And Our Flag Was Still There

292 thoughts on “And Our Flag Was Still There”

1. This here looks like words. However, it also looks like a choice between writing some words, or running out the front door with sharp pointy things. I’m sure that Dan understands. Good to see you feeling rather more optimistic than when sleep deprived and stuck in metal cans with crazy people.

   “If it were easy, it wouldn’t need us.” We’ve done the retreat to Pusan – now it’s just one bloody hill after another on our way to pounding the enemy flat. (Although this time, let’s make sure that the outside parties know they’ll damn well be nuked this time if they want to get busy with us.)

   1. Sharp pointy things, h*ll. Things that go bang. I’m a lousy shot, but it’s a target rich environment.

      1. Practice, practice, practice is how you get to be a better shot.

         Always willing to help with practice.

      2. Shotguns for you, milady. Point them in the right direction at close range and pull the trigger.

         1. Not the clip I was hoping to find, but it sets the stage:

            The clip I was looking for was at the very end of the movie. The doctor, pulling bits of buckshot out of Wayne, asks “who had the shotgun?”

            Caan raises his hand.

         2. My auxiliary backup mama is stone blind. This makes her rather more terrifying with a shotgun than otherwise.

      3. To be fair, the things that go bang work by propelling sharp pointy things at high speeds.

         1. I don’t know that lead slugs are sharp or pointy … but they are proof that an object moving fast enough need not be either.

            1. Put enough thrust behind a brick and even an F-4 will fly 😉

               1. Even more so for the F-104. Still amazed that its fuselage got re-used for the U-2.

      4. Sharp pointy things are backup for when the thing that goes “bang” runs out of bang seeds.

         1. Or when you need to take care of matters quietly.

      5. I’m more a “things that explode” or “things that burn” kind of guy for efficiency and, in the latter, the pure joy of fire.

         And yes, I do consider a homemade flamethrower a valid anti-personnel weapon.

      6. Practice. Practice perfection. You’ll find it soothes the soul. A quiet hour or two on the range does me a world of good.

         1. Hmm. Quiet hour? NFA perhaps? 🙂

            1. NFA, but more often black powder. I don’t go to the range when the Duffer Brigade is at work.

         2. Personally, I find a noisy hour or two on the range of much more therapeutic value than a quiet one. 😉

         3. I’m afraid that if you have two or more women, and two or more suppressors, the range gets noisy again… with happy chattering. It’s quite delightful to be able to talk and listen without all the hurtful sharp shooty noises!

            Silencer is such a stupid misnomer. Gun Mufflers, though, are awesome.

            1. OK, it’s my heritage, I suppose. Gun Muffler strikes me as something made with a nice wool yarn, probably in red. 🙂

               (Gun cozy?)

               1. I don’t mind gun cozy at all. It’s a perception thing; silencers sound all terrible, but it’s harder for screechy people of much vapidness, strong through extremely shallow impressions, and total lack of awareness of second-order consequences to respond with their preset hysteria to “What’s so bad about a gun muffler?”

                  In fact, I’d be tempted to knit one for my pistol a nice cozy in a lovely blue with gold-threading yarn if it weren’t for the fact that you want to dump heat, not retain it (unlike a teapot.)

                  1. Yeah, a true cozy for a pistol strikes me as a *very* niche product. The name appealed.

                     It goes along with the mythical products used by overly enthusiastic car customizers: high speed bumper bolts and fuel-injection hubcaps. OTOH, J.C. Whitney sold some bizarre products to the foolish…

               2. *giggle* Now I have this idea for fund raisers by selling “gun-cozys” knit in different colors and patterns that around appropriately sized silicone socks for firearms storage. And you can get matching sets that cover the earpieces on your shooting ear-protection!

      7. Note to self: Sarah gets the shotgun.

      8. *grins at the mental image of Sarah with an arrayed fan of heavy artillery fireworks ready to be sent off behind her, her thumb just above a nice red trigger button*

         I hope y’all had fun with fireworks on the day! Happy Independence Day, my friends over there!

         (and sorry this is late. I wasn’t well.)

   2. I like sharp, pointy, steely things, and carry them every day. The bang-y things, not so frequently.

      1. You just reminded me to get the camera to take pics of the Coehorn mortar at the museum. Boomy can be more fun than bangy at times.

2. Here’s the thing about America. We usually make it through stuff like this better than ever compared to the rest of the world.
   Not because we’re particularly competent, but because the rest of the world is even worse at coping with bad times than we are.

   1. America. We may be a chaotic, messy, totally fucked up mess. But literally everywhere else is even worse.

      1. That’s actually our secret to success. Unlike most other places, we aren’t ever all on the same page. Or even the same book, same shelf, same library.

         What that means is that there will always be someone around that can fix the screw-ups.

         1. Usually any number of someones, with different methods of fixing things, so lots of things get fixed in lots of different ways, plus also a lot of arguing about it.

3. Freedom is embattled. Of course it’s embattled. As Thomas Sowell pointed out when he wrote “Knowledge and Decisions” back in the later 70’s (published in 1980) Freedom is always embattled.

   mumble mumble Eternal vigilance mumble mumble.

   That said, as I think I’ve pointed out before, a lot of the things that are happening in the world–the Left’s increasing shrillness and the rise of “Radical Islam” being chief among them–bear all the signs of being “Revitalization movements”, which happens when cultures see themselves (whether or not they admit to themselves; indeed vociferous denial is itself a sign) as losing their place in society. Occasionally, very occasionally, the revitalization movement actually revitalizes. Mostly, however, they’re the last gasp before the culture “goes down for the third time.” So keep your bowstrings dry and your arrows to hand for a fear we’ll need them soon. But they’ll never break our spirit and together we will win.

   Why, yes. As a matter of fact I was segueing into that song. 😉

   1. It’s the Ghost Dance.

      1. Yep. One of the classic “revitalization movements” in my Cultural Anthropology class. (Hey, I had to take two classes of “social science” to get my physics degree. Intro to Microeconomics and this one seemed to be the least offensive.)

         1. I had to take classes for Social Science for Forestry too. Late ’70s Oregon State had a class that qualified on History of American Tribes – Good and Bad. Not only that had an engaging lecturer (probably one of the few that did not put me in a class comma.) Forget the other class I took to cover that requirement. Wasn’t Micro or Macro Econ. Those were requirements of their own. Hey, it has been over 40 years. Wasn’t the Geology class, that was just hour fillers (we were required to have 204 hours, which was 22 hours more than OS standard.)

            1. I had to take two semesters for my BSEE and came up with sociology. Soc 101 introduced me to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which taught me several things:
               1) When the pages devoted to footnotes are greater than or equal to half the main text, the author sucks at explaining himself.
               2) Lutherans rank just above Catholics on bottom of the Deplorable scale, with Episcopals at the other end.
               3) “Max” is a good name for a gas grill of the Weber kind. “The Redneck ethic and the spirit of Barbeque.”

               Soc 201 was even more forgettable, beyond an essay assignment that I never got: “Explain the utility of the distinction between tradition and modernity.”
               I got into authoritarianism vs totalitarianism, but Trad vs Mod? AFAIK, the utility of the distinction is either obvious (You are Here!) or only useful to a sociologist.
               That class also taught me:
               4) If it’s going to be boring, don’t take it at 8AM.

               I’m now much more of an early bird, but the lectures were sleep inducing.

      2. One Internet for Sarah!

         The Democratic election posturing I’ve seen so far would fall under the “Ghost Dance” category.

         1. the posturing so far seems to me along the lines of “line up for the cattle cars so we can kill you, or we’re gonna kill you.”

            1. Molon labe meffers.

               1. Which makes you — anti-Semitic, I think, is the current label for “molon labe.”

                  1. I’ve started ignoring them anyway

                  2. I thought they endorsed Antisemitism? Vice-Chair of the DNC (and Minnesota AG) Keith Ellison praised Antifa, Louie Farrakhan and recently met with Jeremy Corbyn and hardly anybody on the Left said a word against him.

                     1. That’s different.

                        1. It’s different when they do it because their hearts are pure (evil, but that’s besides the point.)

                  3. Oh, because Persians?

                     1. They don’t have enough history to figure that out. Besides, the Persians were in fact Indo-European.

                        1. And they are very prickly about NOT being Arabs, I know!

                           I figured that some bright bulb had watched 300 and made the logical leap that copying the Spartans was anti-Arab.

                           1. *snicker* While still in basic training at Lackland AFB in the late 1970ies, I somehow acquired the romantic attentions of an Iranian officer-trainee. A sweet, gentle guy, who was so proud of being a Persian. (Could reel off flowery and poetic compliments like an Elizabethan poet, I was charmed by this facility, but not taken in, in the least.) He and the other Iranians were incredibly contemptuous of the Saudi trainees – crude, uncultured deep-country goat-humpers was about his opinion of the Sauds.
                              Now and again, I wondered what happened to him, when the Shah was overthrown – the new and vicious post-Shah Iran would have been such an inhospitable place for him. I hope that he got out in time.
                              He had a picture of the Shah and the Empress in his wallet…

         2. That is a strange thing to call the Trump 2020 reelection campaign.

            1. It does more accurately describe the 2020 Democrat scrum over who can give away the most stuff the nation cannot afford. Over twenty candidates and each of them competing for a smaller piece of the electorate than the others.

               Open borders and government provided healthcare for anybody, minimum wages that vastly exceed the contributions of marginal employees and driving up the price of college educations by subsidizing student profligacy – what could go wrong?

               Until you run out of other people’s money, that is. (Hey! I know! Let’s just print more money! That’s worked everywhere its been done.)

               Geeze, Ian; if you’re going to try trolling here you will need to up your game tremendously.

               1. Trolling?

                  Am I not obviously talking about the Democrat 24/7/365 Trump 2020 campaign that has been going since November of 2016 and is now being intensified?

                  1. Well, then, Ian, you’ve got me there — I’ve no idea what you were talking about. Your talent for torturing prior statements seems to rival Ms All Out Crazy’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

                     1. Everything the left has done for the last nearly three years has been exactly what they would do if they wanted to prove to the american people that Trump is the best possible option for 2020.

                        They think that they are fighting him, but mostly they are just helping him to get reelected.

                        1. We call those “in kind donations”.

                     2. I think he is talking about things like the Democrats producing a pro-Trump ad free of charge by all raising their hands when asked if they would provide free healthcare to illegal aliens, the calls to decriminalize entry other than with passport and visa via a port of entry, or several Democrats saying the Betsy Ross flag is a symbol of slavery and hate.

                        1. Yep. That is how I read it too.

                           Democrat primaries, no matter who wins it, is writing President Trump’s reelection campaign, or 95% of it. Remaining 5% is economy, economy, economy. The campaign doesn’t even have to mention the nothing that was the Mueller report, that is just the icing on the electoral cake.

                           1. I so hope you’re right.

                              I know far too many people who seem to quite sincerely think the Democrats are an okay start but not socialist enough.

                              And of course: the vote fraud.

                              Gnh.

