Cosplaying The Revolution

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

dancer-2483274_1280

This is going to end badly. Very, very badly.  And the water is going to get very choppy.

To everyone who is old enough and those of us who aren’t but who have read about the sixties and particularly those of us who have followed the glorification and idolization of what was a Soviet agit prop operation using stupid American middle class kids, this is starting to feel like one of those bad remakes.

Mostly because it is.

Older son was born in the last year of the echo boom and for our sins we raised him in a hippie mountain town, and then in an urban area inhabited by college professors.  We didn’t pick areas for the politics but for walkability (this one is the first house not in that criteria) because if I don’t have a reason to walk I don’t, and then I start getting ill.

This means I was exposed at school functions to more “we totes were at Woodstock” and “Come the revolution” types than I ever want to see in one place again. All about ten years older than us.  (Something happened there, because younger son, about 4 years younger was in a class where we were CONSISTENTLY the oldest parents by about 10 years.  I know we spawned late thanks to infertility. But I don’t know when my generation had kids.  Maybe they all married and had kids early? We did the first.)

And these kids came and played at my house, and I heard their talk.  It is not an exaggeration to say they were raised with the idea that revolution and protest, “resistance” and (incoherently) government work is the highest good.  I suspect that J. K. Rowling was raised that way too, from the fact that the only things she could think of for her characters to aspire to were government work.

Now they’ve been wound to a fever pitch by losing the election in 2016.  You see, their idiot parents and their idiot teachers, usually one and the same, have raised them with the idea that history comes with an arrow, and their beliefs and ideas are what the future will approve of and glorify.  Which is mental on many levels, the most important one being that their beliefs and ideas have no future. They do have a past, a miserable one of failure and oppression and mass graves from the USSR to China, from East Germany to Cuba, from North Korea to Venezuela.

But the kiddies don’t know that. They know that America is evil and unjust because it broke their parents’ and teachers blood-red wagon.  It’s “capitalist” and “Capitalism kills” (because homeless, and drug addicts and stuff) and it must be torn down so the great new future comes. It must also be overwhelmed by brown and black immigrants, because those have automatic moral virtue, written in their genes.

Orangemanbad won and is derailing the train of ruin and invasion by illiterate hordes that will bring about the glorious future, so orangemanbad must be destroyed at all costs.  Even if it means that the kiddies destroy their own country and their own society to do it. We deserve it, or orangemanbad wouldn’t be president. And besides America is the most racist country ever and the most patriarchal. (Those burkas? Safe spaces.  The ridiculous racism of Chinese? doesn’t exist. The casual racism of Europeans? Well, the kiddies never even heard it.)

Which brings us to what is going on.  Besides the fact that a lot of it is pre-planned, financed and pre-prepared by leftist agents who need a distraction before their kleptocratic malfeasance comes out into the public. The kiddies are willing joining into destruction and tearing down because a) they have no clue what destroying the economy would do to them personally. The only economics they know is Marxian cargo cult, and they’ve never been hungry a day — or an hour — in their lives. b) In many ways they are engaging in a ghost dance, a doing of actions they’ve been told are merit-bearing in order to bring about the future they’ve been told was inevitable and which now is in doubt. c) this is not in any way rational and sane. It’s a cult facing the tumbling down of their most cherished beliefs and what they do to hold on to them has nothing to do with real life.

Which brings us to Vanilla ISIS and its depredations.  These are NOT — in case you’re someone who only gets news from CNN and BELIEVES it — peaceful protesters.  (In other news, sorry guys, but there is no Easter Bunny and Santa Claus as you heard of him, is also not real.)

Why do I say this won’t end well?  Because it never does.  Cults last stands never end well.  Normally they end in suicide by the cult, but along the line they often do untold damage and destroy innocent people and lives.

Are we pitched into the Khaki and is what emerges completely different?  I don’t know.  And I don’t think anyone does.  It depends on how quickly this crazy gets put down, or whether we continue into even stupider sh*t after.  I’m frankly a little worried about what they do for an encore.  What we’re seeing is people being dumped from their blog hosting (and I mean blogs I read, so no, not evilbad unless anything to the right of Lenin is) and a friend has got permanently booted from Facebook for posting — not political at all, but this is what they told him — about the SpaceX launch.  So we know some of the new offensive looks just like the old offensive “If we stop them posting things that disagree with us, their opinions disappear.”  We’re dealing with people who think covering their ears changes the world.

A friend says that if they’re following the Recreate 68 playbook, it will be car bombings and assassinations.  Of course this crew is profoundly incompetent, so who knows what THAT play will turn into.

Hold on to the side of the boat, and stay away from/be ready to defend from Vanilla ISIS.  (Yes I stole the moniker, but it’s so perfect it MUST become a thing.  Antifa was always named by opposites. They are in fact Vanilla ISIS.) Mostly? Stay away from them while they burn out.  This riot gambit is such bad optics they’re already trying to deflect and claim it’s someone else doing it.

So the question is what comes next. And how supremely stupid it turns out to be.

It’s going to be rough for a little while, but be not afraid: in the end we win, they lose.

 

 

517 thoughts on “Cosplaying The Revolution”

  1. (In other news, sorry guys, but there is no Easter Bunny and Santa Claus as you heard of him, is also not real.)

    At least we know that the Brick Fairy is real.

      1. Shows their incompetence they can’t even make a Molotov correctly.

      2. Now that’s a fine idea. Bricks are expensive, and these are going to waste.

    3. At least the Catholic Church teaches that public venerations of the patron Saint of vigilante justice are the way to go.

      Oh wait, I’m making up stuff again, that very much is not official teaching.

      2. They have been using “saint” Malverde– a mythical patron saint for the Cartels.

        I can just imagine what they’d have to say about Saint Katharine Drexel, and unless I’d be shocked, I’d rather not find out.
        (She worked, hard, to actually fix problems, by empowering the downtrodden.)

          1. I don’t think they’re Catholic, however there is a patron saint of handgunners who would fit rather nicely with vigilante justice, St. Gabriel Possenti.

            He was a playboy who got religion, everybody “knew” he’d give it up, but he didn’t; gang of thugs came around threatening to abuse the young ladies, he made sure they didn’t. He was an awesome marksman, well known for dueling before he got religious.

            Died of TB before his ordination.

            On the list of folks for us to name a baby after.

              1. Forgot to paste the good part:

                According to the society, Gabriel’s marksmanship and proficiency with handguns allegedly saved the village of Isola del Gran Sasso from a band of 20 Garibaldi Red Shirts in 1860. In 1860, Garibaldi’s soldiers entered the mountain village of Isola, Italy. They began to burn and pillage the town, terrorizing its inhabitants. Possenti, with his seminary rector’s permission, walked into the center of town, unarmed, to face the terrorists. One of the soldiers was dragging off a young woman he intended to rape when he saw Possenti and made a snickering remark about such a young monk being all alone. Possenti quickly grabbed the soldier’s revolver from his belt and ordered the marauder to release the woman. The startled soldier complied, as Possenti grabbed the revolver of another soldier who came by. Hearing the commotion, the rest of the soldiers came running in Possenti’s direction, determined to overcome the rebellious monk.

                At that moment a small lizard ran across the road between Possenti and the soldiers. When the lizard briefly paused, Possenti took careful aim and struck the lizard with one shot. Turning his two handguns on the approaching soldiers, Possenti commanded them to drop their weapons. Having seen his handiwork with a pistol, the soldiers complied. Possenti ordered them to put out the fires they had set, and upon finishing, marched the whole lot out of town, ordering them never to return. The grateful townspeople escorted Possenti in triumphant procession back to the seminary, thereafter referring to him as “the Savior of Isola”.

                1. There’s an alternate history for ya — what if he missed the lizard?

              2. I wouldn’t trust Wikipedia especially well– and that’s compared to various saint legend sites– but yes.

                    1. Thanks; when I went looking, that’un failed to come up, and yes, is less likely to suffer malicious bias in the future.

        2. Well, John Moses Browning may not be a saint, but he was a Saint. Latter Day, to be precise…

          (And I have no idea why I remembered that…)

      3. St. Michael the Archangel is probably the right one for this.

        Though of course any saint can be asked for intercession in any case.

  2. Yeah, I’m freaking out again, because of pieces put together.

    So, I really need to switch from reading and writing about this stuff to one of three other activities I could be doing.

    1. I’m spending more time in my ever-expanding garden, which has resulted in a bad case of Obsessive Weeding Disorder.

      A year’s worth of food in progress, come to it.

      1. Sadly, with a bad back and two bad knees, a vegetable garden is out of the question. I miss it.

    1. Yep, and whether Democrats manage to steal the election in November so as to use their government offices to force a “fundamental transformation of America” into a Marxist totalitarian state, or whethet they lose and unleash their Antifa blackshirts even more than they have now, I fully expect at this point to turn into a hot civil war. They very clearly intend to go full Stalin/Mao. They have proven it with their imposition of their draconian CCP lockdowns, their demonization of genuinely peaceful protests, and their use of their rule by decree to strip people of fundamental freedoms. The CCP virus lockdowns were intended as a trial run by Democrats. Now they are stoking rioting and looting so they can achieve permanence.

      The outright approval and cheerleading of violence by Democrats and their media arm against not only political opponents but literally anyone who “is in the way” of their quest for power, as well as innocents, has caused me to lose any realistic hope that a hot civil war can be avoided at this point. Simply put they hate anyone who is not in lockstep conformity with them and have no qualms of engaging in mass violence or mass murder to impose the conformity they desire.

              2. How do you feel about cutting pieces from flags that have passed their useful life? I have two flags that flew from front of my house, but they are too faded and slightly tattered to fly.

              3. I know you’re supposed to respectfully dispose of worn-out flags, but I can’t bring myself to do it. The cheap scrawny one in the barn was a side-of-the-road rescue, and looks it, but that’s how our flag would look after battle, so… And then there’s the big well-made one I filched from the tired-flag-disposal box at the hardware store, because it’s in near-perfect shape and I couldn’t bear to see it go to the ragbin… probably woulda emptied the whole box if I’d thought I could get away with it. Who knows, the day may come when any scrap that still shows red, white, and blue is the only symbol we’ve got. μολὼν λαβέ

                1. I’ll get you one, hon. I’ve actually bought little containers for them. Then life got crazy.
                  I have another space opera series to get started, but then by Jan next year I’m going to return to the DST world, with No Price Too High, set 16 (?) years after AFGM. (Matters because it involves Nat & their twin sons. (it’s complicated.)) They come home, and the house is aflame and the rest of the family is missing. The nearest neighbors have been hanged in their own yard, and their farm likewise is aflame. Luce is missing.
                  So, who do you trust? Well…. two six year old boys. Yes, it’s rough. Yes, it’s a USAian book.

                1. I did!!! Wouldn’t USAians treasure whole flags that they were able to preserve? I thought the sections of flags were both scarcity and secrecy driven.

                  1. What I mean is, right now, there’s no scarcity and we don’t need to be secret… Sorry, I am thinking immersively! I have to work at thinking like marketing.

                    2. exactly, and its one of the ‘secret fannish things’ that we used to have before so much SF went mainstream.

                  2. of course. BUT people preparing to go underground…
                    But note my comment that I will not tear up a flag. not even a very old one.
                    OTOH I don’t oppose having “scraps” printed.

                    1. There are lots of flag-ish things that could substitute. I have a flag beach towel. I totally freaked out one day when, not paying much attention, I tossed a towel on the floor before stepping out of the shower, then looked down. Eeek! Not stepping on that! So, maybe issues with just “flagish” things, too.

                    3. Now that there is patriotic. Makes me want to stand up and be proud to be an American!

      2. What if Trump, who NEVER sticks to the Fascist Left’s script, follows up on naming Antifa a terrorist group by aggressively exposing their responsibility for these riots, and arresting key agitators? Remember, the riots of ‘68 are generally held to have elected Nixon, and Nixon wasn’t the strategist Trump is.

        1. I’m hoping. I’m also hoping he puts the Patriot Act to good use and freezes the assets of everyone who has contributed money to them.

          1. You have a point or two, but I think the Democrats have badly mis-estimated the voters’ likely reaction to the riots, especially if (as seems possible) some or all of the underlying planning by the likes of Antifa comes out.

            Oh, if the Fascist Left were at the top of their game, sure, Trump would be in serious trouble. But they’re flailing.

            2. that too, but i would personally love for Soros’ money to be removed from American politics, permanently.

        2. I don’t think its an apt comparison because unlike Nixon, Trump is the incumbent, and incumbents, regardless of whether they are actually responsible for the problems, generally get the blame. Recall 1932 for instance (which is actually the scenario that Democrats are trying to recreate at the moment).

          1. Key word is generally …

            This time? Maybe not. Oh, they’re trying. We aren’t buying. We’ll see if the traditional liberals are … excluding the liberals in power.

          2. I would have to check the dates, but I thought riots helped Nixon win re-election….

      3. Between their denouncing lockdown protests and cheering Antifa looting, encouraging “Bur it all, baby!” and crying “Not my neighborhood” and reconciling their other contradictions it is my thinking they will all be hospitalized for terminal whiplash along about September.
        –

      4. The result of either of your initial scenarios is the American Franco. Not sure who he will be, but I have some guesses.

        But the end of this is either the Republic or an American Franco who, if we are lucky, sets up a democracy a la Pinochet, but after his death (the Brits and the Spanish taught any future Pinochet not to get up power while alive) and more likely leaves a designated successor who has to kill his competitors given we have no Juan Carlos waiting to be crowned.

  4. “a friend has got permanently booted from Facebook”

    I believe it was 30 days, not permanently, but it’s still thunderingly stupid.

    Is Clamps on Facebook? Might explain a few things.

      1. Or he’ll get out of Facebook Jail for, oh thirty seconds, and get locked again for something from three years ago, like Larry C.

          2. Isn’t it funny how people who have been indoctrinated by soviet union’s propaganda for all of their lives, are now accusing others of being Russian (and presumably capitalist) agents? 😂

                1. I like dark humour but am not about to claim that there’s anything keeping me sane.

                  In our current world you’d have to be crazy to want to be sane.
                  –

            2. At least they’re consistent in believing the Russians magically powerful and effective.
              –

              1. I sometimes worry that the left will go all-out Russophobic. I have a Ukrainian last name and that might be close enough to be targeted.

          3. If you’re thinking of who I think you are, ISTR he was a cog in the machine of the NSA, so probably a Deep Stater.

              1. Yes. No guarantees my recollection of his past is right, but it would explain much.

            1. Moose hangs out at Larry Correia’s Evil Mountain Lair. That’s how it got the name Yard Moose Mountain.
              ———————————
              A Moose once bit my sister.

