.

                I guess the crime scene people ran out of fingers and toes.

                1. It is entirely possible some of that brass went out the windows. But you could at least pronounce the minimum number of rounds he fired. Unless it somehow contradicts your narrative.

                  1. Ah, but if they find fewer brass in Pollack’s room than the number of hits on victims, then the conspiracy nuts will say he had an accomplice that got away.

                    1. There was a video in which someone showed the results of his audio analysis of various phone videos, which indicated a second shooter in Las Vegas. He said that if you timed the difference between the sounds of the bullets that missed hitting the pavement and the sound of the gunfire then the time of flight of the bullets didn’t match the distance from the location of the audio recording to the shooter’s suite in the hotel.

                      I don’t know. I saw the video, but I don’t know what I was hearing.

              2. I suspect that at this point, you’re going to need to locate the police report (assuming that has the info). The press no longer cares, which means that the cops are the only ones who might have the information about the condition of his gun.

                Also, if he plea bargains, we might hear an “in his own words” explanation of what exactly he did during the course of his rampage.

                  1. Two of the kids have apparently filed lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Department and the school. Discovery might have the information you’re looking for.

                    1. So THAT is why the radio dispatch officer’s transcript got leaked!

                      Good luck to them– I wonder if they’ve already got a freebie lawyer crew, or if they’re taking donations for expenses.

                    5. There are a couple of actually decent, objective fact-checking operations.

                      Of course, I always check the folks that are checking, they SHOULD be offering evidence, etc.

                2. Incidentally, for why this matters:
                  Broadly, the folks who push for smaller and smaller ability to fire at one time are using the “it jammed” argument in a sort of heads we win/tails you lose manner since the guy had so dang many clips.
                  Specifically, I want to know if this was a spree shooting, or if the guy had a kill list and left after it was done. Tactics right now assume that most of these guys will be going for raw numbers (mostly because the “go into girlfriend’s shop and kill her” ones don’t usually hit four deaths); if that assumption needs to be changed, we need to know.

                  Hm, maybe that’s why the grabbers get so pissy… they don’t want to think about this kind of stuff…..

            3. A bit more on the cheap Russian ammo. LuckyGunner.com did a comparison of the effect on identical Bushmasters about five years ago. The entire report can make your eyes bleed unless you’re really into that stuff, but they did a short summary video too.

              http://fast.wistia.com/embed/iframe/tl9vjrkx4n?controlsVisibleOnLoad=true&endVideoBehavior=reset&version=v1&videoHeight=346&videoWidth=615&volumeControl=true&plugin%5Bsocialbar%5D%5Bbuttons%5D=googlePlus-twitter-facebook-email&plugin%5Bsocialbar%5D%5BpageUrl%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.luckygunner.com%2Flabs%2Fbrass-vs-steel-cased-ammo&plugin%5Bsocialbar%5D%5Bversion%5D=v1
              Learn more at LuckyGunner.com

              The whole lab report is at https://www.luckygunner.com/labs/brass-vs-steel-cased-ammo/

              1. i will say that the only weapon I have that ever gets cheap Russian ammo is my Mosin Nagant. Not always, but it does seem fitting to use it there.

  8. “I predict you won’t long be left alone.”

    This is because they are increasingly insistent that you swear fealty to their idols, making it ever harder for them to recognise their non-conforming fellows and amping up their paranoia.

    1. Hence their attraction to Islam. Subservience or death.
      They’re too stupid to realize the mo-fans expect it most from them, and even if they do the former, a large portion will end up the later

      1. They’re sill in denial that their spewing of cultural sewage into the Enlightenment’s backwaters is a major part of what has provoked the Islamists’ attacks on us.

        Many of their arguments for gutting the Second Amendment could be equally well employed as cause for reining in the First Amendment. After all, if an internet video can provoke such violently disastrous attacks as occurred at our embassies in Egypt and Benghazi, doesn’t the government have a responsibility to vet all such material lest it provoke even greater outrage? When you consider the insensitivity toward Islamic standards of deportment as is depicted in the movie Wonder Woman, with her shameless attire and insubordinate attitudes toward masculine authority … why, that film is a poke in the eye with a sharply pointed stick and certainly merits whatever response we receive.

        Then there’s Black Panther‘s appropriation of African cultures to evoke a false image of their society … as well as their non-subservient and scantily dressed females — which constitutes a dire insult to the values of our African relations.

        The First Amendment can withstand a little prior restraint if that is what’s needed to stop such exploitation and insult to the victims of America’s cultural imperialism!

        1. They’re still in denial, dammit! S-t-ill, still, still!

          Sigh. The things one sees immediately upon hitting the Post button.

    2. I saw this with various “minority” groups. First, all they wanted was acceptance. And then when they got that, it wasn’t good enough; anything less than vehement endorsement was the same as hate.

      1. I stopped following Erick Ericson when he went hard-core NeverTrumper, but his phrase “You will be made to care” typifies the thinking.

        Pretty much like the Stalin era: the first person to stop clapping is in deep with them.

      2. Remove racism, losers are still losers, there must be hidden racism left or life would be perfect……

        Reminds me of a pattern I’ve noticed in fantasy racism– example:
        Human (or otherwise “normal” race) is talking to Monstrous Race character, and does a rather nice soul-baring “I thought all X were Y, but you showed me otherwise” speech– and then gets verbally slapped by the Monstrous Race character.

        Most of the time, not only do the MR’s group actually do that, the one he’s talking to is one of the few or is the only one who doesn’t.

        But the “normal” character is supposed to be evil for noticing, far more evil than the guys who actually do the horrible stuff he noticed.

        1. One twist on fantasy racism I’d like to see more often in two groups that hate each but are indistinguishable to outsiders. The High elves hate the Forest elves, the Deep Dwarfs hate the Gray Dwarfs, the green orcs hate the also-green orcs, and the human is like “you all look the same to me” which deeply annoys everyone.

          1. Oh, I would ADORE seeing that!

            They always go with the really obvious differences, but one that’s a culture wide version of…argh, city in the middle east. The correct way of saying it sounds exactly the same as the way we say it, but we say it wrong.

            There’s an awesome video floating around with the guy they brought in to teach everyone how to say it correctly, and NOBODY CAN HEAR ANY DIFFERENCE.

          2. Can’t find the video….

            The place is Qatar, video went like this.

