The Other Side Gets A Vote

613 thoughts on “The Other Side Gets A Vote”

1. I still remember the cognitive dissonance of having people complain about Palin’s lack of experience, while praising Obama.

   1. My dissonance organ was permanently disabled watching the NOW Gang (National Organization of Women) defend Bubba Clinton against Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. Seeing those noble, principled feminists whore themselves and their honor for a cheap punk like that finished me off.

      These days I assume there is no moral structure to the Left at all. Just slime, all the way down. The only thing about Obama that surprised me is how lame he turned out to be. I was expecting much worse.

      1. Many people were uncomfortable when I pointed out that the statutes that allowed the investigators to look into President Bill Clinton’s past behavior with women had been signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

         1. You mean they accepted that fact instead of screeched you down? I’m mildly surprised.

            1. No, some sputtered a bit, but they didn’t know what to say. They have had decades since to learn not to let that stop them. 😉

      2. That was the beginning of the end for me too, in retrospect. The whole affair planted a seed of doubt that eventually grew into a towering tree.

      3. It’s always better to look for consistency than to look for hypocrisy. All humans are hypocrites; only monsters are consistently monstrous.

         Clinton was entirely consistent. He was a supporter of abortion, which made the NOW love him. He supported it because he regularly used it. Ditto most other pro-choice males, all of them sexually obsessed.

   2. Just watch the dissonance when Biden gets nominated and we’re told he’s the smartest, most feminist candidate ever.

   3. It really is weird when the biggest complaint about one ticket’s second stringer is that she may be slightly less qualified than the other ticket’s top guy (not my assessment, I frankly thought she’d be a way better POTUS than Obama, but that was a line of attack against her for a while).

   4. And Palin was only running for Vice President, not President as Obama was.

      1. Strictly speaking, you shouldn’t take that approach since the Vice President could become President at any moment, in theory. But, yeah, I do it too. Thus, Teddy Roosevelt being “kicked upstairs” to get him out of the way and winding up President.

         1. She had executive experience, too, being a state governor.

            1. She also had administrative experience.

         2. Mark Hanna’s quote regarding that is great: “You fools! That madman is only one heartbeat away from the Presidency!”

            1. I sometimes wonder whether some people voted the McKinley/TR ticket for the same reason I voted the McCain/Palin ticket – because the better President was just one heartbeat away.

               1. Yep.
                  I’ve said this before. I worked phones for Palin. (No, not McCain) and in the PHONE ROOM OF WHAT WAS OSTENSIBLY HIS CAMPAIGN our war cry was “Drag his skanky ass over the finish line. Drag, drag, drag. Do it for Sarah!”

                  1. Yep.

                  2. I’ve felt for some time that Ms. Palin’s primary qualification was the degree of rabid dementia she brought out in the Left.

                     1. That was a big qualification, yes; however, I’d have loved to see the Senate with her as its president — I suspect she’d have been an active one, as needed.

                  3. My father voted for Wallace because Curtis Lemay. He figured SOMEBODY would shoot Wallace and then there would be Curtis Lemay.
                     My father was Air Force and had worked on SAC bases.

                  4. I still have the bumper sticker in my truck back window:”Don’t blame me, I voted for Palin (and what’s his name)!”

            2. Hanna and Roosevelt both did they part to get McKinley elected. TR hit 24 of the 45 states in a blizzard of campaigning that took him on a twenty-one thousand mile tour of the nation by rail.

   5. Heh… the first snarky comment I heard about Palin’s experience after being added to the ticket was from Obama’s campaign staff.

      Never mind that if you compared the two, Obama AT BEST came out equivalent to Palin… except Palin was executive branch while Obama was legislative, so even there the tie goes to Palin.

      1. Let’s not forget that the press was mostly favorable to Palin as long as she was a pain in the side of the Alaskan Republican Party establishment.

         They didn’t turn on her until she was an obstacle to the Anointed One.

   6. Let’s be honest. They hated Palin because she was attractive, motherly, and not from an Ivy League snob school.

      1. They hated Palin because she was a strong, independent woman who didn’t owe them a single damn thing.

         1. And because she’d destroyed the corrupt Republican establishment in Alaska, which came right back in the moment her political career ended.

            1. You would think that the corrupt take-down of Senator Ted Stevens by the DOJ would have ended several careers.

               Not because they did it, of course, but because they got caught doing it.

            2. I was disappointed when she resigned; then I read part of her book and found out that in Alaska government officials have to pay for their defense when they are accused of corruption. Then she (and her friends) got dog-piled so she resigned to keep her friends from going bankrupt.

         2. They hated Palin because there was a very real chance she might win.

      2. Having graduated from University of Idaho, I can say that the English department was profoundly disturbed by her. She’s ours! But she’s one of them! Augh! I took several classes in the English department during that campaign and, as an older non-trad, asked and got answers. Very mixed feelings.

      3. Motherly? She has five children! And she had the audacity to choose life for Trig even though she was aware that he would have Down syndrome.

         Sarah Palin also had worked at hard, built a good life with her husband. She worked. She had a family. She was athletic.

         Once upon a time that would have been the script of the American dream — anyone can be Vice-President. She should have been the poster child for a liberated woman, but as she not only didn’t ascribe to their solutions, she argued against them, they could not have her.

         1. Plus. Palin supported & defended (well okay told the world this is a FAMILY issue, butt out) her unwed daughter’s decision to have, keep, NOT abort, her child, without public censor from either parent, siblings, or extended family. Latter having gotten the message it is HER (daughters) decision, butt out. Funny, Palin was vilified for this, but I thought that was THE point of women’s lib; it was the daughter’s choice, & everyone else’s to (at minimum) support the decision made. FWIW. Did baby daddy have a say on whether the child was born? Don’t know. The process was kept private. That was the point.

            1. IIRC, he pretty much jetted out, coinciding with about when the psychos would’ve been attacking him for a connection with the Palins, then ended up coming back at least once. (In my family, it would’ve been about the time that relatives got word from the news that he knocked up a girl and walked.)

               Amazing, isn’t it, how they can’t seem to get around to seeing other people as humans, huh? Even the kids who aren’t part of a dehumanized group– they’re useful to attack a parent, so heave-ho to recognizing that kids can be idiots.

               1. “he pretty much jetted out”

                  Yes, which lost him the say, regardless. My point is Palin (appearance at minimum, in actuality didn’t care) was explicitly taking the feminists line “it’s the daughter’s choice, butt the hell out”, & was vilified for it by the feminists. Never been in favor of feminism in all its glory. I’m female & both careers were non-traditional. About the only girly thing I did as a youngster was (okay still am) horse nuts/crazy. Just not crazy enough to have one I can’t afford or take care of.

         2. And NEVER forget she liked GUNS. That alone insured that they hated her.

            I loved her commercial where the farmer was beheading turkeys in the background.

   7. The argument I saw was that Biden would help overcome Obama’s inexperience.

      Of course, the same people claiming that then completely ignored the fact that the Republican ticket had that same experience at the top of the ticket (i.e. McCain) instead of at the bottom.

2. My blog post on the subject of actual totalitarians vs. pretend ones here:
   http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.ca/2018/04/actual-fascism-vs-pretend-kind.html

   Trigger warning: post contains a link to Hugo-nominated cameltoe flopatron site, don’t click it if you don’t want to get any on ya. The executive precis: Fake fascists: Jordan Peterson, Tony Robbins and Ayn Rand. (Really. I wouldn’t lie.) Real fascist: Richard Pan the stupid SOB in California House who proposed a law requiring all blogs and Farcebook posts be fact checked by a government censor.

   I hesitate to mention the Assterisk Awards, because as far as I’m concerned its over with that. But I have to, because SF/F is an important part of our North American culture. We literally live in the SF Future imagined by those crazy pulp dudes in the 1930s and ’40s. Letting the SJWs continue to have everything their own war will make George Orwell the architect of our new future. They’re using his work as a fucking manual, page by actual page. If you want to see a real, live Five Minute Hate just turn on CNN for five minutes.

   The way forward is to be the alternative. Write more and better than the Lefties. It won’t be hard, they have no ideas newer than 1890. Sell your books. Become wealthy. Succeed, and beat the enemies of life at the same time.

   Win the Benjamin Award.

   1. Given how clearly Mr. Pan’s little idea is against the first amendment, I’d like to think that he’d have all 9 Supreme Court justices literally rolling on the floor laughing before they got around to tossing it out. However, I worry that we’ve got too many judges who are of the opinion, “The Constitution is what I say it is.” If that bill passes, free speech in California could easily depend on what side of the bed Anthony Kennedy woke up on that day.

      1. Not just California. Would be bill #2 on speaker Pelousi desk come next January.

      2. I wouldn’t. A supreme court justice who laughs at that does not understand the threat environment. I would prefer them to overturn it and outlaw him (yes, I mean anyone can shoot him with no legal consequences outlawry).

         1. You might even get Sotomayor to sign into that.

            1. She’s an idiot, but even she should realize just how batshit the idea is.

               1. Only a near-complete idiot. Sotomayor was smart enough to opine that my mother had an honest face.

               2. She has surprised me before with aligning a ruling with Scalia et al (forget what ruling it was) and iirc Kennedy voted against them. (I think it was First Amendment related but might have been Second . . . more I think on it I think Second)

   2. That CA assemblyman does not surprise me. Living in CA is what taught me i was NOT a liberal nor a progressive and didn’t want anything to do with them. CA doesn’t care for *any* individual rights, at least not for the enumerated ones.

      1. One thing that continues to surprise me (and as a resident of the Glorious Bear Republic, this takes a lot) is that these bozos always propose their little totalitarian dream legislation with the absolute blithe unawareness that the shiny new government censor job they are creating and staffing with their cousin could without much effort be staffed in the future by a dude or dudette or whatever of a political persuasion other than their own – that the levers of absolute power they want to set up could “fall into the wrong hands”.

         The Founders actually had this figured out, thus the whole separation of powers and built-in tensions and constraints in the Constitution.

         But not in the minds of these morons.

         1. “…the levers of absolute power they want to set up could “fall into the wrong hands”.”

            Right? I always ask Lefties “what are you going to do if the Church Lady gets elected?” What are they going to do if suddenly the Ministry of Silly Walks is run by a Conservative, who fires every single Lefty in the place and makes the goose step the only acceptable walk?

            We don’t have to wonder though. We’re watching it. Trump IS the “wrong hands” and they are freaking the hell out. My favorite thing so far is Trump ending the ever-increasing gas mileage regulation from the EPA. That is AWESOME!

            1. Except it means the government actively fights against the political leadership. We are run by the mandarins of the bureaucracy and a majority (including the armed enforcement Corp euphemized as law enforcement) would have no issue executing enemies of the state just as the Soviets did in the gulags. And patently illegal actions will be ignored at the most benign, supported at most likely.

            2. This, right here, is the absolute CORE of leftism. They are sure — SURE — that government will always be run by The Right People (by which they mean, the Left People), by the Best and Brightest, by the Ivy League, by people who really LIKE kale. That any momentary aberrations from that natural state will be short and meaningless, merely pro forma pauses on the road to the New Soviet Man.

               And let’s face it, they have much data on their side. You’re seeing it now. If they win an election, they turn the ratchet. If they lose an election, the rachet does not reverse — and they promptly start taking steps to make sure THAT won’t happen again (at least not the same way). The Permanent Mandarins are always in favor of bigger government so they act to keep the ratchet locked.

               Of course, this lasts until “The Road to Serfdom” reaches “Let’s get a strong man who can make a plan work!”, at which point he finds all those levers of centralized power and propaganda very convenient. We haven’t reached that point yet — but I think we’re frighteningly close. If the flyover states finally get someone in who they think (rightly or wrongly) is on their side, and he gets pushed out of office, they’re going to conclude (arguably correctly), that voting can’t make anything better. That does NOT mean they all move to the cities, buy a Prius, and attend encounter groups to express their shame at being born a white male. That means they start looking for means *other than voting* to move the needle.

         2. yeah, my idea for a Proposition in CA still stands.

         3. California’s so overwhelmingly left-wing right now that they firmly believe it will never change (or if it does, they’ll be long gone). Of course, given the number on the right who continue to mock, belittle, and question the sanity of the conservatives who still hang on here in California…

            1. yeahhh… i see the nice bait you laid, and i aint taking it. I’m just glad to be out.

            2. Just like the rats faced with the rising water level below decks, it’s all about the timing of when to jump ship.

               1. Note as a general rule the best place for a rat to jump ship is in the last port before the leaking ship sinks, but as in any predictive problem, that one can be tricky – as Berra taught, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

   3. “…Jordan Peterson and the wider phenomenon of self-improvement as gateway to fascism.”

      My brain hurts. So, what about all those kids going to Higher Indoct– er, I mean college? are they getting improved into fascists too??

      Oh, wait, SELF-improved. Unsanctioned improvement. Now I understand!

      1. It’s only because he’s not pointing people in the direction of socialism. If he were, no criticism of the man would be legitimate.

3. What we’ve got to do is refuse to go along to get along. When they say stupid, false, bigoted things, call them on those things, every time. When they start screaming at you for being right in public, don’t let them shout you down. If they start physical altercations, defend yourself and others, but always (always!) file charges against them for assault, and make sure those charges are made public. Do not go quiet into that good night…make every effort of theirs to shut you up hurt them as much as you possibly can. And be an example for others not on the left that knuckling under to the totalitarians is neither a requirement nor even a good tactic. Show those others that they’re not alone in recognizing that the leftists are wrong, and that there are others willing and able to do their best to stop the left from destroying our country and our society.

   1. Yep.

   2. Do not go gentle in that good night, Rage, Rage against the dying of the Right!

      1. Smile.

         1. Ditto.

   3. I aim to misbehave. At least according to progressive standards of behavior for common people.

   4. Look at those girls who had a local politician screaming obscenities and shaking her fist like a b-rate movie villain– and they actually filed a complaint, and the screamer has been charged.

      Guess what? Screaming obscenities at teenagers because you don’t like their shirt is illegal. A very minor sort of illegal, but there are actually some codified “don’t be a dick” laws.

      1. Seems to me that councilperson is creating a hostile environment for young women under the color of authority. There must be a civil rights complaint cause of action there somewhere.

         1. I think it’s more effective to ignore her political position and charge her like any other human being– that way it’ll work on activists, too.

            they do rather depend on laws not being enforced on them….

            1. Ah, but a civil rights investigation or enforcement action would scare the rest of the local government.

               And nothing says “socially ostracized” like “all the power brokers in the community hate your guts for bringing this crap down on them”.

               1. Want to know how to prevent local authorities from tramping around your property without a warrant? post this on your door, or your No Trespassing sign:

                  U.S. Code Title 18, Section 241-242.

                  U.S. Marshalls take a dim view of violations.

                  1. I’m cynical about the rule of law being enforced, given the violation of it being given a pass if you’re ‘part of the correct groups.’

                     I know this is the UK, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we got to this point. I hope we don’t, but …

               2. Scared power-centers tend to try to smack what scares them– that would be you, since the alternative would be smacking their power base. (Plus, they’ve already got defenses because that’s what the left likes to do.)

                  Make their powerbase a liability, by NOT letting them get away with crimes? And if the local gov’t covers up for individuals, you’ve got some lovely outrage? Much better.

                  1. These are not mutually exclusive – embrace the healing power of “And”.

                     1. Goodness, yes, but running after both rabbits can cause issues– and she wasn’t acting in an official capacity, so the easy sell is treating her like a howling maniac protester.

                        Go after the elect official who is also a teacher and went off on a kid for wearing a USMC shirt in class with the abuse of power one.

         2. That requires that unpersons actually have civil rights.

         3. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/241

   5. Also, decide what you can afford to lose. It might be your reputation, job, business, home, or even your kids. But standing up gives you a fighting chance to save them. Kowtowing ensures that sooner or later, you’ll lose.

      1. Standing up actually improved things for Dr. Peterson. He had a base to build on, but at least he gives a great example.

   6. It’s pricey, but you’re right.

4. This was good to read. You make your point well.

   I suppose I want to know the way forward. But that makes me a follower.

   I shall ponder this.

   1. Go write something good, and sell it.

      Find good writing, and buy it.

      This is The Way.

      1. Stand up when you see something wrong. Read Doug’s comment underneath. Make their cheap totalitarianism expensive.
         If they come for the internet (they’re trying to) create alternate peer to peer networks. DO NOT SHUT UP. DO NOT SIT DOWN. Do not go along to get along.
         Aim to misbehave.

         1. If Zuckerbook goes full-Stalin, exit Zuckerbook and go back to blogs. If blogs get censored-by-law, go back to chat. There are more ways around these morons than they realize – and the more they tighten their grip, the more systems will slip through their fingers.

            1. Go to MeWe (https://mewe.com). Many of us are already there…

               1. I am on MeWe too, as of this morning, and I’ve never really walked away from blogging, either. Zuckertwerp can go full-Stalin as much as he likes – but we do not have to play in his garden.

                  1. I’m in it, but its algorithm sucks and I rarely visit.

                     1. I have issues with the interface. Not sure why, but it is very counterintuitive for me.

                        1. For me too.

                           1. Is anyone still on LiveJournal? Except me.

                           2. I’ve got an account, but it’s not the most secure thing….

                        2. [plaintively] Could someone with the right skilz please clone the late and much-missed Votable? That’s the first and only intuitive FB-type interface I’ve seen. Easy, efficient, fast, browser-agnostic, and conducive to both original posts and discussion.

                     2. I’ve been mentioning this to a few people in other contexts. I’m not a software type any more, or I’d do it myself. It would take very little coding (might be just stringing together bits already done), to create a sort of decentralized, threaded blog. Every contributor and every comment is the content belonging to the poster, and you can visit their web site to see the threads of what they have said. When someone posts (as I am doing now), instead of adding content to someone else’s site, you’re adding content to YOUR site, and a hyperlink that shows up on the other person’s site. So you own all your own content. You can “follow” people or “unfollow” them and be notified (or not) or see (or not) their content, by your own choice. Does all the things Facebook did, or the old USENET groups, or one of the more actively curated blogs, but it’s decentralized and everyone who contributes is “building their own brand” of content that they archive, they own, they curate (if they wish). Easy to do and routes around the problem.

                        Free Facebook-killing idea to good home.

                        1. I wish I knew how to do it. I haven’t programed since 1981 though.

                           1. Mathematically certain that we’re no more than two or three hops from Just The Right Person for that…..

                           2. Charlie Martin. Already pinged him privately. Heck, Dan could do it, but his time is about like mine.

                           3. Haven’t programmed in 2+ years. Never done any web programming. Last job, the tools used were waaaay out of date, they were outdated when I started & did not improve in the 12 years I was there. Now? Nope. After 35 years, I’m done.

                        2. This is part of what I have been advocating lately: distributed internet.

                           One of the problems with FarceBook is that it’s ALL on one provider. The same with Twitter and all the others. If you want to interact with the twits you have to be on Twitter. If you want to interact on FB, you have to (usually) be logged in to FB.

                           The internet was based on distribution of knowledge. It was specifically built to NOT be a single point of failure, but instead a network of nodes.

                           If someone can build a non-twit Twitter that lets you see Twitter and Twitter to see you, then we have the paradigm shift to take their power away. Especially if it’s built in a way that you can run a million of them in different places, by different people, all with their own way of thinking. You do it your way, and let them do it their way, and Liberty reigns.

                           1. Everyone in my former fan community is now on Tumblr.

                           2. Dammit, Em – now I have Boy George in the back of my head, singing “I’ll Tumblr for ya, I’ll Tumblr for ya!”

                              And we all know the only cure is to transmit the pun to others.
                              ‘

                  2. Finally dusted off my account that I set up almost two years ago. Forget why I set it up in the first place.

                  3. I set up a mewe account and invited others. Until it reaches a critical mass- I’ll stay on Facebook. My family and far flung freinds before Facebook on all on FAcebook…

                     1. Same here. Set up, learning my way around, but family is on facebook. I’m pondering just doing the feel good stuff, family and kittehs, on FB and the politicial posts on mewe. I’m inviting friends and posting to page and groups. Meanwhile we’ll see how it goes.

                     2. Signed up for MeWe today too. Like Facebook, just the minimum profile, including lack of picture. But not all that chatty on Facebook, minimum posting (okay everyone knows dog died day after Christmas a year ago, & we got a new puppy), follow a lot of groups but if powers-that-be want to track me, enjoy a LOT of natural sights, cats, horses, etc. 🙂 I post a whole lot more here than there. 🙂 🙂

               2. Well, why not. Tho I have no idea what I’d use it for. Other than as a preemptive strike against identity squatters.

               3. It seems to be good but I’m worried about the fact that it’s in California.

                  1. You should be; anywhere cyberspace meets meatspace, Leftists can control it.

               4. Hmm. Reading their Terms of Service – they are almost identical to FakeBook. Think I’ll skip ’em.

            2. Censorship was so successful for the Soviets. Samizdat anybody. They could not stop the spread of info in the 80’s USSR. How does anybody think that they can stop it in 2018 USA.