                           2. far too many people who seem to quite sincerely think the Democrats are an okay start but not socialist enough./

                              To be honest President Trump doesn’t stand a chance with them regardless. Nor will he ever get the ones who are on the side of “not him.” It is the ones toward the middle that he has to make sure they don’t dig a hole in the sand and jump in.

                           3. It’s not that I thought he ever had a chance with them. It’s that it’s easy to think they’re almost everybody and forget there is anybody in the middle.

                  2. Example number 158,934 of why sarcasm doesn’t work on the internet.

                  3. I fear it was not immediately obvious to me because I am not familiar enough with you to assume tongue-in-cheek.

                     I keep not quite telling this one guy on Facebook that his political posts sound like he took reality and started swapping around half the entities involved. Today he very seriously called for refusing to eat with Republicans. I wouldn’t be even remotely surprised by people coming in here to insist in passing that anyone besides a proud SJW is spewing hatred as part of their last gasp before irrelevance.

               2. Let’s just print more money! That’s worked everywhere its been done.

                  Like — o — Germany.

                  Consequences kinda contradict their other claims, surprise, surprise.

4. > Well, we do know how to deal with those, by George! We’ve done it before.
   —
   There’s a certain irony in that the writing on most of my bulk ammunition supply is in Cyrillic. And the guns were mostly made in countries that aren’t Communist any more.

   Funny, that…

   1. Yup … mine as well.
      The reassuring thing about closely studying history is being able to see how often we came through a disaster – sometimes by the skin of our teeth … but also because motivated people stepped out in front and did their bit,

5. I come here for the writing tips and the sanguine optimism, but mostly the sanguine optimism.

   1. Likewise.

   2. Sanguine over here, bloodyminded over there….

      1. Kate at MGC has something on the latter. 🙂

6. hey think ruling the world is their national destiny, when in fact being Iznogoud is their national destiny and their convoluted plots and strange machinations would be amusing if they weren’t dangerous for everyone, including them.

   That is possibly the most perfect summary of Russia I’ve ever read.

   1. Russia doesn’t so much believe they are destined to rule the world; they are paranoid and imagine that they only way they can be safe is if they rule the world.

      That will not turn out as they hope.

      1. Having been invaded from the east, and then the west…there’s reason for paranoia.

         1. I’m not going to try to find the quote, but in the Mars section of TNotB, Hazel notes that paranoid thoughts are easier to do in Russian.

         2. Yup. I had a course in Russian history in college. Covered through Catherine the Great. It’s shocking how much insight you get into current Russian thinking looking at the events of 500 years ago.

            1. I’ve got a shortened translation of Marquis de Custine’s book about Russia in 1839 with a foreword by a member of the American embassy staff talking about how they regarded it was the best guide to the USSR.

         3. And yet, that’s not reason enough: look at the difference between Russian culture and Polish.

            1. I think it was Heinlein in one of his essays (possibly something in “Expanded Universe”) who pointed out that the “Russia has repeatedly been invaded, that’s why they’re so paranoid” is based really on a handful of incidents scattered over a long history. And, indeed, claiming that they accumulated the largest land empire in history from being repeatedly invaded is in a par on claiming a man accumulated great wealth by being repeatedly robbed. Their own professional literature acknowledges that and claims that historically they had nothing to be ashamed of about their military prowess.

               If it wasn’t Heinlein writing about this, and I really think it was, it was Pournelle. But I seem to recall it in connection with Heinlein’s trip to the USSR. It’s been a long time since I’ve read those.

               1. In fairness, I think a great deal of Russia’s “largest land empire” fell into their laps from nobody else being interested it, in the same way that Canada is the second largest nation.

                  “We’re the second largest country On this planet Earth And if Russia Keeps on shrinking Then soon we’ll be first (as long as we keep Quebec)”

                  1. Heh. I read a book some years back on the Yukon Gold rush, and a large chunk of the first third was dedicated to describing just WHAT most of Canada’s landmass is actually like. My response was “Huh. So THAT explains why everyone is clustered around the lower bits.”

                     Basically, the impression I came away with was: trackless arctic swamp and trackless arctic forest or–just for variation–trackless arctic forest-swamp.

                     Which is why anyone who actually MADE it to the Yukon pretty much did so by ship.

               2. I’d point out that the Roman Republic’s expansion was a multi-century reaction to Rome being sacked by the Celts in the 5th Century BC.

7. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.”
   American Abolitionist Wendell Phillips, January 28, 1852

   Corruption never sleeps.

8. “… anti-but really-fa is gamboling in the streets.”

   I saw a report yesterday about the Portland police chief calls for anti-mask laws following recent brawl.

   Of course, calling for laws and pushing for and enforcing them are different kettles of fish.

   1. The irony is that opponents of such laws claim they infringe First Amendment rights.

      1. Funny how some of the groups making the claim that a Portland anti-mask law violate the first amendment are the same people who supported and got passed anti-mask laws in southern states in direct response to the KKK. In other words, they have no problem with anti-mask laws except when those laws are used to expose violent leftists.

         1. You sure about that? The KKK was Democrats, after all.

            1. Yes, because some groups back then like the NAACP were not as radically leftist nor utterly knee-jerk about it as they are today

         2. they have no problem with anti-mask laws except when those laws are used to expose violent leftists.

            The problem with that is that the KKK were violent leftists. They were just violent leftists who became politically inconvenient. Antifa is still politically useful (or so they believe), therefore they get a pass.

            1. I am not sure you can call the KKK Leftists. I don’t believe they were. That is why the Democrats were alright with the anti-mask laws.

               1. The KKK was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party (or was it the other way around?) ever since Woodrow Wilson’s White House endorsement of The Birth of a Nation. The relationship only ended when the Klan became too enfeebled to deliver for Southern Democrats.

               2. The KKK was Democrats. It was a Democrat institution, an attempt to continue Democrat policies of the Antebellum Democrat South by force of arms. They were just politically inconvenient and so were thrown under the bus by the party leadership–at least some were. Byrd, for instance, was a major leader of the KKK (not just some hanger on in a “youthful indiscretion–as if that would be an acceptable excuse for a Republican), never recanted, ane never voted (for example) in favor of confirmation of a black federal judge (regardless of the rest of the party voted).

                  They were the terror and violence wing of the Left back in the day. Antifa with masks of a different color.

               3. Oh, they were. They were the armed branch of the dems, just like antifa now. Until they became… inconvenient.

               4. They were the armed wing of the Dem party, and engaged in statist identity politics. Sounds leftist to me.

               5. The KKK didn’t support the monarchy, ergo leftist under the classical definition of the term.

                  The whole “left wing” versus “right wing” dichotomy barely worked in the pre-Revolutionary France it was developed in, and really has no real application in 21st Century America.

                  1. Apropos:

                     https://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/10/23/right-left-right-a-recent-blast-from-the-past/

      2. …opponents of such [anti-mask] laws claim they infringe First Amendment rights.

         They do. Antifa and the like are designed to provoke us into trading more liberty for freedom. Which, based on our history, we will probably do. Because cucks, and ignorance, and hey-0, if you aren’t up to no good, why would you EVER need a mask? Amirite?

         Just when you think you’ve completely recovered from libertarianism… Sigh.

         Happy Birthday to me! And the U.S.A! Never give up, never surrender.

         1. … designed to provoke us into trading more liberty for freedom security.

            FIFY

            Antimask laws in the US had their origins in the South where their purpose was to obstruct the use of terror and intimidation by nightriders (aka, The Klan.) It was argued, successfully, that parading in their robes and hoods adequately conveyed their message and that wearing of masks was not essential to their expression.

            Anonymity is power, as those engaged in doxxing police officers and Border Patrol agents recognise. There is always a balance to be struck between liberty and security and those who push the boundaries of the one almost always damage the other.

            1. Thanks, Mr. RES. Good fix.

            2. As noted elsewhere, antimask laws are only as valuable as the willingness of police and prosecutors to enforce.

               Courtesy: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/andy-ngo-antifa-kkk-rico/

               “A policy that prohibits wearing a mask to a protest will have police focusing on the wrong issue. Behavior is the issue, not the mask,” [Portland police chief Danielle Outlaw] said. “It could be argued that the mask is an important symbolic part of a protester’s message. . . . There are many legitimate reasons people wear ‘masks,’ including political and religious reasons.”

               AND:

               According to [Multnomah County] DA Todd Jackson, wearing a mask over one’s face is not a sign of intimidation or criminal intent, it’s to protect the person from stalking and harassment should the public learn of their identity

         2. How is wearing a mask free speech?

            I can see how Washington State’s ruling that folks who sign a petition can be publicly listed (it was an obvious “so we can harass them” lawsuit) is a chill on free speech, but the threat involved in forming large groups of masked people seems like it would fall squarely under the area of making threats.

            1. Because it sends a message.

               1. The peaceably assemble part seems relevant….

            2. “How is wearing a mask free speech? ”

               Foxfier, you’re forgetting the march of technology. With current facial recognition technology, it’s far too easy to take a photo of someone and then dox them with it. This tech has already been used for that in commercial applications for such things as grocery store loyalty programs. Of course, governments are already working on tech to get around masks, so….

               1. Europe already does it by tracking people as they walk along.

                  The one that got disrupted by putting a picture around your waist that breaks up the automatic recognition of “body.”

         3. And RES already laid out what I meant.

            1. Fair dinkum

   2. If the Portland PD (and the DA) bothered to enforce existing laws equitably, I might possibly believe that she is being sincere. When someone is arrested and tried for “brandishing” for using a pistol to get out of a Pantifa attack, while the masked attackers in other cases are given a pass, the Chief’s statements just belong on the streets of San Francisco.

      1. When someone is arrested and tried for “brandishing” for using a pistol to get out of a Pantifa attack

         Frankly I’d be tempted to arrest the person as well. You were in a situation where you were forced to draw on a group of fascist street fighters and you didn’t give them lead milkshakes?

         Absolutely shameful.

         1. OK, I don’t know you that well, either. Are you joking, smoking, or trolling? Knowing Antifa’s penchant for 5-15 to 1 attacks, a) the defender would need one of those Hollywood never-ending magazines to pull that off, a-prime) need the skilz to do in the perps with something concealed b) while shooting perps a-h, perp i, j, and k would have handy rocks and pipe, and c) once Portland PD shows up, the brandishing charge just went to Murder 1.

            So instead of the defender getting away with an appealable brandishing charge, he’s either dead or looking at lifetime housing in the slammer.

            I have low standards, but I don’t think that’s terribly funny.

            1. OK, I don’t know you that well, either. Are you joking, smoking, or trolling?

               Oh that is easy enough to answer: I’m always being serious and always being sarcastic.

               Knowing Antifa’s penchant for 5-15 to 1 attacks, a) the defender would need one of those Hollywood never-ending magazines to pull that off, a-prime) need the skilz to do in the perps with something concealed b) while shooting perps a-h, perp i, j, and k would have handy rocks and pipe,

               Welllll………… This is antifa we are talking about. Have you seen how an antifa screams at someone trying to pull their mask away? Are you honestly going to try and tell me that they are going to hold ranks when they are being shot?

               I thought I was being over the top sarcastic.

               I have low standards, but I don’t think that’s terribly funny.

