Anger

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

boogaloo

Yesterday there was a comment by someone here about how he wanted blood on the streets.

Sure. we all want blood on the streets. In a general and metaphorical way. Except some of us have seen blood on the streets. And those of us who have don’t want it.

Now is avoiding blood on the streets consigning ourselves and our children to the type of hell other countries have gone through for three generations?  I don’t know. It might not even be possible for people like me. It’s always a bad sign when I wake up strangling the bed clothes and shaking them, which is the reason I’ve been up for two hours now and it’s not even 8 am.  It’s a sign the anger is starting leak around the edges. And we’re nowhere at the level of oppression going on in Venezuela or even vaguely approaching the crap people put up with for 70 years plus in the USSR.

However people who lived in the USSR and people from Poland, say, might very well tell you it was worth to keep their heads down and quiet until they could be free again. After all if you’re dead you’ll never see freedom again anyway.

Which is fine, but being a live lamb might not be possible for most Americans in this day and age.

This in turn brings me to why we’re angry.

We’re angry because this is a gross violation of our country as constituted, our country as we’re committed to, our country as a country of laws.

Read that paragraph again. And realize that the fashionable habit these days of adopting a pose of the “the republic is gone, gone, gone” is bullshit.  The only people who can think that are people who have never lived in another country as one of them.

I know. I did. And I remember thinking Americans were completely insane. I remember it as through a glass darkly, from the other side of acculturation. But that person and I did share a brain, and I remember my utter bafflement at the American people being mad at taxes — because well, every country levies taxes, right? It’s the price to pay for civilization? — and at American people being furious that the government wanted to take their guns away — what is it with Americans and guns, anyway? The government always takes people’s guns away, to keep them safe! — and at Americans getting all hot under the collar at the idea of a national id card, and…

I also remember coming to the states and being baffled and astonished at people leaving stuff outside, just lying there, and no one stealing it.  And at the way you didn’t bribe the police at a traffic stop. And at the amazing amount of civility in everyday life.

Eventually I realized those were two sides of the same coin.  The respect for the law in the US, specifically the respect for our fundational law of the constitution is woven all the way through.

Which is why places like Chicago of St. Louis, or other places where corruption is naked and in your face are jokes and bywords here. In the rest of the world with the exception of certain anglophone parts of the world, they’re “Saturday Night.”

And it’s why we’re outraged, frothing mad, chomping at the bit.

Look, let’s level set: I’m waiting for the boss over at instapundit to tell me I stepped over the line with my intimation that I want everyone who was/is involved in this attempted coup (against we the people who voted for Trump as president,) to be hanged, cut down while still living and their entrails burned before their eyes.

For those who didn’t get the reference, it was actually the Elizabethan punishment for heresy/treason, since the two were enmeshed in that era, and as such it fits the crime against the most basic beliefs that make us a nation.  So, yeah, as graphic as that was, it was a reference joke. And I was being a nerd.

On the other hand, the reason that joke was made was that a part of me is frothing at the mouth furious and has nowhere to put it.

Because the guy who jacks your car might be showing a lack of respect for the law, but he’s not in elected office, and he most likely hasn’t sworn to defend the constitution. BUT most importantly he’s probably not doing it in the full light of day. His reach is limited.  The assclowns in government right now, however, are screaming from the rooftops that they’re no longer our countrymen and they don’t want to live by the very same constitution they swore to protect.

And we’re not stupid. I’m no dumber than the next person.  The immediate reaction is to view them as enemies, domestic. Which they are.

The anger has been building too. It started during the Obama administration with Fast and Furious, with Benghazi, with Hillary walking free after sharing state secrets with the Russians, with people not fully realizing the enormity of the Iran deal which might meet the definition of treason.

So, Sarah, given you’re as angry as anyone about this, how come you tell us we shouldn’t start the dance.

Because once the dance starts you have no idea how it will go. You might think you do, but you don’t. You might think that you have all the guns, and sure you do, but do you have all the indoctrinated youngsters willing to commit unspeakable crimes for you? Because the left does. And sure, most of those are useless, but not all. Psychopaths always thrive in this type of situation.

So, I’m a coward then?

No. Not for myself. I am a coward for the republic, and for future generations.  And don’t tell me the republic doesn’t exist anymore.  Do you think that it’s EVER existed as intended?  Do you think men suddenly became angels and behaved perfectly according to the law?

If you think that the current abuses — egregious as they are — are the first of their kind against our laws and founding, you either don’t know history, or you really believed the unified mass media all through the 20th century.

Find contemporary writings and read them. More importantly analyze them.

The violations against the Republic, big and small, have been going on since we were founded. And yes, we came back from most of them.

We are now at the very beginning of a very LONG course to come back from the bullsh*t perpetrated upon the nation by Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

Look, just because we’re a constitutional republic, we’re not immune from the trends of thought and technology of the time we live in.  And in the twentieth century the way of the future was a big centralized government with the power to plan everything.

Woodrow Wilson and FDR were “modernizing” the country to “compete” against the behemoths of the day. They thought.

What they did was nearly annihilate the republic.

But the only reason you know that, the only reason you don’t revere their memories is because the times they are achanging and you have access to other means of information.

The fact we’re this angry, the fact that the shampeachment has lost any and all hint of legitimacy to the point they’re now thinking of not sending it to the senate because reasons; the fact that the stand off in Virginia is a powder keg; the fact that we want heads on pikes is paradoxically proof that the Republic still exists and that things are getting better.

Before you become a Boojahideen, consider that fifty years ago, with the information that would be available to the people then, Obama would be considered a national hero, who had brought us summer of recovery. It would be in school books and no one would even doubt it.  Consider the Shampeachment would sound very important and real and we the few who doubted it wouldn’t dare open our mouths for fear of being thought crazy.

The culture war takes time. Frankly, we’ve come so far so fast that I’m shocked. I’m shocked that I’m not alone in my anger.  At the same time I’m even more shocked that people in Europe, who I thought were so far gone as not to have a sign of self determination, are rebelling against their internationalist socialist masters.

Our anger against the current outrageous abuses demands simple, immediate solutions. Heads on pikes. Blood in the streets.

But that’s the way to lose simply. It’s the way to make the whole context: who is more ruthless, determined and has better weapons or can get in foreign mercenaries with better weapons?  Not: who can govern best under the law of the land?

First of all if the dance starts say hello to the Balkans, because it will burn long enough and hot enough to destroy everything you love. It might last way past the time a memory of the Constitution remains.  It will also be seized upon as a reason the Constitutional Republic was a failure.  Just as any aggression initiation on the right will be seized on as a reason for complete repression. (What are you guys? Stupid? Why do you want to do what the left keeps praying for every time there’s a mass shooting? Why do you want to be a “right wing terrorist?”)

No, this doesn’t mean being quiet forever. No it doesn’t mean we’ve already lost.

Impatience is not a civic virtue.  Those who yell about the first revolution don’t seem to realize how LONG that fuse burned. Nor that a great part of the legitimacy of the revolution was that they’d TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE. They’d been reasonable and trying to reign back abuses for DECADES.

Americans are slow to war. We’re a people of law. Also we’re hells own bastards when the war starts, so it’s well that we delay.

Yes, the current abuses are egregious.  Perhaps not the most egregious ones (trust me on this, okay?) but the most nakedly so.

The idiots and their shampeachment and their socialism-gargling candidates are nakedly, in the full light of day, trying to destroy everything we are and everything we believe.

Understand they’re doing that, because they’re desperate. They’re insane with anger. Baffled that what they’ve always done is suddenly not working.

And they’re losing. They’re losing at pretty much everything and showing themselves as incompetent ass clowns in the bargain.

Taking this thing hot now is to give them a dignity they don’t deserve. Do you remember the end of Princess Bride? Let them stay alive and listen to the laughter of derision, and know the Republic lives past them, and that we’re still Americans. Let them know they failed.

Now, should the elections go sideways with truly massive naked fraud; should they try one of their clever idiot tricks to put say Nancy Pelosi in as president, well then… the situation will be different then.

But we’ll have done all we can to preserve the Republic, first.  And then if we lose it, it remains only to keep the idea alive till another generation can pick it up.

Take no counsel of your anger. It is not a wise counselor.

As much of the Republic of Laws as is lost, it was lost before I was even born.  And yet, even flawed and maimed it is the best thing humanity has ever created.

Take no counsel of your fears. They’re lousy counselors.

Yes, there will be reverses, there will be battles lost, but we’ve turned the corner on the culture war. It is as yet a small and tentative corner, and most of our youngsters are still indoctrinated into oikophobia and socialism.  But it is changing.  In something as big as a culture, n a country as complex as the US, it takes time to change.

Speaking out is not glamorous.  And yes, it will cost you many things.

But before we consign the last best thing on Earth to the chancy flames of revolution, don’t you feel we should give the current cultural revolt a chance to succeed?

We can always have heads on pikes tomorrow. But once we’ve set the country on fire, we can’t get it whole again.

 

495 thoughts on “Anger”

  1. My problem is that “Anger When You Don’t See What You Can Do” is harmful to me.

    I can’t reach out and Whack Her Infernal Majesty Pelosi & her minions (for example).

    I can’t reach out and Whack those idiot Virginia Damn-ocrats.

    And so forth. 😡

    3. “If thou wouldst have peace, prepare for war”

      If you feel so angry that you just have to do *something* — prepare. What will you *actually do* if the cold civil war turns hot? Are you in physical shape? Do you use a weapon, and if so, are you in practice? Do you have the supplies laid by to deal with a period of civil disorder? Are you prepared to come back, to find your home burned down, your job gone because of something you said? Financially? Psychologically?

      Do you have a place to run to? Or are you going to stand where you are? Do you know your neighbors? Know where they stand? Do you have a neighborhood watch? A civil air patrol? Friends with the local National Guard?

      The surest guard against the civil war going hot is making sure the “correlation of forces” is in our favor. Deterrence is cheaper than warfare, even when deterrence is expensive. I don’t mean jingoism. I don’t even mean letting anyone know. I mean being ready.

      No one with a full time job is going to do all of these things, and I certainly don’t. But everyone can do *something*. There are always survivors. Be ready to be one. There is always a resistance. Be ready to be one. Civil wars have two sides — be ready to be an asset to yours. And the more that “everyone knows” that this is so — the more that “everyone knows” that if cold war goes hot, then we win, they lose — the less likely that a shot will ever have to be fired in anger, the more likely they are to use ballots rather than bullets.

      1. And if you’re older and can’t get in shape, consider taking a course to be useful in medical emergencies.
        Meanwhile, Anonymous, we don’t allow that tag. Your tag CAN be made up, but you need a tag for your comments here.

        1. Oooh, maybe we could make a list of ‘nyms so folks don’t have to worry about the one they choose giving too many hints about them?

          Examples:
          A-Nonny-Nonny
          Breakini’ 2020 (alluding to Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, a 1984 movie)
          Done&Draggin’ (D&D/tired pun)

            1. There’s so many good ones, though, why not offer them Free To A Good Home?

              Oooh, Q-ute? Q-te? Implying “cute” and Q, Trek or Bond depending on the pic used.

                    3. Dork, Dork, Dork, Dork of Earl
                      Dork, Dork, Dork of Earl
                      Dork, Dork, Dork of Earl
                      Dork, Dork, Dork of Earl

                      Dork, Dork, Dork, Dork of Earl
                      Dork, Dork, Dork of Earl
                      Dork, Dork, Dork of Earl
                      Dork, Dork, Dork of Earl

                      As I-I walk through this world
                      Nothing can stop The Dork of Earl
                      And-a you, you are my girl
                      And no one can hurt you, oh no

                      Yes, a-I, oh, I’m gonna love you
                      Oh, oh
                      Come on let me hold you, darling
                      ‘Cause I’m the Dork of Earl
                      So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and …

              2. It’s a whole ‘nother set of weeds to use q-headed anonymous tags because reasons. OTOH, it’s a fascinating rabbit hole.

          2. I’ve used the same nym (and variants) for so long now, I can’t remember what my real name is…

            1. Yep, pretty much the same for me. I recall a couple of ancient ‘nyms that might only be recognized by systems running clay tablet discs.

      2. “What will you *actually do* if the cold civil war turns hot?
        Are you in physical shape?
        Do you use a weapon, and if so, are you in practice?
        Do you have the supplies laid by to deal with a period of civil disorder?
        Are you prepared to come back, to find your home burned down, your job gone because of something you said?
        Financially?
        Psychologically?
        Do you have a place to run to? Or are you going to stand where you are? Do you know your neighbors?
        Know where they stand?
        Do you have a neighborhood watch?
        A civil air patrol?
        Friends with the local National Guard?”

        First rule of revolting:
        Never admit to revolting.

        1. One sad fact about a lot of civil wars & revolutions is that a lot of the people don’t get to pick their side.
          The Impessment Gang is here, and either you can join up, or you and your family can die right this minute.
          You may think that you can take off later, but state security apparatus knows where your family is. You better start showing more enthusiasm for the zampolit’s speeches if you know what’s good for you, comrade.

      3. I occasionally forget. I’ll make up a handle for comments I feel need anonymity. Perhaps MycroftXXX

        1. Try to have the courage of Patrick Henry.
          Besides, the feds can track down just about anyone in the U.S. if they have enough incentive to do so.

        2. That’s good.

          The problem with “Anonymous” IMO is that we don’t know “which” Anonymous is posting. 😀

            2. I recall anonimouse/anonymouse/anony-mouse somewhere. mouse/mousy for short
              Don’t think it was TBTSNBN. Maybe Shadowfall or Elflife.
              Used to chat with an Anonymoose as well. Bullwinkle was his avatar.

        3. Heh. I’m bringing a (very) used refurbed Dell box up on Linux, and it got named Mycroft. It even has the fortune(1) program to tell bad jokes.

    4. I tried to jack a car, but my arm got tired.

      Great post. I’ve lost the will to convince the stupid, ignorant, and insane among us who have seen the major players in action for decades and still can’t get their intellectual act together, but I think the weight of public opinion has already turned and is about to become undeniable. I attack Marxism where I find it, but not the people who embrace it. I won’t trust them ever again, but I don’t hate them.

  2. “Yesterday there was a comment by someone here about how he wanted blood on the streets.
    Sure. we all want blood on the streets. In a general and metaphorical way. Except some of us have seen blood on the streets. And those of us who have don’t want it.”

    Yes, that’s right. There’s always some IDIOT baying for blood. Anybody who’s ever seen actual blood knows how big an idiot that guy is.

    I prefer to learn from other people’s mistakes, rather than my own. You want to see how “blood in the streets” turns out, just have a look at the Middle East. Its a blood stain that goes from the Mediterranean coast all the fucking way to India.

    So no, blood in the streets is not a good idea, and I will be working to see that it doesn’t happen in my own small way.

    I will also be upgrading all my shit so that idiots baying for blood think twice about trying to take any of mine. I guarantee it will be -expensive-.

    For no particular reason I will now mention Sword Buyer’s Guide, and the completely uninteresting fact that them things never jam.

    Go in peace my children, and remember that an armed society is a polite society.

    1. Here we go, in the right place this time.

      I’ve always adhered to the concept that you should never start a fight unless you know how you want it to end. That includes all the fights I got into as a kid. Doesn’t mean you’re going to win the fight; just that you know what you’re doing if and when you do win it. (And what you’re going to have to eat if you lose it.) It’s also why I’m against bloody revolution without a hard and fast statement of goals and intentions, and an organization dedicated to carrying them out if the opportunity drops in their laps.

      “We” are likely to win any open civil war with the Democrat-Progressive-Left. The problem is, just who are going to be the “We”? Are “we” going to simply clear the deck and start over with the same Constitution? Are “we” going to revise the Constitution with more restrictions on the government, or are “we” going to revise the Constitution to make “us” richer and more powerful? Who is “we” and “us”? The GOP? Which part? The elite masters running it already? The Tea Party? Aryan Nation? Westboro Baptist Church? The Hoydens? Only a couple of those would be bearable, the others would be worse than what we currently have.

      1. Once you cross a particular revolutionary event horizon, personalities become far far more important than ideology.
        One can hope that the person (and it’s inevitably going to be one single person) who wins is influenced by good ideals and not corrupted by power.
        However, Cincinnatus and Washington are extraordinarily rare individuals.
        We got super lucky the first time, Divinely blessed even. We won’t be so lucky the next time.

    2. Be careful of the volk baying for blood; they’re often agent provocateurs.

      There was a saying in the radical groups of the 60s/70s: “The person calling loudest for violent action is always the FBI plant.”
      (Or words to that effect.)

      1. Same with KKK meetings during the same period. If you’re not an FBI informer, look to your left and right to see who is.

        1. knew a DEA guy who told us of a bust by DEA undercover guys, and the “dealers” they were busting turned out to be undercover cops, and the informant was the one person who figured it out instantly.

          1. Way back when one of the Wayans brothers had his own show (with actual scripts; it wasn’t stand-up or a talk show), one of the episodes ended with his undercover cop character making the arrest only to discover that the guy he was arresting was an undercover agent from a different department. And the guy’s secretary that Wayan’s character had started dating was an undercover agent from a third department.

            1. While this sounds crazy and wasteful– remember the most effective way to be a criminal is to subvert law enforcement. And a single leak can compromise an entire organization.

              If you have a bunch of different law enforcement groups all going on their own route, only occasionally working together– it’s MUCH harder to beat the cops.

              (see also, Citizens’ Arrest and the benefits of concealed carry)

              1. From recent history much easier to just be LE rather than subvert.

                And concern isn’t as much the occasional snares catching each other as the concern that agencies make up significant percentages of “hate groups” that are then used as excuses to crack down on subjects of the DCenizens

                1. If you are in law enforcement, and are using it as a weapon, you’re subverting it.

                  Of course, I notice that a lot of the folks trying to declare that hate groups are all ___ tend to throw in call the cases where they catch the bad guy by pretending to be willing to sell weapons. Apparently we’re supposed to let them blow people up and THEN catch them, rather than sell the fake bombs and arrest the guys while they’re planting the fake bomb.

            2. after realizing what was going on they tried to keep up the act, but A: said informant knew the jig was up and was cackling like a rooster B: they were rotten actors it seems. Both groups of undercovers ended up not being such any longer.
              My uncle’s cover was blown once (back in the 70’s) and he was poisoned. Spent a long time in the hospital from it.

      4. A good recent example of that would be the organizers of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest. And they didn’t actually have to “incite” anything, just put a bunch of right-wingers (and not-so-right wingers) within punching distance of a bunch of Antifa and let nature take its course . . . and then selectively prosecute the combatants afterward.

        Which is one reason people attending the upcoming Second Amendment rallies in Richmond should take care, given the track record the Democrat powers-that-be in VA have already established for squelching and defaming conservative opposition.

        1. Nature had nothing to do with it. The violence in Charlottesville was carefully arranged for.

          Now an independent report has come out, suggesting that much of the blame for the clashes, injuries and death lies with poor police work by the Charlottesville Police Department, the Virginia State Police and the University of Virginia Police.

          The report, authored by former U.S. attorney Timothy Heaphy for the Charlottesville City Council, found, as reported by USA Today:

          • Charlottesville police didn’t ensure separation between counter-protesters and so called alt-right protesters upset with the city council’s decision to remove the Robert E. Lee statue from Emancipation Park.

          • Officers weren’t stationed along routes to the park, but instead remained behind barricades in relatively empty zones.

          • City police didn’t adequately coordinate with Virginia State Police, and authorities were unable to communicate via radio.

          • State police didn’t share a formal planning document with city police, “a crucial failure.”

          • Officers were inadequately equipped to respond to the clashes between the two groups, and tactical gear was not accessible to officers.

          Furthermore, though no specific evidence of a “stand down” order was found, as some have charged, the report did find that police didn’t do their jobs: “We did not find evidence of a direct order to officers to ‘stand down’ and not respond to fights and other disorders. Even if there was no explicit ‘stand down’ order in place, CPD and VSP both failed to ‘stand up’ to protect human life.” Areas where conflict could be expected to occur didn’t have police officers assigned to them; areas where police officers were stationed were out of the way.

          When violence first broke out, according to two witnesses Chief Thomas reportedly said “let them fight, it will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.”

          When the police finally decided to shut the rally down, they did it in a way that forced the protesters and counterprotesters into each other, instead of separating them, making violence far more likely. Meanwhile police who could have deescalated the violence stood aside.

          http://tinyurl.com/ybvbpeut

          And when I say “set up”, I mean conspiracy to facilitate murder, at the very least.