               1. They are dreamers, schemers and useful idiots. Consider the fact that the track record of the social system they aspire to create is miserable. They think that only it is done right there will a be a world utopia … or they are manipulative bastards who see the possibility to do very well by themselves selling the dream of a world utopia.

            3. I’m seeing alternatives. Infogalactic was based on Wikipedia (the database may be picked up and reused), with the explicit rule to keep SJW hands off the levers. It’s not always up to date, and for fluff (movies, TV shows) and current events, it might not be as good, but it’s in my browser as one of the defaults.

               YouTube is a challenge; I’ve read articles that say it’s only viable with huge subsidies from Google, so other approaches will have to find other ways to do it. I haven’t had luck with BitChute (video doesn’t play, but a fair number of YT videos don’t play well with my browser on a Linux box). OTOH, I seldom watch videos, so it’s no big loss.

               Not sure what can replace FaceBook, but after the DC hearings, Zuckerberg might possibly be more radioactive than he expected. Here’s hoping…

               1. My major concern with infogalactic is that it was created by the Volksdeutsch Expatriate. Haven’t used it enough to be sure of anything.

                  1. Yep. And shows his fingerprints.

                     1. Unfortunate – the concept is interesting, but in the end, there is no system that can resist its users.

                  2. Including his mierdas touch. Seriously. Who, wanting to make something universal calls it a sfnal name? (Rolls eyes.)

         2. Create alternate everything. Networks, movies, music, new reportage, libraries, …. everything that presently is or is trending toward left-domination. Yes, that’s divisive – but it preserves two sides to the argument, so that truth may be discovered.

            1. Yep.

            2. They will brook no competition, no alternatives. They are like the playground bully wanting a toy to deprive others of it. Any alternative we build they will tantrum over and demand control or its destruction. Look at their reactions to Fox News.

         3. “Aim to misbehave.”
            Hit, or hit not.
            There is no aim.

      2. That’s been where my thinking has been.

   2. There’s nothing wrong with being a “follower.” It’s stupid to expect everyone to invent the wheel when they’re building a cart.

      The problem is in being a mindless follower. Look at Samwise when Frodo was ready to lay down and die– he didn’t go for it, because he knew what they’d been doing was good, so he got stuff back on track.

      Being able to come up with ideas frequently fails to include being able to recognize stuff that can be improved- that is when a good follower is invaluable.

      1. Perfect analogy. Support roles are necessary.

         1. There was a great video running around (can’t find it right now), but the social dynamics of how ideas spread have a CRITICAL role for “first followers”. A guy dancing in the park alone is a curiosity. When someone joins in, other people start feeling left out — soon everyone is dancing.

            1. Basis of “Preference Cascade”. A few agree, nobody knows or cares; beyond some threshold, suddenly it’s recognized and many more begin to climb onto the bandwagon.
               Years ago, I was told that for missions in a foreign culture, the threshold was around 20% of the group populace – after which the new understanding and belief tends to become self-sustaining. Whether it cascades to a majority of the group depends on individual risk/benefit of changing, including social costs.

            2. 1. yep. exactly what a preference cascade looks like! He can do it, I could do it, we’ll all do it.

5. Inspirational!

   1. c4c

6. They had it all.  Make the right noises, support the right causes, and you’ll be on top.

   Just a bit of a qualifier here:  You need to have something more to you than these qualifications to make it to the top, but if you didn’t have these there was little chance you would make it, and even less chance that you would be allowed to stay there.

   Now that something more didn’t have to be a major accomplishment on one’s part. It could be as simple as genetics having blessed you with an attractive appearance on camera and a relatively pleasant speaking voice.

   1. yeah, even with her parentage Chelsea Clinton could not cut it, due to well… that poor girl. Also, she’s about as smart as a cardboard cutout.

      1. Back in the old days that wasn’t necessarily a drawback. And I note that despite the occasional flashes of sunlight in the swamp, the various agencies who are supposed to be concerned are pointedly ignoring all the Clinton Foundation funds that somehow evaporated while she was nominally managing them…

         “Nothing to see here, move along…”

         1. She wasn’t supposed to improve the financials; she was supposed to remove evidence.
            After which, like her Mummy, she would put her hands to her cheeks, and say (with a woeful whine), “Why do you HATE successful women?”

      2. I will give this to Chelsea Clinton — she has clearly stated that Barron Trump should be off limits. 

         I expect being a girl growing up in the White House with her parents, for all the privileges it might bring, was not easy.

         1. That it had to be said at all, mind you…

         2. I’ve had the impression that given a better family environment, Chelsea might be a decent person; sometimes she at least tries. Which is more than could be said for her parents.

            1. Yeah, when you look at who she has always had to be around, it is amazing she isn’t even worse than she is.

            2. Even Hillary (probably) tried to be a decent person sometimes, at least when she was young. It takes years to become so numb to other people…

               1. I don’t know. I’ve seen her elementary school picture. The eyes are dead. Mine were psychotic at that age, but hers are dead.

               2. Considering she got fired for cause from the investigation team for Watergate, she’s had a lot of practice being on the wrong side of decent.

         3. I always said the same thing about the Obama girls. At that age, they were guarandamnteed to have stupid ideas, to do stupid things.

            I did blame their parents for not saying “no” and not applying consequences when their age-related stupidity raised its head.

            The elder is now technically adult – over 18 – so it is fair game to nail her on her own account. The other is still a minor, and therefore it is on Barack and Michelle. (Such is the law, anyway. Although they should both at least have been doing less stupid things at least by his second term.)

      3. It used to be the crack against George W. Bush was that he was born on third base and thought that he had hit a triple. Whether you want to accept the truth of that or not, he at least KNEW he was in an advanced position.

         My impression of Chelsea Clinton is that she’s spent her whole life on third base and thinks that she’s still in the on-deck circle.

         1. The truth of the matter is that modern day America is third base for everyone. We don’t people run homeless shelters without amenities that royalty did without three centuries ago.

      4. Oh boy, the ultra feminazi’s will want to burn me at the stake for saying this. For many women, sometimes their greatest contribution to society would be to just be stay at home moms. As for many men, just picking up trash on the sides of the road is our highest level of competence. Dr. Pournelle was a big one about not everyone should go to college. We still need people with vocational-technical skills; as well as those folks who just do grunt work that isn’t machine-transitionable.

         1. It could be argued that there is no more important role than that of caring for and preparing the next generation.

            Rant mode: Why do you think the left want wants women in the work place and children in day care and public schools? They have told us that they are not only freeing women of the burden of the task, but that they have scientifically trained qualified experts to do the job. They have told us that women should become ‘contributing members’ of society by entering the work force. What were they when they raised their children? SIGH!

            1. And they complain that as the workforce increased (both from this and from the global renters policy that is US immigration enforcement and in some aspects overall policy) wages adjusted to what was necessary for two earner households. But it’s all the fault of evil corporations (unless you donate to my foundation).

               1. I think some of the push lies in the fact that the government is collecting taxes from both members of a two income household. If you raise the base wages there will be more tax revenue, and, until they realize that their money has less buying power, the workers will be happy with you. (So repeat the cycle.)

                  And these are often the same people who also argue for a fixed pie perspective of economics. The lack of knowledge or logic displayed is amazing.

                  1. An increase in the size of the workforce depresses wages. The majority of most second incomes is sucked away by taxes and increased costs for running of the household: child care, loss of time for cost amelioration activities (comparison shopping, e.g.) and similar “labor saving” activities. Ample studies show a “preference” for less work intensive meals, for example, in a two-income household.

                  2. Oh I understand the reason. From govt it’s money, from unions it’s wages and from the gallery it’s a mix of jealousy, anger and ignorance.

                     Just drives me up a wall

               2. I have heard them complain that if women enter a job in force, the wages go down. Like an increase in supply would do anything else.

         2. Feminists, hell, a decent number of stay-at-homes would express their displeasure that you seem to think it’s the skill-equivalent of picking up trash on the side of the road.

            Part of why a lot of women don’t do it is that it is trained work, and most people male or female have not got that training. It also works best for non-super-heroes if there’s a support network– and that has been largely destroyed.

            Thanks to the internet, you can get training on how to do a lot of the stuff….oh, hell, I just thought of another reason they might be going for trying to hold companies responsible for what users submit, liability for all those “how to wire a 220 outlet” type videos would destroy the free DIY videos.

            1. Since we moved to this house, I’ve done electrical work, plumbing, emergency plumbing, low grade carpentry, replaced half the @#@# hardware in the house (did they haunt the goodwill rejection bin for this stuff?!?!), brought the fuse box up to code, and have the prep-work down for another dozen or so home improvement things like fixing the tile they “helpfully” left up and replacing more of the water fixtures– plus the usual mending (which most folks aren’t taught), car upkeep, tax paperwork, dietary work and janitorial work of Kids(tm).

               A lot of stuff I didn’t know how to do, but I knew how to find out, and I know hwen to go “I really can’t do this.” (So far).
               Most folks don’t have that.

               1. It’s so much easier now with youtube.

                  1. I still have several books, but oh MAN do I remember mom frantically going through the pile to find the thing that did that think, you know, it looks like this– and it was a two minute job once she CHECKED the thing, but a half-hour to FIND the information.

               2. Fuse box? When house shopping here if I walked into a basement and saw fuses instead of circuit breakers I waked right back out. I can do the wiring, I don’t want to do the wiring.

                  1. Thankfully, ours was that we’re required to have all the circuits accurately labeled.

                     They almost never check that….but seriously, I don’t even know where the “jaccuzi” could have FIT, and half of it’s in bad penmanship spanish.
                     Or was.

            2. It is true that some of the work involved in raising children does not engage the mind much and is repetitive.  So is a lot of the work that is done outside the home. But which, in the end, is really more important to the world, selling another designer coffee or raising a child to be decent human being?

            3. The argument is more that it’s a job now looked down upon for ‘wasting potential”. You see the same thing when credentialed engineers scoff at the opinions of the mechanic that do the work. You can say it’s just wrench turning but a percentage know exactly what they need for a job and can prevent you from getting into the uninstallable hole. Of course there is a difference in experience and value between your brand new kid and the guy that gets overnighted around the world at $400/hr travel time.

               1. ou can say it’s just wrench turning but a percentage know exactly what they need for a job and can prevent you from getting into the uninstallable hole.

                  “You charged HOW MUCH?! But you just turned one bolt!”
                  “Fine, here’s my invoice:
                  Turned bolt three times: $2.50.
                  Knew which bolt to turn: 19,997.50.”

                  1. My joke had a plumber knowing which pipe to hit.

                     1. The version I have heard has a woman going to a high end hatter and asking that he create her an Easter bonnet.

                        After taking the time to give a considered look at her from various angles and asking a few questions the hatter takes a length of ribbon. He folds and ties it and with a flourish places the creation on her head. The woman is enchanted, it is perfect in every way. She asks the price.

                        ‘Oh, ma’am, for you it is just fifty dollars.’

                        ‘Fifty dollars! But it is just a ribbon and a few minuets work!’

                        The hatter untied the ribbon and folded it neatly. He then offered it to the woman saying, ‘You may have the ribbon for five dollars, knowing what to do with it accounts for the rest.’

               2. Incidentally, picking up trash on the side of the road is actually that simple. Boring, and hot, and not EASY, but you can literally turn five years on the task and the only “training” is that they’re not allowed to quit.

                  If it was manual labor in general pointed at? Oh, yeah, that’s analagous: everybody looks down on the plumber until they’ve got a broken pipe. (Thank God my mom’s first question with any water source is “how do I turn it off,” and that Dad taught me enough of the right words to find a pressure cap.)

                  1. Dad taught me enough of the right words to find a pressure cap
                     How many of those only had four letters?

                     1. *laughs* Nah, dad didn’t talk like that. I was in my 30s before I heard him curse, and it was VERY well deserved.

                        It’s just amazing how utterly unhelpful it is to walk up to the hardware guy and say “I’m looking for a bronze thingie for stopping water out of a pipe, that doesn’t twist on, it’s got six sides just like the ones you do twist and a thingie on the inside to seal the pipe, and it goes on a 1/2 inch copper pipe that has been cut cleanly.”

                        1. Take a picture. Show hardware person. Most “get” it.

               3. The new boilers in our facility are nearing acceptance by the powers that be. Several times during the construction process I walked through the new building and made notes and talked the next day to the contracting engineer. After the first email I sent when he didn’t listen to me because “That’s the way it shows in the drawings” he learned it was less painful to listen to me. I’m just a poor innocent non-degreed boiler operator. Who’s been doing it for 44 years, 21 in the Navy.

                  Not really non-degreed, but political science doesn’t count when doing engineering stuff.

               4. Yeah. I’m an engineer – and from the start, I wanted to be able to DO anything the technician could do, so I’d actually be able to understand what his experience was trying to tell me, and tell him what I thought was needed in terms that would be clear. NOT because I’ve ever had the arrogance to believe I could do his job as well or quickly as he!

                  1. I am very glad I’ve got shop time under me. It gets exasperating when dealing with bureaucracy and it’s stupidity but you can picture the cutting paths and it helps prevent issues.

                     And the technician can tell you multiple things. One is how to simplify a job or get outside the box. The other is just what level of stupid you are dealing with and what you must head off.

                     1. Yeah, shop time (or time spent running wires and connecting fixtures) is a really good idea for an engineer.`
                        I can do the electrics for the pumphouse solar system, but the footings for the ground mount are beyond my tools. ‘Sides, a PE or architect has to do the official plans, so it’s being farmed out. I was able to give a preliminary design from the hardware manufacturer, so it’s not too painful to write that checl.

                     2. I am a programmer. But I am also a “software engineer”. I have worked with more brilliant software engineers & coders, especially those that work a the OS or library level, but to a person they couldn’t get the application out the door into clients hands. They can’t let go of “that’s not the correct way to do it”. Having been trained & worked both sides, usually at the same time, plus having to fix my own mistakes (much easier than other engineering disciplines 🙂 ), & work directly with clients, gave me a huge advantage.

                        1. Out of curiosity: What questions would you ask Zuckerberg? I found it frustrating to watch the little shitweasel give non-answers and doubly frustrating to watch people who weren’t really prepared (perhaps deliberately) to ask any really hard questions, and none on a technical level, data privacy level, or security level, never mind the political inconsistency and clearly biased standards.

                           I mean sure, it’s a dog and pony show, but as Larry Correia has said before, this is a spectator sport.

                           (the “I got a magazine…” one… made me scream in pure annoyance. ARGH HOW ARE THEY SO OUT OF TOUCH THESE ARE NOT THE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE QUESTIONING HIM!)

                           1. I liked Senator Ben Sasse’s asking him to “define hate speech/”

                           2. Yeah, and the bit about conservatives being censored.

                              I still think he was allowed to weasel too much and give too many nonanswers

                           3. What would I ask him? The Voight-Kampff Test questions, of course..

                           4. ARGH HOW ARE THEY SO OUT OF TOUCH THESE ARE NOT THE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE QUESTIONING HIM!

                              Yes, this one of the main idiocies I see in things like this. They need to be hiring professionals sympathetic to their politics to do the questioning. There’s no shame in doing this, no one can be knowledgeable about everything.

                           5. Exactly!

                           6. Seriously, you are asking why politicians don’t pass up face-time on camera?

                              It isn’t simply that these sessions, by their structure of limited interval questioning, are incapable of maintaining the type f pressure necessary for getting at the truth. It is also that, as you note, they would be better served by appointing an interrogatory team of experienced pit bulls prosecutors to develop the questioning.

                           7. No excuse. Not that hard to have an expert behind the “face”, discussing what line the questioning should take next.
                              Just have to have pols who are disciplined about keeping their microphones shut off until they need to speak for the record… which, snark aside, MOST of them could do.

                           8. I remember watching Senate hearings back in the day when Senator Kennedy got to sit in judgement over Clarence Thomas. The senator from Chappaquiddick would have a very thick, very large, briefing book* in front of him from which he’d read his questions. Either they were typed in very large font or were lavishly illustrated because there wouldn’t be more than ten words syllables between turning the page.

                              Nowadays, of course, they can use an iPad and get their questions hand-fed in real time and still manage to come off as Granpa Simpson.

                              * I swan, those briefing books looked like foto-albums!

                           9. All that and a Skype headset, too, if they need to discuss the question with their expert(s) before asking it of the witness. Like I said, no excuse for coming across uninformed AND stupid when doing political theatre.

                           10. Yeah. There is no excuse.

                           11. Fortunately, in the US Senate we have an elite cadre of American culture, men and women who have risen to such heights of power through demonstrated mastery of complex issues.

                               
                               Or so their campaign managers assure us.

                           12. What little of what I watched of the hearing, pretty accurate. Could not believe how clueless the questioners’ were. Either they were treating him with kid gloves or they are idiots. Both?

            4. Hell, I learned on the job and sucked at it. It is only by the grace of G-d the boys are functional and decent human beings.
               Thank G-d for His boundless grace because I DID EVERYTHING WRONG and invented some wrong things to do.

               1. I’ve noticed that most people seem to parent better when they follow their instincts as honed by grandma, rather than any sort of ‘professional’ advice. The most screwed-up kids often come from parents who tried to be up on the latest child psych.

                  1. Even when the latest child psych advice is accurate – and the odds of that are low – it’s going to be *generally* accurate, not accurate for your kid. Instincts + parental advice are more likely to be accurate for *this specific* child.

               2. When we’re at cons together, people will compliment me on how helpful and competent No. 2 son is, and I can’t help but think it’s as much in spite of me as because of me.

               3. At the parent=teacher conferences my wife and I always wondered who these well behaved wonderful kids to have around were the teachers were talking about because we certainly didn’t have any at home…

            5. “… you seem to think it’s the skill-equivalent of picking up trash on the side of the road.”

               I strongly suggest you revisit Mike’s comment. He was not disparaging women nor stay-at-home moms, he was disparaging men That is what the phrase “As for many men” and the reference to “our” competence mean.

               1. I’M not the one disparaging house wives. That example was chosen because the progressive feminists disparage them. And yes, I made housekeeper-childrearer the equivalent of road cleanup crews. Having done both, I don’t have a problem with that. Road crews deal with stuff that would make a haz-mat team cringe.

      5. You take back that horrible thing you said about cardboard cutouts!

         1. I might have been a little unfair to bi-dimmensional-Americans

            1. Ugh. Does that mean there’s a new LGBTQETC to learn that has “2D” tacked on at the end?

               1. You mean you didn’t KNOW??!?

                  Re-education, stat! 🙂

   2. The Left tends to fall into the hubristic trap of thinking that words create reality. That enough ink spilled can make a mediocre media production into a beloved classic, or an abrasive harpy into a President.

      1. This took me forever to learn and believe. In fact I am not certain that I have internalized it yet. Does it mean that “The Marching Morons” would work? How can we set it up to try?

         1. No, it wouldn’t work, because YOUR words don’t create reality, you fascist scum, you. Only their pure words of enlightenment can create reality out of whole cloth.

            Or perhaps they can create realistic illusions out of whole shrooms…

7. A lot of it boils down to the Left relying on the fact that everybody who is not them, is generally too polite and mannerly to cause a ruckus. This has been true at least as long as I have been alive. Only very recently has the opposition decided that expectations of manners and politeness have been weaponized against contrary opinion — it is now impossible to disagree with a Leftist and not be accused of moral crimes, ranging from cold-hearted uncaring for the weak and innocent, straight up to being a Nazi jack-booter who has a Hitler moustache.

   The problem with calling everyone a name all the time, is that you teach people to stop caring if they are called names. That’s how and why Trump happened. Decent men and women looked at Hillary, and they looked at the outrageous orange candidate, and they said, “Well, at least he might turn out better than the serial liar, manipulator, and career oligarch.” And promptly pulled the lever for Trumpenstein.

   This will keep happening, too. Decent Americans will keep responding to, “Vote for what we want, or we will call you all a lot of bad names!” with the power of, “No.” Because they are learning that life is survivable — indeed, even more free than ever before — once you decide you don’t give a shit what the Left says about you anymore.

   1. I don’t have a Hitler mustache. I have hair removal wax!

      1. (insert the scene from Kung Fury where the guards are arguing about their moustaches.) 😀

      2. Well, you’re a Mormon male as well, so there’s that too.

      3. Heh. Grow my mustache and trim it like his, and people would think I was Uncle Adolf’s big nephew. Haven’t found any of his ancestors in my ancestor tree, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some possible common ones between 10 to 15 generations ago.

