One of the first books I read was a book with stories about a mother’s love (being a suspicious little brat, I was convinced this was a plot on the part of all the mothers of the world to instill our minds with propaganda.)
I swear, though most paintings like the one above show no such thing, that the lithograph with that particular story showed the guard holding half a baby, with the other half lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
In the story, for those who just came into western civilization yesterday, two mothers living in the same house (and therefore probably wives of the same man), one of whose sons has died. And both the women lay claim to the surviving son. (This of course in antiquity, particularly in a polygamous family, was not just a son, not just progeny, a baby to love and all that, but status and security for the mother. Part of all the stories starting with Greeks and Romans, and probably earlier (there’s probably prayers for a son written on cave walls) of women who will do anything for a son is that due to the difference in strength and ability to fight and work in unforgiving conditions, the closer a society lives to the “land” and the harsh ways of mother nature, the more important it is for women to have a male who will work and/or fight for them. The old age (which probably started at around 35, given bad nutrition and multiple/continuous pregnancies, not to mention hard work) of a woman with no surviving son was harsh and short. (Or if you prefer short/brutish and nasty.) Her best hope was to be kept as somewhere between a slave or a pet by the family to which she belonged, be that marriage or birth, as long as she could do small tasks of minding the children or menial work. Once she was unable to do that, only a very loving family would care for her in any way we consider humane. And don’t forget long before that, a husband could get rid of a barren wife, and you bet your beepy that “barren” included “can’t have babies that survive.” Which frankly was still true when Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon.
At any rate, in the story, King Solomon, being wise, (that’s why they paid him the big bucks, or at least he had so many concubines that he had to put them on some kind of system of rotation) comes up with a cunning way (and without ever having studied cunningology in Oxford.) to figure out which woman is the true mother.
He orders the baby cut in half and each half given to one woman.
Every woman who has ever carried a child to term and about half of the ones who haven’t just felt her womb contract at the idea. Which is the point. The true mother immediately speaks up and says “no, no, give the baby to that other woman.” And thus Solomon knows who is the baby’s mother.
He was absolutely correct, by the way, even though we can’t know in true fact if the child was the biological son of the mother to whom he was given. No, don’t argue. Yes, I do realize the point of the story is the natural love of a mother for her child. But when it comes to humans “nature” is not the thing, and a lot of people have virtually no instincts (self included) which does not make them bad people. I do know mothers unnatural enough that they’d be happy to have the baby killed if it meant it didn’t go to increase the power and glory of “that woman.” Even if they had birthed it. And I know you do too. And frankly, if I had been the other woman, I might have spoken up first and said “No, no, fine. Give her the child, but don’t hurt it.” Because no matter what it cost me, I …. like humans and believe in life over death.
Solomon CHOSE the woman who would love that child best, and put his welfare above her own. Therefore his “true mother.”
Let’s suppose, however, that Solomon had a little less wisdom, or less power. And therefore gave the baby to the one who was not willing to let the baby go and would rather see him dead.
How good a life do you think that child would have, even if he was zealously kept alive to preserve her status? And how long do you think he’d survive if she’d been able to bear another child who was strong and survived? And supposing he lived to adulthood, how psychologically healthy do you think he’d be?
In what will seem like an abrupt change of subject, but isn’t, 8 years ago I went to a Romney rally near Hoyt Colorado. (Yes, I am mildly embarrassed to admit this, after the insanity that was Pierre Delecto. However, at the time, seeing the fifth “summer of recovery”on the horizon and irreparable evil overtaking our nation and institutions, I’d have voted for Satan himself, and even worked for his campaign because “better the devil you know is the devil. And can’t be accused of being racist against sulphurous Americans for opposing communism.”)
Having seen a lot of more or less open shenanigans played out in 2008, having watched ACORN brag on camera of having “created” 3 million votes for Obama, and then the whole thing memory holed and people deciding that “America really wants socialism” I WANTED to fight against what I was sure was an illegitimate presidency, acquired by force of fraud. I wanted a candidate who would FIGHT.