          Dixon bragged on Facebook about confronting James Fields with an AR-15 rifle, moments before Fields drove his car into a crowd of protesters at the Charlottesville, Virginia protests (and in doing so, perhaps pushing Fields’s emotions past the point of reason). During Fields’s trial, though, Dixon changed his story, claiming it was not Fields’s car he approached with his weapon, but another one.

          https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/07/unc-chapel-hill-a-sanctuary-campus-for-terroristic-radicals-on-the-taxpayers-dime/

          An AR-15 is not a concealed carry gun. How did he get it into the area without the assistance of one or more of the law enforcement agencies whose connivance in ensuring that the Antifa mob would be allowed to assault the protesters who had a permit?

    3. Thanks for the SBG tip, and a reminder that bows are quiet and lethal and so far unregulated, not to mention fun to make.

  3. No, it would be wrong to hope for “blood in the streets.” That having been said: We are at the end of “a long train of abuses,” all of them perpetrated by persons endowed with public offices and the public’s trust. The abuses appear to have reached the edge of the revolutionary abyss.

    The need for change becomes even more imperative, the risk of waiting-and-seeing that much riskier, when we look at such matters as what’s going down in Virginia. Who would suggest that Virginian gun owners “wait and see” how the Tyrant Northam’s plans will turn out?

    I don’t want “blood in the streets,” but we don’t have a lot of chances to avert it any longer.

    1. The guys in 1776 didn’t want blood in the streets either.

      There were a number of causal factors for the Revolution, but the most important one was that George III’s governors and judges operated in his name, but with caprice and lack of accountability.

      Buddy, we got that in spades right now. But while the King was far away and simply didn’t care, Congress is actively working against the country it is supposed to represent.

      I could cut and paste each relevant paragraph from the Declaration of Independence, where Congress is committing the same acts as George III, but I figure most people here are already familiar with the document.

      1. Think the list of terribles was surpassed years ago by our homegrown kings. At least a decent percentage of the kings taxes and such could be traced to a specific costs borne by the crown on behalf of the colonies. Here its costs that the rulers need to be able to enrich themselves, allies, and voters. As well as just straight up harm their enemies just because.

  4. In some ways, it could be argued that I was born into this fight. Essentially not, because I was slow to realize that my grandparents were right, and my parents were slow to realize how right my grandparents were.

    There are victories in small things, and we will always lose in big things when we neglect the small things.

  5. George Washington was certainly not without fault. After all, he owned slaves, and I understand there were some rumors about creative accounting as regards his expense account while POTUS.
    But the one thing he did for which I shall always hold him upon a pedestal as the finest President ever is simply this: he was offered an empire, and turned it down in favor of a Republic, and after serving two terms as its leader stepped down to grow some crops, brew a bit of whiskey, and enjoy the fruits of his hard and significant labors.
    Side note, it is extremely difficult to amend the US Constitution, all sorts of hoops to thread, worse than herding cats. Yet once FDR violated the gentleman’s agreement to self limit to two terms the people rammed an amendment through specifically to ensure that such chit could not ever happen again.

    1. At that point, the President didn’t *have* an expense account. Or a salary. A lot of Washington’s complaints at the time had to do with all the people who showed up and expected to have a party thrown for them, and how it really wasn’t doing his finances any favors. (Mind you, he had the typical-for-the-time Virginian style of keeping up with the neighbors through credit—the Revolution made that unfeasible, and it’s hard to learn fiscal stability late in life.)

      1. “he had the typical-for-the-time Virginian style of keeping up with the neighbors through credit”

        Loath though I am to dispute so minor a point, I must disagree here. Washington, from a background of genteel poverty as a cadet son of a not well-to-do family, married into wealth and quickly figured out that selling to British tobacconists and buying on credit from British manufacturers was a never-ending sinkhole into an abyss of debt.

        Which is why Washington, virtually alone among the Virginia planters, did his best to diversify his income sources and minimizing his reliance on imported goods even to the point of distilling his own whiskey

        The mash bill, or recipe, was discovered by researchers examining the distillery ledgers for 1798 and 1799. His whiskey consisted of 60% rye, 35% corn and 5% malted barley. The records also indicate that George Washington’s whiskey was distilled at least twice before being sent to market. In Washington’s time whiskey was not aged and was sold in its original form.
        https://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/distillery/distilled-spirits-at-mount-vernon/george-washington-whiskey-gift-set/

        This understanding is what made him so able to comprehend Hamilton’s mercantilist arguments and reject the economic policies of Jefferson and his supporters.

    2. Washington did have a salary. (US Constitution, Article II, section 7 clause 7). I had read (don’t have source handy) that he had proposed declining it and receiving only compensation for his expenses, but when the expenses started turning out to be greater than his salary, accepted the salary instead. Either way, he wasn’t in it for profit at public expense.

    3. The expense account thing was when he was general, where IIRC he made a deal with the Continental Congress not to take a salary so long as they picked up expenses.

      1. And the Continental Congress purely suuuuuuucked at picking up the tab. At least in large part because, well, they were a “new nation” with no credit, no allies, and no recognized form of currency.

        Washington sometimes (especially then) got a lot of blame for not winning any battles early on. Well, how could he? Not only could he not pay his men, he couldn’t clothe, arm, or really even feed them until France came through with the first shipments of arms, munitions, and supplies.

        The first guy they sent to France to lay the grounds for the alliance got thoroughly screwed over by the Congress as well (also because of political machinations and the fact that one particular dude from a trio of powerful Virginia brothers took an unreasoning dislike of him). And got that same charge of “messing with the account books” even though he used his own money, Congress never coughed up more than a token payment (which was worthless, since the Continental dollar meant nothing), and had also told him to keep his cover as “just a merchant” intact and so he hid his transactions with the French government in amongst the regular trading in his account books.

        (I must remember, when I start to bitch about our government’s inability to parse fiscal responsibility, that this is really not a new thing for them. They have NEVER managed it at all well.)

        1. Parliament tried a particularly troublesome set of approaches to fiscal responsibility, back when America was British, but given that those led to the American Revolution…

          1. Back at that time, the real power was still in the House of Lords. If the British aristocracy hadn’t treated the colonials as hicks and yokels who didn’t appreciate all their betters were doing for them and dismissed their complaints, they wouldn’t have had so much trouble. But then, they wouldn’t have been aristocrats…

        2. Name me a government that has.

          “Who shall doubt “the secret hid
          Under Cheops’ pyramid”
          Was that the contractor did
          Cheops out of several millions?
          Or that Joseph’s sudden rise
          To Comptroller of Supplies
          Was a fraud of monstrous size
          On King Pharaoh’s swart Civilians?

          Thus, the artless songs I sing
          Do not deal with anything
          New or never said before.
          As it was in the beginning
          Is to-day official sinning,
          And shall be for evermore!”

          https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/general_summary.html

          1. It does seem that “ability to waste astronomical amounts of money” and “weasel out of paying the bills” is a prerequisite for being a government of any kind.

    4. I have sent a letter to some of the Arizona representatives, and McSally, proposing that an Amendment should be added that requires a 2/3rd vote in the House to impeach – same as the Senate to actually convict. That would have shut this circus down before it even got started (yes, the Dems would still have Al put up his obligatory impeachment motion – but it would, at the most, have survived committee, if that). Next one I send to my State Representative will ask to have that added to the next Article V resolution they submit.

      Of course, that is grasping only a very small corner of the tapestry of corruption in DC.

      1. Thing is, impeachment is supposed to be easy, but conviction is supposed to be hard. I think the Founders wanted POTUSes to be careful about what they did, so they made it easy for the House to express its displeasure and tie them up in impeachment proceedings, but they also didn’t want the office to turn into a revolving door, which is why they made it so hard for the Senate to compete.

        1. Your analysis of the Founders intent is spot on!

          The environment, however, has changed since those days. The purpose of this farce (which, if they retain the House, will continue indefinitely) is to tie up an Administration which they disagree with.

          The Founders (most of them) realized that this obstruction of one party by the political opposition would certainly happen, but they expected it would be legislative obstruction, not interference with the daily workings of the executive branch.

          1. At the time the executive branch actions would have also been either de minimis or performed by people brought in by the president. The rise of the bureaucracy means that Republicans can be obstructed in terms of duties by legislators while the leftists in bureaucracy carry on the work in complete opposition to the actual elected officials.

      2. I regret pulling this straw from your grasp, but it requires a Constitutional amendment to enact that change, an amendment which would have to be passed by three-fourths of the States (38 of 50 States).

        So, if you count off at least thirteen states unlikely, under the present circumstances, to support such an amendment you will realize it is merely a spinning of wheels to register outrage but unlikely to have permanent effect.

        California
        New York
        Illinois
        Oregon
        Washington
        Massachusetts
        Nevada
        Meh – complete the list yourself:

        A closer analysis, looking at the states in which the GOP controls both legislature and executive branches might, might find a path to passage, but I doubt it — it wouldn’t take many [RINOs and/or Constitutionalists] in the states to derail such an effort, especially if there is an intervening election for Soros & Co. to weaponize the issue. Best route is comprehensive targeting of ALL representatives who voted for impeachment, attacking them for abusing power and violating Constitutional norms … something the Republican Party is likely incompetent to manage.

        Typical Leftish procedure: refuse to “normalize” Trump’s presidency, then impeach him for not being a normal president.

  6. > shampeachment

    A few weeks ago I noticed that most of the media seemed to be operating under the unspoken assumption that if they managed to impeach DJT, a Democrat would then replace him.

    I guess despite the offices they hold, they’re so unfamiliar with the Constitution they don’t realize that would make Mike Pence President, and another Republican would fill his old office.

    I also note that Mike Pence has been really, really quiet. The Left attacked him for his policies on women in the workplace, and they organized the people who booed at him when he opened a ball game back in November of ’16. After that, crickets.

    Pence knows “CYA” backward and forward; his whole family lives it. He is about as clean as it’s possible for a politician to be. And we’ve seen he plans for the long term, and he has a bit of a temper. Other than that, he’s a political cipher.

    Pence might spend his year just holding things together until the next election. Or he might their worse nightmare.

    In HP Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” a sorceror reanimates the dead to learn their secrets. And when he finds the body of an ancient sorceror of great power, he thinks he hit the jackpot.

    It turned out to be a really bad idea, and he learned he should have heeded the part of the grimoire that warned,

    “As I told you longe ago, do not calle up That which you can not put downe; either from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres beyond.”

    Otherwise known as, “Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”

    1. It doesn’t matter how well Pence knows CYA, they’re coming after him anyway should shampeachment work. Nadler issued a public statement yesterday about it that they’re coming after him too.

      These clowns would impeach Jesus for being mean to the moneychangers.

      1. They’ve not removed Trump from office in three years of trying. As long as Presidents keep appointing Vice Presidents before being removed, it will be Republicans. Sooner or later there will be a Republican President who will fight harder, and people who will back them.

        1. I suspect that the Democrats would find out that they traded a pussy cat for a wolverine if they oust Trump and end up with Pence. Pence is quiet if nobody is poking him. I also suspect that if you piss him off and he will take your arm off at the neck. And whatever you do, do NOT go after his family.

            1. LOL! First I’ve heard of these, much less seen them.

              And no, I don’t think Pence is “rabidly” anti-homophobic. But he doesn’t see any reason to make them a privileged class either. It’s possible he holds a similar attitude that I have; just treat them like normal people, but absolutely no additional benefits because too many people engaged in the LGBTQ lifestyle would probably be detrimental to this nation and society as a whole.

              1. For these folks, that is homophobic. Apparently Rowling been getting some 2 minutes hate for insufficient lgbtqwerty support.

                1. Stop talking sense; internet trolls have an opportunity to convince people that Rowling’s purpose was to suggest that Dumbledore’s preference was the major cause of both the Grindlewald and Voldemort messes.

                  1. Claiming that surgery and hormone treatments cannot fully convert an individual born with one sex into a reproductively functional person of the other is hate speech. So is claiming that someone shouldn’t get fired for expressing such hateful opinion. Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational tolerance.

                    1. Remember, reproductive functionality is not the goal. Leftists are typically anti-reproduction in general, so they definitely favor the transition into something they can (theoretically) have sex with without having to worry about that nasty fertility thing.

                      The fact that the process typically involves the destruction of male organs is merely a plus, and probably why they hardly make any noise about FtM trannies.

                    1. From that lot? Hahahahhaha, no.

                      They’re at the point that everything triggers them. They only clung to HP because it was ‘beloved childhood book.’ But everything else is badthink, and they won’t read it. And now their idol has “betrayed” them by refusing to kowtow to the demands of lunatics.

                      I throw my hands up when they declare that someone saying “Look, you can dress how you like and claim to be whatever gender you like, but firing someone for pointing out basic facts and truth–that there is NO magic wand that will make you genetically of the opposite sex–isn’t right” is hate speech. This is NOT a group inclined to buy different books, because they might, gasp(!), encounter a different viewpoint to theirs!

                    2. To fair to them, they’ve been made afraid of unapproved ideas.
                      I saw this with my kids going through school. Blurt an idea or accidental original thought not just a regurgitated, dictated truthiness, and the consequences were insane and all out of proportion.
                      So they’re traumatized and have PTSD at the very intimation of a different thought. It might not be approved of, and then they get the stick.
                      This is much like some prisoners of war. It takes years, sometimes decades to get over it. And possibly not when your job and livelihood are at stake if you break programming.
                      In case you wonder why so many young ones are miserable. The supressed returns and rages silently inside.

              2. 1. Treating them like normal people instead of victims of centuries of unspeakable oppression denies their rightful victim status and does nothing to compensate their terrors.

                2. Pence must be recognized as rabidly homophobic otherwise Mayer Pete Bootyjudge cannot stride forth as savior of social justice. If Pence is not a monster then Mayor Pete is not St. George.

        2. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take the office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress.

          So if they get John-Roberts-photos on enough Senators to remove DJT then they have to go through the whole shebang again to try and remove Pence, and in the meantime the new VP-nominee the Pence picks has to get a majority in both the House as well as the Senate.

          If shenanigans like delaying any confirmation of VP while pursuing Pence so Nancy gets in happen, that is when the chances go way, way up for the blood-in-the-streets scenario.

          2. I think at that point the chances are about asymptotically one. Possibly even with the nominal live boy/ dead girl

          3. Interestingly other games are afoot:

            As for the headlines we saw after the House vote saying, “TRUMP IMPEACHED,” those are a media shorthand, not a technically correct legal statement. So far, the House has voted to impeach (future tense) Trump. He isn’t impeached (past tense) until the articles go to the Senate and the House members deliver the message.
            (From the Bloomberg article linked by Insty)

            Which begs the question: Will Nancy hold it until the October Surprise window, or just until January some time?

            1. any wait (and they’ve floated it now) is detrimental to their cause, and it still has to be run past the Senate. The longer they wait the easier it is for the Senate to say it is obviously worthy of outright dismissal. Trump wants a trail. Bet he’d be fine with it running into October. Please don’t toss him into that briar patch!
              Someone thinks if they never give it to the Senate it will tain Trump somehow, but it makes the impeachment the equivalent of a Vermont town condemning GWB for Iraq . . . no one is going to give a rodents rear quarters.

              1. “Someone thinks if they never give it to the Senate it will tain Trump somehow,”

                Even if it is passed along and rejected in the Senate, a future House can vote to expunge the articles. Sure, it would likely be another partisan vote …

      2. I would love to know what they think their basis for that would be. No, seriously – what even remotely objectionable thing has he done in the past few years?

        1. Pence has done the most objectionable thing in the universe to the Democrat-Progressive-Left; he’s refused to bend down and kiss their butts.

          1. Worse than that. He was a Kennedy Democrat who became a Reagan Republican *and* and evangelical Christian. He has principles and keeps his word. Can you imagine a thing more frightening to the dems, other than DJT?

            1. “Just let me throw a barrel at it!” “NO, DASH!!!!”

              (Okay, that was from the “Toby Danger” parody of Johnny Quest that aired on Freakazoid! a couple decades ago.)

        3. He’s Trump’s VP.

          They don’t need any more reason and they’ll attempt to find “official” reasons.

        5. He has advocated archaic patriarchal behaviours which stifled opportunities for professional advancement of women in need of mentoring and men to target with #MeToo allegations.

          The Monster!

          Oh, yes: he refused to declare Trump unfit to be president, thus obstructing activation of the 25th Amendment Protocol removing Hitler 2.0. Wait a moment – Reagan was Hitler 2.0, so Trump must be … lessee, George H W Bush wasn’t Hitler, but his son was, so that makes Trump Hitler 4.0: faster and furiousyer.

  7. When that young idiot (and even if she is a certifiable genius, it doesn’t make her less of an idiot), made that statement about putting the leaders against the wall, my first thought was, “Oh no, she’s just guaranteed that when the time comes (God forbid), she’ll be one of the first people against that wall.”

    It’s possible that the same thought occurred to her handlers, which may explain her sudden retirement.

    I do not want blood in the streets. There is already to much blood there. 😥

    1. One of the first things most successful Revolutions do is shoot the revolutionaries. Especially those who weren’t with Dear Leader from the beginning.
      They did it once, they could do it again.

  8. Because once the dance starts you have no idea how it will go. You might think you do, but you don’t.

    It’s not just the boogaloo itself and how it goes that’s the problem, but the aftermath. Indeed, the worst occurrences are often after the fighting has settled down and the winners settle in to consolidate their power.

    The American revolution was extraoridinary in that the aftermath of the Revolution was relatively peaceful. Yes, there were some folk who used it as an excuse to settle old scores and there was some lashing out at loyalists, but on the whole we as a new nation got along with the business of living our lives and growing the nation.

    But it could so easily have gone differently. Just consider how enthusiastic Thomas Jefferson was in his praise of the French Revolution, which praise extended well into the First Republic and the Reign of Terror. This, indeed, was one of the points of contention between Jefferson and Adams during Adams’ presidency (per McCullough’s biography of John Adams).

    We may have dodged a bullet back then. Even with the deck stacked in our favor–a population long selected for self government, continuity in that self-government from practically the first colonies through the revolution and after, the “tyrannical” practices against which they were revolting being established by outsiders and not that self-government–we still had major figures behind the revolution who considered widespread bloodshed among supporters of the old regime perfectly acceptable. A modest price to pay for “liberty”.

    Would whoever were to win a new revolution pull back from the brink before going full Reign of Terror? I have my doubts, particularly since the problems are not being imposed by an exterior power but are being imposed willfully, or at least negligently, by our own people.

    1. That’s another reason to be “concerned about Anger”.

      It can easily turn into Hatred of those who supported the tyranny or weren’t “vocal enough against the tyranny”. 😦

      I fight my anger because while I “hate” Hatred, I’m fully aware that anger can turn into Hatred (and not always Hatred of the correct target).

    2. I never understood how someone as intelligent as Jefferson couldn’t understand that he’d have had a date with Madame Guillotine.

      1. Sadly, being highly intelligent does NOT preclude one from a.) being an idiot, and b.) having a complete logic fail when one is enamored of An Idea(tm) and so blinding oneself to the Idea’s flaws.

        Possibly Jefferson was a romantic. Seems a lot of romantic-types are STILL enamored of the French Revolution and various offspring.

        1. b) is much, much more likely to happen in the highly intelligent because the intellect falls in love with its own ideas, and doesn’t want to let them go. We cannot be ruled by angels, and the Top Men have done gone and let us down. The best we can do is make sure the Wrong Man for the job does the Right Thing.

          There will never come a point where peace and prosperity are absolutely ensured. We must earn them, and guard them well- from ourselves as well as envious others.

          2. There was a comment made (read it in a John Adams bio) by IIRC Abigail Adams that went “Tom Jefferson would have been happier if somebody paid all the debts he owed to English Merchants”.

            IE Tom Jefferson loved France because the French were the enemies of the people he owed money to.

            I suspect that’s part of the reason he saw the French Revolution through rose-colored glasses.

            1. I imagine there’s also an element of the self-delusion that causes the folks in the blue archipelago to claim that making half a million a year doesn’t kick them out of the middle class or my friend who grew up in a six million pound townhouse in London to sincerely believe he’s not upper class (because his family doesn’t have a title).

              1. Well, I can’t blame a fellow for simple ignorance (willful is another matter entirely). Myself, I thought we were pretty solid lower middle class. In Appalachia this meant we never went hungry in the early spring and sayed in wood all winter, for starters. Folks around us might have been a smidge better or worse off, but nothing big.

                Had I been born to a family in the upper East, I might have grown up similarly insulated. For a while. It’s easy to overlook the little things, like the distant cousins what threw away more stuff than we ever bought because they didn’t take care of things. And nowadays, I know small business owners that do a couple mil a year in gross, but net about the same that I take home myself.