         1. Eh. Genealogy is a horrible way of finding out who your ancestors were. It only tells you who your ancestresses said your ancestors were. And would you trust women you never met?
            AFAWCT my husband has mostly Anglo/Irish with a sprinkling of German and French and a bit of Amerindian.
            But there are MANY common genetic traits in our families, some of them too weird to be “coincidence” and when we were young people ROUTINELY mistook us for siblings. (And some got vocal about our fooling them about being husband and wife.)
            I know I have English ancestors (family names) but um… a) just shortly before Dan’s family scarpered for the Americas. (They decamped shortly after the Mayflower landed. It might have been the second ship out) b) should not be the same ETHNIC group, if you know what I mean.
            My favorite explanation is that one of his ancestresses ah… enjoyed the swarthy-skinned peddler behind the kitchen door…

            1. “And would you trust women you never met?”

               I’m not sure I trust women I have met. How’s that Eagles song go?
               “Four that want to own me, two that want to stone me, one says she’s a friend of mine?” (That one I married.)

               1. Oh, take it easy…..

         2. When he was still based in NYC, Rush saw one of his ads defaced with a Hitler mustache. He laughed and said it made him look like Oliver Hardy.

      4. It’s still there. They can see it.

         In seriousness this is pretty much the only reason I haven’t shaved my head since I’m at the phase of ‘worse than bald’ in hair loss.

         1. Namely that don’t feel like dealing with skinhead garbage from people.

            1. Friend had the same dilemma. One day he finally had enough of maintaining the combover and clipped the remainder short (*not* shaved). Took ten years off him and gave him a new air of confidence without making him look like a skinhead.

               1. I already have it short for both nomex hood and so I don’t rip it all out at work. Hoping for a few more years til thinning is too bad.

                  1. went full shave for ease of maintenance after the person who cut my hair developed MS. Was told I looked younger than I was . . . until the mustache went gray.

                     1. I have an almost solid white goatee and silver throughout my hair, and people still underestimate my age by about five to ten years.

            2. Eh. I keep what I have left trimmed back. In the (unlikely) event I ever get into LARP, all I need is the costume. (I just about have the belly for a dissipative monk character, too – that does annoy me.)

   2. Exactly my point. When we internalize “I don’t give a sh*t what you call me, I’m going to make sure everyone knows just how wrong you are,” there’s little or nothing they can say or do that will stop you.

      1. And you can tell just how coddled and pampered they’ve been up until now, because even a little bit of push-back sends them into a froth-mouthed conniption fit. They are literally apoplectic that anyone is even allowed to think differently, or believe in a contrary way. The champions of tolerance and inclusion, are outraged that they might actually have to put their money where their virtue-signalling mouths have been.

         1. Left wing ideologues are maladusted narcissists and their anger goes from 0-60 in less than a second when challenged, so you really have to want an unpleasant experience when you try and correct them and you are still unlikely to change their mind.

            1. You always have to remember that you’re not trying to change their minds, which is impossible given that their dogmatic beliefs haven’t been arrived at through any logical means; you’re making sure that anyone listening to them realizes that the nonsense they’re spouting isn’t received wisdom but just another opinion among many.

               1. Yup. Larry Correia says this is a spectator sport, and I think he’s right. We will never change the minds of those who are convinced they have all the right answers. But we can show the undecided thinkers that it’s possible to reasonably and logically (and morally!) disagree with the Correct Thinking™, and that this disagreement is not just achievable, it’s vitally necessary to the health and future of the republic. Because if America truly becomes a zombie-ized supermajority of emoting feeliez — all raging their pink-haired, nose-ringed, pussy-hatted economic and social theories at the heavens — we’re going to spiral into the crapper permanently. The country will crack up. It might go from cold to hot, as Sarah warns. And then . . . well, hopefully we don’t get that bad. But maybe it does? Their side has certainly delighted in insurrectionist war rhetoric since Trumpenstein took office.

                  They have no clue whatsoever what it is they are egging for.

                  Again, don’t convince a mannerly man, that he no longer has anything to gain with being mannerly.

                  1. Part of the problem is their mythology, in which they always win the revolution, because arrow of history…

                     1. They think it points at them, forgetting it is aimed.
                        ***Thunk***

                        1. They have the arrow of history — we have the bow?

                           1. I told them to catch

                     2. They’re confusing the “”arrow of history” with

                        

                        1. While I suppose they must have been out there somewhere, I just realized that I had NOT seen a sign or meme pairing “I’M STUPID –>” and “I’M WITH H–>ER”. Or if so, I managed to somehow forget about it – that seems unlikely.

                           1. **WITH** stupid.

                              Ox slow, yes.

                     3. Yes. They forget the fate of Robespierre. And his fellows.

               2. I think in some social situations your advice is correct but in other situations right-wingers are best advised to keep their mouths shut or they are likely to experience Kafkaesque tribunal and get raked over coals because you said wrong pronoun.

                  1. See my first comment, up post.

                     When they say stupid, false, bigoted things, call them on those things, every time. When they start screaming at you for being right in public, don’t let them shout you down. If they start physical altercations, defend yourself and others, but always (always!) file charges against them for assault, and make sure those charges are made public. Do not go quiet into that good night…make every effort of theirs to shut you up hurt them as much as you possibly can.

                     1. Let’s get a preference cascade going.

               3. Oh, you can change their minds. Just not very quickly. Just keep washing away their foundations one grain of sand at a time. Keep calm, present facts. And every time they start getting emotional and loud, call them on it. “I can see this is a very emotional issue for you. You know that emotional people tend to stop thinking logically and rationally about things. Why don’t I just leave you these references for when you can calm down?”

                  1. Mr Houst I fear you will rarely (if ever) be able to change their mind with facts and reason. This is primarily because of their relativistic idea of truth and and morality. To the liberal raised in the modern world there is no such thing as absolute truth or fixed fact. There is their truth and your truth their facts and your facts and both are equally valid (well not really, theirs is clearly better 🙂 but they won’t admit that). If you point out their incorrect data they merely look at you as if your some idiot that just can’t see the actual truth. Hell if you took 2 apples and piled them next to 2 more and had them count to four (presuming this intellectual feat of mathematical ability is not beyond them) they’d still argue that 2+2 is NOT equal to 4 except in certain special cases (like when performed by some old white guy). I’d have far superior odds of reasoning with my cats (or a large blob of Jello) than reasoning with your average MK I SJW. And the upper echelon SJWs? Even worse. The often KNOW what the facts are but their morality is one where the ends justify the means. Whats 20 million dead kulaks between friends? The State must succeed!. Truth and reality be damned, full speed ahead to the great and glorious liberal future.

                     1. But the by-standers often get thoughtful looks on their faces, and you discover later that you chipped a bit of their mental block loose.

                     2. This is primarily because of their relativistic idea of truth and and morality.
                        Well, that’s the primary point of post-modern relativism. If you shake the bedrock of reason and the bedrock of faith, there is nothing else left to build a home upon, except the shifting sands of emotion – which are easily blown about by those in power.

                        And how dare you insult your cats’ mental faculties!

                        1. The wise man builds his house upon the rock, the foolish man builds his upon the sand.

                           And as for my felines, they’re quite intelligent (for felines), but the only argument they’re likely to pay attention to is a bowl of food or a catnip filled toy :-).

                           1. “the foolish man builds his upon the sand.”

                              And demands subsidized flood insurance, such subsidies taken from the wise man. And when the inevitable happens he demands the guys who claimed all the good rocks for their houses be taxed to “allow” him to rebuild on that sand, and then forced to underwrite programs to ameliorate climate change to end endangerment of sand castles.

                  2. Thank you. Really, thank you. Some of us here were once part of that morass. I was raised in a liberal north-eastern intellectual household. If many someones over a good period of time had not made the effort to challenge my beliefs I might still be part of that world.

                     The image of removing a gain of sand at a time is good. After a while the whole foundation will collapse. Being called names or yelled at — that serves re-enforces the defense mechanisms.

                     1. Technically, CACS, we were *all* once part of that morass. It takes some people more than 18 years to grow up, is all. 😉

               4. Bait them like a picador does the bull. In this venue, the matador with his sword is unnecessary.

               5. Exactly. Old saying, “convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still” — i.e. in one argument, you are VERY unlikely to change someone’s mind. At best, you plant a seed — and defend your ideas to auditors.

         2. I’ve had pretty good luck with holding them to the “be polite” standard they’ve been using, for private situations.

            Usual exchange is something like:
            *frothing lefty statement offered as fact*
            *polite correction, suggestion this isn’t really the place*
            Then the split is either a mild surprise that everyone didn’t “know” what they are saying and a request for sources, or hysterical howling; in the former case, I give multiple sources (preferably collected primary sources) and search terms; in the latter, I ask them to stop trying to pick a fight just because not everybody agrees with them. Which usually makes them respond by accusing me of trying to pick a fight, at which point I say that I did nothing but talk about what I believe, exactly like them. If they don’t want people to disagree, don’t bring it up in an unrelated area. At which point a family member usually steps in to “break up the fight.”
            Oddly, haven’t had more than one fight with any one relative…..

         3. The problem is that the conniption fits include trying to get the people who defy them lose their livelihoods, socially ostracized, legally without support and then dead. Those attempts can only be resisted if there’s ENOUGH of a resistance all around, supporting that resistance, and alternatives to things. My biggest concern is right now, from observation, it seems to cost our side more than it does them.

            I’m on Gab, but I’m not really happy with how much anti-Jewish sentiment I run into there; because I’m all too aware that once that starts, there is nothing to stop a different group from being the next Jew.

            1. Gab is a pit.

               1. Unfortunately, it “benefited” from early push by VD. That initial crowd colours it.

            2. Odd that should come up… had a thought line while I was driving and a character* popped up in my head, asking:
               “Have they started trying to take out the Jews yet?”
               “The what? Who? Isn’t that some human group?”
               “Yes. It’s a practical gold standard of ‘crazy psychopath,’ sooner or later– usually sooner– they decide to try to wipe out the Jews.”

               *Affable antagonist who really likes playing a villain when there’s no harm required.

               1. The thing I find disturbing is, it’s becoming rather common to see again, in comments like in Disqus and Twitter. And the big irony is it usually comes from a lot of people who also complain about white genocide and racism against whites.

                  Mind, I complain about white genocide and racism against whites too, but I’m also able to recognize that calls of discriminating against one racial or ethnic group because of perceived ‘control’ or ‘power’ means that once that group is ‘removed from threat’ there will be another target.

                  1. There’s a crazy subgroup for Cathoicism that has it– TAC kicks them to the door, but it’s scary how you can’t tell them from the Arabic ranting until they drop in the religious aspect. (for both) Not to be confused with the reflexive liberal hate for Israel that’s more because they won’t be good little victims and keep insisting on fighting to live.

                     And now I’m envisioning, for some reason, an entire anime of temptation demons where one department focuses on ‘hate the jews’ and has a big interior argument about if they’re cheating by getting multiple groups to all say the same obviously false things.

                     Seriously, if the claims about “The Jews” didn’t break so hard when reality-checked, I’d probably be suspicious. But they’re just… silly levels of wrong. Like making a vast conspiracy of home schoolers or something.

                     1. A Conservative Jewish friend of mine kept fussing about how the checks from the World Zionist Conspiracy never got to her.

                     2. I’m seeing blood libel again lately. It’s … disturbing.

                        1. Wait, the old “Jews eat Christian blood” type blood libel?

                           How is anybody that dumb? For starters, basic logic: what the @#$@# would they have used BEFORE THERE WERE CHRISTIANS?

                           1. It’s more ‘The Jews want (group) dead and are using (Americans/Russians/The West) as pawns to get it done! WHITE PEOPLE RISE UP AND DEFY THE JOOS.’ Or weird claims that the reason why Israel wants Palestine gone is to ‘get the fertile land.’ (The Gaza strip was fertile land before the Palestinians took over, but hey, facts, narrative…)

                              And this:

                              Disgusting propaganda! #Palestinian Authority TV misrepresented a photo of Holocaust concentration camp victims as #Arabs, and wrote that #Jews burned Arabs in ovens #NeverAgain https://t.co/ThskgCEK1y pic.twitter.com/Xvi9wd7HPC

                              — Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) April 12, 2018

                           2. Ah, I’d classify that as more of a generic conspiracy theory– depending on the details, if it was knocked down to a country level it’s even true sometimes. (The diplomatic tactic of “let’s you and him fight”.)

                              It’s mostly obnoxious because it chooses the Chosen People for the irrational fixation; for crying out loud, the Catholic Church would be a better conspiracy choice, at least we have fixed leadership and at least theoretic agreement rather than birth-joining.

                              Taking crimes against someone and claiming they committed them, though, that’s horrific.

                           3. I believe we were previously believed to have used the blood of Gentiles (that is, any non-Jewish person) but that Christian blood was determined to be purer and offer better flavour.

                              You should be well aware that there are no arguments so dumb, so laden with illogic, that there cannot be many found eager to believe. It isn’t as if this blood libel makes less sense than Anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change.

                           4. Eh, I can sort of see an argument someone might use from the blood of the lamb used in Egypt=> we are the Sheep who know His voice=> baby Christians thing.

                              But.

                              That still requires that one somehow fit the Virgin Mary into unwilling blood sacrifice, along with Jesus Christ Himself.

                              Islam sort of has an excuse, but any Christian!??

                           5. Heard one person talk about this at length. A conservative Jew comparing traditions. Part of it is the matzoh bread and the communion wafers. Matzoh is baked and looks burnt and black. Then there’s the tool used to ensure that it doesn’t rise that looks like a round crown of thorns. Get superstitious people seeing all these similarities and differences and they tend to jump to conclusions. The whole blood libel has been around for a long time and some cultures have taken the Christian aspect of it and used it for themselves.
                              Honestly none of it makes sense. Just fear of the other I guess.

                           6. I have not noticed Christianity being noteworthy for the practiced intelligence of its adherents, nor of being plagued with more rigorous thinkers than any randomly gathered group of people. Like the song says, “h8ers gonna h8.”

                              It isn’t as if He promised to perfect His followers in this world.

                           7. The folks who spread this junk generally pride themselves on being deep thinkers, though.

                              The one “Jewish conspiracy” guy I know in meat-space was actually relatively sane about it– he thought there was a conspiracy of Jews, not that the Jews were conspiring as a group. Still loony bin type stuff, but not in the burn-it-with-fire area.

                           8. In my experience the folk who pride themselves on being “deep thinkers” are delusional optimists at best and bad spellers (derp thinkers is more accurate) at worst.

                           9. Only those senseless enough to be constantly declaring it. 🙂

                           10. It goes back to the prechristian Greeks.

               2. “It’s a practical gold standard of ‘crazy psychopath,’ sooner or later– usually sooner– they decide to try to wipe out the Jews.”

                  In fairness, not all groups which try to take out the Jews are interested in world domination. Think of it as a side dish: You can have the pizza and elimination of the Jews, or you can have pasta and elimination of the Jews. Just because you want to eliminate the Jews doesn’t mean you want the pizza.

                  We are sort of the extinct volcano base of megalomaniancs, however.

            3. One must be most selective on Gab. The “news” section is garbage at best – and it’s rarely at its best.

         4. OK, this is more question than nit-picking, but isn’t “conniption fit” redundant? “Apoplectic fit” is not, but isn’t a “conniption” a “fit”? That’s the way I’ve always used those two words. (And, yes, I’ve actually used those two words for a loooong time.)

   3. “… not be accused of moral crimes”

      How DARE they try to impose their morality on others? Cultural imperialists the whole fascist lot of them!

   4. It’s not just that we’re too polite to raise a ruckus (and we are). But also, we’re just too busy. We’re the ones working real world jobs with actual responsibilities. We’re doing home-making, raising the kids, taking care of our parents/children/disabled family members. We’re the ones supporting charities, either with money or volunteer work. We’re the ones keeping the world going.

      The flaming crazy lefties, they’re unemployed or, at best, scraping a living doing blogs, writing low-pay pieces for outfits like Bleeding Cool or Buzzfeed. Or they may work low-pay jobs at non-profits. No family, no kids, for the most part. They have time. And the more programs they invent to support themselves, the more they tax us and burden us to support it all.

      1. “The flaming crazy lefties …”

         Many of them are working side-gigs for Soros-money. I am somewhat surprised there is not some ambitious red-state AG investigating the flows of money from the Soros/Steyer/Tides axis and building a RICO case against them. The support money from Soros to BLM was long ago established. I wonder who provides transportation for Antifa and other groups.

         There also ought be investigation into the teachers’ unions and other groups whose hands are up the Parkland school shooting sock-puppets backsides.

         Remember: the reason the Left imagines we are all AstroTurf minions of the Koch brothers and the Mercers is because that is their operational model.

         1. Take a look at the current strikes. All in red State. Demands shift and move from employment issues to politics. And not willing to accept compromise because they know there will be no punishment. Once you start telling politicians how they will increase revenue (that just happens to be the same as the want of the minority party) it’s not an economic strike but a political rally.

            1. It would be interesting to see the legislature pass increased support for charter schools, including vouchers.

               As well as enacting Wisconsin-style decertification of teachers’ unions.

               If y’all are going to engage in unlawful strikes we have no reason to treat you as lawful organizations.

               Other interesting responses might include reduction of time in service toward vesting in pensions and tenure at a 3:1 ratio, that being about the amount of time required to “catch-up” for every day of class lost to such interruption. Impose significant fines on union funds for their illegal walkout. Charge union leadership with extortion and conspiracy to defraud the public …

               1. The charter schools are in the strike (I’m not gonna play the walkout semantics.

                  And will just have to see where the leg goes. Said they were done with legislation when they passed two more tax increases yesterday but schools still closed. And of course only fawning media.

               2. Somehow they even convinced my sister to support their ludicrous strike here in KY (her daughter is a middle school vice principal, but usually has decent sense). Would have started banging my head on the table we were eating at, but I didn’t want to have to buy the restaurant a new table.

               3. I keep looking at OK and thinking that the poor AP class kids are toast, because they’ve missed two weeks and the test dates are national. They are going to have to get a special OK-only re-set of the testing dates, and even then it’s going to be a mess.

         2. >somewhat surprised there is not some ambitious red-state AG investigating
            —
            Unless there’s a specific aspect that’s actionable under their laws, *and* they have jurisdiction, they’re stuck. And even if those requirements are met, few AGs will bother with anything that doesn’t look like an easy win (becuse losses look bad for re-election) or doesn’t involve fines or some other profitable ending. Like everything else, enforcement revolves around status and money.

      2. It’s no surprise that the majority of leftie politicians are by training either lawyers or journalists (by one poll, 90% of D-Congress, vs 50% for R)

         ….two professions that make most of their money off the misfortunes of others. When the world goes well, they’re both out of a job.

         1. Also live in a fungible reality. Words can supersede reality.

         2. Also, two professions where actual reality/facts don’t matter toward their success (even though they should matter).

         3. “When the world goes well, they’re both out of a job.”
            There are several episodes in the Book of Mormon where the “good guys” are being baited by lawyers (and sometimes judges) for exactly that reason.

      3. “The left has activists; conservatives have day jobs.”

      4. There was some gathering about a political topic in St. Paul many years ago and it was, for once, on a Saturday when the legislature was in session or there was some hearing going on. it came as a shock to some that so many had the view opposite the one they usually heard. “Where are you all? We never see you at other times!” got the reply that the Other Times were work hours on weekdays and they had jobs and did them. Alas, while ox remember, legislators seem not to.

         1. This is a good argument that the legislature should only meet on evenings and weekends.

            1. But when would they drink?

               1. In session. Call it… “truth serum.”

   5. It strikes me the time has come to stop saying “…you and the horse you rode in on…” to “…you BY the stallion you rode in on.”

   6. “The problem with calling everyone a name all the time, is that you teach people to stop caring if they are called names….And promptly pulled the lever for Trumpenstein.”
      And if you keep lumping the decent moderates in with the radical crazies (on either side), then they will eventually quit being moderate.
      Cue Mark Steyn’s Maxim (although similar ones have been spoken by other people):
      “The political class has refined Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death my right not to have to listen to you say it.
      ….
      If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.”

8. I’m seeing/hearing a bunch of my leftier friends/coworkers comment on “all the Republican rats are fleeing the ship” in DC and laughing their heads off, while my right leaning friends/coworkers are talking about how worried they are about the Republicans losing control of the House and Senate. These are the same people who keep saying that we need term limits to get the bad apples out of the barrel. I’m just over here thinking, “if we can get rid of the career politicians, maybe, just maybe, we can get some people in who are more concerned about doing the work and not just propping up the institution.

   1. See, this is the reason I keep pushing an Article V amending convention. I don’t think the current administrative state can be cleaned up from the inside. I think it requires a group from the outside to radically reduce the size and reach of the administrative state so no matter how evil and corrupt it is, it has much less ability to harm normal Americans.

      I know, such a convention might not achieve that. But I’m pretty sure nothing else can possibly do so, and the convention could.

      1. Under the present socio-political climate who do you think would control the Article V convention and what do you think it would turn out?

         We might get a document like that of the European Union which covers such important issues as definitions of what constitutes a sauce and what is a vegetable (for the purpose of trade) in its constitution.

         1. I’m not going to debate it here, but what other mechanism do you think might achieve a reduction in the administrative state? I can’t think of any that could do it.