               You should develop your sense of humor more. It is the best way to deal with Interesting Times. And are we ever in Interesting Times.

      2. If the Portland PD (and the DA) bothered to enforce existing laws equitably, I might possibly believe that she is being sincere.

         **nods** She is perfectly sincere. BAD people won’t be allowed to wear masks in public. That’s not Antifa, of course. It’s you. And me. And everyone who wants to give the Portland PD and DA the finger.

   3. But anti-mask laws are RACISSS! They discriminate against cultures that insist their women walk around with bags over their heads…

      [any comments about the differences between race, religion, and culture will be ignored, since anything they don’t like is racist by default]

   4. I highly, STRONGLY, expect the mayor to tell him not to do that, or he WILL be fired. Immediately.

9. “I’m saying the horrific point to which we’ve come is a good thing.”

   Things always look like they’re going to Hell in the short term. Go back in our history and you will find innumerable moments when all looks lost, the cause of human liberty forlorn.

   On this day in 1776 the people signing the Declaration reasonably believed they were signing their death warrants. In 1863 the Siege of Vicksburg and the Battle of Gettysburg seemed bitter victories. In 1918 (okay, it was July 4th of the Julian calendar) the Bolsheviks killed Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family. And in the early 1940’s things were looking none too good for human liberty anywhere in the world.

   But to give up? to bend the knee and accept servitude? I don’t think so. Life is not so precious as be bought at the price of liberty and as for any presumptive “master” well, as the man said, “That sonuvabitch ain’t been born yet.”

10. Watching the Sacred Musical, it struck me that the Democratic Socialist patriots just want to relive those days.

    “Our children all have dysentery
    Little Tom keeps turning blue
    Little Abbey has the measles
    And I’m coming down with flu
    They say we may get smallpox”

    “Madam, what else is new?”

    1. TCM is running the Sacred Musical this evening I just came from hearing that song. Perhaps there are some hidden USAians at TCM.

       And just to be complete, Sit Down John…

       1. MY OWN KIDS yell “Sit Down John” when I get going.

          1. Do they at least change the lyrics to “Sit Down, Mom” when they sing? 🙂

             1. Nooooooo!

11. And we still have children, though the Obama Recession put a hit through our birth rate.

    This one is….even though I know a lot of the holes in it, I can’t square what I actually see with what is reported.

    There’s been babies all over heck the last three years. But, supposedly, there was a huge drop in births for 2017 vs 2016.

    Click to access nvsr67_08-508.pdf

    Going off of birth certificates, at that! So you don’t have th ereporting issue where so many states don’t report…

    Oh, booger.

    I just realized there may be an additional issue with the stats; there is of course the South-and-central-American anchor baby problem, but there’s also the Chinese and Russian version.

    If that dropped, then it would drag down the raw number of births– but two percent?!?!?!

    Likewise, fertility rate assumes that you have an accurate guestimate of the total population. Illegals and folks on visas, obviously, aren’t going to be in that population, but will be in the births. I’ve been pointing a related thing out for years with the “teen pregnancy rate,” since you’ll get ladies who are going gray that insist they’re 16 because of the protections that make it easier to skip out on the bill.

    Just occurred to me that if you are using the really freaking obviously inflated census numbers from the last go-round, where they added in estimated numbers who didn’t get counted, you’re going to be expecting real births from imaginary people.

    1. Yep.

    2. Ah. I’ve taught you well grasshoper. Take NOTHING on faith. Particularly when it comes from the government.

       1. Biggest issue is I am still learning to figure out how to break things.

          1. Attack the joints.

       2. If the Left is involved, you can take it on faith that they are lying.

    3. Anything with government stats is suspect, these days. There was a reason Obama pulled the Census in under the White House, along with a lot of the economic data. Once the basic numbers become subject to political pressure, the whole thing turns to mush. And, mush it has been, for a long damn time. I would lay money that a lot of the population numbers around the world are bogus, right along with the economic data. There’s no real vested interest in accuracy, and an awful lot of benefit to be accrued via distorting them.

       Especially in China.

       I’m not even sure where you’d go to start trying to get down to ground truth, TBH.

       I would lay long odds that the Chinese government has been responding to fake economic and population numbers since the 1980s, and even they don’t know ground truth on a lot of issues with the banks, the loans, and the population counts in the various regions. There were distinct incentives for the local governments to lie, for the businesses to lie, and for everyone else to lie their asses off.

       Which is why I expect China to crash and burn, within a generation or two, based on the lies and the whole “social credit” idea, which is going to get suborned very quickly, corrupted, and turn into a source for even more lies and distortions. The more control the central Party reaches for, the less they’re going to have, and the greater the eventual explosion is going to be when the whole thing blows up in their faces. Couple the endemic lying going on with something like epidemic Ebola or some of the more virulent influenza varieties that are percolating in southern China’s morass of duck-human-pig agriculture, and we’re probably going to lose a significant swath of the Chinese population. And, entirely through misadventurous mismanagement by the Chinese Communist Party, which is going to have interesting follow-on effects.

       “May you live in interesting times…”. Whoever said that was profoundly right about it being a curse. I could do with a little less “…interesting…”, if you know what I mean…

       1. Absolutely this. Nobody knows nothing….

          1. The writer at wilderwealthyandwise blog claims that he can’t find good stats on the amount of censorship.

             As far as I can tell, he’s correct (the ALA’s banned books report is a joke).

             Your comment that it’s because NOBODY is tracking anything well is weirdly comforting. (The alternative is pretty bad).

             1. Thing is, most of the censorship these days isn’t the hard-and-obvious sort where they are piling the books up in the square and burning them…

                It is, instead, the insidious soft sort of thing where books of incorrect thought-line are quietly “de-accessioned”, and then pulped. On the other end, it censors softly by choosing not to publish, and quietly discouraging authors not to write or research specific topics, because “they won’t sell…”, when the truth is that the work won’t sell because the publisher doesn’t want it to, and won’t advertise or promote it.

                There is no way you can turn any of that into statistics, at all.

                1. After all. Anything actually published and publicly decried; that is a marketing tool … Harry Potter books is one I can think of … Hell, I had not intention of buying them, until … OTOH Shades of Gray – ack, gag, no … don’t care how well written or not. Have not read it or the sequel(s?). Not going to. Neither have I read the hunger games.

          2. Here’s an interesting data point that just popped up for me over on Reddit:

             https://pressfrom.info/us/lifestyle/health-fitness/-295182-russian-official-we-re-catastrophically-losing-the-population.html

             What were we just talking about…? I wonder how long Ms. Golikova is going to remain healthy?

       2. Hon, when you start sounding utterly sensible, I worry.

          1. And he has been. For a while.

             1. I know….

             2. Nyah – he ain’t sensible, the world is mad.

          2. Fox, when folks like you start saying that I sound “utterly sensible”…?

             That’s when I really start worrying…

       3. It isn’t that “a lot of the population numbers around the world are bogus” — it is simply that they are unreliable and therefore might as well be bogus. Just as it doesn’t matter that in China there are “distinct incentives for the local governments to lie, for the businesses to lie, and for everyone else to lie” as there are NO incentives for anybody to tell the Truth.

          Lies and cooking the books are the normal state of mankind, the default of almost every government there has ever been. Humans learn from the earliest awareness to lie, fib, prevaricate, dissemble, misdirect, evade and misrepresent.

          “Where did you go?”
          “Out.”

          “What did you do?”
          “Nothing.”

          “What are you up to?”
          “I’m just minding my business.”

          “Where art thou?”
          “Where is thy brother?”

       4. You never want to hear your doctor say
          ‘That’s interesting…”

          1. Every TIME. Though we have a good one, now, and she at least pokes around till something works.

          2. No, what you really don’t want to hear your doctor say at 0900 in the morning(after you just had a abdominal MRI done at 0200) is (and I quote), “I don’t like what I’m seeing.”

       5. We’re surrounded by lies and liars and we cannot see.

    4. The Army needs to be doing the census along with providing security for the polls…

       Like I said before, it’s a service we have provided free of charge to countries that were having problems with their democratic procedures.

       In 2000, Fidel Castro offered to send the Cuban Army to Florida to provide poll and counting security. People laughed, but Florida would have been well-advised to have taken him up on his offer…

       1. Him, no, but someone honest, sure.

          1. Gotta agree with you. The military is a solution to military problems, and when you try to make it a solution to other problems… Nope. Not going to work. This is why South American nations are constantly screwed up–They see a problem, see that the military is the only semi-functional bit of the government they have, aaaaannnd… Yeah. Bad, bad idea.

             You want to fix something in civil governance, you’d best be fixing it direct, and fix it yourself. Ain’t no magic monkey gonna show up and do it for you, and if you try to bend a tool that’s designed to kill people and break things over to doing civil functions, you’re already halfway to having the military running everything, which is when you start having a military that’s no good at being a military, and which people start going into as a path to civil power. Both things are why South America is what it is.

             What you have here, with this desire to go to a military solution for something like this is another expression of the things that went wrong in California with the whole Proposition 13 thing. The people behind that, and the folks who voted for it, decided that it was too hard to address the problems of overspending and government overreach by actually checking their legislators. So, they thought “Let’s starve the beast of funding, indirectly, through tax law changes…”.

             For evidence of how well that didn’t work, please see the recent history of California.

             You got a problem with the government, address it directly: Go after the crooks, go after the responsible politicians. Do not do like Congress has done over the last century-plus, and slough off your responsibilities as a citizen on another part of the government, because that’s going to come back and bite you in the ass.

             You want to rely on the Census? Then, you’d best get your happy little self out there and do something about it. It might be too late for 2020, but something like Judicial Watch would probably be a really good idea for some concerned citizen to get going. Me? I’m thinking seriously about getting some sort of election monitoring deal going so that those of us in the eastern hinterlands of Washington state start sending election monitors over to Kink County, and observing what the hell is really going on over in that den of corruption.

             1. Prop 13 dealt with limits on reassessment of property values for tax purposes. Rather than being concerned with starving government of funds, it was aimed a making it less likely that (particularly elderly) people on fixed incomes would be forced out of their homes due to property tax increases.

                1. Bullshit. You’ve no idea at all what you are talking about–I was around and paying attention to the whole thing, and read all the materials they based the campaign for Prop. 13 on.

                   Yeah, you’re quoting a part of it, but not the entire thing. The root that got talked about at all the meetings and campaigning for it was “Government is too big, starve the beast…”.

                   And, of course, the legislature turned right around and instead of cutting discretionary spending, started cutting spending on critical services, on the theory that nobody would pay attention, and would acquiesce to nibbling little tax raises or sending money to pay for police when what they should have been doing was cutting the discretionary spending on crap like benefits.

                   Prop. 13 is a lesson in what happens when an electorate goes for the easy solution that sounds good, vs. the hard work of actually supervising what their representatives are doing in the legislature.

                   1. Before you call BS, and claim superior knowledge, you might want to figure out if the person you’re talking to was also there, and was old enough to pay attention to politics.
                      I call BS on your call of BS, LOL, because I was also there, and paying attention, and voting.