                But I get the point about folks that think a couple hundred or so extra a year is “crumbs.” Or that buying a new car (even if it’s a little four banger) every couple of years means they’re barely scraping by (well, they could be with poor money management. My point is that option doesn’t even exist for a lot of people).

                Ol’ TJ honestly admired the French, and they did come through for us in the Revolution. He really should have known better. Might well have, in his heart of hearts, but kept hoping for the best beyond all reason. He didn’t have quite the access to information we do today, but it *was* there to be found if you looked for it.

    3. Actually, there was considerable lashing out against loyalists during and after the Revolution. Enough so that, when England lost, about 15 percent of the Loyalists (65,000–70,000 people) left the United States. According to Wikipedia, “Historians have estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of the two million whites in the colonies in 1775 were Loyalists (300,000–400,000).”
      I suspect that what the Loyalists endured from their neighbors was much more harsh than what we’ve been enduring from the Progressive Left over the past decade.

      1. And vice versa, and there was also loyalist on loyalist issues. Forex, some of the indian aligned Loyalists killed a Loyalist colonist woman who was girlfriend to a red coat.

      2. First, I wonder how much of that is Zinn-level revisionism. But even allowing it as accurate compare it to the way the supporters of the losing side have been treated in pretty much any other revolution in history.

      3. Most of them moved to Canada — swamping the existing English-speaking colonies. There is a certain amount of historical issues in “We’re not the US!”

        1. And that, kiddies, is why the American attempt to annex Canada in the War of 1812 did not go as anticipated.

          ProTip: if you are planning to occupy a place it is probably not a good idea not to force your dissenters to resettle there.

  9. I will only say it once and will not debate the topic, as I know it sets off too many people: if you haven’t tried an Article V amending convention, you have not yet tried “everything else” short of a civil war.

    2. Except by that point, the amending convention is likely to make matters worse (you can bet first on the agenda would be ridding us of that meddlesome electoral college). And oh, the voter fraud THAT could conjure up…

      1. That my friend, is why you limit it to a single issue, and have all your state buy-in BEFORE going to Congress with it. Because dollars to doughnuts, if Congress had any chance to screw with it, they’ll mess the whole thing up.

        2. The Constitutional Convention was charged with amending the Articles of Confederation. The Federalist Papers argued at length that they had no choice, but there’s no arguing that they vastly exceeded the scope of what they were told to do.

          Hence, your “limit” may not prove very limiting.

    4. drloss, an article V amending convention is only as good as the delegates who can attend it…. and the electoral system used to conduct the ratification vote. Research who made up the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. You don’t find too many who were openly advocating returning America to the Indians and leaving.

  10. My usual answer to anyone WANTING “Blood in the streets” is to ask them to honestly think about the one person they would least likely want to die, then ask them if “Blood in the streets” is worth that person’s life. Because if that particular balloon goes up, nobody is safe. Wives, husbands, children, tiny little babies… All heads are on the chopping block, because civil war isn’t and the ones who are harmed most are always the ones caught in the crossfire.

    This is why we try absolutely everything we can to correct the problem before we start shooting.

    Sadly, that is also why, to be done right, impeachment needs to have a specific, well-defined crime, along with very specific, verifiable evidence. Enough evidence that (very much like the impeachment of Clinton) a portion of the President’s own party votes FOR it, and every part of it needs to be open and honest. The Democrats have forgotten that, or don’t care. The media has forgotten that, or it doesn’t care either (fourth estate my ass).

    When not a single representative of the President’s party votes for the impeachment, that is a SURE sign that it hasn’t been done right. As other’s have pointed out, impeachment does not mean the President’s party loses control of the Whitehouse, so there isn’t the impetus to cover for a criminal President that the media and the Democrats have been pretending.

    If the crime rises to the level where impeachment is the right solution, and the evidence is clear enough that an impeachment has a chance of succeeding, there WOULD be representatives from the President’s own party who would vote for impeachment. That goes DOUBLE for TRUMP. Not less… DOUBLE (if not more). Face it, Trump is an asshole (and yes, it is not lost on me that that is part of why his base loves him). He has insulted, made fun of, and fired enough people, publicly, in enough screwey ways, that there is bound to be Republican Representatives who, if the charges and the evidence were there, would have voted for impeachment.

    1. “Trump is an asshole”

      Definitely. There are enough “Never Trump” in the RINO, heck even those further to the right of Trump, sections (entire intersection of Never Trump), that had there been a whiff of validity to the proceedings, they would have gleefully voted for impeachment. They didn’t. Not only did they not vote for impeachment, they vocally denounced the entire proceedings. They don’t like him. They hate how he does business. They know they still keep their party in the white house. They still voted against impeachment.

      1. “Trump is an asshole”

        Yep. So was that Macedonian kid, Alexander. He “solved” that Gordian Knot problem all wrong.

        1. Right? I don’t want to date him.
          Also I’m not sure that someone who is very polite an apologetic would do us any good now. I don’t in fact know another president who could have survived what’s been thrown at him.
          Sure, I was a Cruz girl. But it turned out we needed Trump. Sometimes the miracles you don’t pray for are the best of all.
          Also frankly, when you look at what these people have been doing, you become an asshole. It’s a good alternative to putting their heads on pikes. And it gives us a chance to maybe restore the republic without wading through blood. Since rivers of blood tend to take the good people with the bad, that’s a good thing.

  11. The Progs have now turned their 2016 grief into Articles of Impeachment which consist of “Mentioning a potential political rival’s name in connection with a request to investigate where billions of aid to Ukraine disappeared to” and “Upholding the Executive’s Constitutional privileges in the face of a Legislative tantrum”.

    They blew their credibility. This will backfire on them.
    And there will be prosecutions once the jots & tittles are taken care of – count on it. DJT isn’t forgetting and evidence there is aplenty.
    Yes, some of the bad actors will skate – but with enough information coming out in the cases that are brought that they will no longer have any power.
    Not as satisfying as the hangman, but that’s how you avoid blood in the streets.

    1. The Durham Reaper is sharpening his scythe. The Democrats are scorching the earth, razing the very hedgerows of Law & Tradition behind which they hope to cower.

  13. I guess I’ll probably be the lone voice of dissent here, but hey, speaking out isn’t glamorous. No, not in the call for blood – I agree that path is as irreversible as it is undesirable.

    But is the Republic still here? I’m not sure I buy the argument that it is. As Adam Smith noted, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation. Being the nation with the most ever to ruin, I’m sure things will continue to appear as a reasonable facsimile of what was for a long time yet to come, but we’ve crossed some new thresholds compared to our history. This is a comment that could go on easily for 5K words as an intro, but I’ll only touch on four-ish main points.

    The first is demographics. This alone deserves 5K words, but suffice it to say the country no longer has a dominant religious character or culture that promotes success or unity. Some mouth breathing idiot will read this as a comment on race because the education system has taught them to do so, which leads to the next point.

    You think alternative or private education systems are free of Leftist pap? Think again. They also comprise a small fraction compared to the public ed system. There’s a reason the vast majority of young voters support impeachment. And they vote – a power they didn’t have back in the old days. This leads to the third point.

    Our legal system no longer functions as it did. The vast majority of the population lives in cities now (that ties back into the first point), those nakedly corrupt shitholes mentioned in the post. The very concept of sanctuary cities is anathema to a republic of laws, but here we are. The dominant ideology held by those in the legal profession is Leftist. Legal pragmatists and living constitutionalists (and their professional organizations) dwarf those who are members of or fans of The Federalist Society or originalism/textualism. The SCOTUS’s own website promotes Living Constitutionalism. Hell, look at the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to see how deep the rejection of republicanism/federalism has gone. Then of course there’s our legally approved voter fraud (which also ties back to demographics.)

    Lastly, the size and scope of the government is orders of magnitude greater than it was compared to history. The out-of-control bureaucracy is quite obviously in control.

    The long march is over, and the Gramscian damage – at least as far as I can tell – is as complete as it is permanent. A majority of the corporate class is completely on board with the “progressive” agenda and willing to act as proxies for leftist government censorship.

    I know that none of this is new or novel to this crowd. I post this for someone to make the argument that our Republic is still functional and reparable, because when I examine the available evidence, I don’t see how we’re voting our way out of this.

    1. The republic IS still there. By contrast to everyone else in the world, wounded and often in the default.
      But we’re fighting to bring it back. Do you want to throw it in the trashheap instead? You want that upon your head?

      1. Do you want to throw [the republic] in the trashheap instead? You want that upon your head?”

        When the defining characteristics of a Republic are gone, I’ll ask again – how are we going to vote our way out of it? This is a serious question and asking it is not calling for abolishing the Republic.

        Someone upthread mentioned an Article V convention. I see this mentioned a lot. Those share a characteristic with revolutions – they might start out one way, but can end up as something unintended. So let’s say we accomplish the unlikely and pass one that gets us what we want (which would be what, by the way?), we have a not-insignificant portion of the country that routinely acts – some in their legislative and official capacities – as if some of the ones we already have don’t even exist. Or they seek to abuse other amendments.

        1. We have formal documents, and like to spell things out explicitly. This confuses us, because we had the essential necessities for a Republic before we established the documents. A republic is first cultural.

          We cannot accurately measure the current ‘state space’ of the culture. It depends too much on the hidden hearts of very many people. The media is the enemy in every detail we have about that the culture actually is. It serves the leftist agenda to sell different sup populations different wrong models of the overall culture, but that doesn’t mean any of us are piecing together 100% correct 100% current cultural models.

          1. And what happens when that culture changes? I think we’ve all seen ample evidence that the culture has changed.

            I’ll agree that it’s impossible to quantify, but where would you say the Overton Window is on, well, any issue?

            1. Are you saying that we should “give up” on fixing the Republic?

              Are you saying that we should just let the SJW rule?

              Are you saying that we should force our version of the Not-A-Republic onto others?

              Sorry, I’m going to assume that the Republic still lives and can be fixed.

            2. I say that I can make estimates about historical cultures but cannot know the current culture.

              That vast majority of my RL contacts are people I don’t trust enough to share my full inner self with, and also people who I don’t know well enough to understand who they are at the deepest level. Even if I was meeting a lot of people, and getting to know them well fast, my capacity for remembering and analyzing is much too small to really know a significant number of people.

              I would be surprised if I could ground truth a thousand people’s worth of culture. Possibly limited to Dunbar’s number, possibly quite a bit smaller. Okay, that may simply be me being retarded.

              We know that the US has a bunch of regional cultures. Very few of us have deep contact with all of those cultures.

              I’ve lived in a state for 25 years, albeit as a virtual hermit with hippies making up an unrepresentative large fraction of my human contacts. I might understand the local culture or I might very much not.

              Our cultural models may all be at best fitting a small number of personal contacts to a statistical model of the country. We don’t know how much of the culture is hiding from the left behind a mask, and we cannot judge the impact of that right now.

              1. You can tell what the real culture is when there’s a flood, hurricane, a great fire.

                Most of the USA is still there and still okay. Even LA, if the fires are anything to go by. Misbehavior like looting is still isolated, not general.

                  1. Yes, exactly that. The Redneck Navy shows up in numbers whenever something floods, and half the time they have more and better stuff than the cops and the firemen.

                    You don’t see that in places where the culture is lost already, or where it was never won in the first place.

        2. This is a misconception I often see. An article V convention IS NOT an ab initio document like the Constitution was.
          Text of Article V
          The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

          It is a series of amendments proposed by representatives selected by the several states. Those amendments still must be ratified by a supermajority of state legislatures and can not change things an amendment may not change (e.g. senate representation may NOT be changed without the consent of ALL states affected) .

          Far more dangerous is the left’s penchant for treating words like Humpty-Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking glass and in fact feeling that NO text has meaning other than what the reader imparts to it.

          1. True. And we could do the state to federal amendment process if we wanted to. For instance, we could amend the 2nd Amendment to state:

            “An arm shall be anything that can be carried and used as a weapon by any one person; excluding those that involve probable suicide or sure injury of the user.”

            Start with your state and get them to pass it, and keep it active (no time limit.)
            Once passed, send the proposal to the other states for consideration, with the stipulation that it goes to Congress for proposal once it passes 2/4rds of the states, and that it be considered ratified once 3/4ths of the states pass it.

            Congress has to call for a convention once 2/3rds of the states propose the amendment. If they try to put it off for more than 6 months, you should consider removing your Congresscritters by whatever works. And once 3/4ths have ratified it, it’s official.

            1. can be carried and used as a weapon by any one person

              Warships were the original crew served weapon.

              Article 1, Section 8 says your limitation is invalid. As if the Second Amendment hadn’t already done that.

                  1. I’m holding out for mecha and spaceships. I can spare some puny nukes and diseases that will be squished soon. BFRs for the win. *grin*

                3. Warships? Only if you can pick one up and carry it. NBC munitions tend to be types that will kill the user just as likely as the targets; and more to the point, aren’t really targetable in the first place. But an IED in many cases isn’t much different than a claymore mine; which can be safely used as a targeted weapon.

                  And yes, I also considered the backpack nuke as an extreme case. Thing is, I doubt any private citizen has the ability to construct one without killing themselves in the process.

                  1. depends on how strong you want the boom to be. One would be damned easy, but efficiency and quality would make conventional boomschtoof a better choice in that size.

          2. On that note, I found myself thinking it would make a good Star Trek series to have one set during a period where the “great thinkers” of the Federation were twisting the meaning of their Prime Directive into a rational to invade an conquer everyone, to “preserve their untainted culture” and just following the internal tensions of that to its logical conclusions.

            1. Sadly short of fanfic you will never see that as the Star Trek ethos (inherited from the Great Bird of the Galaxy) as it exists says that the future is “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. On top of that CBS/Paramount owns the franchise and if there are more libertarian/conservatives than can be counted on my 20 tentacles I’ll need the loan of our hostesses shocked face.

          3. Note that the Constitution was instigated in a body, the original purpose of which was to revise the Articles of Confederation. Want a UN-sponsored constitution with rights similar to those articulated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights (eg. ‘Speech shall be privileged, unless that speech is in opposition to the aims of the UN’), or worse? Your Article V convention is an open invitation to that.

            1. Except that if passed by the Article V convention (which itself required action by 2/3’s of the states) it still needs ratification by 3/4 of the states. If 3/4 of the states would ratify that nonsense then we’re toast anyhow. Article V is a way to go around a congress that like the Rump parliament in the English Civil War is refusing to act or decamp. Many parts of our Constitution and bill of rights are reactions to the English Civil war (E.g. Article V, prohibition of religious test for office, Establishment clause of Amendment 1). If things have gotten to that point we’re here again:

              When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

              And I guess when that has happened then its time for this ancient creature to find the local Boojahideen underground. Not much good with with firearms, but you be amazed what a solid knowledge of kitchen chemistry and expertise in embedded operating systems could do to our rather delicate Infrastructure. Might as well show up at the pearly gates (or Valhalla) with decent honor guard. Ultimately even St. Peter drew his sword, he’ll understand.

              1. Ratification by three quarters of the states? Meaning, thirteen states can block it?

                From Ballotpedia (Numbers subject to change)
                https://ballotpedia.org/Partisan_composition_of_state_legislatures

                Trifecta status by state
                State Trifecta status Year of last status change
                CA Democratic trifecta 2011
                CO Democratic trifecta 2019
                CT Democratic trifecta 2011
                DE Democratic trifecta 2009
                HI Democratic trifecta 2011
                IL Democratic trifecta 2019
                ME Democratic trifecta 2019
                NV Democratic trifecta 2019
                NJ Democratic trifecta 2018
                NM Democratic trifecta 2019
                NY Democratic trifecta 2019
                OR Democratic trifecta 2013
                RI Democratic trifecta 2013
                WA Democratic trifecta 2017

                AK Divided government 2015
                KS Divided government 2019
                LA Divided government 2016
                MD Divided government 2015
                MA Divided government 2015
                MI Divided government 2019
                MN Divided government 2015
                MT Divided government 2005
                NH Divided government 2019
                NC Divided government 2017
                PA Divided government 2015
                VT Divided government 2017
                VA Divided government 2014
                WI Divided government 2019

                I count fourteen Democratic Trifecta states, and that’s without moving Virginia, which went all Dems, all the time this year.

                So they don’t even need to carry a divided state, such as Maryland.

                What happens if an Article V Constitution is adopted by forty states, with California, Oregon, Washington ad Nevada among the rejecting states? Can they be forced into the new Constitution? If Colorado and New Mexico are among those resisting and (presumably) seceding, what happens to Arizona?

                1. OK the process as I understand it from straight reading of Article V.
                  1) 2/3’s of the states call for a Constitutional (Article V) Convention.
                  2) Congress defines what is going to happen in detail (representatives, time place etc)
                  3) Convention meets and writes amendments. This is NOT necessarily a new constitution but there are few limitations on them in Article V so the amendments can be anything (Including revocation of the whole constitution and Bill of rights). The exception here is that Article V explicitly forbids changing representation in the senate without consent of all states, presumably by vote of their legislature. Also states boundaries may not be changed without the consent of the state. Anything else is fair game
                  4) Amendments then need ratification by 3/4 of the states. Congress is out of the loop on this

                  As RES has noted currently there are 14 states with one party democrat governments. So to pass ANY amendment that they would oppose you MUST get 2 or more defectors (as well as all the split states). Similarly there are 21 States which are 1 party Republican rule. So you need at least 9 defectors to do anything like repeal the 2nd Amendment. So no matter what you do you need consensus. This is at the founding fathers intended. This analysis applies to ANY amendment whether article V based or from congress. To some degree I think this is why The democrat party went to the courts starting in the 60’s. Getting consensus for an amendment is REALLY hard and the Democrat’s don’t like hard work, also their current flavor won’t compromise.
                  So I suspect they are far more likely to go rogue as Obama did rulling by fiat as clearly we’re too stupid to rule ourselves.

                  This kind of impasse usually proceeds a shift of party system (see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_the_United_States 1-5th (maybe 6th) party system). This is like when the republicans emerged. It may be that we get a mationalist (in the good sense) andsomewhat isolationist party out of Trumps part of the republicans and that the RINO and the Democrats go form a TRANZI/Socialist european like party.

                  Party system shifts are not pretty, one of the classics happens just before the Civil war with the death of the Whigs and the emergence of the Republicans.

        3. You don’t vote your way out of it. You hold on until the trends we are starting to see seriously take hold.

          Media organizations are starting to go out of business because *nobody trusts them*. Think about that for a moment, and consider what happens to leftists without the giant shield that those orgs provide and to conservatives without constantly being stabbed by them.

          We are seeing pushback on the educational side that would have been unthinkable as recently as 1998.

          Blacks are *working* at a rate not seen since pre-LBJ.

          The cultural tide is starting to shift, we just need to make sure the bastards can’t consolidate effectively enough to stop it.

          1. And along with everything else, we’re starting to get the courts. I don’t think that the importance of this can be understated. Good judges are valuable for two reasons. The first is that rule of law is absolutely essential to a republic, and one of the fastest ways to get rid of rule of law is to have the population feel contempt for it. We get contempt when the judges run wild.

            The second is that we need to stop the imposition of the progressive agenda by judicial fiat, particularly over the express wishes of the voters. And that means filling the holes on the courts with as many reliable judges as we can find.

            1. Another, darker thing happens when the rule of law gets shifty.

              Shadow governments.

              Short version, when the courts let your brother’s murderer go free, but the local gang says they can protect you and give you justice, who are you going to follow? The cops and courts that failed you? It has happened in other places. It is happening *now* in places that may or may not surprise you.

              Rule of law is one of those rarely appreciated things that you notice, and miss, *very* quickly when it is gone. Our host has alluded to it many times. This rule of law thing? It is *not* normal, judging by the rest of the world. Creating a culture that values it, even unconsciously, is so big a thing that I am not even remotely sure how we managed it. Himself’s grace, most likely, working through human agents as he does.

              Rule of the Strong and the Quick is chaos incarnate. Warlords and feudalism is a step, a small but measureable one, above that. I don’t see us falling that far, not on a national scale anyway. Kleptocracy, socialism, iron-toothed greedy bureaucracy, nepotism, clans, democratic-peoples-republics… Also not good options.

              It is a strange thing to struggle for normalcy. But that is the course we must take. We can’t change minds by shouting. Speaking the truth and knowing what it is (and what it isn’t) helps. It elected a president that hardly anyone would have believed was possible. A good portion- maybe even most- voted not so much *for* him but *against* her. And somehow things turned out, well. Better than alright.

              Better than I thought things could get in so short a time. Impeachment and all. Maybe, just maybe, we can make things just a little better as we go.

              1. Also, as Glenn Reynolds occasionally observes, the police don’t exist to protect us. They exist to protect the criminals from the rest of us.