            1. There’s all sorts of mechanisms that could reduce the administrative state – meteor strike, nuclear strike destroying Los Angeles, Cape Verde landslide triggering a tsunami that wipes out much of the East Coast, etc.

            2. There is no lasting fix in the law. Unless and until we realize that and commit to making a conscience effort to educate and inspire our children and our children’s children — and somehow get them to do the same it will not change.

               1. The people have to zealously defend their rights. They have to INSIST on them. Then they have to hold personally, physically, irrevocably responsible those who would take them away. Sometimes that involves watering a tree.

            3. Tax cuts.

               You really can’t lawyer your way out of the situation where lawyers run the world. That’s organizing the deck chairs on the Titanic.

               You have to take the profit out of it. Make them go away hungry, to seek cheese elsewhere.

               How do you take the profit out of government? Tax cuts! I’m not talking about Laffer Curve-style “reductions in the rate of growth” here. I’m talking 10% across-the-board budget -cuts- where entire ministries get 10% less money than the year before. Actual shrinkage. Take the money away from government, leave it in the pockets of the people who did the work.

               If the USA (or Canada!) took that project on, and voted to reduce ALL government budgets 10% a year for 20 years, the government would end up just about the right size.

               We absolutely need government to maintain our civilization, we just need a lot less of it.

               Being that this is an SF site, we can forward this in the popular culture by writing smaller government into our fiction, thinking about things like “if this goes on…” in government growth, maybe God forbid write something other than Prolapsed Empires, dystopian post-apocalyptic urban wastelands with zombies, and Frankenstein. (I’m a bit pissed off today, I chanced to look at New Releases under SF at the Apple TV thing last night. Oh, my Ghod, what a horrific collection of unwatchable horse puckey. Five versions of Frankenstein, for starters, all made in the last year or so.)

               We have a lot of power. We need to use it. Hit ’em where it -really- hurts.

               1. And how do you get those tax cuts? In the US, it would have to be by constitutional amendment–the administrative state will never do it without being forced to. And how would that amendment be proposed? Certainly not but the administrative state itself; only by an outside agency. Hence, the need for an Article V convention.

                  1. We have been ignoring the Constitution we have now, why would a new one be treated differently?

                     1. Then why even bother trying? I’m sorry, but what you’re counseling is defeatism.

                        1. NO — see my other comments about taking care to educate.

                        2. It seems more to me that CACS is counselling not repeating the same old tactics and hoping for a different result.

                  2. You got some this year already. You voted for Trump and tax cuts, you got Trump and you got a tax cut.

                     That is called forcing the administrative state to stop doing something. Keep going. Start making a ruckus for morebiggerbetter tax cuts.

                     As for constitutional amendments, they’ve been breaking the 2nd since the Sullivan Act, and they’re actively talking about ending the 1st in California right now. Amending the Constitution doesn’t -do- anything, it has no existence in Reality (TM). You need to change reality in ways that hurts the enemy. Take away his resources.

                     You don’t fight lawyers with law. You fight them by attacking their money.

                     1. Except we also got the recent omnibus that at best maintained status quo and other places increased the DNC warchest we call the adminstrative state. The same thing that the Rs were railing against since 06. And they’ve pretty much handed off any claim to fiscal rationality in future.

                        1. George Washington pretty much lost every battle he fought up until Yorktown. There are few victories that do not incur defeats along the way.

                           Heck, if winning decisive victories was all it took the War of Southern Secession would have ended within its first year.

                           1. I’d be happy if half the army could march in same direction and refrain from running each other thru with their bayonets.

                           2. The battles of Trenton and Princeton were both solid victories. And as an added bonus, Alexander Hamilton got to bombard with cannon the college that rejected him.

                           3. Trivial wins that do not refute the primary claim, but yes, useful. Now if only he had won the battle for New York, or successfully defended Philadelphia, or …

                           4. In the wake of those two battles, the brothers Howe more or less abandoned New Jersey to control by Washington and his forces for quite a while. For that matter, despite its inconclusive nature, the later Battle of Monmouth Courthouse did once again result in the British decamping from New Jersey.

                           5. The Other Sean (posted at ‘the wall’): …the later Battle of Monmouth Courthouse did once again result in the British decamping from New Jersey.

                              France had finally openly entertained our delegation at court and signed trade and mutual protection treaties.   The British were already on their way out of New Jersey, retreating from Philadelphia to ‘consolidate’ their forces in New York.  Monmouth did put a further sting into that retreat.

                        2. Republicans are known as The Party of Stupid for a reason. They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

                           But, it could be worse. You could be living in Canada.

                           1. At least they don’t maintain the fiction of pure freedom. You are still a subject of the crown at some level. Here you tell people they are free but they are merely enslaved by those ruthless and amoral enough to get high in politics.

                     2. Ummm…. those tax cuts translated into MORE spending.

            4. Actually enforcing laws against corruption, and making a HUGE stink when they abuse legal situations.

               Like that Republican who was indited for “revenge porn” in taking pictures of his girlfriend without her consent or knowledge… and turns out they never had any pictures, and the woman is now saying she may have dreamed it. And they withheld that liiiiiiittle fact from the defense.

               Ooooo-boy. Does THAT need to be charged to the full extent of the law.

               1. Except how can the groundlings force that issue? And get it’s knowledge outside the blog bubble. That is the step I just can’t find.

                  The government saw no problem with withholding the truth in one of the Bundy trials. Namely they said that the statements that the Bundy’s used citing snipers and observation were fraud. Except the feds had snipers and observation surrounding the area and didn’t feel like admitting that. There is no way that was the first time they tried that.

                  1. By making a stink– the government is not a monolith, there are folks who will even if they’re corrupt as heck use this to get advantage.

                     And when they fire the guys who fight corruption? Sue for wrongful termination. Donate to them. Complain loudly. Make it so it’s not something that only folks inside the blogosphere know about.

                     The Bundy Case is both an example of how things have gotten better– the snipers refused to fire when given an illegal order, because they grew up hearing about Ruby Ridge, yeah it might’ve been from Crazy Uncle Bob but they heard about those evil charicatures and damned if THEY were going to be like THAT– and of how we can make it better.

                     Spread the word. Even my totally -not -political cousins know that the “Bundy situation” was totally bonkers, and not because of the Bundys.

                     1. Sorry, Fox, the reason they didn’t fire is simple: there were enough people on the other side with guns that the odds were too high they’d end up dead. They didn’t sign up for that.

                        1. Am I going to believe your mind-reading powers– which I know have failed several times when applied to me– or folks who at least know the people involved? And are aware of the specific tactics of the situation?

                           Choices, choices….

                           1. You’re the person who hasn’t read the accounts of people who were there.

                              I’ve never claimed to read your mind. I simply look at what you say and apply English.

                              And finally, you couldn’t spot the damns I give about what you accept with the Hubble.

                           2. You’re the person who hasn’t read the accounts of people who were there.

                              Given you made two big mistakes in your reading of what I just wrote, that’s not much better.

                              I get it. You must have your enemy. Just stop expecting me to join up against people who didn’t do the wrong your theory demands so they must be guilty some other way.

               2. Which isn’t stopping the legislature from going ahead.

                  http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/382782-shocking-report-finds-credible-allegations-of-sexual-assault-by-missouri

                  After all, she’s now got two friends backing her, and supposedly a tape made by the alleged victim’s husband of the victim talking about it.

                  He was a moron for not realizing the new rules: 24/7 audio and video accounting for every instant of your life or you’re guilty.

                  1. It looks like the Hill is conflating the commission (which the Greitens didn’t speak to) with the criminal case.

            5. I’m sorry, but how will an Article V convention do anything about reducing the Administrative State? If anything it seems more likely to increase their power, under the principle that those who enforce the laws (either directly, as police, or indirectly, by crafting the regulations implementing and governing the administration of said laws) wield ultimate power.

               As Professor Friedman has said, we must create an environment in which the wrong people do the right things.

               I must revisit Yes, Minister and ponder the problem.

            6. A return to supporting the gov’t via export tariffs instead of via income tax.

               That automatically limits the size of gov’t relative to the prosperity of the citizenry. Not enough prosperity to generate profitable exports? No money for D.C.!!

               Which is another reason we should import cheap raw materials, but export value-added finished products, instead of the other way around like we do now.

               1. We do import the raw material for our creation industry. We call them H-1B.

                  But ya. The servicing economy shouldn’t be as all encompassing as it is. It is almost always the lowest and tightest paid and you need entry of money rather than the ringaround where the barista pays the Uber who pays the stylist who pays the barista. Plus the remittances leak (what percentage of it comes from getting goodies from Sammie probably is not insignificant.)

            7. Reduction? With “fusion centers” and mega-contractors like whatever Blackwater calls itself this week, the Federal bureaucracy is growing fast faster than the official “receives a Federal paycheck” numbers would indicate.

            8. Rope.

               1. Modern lampposts are designed to frustrate such remedial activities.

                  Tar. Feathers. Some assembly required.

                  1. Cell towers have structural cross-members which could substitute for the lamppost.

                     1. Some towers even “look like” trees … just saying.

         2. Remember that anything that comes out of an Art. V convention still has to get through the legislatures of 3/4 of the states.

            1. ehh, then you end up having to cite the 25% of states that will override anything he wants done, and he can’t explain how it will still work.

               1. You’re not going to get anything like a repeal of the Second Amendment or raising the voting age to 21 through, no. But I think that a balanced budget amendment and possibly term limits has a broad enough base to make it. Granted, it would depend on the specifics of the amendment, but I can see Democrats supporting it on the idea that it will force Congress to raise taxes while conservatives supporting thinking that it will mandate reduced spending.

                  And if it doesn’t work, it hasn’t cost us anything.

                  1. Unfortunately, it’s likely that whatever you come up with, the slimy bustards will figure out a way around it. Look what they did with the 27th Amendment. Pay raises we vote ourselves don’t kick in until an election has occurred? OK, we’ll give ourselves a recurring automatic boost in pay *unless* we vote to reject it . . .

                     1. My idea is to simply say that Congress cannot appropriate more money than was collected in taxes and fees in the most recently completed fiscal year. Throw in a hefty pay curtailment for Congress and the President (and their staffs!) if they don’t have an actual budget – no continuing resolution that doesn’t run through the fiscal year – by October 1.

         3. And the curvature of a banana!

            1. and the correct proportions for a cucumber. seriously.

               1. I wonder how long that took them to negotiate?

                  I have a lovely catalog features various kinds of garden seeds from all over the world. I was reviewing it recently. The Dutch have a lovely yellow skinned cucumber, the Germans have a boxy pickling variety, the French have the tiny Cornichons, the English have a hot house variety which is long, pointed at the ends and low on seeds, the Armenian is rather long, pale green and ribbed, and the lemon cucumber, well it looks a bit like a lemon, only rounder. (This doesn’t even get into the Asian varieties, among which is a rather sizable red fruit that is used in cooking.)

         4. “Under the present socio-political climate who do you think would control the Article V convention and what do you think it would turn out?”

            This.

            You can’t possibly have a constitutional convention and have anything other than emoting and turf grabbing. If people don’t understand why we’ve got the constitution we’ve got, there’s no hope to change it in an intelligent way. After all, why do you want children to die?

      2. The problem with such an amendment convention is it opens the door for THEM to eliminate all those pesky protections already in the Constitution. This is war. And we need to be very cognizant of that fact. Attack when we are ready, and when our opponents are not. Sun Tzu’s, Art of War needs to be on our mandatory reading list, if not a copy of it ever-present on our desks.

      3. And by what mechanism will the resulting constitution be enforced? 90% of our problems come from the existing constitution being relegated to toilet paper.

   2. Term limits for Federal politicians, yes. But the Congress and Senate are representatives of their states, which are independent polities in a union. Refusing to acknowledge their lawfully-elected representatives would effectively disenfranchise entire polities. Polities with their own governments, their own laws, their own armies, and in many cases their own air forces and navies. Some of those polities already unhappy with the Fed in general.

      You *really* don’t want to open that box.

   3. If the people really wanted term limits they could achieve it without imposing it by law.

      1. Not true. The problem is that by the senate rules, the senior senator gets more power, thus any state voting its senator out loses a significant amount of power relative to states that do not. This is a situation where everyone has to be forced to limit the terms, or no-one can afford to.

         1. States have replaced long term senators; it can be done.

         2. Besides, it’s a well-known truism that incumbents have vast advantages in being elected. Yes, incumbents HAVE been ousted before, but usually only because they pissed off SO many people they wouldn’t be able to get elected as county clerk.

      2. Yup, term limits can be fairly easily enforced at the ballot box. Getting people to actually do that requires more intestinal fortitude than they are likely willing to expend.

         1. **BING** ^^THIS^^

         2. You are assuming honest elections. That is a mistake.

   4. But then there’s the established bureaucracy. Cut that in half and have a “twenty years and out” policy, and maybe the whole government will remember that they work for us.

      1. THIS.

         Politicians come, politicians go, but the bureaucracy remains entrenched. I would also suggest that something should be done to address bureaucrats writing policy and law. That should be handled by elected officials, the ones who were Constitutionally authorized to do so, and who will face re-election.

         And dear G-d, wouldn’t it be marvelous if we could eliminate omnibus bills?

         1. And again, how do you propose this be accomplished? Good ideas are easy; putting them into practice is always the cropper.

            1. I largely repeat myself:

               There can be no lasting fix in the law. Unless and until we realize that and commit to making a conscience effort to educate and inspire our children and our children’s children — and somehow get them to do the same it will eventually bring us back to where we are now — ignoring the Constitution we have.

               1. And I repeat myself too. Assuming that everything will fail is defeatism. I choose to fight.

                  1. I don’t assume everything will fail. Anything imposed from the outside will, and that includes all law. I argue that the only solution is to make the commitment to continually educate people in liberty.

                  2. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. John Adams

                     An Article V convention will not bring about a moral and religious people. If we restore moral nature and love of liberty we will not need an Article V convention.

                     You seem focused too much on the cart, too little on the horse.

                     1. We need to educate and inspire.

                        There’s been way too many years, perhaps generations, of not bothering to teach what “everyone knows”. Everyone knows why freedom of speech is important and how necessary it is that you defend the other person’s right to say what you hate. Everyone knows. Everyone knows that you have to respect the religious faith of others. Everyone knows how important the right of assembly is and why the police are right to protect the marches of hate groups. Everyone knows.

                        But now they don’t anymore. It’s not just the 2nd Amendment, it’s all the parts of the First. It’s the Fourth. In fact, all the words that mean good things, like “Liberty” or “Freedom” or “Tolerance” only mean those things when it’s something comfortable and happy. And if an authoritarian State and the destruction of our Constitutional rights makes a person comfortable and happy, then that’s what “Freedom” means.

                        1. The ALCLU once got to say they were nonpartisan and just about rights because they supported the right of Nazis to march thru a city following the same requirements that the March for puppies and kittens would. Today they have stated they will make distinctions against groups they dislike. So a nonleftist rally is bad because someone might be armed but commandeering a bus, or airport or mall and preventing the use of the facility by others is a gosh darned right.

                           And people think “I don’t use that right so I don’t need to care”. Ironically it’s a similarity between the abortion debate and firearm. We get told that white men (stereotyped Republican) shouldn’t get any say in abortion law. But at the same time facts are superfluous and bullying when they want to ban something they have no use of.

                        2. Heck, it’s basic cultural norms.

                           Like “ladies don’t go out drinking” or “don’t sleep with anybody you’re not married to, it goes badly” or even the old grandma’s running joke about “oh, my, this is why you have children when you’re young!”

                           Now we’ve got a drunken hookup culture that’s resulting in a ton of very unhappy people and probably the mental health crisis, predators are freaking celebrated until they get old and are better used as a target (hello, Hollywood elite) and you’ve got 40 year old ladies with full time jobs who never were taught anything about homemaking but that it’s demeaning, trying to keep up with kids that they’ve got a standard of supervision that would make prison guards sweat.

                           And don’t get me started on the issues with courting.

                           1. “Now we’ve got a drunken hookup culture that’s resulting in a ton of very unhappy people and probably the mental health crisis, …”

                              How do you think the party of government gets its supporters if not by encouraging dysfunctional lifestyles?

                              And don’t you dare judge them!

                           2. And don’t you dare judge them, you worthless, sex-traitor, breeder!

                              FIFY.

                           3. Apparently not even those preaching the message actually buy it:

                              Cosmo editor: Stop getting drunk, ladies, and settle down
                              … Back when she helmed Cosmo and, before that, Marie Claire magazine, she was inundated with tales of hellish dating experiences. From story subjects to readers to her younger employees, “I talked to thousands of successful, smart women,” says Coles, who’s now chief content officer at Hearst. “They’d gone to college, their careers were going well — but they were really frustrated trying to find love.”

                              And “frustrated” is putting it mildly: Many a girl ’fessed up to drinking until they blacked out so they could power through awkward hookups. Others told her about weekly group trips to the pharmacy to pick up Plan B emergency contraception. Coles — a woman not easily shocked — was alarmed.

                              Her new book, “Love Rules: How To Find a Real Relationship in a Digital World” (Harper), looks to overwrite these troubling trends with healthier behaviors. It’s an unflinching guide to dating in a swipe-happy world, aimed at millennials and boomers alike — and it’s blessedly free of kooky Cosmo sex tips. In the gospel according to Coles, dating in 2018 is missing one major thing: honesty. She’s tired of women lying to themselves about what they really want.

                              “It might be that you never want to get married, or it might be that you really, really do,” she says. “Either is fine. What’s not fine is not to be honest about what you want.”

                              She thinks that successful women in particular struggle with reconciling their Miss Independent attitudes with their romantic ideals. Ambitious women who dream of picket-fence perfection “feel terrible saying so out loud … I think, they think it signals a weakness, that they can’t be entirely independent.” She understands the impulse, but holds that the self-repression needs to stop.

                              While women are busy faking their feelings, society’s lying to them, too.

                              “We live in a very politically correct age,” Coles says. “There are things we’re not being honest about with women.”

                              One myth she’d like to see die: That it’s cute and fine to get completely trashed and wake up the next day confused, remorseful and unsure if you’ve slept with someone.

                              “It is not empowering to get blackout drunk,” Coles says sternly. “Fifty percent of sexual assaults occur when alcohol is involved … We have to stop pretending that drinking heavily for women is fun. It’s not. And it is making people miserable.”

                              Another falsehood Coles wants to debunk concerns the idea that women don’t need to worry about having kids until they’re in their 30s.

                              “We have a generation of women who think that they can just have IVF and everything will be fine,” she says. “The odds are against you once you start having IVF, and the odds are against you over the age of 35. And to pretend that it’s easy to have a baby in your 40s or 50s is — it’s just selling women a false dream.

                              [snip]

                              “At 36, I had no idea how tired I could be,” she writes. But, she also notes that she didn’t realize how much she’d love being a mother. “[I didn’t know] how fascinating being a parent would be … no one really tells you the good stuff anymore.”

                              Finally, Coles says we need to be honest when it comes to dating apps. Recently, a friend complained to Coles when a Tinder match suggested they go for a hike — even though she’d claimed to like hiking on her profile.

                              “She was like, ‘Oh, God, I hate hiking. Now I have to go on a damned hike,’” she says. When Coles asked her why on earth she’d professed a love of the trail to begin with, the friend said she’d fibbed because so many men say they enjoy the outdoors.

                              Tactics like these are a waste of time, and a misuse of apps’ filtration systems, Coles says. You’re not just looking for any old dude; you’re looking for a good fit, so when it comes to your profile: “Be authentic. Do. Not. Lie.”

                              If we can all manage to cut the BS, the payoff, Coles promises, is worth it.

                              “It’s not retro to want to get married and have kids,” she says. “Nothing’s more important than who you love and who loves you back.”

                              [END EXCERPT]

                           4. Ambitious women who dream of picket-fence perfection “feel terrible saying so out loud … I think, they think it signals a weakness, that they can’t be entirely independent.” She understands the impulse, but holds that the self-repression needs to stop.

                              (cough) Because the constant assurance that wanting it is a moral failing had nothing to do with it, I’m sure….

                              /sigh

                           5. “She thinks that successful women in particular struggle with reconciling their Miss Independent attitudes with their romantic ideals. Ambitious women who dream of picket-fence perfection “feel terrible saying so out loud … I think, they think it signals a weakness, that they can’t be entirely independent.” She understands the impulse, but holds that the self-repression needs to stop.”

                              No one tells anyone on either side “Marriage is a (life) partnership.” How that partnership comes together is a dance based on what each partner needs & can provide. Independence has nothing to do with it. Sharing is everything.

                              “Another falsehood Coles wants to debunk concerns the idea that women don’t need to worry about having kids until they’re in their 30s.

                              “We have a generation of women who think that they can just have IVF and everything will be fine,” she says. “The odds are against you once you start having IVF, and the odds are against you over the age of 35. And to pretend that it’s easy to have a baby in your 40s or 50s is — it’s just selling women a false dream.”

