Everybody Knows

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

newspaper-1648554_1920

There is a Leonard Cohen song that came out in the nineties. I want to say early nineties, but for much of that decade I had small children, so it all runs together. Also, I’m uncaffeinated and late and too lazy to look.

Anyway, the song is called “Everybody knows” and it’s a marvel of double-meaning.

What the song says explicitly is a bunch of stuff people like my brother — look, European, left — believed at the time.  Stuff like “Everybody knows the war is over/everybody knows the good guys lost.”

Bizarrely, before they went into hysterical denial of communism being the regime in the USSR and starting to call those seeking to re-establish it “right wingers” the left kept insisting the good guys had lost the cold war. Apparently we just look richer and more concerned for the right of the individual, but the evil Kapitalism of Amerika (it’s much more scary written with a K) kills more people than the Gullag and destroys everyone’s soul in the process. We’re just sneaky about it. So sneaky, in fact, that we don’t need to prevent people from leaving, we need to prevent people from coming here. That’s how sneaky we are.

Stop laughing. There’s a good chance your college student believes this. There’s also a good chance your college student is stupid enough to buy Bernie’s line that bread lines are preferable to our over abundance of food, because at least “everyone is equal.”  Someone should ask comrade Bernie about the State stores for very important functionaries that crop up everywhere that has tried the communist slimming diet (It is to die for) and which has goods comparable with what the low middle class in America can afford, sprinkled with a few gold geegaws which is the communists idea of classy.

Yes, I know, some pigs are more important than others. And some pigs work so hard for their money the state.

However, intertwined, in the song, alongside this litany of “everybody knows” is a very personal story of a faithless lover that “everybody knows” is faithful.

I can read print (though a lot of the reviewers couldn’t.)  It of course means that what everybody knows is mostly …. well… rumor.

And while in this glorious year 3 of the dropping of all masks, we’ve found that hearsay evidence is better than direct knowledge (if only the founding fathers had known! No more more confronting your accuser, when everybody knows.) it turns out rumor is often wrong.

Which btw should be obvious to anyone who has played a game of telephone as a kid. Or, you know, lived in a small village and learned everything possible about evil. An experience that shaped both myself and the fictional Miss Marple. But which has apparently left not only most democrats in the house, but most democrats, untouched.

On the serious side: this is why we can’t get through people, even with facts and reason. They reset for a minute, and then go back.

See, humans are setup to believe whatever the tribe believes. Therein lies safety.

The problem came in with mass media, which like mass production was useful and good for its technology, but was also possible to be captured by a small number of partisans.

Which means the reality disseminated from mass media might have bloody nothing to do with reality, and it didn’t matter, because most people never heard it. The media established the consensus.

Given they were a target of the long march, that will tell you how we got so far (left) so fast.  Particularly when they also had mass education and mass entertainment at their disposal, all blaring the same, coordinated nonsense.

It’s started to shatter. The story of the faithless lover is now woven in.  But ….

Look, I’ve just given you a shovel and asked you to clean the Augean stables. There’s a lot of sh*t in the way.

For instance, this week someone found out something like 80% of college freshmen believe the US INVENTED slavery and did it for racist reasons.  The report had a shocked tone.  Bah, I could have told them this was already true in the eighties amid my black friends then.  This is what they were TAUGHT and they were shocked and offended when I showed them slavery is the oldest sin of mankind and people of every color have been enslaved and slavers.  Some stopped talking to me, because I was somehow trying to take away the specialness they’d held onto for years.  (Why being a victim is special, I don’t know. Unless because our society is so rich, so immensely wealthy that people experience very little actual hardship and therefore claiming some is a treasure.)

The rot goes deep. It started well before we were born. And by we, I mean those of us tottering over the mid century already.

The fight back hasn’t started but maybe ten years ago. Okay, longer for some of us, but the voice crying in the desert did not have a wide audience.

If you want to know how much impact we’re having talk to an European. Even those of them who are fed up still know a litany of “everybody knows” which is insanely counterfactual.

Among other things, ALL of them know we live worse than they do; that we lack basic necessities and people die on the street for lack of health care; and that … well, once in a comment thread argument with a bunch of Europeans, we realized that we got up every morning, drank a cup of cold poison….  And it took them a while to catch on what we were doing.  Yeah.  They also know we all shoot each other on the street over a cross look.

It’s important for them to know this. At least from their governments pov. Or they might start thinking that socialism isn’t the solution for all that hails them, and that giving more power to corruptocrats is a bad idea.

The fact it’s not true is… a mere inconvenience. And the sheep need never know.

Here… Here we’re starting to make inroads.

Is it still in time to pierce through “everybody knows” and save the Republic?

I don’t know. And neither do you. But you should regard everything you hear from a lot of places at once as suspect.

Yes, there is Russian interference. Oh, NOT FOR TRUMP. If anything, they preferred Hillary, the successor of Mr. “more flexibility.”  But mostly, they wish to cause chaos. Russia, China, and various Arab potentates ALL wish we will either leap at each other’s throats and engage in a lengthy civil war, while they do what they want to the world.

For Russia and other oil producing countries, it is ESSENTIAL that we stop fracking, or else their entire economy implodes (as it SHOULD have years ago.)

They don’t have much time, and they’re desperate. They’re pouring large amounts of money into disinformation campaigns.

The good thing about this is that most of them don’t understand us. (That includes the democrats, thank heavens.) They are bound in their own “everybody knows” and most of their attempts at splitting us are “wait, what?”

But they’re testing stuff over at the chans and they’re getting BETTER. Or worse for us.

Anything that appears everywhere at once with no precipitating incident, no matter which side it purports to be from should be suspect.  The question should be “Why is everyone suddenly so obsessed with this, granted important, but not exactly something the government should meddle in, issue? What has happened to make it news of the day and the cause of contention everywhere?”

If nothing has happened, and this is suddenly all over (one example from the left is the whole trans madness) …. consider it’s a campaign.

Most of these are attempts to herd you. And most of the people herding want the US to vanish over a cliff.

Don’t be a sheep. Think before you leap.

And keep hoping we can avoid electric boogaloo until “what everybody knows” shifts enough that we can live together.

 

 

463 thoughts on “Everybody Knows”

  1. “The fight back hasn’t started but maybe ten years ago. Okay, longer for some of us, but the voice crying in the desert did not have a wide audience.”

    Tea Party started in 2009; I was at the first rally in Dallas. Million TeaParty March in DC was in 2010. I was there too.

    That was 20 years ago. And we had a wide audience; our so-called elites didn’t care. The only way they would have cared (and plenty of us said it then) is if we had shown up carrying rifles and used them if challenged. Same as it ever was.

          3. Oh, I remember my parents and their peers anger about the insane taxation and power grabs of the “East Coast Elites” in the Sixties and Seventies.

            I wonder (not often, but sometimes) whether it would have been better if Reagan had not won election and release some of the pressure that was building up then.

            At the very least, in my twenties I wouldn’t have been concerned about what lying on the cold ground with my sniper rifle while the rest of you stormed the cattle cars would do to my arthritis.

            1. Let’s follow that thought.
              Without Reagan, the Soviet Union would not have fallen so soon – maybe not for another decade. It’s likely Gorbachev would not have been in charge when it happened.
              Now imagine the breakup of the USSR under a leader more akin to a Khrushchev or Stalin than the implementer of Glasnost.
              We dodged a serious, possibly nuclear, war when Gorbachev decided to let the satellites go peacefully. Without Reagan I don’t think it would have ended nearly as well.

              1. The thing is that the USSR turned from leaders who had grown up in Tsarist Russia to those who grew up in the USSR, which was rather more stultifying.

            2. I ain’t storming nothing. This is my second chance to get into combat engineering doing explosive demolition and I’m not missing it this time.

              1. “No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There’s always a boom tomorrow. What? Look, somebody’s got to have some damn perspective around here. Boom, sooner or later… boom!”

                -LtCdr Ivanova, B5

                1. Dr Franklin: “You’re a pessimist, Lt Cdr”
                  LtCdr Ivanova: “I am Russian, Doctor. We understand these things.”

                  1. Before B5 she was in an SF movie called “The Hidden”, made in 1987. It apparently came and went without anyone giving it much notice, but when I came across it it was one of those unexpected surprises where I thought I was going to get a “B” movie and got something much better.

                    1. naah, it was a small budget just short of direct to video film, had a bit of a cult following wfor awhile.

              2. I hope you’ll wait on the boom ’til the ‘evacuees’ have been rescued, otherwise there’d be no point to the exercise . . .

              3. Ya think??? I’m usually good so long as I’m vertical – although a couple of years I’ve worn my heated gloves when we went out to the Christmas lights festival. (Alas, they are no good for typing, or I’d wear them all the time.)

                Main reason I’d be overwatch, anyway, is that even when I was much younger, I have always been slow. Whether advancing to the front or the rear, I’d always be behind everyone else.

            1. I don’t think the mobs will form, at least not generally. The ballot boxes are working, Trump got elected and the Deep State hasn’t been able to bring him down. The Democrats were able to take the House in the midterms, but that’s hardly surprising (Americans generally like divided government) and they were only able to do that by running against the Democrat craziness, something that’s going to be much harder for them in 2020. That’s a major reason why I don’t think that the impeachment articles will ever make it out of the House.

              If we do see mobs, they’ll be Antefa types throwing a temper tantrum in the city centers because that’s all they know how to do and their moms won’t let them borrow the car to go fight their Great Patriotic War.

              1. Actually, Jeff, I expect to see them pulling a New Black Panthers outside polling places in Philly 2008, but more widespread. For example, I can see them doing it in Houston, where the police chief is pushing gun control and sanctuary cities.

                1. Maybe, but I think if they tried that today there would be equally armed guys in MAGA hats staring them in the eye in short order.

                  1. Yep, if the MAGA guys want to be arrested by Houston PD. That’s what makes Antifa a threat: they have LEO cover in any blue jurisdiction.

                    1. At which point they’d either have to arrest the Black Panther or open the department up to a civil rights lawsuit.

                    3. I am NOT embedding the link to this WaPo drivel because if anybody knows about unfitness to be Attorney-General it would Eric, the Fast & Furious wingman, Holder:

                      William Barr is unfit to be attorney general
                      By Eric H. Holder Jr.

                    5. I’m going to have to see if I can get a friend of mine who’s in the NH House to get that same day voter registration amended. Problem is, he’s a Democrat.

                      Make it a requirement that you may not use out of state identification, and you have to show two peices of information showing residence in the state: NH driver’s license/ID card plus a property tax bill or utilities bill.

                    6. Or just a requirement that no election result will be declared as final until all those “provisional ballots” are verified. If the process takes longer than 30 days then all unverified provisional ballots for any party will be declared invalid.

                    1. My hope and to some degree expectation is that they will find another way to screw up. In particular, they have gotten away with massive, systemic vote fraud for a long time, and I think they think there are no consequences for being caught at it. They also, from their behavior, haven’t learned that Trump is an alley fighter. They still get outraged every time he hits back.

                      Now, there are several prosecutions for vote fraud going on now, but the Left is studiously ignoring them. I think Teh Narrative is that these didn’t happen. I think they are going to get really reckless in 2020, and I seriously expect Trump to be waiting for them with a large can of whop-ass.

                      Maybe I’m wrong. But if my scenario plays out, the Democrats might have trouble running against a tea-total candidate in Lynchburg Tenn., outside of their completely corrupt city strongholds.

                    2. “outside of their completely corrupt city strongholds.”

                      Which will be all they need to flip the electors for that state.

                    3. That’s why some of the suburban districts in some places have begun delaying announcement of their counts. If the Dems don’t know how many votes to fabricate it makes their task harder.

                1. And I think in 2018 the GOPe effectively threw some of the races, when the candidate was anything like a Tea Party/Freedom Caucus/too-independent type. In the Kansas governor’s race, for instance, much of the state GOPe was campaigning against GOP nominee Kris Kobach. In the Senate race vs. Sherrod Brown in Ohio there was virtually no advertising for the GOP challenger.

            2. The problem with preference cascades, chain reactions, criticality events is.. they tend to blow out the limiters. Romania, really, was mighty damned lucky it was ONLY what it was. Had they gone Full French Revolution…. NEVER go Full French Revolution.

              1. Yeah. I mean, when I was there in 2001 many of the buildings in downtown Brasov were still *riddled* with bullet holes. I knew a woman my age who had been in Timisoara when it all hit the fan, and when asked about it she shrugged and said “Yeah, that wasn’t a great Christmas. We had to crawl around on the floor because no one wanted to get hit by a stray bullet.

                Although given that the final match–or so I understood from folks there–that lit the powder keg in Romania was Ceaucescu’s construction of the “Hunger Domes” in Bucharest (ie, centralized locations where the ENTIRE population would have to go to stand in line for food, and which therefore could be cut off at his whim). I mean, there was a LOT bad happening there (I’ve found out more in later years as I researched it, but generally folks didn’t like to talk about it. And of course there were the idiots longing for the “good old days” of Communism) but that seemed to have finally made the populace sit up and go “Oh no you DON’T.”

                But given that provocation–on top of what was going on with the “orphanages” and other abuses–I’m frankly surprised they didn’t go Full French Revolution, and rather impressed they didn’t.

          2. Lots of systematic long term problems tend to work that way..
            New paint is cheaper & quicker than repairing the underlying problems.
            So, the problems get ignored and covered up, and tend to multiply. Until they can’t be ignored, and it’s too late by then.

    2. Oh, they cared. That’s why they promptly tagged the Tea Party as “racists” and had the media report only negative things about them.

      1. like the “racist Teabagger” they only showed from the back, shoulders down, arms and hands not in view, because A: he had an AR over his back and B: he was a black guy

      2. For the record, the tea party I attended had people of every color, including a bus down from one of the local reservations…. with everyone dressed in full regalia, which I thought was amazing.

      3. There’s also the Not Our Kind Dear phenomenon. Nasty populists, populizing. Can’t be supporting that!

        I remember Florence King being repelled by them, back when NRODT wasn’t trash-can liner.

        People like Mr. Klaven shaking his head about wossname – the Sense candidate Moore and saying “…well, it might be a put up job, but where there’s smoke there’s fire!” Even though, objectively , Mr. Moore’s sexual choices were miles better than Mr. Klaven’s. Just… Not Our Kind. So no support and tacit tolerance for lefty shenanigans.

    4. And that’s what makes the impeachment proceedings such an obvious farce. They actually ran focus groups to find the most egregious wording for the articles. That’s not a legal proceeding, that’s political propaganda at Ministry of Truth and KGB levels. The people who did that are no longer our countrymen; they really are the Enemy.

      1. I would cry NOT a tear is Pelosi, Schiff and Naddler got what Ceausescu had coming to him.
        And it’s not off the table, if they keep poking the bear. They have no idea of the levels of anger in this country.
        They’re tap dancing on a powder barrel.

        2. I admit I would shed a tear or two — for the damaged souls of those who’d served them their deserts.

          My preference is always that sinners repent and follow the example of Saul of Tarsus.

          1. I’d like that, too. But an opportunity to do some terminal ballistics testing of a .457 round ball in front of 30 grains of Swiss #1 powder would not be terribly unwelcome.

          2. I agree with Res.

            They need to fade away shaking their heads screaming into the dark night of irrelevancy, a obscure footnote of history, screaming “But, But, But, But, it wasn’t suppose to be meeeeeeee … No, no, that is the wrong way, why won’t you listen to me? …” with their descendants blasting them from the family tree to wipe away the stain, least it stain the next generation.

                1. Oh, a Paternal Government is an interesting idea; look how many genuinely popular SF or fantasy worlds are built on just that. Of course, in many of them you have actual Gods keeping the Elite in line.

                  (I would LOVE to see the Progressive Left explaining their shenanigans to one of their fantasy Goddesses.)

                  It doesn’t work in real life, because in real life the author isn’t keeping the scumbags from winning.

                    1. There is a significant difference between the Gods of modern fantasy writing and the Gods of the old pantheons. Very much the same kind of difference as there is between actual Socialist government and fantasy Socialist government.

                      The Left has very little grasp how much of an improvement the Judeo-Christian God is over pretty much anything else on offer.

                      Seriously: never mind The Buddha. If you meet Woton on the road, do your level best to kill him. You might as well, you’re probably screwed anyway. And if you manage to kill him, burn the body and scatter the ashes in several different bodies of water.

                    3. Unfortunately, you don’t need to limit it to fantasy writing. I have seen neopagans clueless to how much of their “religion” was extremely liberal Christianity.