            “Hey, this is talking news head! Everyone says Cutter, but we’re doing it wrong. Here is Professor Obviously From The Middle East. What is the CORRECT way to say it, professor?”
            “Well, you’re correct, cutter is wrong. It’s said cutter.”
            “…Cutter?”
            “No, cutter.”
            “Uh, female talking news head, you say it.”
            “Cutter.”
            “NO, it’s CUTTER, not CUTTER!”

            Etc.

          4. The Star Trek episode with the two aliens who were black on one side, and white on the other.

            1. Are you referring to “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” from the mythical ST:TOS Season 3? Never happened. There was no third season, the show was cancelled after Season Two. “Assignment: Earth” which introduced Gary Seven was the final show.

              Season Three is a myth, based on bad Star Trek fanfic.

              1. “The Star Trek episode with the two aliens who were black on one side, and white on the other.”

                I remember the episode too. But can not remember if it was original or Next Generation. Pretty sure not Voyager, Deep Space Nine, or Enterprise, but might be wrong. The both aliens were white on half & black on other half. But aliens conflict was based on which side was black, left or right. With representatives of both sides on board, the someone on the bridge crew said “I don’t see any difference between them” to the aliens shock.

          5. The narcissism of small differences tends to get seriously underplayed when discussing fantastic racism. Whether your early 20th century Teutonist portrayed the the Celts or the Slavs as the inferior race that the glorious Teutonic Man contrast with depended on which one was their neighbor.

  9. Does tend to explain the intensity that the left is exhibiting in their efforts to see that it is difficult to impossible to buy that sword. I assume that sword is a metaphor for any arms suitable for personal defense.
    Politicians and representatives of the NRA are called NAZIs, demonized, shouted down, in the extreme threatened or at least wished death.
    Deja vu all over again, Sad Puppies writ large.
    Time and past time to seek out those arms you are comfortable with and the training to use them effectively.
    Search your hearts. If you honestly say you could never shoot someone then you have no business with a firearm. It would only be taken and used against you. But if you value your life and that of your family above that of an attacker you need to decide what you are willing to do and how best to accomplish that.
    We are fortunate to have several experts in our extended community who can help with that. Mad Mike, Peter Grant, Larry Correia, even myself can provide a bit of guidance, answer questions, give links to more information.
    One thing to always keep in mind, no matter what you’ve been told, the government has no obligation to see to your individual safety. Sure, the police will try to help if they can, but their primary duty is to society as a whole, not you, and when seconds count they are mere minutes away.

    2. > their primary duty is to society as a whole

      It has become increasingly apparent that they feel their primary duty is first to themselves (“go home safe at the end of the shift”) and then to the polities who sign their paychecks.

      The citizenry… from the cop viewpoint, they’re all criminals they haven’t caught yet, not their employers.

    3. Not only are LE agencies not responsible for you but more and more it seems they like casualties. Gets them more privileges and power. When the victim is one of the subject class it’s not like it’s a real person.

    4. I can and would, absolutely, in defense of my daughter … who now is a pretty tough cookie herself. But when she was a baby, barely a couple of weeks old, I realized absolutely that I would kill anyone or thing who tried to harm my child – gun, bare hands, whatever. It was a terribly primal feeling, almost overwhelming.

      1. Beloved Spouse and I were gaming scenarios last night in which the need of a gun for protection was largely undeniable. At the house where our daughter was born there was a neighbor who kept a pack of large, feral dogs. Had he not moved on before the Daughtorial Unit was delivered you can bet the household adults would not have sat out sans guns while she toddled in the yard. The dogs had been reported to the police but there was no basis for their involvement until after the dogs savaged somebody, and even then only against the dog doing the savaging.

        I admit that in the event of an attack on the D.U. the first two shots would have been into the dog and the third would likely have gone wild and hit the dog’s owner.

        Loathe as I am to give linkage to the NY Times …

        I Wanted to Be a Good Mom. So I Got a Gun.
        By BETHANY MANDEL
        A few months after my father left our family home for good, my mother heard me screaming in the middle of the night. It was the kind of scream that made her grab her rifle in one hand and some ammo in another.

        It was a spring night and I was sleeping with my window open, which was right above my bed; I loved breathing in the fresh air. That night, in that open window, I heard the banging of a ladder, and by the time my mother made it into the room and began loading her gun, a man was about to climb in.

        She said something along the lines of: “Bethany, come over here. I don’t want you to get his brain matter on your face.” I backed up behind her and my mother raised her gun. The would-be intruder slowly backed down the ladder. As he climbed down, my mother approached. The barrel of her rifle was inches away from his face and she told him, “Next time you come here, I won’t hesitate.” She had her gun pointed at him through the window on his way down, and as he went down the ladder she grabbed the top and shook it, just to put the fear of God into him one last time before he fled.

        My mother admired Ralph Nader and voted for the Green Party candidate during every presidential election I walked into a booth with her. There was not an issue on which she was not the most progressive person in the room. And yet, she owned guns. …

        1. The NYT story here is curious. If this lady owned a rifle and was this comfortable using it to deter a crime, she wouldn’t have kept it unloaded and had to “grab her rifle in one hand and some ammo in another,” then make “it into the room” and begin “loading her gun.” This was written by someone who doesn’t know anything about firearms. It just doesn’t ring true.

          1. there are/were places that allow(ed) you to keep your weapons, but they must be unloaded (I think one place tried for “Not in the same room” but sorta glossed over how such was to be enforced) all in the name of preventing accidents. My dad kept his unloaded until all of us kids were old enough to know better, With my younger sisters this wasn’t until about middle school age for me. I used to have to rush and load the .22 when grandma wanted a squirrel shot.

            1. Heard of a man who gut shot some problem dogs where’d they crawl home and die. The dogs were owned by a man who denied they were killing the other man’s livestock.

              No, I didn’t approve of the gut shot approach. I was always taught to go for a quick kill where the animal wouldn’t suffer.

              2. “The dogs were owned by a man who denied they were killing the other man’s livestock.”

                Hate it. But live in a state that if a dog is caught on farm/ranch where livestock might be, they can be shot on sight, without repercussion. Lost a dog that way. In town, had no idea there was a sheep ranch behind subdivision where renting. Some one left a door ajar & both dogs got out (someone who was TOLD to make sure door was firmly shut, but thought they knew dogs better than the owners & they would “stick around” with people outside, not their owners; & yes we were very, very, extremely angry; enough very?).