                              IVF is a lot easier to actually get now. When we were having problems the doctors with that option wouldn’t even consider us without a definitive diagnosis on the infertility reason, even thou we’d have to pay for everything, and after 10 years, were headed into less fertile years.

                              ““At 36, I had no idea how tired I could be,” she writes. But, she also notes that she didn’t realize how much she’d love being a mother. “[I didn’t know] how fascinating being a parent would be … no one really tells you the good stuff anymore.””

                              No kidding. Babies/Toddler/Kids are tiring & fun, for both parents, or should be. Back when there was no effective birth control, parents who had kids into their late 30’s, 40’s, & yes even surprise packages in their 50’s (it happens naturally, just not frequently) almost always had older children old enough to help raise the youngest. Grandma had her youngest at 42. Youngest was 3 when first nephew was born. Had multiple friends growing up who was OLDER than one uncle. Son had friends where they had older siblings that were 15 or more years older (parents essentially raised two sets of “single” children given their age differences, not by choice).

                              I read of people who choose to have kids in their 40’s & 50’s, their choice, but my response is “are you nuts?” (my opinion … yes!!!) And that includes the guys, no matter how rich they (either party) are & able to afford staff except/even during the “fun”. FYI. I don’t include those who have to raise their grandchildren or the kids of younger relatives, they are a different category.

                           6. “Grandma had her youngest at 42. Youngest was 3 when first nephew was born. Had multiple friends growing up who was OLDER than one uncle.”

                              There is ample evidence that being in a large family is conducive to one’s long-term mental health, happiness and stability. For one thing, a child is forced to learn to get along with others and that Pwecious Snowflake is not at the world’s center.

                              Had I confidence in the Progressives’ competence I would suspect the push for smaller families was intended to produce more brats and fewer adults (as proportion of population.)

               2. > no lasting fix in the law.

                  Nope. Considering they already ignore or “re-interpret” the parts of the Constitution they don’t like, which is, after all, the supreme law of the land…

                  “Yes, we’ll pass a law saying the Fed has to obey the law… that’ll fix it!”

                  1. Well, no — but at least in some cases, a law that specifies the penalty for violating a Constitutional guarantee would useful to pre-empt bad laws that attempt to do so. E.g. “initiating an unlawful search shall be penalized by X”

                     1. Funny thing, there may be law, but if it is not enforced, or is selectively enforced, what good is it?

                        Nikolas Cruz should not have been able to acquire the weapons he used to shoot up the Parkland high school. The federal and state laws that are already on the books had not been enforced. Numerous reported incidents of concerns were not fully investigated. The records that are already required had been kept.

                        1. …The records that are already required had not been kept.

            2. Well, the military already pretty much have that. Only the very senior enlisted, and the top half of the officer corps go to the 30 year mark. Most retire around 20 to 22 years; if they make it that long.

      2. 20 years and out, and NO PENSIONS.

         1. I would allow 401k but no fixed payout pensions.

   5. The House is (barely) in play, pretty much because the Rs forgot to repeal O-care like they promised, but in spite of the fevered dreams of the loonies, I think the Senate is going to stay about where it is.

      The tax cut will only help.

      But as someone else noted, it’s the permanent bureaucracy that’s the main problem. Not sure how, but they definitely need some purges (as in end-of-job-see-ya, not a traditional leftist dig-a-bigger-hole-comrade-they’re-sending-more purge).

      1. Admittedly I’m more bearish on both but the problem that sits below the surface is whether the politicos that are not retired or tossed understand that a depressed base is what hurt as opposed to their typical belief of ‘we weren’t liberal enough’. Especially given the amount of internal gerrymandering and favoritism we have seen among the high eschelons.

      2. It would be nice if the laws creating administrative departments were better at defining when “done” is. I.e. EPA – instead of leaving it to the department to keep redefining standards so they can stay in business, the law should say “when pollution gets down to X, go to maintenance/enforcement employment, which shall not exceed Y% of make-it-better employment.”

         1. This.
            I’m also good with mandatory retirement ages and years-in-service caps for all employees.

            1. Nah, I know too many people who are “fixers”– they never spend much time in one place, they keep getting moved around because they’re GOOD at finding people who are trouble, and getting it stopped.

               Put in career caps and you make it so that the fanatics have a built in advantage, they don’t spend any time figuring out what their goal is. Encourages the short timer mindset.

   6. Except at the same time all this is going on the government is persecuting anyone that touched Trump’s campaign. Even if he was the incarnation of the best results of Reagan and Clinton’s terms Trump will probably be one of, if not the only DC government denizen to come out more impovershed than he entered. And any grey area will.be used against him and family.

      Between that and the attacks on his family (powder to JR, Barron, etc) that’ll be great to remind responsible people to stay out of the cesspool. So you get the control freaks and corrupt.

      1. And the madman. Trump may be inclined to suck up to evil, but he is much much saner than some people he could be replaced with.

         1. Like the ones that treat assassination as a joke. Yep.

      2. “Between that and the attacks on his family (powder to JR, Barron, etc) that’ll be great to remind responsible people to stay out of the cesspool. So you get the control freaks and corrupt”

         I still maintain that a major and possibly only factor in Jr’s sudden divorce was his wife trying desperately to get the kids out of the line of fire, possibly with his agreement, because she realized that Democrat assassins only have to be lucky ONCE.

         1. Would not surprise me at all. Especially since security is an unnecessary expense for even Republican cabinet members according to the congressional rulers

         2. …and if they can’t get the guy they’ve dehumanized, they’ll get the “nits.”

            /shudder

9. Liberty is always a generation away from extinction.

   Which is why it has, does, and will require constant vigilance.  Each generation has to be taught the principles, trained in the tools to continue, inspired and given reason to carry on.

   1. B-b-b-but liberty is racist! Worse even, it’s sexist and homophobic! We must train the coming generation in only the Correct Thinking™ so that marginalized people are not harmed by the rest of us thinking for themselves!

      1. And specist! And planet-bound-ist! And orbitally-bound-to-a-star-ist!

10. c4c

    1. c4c

11. It is worse here in Canada than it is in America but there is no actual right wing party to vote for, they are all Statist in one way or another.

    Conservatives in Canada are inevitably what we call Red Tories and they are only slightly less left wing than other parties, same dynamic happening in United States as well. I don’t know how this dynamic changes and while individual right wingers might try and fight back no political party cares what we think.

    I’ve seen a few studies over the years comparing the intelligence of progressives, conservatives, and libertarians and right wingers always ranked highest/smartest. If you are talented right winger, you want to follow your passion and succeed at career and politics is not at all attractive to most of us. It is only second or third rate minds who are interested in political life where no real talents or abilities are necessary, just need to have desire to lord it over your fellow citizens.

    1. “Conservatives in Canada are inevitably what we call Red Tories and they are only slightly less left wing than other parties, same dynamic happening in United States as well.”

       All parties in Canada are parties of “more government” fundamentally. The solution to all problems is more and better regulation. “People are stupid. There oughta be a law!”

       That is not a political issue. That is a -cultural- issue. I can’t talk to strangers anymore, here in Canada, because they only ever talk about why thereoughtabealaw. Raises my blood pressure every time.

       Take a look at the public comments about the Humboldt bus crash. Whole hockey team killed, 15 guys dead. Everybody is all thereoughtabealaw!!! about whatever their pet peeve is. MORE government. Faster! Hurry up!

       Nobody is looking at the transport regulations, taxes, manpower, road signs, the fucking staggering, inconceivably huge amount of money, time and material spent in Canada on road safety, and saying: “Well, that didn’t work, did it? Maybe we don’t need all that if it can’t even prevent a truck from killing a bus full of people. I wonder if we could reduce cost somewhere?” We’re not hearing that, are we?

       So if you want Canada to change, being in the government is not where you’re going to make an impact. Changing the culture is what needs to happen.

       This is why Trump won. He’s attacking the Lefty culture. And, of course, it is attacking him back. But, and this is the good part, the culture is -losing-.

       1. We in the US are in the middle of that debate as regards guns and our Second Amendment. Thereoughtabealaw translates directly to “make all those icky evil guns just go away!” Which naturally ignores both the reality that guns in the hands of honest citizens are of incredible value, and the uncomfortable fact that the low ball estimate of firearms in private hands is 300 million. Official number, actual could be as much as triple that.
          And there is little if any discussion, certainly not in our media, about the ultimate goal of the anti gun folks. “We don’t want all your guns, just the scary evil ones” is and always has been a sop to still the fear against the real agenda, total confiscation and bans of all firearms. A disappointing number of people would in fact accept that “solution” in exchange for the assurance that they and their children would then be safe. This of course ignores the shining example of how that approach plays out, Great Britain. Britain where handguns are almost completely banned, long arms are bolt and single shot mechanisms only, and they still have a violent crime rate five times that of gun crazy America. And in very recent news London for the first few months of 2018 is reporting a higher murder rate than New York City, and their mayor has launched a campaign to demonize and eliminate all knives from his city.

          1. Thereoughtabealaw against icky gun grabbers, that makes all of them go away. Perhaps to Venezuela, or Cuba.

          2. And you’re evil and insane if you ask ‘what would stop this and the greatest number of issues’. Banning a firearm type will reduce crimes with that type. But a percentage just shift to different weapons and it also zeros defensive uses. Treating schools like we do our offices or colleges (secured access), fixing the gaping holes in our security apparatus that allowed it, and remind people that the big red trucks and cops are second responders. We treat getting first aid training for puncture wounds as something that shouldn’t be necessary.

             But it’s only the fault of the NRA.

             1. One need only look at what our politicians and famous celebrities do to protect themselves when they feel threatened. Armed bodyguards of course, and in the case of politicians armed with true military grade weapons.

          3. And in very recent news London for the first few months of 2018 is reporting a higher murder rate than New York City

             If I remember right, it’s not rate, it’s number of homicides being investigated by Scotland Yard inside of London vs the number of homicides in New York City– because the UK doesn’t have a “homicide rate.”

             It’s a freaking brilliant work-around, even if it can’t catch the “this is clearly not a homicide because he was declared dead at the hospital, not where he was found in a pool of blood in the street” type nasty tricks.

             It wouldn’t be caught yet, but New York does remove justifiable homicide from their stats, if you manage to survive long enough to go through the trial.

             1. I misspoke, it is actual numbers not rate.
                But London and NYC are roughly equal in size, both being around 8.5 million population in the greater metro areas.
                And true New York tends towards firearm deaths while London favors knives, but not exclusively, still gun deaths there in spite of draconian gun control laws.

                1. And London includes little old pensioners who manage to stab the guy trying to kill them.

                   1. Well of course. In old Bailey they’re murderers in the defense chair.

             2. Foxfier, I believe that you were correct up to 2015, but I believe they’re using a standard closer to ours now. As I understand, the key difference now is with regards to deaths from arson, and I can’t remember if we count them in murders and the Brits don’t, or vice versa.

                1. The only change I can find is that they’re recording offenses by year reported, rather than when they are convicted. If they had actually started reporting the “all suspicious deaths as homicide” standard, there would’ve been a huge jump over when they did the “only convictions with no appeals left” standard.

                   And there is notably no definition I can find for how things are “reported as” a homicide by the police.

                   https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/compendium/focusonviolentcrimeandsexualoffences/yearendingmarch2015/chapter2homicide

                2. 2015 article, no mention of any change:
                   https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2015/7/17/how-the-uk-covers-up-murder-stats/

                   1. You may be right about there not having been a change in 2015. I was going by something I’d vaguely remembered reading the other day in a Baen’s Bar thread. And after rereading that thread, and about 90 minutes of reading various articles and the documentation from the UK government, I’m still not sure which set of statistics mean what. As near as I can tell, they’ve got one set of murder statistics based upon police reports, which may be adjusted if trial outcome is self-defense, justifiable homicide, etc. or if evidence subsequently suggests suicide vs. homicide, and a separate Homicide Index that’s based upon homicide convictions (and which officials prefer to quote from, because it looks better).

                      Then there’s a potential problem all of these statistics, from anywhere, share. The best statistics appear to be those derived from police statistics. But politicians often incentivize police to reduce crime rates, and one of the easiest ways for police to do so is simply not to report it.

                      1. Like the example I mentioned of reporting someone who was beaten to death in the street, but only declared dead at the hospital, being reported as an “assault.”

12. The other side gets a vote. But they don’t get a veto.

    1. Nope. We won’t let them.

    2. “The other side gets a vote. But they don’t get a veto.”
       Bumper-sticker of the week.

13. Think back, those of you who are my age or close to it, to all the times when you were — seemingly — the only one who saw that “what everybody knew” was wrong, all the times when if you had said what you believed people wouldn’t necessarily oppose you: they’d just think you were crazy.

    Sounds like high school. 😉
    To be fair to them, I was crazy. To be fair to me, so were they…..

    1. Oh, that slow horrified realization that _scientists_ were cooking the books on global warming . . . At least I was always conservative. I din’t have to change my political philosophy. Just get more cynical.

       1. Global warming, and also the population bomb. When I realized that the natural course of events was not leading us to a Soylent Green nightmare — but instead, we were experiencing birth rate plunges in all the first-world economies — it told me that the population control fanatics were not operating from a place of science, but a place of ideology. (shakes head sadly at Kim Stanley Robinson)

          1. And the second and third world ones too, Brad. They just lie.
             I don’t know if it’s a cyclical thing for humans, (we know we’ve had bottle necks in the past of maybe up to 250 individuals) the propaganda about overpopulation, or just that women know how to avoid it even in third world countries, thanks to the net, but population is plunging all over. Friends working in Arab countries say yes, even there.
             What we have is that net receivers of IMF monies lie.
             My question is, “how long till we plunge below the needed population to sustain a technological civilization?”
             Notice I built this into the background of DST 21 years ago.

             1. One wonders how long it can be kept up. At some point, a population crash is going to translate into second order effects that can’t be hidden.

                1. It already is to an extent. I understand the Muslims fight so hard because they see their population crashing.
                   Europe hasn’t defended itself because it lacks men of military age.
                   Etc.

                   1. Well, Europe also lacks men with testicles and castrates what few show up.

                      1. I dunno. The invading population still seems to be plenty aggressive and uses those appendages on everyone.

                   2. China is already up against the effects of the “One Child” policy.

                      1. Though there, it seems their numbers were wrong in the other direction. They’re finding a bunch of young women who were just never reported before. (That’s rumor to me, at this point.)

                         1. There’s no way enough girls escaped the forced sterilizations in the doctor’s office to significantly change the rate– I’d be shocked if it managed to balance out the basic dying-before-adulthood rate.

             2. It’s not just population, it is effectiveness of education and level of sanity.

       2. I can’t even remember what it WAS that was “but you are scientists!” for me, just remember it rectified the respect for “scientists” over to the respect for science, with a stringent eye on the process being followed.

       3. For me it was public health. When I started reading all the gun control articles in medical journals, the place where doctors get the science they use to heal people, that’s when I got angry. They corrupted the medical literature and the CDC for political propaganda. Deliberately, and maliciously. Whole careers were built on lying about a subject that wasn’t even part of public health.

          Then I started seeing all the same names showing up in glowball wamening, and knew what was going on there too.

          1. The latest lie being told by anti gun activists is that the CDC has been forbidden from conducting any gun related studies when in fact their only restriction is that they may not spend public funds on efforts to enact gun control laws. In truth the CDC did a notable study on defensive gun use that determined such incidents occurred between 300,000 and two million times a year. Unfortunately that study never really got all that much press for some unknown reason.

             1. They’ve been lying about that since Newt Gingrich was Speaker. This is the new lie:
                http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.ca/2018/03/gun-control-no-lie-too-ugly.html

             2. Got a link to that study? Might make for interesting reading.

                1. Its some balderdash that certain “Constitutional Scholars” from Ivy League universities are peddling of late. A big of Google-fu will no doubt turn it up, I have not read the original “work” if I may make free with the word.

                   Former Justice JP Stevens, a Liberal judge writing in the NY Times, that sounds like pain. Let us know if it was worth it. ~:D

                   1. Apologies – that was meant to be a reply to Uncle Lar (the CDC study he references)

                      1. Took some digging, mostly a search turns up secondary sources, but here is the link to chapter 1 of the actual CDC report:
                         https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1

                         1. Thanks!

          2. Global cooling flipping to global warming. Both with same “cause” and “solution”. That was my eye opening “I’m being lied to” moment.

             1. I used to be a trusting soul, brought up believing in Queen and Country, always told that the Authorities had one’s best interests at heart, and if I would only straighten up and fly right, everything would Be Okay. And despite my lyin’ eyes, I believed it.

                Right up until about 1992, when the Canadian government decided they would make a gun I owned at the time illegal. It was an expensive gun, too. No compensation, no return of sales tax, no nothing. Banned, tough shit. Kiss your money good bye, you criminal.

                Which seemed insane. Really phobic, and not what I expected from a Canadian government. So, I looked into it. I was back in university studying for PT and taking statistics etc. so I read -all- the journal articles. Couple hundred of them.

                Have you ever read anything so blatantly dishonest that you said “Are you kidding me?!” or “No way!” out loud in the library? I did that a lot.

                I wrote a 62 page monograph on the subject and posted it on the then-new InterWebz waaaaay back in around 1995. (A few years later the National Academy of Science set up a Blue Ribbon Panel and did the same thing I did by myself, coming to the same result. Your tax dollars at work.)

                But in those days, I thought they were just deluded, or possibly stupid. Wishful thinking can be a pretty powerful thing for some people. Maybe that explained the incredibly bad science.

                It wasn’t until Alan Rock and the Liberal Gun Registry that I -finally- understood what we were dealing with. Long story short, the Liberal Party gained power in 1993, passed C-68 around 1995 and had the Registry up and running a couple years later. It was supposed to cost ~$200 million dollars to register every gun and gun owner in Canada. By 2002 they had spent $2 Billion dollars.

                I knew a little something about computers back then. I knew that the War Amputees Society of Canada ran a license plate tag service that sent a letter and a key chain fob with your license on it to every driver in Canada, for a donation. I had seen their offices, they ran the whole thing on an IBM System 38 from the 1980s, and the thing cost -maybe- a million bucks. I knew there were 7 million gun owners and about 18-20 million guns in the country, which would generate a database that could be handled by a desktop computer. (These days it would fit on your phone.)

                But they spent two BILLION dollars. You can’t be that incompetent. Something had to be up. I struggled with that for a few years. I finally understood in 2004 when the Liberal AdScam scandal erupted. It was so simple.

                They were stealing the money.

                They were laundering taxpayer dollars through the gun registry bureaucracy, and giving to their friends. That’s how you spend two billion on a two million dollar job.

                That was the epiphany where I finally broke the programming of a lifetime. Once I knew that, everything else magically made sense.

                They’re not stupid. They are thieves. They’re stealing the money.

                That’s the real reason I’m arguing with Dr. Loss elsewhere in this thread about a Constitutional Convention. You can’t deal honestly at law with evil men, because they will lie, cheat, steal and very likely kill you for opposing them. They have to be defeated and driven out. The best way to do that is to take away the money, then they leave on their own.

                1. “They’re not stupid. They are thieves.”

                   Here in the US the Obamacare implementation was an egregious transfer of America’s wealth into the hands of the incompetent computer programmers and corrupt insurance companies.

                   As for any Article V convention …

                   I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
                   Take a bow for the new revolution
                   Smile and grin at the change all around
                   Pick up my guitar and play
                   Just like yesterday
                   Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
                   We don’t get fooled again
                   Don’t get fooled again
                   No, no!

                   Meet the new boss
                   Same as the old boss

                2. “But in those days, I thought they were just deluded, or possibly stupid. Wishful thinking can be a pretty powerful thing for some people. Maybe that explained the incredibly bad science.
                   …
                   They’re not stupid. They are thieves. They’re stealing the money.”

                   And still doing it.
                   However, now people are starting to notice.

                   1. Yes, people are starting to notice.
                      But when I think about how much WORK it took me to dig out into the sunlight, its scary. We’re talking 10 years of reading, thinking, writing, studying statistics and on and on it went, until the obvious thing that was staring me in the fact the whole time finally penetrated. They’re just lying and stealing the money.

                      Wow. Talk about a worldview crumbling.

                      Now of course I see something in the news and say “Scam!” immediately, because I’ve seen the pattern of what they do. It leaves an imprint and you can infer it from news stories. Whenever you look at something government is doing, and it seems so stupid you can’t believe it, like building a wheelchair accessible bathroom on the -second- floor of a fire hall with no elevator, that’s a scam in action.

                      Here’s a perfect, perfect example just today. In Los Angeles the city is applying a white emulsion coating to streets, to “fight global warming.”
                      http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2018/04/12/o-sweet-saint-of-san-andreas-4/
                      It’s a payoff from some bureaucrat to some guy, somewhere. Either they’re paying off the contractor, or the supplier, or even the neighborhood getting the road treatment, but somebody is getting a payoff.