                    4. And the scary part is that compared to Zeus, Wotan/Odin would actually be an improvement.

                      I have a story where one of the major societies was put together by a bunch of SCAdians, and neopaganism is one of the major faiths.
                      The Greco-Roman based pantheon is short a few deities, because of a man who came from the east…

                    5. Mr. Reagan’s claimed “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit” ed

                      It’s true. If the Authorities th a can award it don’t know what you’re up to, life is much simpler.

        3. Same. The guy I follow on Twitter who talks about what life in Romania was like under Ceausescu got banned again from Twitter.

          Saw this and I am actually rather puzzled as to why this whole farce hasn’t been shut the hell down by this.

          NO FACTS CAN BE CITED and it’s so obvious what they’re doing.

          1. Impeachment isn’t a judicial process. At this point it isn’t even a political process. It’s a subrational emotional process, a continuation of the screaming liberals did in the wake of 2016.

            1. It still surprises me that The People aren’t getting more upset. Though I guess we’ll see at the 2020 elections. I mean, they’re not even bothering to HIDE the sabotage of Trump on the tech side now, censoring conservatives and non-Left opinions, or anything going against the Woke orthodoxy. In the US.

              Rather shocking, really.

              Speaking of screaming, I kind of am also rather shocked that there’s calls for censorship of porn from well, the Right. The thing that shocks me is the arguments used are pretty much the echo of every single gun-grabber out there (FOR THE CHILDREN!) and calls for the government to handle it. I find it rather terrifying, honestly. I don’t like (live) porn (written erotica / 2d for when I feel like perusing it) but I don’t think it should be censored. In fact, calling for any kind of censorship for anything, especially on the Internet, coming from anyone not on the Left is playing into the hands of the vileprogs, who are pretty much in control of most, if not all the industries involved, and seems like a spectacular own goal that will lead to the end of any discussion of topics that are not approved by ‘the powers that be.’ I get they’re upset at the ease of access that kids have to the stuff, but that’s parenting.

              Reposting my short point about it here: My argument against it is: It’s too easy to expand what is considered ‘restricted adult content’; and from there ‘banned content’. Dilute the 1A, it’s easy to erode the rest. Remove the 2A, you lose it all.

              It would not be hard to use any censorship laws brought in for ‘adult content’ to hit discussions about firearms, etc, say, on the guise of ‘preventing’ more school shootings. Political discussion of anything that isn’t filtered through ‘approved and vetted’ educational sources/news? Children shouldn’t be exposed to that. And so on.

              Strikes me as just… so blind.

              There were suggestions of age-vetting via ID, specifically for porn sites, but apparently that was attempted back in 1995, which lead to the sites in question pretty much being credit card fraud mills (and do we really want the government to know such intimate things? Like, wow, it’d be a whole ‘nother dating/hookup site database scandal all over again.

              It’s a rather baffling ‘trust the government’ from people who usually don’t.

              1. The calls for censorship of porn are PRECISELY one of the memes that came out of nowhere, were tested on certain sites by Russian influencers, fallen for by the ultra so-con and are now being suddenly (this has been maybe a month) on all respectable left of center sites.
                And you’re absolutely right. Those of us who see where these laws lead: the laws against porn in China have been extended to cover “unrealistic” which includes religious content, are horrified at how easily people fall for this outright manipulation.
                Now if you point this out you’re called pro-porn and shut down.
                And it’s all bullshit created to stampede us. They’re not going to get rid of porn any more than the left is going to get rid of guns. They’re just going to make it harder to control and send it into the shadows.
                BUT more importantly, no one was talking about this until suddenly certain predictable and trouble making voices (and again on the chans these are almost always Russian) started screaming about it.

                1. From what I’ve gleaned from reactions (like Sargon of Akkad’s) apparently it’s spread on Twitter supposedly came from the Gab twitter account. There are the empathic arguments that try to paint girls who choose to get into porn for money as victims who would ‘otherwise be penniless’, setting aside completely that the ones who do get in do so willingly most of the time, and as some have pointed out, how is that any different from any 18 year old who gets into a college and ends up owing tons of cash in debt, or any other choice of employment. I forget exactly why I started following this person but there’s a literal escort girl who is a self-employed prostitute and is proud about it (and regularly talks about how just because she’s a sex worker, doesn’t mean she should be treated like trash and shouldn’t be put into danger/ignored because of their profession.)

                  I mean, it’s as if they paint all women as virginal saints who were all coerced into it. Some might be, but FFS, not all of them.
                  I literally have no issues with people who voluntarily go into that work, be it porn or prostitution, as long as they make that choice themselves (and if they regret it afterward, they’re consenting adults, and should have the options for help available). Like, it’s a flip around of the ‘safe space needed for college students’ argument, where instead of choosing not to go to conservative-centric college talks, they desperately need safe spaces to cushion them; in this it’s ‘we need to make sure they can’t make the awful choice of going into porn, EVEN IF THEY WANT TO!’

                  I don’t think it was Russia though, but progressive false flag seeds, because a lot of the arguments I’ve seen echo not just gun-grabber ones, but are more erudite versions of the wailing about anime bewbs and how they’re exploitative to women and denigrating to ‘real women’. (As if the fact that the women in question weren’t real wasn’t so obvious. e_e ) If it seems Russian, it’s because they’re using the same Russian propaganda distribution techniques.

                  As I pointed out there’s lots of REEE about anime bewbs, but none about the unrealistically sized anime shlongs. Or the fact that 2D/CG porn is pretty much guilt and exploitation free if the main argument against porn is ‘exploitation and the harm of the people who produce it.’ The artists and the VAs aren’t having paid sex to make the end result, but they are being paid to voice act and make the virtual characters.

                  Incidentally, Japanese seiyuu – including popular ones – do hentai voice work, either as anime or erogame characters. Was rather surprised to find out one of the long-runners of the seiyuu industry (Midorikawa Hikaru) did voice work for Kao No Nai Tsuki (a rather surreal, supernatural-haunted house plot hentai/erogame, whose character designs and art are done by one of my favorite artists, a woman who goes by the artist name of Carnelian – and yes, a lot of her work is in erotic stuff, hence the name.

                  But the stuff that’s being used to argue against porn? Is such an obvious trap that it makes Wily E Coyote’s work subtle.

                2. I’d be totally against wholesale ban. What I thought of was ISPs allowing user account level selection of what content would be accessible by the account – keeping it completely controlled by the user, allows them the choice of doing this or not, and could be a paid extra. Keeps the government out and is more tied to personal responsibility.

                  1. There has been discussion of things along these lines in the past, with porn sites voluntarily flagging themselves in a way that would allow easy identification by automated software. There’s even been talk about creating a domain explicitly for porn. The problem, though, is that not all of the porn content providers are going to go along with it. So then you either end up with a useless system that people don’t use, or you have to have an outside party auditing sites that don’t voluntarily submit to it. And since websites can appear and disappear so quickly, a human auditing it wouldn’t be practical. That means software and algorithms, which means that you’re right back where we were with the client-side censorship software that blocked both sites that had porn, and sites with information about breast cancer.

                    2. Yeah, I hear you on the issues. I saw a discussion where, because of the fellow in IT working with the medical industry, they had to manually vet traffic precisely because of breast cancer/testicular cancer/etc. to filter from legitimate porn (which was verboten per work agreements), as well as keeping an eye out for the illegal bad stuff.

                      It was a scary story, because one fellow in one of the businesses they were vetting had taken home a work-assigned laptop and connected to the work network, and apparently downloaded TONS of CP. The guy was arrested, charged, sent to jail, but the IT team felt that there was something a bit off and did a bit more investigating and found that the laptop had gotten infected with something that basically turned the laptop into a bot server/redirect for CP, and the guy was legitimately innocent of the charges and was only connecting to the work network for work purposes. They were able to get him freed but that poor bastard’s life was completely destroyed otherwise.

                      I don’t think it’d be easy; you’d probably end up with sites like Danbooru probably self-flagging the NSFW content and the SFW content (they already do that, and there’s Safebooru) because they have both (such as official art from games and anime) and it would mean both algorithms and live eyes, or as you said, client side software where the client can manually whitelist or blacklist sites.

                    3. Which is why they want to create the .xxx domain to “make that easier”. Never mind that you still have to have all the vetting to see if content “should be” in the xxx domain.

                  2. MOST net nanny programs keep kids safe. It’s a pain to the parents, because you can’t say look up anything with a picture of a naked statue. No, seriously.
                    We used it till the kids were old enough to talk to. You can’t protect them forever.
                    I think by 15 both our boys had enough “formation” and talking to us about things that if they looked at porn, like, ever, it was for a week and then they decided it was gross and moved on.
                    We had more trouble with younger son’s neo pets addiction, honestly.
                    We used to look at their logs. Marshall went through a phase of looking up Japanese school girls (to draw. At the time he did a lot of art) and then getting grossed out when he got the porn sites and coming to us to complain about it…. Which was funny.

                    1. A couple of decades ago there was an amusing incident with a politician who was giving a live demonstration talking about how great Net Nanny-type software was. And then he discovered that his own official website was blocked by the software he was demonstrating. IIRC, the reason turned out to be the words used in his posted statements against porn, and extolling the value of blocking software.

                    2. Keep in mind we still used it when the kids were really young. But this was also the raw, unfiltered internet, where a friend doing a search for Dwarf Lemon Tree got page after page of dwarf porn.
                      Now the search engines are better.

                    3. *bursts out laughing* Poor Vincent. He’s a big Warcraft lore fan, and while playing the classic games (I think he was on WC3 then) he decided to look up art of Jaina Proudmoore. This was a couple of years ago, so he was far LESS aware than he is now. Rhys happened to poke his head into Vincent’s room JUST as the results came up, and despite safe filters, some fanart porn came up. Rhys described that at first, Vincent looked puzzled and confused, leaned in to squint at the ‘odd’ pictures, then recoiling in horror when he realized what he was looking at. Then he saw his Dad out of his peripheral vision and panicked.

                      He didn’t get into trouble because he was not deliberately looking for smut, and us grownups both laughed with affectionate amusement and soothed him.

                      Right now, he thinks it’s pretty gross/weird / silly to fixate on, but he is aware of it, and knows he can talk to us / rant / seek advice / ask questions. And yeah, we have a bigger problem with game addiction than porn interest. I’m trying to temper that as best as I can, because part of the ‘addiction’ is less addiction to the game itself than him finding kids who are like himself (he doesn’t completely fit in with kids at school); and since we definitely can relate both of us parents, on that score, we do allow him the time to play, but he has to finish work first.

                      But yeah, you can’t protect the kids forever – and in fact, you shouldn’t. At some point you have to start weaning them gently toward adulthood and personal responsibility and making their own choices. Even now it’s considered appropriate to teach basic stranger danger to toddlers; but somehow we’re supposed to be flailingly incompetent in raising our kids more than that that we need BIG GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP to help?

                      It’s such an obvious lefty spiel.

                      Right now, it sounds like (from Britain) there is a huge rejection of increased government interference in everyday aspects of life, etc. That’s heartening and indirectly increases my conviction that the sudden porn ban push is a false flag op. This isn’t to say there aren’t ongoing and valid discussions about how to decrease our kids’ access to such on a greater scale than just parental level, but when one really thinks about it, there is a point where it boils down to personal responsibility and choices, not just as parents, but also as adults. To push for anything else otherwise is just communism and totalitarianism wearing a different mask.

                3. Not completely out of nowhere– they showed up after several different organizations were having success in getting people to recognize that using pr0n was bad, hurt their relationships, not everyone uses it, and helping them quit the habit. Ditto with folks having success pointing out those “sex education programs” that were really obvious grooming programs.

                  “Unite the Right,” anybody?

                  1. This won’t. And giving government that power will give them the chance to ban EVERYTHING they don’t like.
                    Again, Fox, this meme was being tested a month ago at the chans. i heard of it. I have contacts.

                  2. God gave us free will to decide what we wanted to see, and what we didn’t want to see. So why would you be foolish enough to surrender that right to the government to allow them to censor everything? Pure laziness? After all, as pointed out, there are commercial products like Net Nanny that allow you to choose what you want censored. Heck, there are internet games out there that will filter the in-game chat for you. I prefer to see the raw feed, no matter how gross or over the top. If it’s from an individual all the time, I get to decide to put them on /ignore, not some faceless progressive drone.

                    1. Will y’all please pay attention to what I’m writing instead of assuming stupid arguments on my behalf?

                      Please?

                      These jackasses didn’t come out of nowhere– they hitched on to the voluntary and persuasive movements that were already working.

                      If it works, they get a new hammer; if it doesn’t, they discredit that effective movement.

                      It’s a Xanatos Gambit.

                  3. It’s a constant problem, and there are at least two immediate reasons for it. Some want power, recognize a cause that others are willing to fight for (making it worthwhile to get power over those interested in the cause) and try to get that power through a form of virtue signalling.

                    Others are more interested in co-opting the movement and then twisting its purpose to their own ends. But both types of people tend to adopt the same extreme virtue signalling tactics at the start. I suspect that part of the reason for doing so is a desire to impress the more devoted (and fanatical). But part of it might also be because they’re not really true believers themselves, and so have trouble identifying just how extreme they should go.

                    1. There’s also the folks who find it really useful to have a bunch of folks who know, in their guts, that they’ve done something wrong– but have no way to escape.
                      No route for redemption.
                      They can’t even talk about how they feel, when they’re being constantly urged to talk about their “feelings.”

                  4. Excellent point Foxfier. That fits the pattern to a tee.

                    It would be funny to make the tech giants enforce porn -free safety unless they were willing to loosen up on right wing -idea free safety. Haven’t noticed any aerodynamic pigs lately, so not laying in popcorn supplies.

                    As for pork and prostitutes, bring back shame.

                4. fallen for by the ultra so-con

                  Is there anything that group doesn’t fall for?

                  It’s actually worse than that, because the SJW archetype didn’t originate with blue hair and nose piercings fully formed from the head of Zeus. It is just a slight variant on the very old Church Lady problem.

                5. I believed the old Free Speech movement idea that we had to protect profane and lewd speech because it would be a nose under the tent to ban political speech. But now we still have bans on political speech (well, spending money to publish political speech that might actually effect someone’s election and political speech that important people consider hateful anyways which is very close) but profane and lewd speech are protected. I am unconvinced that protecting them in anyway has protected political speech or that banning them will somehow open up an avenue for banning political speech that the politically powerful would hesitate to use if we hadn’t.

                  Not that I’m for banning profane or lewd speech (except for obvious cases that involve minors or frightening the horses). But I think history has proven that protecting it will help protect political speech is a canard. Nice theory, but I don’t see that history supports it at all.

                  1. No. Please, no.
                    Look, it’s not a canard.
                    Yes, there’s foul stuff there.
                    But what you’re handing the left is the right to ban anything they dislike. They already CALL IT PORN.
                    Gun porn. Escapism porn, etc.
                    I don’t have a dog in this race. I don’t write it, and I don’t read it. i don’t even write romance-with-sex. One of the consistent complaints my readers have is that I sometimes forget to have the characters kiss on stage.
                    BUT THIS is the true nose under the tent. You will be silenced if you push this.
                    Look, I grew up under national socialism. The public sphere was VERY safe for kids. NO porn. Nothing resembling porn.
                    The government also used that to control everything else, and ban selectively.
                    Give the president space to work on social media issues. He will, if he’s re-elected. He’s already indicated that.
                    Freedom is always better than the alternative.
                    Yes, some people will be lost. But probably not all you think.
                    And again, this push was test-marketed on chans by known Russian agents.

                    1. I’m not advocating for banning lewd or profane speech (except, as I mentioned the obvious exceptions for minors). But I no longer believe that we’d be handing the left a right to ban anything for the simple reason that I think they would not hesitate to ban it regardless of the precedent. I think it comes down to simple power at this point. If they can’t muster the political or cultural power to ban it they won’t. If they have the power to ban it they will, and whether porn or profanity has been banned before won’t matter. They’d be just as happy to ban “gun porn” regardless of whether sexual porn was legal or not.

                      Just like they impeachment of Trump has NOTHING to do with legalities or legal precedent or what the president has power to do or fair play or even rationality… It only comes down to “do we have the votes?”

                      If they had the votes they’d shut us up tomorrow (well, they’d make us illegal, at least), and if they didn’t have one excuse they’ll make up another. The legal status of porn would have as much to do with their decision as the details of Trump’s constitutional powers to conduct foreign policy do with their impeachment vote.

                      I think protecting lewd and profane speech will do nothing towards protecting political speech.

                    3. Mr. Taylor and Mrs. Hoyt are both correct.

                      We won the gummint not banning porn and not also banning political speech.