                Rancher “said” he was sorry. That he fired a warning shot & both dogs kept going toward the sheep, then he killed the first dog, at which point the other one turned & ran, that he should have shot the other one first, because the one killed would not have turned & ran.

                BS. 100% Liar. No warning shot. He killed the first dog immediately on sight. Both dogs were terrified of gun noise. The dog that got away was terrified of ANY loud noise & as demonstrated all but turned inside out getting away. We had to drag her out from under the house’s foundation when we finally found her. We were lucky the rancher did not demand the one who got away be turned in. We until we moved, I could barely get her out of the house, she was that terrified.

                Granted most ranchers do whats called the 3S’s when this happens: Shot, Shovel, & Shut up. Denying ever seeing lost dogs.

                1. When mom was little they had a “neighbor” that would gut-shoot dogs on other people’s property. They lost her first dog that way.

                  Neighbor came up to her fishing with her second dog, a few years later– Red* hadn’t left her side– and tried to shoot the dog in front of her.
                  She pulled her rifle on him.

                  He didn’t shoot any more of their dogs.

                  Got in trouble from her dad, but only of the “well, I HAVE to punish you, but damn I’m proud” sort.

                  On the flip side, more than once she followed dogs that left bloody animals behind them to the owner’s door, was told they’d been inside all morning (one time over the still wet muddy footprints). She’d give the owners the same speech each time, that the next time they were chasing the cows, they’d be shot. But their deaths would be clean, and the corpses would be decently buried.

                  It was horrifying how often she had to shoot the dogs anyways, and how many owners didn’t care about the BLOODY CHUNK their dogs took out of the cows. Freaking psychopaths.

                  *he was black and white. This dog died of old age decades before I was born, and I “know” him.

                  1. “On the flip side, more than once she followed dogs that left bloody animals behind them to the owner’s door, was told they’d been inside all morning (one time over the still wet muddy footprints). She’d give the owners the same speech each time, that the next time they were chasing the cows, they’d be shot. But their deaths would be clean, and the corpses would be decently buried.

                    It was horrifying how often she had to shoot the dogs anyways, and how many owners didn’t care about the BLOODY CHUNK their dogs took out of the cows. Freaking psychopaths.”

                    I get it & I know often that is the only option. Still Hate it. At the time my Uncle was a sheep rancher, so I knew we had no rights or options, no matter that it was not our error other than trusting the wrong person. We moved (within a week or so, hey its been 40 years) as soon as we could, to prevent another occurrence. In addition the surviving dog was taught never, ever, to leave through an open door, or gate, unless specifically invited by either one of us, no exceptions.

                    That the rancher 100% LIED when 100% legally entitled to what he did is one side of the anger, that we “couldn’t be angry” (well we could we just had to hide it) at the root cause because said root cause was the significant other of a very good friend of both of us, well enough said …

                    1. I definitely understand the not being “allowed” to be angry thing– and hell, the fact that I know about the dogs from when mom was a kid tells you that I have an idea (though, thank God, not first hand) exactly how much that tears you up.

                      They’re YOUR dogs, that’s an obligation and an honor…and some SOB lied in order to violate that, and someone else didn’t care enough to respect it.

                      That burns.

        3. Anti-gun Vulture Shannon Watts evidently went off on this woman for … ready? … get this… her privilege. And for the fact the story was illustrated with a black mom at a gun store/show (Bethany is not black). Watts got chewed up on Twitster, it seems.

          1. I had given a moment’s thought to skimming through the comments to the article … but I’m over Sixty and life’s too short for reading such dribble.

            Admittedly, life would be too short for such if I were under Thirty.

    7. I feel blessed in our county. The sheriff’s office knows that when seconds count, they might be an hour’s driving time away, and actually encourage ownership and concealed carry for those eligible. With my trips to the blue side of the Cascades, I’m rethinking the carry piece. Time to get some practice on the 1911 and the small 9mm. I think the time for the mousegun is past.

      1. Detroit’s Chief said it and got some grief, but the Milwaukee Sheriff is the one the left loves to hate for coming out and saying [paraphrased] “Get a gun, we will get there ASAP, but that might be too late”

        1. There are a lot of top cops who will tell anyone who asks that they support private gun ownership. This has occasionally caused problems when the state government passes some sort of particularly burdensome gun control bill, and the local PD flat out say that they’re not going to enforce it.

    8. > Does tend to explain the intensity that the left is exhibiting
      > in their efforts to see that it is difficult to impossible to buy
      > that sword. I assume that sword is a metaphor for any arms
      > suitable for personal defense.

      One of the harder arguments against gun control for the left to refute is that most of the firearms we use today are *effectively* 19th or early 20th century technology produced with modern metallurgy. You *literally* can make a full auto rifle or pistol with a drill press, a hack saw and some files. Add in some sheet metal folding and you’ve got a REALLY useful weapon. Not good enough to snipe out to 1000 yards, but enough to get the job done at close ranges.

      Modern *generic* machine shops? Oh my.

      Modern 5 axis CADCAM systems? No problem.

      So no, the left isn’t making it *impossible* to buy that sword, they’re only making it illegal.

      1. Screw ’em. If they somehow manage to get their dream (and God help us all if that happens, the Devil’s gonna be busy with all the new recruits headed his way) then we just take a page out of the Progressive book and create ‘Gun Sanctuary states and cities’. What’s good for the goose. . .

      2. You want to snipe out to 1000 yards, you really want a lathe and a milling machine.

        1. Paraphrasing:
          “Dr. Feynman, how do we eliminate nuclear proliferation?”
          “You’ll need to start with regulating shovels, at the least.”

          That dirt you see outside? It’s uranium ore. Not high grade, no, but… with with time and determination… you still get uranium. And, as (I think it was) Tom Clancy pointed out, “Second best also goes boom.”

        2. You can find Boris’ “Shit-Shovel AK Build” on BARFcom, and on a couple other forums.

          Granted, any reasonably thick piece of sheet metal will do for an AK receiver. Back before laser-cut U-fold-ems some people used old car fenders.

          The receiver is only important because that’s the serialized part that the ATF considers “a gun.” The lower on an AR is little more than a bracket to hold the magazine and fire control group; all the expensive bits are in the upper.

          Boris’ “Fruity Ghost” thread on BARFcom shows how to cast your own lowers from plastic, using a finished one to make the mold.