                You know, it occurs to me…

                Given the recent attitude by various DAs toward crimes like shoplifting several hundred dollars worth of goods, the DAs might end up providing new inroads for organized crime. After all, one of the ways that organized crime pays for itself is by collecting a “tax” from retailers in exchange for promises to not allow that sort of thing to happen…

                1. Also, as Glenn Reynolds occasionally observes, the police don’t exist to protect us. They exist to protect the criminals from the rest of us.

                  *Waggles hand*

                  There is some truth to that perhaps, but as the late Jerry Pournelle liked to point out the existence of a reasonably effective police force has a significant deterrent effect on crime. Sowell also expounded on the idea, not specifically about police but that the likelihood of punishment does tend to reduce the incidence of crime. As one example while “studies” have shown little correlation between the death penalty and the rates of capital crimes other studies that look not just whether there is such a law on the books but the likelihood that it will actually be used has a very decided effect. (A penalty that is not enacted has little to no effect? Whoda thunk it?) He also traced how the courts, particularly the Warren Court, kept finding new “rights” for criminals making it increasingly difficult to actually punish them and crime rates kept rising right along with these new “rights”. Haven’t been able to delve into that in sufficient depth to know how much of that to believe but it seems to pass the “sniff test”.

                  I can see where Sowell is coming from on the ever expanding list of “rights”–including to correct the “unfairness” that some criminals are less able to avoid punishment than others. However, I can also see the other side. Things like exclusionary rules for illegal searches were implemented because something had to be done to keep the state from simply ignoring the 4th. The honor system certainly wasn’t working. The earlier idea was that the evidence could be used, but the person whose rights were violated could sue the state over the violation. That ended up not working any better than the honor system. I can see that taking away the ability to benefit from the violation could seem a reasonable approach. Only, as time has shown, that hasn’t worked very well either.

                  Dan Ingersol, a defense attorney who used to write a column “The Law is a Ass” that examined the uses and abuses of law in comic books in a comic book fan magazine went into the history in some depth.

                  So I can see why the need to do something to “encourage” agents of the state to not violate the rights of people, even when those people are suspects in a crime, although I’m not so sure that the methods chosen by the courts are even particularly good ones, let alone the best.

                  And, yes, I’ve wandered a bit from where I started. 😉

                2. Also, as Glenn Reynolds occasionally observes, the police don’t exist to protect us. They exist to protect the criminals from the rest of us.

                  And as I respond every time I see it:
                  Not criminals. The accused.

                  Making it so you can’t scapegoat folks probably does as much to cut crime as punishing the wrong-doers does….

                3. No, they exist to protect us as suspected criminals from the rest of us. And they even protect us, somewhat, from the rest of us after we’ve been convicted; punishment should be fair, equitable, and proportionate to the crime.

              2. Short version, when the courts let your brother’s murderer go free, but the local gang says they can protect you and give you justice, who are you going to follow?

                It seriously rocked my world-view when I figured out that part of why the Mafia got powerful was that they were acting as a government– you pay their protection racket, not only do they not torch your shop but nobody else does, either.
                Contrast with the gov’ts when they were getting strong, where the soldiers would shake you down and then stand there as you’re robbed.
                And don’t get me started on the whole “don’t mess with the shop keeper’s daughter” thing, that’s an obvious good will move.

                1. It seriously rocked my world-view when I figured out that part of why the Mafia got powerful was that they were acting as a government– you pay their protection racket, not only do they not torch your shop but nobody else does, either.

                  Heh. That was actually a plot point of one of the Myth stories by the late Robert Asprin. (I don’t suppose that spoilers count at this late date, but if they do, be warned.) Magical mafia (led by a Fairy Godfather, dontcha know) moving on on the Bazaar on Deva. Our Heroes are hired to stop that. They do so by basically going on a rampage, forcing the Mafia to cover ever increasing damages making it too costly to continue.

                  Result is the Mafia hires Our Heroes (who they don’t know were the causes of their problems) to be their representative on Deva (to save face “You don’t have to make a profit, just don’t lose money”). Meanwhile, they are hired by the Bazaar to keep the the Mafia out. So, basically, they get paid twice to do nothing.

                  It’s that kind of series. 😉

              3. I’ve seen the argument that it mostly comes from the Anglo-Germanic influence, specifically because the rulers tended to be weak (German principalities were *small* pre-Napoleon, and the English throne was the booby prize of royalty). When you haven’t got the means to obviously prevail by main force, a rules-based system is the only thing that will work, and it eventually becomes ingrained (as well as the consequences of violating it – can you say Charles and George?).

            2. There is a theory wandering about that this shampeachment is actually a result of Dem panic over another Trump Supreme Court appointment. (For that matter, Byron York has suggested the demand for Impeachment witnesses in the Senate is an attempt to replicate their “Kavanaugh Strategy” because it worked so well before.) In three year Trump has (unless some f those McConnell crammed through today increases the count) Fifty appellate judges — compared to the fifty-five Obama succeeded in appointing in his eight years. Other reports say Trump has now appointed (checks notes … discovers has no notes) one-third of the Federal judiciary.

              The FISA eavesdropping is going to result in curtailment of that process.

              The FBI’s standing in American opinion is, I think, lower than ever before.

              The Republic seems to have a good chance of being restored as we discuss. The thing about pendulums (pendulae?) is that if their cycle is long enough you cannot be confident when they’ve reached the maximum and are swinging back the other way.

              1. It might be true, In 4 years he (and the Senate) almost turned the 9th into a reasonable court. If he gets a second term he’ll certainly get another Supreme appointment for Ginsburg and Possibly another for Breyer and/or Thomas.
                I’d hate to lose Thomas, he is dependable fairly strict constructionist But he is getting old and will likely retire to make sure his seat doesn’t get swapped to some liberal idiot instead of hanging on like RBG who is make the Supreme court look like weekend at Ruth’s. Breyer is a wishy washy liberal that on SOME things (4th, 5th amendments) can be coaxed to a constructionist argument. He is unlikely to retire and seems in good shape, but is 81.

                Now someone needs to fight Soros’ tainting the states Attorney Generals and Secretary of state that mangle the voting and prosecution of issues.

          2. Thanks for a good faith effort at answering my question, which some have strangely read as a call for the abolition of what’s left.

            This ties in well to a comment I made a few days ago here that the Right, the actual Right, needs the funding and organization that the Left has. We are hopelessly outmatched in that regard, as it stands right now. The TEA Party was an incredible pushback that was quite effectively undermined by financial shenanigans.

            Conservatives have been screaming into the hurricane for a couple of decades, but that’s about it. That we’ve managed this much is a near miracle. If we had the organization of the Left, we would be unstoppable. That’s what’s so effective about Gramscian Theory. Most of the organizations’ skin we had is now being worn by the Left.

            1. To what use would that directed funding and organization be put? There is a step missing here.

              2. Well, what niches are available that aren’t being addressed?

                1. A national payment processing service (banking institution, credit card issuer) that won’t refuse service on ideological grounds.

                This is potentially the biggest one, since we’re seeing a number of processing services take exactly that tack, refusing to allow wrongthinkers to even open bank accounts, collect payments and donations, or buy certain legal goods and services.

                On a similar level would be acquiring or creating network infrastructure such as hosting services. As gab saw with MS Azure, you may want to allow free speech on your website, but unless you own the infrastructure, that isn’t your decision.

                2. Media acquisiition: buy some center-left media outlets and parade around in their skins. Yes, it relies for it’s effectiveness on inertia, and I’m not sure how effective it would be.

                3. Add push to existing efforts to showcase corruption. Project Veritas is one such, Judicial Watch another. Of particular importance is corruption in the voting process. Model it on Jill Samms “Voters Protective League from the Lensman, where the voting rolls are thoroughly vetted and each claimed voter on the rolls is verified…. and then watch and see who shows up to vote.

            2. “the Right, the actual Right, needs the funding and organization that the Left has.”

              Difficult to do, as the Left has a far more clearly defined goal.

              More importantly, they’ve the Close Air Support of the MSM which (as we observed with the T.E.A. Party and the Wall Street Occupants) acts as sounding chamber to amplify the wrongs of the Right (even when no wrongs exist) and suppress awareness of the abuses by the Left.

              Because the MSM exists as a cultural infrastructure it is very difficult to replicate it or establish alternate structures — witness the derogation of the “Faux News Network.” The Left’s captured media bring a credibility, no matter how undeserved, that nothing on the Right can match. Simply consider the disparate reaction to presenting your typical undecided with an article from the Washington Post versus one from the Washington Times.

              This is, also, why the Left invests so much time, money and energy in defaming the Right as “racist, sexist, [[whatever]phobic, and White Supremacist.” They do not seek to refute our arguments, they desire to disallow our arguments. Funding organizations to counter that merely burns down their houses while they’re setting ours aflame. Whichever side wins, those attempting to preserve the fundamental structures of our society lose.

        4. If they are gone, burning the country down will help noone. And so long as we are not prisoners of the state, we may still live and teach them to others.

          It’s very easy to want to be quit of the whole thing; we’ve all got other things we want to do with our time and energy, but blowing it all up is a lazy way out.

    2. Come on. ACW*, Jim Crow, Wilson, FDR.

      The theory of this nation, so far as it can work in practice, is republican. Violent democracy is not very compatible. Yet we had large chunks of the nation locally ruled under that theory by locally popular factions. You still find chunks of those regime’s legitimating narratives all over the place.

      There are people alive in their seventies who were raised on big daddy FDR’s government as the source of all virtue, and still believe it.

      The only way we can tell that the US wasn’t dead long ago historically is subsequent events proving that model incorrect. We cannot have the information to calculate whether the US is dead or alive right now.

      “I don’t see how we’re voting our way out of this” is looking for a simple model to fit to society, and correct it. Rigorous confessions of opposition to leftism include the fact that societal models simple enough for human minds to process are missing information that will at times be important. When you use political force to ensure that policy implements a simple model, you make it much more likely that the cases where the simple model is incorrect occur.

      The correct action is a) faith that the republic can continue in functioning without b) compromising on the values whose implementation is necessary for the next life.

      *I am staunchly Unionist.

      1. “Come on. ACW*, Jim Crow, Wilson, FDR.”

        Examples which all predate the new factors I listed.

        “There are people alive in their seventies who were raised on big daddy FDR’s government as the source of all virtue, and still believe it. “

        And there are more people alive today who believe in even bigger government and were raised on bigger government than Big Daddy FDR provided.

        ” We cannot have the information to calculate whether the US is dead or alive right now.”

        Indeed we won’t know if the patient is dead until its heart stops. But the contention was not if the US is dead or alive, but its republican form. The legal examples I listed are just a teaser that I know I don’t have to present here. Hell, judicial usurpation was raised on this blog a few days ago. These are not hallmarks of a healthy Republic and I’m not aware of any effort to remedy these ills.

        ““I don’t see how we’re voting our way out of this” is looking for a simple model to fit to society, and correct it.”

        Nonsense. Concision is not simplicity. I took the time to explain precisely why the Republic is dysfunctional in its current state and why those factors appear insurmountable. Responding that having “faith” in a system that is currently not working is… less than compelling.

        On a weekly basis, on this very blog, we’re reminded of the massive election fraud machine the Left employs. How again is voting supposed to remedy this problem? What did Republicans in the state legislatures they won control of in all those states during the Obama years do to fix it?

        1. These are not hallmarks of a healthy Republic and I’m not aware of any effort to remedy these ills.

          1) “Not healthy” is not the same as “dead.”
          2) That generally means you haven’t got the right sources. The efforts are usually local because the problems are human so there aren’t very many big solve-it-all options, and you may or may not think they’re effective when you find them, but if you aren’t aware of an at all it’s a warning sign that more information is needed. Sort of a cousin to the “never argue for something you can’t argue against” rule.

          1. “Not healthy” is not the same as “dead.”

            Aye.
            I am currently “not healthy” (trigeminy PVC, with annoying symptoms – ablation surgery is scheduled for very late in the month). However, “I aten’t dead.”

                1. I am hoping to avoid undead and simply remain alive, but weird things happen. Not bionic – the plan is to stop a sort of misfiring bit that tries to be a pacemaker but isn’t firing right, without overriding with an implant. As for super-demi-god… I do not see that happening, but now I am at least mildly curious. Mainly, I want to know what the downsides are likely to be. Ox slow, but still know that Olympus (not the camera folks) is best avoided.

                  1. You never know. Personal life not withstanding, Hera might take a liking to you and decide you’d be the perfect foil to twit Zeus.

                    “But Zeus, how could I possibly be having an affair with Orvan? I’m not even his type, much less species!”

                    2. Umm…did you forget that this is the Greek god who forced himself on women (and small boys) in the shapes of…::checks notes:: a swan, a shower of gold, an eagle… And I’m sure there are other things I’m not recalling at the moment. 😉

                    4. Bah! All lies, nothing but tales made up by his enemies, jealous that Zeus could attract the chicks while they were resigned to abusing themselves. I mean, c’mon – Zeus was the freakin’ KING OF THE GODS! He didn’t have to pull those stunts. Face it, there were unfaithful wives and unchaste daughters all across the isthmus only to eager to blame their obvious condition on an all-powerful lightning tosser.

                      Every day I see a dozen or more emails from them in my spam filter,easily. “Lusty MILF says ‘My Husband’s Away, Let’s Play,” “Oops! I Forgot My Panties; Want To See?” and “Curvaceous Cutie Wants To Ride Your Tool!” — the Harlots of Babylon persist even now, enticing men to their dooms and blaming Zeus for the by-blows.

                    5. FWIW, I figure that given what we know of Zeus’ behavior, he would be angry if *SOMEONE ELSE* went into the zoological crossing zone.

                      Especially if it made him look like an idiot.

          2. “1) “Not healthy” is not the same as “dead.”

            I was only continuing the metaphor that Bob used. Perhaps I should have been more figuratively specific and said ‘critical condition’ or ‘terminal’. I thought my original comment was effective at showing just how “unhealthy” the patient was.

            ” but if you aren’t aware of an at all it’s a warning sign that more information is needed. Sort of a cousin to the “never argue for something you can’t argue against” rule.”

            I don’t buy this. I’m not coming into this with an empty tank. If it will satisfy your objection, I’ll add that I’m not aware of any effective efforts to remedy these ills.

            1. The metaphor holds, still.

              Too many folks here know folks who were “terminal” with “no hope” who recovered.

              It’s a matter of judgement– which is also what a statement of effective efforts is. All too often, it’s declaring the stables can’t be cleaned.
              For love of little green apples, I know of MULTIPLE judges who overstepped and have been either not re-elected, were recalled, are under arrest (turns out that once folks started looking, they had nasty stuff in their background, usually only comes up as a footnote to the effect of “so and so hit the public spotlight in ______.”) and that doesn’t even touch on the way the Senate is actually filling empty judge seats.

              1. Heck, I still insist that California can be salvaged. It won’t be easy, but things will eventually shift back.

                  1. Yup. There still exist native Californians that remember a state with beautiful weather and lazy politicians (i.e. not actively trying to drive things worse).

                    1. As David Weber pointed out when discussing the Peep conquest of San Martin, one of the unintended consequences of prolong was that conquered territories got much harder to pacify because people who remembered not being conquered lived so much longer; you couldn’t just wait for them to die. 😎

        2. A model so complex that only the most capable human in the world can understand it is still a simple model where human societies are concerned.

          Use of Federal power was kept so constrained in Jim Crow that the corrupt state and local executive, judicial, and legislative powers effectively had a free hand to murder as part of their re election strategy. We had local reservoirs of good government in a few locations that had not gone in for that nonsense.

          It is not America’s first rodeo.

          That you or I do not see or understand a path to sustainable set of new norms does not mean that Americans will not wind up crowd sourcing one.

          1. The changes to our society are quantifiable. Demographics, legal framework, information flow – all measurable. And they all affect how the Republic functions. Asserting that they will change for the better because It Always Has is simple wishcasting.

            1. Demographics?

              Let me tell you something about the kids these days: they learned to lie to authority in preschool. You have no idea how they’ll vote. Neither does anyone else. But I can tell you they think it a positive moral good to lie to authority.

              And they’re good at it.

              If you want to know what the kids actually think, forget it. You’ll find some interesting bits and pieces, like Latin Mass Catholic churches having explosive growth, but you won’t find anything conclusive. (I’m pretty sure the kids I know would love a Pence Presidency. Small sample size.)

              Just remember they grew up on the internet, and they’re better at playing the role of what teacher wants to hear than paid actors.

              1. Also on demographics, just because young people are more likely to support leftist/socialist policies it does not follow that they will continue to do so when they’re older. The same things that sound appealing to a person of extremely limited real-world experience will look utterly laughable once they have a few more years, and the experience that goes with that, behind them.

                1. Also on demographics, just because young people are more likely to support leftist/socialist policies it does not follow that they will continue to do so when they’re older.

                  *snickers* It’s FUN to trace the way that “youth vote” kept edging up to older and older, and then when it became obvious that the “kids” were not voting according to the label, Millennial suddenly became a go-to MSM insult.

                  1. When I was in HS there were major, & I do mean major, uh debates, regarding Nixon, and Republican & Democrat policies in general. One Uncle & One cousin were staunchly not debating for GOP or Nixon. Please note, cousin is 5 weeks younger than I am. Uncle is 6 years older than we are. Fast forward almost 50 years. Trust me neither do now. Oh, they still believe in charity, but directly, on their own terms; or they choose what & how to contribute.

                3. This, of course, is a 180 degree reversal of the argument Sarah tried to use on me:

                  “Remember the young who will be the shock troops of necessity (we’re not up to it physically, sorry) are mostly left-indoctrinated. So most likely to be international socialism.”

              2. And I like the way the right buys the leftist bullshit that if you can tan you’ll vote left.
                To them as to the left I say “Gaze upon my middle fingers. Matched set, biatches.”

                1. They buy the bullshit, then claim any on the right who disagree are “cucks” and such? Though since they embraced so much leftist propaganda, I guess they also embraced leftist projection habits as well.

                  Hm. Does WordPress have “Eyeroll” and “Facepalm” emotes like Twitter does? If not, then another reason for WordPress Delenda Est. 🙂

              3. So we’ve managed to produce a generation or two that counts lying as a virtue. I’m not sure that’s hopeful.

                1. It is. Ask the Polish.
                  Everyone learns to lie under leftism.
                  Also, seriously, why would telling the truth to an intrusive government be a virtue EVER? Why would you think so? It’s never been. It never will be. It’s weird to even contemplate it as being.
                  If people who have the power to coerce you (teachers, colleagues who’ll end your career, government) ask your opinion, the question is ALWAYS “what business is it of theirs?” And the sane answer is always “lie.”
                  I don’t even understand WHY that wouldn’t be a virtue.

                  1. This is actually a very long running theological argument– basically, what is a lie, morally speaking?

                    The definition I favor is to willfully withhold a truth to which a person is reasonably entitled to have; that covers both silence and speaking, half-truths, misleading statements and Nazis-asking-about-Jews-in-the-basement.

                    You cannot reasonably consider someone entitled to information which would obviously and directly result in them committing a mortal sin. (Nazis at the door situation.) You cannot consider someone reasonably entitled to information which would cause disproportionate harm to an innocent party. (Not just the Jews in your basement, but also the kids who will be unjustly punished if they speak up.)

                    Misleading someone is like physical violence– you need serious cause to do it. Likewise harming via giving information to those not reasonably entitled to it, or witholding information from someone who is reasonably entitled to it.

                    3. Well, most of them would require a lie to involve a falsehood. Other means of withholding the truth, however, can be sin, and the general term in my experience is deception. (Some discussions may be unclear if you don’t know these usages.)

                      A good overview of the subject is in the appendix of Newman’s Apologia — not the serialized edition, but the one (with some revision) for collected publication

                    4. Someone who is at the pay-attention-to-existing-jargon level is much more likely to know the commandment says “false witness,” with the thing echoing the whole ‘shall not kill’ vs ‘murder’ or unjustly kill argument.

                  2. “I don’t even understand WHY that wouldn’t be a virtue.”

                    One of our strengths has been that we are a “high-trust” society. If everyone has the habit of lying routinely, how do you have any trust in what they say? They just might be lying to you instead of the Leftists.

                    Pretty much defines “low trust” in MY dictionary.

                    1. Nope, nope, nope, nope.
                      Low trust and high trust has to do with “you’ll do the right thing when required” like assist your neighbor, or not steal his stuff.
                      LYING to a pollster? Seriously? Do you even know who’s asking? Or why they want to know?
                      Weirdly, having lived in a low trust society? They answer all the questions of people “in authority”. Often truthfully. (Unless paying money is required.)
                      “Mind your own business” is now and has always been an American thing. And if you can’t get the busybodies to quit, you tell them what they want to hear, so they’ll go away.