                      We LOST the game where corporations ban pork (sometimes) and also ban political speech (ours). Figuring out how to turn that around is the issue.

                      I am no longer a corporate free-speech absolutist. Let them bake cakes. If your private company wants to censor porn, have at it.

                6. The reason this type of ban is so effective at changing conversations is that everybody, I mean everybody, has a line there, something they cannot defend. Fetish-clad models stomping hamsters, sexualizing children, hentai, wrestling in lemon-pudding — there is nobody so broad-minded, so committed to first principles that there is nothing anywhere which causes them to shudder and quote Sam Rockwell’s Galaxy Quest line, “That’s not right.”

                  The trick is remembering that the cure is invariably worse, long-term, than the disease. You’ve a choice between two forms of moral corruption, so choose wisely.

                  Sometimes, saying “Get thee behind me, Satan!” is merely an invitation to be taken from behind.

                  1. I had a very good conversation lately involving hentai. I’ve made it repeatedly clear that I’m fine with 2D/illustrated/CG/VR/written porn on the grounds that it’s not real (and explained that if we were to go down that path and censor that for (reasons), literature examples of sex, both horrible and not, will easily follow.) The line for me is ‘it is fiction and not real, no people were harmed or exploited in the making of this.’

                    As disgusting as Hogg is, it’s fictional; to push for a ban on it would likely eventually result in a ban of the stuff I like that would, on the surface, count – such as Kaoru Mori’s Young Brides Stories where the first couple you run into is a 12 year old boy who ends up via arranged marrage with a twenty year old wife. He is considered a legal adult by his people and culture, but not so by our (the reader’s) standards. Part of the couple’s growth and challenges is the fact that as she falls for her groom and sees him as a man (versus her initial attitude of treating him a bit like a younger sibling) is her (rather implied) desire to be sexually intimate (but is happy to wait because she is happy not to be married to a withered old man like she expected to be, and is glad they’ll have a long marriage together.) It’s implied he is aware her desire and of his physical immaturity in this regard and wants to increase his ‘manliness’ in other ways to compensate for it until he does (as well as the fact that he is less capable as a fighter than his plains-raised bride.) That doesn’t even cover the other couples you are introduced to (such as the precocious twins who WANT to be married off at 14 (?) and eventually are.

                    That’s just one example off the top of my head. The screech would come (and there has been some) about the latter having examples of ‘underage’ kids getting married, and being ‘no different’ than the child sex slave in Hogg. There are similar examples of such arguments already being made – desperate 18 year old girl – no, no boys thought of here! – being ‘forced’ to sign a contract to do porn ‘in order to survive/earn money’; as if there are legally no options for this hypothetical 18 year old girl to find any other employment. and citing that as (just one of the) reasons to BAN PORN EVERYWHERE. (I should note that the argument was quickly deep sixed by people who pointed out the flaws in that reasoning, as well as essentially arguing that all employment being ‘exploitative and anyone signing contracts is then painted as a victim who was forced, because otherwise there’s financial hardship’ and ‘At what point is personal choice and responsibility going to come in?’ and ‘what if the girl chooses that route because she thinks it’s easy/ wants to have loads of sex and decides she may as well get paid for it?’

                    So yeah.

                    For RL fetishes, it boils down to safety, consent, and age. Stomping hamsters and CP would be well outside the ‘safety’ and ‘consent’ range, as neither the hamster or child can consent to the acts; versus BDSM where you might have sexual acts which are pain/harm, but are consented to mutually by adults and there are supposed to be safeties in place (and if those are removed by mutual consent, then you choose those risks as well. I’m not going to go into the nitty gritty of this as I’m not ‘in the scene’ as it were and only know what I’ve read/been told.)

                    You can’t protect children forever. They eventually grow up, and then have to take their damn chances and make their own choices, good and bad, like the rest of us.

                    And lastly, as I recall, the First Amendment isn’t just for speech we like. It’s there also for speech we explicitly do not like. So if I have to point out fictional or illustrated lolis and shotas aren’t real people, and it’s stupid to behave as if they were, then that’s what it takes.

                    1. I concede that my biggest complaint about the [TOPIC] is that it is deadly dull. There is admittedly a certain “traffic accident in progress” element to it but that is hardly erotic or even interesting.

                      It isn’t as if they offer much in the way of character growth or plot, either, and the dialogue is not (based on my limited experience) witty, sparkling, clever, insightful, or coherent.

                    2. Ha, I hear you on the ‘traffic accident in progress’ – “I wonder how bad this will be” mode happens. There were a few I watched for plot (weird, I know, but those were the interesting ones) and anything by Carnelian is pretty, but I lost those few some years ago to a suddenly failed hdd. Oh well. I haven’t actually played any erogames, but just to contradict you on the ‘doesn’t offer much in the way of character growth or plot’; Fate/Stay (the first one) was originally an eroge.

                      https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BleachedUnderpants

                      My preferred mode of *sparks naughty inspiration towards hubby* erotica is written, but it’s kind of hard to find good stuff.

                7. I’m just happy that the American Left has finally woken up to the threat posed by the Russians.

                  Wish they’d figured that one out before selling a controlling interest in North-American uranium-mining rights. I sometimes think certain people’s spying Russian puppets behind every bush is a distraction from those who’ve really colluded with Putin.

              2. These morons don’t seem to get that not only do their proposals make it easy to justify gun-grabbing, the whole argument can be transferred seamlessly to justify wholesale censorship of “hate speech” which is also “harmful to children”.

                Some people, such as David French, Pharisee extraordinaire, see that as a bonus because it can be used against Trump supporters; they’re in for one helluva shock when the muzzle is slapped on them.

                1. A few of the more ‘rational’ or ‘common sense’ sounding arguments are fairly emotional, touched with reason, as opposed to ‘reason tempered with compassion’. It’s weird because once I started looking at it (my not being online means I actually don’t often catch things blowing up) it was so ridiculously obvious that I am rather shocked at how what I consider normally reasonable folks falling for it.

                  It’s also very slippery slope censorship, much in the same way that gay marriage rights struck me as being a gateway to the ‘cannot criticize, must bow to demands, straights cannot refuse / to trans hyperactivism and eventual pro-pedo arguments -because ‘love is love’ was such an easily twistable argument, really – but back then if anyone pointed this out, BAM you were a bigot.
                  Nope, those of us who pointed this stuff out were noting that the arguments for pro-gay marriage/acceptance were just not as ‘simple’ as they were being presented as, and could be abused. I personally really did not have issues with homosexuality between consenting adults, or their getting a civil ceremony marriage (because afaik, most religions aren’t friendly to the concept of gay marriage or homosexuals.) Rational middle ground, not ‘overwhelm everything.’

                  Now we have ‘Desmond is Amazing’ and his rather terrifying knowledge of the gay bar /trans scene drug use, and his being pretty much the new creeping campaign of acceptance for child sex. *shudder* And the ‘drag queen story time’ thing. And the introduction of transgenderism to five year olds.

                  That is where we are now because being screamed at, and destroyed as bigots kept us quiet. And the really horrible thing is, I think it will keep on going until the only way out of it is a third world war of some kind, or multiple civil wars that rip apart what we know as Western Civilization. Again.

                  1. Most people these days don’t have an issue with others practicing homosexuality. California voters passed a law allowing “civil unions” for same sex couples that provided those couples with the same rights and privileges as married couples. And then those same voters passed Proposition 8, which (re)banned same-sex marriages in California.

                    Ironically, the reason why Prop 8 had to be on the ballot in the first place was because the top court in California used the civil union law as an excuse to invalidate the pre-existing law against ssm.

                    2. I had the same reaction. But:

                      * Hubby is from CA, so, yea, CA …

                      * Software I worked on had Utility Module. We used live data to check changes. I had to change the Billing Form for one of the counties that billed for water & power for multiple failed districts. Change format, which changed how charges were summarized & portrayed, for that county … Testing, when I saw the totals … I thought I had really, really screwed up. Nope. Triple ours & ours aren’t inexpensive. This was 5 years ago. Think it has gotten better?

                      * Recently we (well hubby is, I get it second hand), a golf buddy is working out of San Diego County, as a power line supervisor. They’ve got him standing around supervising the crew, plus someone from: Archeology & Cultural, Geology (in case survey missed something), OSHA, and one or two others (I forget). Plus, crews do not work in the rain (guy came from Lane County, Oregon). Crews are salary, not exempt (OT entitled). When he arrived, he had to take 6 weeks of “supervisor” classes to cover appropriate conduct, etc. His pay? $275k salary. $5k Housing allowance. Six weeks vacation + additional sick leave as needed (he’s about 6’3″, weighs a good 375# or more, not muscle, & 58 (no *age bias here). Plus he gets days off to be flown, on companies dime, anywhere. They flew him down, & paid for hotels, for 3 rounds of interviews, going through their procedures. Keeping legal residence, including drivers license, & vehicle registration, in Oregon. Don’t know how that affects CA state taxes, suspect has to pay. Oregon State taxes give you credit for taxes paid to other states, so not much, if any double taxation.

                      I’ll repeat. Yes, CA …

                      *Age bias, nope, EWEB pulled that locally. Or rather high salary bias.

                    3. There’s just so much strange coming out of CA lately, it’s getting a bit hard to track them sometimes. Like their whole ‘homelessness is not illegal’ so they have an epidemic of it (causing other epidemics and flesh eating bacteria cases!) and… the (proposal?) for what are pretty much internment camps for the homeless (which has me laughing in schadenfreude, since this comes from the people who were SOOOO SURE THAT TRUMP WOULD HAVE PEOPLE IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS!!!11.

                    4. “pretty much internment camps for the homeless” with rules no less.

                      Eugene too. Although Eugene homeless are not required to use the camps. Most don’t. They don’t allow animals, drugs, or alcohol. A LOT of homeless have animals.

                    5. “Rules are good if WE are the ones who implement them!”

                      Yeah, here too. I understand that some of them are genuine companions, but having seen some of the ones with pets here, my cynical mind wonders if they’re not just a variation of the ‘have a baby in arms/crippled child to garner more sympathy’ hooks (since the baby or crippled child hook isn’t likely to be allowed now in the West…)

                    6. Yes, agree.

                      Being poor, homeless, with a child, is not considered child abuse. Being poor, homeless, psychotic, with a child, OTOH, at minimum is neglect, whether they are competent enough to commit neglect. An animal, as long as it looks healthy, and they generally do, won’t be removed from their care, but won’t be allowed in any shelter, or most camps.

                    7. “the people who were SOOOO SURE THAT TRUMP WOULD HAVE PEOPLE IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS!!!11.”

                      FIRST RULE OF PROGRESSIVISM: It’s different when we do it!

                    9. Part (and I strongly emphasize that word “part”) of the problem with the homeless in Southern California (I don’t know about the Bay Area) is judges who ban pretty much any and all attempts to impose any sort of controls on the homeless. That’s nowhere near the only reason. But it definitely doesn’t help.

                  2. A critical question to be addressed in all policy is “What controls are in place to limit their reach?”

                    Because any power granted to government is like wildfire, an opportunistic danger to the unprepared. Reliance upon the reasonableness of the affected is akin to relying for your firebreak on there being no droughts.

                    1. relying for your firebreak on there being no droughts

                      *quietly notes that the Greenies have gone somewhat quiet regarding fires right now, though some idiots are wailing about the NZ volcanic eruption’s ‘effects’ on emissions and how humanity MUST reduce their output even FURTHER to ‘compensate.’)

                      I taught my son about perpetually erupting/active volcanoes in response to this new idiocy.

                2. Right?
                  But Steve, I too share your fear they’ll steal the election with fraud, but be not TOO afraid.
                  Don’t forget they had their inner polls last election too, and they were more accurate than what they fed people.
                  They knew that things looked bleak. BUT their hubris failed to believe it.
                  Their hubris fights on our side. We’re seeing it in action with the impeachment too. This is not the Teflon president. This is the boomerang president. Whatever they throw at him hits them in the face.

                1. Which is a separate issue, better addressed via school choice so parents can afford to remove kids from that environment.

                  1. They already kboshed that by trying to force all schools to offer the exact same sex ed– which is why there started to be success in rolling it back.

                    And then all of a sudden these heavy handed proposals show up EVERYWHERE.

                2. Sure. But that has nothing to do with the government stepping in to regulate it.
                  It has to do with “People should mind what their kids are being taught in the indoctrination centers.”
                  Look, I’ll be honest, we sent our kids to public school. I do have some regrets, except private schools in our area were even more uber woke, and we couldn’t afford them.
                  And I COULDN’T with Dan working 18 hour days on the regular, have two “profoundly gifted” children on my hands. Plus they wanted advanced math and physics, and I couldn’t. (Though I could have hired tutors. I’m an idiot because that never occurred to me.)
                  BUT I did arrange my life so that I taught them after school. Both fostering their interests (which one year cost us 11k. That was the year of online courses in Latin for one and Greek for the other and I should have just mortaged the house to Great Courses) BUT also a lot of having them help me do things like house renovation while I talked to them.
                  That’s when you impart your values. In those long, rambling conversations. A lot of the topics on this blog are things I covered with my teen sons. Mercy versus harshness and mercy that kills because it encourages bad things, for instance, was a perennial.
                  And there was a lot of discussion about the fact that addictive personality runs in the family. You can’t stop it, but you can channel it to good things, like learning, not bad things like porn. And how you can get addicted to the stupidest things. (I lost a year to fanfic. Not even joking. And had to treat it like an addiction to escape.)
                  So. That is what it is. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR KIDS. (General you, not individual.) I know what you’re paying for that.
                  You can’t hand over your kids to strangers/the government and pursue your big beautiful career, or whatever, and expect the government to do what you’d do. They won’t.

                3. I understand that, but calling out inappropriate school teaching isn’t the same as calling for wholesale ban.

                  The rather interesting thing I did notice was that my son says that most of his peers are quite able to access porn (there are those who gleefully show it off like the dumbasses they are); but their sex education classes were at best borderline uninformative. I doubt any of them are taught that contraception has a failure rate, and apparently they only barely touched on STDs, and I think because of the high population of Muslim students, homosexuality wasn’t even touched on (though a subject of discussion amongst the kids by themselves.) From conversations, he is aware of what fetishes are (like foot fetishes) but still dissolved into giggles when I told him there are apparently women out there who get paid good money to film themselves rubbing balloons on their bodies. (BUT WHY?!?!?!)

                  Kiddo had the biological basics from when I was carrying the boys, but because he’s of the age where some people end up pregnant because of sheer ignorance and one-sided ‘sex is fun’ messages, I told him flat out that if you engage in sex, you risk either siring a kid, or getting a disease as much as you get fun, which I also didn’t deny sex can be, especially so, if it’s with someone you love. So, I’m kind of hoping that he’ll be careful as a teenager, and still want to become a father later on (even now he’s seeing how mental some girls can be) especially since he loves his little sister and has loads of fun playing with her, getting hugs, and seeing the new things she can do.

                  1. Can’t copy to respond in a quote– first paragraph response only–
                    correct, it’s not.

                    Which is why they’re so freaking desperate to conflate the existing, organic, starting-to-get-successful effort with this out of the blue suddenly all over the place stuff.

                    1. Yep. I didn’t realize that. The astroturf is directed.
                      BTW though I have an addicted personality, the only times I got seriously addicted to anything (and it’s usually stupid crap like fanfic) there were things I was running away from in my life.
                      The last serious time was during son’s hell in Middle School. I couldn’t help him, felt powerless and didn’t know what to do. Phantom might be right though, as extreme as that was, it sure taught him to fall and get up again.
                      The social media thing has become a problem because I had actual physical issues I felt powerless against. I’m finally getting on top of it now I am better.
                      What I mean is, these addictions, to porn or whatever, need to be dealt with one on one.
                      The heart wrenching “I was married to a porn addict” articles, all of a sudden everywhere are heart wrenching. They’re also stupid. There’s a problem there, an individual problem. And if you don’t fix that and ban porn, a) they’ll find their way to banned porn. Because they will. b) if not, they’ll get addicted to something else. And don’t say it couldn’t be worse, because it could.
                      ARGH. the astroturf drives me nuts.
                      These people are electric sheep who graze on astroturf.

                    2. Oddly enough, had almost this exact same conversation over at Insty in the last few days– the attempt to change “alcoholic” to “alcohol abuse disorder” or some such junk.

                      Dude pointed out that a serious portion of “alcoholics” aren’t, almost a direct rephrasing of what you point out about trying to hide from something.

                      ….which, combined with what I mentioned yesterday about blocking off routes to actually FIX freaking problems, is getting me worried.