          5. Yay! Just like Teflon Don!

            Now get denounced by the SPLC, and you’ll be in the club!

      2. *laughter* If he is, it’s with a very locked down profile, because that’s how the whole damn Internet knows his real name. He blames me for this, because he was convinced that a number of us females were just sock puppets of evil Cutelildrow (yep, Foxfier, MaryCatelli, and Akilika, you’re me, totally yo lmao) but y’all know I never have had a facebook and don’t even know how that works. Anyway, one of the other young ladies who used to hang out at Jordan Bassior’s blog said there was just no way ‘she’ was this obnoxious just at Jordan’s (we all thought Clamps was female because he pretended to be a young one AND ‘spoke/wrote’ like a 14 year old because surprise, people treat kids, especially female kids, usually nicer.)

        She did the search. I don’t remember why I didn’t google, but I think I was busy with something and was just chatting while doing it, and whatever that was, it was probably pretty important to me at the time. But lol, there it was, a whole open profile with his livejournal username, his website, real name, age, location, the works. And a whole bunch of other shit. That’s how people found out who he was and what he’d done long before he ever showed up at Jordan’s. One of my guy friends who would occasionally read those discussion threads (was RL busy, but he enjoyed reading the alt-history what if ones) messaged me latter and boggled that a man in his late twenties was such a whiny, petulant effeminate brat that never in a billion years would my friend have pegged Clampsy as male. I remember laughing myself into stitches because of that. He really kept going ‘how the actual eff’ in unmitigated disbelief.

        The really odd thing is, he didn’t really deny his real identity too much, but blamed me for it for reasons none of us could parse, a really strange mix of ‘sockpuppets’ and ‘covering for my ‘stalking’. The screaming he did in the LJ comments across a number of posts was epic. (shrug) He also scrubbed his Internet past a few years ago.

        It still makes me chuckle on occasion, because I remember my friends’ voices as they sputtered in bafflement.

        1. Oh good heavens. Anybody who can’t tell Mary and I apart needs serious mental help, it’d be more believable that you and I were at least a group blog.

          Heck, a group blog– bunch of folks all pretending to be the same people– would be more sensible than any of us being the same person as another, just from the matter of time. I know I’m not around as much as I use to be, but still!

          1. I think at one point the only ‘real’ people were Jordan and I, it seemed. It used to make us wonder how anyone could think that.

            Looking back on it now, the only thing we all shared was being able to make very detailed,rational arguments, and make the snarky or humorous remarks whenever needed.

            Maybe that’s why we were ‘sockpuppets.’

            1. Familiarity with Catholic theology, an interest in mythology, and what would be considered conservative political philosophy in the US, too.

              But Mary can write, you can tell good stories and draw, and I am argumentative.

              1. Foxfire, you left off the supporting superpower of digging random facts out of the bowels of the internet.

                1. I just count that as being curious and having a hard time not sharing something I think is neat/interesting/relevant/important, but I’ll take it with thanks!

              2. That’s all made up, I am sure. After all, nobody would like Mary’s books and my art or your arguments over Clampsy’s brilliant yet unrecognizable geheeeniiius, don’t you know!

                Okay, no laughing while eating cereal, Shadow, even self inflicted.

                1. Ok, this conversation just took a turn for the weird, and it wasn’t any of your guys’s fault.

                  I was just watching Fairy Tail a few minutes ago, and for some reason, Foxfier’s “voice in my head” drifted into Carla’s voice, and from there, Shadowdancer’s voice became Wendy’s.

                  I’m clearly tired, and I need to go to sleep now!

            2. “… the only thing we all shared was being able to make very detailed,rational arguments, and make the snarky or humorous remarks whenever needed.”

              How many people on the Left do you see displaying those traits? Is it any wonder they think conservatives exhibiting those abilities are sock puppets?
              –

              1. They see loads of sock puppets on their side, and assume we must be the same.

              2. Not very many, these days, and a lot of them are being declared right wing because they’re right of Stalin or closer to centrist. Classical liberals are considered full on MAGA hat wearing rednecks by the current Left now.

        2. My favorite protester so far was the guy declaring: “We are Legion.”

          Yeah. Might want to look up the origin of that quote there, buddy. Or is this an unexpected moment of candor?

          2. There’s a sub-culture (I don’t mean Satanists, although given both include a lot of idiots it’s probably got overlap) who look at demons and just think “cool!”

          3. Well, I’ve had a very strong compulsion starting this week to add even more meditations on St. Michael and the Heavenly Host to my personal devotions, make of it what you will.

      3. Well, at least some do tell you. I’m still in “timeout” over at PJM for two more days… (My best guess is that I posted a quote from the Baltimore Mayor on the story about the attack on CNN HQ. Hopefully none of the ones that understood the comment on the hypocrisy of the Left were knocked off with me; I haven’t seen them lately, either, though.)

        I’m this close to deciding whether to look into a refund of the VIP membership.

  5. Use their rhetoric against them– “Say the names” of the people killed because of the riots. “Say the names” of people who wear beaten and left for dead. How many will be killed and destroyed because of your actions. “Say the names.”

    Evil is this– actions that destroy and ruin instead of create and build.

    1. In this world there are those who build things up, and those that burn them down. I have zero regard for the second sort.

        2. Bit buildings? Who’s biting the buildings? 😀

          Maybe ‘Management’ is real?

            1. Thank you, I am rather proud of my snarking and general smart-assery. 😀

            1. ehh, couldn’t get a decent line of sight and corona made it impossible to get a permit to film it.

                1. Yeah i was gonna take my Phantom down there, but a bunch of furloughed people and/or people not in their office and good luck getting the permits…

        4. Creative destruction is a thing. Of course destructive destruction will try to claim that “creative” mantle to deflect blame from itself.

          It’s the usual pattern: Evil things claim that they’re good, or at least justified things. Rioters claim to be peaceful protesters. Murderers claim to be acting in self-defense. Tyrants claim to be doing what’s necessary for the Good of the People. “They make a desert and call it peace.”

          Evil has to lie, for the sake of its own survival.

          (“And besides, that building has been bitten. It’s rabid! It has to be put down!”)

          1. As the Patron Saint of Paradox put it– “The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.” from his regular essay in the Illustrated London News, June 11, 1910.

            Which, does anybody know where to find that issue online, for free? I has a fail, and I like him, but I’m not paying $35 for the collected Chesterton #35 just for this.
            It took me months to get through the Collected Chesterton that has Heresy in it, because I kept stopping to think, and that was ten years ago!

          2. I see you ran into the same problem I did. It is hard to explain creative destruction without describing the destruction destruction. 🙂

          3. When I listen to “Cases of the Week” from Andrew Branca’s “Law of Self Defense” blog, I’m sometimes amazed by what some people attempt to justify as “self defense”.

            Yes, I knew going in that bad guys always try to justify their violence as “self defense”, but it’s still mind-boggling.

    2. I’m fascinated, though sadly not surprised, that rich white kids’ take on racism is considered more accurate and newsworthy than that of actual minorities. Like that Congressional hearing on white supremacy where most of the experts on its effects on the black community were middle aged white female academics, and the congressional panel was doing its best to prevent the one black woman from testifying, (Candace Owens I believe?)

      I doubt that a single rioter/looter/thug actually gives a damn about the black community. Or any community at all.

      1. I saw a meme on Twitter that sums it up perfectly. It’s a cartoon character (I think She-ra), blond, fair of skin, dressed in a white bathing suit with bracelets and a tiara, holding a flaming sword high. And the caption reads, “By the Power of White Girl I am offended on your behalf!”

            1. I wasn’t too thrilled with the de-aging, nor the new character design, but I was willing to go be things a try anyway. Then I read of the… wokelitude?.. of things and didn’t bother. When individuality is to a thing only the Bad have? Pfui.

              1. When individuality is to a thing only the Bad have?

                I probably missed something. As far as I have gathered secondhand, the writer hired to do the remake fell gleefully upon the opportunity to make her slash fanfic a reality and get homosexual relationships, gender nonconformity, etc., to center stage — but the early-season bad guy Learning About Friendship and developing individuality (he got lost from a clone army) is a significant improvement, so I’m not sure this was one of the intended themes.

            2. Nu-Ra was the showrunner having a pedophile lesbian fantasy play out between her self-insert and a prepubescent She-Ra.

              All those announcements that She-Ra ‘wasn’t for you to drool over’? Pure projection on the part of Noelle Stevenson. The vulnerable women in her meatspace sphere may well need our prayers.

              -Albert

      2. It is a widely known fact, documented in a great number of academic journals, that only college-educated White folk (generally holding advanced degrees) can properly understand the problems of Minorities in America. Minorities lack education and perspective to recognize the true origins of their problems, and because of this lack frequently fail to be authentic voices for their races.

        The only exceptions are Rap Artists and third-string NFL quarterbacks (with woke grrrlfriends.)
        –

          1. Your link goes right back to this page. Are you just trying to spare the REST of us from seeing it? :p

          2. Give Mead her due, she definitely took an idea and ran with it. But I wouldn’t put Mead at the head of the snake. Dig deep enough, you go back to the Enlightenment, before the wars.

            Mead’s teacher, and somewhat idol, was Ruth Benedict. Benedict was a product of the elites of the time, as was many an anthropologist of the time (it was more a hobby of the rich than the often dirty, smelly business of the middle class as it is today).

            A lot of the elites of the time embraced prototypical versions of current leftist thought. Mead was no different. Given the revisions that are going on (track changes in wiki articles if you don’t believe me- the literature has shifted over time as well), this would be a good time to look back at first sources and see what is changing now. Give it, say, five years. Mead will eventually be vilified for, either not going far enough, or missing out on some future leftist shibboleth.

          2. Thought: if cogito ergo sum – thus all these other NPCs out there, since they are letting others do the “thinking” for them, they don’t actually exist. Thus those of us, who for whatever reason, tend towards the obsessive fact swallowing and comparing and thinking, by Patrick, are the only Real People. The rest are shadows.

      3. I am old enough to remember the 60s and “they” never understood how the regular citizens of Chicago regarded the demonstrations with disgust and loathing.

    3. Sadly only ones that get out are thru the cracks, namely the Marshal and St. Louis Ex chief, are the ones that for better or worse can be waved as a bloody flag. The LV cop shot in head will never be widely known, Nor the men and women beaten and left to die for the crime of opposing the mob.

      On the opposing side, the other victims of overzealous and/or undertrained cops are ignored. Ask anyone screaming about (justly or for power points) Mr. Floyd about Justine Damond, Duncan Lemp, or any of the other people killed by police and they will have never heard of them. The making of this all about race means the only change will be that abusive cops will be allowed free reign on people at the bottom of the progressive stack and that the power to mete out justice will be transferred to the upper parts of stack as well.

      2. It was pointed out to me that the cops may have been trained wrongly… they are all doing the same dumb things… in different areas. Yes, badly trained imho or not trained correctly. or not at all

        1. Maybe the solution is to have everyone in the force go through a physical training session where they’re on the receiving end of the restraining holds, as well as a minute or so on the receiving end of the wrong restraining holds so they can understand the stress doing it wrong puts on the detainee.

          Or maybe we need to put leg restraints in all the cop cars so that the police just need to wrestle him down long enough to get the cuffs on and then let him wear himself out.

          1. They do their training on each other, so most have already been on the wrong end of someone doing it wrong. IMO, it wasn’t the hold itself that was problematical, but the length of time it was used. Once they had him under control, there was no need for it. And continuing for minutes after being told there was no pulse shows depraved indifference to Mr. Floyd’s wellbeing.

            1. Maybe, but I’d bet that for liability reasons the instructors correct the bad holds too quickly for the trainees to get a real idea of how something as innocuous as resting your knee on someone’s chest can quickly become dangerous.

          2. The solution is to break the police union, since it prevents the cops from being fired.

            1. We do need to be careful about that, since making it easy to fire cops would make it easier for a corrupt official to corrupt the police force.

          3. I like the leg restraint idea. But yea, they may need training every year. In other fields you train all the time.. and with my dialysis machine… I get training monthly. Shouldn’t be a problem. We all need refreshers.

        2. After the cop in, was it Ft. Worth? shot the woman who was coming to see who the prowler in her back yard was I noted that there seems to be a programmed chain of action drilled into officers that, once activated, cannot end without shots fired.

          Don’t let a newbie cop (or one that simply doesn’t learn even after years) see you with what they think might possibly be a gun if they squint hard enough. Catch-22: there doesn’t have to be anything remotely like a gun in a hundred miles for them to see one.

          1. We had an officer-involved shooting in K-Falls a few years back. Beef over a car sale; he-said/she-said two different things, and he had a record. Got into a tussle with the responding officer(s?) and he ended up on the ground, but not prone. For some *stupid* reason, he went for his cell-phone, and the cop-chick thought it was a gun and shot and killed. TPTB called it a valid shooting, though one would hope that said cop would end up on desk duty until 2099AD or so.

            OTOH, when you’ve fought with somebody a hell of a lot bigger than you (assumed; never saw pics of the cop) and you actually get him on the ground, the adrenaline level is going to be through the roof.

            1. Flip side, they’re “trained professionals”. If they can’t control their adrenaline levels, they need to go back to Gender Studies or flipping burgers.

        3. Gee, I wonder who is responsible for training those Big City cops* and for supervising their performance o the job? It should be acknowledged that all those big City cops are union members, too, and we are constantly assured that Union Membership is a guaran-damn-tee of professionalism and superior job performance.

          *I am advised via Power Line, based in Minneapolis, that the mayoralty is held by a Democrat and has been for decades, and while the City Council is not 100% Democrat the sole exception is a Green party member who finds the Democrat party too right-wing. Anybody know the party affiliations of mayors in Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, DC and other cities troubled by riots & looting?
          –

          1. party affiliations of mayors in Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, DC and other cities troubled by riots & looting?

            –
            Democrat, Green, left of Stalin?

            Quick search of the ones listed: Democrat or officially doesn’t “matter”.
            –

      3. “abusive cops will be allowed free reign on people at the bottom of the progressive stack and that the power to mete out justice will be transferred to the upper parts of stack as well.”

        Well that’s the goal, actually. As I have noted before, the Democrats/leftists don’t want equality; they want to be perpetually “more equal than others”. They are fine with oppression and tyranny as long as they are the oppressors and tyrants. The past year proves this beyond any doubt.