I ended up standing in line (I didn’t get in, btw. Hell, the line extended to the highway from Denver to Colorado Springs, with every on ramp closed and the highway at a standstill. Yes, Colorado went for Obama. Yes, it was fraud. Insane, galloping fraud. I invite you to imagine the sort of opposition to Obama that made people treat milk toast Romney as they now treat Trump. And yet Obama won. Despite a complete absence of any show of enthusiasm for him in 12. I mean we lived in a college neighborhood and there was not a single sign. Sure. People really wanted to vote for him. And the Democrats’ incoherent attacks of “women in binders” totally worked with the population. Other leg. Pull it. It plays jingle bells.)
As I stood there, in the evening cold, wearing a skirt, because I’m an idiot, a person went up and down the line with a clipboard asking “are you a lawyer?” and taking down names of people willing to fight any fraud in the election. This made me too happy for words.
What didn’t make me happy was poll watching, seeing rampant fraud (a lot through ballot harvesting) and watching my state fall to the dems by a slim margin. (They immediately, and after the ballot initiative was defeated at the polls, btw, by executive order made all the voting in Colorado be by mail only, and also registration be by mail, no …. existence needed. Which is why Colorado went to Hillary, and why we haven’t been bombarded with pollling calls and adds this election even though we’re theoretically a “flip” state. Because, you know, we are in te Democrat bag. They stole us, and they mean to keep us. (It is also why the despicable Polis feels safe in the bullshit he pulls on us, from turning Denver into a vast homeless encampment — and turning the convention center, which cost the state a river of tax payer money into a homeless hostel — to destroying our tourism-economy.)
I called in the irregularities I saw. We all did. I ended up in group calls with poll watchers from all over Colorado, all of us — at once — yelling at campaign staffers. And it will neither surprise my regular readers nor appease them (though it might make them giggle) that I was so furious I went unstable Latina on the campaign headquarters, and end up screaming at Reince Priebus himself.
To no avail. Romney did bloody nothing.
And then I watched everyone on the right go on about how people really, really preferred Obama, and we needed to change ourselves to meet them where they were. We needed to become somewhat socialist, because that’s where the nation was. And if I tried to explain the massive amounts of fraud, everyone would go “well, that’s a conspiracy theory.”
This would be like the mother deciding she REALLY was barren, and her best hope was to endear herself to the chick who was willing to have the baby cut in half.
I come to explain Romney (and the others before him) not to praise him (or condemn him.) It’s easy to call them names, to refer to them as RINOS. Yes, many of them are, but what “Republican” means has also changed. No, not the way the left claims. It has changed AWAY from authoritarianism and towards more individual freedom. Any Republican with Nixon’s positions today would be called a Democrat. But that change in the party had to wait till communism fell and people realized the “scientific” system of governance was no such thing.
And yes, I know about the court ruling preventing republicans from challenging fraud. Those rulings were obviously insane, since apparently the New Black Panthers standing outside the polls in Philladelphia was not “voter intimidation” but asking for ID is “racial discrimination.” I’m convinced (And so was Romney, otherwise why canvas lawyers) that the fraud was blatant enough it could be challenged.
And DEAR LORD the fraud was appallingly blatant. And it got MORE so in 2018 when Arizona kept the polls open till the “right” person won, etc. And it should have been stopped.
The part where I explain Romney is this: It was going to be a horrible fight, and it had an enormous chance of getting us in a civil war. And even if we escaped that, it would destroy the integrity of America and the faith in our election system completely.
He judged it was better if the Republic lived on, even under Obama. Possibly he figured that we’d had horrible presidents before and we’d have them again. We’d survive that, he’d have his shot later, etc. etc. etc.
Look, I’ve said before as horrible as Obama was, and as much as everyone who ever cried out against Nixon over Watergate should go an apologize at his grave, as Obama’s malfeasance comes out, I’m NOT saying Romney was better. Heaven help us, but Obama might have been the best choice that horrible year.
Because Romney might have — in fact probably does — loved America enough to concede a ridiculous, crooked election, but he was no Solomon. (And I leave to your imagination what he would have done if they’d thrown one tenth the bilge they’ve thrown at Trump at him.)