                      Fits really, really well with your observation about being stampeded.

                    3. Oddly, there’s a popular tumblr post about how they learned that if you put rats in “rat paradise” — conditions with opportunities to socialize, explore, etc., basically do anything but sit alone in a cage with food and water, and give them a choice between water with and without an addictive drug (I think an opiate), they tend to choose the water without. Even if you have first gotten them addicted.

                      I’m always sort of nervous around tumblr about what conclusions the posters are intending to draw — even the people I know who are sensible part of the time seem likely to run toward politics with high government control and limited personal responsibility, even when they don’t think of it that way — but it’s still really interesting.

                      ….

                      Actually I’m pretty sure the experiment’s been cited around here before, and I should probably look it up properly except I should also really get back to work.

              4. > It still surprises me that The People aren’t getting more upset.
                —
                We’re past the “upset” part.

                In our various ways, we’re working on “be prepared.”

                1. Insty has been carrying links to articles. Sounds like a lot of Dem congresscritters are getting screamed at by people fed up with TDS in Washington.

                  I’m now not sure if the House will actually pass impeachment articles. The Dem leadership has gone out of its way to remove even the slightest appearance of due process or fairness.

                  Is is going to be ballot, jury, or bullet?

        4. Poking the bear: my pastor (United Methodist Church) prayed for the prevention of civil war on Sunday.

          That’s where we’re at.

          1. Our church has started praying to St Michael. Though that might be the internal corruption they’re calling attention to. I mean, he’s stopped mentioning pope Che. Sometimes they forget to pray for him, in both the churches we attend. “Forget”.

            1. Our parish includes B16, and still has his picture up.

              They’ve also got laminated sheets with the Divine Mercy Chaplet and St. Michael’s, plus a few other prayers they do before every single mass.

              No wonder we’re not the only ones with more than two kids.

              1. And last elections we did a cycle of rosaries for America.
                BTW they moved the priest who made us stop attending the other church here. AND he was one of the “fifty chosen as emissaries” by pope Che.
                We’re quietly avoiding the church and going to the Cathedral. And we’re not alone. I’m recognizing faces. Also when we HAVE to go local, through lack of time, the big beautiful church that was just built and pouring at the seams 3 years ago is now half empty.

            2. My church’s general authorities have also started praying for hearts to be softened and the divisiveness to be eased (they try really hard to avoid making overtly political statements, and succeed about 90% of the time–which of course pisses plenty of people off, just as people get pissed off if they DO say something on a political hot-button issue).

              But yeah. I’m concerned about the election season. Especially since regulations and sky-high costs have made it IMPOSSIBLE for my mother to stock up on her insulin. (If anyone deserves to spend some time roasting in hell, it’s the a-holes who decided to jack the cost of insulin up by several THOUSAND percent during the Obama years–the attitude of “powers-that-be” towards diabetics is “it’s your own fault, you deserve to suffer/die” seems to be a major contributor to that as well.)

              On the other hand, Wyoming is a very red state, except for Laramie and Jackson Hole.

              1. My mission president was from Afton.

                Our church has also pulled out of the Boy Scouts of America, and is creating new programs to take up the slack.

                The general authorities recently took a public stand against the “Equality Act” (I think that was the name of it) in the House. That stand didn’t get much attention, of course. I can’t imagine why. /sarcoff

                1. Yeah, they’ll speak up when it’s something really egregious (and do so knowing that it will STILL piss off any number of members–but they’re not in the business of keeping us all happy, either).

                  I actually didn’t know about that–but family crises and health issues also mean I haven’t made it to church much in the last year, and so if there was a letter I missed it.

                  I’ve had to explain to one of my former visiting teachers, more than once, that NO the Church will NEVER come out in support of the Republicans. They won’t come out in support of the Democrats either. Officially, they Do Not Get Involved and let people vote how they like and only require that a.) no one bring politics to the pulpit and b.) please do not get into shouting matches/fist fights over politics at church. She is very offended that the prophet doesn’t order us all to vote for . She did not like it when I pointed out to her that sort of violates the whole “free will” thing. And also that God doesn’t belong to either of those parties and isn’t going endorse them either.

                  (I’d prefer to be apolitical, but since you gotta vote for SOME of those weasels, it’s best to find out which ones aren’t at least openly corrupt and/or insane…)

                  1. Check the Church website periodically. That’s where I found out about the official position against the Equality Act.

                2. Mind you, I think you guys are crazy heretics. (To be fair, given my upbringing and divided religious instruction, I’m one too. And mom is an uber-heretic, which is funny. Only woman ever to threaten to walk out of Christianity if her Torah study group’s blessing wasn’t used in her grandson’s Catholic wedding.) but I think at this point we’re — all of us who believe and many who don’t but who believe in the ethos of individual value and individual responsibility and liberty are all fighting on the side of light.
                  And the dark, it does encroach from all sides.

                  1. And you guys are well-meaning individuals who have been led astray by the gradual corruption of elements of the doctrine over the millenia.

                    😉

                    On a more serious note, we’re all in this together. We all want more or less the same thing, and our differences are minor in comparison. To modify a phrase (from Franklin, I think), we either stand together, or hang seperately.

                  2. Right??? We are ALL crazy heretics in our own way.

                    Actually, one of my favorite ways of passing the time with friends of other religions is comparing notes on the “weird stuff my religion does” and “weird stuff other people think my religion does.”

                    Generally, so long as the person isn’t a humorless scold, we can all find something weird and hilarious in our various religious beliefs (or views thereof) to bond over.

                    (My favorite has always been, when I served my mission in Romania, the government had, for reasons known only to their strange little heads, translated “Amish” to “Mormon” when they aired the movie Witness on national tv there. Spent the rest of my time there calmly explaining that no, in fact we DO use technology–we like it very much–and that the folks they’re thinking of were actually Amish.)

                  3. I figured out some time ago that there’s only one opinion matters on who is a true believer, and He hasn’t invited my comments on anyone but myself.

                    I rather suspect that He would not appreciate my chiming in about how other people are expressing their love of Him instead of attending to my own relationship to Him.

                    Besides, being wallaby I know I am His favourite.

              2. Walmart pharmacies have an over the counter, store brand insulin available in most states of the U.S.
                It’s the older style of Regular and N.P.H., but they are only $25 a bottle. Most medical professionals I’ve spoken too don’t even know about it.
                You need to know how to use the older types. They aren’t as flexible in usage, requiring more structured meal/injection times. But they can supplement an existing insulin supply of the more modern analogues.

                1. Hmmmm…I did not know about this. I’ll mention it to Mom, at least as an emergency supply for her and grandma.

                  Mom uses Humulin and Lantus, grandma uses just Lantus–so I’ll have to see if the generic ones are close enough so as not to be a danger. (Actually, grandma would probably do fine without it at all, it’s Mom I’d worry about.)

            3. No reason why it can’t be both.

              Also, they should not forget. The worse he is, the more prayer is prudent.

  2. IMO “Everybody Knows” is extremely close to “They Say”.

    IE: Both should be looked at closely to see what the Truth actually is.

    1. “fire won’t melt steel”

      And how is steel made?

      And even if that were true, anyone who even SAW a blacksmith working would realize you don’t need to MELT metal to weaken it.

      Even Ox… oh feh… some humans is just stupid.

      2. There’s a video by a blacksmith that shows what happens to steel when it gets as hot as it likely did in the WTC towers. No, it didn’t melt, but “like a noodle” was the blacksmith’s comment on it’s strength. Not something you want to happen to a skyscraper’s structural supports.

  3. “Everybody knows” the Earth is flat, everybody knows fire won’t melt steel, everybody knows the body’s illnesses are caused by imbalanced humours.

    Everybody don’t know crap.

    1. “Everybody knows” Trump cheated in 2016. “Everybody knows” this to the point that Schiff can say it on record and nobody calls him out on it.

      “The argument — ‘Why don’t you just wait?’ — amounts to this: ‘Why don’t you just let him cheat in more election? Why not let him cheat just one more time? Why not let him have foreign help just one more time?’”

      That quote implies that Trump cheated before– how else could he beat Clinton, ne?– and will again. Even though all the investigations so far have turned up nothing in that regard. Any sane and balanced reporter would have pounced on that right away.

      1. The ability of people to use YouTube to post content that disputes the leftist/Democratic Party narrative is why Google announced this new policy, per Breitbart:

        https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/12/11/youtube-to-demonetize-channels-even-if-videos-dont-cross-policy-line/

        Google is doing this with the express intent of silencing non-leftists and helping Democrats in the 2020 elections They are using their monopoly power to conduct a war against non-leftists

        Just think of all the rap/music videos that fall into their new hate speech definition which will certainly not be banned by Google, even when they are express “dis” videos directed at other people.

          1. Yes, youtube has gone bad, and honestly we need — G-d forgive me — government intervention. Because if they are selecting, they’re a publisher (just like FB, etc) and LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE for all content, including oh, Palestinian murder bullshit.

              1. Government is already involved, shielding Big Tech from liability under various laws, so long as they are not editing/curating content. But they are curating (and censoring) content, so that shelter should no longer be provided. Alas, Big Tech is trying to argue it both ways, and their bought tools in Congress and the courts go along with it.

                1. Exactly.

                  They’re taking advantage of the existing laws, in a way that the laws were made to prevent– they’re going to get burnt.

            2. There is a (much smaller) alternative in Bitchute. Other alternatives are starting to show up in various forms of social media and deplorable news, despite the best worst efforts of Those Better Than Us.

        2. Sounds like a good subject for anti-trust and an FEC complaint about in-kind donations. Bloomberg is getting one of those after announcing that they would only investigate Trump.

        3. Bill Whittle recently had an exploration of how Google compiles user data in order to manipulate people, but (alas) I cannot now determine which it was.

        4. Twitter seems to be in the process of setting up algorithms to promote a “healthy conversation”, and pay no attention to the fact that it will censor anything not approved by the Trust and Safety Council*.

          (*) Paging George Orwell! George Orwell to the two-way television, please!

        5. If I had all the time in the world I could crank through leftist vids checking for Whiteness critiques (pattern of negative vids in protected class : Race) or cis-gendered or hetero-normativity
          (protected class sexual expression). Just to be going on with. And archive and screenshot and make YT pattern+of-harassment claims

          Oh the lulz.

          Oh the WordPress belongs in a true fire if this comes up twice.

      2. Schiff being on record lying and not being called on it is lng-term Standard Operating Procedure. That is how they create the Fictional State, aka, Teh Narrative.

        Similarly, it is High Crimes & Misdemeanor when a Republican administration investigates Democrat corruption but Important Government Function when Democrats investigate Republican corruption. A Republican abusing political office for partisan advantage is treading on Democrat toes as they’ve long ago claimed exclusive right to employ such tactics. (e.g., Nancy Pelosi’s House delaying approval of USMCA until it is politically useful to announce passage of an “infinitely improved” pact.)

        We’re playing against a stacked deck, mon ami, and there’s no sense quibbling over minor details. Look at the forest, not the trees.

        1. We’re playing against a stacked deck, mon ami, and there’s no sense quibbling over minor details. Look at the forest, not the trees.

          Well yes, but I find it interesting that Schiff has essentially admitted, with that comment, that they are impeaching Trump for winning the election. Nothing more, nothing less. They’re dressing it up fancy, but it’s just because he beat Clinton. And they are admitting it.

        2. No no…
          Republicans try to dig up dirt on their opponents. That’s horrible.
          Democrats investigate credible evidence of criminal activity. That’s a patriotic duty.

    2. *puts up 5 points*
      dude, a meta-zing? Nice.

      (For those going ‘whu?’– the whole “Columbus was believed to be going off the edge of the earth” thing is false, they not only knew it was round but were pretty accurate on how big it is, and believed he’d die before he hit India which would’ve been true but there’s land between ’em, thus it’s meta.)

      1. They were arguing over the diameter. Samuel Eliot Morison’s “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” goes into Columbus’ reasoning.

        It should be noted that when they put the Santa Maria aground, Columbus put the crew ashore, told them, “Get a colony going, I’ll go get help,” and sailed off in the Nina. HE CAME BACK! With the Nina…and 28 other ships full of reinforcements. The greatest mariner of his time.

    3. “Fire won’t melt steel”

      There’s a pistol in my safe made in the 1860s with a barrel marked “Acier Fondu” (Cast Steel) that says otherwise. 🙂

          1. And you’d have to use Rosie O’Donnell’s head as a forging hammer to get it through her skull……

  4. ALL wish we will either leap at each other’s throats and engage in a lengthy civil war

    Well, that’s nice and all, but the guy over there has a throat that really needs cutting. So if you’ll excuse me…

    BANZAI!

    1. Oh, dear Lord. DO YOU THINK I DON’T FEEL THAT FIVE TIMES A DAY?
      do you know why I stopped writing at a cafe?
      Because my voice goes high and warbly and I start correcting college students’ bullshit assumptions in their conversations.
      And what they don’t know is that when I sound like that I’m exerting ALL my will power not to go berserk and fan them with the nearest table.

      2. No table. Sword or axe. Vikings use either. Allow me to recommend the products of Arms & Armor, they make some excellent weapons.

  6. “They also know we all shoot each other on the street over a cross look.”

    I was in Europe this past summer and a London cab driver asked me if Americans at restaurants put their guns on the table while they ate the way that Europeans will pull out the cell phone and set it on the table. This was a guy who was very pro-Brexit, pro-Boris Johnson, and clearly ‘right-wing’, and yet he still thought that Americans are so gun-crazy we shoot each other like in Hollywood westerns. Boggled my mind at the time, although I hope I corrected his misconceptions on some level.

    1. I work every year with an American who lives most of the year in Europe (and the rest in Florida.) She’s picked up the Continental European ideas and attitudes after living there for 20 years or so. One of our rules is never, ever discuss politics (unless she initiates the discussion, and that’s usually to make fun of a politician. Which is always bipartisan, thus far.)

      She was bragging about how wonderful all the book stores are in Germany, and wouldn’t it be great to get rid of big mail-order places and go back to local bookstores in the US? So I told her about the background of “what happened to all those little local bookstores.” She’d never imagined that US tax laws might have initiated the withering and dying process. It was “Amazon did it.” Not Borders and B&N, not the US Govt. Because that’s what European governments tell people when they keep the protectionist rules in place – we’re saving you from Amazon and the eeeeevil exploiters who would destroy our culture. (FWIW – chick lit in German? Just as fluffy and silly as chick lit in English.)

    2. Putting your sidearm on the table is gauche. Not The Done Thing.

      Putting your cell phone on the table is equally gauche. Doubly so on a date. Pro tip: Set your ring tone to “vibrate” AND LEAVE IT THERE!

      2. For those who have to be Reachable, there’s also “do not disturb” on most newer phones– if it’s not on the list, it won’t ring, unless it’s a double call in quick succession. (or whatever rule you put in)

      3. Doesn’t it depend on the sidearm?

        If a venue doesn’t have the good sense to employ seating permitting your saber to freely dangle, or your shotgun to stand alongside your chair, isn’t the gaucherie theirs?

        N.B. everybody knows polearms ought be checked at the door.

      4. I see a lot of “turn on the speaker, turn the volume all the way up, lay it on the far side of the table, and hold shouted conversations while maximally annoying other patrons.”

        One particularly obnoxious jerk ended every reply by shouting “Ya know wutta mean?!” After a while I joined the conversation by shouting “YAYus!” and “Witness!” and “Preach it, brother!” For some reason he acted like he found that annoying…

        2. At least you know that they aren’t talking to the broccoli. I’m not all that sure sometimes, and thinking that I should have placed my Glock where it would be easier to lay hands on.

          1. I still don’t have a perfect rig. Pocket carry works well, but limits both what you can carry and the draw. What I really need is a strong-side shoulder rig…essentially a belt holster, but on a shoulder harness that keeps it high enough to be concealed under a jacket. It’s a body shape issue. I’m of the spherical sort.

            1. For meself, I’m saving up for a bespoke custom-carry purse. Yes, I KNOW that purses are for lipstick, but I am attached to my purse when in public.
              And I want a locally-made, custom bespoke purse because I suspect that the local baddies all know what the commercially-available items look like. I know – I am attributing a fashion sensibility and an awareness of detail not normally demonstrated by the scum-bag element – but still … I’d like to keep the scum-bag element guessing.

              1. Leslie Fish wrote a song about a friend of hers who’s a herpetologist…..and her purse.

                “I’ve got a purse that goes rattle, hiss, and slither,
                As I walk so meekly down the street.
                And I hope some punky boy will snatch it,
                And I smile as I think of what he’ll meet!”