        1. Oh I know. And they have not only the feds but many cops (as we saw with covid) and parts of military. I expect to die in a genocide in the US

          1. If it gets to that point… you’ll see those like me with disabilities (end stage kidney disease and on dialysis) die first. Probably the mental infirmed such as Down Syndrome before me.

    4. One of my leftier friends posted that “Say the names”meme a few days ago. I responded. Both of my grandmothers are in their mid-90s and don’t really want to be here anymore.

      It devolved from there into comparisons to previous pandemics, to which I pointed out that even if we saw a death total of 2 million like was originally used to scare us into lockdown mode, the deaths would still have to go up to match the rate of the 1918 Spanish flu. I think we’ll get to the total number from 1918, but not close to the rate. At 0.8% of the population, we’d have over 2.5 million dead.

  6. I don’t remember exactly where I saw it, but someone did post a message to the insane left in response to their crowing that they were going to leave the cities and spread out into the country. He said something along the lines of I’m not being macho or bragging, not puffing myself up, I’m just telling you what will happen if you try that. You will die. You won’t be playing with well-insured businesses that can absorb your depredations, with compliant left-wing local governments, you will be dealing with heavily armed Americans defending their homes and families. Many of us have military training. Let me reiterate (he said). You. Will. Die. The American people will not just let you waltz around and destroy things.

    He’s right. If they show up in east Tennessee, they will never be heard from again. I can guarantee that.

    1. There were rumors–at least, later it turned out (thankfully) to be rumors–flying heavily yesterday that Antifa planned to bus rioters from Colorado to Casper, Wyoming to start stuff. The response–prior to confirming that this was in fact not true (or they chickened out?) was for the police to announce their plan for closing downtown, and posting snipers on rooftops…

      But yeah. Aside from the whole “Srsly, it’s Wyoming, why are you even bothering bc you have to drive two hours to get ANYWHERE”…everyone is armed.

        1. Not a lot of pigs (well, other than the 4H kids, who usually have one for show/selling at fair time) BUT…it’s Wyoming. It’s desolate as heck. There are a LOT of places to dump a body and it will probably either never be found, or not be found for a very long time. (Case in point: the serial killer who passed through Rawlins in the late 70s–of the two very likely victim of his (one of whom my mother knew from high school), only the skull of one was found, and the other one never has been found, and local theory is he probably dumped her in Sinclair Reservoir, which is very large, very deep, and very cold…)

          But yeah. I’m starting to hear more murmurings that protest groups either are chickening out altogether, or are contenting themselves with merely protesting. Which is fine, everyone is cool with waving signs and shouting slogans.

          There were, according to my coworker (today is the one day a week I drive in to the office during the ‘rona craziness, heh), 3 suspicious vans with California plates lurking. Though if they want to try anything in Rawlins…well, Rawlins is REALLY spread out. Also grotty. (The only place in Wyoming that is considered a bigger hole than Rawlins is Rock Springs.) Oh, and this is where the state penitentiary is…so probably trying to get stroppy here would go even LESS well than in other parts of the state…

          Laramie–which is where the uni is–and Jackson Hole–which is where the Hollywood folks live–are the two liberal bastions in the state. And even starting something in THOSE places would go badly indeed. Laramie, they might get away with at least starting–the PD there is notoriously unpopular and supposedly quite corrupt–but…all the students are gone. So the only folks there right now are the folks that live there year-round. (Including some students but…they LIVE THERE.)

          Also, I keep seeing vague posts indicating that they want to do this “big march” from one town to another. Which is great…except for the part that everything is an hour or two of DRIVING away from each other. 😀

          (I’m pretty sure even people from Colorado, which is right next door, don’t really grok how much NOTHING is in Wyoming…and it’s a lot of nothing without any water, to boot…)

          1. I grok it. An hour or two at 75 to 80 miles an hour … I mean this is a state that has on/off ramps for Ranches for crying out loud, off freeways … (not the only state). Then there is a good half hour drive to the ranch complex (not at freeway speeds, but still).

            Forget pigs or triple-S, rumor has it NW corner of WY has some water that when people leave the trails cause them to disappear clothing & all, too quickly to recover remains even with rescue standing by ….

          2. Back in the 80’s when they were debating eliminating the Federal 55 MPH speed limit, it seemed it was always an East Coast politician (from one of those states that aren’t big enough to cover a county in other states) saying that no one “needed” (there’s that word again) to drive faster than 55.

            I always wanted to put them in something like a Chevy Chevette with a governor to keep it at 55 and drop them into the middle of Nevada or Wyoming or Montana… and see how they liked it.

            Oh, and the car has no cruise control or A/C, and only an AM radio. (Why yes, I do know I have a wide cruel streak).

            1. “… no one “needed” (there’s that word again) to drive faster than 55.”

              The owners’ manual says “Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness.” Nothing about permitting some fancy-pants poncy politico determine what we “need” in there. When it comes to restricting inalienable rights the burden of proof is on the restrictor.
              –
              –

      2. I did a share of growing up in Casper in the 70s (4 yo through 4th grade, then 7th-9th grade). There was a tail back then of a biker gang coming through town and one deciding he was going to take a rancher’s daughter on the road with him. Drove her on his back out to Daddy’s ranch where Daddy unloaded two barrels of shot into him.

        Daddy was hauled into court and fined $50 for hunting out of season and $50 for hunting without a license. Bikers soon left town according to the tale.

        Is it true? Probably not, but it captures the mindset Antifa would encounter and the level of sympathy they would receive for suffering such a reception.

        1. Probably the fines bit is a joke, but I’d believe the rest of it. Although I suspect the true story would be a bit darker than “biker takes his girl to her daddy’s ranch” 😀

          1. Oh, there was a posse, a no shit posse, when I was a kid, out after a couple of rapists. The did not capture them, but did find the bodies as best I remember.

    2. Sadly, someone will be hoping for that. So they can make examples of the racist reactionaries. Doesn’t mean they will succeed, but there’s some would-be mastermind out there thinking that way.

      1. Yeah. Of course, the truth is that racism in Wyoming is more likely to be directed towards Hispanics and Native Americans–because those are the “other” races the white folks regularly rub elbows with, and we all know the saying about familiarity and contempt. But black folks are still pretty rare here–in fact, the nurse that helped care for my grandmother last hospital bout was black, recently moved to Wyoming, and originally from the Deep South, and his comments to my parents (he was VERY black) were to the effect of that it was kind of nice here, because most of the folks he’d encountered in Wyoming so far didn’t actually seem to CARE that he was black. (Which is true–most folks here at least try to judge more on whether or not a person is an a**hole versus their skin color. I mean, c’mon, there’s barely more than 600k people in the ENTIRE STATE. We *have* to get along.)

      1. I think that the FL chief said it something like “The people I serve have guns. They like having guns. I like them having guns. Don’t come here.”

        The other, I saw on RedState (I think, might have been HotAir). Don’t remember who wrote it, though. But there have been quite a few posts like that, in quite a few places, so drloss might be thinking of a different one.

        1. They’ve not only got guns, they’ve got gators. You think hogs can dispose of a body…

          The three G’s! Guns, Gators, Gone.

            1. I have a desert that’s used as a drug and human trafficking corridor. Which means any bodies that are found there are presumed to be from those sources and receive only a perfunctory investigation.

              1. So if Pelosi, Nadler, Schiff, AOC, Cuomo, deBlasio, Whitmer, and Newsome were all found dead there, there wouldn’t be any questions asked? Asking for a friend. 😉

                1. As long as they weren’t immediately identifiable, I’d give you good odds, even with those luminaries.

                  (Given that they’d most likely be discovered by Border Patrol, maybe better than even, even with partially identifiable remains, given those luminaries attitude towards the Border Patrol.)

                  1. Folks. Take it from an anthropologist that knows… stuff.

                    It’s a lot messier than you think. It is an annoying, messy, smelly thing to do, and it takes longer than you’d think. No part of it is especially fun. It drags in other folks that *really* don’t want to have to deal with it, who have to carefully catalogue, identify, classify, label, file, and update said mess in triplicate to multiple agencies hither and yon, causing still more folks the headache. It’s a dirty business from end to end.

                    That said.

                    If you gotta, you gotta. Life, liberty, and the *pursuit* of happiness is your birthright. If some fool threatens said life, may your aim be true and may you check the fargin downrange, too.

                    1. People that hunt, virtually anything, for fun aren’t likely to miss a target larger and slower moving than what they’ve been taking down already. These people field dress their own animals, and are usually adept at making their own sausage. I am related to farmers that still have areas of tree rows that they don’t let anyone near because of events that happened in the 1920s.

                      Rioting in rural areas should be a non-starter for anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together. So, 50-50 that they try it, once.

                    2. It appears that lefties tried it in Klamath Falls, OR Sunday night. The locals were alerted, and the business owners showed up with friends, who brought friends, and so on, and everybody was doing open carry. The news people Westside in Medford were shocked that so many people would carry openly, but we deplorables thought it was a great response.

                      Apparently two people tried something and got arrested. Probably it saved their lives.

                    4. I was told that the protestors who actually DID show up in Casper were greeted by locals who quietly walked with them, several feet apart (social distancing, y’know)…and were openly carrying. Not sure if it’s true or not, but it gave me a chuckle all the same, and yeah–there WERE protests in Casper yesterday, and they were very polite protests.

              2. The classic guys who mysteriously drop dead of natural causes after losing their wallet, jewelry, keys, any identifying teeth and patches of skin that are popularly used for tattoos, right?

              3. I heard from a reliable source that the Navajo take a dim view of drug traffickers in their territory, and 3-S them on sight. Expect they’d respond similarly to imported rioters.

                1. All of the indian tribes are super peaceful and non-violent, and have always ever been so.

                  1. OK, good try, but let’s do that over. You’ve GOT to do better at keeping a straight face, Bob.

                    😉

                    1. To be completely straightforward and not at all sarcastic, some of the tribes retain a fair amount of their prior culture. They were beaten by the US Army Cavalry, and more or less confined to the reservations. Anti-Fa and Black Lives Matter are not a zit on a tick on the US Cavalry’s most fleabitten nag ever sent to the glue factory.

                      There may well be an indian tribe somewhere hapless enough that these SA larpers could burn them off their reservation. These prancing Deutsch Madchen Bund wannabes are probably so urban and so incompetent that if they tried to find said reservation, they would get lost and die of starvation, dehydration, and exposure a dozen miles outside the city limits, twenty yards from a properly marked highway.

                    2. ::considers what would happen if the protesters went to the Wind River Res, which has all of that PLUS Wyoming isolation::

                      ::dies laughing::

                  2. of course they are, they never had wars with each other until the white man came. Nevermind that there are tribes that were hereditary enemies before we even got here, those were all just Romeo and Juliet type misunderstandings, not wars.

                    1. No, the Klamath and the Modocs just lurved each other. To death, occasionally. (See Modoc war, origins thereof.) Not a good idea to tick any of them off. (Don’t know any Yahooskins, but the group that their tribe belongs to had a bit of a reputation…)

                  3. I went to the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, an agglomeration of nice Indian tribal artifacts collected by one man, without much of a theme or sense of history in the collecting.
                    Exhibits areassorted by tribe and area, but the collections are entirely lacking any weaponry. The only knife that I saw was marked “Souix skinning knife”, but it was actually a factory-made, Green River branded commercial knife.
                    As I left, I commented to the head Docent, “a nice collection of artifacts from groups of peaceful, pastoral nomads without territorial ambition”. The Docent was not amused.
                    John

                    1. The Eiteljorg dos have one of my favorite collections of American west artwork, though, right up there with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody.

        2. Sheriff Grady Judd. Not going to look up the exact quote, but something along the lines of “if they enter your home, I recommend you blow them back out the door.” Fifteen years ago when asked why a guy who executed a cop and his dog had been shot at 68 times, his response was “They ran out of bullets.”

      2. https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/06/01/florida-sheriff-grady-judd-speaks-for-america-n481418

        Polk County Sherrif Grady Judd, progressively loosening the reins on his southern accent throughout:

        “I have received information from social media, that some of the criminals were going to take some of their criminal conduct into the neighborhood. I would tell them if you value your life you probably shouldn’t do that in Polk County. Because the people of Polk County like guns. They have guns. I encourage them to own guns.”

        “They’re gonna be in their homes tonight. With their guns loaded. And if you try to break into their homes to steal, to set fires, I’m highly recommending they blow you back out of the house with their guns.”

        1. Saw that video. Cheered. Thanks for the handy transcript, suitable for quoting far and wide.

    4. “You won’t be playing with well-insured businesses that can absorb your depredations”

      I don’t believe most business insurance covers losses due to rioting — which doesn’t mean Macy’s (for example) cannot afford to simply write-off the losses at their 34th St. store in Manhattan and use this as a pretext to close that shop and sell the property (which probably has greater value as real estate than as retail operation.)
      –

      1. About that … well & concisely written:

        The Suicide of the Cities
        By Kyle Smith
        I noted on Twitter last night that rioting, coming right after the virus, is a catastrophe for the cities. Regardless of whether Trump or Biden is elected in November, it’s easy to envision the following happening: Americans will flee the cities as they did in the post-1968 era. Thirty years of great progress for cities will be undone by the events of one spring. People will move to suburbs and exurbs. A lot more families will buy guns. Gun owners vote heavily Republican. People in less densely populated areas vote Republican too.

        Trust in the government to provide basic services was already shaky and will tumble further. People who don’t trust the government to provide for them vote Republican. There will be an increase in homeschoolers. Homeschoolers vote Republican.

        The involuntary experiment for telecommuting, particularly among white-collar workers, has proven that workers can be relied upon to work from home. People don’t trust the New York City subway anymore but those who don’t need to come into the office can live anywhere. This is especially true of some of the most successful people — lawyers, people in finance. High-income people will be disproportionately among those leaving.

        The balance of cities, already hit by a fiscal hurricane because of the duration of the lockdown, will tip toward heavy consumers of government services and away from high earners. Cities will be forced to raise taxes. The taxes on high earners and corporations will seem punitive. Even more of them will flee as taxes go up. The things successful people like about cities, such as high-end restaurants and culture, will follow them out to the suburbs. Corporate office parks in the suburbs will see a resurgence.

        People who stop commuting into cities will lose interest in them and their institutions. They will lose interest in funding cities. This will worsen the fiscal problems for the cities.

        Cities will lose congressional seats. Federal funding will be steered away accordingly.

        Voters left behind in cities will be a combination of the indigent, immigrants working in low-end jobs, the young, and the woke. These people will vote for a hard-left agenda focusing on aid to the poor, forgiveness for criminals, hatred of the rich, and boutique woke issues such as global warming that will push the Democratic Party well to the left.