                      That’s mostly what a tax cut will kill off. It gets rid of the crooked bureaucrat, he doesn’t have any budget to spare for scams. He can be the biggest criminal of all time, but it doesn’t matter because there’s NO MONEY. It gets rid of the crooked guy accepting the favor too. That guy goes and looks somewhere else, because no money.

                3. ” You can’t deal honestly at law with evil men, because they will lie, cheat, steal and very likely kill you for opposing them. They have to be defeated and driven out. The best way to do that is to take away the money, then they leave on their own.”

                   THIS. Except for that last sentence. If you could actually take away the money, that would be one thing, but our instituting a warm-body democracy ensured that parasites would have a say, and there are more of them.

             2. I was studying geology when the global warming thing started to show up. We had just gone through stuff like the locally found proof for the Holocene Climatic Optimum – so, okay, it used to be quite a bit warmer in Finland once upon a time, the pollen found in different stratum and so on. Or several times, there was the Medieval warming period which had extra proof in local man kept records too, when oak forests grew in southern Finland, except then it again got colder and when the trees were cut to build ships they were not replaced because now it was a bit too cold for oaks.

                And so on.

                So my first thought was: hey that sounds good, we might get that nice warmer local climate back. Except it seemed everybody was all about disaster! Horrible! Seas will rise and we will all drown! Wildlife will perish! And so on…

                No talk about the natural changes which had happened before. Why not? Never? The Vikings in Greenland kind of things were spoken about when it came to history, but why no mention when talking about this global warming thing? So what if it would have been caused by human activities this time, how could that make it somehow worse than the natural versions which had happened before when everything seemed to have been much better for both humans and even wildlife… Why could I find no answers to these questions?

                Pissed me off, that did.

                1. “how could that make it somehow worse than the natural versions which had happened before when everything seemed to have been much better for both humans and even wildlife”
                   That was kind of my thought, back before I discovered that the only science that was settled was how to fleece the marks.
                   Then I noticed that none of the doom-‘n’-gloomers were interested in funding mitigation strategies for the coming hot times (since they had decided that the formerly prophesied Ice Age wasn’t coming after all).
                   Then all the other evidence of scamming came in.
                   And BTW, those darling polar bears that are all going to die?
                   Not so much.
                   http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/04/11/delingpole-climate-alarmists-maul-inconvenient-polar-bear-expert/

                   1. Mitigation strategies? That’s Bjørn Lomborg heresy. There’s now money nor power to be made in that.

                      1. There’s not money …

                2. Some years ago there was the bit how polar bear populations were supposedly in decline and such, and to support the concern there was a reference to some indicator… which was known to BE an indicator because of records of it happening before. Hrmmm, it happened before? And wasn’t a big deal? Just shocking that that little reference somehow just faded away. And by shocking, I of course mean ‘utterly predictable.’

                   1. I was just at the zoo and the polar bear exhibit, (which is very nice but only had one polar bear so I hope the other is off someplace having baby polar bears), had signs up about the threat of polar ice retreat killing off polar bears and how to donate.

                      1. Can I donate a bunch of Progressives to keep the polar bears fed?

                      2. In Kansas City, by any chance?

             3. Well, if you looked at the details, the cause wasn’t the same (particulates blocking sunlight for the cooling predictions, greenhouse effect trapping heat for the heating predictions), but yes, same solution. Given that the historical news stories of “New Ice Age” and “Death Valley Earth” ran in cycles relatively close to three solar cycles each (about 30-35 years), the switch in predictions is not surprising, but the identification of the source of the cause (coal power, primarily) being the same felt somewhat ludicrous to me.

                1. Cause in this case being “humans having an industrial civilization.”

                   1. Yeah, that’s why I specified details over general.

          3. Was seeing that when the er doc “AR BOOLITZ R D WURST” post was floating around. There is a reason for a lot of that. Namely the heavier rifles with hunting rounds are “police matter” instead of a status red. Nevermind I’ve personally worked folks trying hard to die from single 380.

14. Marianne is hot, I like her, but French Revolution has to be single worst event in modern era because it brought us the Jacobins, the original left wing people who believed a lot of other people had to die and then paradise on Earth will be created. Jacobins were first to have reign of terror and then other left govts have followed their lead ever since.

    1. Initially embraced by the French, even Tom Paine eventually found it necessary to flee the French Terror.

    2. Hey, she’s the only one who remembered to bring a bayonet, so hot and smart.

    3. As I said, even if you win the revolution, it doesn’t necessarily stay won. The French revolution counted out human nature, and insisted on equality of results.
       The result, as it always is, was death and destruction.

       1. Death appears to be a great equalizer. The dead aren’t very demanding and do not place a long term burden on resources (particularly if you utilize cremation — they don’t even take up much space). Further, once you destroy everything no one will have more than anyone else. See — it does work.

          1. That, and they always vote the Party ticket…

       2. And, of course, after all the death and destruction, the final result of the revolution was yet another Bourbon monarch named Louis.

          1. At least they had the Bourbon.. oh, right, not that kind.

15. Two things you can do right now. Bank of America has thrown their hat into the anti-Second Amendment ring, refusing to loan money to manufacturers of “military-style guns”; and hinting that they intend to expand that denial of financial services to anyone in the firearms industry.

    First thing is to write letters (or e-mail) to the CEO and Board of BoA telling them that such action is going to cost them your business, your investments, and that you will recommend to all your friends and acquaintances to do the same.. Then make sure you cancel your accounts with them, and instruct your financial managers to divest any BoA holdings they may have under our accounts. (Do get the best return on those sell offs though.)

    Second thing is to tell the world and sundry of why you are no longer going to do business with BoA. And keep pushing it until they either change, or get sick of it.

    I’d go for a third action too. Get the government to work on them. Push for financial auditing of BoA. Possible money laundering. Get Congress to roll back any sweetheart deals that they probably are giving them. I don’t know where all the fingers and pies are, but a multi-national organization that big has to be doing illegal activities, even if only by accident.

    Even a grizzly bear will go someplace else if enough small dogs bark and nip at him long enough.

    1. BoA story from Commiefornia: That interest rate on your savings isn’t (arbitrary numbers for demonstration purposes) 1.0%. It’s more like 1.000009%. BoA has a habit of shaving off the .000009% and keeping it for themselves. This amounts to multiple millions of dollars. Every so often they get “caught” and fined, but the fine is like $2M and a tiny fraction of the profit. So as soon as official eyes are averted, they’re back at it.

       1. It seems every time some bank/card co. is found to be or invents a new (name for a) way to screw over its customers, it’s one of two places and BoA is one of the two. I forget the other just now, but they’re places I simply refuse to deal with. The currently revealed anti-liberty stance of BoA is just further confirmation of a correct decision.

          1. I forget the original reason I stopped banking with BoA. I think it was either over their horrible lack of security, and refusal to correct the issue; or over charging fees that effectively zeroed people’s accounts over time. There are like about 3 or 4 other major things that they do as a ‘bank’ that are so anti-customer oriented, I’m surprised anyone banks with them. But I do have to periodically remind my money managers to not dip into the BoA waters.

             1. Not BofA, but Chase. Our bank had been acquired, during the banking/housing crisis. Our accounts were fine, we had all the “criteria” to keep everything free. However our kid, no. We were on his accounts, so (with his permission, he was in college), went in to discuss the situation. “Nothing they could do.” Well he could get a student account for free until he graduated. Okay, delay the problem about 8 months. Nope. Told them when we move, we WILL move everything, no half measures. Already had account at local credit union, just hadn’t consolidated. Had kid open his account at CU. Shut down accounts at Chase. Chase sputtered. Not a lot of money in the scheme of things, but a lot of accounts. Especially since we convinced a lot of family & friends to do the same thing. No judgement. Just stated the situation, our opinion, our solution & why. Guess friends & family agreed. My understanding it wasn’t the amount of money, it was the number of accounts the bank lost. *** very evil smile ***

                1. I’ve not had any significant issue with Chase, but I refuse to deal with BoA and Citi[sic]Bank now.

                   1. Had (they shut it down after less than 3 months not using it) a BofA card. Now have a Citi CC card. Former started as a Schwab card for the better than good (at the time) rebates; Schwab “dropped” the experiment & gave/sold the existing customers to BofA. Switched to Citi CC because of Costco; no problems yet, but if there are I’ll (try) go through Costco ** evil grin **. Doubt I’ll have trouble as they provide me with my current Credit Rating #. Possible they’d risk someone with a stratosphere rating (yes bragging, earned every point), but really doubt it; but then I am a parasite as they pay us money & we never pay them … but then they can get $90 – $150/month just from Vendors we do business with (& I track every transaction)*, so maybe it balances out.

                      * Can you tell I’d been working on software for the last 35 years? 🙂 🙂 😉

          2. Long, long ago, my grandfather worked for them– how long ago? Some of the papers say “Bank of Italy.”

             About 2002 my dad was saying things like “at least my dad didn’t live to see them getting so bad that the military dumped them for travel cards.” And canceled the last account he had with them.

             Have avoided them since.

             1. The present BOA has very little connection to the Bank of Italy; multiple mergers and acquisitions have brought in an abundance of managers owing very little fealty to the traits which marked BOA’s ancestor. They are now a creature of government, relying upon patronage in high places to protect them from the consequences of their actions, and if that patronage sometimes requires a little virtue signalling it is a small price to pay.

                1. It still would’ve hurt him, and they do bank (heh) on that tradition and name.

16. I cover the Hungarian Revolution of ’56 and the Prague Spring this week. Hearing first-hand accounts, plus having read _The Bridge at Andau_ when I was a teen… Yeah. Build under, build around, teach what really happened.

    1. The Hungarian that I took Russian from in 1989 was *in* the Hungarian Revolution.

    2. THIS.

       When our opponents are willing to play the long game to impose their vision we have no choice but to play a long game as well.

    3. “Teach what really happened” is a huge one right now, because our institutions of knowledge are overrun with people who think facts and truth don’t matter as much as perspectives and narratives. We must preserve actuality, in various forms.

       1. “I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver’s Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson, and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
          Everyone laughed quietly.
          “It can’t be,” said Montag.
          “It is,” replied Granger, smiling. “We’re book burners, too. We read the book and burnt them, afraid they’d be found. Microfilming didn’t pay off; we were always traveling, we didn’t want to bury the film and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it’s here. And the hour’s late. And the war’s begun. An we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors….”- Ray Bradbury.

          We are the smugglers from Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Brad. And it might get much worse before it gets better.
          Sancto Leibowitz (well, in the immense, infinite sequence of universes he must have existed somewhere) ora pro nobis, as we go into the night of ignorance with our load of forbidden knowledge.

       2. Well the teachers are more interested in repealing a tax deduction than teaching.

       3. This is one thing I’m trying to subtly pass to my brother. Going to school for teaching and iirc history and I try and give him stuff that is contemporary to the narrative history and serves to clarify the narrative.

17. We need to fight back, and we have to be better at it– we have to make dang sure we don’t waste possible allies, or take stupid stands.

    Because we can’t do the whole “rule by terror” thing. We’re just not suited for it.

    We have had luck in “rewarding” companies that are brave– see the Chick-fil-A buycott, or the many folks saying they’re going to stop by Arby’s. (Reminds me, I need to do that….)

    1. A friend works at Chick-fil-A.  She has described the day when the pro-boycott protesters came to surround the location where she works.  There were far less of them than the counter-protesters, who came in droves to buy food that day.  It being a hot day, the Chick-fil-A workers handed out bottles of water to the protesters.  In the face of this the protesters eventually gave up.

       1. I know that buycott was a serious sacrifice for our family, because it took almost two hours to get in to order. The line was out the door, and cops had to show up to manage the traffic issues, even with the way the workers were doing things like taking orders by walking down the line of cars so the food was ready by the time you reached the window.

          Not that a line is unusual– I can’t help but notice the only time their drive-through is empty is on a Sunday!

          1. Chick-fil-A opened it first store in ND here in Fargo a couple of months ago. The drive-thru lines during the weekdays are finally down to being contained inside the parking lot.

          2. Go inside. Much faster. But ya. They were the first fast food place I remember seeing multiple order boxes and rows. Go by in evening and full.

             1. Five kids, half of whom need help getting unbuckled*, and I doubt it would take less than five minutes, so the equation gets mixed up a bit. 🙂

                *which half of the older three varies. -.-

             2. Depends on who’s working. Now, granted, this was at McDonald’s, not Chick-Fil-A, but I pulled into a parking lot with a long line and saw that there were maybe two people at the counter inside, so I parked and walked in.

                I counted at least ten cars getting their order at the drive-thru window before I got mine that I was second in line for inside.

    2. The 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando happened in the early hours of June 12, a Sunday. By midday the line of folks willing to donate blood to aid the survivors stretched for blocks. Two local Chick-fil-A restaurants opened their kitchens and brought cold drinks and sandwiches to those waiting in line. Also, Pulse was a well known gay club. By Federal regulation practicing gays may not donate blood, so it wasn’t about LGBT, it was about helping people in the community that were hurting.
       Thank the Lord I like their chicken. Makes it that much easier to swing through the Chick-fil-A drive through fairly regularly.

       1. Yes, it does help that Chick-fil-A produces a pretty good product.

          1. The real reason crack cocaine came to the us. It’s in the breading.

          2. I get the idea their menu has changed since I stopped at one of their stores in Memphis, 30-odd years ago.

             They had pressed ground chicken parts shaped like drumsticks, ground chicken patty burgers, fries, and a few other items. Nothing that looked like a recognizeable chicken part.

             The meal I got was so nasty I didn’t finish it, and I’ve always held them up as an example of the worst fast food I’ve ever encountered.

             1. How… utterly bizarre. That doesn’t resemble any menu of theirs I’ve ever seen. Maybe it was a Memphis thing.

                1. yep, the first time i went to chick-fil-a was around 30 years ago, and the menu was basically identical to now.

             2. Truth is, I personally wouldn’t know. Sadly I don’t digest meat, fish or fowl properly. I have a number of friends and acquaintances who prefer it to all other available chicken places.

             3. Are we talking Chik-Fil-A here? Because I’ve been going to them for over 15 years and never encountered that.

18. Wha?!? If they get a vote I’m not gonna play!

19. What! No rent-a-guillotine business? No baskets for every budget? How am I supposed to turn a profit on this enterprise? Yes, there are the prepackaged tar-and-feather kits, but it’s not a real revolution without guillotines! 🙂

    On a more serious note, it’s critical to keep the pressure up. The biggest problem our side has is a tendency to get despondent when a single electoral victory doesn’t deliver everything we want. 1980, 1994, 2010, 2016…I’ve seen this before. One big victory, limited results, despondency…and the Left wins in the end.

    No. Real winning will require winning three out of four cycles in a row. Winning enough to crack the Ancien Regime. And the Left IS cracking. Love him or hate him, Trump has shown us the full totalitarian desires of the modern Left. I’ll be honest, I truly fear the results of their getting power again…because I think they WANT a Second Civil War, and mean to provoke one.

    1. Oh, Lord, they’re cracking in a ridiculously loud way.

    2. “I think they WANT a Second Civil War, and mean to provoke one.”

       Not quite. They are sure that we don’t want one and will stop short of provoking it. Observe the Antifa idiots cocksure there will be no resistance to their tantrums.

    3. One wonders if their reaction will increase the “I don’t like him, but will crawl over broken glass to harm his enemies” contingent in Nov.

    4. Not a civil war. A krystallnacht.

    5. Feh. Have you tried to find a tumbril recently? The closes you can get are those two-wheeled “garden carts” at the big box stores…

       1. The modern equivalent would be pickup trucks. Preferably rusty, manure-caked stakebeds.

    6. I propose Rent-A-Trebuchet. Or pay-per-fling.

       We can set up somewhere near Harvard with some truly enormous trebuchets and bombard the buildings with some of the fruits of their indoctrination engine.

20. “Never give up, never surrender” was perhaps meant to be a more or less silly catchphrase of an imaginary hero in an imaginary television series, but as it happens it is a pretty good principle anyway.

    “Never stop” might be even better. Because you really can’t in this game. Not even when you very clearly have won. Because the moment you turn your back and go back to not paying attention that victory gets attacked, and the next time you look you very well might find out that you once again need to start fighting from what looks like the losing position.

    1. Part of why Galaxy Quest was so awesome is that it caught both the “mocking that which is noble” thing that’s so common– hah hah hah, never give up, by item of dude I’ll avenge you, hahaha ha– and then recognized the problem was the mockers, not what they mocked.

       That nobility is good. And it’s expensive. A lot braver than the guys who mock it.

       1. Nobility also requires you to think about what it is that is right and if necessary face risks to self to do it.

       2. by item of dude I’ll avenge you

          BWAHAHAHA! Oh, that is awesome! ROFLMAO!

          1. A little tweaking and that would make a great T-Shirt:

             “By Awesome Dude’s Mighty Item, I Shall Avenge You”

             1. It might be a good one to MadLibs:

                “By [Adjective] [Person]’s Mighty [Noun], I Shall [Verb] You”

                Or possibly return to the original phrase order:

                “By the [Adjective] [Noun] of [Person], I Shall [Verb] You”

                For the thoracically endowed we might opt for a t-shirt offering multiple choice selections …

                “By the [select 1: awesome/mighty/rectilinear/rotating] [select 1: hammer/sword/codpiece/dreidlel] of [select 1: Thor/Grapthar/merlin/Mrs. Miggens], I shall [select 1: avenge/repay/destroy/irritate mildly] you.”

                1. HAHA!

             2. Sounds like my brother’s “sports team” shirts– they say things like “COLLEGE TEAM NAME” over the standard “ATHLETICS DEPARTMENT” and such.

          2. By the power of Grayskull, I have the power!

21. We’re just getting started. Giving up now is like moving your first pawn, seeing your opponet move his second pawn, and conceeding the match.

22. “If the war turns hot, we’ll probably `win.`”

    That’s what the White Russians said.

    Which reminds me, I need to check the amount of Kahlúa in the liquor cabinet.

    1. The reds had fooled the soldiers (well a large enough number) into backing them

    2. Yep. Again, only one side has drawn blood. And they made sure that the attack was shrugged off by populace. Vandalism for the cause is legal according to a jury over pulling down a statue with video and admission. Plus out of the hundreds arrested at inauguration I don’t think any convicted.

       On the right, at the first whiff of criminality from someone not of the body, they are thrown off the cliff.

    3. I’ve been reading about the Russian Civil War (1918-1921 version). What struck me is just how icky most sides were. Once you got past the “leave me alone and get off my lawn” individuals, in Ukraine alone you had criminal gangs, war-lords (I repeat myself), The Reds, Ukrainian Reds, the official Whites, the other Whites, and probably a few the author missed mentioning. Belarus wasn’t much different.

       1. And some German who wanted to carve a territory for themselves. Almost forgot that crew.

       2. Oh, yeah. I’ve only dipped lightly into reading about that topic, but it was such a complex, multi-sided mess – and even the factions I agreed with in broad strokes often had a seedy underside or were allied with some truly evil folks for expediency’s sake.

23. Thank you. I was deciding how best to hunker down and try to survive the post SJW takeover, but that won’t help my family and I’ve already got a target a mile wide on my back as is. Better to fight to the end and try to make a world for them to inherit than roll over and play dead, hoping for the violent ones will ignore us.

    1. If we go down in a hot war, make sure you’re able and ready to take an escort of them to hell. I’m just starting to work on that.

       1. Given that they tend to go for mobs, I can see a few *very* nasty things to do to a large group of people who pack themselves tightly in a predetermined space. I’m actually kind of shocked it hasn’t happened already.

          1. Massed attackers is one of the few things a bump-stock is ‘good’ for. Keep in mind that most semi-automatic rifles (and shotguns) were never designed to be fired at near automatic rates for long periods of time; and probably will jam after a half minute or less of continuous fire.

             1. Think “whiff of grape-shot”. Four large gauge shotguns, fired simultaneously.

             2. The things I am thinking about would never have the person doing them anywhere near a firearm.

                Keep in mind, my training is as an engineer. We tend to… overdo things.

                1. Nothing exceeds like excess.

                   “You did WHAT?!?!”
                   “I reduced the problem to a trivial state. of course.”

24. I am watching with some fear and trepidation the run up to the 2018 midterm elections. The Dems are predicting a wave of conquest based both on historical evidence that the party out of power always gains seats and from the results of a couple of special elections where they squeaked wins.
    The historical rationale is that after a big win that party tends to coast while the losers are incentivized to try harder. Those special election losses had weak Republicans running and massive spending by the Democrats.
    What I am desperately hoping is that the Dems continue to over play their hand and so offend the Republican base that there is a huge turnout in November. Trump is already hamstrung what with the deep state and activist judges. Losing the Senate and possibly the House would almost certainly give us an impeachment trial that won’t go anywhere, but would further handicap Trump’s agenda.
    Note, never a big fan of Trump, but he’s doing some things right in my estimation and worst case at least he isn’t Clinton.