                      1. Interesting… So, all those meetings and rallies I was dragged into, plus the stuff in the literature we got, and in the news… That was all a figment of my imagination?

                         Very… Interesting. I don’t think you remember those years as well as you think you do, or that you paid attention to the same people I did.

                         An example would be all the speeches Reagan gave in support, where he clearly discussed the idea that the only way to rein in California government was by cutting off funding via Prop. 13.

                         I can’t find the text of those speeches, or what I remember reading in the news, but there’s a bunch of stuff clearly supporting the idea that the basics of Proposition 13 were about reining in big government, not necessarily reducing the property tax burden on property owners.

                         http://www.metnews.com/articles/2004/coupal061804.htm

                         That’s one, discussing the roots of where Reagan came into the picture. More links are easily findable with a simple set of search terms “big government” and “Proposition 13”.

                         Either you’re misremembering things, or never encountered the things I did.

                         1. THEN the whole concept was exported to Oregon. Only Oregon went one better. Tax base does not change when the home changes hands, regardless of how much more a home may sell for. Sold for Less than taxable value, does not reduce the taxable value automatically, but when you contest it, you have solid legal basis to get it reduced.

                            Another difference (guessing) is Oregon property taxes go to the county, not the state. Minding the spending is county by county. What kills counties in Oregon, isn’t the Prop 13 equivalent. It is having 50% or more federal + state land that pays NO property taxes. There is an argument that those parcels should have property taxes. That means entire country, or state, would be paying for needed services related to those lands in those counties. Plus, a limited per board foot of timber removed during harvest.

                   2. This is getting into politics, so I’m stopping here

             2. More power to you!

             3. I can think of nothing so likely to breed contempt for civilian leadership than pushing the military into closer familiarity with them.

                You think we find AOC clownish, how do you think a command sergeant-major views her?

                1. It strikes me that AOC is the congressional equivalent of a fresh-minted ROTC generated second lieutenant.

                   Which is probably an insult to butter bars.

                   1. RES you can take the probably out of that. Comparing them to AOC is insulting to Butterbars everywhere. A fresh minted 2nd Lt (or Ensign) is lacking in experience and given time will learn if they listen to their non-coms. AOC seems to be wholly lacking in intellect. and listening to the long timers in the democrat party most certainly would not help.

                2. The CSM would likely be another political animal, given how we usually select for those.

                   The folks you need to worry about aren’t the higher-ups; it’s always the mid-grade guys that make the revolutions. The higher-ups are too invested, selected too politically. The revolutionaries always come from the mid-grade guys who aren’t vested for retirement.

                   Examples of this would be Khadafy in Libya, and a host of others. The upper ranks of the military never make the revolutions, although they will respond with a coup, a la Pinochet.

    5. And we still have children, though the Obama Recession put a hit through our birth rate.
       I know where I am, and I’ve kinda counted friends and family in my generational co-hort. From that, those who are married are having babies (going on three for many in my sample group), but I think a third are married an the rest are not married and not having kids. I wonder what is going on in the population as a whole.

       There’s been babies all over heck the last three years. But, supposedly, there was a huge drop in births for 2017 vs 2016.
       Are you saying that the rates are off, or that you think the raw numbers in the document are also incorrect? It’s an interesting read. According to raw numbers, first babies were 38% of the births and second babies were 32%, while third and fourth were 17% and 7% of the births. That’s trivia, true, but I’ve been wondering how common 3 and 4 kid families are. If those numbers are correct, then they’re not as common.

       1. I cannot give good numbers, because I work at Sam ‘s Club, land of babies. And of large families.

          1. Yeah your doing population estimates would be the definition of selection bias.

       2. I’m fairly sure that the birth certificate numbers are accurate enough to not matter.

          I’m not going off of people I know– I’m going off of “do I see babies when I am out doing stuff.”

          When we had Princess 9 years ago, I was one of the few babies; now, there are babies all over– tiny ones, too!
          In El Paso I figured it was the Army base being there– military does tend to have more kids– but I observed it during the move, too.

          Which table had the number of older siblings? I found the interval between births one, but….

          1. I think the more important thing is what’s actually going on in regards to the cultural “supports” for having kids. There’s a lag involved, when you start influencing and “nudging”, one which we’re only starting to see the effects of.

             Socially, I think we’ve made a huge mistake in how we’ve essentially recapitulated the monastery effect of the late Middle Ages on the modern upper-class woman. We’ve prematurely moved over to a model where child production isn’t the primary focus of a woman’s life, and the “birth dearth” in the college-educated crowd is a result.

             I’m not saying that “women can’t have it all”, merely pointing out that the root biological facts of reproductive health and lifespan militate against it. We managed to change a bunch of stuff, post-Semmelweis, but the fundamentals are still there: If you want to utilize your best years for reproduction, you can’t mimic the male life patterns at all. Which is essentially what we did, and we’re paying the price for it.

             Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the downward trend in IQ test results is real, a possible/probable cause for it would be that we’ve essentially removed a huge swathe of the high-IQ baby-makers from production. They’re having fewer kids, later in life, and those kids are having more health problems because Mommy was in her late thirties vice her late teens when they were conceived. So, the next generations aren’t as “smart” on the IQ test as the previous ones were…

             I really hate to say this, but the facts are that we moved to this new reproductive schema way, way prematurely: This is something we should have done only after vastly increasing lifespan, and getting a better handle on reproductive health. The biologic facts on the ground in the present era really militate against the large-scale changes we’ve made so thoughtlessly.

             I don’t think the current mythos regarding the roles/responsibilities of the sexes is really viable, in any long-term sort of way, until/unless we get some significant changes to lifespan and can fix that whole fertility/healthy baby thing for older mothers. The health numbers just don’t work out, unless you start making some serious social adaptations we just haven’t bothered with–Things like enabling late-life careers for “retired mothers” who spent their most fertile years having kids, the way biology demands. Another option would be for there to be more flexible marital arrangements, with a couple of working adults coupled up with a “breeder” who makes the babies for both women in the marriage. Effects of that might be even more disruptive than what we’re doing, because you’re effectively breaking down the whole idea of monogamy–But, if you want those high-octane high-IQ women to be sticking around in the gene pool, you’re going to have to do something like have a partner that isn’t as externally driven to carry her kids for her.

             Of course, a lot of this could (and, probably will be…) by things like artificial wombs that can serve to enable older women to have kids successfully. Until then, though? The biological facts on the ground mean that we’ve moved prematurely to a model of society where we have young women on the life-trajectory that used to be male-only. The basic biology militates against it, when you look at the cold reality of it all–Which, I’m afraid, most of us simply do not…

             1. Oh, women can “have it all”. They have to be broken in childhood to get there, and not in the direction they’re getting broken, though. (Ask me how I know) And all of the aspects of the “all” will suffer from their divided attention (ask me how I know again.)

             2. Another option would be for there to be more flexible marital arrangements, with a couple of working adults coupled up with a “breeder” who makes the babies for both women in the marriage.

                Doesn’t work. That’s basically what Nannies do, other than not giving birth.

                The relationships get really ugly, and it’s not nice for the kids.

                **************

                You’re right about how it’s basically mandatory for women to go to college if they’re not losers, and get a degree, and then the debt means they HAVE to have a job to pay for that, and they couldn’t afford kids even if they have the time– and it’s a mess. That’s part of why even though I married in my late 20s, I was still one of the first to marry and have kids in my graduating year. (there were married folks, and there were kids, but they didn’t overlap much)

                That said, folks are getting rebellious. Partly because an outsized number of kids were born to those who were last generation’s rebels.

                1. It seems to me I have read studies purporting to show that women who wait to have first births in their Thirties tend to have lower IQ children — although I expect any such studies are now suppressed as against the Public Interest.

                   We waste an incredible amount of people’s time with “education” — largely do to the factory production method into which we’ve fallen. Pretty much any home-schooler can tell you they cover far more material in far less time than any contemporary school, and the kids generally understand the material better.

                   As for women being pushed into the wrk force, that increases the labor supply and drives down the price of workers — making it far harder for an individual to support a family on just one paycheck. Sigh – unforeseen consequences!

                   1. Sounds like a variation on the known issue of mothers over 30 having a higher risk of Down’s– it’s less suppressed than rolled over into the stat where having several older siblings makes you more likely to be born with Downs.

                      Of course, THAT stat ignores that the religious fanatics who have lots of kids are very unlikely to kill their kid when they hear he might have Downs.

                   2. (For anybody reading who doesn’t know me– we’ve got six kids.)

                2. If you consider religious folk rebellious, then yeah that fits my family. 🙂 Me, I was buying the idea that I ought to pursue a career if I could when I ran across the Atlantic article by Anne Marie Slaughter which alerted me to some of the trade-offs involved from the side of one who did it. She planted the seed that it might not be worth it trying to have it all. I had a really different upbringing, stay at home mom, early school at home, plenty of church. The career path seemed better in a grass is greener kind of way.

                   When we started our family, I made a choice to put the kid first, even if it means work is curtailed for good. I’m in a perishable skills profession. Right now, my college education means I can understand my husband’s work talk, but that’s it. We’ve joked that we just need to find someone to hire us both for the price of one, and swap who goes into work and who takes care of small children. I think our hostess has a short story on that idea, but we’re one of the goofy couples that that would actually work for.

                   1. It totally works in tech, if you can work from home. Would work for us, too if we were in the same field.

                      1. The current personal experience is that the company wants the employee to show up in the office. I agree that it’s possible if the company is willing to have work from home.

                   2. If you consider religious folk rebellious, then yeah that fits my family.

                      Well, who is going against what popular culture says we’re supposed to do?

                      We’ve joked that we just need to find someone to hire us both for the price of one,

                      Funny thing, when you get to looking at famous scientists and such– that’s kind of what THEY did. Their wives were assistants. It’s what my mom did on the ranch, too, although she usually got hired at least part-time since she’d be workign anyways.

                   3. Wasn’t much of a dater through HS (or at all) or college, until very late.

                      Didn’t choose to have the one child in early 30’s, just biology chose otherwise. In fact, when work options, or lack there of, hit early in our marriage, we decided to start trying. Eight years later, and minor medical intervention, we finally succeeded. I was 32. We’d been married almost 10 years.

                      We chose the route that affected both our careers. As long as I was working, hubby shutdown overtime and trips out of town, as much as possible. Me, I did the flex hours as much as possible. Which meant supervised play time didn’t start until 9 AM and was done around 2 PM. Motto was “Kid first. My time begins when he is 18.” (Surprise, at 16 if they have their own car, some “me time” gets shoe horned in.)

                3. And then add in the problem that you (the woman) finally get to that point and it seems that most of the men in your ‘options’ pool are either manchildren or so gun shy about marriage/committed relationships that you end up with pretty much zero options.

                   Me, I’m liking the idea of arranged marriage more and more all the time, provided the people doing the picking know me and prospective spouse well and have our mutual best interests in mind, heh.

                   (And I will add that coming from a religious-cultural background that insists upon chastity when not married also adds another layer of difficulty. If one is committed to that, which alas, many of us are.)