        In other words, the demonstrators and rioters are going to remake the cities in their own image. And it’s going to be disastrous for those cities.
        –

        1. Anticipating one criticism: as we have seen with the Californication of Western states, while these vermin flee the results of their policies they often fail to recognize the failures were of their policies, thus demanding their now localities repeat the errors of their past localities.

          In their minds their policies work, they’ve just never been put in effect by the right people.
          –

          1. In their minds their policies work, they’ve just never been put in effect by the right people.

            –
            Haven’t we heard that tune before? It was catchy at first, but became excruciatingly annoying after a few repetitions.

            They’ve had a hundred and fifty years to find ‘The Right People’ and they haven’t found a single one. Have they never heard of ‘There is no Right Way to do a Wrong Thing’?

            You could be right about them drowning in their own sewage and imploding, because they do not create, or even make, but only take, and you can’t build an economy out of takers.
            ———————————
            The Democrats are willing to burn America to the ground, so long as they wind up squatting on top of the ashes.

            2. > Haven’t we heard that tune before?

              Absolutely not! You’re simply imagining things. “Nothing to see here, move along.”

    5. It was at RedState, with a follow up article showing what happened to a solo Antifa who tried just that. The first thing the locals did was rip off his mask.

        2. “This is bad…” I don’t think we have the same meaning for that word

          “This ain’t fair!” If you find yourself in a fair fight, it means both sides have F**ked up (Murphy’s Laws of Combat)

    8. “…afore my time but I been told
      they never come back from Copperhead Road.”

      Of course, their idea of “the country” is probably Queens.

  7. “ Of course this crew is profoundly incompetent, so who knows what THAT play will turn into.”

    Thinly laminated over the floor, ceiling, and walls.

    They’ve forgotten their own history. The riots on 1968 elected Nixon. Unless something happens to drastically change the stage, these riots will elect Trump.

    2. I only vaguely remember the summer of 1968. I do remember my parents were VERY stressed out. The local “cities”, New Haven, New London and Hartford were all having issues. Within 10 years they were empy of middle class residents with nearly the only residents being college Students (Yale in New Haven, Trinity in Hartford, New London had Connecticut College for Women and the USCG Academy although those are on the outskirts adjoining the suburbs). Really those cities never recovered. Newark that had fires and massive protests was only JUST coming back to being gentrified 50 years later (and only because access to NYC is good). I think the powers that are behind this stuff don’t care who wins the election. Their Eschatology is one of violent overthrow as they are dyed in the wool Marxists. Sadly a lot of folks are going to get hammered in this because they’ve bought into this ludicrous ideology. Not sure how to fix this repeating idiocy, even the most draconic of measures (No offense Drak) will not undue stupid unless applied across decades/generations. I mean these folks Grandpaents/great grandparents participated in this nonsense last time, but as one great author said

      As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
      There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
      That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
      And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

      I really wish it wasn’t so, but it Mr Kipling seems to have captured a universal statement.

      1. dang didn’t finish my sentence .
        Nearly the only residents being college students and those to poor to leave.

      2. even the most draconic of measures

        –
        I think you meant ‘draconian’ which has nothing to do with actual dragons.

        As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
        There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
        That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
        And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

        –
        I only see three things there.

        1. “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” gets posted here enough that the end is probably generally surmised. And/or there was a copy/paste error, or WordPress chomped something, who knows. 😀 Here’s #4, which is another whole stanza:

          And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
          When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
          As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
          The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

      3. > Their Eschatology is one of violent overthrow

        You may have a point. As I’ve mentioned before, they’d already freakin WON. Yeah, the Trumpslide was an annoyance, but all they had to do was dig in and wait four or eight years, and he’d be gone. But they’ve gone completely shrieking-monkey-fit and unleashed the Crazy instead.

        Everything that Trump’s supporters approve of is directly due to the Left’s actions in the first place. But they’re too stupid to realize the more Crazy they unleash, the more it supports him. In their echo chambers there’s no room for external reality.

        It’s starting to look like they want a fight more than they want success. But they have no freaking clue about fighting, other than comic books and hair-pulling in school.

        1. I believed at the time and still believe to this day that the Dems could have easily managed Trump had it not been for Hillary’s (and, as we ow know, Obama’s) little time bombs. He was so bloody eager to make deals to spend big on infrastructure they could have given him the wall and a trivial, easily worked around cap on immigration and he’d’ve had flooded their districts with new bridges, repaved roads, high-speed everythig ad all at union wages.

          Instead they had to piss o him and piss him off.

          Thank-you, Dems!
          –

          1. They pissed on him to start with; that’s why, after being a lifelong Democrat, he jumped ship and ran as a Republican.

            As I recall, it was at a social function with the Clintons and a bunch of high-ranking DNC people and donors, people he had known and associated with most of his working life. Trump said something about how with all the people they were naming, he should toss his name in the pot too. They hooted and belittled him for even suggesting such a thing.

            Donald J. Trump is a proud man. But I expect most of his former compatriots have no idea why he split with them. And their crazed hatred isn’t because he’s their political opponent, it’s because he is an apostate, having abandoned their secular religion. And that must NOT be condoned, ever, by anyone.

            1. I thought that, until I read the Bender Affidavit. It describes methods and names names. Trump is conspicuously NOT named. I take this to mean that Qatar tried to corrupt him as they have media and other prominent figures, and FAILED, and now he knows who is burying the bodies. And that makes him too dangerous to anyone who took the bribe. And THAT is why all the desperation to be rid of him.

              https://www.docdroid.net/DtiLYBH/bender-affidavit-pdf

              Long read, but worth your time, especially if you’re already familiar with the territory covered by Yuri Bezmenov and Stephen Coughlin.

          3. GOPe made the same mistake.

            https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/01/20/bob-dole-ted-cruz-donald-trump/79079408/

            “Bob Dole said Wednesday that Ted Cruz at the top of the GOP ticket would mean “wholesale losses” for the party in Washington and across the country.

            “I don’t know how he’s going to deal with Congress,” Dole said in an interview with The New York Times. “Nobody likes him.”

            Dole, a former Kansas senator, was the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 1996.

            Donald Trump would “probably work with Congress,” though, Dole mused, because he’s “kind of a deal maker.”“

        2. “You want more Trump, this is how you get more Trump” could easily morph into “You don’t want what comes after Trump and this is how you get what comes after Trump”.

      4. My last couple of year in the Navy I lived in downtown New London (could walk to the El ‘n’ Gee) and you’re right except you forgot Mitchell College and that international one as well.

        But the CC (was coed by then, we’re talking 90s) students were the epitome of over educated upper middle class white shits who wanted REVOLUTION. Now, their knowing everything was fine, all 19 year olds do…just some are correct by Company Commanders in boot while others are reinforced in it by leftists faculty, but they were so damn hypocritical already, with their money and toys and calling Daddy to bail them out of their stupid.

        Still, I probably abused the Puddle Pirates more.

        1. Yes there is one verynice area down past the hospital and around Mitchell. But if you live there, you want to avoid their public schools at all costs. I have stories of dealing with New London High during the year and a half younger child was at the attached STEM magnet school.

        2. Yeah Connecticut College went Coed in 1969. But it still had darn few males when I was
          going out there to see Shakespeare plays in high school (Twelfth Night, Henry IV part1).
          And yes over educated upper class twits. A shame really, a couple of my maternal great aunts when there in Teens/ early 20’s.

            1. Right you are sir, Hardly any men, very few males in late 1970s. I think I remember seeing a ratio of ~20 female to 1 male in ’79 looking through the college catalogs.

      5. People in 1968 didn’t have just a few weeks of riots to get thoroughly sick of the left. The rioting of the 60’s was spread out over several years. Watts in 1965, Hough (Cleveland) in ’66, Detroit in ’67 Chicago ’68. I was living in the Cleveland area, aged 7 -> 10, during that period.
        We were lucky during the Hough riots. We’d moved into the (defacto segregated) city of East Cleveland a few years before, and my parents helped with the block-busting. The middle class blacks that had just moved into an area with decent schools weren’t about to let anybody mess things up for them. While the people in Hough rioted we held block parties.

        Of course back then we had fewer alternative information sources to counter the MSM narrative. It took longer to figure out they were lying. But 4 summers of riots finally sunk in.

        The old message seems to have been learned again. Most of the U.S populace no longer trusts the MSM. Their shilling for the Dems will mostly be ignored.

        1. If you look on youtube, you can actually find the tv news documentaries about the riots. There’s some really disturbing stuff they didn’t consider should be left out. It makes me wonder what the heck was REALLY left out. I wish more people watched FULL war footage. We do NOT want this! I so do not want it. It’s not windows smashed, it’s body parts splattered. It’s having your loved ones splattered over your face. There’s no video game redo/reset.

          I feel so sick.

          1. The videos that have already come out of these riots are sickening and disturbing.

            We haven’t even reached the Bad Stages and it is already at the level of asking “will I start counting ammunition if I watch this?”.

              1. The bottom link on Insty’s post has video of the reaction to someone shooting back, but isn’t the one I’ve mentioned here.

              2. Time for a massive change before the Left sparks a race war with only losers.

                That’s supposed to be the money quote for those links, but I think there are too many racially blended families nowadays for the left to really pull that off. I have mixed-race nieces (and grand-nephews/nieces) in my family and grandchildren from my wife’s family. The left has fomented some evil, and there will be more before it’s over, but it can’t spread the way it used to when anti-miscegenation laws were just starting to be overturned.

                1. It only has to work well enough to make people scared— “can I trust this person? They are not Known To Me.”

                  Those mobs in the videos are pretty solidly mixed, in most cases, too.

                  Gosh, look at the harmony! Even illegals hanging out with inner city gang guys, and that hardly ever happens! All they have to do is have a chance to attack people who can’t fight back.

                  1. But that can be tamped down a lot quicker (assuming those in charge actually try) because who is “other” isn’t clearly defined.
                    It’s still evil, but it won’t last nearly as long as the old race riots.

                    1. Sure it is– “other” is anybody you haven’t already got vetting on.

                      Anybody who doesn’t give off the right “signals” to say “one of us.”

                      Anybody who behaves….to allude to a theme on this blog… Oddly.

            3. Oh, I was mentioning the ones from the 60’s. The propaganda arm is stating there was no riots, nor burning during the 1960’s riots. Please. They burned down NE DC and Detroit! There’s film footage!!!

              2. Property damage was less in Chicago for the ’60s riots. The area where my father worked was a medium nasty bit of the west side ghetto, but when I was working there 3 years later, it wasn’t a burnt-out hulk. The nearby park was decent looking, though we walked in groups of four, and occasional red, wet droplets on the sidewalks reminded us why. OTOH, Richard J. Daley didn’t want trouble, and confronting rioting with a “shoot looters to maim, shoot arsonists to kill” tends to take the enthusiasm out of a lot of rioters.

                OTOH, a couple years later (late summer ’73) the office I’d worked in had been relocated to the suburbs…

                AFAIK, Detroit didn’t really try for control, which is why aerial video of neigborhoods resembles Paradise, CA after the fires cleared the town. I’ve seen suggestions that Detroit’s vacant areas be turned into farmland. File under “not bloody likely”, though.

      1. They never forgave Nixon for exposing Alger Hiss. And Nixon hated them in return.

        Hiss had a *lot* of supporters, many of whom made sworn statements in his favor. Even when the USSR fell and the SVR started selling access to KGB records and Hiss’ status as a Soviet agent was confirmed, they reserved their anger for Nixon, not for Hiss.

        Makes me wonder how many of those people were also Soviet agents, and how many were what Lenin called “useful idiots.”

          2. You think they photoshopped a religious service and a recent riot into one frame?

          3. The lighting on the two groups (“Guard” and crowd) doesn’t match, quite. There’s an “off” feeling to something.

            2. Oops, my bad, the military guys are in full sunlight, and the rioters are under the clearly visible overcast sky. Somebody needs to go back to fakery school.

          1. I don’t have a problem with them being non-threatening to a peaceful protest. The best play is to get the bulk of the crowd and the police/national guard on the same side. You don’t do that by trying to intimidate a non-violent march.

            I just re-read Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch the other day and was stunned at how apt it was. Especially the part where Vimes/Keel saved the Treacle Mine Road station in large part by humanizing the Watch.

              1. The military, including the National Guard, is supposed to be subservient to the public, including peaceful protesters. They were still able to rapidly respond if the situation deteriorated, but they were sending a message “I’m not a threat to YOU.”

                1. But that kneeling was taken in possession by a creep who was using it to spit (to be polite) on cops and the flag. Don’t see condoning much less participating in that gesture.

            2. I’m okay with the story I read about the protestors chanting for the police to kneel WITH them, and the cops did–and then the protestors knelt too. I think context is key. (And I agree, that photo looks faked.)

              I’m okay with police (or the NG) out there reaching out and, as Jeff referenced Night Watch, standing WITH the scared, hurt, and upset citizenry. Or kneeling with them, or reaching out to embrace them, or otherwise choosing not to be antagonistic from the start. Because so far as I can tell, any halfway decent cop out there is JUST as pissed off about the Floyd murder as everyone else.

              I think an important distinction to be made is that they kneel to/with the PROTESTORS, NOT the rioters. As is becoming increasingly clear, those are two very different groups. Rather like the agitators in Night Watch, come to think of it…

              1. I was re-reading it as the riots burned and kept thinking “Terry, you magnificent bastard.”

    5. Consider the whole thing as urban renewal… lots of shovel-ready jobs cleaning up and rebuilding, should put the kobosh on bad unemployment numbers… tho the people who end up paying for it (given that civil unrest is usually not covered by insurance) may be rather more security-minded than future rioters would have liked.

      They think they’ll get to control the ballot boxes, tho, because between CV and riots no one will dare go to the polls, so they can stuff at will.

      I think they’re in for a rude shock come November, and then they’ll try this rumble again. At which point Trump has nothing to lose and the rest of us are sick enough of their BS that coming down hard on their Antifa necks won’t bother us a bit.

  9. It seems to me that the reporting of the Madison lockdown protestors as terrifyingly violent, and of the Minneapolis (and many other places) looters and arsonists as peaceful, is about as conclusive evidence of media dishonesty as one could ask for. The contrary evidence is right there on the screens . . .

    2. It’s the way media covers stories. The right has only “extremists”, the left has only “activists”.

    3. Same thing here in Michigan.
      Protesting the lockdown? “Right-wing facist racist people haters.”
      These protesters and rioters? “I’ve decided to move the entire state to phase 4 of my magical recovery plan!”