          Then there’s the “Mujaheddin AR” site, where a guy shows how he finished an 80% lower with hand tools…

          1. all-plastic ARs dont tend to hold up very well.

            the lower for the AR also holds the buffer tube and spring, at the back. on all plastic AR lowers, the lower tends to split right at this area.

            An AR lower isn’t just a ‘ a bracket to hold the magazine and fire control group’ it is a stress-bearing part. otherwise, AR lowers printed in ABS, using the standard AR pattern, would work just fine. Hint: they don’t.

            1. Yeah, but a plastic AR isn’t meant to last. It’s meant to be a finger in the eye of gun grabbers, or in extremis last long enough to liberate a better weapon from a blue helmet or their analog.

                1. You’re forgetting about the single shot stamped metal pistols OSI would drop behind the lines in WWII. The whole purpose was to shoot the NAZI and take his weapon.

                  1. yes, but they didn’t *break* after two to five rounds, and there is little evidence of their actual *use*

                    ALSO…

                    Nazis didn’t wear body armor capable of stopping small arms fire.

      4. There’s a neat little video “game” on Steam called “World of Guns: Gun Disassembly”. It’s more of a toy than an actual video game, but it revolves around taking real-world guns apart and putting them back together within the context of the application. After playing with it for a bit and unlocking a number of the guns, it became disturbingly apparent that the simplest weapons around (as far as number of parts and design are concerned) appeared to be submachine guns.

    9. I assume that sword is a metaphor for any arms suitable for personal defense.

      I took it to mean all means of resistance– especially the mental ones.

      You can’t fight if you can’t imagine a reason to fight…..

  10. I see a lot of discourse along American lines here. Trouble is, the battle isn’t just being waged in the streets and campuses of the U.S.A. Even across the globe people are starting to notice the craziness the marxists have foisted upon their governance. Some are standing up and saying, “This far, and no further!” others are starting to curl up in a fetal position hoping for the bad times to go away.
    In Canada, freedom of speech and freedom of expression is on the ropes. Through colleges, universities, and even by government dictate. The battle isn’t in just one geographical location, it’s everywhere.
    The Crazy Years are here, and we must find a way to stay sane and drive the demons back.

    2. Data points:

      Angela Merkel was recently forced to admit stop denying the existence of “No Go” zones in Germany.

      The NY Times this weekend featured a story on the fading of Sweden’s Socialist Miracle under the onslaught of unassimilated hordes of refugees filled not with gratitude but contempt for Swedish largess.

      The two biggest gainers in Italy’s national election last Sunday were parties — one Left, one Right — advocating for renewed control over immigration, capturing nearly fifty percent of the vote between them even though they’ve nearly nothing else in common.

      It looks increasingly as if Canada’s election of Boy Trudeau was merely a last gasp of the old order and one which is proving disastrously humiliating.

      1. Canada doesn’t get uneducated illegal immigrants like America and Europe do, who is allowed to enter Canada is strictly controlled by points system. Canadians far less vexed with immigrants because government screens people and we only let in right kind of people, mainly educated people who aspire for middle class life.

        1. If Trump gets really serious, look out for that to change a bit– there is a very large illegal population in Washington (state), and most of the folks on the dry side would be delighted for that to be cleaned up.

          Lot faster to run north than to get south.

          1. I’m seeing the reports about ICE raids in the SF Bay area. It’ll be interesting to see what happens here; at least one outfit uses lots of seasonal workers for their crop (strawberry plants). Haying* seems to be pretty well mechanized, and I think potatoes are less so, but the strawberry operation uses a bunch of people. (The plants go to commercial strawberry producers, mostly. I assume it’s Watsonville/Monterey in California.) OTOH, robotic cultivators are coming out. On the gripping hand, the illegal immigrant problems are worse west of the Cascades, complete with a DA who doesn’t believe in blind justice. Things will get interesting.

            (*) The Tribes made a water call** on the local river and non-exempt wells within a mile of the river, so haying in our valley is dormant. This has been a dry winter, but the water calls keep happening in wet years, since they got the rights. Oregon Institute of Technology had to do a new well when Klamath Lake was included in a previous call. Residential wells are exempt from such controls. (And, that was tested in court. No, one town could not be forced to close its municipal well.)

            (**) In Oregon, water rights are set by seniority. If I have a right dated 1940 (I don’t), someone with a right previous to that can claim water over my priority. The Tribes (Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin) were adjudicated water rights “from time immemorial”, so if they want to protect the sucker fish***, they can make that call. It’s been going on a few years now, not sure how it’s going to play out.

            (***) I’ve heard rumors that the sucker fish were accidentally obliterated in Klamath Lake in the ’70s when a government agency got rid of some trash fish populations. I’ve seen this done on a small scale in Michigan in the ’60s. It can be really effective.

            1. I remember that when they put the water deep…it hurt the sucker population, because they need warm, shallow water.

              That’s why they like irrigation ditches…..

              **********

              I don’t know how common it is, but potatoes can be almost 100% mechanized, even more than hay. Up above Seattle they do it– even the delicate ones, golden potatoes. (If you get a chance, the ones from…hughes farm, I think?… gah, droolworthy)

              It’s mindblowing how much space is used for potatoes there!

              1. I haven’t looked at the harvest up close, but it’s amazing to see them going late at night with flood lights during the peak. It looked like they were doing it all night last year. There’s some heavy equipment to get the dirt off the potatoes and do a quick size sort, but you’d need a few extra people to run the lights and such. Haying looks like it can be done by one or two people once irrigation is set up, for even big (1000 acres) fields.

                The other amazing thing is the multi-person cultivator rig for strawberries. The big tractor has frames with cushions on either side, and a bunch of people (8 to 12, I think) lying on them and weeding with the tractor moving down the rows. I can see that rig getting replaced by a RoboWeeder Mk 1 once it exists.

                1. I’m not sure, but strawberries might be a problem for automation because of the runners. If a weeder grabbed a runner to pull it, it might pull the whole plant up. (I think it makes the problem harder/more expensive to solve, not unsolvable.)

                2. They probably WERE doing it all night.

                  The “farmer” that rides with my parents has equipment with all the lights built in– if you heard about that sad train accident with the potato truck, that was his operation. Driver had only worked there a year or so, but his son (and grandson?) has been with them forever, and I can’t remember if the guy who was in the passenger seat was the farmer’s son or his son in law, but it was a really bad month or so. (Just a badly designed intersection and a tired driver– they were driving back to the main garage after a full day and the kid barely had time to jump out before the train hit, got seriously hurt anyways but lived.)