    1. I think the House is in play. Ryan not running for reelection helps the GOP. They can throw Ryan under the bus for all the failings of Congress, deny the Democrats a target, and continue to tie every Dem candidate to Pelosi. Unless Steny Hoyer can mount a coup against her…he’s a more cunning opponent.

       The Senate? The Democrats have the worst possible electoral map, defending many seats in states Trump carried in 2016. The odds of them taking the Senate are poor.

       1. Definitely hoping that Clinton, Pelosi, and Mad Maxine Waters continue to screech their vile comments to the media. That alone is worth at least five points in the final tallies.

          1. the picador thing applies here — Trump-like, keep poking at the loudest screechers to make sure no-one can easily doubt how vile they are.

       2. They gotta have something to run ON. Just saying “we’re not as bad” does nothing to motivate a base and runs the risk of alienating voters who are fencesitters. They tried that in Pennsylvania and tbh in Alabama. Didn’t go so well.

          Meanwhile promising to bring San Francisco values to Wisconsin won by 12

          1. Who won the San Francisco values thing?

             1. Wisconsin supreme Court election.

                1. But who won? The guy who said he’d bring San Francisco values to Wisconsin, or the guy who used that as a negative campaign ad?

                   Madison, at least, is a San Francisco wannabe, just lots colder…

                   1. The one that said he’d bring it.

                      1. Is reason is called MadTown.
                         Is also reason there is Wisconsin… and then there is Madison & Milwaukee.

          2. If you’re referring to the Alabama GOP primary, the problem was that Mitch McConnell decided to throw his support to the one Republican Roy Moore could beat in a runoff.

             1. More to the actual election. Again it was turnout that decided it. Telling people that “zomg there’ll be a Democrat” is not necessarily enough to get voters out for a lackluster candidate. And the gop will have plenty of those if history is shown

                1. Not to mention an extreme smear campaign fed by women who suddenly remembered attentions Moore paid them over 30 years earlier. Funny how none of that ever came up in the primary race, only when he faced off against the Democrat. Evangelicals were a major portion of Moore’s base and while it’s doubtful any of them would switch their vote I suspect a fair number simply stayed home unable to cast a vote for someone under a waterfall of accusations. As best I can tell none of those accusers followed through once Moore lost the election.

                   1. Yep.

                   2. Plus iirc a number of the late polls were in Moore’s favor so it makes it easier to just stay home. Basically it was 11/2016 on the other foot.

                   3. ALL of those allegations occurred at a time when Moore was a Democrat and there are no, nada, zilch, bupkiss claims of such behaviour by him since becoming Republican.

                      The obvious conclusion is that if women want to be treated respectfully they ought encourage more men to become Republican.

    2. “The Dems are predicting a wave of conquest …

       If you look at the individual midterm results in the first year of an administration it is clear that the gains are rather small and the large gains they are predicting are largely the effects of just two such campaigns: 1994 (Clinton’s first term) and 2010 (Obama’s first term.)

       Both of which followed Progressive attempts to radically change the nation.

       1. Yes! Those two were bloodbaths for the Democrats – but they are also outliers.

          1. I lay at least partial credit for 1994 at the foot of the assault weapon ban of earlier that same year. As for 2010, well we had two years of our glorious leader genuflecting to foreign despots and a fairly constant drone of anti American race baiting from the oval office. That he won reelection I blame on the Republicans lack of a viable candidate as well as a barrage of dirty tricks from the Democrats.

             1. But the same caveat comes that did for Obama’s second election. A chunk of the conventional wisdom said that the polls were over counting minorities and students, and thus the electorate would be more comprable to 2004 than 2008.

                Oops.

                In both those midterms Republicans were energized and that is partly what drove the outcome. The media has managed to keep a pretty hyped up state where some special elections are getting presidential levels of Dems coming out. That was what hit the Virginia legislature and Alabama. Both candidates and the party need to take it seriously.

                1. Here are the House results for the last five midterm elections in the first term of an administration:

                   1982 Seat change
                   R: Decrease 26
                   D: Increase 26

                   1990 Seat change
                   R: Decrease 8
                   D: Increase 7

                   1994 Seat change
                   R: Increase 54
                   D: Decrease 54

                   2002 Seat change
                   R: Increase 8
                   D: Decrease 7

                   2010 Seat change
                   R: Increase 63
                   D: Decrease 63

                   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2010

                   Simply change the year in the URL for each election’s results.

                   1. I know the variances tend to be smaller than just the wave (although 2002 probably more of outlier than others) but the enthusiasm is there and on the Dem side the environment is similar to or more impassioned (I guess is the word) to 2010 or (I’m assuming) 94. Iirc house flip was only something like 30 seats and got 3-4 baked in in PA IMO.

                2. Take it from someone who has family in AL: that’s not what happened.

                   What happened is that Vichy Mitchy and crew didn’t like the thought that someone who wasn’t a Vichy Bot might get elected, so they backed a candidate, Luther Strange, who acted as Eric Holder to a crooked AL governor, instead of Brooks. When he lost, Moore was all that was left, and they supported false charges against him from the Democrats, and refused to support Moore (also not a Vichy Bot).

                   Same tactics they used against several other Tea Party candidates over the years, although the fake pedophilia charges were new.

                   1. I’m not saying it was the (sole) fault of Moore. Or honestly even saying where the blame is from.

                      But turnout was a driver there iirc. Regardless of side in politics like battle it comes to firstest with mostest. Between the infighting (that will probably not be absent in November) and accusations you had a depressed rep turnout and increased Dem. Iirc just a few days before election polls showed Moore +5 but the crosstabs were not matched by election turnout.

                      The same story has played out in most of these special elections where reps performed at or around PAR but Dems showed up en masse. Look at the VA delegates races for another case. The near house flip there wasn’t just a factor of DC metastasizing but who showed up.

                      That is where the November danger is. Especially if they can reproduce blue dogs.

       2. I have every bit of confidence that the Democrats are working just as hard as the Republicans to throw the race to the other side; to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory; to find the most unpalatable & unqualified candidate for each office; to generally behave as if working for the interest of their opposition.

    3. Your lips to God’s ears on the impeachment. Do you really trust that a dozen senators won’t vote to rid themselves of the meddlesome Trump.

       1. They won’t unless they think they can get Pence, and ALSO want whoever the new Speaker is, in. The House is really, really, important.

          1. Seeing as there are at least four rep senators who id almost put money on having voted Hil and for many of them doing so would provide protection against investigation and not harm them electorally plus give them reason to adopt things like superdelegates to prevent having to sadly impeach someone of their own party for having misremembered the date of a conversation.

             Most of the folks who drive these decisions are never in danger. Safe district and state and they have friends in the local party to boost em. And the actual perks of minority party are better for em. Minimum responsibility but the best possible fundraising.

25. “The plan never survives first contact with the enemy.” I think the ProgLeft forgot that. We (the people VileProgs think are their enemy) finally showed up to fight, and wow! The panic and reaction. Heh.

26. I am rereading AFGM.
    You time things wonderfully again

    1. I have two more books in that particular time line pushing really hard: Fire and Smoke from Nat’s perspective and The Blood of Heroes from the perspective of Abigail Keeva Remi then aged 16.
       The problem is writing the intervening books. BUT what I’m trying to say is: that cycle of revolution/etc is not over.

       1. I’m at the point just before Luce and Abigail head off on their own

          1. Man I hated writing that one. I had plans to write about her grandkids… But it was how it was.

             1. I was mad at you when I first read the book.

                1. I sat there, looking at the page and going “I must erase that and write new”. And I couldn’t. That was the True Story TM. Sigh

       2. oh, and I eagerly await those other stories.

          1. The Blood of Heroes
             Daddy’s Girl
             Why do parents lie to their children? Or else keep them so close confined that lying isn’t needed?
             And why are children so blind to who their parents really are?
             Answer me this: what can be served by going through life with each generation blind to each other?
             Oh, I know what my parents thought they were doing. At least I think I did. They were protecting me. Protecting me from their enemies, protecting me from their fame, protecting me from what I was: an artifact, created in a lab, and one most natural humans would object to.
             I know, or think I do, they did it out of love. They wanted me to live the simple life, to grow up in a small community, to be a good, happy country girl.
             They forgot one thing. They forgot they had me made to be theirs. Simple and happy were not in my makeup. And no one told me anything. Even my brothers joined in the conspiracy to make sure I knew nothing and did nothing.
             My name is Abigail Keeva-Remy. I grew up in Liberty, a small town on the outskirts of the newly reclaimed North American territories. Or rather, twenty miles outside it, because my parents didn’t want to be too close to the town. They were never too close to anything.
             When I was sixteen, I wanted to go to war.
             This is not as crazy as it might seem. I’d been raised as a strict USAian, fallen asleep at the Fourth of July Service with its interminable readings, received candies for memorizing bits of the constitution, eaten too much at the picnic and ooed and aaed at the fireworks. I learned to cook the fall festival foods from Father, Lucius Keeva. I never understood how they decided which one would be called father and which one would be called dad. You’d think that dad, the softer, more casual name would go to Lucius, Luce, as dad called him, who was the one who told us stories, who bandaged torn knees, who read to us, and who stayed up all night with me, when I wasn’t feeling well. Dad, I thought for most of my life, didn’t care about much but his cows.
             Sometimes important people came to see him, Generals and presidents, and more often than not he’d receive them in the barn, while controlling the servos to muck out the stalls, or fixing the milking machinery. Once I remembered Father saying, “Good Lord, Man, it’s General Herrera, you can’t have talked to him while elbow deep in a cow!” He’d been half-laughing, as though the circumstances were very funny, but dad had shrugged, his face impassive, and said, “I had to do the insemination then, or we were going to lose the window. They want my opinion, they can damn well get it while I’m doing the important stuff.”
             That was dad. For warmth and human touch, he could have given a run to a snake, or perhaps a discarded snake skin. He was tall and spare, and had pale blond hair, like my brothers’, and almost black eyes. Some accident, long ago, had shattered his left hip in a way regen couldn’t fully fix, and if he had to stand for a long time, he’d go pale, and all the lines on his face looked like they’d been carved by a sharp knife. And if it were I or one of the boys causing him to stand, Father would get sharp with us. It was almost the only time he did.
             If it sounds like I’m describing an idyllic if quirky family, that’s because you don’t know the other stuff. I told you we were strict Usaians, and it’s true, but we weren’t allowed to join the community. I was never allowed to go to the training center. My brothers had gone, but when I asked why they could go but I couldn’t, Max, the older one by twenty minutes – they’re identical twins – had said “Maybe they didn’t want you to learn to fight before you learned to write, kid.” And wouldn’t explain. No one ever explained anything.
             I wasn’t allowed to have sleep overs. I wasn’t allowed to learn anywhere but at home. I couldn’t join the sewing circles or other women’s work. And though I was encouraged – no, required – to join the Sons of Liberty, when I went on training weekends, the instructor seemed to have a special mission to keep me from being alone with any girls at any time, or to engage in any unsupervised talk.
             It was like I was raised in a family that loved liberty and therefore I must be kept a prisoner.
             Take the family. Please. At least at the time I’d have given the four of them by weight, and at a cheap price per pound.
             I was ten years younger than my brothers, Max and Ben, but when I asked my parents why, all dad would say was “Because by that time we’d forgotten the pain of raising babies.” And Father’s eyes had crinkled at the corner, the way they did when he was amused, and he’d said “Temporary insanity.” And that was it.
             So. I’d grown up practiced in the art of war, but when the war with Liberte for the territories south of us broke out, and my brothers were allowed to join up, and our parents sent them off with obvious pride, I was told I was too young.
             I wasn’t too young. Two of the girls from my Sons of Liberty training group joined. I stood in the kitchen and tried to argue with dad.
             Okay, you’ll say I’d picked the wrong parent. But I’d already tried to work my way around Father, which wasn’t usually all that difficult and had got the flat “no” and when I pressed further the “Abigail, really. No. We can’t afford to lose you.”
             “Why?”
             “Because I don’t want to have to put your dad down or keep him in a straight jacket the rest of his life. No.”
             “Why in hell? What would dad care?”
             “Abigail, you’re not too big for a spanking. Just no. Get over it.”
             So I’d waited till Father had gone to bed. Oh, not to sleep. He cooks you see, and then immediately after dinner, he goes to bed with a gem reader. When we were little he’d read to us, then go to bed with a gem reader, while dad tidied up the kitchen and made sure the house and perimeter were safe for the night, and the defenses armed. He said he needed that time to himself, and he’s weird and doesn’t like hollos or virtus, but reads really boring old books in his gem reader.
             So Father had gone to bed, and dad was cleaning the kitchen. Correction, mostly activating the servos that cleaned the kitchen. I’d asked once how they divided tasks, and I’d gotten the same answer for everything from how they decided which surname went last to how they’d chosen what we’d call each of them, “We arm wrestled.” I was almost sure that wasn’t true, but with those two you never knew.
             I figured if dad was the problem, I’d talk to dad. Okay, it was probably stupid. There must have been something else going on, because they’d been whispering to each other over the dining room table. And Dad was looking sharp-featured and worried. Not quite as though he were in pain, but not much different.
             So, I approached him, while he was feeding the dogs. We always had dogs. Big, yellow setters, dumb as mud. They’d been my playfriends when I was very little and didn’t realize other kids had human friends. At that time we had five: Daisy, the matriarch, getting on in years. Bob, the patriarch, ditto, and three of their sons, named for reasons that I’d never understood, Huey Dewey and Louie.
             Dad was kneeling on the floor, patting the dogs, and trying to keep Huey from filching everyone else’s food. He turned around when he heard me come in. “Yes, Abigail?” It was said in his normal tone, very cool, very collected. I knew – I’m not completely stupid – he’d spent some time in the army before the farm, and it always seemed to me he treated us like bothersome recruits.
             “Dad,” I’d said, and then floundered. And then took a deep breath. “I want to enlist.”
             “No.”
             “Dad, I’m too old to sit at home, and you and Father don’t let me DO anything. I don’t even have any chores in the farm.”
             His lip twitched, in what might be amusement. “You’re welcome to help me muck out the stables tomorrow.”
             “I want to join up.”
             “No.”
             “You let Max and Ben join up.”
             He had stood up and loomed over me. I have absolutely no idea where my genetics come from. Dad and Father are both tall and blond. Dad is tall and spare and Father is very tall and built like a brick shithouse – at least that’s what he says he is, though I have no idea what a shithouse is – and my brothers are built like Father, but with Dad’s features and coloring.
             I’m small, dark haired, dark eyed and rounded. That’s probably why they think I can’t do anything.
             “Young lady, there was no ‘let’ involved. Your brothers are 26. We had no means of keeping them from seeking glory or whatever the fuck young men think they’re doing when they put on a uniform.” I could tell he was not his normal self, because though I’d heard him swear once or twice before, he’d never done it when he knew I was present. “You’re sixteen. We can keep you safe and the answer is no.”
             “But Mary and Anne joined up, and they’re only my age.”
             “Who in Hell are Mary and Anne?”
             “They’re in my training group.”
             We’d been yelling at each other so much, that we must have alerted Father. And what’s worse, I hadn’t heard him come down the stairs. So, he’s normally the sweet and nice one, right?
             But when he thinks we’re upsetting dad – whether that’s true or not, or fair or not – he becomes like this brick wall. A spiky brick wall.
             He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Abby, stop upsetting your dad and go to bed.”
             “Luce, I don’t need you to protect me from my own daughter.”
             “Father, I was only—”
             “Founders memory,” Father thundered. “Both of you. You’re so damn much alike. Stop arguing Abby, and go to bed. We’ll talk in the morning.”
             “No,” Dad said. “She should understand that right now of all times—”
             “No, Nat, she shouldn’t. We’ll talk about what she needs to know and tell her in the morning. Now go to bed, Abby. And you, please, come to bed.”
             And that was it because when Father got like that there was no arguing with him.
             Only I was simmering, and I suspect so was Dad. I heard them talking late into the night, in their room down the hall, and I could hear Dad’s voice get all curt and clipped the way it does when he’s furious.
             Well, I wasn’t going to stick around and have him be furious at me in the morning.
             At first I thought of running away and enlisting anyway, but dad and Father had influence, though I never knew why, and if I tried I’d probably have gotten flown back and delivered to them in disgrace.
             So instead I went fishing. I took Huey and went out to the fishing hole, where I rarely went without my brothers, as far from the house as I could manage. And I took one of the old fishing poles and creels from the barn, so they didn’t see mine missing and guess where I’d gone.
             I wanted them to worry a little. I thought they’d be more likely to give me what I wanted if they did.
             So I spent the day away, and caught three trout, which I figured would keep Father from killing me when I handed them over.
             I was on my way back to the farm when Huey suddenly growled and stopped.
             The explosion came shortly after.
             I started running. When the pole stuck in long branches, I dropped it. It was an old pole anyway. But I held on to the creel as I ran. There were more explosions. Some of them muffled. The smell of explosives and burning filled the air. I could hear our cows mooing and thought something must have gone wrong and the barn must be on fire. I must get there and help dad get them out.
             I ran like crazy, but the farm was visible long before it was accessible, and I had never run so fast even in all my training time. I stumbled a couple of times, and got up again and ran. I realized, about halfway through, I didn’t care what the hell else was wrong, as long as dad and father were all right.
             I think that flyers went overhead, which was weird, because we weren’t on any of the flyer routes over our farm. But I didn’t care. My heart was pounding so hard, I thought I was going to die, and all I could be sure of was the blood beating in my ears.
             On the near-perimeter of the farm, where the back lawn began, Huey, running ahead of me, made a peculiar sound. Then howled. I paused only briefly by Daisy’s corpse. She’d been shot through the head.
             Bob was further on, a barely recognizable charred lump. Normally that would have been enough to make me scream, but right now, nothing was. Not until I found Dad and Father. I called them, loudly, “Dad? Father? DAD!”
             Nothing. The farmhouse was burning. Those two idiots had it built of logs. Not ceramite and dimatough shaped like logs. No, real logs. They said they liked the pine smell. The barns and outbuildings were made of ceramite and dimatough, and they and the animals were fine.
             But I couldn’t find my parents.
             NONE of our perimeter defenses had activated. In the middle of the lawn, there was a torn up patch of ground and a great deal of blood, but no blood trail leading anywhere.
             I went through the barns and the pens, and I looked, but I couldn’t find them.
             And then I called the Longs. They were the neighbors we were mostly friendly with, and kind of like grandparents to me. John and Mary were in their seventies, maybe older. Their kids had moved away, but they still looked after the farm. When Father and Dad had to go anywhere when I was little, I stayed with them.
             They came as soon as I called. Okay, twenty minutes, by flyer. John, I noticed, was armed. Mary too, probably, but she was wearing the work pants and tunic she normally wore around the farm. John had walked around the cabin looking at something electronic in his hand.
             Mary just stood by me, hugging me. For once, I didn’t try to fight it and leaned into her.
             “Where are they?” I asked. And, as John approached, “Are they—”
             “No,” he said. “No. One thing we know is that they’re not dead. They’re not in there.”
             “How do you know?”
             He seemed to take a long time thinking. Like my parents, he and Mary never told me anything I didn’t need to know. Then he sighed. “The military implants chips in all fighting men. They both have them from when they were enlisted. They’re too out of range for me to tell you where they are. But they aren’t dead. If they were dead the chips would give a different signal.”
             “But… where are they? Are they in trouble?”
             I could feel the Longs look at each other over my head, the kind of look married adults give each other when consulting on what to say. It’s like they can say volumes with their eyes.
             “They– There are people we’ll let know what happened. People who will look for them.”
             “No. I want them back,” I said. My voice sounded petulant, like I was about five. “I want them back and all right. I argued with them last night. They’ll think I hate them.”
             Mary squeezed my arm, “Sweetie, they’ll think no such thing. And you have to trust them. They’re survivors. They’ll come back. You come and stay with us. You and Huey. And we’ll look after you and John will come here and look after the animals till they come back.”
             I let them take me to the flyer. I let them take me to their home, as familiar to me as my own home. Mary prepared the trout for dinner but I couldn’t eat a bite.
             Look, my parents are annoying and cryptic, and sometimes I wanted very badly to get away from them. But they were mine, and damn it all, I missed them already. And I couldn’t stand not to know if they were even dead or alive.
             I suspected that John had told someone. No, I knew he had. People in uniform had come to the door, and John had gone out to talk to them.
             I have this thing I can do, which Dad says is like Father. I can run faster, hear better, see better, be stronger than I should be. I’d stood by the door and listened very intently while they talked far away, under a grove of trees, three solemn men in uniform and John. They probably thought I couldn’t hear anything, and truth be told, I couldn’t hear much. There were some words, though, and they made me ill: commandos, interrogation, torture. None of which belonged in the same world as my parents.
             At this time, Father should be up in their room, with his reader and his book gems. And Dad should be feeding the dogs, and setting things up for the night.
             Huey pressed against my leg, and I thought the other dogs were probably all dead. And my parents might be worse than dead.
             Before, when I thought I’d eventually have to run away from home and join the army, I’d stashed things in the barn to aid my journey. You see, I figured my only chance was to join in an outpost so far they didn’t know who I was. And give a false name.
             So I’d packed a backpack to the maximum regulation weight I’d carried when training with the SOL. It had three changes of clothing, four meals worth of rations, a broom, five burners and three spare powerpacks.
             That night after the Longs had gone to bed, I’d disabled the alarm in my window – I’d had to learn to do that, for just a few minutes unsupervised, at home – and shimmied out the tree outside it.
             Then, avoiding perimeter defenses, I walked out of their property and towards the farm. It was going to take me half the night to get there, but once there I could get the broom. I didn’t know where I was going to go yet, but I was going to find out.
             My parents were mine. And I was going to rescue them.