The problem in fact is that there is no Solomon. And that in every election since Clinton put the horrendous “Motor Voter” act as a facilitation for fraud, the democrats have refused to accept defeat, claimed the election was fraudulent (I give you “Tank” Abrahams) and generally behaved like the other party has NO legitimacy.
What we’ve faced since 2000 — yes, Bush got that one, but he never fought against the perception that he’d “stolen” it. Instead he tried to rise above it — is a judgement of Solomon where again and again the baby is given to the woman who demands it be killed if she can’t have it.
And again and again, we’ve seen what that results in. More and more our institutions are corrupted, our children turned against America itself, till we have people on the streets of America screaming “death to America.”
We know the other “mother’s” plans for America too, now.
“No borders, no wall, no America at all.” The other mother, in fact, plans to take the baby out back and slice him and dice him. Or perhaps sell him to slavers. Same dif.
What they plan is to destroy the Republic. Perhaps because they view their status in the “world” is more important and perceive more rewards coming to them from the oligarchs abroad. Or perhaps because they really, would prefer to destroy the last, greatest hope of mankind, if they can’t own it.
Who knows, who cares?
Are we going to see that again? I don’t know. Trump IS a fighter, but he has lost his footing a couple of times. Sure, perhaps the engineered crisis over the “pandemic” was something he couldn’t dodge. But he also didn’t dispute the 18 elections. He did a Romney on them, and let them take the house on fake “victories” and turn the next two years into the hell we’ve gone through. Including and up to the “pandemic” response. Is he going to think his judicial nominations are enough? And step aside, and let the insanity continue after the dems use their fake polls, their “all vote by mail” fraud, their news media, to browbeat the American people into accepting that America really, really, really wants a “zombie win.” Who knows? Heave knows the man has to be tired. Bone-weary.
But the problem is saying “I love America too much to want to see her rent by a civil war, or destroyed by loss of confidence in elections” is no longer an option.
If we lose this one, we’re going down for the long count. The long, long count. Sure, the left can’t keep what they take. But they can do enough to see America divided and parceled out to foreign powers, all of whom behave more like China than anything in Western Civilization.
It’s not that I don’t understand the temptation. Fighting, in courts, first, might be more risky. On the other hand it has SOME chance of winning. For the other…. (opens hand) America shall be nothing but a glimmer in the wind.
And you know, this is America, so there is a Solomon. There is a judge.
We the People of the United States of America. Now. Always. We THE PEOPLE.
There is no option for sitting this one out. And no, I don’t want to hear any whining about how third party is the only way. There is no choice between cake or death.Your choice is, do you want America to live or not? If you do, vote for Trump. He’s flesh and blood, and heaven knows he’s flawed, but he’s trying to keep the Republic to allude to a musical on other “In conditions that a Merciful G-d should scruple to impose.”
Vote as if your life depended on it. Given the crazy Green New Deal and their lust for reeducation camps, it probably does. But more importantly, the Republic depends on it. We are flesh and blood. Dying was always baked in. But the republic needs not die.
And if it fails in the face of what promises to be an unprecedented tsunami of fraud. Then fight. In the courts, in the public square, in ANY WAY YOU HAVE TO.
You are Solomon. You are the king and judge of this land. Don’t give it to those who would destroy it.
Fight to the extent you can, as hard as you can. And in the aftermath get rid of the corruption and those who view America as a toy to control or destroy.
Let not government for the people by the people perish from this Earth.
Be not afraid. Our purpose is bigger than our lives. Fear is besides the point.
According To Hoyt 
Make sure your sights are zeroed and cowitnessed, and your mags (plural and plentiful) are loaded.
And with apologies to Colonels John Parker and Jeff Cooper, do not fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war then by God give them far more war than they’ll ever care to enjoy.
And batteries.
True. But properly-cowitnessed backup irons never need batteries.
So long as we understand that irons are a crappy and inherently inferior substitute for a good optic.
As someone who only has irons on his pistols (OK, and the wifes’ 22 rifle,) I would disagree with that statement…
Irons, you won’t need to worry about the batteries being dead and your optic not working.