      Of an interesting note, there was nothing on any of the news about damages from the lockdown protests in Lansing. Estimated damage from the new protesters / rioters was at least a couple thousand (and interestingly-er, Googleing for info finds 2 stories about how Lansing residents and businesses reacted to the damage, followed by a string of articles about the lockdown protests…)

  10. Like I commented on the previous post, the most pacifistic, anti-violence person I know is now calling for ANTIFA to be put down and/or strung up.

    When she is genuinely calling for the exact same response that she usually freaks out at me for espousing, I know that Things Will Not End Well.

  11. Born in 51 graduated in 69 so I remember those days quite well, not fondly, but well.
    My teachers were WWII veterans and spouses of vets and it was a small midwestern town at least 20 years socially behind the rest of the country. So of course all my classmates were wanna be radicals.
    I think I was one of the few who did not bus into Chicago in 68 for the festivities. But by that time I was a devote of Heinlein and more intent on keeping a low profile and gearing up for the inevitable apocalypse.
    And some of what went on back then makes today’s kerfuffle resemble a fractious church social.
    I’m with you my fine Portagee niece. It is going to get much worse as we approach the ultimate prize, Tuesday November 3 this year. What I hold in sincere doubt is as to whether we ever actually will know the real results of that election. Trump wins, the left will declare it invalid aided and abetted by their media shills. If Trump loses he will quite rightly in my opinion claim fraud and challenge the vote.
    And with either result those looking to seize control of the country and force us into becoming their vision of a socialist paradise (aka just another third world chithole) will turn the volume of their attacks way beyond the limits of the dial.

    1. Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send ’em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot.

        1. They were both educated at highly regarded schools. They had been assured that this would guarantee them materially gratifying lives. They were both unemployed. Clearly society had lied to them and must be punished.
          –

    2. If my Daddy had been both rich and indulgent (he was neither) I might have wound up cosplaying life, although in a very different way.

  13. I read a piece that claims 20% of folks have no sense of need to believe in a divine being. Thus some 80% of us do have an urge to believe in something. But atheists, communists and others of that ilk are told it is only the stupid unwoke yokels who do so and because believing is hard wired into their DNA they turn their assorted credos into a religion. And the most fervent are radicalized into their version of religious fanatics. History has shown that fanaticism running amok is akin to coexisting with a hand grernade with a loose cotter pin. As we are seeing yet again (I do remember the 60s).

    1. Look to history. Religious belief has been with us for as far back as we can look. Before *script* even, if you believe some sources. There is something within human beings that tends towards belief.

      I cannot think that it happened by chance. But then, I believe. I once did not. The problem of belief and moral behavior bedeviled me at the time, as I recall. *chuckle*

    2. I heard it once described, iirc, as a “god-shaped hole in our psyche”. And if we dont fill it with God (or god(s), or some aspect of the divine), fill it we must with something, even if just a velvet Elvis.

  14. Cosplaying is an apt term, and those doing it really ought to think ‘er through. This is at least in part an explicitly Leninist insurrection. In that scenario anyone cosplaying at being a Leninist is up the creek no matter _which_ side eventually wins.

    1. well, realistically, i don’t know if its cosplaying or at this point they think they have moved up to professional acting. Unfortunately, like most professional actors in New York and LA, they have no idea what gun ownership rates are outside those cities, and I am still kinda hoping they don’t have to find out.

      1. That’s odd, because I hope they do and sooner rather than latter.

        The sooner they try it and learn the fewer people, among them and total, will learn the lesson with Darwinian finality.

  15. Oddly enough it makes me want to re-read the Skaith trillogy. It’s sort of a sci-fantisy Conan the Barbarian set of Hoth, but it took me until the third book to realize is was Conan the Barbarian vs the *Hippies* on Hoth.

    She did not have a particularly favorable view of the hippies at all…

    2. I’ve only read the middle one (that was the one the used bookstore had), but it struck me as an interesting meditation on how a world deals with its inevitable end.

            1. Not my story to tell, but it appears even Baen has decided to roll left and die. Then while firing authors they are refusing to release books they also refuse to print and sell.

  16. Although it’s likely the post I saw the other day about someone (maybe or maybe not Antifa) talking about how they should go to these small towns in Wyoming and start something was false (or they chickened out and/or realized that THERE IS NOWHERE TO RUN OR HIDE* in Wyoming unless one is a mountain man), it still made me chuckle how the person was essentially trying to convince themselves that it was silly to be “afraid of these small towns.” I thought “Oh, honey. There is a REASON that little voice in the back of your head is saying “Don’t do it.”

    The only protesters I saw (yesterday when I went to Laramie) were simply protesting. Also walking the kids/dogs because it was a really nice day and, for once, NOT WINDY. Sure, it was a bigger and younger crowd than the Usual Suspects who protest on the corner of 3rd and Grand, but no one batted an eye at them. May it stay that way.

    *There is a reason they sited several POW camps in Wyoming during WW2. (The Italians who got sent to Ryan Park really enjoyed it, enjoyed the employment they were given while there, and some of them came back after, lol.) There were only a couple of escape attempts the entire time–and both times the would-be fugitives either turned around and came back almost right away (it was winter), or got to the “nearest” town (40 miles away) and realized that the NEXT nearest town was 60 miles away, across a whole lotta nothin’.

    1. There’s a video going around of one of the mobs charging at a strip mall, which has a jewelry shop in it– according to the comments, the owner of said shop is Vietnamese (didn’t say if ancestry or immigrant), and decided that the LA Roof Koreans are awesome Americans whom he should emulate.

      Sat in his shop until they shot the door open, and returned fire.

      Video shows the mob throw on the brakes like a cartoon and sprint in the opposite direction….

      2. The LA Rooftop Koreans are awesome Americans, and good for him for realizing that. And as a sidetone, “LA Rooftop Koreans” is also an awesome name for a band.

        1. And based on pictures I’ve seen the past week have also inspired Rooftop Pakistanis and Rooftop Sikhs.

          I swear, if the four countries in question want to send more like that to become Americans I’ll happily given then 10 Antifa college educated workers in exchange for each.

            1. Eh. Y’all would fit right in in Southern Appalachia.

              One of my uncles got in a fight with his brother the oncet, and one of the new local policemen tried to break it up. And failed. He then tried to threaten them with his revolver. No dice. Shot my uncle.

              This just made him mad.

              My other uncle called for an ambulance for said policeman who, for his one bullet that hit, received three broken ribs, broken clavicle, cracked radius, and a whole heck of a lot of bruises, plus a concussion. The uncle that got shot drove himself home and had his wife get the bullet out.

              I’ve also a great aunt that had to be held down by four grown men so she didn’t murder a boy her daughter had been seeing in broad daylight. And having heard it from said grown men, she might still have got free if her sister hadn’t helped out.

          4. Doubt that the SIkhs needed the inspiration. Good people, excellent cooks, generous and I would not want to threaten them.

      4. Oh my. Haven’t seen that one but — well done, indeed!

        The forces of law and order, embodied in the average man.

  17. Fairly recent history/meme question– does anybody remember if Desmond Tutu spoke out against the systematic slaughter of white farmers in South Africa?

    There’s a quote floating around, attributed to him, saying that failing to oppose an injustice is to be party to it– but the only place I can find the quote is in the same format it’s offered, no date, no context.

    2. That’s not injustice in their mind. Whites deserve it. They are looking forward to being able to push folks to knees and execute after november

    3. Nope. He was popular at my college (I seriously attended the wrong school) so we had access to all his writings and he actually spoke at a gathering of the honors program at one point. I don’t know if he actually condoned it, but he certainly never spoke out against it.

  18. The anti-white, benevolently racist sentiments being openly espoused by white kids themselves is what scares me. Every time I’ve seen someone I know and thought I liked apologize for not “doing better as a white ally”, I’ve had to stop myself from asking them if the Jews walked so willingly onto those trains back in the 30’s and 40’s. Hyperbole, maybe, but this is the mindset of how it starts.

    I have a fleeting hope that the poor business owners who had their livelihoods destroyed by members of their own community (tag teaming, of course, with busloads of little Antifa brats) will see the same white kids, the celebrities, and the Biden campaign bragging about donating money to bail out the *ahem* “peaceful protesters” and decide that enough is enough with the party of the plantation. I saw a big awakening when Biden made his “You ain’t Black” statement but I knew that as soon as the BLM showed up to Minneapolis that this was going to turn back into a race war to take the heat off both him and the progressive Democrats who failed their citizens by letting a bad apple cop stay on the force.

    I’m still relatively young. I will gladly defend my property and my beliefs but right now this is really the first time I’ve felt fatalistic about what is happening here in the US and where my future lies.

        2. If they were winning they wouldn’t be risking these kinds of gambits. They’d just sit back and allow the inevitable to transpire.

          1. I’m not completely certain it is a gambit, though. A lot of it, from “bake the cake” to the “thou shalt be diverse” to the power of the racialism groups (church means jail, tossing molotov means bond courtesy of corporations, feds, and so on) seems more like the taunting of the bully who knows he will never be disciplined. What fun is power if you cannot flaunt it

            1. They have no interest in cake, have neither recipe nor ingredients, they just want an excuse to break eggs.

          2. And apologies for the hard cynicism. Just have seen very little but rara racist looters in any of the groups I float in and honestly feel that family members would be glad if i went out like a tibetan monk. Have seen very few folks willing to be open to “compromise”, meaning actually solving root cause

            1. Solving the root cause is going to require driving the leftists out of the country.

              Remember that “bake the cake” is at the tail end of decades of “hate crime” work and even after that it’s turned off a number of supporters.

          3. I cannot recall them ever demonstrating patience as a skill they’ve developed. Sitting back and waiting ain’t i their toolbox.
            –

            1. They’ve been waiting for over 100 years now. Some of the hotheads haven’t, but they’ve set the movement back enough to get us to this point.

    2. They’ve been raised that way. So were their parents. Their schoolnbooks, their TV, their music, all reinforce the Narrative. Everyone they ever met thinks exactly the same. Well, except for a handful of deplorable Nazis, but they’re mentally ill and will be dealt with once they get the reins of power firmly back in their grasp.

      *This* is what happens when you let communists take over your school systems.

      1. What’s sad is that even those conservative teachers have been so indoctrinated that they don’t even realize how deep in they are. My wife (teacher) and I dance around the issue more and more. She rails against the things that the district does, but isn’t quite ready to acknowledge the root of the problem.

        1. I owe Sara, and a few others around here, for poking me to look deeper into stuff I’d learned in the ’80s-90s. Alas, now I see through lots of really cr@ppy propaganda that would make a Pravda editor cringe, it’s so ham-handed.

            1. This is why I never let Otto Corrupt get between me and what I’m writing:

              Spall chokers dew naught toast fur thick core wrecked woods. Envy wort fawned inn thew spilling least whale past thaw text, sew ewe cairn seam howl offal id cud guest. Yew cold bean riding tootle nun cents ink witch ovary wierd whiz spoiled joust write. Must sprawl chalkers woad knot abject two enemy port orb thistle albumin nation.

              Aye head bitter stock thirst noun seance know.

              1. I have laugh every time on FB, when someone writes the equivalent of “Wear the buffalo roam” … I always think “um, okay, but pretty sure that isn’t what you meant.”

          3. And you should see the hammering “right-wing shill” Leslie Fish is taking on Fecesbook for pointing this out.

            (Someone who’s been a union organizer and an actual Wobbly as right wing shill. Anyone still believe we can live next door to people this dishonest?)

    3. There are fewer than you’d think.

      Oh, the opportunists are there. The straight criminals, too, taking advantage. But true believers? Not so many. The go along, get along types make up a bunch, as we saw with the Berkley riots years back. Many are default leftist, not particularly political, but leftism is whats on the news, and on TikTok these days.

      1. A couple decades ago, I was couch-crashing, and stayed a while in Berkeley. The physics and research folks at UC Berkeley are a completely different world from the rest of campus…

        Anyway, as I was walking down the sidewalk one day hoping to find a grocery store (this being before the ubiquitous smartphones), I heard two girls in front of me chatting.
        “Are you going to the protest this afternoon?”
        “I dunno. What’s it’s bout?”
        “I have, like, no idea. So, are you going?”

        Yep, that’s the red diaper baby generation in their native enironment in a nutshell.

        1. I was just reading the weekly column from Jonah Goldberg* and was struck by this passage which nicely encapsulates the syndrome you cite:

          A lot of the right-wing commentary—including much of what I just wrote—focuses on the hypocrisy of telling people you can’t go to a traditional church service but you can go to the church-in-the-streets of anti-racism.

          It is a social affair, occupying the space once filled by proms and pep rallies. It is the church of the … well, o-believer is too strog a term; it isn’t that they don’t believe but that belief isn’t what’s important to them, it isn’t why they attend. They go for a faux communion, for fellowship that derives from common ritual, not common faith.

          *I don’t agree with him on Trumpism but he’s not gone full David Frum (or David Brooks) and is thus a reliable check against my tendencies to get carried downstream.
          –

    4. Conversely, for the first time in a loooong time, I’m seeing the potential for a turning point, where communist ascendancy suddenly gets hoist by its own petard.

    6. I’d really like the GOP to run some kind of “Give us five” campaign in the cities. Point out how those communities have been voting Democrat for decades and ask how much has changed. Ask for people to commit to voting Republican for 10 years, 5 election cycles, and see if things improve. Then point out that nobody has to know how you voted in the booth.

  19. “I suspect that J. K. Rowling was raised that way too, from the fact that the only things she could think of for her characters to aspire to were government work.”

    Point of order! Two of Rowling’s most charming and intelligent characters did indeed aspire to something better than cleaning up Fudge’s mistakes: Fred & George, the Weasley twins, demonstrated an appropriate (lack of) respect for their educational strait-jackets and became highly successful entrepreneurs, creating jobs and joy in their magickal little world.

    They are, of course, the exception proving the rule.
    –

    1. Well now, Rowling also did well by innkeepers and bus drivers. And was quite respectful towards the majority of Hogsworth professors and staff, except for the evil ones of course.

      1. I think it’s more indicative of Rowling’s world view that she doesn’t show many job opportunities in the wizarding world outside of the Ministry of Magic. Besides the Weasley twins, and a few shopkeepers, it only seems to be tabloid journalism and sports.

        1. While she is a very entertaining writer I would not attempt to argue that Rowling is a good writer … and I will make a surprising range of arguments as long as somebody else is buying the beer.

          In her defense, these are YA novels and Young Adults rarely have a very deep understanding of economies. As well, in Britain just about everybody does wok for the government. The government or Richard Branson.
          –

          1. Young adult novels aren’t meant to be deep treatises. But Rowling does a better job of world building than Veronica Roth or Suzanne Collins.