              2. Well, a purse has the advantage that you can carry an awful lot of firepower. Say a Glock 17…with red dot sight, compensator, and a pair of 33-round magazines as reloads.

                1. Depends on the purse. When my Mom was going back and forth between Globe and Thatcher, teaching microbiology and anatomy at the nursing school, she carried my Dad’s Army revolver in her purse. No reloads, though – if there were more than six problems, she had the tire iron up front by the driver’s seat. (Yes, six. That was the only handgun she was ever comfortable with, but she went skeet shooting with it.)

              3. > bespoke purse

                Pay particular attention to the strap. Mrs. TRX has complained that most purses, even ones designed for concealed carry, have straps that are too narrow and they dig into her shoulder. Even small amounts of extra width can reduce the load across your collarbone a lot.

                I’ve noted many cheap shoulder holsters try to get by with flat straps. To properly go over your shoulders without putting most of the load on one edge, the leather needs to be cut in a shape more like a cutlass, so that it hangs straight while curving over your shoulder. But that uses a lot more leather, and many manufacturers try to cheap out.

                On the off-the-shelf CCW purses, the big split seems to be between “gun in separate compartment” vs. “compartment inside with everything else.” The inside type is theoretically more secure, but getting the gun out of there takes so long you might as well just whack them with the purse. For outside access, you have the problem of children or “dippers” getting at it easily… TANSTAAFL.

                Finally, the purses either just have a rectangular pocket you drop the gun into, where you then have to fumble it out by whatever you can get hold of, or a one-size-fits-none pouch that’s “adjustable” with Velcro, some with a nice retention strap. Those can be even harder to get the gun out of than the plain pockets.

                A particular problem with the inside-access designs is that anything *else* in the purse can make it very hard to get hold of the gun, particularly if you’re trying to draw without hauling the thing around so you can look in there.

                If you’re going custom you’ve probably already considered all that, but Mrs. TRX now has a drawer full of purses that fail on one or more of those areas…

                1. Thank you for the analysis. I’ve been tempted by some (although the phase when my child kept unpacking the diaper bag definitely gave me pause on the bag carry option) but will need to review them with these points in mind.

                2. Chances are you’re going to have to pick among the least-objectionable of a poor lot.

                  I would suggest your primary consideration should be “how hard is it to get the freakin’ gun out of this thing?!” follower by putting dumping the contents of your current purse in there and trying it again.

                  I’m no fan of the speed-draw concept, but if you can’t get the gun into your hand in a timely fashion, it’s more of a liability than an asset.

                  Further options you might want to consider, depending on your current activity / body shape / preferred clothing / weather are fanny packs (which can be worn on the side or front), belly band (which is like one of those post-pregnancy abdominal binders, except with a holster sewn to it), and fake phone or medical equipment case. Granny sweaters seem to be moving out of style now, but they’re great for helping conceal ordinary holsters.

                  That is, rather than concentrating on only one way, having options can be handy. Though there are some who will vehemently disagree, of course.

            2. My shoulder rigs all draw *down*, not up or forward. They’re all “single side” types, which work a lot better for me than the X-types.

              One advantage of the down-draw rigs is that you can draw with either hand if you want.

              2. DeSantis for the 1911, Nevada Gunleather for the J-frame, and a hybrid Safariland/Nevada rig for an oddball Euro .45.

            3. One of the keys to good, comfortable holstered carry is a good belt made for same. The 511 belt works great, but is a bit heavy.
              I’ve got a Mastermind Tactics belt that was a giveaway, and it also works great.
              With that and a good holster*, I’ve toted a Colt Commander or a Glock 19 under a t-shirt with no appreciable printing. Or a Beretta 92 under a Columbia fishing shirt.
              *I’m partial to the Custom Carry Concepts Gesalt.

              1. Upon viewing the gun leather on offer in AZ way back when, and understanding that anything I could afford was going to be useless trash, I made my own.

                It turns out that making a custom leather holster is dead easy. Two pieces of leather, some wood glue if you’re poor, leather glue if you’re not, wet the leather, clamp it around the gun with glue on the seams. Put the gun in plastic, obviously, like a dry-cleaner’s bag. Wait for the leather to dry, then stitch it up. Seriously dead fricking easy.

                My first attempt succeeded very well indeed, giving me a very nice inside-the-pants concealed holster for the small of the back location, just behind the hip. Easily removed by unsnapping the belt loop, so you can put your piece on the table without drawing it from the holster.

                Thereafter I made several rather nice holsters, some with carving and punched patterns, but the first one was my carry holster.

                Something I really don’t understand about firearms dealers in the USA, they don’t have decent leather holsters for sale. Everything is kydex and nylon, bulky, one-size-fits-nothing, make-do crap. I think there might be space for an internet custom holster maker.

                1. There’s a few good ones out there, and the range is roughly $60-$120.
                  Kydex (not the cheap plastic stocked on most gun store shelves) is a great holster material, as it will retain the gun if properly molded, but won’t get soft over time and cause an inadvertent loud noise/ leg injury during reholstering.
                  The guys who do customs IWB leather will put in a metal reinforcement likewise.

      2. I’m kind of wondering if I can get that holstering/reloading system from Equilibrium. Or maybe the hyperspace arsenal from Ultraviolet. 😉

        1. I always wanted one of the power holsters from “Deathworld.”

          –snip–
          “It is much more precise than that. Here, take your left hand and grasp an imaginary gun butt. Tense your trigger finger. Do you notice the pattern of the tendons in the wrist? Sensitive actuators touch the tendons in your right wrist. They ignore all patterns except the one that says ‘hand ready to receive gun.’ After a time the mechanism becomes completely automatic. When you want the gun—it is in your hand. When you don’t—it is in the holster.”

          Jason made grasping motions with his right hand, crooked his index finger. There was a sudden, smashing pain against his hand and a loud roar.
          –/snip–

          [Jason needed a little practice…]

          1. Well, I’d prefer the Equilibrium ones for their… incident-inducing qualities. 😀

            (Though I doubt pistols that huge could fit in uniform sleeves like that.)

    4. > if Americans at restaurants put their guns on the table while they ate the way that Europeans will pull out the cell phone and set it on the table.
      —
      Now that’s just silly. We’re not so eaten up with our guns we can’t leave them holstered while we eat.

      Not like the Faceborg addicts who start stressing out if they go more than a few minutes without their fix…

    5. “…if Americans at restaurants put their guns on the table while they ate…”

      No, because then you can’t Han Solo the guy across from you if he gets uppity.

    6. My daughter has a good few internet friends in England, and just about all of them are convinced that here in Texas, everyone lives in ramshackle wooden shacks, with outhouses in back, and tumbleweeds rolling down the dusty, unpaved streets, and there are frequent gunfights in the streets.
      She says, “Only on the South Side…” but they still have gleaned any idea of what Texas is like from old cowboy movies. You’d think that they could have picked up some hints from watching Dallas…

      2. Once, I sent a picture of an early snow in Alaska to friends in the lower 48. It was knee-deep when I went out and stood in it, wearing sweats and a t-shirt. I expected teasing about the t-shirt…

        Instead, “OMG, there are suburbs in Alaska?!?”

        *facepalm*

        1. *snickersnort*

          I remembered suddenly folks from the US asking “Whose chickens do I keep hearing?”

          When I said they were mine, everyone thought that it was so cool that the Philippines had rural Internet. I said “No, I live in Metro Manila, pretty much.”

          “YOU HAVE CHICKENS IN THE CITY?”

          Me (summarized:)”Everyone has chickens. Most men are into cockfighting. Me, we started out with a few pet chicks…that grew to chickens…and now we have nearly 200 chickens. On a suburban gated-community house plot and home.”

            2. Florida: no imagination….
              “I said, “He’s swallered the hook, Mama. Grease up the skillet!”
              I knew she was gonna wring my neck for sure.”

              1. For us it is wild Turkeys, who are mean, can’t be harassed, and can’t be hunted (residential). Not calling them stupid, just mean. Then there are the large, used to be, domestic rabbits breeding like, well rabbits.

                  1. Guns & Bow/Arrows. Suppose slings, rocks, or nets, could be utilized during appropriate hunting season. BUT, Eugene area; even if we aren’t exactly city, yet (hasn’t been “yet” for 55+ years). Someone will screech.

                    2. Poisons would make me angry. But suppose so. Not sure when Turkey season is. Plus there is a limit, so whole flock isn’t going to be taken out anyway. Unless the neighbors get involved. I’ve been told that wild turkeys locally aren’t that good of eating. But ???

                      My concern is turkeys being followed in by predators. Cougars or Coyotes. Cougars aren’t likely, we are in the flat of the valley, they stick to the foot hills and timber. Possible, but not likely. But they didn’t use to be in the foothills either … lack of hunting by dog is culprit. Coyotes very high possibility, as are bobcats.

                      Not mention one of our cats is going to get it into his head that even as big and heavy as they are, they are birds. Did I mention Turkeys are mean? They are bigger, they are heavier, there are more of them to gang up on one cat.

                    3. They wouldn’t be considered ‘good eating’ by modern day standards because they’d be ‘thinner, tougher and gamy,’ I reckon, compared to a farm-raised bird. You might have to hang the bird, marinate extensively, and not overcook it. (Looking at google, must stop because my mouth is watering and I can’t get this stuff lmao). Supposedly they’re flavorful.

                      I’ll admit I’m not sure how limits work. Limit per person per hunt? Total? Is the limit for native population, or ferals, or just a blanket? Over here hunting of ferals is greatly encouraged (feral animals, not people!) because of the damage they do.

                      I’ve heard of wild turkeys causing serious damage to vehicles if hit by cars. Having seen some (rather scrawny) examples of the domesticated kind (someone tried to raise some a few streets away from where I used to live in the Philippines, reckoning they weren’t much different from raising chickens… those effers would charge us like the territorial idiots they are if we walked by to reach the local corner store. And they were skinny things, not the huge gorgeous birds I see in some videos.

                      I discovered there are wild turkeys here in Australia too, but they’re slender birds compared to the ones in the US, about the size of a large rooster. I used to see them from my hospital window back in Townsville. I, being me, wondered how they tasted, but they’re protected.

                    4. https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/s960x960/79333518_10221470355136694_6544976516344709120_o.jpg?_nc_cat=107&_nc_ohc=5AFXAUQzMToAQnY6Kg4C4p5uxrwGUPUcdQX-12PiCS3-yRAeA7Kb9XZjA&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=113a32a6f04b3ff73b59e8d0834f4447&oe=5E771D81

                      https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/79092923_10221470355376700_7247251115744428032_o.jpg?_nc_cat=104&_nc_ohc=UOe9C842lxUAQnQvbaSBIOTqJaXETlbCTlYJJfGlozSyzRHp0TYp03fAw&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=5e58f645fc25824f39a8c3dda6fd655b&oe=5E6E7FF4

                      There was a baker’s dozen. Hens and current years chicks.

                    6. My thought too. Mini-flying velociraptor. Don’t fly formation like ducks, but they can fly, they do fly to roof tops, or trees for roosting. I’ve heard some not nice words about them choosing top of vehicles to roost. They are good for lawns, when they are pecking up bugs. Not so good if they settle down at noon, they tear it up. No helicopter flop for these birds.

                    7. > Limit per person per hunt? Total? Is the limit for native population, or ferals,
                      —
                      Most states require a hunting license and/or “tag” for various types of game animals. For common animals like deer, it’s common for a hunter to get a tag for three, usually bucks, though does may be allowed in times when population is high. The tag is normally good for one hunting “season” (a few days to a few weeks)

                      In some cases where animals are rare, tags are allotted by lottery; it might take years before you get a tag, and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to fill it within the given time.

                      The reason for all this is “conservation”. Back in the 1800s commercial hunters nearly wiped out entire populations of animals. The legislatures viewed the animal population as part of the “commons”, and the regulation isn’t to hassle hunters, but to conserve the populations so they may be equitably shared. (like many English words, “conservation” doesn’t quite have the same meaning nowadays…)

                      Some places list different animals as “nuisance”, “invasive”, or similar designations, and they may be hunted at any time without tags or hunting licenses, with few or no restrictions.

                    8. Deer here is ONE per tag. One tag per person. Lottery for Doe, which is Doe or Spike, must have antlered tag, then you pay extra for the doe tag. Use to mean if you have doe tag, then two deer, one fork or better, one doe. Now, no, if lucky to get antlered, your doe tag is void. That is west side. East side most units are lottery. Up until I was in my 20’s, you could get a west side tag, and an east side tag (two deer). That option went away, you had to choose, west or east side tags. Then they added the unit lotteries. At first you could put in for each unit lottery but could only use one tag won. Now you can only put in for one unit lottery. Elk is the same way, only it has been lottery for years. If only one person in your group has a tag, only one person had better be carrying a rifle. Others can be with that person, they can “dog” the terrain (dogs are not allowed on deer or elk hunts) for the person with the tag.

                      Turkey is 3 per tag with visible beards (a hunting site summary, but not official Oregon site). Can only be hunted with shotgun or bow, so no rocks or slings 🙂 from official Oregon Gov site.

                      Been years since I’ve been in deer or elk camp, been years since I’ve hunted. But still have family who hunt. Grew up on venison, elk, trout, & salmon. Until I was in college (uncle started raising sheep, so folks got mutton through him), if nothing came in from the hunt, we didn’t eat meat; once the prior years ran out. With the entire list, we always had some meat. Out of the family that still hunts, I think they got 2 deer from 4 tags. No elk this year. Ages of hunters: 50, 73, 82, & 85 … word is this may have been the last year.

                      Argument is “hunting is more expensive than buying meat from the market” … well, yes if you have to fully get outfitted &/or hunt out of State. Dad grew up putting meat on the table, sure tools got upgraded over time. It was not cheaper to buy meat from the market; not then. Warmer & safer, maybe, but not cheaper. Also, Dad self loaded for everyone.

                      FYI. Turkeys aren’t the only urban “invaders”, but there are sections in town where deer are considered “hoofed rats”, no hunting them there either.

                      I worked one season June through September for the USFS. The local guys who hunted after work and weekends in the area would gripe during the week. The crew would see deer walking in & out of the crew work area, within yards of crew members. Come after hours or weekend, nada.

                    9. Wild hogs in Texas … an invasive pest (and there was a woman killed a couple of weeks ago by some of them! :-0 !) There’s no license required, no limit and no dedicated season. Unfortunately, unless they are younglings, they aren’t very good eating.

                  2. To be fair. Rabbits are native to US, and Oregon. Also have a fair number of native felines, even if native felines are typically bigger. Feral domestic rabbits are bigger than the Oregon native bunnies, but the feral aren’t replacing or out competing the natives. Feral felines aren’t out competing native felines either. Stupid Nutria tho are a pain invasive. Although the local eagles and river otters adore them.

                    1. So your native predators are able to keep them in check to some extent. From what I hear the rabbit population here is so huge our native predators can’t keep up. And when you have hawks that deliberately spread fire as a tool for flushing out prey…

                      Yeah, that had me bury my face in my hands when I found out about that. First the damn eucalypts, now the hawks. Makes you wonder how the koalas survived at all.

                    2. That’s because Australian life was like our liberals. It was a niche, where it was protected. So it stuck at marsupial mammals. Who, except for opossums, were outcompeted by placental mammals everywhere else.
                      Evolution is not a nice force.

                    3. Survival of the fittest usually isn’t, and shouldn’t be ‘nice.’

                      I don’t think that other than the local possums, we have carnivore marsupials. Maybe omnivores? I’d have to look, because afaik, they tend to be herbivores and maybe insectivores.

                      I kind of want to make a rug made out of rabbit hide, but I don’t know how good rabbitskin is for that, specifically out of rabbits I’ve shot. I’m still of the opinion that just because they’re vermin, doesn’t mean it should be a total waste, you know?

                    7. Oh I agree, definitely. But can you imagine the screaming? I mean, we already have the vegans sabotaging farmers here, the water problems driving cattle farmers to bankruptcy (in favor of huge almond farms run by foreigners) … there’s just so much going on its flipping my conspiracy theory switch (simply because it seems to happen all close together.)

                    8. No natural predators? Aren’t there Tasmanian Devils in Oz?

                      Of course, based on the documentaries I grew up watching they are not very effective against rabbits. Not the little grey ones, at any rate.

                    9. We have tons of snakes, birds of prey, and the dingoes and crocs, plus the various feral carnivores; Tazzie devils have a rather small range, plus there’s a disease that’s really smashing them right now. But the damn rabbits just breed so much it’s beyond control.