Irons, you can bang around and smack around without worrying about them breaking (granted, a GOOD optic will take a fair bit of abuse.)
(This coming from someone who only has optics on his 2 rifles, EOTech 512 on the AR and nice Vortex scope on the bolt gun)
Optics come with their own tradeoffs, yes.
But the key point here is that irons force certain unnatural requirements, like front sight focus instead of target focus. Much of irons training is actually training to get around all the ways they suck.
I don’t disagree, I find it FAR easier to use my AR optic vs the irons on the wifes’ rifle.
Oh HELL yeah! My holographic sight is orders of magnitude better than my irons.
Once I got the trick into my head of focusing *THROUGH* the holo-sight (didn’t take me long, thankfully) I realized how EASY it was to shoot.
Now, the wife…
The first time she shot my AR (first time shooting, too,) she tried to put the dot on the end of the barrel on the target…
Thankfully, she didn’t hit the ceiling and get us kicked off the range (indoor.)
As it is said – tactics, & logistics.
If you can’t afford an ACOG/RMR, a Vortex Strike Eagle 1-8×24 is great.
Works with or without batteries. I hardly ever use the illumination.
I’m using a Vortex UH-1.
My Trijicon ReflexII don’t need no stinkin’ batteries! At least not until the end of it’s half life cycle. 😉
I’m not big on guns, not much of a marksman, but I love fire like two dragons and an efreet having a threesome.
Kill it with fire. It’s the American Way!
*bursts out laughing* I love that description, thank you.
John Parker: “Good! … What is a ‘truck’?”
You mean John Farnam?
#NotAllMothers
–
Trump has already per-committed to fighting fraud.
And looking at the left as they currently are; can anyone honestly claim they are competent? Pelosi just came out saying that they need to consider the 25th because of Trump’s illness. Last week’s news.
*pre-committed
Yes right on. To the barricades.
Do you hear the people sing?
Random tangeant, but that song will forever remind me of my trip to France and my one and only ride on a TGV high-speed train.
We were travelling from Interlaken Switzerland to Paris and changed trains somewhere nearabout the French border (forget exactly where) and boarded the TGV for the rest of the trip to Gare de Lyon. Roughly a 2.5-hour journey IIRC.
Shortly after the trip began, we could hear the folks in the compartment next to our seats (they carriage had a private area at one end that’s “walled off” from the rest of the coach, we were sitting directly outside this area) start singing. Loudly. And drunkenly. After a few moments, I realize that I recognize the song. A few minutes later, I realized that they were singing “We’re Not Gonna Take It!” in French. And they kept on singing it. Over. And Over. And over. For the entirety of the trip.
When we disembarked, we had to walk through their compartment. Every single horizontal surface was covered in empty alcoholic beverage containers.
Ooh, random alcohol-influenced behavior story time.
I grew up in France, and at one point we went on vacation to Venice. Hotels were expensive, so we found a camping spot not too far from the city and slept in a tent for a few nights while we toured the city in the daytime. And one night, some people (mid-twenties, apparently) came back to the campsite around 1:00 AM or so, drunk and singing loudly enough to wake my father up. (I didn’t wake up, so I got the story second-hand from him). He was irritated, and they were singing in English, so he yelled at them in English, “Hey! Don’t you know how to live in society?” To which one of them immediately replied, “Nah, we’re Australians!”
I don’t remember him saying so, but I get the impression that after that line, my father found he couldn’t stay irritated as his amusement was winning out.
LOL.
Alcohol-influenced behaviour story time?
So Tuesday (also Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays) …
Y’know …. nevermind.
Sláinte!
LOL!
Venice was fun… or it would have been if we hadn’t spent most of the day completely lost! I swear, that’s not a city: it’s a freaking maze!
Actually since governments are lovecraftian entities from hell on the best of days probably something more like this:
c4c
c4c
It’s easy to call them names, to refer to them as RINOS. Yes, many of them are, but what “Republican” means has also changed.