                   1. There really should be a skit for those guys who complain that
                      1) all the single women they know are whores
                      1a) none of the women they date will put out in return for a nice dinner
                      1b) the women they ask to go home with them on the third date go “uh, no thanks”

                      2) all women care about is money
                      2a) any woman should pay at LEAST half the costs for dinner
                      2b) women who keep track of who pays are horrible

                      3) women are dishonest
                      3a) they go out on dates with guys they aren’t interested in because he offers to treat them to dinner
                      3b) they don’t ask guys they’re interested in to dinner
                      3c) they don’t realize the blessing they are given for the company of the guy who is going dutch with them.

                      ….yes, I have seen folks use more than one of these FROM THE SAME GUY.

                      It’s like the chicks who get huffy when someone asks them out but also get upset that more people don’t ask them out…..

                      (Do a stand-up show! Arrange dates between the folks that laugh!)

                      1. Oh yeah, I’ve heard variations on all of those complaints and yeah, sometimes from the same a**hole.

                         They consider themselves “the Nice Guy” who always gets Friendzoned. My reaction is usually “Dude, if you got friendzoned, then she is being waaaaaay too polite. Because I wouldn’t touch you with a ten foot pole as a friend, let alone potential mate!”

                         (Though because I, too, am supernaturally polite, I don’t generally say that, alas. I just back away and do not engage.)

                         1. They probably consider YOU a friend who has friend-zoned them.
                            Not violently rejecting ’em is sometimes all it takes.

                            TBF, that’s about all it takes to be a ‘friend’ to me, but I don’t expect to get laid from it…..

             3. Don’t get me wrong, here–I’m not making a value judgment on any of these choices that women make. At all. What I’m trying to get at is the observation that the raw cold facts on the whole issue aren’t quite as simple as a lot of the advocates for change have made them out to be.

                I do think that a lot of the social changes we’ve made since about 1880 were extremely premature, and probably very maladaptive for the reality of things we have here-and-now. Improved lifespan, better control over reproductive health…? Oh, yeah… You can have the girls follow their brothers into the maw of career-development and all the rest of the usual male “prerogatives”. The way the actual conditions are set now, though? It’s a recipe for a lot of societal and personal dysfunction.

                I’m sure that the implications of it all weren’t clear to the early activist types, but the facts are, they advocated for changes (and, mostly got them…) that were inimical to the interests of society-at-large, and a lot of other women. Not to mention the men those changes made miserable, but those have never mattered in the first place, being the sacrificial “scratch monkey” of the two sexes.

                I honestly don’t see a path out of this current mess, absent some major changes in lifespan, reproductive health, or maybe artificial wombs. The social changes you’d need to satisfy the ambitions of the women who “want it all” are probably dislocating enough that you’d break nearly everything else trying to make it work for them, and we’re seeing a lot of those side-effects in today’s society around us.

                Not a value judgment, just an observation. Personally, were you to tell me that I had to spend twenty or so years of my life playing nursemaid/mother/supervisor to kids…? I’d lose my mind. So, I sympathize with the women who don’t want to go down that path. The problem is, I’m afraid, that we can’t deal with having the majority of the high-octane “bright” women doing this, and still maintain the rest of the package we like. The lowering IQ scores are, I suspect, a symptom stemming from several causative factors, like “reduced high-octane” mothering and that the mothers that are having kids are somewhat “lower octane”. There is, no doubt, a synergism going on that comes from less “ept” mothers, fewer high-octane women in education, and fewer kids from those high-octane types. Benefit to society for enabling these women to follow their desires…? Questionable.

                I’m sure that my grandmother and great aunt, who were born in the 1890s, would have loved to have the opportunities available to the women of today, but I question whether they would have followed the family trajectory that resulted in my existence in the first place. It’s not the cost of the doggy in the window, it’s the opportunity cost you suffer from your choice to leave that doggy in the window, or to buy it. One path leads one way, another leads to vastly different results in other arenas.

                1. I get it. I’m just saying women (or anyone) can’t really have it all. Choices are needed.

                2. “were you to tell me that I had to spend twenty or so years of my life playing nursemaid/mother/supervisor to kids…? I’d lose my mind.”

                   Whereas the satisfactions of inquiring, “Do you want room for milk?”, of tending a register at Walmart, performing title searches at the Registrar of Deeds, or of being a code monkey are beyond counting.

                   I haven’t done research on it but I would roughly guess that the vast majority* of jobs are just that: jobs. Careers are less numerous and, truth be told, less satisfying than most folks imagine. The thing about kids is those tending them get to watch them grow, whereas tightening nuts on a Toyota assembly line seems far more like the labors of Sisyphus.

                   Given my experience of bosses in a variety of workplaces I don’t think any child I reared could be more irrational, more obstreperous or more pointlessly demanding.

                   *I would put the over/under at 75% and expect to fall short.

                   1. I’m not naturally good with babies/toddlers. I prefer kids after about 6. I stayed home with mine. I might not have been the best of mothers, but it didn’t kill me.

                   2. I’ve been around small kids from babies to late toddler-hood; I’ve baby-sat immature young adults. I’ve dealt with pointy-haired bosses, and monotonous mindless labor. Of the three, the one that would drive me around the bend would likely be the small child… I’m not wired for that, at all–The cries, the endless neediness, the responsibility…? I’d be over the edge so quickly, for soooooo many reasons.

                      Now, never having done the whole “Dad conversion” thing that I suspect stems from being around pregnant women…? Maybe I’d be able to deal. I doubt it, though–A child’s cries are like freakin’ nails-on-chalkboard for me, and always have been, even with my immediate family members.

                      That said, I wonder if there are any stats out there for young males who had the signal experience of dealing with infants during their early teens, and if they’re any less likely to have kids of their own? Anecdotally, for whatever reason, a lot of the guys I’ve known who’ve actual experience of coping with infants were notably reluctant to have their own. The guys who dive head-first into fatherhood without a backwards glance seem to be the ones who have no idea at all about what they’re getting into…

                      Always told my mom that the best birth control device she ever implemented with my sister and I was having a second set of kids when we were pre-teen and teenagers… That marked me for life.

                      1. Hmmm …I’ve always thought that having the good fortune of acquiring a baby brother at the age of eleven, and at the very beginning of summer vacation was an absolute bonus when it came to being a parent myself. I had no serious hangups about caring for a baby – already been there, done that.
                         And that younger brother was still in the house as a teenager when my daughter (then two years old) came to live with my parents for a year. I think that experience helped him no end, as now he is a wonderful parent in his own right. Although – his two kids were adopted at the age of about three and six or seven.

                         1. Slightly different path. Could have had the experience of dealing with young cousins as a mid teen, as it is I’m 22, and more years older than them. (Uncles are not quite a decade older.) Did the babysitting gig. Made a lot of money. Meh. So had the experience. But what really helped me when our child was born (finally) was 14 years of SDSTFU to others regarding my German Shepard. Which taught me to take my own path regarding child rearing (yes, kid was the most important thing in the house, no we are not *spoiling him.) AND yelling, screaming, hitting, accomplishes absolutely nothing, with dogs, babies, and toddlers. BUT for their own health, safety, and well being, you are in control, giving in ain’t the answer, and sometimes giving them the choice is the answer.

                            * Answer to spoiling was always. “Nope. Not spoiling. Past that. Working on rotten.” Always shut people up. Don’t know why.

                            1. Family mantra in representing the Daughtorial Unit to schools was: You may have expertise in teaching children, but we’ve expertise in this child.

                               Every child is an individual and deserves to be respected for that individuality. Failing to recognise that is a form of abuse.

                3. Personally, were you to tell me that I had to spend twenty or so years of my life playing nursemaid/mother/supervisor to kids…? I’d lose my mind.

                   Heh. Funny thing, I don’t like kids.

                   Not like I actively dislike ’em, but children in general– when I was looking into becoming a teacher, I was looking at youngest towards high school.

                   But I like my kids, as people. And I can actually DO something if they’re having in ways I disapprove of, and you need to be smart to keep up with a smart kid’s mischief. (maybe that’s the real reason that so many bad teachers want the bored kids drugged up)

                   1. My husband is really good with kids. He was going to be a math teacher until he took his first teaching practicum, in the classroom. He switched majors. Still made him a good coach and scout leader. But these activities there were expectations and he had options.

                      To sympathetic ears he jokes that one symbolic ritualistic killing at the beginning of the season would bring everyone into line, for some reason. But he’d settle for the rules he had.

                      Biggest rule. Whose turn. Beginning of every season team was told to line up in whatever order they chose. That was the order for the entire season. Whomever was the last to play in one game, the person behind was first in line for the next game. If you missed a game, and “missed your turn”, too bad. Missed practice for no excuse? Sit out your first turn. Guess who had a problem with that concept? Kids? Nope. Parents. Not many kids missed games, nor missed practice, unless they were sick or hurt. Not only that, hubby went over with the rules with the kids once. After that when rules had to be reexplained to someone (parents) guess who cited the rules? Yep. Kids.

                      Ironically. It never was the rules specifically. It was there were rules. They were adhered to consistently for everyone.

                      1. Ironically. It never was the rules specifically. It was there were rules. They were adhered to consistently for everyone.

                         Reindeer games. Ick.

                         Interestingly enough, one of the biggest warning flags for possible child predators in the Safe Spaces training is that they act like rules don’t apply to them.

                         1. “one of the biggest warning flags for possible child predators in the Safe Spaces training is that they act like rules don’t apply to them.”

                            So … Progressives, essentially.

12. When I feel down, I ask myself: Are we worse off than on June 1, 1942? Then an outnumbered American task force with 3 carriers waited to ambush the Japanese fleet sailing toward Midway. Hitler heading for the oil of Baku. Leningrad under siege. Rommel poised to seize Egypt. No chance of a second front.

    We do face dark times today. Pray the current civil war is resolved “peacefully”. Do what you can. Don’t be discouraged. Give thanks for the strange “Judge” God seems to have sent. The left seems to be moving before they are ready. A hidden enemy revealed themselves. This is something to be grateful for. It helps to know where the enemy weapons are emplaced. It helps to know who are the traitors.

    1. One of my lefty friends posted a meme yesterday about how hypocritical it was of Christians (especially Evangelicals) to support Trump. It apparently needs to be pointed out constantly that God uses those available, as they are, rather than just those of saintly conduct and righteousness.

       Even Christ’s 12 disciples were deeply flawed men. Several were of the militant nationalist persuasion, tax collectors and/or thieves. Simon Peter cut off the ear of one of those sent to arrest Jesus in the garden!

       1. Was that based on David French’s piece in Time? I’ve tried to engage my never-Trump but conservative friends on that, unsuccessfully.

          Sadly.

          1. Oddly, French seems to have become reconciled to Trump, accepting that much of his sturm und drang is mere distraction while he actually gets a considerable amount of good accomplished.

             Note the thrust of this recent comment:

             ‘[T]anks have had their own very benign role in Washington parades for a very long time. Tanks have rolled through the streets during inaugural parades for presidents Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. … It’s certainly fair to critique the cost of any given public display, and disruptions like temporary shutdowns of Reagan National Airport can certainly annoy travelers, but the use of tanks in an Independence Day celebration is simply no big deal. There is nothing ominous about their presence, especially given the fact that our military is (rightly) one of the last trusted institutions in America. It does not threaten our Constitution; it protects our founding principles.