                    10. There was an Australian bird that got the habit of handing on sheep and pecking holes in their backs, which would get infected to the point where the sheep would often die. Nobody could figure out *why* the birds were doing that (at least, last I heard…), but they had a push to eradicate that particular bird population before the activity spread.

                    11. Down South, especially in Louisiana, nutria are considered lunch by lots of people. Any recipe that involves squirrel will probably work with nutria.

                  1. My first brush with urban wild turkeys was in the parking lot at work one morning; during mating season. Huge flock with 4 males. They weren’t letting people get out of their vehicles. Called my favorite radio station to report a traffic problem in their area. They asked where. Answer – Outside your door … station broadcasts out of building in same complex. Station did post videos of the turkey flock throughout the day, but I couldn’t find them. Not like this happened recently. As of Feb 2020, I’ll have been retired 4 years, & it happened before that.

                    2. ***has visions of a flood of turkeys and terrified people stuck in their cars***

                      Your visual wordage is correct … Add occasionally people trying to get out, then diving back into their car, or making a run for building main doors, people stuck behind doors of buildings trying to leave, traffic backed out the driveway and onto the busy access road … then the police got involved, because traffic had to be cleared. Remember Turkeys can’t be hazed …

                      People were more amused than terrified, that I could see. But it definitely was mostly “you first”. Turkey flock was large, probably 30 or 40 birds, couldn’t take up the entire 3 sections of the parking lot being more or less bunched up, but the Toms were finding their charges herded, like um, you know, turkeys, … or not very well, so the flock kept changing sections. As the flocked moved out of the section you were in, you made a run for it. Took awhile for the flock to move off.

                    3. Turkeys are large, aggressive, and the beak and talons can inflict painful wounds to your body, and then to your wallet, after deductible and co-pay.

      3. Europeans rarely have a good idea of just how vast the United States really is. Their countries are the size of American states.

        1. And their houses are the size of American living rooms.
          And their kitchens are the size of American bathrooms.
          And their bathrooms are the size of American closets.
          And their closets are nonexistent.

          1. Damn near. Every time I go over there, it feels like everything is about 3/4 size. Maybe 2/3rds.

        2. I do get a kick out of telling my European co-workers about how from the center of Florida (Disney) one can drive north at 120 kph on an interstate, and still be in Florida 3 hours later.
          Or drive from mid Missouri through Kansas to mid Colorado at roughly the same speed, and the trip will take about 15 hours.
          Or that a half hour drive as part of a commute/ shopping/ going to church is normal in my home area.
          Blows their minds.

            1. The sun is riz and the sun is set and here I is in Texas yet.

              The Daughter and I drove I-40 through the skinny part — the Panhandle — and that was 177.139 miles.  Yes, we took the time to stop at Cadillac Ranch.

        3. And ditto Australia. We can fit entire countries into our states.

          Oh the reaction my father in law had when visiting relatives from England said they’d decided to take a day trip to visit Sydney (in-laws are outside of Melbourne, in the rural areas). Even after finding out it’s a eight-ten hour trip MINIMUM one way… they decided to do it. Got up long before dawn, got there, then spent a few hours doing the big tourist attractions, then drove back.

          1. One summer, I thought it would be fun to take the train from Cairns to Hervey Bay and visit some friends. Was told that it was a LONG trip, and just flew into Brisbane instead, and drove up.
            It was still a long drive- 4 1/2 hours. Got me good and tired for the long flight across the Pacific & American continent.

            1. XD It’s one of the difficulties in having one’s in-laws spread across Australia. I’m not particularly fond of domestic flights in Australia; every one of them I’ve been in, I’ve had to climb stairs to and from the plane / tarmac. I’m always afraid of my ankles giving away from under me (they sometimes do, even on completely flat ground) and I’ll just tumble. Terrifying to think of with babe in arms, trying to lug carry on and baby gear, and so on.

        4. All too many Americans don’t, either. Their America is all one urban hive, connected by subways, airports, and the occasional train.

          If you don’t have a car, “America” looks pretty much like anywhere else, I guess.

          America isn’t just a “car culture”, you can’t even *get* to most of it without a car.

          1. My Mother used to laugh at a Lefty trope from the (I believe) 1950’s that still have adherents in the 1970’s; The Megalopolis: one huge city of uninterrupted paving from Boston to Richmond!

            And never mind the Pine Barrens and other inconvenient facts.

    8. I hope you explained that the only people who do that are ostentatious show-offs hoping to impress everyone with their expensive (usually gold or nickel plated) purse gun.

  7. The original setting for the card game (and later RPG) Legend of the Five Rings had a character by the name of Akodo Kage. Everyone knew that he was the most honorable man in the Empire. He was so honorable that when the Emperor ordered the Akodo family dissolved, Akodo Kage was the only member of that family allowed to keep the family name. He was so honorable, that everyone knew that everything he did was honorable, even if you initially didn’t catch the context that made it honorable. And it in land where people sometimes draw swords and duel over accusations of dishonor, obtaining such a reputation took a lot of hard work.

    A much less-known fact was that he was also the leader of a ruthless and evil conspiracy that aimed to overthrow the gods and the empire.

    L5R (as it’s often abbreviated) was acquired by FFG a couple of years ago, and the setting was rebooted with some notable changes. I don’t know whether they kept Kage.

    1. https://l5r.gamepedia.com/Akodo_Kage

      He’s in the L5R reboot. I haven’t been following the story so I don’t know if they’re going to have the Kolat conspiracy happen in the rebooted storyline or if they’ll take it in different directions. But his card’s ability is fully based around the idea of being the most honorable person around, so they’re sticking with that part of his character theme at least.

      BTW, for those who follow that link and read the card but don’t play L5R, an explanation of how his card works: the “honor bid” is done with a dial that can go from 1 to 5. You and your opponent both secretly choose a number on the dial and place it face-down on the table when you’ve chosen, then turn your dials over once both players have chosen. Bidding high numbers gives you an advantage: more cards drawn, or more strength in a duel. But after the numbers are revealed, you look at the difference in the bids, and whoever has bid the higher amount has to pay that difference in honor points to the lower bidder: if I bid 2 and you bid 5, you get to draw 5 cards and I only draw 2, but you have to pay me 3 honor points. Everyone starts at about 10 honor points, you win instantly if you reach 25, and you lose instantly if you reach 0. So what his card does, by letting you set your opponent’s dial to equal yours, is to say “Because I have more honor points than you already, I’ll forgo taking more from you, and instead deny you the extra card draw or duel strength that you were trying to get.” Very much in keeping with the honor theme of the original character.

  8. For instance, this week someone found out something like 80% of college freshmen believe the US INVENTED slavery and did it for racist reasons.

    *raises finger and resists the urge to say chotto matte kudasai in terrible Japanese*
    Someone found out that 80% of college freshmen who would answer the question said they believe the US invented slavery for racist reasons.

    Which is also depressing, but a different thing….

    1. If those same freshmen mentioned Moses in Egypt, they’d likely be attacked as Bible-thumping idiots, even though quite a few people are familiar with it, and multiple movies have been made about it (the last one being that mess a few years ago).

        1. Or everywhere but here, in every time but post-1800 or so – it is a uniquely modern anglospherian thing to even contemplate not slaving.

        2. Thing is that the Israelites in Egypt is the one culture-wide story that revolves around ancient slavery. If you say “Moses in Egypt”, then it’s a story that everyone would have recognized just a few decades ago, and you can’t think about that story without thinking about slavery. Sure, Rome had slaves, as did most of the world. But mention Rome and there are any number of completely relevant thoughts that can come to mind without considering slavery.

          1. Well the MSMedia thinks a reference to Spartacus will still be understood. Either they’re mistaken again (likely enough) or people do realize there were slaves in Rome but have compartmentalized their thinking so much that in their heads Roman slavery can’t possibly have any relevance to American slavery.
            Things that happened long ago and far away are myth/legend/fairy tale.
            Things that happened long ago and nearby are history.

            1. If you point that out online, they’ll tell you that American slavery was the WORST EVER.
              They’re full of sh*t, btw.
              Being a slave in Africa or the Caribbean was a death sentence.

              1. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, a great many African slaves ended up in the Middle East where, suitably* fixed, many served as harem guards and attendants.

                *N.B. – such fixing did not generally involve anesthetic or antibiotics ,,, or even sterilized implements.

                2. That’s what made the Middle East so great! If we had only castrated all the men and raped all the women, slavery in America would have been SO much better!

                  I have literally seen a leftist urge that on the grounds it would have prevented a separate class.

            2. Have you forgotten Doublethink?
              They’re not supposed to think about things, or connect the facts.

            3. It is a shame how that movie cast all those white actors in roles that ought have gone to African-Americans.

              Shameful, simply shameful.

              Corey Booker, of course, as a proud Black man ™ could never have identified with the experiences of White folk.

          2. Okay. I know the premise is not true. But …

            Egypt is in N. Africa. Egyptians are Black (shut up)
            Jews, & therefore Moses, are white (quit laughing)
            Thus, since Jews were slaves in Egypt, Blacks enslaved Whites. So Blacks invented Slavery. Plus, the whole tried to kill the first born of all slaves, were cruel …

            Okay. Now you can laugh your heads off …

    2. You may be right. My observation has been that the kids aren’t stupid, just ill-educated…but they know it, and would like to remedy it.

      1. There will be a market for a new round of revisionist histories, this time debunking the Left’s accumulated mythology and outright propaganda.

    3. Japanese has some really awesome phrases like that. 😁 I’ve taken to just using “ganbatte” by default, instead of “good luck,” because it also has the sense of “fight hard.”

      Also, has anyone else noticed that Japan sometimes out-Americans the US? If I want a cartoon with good messaging for the Young Master, outside of The Incredibles and a few other outliers, I’m looking at anime.

      1. I have noticed that…..

        ***********

        My kids get “hurry up” and “NOW!” yelled at them in bad Japanese quite a lot. 😀

        Hey, they take our phrases, it’s fair. ^.^

        2. It’s human!
          We do cultural appropriation. Always have.
          If we ever meet aliens with four arms, we’ll be figuring out a way to do their gestures, wear their clothes and generally take the best stuff of their culture the next day.

            1. An actress in Hollywood (unfortunately I can’t remember which one) dressed up as a Hindu goddess for a Halloween party several years ago, complete with multiple arms (may have been a blue-skinned Kali).

              1. An actress in Hollywood (unfortunately I can’t remember which one) dressed up as a Hindu goddess for a Halloween party …

                Let us hope for her sake that she never gets it in her head to run for political office … as a conservative.

      2. I’m watching a silly (yes, it’s silly; but I’m finding it fun silly) Mandarin series on Netflix right now that just started a new story arc. And it appears that the bad guys are forcing PETA-style beliefs on a local town. The main characters discovered this when the waiter in a restaurant explained why every single restaurant in the town only offrred vegetarian meals. And then shortly afterwards, one of the characters goy bawled out by a young woman for accidentally sitting on ants. And then the woman announced that she was going to *bury* the ants in question.

        The Asian markets will allow mockery that’s now prohibited in the West.

        1. Not just mockery– but deep thoughts, without it being preaching.

          Watching a series that I hadn’t realized I’d heard of until we hit the outrage!!!1! moment, where a sympathetic character buys a slave.
          …
          It’s not a “kick the dog” moment, either.

          Dude is broken, but still good, and they manage it realistically enough that Elf and I take twice as long to watch it as we “should” because we keep pausing it to talk.

      1. Based off of my experience, if someone is asking you an obviously moronic question that has an obvious correction, in public, especially in a school, you do not want to make that correction.

        They’re trying to bait you into saying it, and that is not going to be a fun experience.

        No need to walk into an obvious ambush, y’know?

        1. Sometimes it is best to walk into an ambush knowingly – as long as you know and they don’t know you know, you can leverage that. Assuming you are too close and can’t outmaneuver due to a bad position near the appetizer table, forward into the ambush might be the best option.

          Then the immediate action drill for a near ambush is to assault into it so as to get out of the kill zone fastest (see MCWP 3-11.3 Scouting and Patrolling p 11-8,9 in “Counter Ambush”).

          Same thing works for conversational ambushes – if you can’t avoid them, don’t go on defense – that just fixes you in the conversational kill zone; best to fix conversational bayonets and verbally assault.

          1. Except there is no reason to bother fighting.

            If you win, it’s cut; if you draw, they’ll edit it to attack you. If you lose, you lose.

            Oh, and if you win but are injured, people on “your” side will attack you for stupid reasons.

            1. Yeah, I do find that the computer’s final conclusion from WarGames as told to Mathew Broderick applies more and more to such interactions.

        2. The Greeks & Romans stole slavery from the Egyptians — it was just another instance of the White man’s cultural appropriation from the Black.

          No need to make the correction they anticipate.

  10. I don’t know. And neither do you. But you should regard everything you hear from a lot of places at once as suspect.

    Amen.

    Even if it’s on “safe” sites.
    Either it’s single source on accident– thus single point of failure– or you’re looking at planted information.

    1. One of the habits I’ve gotten into before spreading some interesting tidbit of news from online is to try and trace the story back to where it originated from.

      1. Remember that story about the kid who was expelled for saying he had the One Ring from lord of the rings, and when you dug a bit your found out (initially) that the only source for any information was his father, who had personally contacted multiple reporters with his version of events?

        Eventually, it came out that he had a ring from a magician’s set, had told another kid that he could strangle the other kid to death with it and make him “disappear,” and that he had a rather long recent history of “troubled” statements like this.

        Or, more recently, the “this homeless black woman went to jail for 5 years for trying to get her kid a better education, this rich white woman got five days for buying her kid a place in college” shtick that ignored that woman #1 was in jail for dealing crack at the school she fraudulently enrolled her son in, and tried to proposition the cop who caught her. (Plus had a long criminal record.)

        2. Goodness, but it gets exhausting, doesn’t it? x_x

          It’s actually a good part of the reason why I picked up the habit of reading the comments–you’ll usually get someone pointing out that stuff reasonably quickly at any story more than a week or so old. Except… it doesn’t really work consistently anymore; there’s too much screaming to sort through before you get to “that’s not what happened” rebuttals.

          (And then there’s the “that’s not what happened” rebuttals that don’t actually rebut anything… but that’s a lot easier to work through with a bit of parsing.)

          1. Or, on the MSM sites, the useful comments get disappeared almost as fast as they are made, or comments are blocked altogether. I’m beginning to immediately consider a story suspicious if the comments to that story and no others are blocked.

            1. Ugh, yes to the tenth. -_- You want to shake people and ask them if they really think that getting rid of the naysayers really makes it look like they’re being honest, instead of just making it obvious it’s malice instead of ignorance.

              It’s like what Sarah says about removing the safety whistles. It may have the immediate effect you’re going for, but there’s a reason they’re there…

    2. A LOT of this when it’s about Amazon “pulling” conservatives.
      Again, my reality check: they haven’t taken down Darkship Thieves which is as Libertarian as I ever was. They haven’t taken down all the conservative books I buy, including “The Plot Against the President” but they took down some minor writer’s opus that maybe 200 people bought? WHY in hell.
      And then I find out this person had actively violated terms of service in various way, but screams “My book was taken down because conservative.”
      And this was ALL OVER conservative sites.
      The problem? If Amazon ever actually pulls stuff on opinion? No one will believe it or fight back.

      1. See German atrocity stories from WWI, and why people didn’t believe the Nazis were actually doing anything they actually were in WWII. “Oh, you said that the last war, and you were lying then…”

        1. Exactly this. I did a long review in college – yes, I went into the newspaper archives and scanned every issue of the Chicago Tribune from 1935 to 1945 … and every time that there was a report of Nazi atrocities against the Jews – there was a bunch of letters to the editor; basically saying that we fell for all those atrocity stories the first time around, not gonna fall again.

          1. It’s also why General Eisenhower insisted on sending cameras into the camps that were liberated by the Western Allies.

  11. For Russia and other oil producing countries, it is ESSENTIAL that we stop fracking, or else their entire economy implodes (as it SHOULD have years ago.)
    They don’t have much time, and they’re desperate. They’re pouring large amounts of money into disinformation campaigns.

    *grimace* And not just money.
    I think there’s a very good chance that the Pensacola shooting was incited exactly because the current Saudi heir is not as psycho as the rest of the area– so they’ve got to take him down, to keep a united front.

    I’m rather worried at how many people were suddenly not aware that we train foreign nationals in the US, and act like it’s a new thing, rather than an explicit goal that we know has prevented horrific tragedies both when the US is working with other groups, and even when we’re fighting them, or when we’re not involved at all. They get an idea of how we think– and like Yamamoto saying that their orders are a bad idea, they may be ignored, but it’s useful.