      2. Old order is collapsing, I agree, but it would not surprise me in least if collapse entirely misses Canada or will be long time before it arrives. Progressives very powerful here and there is nothing really riling Canadians up to change course. Even Conservatives are not right wing, they are slightly less left wing than all other parties, Whig or libertarian thought or policies are totally absent here in Canada.

        1. Plus the mindset of “if the Americans are doing it, it must be evil!”

          Friggin idiots, many of my countrymen…

        2. Keep in mind, though, the “conservatives” that you’re describing are quite similar to much of the “right” in Europe, which is often just a more nationalistic version of the usual socialism.

    3. Speaking of Canada, why is Justin Trudeau such a twerp? He almost seems worse than Obama.

      1. Yeah, dressing up the whole family in coordinating Bollywood costumes, repeatedly, throughout the India tour, was …
        Silly.
        That’s about the mildest term I can come up with. Look, I get the fun of cosplay, but as part of a state visit on the part of an executive of a sovereign nation?
        Premier Zoolander, indeed. Wonder what he and the family will wear, if they ever do an official visit to Texas…

        1. CBC and Globe & Mail love him, good luck getting through to a large % of the pop.

      2. Silver spoon communist…. And he probably is just with a smaller base to do damage to that was already hurting before he got there.

        1. One of the commentators on Tim Blair’s noted that he’s aping one a typical visit by the Princes of England, but without the class.
          In his little peabrain, Justin thinks he’s the equivalent of the Royal family, because his official dad was a PM, and his real dad was probably a Kennedy.

      3. Justin seems clueless and rather harmless. Kind of like a 5 year old playing dress-up and pretending to be in charge.

        Obama. . .the less said the better. I just hope he finally fades into the woodwork so we don’t have to hear whatever the latest stupid crap coming out of his mouth his.

  11. “No, Sarah, not everyone in that room hates you. Most of them don’t know you yet.”

    One of my Special Powers is that almost all animals love me. Particularly the ones I’m most allergic to.

    The other Special Power is that a great many people DON’T like me. As in, I walk into a room full of people I’ve never seen before, and some percentage of them will bristle up and start doing the chicken dance like they’re preparing to fight. More than once I’ve felt like Mr. T at a Klan meeting.

    The weirdest thing is, as far as I can tell in the mirror, I’m just an ordinary-looking schmuck. Perhaps it’s one of those “social signaling” things I missed out on…

    1. “One of my Special Powers is that almost all animals love me.”

      Me too. Not allergic to anything, so not a problem. Plus, lets see, puppy is now a year old & it’s been about 3 years since the last “orphan”, as in very young kitten presented itself to me while I was out & about (FWIW, the fee rescues want, are cheap!); my point, we’re due. Just praying it’ll happen AFTER our current senor crosses the Rainbow Bridge (she’s 19 this summer).

      “other Special Power is that a great many people DON’T like me. As in, I walk into a room full of people I’ve never seen before…” Opposite. Not that people necessarily like me vs not, but I’m ignored or invisible. Yes, in certain situations it is very irritating, but I’ve taken advantage of it, in fact, a lot.

      1. My wife has the opposite power from mine; she can walk into a room full of strangers and everyone acts like she’s a long-lost friend.

      2. Cats and young girls.
        “Mr. Houst, would you like to play with Barbie with me?”
        it’s so hard to say “No” to a cute little 5 year old girl without being rude.
        /sigh

          1. We’re usually sitting at the table drinking coffee and eating Danish about then.

            Rule Number 1: Never be with someone’s child by yourself. (Does not apply in life or death scenarios.)

            1. “Rule Number 1: Never be with someone’s child by yourself. (Does not apply in life or death scenarios.)”

              Or just your significant other because, obviously, they will back you, regardless.

              1. …who have been carefully coached by the schools, and in some cases by their parents, with just the right words to say to get someone into “guilty until proven innocent” trouble.

                I didn’t like kids even when I was one. And now they’re an even worse hassle.

      3. “Invisibility” has its advantages, but it seems – at least for me – that I only have when I don’t need it and if I desire it, I might as well be a searchlight.

        That bit in the theme song to Cheers “…where everyone knows your name..” has long bugged me. There are times I wish to go someplace where nobody knows me.

    2. Have you tried smiling, or does that make it worse? 😀 I do seem to have some tendency towards glowering, usually things work a bit better when I remember not to. But some people do look more scary when they smile.

    3. Same here. When I was younger it bothered me. Now I use it to my advantage. I find the less is say the better it works.

    4. $SPOUSE will get cats coming up to her and rolling on their back for a tummy rub. Disconcerting when it’s somewhere we’ve never been to. And yes, she’s allergic to cats. OTOH, the feral cats in the area avoid everybody, but paranoia is a survival skill when you have big owls around. (And hawks, and eagles, and badgers.)

      We’re both pretty good with dogs; lots of practice with dogs in cars and trucks and the two we have.

    5. I get the opposite reaction from most groups of normal people– a sort of general “oh, she’s useful”…right up until a word that isn’t “yes, of course” comes out.

      Apparently, I’ve got either “sucker” or “doormat” written across my forehead, in very large, bright letters.

      1. I think I can come off either way – I can slip into a room unnoticed, and wander around without any notice being taken … but then when I am in ‘author-personality-mode-full-on!” then it’s … kind of like Dolly Levi, taking the place by storm; full personality engagement, charm turned up to 11+. I did one of these appearances to support another author of a local historical, and one of his friends turned to my daughter and said, “Is she always this way?”
        Can’t recall what my daughter said – but no, it’s exhausting to maintain for more than a couple of hours.
        (Dogs and cats do like me on sight, by the way. Don’t know if that has any particular bearing.)

        1. Our family coined the personality trait “performing introvert” because we are just like that: happiest to be alone, but can put on the act when required.

    1. Wasn’t giving TrumpHitler access to The Button supposed to have us in a nuclear war by now? 😉

        1. Before I joined Liberals Anonymous (Hi, I’m Pete), my reaction to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was “if we survive the next 4 years, we’ll be rich”. I didn’t do half bad, and by ’84 I was registered as a GOP.

          California Democrats being themselves also helped me leave liberalism. Sadly, the whackos in the ’80s are now the senior states[men|womyn|whatever] there.