I don’t call Romney, McCain, et al RHINOS. I’m the rhino. I vote Republican, but I don’t believe in what the party believes in. Oh, I support most of the party’s platform, but that isn’t what the party believes in.
By it’s actions, the GOP has proven it believes in playing nice with Dems to get a share of the graft. By it’s actions, the GOP has proven it believes in voting for the platform every chance they get, to insure my vote, until they are in power. Then they vote to get some graft and “fix” the Dems changes, which doesn’t mean repeal, but means fix them in place.
He judged it was better if the Republic lived on, even under Obama.
And he was wrong, because freed from re-election, Obama mortally wounded the Republic by converting the apparatus of the state into an open arm of his party, as we’re learning.
Elect all the Republicans you want. Most are cowards who won’t rock the boat and when one who fights comes along the bureaucracy will just ignore his changes, undermine him, and keep the engines of power warm until the Dems are restored to their rightful place.
Trump IS a fighter
Trump is a fighter, but no one else in his party, hell even most of his staff, are not. They’d rather go down instead of fighting because “that’s not who we are”.
And they are right. They are cowards more attached to their crumbs of power than moral authority. Most GOP office holders and party leaders are JV Democrats: power addicted people without the cunning or skill to succeed in the party that openly seeks power, so they claim to not want it to win in the other party then undermine what that party stands for.
If Trump fights he will fight alone with respect to people “who matter” and when people who don’t try to support him, watch how quickly Republican DAs will charge “rioters” who aren’t the right shade of leftist. If we join him in the fight it will be scorched earth by them and better damn well be by us or we’ve wasted it all to give the Dems what they want, rulership of Hell because the damned are easier to cow.
It is time to accept we lost and decide if we are going to take it back, burn it down so they can’t have and destroy belief in its ideals by claiming those “racist” “white supremacist” “evil” ideals are why their utopia is failing, or roll over and either not care about our children or, for those of us who don’t have them, try to run out the clock by hiding until our deaths.
I had selected Plan C until Trump came along. Even then I voted him as a Plan C middle finger to the GOP (much, much more than the Dems) figuring they wanted Hillary more they could have her.
Early after Trump won I thought Plan A was on offer. Right now I’m back to picking B or C again.
We’ll see in 27 days.
I’m not FOR the Republican Party.
I’m AGAINST the Democratic Party.
Even though they’re just two aspects of the Uniparty.
Posh. That’s the idiot hippies saying “uniparty.”
BULLSHIT.
One party is mostly commie. The other, misguided as it might be, ISN’T. Sure, it’s made of humans and idiots. Like everything. But the parties are NOT the same.
What is the appeal of communism to Antifa? To rioters? To some pols it’s sweet sweet cash from China. Why are the hippies so anti American?
Because their forebears were spun by Russian propaganda, and convinced to be smart they HAD to reject America.
Antifa (and the rest of the Fascist Left establishment) believe that their dream of Communism;Socialism will put them high up the social structure. And never mind that in every country that HAS gone full bore Communist the power has ended up in the hands of psychotics and thugs who viewed political agitators as troublemakers and liquidated them as quickly as possible.
Just as the old Aristocracy of Europe believed that their ‘breeding’ proved they were best suited to rule, in the face of the facts on the ground which would have dictated culling most of them as inbred mutants.
Elites nearly always cling to notions of superiority and dreams of authority that are in contradiction of the facts.
Also the assumptions of financial gain and just straight up indoctrination like with climate change. Reparations, free college, freehousing, assumptions that the jobs will just appear, etc. Might be bad ones but there are financial motives on lower echelons just as much as the higher ones
And on the lower levels there’s this: they were told all their lives that getting a College Degree was the ticket to a Good Job. They weren’t urged to be selective about what degree (unless they had very good parents, and then they probably didn’t fall for the Fascist Left narrative enough to be little Brownshirts), just Get A Degree!! And most degrees AREN’T tickets to a Good Job. They may be a certificate to getting interviewed, but getting a good job usually requires working your way through several bad ones first. And if you don’t have the habit of hard work, you lodge.