    It’s…worrying.

    1. I don’t know whether your theory about Pensacola is accurate. But the seemingly knee-jerk push to disengage with Saudi Arabia in the aftermath worries me. As you noted, the guy currently running the kingdom is the best chance that the country has right now of achieving some semblance of normalcy.

      1. Similarly, when Erdoğan’s Turkey(!!!) gets overwrought about a Saudi murder of a journalist I am disinclined to run up the Outrage Flag and salute.

        Nor am I terribly concerned by Russian, Chinese nor Iranian criticism of America’s civil rights “crimes.”

      3. Oh, gads, did you hear the fluttering over Trump responding differently to this attack than other attacks “from citizens of Muslim countries” and then 30 seconds later they mention that the King had CALLED TRUMP to express his regret for the shooting and offer to help?

        Vs the leaders who are going “Whoot! Too bad he didn’t kill more!”

        Gosh, why would Trump respond differently? ’tis a mystery!

    2. Used to be a great little restaurant in a couple of house trailers on Redstone Arsenal called the Soldatenstube. Originally established by German soldiers there for long term training at the Army missile command. Great German food. I think it had to move off base after 9/11 as access by civilians became much more difficult.

    3. Not just you guys. When Rhys was getting his paratrooper qualifications, he was told of a rather amusing story of this Jordanian guest trainee who… well, would dive out of the plane. And spin head over arse. And somehow not black out and came out alive of every jump. Very friendly bloke, but they could never get him to not spin. Even when they DID get him to jump as he’s supposed to. He did everything else right though so I think he got his ‘ice cream cone’ patch.

  12. “Fracking” & Foreign Interference.

    Well duh, slaps head. OTOH figured it was disinformation. I mean NOW they want to kill Bared Owls because they are mating, out competing, or driving off the Spotted Owl. No. Non-man made evolution. Leave them alone, deal with it.

    I can only find sources that the Spotted & Barred Owls are “closely related”. There is a source out there that they are the same owl, just from different locals, but I can’t find it. 🙂 As tempting as it is I won’t say “I just know it”. Because I didn’t, not at all. Took reading the article making the case they were same owl from different locations to make that believable. Besides not everyone “knows this”, yet.

    1. At least a decade ago, FWIW, I read an environmental science piece on the NPR website bemoaning the interbreeding of Spotted Owls and Barred owls. The topic came up because a judge in New Mexico refused to block some development or something “because of the spotted owl.” When the pro-spotted-owl people admitted that the local owls had out-competed the spotted one, the judge tossed the case out.

    2. DNA analysis, which IIRC I read by way of a wildlife biologist, but now cannot find again: same owl, different markings, hence ‘overlapping’ range. Spotted is rare because it’s not as good for deep-woods-camo, and also recessive.

      Some official idiots were shooting barred owls to prevent them from mating with spotted owls, since the offspring are mostly barred and OMG it’ll make the spotted owl disappear. This logic is the same as if one were to ‘protect’ yellow Labs by shooting all the black Labs.

      Incidentally, same nonsense about the “endangered red wolf” — per DNA analysis, actually a mix of wolf and coyote (and a small population because wolves usually prefer to kill coyotes) that happens to have the recessive tanpoint markings common in southern coyotes. (Which probably came from a domestic dog cross, so the joke is on them.) Considering them ‘endangered’ is like saying Labradoodles are endangered.

      1. This is what I remember reading, but couldn’t easily find the article.

        Like the comparison to declaring black labs VS yellow lab to spotted owl VS barred owl, and the red wolf VS labadoodles.

      2. Labradoodles are endangered; we should exterminate the Labradors and the Poodles in order to preserve the Labradoodle.

        I kiid, I kiid, and it is kinda inappropriate for /me/ to so do. Too much risk it is serious, and I’ve carefully worked out a different policy on the extermination of dogs. (They are useful tool for other humans, and it is shameful to waste or misuse tools.)

  13. The fight back has been going on for longer than many people really. When I first started paying attention to politics, in the mid 1970’s, it was a forgone conclusion that handguns would be broadly banned in the very near future. There were people who weren’t happy about this, but even Conservative sources such as the National Review (which my Parents subscribed to) just assumed it would happen.

    It didn’t.

    Instead, in the 1980’s, a concerted effort began to roll back Gun Control laws, at least on a State level. “May issue” laws about concealed carry (which left it up to the police to decide wether to issue you a carry permit) were replaced with “Must issue” laws, which said ‘can’t find a legal reason to deny? Give the man his permit!”. There are now a very small number of States that still cling to ‘May Issue” or worse. The vast majority either have ‘must issue’ laws or have adopted ‘Constitutional Carry’; which basically means “Oh, a citizen has decided to carry a firearm, openly to concealed, and has yet to do anything illegal with it? Then, Mr policeman, its nunyo bidness”.

    Now, that’s only one issue, but it’s an issue that’s very important for the Left. They tried to disarm the populace…and failed. Not only failed, but were driven back. And without confiscating those weapons, their hope of imposing anything really radical on the flyovers is vanishingly small.

    1. This. People run around whimpering about the bias of the Propaganda Press…gun owners have been subjected to saturation propaganda bombardment for over sixty years.

      We win because we speak the truth. And because we fight for every fraction of an inch. If the “conservatives” had one-quarter the fighting spirit of firearm owners, the Left would be a stuffed exhibit in the Smithsonian. Liberalis Stupidus…the Missing Link between ape and amoeba.

      1. This was the canary in the mineshaft for me. The spread of, first, ‘must issue’ and later Constitutional Carry, told me that the Left was losing. My take is that their peak was the resignation of Nixon. After that they were so SURE they were winning that they started squabbling among themselves, with the consequence that no major faction leader got the Democrat nomination in 1976, and Jimmy Carter was elected as a compromise candidate. His Presidency was a failure in part because the Left didn’t back him, and that resulted in Reagan.

        The Left has had victories since, but they have consistently cost them more in political capital than they got back out of them. They still have some momentum, but they are no longer gaining it.

        Look at Obama’s administration; their big win was Obamacare, which laid a whole henhouse worth of eggs.

        We still have to fight. They are still dangerous. But they are losing ground.

      2. Yep – the major CA gun rights “advocacy” group was for many years run by “compromise” folks who were drinking buddies with all the ban politicians. They helpfully provided ban bill language to supposedly try and marginally soften the latest bills, over and over, and look where that got the Bear Flag Peoples Republic’s citizens. Said Quislings were finally replaced, but only well after the damage was done. And post-Schwarzenegger Gerrymandering Redistricting Commission, absent court rulings like the magazine ban stop order recently, there’s not much hope for any change until the state bankrupts itself and goes into Federal receivership.

        My message from here behind the lines: Fight back, fight for every inch, never compromise, never surrender, never retreat, no kidding.

      1. In the 1970’s, with Buckley alive, it was Conservative. Like many old school Conservative voices, the NR is seriously uncomfortable with Trump.

        *shrug*

        Haven’t been a dedicated reader since Florence King left.

        1. You’re being overly generous.
          Buckley was ruthless about being and remaining the voice of the conservative movement.
          .
          I used to wholeheartedly support them.
          Then the information about what the USSR had been up to domestically started coming out.
          Instead of mea culpas, Buckley and NR ignored the stories, and kept touting that they had purged the Birchers (who they clearly owed an apology).
          It left a bad taste in my mouth, but I wrote it off as a human failing, not subversion.
          Then Perot and the Reform movement happened.
          At the time, I took the unabashed venom as fear that Perot would split the vote, and lead to Clinton’s election.
          But they never reacted as strongly to Clinton actually being in office. Not even when he accused us of burning black churches. Not even when Ruby Ridge and Waco happened.
          Not that I thought about it much, it was just something that was niggling at me in the background.
          During the same timeframe, they actively covered for Dole not letting the Contract With America come up for a vote in the Senate, and then actively pushed his nomination for the Presidency.
          Which bugged me a bit.
          Then there was the full throated support of Bush II, which considering how frequently he undercut positions NR had advocated for decades, I found shocking. Especially when he actively lied to Congress to get Medicare Part D enacted. Or supported Bush breaking all precedent to essentially appoint Frist as Senate Majority Leader (given what we later learned about Larry Craig, for good reason, but the reason was actively hidden).
          Then there was McCain. And Romney (of all people). But the same people who highhandedly told me I had no choice but to support those two losers absolutely lost their s$&t when it came to Trump, even though he was clearly tti the Right of both.
          So when the great unmasking occurred, it was more “huh, that makes sense” than earthshattering. I finally had a perspective where things made sense.

          1. Sums up the reasons for my attitudes perfectly. We’ve tried fighting nice. See how well it’s worked out “on the ground”. Yes, we know we’re being screwed. Doesn’t stop them from continuing the screwing.

          2. I was never a Perot fan.

            *shrug*

            Something about him set my teeth on edge. Now Trump is a loudmouth, but for some reason he doesn’t have the same effect on me.

            Of course that could be how much I loathe Granny Maojackets von Pantsuit.

  14. “Everybody knows the war is over …”

    Often argued in hopes to make the other side give up fighting, in which case the argument will be proven right.  

    I wonder how many argued that the war was over after New York, Philadelphia and Charleston lay in the hands of the British soldiers?

      1. Considering that they prompted Thomas Paine to write that famous column about “summer patriots”…..

    2. From The Lost Battalion, a film* about an American battalion of over 500 men which gets trapped behind enemy lines in the Argonne Forest, hung out to dry by our French and British allies:

      Maj. Prinz: [speaking German; subtitled] We learned at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood that these Americans are unpredictable. They don’t retreat when they’re supposed to.

      Gen. von Sybel: [in German] How inconsiderate of them, Major.

      *A terrific film little seen.

      2. Why is it I’m vaguely reminded of a story of a soldier whose accuracy of fire so terrified a bunch of Germans they surrendered to him and he kind of just walked back with all these terrified Germans meekly following him. Apparently headshots were much easier, despite being smaller than the turkeys he used to hunt.

        Might be conflating two different stories, but… yeah.

            1. Sgt Alvin York. Happened at about the same time as the Lost Battalion. Which is why his story only became better know some months later.

              Sabaton wrote songs about both incidents. Covered in Sabaton History.

        2. Yes, York.

          From Wikki: 

          By the end of the engagement, York and his seven men marched their German prisoners back to the American lines.  Upon returning to his unit, York reported to his brigade commander, Brigadier General Julian Robert Lindsey, who remarked: “Well York, I hear you have captured the whole German army.”  York replied: “No sir.  I got only 132.”

      1. One of the most interesting things in my British history class was learning the parallels between the British loss of the Americas and the American loss of Vietnam. In both cases, the defeat came down the politicians losing the will to fight an enemy with a fair amount of local support and a foreign power supplying help, not a lack of ability to kill the soldiers on the other side.

        You don’t have to defeat the other side’s armies to win, just their rulers. (See also Nagasaki)

      2. Not city-oriented, no, but did have some relatively large (for the time) cities in addition to the market town. Almost all of them were the major port for their colony. IIRC Philadelphia and New York were among the ten largest cities in the British Empire at the time the War of Independence broke out. Those cities just weren’t the focus of much of the populace, which was scattered across millions of small holdings, often hundreds of miles from anything that would be called a city even then.

        1. I have seen Philadelphia listed as either the third or second largest city in the British Empire at that time.

          Philadelphia was well located for settlement, with an excellent deep harbor that really only became untenable with the super ships in the 1960s. It was far enough inland to be protected from ocean storms. Seafood came in from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay to the Delaware Bay, and farm goods from the rich lands of Lancaster. Ample building materials, both wood and clay for bricks were readily available. Who could ask for anything more?

          1. Apparently, John Adams. He had *views* on “foul, fetid, foggy, filthy Philadelphia”. At a stage in mife where other men prosper, he was resuced to living in Philadelphia.

      3. Unsurprisingly, there is some dispute as to just where Sgt. York’s combat occurred, with several sites considered likely.

        From Wiki:
        “In an October 8, 1918, attack that occurred during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, York’s battalion aimed to capture German positions near Hill 223 (49.28558°N 4.95242°E) along the Decauville railroad north of Chatel-Chéhéry, France. His actions that day earned him the Medal of Honor.”
        [SNIP]
        Under the command of Sergeant Bernard Early, four non-commissioned officers, including recently promoted Corporal York, and thirteen privates were ordered to infiltrate the German lines to take out the machine guns. The group worked their way behind the Germans and overran the headquarters of a German unit, capturing a large group of German soldiers who were preparing a counter-attack against the U.S. troops. Early’s men were contending with the prisoners when German machine gun fire suddenly peppered the area, killing six Americans and wounding three others. The loss of the nine killed and wounded put York in charge of the seven remaining U.S. soldiers.[23] As his men remained under cover, guarding the prisoners, York worked his way into position to silence the German machine guns.
        [SNIP]
        “During the assault, six German soldiers in a trench near York charged him with fixed bayonets. York had fired all the rounds in his M1917 Enfield rifle,[25] but drew his M1911 semi-automatic pistol[26] and shot all six soldiers before they could reach him.

        “Imperial German Army First Lieutenant Paul Jürgen Vollmer, commanding the 120th Reserve Infantry Regiment’s 1st Battalion, emptied his pistol trying to kill York while he was contending with the machine guns. Failing to injure York, and seeing his mounting losses, he offered in English to surrender the unit to York, who accepted.

        “By the end of the engagement, York and his seven men marched their German prisoners back to the American lines. Upon returning to his unit, York reported to his brigade commander, Brigadier General Julian Robert Lindsey, who remarked: ‘Well York, I hear you have captured the whole German army.’ York replied: ‘No sir. I got only 132.'”

        The battle in which the Lost Battalion is set occurred is described by Wiki:
        “The Lost Battalion is the name given to the nine companies of the 77th Division, roughly 554 men, isolated by German forces during World War I after an American attack in the Argonne Forest in October 1918. Roughly 197 were killed in action and approximately 150 missing or taken prisoner before the 194 remaining men were rescued. They were led by Major Charles W. Whittlesey. On 2 October, the 77th launched an attack into the Argonne, under the belief that French forces were supporting their left flank and two American units including the 92nd Infantry Division were supporting their right. Within the 77th sector some units including Whittlesey’s 1-308th Infantry were making significant headway. Unknown to Whittlesey’s unit, the units to their left and right had been stalled. Without this knowledge, the units that would become known as the Lost Battalion moved beyond the rest of the Allied line and found themselves surrounded by German forces. For the next six days, suffering heavy losses, the men of the Lost Battalion and the American units desperate to relieve them would fight an intense battle in the Argonne Forest.

        “The battalion suffered many hardships. Food was scarce and water was available only by crawling, under fire, to a nearby stream. Ammunition ran low. Communications were also a problem, and at times they would be bombarded by shells from their own artillery. As every runner dispatched by Whittlesey either became lost or ran into German patrols, carrier pigeons became the only method of communicating with headquarters. In an infamous incident on 4 October, inaccurate coordinates were delivered by one of the pigeons and the unit was subjected to friendly fire. The unit was saved by another pigeon, Cher Ami, delivering the following message:

        WE ARE ALONG THE ROAD PARALELL [sic] 276.4. OUR ARTILLERY IS DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVENS SAKE STOP IT.

        Despite this, they held their ground and caused enough of a distraction for other Allied units to break through the German lines, which forced the Germans to retreat.”

        So, as you see, the two events were roughly concurrent, with Yorks’ effort happening about the time the Lost Battalion’s was concluding. It is entirely possible that his awards were in part an effort to distract from the Charlie Foxtrot involving the 77th Division, but one would have to be extremely cynical to entertain such thoughts.

        1. > ordered to infiltrate the German lines to take out the machine guns
          —
          That was, if not precisely a suicide mission, then one without any real expectation of success.

    4. “I wonder how many argued that the war was over after New York, Philadelphia and Charleston lay in the hands of the British soldiers?”

      Or after the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

  15. “the evil Kapitalism of Amerika (it’s much more scary written with a K)”

    The use of the letter “K” in place of “C” is merely an artifact of Germanic language. Such usage in an attempt to be invidiously insulting is nothing more than an expression of latent racism — a racism which they expect to be shared by others and hence their dog whistle.

  16. “An experience that shaped both myself and the fictional Miss Marple.”

    It is important to recognize that nobody disputes Miss Marple’s credibility.

    Everybody knows that what “everybody knows” is often codswallop.