          1. “1980 was “if we survive the next 4 years, we’ll be rich”. I didn’t do half bad, and by ’84 I was registered as a GOP.”

            Ditto. & we started in the hole in 1978. Had to borrow money from our folks to go to work upon graduation in ’79. Plus the job we started at guaranteed we’d get laid off every year for more than a few weeks for at least first 10 years (thanks to the Spotted Owl that was for the next 33 years, & one of us changing careers, but I digress). 1) one net pay check went into savings, every month, that was AFTER max contribution to 401(k), and/or IRA (when came available); 2) minimum payment to student loans. Hey, the loans were $19/quarter & $20/month, at interest rates that were 3 or 4%. We were getting something like 10 or 12% interest on savings, darn right we took 10 years to pay them off; & 3) Paid off credit cards every month without fail, unless we knew we’d be laid off & card had hardship insurance that paid if laid off – ridiculous payment made too: Minimum Payment + Interest Accrued that Month + % of outstanding balance, hubby was former math major, darn right we took advantage, money in the bank. Eventually card companies caught on & dropped the option or made it not worth it & we dropped it.

            Still good rules to live by for anyone starting out today. Except #2 (not really an option now), & second half of #3, not worth the cost if available.

            FYI. One lesson personally learned the hard way. Living expenses absolutely required monthly has to be the lower pay check. YMMV.

  13. Look in the mirror and see the monster…. Jordan Petersonian! It’s in the air these days.

  14. My mother, who lived through the Great Depression, taught me to be a prepper. I taught my children the same lessons. What truly drives me nuts, is the liberal who destroys his own area, moves into mine and THEN demands we become like the area he left! I have noticed that the large cities tend to be progressive, the smaller cities, towns and rural areas seem to realize that they are responsible for their own lives.
    If Mao’s (or it’s American version) Cultural Revolution comes to Texas, it will be bloody. There are more hunters in Texas (1.2 million or so at last count) than there are members of the U.S. Army (1.08 million or so according to Google). I do not think I have ever met a true progressive hunter. I am an NRA member but I notice that while I have “blood on my hands” the NEA that lobbies to keep schools as “gun free” kill zones is a paragon of virtue.
    I figured Marx out decades ago, flying along the now defunct East German boarder I noticed all the security towers had their machine guns facing into East Germany. They were there to keep their people in, not us out. Venezuela does not have a problem with illegal aliens entering their country. They have a problem forcing their oil field workers to go work for essentially no wages.
    I used to try things like asking global warming nuts to give me, exactly, the correct temperature for the planet. If you want to destroy my county for your cause, at least you can define your victory criteria. As an aside, I am an astro-physicist and I know that the sun is a star and is entering a cooling, contraction period like we haven’t seen since the little ice age of the Maunder minimum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum
    As the bills for the liberal/progressive agenda come due, we are going to face more critical systems failures. The only response for the liberal will be to blame those who did not cause the problems and try for more and more control. Eventually, the great unwashed either become slaves or rise up and destroy their task masters.

    1. They won’t even need to shoot a lot of people. Interdict trucks for a few days, and the cities mostly die.

      1. Open a few contactors – those leftists don’t really NEED all that electricity.

        Close a few valves – those leftists don’t really NEED all that water, gas, etc.

        2. F-ing scary what a few seriously pissed off people could do if they wanted.

      2. Over the last couple of days, I’ve been kicking around the idea of what might happen if we suddenly started getting Carrington Event-level happenings on the order of once a month (obviously *something* dramatic would have changed with the sun to cause that to happen).

        While I haven’t really sat down and figured out the details, my gut feeling is “really really really bad”.

        1. That often and we’d probably figure a way to (1) harden up, and (2) what was really essential.

          1. Thing is, you can harden facilities with a little extra effort. But stuff that by necessity is outdoors – like vehicles… It can be done. But it’d probably get expensive. You’d have to carefully weigh the costs involved.

  15. “Study history, study philosophy, study civics and the constitution. Be ready to defend yourselves.”

    That’s all good for forming your own philosophy and background. However, those are not weapons in their own right. What you need are specific arguments using specific examples from history etc. And you may need to practice using them verbally; since detractors rarely engage in written duels other than spam and trolling, and won’t wait.

    e.g.
    The 2nd amendment only protects hunting.

    Ah, no. Let me borrow a paragraph from Larry Correia (you might want to memorize it.)

    “Having just gone through a war against a tyrannical government, the Founders understood that governments can go bad, so they made sure to note our God given right (or we’ll say naturally occurring right, since a bunch of you are atheists) to keep and bear arms in order to defend ourselves. The 2nd Amendment isn’t about hunting or “sporting purposes”, it’s about having weapons that you can fight with. As an added bonus, being able to protect yourself from a tyrannical government means that you’re a lot better equipped to deal with any common criminal who decides to hurt you.”

    That paragraph is the weapon you use against anti-gunners using the hunting argument. You have to know the arguments to know which weapons you need.

    Of course then their follow is that this is America, and the government would never become tyrannical.

    Tell that to the Japanese, Germans, and Italians they rounded up and put in concentration camps in WWII. Tell that to the Native Americans. Tell that to the people in post-Katrina New Orleans. Or Randy Weaver and his family (what’s left o fit), or David Koresh and his followers (what’s left of them.)

    1. “… this is America, and the government would never become tyrannical.”

      I dunno ’bout that. I was watching MSNBC last night and they told me Trump was on his way to being Hitler. Had I been a German Jew in 1933 I think a small investment in personal firearms would have been worthwhile.

    2. You’ve seen the latest thing, right? The one that says the Second Amendment was specifically put in place to keep slavery around (because slaveowners couldn’t keep slaves in check without overwhelming force.)

      2. I think I need another four hands or so to give that idiocy the facepalm that it deserves.

        1. Because Kali is the Destroyer, and destroys those who abuse her with those silly memes.

          😛

    3. Explaining that the 2nd Amendment has nothing at all to do with hunting leads to confused looks on many a face. I often refer people to look at the Battle of Athens to explain why the 2nd exists. There’s a reason the Battle of Athens isn’t taught in schools… It destroys the idea that the 2nd amendment is outdated and worthless.

      Had a very liberal friend ask “Well, who decides when it’s time to overthrow the government?” My answer was “The people”. If you’re acting on your own, or are the only person doing it, you’re not the people. There is no absolute answer to that.