             1. Luce’s girl, isn’t she? Head on out on a rescue mission totally ill-prepared . . .

                Thank you.

                1. She’s actually more Nat’s girl, as it develops.
                   And… oh, um… Athena might have donated the necessary genetic material to bridge theirs. 😉
                   Hell of a combination.

                   1. The planet should maybe surrender now while it’s ahead then

                      1. 🙂

          2. And okay, I MIGHT be torturing you.

             1. Oy, yes, yes you are, just finished the snippet. MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                1. I need to write the bridging books. Darkship Revenge made it clear that the world is not what I thought when this hit. It might be a different war. I know the one earlier is a USAian civil war, before Abbie’s birth.

                   1. Funny because that kind of setting was what i had in mind for an anthology story.

             2. Okay, OKAY!

                The meeting room is the Far Side of Nowhere. The password is Chicken Little.

27. First, thank you very much, Sarah, for providing this venue for saying this.

    The worst part of the political situation in the U. S. right now is how easy it is to avoid the whole thing. It is so frustrating to see an entire political party so delusional that they are risking real hardship, real *death* just because they can’t have their way all the time. Not only this time, or most of the time, but *all* the time. And they invent new things to be aggrieved about constantly, so they have no choice but to be perpetually angry, demanding someone’s life.

    It can all be avoided by leaving other people alone. But they won’t. Not *can’t* — they *won’t.* Every day they make the decision to hate someone else enough to wish them harm, sometimes death. Some of them aren’t kidding.

    You don’t have to be conservative or libertarian to be bewildered by what they’re saying. You just have to be non-Leftist. Anyone but a Leftist is a monster, if you’re a Leftist, because why else could a person even *think* differently?

    The dangerous indulgence of their childish fantasies can’t be sustained. The whole country is turning into The Lord of the Flies, only because the Left isn’t peaceful enough to turn it into Animal Farm.

    What worries me is that at some point, there will be real bloodshed. What happened after a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to murder Congressmen is instructive. The Left had an ever-so-slight pause in their death rhetoric, but they didn’t take it as one of those “teachable moments” they’re so fond of. They’re pretty much okay with what the shooter did; they just don’t want the blood on their own hands. But they’re still calling for blood.

    I don’t know where the hot war will start. I wish there wouldn’t be one, but the Left wants one, and will keep pushing until they get one. It’s in their hands to avoid it by growing up, but there’s no sign of that. I don’t see any way to avoid a world of hurt.

    1. “It’s in their hands to avoid it by growing up”

       The Left mistakes our restraint for weakness because that is the only reason they know of for exercising restraint.

    2. You know, I could have sympathized with that gunman had he listed all the crimes committed by specific congresscritters that he had no faith in their ever being punished for, much less charged or prosecuted; and targeted only those so identified. But he didn’t, he went after the entire bushel basket, not the rotten ones. It’s instructive. They hate our entire ideology, not any particular thing(s) we do. I don’t object to helping those in need. I don’t object to contributing to projects that benefit large numbers of the public. I just object to not having any choice about how much to donate, and to being forced to do so at gun point.

       1. What were we talking about the other day? Things that everyone “knows” that aren’t true? Everyone says the federal government doesn’t tax us at gun point. Guess they never heard of Edward Lewis Brown and his wife, Elaine Alice Brown.

    3. If it makes you feel any better, I think there’s a lot of people on the left who agree with you. For instance, there were a lot of leftist people I know who were quite dismayed by the thought that an American election should be overturned by a small group of unelected “electors”. The SJW crowd may have infected a lot of the press, but they aren’t representative.

       1. But we are not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic.
          And we elect our president through the electoral college which is driven by the popular vote with modifications such that a few big cities cannot of themselves take over the entire country.
          Afraid you won’t find anyone buying into that load of carp here. Try one of the leftie blogs.

          1. I think it was more referring to the attempt to get the electors to change their vote.

             But that democracy conceit is buried deep and can be a disservice. The gerrymandering thing in pa is an example. If most of your population is clustered into one area it is more logical to have a representative or representatives for that area. The garbage of represent a bit of a city split 5 ways and a bunch of farmland means one side or the other will have no representation.

       2. Lincoln lost the popular vote.

    4. Is there a formal name for the kiind of insanity that finds it necessary to be angry all the time, to feel alive or participating socially, or whatever their reward mechanism is?

       1. Insecurity?

          I don’t mean just the *snide voice gosh aren’t you insecure* type meaning, but that sense of vulnerability, awareness that you’re in danger, which causes a hair trigger.

          And if that hair trigger isn’t hit, ti’s almost as bad…. you’re sitting there for fight or flight, doing neither.

    5. The whole country is turning into The Lord of the Flies, only because the Left isn’t peaceful enough to turn it into Animal Farm.
       That seems scarily accurate and apropos.

28. I was struck how your blog echoes Isaiah 59:15, “Truth is lacking,
    and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey.…”

29. I think that conservatives are really disgusted with the Republican congress but I don’t think that means that they’re suddenly going to be voting for Democrats. The usual “hope” is that the other side simply stays home. And there are so many loudmouths who have been so incredibly toxic that I’m frequently shocked. There seems to be no concept whatsoever of winning hearts and minds (after all, if your opponents are evil, why would you be trying to win them over). Anyone who can’t run a good campaign based on true quotes of “this is what they think of you” deserves to lose.

    But that’s politics.

    I’m more concerned about the culture and the philosophical basis of our liberty and failure to teach the benefits and necessities of any of it, individualism or the free market, anything.

    Because I think we’re stuck arguing at the wrong level of effect.

    Consider, for example, “inclusion.” Is anyone whatsoever opposed to equality and inclusion and having a really big tent that allows all the myriad people to mingle without being forced to conform? Of course not. But that’s not the tier where the conflict exists. The conflict exists in the context of an assumption that WHATEVER WE DO MUST BE COMPELLED and ALL MUST BE FORCED TO CONFORM. So you know… no Big Tent of non-conforming inclusion, of diversity or individuality for you!

    Because the base assumption isn’t inclusion, the base assumption is corporate conformity. Like that help-page Instapundit linked for applying for a teaching job to some California university (Davis? San Diego? It had a “D” in it) for the part of the application where you had to affirmatively assure them that you were supportive of inclusion. Again… no one is against inclusion, but a whole lot of people are against having to prove your innocence with an affirmative statement of your “faith” (or as Instapundit said, “loyalty oaths” and a whole lot of people get cranky over the sure knowledge that writing out your inclusive philosophy and list of active things that you’d done to promote inclusion FROM AN INDIVIDUALIST point of view would get your application for employment circular filed.

    So how do you shift the conversation and the debate (or the explanation for the young people around you) to the area of disagreement which is not focused on the “issue” which could be anything at all, but on coercion, authoritarianism, punishment for dissent, refusing to deal with people as individuals, and the need to legislate morality?

    1. It’s the motte and Bailey defense, or rather offense.

       And about only chance for larger groups without a long march is probably to give back. The clear backpack thing is an example. Yeah, you did nothing but neither did 299999997 gun owners (including sheriff and deputy)

       1. Motte and Bailey applies to so much that it could almost be considered THE paradigm for modern political discourse.

    2. Ah yes, compelled speech or else.
       https://jordanbpeterson.com/compelled-speech-law-society-upper-canada/
       The rot in Canada goes deep.

       1. VERY deep.

30. After all, why should you be cranky about being coerced or punished when it’s something that you ought to be happy about doing?

31. So, why are we shocked by the people who think we need to be put down and controlled? Why are we shocked by attacks on the amendments the founding fathers gave us?

    The other side gets a say.

    Because we have an organized way for the other side to have a say designed to prevent violence. Now the other side is doing its best to shut that down and to use violence to shut us up.

    Meanwhile, much of our nominal side refuses to fight back and is even now stabbing us in the back.

    A not inconsiderable fraction of us grew up with a “settle this like men” mindset that said if you don’t want to argue we can take it outside, settle it away from the women and the children, then come back in and get to the serious business of beer having picked a winner.

    We aren’t sure how to deal with someone who won’t argue but instead of taking it outside they want to go into the house and hold the women and children hostage to get their way. Yet we are not currently allowed to take the traditional method of dealing with such yokels.

    I know that traditional method would cost us beyond price but some days I wish they’d finally pull out the knife and hold it to a throat instead of settling.

    Then we could finish that the way men do and get back to the beer.

    1. “Because we have an organized way for the other side to have a say designed to prevent violence. Now the other side is doing its best to shut that down and to use violence to shut us up.”
       Excellent point.

       1. Violence, lawfare, outright lies and slander aimed at deprivation of livelihood… and we ‘can’t’ retaliate in the same way. Because ‘fighting back’ even verbally, is seen as ‘wrong’ somehow.

          1. Actually, it’s seen as “in-civilized”. All the while civilization is being eroded/chipped away by those to whom we cannot respond in “in-civilized” fashion.

32. Okay, Sarah, but the really, _really_, REALLY important question is, if push comes to shove, are you willing to pick up the banner, strip to the waist, and charge?

    1. Yes. Actually.

       1. Will we need to modify this (in)appropriately?

          

    2. I will note at 55, I can still go without a bra and no one notices sag. So, this would be feasible.
       YES I’m bragging! I win over gravity! Gravity is my bitch!

       1. I thought those ant-grav implants were one of the perkies of being a Space Princess…..;-)

          1. perkies. ISWYDT

    3. -Pace- the Spartans, most women run faster and fight better with some support up top.

       1. I was a marathoner in my teens. I got boobs at 8. I can testify to this.

    4. Y’know, having seen those paintings in various government buildings in France, I always wondered why they decided that stripping to the waist, baring boobs, to be a banner-bearer was supposed to make sense. I suppose they’re meant to be inspiring paintings, but they only brought about a sense of puzzlement in me. (And my younger brother apparently wondered the same thing so it’s not just me.)

       1. They bared boobs of models to prove they were women. They had very convincing cross-dressers.

          1. Ahhhhh. That makes more sense. So it’s not an actual thing, but an artistic embellishment. (Asking the locals usually got a headtilt, look at the painting, the light going on in their eyes and an embarrassed ‘Desole, je ne sais pas.’)

             (one day, I’ll find out how to pull those accented characters.)

             1. (one day, I’ll find out how to pull those accented characters.)

                You use Linux, right? Then you want to go to your keyboard options and find the one about the Compose key. You can set the Compose key to be several different physical keys: personally, I prefer the “Left Windows key acts as the Compose key” setting since I never use the Windows keys for anything else when I’m in Linux. Then once you have a Compose key set up, you can type “Compose key sequences”, where you press the Compose key as if it was a regular key (no need to hold it down the way you need to hold down modifiers like Shift, etc), like follows:

                Compose key, then e, then ‘ (apostrophe) produces é
                Compose key, then e, then ` (backtick, the letter under the tilde in the upper left corner of a US keyboard) produces è
                Compose key, then – (hyphen), then > (greater-than) produces →
                Compose key, then < (less-than), then – (hyphen) produces ←

                And many other combinations. An Internet search for "linux compose key" (without quotes) should help you find more, but here's a small subset of the most-commonly useful ones:

                https://tuttle.github.io/python-useful/compose-key-cheat-sheet.html

          2. https://tudorstuff.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/the-tudors-boobs-exposed/
             Elizabeth I is alleged to have sometimes dressed revealingly to assert her status as The Virgin Queen.

       2. Then it became a convention.

          1. Boob-Con?

             1. Are you being a boob today?

                1. Well, ok, two days ago. So sue me. 😛

                   1. I admit I always feel a little booby.

                      But you recalled this song to memory … they played it when I saw them in concert back in 1972.

       3. I thought it was to get guys to follow them.

          1. I thought it was because Artists like drawing/painting nekkid women.

             That sure seems to have been the case for many of America’s greatest comic strip/book artists, from Al Capp to Wally Wood, not to mention Frank Frazetta (who worked for Capp for half a decade, drawing such beauties as Daisie Mae Yokum and Stupefyin’ Jones.)

             

       4. It’d be distracting as hell. Keep the boys on the other side focused on boobies, and they’ll never see the bayonets coming. It’s like the chainmail bikini – +3 distraction bonus.

          1. GURPS: Protective Nudity.

33. Sarah, I love you, but if you think you’re being even-handedly realistic, allow me to offer you a whiff of Mystic Monk. Your take is infected with near-Pollyanna-level optimism as to our current situation and the relative power of the two sides.

    We have no way of seriously having a voice in the conversation of the larger public. We are shadowbanned and deplatformed out of any broad Internet audience; we have no broad television audience; we have no broad print periodicals audience; we have no broad music audience; we have no broad educational audience; we have no support from artists; we have no support from the graphic design industry; we have no support from the tech industry; we have no voice in the D.C. bureaucracies that persist in spite of election results; we have no voice in the Fortune 500 boardrooms; we have no voice in the Fortune 500 human resources departments; we have no voice in the sermons of most churches; and we have little remaining support among police and law-enforcement, where the leadership have been thoroughly sanitized by the left. What little support we have in the judiciary is growing at present, but that growth will freeze when the GOP loses the Senate this coming January, and will then be dysgenically overwhelmed the moment Trump is evicted from the Oval Office two years after that.

    You think blog-posts are “revolutionary?” As well say that private conversations with neighbors already selected for like-mindedness are revolutionary. Blog posts by conservatives for conservatives are exercises in evangelizing Sts. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

    You say: “Thing is, the founding fathers, …[w]hen they pledged their life, their liberty, their sacred honor, they expected to lose all three.”

    Yes: Because they were expecting to try to shoot their enemies, and be shot at in return. And, please note: They had a very good reason to think that their supporters would not react to the gunfire by abandoning those who fought for them and expressing horror that they’d resorted to force.

    “So what do we do? … We do the same we’ve always done. We’re faster, smarter, more capable.”

    Are we? Can our technologists build cloud networks and cloud-based social media applications as robust and attack-proof as theirs? Can our graphic designers and marketing campaigners appeal to the public as creatively and effectively as theirs? Will our musicians churn out as much truth via lyrics as theirs churns out lies? Will our architects be hired to design buildings which echo our aesthetic vision as often as theirs? Will our lawyers ensure we can win cases against theirs? Will we develop an industry-sized platform for election-cheating, such that they must worry about winning by more than the margin of fraud?

    “Sure, we’re the nice people who don’t boycott, who don’t make a political line in our consumption… Guys… we might have to. And we might have to get more vocal. We have to make them fear as they’ve made us fear. We have to fight back as hard as we can in this arena of words.”

    Show me ten million bourgeois hardworking conservative parents-of-small-children taking days off from work to march in each city capital, clogging the highways with protesting pedestrians, occupying administrative offices on college campuses, shutting down collegiate and professional athletic events, and gladly getting arrested for their trouble. Show me preachers advocating their doing so, from every pulpit, every Sunday. (Hell, they didn’t do that for ABORTION, and that’s been a more morally-execrable and shameful history than Stalin’s purges.)

    “Because, guys, this is a civil cold war. And we want it to stay cold. If it goes hot, then the OUTSIDE COUNTRIES get a say, and America as such will be a notional memory.”

    We do want it to stay “cold,” for the very reason you state. But we’d better, to a man, be quite willing for it to go “hot,” and ready to engage, wholesale, with gusto, if it does. Because if that happens, and we suddenly gasp with horror and back down — as moral and stable individuals are apt, quite correctly, to do — then they will realize they have nothing to fear from that quarter. And they already have no reason to fear from any other.

    “There is one thing we remember from the cold war: Mutual Assured Destruction works.”

    It only works against sane, plodding, chessmaster-like adversaries who don’t believe in life-after-death, who’ve survived climbing the Communist Party hierarchy through caution and calculation taken to paranoid extremes.

    It doesn’t work, for example, against Iranian ayatollahs and ISIS fighters who believe that a massive bloody war is just the thing to let loose the Mahdi. And it probably doesn’t work against leftist SJWs, who’re roughly as sane and calculating as an aardvark in a china teapot.

    “But we need to make them understand if they can ban us, we can ban them.”

    From what?

    “If they can punish our opinions, we can punish theirs.”

    How?

    “So, let’s fight the cold war so we don’t have to fight the hot…. This is no time to get wobbly…. In the end we win, they lose, but only if we fight.”

    I hope you’re right.

    But I’d like you to convince me, please. And I can be swayed, but I’d like to see real answers to the challenges I’m raising to your Extreme Optimism.

    1. Bullshit.None of these are true. They were once. not anymore.
       WE are winning, slowly. No one expected it to be overnight.
       This “We’re losing everywhere” is an excuse to do nothing. Listen to Peterson sometime.

       1. “This “We’re losing everywhere” is an excuse to do nothing.”
          Or go for a more “radical” “alt-right” type solution- which is basically some flavor of Euro “rightism”… and that is usually just nationalistically flavored Marxism.

          1. Well yeah.
             What, you didn’t think we’d end up with a few psychopaths who want to use words like “honor” and “duty” to cover up the fact that they want to hurt people and need an excuse?

       2. Sarah, you might want to post a ‘we’re winning slowly’ piece over at Insty some time. They could use one.

    2. …we have no voice in…

       Only if you rule out ever single stinking example where we do have a voice, and define “broad” as “bigger than any example given.”

       You’re being blinded– quit listening to the twits!

       1. “I keep listening to what the enemy tells me I’m able to do and don’t know why I can’t do anything!”

          1. I think it’s less the enemy than The Enemy, honestly– be he the black dog or demonic doubt, it’s way too easy to fall victim to the “I haven’t managed Perfection, so all my fighting has been in vain” trap.

34. I’ve observed that the Democrats and Republicans fight as hard as they can to give every advantage to the opposite party, which then works as hard as it can to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.
    I suspect that neither party wants to be holding the reins of power when all the various ticking timebombs (social security, debt, higher ed) go off, and the public is looking to decorate lamppost with politicians.

35. We’ve had to be faster, stronger, and insanely hard working to be heard, and evne then we were torpedoed at every turn.
    Like Rush.

    1. You know, I still think the rock band “Rush” when I see that name.

36. Did I promise you a rose garden?
    Well, the Founders promised me a nice tree. Of course, they also promised that some would need to water it from time to time.

    Pull your pants up, take a deep breath.
    And, for crying out loud, pin that dress up!

    1. No. The girls want some air.

    2. When I use the image in class, I carefully ignore the nudity and focus on the rest of the image. If I don’t acknowledge the giggles, they go away.

37. Regarding Bank of America not wanting to loan money to firearms companies…. Well, if a baker can be *forced* to bake a gay wedding cake, I would say that we should *force* BoA to loan money to firearms companies! After all, that is the “fair” thing to do!

    1. I am sure the fact that BOA makes very large campaign contributions to politicians would have nothing to do with any decision to prosecute.

38. The other side votes, and gets trounced for doing it.

    http://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/batra-social-justice-warrior-misses-the-boat-on-humboldt

    “The depth of Humboldt’s loss has touched the hearts of people around the world.

    A GoFundMe campaign has already raised over $7 million (and climbing) to support the victims’ families.

    So it’s difficult to imagine someone finding this to be somehow dark and nefarious. Difficult, but not impossible.

    A freelance writer, self-described activist and “happy socialist,” Nora Loreto, whose work has appeared in the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s, took to her Twitter account to lament: “I’m trying to not get cynical about what is a totally devastating tragedy, but the maleness, the youthfulness and the whiteness of the victims play a significant role.”
    …
    She goes on to suggest in subsequent tweets that her point was, “I want justice and more for so many other grieving parents and communities.”

    What a sad and senseless way to draw attention to other legitimate causes.

    Loreto, and many others on the extreme left, apparently feel they get a pass on saying vicious and hurtful things because they claim to represent oppressed minorities.

    But all such race-baiting really does is to destroy their own credibility.

    No one with a good heart is looking at this loss of life in Saskatchewan through the lens of race or gender because this loss goes beyond race, gender and politics.
    …
    If you want to address institutionalized racism, fair enough, that’s a legitimate discussion.

    But gratuitously smearing the members of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team to do it? That’s just appalling.

    It must be exhausting to be so angry and aggrieved all of the time.

    To say nothing of pathetic.”

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