So they have this trained-in feeling that the World owes them, because they did what they were told to, and didn’t get the prize.
And all through school, and college, they’ve been passed along on low effort. There are a LOT of reasons for that, but the end result is, they have lousy work habits. And most of them are too f’ing thick to learn. They got through most of their education by learning the incantations that please a certain kind of educators, and don’t realize that a worker who repeats buzz-words instead of thinking is a freaking drone, and probably an oxygen thief.
There really is no pit of Hell deep enough for the Ed School grads who did this to the educational system.
Number two son left the education department because he simply couldn’t deal with the BS. He told me “why should I stay in a school that officially hates me?” It’s a real pity because his goal was to teach history and coach sport at a boy’s high school. He is exactly what a bunch of sixteen year old boys need. What they get is girls whose grades weren’t good enough.
I had a bit of insight a few days ago. What if the reason so many big companies particularly Big Tech want to keep the foreign labor pipelines (H-1B etc.) open is because most American university grads are becoming less and less of an asset to the workplace. A nice Indian employee who shows up for work then just does what he is hired for rather than demanding his employer entertain the latest SJW cause sounds good to me. Look at Spotify and Joe Rogan. Can you imagine how it must feel to sign a big deal like that and have low level employees Sh!t all over it because of SJW nonsense.
Nope H1-B are much cheaper. Most of them are contractors. They bring them here for a few years where they live several to an apartment and then go home. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Keep in mind that tech companies are by and large not run by tech guys but rather by deal making psychopaths who have been able to leverage the increasing returns to scale that come with any new area along with using cheap money to buy everything in sight. They’re not good at anything beyond cheating and stealing other people’s ideas. Zuck is the perfect example.
THIS.
I’ve been saying for decades that, despite the propaganda put out by the Micro$oft PR Dept., Bill Gates is not a programming/computer/tech genius.
What he is, is a genius at taking other people’s ideas in ways that circumvent giving the originators credit/rewards in ways that keep him from beings sued successfully efforts and marketing them as his own to the general public. He was also good at sabotaging and crushing technologically superior competitors (such as DR DOS and WordPerfect).
Recentish example, though Gates hasn’t been the CEO for over a decade and this was under Ballmer, not Gates: Microsoft bought Bungie, the video game company that made the Halo series of games. Until then, Bungie had been famous for developing for the Mac, but Microsoft changed that, and for a while, Halo drove the sales of Microsoft’s Xbox.
Now Microsoft has just bought Bethesda, the makers of Skyrim (Elder Scrolls 5). Whose next game in the Elder Scrolls series won’t be out for a few more years, but is going to come out on PC and Xbox, and probably only those platforms. Playstation owners are, unless something very unexpected happens, out of luck if they expected to be able to get Elder Scrolls 6 on their platform. (Though given that it won’t come out for a few years, it probably would have come out for the Playstation 6 or something, so current PS owners would have been out of luck anyway.)
I’ll also mention that since Microsoft’s current CEO, Satya Nadella, took over from Ballmer in 2014, for the first time I’ve seen Microsoft’s behavior in the open-source world as positive. They’ve open sourced VS Code and have been working hard at continuing to develop and improve it, rather than dump it on the world and say “Okay, it’s open-source, now we’ll sit back and let other people work on it while we rest on our laurels.” And in the couple years since they bought Github, I’ve seen only improvements to Github’s services. For example, instead of trying to monetize it massively the way many people thought they would, they actually made *more* things available for free, such as unlimited private repos available to free accounts (previously you had to pay to have private repos), and Github Actions available to everyone with free accounts as well. (And if you’d previously used Azure Pipelines, you’ll recognize the visual look of Github Actions as being very similar in feel to the look of Azure Pipelines, strongly suggesting they use the same technology behind the scenes).
Basically, now that Gates and Ballmer aren’t running the show, Microsoft has been a much better member of the open-source world.
I always thought I’d want to get on with one of the “big guys”. Big salary. You know the works. Am I glad I failed.
I realize that they are much cheaper but I think that is not the only benefit especially going into the future. A modern college student educated in the pro activism and grievance laden rhetoric does not seem like a good employee to me.