  18. “… the reality disseminated from mass media might have bloody nothing to do with reality,”

    I have long been fascinated by the ways in which mass media shapes our expectations of reality. There are the obvious elements, such as normalizing homosexuality, the silly elements, such as the way punks learn to shoot badly from seeing handguns wielded sideways on screen, and the decried ways, such as the ways in which [smut] conditions social cues for sexual excitement and performance (shaved pubis being a thing done for the camera and offering limited benefit to the shaver, for example.)

    There are other ways, as well, far more subtle. We’ve long since recognized that portrayal of certain racial and ethnic groups has harmful effect, but things as simple as performing emotional states have become incorporated into our behavioural arsenal, leading people to display emotions as they’ve seen them enacted on screen. Our subliminal conception of things such as a standard middle-class American home are affected by what we see depicted, which affects aspirations in our own lives no matter what our brains tell us about the unreality (for example, there’s no way Lois Lane can afford that Metropolis apartment in the first Superman film, not on even on a “star reporter” salary.)

    Even when our brains recognize these standards and expectations as nonsense they still modify our own subconscious expectations.

    1. the silly elements, such as the way punks learn to shoot badly from seeing handguns wielded sideways on screen,

      I wonder how many lives have been saved because of jammed guns and missed targets by punks doing the fire-sideways things.

      1. I was in the Navy with a guy who grew up with people in that world and he said it was deliberate. You needed to send lead downrange to prove that you were tough and couldn’t be pushed around, but if you killed someone on the other side you might trigger an all out war.

        1. Basic tribal thinking. You need to look tough, but you don’t want to accidentally start a war with the other group.

  19. Hmm. I guess I ought to be infected, being a European – born in England with a family in Britanny that goes back to at least 850 AD. But I went to a school whose headmaster preached the gospel of ‘test everything before you believe it, and remember that whoever tells you a ‘fact’ may be leaving out the bits that contradict it’. And my father died in 1940 fighting a foul ideology so I took care to learn how to recognise one. Yes, the vermin were around in my school days. But I’m not infected.

      1. But if the propaganda was still working well, Brexit would not have won. Nor would there be successful campaigns to reverse course on immigration policy. It’s breaking down, and the Elites are having a whole herd of cattle, breach presentation.

          1. I really think they would be better advised to let it run, and come back later. But they are too OUTRAGED that the COMMONERS have had the GALL to not do as their betters tell them.

            I can’t see that coming out well for the Elites. Even if they manage to stop Brexit somehow, there will be a horrific price to pay. And by now, their intransigence means there will be a big price to pay anyway.

            1. It looks like it’s going favorably for pro-Brexit parties right now, but given that the powers that be refused to listen to the PREVIOUS Brexit votes…

              I think they’ll ignore this at their peril.

              Hell, I think if it wasn’t for the fact that the Queen is probably distracted by the fallout from Prince Andrew and treading carefully, Brexit should’ve happened before this (she said in her last address that it should happen on Oct 31.) It should’ve.

  21. Hahaha! (Slightly hysterical laugh)

    I might have brought up my new info about the medieval Dublin slave market of white people while I was riding the bus. And the temperature might have dropped about thirty degrees.

    Things thawed a little when I mentioned the Saharan tribe with the Scottish relatives, but not a lot.

    2. Well, Stalin [i]was[/i] on our side, but Roosevelt was, at worst, only half as evil as Hitler. The Nazis still win the Evil Trophy.
      ———————————
      Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

      1. I did say that he had my full.permission to snark at the Soviets for that, especially since it took them so many tries to pick the winning side and use it to steal land. But he didn’t want to insult the morality of the Soviets.

        Funny, that.

    3. If one includes the USSR, he might have a point….but he doesn’t mean that.

      Of course, what exactly he DOES mean would involve his making statements that could be debated…and he probably can’t.

  23. The reason that facts and reason don’t work is because most of the time we are not dealing with the presuppositions of progressives. By presuppositions I mean the most fundamental beliefs–their most authoritative beliefs, which are religious in nature. Every event, every fact they encoubter is evaluated in terms of these presuppositions. All human beings are like this. If you share many of the same presuppositions with someone then you can ‘reason’ with them. If you do not then you must understand their presuppositions and attack that foundation. You must show that their presuppositions lead to contradictions aka that their fundamental beliefs, if correctly applied, lead to evil as it is defined in their own system of belief. This attack has to be sustained, relentless even, because it takes an earth shattering event to rock our fundamental beliefs.

    Tldr: We must understand that seeing isn’t believing–believing is seeing.

    1. It has been pointed out to the mismanagement that the preceding is not traditionally deemed a Christmas song.

      We express our deepest apologies and proffer this alternate.

        1. For the resident Finn
          Floor singing in Finnish

          I’ve come to the conclusion there is nothing Floor cannot sing, in any language if given a bit of time.

  25. On the “reset” thing, have you ever actually seen it happen? It’s terrifying and saddening, and I got to watch it happen to my mother. I had a long conversation about gun rights with her at one point, and I had managed to walk her through to her own conclusion that banning guns would be fruitless and not solve the problems she wanted to solve.

    And then I watched her eyes sort of glaze over, then give herself a shake and shout that she didn’t care, that guns were evil and they should all be destroyed. And she refused to discuss it ever again.

    It still bugs me on occasion, but a lifelong progressive Catholic Democrat from Connecticut was probably a lost cause to begin with. I still love her, but certain times of year like election season can get very uncomfortable.

    1. One of the reasons I love and miss my parents is that if I argued with them, and won my point, they didn’t reset. I had a couple of teachers like that in high school, too. One in particular, an English teacher, made the flat statement that Science Fiction was trash. I asked him if he had ever read any, and he said, “No.”. So I said, “Then, you really aren’t entitled to an opinion, are you.” (I was, and still am, a wisenheimer) . He thought about that for a moment, and said, “You’re right.”. Later, he became an Asimov fan.

      2. That kind of person is rare these days. Dad was one of them (though it took a LOT wrt to Israel – he had to live there, and it took him only a few months to become solidly anti-Palestine after seeing the food and medicine aid trucks go into Palestine) but… yeah.

  26. Does she really believe this? Does she expect the MSM to don sackcloth and ashes and flail themselves for the sin of enabling Trump?

    Yeah, the Media are too soft on Trump, that’s the problem.

    ‘All they do is enable him’: Pelosi slams the media’s coverage of Trump

    While members of the media melt down over every little thing President Trump says or tweets, he distracts them from what he’s actually doing.

    More than two years into his presidency, it should be clear that the press needs to rethink its anti-Trump strategy. When CNN dedicates an entire segment to Trump’s Twitter typos, and media liberals lose it over Trump’s jokes about running for a third term, it’s time for the media to refocus on the things that are really worth discussing.

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agrees.

    In an interview with Richard Jewell actress Olivia Wilde published this week, the California Democrat slammed the press for empowering Trump, saying, “All they do is enable him, and that is really a sad thing.”

    She continued: “I’ve said to many of my friends in the press, ‘You’re accomplices, whether you want to be or not,’ [and they say,] ‘If he’s saying it, then it’s news.’ I don’t think it’s news, but it monopolizes the airwaves. So there is a lot of responsibility to go around in terms of the creation of whatever that is in the White House.”

    Members of the media may defend their excessive coverage of Trump’s every move by invoking democracy or free speech or some higher ambition, but at the end of the day, they’re just trying to get more viewers. And their actions help the president.

    “But he has a tactic,” Pelosi said, “one that is used by autocrats, which is, ‘Just as long as they’re talking about me, no matter if it’s bad, then you’re not talking about my opponent.’”

    She’s right, and if the liberal media don’t want to see Trump reelected in 2020, they should take Pelosi’s advice.

    1. This was noted by many even back during the primaries. The press was in such a rush to fool Trump into committing a fatal gaffe on television that they gave him more time to talk than anyone else.

    2. One of the keys to a successful Blitzkrieg is that your enemy willingly (and foolishly) charges where you want them to go, allowing you to surround and destroy them.
      This is what the press is doing with President Trump- and it makes me happy that he’s smart enough to know this and use this.
      If the press went with a true Fair & Balanced approach, they would very likely had a greater effect. But, they’ve drank the koolaid that the Future is Progressive, and thought all they needed to do was virtue signal loud enough.

      2. As to judgment and mental state of St. Nancy the Pious:

        She chooses to maintain a home in the City and County of San Francisco.

        ‘Nuff said.

        Of course, there’s no poop on the sidewalks in front of her house…

    4. RES, if they had done that to him as a candidate, they might have had a chance. Now that he’s an incumbent? They would have to get every media outlet worldwide to agree; otherwise, even if the US press doesn’t cover it, the foreign press will. Then we can call them (rightly) both biased, because they aren’t covering him, and clueless, because foreigners are eating their lunch.

  27. I went to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts some years ago with some otherwise well educated friends. We had gone to see an installation of South American contemporary artists. They were go smacked that EVERY ONE of the artists had spent time in the US, because there were all those Black Peple in the art!
    When I explained that over 80 percent of the transatlantic slave trade was bound for Brasil, they refused to believe me. I was hushed by other patrons, and called a rascist liar.
    This was before Brasil was held out as the glorious affluent melting pot that the USA never was, ’cause Kardashians or something. Pay no mind to the bodies in the harbor, thick enough to cancel Olympic events.
    I don’t speak the language worth a damn, and I understand that it has diverged from the old world roots, but I can understand it spoken damn good and well, and I can read it.

      1. Been watching several of the current streaming shows that have all the translation credits tacked on the end (why yes, I am one of those people who watches the credits, why do you ask?), and I see both Portuguese and Brazilian-Portuguese translation credit slates, so the difference is enough that for The Mandalorian, for example, The House of The Mouse pays for two unique dubbings.

        1. Does ya freeze frame them? I regret that a) these old eyes no longer read as quickly as a brown fox, having become more like a lazy dog, b) broadcasters shrink them into minuscule boxes in order to push more ads, and/or c) producers roll them (too hastily) over backgrounds that are ever more cluttered.

          Of course, with anime there is often the issue of the name credited is a pseudonym employed to get around contractual limitations, so even when read it I don’t know who it was.

          And yeah, we back up to re-read things like who wrote and who directed this particular episode. For example, we noticed that almost all of the best episodes of The Librarians were directed by Jonathan Frakes, and any episode written by one of the Blue Bloods producers is generally excellent.

  28. If you have ever dealt with pathological liars, you find that they are first really really good at selling themselves on the falsehood.
    Even when it becomes crystal clear to everyone else that the liar has been caught, they stick to it.
    Even when it becomes super stupid to stick to it, they stick to it..
    I don’t know if it’s because deep down, they honestly cannot see reality, or if they believe (based on past successes) that if they stick to it long enough, they’ll get off the hook.

  29. Mom and Dad watch CNN, and I swear…
    I send them articles, and they point out “it came from The Federalist and (insert “bias checking” website here) it’s a far-right website!”
    (Article is on why gun owners are not fans of the usual argument put forth on why there should be more gun control.)
    I’ve asked them to not look at the website name, just read the article, and read what they are talking about. But, they are so concerned about making sure they know where their news is coming from and of course CNN and the network news is “mainstream”…

    1. Just ask them if they are on the national do not call list and then if they say yes, ask them whether they still get telemarketing robocalls even though it is illegal for them to be made to people on the do not call list.

  31. These I find myself less interested in politics and more interested in religion. I feel as though more can be done in the religious sphere than the political one.

    1. Problem is that the Left is trying to use politics to forcibly coopt the religious sphere. That’s what the Equality Act is about.

  32. I had a conversation the other day with a guy and I tried to explain that a global catastrophizer who’s genuine purpose is saving the world will behave differently than one who’s most interested in being better than other people. Because one will care about doing what works and the other cares about everyone knowing how awful, wrong and horrible they are.

    The fellow accepted my examples and then said, essentially, that just because the left has all these sanctimonious people doing what is the opposite of effective, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t force the right to stop destroying the world.

    All sorts of wrong there but primarily, what he knew was true was tribally who was right and who was wrong and no matter the consequence of the behavior of those in his tribe, the other tribe was the one who was guilty and deserved to be forced into compliance.

    Because he knew exactly what everyone knows and there was no changing it.

  33. “the US INVENTED slavery and did it for racist reasons”

    Which is ass backwards – Americans invented racism for slavery reasons.

    (Really. The serious efforts to explain how black people are inferior started in the US after the Revolution. Because if “all men are created equal”, slavery is wrong, and nearly every rich man in six states is a criminal who should lose most of his wealth. Since that can’t be true, some exception to the first principle of America must be found or invented. Caribbean and Latin American slaveowners didn’t have that problem. There’s race prejudice in those societies, but not what the US had.

    I recently saw a comment from a chap who said that Obama is not “African-American”, he’s Kenyan-American. The chap is himself of black West Indian descent. He grew up in the US, knew many American blacks, and realized that his experience, his heritage -like Obama’s-is very different from that of American blacks.)

    1. Meh. I don’t buy it, and most of what you say is nonsense.
      All those myths about black people being inferior were everywhere BEFORE AMERICA WAS EVEN AMERICA.
      Why? Because Christians had to justify enslaving black people. They were also at times horrified by the savagery of barbarians. So.
      Also, one more step over the line and bullshit like this, and I ban you.
      My patience grows thin, sir.
      And I have no time for bullshit.

    2. Racism is racism, and doesn’t need slavery to exist. Once upon a time, everyone knew that their own race was the best, and all others were inferior. There’s still lots of that attitude today throughout the world, although the fact that it is (officially) out of fashion in the US, and the US has a large influence on the rest of the world, means that it’s not as visible as it once was.

      But the locals in other parts of the world all know.

          1. And they look funny: Skin pale as corpses and hair the color of straw.

            When you read Gaius Iulius was “blonde” that does not mean what that word means today.

              1. I wonder how much of that is the result of the various waves of Ostrogoths and Visigoths and other *goths picking up girls in local bars.

                1. Or raping them after the battle.
                  Sure, there might be some. But remember Portugal is ONE LONG SHORELINE.
                  It’s not just back then. The crusaders who freed Portugal from the Moors were French and German (And the French at the time were Germanic-tribesmen, mostly. Franks.) The French and the English tramped all over as recently as the 18th/19th century.
                  And the North of Portugal was part of the Celtic commonwealth and had trading with Ireland from… oh, the 4th? century bc.?
                  It’s not surprising there are blonds. The amazing thing is how it reverted to fairly dark.

                  1. Yeah, I’m certain the *goth definition of “picking up girls” is something else that was different than that phrase means now.

                    The corpse with straw hair bit from a Roman screed I read complaining about all those germanic barbarians working in the city, so I’m sure it was over the top, but the fact that a major portion of the empire was ex-Celt means that there were plenty of respectable Roman citizens with northern heritage.

                    Re Portugal, as I understand it the place gets washed over with a new wave of invaders regularly all the way back to as far back as they can figure out, at least as far as the horse-people wave in pre-pre-prehistory. I guess the reemergence and dominance of the same form means, like the way feral dogs always trend back to the same form, that that Mediterranean form of human is the mean as long as we’re not currently running a glaciation cycle.

                    1. Portugal and my own DNA if 23 and Me is to be believed is a hodge podge. I mean I EXPECTED Congo (and the specific area is right. BUT Amerindian? WTF great great great grand? Did you get a take-out bag? I mean, it’s not a ton and probably 6 gens back. But still more Indian than Elizabeth Warren.)
                      My kids call it the welcome mat of Europe where everyone wipes their DNA.
                      My husband calls it the reservoir tip of Europe.

  34. I keep forgetting to remark on this, but, the ‘everybody knows’ that everyone in the US is starving etc etc, was big in East Berlin, ‘because capitalism meant you worked hard for such small pay so the rich got richer off you.’ And it’s the same mindless drivel you get from the same millenials and hippies and current gen socialist/communists who post from their iPhones and Apple laptops and howl incoherently that socialism is the answer to everything including mitigating the increased C02 emmissions from volcanic eruptions. Same mental vomit, coming from the richest most immature ‘adults’ on the planet. Bernie never had to endure the breadlines he says are so amazing, or eat the hard bread sold at those lines, I’m sure.

    I remember those state authorized stores. I had access to them as a diplomat’s kid, and they had ‘luxury goods.’ Belgian chocolate was a common one, and is the one I recall the most personally because I remember going in there to buy a box to give to my mom, ‘because Mom likes the seashell chocolate’ and my friend wasn’t really allowed to go in but the woman at the store couldn’t tell me no. I bought a box for my friend too, and in my childish innocence didn’t think it was special. Apparently it was for her and her family.

  35. Everybody knows that Bloomberg thought he bought himself a safely anti-gun assembly in VA.

    Apparently, Bloomberg didnt realize the VA is not NY.

Comments are closed.