             In reality, I suspect that many thousands of Independence Day visitors will enjoy seeing the tanks. In fact, the sight of military equipment is a time-honored recruiting tactic. They fire the imagination of young people who could see themselves in command of a magnificent machine, performing noble and heroic service to our country.

             Finally, as an Army veteran, I for one am glad to see our vehicles get their due. The Navy and Air Force hog the public glory. Let’s give the tank its moment in the sun.”
             https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-bit-of-perspective-on-trumps-tanks/

       2. Yeah, because it would have been the totally Christian thing to support Hillary. Hillary, whose judicial appointments could have been relied upon to find against Jack Phillips, the Gibson bakery and otherwise drive Christians from the public square … and then to attack them for not living the Faith, so obviously they are not sincere in their beliefs.

          I. Think. Not.

       3. The guys who do the job are the ones who show up. None of the super holy dudes showed up, Jesus had to make due with a bunch of hardass fishermen.

          Probably a lesson in that somewheres.

          1. Thing about the “super holy dudes” though, was that they weren’t super holy dudes–they were just really good at pretending to be super holy dudes, while actually being power-hungry dirtbags.

             Jesus went out and found people who weren’t power-hungry dirtbags.

             1. Well, clearly there were God-pleasing people out there. But not all of them were cut out to be apostles, or at least not in the first wave. I mean, Jesus was a big fan of the centurion who needed his servant healed, but he did not get picked, either.

                God makes people have different strengths and weakness, and then He also.passes out gifts that might not seem to fit. But clearly He thinks they do.

                But “able to do a lot of hard work and hard travel” was probably one of the qualifications….

                1. I’ve seen the argument that God deliberately chooses the Short Bus people. Pick your category of deficiency, God has used one for a hero. (Jonah’s a great example).

                   So no-one has any excuses. “I may be stupid, foolish, and generally annoying, but God WILL use me for good if I step up.”

                   1. God seems like a very good pool player who likes a challenge. So he invites us join him as partners. I remember one strange Saturday night when I found myself talking to a weird group of people about religion. I realized this is exactly where you would have found Jesus, talking to “sinners” rather than the saved. I wished He was there, it hit me that He was. He was speaking thru me. All I had to do was listen and speak at the same time.

                      He has a weird sense of humor. Our church is across an expressway from the town fireworks, so we open our parking lot and ask for a $10 “donation”. I had gone early and parked away from our church, so figured I did not need to park at the church. Went to the car to get a chair, and saw on the ground a $10 bill. The image of Jesus, Peter and the fish with the coin, came to mind. Drove over to the church. Gave them the $10 bill and parked. I can take a hint.

                      1. I welcome correction, but as far as I know, only Christians and Jews perceive the Creator of the Universe as someone who lloves and enjoys them.

                         I wish English still had the thee/thou construction. I think we lost it around the middle of the 19th century.

                      2. Never, *ever* tell me God has no sense of humor. I was at church during a really bad time (recently-deceased mother, plus other problems) and the sermon was, despite my best surly efforts, penetrating.

                         I did not WANT to be consoled at the moment and spent most of the service telling myself “this is your imagination, if God was trying to get through to you, they’d do something cheesy like playing at the end.”

                         They did.

                         I stopped in my tracks, looked up, and said “FINE then.” 🙂

                         1. Of Course He has a sense of humour. We have puppies and kittens, he has us. I am sure we’re far more entertaining than hamsters even if, compared to His majesty, we are so much less.

                         2. The number of times I got the sermon I needed…

                            1. When I prayed for a gift of the spirit, He gave me the gift of poetry/prophecy. I turn sermons into poems during the sermon, then share with the preacher. It is a very good way to focus on what is being said, trying to condense the essence of a half hour sermon into 8 to 20 verses.
                               What is interesting: I also get/hear poems before the sermon that relate to the sermon I have not heard yet. It doesn’t surprise my pastor, he just says we were both listening to the same Person.

                               One of the top 10 paradoxes is Awe and Intimacy.

                   2. Also, it helps keep people straight about who’s responsible.

                   3. I think, too, it’s that–at least for the really, really big jobs (like apostles) he often finds those who are willing to surrender themselves to HIS will. Free will being all important, see, God won’t just force us to do stuff. If He did, he wouldn’t be God. So I picture him getting his mortal children to do stuff is a long, long exercise in persuasion, object lessons, and a great deal of frustration. (And being the most excellent cosmic Troll, see Jonas and the whale. Or, what happens when you whine about going to preach to the sinners, then whine because the sinners actually repented and changed their ways!) And so those who end up doing some of that really big stuff weren’t necessarily perfect saints we like to picture, but those who were not so caught up in their OWN self-willed path and stubbornness that they were willing to listen and actually surrender their will to His. At least on a case-by-case basis, because nothing anyone ever says will convince me that Peter and Paul both didn’t have huge stretches of stubborn, mule-stupid behavior.

                      And Judas? He was an apostle…and I suspect the betrayal was more down to “He’s not doing things the way *I* think they should be done!!!!” as much as anything else. (Though yes, of course, it HAD to happen, so there’s some interesting philosophical debates in there…) He wanted it done His way, not God’s. Did God know this when he had Jesus pick him out as an apostle? Probably. But he still had to give Judas the chance to prove otherwise.

                      (We don’t seem to know a lot of his background, compared to some of the other apostles. I often wonder if he wasn’t from the more ‘expected/traditional’ background than the others, and those preconceptions he came in with–as opposed to being a fisherman, or a despised tax collector, etc–might not also have contributed to the problem.)

                      1. So … what you’re saying is that the apostles and disciples were no better than me (and y’all) and therefore there’s No Excuse to Not do His work?

                         1. Shocking, isn’t it? And, *gasp* they probably screwed up on the regular and weren’t perfect, either!!!

                      2. As I remember Judas Iscariot was labeled as a Zealot, the Jewish sect that ended up at Masada and got the Romans to destroy the temple and forced the Diaspora.

                         The betrayal was definitely an attempt to get Jesus to become, shall we say, more direct in his actions.

             2. Wouldn’t Saul/Paul be Exhibit #1 for a super holy dude that was super holy– just wrong, and got hisself fixed but GOOD?

                1. Definitely Saul/Paul fits that bill. Saul of Tarsus was a Pharisee and was a disciple of Gamaliel one of the more well known Rabbis of the first century (Gamaliel gets a mention in Acts). Saul was persecuting Christians (he holds the cloaks of the people that stone Stephen in Acts and hunts down Christians) but is struck blind and then restored.
                   Other folks also come to mind, Nicodemus seems to be one of the elders of Israel. There is also the rich young ruler mentioned in Mark (and elsewhere one of the other synoptic gospels Luke?) .

                   1. Oh, how could I forget! Joseph of Arithmea, whose tomb Jesus was buried in was a member of the Sanhedrin! (sp)

                      For that matter, Mary and Martha and Lazarus were religious groupies who actively supported the ministry.

       4. The left’s claim is based on the leftist’s own attitude that demands absolute 100% purity and conformity of belief in and to leftist ideology and whatever the party line is at that particular moment. Thus, Obama 2nd inauguration, Betsy Ross flag good, 2019-Betsy Ross flag bad because leftist who hates America and idolizes Fidel Castro and Che Guevara object to its depiction on sneakers.
          It is no accident that the left has revived Maoist struggle sessions and Stalinist approach to those who disagree with them.

          1. Cardshark you said “Stalinist approach to those who disagree with them.” I don’t think they’ve used an ice axe on any of their opponents.

             well yet…

             1. Right now it’s crowbars and cement shakes. And, the definition of opponent seems to be “anybody who doesn’t completely agree with my moonbattery”.

                1. Golly, have we already forgotten about swatting? They like to subcontract their violence when practical.

                   1. Yeah Stalin had farmed out dealing with Trotsky. Not that I suspect Stalin would have been squeamish about doing the deed himself if Trotsky had gotten within arms reach.

                      The Antifa folks are getting more and more violent, although the Weathermen of the sixties were none to friendly either. Just that in those days the police were likely to deal with them instead of sit back and let chaos reign because some idiot told them to do that.

                      1. yes, but if they try actual weathermen tactics they are going to find out exactly how many bomb precursors that the ATF tracks the purchase of these days….

    2. Dark times today and every day. Contrary to Progressive eschatology civilization is not the natural state of humanity, and liberty is an anomaly. Selling your soul to the State will not preserve those attributes.

       This message brought to you by the firm of Nastee, Brutysh and Shorte.

13. Huzzah!

    A Writer As Big As America
    By Sarah Hoyt
    As some of you know, I’m an American by choice. I left kin and country, culture and connections to throw in my lot with the freedom gang.

    How did this come to happen? How could a girl raised in Portugal, of patriotic (fanatic, really) parents get to the point where she felt expatriate, a stranger in a strange land?

    Well, a lot of it had to do with what I read. When I tell people I was raised in Robert A. Heinlein books, I wasn’t joking. And there was something in those books that just made me American, before I even realized it was happening. …

    1. Thankee, Res! The first day I don’t check PJ.

       Should’ve known Mrs. Hoyt wouldn’t miss the Fourth.

14. Pingback: A Classic Ode To America | Transterrestrial Musings

15. “I don’t like the crackling noises coming off China.”

    Those are the noises a rotten tree makes just before it comes crashing down.

    Sure they look really big, really strong, sure they grew really fast, they have a big army, big navy, and their air force is getting lots of fancy looking planes. Commies love that stuff.

    But they are -hollow- inside, just like the Soviets were, and for the same reason. A billion little ants carrying away the inside of the tree as more is added on the outside. One crumb at a time. It adds up. Sooner or later, the tree falls.

    President-For-Life is what you do when there’s no way to dismount the tiger you’re riding and live. President-For-Life Xi openly mocking the Prime Minister of Canada (who is a jackass, in all fairness) is a desperate con-man making a ruckus in the front of the saloon while his boys are trying to steal the piano out the back door. I think they really need that piano.

    They’re doing massive Big Brother surveillance of their population. Commies only do that when they’re afraid of ending up hanging from a lamp post. Starving rebellious sections of the country is cheaper and easier, disappearing rebellious individuals is cheaper too, but they can’t get away with that anymore on a large scale.

    I wonder how long it would take the nuclear armed US Navy to blockade the South China Sea? Two weeks?

    This is not to imply any of the forgoing would be a good thing. No matter what the reason, the failure of the Chinese government will imperil a billion people who otherwise would be doing just fine.

    This seems a very good book idea. How does one arrange a soft landing for the population of a failing totalitarian state?

    1. I believe China is underestimated at our peril. I also think the technological advantage we used to have is dangerously assumed to still exist. I think there is good reason to believe that our technological advantage is not nearly what it used to be, and China, even presuming their population is overstated, still has a A LOT of people that can be pressed in military service. China, for the first time since Mao’s death, has leadership that once again thinks that they can start and win a nuclear war because of their population size and construction of underground facilities, and an expansionist attitude to match.