      2. Rowling also did well by innkeepers and bus drivers.

        Not sure I would agree. Aberforth came off okay, but both Rosemertta and Tom from the Leaky Calderon had little personality beyond being there to serve their betters. As far as the bus drivers were concerned, I always thought the attitude towards Stan Shupike was pretty condescending, with the insistence that he couldn’t possibly be a Death Eater even while he was actively flying around working for the Death Eaters.

    2. George and Fred came immediately to mind. And it is clear that Rowling intended them to be a foil. But she almost undermines herself when it’s clear that the twins are making more money than Ron thought was possible (they have flashy clothes and buy him new dress robes, etc). Clearly, it pays better than working for the Ministry of Magic…

  20. Besides the fact that a lot of it is pre-planned, financed and pre-prepared by leftist agents

    I am beginning to think the balloon went up prematurely: All the plans were in place, people were given routes and keys to trucks, pallets of bricks and bottled accelerants were all pre-stockpiled and ready to go, and white dudes with black hoodies, pro-grade gas masks, black umbrellas, and claw hammers were assigned various commercial windows to break in minority neighborhoods, all with an execution plan based on some mass-protest event that was intended to happen closer to the election, though with no fixed date.

    But then the demonstrations kicked off and met the launch criteria, so they started anyway.

    I think it’s too long until November, with too much potential good economic news from any lockdown release recovery, and too much good news that could accrue through suppressing the violence and rebuilding burned cities, to have the desired effect.

    Which will probably make the “Antifa’s Last Stand” event that much worse, but hey, they’re an international terror group, and as such subject to all the war-on-terror kinetics worldwide.

    1. When you wrote this, my head started to hear, “Odysseus! It’s Odysseus now, damn it! The ball is now officially up!”

      And, I wouldn’t be surprised. Rational conspirators would either be getting behind this and pushing hard because it’s happening now, or trying to get it damped back down as a “trial run” for mid-October/November. This sort of half-and-half process is going to ensure that the “silent majority” will see what is being done.

    2. I think you might be on to something. This would have been more effective closer to the election. It also seems that the ‘rona restrictions are going away with all these protests.

      And, I agree that given the suddenness of it all they are unprepared to hide. The whole “pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain” is falling apart. One way I track this is the level of vehement denial that greets any comment or post that questions who’s behind the riots. If the pushback isn’t direct (don’t you understand people are angry?), then it swings back to white supremacists quickly. Anybody but Antifa. The cognitive dissonance is becoming harder for sufferers to ignore.

    3. What’s been puzzling to me is how quiet California has been. There’s been some rioting and looting – in Santa Monica, for instance. But by and large the state that had the Rodney King and Watts riots has been surprisingly calm.

      1. I hear from friends in San Diego (where I used to live) that at least two banks and a major supermarket were burned.

        1. On the other hand, the SJPD really stomped down very hard at the end of the first day of protests – they let the protest mob block 101 through San Jose, march around being all protesty on city streets and be generally disruptive all day, but as the sun got close to setting they declared it an illegal assembly and started clearing streets, and then holding them cleared under the declared curfew. Aside from a few dumpsters set on fire in the middle of streets there was no arson. The loot-o-tron map that the SF paper put online shows only a liquor store and a CVS looted right next to Valley Fair shopping Center, but nothing reported actually at Valley Fair or at the high-end Santana Row right across the street.

          The City By The Bay That Smells Bad, in contrast, has been enjoying multiple nights of vandalism and destruction in spite of their curfew as SF City Hall gives protestors room to express themselves. Daytime marches are peaceful if overly well organized, but at night things get sporty. The SFPD has been calling for mutual aid reinforcements to man what is apparently some form of containment strategy, and finally, in the past few nights, there have been enough out-of-town cops on hand to enforce effective street blockades and keep the mobs more corralled, and to prevent any more looting and vandalism of the major retail centers. The SF mayor and police chief have been forced to hold press conferences condemning looting and violent destruction, which clearly pains them no end. There have been some later looting events in SF, but the SFPD swooped in and used those flex cuffs.

          Around the rest of the SF Bay Area there has been a lot of opportunistic looting – one large auto dealership had over seventy cars stolen, and after an initial concentration on looting the toilet paper from Target stores the general focus moved upmarket and various high-end retailers have been hit. Lots of Apple stores hit (apparently nobody explained to looters that Apple electronics have unique identifiers accessible remotely, as well as built-in GPS).

          Mapped out it’s not geographically concentrated with some exceptions – it looks more like the local organized criminal element is taking advantage of distracted police departments. From what I can tell this is what’s going on down in LA as well.

          So I agree – overall out here in the Glorious Bear Flag Peoples Republic it’s gotten locally sporty but nothing at all like the hellscape in NYC.

          1. All of which generated a little zoom call scene:

            “This is it – We have to go now!”

            “But we’re not ready west of the Rockies! We only have a few loads of bricks en route to the west coast, no trucks rented, and almost no equipment out to the cells! Even Seattle isn’t ready yet!”

            “I told you that you had to get your people to ignore the lockdown and get ready, but no, you were too scared of the virus. I even gave you the inside scoop we’re getting from our people inside state government – the bug is only bad if you’re already sick – but you stayed home and made those stupid youtube videos instead of doing your duty for the revolution! Screw you Hollywood idiots – we’re going!”

          2. I first was upset they were letting them block freeway traffic. Then it dawned on me, letting them up there puts them away from any place to loot. The fences limit escape routes IF they want to arrest someone. With the wuhan panic there isn’t that much traffic to block.

            We get phone notices about the curfews. Both Santa Clara and San Jose have the same curfew times. The Santa Clara police have a history of being very good. We have the 49’er stadium, so they are used to working big crowds. San jose police not so good.

            Actual black population concentrations in Santa Clara county do not exist. The closest area is East Palo Alto, which is actually in San Mateo county. Alameda county and Oakland is the closest big concentration. That is at least an hour away to the North. Berkeley is to the North of Oakland, so even longer travel times.

            1. Santa Monica, yes. Parts of Long Beach – in Orange County – were also apparently hit hard. But the only indication in my part of LA County that anything unusual is happening is the curfew order.

        4. Yesterday from my mom, who lives in Pleasanton (who’d live in Unpleasanton?) a short hop east of Oakland:
          ===
          They evidently broke into the newly renovated mall in Walnut Creek. Have been in other small towns in the Bay Area.

          They have done terrible damage in Oakland.

          [When she came back from next door] I noticed the police were parked in force at the entrances to the mall, had a cement barrier across the one I could see with cop cars with lights flashing. I could only see two of the entrances and they were definitely blocked.
          ====

          Friend in Long Beach says the roving ‘fireworks’ were going off all last night.

          I’ll give Commie Newsom a little credit for at least keeping his mouth mostly shut, instead of immediately throwing fuel on the fire like so many other governors have done. Then again, he’s never really recovered from when Trump read him the riot act after those big fires….

      2. There are only so many explanations for what the center of gravity of this is. What is the core organizing party? China, Democrats, CIA, Russia, FBI, Silicon Valley, communists, Jeb, cartels, nihilistic ‘anti-racist’ millennials…

        Theories of organizers have a relationship with theories of objectives. Objective is often assumed to be the next election, or a conventional communist wet dream revolution.

        But what about Newsom’s separatist talk, and western states faction?

        The Chinese are not necessarily tied to convention when it comes to US domestic politics or revolutionary ideology. Revolution and election are all or nothing. The one has a track record of nothing in the US, and Hillary lost last time. Separatism in the western states, and economic damage in the non-western states covers the risks a little bit better. The Chinese do seem to estimate the economic value of cities highly.

        1. There have been reports of agitators being heard speaking Mandarin Chinese. Wouldn’t be surprised if they have a hand in, but I doubt they’re the major force here.

        2. “what about Newsom’s separatist talk, and western states faction?”

          Have you seen the kind of money Gavin the Gormless is pleading for in the bailout? Talk of leaving is just boob-bait and as credible a threat as holding his breath until he turns blue. If they leave the Union they’re bankrupt in ten years (a little longer if they can manage to target the exit taxes just right to keep businesses from bailing.)
          –

          1. That’s keeping things constant that might not be so.

            Specifically, tax base in the non-western states, debt, and California spending. Economic damage from the riots could change the first. Perhaps not enough to really change the dynamics much, but foreign intel may estimate differently. California, Oregon, and Washington would not need to honor their debts or continue their social spending if they successfully transition to an independent dictatorship.

            1. Not need to honor their debts or continue their social spending?

              Their public pension fund is incredibly underfunded, and I doubt the public employees will accept that being topped up via printing paper with Magical Monetary Thinking. And if they reduce social spending (which elimination of Federal Medicaid funds would certainly encourage) there are a lot of people living there who will probably get very unruly.

              https://usdebtclock.org/state-debt-clocks/state-of-california-debt-clock.html
              According to the California Policy Center, “The grand total of government borrowings, unfunded OPEB obligations and unfunded pension obligations is $1.28 trillion, or 52% of Gross State Product” as of 2015. I doubt it has improved over the last five years.
              californiapolicycenter[DOT]org/californias-total-state-local-debt-totals-1-3-trillion/

              That’s assuming they could secede without taking on a proportionate share of the Federal debt.
              –

          2. No one – and I mean NO ONE – in the general electorate takes talk of California secession seriously.

    4. Concur. Someone screwed up timing.

      On the plus side:

      Achievement unlocked: Unlawful Enemy Combatant.

      That’s gonna hurt.

      1. Yeah, the people complaining about DJT defining Antifa as a domestic terrorist org are not reading the DJT post: The tweet did not use the word “domestic.”

        And what he did say is a legally significant phrasing, especially for going after their funding sources and monetary assets anywhere around the world.

        In fact, as a hypothetical legal note, if any evidence of any Antifa assets “harboring or aiding” any Al Qaida or subsequent spinoff organizations or persons (i.e. Daesh) were to come to light, Antifa would then fall under the 2001 AUMF resolution as a congressionally blessed military target.

  22. Democrats response to riots and looting; ban people from defending themselves:

    Via Breitbart:

    “West Palm Beach Mayor Bans Guns, Ammo Sales in Response to Rioters
    AWR Hawkins
    Breitbart
    June 3, 2020

    West Palm Beach Florida Mayor Keith James declared a 72-hour State of Local Emergency on May 31, 2020, in response to riotous protests and the declaration includes a ban on gun and ammunition sales throughout the city.

    The declaration is published online begins by positing there “has been an act of violence or a flagrant and substantial defiance of, or resistance to, a lawful exercise of public authority.”

    It continues by maintaining there is further risk of acts of violence and/or defiance of authority, including “widespread disobedience of the law, and substantial injury to persons or to property; all of which constitutes an imminent threat to public peace or order and to the general welfare of the City of West Palm Beach.”

    Therefore, he declared a State of Local Emergency which bans “the sale of, or offer to sell, with or without consideration, any ammunition or gun or other firearm of any size of [sic] description.”

    His declaration also bans “the intentional display by or in any store or shop of any ammunition or gun or other firearm of any size or description.”

    James’ declaration also bans law-abiding citizens from carrying guns in public places for self-defense.

    The prohibitions are all in effect until 9 p.m. local time tonight.”

    1. Florida’s state gun laws have preemption over local laws. And they have teeth; “penalties may include fines, removal from public office, termination of employment and other punishments”.

      Mayor Doofus must be thinking he has enough clout in Tallahassee to do it anyway. We’ll see…

    2. The local emergency declarations (Fargo, ND) also banned the carrying of all weapons in public during the declared curfew. I pointed out to my wife that would be well nigh impossible to prosecute if there aren’t any other charges, especially if the defense lawyer wanted to get sporty.

  23. Many of us hated the idea of Mr. Johnson’s war, and many of my classmates ended up in Vietnam. Only a few nuts were Rah Rah, Ho Chi Minh tough.
    This time is worse, because of who the parents are. Too many spend all their energy on hate. But what we see is a logical culmination of the years of misinformation beginning in Kindergarten.

  24. “they’ve never been hungry a day — or an hour — in their lives.”

    Unfair! Many of them have been “somewhat peckish” for as long as the period between Morning Milk & Cookies” between Second and Third Periods and when the cafeteria opens for school lunch! Those with late lunch schedule have even thought they were going to die if they didn’t get a doughnut, soon!

    Ad even more have suffered Food Insecurity, a malady nearly as bad as psoriasis.
    –

  25. “These are NOT … peaceful protesters.”

    What!?? MORE of your Far-Right demonization? Everybody KNOWS that destroying property is not violence (New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nikole Hannah-Jones said so!) Violence is when you Right-Wing crypto-fascists say things that hurt gentle-peoples’ feelings!

    I cannot believe you are so insensitive to the problems of poor oppressed people and write of them so harmfully. Brute!
    –

      1. Heh. It seems that this NYTwit imagines property is fungible, like manna from the Heavens. Since it “can be replaced” she’s okay with (other people’s) property being taken or destroyed.

        Apparently she’s never i her life had to deal with an insurance company other than to pay the premiums.

        “Yes, the Home Entertaiment system was several years old. No, I don’t have the receipts to prove what it cost! What do you mean that you’ll only be able to pay me a third of my claimed amount!!!!??? It’s going to take HOW LONG to get this claim processed????”

        Property is time spent, and you can never get that time back. And not all property is replaceable, as the recent immolation of Uncle Hugo’s reminds us. Signed First Editions for books by deceased authors are a limited resource.

        Oh well, I guess there’s no big deal over the burning of the Library of Alexandria – it was just property, after all.
        –

        1. Well, I’m sure the Library of Alexandria was full of badthink so it’s no big loss, right?

      2. That’s the spirit!

        My only concern is what do I take to confront such meatheads – do I grab the carbine, the shotgun, or do I just go down in the birthday suit with an axe in each hand?

        And yes, all of that is on my side of the bed. 😀

        1. I vote for birthday suit and axes.

          A lot of people can convince themselves someone with a gun might miss them, but it’s a lot harder to crank up that kind of bravado when facing sharp edges.

          1. Yes, sadly, we’ve already seen–with the shopkeeper who had a machete and was nearly beat to death (and I think I saw he’d died?) that as compelling as the image is, in truth the rioters are more likely to respect guns.

          2. Judging by what Cú Chulainn was like under the ríastrad – I don’t think it matters. 😀

  26. When I was growing up I was taught that having a Civil Service job was a good thing, but not because my
    parents were hippies (oh, my, no. Dad thought Rush Limbaugh was too moderate). No, it was because they were Depression kids and a government job meant a steady, reliable paycheck.