                    2. The high trust has been damaged.

                      Happened when kids found out they’d be abandoned to fend for themselves against bullies who would target them for wrong-think.

                    3. “High Trust” and “Low Trust” relate to “who do you trust”.

                      From what I understand about it, in “Low Trust” societies generally you only trust your family/clan.

                      In a “High Trust” societies, there’s a strong element of “you can trust other people until they show that they are not to be trusted”.

                      Obviously, even in generally “High Trust” societies, there are “things” you don’t share unless you really know the other person.

                      The stranger in your neighborhood may not be automatically seen as the “enemy” but you aren’t going to share with him things you only share with your friends.

                      Of course, for me, the pollster is this stranger who “buts his head into my home and wants me to answer questions”. I don’t lie to him. I just hang up on him. 😀

                    4. This: the circle of trust in low-trust societies extends only to kin, close kin, and perhaps clan. In high-trust? Basically anyone not obviously skeevy … and right up until they prove themselves not worthy of trust.

      2. “I am staunchly Unionist.”

        I am not. But there must be a peaceful and orderly process for secession. Declaring “We’re going to take our tax monies and go home” is not sufficient.

        Entanglement of Federal and State institutions may, may now be so great as to render secession impossible, but if so that must first be proven in law, not blood.

        1. The way ACW should have gone:

          1) Accept that, per the 10th Amendment (no language in the Constitution forbidding a state from leaving, nor empowering the Federal Government to hold a state against it’s will, so “reserved to the States or to the people”) the southern states could secede.
          1a) Union notes that perhaps a specific procedure for secession should be included or that it should be specifically prohibited–Constitutional amendments to one effect or the other ought, then, to be proposed and sent to the remaining states for ratification.
          2) Property owned by the Union Federal Government (like, for instance, Fort Sumter), however, is still owned by the Union Federal Government–the South has no more right to seize than any banana republic to seize property after someone does the work of developing it.
          3) South still fires on Fort Sumter, an act of war against the Union. Civil war happens, only instead of suppressing a rebellion it’s a war between two sovereign nations.
          4) In the end, the South still surrenders. The Union has now conquered another sovereign nation. It can subdivide it into territories however it chooses and set whatever requirements are appropriate and constitutional for said territories to be admitted into the Union as States. Note that there is no particular reason why the original state boundaries need be followed in establishing the new territories and states.

          There you have it, we end up pretty close to where we ended up vis a vis the abolition of slavery while still leaving us “these United States” as opposed to “the United States”. The federal system of mostly independent and largely sovereign states would still be intact.

          1. Secession should pretty much be the reverse of how states are admitted:
            (1) State votes to be admitted/secede.
            (2) State ratifies/repudiates U.S. Constitution
            (3) Congress votes to admit/permit secession.
            Most of those votes are mere majorities. I’d recommend they require the 2/3rds supermajory for all those votes; otherwise you end up flip-flopping all the time. Furthermore, there should be a process whereby the U.S. can forcibly EXPEL a state, for cause. Although in that case, I’d recommend a 3/4ths supermajority of Congress before they could do so.

            1. What one wants and what the Constitution says are not always the same thing.

              One might argue that your proposed procedure is how it should be (although I question the justification for essentially giving Congress power to hold a state against its will–which is what having a Congressional vote as part of the process entails), but absent language in the Constitution either granting Congress power to hold a State against its will or forbidding States from leaving, then, per the 10th, that power belongs to the States or to the People (and I submit that by its nature it would belong to the States).

              Thus “1a” in my “how it should have gone” sequence–recognition that a procedure needs to be regularized.

            2. Forcibly EXPEL a state, for cause????? Hard to see how that would work, or what would constitute such cause. The intermingling of federal and state claims, funds, regulations, programs and other factors seems likely to make extraction from a state exceedingly difficult. It would also have the problem of punishing the portion of the state’s citizens who are fighting to obstruct their state government’s mangling of the law.

              A more modest proposal might be to allow decertification of a state government, denying them representation in the House, Senate and Electoral College, withholding federal program funds and, I don’t know — making the interstate highways through the state into toll roads. This would only be an option in extreme circumstances (yeah, I know: we’ve heard that about impeachment, too) such as denial of citizen’s rights under the First Amendment, Second Amendment, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, Twelfth, Thirteenth, Nineteenth, Twentieth and other Amendments. Gross corruption or Incompetence might also be grounds for decertifying a state government.

              Decertification of a state government would essentially return states to Territory status, or perhaps as a US Possession until they can address the causes prompting such reduction and apply for readmission to statehood. It would also be a first step toward secession or, alternately, it might include a ban on secession given the inherent rejection of a state government’s legitimacy.

              1. I think he was thinking along the lines of explosives at St. Andreas.
                Look, it’s a beautiful fantasy. But I have friends there. Conservative friends, even. And their houses don’t float any better than the houses of the modderpockers.

          2. I’ve mentioned this before. The founding document of the USA is the Articles of Confederation, not the Constitution of the United States. The Articles quite clearly state that the U.S.A. is a perpetual union. Perpetual. The Articles, like the Constitution, have instructions on how new states can join, split, etc. Doesn’t state that states CAN’T leave, but there is no provision for it. The people who wrote the Constitution were quite well aware of the U.S.A. being a PERPETUAL union. The Constitution has provisions for states to enter, split up, merge, and swap property. The Federal Government can acquire and dispose of minor property. A territory can become a state, or independent, or whatever. (We should grant Puerto Rico independence whether they want it or not…..IMHO). BUT- there is no provision for a state to leave. This was not an oversight on their part. Joining the Union as a state is and always was intended to be a one way trip. 10th Amendment neither grants nor recognizes a states right to secede from the perpetual union.

            The Federal government has the duty to step in and ensure that a state has a Republican form of government. One reason why Reynolds vs Sims was incorrectly decided.

            1. “We should grant Puerto Rico independence whether they want it or not…..IMHO”

              Only if you WANT a Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or some combination having permanent military basing rights there. It’s the strongest single argument against kicking CA out also.

    3. You can take a look at what just happened to the British Labour party. They thought they had a firm upper hand, but overplayed it and suffered an electoral bloodbath.
      The people of the United States gave the House of Representatives a majority, which it promptly used to conduct such a nakedly partisan hatefest that it’s a national embarrassment.
      A prosecutor who went after a common burglar with as much disregard for due process of law as the national Democrtic Party gave the elected President of the United States would be shredded in any courtroom, and if he somehow managed to get a conviction anyway, it would almost certainly be overturned on appeal.
      Most voters don’t much care about the fine points of legal procedure that lawyers obsess over and are astonishingly oblivious about what their Congressmen are actually doing, but this is going to be hard to ignore.

      1. “[Labour] thought they had a firm upper hand, but overplayed it and suffered an electoral bloodbath.”

        Rest assured (not) that they still prefer a far more socialist model than we here would.

        “[Shampeachment] a national embarrassment.”

        Not to just under half the country. It probably would have been thirty years ago, but this is 2019. And that’s just another indicator of the huge cultural shift that’s occurred here.

        1. Rest assured (not) that they still prefer a far more socialist model than we here would.

          Yes. The British baseline is far worse than ours.

          And even with that inherent inferiority the British people just yeeted Labour out on their ass in the worst defeat since 1935. And kicked out the leader of the Liberal Democrats for an encore.

          Meditate on that and you will gain perspective.

          1. THIS. Damn it, this.
            Also keep in mind that what’s a good state for Europeans is not for us and vice versa.
            I’ve maintained for years that Portugal needs a king. It’s the only thing they’ll obey. Personal loyalty.
            we should allow other countries to be free in the way they wish to be free, provided they leave us alone and don’t slaughter people in batch lots. And even there the opposition to Marxists is growing.

          2. My perspective is fine, thankyouverymuch.

            That information doesn’t change the fact that one election in which one set of Statists were tossed out for a set of non-Anti-semitic statists isn’t that encouraging.

            Their courts just ruled that it was legally justified to fire someone who thinks that biological sex is a reality. That’s not some rogue judge, but one who was enforcing existing law. Similar laws are already on the books in NY, CA, and IL, I believe, if not more states.

        2. But who is claiming that ‘just under half’ the country supports it? The polls? They didn’t talk to EVERY person in the ENTIRE country–and oh yeah, we already know the polls lie. People lie to pollsters. They lied and had the polls convinced that Hillary would win. Pollsters also have agendas–statistics can say whatever the person with the agenda wants them to say.

          Why in the world would you believe what the media is claiming at this stage?

          1. Something else to note –

            Ace highlighted an interesting story over at CNN. One of CNN’s *own* polls showed support for impeachment dropping even among DEMOCRATS. The response by one of the CNN commentators present was quite literalky to say, “This can’t be true because I refuse to permit it to be true.”

            That’s paraphrasing, but it’s the gist of what was said on-air. It’s also why Ace had a piece up about it.

            1. Yes, and note that immediately thereafter it suddenly became “Support for impeachment is rising! We’re not lying, we swear!”

              And then, at least it seems to me the last couple of weeks, any mention of polls relating to impeachment have been memory-holed in the MSM.

          2. I’m not a huge fan of polling, but ignoring polling (like the Democrats are doing) is whistling past the graveyard. A lot of people on the Right did it in 2012 to our dismay. I know I was one of them. Do they account for fraud? Of course not. But this is simple public opinion, not something put to a vote or nationwide referendum. If you think a large sample size cannot get you a reasonably accurate idea of where a large population stands on an issue, you don’t understand polling.

            Let’s say that poll only showed that 40% of the country supported Shampeachment (it’s higher, but nevermind), that’s 40 freakin’ percent of the country. That’s massive voting power. That’s a huge bloc of the country that doesn’t give a flying fig for republicanism or the rule of law. That SHOULD be the national embarrassment, but sadly it’s not. One thing Romney was right on in 2012 was the 47% number.

        3. “Not to just under half the country.” How many people are lying to the pollsters because they are worried about the results if they are honest? And how are the polls stacked, worded, calculated?

          I’m not disagreeing entirely, but I teach political statistics as part of a course, and the ways those are gamed are . . . I’ll just say many and varied. And that’s before people start lying to the pollsters.

            1. “Hello. We’re running a poll on NH voters. Do you have time to answer a few questions?”
              “No”
              “That’s okay, this will only take a minute. What political party do you belong to?”
              “Nazi”
              “Excuse me?”
              “I’m a Nazi.”
              *click*

              1. “I’m a Socialist, but not an International one – I’m a National Socialist. Like Bernie. You know, a Nazi.”

              3. I belong to the Green Party and am supporting Trump because his policies have produced CO2 reductions far beyond what the Paris Accords called for!

            2. It’s a time honored tradition in the rural south. See, it’s still okay to make fun of rednecks. So when the polling place calls, we get free entertainment. One year, the write in was leading the polls with “Free Candy” edging out the Sheriff’s deaf dog, according to the local paper. The national poll had (locally) Stone Cold Steve Austin winning the presidency, but only if he ran with Tom Selleck’s mustache as VP.

              The people went in the curtained booth, the people came out, and we counted up the tally. Seems the incumbant lost (again, recurring theme), and the president ended up being one or the other again. Is it a wonder the polls that come in from out of state dread Holeinthewall County? *chuckle*

          2. Concur, with the note that from all accounts from inside campaigns, private internal polling is always more accurate than public polling, for some unfathomable reason, certainly not having to do with the funding funneled from various sources to the public pollsters.

            It is certainly possible to poll accurately (one Brit pollster nailed the election results there – see https://order-order.com/2019/12/13/opinium-claim-polling-victory/ – and there were a few accurate polls in the last several US national elections as well), but the way most polls are so statistically-significantly wrong, even right before an election when push-polling typically tries to converge, is indicative of much more than liars in those polled.

          3. Social Desirability in responses is definitely a factor. But if you teach political statistics, and follow polling, you know that most of them can get you a reasonable idea of where a population stands if the sample is large enough. As for bias in wording, that’s why aggregating polls like RCP does is valuable. In looking at the wording of the polls I’ve seen, the question on impeachment has been acceptably worded. Do you have some examples where they are not?

            But let’s say that the polls are biased in wording and that Social Desirability is a high factor, would you dispute that, based on the latest aggregate of polls, at least 40% of the population supports Shampeachment?

          4. This is quite true…. and it’s only gotten worse as people have figured out that there is no such thing as an anonymous poll.

      1. Okay, Steve, reasons:
        Trump is still president.
        He’s starting to clean up things.
        Things were far worse last century
        Most of your sense of despair is coming from crazy people who test their memes on the chans.
        The only way we can lose now is by going hot WHEN WE’RE ACTUALLY WINNING, the masks are falling off and people are getting tired of the left’s shit?
        Also, WHY would you want to give the left their wet dream of “violent right wingers.”
        Why do you think they want that?
        As for the republic being gone: it’s existed more in default than reality since about 30 years after the founding, give or take.
        AND YET, flawed as it is, it is still the best thing in this sad world. Even in places like NYC an emergency means people get helped.
        You need totally fucked up hell holes like New Orleans for the wheels to come off. And even there, it wasn’t as bad as the press said. NOWHERE near.
        And those are still very limited in America. They’re de facto normal in the rest of the world, with the exception of parts of Australia and parts of the UK (note, parts.)
        But go ahead. Toss the baby with the bath water. Because you have your own truth. And you like the catastrophists who are cheering for the demise of America.

    1. We replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, and our institutions were never the same.

      The Democrats started a fighting civil war, our per capita bloodiest war, and our institutions were never the same.

      FDR had more than two terms, and our institutions were never the same.

      Never give up, never surrender.

      We can always maintain our will to oppose the left until we have no longer have any life to act with.

      The Samurai passed down lore of of decapitated men swinging the blade one final time.

      The left want us thinking that we are alone, hence have lost, and that all our choices are futile ones.

      Take this opportunity to remind yourself of your resolve to go to your afterlife knowing that you did your duty.

      ‘Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days … we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.’

      Be of good cheer, be mindful, be firm.

      We need not be desperate. We have less than ten months to the the election, and events thereafter. Much is unknown and uncertain.

        1. Oh, I’ve had my times of depression on this topic. It is just I’m feeling okay right now, and this is one of my sane topics.

          I’m still crazy on the topics where I’m considerably outside of the mainstream consensus for here. Okay, there’s a case my foreign policy is also my insanity, but the rest of the world is also crazy on foreign policy.

          I am stressed, and angry.

          I have been tempted to rashness. Gaming it out, random terror is not what the left should be worried about. The left should fear starting a civil war and bringing enough of the rest of the country in on the other side. My best strategy is treating individuals justly in accordance with how they’ve treated me and others.

          And I’m pretty ticked at certain foreign powers. I think I’ve found a way to advance my foreign policy interests, and have been sinking time and energy into that. Yeah, domestic politics are important, if we lose a civil conflict, we lose in foreign policy. Still, I think it isn’t wrong for me to chase this other thing.

      3. From WIP, seems appropriate:

        “So, are you ready to follow me into the lion’s den, gentlemen?” asked Nammu with a small smile. “As my Alice likes to say, we are burning daylight.”

        FBI Special Agent Perkins looked at his partner. “This is because I said I was bored, isn’t it?”

        “Probably,” said Special Agent Watkins shaking his head in dismay. “You want to?”

        “No!” exclaimed Perkins vehemently. He’d been in gunfights before, he knew at least a little bit about what awaited. “But man, there’s a freakin’ flying saucer!”

        “Yeah,” said Watkins, turning to narrow his eyes at Nammu Chen. “The flying saucer is on our side, right? Who’s on the other side?”

        “There are several possibilities,” she replied calmly. “I really don’t know what we are facing, that’s why I asked for your help. Hopefully you will be yawning with boredom while I do all the work, and you will end the day with nothing but a good UFO story to tell at the office tomorrow.”

        “But if it all turns to shit it won’t matter where we are, right?” said Watkins grimly. “The flying saucer and the science fiction weapons aren’t going to cut it?”

        “No,” admitted Nammu regretfully. “It won’t matter where you are.”

        Perkins started the car and backed out from between the stacks of telephone poles. “Screw it. If I’m going to die anyway, I am not going to show up at the Pearly Gates to tell Saint Peter I’m the guy who wussed out on saving the world.”

        “I guess we’re saving the world then,” said Watkins philosophically. “Where to, ma’am?”

  15. If there is to be blood, let them begin it. I am confident that our arguments can carry the day and that any blood that must be shed will only be that of those who reject reason. If we must convert our fellows to the cause of Liberty by sword that is false conversion and unreliable. Abandoning reason and argument for arms is conceding we cannot persuade them, it is admitting our inability to preach the word of Liberty, admitting that Liberty which must be imposed cannot be sustained.

    I refuse to take counsel of my fears, nor let anger rule me — were I to do so I would betray the cause of Liberty by proving Man unfit to rule oneself. We cannot save this city on the Hill by razing its walls. We mut hold in mind the words of Screwtape, that it matters not whether Man be Pacifist or Patriot so long as he abandons Reason to be so.

    Our cause is not lost until we abandon it, give vent to rage and destroy ourselves in pursuit of that which, by desperately grasping for, we push it farther from us.

    1. Or to put it in (once-)contemporary language,

      Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.

      Nationally, statewide in Virginia, and otherwise, it’s still very good advice. And often better strategy.

      ***

      We still currently have our President in office, and very much in charge (and see his remarkable letter to Pelosi, America, and posterity on that) — and what did he choose to do during the vote itself? Be with his people, openly and visibly, still doing his job.

      If he can continue to support our Republic, so, then what ought we do?

      And now, there seems to be genuine question as to whether Pelosi’s House will even send their voted Articles on to the Senate. (Huh?)

      Meanwhile, I do have an immediate target for my (surprisingly sharp, even to me) anger at this long-telegraphed soft-coup attempt: the party that, through its clear and visible leaders like Pelosi, Nadler, and Schiff, designed, engineered, and deployed it. They, not Trump or his party, are the “clear and present danger” to our country and Constitution — really.

      Literally.

      It’s time we all, individually and collectively, started taking this party seriously in their own words and deeds. They’re not some dotty old aunt; they are and have long been exactly what I said above. They are the party of the (second, modern, post-Bedford-Forrest) KKK; they are the party of the Steele dossier and their “insurance policy” soft-coup + con-job; they were the fawning fellow-travellers of Mussolini and Hitler pre-WWII; they are the party of Bernie Sanders and his Venezuelization of America; they are the party of the grossly under-reported evident attempt by Ted Kennedy to conspire with the entire Soviet government to deny Reagan a second term (per Tim Sebastian 1992, Paul Kangor 2006, etc., search e.g. “KGB memo Andropov on Kennedy”).

      They are, if not all individually then surely severally, our Party of Corruption.

      They are the party of whatever happens tonight at their latest riot at the asylum, unless cancelled by another last-minute union strike. (I and one or two of my friends plan to watch it with literal popcorn, again.) Crazy people should not be allowed positions of resposibility and consequence.

      Or as a significant American leader said sort-of recently, “Clean the House.”

      Perhaps History, Fate, or God Himself has/have given us all both a grand opportunity, and a good hard kick in the pants, to reclaim our Republic and set things a lot closer to right. Slowly, messily, painstakingly — and well.

      Or else get stupid, impatient — and defeated for a very long and ugly time.

      1. I want to know which idiotic site is trying to weaponize people to go hot. I suspect like the anti-porn thing it is a meme tried by Russian trolls on the chans and then picked up by the obvious stooges.
        I know there was a blog promulgating this, because they all have the same talking points “Everything is lost. No use talking. it’s time to go hot.”
        And I wish people would start realizing when they’re being spun. What you said above: THE PRESIDENT IS STILL THERE. And he’s fighting back. And for a miracle the GOP has had new balls grafted on, and even Graham is the Grahaminator at least half the time.
        Dear Lord, this is the time when you want to grant the left’s wet dream of “domestic right wing terrorism”? WHO THINKS LIKE THAT. And don’t people have alarms on the back of their heads when someone spins them that way? SERIOUSLY?

        1. FBI perhaps instead of Russians.

          This impeachment stuff may be simple Democrat insanity, but given all the deep state choreography, it is possible they plan to use agents provocateur to create ‘pro Trump right wing terrorists’ in order to legitimize things.

          Trump is a fighter, and we should trust his instincts and self interest while he is in office. If they pull him out, and try for Pence next, they will alienate Pence. There’s is chance that Pence’s Vice President would be an ambitious fighter going into things with eyes wide open.