       1. An American technological advantage? Ephemeral in dealing with a foe who thinks property rights are for suckers.

          COLD WAR II: Engineer faces 219 years in prison for smuggling US military chips to China.
          https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/334989/

       2. > population size

          …which they have been concentrating, often involuntarily, into giant urban hives.

          The USAF calls those, “targets.”

          1. The empty cities China keeps building tells me all I need to know about how accurate the news of China’s impending domination is.

             Especially because while I may be a damn kid, I have read SF from before I was born. SF from the time that the Soviet Union was unstoppable.

             “… as Farce” indeed.

       3. “China, for the first time since Mao’s death, has leadership that once again thinks that they can start and win a nuclear war because of their population size and construction of underground facilities, and an expansionist attitude to match.”

          Yeah, that’s all true. But this is us:

          I watched that today, and I felt the monster try the bars of its cage.

       4. China has the “Imperial Germany” problem–they’re the biggest kid on the block, they’ve been acting like it, their peers are all rivals, and their allies are either untrustworthy or ramshackle or both.
          If there is a big conflict, it’s going to be The Great War: Asian edition.

          1. I’ve noticed that, too. China is like Wilhelmine Germany – the new rising Great Power, looking for tokens of respect…and finding out that being a Great Power isn’t nearly as satisfying as they thought it would be.

             And they don’t have a Kipling writing, “The Yellow Man’s Burden” in commiseration.

          2. China has an additional problem – the “enemies”, at least as seen by the Party leadership, are already within the gates. Hong Kong is very much hostile to the goals of the Party, and Beijing knows it. Hong Kong is also by far the single most valuable chunk of real estate in the country. So Beijing needs to tread carefully. The communist mandarins *must* bring Hong Kong to heel, but must do so in a way that doesn’t kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs.

             And there’s an additional aspect to it. Many mainland Chinese are also hostile to the goals of the Party. But they’re willing to put up with the oppression to a certain extent, particularly if they feel like their lives are still improving under the Communist regime. But if that stops, and if Hong Kong is still getting away with active displays of violence, then that could change very quickly. Oppressors can only oppress so long as the oppressed think a punishment will occur if they disobey. If the oppressed decide that the oppressor is a paper tiger, then all bets are off. And if Hong Kong’s defiance starts to look too flagrant to the general population, then that desire for freedom might start making itself known in parts of the mainland, as well.

             1. Or if the oppressed feel they are going to be punished for something someone else did. Or same punishment for all infractions.

             2. China is in the same situation as the former USSR. The Party was a big step up from what they had before; most people could look back within their lifetime and see how things were tremendously better than they had been before. Medical care, education, jobs, consumer goods…

                And most people were happy and grateful to the Party for that.

                …until they got a good look at how the West was living, and started wondering why they had stopped short of that. And then wondering about it in public, with friends.

                And then bits started falling off the social structure…

                1. Actually, one of the first researchers allowed into Red China found that if asked for the best time in their own lives, they would gush about the Republic. Once he asked one if his life had been improving, and the response made it clear the man was thinking since the Great Leap Forward.

                   1. *nod*

                      Based on what I hear, life is reasonably nice if you live in one of the urban areas (particularly Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzen). But I’ve heard that the rural areas are still in pretty bad shape. Also, the rural areas would have been hardest hit by some of Mao’s crazier ideas – such as the anti-sparrow crusade, and the push the government had early on to put a smelter in every rural backyard.

                      And while life is nicer in the urban areas, it’s the urban citizens who get the most exposure to western “corruption”, and thus are the most likely to start agitating for more of a say in the government.

       5. What would we do if ships started crashing on our shores full of Chinese, men, women and children? And the ships kept coming?

          1. They’d need a hell of a lot of ships just to match what’s coming over the southern border…

             There have, however, been some instances illegal Chinese in Canada; the Canadians actually deportesome of them from time to time. Looks like the numbers are in the dozens or hundreds, about like the US deports South Americans. Which makes me wonder if Canada’s enforcement is as useless as the US’, or if they’re super-efficient…

             1. Their record-breaking high for total illegal immigration is slightly less than what went through El Paso’s border patrol area this February, IIRC.

             2. “Which makes me wonder if Canada’s enforcement is as useless as the US’, or if they’re super-efficient…”

                Its -selective- enforcement. Persons seen to be fleeing the Evile Trump Empire are featured on Canadian television all the time, crossing the basically wide-open border in the Quebec woods. Most places all there is at the border is a sign telling you its the border. They’ve been lining up at these little crossings, waiting to be taken into custody by the border cops who have put up tents there. Those people so far have ended up in federally funded hotel rooms from Montreal to Edmonton.

                Elsewhere, away from the cameras, things are much less accommodating. They deport people back to their homelands right from the airport when they land seeking asylum, unless they have a really good tan. I would not want to be a Cuban trying to escape Castro, and landing at Toronto airport.

                So, as with most official things in Canada, its political. If you’re not this week’s front page official pampered pet, you don’t get the kid glove treatment. You get a punch in the face, a night in the crowbar hotel, and shipped out on whatever cattle car was first in line.

                1. Dan had trouble going in in the eighties to fix software that had broken.

                   1. Oh absolutely. If you’re an American with no criminal record and a perfectly legitimate reason to be in Canada, they will find a way to make your life difficult.

                      I’m convinced its just to see the look on your face. They’re assholes.

                      Sadly, the same is true going the opposite direction. Many times I’ve showed up to catch a plane from Buffalo to Arizona, with all my papers in order like a good little prole, and they’ve blustered and browbeat me over some imagined shortfall. Last time it was because the son of a bitch didn’t read the form I handed him. Claimed it didn’t have the return flight on it. Let me through anyway, which made no sense whatsoever.

                      I guess the look on my face was very flat and uninteresting. Probably because I was about five hours early for my flight, and I really didn’t give a shit if he sent me back anyway. Otherwise he’d no doubt have kept going.

                      You remember that post I made where I said most people aren’t assholes? I still think that’s true. But assholes do exist, and seem to gravitate to government jobs.

                      1. They let Dan through when he told them that he WANTED to be sent back home, because this job had taken him away from his wife of two weeks.

                         1. Yep, that sounds about right.

                            “Send me home! Right Now! I’m begging you!!!”

                            “Your visa has cleared, sir. Have a pleasant trip.”

                      2. “… assholes do exist, and seem to gravitate to government jobs.”

                         Has anybody ever been fired from a government job for being an asshole? In most private sector jobs treating customers like [feces] will get you fired, but evidence suggests that in the public sector it earns promotion. The wonder of it is not that so many public sector employees are assholes, it is that any are not.

                         1. Speaking as someone in a government job (though not, I hope, an asshole)…it depends on just how egregious it gets. Sadly, general assholery is likely to get the twerp promoted–but the dark secret isn’t because that behavior is *encouraged*, it’s because the way stuff is set up plus the odd mortal fear the government (US anyway) has of lawsuits means that it is virtually impossible to get fired* from the job for pretty much ANY reason unless you happen to be in the one-year probationary period after starting a new position.

                            Generally, promotion happens with problem people because it’s the only way for to get rid of the problem. So they promote them elsewhere, and then they’re someone else’s problem for now.

                            The fact that it means that the upper echelons then end up almost entirely occupied by the assholes and the incompetent…well, then it turns into the same problem we have with Congress and term limits: it’s a self perpetuating problem.

                            A very close relative of mine who works in the same agency I do was told, to his face, that he was being denied a promotion to a management position because he would, and I quote “make people do their jobs.” And that was just too mean.

                            *That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. But most of the ones I’ve seen have either occurred during the probationary year, or were the culmination of long-standing behavior problems (like, oh, drunk driving. ON THE JOB) that had been ignored because but had finally become so egregious they couldn’t be swept under the rug anymore. Yes, it is as demoralizing as it sounds. But it’s amazing what some of us will put up with to keep food on the table, sigh.

                            1. Your points are valid, but …

                               I fear I was insufficiently clear. It isn’t a matter of whether government jobs encourage such behaviour; it is that they do not discourage it. Most anybody in any service industry job (best comp to gov’t job interacting with the public) has multiple interactions a day in which it is necessary to suppress [irritation] and remember that “the customer is always right.” But for government employees the customer isn’t always right [see: Lois Lerner] and the customer’s purpose can be frustrated at no cost to the job-holder.

                               If you do not like your treatment by the clerk at the DMV (or any other permit-issuing agency) what are you going to do? Take your business elsewhere? Sure, you can complain to your elected representative, but so what? The government employee union carries more weight there so the best you are likely to receive is sympathetic noise and a promise to “Look into the matter.”

                            2. There usually are complaint boxes– write it up as best you can, file it, and that hands documentation to anybody who is trying to fix it.

                            3. That is true. It is very sadly not discouraged. And most government agencies do not, in fact, have complaint boxes.

                               (Though the CIA apparently has a customer service desk, which just boggles the hell out of me. Or at least they did back in 2009, when I was job hunting and looking for something that might make use of my language skills.)

                2. I used to sell stuff by mail order. I sent stuff to East Germany, The USSR, and little African countries I’d never heard of.

                   The *only* country I ever had problems with was Canada, where one out of four packages would vanish after they crossed the border. My Canadian customers said that was par for the course for anything coming out of the States.

          2. Been happening for a while; just doesn’t get the press. Guess little brown people drowning in the Rio Grande makes more ‘better’ press than container full of little yellow people starving to death on dock in LA. When I was on Kwaj. in the 90’s, one of the most exciting times we had was when a ship full of Chinese ‘immigrants’ lost power and had to be towed into the harbor. We put them up in a camp until the Sultan of Brunei sent his gold-plated (really) Boeing airliners to bring them back to their point of origin.

    2. My view on President-For-Life Xi is that with an unstable country, changes of leadership usually do not go well. Better the dictator you know and can work with than an uproar and upset that’s likely to finish up with someone worse in power, and quite probably blood in the streets.

16. A “world without America”? They’re just mad they lost the Cold War.

    Fourth of July flag-burning at White House erupts in chaos, with 3 arrested
    At least three Revolutionary Communist Party activists were arrested outside the White House after burning an American flag on the Fourth of July.

    The activists, opposing President Trump and calling for a “world without America,” were met by a large counterprotest.

    The Secret Service arrested flag-burning activist Gregory “Joey” Johnson and at least two allies in the aftermath. … A man who identified himself as a veteran grabbed the half-burned flag after it ignited on Pennsylvania Avenue. …

    1. It’s always amusing when bureaucratic regulations instigated by lefties bite the backsides of a lefty who has successfully used our own institutions (Free speech, free protest, and yes, freedom to burn the flag as same) against. For profit.

       Gotta check the burn ban and zoning laws, buddy.

    2. Looks like bystanders were taking action before the Secret Service got there.

       “It’s my First Amendment right to burn a flag as a political statement!”

       “And it’s *my* First Amendment right to protest your statement by kicking your ass…”

       Overall I thought the whole show went pretty well. Needs more tanks next time, though.

17. Happy Independence Day, Mrs. Hoyt!

    I will try to not let the b*stards get me down.