    1. Mom told me the two reasons Grandma’s family did ok through the Great Depression were that Great Grandad worked for the postal service, and that he raised meat rabbits.

      1. Dad said his grandparents said they heard about the Depression, but they never noticed any difference. Being subsistence farmers in the Cumberland Mountains has its upsides.

        1. Maternal grandparents were the same. He was a mechanic for the mines. It was a step up from working the dry scrub farm on the high prairies of Montana … I’ve seen the cabin they lived in during the ’30s, before they moved to Denver, during the war. It was slightly better that the cross country ski and snow shoe, snow shelters you find in the Willamette and McKenzie Passes in Oregon (I’m sure other places but these are the ones I’m familiar with). Better because it had 4 walls, a door, couple of windows, & a floor. About the same size.

  27. I’m not one to espouse conspiracy theories here, but I’m noticing a distinct pattern of message propagation lately, especially within the last few weeks and months.

    Blatantly inflammatory statements are being spread, on both sides of the political spectrum, using quickly created and then quickly abandoned sock puppet accounts, which messages are then launched into a viral storm by massive collections of bots. These messages are finely tuned to generate an instant visceral reaction in their target audience.

    For instance, the @ANTIFA_US Twitter account that posted:

    [quote]
    Tonight’s the night, Comrades✊🏿

    Tonight we say “Fuck The City” and we move into the residential areas… the white hoods…. and we take what’s ours🔥
    [/quote]

    The thing is, while Twitter suspended the account fairly quickly, the damage was already spreading via the bot networks that were spreading screenshots out, even before the account got suspended. These images then reached critical mass when some people started reacting in a physical manner by arming up and making preparations to repel attacks in the suburbs of major cities. Even official authorities began to react to it.

    Another example of deliberately spread mis-information, is a post I found yesterday and then attempted to derail that featured a screen shot from a video seeming to show a kid throwing a smoking object into a horse trailer.

    The actual video showed a dualie pickup, pulling a horse trailer, that slowly made its way through a crowd of protesters, who then proceeded to attack both the truck and the trailer. Violent acts, all told. However, the kid throwing the smoke bomb? He’d picked it up from the ground, and tossed it out away from himself and the crowd, and the video clearly shows the smoke bomb rising above the level of the windows of the trailer. It appears that he was just walking in tandem, not even chasing the truck like many others in the video.

    The screen cap featured was deliberately misleading, making everyone feel sympathy for horses that they then claimed had been killed.

    Here’s the misleading post:

    I’m not disagreeing with the fact that the kid shouldn’t be in that crowd in the first place, walking on a freeway overpass, tossing anything at moving vehicles.

    The point I’m trying to make is that this post was trying to be deliberately inflammatory, generating the most hate and negative reaction possible by misrepresenting the facts.

    You will notice that there were dozens of early commentators, besides the author of the post, that continually tried to state that the horses were now dead? None of that information was true. There were no horses in the trailer. Here’s the proof of no horses in that trailer:

    These comments likely came from sock puppet accounts run by bot networks, controlled by a scammer.

    Very often, scammers will post and propagate stuff like this to get people to donate to GoFundMe campaigns, with the stated goal of sending funds to the victims, but in truth, it’s just a scam to separate people from their money.

    I am a staunch conservative. I completely disagree with the idea of protests that disrupt and endanger the travel of civilians to their homes.

    That being said, it is my opinion that posts like this are contributing to, if not entirely fueling, the continued escalation of hateful action and reaction between the two ideological sides of this debacle.

    My degree is in Network Security. For my job, I specialize in Image Management. My job is to create and identify patterns. This kind of misinformation campaign is starting to look heavily orchestrated. I am beginning to think that this war of hate and terror is being propagated by someone who is actively trying to not-so-subtly disrupt the United States in a planned and methodical manner.

    Whoever is doing this doesn’t care who may or may not get hurt by their misinformation

  28. A co-worker of mine today commented that a friend of his (yes, yes, this is a “friend of a friend” tale) said the goings on right now are very similar to the sort of things that happen when countries are collapsing.

    This was based on the friend having worked with (or knows people who did) people from the CIA…
    The TLA that back in the day (and probably still today,) had a fondness for trying to topple governments from within…

    I live not far from where there’s reportedly going to be a protest march this weekend, and while I’m hopeful it will go the same way one yesterday went (peaceful march down a main-drag to a city hall,) I’m also concerned enough now to lock-and-load in case the crowd heads this way and gets rambunctious. Drive past the neighborhood, or even through it honking horns and hollering? Enjoy yourself, I still think you’re being idiots.
    I don’t *think* they’ll come this way (we’re a good 2.5 miles from where they plan to stop marching, and there’s much better targets closer,) but it’s frightening that I’m concerned enough to prepare for problems.

    1. It’s not as dark as it seems. See ‘The Last Centurion’ and Bandit 6’s explanation of low-trust and high-trust societies. Bad as it looks, we still live in a high-trust society. We don’t assume the cops will shake us down for bribes, or ‘enemies of the state’ will disappear in the night.

      If the left-wing radicals get their way, though…

      1. Love that book, and yes, every time crap like this happens, or there’s the wailing about the collapse of neighborhoods, I think of the high-trust / low-trust society bit. I feel like I grew up in a “high-trust” era and we’ve been (at least where I’ve lived) sliding more and more towards “low-trust.”

        I think (and I believe it’s been said in comments here by others,) that the left-wing radicals pushing these sort of things always think they’ll be the ones putting people up against the wall, be the “leaders” and not the ones being put up against the wall. Forgetting that the “useful idiots” of today become tomorrows’ “non-men.”

        1. Yeah, once De Revolution Mon! has won, there’s no further need for revolutionaries, and such societies only have one answer for dealing with inconvenient subjects.

    2. Meh. While it is true that “The Big One” will be presaged by many temblors, it is not true that all temblors presage “The Big One.”

      There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and in this nation, I think, more than most. Dependence on our MSM for accurate reports is less reliable than astrology using only sun signs.
      –

      1. I fear that the thought that most immediately enters my mind in response to most MSM reprts of disaster is this …

        [a gun goes off at the football game]

        Hotlips O’Houlihan: Oh my God! They’ve shot him!

        Colonel Blake: Hot Lips, you incredible nincompoop! It’s the end of the quarter.
        –

      2. It’s obvious, to me anyway. that the dominant news media follow the “If it bleeds, it leads”, and “First to print/broadcast wins!” creeds at the expense of “Get the facts right before you make yourself look like fools” The evidence is that they have beclowned themselves so often, they don’t care anymore. Sensational, irresponsible reporting is the norm. And, no, it doesn’t matter how often you repeat a news item, it does not add to its accuracy.

    3. As a side note, the CIA’s main focus was not on disruption and chaos and such as we see in NYC etc. – they normally just were interested in inserting Their Guy at the top in place of any other guys.

      The riot and ruin specialists were the KGB.

  29. What I’m hoping for is simple…somebody with sanity grabs the city mayors where the worst problems are, squeezes something painful to get their attention, and informs them that if they let these things go on, large and small businesses will move out. The range of the middle class will move out. Their tax base will leave. And, without your tax base, you don’t have any money to play with or give your supporters and donors. So, getting these riots and such under control comes into the category of “this is a good idea”, yes?

    And, I do think that they were going to set these riots off closer to the election, so that it could all be “Orange Man Bad” blamed to help get Biden elected. But, somebody thought the revooollution was now, and started it rolling too soon.

    1. Heck, all that should need to be done is to point at what happened with Detroit after the riots in 1967 and after. People who could, fled the city (the so-called “white flight” Coleman Young touted) taking their tax dollars with them, closing small business, etc.

      Detroit is still trying to come back from that, and it’s been over 50 years…

      1. The Democrats already have a plan to try and use the federal government to compel people to live where Democrats want them to live; “regional planning” which is directed by Dept. of HUD based on the claim that unequal results requires government to step in and mandate what are essentially racial quotas for neighborhoods and to eliminate local zoning and planning and replace it with “regional planning” which will be dictated by the big cities, essentially turning the suburbs and rural areas into serfdoms of the cities.

        The “green new deal” is also designed to do this. Using the combination of “ending racism” and “saving the Earth” Democrats under Obama already started on micromanaging where and how people live. Trump’s election interrupted it. If Democrats win in November, they will push it again, this time on steroids.

        1. Which is a REALLY good reason to burn the cities down, at this point. “White flight” was because the sane people didn’t want to live in the rat-mazes. We don’t want live like Europeans, especially the Continental Europeans. We didn’t like how the cities were run, we couldn’t run the cities, and we didn’t want to be there anymore.

          I don’t want them coming to follow us.

          1. Already being pulled by Eugene, and they aren’t that big. ’60s saw a vote for Santa Clara, north River Road, essentially north of Beltline, to incorporate. It passed. Eugene got the vote voided. Then tried to incorporate the area into city boundaries. That they got their hands slapped. Tried again when county was tasked insuring that the same area was forced into the sewer system, in the ’90s. Never mind that the area voted and tried to join the sewer system when it was first put in, and Eugene said no, in the ’70s. They got slapped again, hard. OTOH the area is officially in the Eugene growth boundary. Any new subdivisions, or builds, are automatically city. Any permits to work on existing residential property goes through the city, although they can’t force you to agree to join the city when it comes to a vote (yep, slapped, again). It is a interesting patch work out here.

            Eventually Eugene will figure out how to encircle the county residential properties and force the rest of us into city taxes … that is about all we’ll get. We already pay into one of two school districts depending on whose boundaries your residence is in. Other than that we’ll lose Sheriff coverage, and gain Eugene PD coverage. The volunteer fire department likely to be disbanded and replaced by city fire. Already have EPUD water, power, & sewer. Otherwise, we get a library card. We can pay for a library card now. I think it is $120/year. I guarantee taxes will go up more than $120, and we’ll still pay for the services that will be reduced or eliminated. Beyond that because in city growth boundary they are forcing what they are calling “in filling”, allowing small multiplex buildings in what was originally over sized lots in residential areas.

    2. This is what I thought about the house arrest nonsense when that became open-ended. A lot of mayors snd governors reveled in suddenly having a bunch of people doing what they told them to do. They didn’t notice they were spending way more than they were taking in until it was too late to avoid the pain. Same thing is happening with the Days of Rage. The mob is shouting their campaign slogans, and they can’t figure out how to tell them to stop AND get reelected.

      1. I’ve been thinking, and people I’ve mentioned this to agree with me, Michigans’ economy is going to be SO f*ed when Her High Lordship and Governor deigns to allow the peasants to re-open their businesses with no restrictions (and finally allow the barbers, stylists, and spa owners to re-open.)

        The “fun” part is, people on her side refuse to see just how bad it’s potentially going to get. I hope my favorite local barbershop (not a chain, place has been there forever) survives. But I’m not counting on it. I hope the spa my wife and I like to frequent for couples massages survives (again, not a chain.) But again, not counting on it.

        Same thing for any number of small, local businesses. Or worse, they’ll re-open, at least for a while (could be weeks, could be months, but probably not years,) then fold because they just couldn’t get enough cash flow back in to recover. Staff will have moved on to other employment, so now they don’t have the people who knew what they were doing or how things were done or were favorites of customers.

        Yet the lockdown protesters “just want to get haircuts and don’t care about anyone else…”

    3. Who cares about outdated capitalist concepts like “tax base”? AOC has assured us if we need money, all we have to do is print it.

      1. I would LOVE to believe that she’s a Koch Brothers plant designed to prove just how stupid these things sound. It would make me so very happy to believe that. Yet…

  30. Kids) We’re in the middle of Gen-X (1971 and 1973) and had kids later because of a couple of things. Some of my classmates have grandchildren already, a couple that are our daughter’s age, and some didn’t have kids until after our daughter was born. Gen-X seems all strung out from having kids while in their teens to their 40s.

    Vanilla ISIS/Antifa) It amuses me that right up until Orangemanbad said he was declaring Antifa a terrorist organization the left was all for them. Then suddenly they’re just a loose collection of people that don’t have any organization, just people who are against fascism. Never mind they have a website(s) and a logo, etc. And amazingly, all of my leftier friends have gone all in on Antifa not existing.

    I don’t fault my foreign friends thinking Trump is a fascist, they not only don’t live here, but all their media seems to constantly harp on it. He’s apparently the first dictator in history to try to reduce the size of the Federal government and try to give more power back to the States. I’m undecided as of yet if I want to get into the whole argument about who fits the definition of fascist better, Trump or his multitude of Democrat predecessors, as I’m sure it will piss off a bunch of people. For the moment I’m letting it slide.

      1. Yeah. You need only think back 31 years this week to see how real dictators operate in times of actual peaceful protest.

    2. Yeah, looks like Trump played hooky from a lot of his Evil Overlord classes.

  31. I notice that the places where rioting is worse are principally those places where the political leadership is the most dominated by leftists. For all the rhetoric about racism, has nothing changed since in the half century since 1968? Has all the effort poured into redistribution of income through progressive income taxes and tax credits for the poor accomplished nothing? Has all the effort poured into eliminating racial and sex discrimination and assuring civil rights gone in vain? Has all the effort gone into police training been wasted? O, perhaps, have the ills of society been misdiagnosed and the prescribed treatment actually made matters in some respects worse?
    Rioting is not the language of the unheard. It is the language of the undisciplined and violent, those who cannot or will not think of the consequences of their actions. It is the language of the privileged and entitled, who think the world owes them a living and will take it by force if it isn’t given to them. It is the language of the ungrateful and selfish who care nothing for their neighbors.
    Rioting has next to nothing to do with skin color and very little to do with actual wealth. It does not matter much whether the rioters are the privileged white children of academics or common dark-skinned thugs from the poorest of minority neighborhoods. It has everything to do with culture absorbed from family, the neighborhood, at school, and the popular media. It is the language of those who have been raised in a culture where gangsters and criminals are praised and emulated and the police and other civil authorities are the enemy, where positive role models and moral teachers are weak or absent, and where efforts to educate and improve oneself are derided and punished.
    For civil authorities to sympathize with the rioters demonstrates either cowardice or complicity. “Stand down” is no way to fight either a fire or a riot. “Let it burn” is abject surrender to an inferior force. How can anyone expect good morale, effectiveness, or preparation in police departments which are persecuted from both the bottom up and the top down? How much revenue are you going to collect next year from the burned out shells left to bankrupt owners? Figuratively speaking only, political heads should roll. Yes, I’m looking at you, Minnesota and New York.