          Assassinations of key figures like Trump might be a reason to go hot. If Trump is removed from office, and Pence proves a squish, there may be reason for hot. Until then, the President has some serious incentive not to be late to the game, and has information we don’t about how desperate things really are. Impeachment can still play out politically, and the politics is uncertain enough that it may be in our favor.

          Civil war might work out with outcomes we can tolerate, but it has a lot of them that would be very bad for us. Escalation of lone wolf random terror as a start would most likely take us to a shitty eternal balkans outcome. Trump maybe doesn’t have people he can trust to act on his behalf, but Trump starting it because the Democrats make a fatal mistake is one of our better starts where civil war outcomes are concerned.

          “Mere impeachment is reason to go hot” or “we can’t fix things now because impeachment” are narratives best serving the adversary.

          We survived Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, although, in hindsight it is clear that we probably should have backed him. That consent decree dating to that era is also fairly strong evidence of a partisan judge.

            1. Depends on the reaction – if the assassin is promptly arrested and jailed, with full bipartisan (specifically the Dem leadership and media) calling for his head, it might be survivable.

              1. promptly arrested and jailed, with full bipartisan (specifically the Dem leadership and media) calling for his head

                Well as long as we are asking for miracles let’s have another:

                “And people believe them for a second when they condemn it”.

                1. I am confident that the Dems & Media (BIRM) would loudly and vociferously denounce the assassination and demand stricter gun control to ensure it could never happen again.

                  I would not be the slightest bit surprised if, upon realizing the enormity of her actions, that assassin hanged herself.

                1. You’re worrying about the wrong thing. Worry about a false flag to remove Hilary or the Obamas first. None of them really has any further utility as candidates.

          2. Could be right about the FBI. This is precisely the kind of rabble-rousing instigation that Holder and Co. were good at. And it’s right out of Saul Alinsky’s manual iirc.

            1. Somewhere is a cartoon of a KKK rally in which every attendee is an FBI agent undercover …


              … but this is the best I could find.

              Geeze, I’m so old I can remember when the Left denounced the FBI as agents of oppression. I guess it’s different depending on who they oppress.

          3. First of all, I liked Nixon, and even though I couldn’t vote at the time, I personally supported having him as President based on research and a bibliography on him.

            The problem with Richard Milhouse Nixon is he really did conspire to break the law and violate his opposition’s Constitutional rights. That’s a total fail at his job; and had he not resigned, a full trial and removal from office would have been both appropriate and required. The sad part was what he did was totally unnecessary, and done out of fear.

            Contrast Nixon’s crimes with Clinton’s. Clinton was convicted of perjury for lying about a relationship with Monica Lewinsky during testimony on the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. A case that was eventually settled out of court and managed to avoid a full-up trial of Clinton, and possible conviction. Not quite as egregious as Nixon’s crimes, but still a crime, and a coverup of a more serious alleged crime. Technically speaking, Bill Clinton should have exercised his 5th amendment rights and declined to testify, and the trial would have gone nowhere and he’d never have committed perjury. Let’s just say he was impeached and convicted of being a stupid jerk.

            Andrew Johnson? His impeachment was even flimsier, albeit still base don his violating a law; a law by the way, that was repealed 20 years later, and likely un-Constitutional based on Supreme Court opinion (but no official ruling.) Johnson was acquitted in the Senate trial, barely.

            Now we have the Trump impeachment. The articles contain zero mention of any criminal statute, much less violation of any. The things he’s being accused of doing wrongly, are the things his opponent already did publicly and got away with; whereas no evidence has been shown that Trump actually held up any funds for quid pro quo, or even stated that he would do so. Obstruction of Congress is not a crime. However, Congress’s obstruction of investigation into the alleged Biden-Ukraine corruption IS a crime of obstruction of justice. One I’d dearly pay to see President Trump arrest and jail all the Democrats on.

            1. A note on Nixon –

              To this day, there’s still no evidence that he ordered the break-in at the Watergate hotel. There’s plenty of reason to suspect he did (Haldeman apparently believed Nixon was in the loop on it). But we still have no information actually suggesting whether Nixon ordered it, or The Plumbers became foolishly over-zealous.

              1. G. Gordon Liddy — who should know at least a little something about this and has no present reason to cover for Nixon — has maintained it was arranged by John Dean, dishonestly using Nixon campaign resources for Dean’s personal benefit.

                Nothing Dean has ever done since has persuaded me of his personal integrity or reliability.

                It should be acknowledged that those resources — Liddy’s Plumbers — existed within the campaign assets.

          4. . . . – – – . . .
            “it is possible [the FBI] plan to use agents provocateur”

            Bob, that’s just crazy talk! It is well-reported that the FBI has never (aside from a few unfortunate incidents hardly worth discussion), ever used agents provocateur!!! That would be entrapment, and that would. be. wrong. The FBI is a highly professional cadre of skilled, highly trained, dedicated law enforcement officers committed to protecting the United Sates from terrorist actions (aside from a few unfortunate incidents hardly worth discussion).

            I cannot emphasize enough how wrong your suggestion is, and want to assure any visitors to this blog that Bob is, indeed, a fool and his views and opinions do not reflect those of the other Huns commenting here.
            . . . – – – . . .

        2. The Republicans need a gain of 19 seats to take the House. The House Dems themselves identified 44 vulnerable seats right after the 2018 election. After this impeachment fiasco, that vulnerable number may be higher.

          19 out of 44 is just a 43% win rate on those vulnerable seats, which is completely doable.

          All is not lost. Do not lose hope. The ballot box is the next effort, and money is speech.

          1. We need not only the GOP to take back the house. But realistically GOP needs a majority, without the RINO, or never Trump, group. But I’ll settle for 19 or more.

            Also need a better margin in the Senate.

            Plus keep it in 2022.

            Don’t believe in miracles.

            1. If we can retake the House, even with the RINOs, then we get Pelosi out of the Speaker’s chair. That let’s McCarthy set the business of the House, and torpedo further Democratic silliness.

              So while a non-RINO majority would be preferable, I’ll also take one that’s forced to rely on RINOs.

            2. Apparently the census is giving 29 seats to illegal immigrant heavy states and taking them from others. So we might never get the house again. Maybe. Unless the dems get us so disgusted…
              Hell, I think in five years everything will be completely different.

              1. I read that the other day some reporter was trying to get some “man in the street” comments in support of Trump’s impeachment. So he went and spoke to random people in Venice Beach, CA.

                Apparently every single person that he spoke to spoke up in defense of Trump.

                That makes me wonder if things might not be as dire as we fear.

            3. “Don’t believe in miracles.”

              Oh, definitely do believe in miracles. Just don’t rely on them. Miracles are more likely to occur for those who’ve done the hard work of preparation.

        3. And I wish people would start realizing when they’re being spun.

          Amen, amen, amen to that!

          It’s so often amazed me — as a lifelong introvert, Deplorable, and natural analytical thinker, surely nothing so rare or so precious — not just what people (some of them) will swallow whole, but what others will try to feed them.

          (Mostly, it annoys me, beyond the big red flashing “DUMB-ASS MANIPULATOR” sign that figuratively blinks above their heads. But to such an attitude, annoyance can easily be just one more bit of data.)

          “Everything is lost. No use talking. it’s time to go hot.”

          is indeed a kind of logic, but it is not rational logic, it is quite vacuously empty of same; it is instead an emotional logic, aimed and targeted rather precisely at bypassing reason with emote-ing. In a way that tends to suppress conscious, deliberate thought and self-aware feeling, as one sinks into the — swamp? — it beckons one toward.

          Or to put it another way, feelin’s is not thinkin’s. (And this is #1 not #2.)

          And oh, yes, it looks / sounds contrived. About as contrived as…

          It’s a sad day…
          I didn’t come to Washington to impeach a President…
          No one is above the law…
          [Waves never-opened copy of Constitution…]
          A President is not a king…
          [Quotes by rote from Federalist Papers (what’s that??)]
          I will do my sad duty and…

          Pfui. Try not to hit your (D) head on that big red-flashing sign on your way out.

          (And if you want to use your time constructively with those impeachment “debate” remarks, listen to Steve Scalise, the guy who literally took a bullet for the Republic, on a baseball field. Or to former California dairy farmer Devin Nunes, e.g., “It’s not easy to make a coup attempt boring, but the Democrats found a way…”)

        4. The POTUS is still there and there’s been some amusing things on Twitter. There’s a claim that until the House submits its Articles of Impeachment to the Senate for trial then the President hasn’t been Impeached yet.

          Which, if true, is even more amusing. Especially with all the idiots who thought Trump was no longer President after the vote.

          1. Do they become invalid if they are not acted on by the formation of the next congress?

            1. Unknown but I doubt it.

              In the prior cases, the Senate was sent the articles during the same “Congress” that the House created them.

              Of course, IIRC earlier Senates acted on the articles as soon they received them.

              1. Based on the principle of the House being newly elected every two years, with no Congress able to bid subsequent Congresses to their will, I suspect the articles of impeachment, like any Bill or nomination left open at the expiration of the House, would become void.

                Of course, the Constitution is mute on this because its authors never anticipated a House so frivolous as to pass such articles and not submit them to the Senate. Given the Democrats’ history of re-writing the Constitution on the fly it is impossible to be confident just what could happen.

                N.B. — I tried looking up the question of what happens to indictments issued by a grand jury once that grand jury’s term expires but light searching provided no useful insight. Apparently prosecutors only request indictments from the grand jury when it is their intention to act upon them. What a crazy way to run a legal system!

            2. That’s a subject for debate…..

              Yes, Clinton was impeached by the House of one Congress and then tried by the next Senate…. but the House had both voted on the articles AND transmitted them to the Senate in due form, which then referred them to the proper committee staffs for investigation and setup.

              Pelosi didn’t do it that way.

  16. Before you become a Boojahideen, consider that fifty years ago, with the information that would be available to the people then, Obama would be considered a national hero, who had brought us summer of recovery. It would be in school books and no one would even doubt it.

    When I was in school, I got told all kinds of BS that my folks only found out if I happened to bring it up– which happened a lot, because my family talks a lot in a broad range of directions, but not even a third came up.

    Now I do my kids’ lessons, and when they have the fluffy bull feces stuff, I point out where it’s wrong. Even when it’s my kids reading off “The Indian tribes were the first people in the Americas-” I can sort and say something about how they over-simplified, at EARLIEST they were the third group. The kids didn’t ask what happened to the first ones yet, they understand superficially the idea of a people dying out, but don’t really grasp what that involves.

  17. WAs that quote at the top supposed to be English?

    My anger started AFAIR, during Bush v Gore and it just keeps getting fed. II used to work in a defense industry, and know what should have happened to everyone involved in the Secretary of State’s private server. I see signs of hope, in the booing of Schiff by consituents, and othes, but it’s going to be a long and interesting set of decades.

    1. It’s a mangling of the words attributed to Colonial militia captain John Parker, at the battle of Lexington, “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

    2. To ‘yeet’ is to throw, generally quite violently; ‘boog’ is apparently ‘fight’ by the slang-route of boog<=boogie<=dance<=fight.

      1. “Boog” comes from:

        Civil (or Revolutionary) War 2: Electric Boogaloo.

        The Boogaloo.

        Big Igloo.

        Large Dwelling made of Ice.

        And a thousand other mutations of the meme.

      4. You might be a homeschooler if you have ever seriously sat down and conjugated the verb to yeet with your kids.

        We like yote/yoten/yoted better than yeeted for past tense, mostly because if the teen yells yeet, yelling yote as you throw the thing at him is more fun than yelling yeeted. (Usually ballet slippers, you know how my teens are.)

        So we want to yeet to be an irregular verb.

        1. maybe my kids are crazier. Also, I took to the net like a duck to water sometime around 95, so I track about 20 years younger in my understanding of these things… 😀

          1. I took to the net in ’95 or before too (occupational hazard. What I didn’t take to was gaming in any shape or form.

        2. I only ran into “yeet” a few months back, in a D&D memes group.

          Feedback to the bard from the barbarian on his musical ability.

          2. I confess my reaction to “yeet” is along the lines of, “Yes, I had lunch just a little while ago.”

            Admittedly, I’m an Odd duck. (Perhaps that ought be punctuated slightly differently: I’m an Odd; duck!)

  18. “Yesterday there was a comment by someone here about how he wanted blood on the streets.
    Sure. we all want blood on the streets. In a general and metaphorical way. Except some of us have seen blood on the streets. And those of us who have don’t want it.”

    You have it quite right madam the blood in the streets would be bad. The more terrifying thing would be the way out of it. The ways that come out a reasonable republic ride on a knife’s edge. Stray a little off that path and you are deep into the ughknown. There are horrors there that might end with large portions of the earth glazed green. Or a nation that makes Col Kratmann’s U.S. in Caliphate or S. M. Stirling’s Domination look like a tea party at a 19th century Women’s College. And even the lesser horrors might rival much of the worst of the 20th centuries excesses. Best to shun that path unless no better path is clear. And even then Pray very hard that the Author really does protect children, drunks and the United States of America.

  19. Pingback: The Writer in Black

  20. One of the big points of T. H. Breen’s _American Insurgents, American Patriots_ was how long it took to establish the networks and the common beliefs that led to the events of 1775-76. In some ways—perhaps many ways—it went back to the Great Awakening, and the networks of people that formed in order to pass the word about traveling evangelists such as George Whitefield. Many of those networks stayed in place, linking the colonies in ways that the British government didn’t see or understand. Those networks provided the foundation for news to pass about the effects of Parliamentary laws on the other colonies, and helped congeal a sense that the Colonies were all one body. It took at least a decade, and even then it really wasn’t until the Intolearable Acts that more of the colonies agreed that the time had come to hang together as much as they could.

    I highly, highly recommend all of T. H. Breen’s books. He looks at the roots and foundations in everyday life, what was going on with the bulk of the population of the colonies in the decades leading up to 1775-76.

    tl;dr: A whole lot of things simmered and spread for a very long time before Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and the Declaration of Independence.

    1. Many of those networks stayed in place, linking the colonies in ways that the British government didn’t see or understand.

      Today’s equivalent, and equally misunderstood by most of the elite – the internet and social media. How did the crowd in Battle Creek know when and where to show up and how to get tickets to get in? Social media. I’m willing to bet that local newspaper and coverage of the upcoming event was pretty close to if not actually non-existent.

      That’s why the push by Facebook and Twitter to censor – while claiming they don’t. That’s why Democrats want to outlaw hate speech, which THEY get to define.

      Rush Limbaugh singlehandedly making AM radio the go to forum for conservative news was the beginning of the total loss of control for information sharing. There never was full control, but only 3 major television and radio networks and newspapers across the country relying on feeds from AP/UPI/NY Times/Reuters homogenized the news media for a very long period of time.

  21. Blood on the streets is the solution that is “obvious, simple, and wrong”

    I don’t want 100+ million urbanites dead from supply chain disruption, and I wouldn’t even if I wasn’t one of them.

  22. If I may quote from the Book of Mormon. there is a passage which I believe the founders would have fully agreed with had they heard it:

    “Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right, but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this shall ye observe and make it your law– to do you business by the voice of the people. And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you…”. Mosiah 29: 26-27

    I don’t think we’re quite to that last point. Yet.

    1. Actually…

      The Founders were scared of the possibility of a tyranny of the majority. The Senate is one of the safeguards against that, as is the Electoral College.

      Having said that, the majority usually has more of the right of it than a small, noisy faction. But minorities can go bad, particularly in a localized area. Using the Book of Mormon as an example once again, the City of Amonihah is a perfect example of how an unrighteous majority can vote the wrong leaders into power.

        1. It is like the founders took a crystal ball, looked into the past and found the future in today’s pocket coastal population majority crazy, against the rest of the country.

          Plus they just might have known about “failure to know, or ignore, history is the ability to repeat history” or words to that effect. It is like they wanted a foundation to prevent tyranny by the mass majority, however they put it.

      2. The founders, as students of the classics, had forgotten more about the history and failures of Athenian democracy that most of us will ever know, They installed multiple checks and cooldowns on the vagaries of fashionable opinion, in an attempt to determine the true “voice of the people” without stifling it. Fashionable opinion, in Athens, post-revolutiony America, and now, is frequently led by cliques of minorities, and has served as a route to tyranny.

    2. We’re not quite there, but lemme tell ya–and continuing with the Book of Mormon discussion here–an astonishing chunk of the Democrat leadership are starting to smell strongly of Gadianton robbers to me. I mean, I’ll guarantee there have always been “secret combinations” going on in the Swamp–it’s practically inevitable wherever power is concentrated for more than a short time–but things out there are REALLY beginning to stink like the Gadiantons.

      (And for those unfamiliar with the Book of Mormon and/or the Gadianton robbers–in short, they were seriously bad news of the “topple the formerly liberty-loving government and install oppressive dictatorships” type. Usually when that government had become riddled with corruption and people greedy for absolute power and wealth–and so willing to make bargains with pretty much anyone or anything.)

      I do take heart both in their clear desperation–they’re exposed and everyone is going “We see you” and the fact that this is happening in other parts of the world as well. (Like Britain. Like others have said here, I’d given up the UK as a lost cause, but dang if they didn’t surprise the heck out of me! There’s hope for them yet.)

      1. I know a lot of Mormon theology (Best friends were LDS for twenty years. No, they haven’t changed, but… well… he died and things changed) but you’re out of my depth.
        However I was talking to Bill Reader the other day and he reminded me of this article, which, being from my tradition feels “right” to me.
        And he also said “Look at Trump and Boris and…” I don’t remember “All have these mops or light hair.” Apparently Bill’s own religious tradition, (don’t ask) speaks of men with golden crown arising at the command of angels. He and I both feel insane talking about this stuff, but read Richard Fernandez “Why do all these confrontations read the same?”
        https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/night-of-the-demon/
        And I say onto you Be NOT Afraid. (And also remember why I stepped out of cover, and why I do this. We are not alone. (And if you never heard why ping me privately.))

        1. And both comments showed up. WordPress delenda est…

          Yeah, I figured the reference would go over most folks’ heads, but had to say it.

          In essence, it was a very nasty group that arose, oh, a couple of centuries before Christ’s birth, made all kinds of secret pacts and covenants (with themselves, mostly, but also darker things) to gain power, and do murder to gain power, and essentially were the ultimate cause of the downfall of the Nephite and Lamanite nations some four centuries AFTER the coming of Christ–because they were like damn weeds, and kept popping up again when corruption crept in. Different men (and women, probably), of course, but the same essential evil: power, control, and riches, at any cost to other people. That’s all they cared about. The longest book within the Book of Mormon (Alma) spends most of its content on a massive war that came about because of the first group’s shenanigans. (It’s a very exciting book, lots of heroism and daring plans and escapes and cunning strategies to defeat the evil guys all mixed in with the spiritual doctrine.)

          Whether or not one believes LDS doctrine doesn’t matter in this case–it’s still a good analogy. I’d say that it’s almost certain that in EVERY human civilization everywhere from the beginning of time, you’ve got groups like this cropping up when corruption starts getting hold, and the civilization either burns them out (as, I am hopeful, we are beginning to see here and in some parts of Europe), or ignores them/gives in to them/joins them, and then that particular civilization ultimately ends up no more. Really it’s an object lesson in why one ignores the greedy and corrupt at not only one’s own peril, but the peril of all. And groups like that, sadly, are part and parcel of human nature. (And, like human nature, they can never be entirely eliminated, so one must remain vigilant.)

          I’m angry, but not yet afraid. Worried, mostly, but I do believe Himself has had a hand in any number of events, and He is not quite ready to let us completely screw ourselves over. At some point He may withdraw his hand, and say “Look, I tried, but y’all aren’t listening”–but for heaven’s sake it takes a LOT to get to that point, and we aren’t there yet. Not by a long shot.

          And even if the lefties attempt cheating, they’ve exposed themselves so thoroughly by this point I don’t think it will go the way they want it to. Hopefully not to the blood on the streets point.

          That article you linked is a good one–and shares a lot with my own faith’s traditions. We’re in a battle not only for our physical freedoms, but also that of our souls, regardless of religious traditions or beliefs.

        2. The Book of Mormon has a great deal to say about government, both good and bad,
          Briefly, the middle part of the book recounts that a good and just king confronted with a succession crisis decided to abolish the monarchy entirely and set up an elective system of judges. (It is this king I quoted). Over time, there were numerous attempts to abolish or overthrow this system and re-establish a monarchy, by coup, popular vote, or local insurrection. When these attempts failed, the leaders would frequently defect to the nation’s enemies and lead an invasion. The most successful attempt, known as the “Gadianton robbers” began with an assassination conspiracy, branched out to organized crime, evolved to infiltration and subversion, and eventually caused civil war, more than once. For more details, read the book.
          Of course, modern history doesn’t duplicate this chain of events, but there are nevertheless some striking similarities to modern trends,

      2. Interesting. Sarah, I just typed an answer to this, lengthy and explaining I don’t know much about Mormon theology. Or rather, I do, but you went out of my depth. And giving you a link to something. And WordPress swallowed it as if had never been, which considering the subject… um….
        I’ll type something like again after this comment and we’ll see.