      1. When conditions become so intolerable that risking our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor becomes preferable to allowing things to continue. In other words, well past when we should’a ought’a done something.

      2. An interesting read, thank you. Couple of points. You are soooo correct about who makes the decision being “the people”. Lone wolves don’t cut it. However, it often does take one person to be the igniter, the one to stand up and say, “enough is enough, time to fight back.” That one needs to get the rest to sign on, or it’s not going to work.

        The other point is that so many times those who revolt do so, claim the top dog position themselves, and merely perpetuate the abuses, much as we see the communists, Marxists, and socialists who take over their countries by hook, crook, or fire. The Athenian GIs broke the tyranny, and then faded to leave the duly elected in charge. They didn’t hold onto for their own benefit.

        1. When I was living in Athens while working at Watts Bar nuclear plant in 2011-2013, I got to talk to a couple of the guys who were a part of the group of men who took on the machine there in 1946. Interesting old farts they were. I would not have messed with them even at their advanced ages.

      3. “If you’re acting on your own, or are the only person doing it, you’re not the people.”

        You have the Right to revolt. You do NOT have the Right to succeed.
        I prefer the “Unintended Consequences” way of revolt. Each PERSON decides the Bureaucrat, Politician, maybe media person who stands against the Constitution. Plan, execute, STFU. repeat until they go back to the Constitution. It is not about land, control of areas or people, it is about the Constitution and the Government being constrained by it. We are LUCKY we don’t have to invent what we want government to be. We KNOW.

        Every Man has his breaking point where he says this is as far as I go. Here I stand and fight for what I believe is right. Just because you are alone doesn’t mean you are wrong.

  16. the left would find some sort of rationality when their great prophecy — the future is socialist/communist — was disproven
    The advantage of a prophecy is that – without a set time for it to appear – it can go on forever, always just beyond the horizon, always just “over the next hill”.

    1. Which is why some places had “if your prophecy doesn’t come to being in X time you will have your head lopped off” provisions.

      1. Suffer not a false prophet to live.
        How do you know if he’s a false prophet or not?
        Was he ever wrong?
        Yep.
        Then he’s a false prophet.

        1. Yup. Though for the pendants out there. “Was he ever wrong” did not mean statements like. “huh, I think it’s going to rain today” *grabs over robe just in case*

          1. Well, there was one time that predicting rain would have absolutely labelled you as a false prophet………

            (When Elijah prophesied God’s drought for Israel under Ahab and Jezebel.)

      2. Sometimes prophecies are conditional though. If you don’t repent, I will destroy you. If they repent then the lack of destruction doesn’t mean it was a false prophecy.

  17. Moving out of places where the cold civil war will go hot, if you can, is also not a bad idea.
    The difficulty is that some large percentage of the places where there will be no “hot” are places already lost to the utopian vision of the progs.

    1. The Jefferson counties are still trying to keep utopia far away. Not always successful, but rural counties offer more options to stay out of the furnace. So far.

    2. Not so much ‘lost’ as not yet experienced the bouncing of the ‘reality check’. 🙂

      It’s coming and that check is going to leave a mark when it lands.

      The question is what part of those currently in the throes of this particular bit of insanity can be saved? What will society do with those who will not accept reality?

  18. Funny, I just did a musical interlude on a related theme over on my blog.

    All they have are war tactics

    The problem is, that we’re not using war tactics, perhaps for good reason or at least reasons that seem good. “Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

    But if they continue, then “We’ll teach them the ways of war” as in:

    “Guard your women and children well
    Send these bastards back to Hell
    We’ll teach them the ways of war
    They won’t come here anymore
    Use your shield and use your head
    Fight til every one is dead
    Raise a flag up to the sky
    How many of them can we make die?”

    It will not be pretty.

    1. Scott Alexander over at Slate Star Codex did a post about “conflict” mindset v.s. “mistake” mindset:
      http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/

      I suspect the people you’re talking about are conflict thinkers (at least in this area) while most of “us” are still working through the “mistake” thing.

      We probably should stop being so generous.

  19. #HollywoodLivesMatterMore:

    “Tim Wise
    ‏
    Verified account

    @timjacobwise
    Follow
    Follow @timjacobwise

    More
    Replying to @benshapiro
    I love how right wingers try and make it seem hypocritical when people who get their lives threatened regularly (bc they are celebs and liberals) have “armed guards”…They are actually under threat; not so bubba from rural Georgia who wants 40 guns because he’s compensating”

    1. So, you have to prove a viable threat before getting a gun? Well, *that* should be easy to ensure happens properly…… *eyeroll*

      (That’s on top of calling bullshit on the comparison.)

        1. Remembering that bank robbery a couple decades ago when the LA cops were seriously out gunned, so much so that they requisitioned weapons from the inventory of a local purveyor of armaments.

          Imagining the clerk/owner demanding to see their permits — Hey, this is LA! Just because some dude shows up dressed like a cop don’t make him a cop! — and insisting on doing the background checks and seeing a certificate of need to own the weapons.

          2. What was that brittle that was the prequel to Rourke’s Drift? The one where men ran oat of ammo because the supply sergeants wouldn’t let it out of the wagons without the proper paperwork?

            2. Isandlwana. And that’s something of a myth, concocted as a result of some people’s refusal to believe that a force of African natives could best Europeans in a fair fight.

          3. The film dramatization has the cops calling out the gunstore owners for selling such horrific weapons to the general public.

    2. So what Mr. Wise is saying is that the 3425 victims of violent crime on an average day (2015 figures–and more actually since many crimes have more than one victim) don’t count next to a few celebrities.

      1. Hmmm. Nope. Can’t even see the Muslim Brotherhood shouting, “Death to Beyonce’!” Not unless she decides to play Cairo, Egypt.

    4. The only “threat” those celebs experience is the threat of losing their plush, rarified lifestyles where they are catered to in person and online simply for being famous. Woe betide them if they had to get a regular job and actually deal with regular people on a daily basis.

    5. Wise is one of those… special people. He’s basically a bigot towards gun owners and people in rural areas. This is one of the tweets he deleted but thankfully someone managed to archive:

      http://archive.is/bB2o9

    6. Tell that to the kids who died at school.

      Just because you don’t know you’re under threat doesn’t mean that you aren’t.

  20. Someone pointed out that when socialism/communism became too disreputable (by way of their main prop, the USSR, falling apart), the Left simply switched from class politics to identity politics without missing a beat, but absolutely nothing else changed.