    1. Illegitimi non carborundum!
       Yeah, bogus Latin I know – but has a long backstory,
       The part I like the best is that Vinegar Joe Stillwell took it as a motto.
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum

18. Pingback: Fourth of July – Herbert Nowell

19. If the flag is still there, it is only because good men and women have answered the need to defend it.

    That flag don’t defend itself, you know.

20. There’s a tv show I’m watching on Netflix. It’s set in the very early 1900s (so early that everyone knows that the friction between Russia and Japan will shortly erupt into war). The very first episode had a group of American soldiers walking down the street in New York. One of them (and only one of them) was black. As I’m sure most of us here are aware, that would have been very unlikely in that era, as blacks were kept in their own units (with white officers) until after World War 2.

    But I’m willing to give the scene a pass for two reasons. The first reason is that the series is a foreign series. And I don’t expect foreigners to know every last bit of minutiae about American history (particularly when it’s not a prominent part of the story). The second is that the scene gives me patriotic warm fuzzies. The young male lead, himself an immigrant from a faraway land, is inspired by this scene of mixed race friendship to declare that he would like to become an American. He ends up joining the United States Marine Corps.

    1. Sometimes with white officers; there was at least one black general, right before they disbanded the last horse group.

    2. What show is this?

21. Communist: a socialist who has gained control of the armory.

22. Yes it is that bad in Boulder. Call the bocogop.org office, leave some way to contact you with the office and we’ll get back to you with details

    1. Really? Hell. It was about half that bad in Colorado Springs 2008.

       1. El Paso still has some non-socialist elected officials. When all county officers are one party.. watch out. Is there some way to talk offline? Would love to have you talk up here sometime . Yes, with any accent. Your words are amazing

          1. For what it’s worth: all of the security people I know or have met consistently recommend Signal for secure communications.

             (I don’t mean the two bit idiots who think “high security” means putting the post it note with the password under the desk)

             1. Yeah… I had some people try to get me to install that. I went to their web site and looked. They claim to be “open source”, but there’s no source code on their web site, nor can you download it from there. The only way to get it is to sign up with Google and download it from the Google Store. There’s a Git project for “signal”, but there’s no link to it from the main Signal site.

                So, no source, a secondary site that could be any anonymous scammer, and binary availability only through a compromised source. For an application that bills itself as “high security.”

                That’s a whole chain of fails. “Run away! Run away!”

                1. Yeah, Google can be trusted to keep my confidential information safely*, according to Google.

                   And in passing, as called out by Insty (computerweekly link, not to slashdot), with emphasis on “secretly owned”.

                   https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252466203/Top-VPNs-secretly-owned-by-Chinese-firms

                   (*) Until they find a reason to use, give, or sell it.

                   1. Oh pish-tosh! You’re just paranoid. Google will decide what constitutes “safe” keeping of your confidential information and what release of that information is for your own benefit. Surely you cannot be so unreasonable as to imagine you have sufficient understanding of this complex digital world as to better define “safely” than can Google, with their vast bureaucracy of cyber-experts and lawyers?

                      If they harbored any maleficent intentions would they have “Don;t be Evil” as their motto? Shut up, take your soma and relax.

          2. very much so.
             My two initials, last name at hotmail dot com and I can then give you phone #

             1. Does “I can give you phone number” sound a lot like “moose and squirrel” when you say it out loud? ~:D [running away!!!]

                1. You’ll only die tired. Actually I talk like that whenever I’ve just re-read TMIAHM.
                   Portuguese doesn’t do that. And my accent REALLY isn’t Russian. The vowels are completely different, as well as about half the consonants.

                   1. Oh no. She’s brought out the heat-seeking carp… Aiieee!

                   2. It has struck me that most Americans do not actually have an accurate idea of how a Russian accent sounds. Mostly what they know is June Foray’s Natasha, which is probably as accurate a representation of a Russian accent as Chico Marx is representative of an Italian accent.

                      1. that was *maybe* true 25 years ago. now many areas have enough recent Russian emigres that i am not sure that is the case any longer

                         1. Hmm, tries to remember Mikhail’s accent (St. Petersburg) from Y2K.

                      2. Mostly what they know is June Foray’s Natasha,

                         Or Walter Koenig’s Checkov, likewise not terribly accurate.

                         1. really depends on the region and what otehr languages they learned when.

                      3. Amazingly I had a coworker who had been raised in Moscow and went to one of its technical institutes (aviation/aerospace? ) He really did sound a bit like Boris and his name WAS Boris.
                         The most amazing thing is he was a short (5’4″) stocky gentlemen with a mustache. We had an outing where the assorted spouses/ significant others were invited. Boris walked in with a lovely tall (at least 5′ 8″ almost as tall as my wife who is 5′ 10″) slim raven haired beauty. Boris then proceeded to say “May I introduce you to my wife Natasha.” Every last person in the room was in contortions trying very hard not to laugh out loud. Boris and Natasha (yes those REALLY were their names) had a twinkle in their eye as they had been in the US quite a while and knew what effect this would have on the assembled group.

23. Despair? Ha! It’s time to rejoice! The foes of Civilization can no longer lie about their goals, no longer conceal their madness and treachery. Draw your swords, and let the joy of righteous battle sing in your veins!

    And drive those murderous scum into the depths of Hades!

    1. Right the left has started monologging like a lousy Republic serial villain. If you’re paying attention (and care) you’re amazed/outraged. One horrendous example was the statement the Virginia governor made about an infant surviving a very late term abortion. It was nothing short of chilling. This is idiocy from the Baal/Moloch worship of the ancient middle east. The amazing thing is most people didn’t notice and some far less critical thing had grabbed the gaze of the masses and that statement had passed into the memory hole as Winston Smith might refer to it. I don’t know how people miss this stuff. I feel like I’m living near the start of C.M Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons”. I know we shouldn’t despair but fixing this short of letting nature take its course (stupidity has its own price) evades me some days.

       1. people noticed. then they noticed his college yearbook photos, then they shuffled that off into the memory hole too

       2. For those not familiar:

          He is a former Navy doctor, and stated that what you do is “make the child comfortable” and then discuss what to do with the mother, figure out if she wants to ‘keep’ it or not– very obviously not talking about adoption.

       3. Oh, many, many of us have not forgotten. Nor have we forgotten that yearbook photo, nor how obvious the media was in shouting “WHAT’S THAT OVER THERE?!?!” as they tried to shove it in the memory hole.

24. Thank you Mrs Hoyt, I really needed to read something like that today. It is far to easy to think the maniacs from the left are winning with the way mass media and social media seems to always favor their stances on things.

25. Heh. Proof that a little knowledge can constitute great ignorance:

    Colin Kaepernick breaks silence after igniting controversy over Nike’s Betsy Ross flag shoes
    Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has made his first public comment since Nike stopped selling sneakers featuring a version of the Betsy Ross American flag after he complained to the company.

    Kaepernick, who has been featured in Nike ads, broke his silence by quoting Civil War-era abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass.

    “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine…There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour,” Kaepernick tweeted on the Fourth of July.

    Douglass, who over 180 years ago escaped slavery and became a best-selling author, said the lines in an 1852 talk titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In the speech, Douglass blasted slavery as a practice of savages and a disgrace to America, exhorting the nation to reconsider its purpose as found in the Constitution, which he termed a “glorious liberty document,” and the Declaration of Independence.

    [END EXCERPT]

    From the remainder of Mr. Douglas’s speech:

    “While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”

    Douglass expressed his confidence that the timeless principles of the Declaration, solidly grounding the technological and cultural advances brought about by American ingenuity and changing times, would clear the path to freedom.
    From Sen. Mike Lee, writing in the NY Post today, in a column adapted from his new book, “Our Lost Declaration”

    1. Kind of the equivalent of Kaepernick arguing that Caesar’s assassins were all, all honorable men, citing Marc Anthony’s testimony.

       1. I come to bury Kaepernick, not to praise him.

    2. I see, thanks to Instapundit’s Twitchy link, that others have thoroughly spanked the spoiled brat:

       https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2019/07/04/ted-cruz-and-charles-c-w-cooke-just-embarrassed-colin-kaepernick-so-badly-even-we-feel-sorry-for-him/

       Cruz:
       Let me encourage everyone, READ THE ENTIRE SPEECH; it is powerful, inspirational, and historically important in bending the arc of history towards justice:

       Cooke:
       All of these quotes, @Kaepernick7, are contained within the same speech that you quoted. Are you afflicted by some ugly malady that prevents you from finishing reading a document? Or did you just want to provide an impression wholly unsupported by the evidence?

    3. His politics are going to cost him everything, aren’t they?

       1. We wish.

26. Between the despair and the hope, I have to enjoy the comedy.

    And the tragedy.

    The left knows, I think more than we might realize, that they’re hitting the now-or-never point. Too many people have seen the face of Moloch. They have to win now, or too many of their sins will come to light. They can’t hide what they are anymore.

    Hell, they can’t even put on a Presidential debate without it becoming a disaster for their particular Anointed Ones.

    This doesn’t mean we should relax, mind you. It means we need to go after them even harder-Americans have always had an issue of poor follow-up after major battles, and we cannot have this be the case. Keep fighting. Force the Left further back, into the sea, and keep pushing until they all drown.

    They’re going to fight, even harder than before. We saw that in Portland only a few days ago. If we’re lucky, this kind of thing might end without people getting shot. But…I am ready for what happens next the same way a guy with a parachute standing at the door of a plane, ready to jump is. The next step is a doozie, but we have to make it.

    1. “Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.”

       ― Horace Walpole

27. What Churchill said in “The Gathering Storm”, seems to apply:
    “if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

    That is the warning for us.

28. I am outraged! I’ve just listened to (a DVR of) President Trump’s Independence Day speech and he never said a word about our national failure to be WOKE from Day 1 of our beginning. Nothing about how Capitalism exploits the worker, nothing about our oppression of women, people of color or kinkisexuals. He failed to acknowledge our appropriation of Nicaraguan soil to establish Panama and build that canal, nothing about United Fruit, nothing about our contribution to species extermination and Climate Change.

    This just proves how unfit Trump is to hold any office above dog-catcher.

    Utterly SHAMEless!

29. Still waiting for the MSM to show why his speech was just a campaign speech.

30. Yeah, it looks like the dems are planning on running Kamala (lying b***h) Harris, someone that there is actual proof to be show will sell out your individual rights in order to score political points….

    ( she certified microstamping to be free of patent encumbrances, thus keeping any non-microstamped firearms from being added to the CA Safe Handgun list, when the technology was NOT free of such encumbrances and she demonstrably KNEW both that, and that no handgun manufacturers were making microstamping-capable guns… in doing so she was knowingly ensuring that the available new handgun models available in California would be a gradually shrinking supply as manufacturers removed older models)

31. Our flag was still there. Until the town declared flags may be no larger than thus. And the HOA said flags detract from property values and must be taken down. And the woke person down the street screamed that it was a sign of racism, and flying it was a hate crime. And…

    Sigh. Those aren’t personal experiences, but all have been in the news within the past month.

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