      3. Okay, so it’s like this: I’ve been getting what I would call “symbological” vibes I don’t like out of this whole thing.
        A couple of years ago, Richard Fernandez crystallized it for me with this: https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/night-of-the-demon/

        If you have never heard the story of why I stepped out from under political cover you might not get the full significance of this. (And also feel free to ping me by any means you wish, and I’ll tell you in private.) Let’s just say I have more than reason to believe Richard is right. Weirdly, too, mine is not the only such story (And we’ll just say it’s too weird to tell on blog comments perused by the other side. Other side=take it as you will.)
        And then the other day I was talking to Bill Reader whose faith tradition is profoundly weird (you don’t want to know) and it appears in his tradition there’s a thing about when good awakens he’ll recruit men with golden crowns, prompted by angels to do battle on its behalf.
        And he pointed out both Trump and Boris (and someone else whose name I can’t remember, because I’m mid-novel) have golden manes.
        Crazy? I wish I could say so for sure. But this stuff has felt “Myffic” for a while.

        1. I would like to hear that story, if you are comfortable sharing with someone you have never met.

        2. Hey, there’s an unofficial saying in the LDS tradition that you can find truth everywhere, if you’re looking for it. Odd Bill Reader may be, but I do agree this all feels more mythically fraught than stuff has in a long time.

          I mean, as Arthurian heroes go, Trump and Boris feel a bit more like something Pratchett would have come up with–but given how I feel about Pratchett, this is not a bad thing. We aren’t going to get perfect heroes, but even flawed and only-sometimes-good men standing up to the howling dark and chaos and saying “This far and no farther” is the stuff of legend.

          I mean, people demanding their heroes be without flaw (or, on the flip side, refusing to see flaws in people who do, in fact, have them and so become blind to a possible fall from grace) are in for a looooong wait. So far as a lot of faith traditions say, there was only ever ONE perfect hero who walked this earth. And he’s not coming back until the end, and we’ve really buggered things up.

          1. Aragorn wasn’t exactly photogenic. Frodo himself mentions that he “feels fair, but looks foul”. OMG. Did I just compare Donald Trump to Aragon the King?

            1. you’d not be wrong. Though I always think of him as Moist Von Lipwig. When cornered, he makes the challenge BIGGER…. And the other parallels are pretty good too.

              1. Now THAT…yeah, I can see that. Right down to the near-babbling off the top of his head that so irritates the lefties (who double down screaming “He’s a liar!!!”)

                Nah, he does strike me as an exaggerator, and a bit of a fibber–he’s a salesman, after all. And, I rather think, a storyteller at heart. But given the usual run of malicious lies–and OBVIOUS lies–that the lefties, the MSM, and even to a large extent the GOP have been trying to ram down our throats for years and year, it’s rather entertaining and refreshing.

            2. ::dies laughing:: That’s…quite an image there…

              I went with the “It’s just because Aragorn looks like he’s been living in the Wild for decades” theory long before the films 😀

              1. In the light of the other talk about folks who do “adventures” rather than being respectable sorts, I took it to mean Aragorn looked like he worked for a living, rather than trying to look like a Gentry while radiating used car salesman rays.

          1. By Himself do you mean the Author? He has no sense of humor? He created Cats for heavens sake. Animals so serious they can’t help but be goofy. Look at the 4th chapter of Jonah and the plant and how he mocks Jonah. Or chapters 38 and 39 of Job when He answers Job . Gird yourself like a man, i.e. hey Sissy man pull yourself together and see if you can cope with this. The Word Incarnate makes wordplay ALL over the place (presuming the authors of the gospels quoted him correctly, and those turns of phrase are so clever it seems clear they stuck in their heads), some of it verging on dad jokes. And of course He puts up with us, we’re even sillier than the cats…

            1. I said he DOES have a sense of humor; I was looking at all the puns He put into prophecy, specifically, and agreeing that “golden crowns” lining up with freakin’ hair color would fit it. (probably not the ONLY way, but it’s like He’s noticed He has to tell us in fifteen ways just to get our attention)

              1. My apologies Foxfier I clearly misread. DOES not Doesn’t. mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa 🙂

            2. Seriously, “you will know him as God Walks Among you.”

              Jesus: “Er, yo. I am God. Walking among you. Kinda my job.”

              Folks interpreting prophecy: *headdesk*

        4. There’s an unfortunate sign of our times in the linked piece by Belmont. He quotes Auxilliary Bishop Barron, who talks about his realization that there is a malignant force out there, aka a devil (or close enough to it). And he came to this realization in the ’90s.

          Bishop Barron’s Wikipedia entry states that he attended (and graduated from) the Seminary in the ’80s…

          1. What’s that saying (and I don’t remember the original source, either): “The best thing the devil ever did was convince the world he didn’t exist”?

            1. It’s apparently quite common these days for ordained clergymen to believe that large parts of the Holy Writ – including any mention of an adversary – are purely figurative, and not to be taken literally. The Auxilliary Bishop quoted in the article used to be yet another individual who fell under that description. But it appears that he’s since come to believe otherwise, in large part due to the Catholic sex abuse scandals that leaked out in the ’90s.

                1. Yup. It does lead to some interesting situations, though. One of the supporting characters in a series I’ve read off and on is an Anglican clergyman. I saw a comment or two from people annoyed that in one of the novels, said clergyman decides that he needs to have a chat with some of his congregants when an impromptu survey revealed that a number of them believed in the Devil. Some others of us merely noted that it’s an accurate portrayal of the majority of Anglican clergymen.

                  Though in this particular instance, I suspect that the author meant it as a dig at people like those congregants.

                  1. Back in the 1970’s I heard of people in Protestant seminaries who were open atheists. 😦

                    2. Have no idea why the idiot atheists went to schools that trained people to be pastors/ministers. 😦

                    4. Because seminary students were exempt from the draft. The late rabbi at my mom’s shul was one such.

                    6. If the seminaries knew those people were atheists and accepted them, then they were already corrupted. 😡

                    7. Of course, there’s the question of “why did seminaries accept atheist students?”. 😡

                    9. There might have also been a tinge of hubris on the seminaries’ part; after all, both St. John Henry Newman and C.S. Lewis included times of agnosticism/atheism in their spiritual journeys.

                      Maybe the seminaries thought exposure to theology would be enough to change those seminarians.

                    10. Frankly, I don’t know which would be worse –

                      That the Catholic priests engaged in rampant sexual abuse are atheists?

                      Or that they’re not atheists?

                    12. First, the other denominations also have problems with the sex abuse.

                      As do teachers, etc.

                      Second, there is some reason to suspect that the cover up influence in the Catholic church heavily overlaps with the liberation theology influence. Which means true believers in socialism, which is neither atheist nor Christian. Even if it clothes itself in the appearance of Christianity as it bows to worldliness.

                    13. Not just liberation theology. During the 70s every psychologist agreed it didn’t hurt the children and might help them. when the church chooses to listen to scientists it’s always this kind of bullshit, and I suspect they did just that.

                    14. I recall an argument that a large part of the Church’s problem in this arena has to do with contemporary therapeutic philosophy, trying to heal without punishing. And of course much of the attention is focused news coverage, making headlines from Church scandals and shading the greater percentage of abuse in other institutions. Consider the results if the victims of teachers’ abuse were able to sue the “enabling institutions” the way the victims of Church pedophiles can sue the Holy See. Unions, school systems, and certain Federal departments would take quite different responses than we now see.

                      As for the Liberation Theology element, I also read rumours about financial scandal in the Vatican bank. When the clergymen in charge of fiscal operations know they won’t be audited and that only G-d is watching, their lack of Faith sorta matters. The problem with lack of transparency in institutions is that they inevitably seem to draw those who most need to be watched.

                      Funny how that works.

                    15. I read a while back that the United Methodists have the highest proportion of atheist ministers of any Protestant religion…. Could be true.

                    16. I have occasionally suspected that there are few things more effective at killing religious faith than theological seminary.

                    17. One of the more difficult discussions we ever had with Daughtorial Unit was about Bishop Sprong. Not just how an avowed atheist could become a bishop but how his denomination could tolerate his being so.

                      It is difficult explaining illogic to the innately logical.

                    18. You don’t need look at seminaries (although they are a major source of the issue). Look at Bishop Spong of ECUSA the retired Bishop ef Newark New Jersey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Shelby_Spong). Here we have a Bishop for G*d’s sake who basically denies 90% + of the Nicene Creed (Recited EVERY Sunday as part of the Episcopla Churches Liturgy). Wikipedia refers to him as a “Liberal Christian Theologian”. Two out three ain’t bad. And he was made a bishop in 1979, that 40 years of rot at the highest levels. Most of the main line protestant “Christian” denominations
                      (UCC, PCUSA ABC) have been swirling around the bowl since the 50’s. The Methodist’s are mostly there, but the world church outside the US and Europe rage against the US heresies. Likely there’ll be a split. Similarly the world Church of the Episcopal/ Anglican tradition is still orthodox trying to rein in the British/ US church. Of the mainline large protestant denominations only the Southern Baptists have held out against those heresies and they have other issues (Personnel) of late. It’s a mess, but then we were told someone would sow weeds with the wheat in a parable so we oughtn’t be too surprised. Just be on our guard :-).

                  2. Which makes no sense. There is evil. Evil that everyone can point to and say “That is evil!” Not the version that depends on what angle one looks at the action from. Not much of a step to believe in demons, nor to believe in the king of, or head of, demons, or the Devil himself, no matter how named.

                    1. From the Fifties on, and probably before, there was a lot of “let’s interpret this Biblical teaching all as personification and metaphor,” particularly with regard to demons and miracles and supernatural events. There was also a lot of credulous nonsense being said about supernatural events by some people, which made even genuinely religious people even more skeptical.

                      But there seems to have been something of an uptick in supernatural occurrences in the US, many malign, and it seems to have started in the Nineties. So it doesn’t surprise me that Barron would have “gotten it” then. But it was also the time when older books, the Fathers, etc., got more easy to access, and that made a difference to many Christians on the Internet.

            2. As it seems no one here wants to venture, the phrase carries an echo of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape, although I am disinclined to look it up. There was certainly something about two opposing views, one that the Devil was all-powerful and the other that he didn’t exist.

              Certainly, if there were a Devil a primary target of his wiles would be seminaries, both because of the fertility of the ground and the spread of his seeds.

              1. The form “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” appears in The Usual Suspects, but I suspect the movie was quoting from somewhere else.

        5. Would love to hear the story Sarah, but also understand a need to hold some things close. I’ve had a few “unusual” experiences and know they can be life altering. My concern in all this mess rests with the people I know here in deepblue land. I can’t quite imagine any way the divide gets bridged/mended, save perhaps by something “spiritual.” Don’t mean to sound woo woo, but there it is. I have no clue and am deeply disturbed to see friends hanging breathlessly over every moment of last night’s vote.

          2. Last night, I overheard a man talking to his wife/girlfriend about how Tulsi Gabbard was such a weirdo, and in some cult. And she was a Russian agent.

            People really do believe this stuff.

            1. I’m quite puzzled about why she voted present, so I’m wondering if there isn’t something to the Russian agent theory. It is probably just expecting the current mess to implode, and positioning for a political career after the event.

              1. I suspect she’s hoping to position herself as you suggest.

                Her poll numbers are miniscule, but still surprisingly good for someone who the party higher-ups appear to be trying to silence. She can afford to flip the bird to the party base in this election since she has no realistic chance of winning, and the party isn’t going to pay her off afterwards with a cushy job. And if the mood of the Left shifts to less insanity, she’ll be the only presidential contender from this cycle who didn’t run support a political stunt that more and more of the country appears to be viewing as a joke and a distraction. That could make her the front-runner purely by default.

                Also, she stated earlier that she thought Trump should be censured, but not impeached.

              2. Could just be that she has integrity, and didn’t think she should have a vote one way or another when she is running against him. If that is her reason, I have no problem with it, and wish/hope the other candidates in the other house will fo likewise. Unlikely, however.

              4. She’s said that she thinks Trump did something wrong and should be penalized. However, she doesn’t think impeachment and trial is the right way to do that.

        6. I’m not sure about the ah… mundane details. Let’s just say I have strong reasons for some of the stances I’ve taken here on evil and the questions I’ve asked about the demonic. He may be more literally correct than he thinks but that’s all I’ll say here.

    3. What I saw recently from fellow Mormons was that if you are reading the Book of Mormon and you aren’t a conspiracy theorist, you need to read it again.

      And Epstein didn’t kill himself.

      1. The sweet thing about a conspiracy sponsored by the devil is that human agents who don’t believe in a devil can’t track it, can’t expose it, and can’t prove that it even exists.

        1. Human involvement is pretty much a requirement for any sort of conspiracy in a modern-day Earth, no matter what is pulling the strings. Roll that up, and the immediate threat is resolved. Sure, it’ll eventually come back. But that’s going to be the case regardless of whether the creator of the conspiracy is infernal, extra-terrestrial, or the socialism meme. In the meantime, you get some peace while the conspiracy rebuilds itself under its new cover identity.

          1. Yep. Identify the human agents. Look for an obsession with power, money, and sex (in some combination) above truth or the welfare of others. I think we have what’s called a target-rich environment…

        2. However, the Devil, like God, works through human agents that can be. And I really don’t care what motivated a pedophile; I just need the evidence of the act to make sure I am killing the right bastard.

  23. We’re all familiar with the role that the Turkish military once played in Turkish politics. When the government srarted to get too Islam-isty, the military was supposed to launch a coup to resolve the situation. And that sounds fine from the outside.

    From the inside, though…

    The army may not have been shooting at the civilians, or looking to arrest them. But for the duration, the population at large was essentially confined to their homes.

    I hope you had enough food stored away.

    And those were relatively painless affairs as revolts go.

    1. Well, if this was post-Ottoman empire, I can see why it cropped up.

      Ottoman empire politics–especially around the succession–always struck me as even MORE bonkers than succession politics/insanity in the kingdoms of the Middle East.

      (I think one could make the argument that one thing that gave the Western nations an edge over those of the Middle and Near East in the middle ages, was the fact that their lines of succession were a lot more stable and clear than the “let’s you and him fight” that seemed to be the order of the day amongst the Islamic princes…that kind of behavior was a LOT rarer in the West. Still happened, but seemed to be considered an aberration and generally disapproved of.)

  24. They, who long for Socialism ‘as they will ensure will be the real one’ want the end of the Republic, because they can’t win with the rules as they are. They’ve seen how even very woke Britain swung. They’re desperate. Canada, well. Don’t know about Australia at present. But the US is a big prize for the Communist worshippers, and they will try. And all I can say is, for the sake of everyone you love, and the world you know, don’t let it happen.

  25. Pingback: Daybook 3: From fables to power lust

  26. Incredibly off topic, but I don’t care… just got an email about this upcoming book…

    Don’t know how this will appear in the thread… a new Heinlein book in 3 months?

      1. IIRC This is an earlier version of “Number Of The Beast”.

        I’m not sure I’d pay good money to read it.

        1. As I understand it, not only is it an earlier version of Number of the Beast, but Ginny absolutely, positively, Did Not Want It Published.

  27. I truly think the proper GOP House response to yesterday’s debacle should have been outright laughter and a reminder that it was the Democrat Party who elected Judge Lynch a hundred fifty years ago.

    Shampeachment?

    “This impeachment is a travesty. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”

    2. I’m overtired. My first thought was “is that a portmanteau of shampoo and impeachment?”

  30. Oh my. Continuing a conversation we initiated a day or two ago …

    The Queen Backs Brexit After All
    “My Government’s priority is to deliver the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union on 31 January,” Her Majesty intoned at the State Opening of Parliament. “My Ministers will bring forward legislation to ensure the United Kingdom’s exit on that date and to make the most of the opportunities that this brings for all the people of the United Kingdom.”

    Elizabeth II vowed that her Government would “seek a future relationship with the European Union based on a free trade agreement that benefits the whole of the United Kingdom.” Then, with an eye to America and other national markets, she announced they will also “begin trade negotiations with other leading global economies.”

    No doubt, the Her Majesty reflected, she’s said all this before. Still, her kingdom remains tethered, inexplicably, to the EU. What’s changed? Boris Johnson is prime minister, with a majority parliament standing foursquare behind him and Brexit.

    The Queen’s Speech is a yearly overview of the government’s agenda, presenting in broad brushstrokes its objectives in office; sometimes even coinciding, wits whisper, with electoral manifestos. Such laundry lists of pending legislation can range from the transformational, like the UK seceding from EU membership, to the mundane, as when the Queen announced reviewing “hospital car parking charges.”

    [SNIP]

    2. I am….disappointed that no one has yet put a “Yaaasss, Queen” caption on a picture of Queen Elizaebeth stating that Brexit will happen. Anyone with meme-making skills willing to oblige me?

  31. OK, folks. Let’s talk strategy here. The way I see it, it is imperative that the Left be forced to fire the first shot. A very strong case can be made that the Confederacy lost the Civil War the instant they started it…firing on Fort Sumter lost them any “let the erring sisters go” support from the Corn States, and even the Tobacco Belt was deeply divided. Had Lincoln started the shin-kicking, Virginia and Tennessee would have not fractured, and the odds are that Maryland and Kentucky would have seceded. And the Midwest would likely have turned against the war.

    So…it’s time for cold, focused resolve. Political action, definitely. And I personally think that will be enough.

    Don’t buy into the Great Libertarian Fantasy of the Great Collapse that leads to the New Libertarian Utopia…history teaches that those Great Collapses lead to a Leftist murder-topia (the French Terror being the best example), and if you’re lucky, you get a benevolent dictator like Napoleon fairly quickly. If not…well, ask the Russians what Stalin and his successors did.

    Squirrel away food, arms, ammo, and medicine if you like. Practice both armed and unarmed fighting. When was the last time YOU shot anything? In my case, the answer was last night…and I just got back from karate practice.

    One thing to work on…SECURE communications.

    1. Strategy to make sure it doesn’t happen, too. Volunteer with immigrant resettlement groups. Work to acculturate people and help them assimilate. Don’t let leftists and their ideas of a permanent demographic majority just slide by unchallenged. Many of the folks they are advocating be allowed to enter the country are *deeply* socially conservative. If we can moderate that, and get them away from the leftist economic ideas (which should be made easier by the fact that they *don’t work*), it will make the necessity of taking the country back by force fade further away.

      Don’t cede the field of battle before even gathering the armies.

      1. Not always — consider Israel and the Yom Kippur War. Having waited for the enemy to open the ball didn’t obviate the opprobrium directed at them.

        Of course, Israel is an instance of an idealistic faction who refuse to merge into the dominant polity, so the correlation might not be perfect. The fact of an existing deeply rooted antipathy toward that faction cannot be ignored.

        1. I suppose it depends on definition in that case– it’s kind of hard to do “unprovoked war of intended genocide on a peaceful neighbor whom you outnumber, launched on a high holy day when you believe they will be peaceful and vulnerable” back at someone, especially when you are only you.

          All the traditions I’m familiar with, it means a proportionate response; the neighbors aren’t glassed over ruins, so…..

    3. “A very strong case can be made that the Confederacy lost the Civil War the instant they started it firing on Fort Sumter – ”

      This is a common misunderstanding of events that actually contradicts your point. The South seceded peacefully, they gave the Union several warnings to abandon Fort Sumter, over the course of several months. They Union instead chose to resupply and refortify it.

      It’s like saying you must allow me to set up a sniper position outside your bedroom window and cannot take direct action until after I have blown you apart with a 50 cal.

      And the South’s rewards for those months of civil and respectful warnings to not reinforce Sumter? They were STILL painted as the bad guys for “starting” the Civil War. Do you really think your case will be any different, that when the Left wins, they will allow history to portray you as a man of wise caution? No, you’ll be scapegoated in the same way the South has been.

      Han shot first.

      1. The South seceded peacefully, they gave the Union several warnings to abandon Fort Sumter, over the course of several months.

        “Leave your stuff or we’ll shoot” is not peaceful.

        Hell, the Cartels do that to black families in neighborhoods they want to take over– and then they start executing anybody who is black, as a possible threat.

        1. Fort Sumter was Federal land, owned by the Federal government in complete accord with the Constitution which South Carolina had ratified. So, while it was located in the South, it was still owned by the Union.