    1. Of course a great deal has been accomplished in the last 50 years. Great fiefdoms of government bureaucrats have been established to administer the literally trillions of dollars spent on the war on poverty. End the war? Lift the masses out of poverty? Are you crazy, stupid, or both? That would eliminate all those cushy government jobs. Heard recently from an expert who sounded reliable that seventy percent of those dollars earmarked for social uplift programs actually goes for the salaries and benefits of those people administering the programs. Obviously to them solving the problem is simply unacceptable. How dare anyone threaten their livelihood!

      1. It would have been much cheaper to hand each one of ‘the poor’ a check for a million dollars.

    1. Weapons grade stupidity.

      “noticed his weapon wasn’t what they were issued” That unit must be much, much bigger than the ones around here. If there’s an unknown face in formation, everyone knows.

      1. I would guess they’ve got units from multiple areas all piling into one area, and there’s always a couple of guys who are…ah… special? … when I’ve seen that happen for active duty and reserve.

  33. Have you seen the various videos of white idiots kneeling before blacks and begging forgiveness.

    They weren’t raised to be revolutionaries. They were raised to be slaves and, to quote a free black soldier on seeing his master among Confederate prisoners, bottom rail on top now. And they are happy to be the new bottom rail.

    That, more than any violence, has me frightened for the future.

    1. Only some. And sometimes they’re raised to be both. Self hating and submissive to holy minorities aggressive revolutionaries to their fellows.

          1. Sarah’s right, they’re cosplaying; if the cops were what they claim they wouldn’t dare taunt them that way.

            Of course, the Left has trained them well in not letting contradictory thoughts bump up against one another.

            I betcha that if a couple bikers were to walk up and club one of those twerps they’d scream for the police quickly enough.
            –

    3. That’s been true for a while. If you can find it, read the last story in Poul Anderson’s “Trader to the Stars”.

      “Do you think that they yonder is free?!!?” His hand chopped downward in scorn.

      1. I don’t remember that stoey. I’ll have to go back and take a look.

        Still, a sci-fi story is a long way from a seating mayor, some random people stopped on the street, and a group of police.

  34. At this point DeBlasio is going right for outright Nazism; today he issued yet another threat, including warning of arrest, to Orthodox Jews who plan to participate in a funeral because it would violate his “social distancing” orders. Meanwhile he allows others to literally riot and loot.

    Looters who do get caught are being immediately released under New York’s “no bail” policy.

    DeBlasio has targeted Jews, particularly Orthodox Jews with selective enforcement ever since he became Mayor and continues to do so even as he gives a pass to violent leftists whose views he agrees with. Indeed he even explicitly stated that he is allowing the protests about Mr. Floyd because he views them as “more important” than other protests or expressions of speech or religion, whether they be protests against his policies or religious services and funerals. The harshest treatment is always reserved by DeBlasio for Jews.

    DeBlasio’s discrimination against Jews has crossed the line into criminal violations of fundamental constitutional rights and federal civil rights laws.

    Given he is an international socialist, he is the poster child for the designation of CommuNazi.

    1. I don’t know why New York’s Jewish community puts up with it. Why stay in New York? Like George Carlin asked of the starving Ethiopians, “Why don’t you go somewhere else? Walk to where the food is!”

      A risibly small consortium could outright *buy* a city like Gary, Indiana and set it up as a primarily-Jewish community, kiss New York’s taxes and regulations goodbye, and live like kings on the money they saved. But noooo, they stay in Shitholistan, “We may be oppressed, but we’re still New Yorkers!”

      1. I seem to rember reading a few years back that they were doing just that in Dothan Ala

        1. Aw, c’mon – you KNOW why, you’re just too nice to say it.

          Even in the camps there were some who cooperated with the guards in hopes of going last.
          –

        2. “But we’ve always voted Democrat!”

          Sarah talks about “unthinking”, but some people seem to have no real grasp of cause and effect to start with.

          1. “But we’ve always voted Democrat!”

            –
            “And are you happy with the results?”

            “Uhhhh…”

            “If nothing changes, nothing will change. What can YOU change?”

            “Uh, not voting Democrat?”

            “We have a winner!”

    2. Ben Shapiro put out a joke he claims his NYC neighbors are telling the other day:

      Why does the groom break a glass at the wedding? So DeBlasio will mistake it for a riot and leave it alone.

  36. “… seeing is people being dumped from their blog hosting ”

    Hope you have a backup plan Sarah, as I suspect you know, WordPress, just failed that test.

    2. Is that why this didn’t show up on my feed? I got the email notification but had to click on AccordingtoHoyt link under my followed blogs?

      2. Several of Sarah’s recent postings do not show up on the Following page at WordPress. Although SJW woke-ness like ‘Support The Fight Against Inequality: Resources And Ways To Act’ are all over it.

        So, those ‘Resources’ would be, like, conveniently placed pallets of bricks? ‘Ways To Act’ includes behavior that would shame any self-respecting baboon? I’m sure not going to waste my time reading that drivel.

  37. The problem is not that the advocates of Communism and Socialism are doing it wrong. They will explain it directly that those they are trying to help are the ones doing it wrong. If the People would just Obey the Plan, it all works.

    Those that are not in on the con -believe- that. Those that are in on the con -exploit- that.

    Some become quite unruly when you easily refute that crap.

    1. No. I’ve been waiting. There’s a reason Leuton ends up, ah, let’s say experiencing a great deal of incendiary urban renewal at the end of one of the Cat books.

      1. For those curious, at the time I wrote the book, Leuton had the single highest concentration of South Asian Youths [press term] in the greater London area.

      1. Yep, it’s going on in France and Germany as well. Trump and Barr’s mistake was labeling them a domestic terror organization. They are unquestionably an INTERNATIONAL terrorist organization. That designation would add some even more teeth to efforts to go after them. It would also put Democrats in position of defending Antifa’s even more outrageous violence in Europe.

        1. Barr is Attorney General, so he only does “domestic”.

          Other people (notably SecState) do international.

          And DJT did not use the word “domestic.”

          1. Barr does have authority over dealing with the activities of such international organization that occur domestically and there is nothing that prevented him legally from calling it an international terrorist organization. In fact, while there is a law that allows for declaring a group to be international terrorist, there is no federal law that authorizes a designation of being a domestic terror organization. Accordingly Barr’s declaration is actually legally meaningless.

    4. No one respects the Bobbies. Check out the end-notes of COP World by James McClure. McClure was a writer (Kramer and Zondi novels) and also an award winning newspaper journalist. He wrote a book about the Liverpool? police (Spike Island) and then a couple of years later about the San Diego PD. He was convinced that the reason US police suffer so much fewer injuries than UK police was because the US officers were armed. Whereas if the Bobbies had to go into a bar, everyone felt it their duty to take a whack at them as they walked past.

  39. It’s fetish stuff. They don’t really mean it, especially since most of Vanilla ISIS is pretty racist. Lots of rich white kids shoving black kids around at the riots, and lots of black kids startled to encounter actual racism from their supposed allies.

  40. What we’re seeing is people being dumped from their blog hosting (and I mean blogs I read, so no, not evilbad unless anything to the right of Lenin is) and a friend has got permanently booted from Facebook for posting — not political at all, but this is what they told him — about the SpaceX launch.

    I’ve recently figured out how to set up my own e-mail servers (Postfix/Dovecot/OpenDKIM/DMARC/SPF) – I’ve even written up draft 1 of the instructions. The problem is, they’re crazy involved, and will probably make a non-Linuxer’s eyeballs bleed to look at. However, it’s an important *decentralized* protocol that people can use to communicate from their own servers and clients. Do you guys think it would be useful to you?

    Maybe along with tutorial #(infinity+1) of how to set up basic LAMP servers (Linux/Apache/Mysql/PhP servers) to serve webpages?

    Linode is a hosting provider that I recommend – they seem to just give you the bare server, and hopefully won’t engage in the petty political bullshit. I had been using Bluehost, but they’ve gotten a little annoying, and may be going downhill as a company. I use Namecheap as my domain name registrar.

    2. Ouch … probably too much for me, though Fastmail is still in the business of hosting domains, and I’ve toyed with the idea of using them for my own site and email addy. FM has been pretty good about protecting its customers over the years, though I’m not up on the latest.

    3. MadRocketSci, unrelated to the topic at hand but related to your comment, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to get said directions. Even better would be for setting up an internal-only e-mail system (I have some homelab stuff I’d love to be able to get alerts from, but I’m more a Windows guy with a smidgen of Linux knowledge. I’m not afraid of CLI, if that helps.)

      I can provide an e-mail address, if you’d be willing.

          1. No worries, I was able to grab the tutorial from what you posted (download option popped up when I moused over it)

            Now I have a weekend project that doesn’t involve cutting the lawn!

      2. PPS: Running your own wordpress instance is far easier than this. (For some reason, email servers come in buckets of ancient parts) I’ll try to write up some tutorials on how to do a wordpress installation as well.

    4. Would be a good general tutorial, especially if you could work up a prefab disk image for less techie folks to use.

  41. I run my own instance of the wordpress software on my servers for my blog. Unless these guys are bigger bastards than I expect, they probably can’t do anything to *my instance* of wordpress. (Unfortunately, some updates forced on me at Bluehost have left me stuck with their hairbrained idea of an editor, but there are add-ons to fix that and restore the classic editor I’ve been using.)

  42. FWIW as a sidebar … The narrative is strong with the media/elite here in Chicago.

    Most print/web news leans towards the protest theme, to the point that it’s become difficult to know if one’s neighborhood might become involved. Local helicopter cams follow events, and some updates are available from local PD twitter feeds. Police scanners are probably one’s best source, when they have not been hacked by Vanilla ISIS.

    Quite a difference for me, as I lived through race riots in Milwaukee in the 60’s. We had officers armed with shotguns on the major intersection 6 blocks from my very suburban home. There was a trained sniper/officer (Vet, if I remember right) stationed on tallest water tower with instructions to disable ANY car on the highway. Today, in Chicago we have a set of barricades 100 yards from my front door, blocking bad guys from exiting to our local strip mall. Effective, eh?

    So as an old timer, the difference is obvious. Way back when, the NG pretty much ended things in a matter of days. We had lots and lots of them. Today, in Illinois we have < 500. So yes, it's pretty clear, the government here is in cahoots with the crooks. They aren't serious about ending anything.

    I haven't given up on Chicago, but the path ahead isn't clear. Maybe the city and state are write-offs. Could be … Also possible that this is only Act One, as so many of you seem to think. And yeah, I guess that feels right.

    1. Re scanners: The SJPD just upgraded to one of the new hard-to-scan trunking digital systems, so the web-based scanner repeaters don’t have a working repeater feed anymore.

      Local FD and the California Highway Patrol are both still analog scannable and repeated online, as are other semi-local agencies (SFPD dispatch is still available).

        2. Most of our state has gone to Digital for Public Safety comms. There are still analog systems as backup in case the main systems fail, some rural FDs still use analog for paging alerts.

          Bearcat makes scanners that work on the digital trunking systems, but not if they are encrypted.

  43. https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/06/03/george-floyd-death-derek-chauvins-murder-charge-upgraded-to-2nd-degree-unintentional-murder-3-other-officers-charged/

    Additionally, Derek Chauvin’s murder charge has been upgraded to second-degree unintentional murder. He still faces third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter

    What’s the difference between these, because … what is ‘second degree unintentional murder’? Last I checked murder was a specific definition. And what is third degree murder?

    1. It has to do with level of intent. Second degree murder has to be an intent to commit murder/. First degree requires it be premeditated; i.e. it was planned to commit murder. Third degree has a lesser degree of intent, for instance intent to cause harm which could be reasonably expected to result in a persons death.

        1. Manslaughter is generally depraved indifference, or intent to cause harm which could be reasonably be believed to cause injury but which ends up resulting in death. Manslaughter can be unintentional or intentional but without the state of mind to be elevated up to murder.

          Keep in mind that specific definitions vary from state to state (and certainly from country to country).

    2. Layman understanding:
      Murder is a specific offense, that requires proving some measure of Mens Rhea, a guilty or evil mind. Third degree is a weaker charge than second degree, which is a weaker charge than first.

      Manslaughter and homicide are more related to simply causing an unlawful death.

      Caveat: today is a bad health day, and the thinker isn’t working correctly.

      2. In some areas homicide does not necessarily relate to an unlawful death. I.E. Justifiable Homicide in a self defense case. Although to be fair, I’ve never seen the term homicide used in a legal proceeding that involved a lawful death without the “justifiable” qualification as part of the term used.

    4. MN has way too many levels of offenses. Once saw someone on probation for something like 7th Degree Assault. I have no clue what that is.

  44. Please look for the video of the people looting a MOVING TRAIN.
    They are well organized. Found the right Container (with big screen TVs) and are having a good time.

    1. Oh, for some of them to win Darwin Awards by falling under the train wheels…

      2. https://oldnfo.org/2020/06/02/fwiw-2/

        Key bit is Strech’s intel that there are professionals involved.

        Youtube is replacing the covid scaremongering propaganda videos they throw onto the front page with black lives matter ones. Fails to disprove the China orchestrating things hypothesis.

        I’m vacillating between “kill them all” and “cold blood and thinking things through is the only way we can hope to prevent people from doing this again.”

  45. But I don’t know when my generation had kids. Maybe they all married and had kids early?

    –
    You are slightly younger than I am. By the time our son was born (also infertility issues) some classmates had older children ages from entering HS to a couple of cases, graduating HS and starting college (they might have started before graduation …).

    Traditionally figure average 20 (ish) years per generation.

    Maternal grandmother. First child at 22. First two grandchildren at 45. First great-grandchild at 66. First great-great grandchild at 92.

    My paternal grandmother wasn’t that far off either. First child at 27. Last child at 42. First grandchild at 45. First great-grandchild at 67. Her third to last grandchild was born when she was 79. By then she had 6 great-grandchildren.

    Mom OTOH. I’m 22 years younger. Her first grandchild is 54 years younger. First great-grandchild is 76 years younger.

    I can relate to being one of the oldest mothers in my child’s classes. There were other older mothers, but they generally were dealing with their youngest child or raising their grandchildren (way too many of the latter).
    –

    1. If it weren’t for her obvious sincerity I’d say she was attempting to manufacture an incident, same way some gals scream “Sexual Assault” if a guy’s gaze lingers more than four seconds.

      That sort of faux injury was standard in the Sixties.

      But in this case I believe she truly is upset that her pacie was taken away.
      –

  47. Pingback: Ouch – Dark Brightness

Comments are closed.