    This seems sufficiently accurate for all practical purposes.

    1. Just give it time. Look to what has come to pass in the former Great Britain if you don’t believe me.

  24. After all, by the time the Soviet Union fell, the left had taken the heights of culture, from arts to social sciences, to academia, to opinion, to news, to even entertainment, including most genre writing …

    There was a reason that most of the books and short stories I found worth reading were written by authors whose careers started before WWII, such as Margery Allingham.   At first I had thought it was the the vocabulary, the sentence structure and the pacing were more to my taste*.   While that is true, it was also the basic presumptions that the world view of the publishers and the authors brought to the stories.

    *O.K.,  I admit that William Faukner’s sentences might go on a bit too long for anyone, but they do have a texture and depth which is sadly lacking in today’s writing.

    1. Even assuming co2 is quickening warming there seem to be two routes one can take. One is to limit co2, the other to mitigate damage. The former is dependent on billions of people freezing their societies, that a bevy of assumptions are right, and that not too late. The latter is just evolution as has been practiced for eons. But the former is the path we are headed down.

      1. The basic assumption behind the climate alarmism industry is that any change will inevitably yield only negative results. If one states this assumption, that whatever happened to be the case ten, or a hundred, or N years ago is inarguably the best of all possible worlds, so that any difference from that one magic point in time will problematic for humanity, it sounds idiotic. But that “We are now leaving the Golden Age of Perfect Climate” concept right there in all the arm waving and running-in-circles stuff which is pushed out every year.

        Before they started changing correcting the historical climate measurements, it was generally recognized that the 1940s were the warmest decade in recent memory, and that periods in recorded history were warmer still, with, for example, vineyards producing crops of wine for long periods in Roman Britain, and later on, Greenland actually being green enough to sustain flocks of sheep for it’s Viking settlers.

        But all that cannot be allowed to have been the case, else unanointed fools like me will point to it and say “But, what about…”, so the recent history is being “corrected” into alignment with dogma, and the older past climate indicators are simply being ignored.

        And the intent of all this is for our betters to have a noisy tantrum on the floor of the grocery store of history, yelling as loud as they can to stop adaptation and mitigation efforts, demanding that society as a whole must immediately jump back onto that Inevitable Arrow of History that so loudly fell apart when the USSR fell.

        And as has been happening recently, the best reaction of the rest of us in the store is to maneuver our carts right around the tantrum and carry on buying sunscreen, shades and flipflops for our new beachy future.

        1. Oh I know. I’m just trying to give the absolute greatest level of benefit of doubt and still note that the intent, potential outcomes and choices don’t match

        2. I’m going to disagree here. The basic assumption behind the climate alarmism is that The Right People need to be in charge of running the world economy.

          1. I’d content “Do what the Right People tell you to do” is the purpose of climate alarmism.

            The assumptions behind it, like the backstory of comic book characters, only really matters to those who buy into the story. Thus questions that stem from internal inconsistencies in the assumptions, as in either “Wait, so global warming would be bad in the middle of an ice age?” or “He was bitten by a radioactive what?” Only come up when the suspension of disbelief gets thin, endangering the “Shut Up and Do What We Tell You, Prole” purpose.

        3. > warmest decade

          And because of “weather”, 1946 was freakishly cold, and crop failures compounded the problems of the destruction of the agricultural base during WWII.

    3. *twitches when she gets to the part about their share of tragedy growing*

      If the law enforcement is so obscenely lax that a career criminal who shot a dude in the throat got two years and was released before he served a day of it, then released AGAIN after he showed up and threatened the victim again, this is solidly in the “unexpectedly!” file.

    1. A rough equivalent is a solid hickory cane with a traditional curved handle. Mine is a freebee from a livestock sale, Looks innocuous, yet I’ve dropped a full grown hog with one.

      1. Some Walmarts are carrying them, now.

        I can’t tell what sort of wood they are, but the grain was very nice and tight, and it had a good heft. Still annoyed I didn’t buy the dang thing Just Because.

        1. Haven’t needed to hit somebody with it, but I got a good “heavy” walking stick at Big R.

          1. My preference is an ebony stick with silver handle. Because you never know when nor where you might be attacked by a werewolf.


            Besides, they’re elegant and go with anything.

            1. If you want to deal with werewolves, you need a silver blade not a knob. Unless werewolves in your neck of the woods are pajama boys or something.

              1. I’m pretty sure bludgeoning them with a silver knob works fairly well. At least, so I recall Larry Talbot testifying.

                Of course, his experience strongly argues for ranged weapons.

              2. From memory, it’s either the moon-power or the purity aspect of silver that makes it bypass werewolves’ demonic immunities– that said, I wouldn’t want to get in a muscle-based-fight with a freaking fuzzy version of Batman’s Bane!

          2. Met a gentleman at the grocery store today who had an AWESOME walking stick– it looked like a cross between a rather long, narrow bat and an old style umbrella. Umblella hook melded into the neck of the bat, then it went out into a very nice little hardwood bat with a big, obvious no-slip rubber plate on the bottom.

            Day to day practical, that thing moved like it was a leg, rather than needing even slight wrist movement to move it– rare event practical, *I* sure wouldn’t want to be ducking it!

        2. A local feed and seed store carries them as they’re popular for handling livestock. They even had a shepherd’s crook. That’s where I got the eye-hoe handle that I use as a walking stick.

    2. My son used to like to walk around the neighborhood with my hand and a half sword. He specifically stopped and asked a cop once if what he was doing was okay. Cop told him he was fine.

      But this is Arizona.

        1. Nice!
          Number 3 Son is a smith, and makes knives; hasn’t tried a sword yet, but he is a-hankerin’ to.

  29. Having done it once or twice in NYC in full dress blues, when you’re carrying a sword, doesn’t matter how crowded it is, there’s no problem walking through crowds. No one bumps up against you, and openings appear in front of you.

  30. O.K., I admit that William Faukner’s sentences might go on a bit too long for anyone, but they do have a texture and depth which is sadly lacking in today’s writing.

    I always likened reading Yoknapatawpha tales to either plowing or mudding the Mississippi, but I could never decide which.

  31. Yes. I need to get the yard ape to a shooting range. We lost our local gun safety / beginning shooter course a few years ago, and I’ve been procrastinating. One more thing to add to the “list” of things we’ll be home-schooling.

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