          South Carolina simply reclaiming it and kicking its owners out is the kind of move you expect from third world dictators. The proper course of action would have been for the South to negotiate purchase of Fort Sumter from the Union. But, they weren’t going to do that. Thus, war was inevitable. I would have preferred that it had been handled in such a way as to have not screwed up the concept of each State being sovereign and only delegating certain powers to the Federal Government for the twin purposes of smoothing out relations between the States and presenting a public, and united, face to the rest of the world.

          1. I suppose I should be flattered that you’ve found it so necessary to insult me.

            I’m not.

            Instead, I’m just sorry to have not accepted your assertions rather than getting angry. It’s not worth it.

            1. I haven’t insulted you.
              I was insulting FEN.
              Unless you’re Fen that’s a weird statement.
              I have said some things you’ve said are beyond the pale. They’re above all beyond what I expect from you.
              I don’t know why you’re so invested in this, Steve, but you’re worrying the living daylights out me.
              I argue with you because you’re worrying me to death.
              I don’t know where this conviction came from, except perhaps that you are depressed and despair. But your certainty that we should go hot at the worst possible time and in a way guaranteed to lose whatever you think we’re trying to gain, is worrying the living me to death, because it seems resistant to reason or actual circumstances or… anything, really.
              And I don’t know why. I just know it’s dangerous.

              1. “I don’t know where this conviction came from, except perhaps that you are depressed and despair.”

                Despite the importance of standing on principle and defending liberty it is critical to remember that — in the long run — it doesn’t matter whether we win or lose. The Alamo fell, the defenders of Masada lost, the Spartans’ 300 lost, Roland eventually fell at Roncesvalles, Arthur fell at Camlann and Christ died on the cross. The Norse and the Christians share a belief that Good will eventually fall to Evil, whether at Ragnarök or Armageddon … but that Good will eventually rise triumphant, reborn.

                Victory is not the point; fighting the good fight is what counts. I’m likely as depressive as any here — it is in my Slavic DNA, and essential to the world of the wallaby — but I fight to defend values in battles that can never be won so long as Earth endures.

                You cannot force a man to be free, you can but battle to preserve his option. But essential to this fight is the knowledge that it just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

                Style matters.

            2. The last time you got like this was before the elections in 16. You were wrong then. Admit you might be wrong again.
              This is why I think it’s a symptom of depression.
              I just have no idea WHY you feel a need to think I’m insulting you or to be mad at me. That I leave to your own conscience.

              1. “I just have no idea WHY you feel a need to think I’m insulting you or to be mad at me.”

                Yeah, I can’t imagine why being told I’m clueless and/or crazy would offend me. Totally unreasonable of me.

                And I’m not sure I’m angry with you so much as exasperated. The closest classical example I can come up with is Patrick Henry:

                No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope that it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen, if, entertaining as I do opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve.

                This is no time for ceremony. The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate.”

                “The last time you got like this was before the elections in 16. You were wrong then. Admit you might be wrong again.”

                I’m not sure I was wrong, then or now. Yes, Trump won…. and was promptly hamstrung by his own party in the House and the Senate. Bills to accomplish what he (and too many Republicans) ran on should have been passing like clockwork if we actually had majorities to support them. I was calling out vote fraud all through the interim, and likewise the excesses of the judiciary and bureaucracy.

                Oh well. I’m not giving up. You can dox MY online history as well, but it’s been pretty consistent for quite a while.

                1. You’re not a Turk or someone who only comments to call for blood.
                  I still ask you consider that you’re depressed and taking too dark a view of this.
                  We have been clawing back freedoms for the last 30 years, despite people like Obama.
                  I used to hear that politics was downstream from culture and not believe it, but I think they were right.

                2. “Trump won…. and was promptly hamstrung by his own party in the House and the Senate.”

                  I am not sure they thought Trump really was a Republican. Or realized how pissed or how much dirt or how frustrated as a business owner he was, or the biggest, the GOP had to grow spines. I think the last two years have eliminated the first part of the list, and we are seeing spines in people we haven’t seen in … uh ever? I think 2020 (okay hope) is going to rock the Democrats (not in a good way either). OTOH super majority isn’t good for either party.

                  If any President can handle it without getting a god like complex, it is PDJT. If only because as head of his businesses & family, he already is a minor one, doesn’t/didn’t need the Presidency, & is well aware of what happens if the power goes to his head.

                  What I find interesting is PDJT and staff are not taking 2020 for granted. They are pushing through the federal judges in areas that have been blatantly treading in on making decisions contrary to law or common sense (9th circuit). Plus getting other items done, jic, he is not back for another 4 years.

  32. with Hillary walking free after sharing state secrets with the Russians

    with Hillary walking free after selling state secrets to the Russians

    Ya got the wrong verb mixed in there. 😛
    ———————————
    Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do remember history are doomed to watch everybody else repeat it.

  33. The world will not like what happens if the United States has a civil war of any kind. The “worst” circumstances of such a war would be bad all around. The “best” from an American perspective would be terrible for quite a few of the power-broker nations such as China and Russia. And any nation that harbored any leftist/socialist figures that didn’t make sure that their exile was a quiet one in all respects.

    (And, if there was, God-forbid, an attempt at an external intervention? Especially if it’s the usual kinds of UN-type troops. American soldiers are not very atrocity prone-not our usual makeup. We do, however, have a very firm sense of justice, and we would see things that would make Col. Kratman feel nauseous about in reaction to the usual “peacekeeper” activities. Assuming, of course, that an external intervention doesn’t cause both sides to quietly decide to shoot their worst offenders and join up to go after the “peacekeepers.”)

    1. The worst-case scenario for any country after ACW 2.0 is over is that America finds out that said country was responsible for whatever events incited the thing.

      Pretty sure the results would make what happened to Carthage look like a tea party.

    2. . We do, however, have a very firm sense of justice, and we would see things that would make Col. Kratman feel nauseous about in reaction to the usual “peacekeeper” activities.

      Assuming enough of them survived their usual amusements long enough to get military attention.
      Even the most basic “withhold the food aid unless you deliver willing females” games would be likely to, ahem, end poorly.

      1. “You’re new here, boy, so warning you now. Don’t play those kinds of games with Americans. They’ll send your head home with your balls stuffed in your eyesockets and that’s if your lucky.”

    3. If an ACW 2.0 occurs the world economy might never recover. Not only are we the primary engine of the world economy, think about what is going to happen to the valuations of all those USA debt instruments in China’s vaults.

  35. If we enter the tunnel of civil war, what will emerge from that tunnel will be an totalitarian state. No matter who wins, AT LEAST 2 billion people die, and civilization falls into a dark age that takes hundreds of years to recover from.

    We have made our civilization fragile. When electrical transmission lines are blown up, critical bridges cut, where do 5 million people in the bay area go for food, water, shelter? The San Francisco bay area has many single points of failure. At least half of California’s population dies.

    When the cities become death traps, their former residents leave seeking a safe place. They will descend on adjacent areas as a plague of locusts. Will Iowa guard the bridges along the Mississippi and kill anyone from Chicago who dares to cross?

    China dies. It can’t feed its people now. What does the world do when the one who comes to others aid needs help? They are not coming to help. Only vultures come to scavenge the corpse. I have been contemplating the results of a civil war for a while. It scares the hell out of me. Yet Churchill’s 1940 comment resounds.

    ““If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

    We must try to live these words, in the coming dark hours. Perhaps those here with a talent with words can write a novel about the danger we face to warn those from the left of the danger they face.

    2. The problem is that we’re certainly at and arguably past the “precarious chance” and being told we SHOULD wait for the “better to perish”.

  36. And we’re nowhere at the level of oppression going on in Venezuela or even vaguely approaching the crap people put up with for 70 years plus in the USSR.
    Though we’re WAY BEYOND what the Founders rebelled over.
    It’s important to note that, especially when the other side constantly blathers about “tolerance”.

    Sic semper tyrannus!

    1. “Though we’re WAY BEYOND what the Founders rebelled over.
      It’s important to note that, especially when the other side constantly blathers about “tolerance”.”
      Which our “Founders worshippers” seem anxious to gloss over. The only tolerance is that Leftists haven’t quite raised the nerve to arrest us openly. They’re at least inventing charges.

      1. Yeah. we founders worshipers have a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, and also know without them we will not win.
        We also know that by that count, we’ve been WAY past it all of the twentieth century. And that now we’re ACTUALLY starting to win back the republic, slowly and incrementally.
        And that starting some shit for no reason except because agent provocateurs are poking us would be stupid.
        But hey, you do you. You want to be stampeded towards stupid shit and throw away all the progress we’ve managed in rolling back the oppressive control of the left in the last twenty years? Go for it. Just don’t do it in OUR name.

  37. Pingback: Never Yet Melted » Sarah Hoyt is Getting a Little Angry

  38. Forgive the length, but this is from “Mr. Lincoln’s Army” by Bruce Catton (Open Road Media (November 3, 2015)). The parallels between their situation and ours is uncanny.

    “The point that is so easy to overlook nowadays is that the men of the 1860s were living in the center of a fiery furnace. It was not a tidy, clear-cut war against some foreign nation that was being waged. It was a civil war, a war not between men of two nations but between men of two beliefs, two philosophies, two ways of considering human society and its structure and purpose. The opposing beliefs were not sharply defined and clear so that no man could mistake which camp he belonged in. On the contrary, there were a dozen gradations of belief leading from one to the other, and a man might belong in one camp on one issue and in the other camp on another; and the very word “loyalty” might mean loyalty to a flag, to a cause, or to a belief in some particular social and political theory, and “treason” might mean disloyalty to any of these. Indeed, the war was peculiarly and very bitterly a war of the tragically modern kind, in which loyalties and disloyalties do not follow the old patterns even though those patterns may be the only ones men can use when they try to formulate their loyalty. And so that generation was deprived of the one element that is essential to the operation of a free society—the ability to assume, in the absence of good proof to the contrary, that men in public life are generally decent, honorable, and loyal. Because that element was lacking, the wisest man could be reasonable with only part of his mind; a certain area had to be given over to emotions which were all the more mad and overpowering because he shared them with everyone else.
    Hence the Civil War was fought and directed in an air of outright melodrama. It was stagy and overdone, and the least inhibited theatrical director nowadays would throw out large parts of the script on the simple ground that it was too wild to be credible—but it was all real, the villainies and dangers were all visible, and the worst things anyone could imagine seemed quite as likely as not to be completely true.”

    1. Thank you for that quote. I have a number of Bruce Cattons’ books on my shelves – my mother was a Civil War buff and a fan of his as a historian.
      It was all … complicated. I am trying to make that all clear in the current WIP; the main character is a woman, a fervent abolitionist, and yet – as the war drags on and chews up a generation of men, she begins to consider (and secretly regret) the cost of it all. Oh, don’t worry – I am not going to go all social-justice warrior in this. But it must have begun to worry at Northern abolitionists – the human cost of the great crusade, especially as it began to bite. And my MC becomes a battlefield nurse, so she is faced with it,

  39. Interesting comments, reminds me of an old joke I stole:

    Two conservatives are being led into the Death Camps, one says to the other “now don’t make a fuss, we might get in trouble”

    We wouldn’t be in this situation to to begin with if Republicans had demonstrated they possess the will to act. Instead, WE have taught the Left that there are no real consequences for their actions.

    I also believe that some of us are trying a bit too hard to virtue signal how wise, civilized and reasonable they are. Would you have us go softly into the night like the Europeans, while you write 500 word essays lamenting the fall of the Republic? I would ask “where is your red line, do you even have one?” What has to happen before you are willing to pick up a rifle.

    Sure, violence is an unpredictable and dangerous escalation. But if two men are in conflict, and one is willing to resort to violence and the other is not, who usually triumphs? Some of the comments here remind me of the Europeans who were so terrified of war that they surrendered Europe and thus were complicit in the murder of 6 million Jews.

    We don’t seek violence for the sake of vengeance. The Bully’s nose needs to be bloodied so that he becomes and Object Lesson for all who would be like him.

    You referenced our boss, the Godfather at Insty. He once said:

    “When the responsible authorities fail to act, other forms of authority will assert themselves. They may not behave responsibly, but they *will* act” – Glenn Reynolds

    1. We wouldn’t be in this situation to to begin with if Republicans had demonstrated they possess the will to act. Instead, WE have taught the Left that there are no real consequences for their actions.

      99% of the time, they’re being obnoxious. Not a threat.
      Part of what they are trying to destroy is not just the Christian idea of restraint when wronged, but even the Jewish concept of hot hitting back twice as hard.

      1. Or the American idea of minding one’s own business. Which has already been significantly undermined by the way Social Security, etc. forcibly couples everyone’s personal business together. Maybe need to go further into root causes, and specify income tax, but returning funding of the Federal government from income taxes to tariffs is perhaps against my personal interest.

        If you cannot mind your own business, independently of everyone else, you have to ‘invest’ in public business. The left thinks that a shared business might run as well a personal private business, with as much investment. Soviet Union is an example of disinvestment in shared business. For a widely shared business, we only have the crudest statistical information about our business partners, meaning uncertainty in judging the value of personal investment, and only the crudest most heavy handed tools for re-negotiating the terms of the business.

        The left is set on using mobbing and thought policing in order to force the negotiating results they want, public investment to the same degree and intelligence as private, but will not be successful. To the extent that conservatives have common goals at all, it may be in the conservative interest to force a negotiation on different terms, and mobbing and thought policing might not serve that forcing.

        If we have different designs than the left, the tools found best for the designs of the left may not be optimal for our designs. Buckley forced a substantially poor tool set when he quashed the influence of the John Birch Society, but it is not clear either that the John Birch Society had the optimal tool set for my goals. The possible bandwidth of conservative media in the old form forced a small space and manpower for exploring tooling options, pretty much ensuring the design would not be optimal.

        We have much better options now for exploring the design-space of tools for accomplishing ‘conservative’ ends, and it will take time for conservative intellectual activists to really help translate that into effective conservative activism. Look at how much we can learn from 4chan experiments, however poorly designed they may be for discovering best ways to accomplish conservative goals. I think Phantom and Ian are loonies*, but they still come up with stuff worth learning from.

        Right now, long term conservatives of thirty to forty years of age are used to crowdsourcing tools and info from the internet. Ten or twenty years from now, those folks in conservative activism will be a lot more of a voice in conservative activism. Right now we simply have to live with a number of nominal ‘allies’ who have not learned to combine general politeness with measured and deliberate obnoxiousness.

        *I think the consensus here is that on the issue in question, I am definitely a lunatic.

            1. One’s already been sentenced, by the way– a relatively simple case where the FBI guy used his wife having worked for a GOP guy to illegally access his email.

              We all know, though not quite as well as they do, that more complicated stuff takes longer…. *evil laugh*

      3. Nit: The Jewish concept isn’t “don’t hit back twice as hard” it’s “don’t start a genocidal clan war over a minor insult”. A matter of scale perhaps, but an important one.

    2. Rolls eyes. Bucko, no one is saying there won’t be violence.
      No one is saying not to fight in extremis.
      I’m saying we’re not there. Might not be there. The president is still ours, so is the senate.
      Stop wagging your fucking dick and use your fucking brain.
      And there is a special place in hell for making a berserker tell you not to start the fucking stupid dance just to get us all quashed.
      You’re an ass.

    3. Who said anything about refusing to use violence? Not a bunch of pacifists, mostly just people who have a good idea of just how bad it will get if the dance starts, an would really not go there absent no alternatives.

    4. One bad joke deserves another …

      A Texan, a Frenchman and an Israeli are on a plane flying over the Pacific Ocean when the engines stop functioning.

      The plane crash-lands on a Pacific Island and the three are immediately captured by a tribe of cannibals and taken to their village.

      The chief tells the three captives these cannibals are civilized and they have a custom on their island that before they eat anyone, they grant that person his or her last wishes – no matter what they are.

      He asks the Texan, “What is your last wish?”

      The Texan replies: “I want a 2-inch thick steak with all the trimmings, Cajun fries and a case of Bud.”

      The chief motions to some of his tribesmen who immediately run into the jungle and come back with the steak, the fries and the beer. The Texan eats his meal and he is thrown into the pot.

      The Frenchman is asked: “What is your last wish?”

      He replies: “I’d like a case of Dom Perignon, and I’d also like a big plate of escargots cooked in the French manner.”

      The chief motions to his tribesmen who immediately rush off into the jungle and bring back everything the Frenchman asked for. He eats and drinks his fill and is then thrown into the pot.

      The chief turns to the Israeli and asks, “And what is your wish?”

      The Israeli looks the chief squarely in the eyes and replies: “I want you to kick me in the behind as hard as you can.” The chief is bewildered and asks the Israeli again, only to receive the same reply. “I want you to kick me in the behind as hard as you can.”

      The chief shrugs his shoulders, asks the Israeli to turn around and kicks him as hard as he can. With that the Israeli pulls out a gun and kills the chief and all the other cannibals.

      The Texan and the Frenchman get out of the pot, look at the Israeli and say: “If you had that gun why didn’t you do anything sooner?”

      The Israeli replies: “What? And risk being condemned by the U.N., E.U. and the U.S. State Department for ‘overreacting’ to insufficient provocation?”

  40. “the fashionable habit these days of adopting a pose of the “the republic is gone, gone, gone” is bullshit. The only people who can think that are people who have never lived in another country as one of them.

    I know. I did.”

    I love you Sarah, but… I’m not sure I trust your perspective here. You grew up under these marxists systems yes? And yet, weren’t you still caught flat-footed by the Publishing Establishment before you went Indie? And wasn’t the Hugo mess initially a surprise to you? You came from a culture where you had to network to a member of the Inner Party to get toilet paper and razorblades, but you didn’t see those other things coming?

    1. No, you don’t love me. You’re an asshole.
      I wasn’t caught flat footed. I knew what publishing was. Which is why I kept my mouth shut and kept on publishing before my conscience pushed me out of the political closet.
      I was surprised by the bullshit with the Hugo, because I never thought it was that important.
      You have no idea. You’re an actual dyed in the wool ass, trying to instigate people to fight with no need.
      Go tell the FBI no sale.

  41. Damn you Sarah you wrote a good chunk of the post that i was planing as a big end of the year thing!

    But I’m going to use it for tomorrow morning Radio show where I’ll be guest hosting on WCRN

  42. Dear Mrs. Hoyt,
    A rather important point you’ve missed:
    This balkanization and ultimate destruction of America which you would avoid in a Civil War is what the Progressive Left fervently desires. It won’t be the Right which first acts on its anger.

  43. Pingback: THERE MIGHT COME A TIME FOR THIS WORD. THE TIME IS NOT NOW:  Anger…. – The usa report

  44. There may be hope in so far as we’ve all seen the pendulum swings both ways, I’ve been aware enough to watch it swing for well over half a century.

    Sadly though the center moves toward the left, JFK’s democrat party was far to the right of today’s Republican Party.

    There may be hope but I’ll keep my powder dry and avoid crows as much as possible.

    1. No. The center moved towards the left. PAST. Remember that JFK died when most of us were born.
      Also, bah. I dispute that. The Republican party back then was far to the left of now in many things like gun control and economics.
      So. No.
      Also if you can’t feel it, I can.
      The times they are achanging.

  45. One useful action we can each take is to review our local media coverage of the Russia/FBI/FISA news coverage and write the news outlets asking

    a) whether they’ve publicly corrected their false erroneous reporting,

    b) whether they’ve taken steps (and what steps they’ve taken) to prevent such false erroneous reporting in the future, and

    c) whether the lying sack of feces crapweasels promulgating reporters responsible for the false erroneous reporting have been suitably chastised.

    WE NOW KNOW: PERPS & CHUMPS OF THE MSM
    … reporters kept taking the bait on the key idea that Steele was an in-the-know superspy whose conspiracy/blackmail claims were taken seriously by investigators. Credulous reports originating from this premise — about Comey’s “bombshell” delivery [Zach Beauchanp, Vox] of Steele’s compromise claims to Trump, or news that a court found “probable cause” [Ellen Nakashima, Devlin Barrett and Adam Entous, Washington Post] to believe Page was a foreign agent, or even in hagiographic portraits of Steele as a real-life George Smiley [Jane Mayer, New Yorker] — now look like fruit from a poisoned tree. Was it eaten knowingly or unknowingly?

    If reporters were burned, they should be angry, and corrections should be forthcoming. If there isn’t an effort to reverse the wrong coverage, it will look like certain outlets (particularly cable channels) were complicit in knowingly giving oceans of airtime to shaky stories. It’s a bad look either way, but door number two is worse.

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