They were raised to think so.
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” is the cruelest joke in the universe.
Not least because even someone who sees the lies still has all of those foundational instincts.
They assume they can keep their latte with soymilk and nice housing and money for music-n-stuff without having to have an icky, “unfulfilling” job.
Went to a presentation on child-rearing approaches once while my wife was pregnant with our first. It was for a Christian audience and by a Christian, so that verse got mentioned. And the guy giving the presentation said something like, “I think this one gets misunderstood a lot. I think the original language had more of an implication of ‘in the way he’s naturally inclined to go’, i.e. figure out whether your kid is more inclined to be a computer scientist or a soccer player or a musician, and give him lots of opportunities to grow in the direction he’s naturally inclined towards.” Because many people do depart from the teaching their parents gave them.
Now, you’re quite right that the fundamental teaching will stay with you at some level. People who were raised in homes that believe X, usually either end up believing X or become the fiercest anti-X advocates you meet, because they strongly feel the effects of believing X on them and are rebelling against those effects. Whenever I meet someone who’s vehemently anti-religion, for instance, they tend to say something that clues me in to the fact that they were raised in a strongly religious household. Or, for a different example, it’s hard to find a more vehement anti-communist than someone who escaped a communist country. So the things you learn early on do tend to stick with you, even if the way they stick with you is as a strong motivation to oppose them.
I’m aware that it is a line that is more detailed than immediately apparent. (It’s *PROVERBS*, a metric crapton of problems come from people screwing up that book)
As for your second paragraph, well, I did just call “train up a child[…]” the cruelest joke in the universe………..
Of course, there’s the version attributed to the Jesuits, of, “Give me a child until he is seven. You can have him after that.”
Hence the never ending push by the schools to get their claws on children earlier.
I was always planning on homeschooling, but I think that wasn’t the sole reason I was flabbergasted at the doctor asking about pre-K at the 3-year check-up.
I mean, excuse me? She’s THREE.
(And when we said we were homeschooling, she immediately turns to my daughter and asks if she has any friends and things like that. (She answered well, but that’s beside the point.) As though I needed to earn her approval to raise my own children!)
(…which, in honesty, I probably do. I rrrrreally need to find a new pediatrician. -_-)
The Democrats are Progressives, who are Socialists, who are Communists, who are Fascists. The old Republicans are mostly mild Rotarians.
It sure as hell has been trying to be commies for most of this time. Except that the scum don’t even have the basic honesty to admit it.
Well, there *was* the “trained Marxists” bit.
But then, basic honesty is quite alien to the left. As is self reflection. And so on…
Oh, I was talking about the Republican establishment.
Yep, there are grifters in the Repbulicans. Already wrote about that a bit. But the Right has limits. And occasionally punishes the guilty. When is the last time you saw the left call out bad behavior in its own ranks?
From what I’ve seen the right doesn’t have much room to be anything but squeaky clean or they get pounced on.
When the Right punishes its people it is more along the lines of “Crap! This guy is an effective fighter against the other side. Expose his mistress and make him resign.”.
Steve King. Dude got primaried (after they stripped him of his cabinet appointments). He was pretty meh before the racist crap he said got out, not a prominent conservative by any stretch.
Conservative groups funded the heck out of his opponent in the primary (not the general- he got beat by another republican after being in Congress for years). Booted his butt right out.
That’s the biggest one I can think of off the top of my head. Need to get Romney primaried. And whatshername, the Alaska congresscritter, and the Maine one.
You’ll never find me singing the praises of the right as perfect. They’re not. I am *still* pissed about, oh, a whole Congress full of do nothing crony capitalist grifter swamp dweller slimeballs- and I don’t just mean the 2016-2018 Congress.
With the left…. I think the last time that happened involved a guy named Stalin.
Serious question: after watching the last four years of republican behavior, how can anyone claim with a straight face that it isn’t a uniparty?
Again, how old are you?
Do you remember Obama?
It’s not a uniparty.
I remember Obama. Is the republican behavior towards him supposed to be evidence of non-uniparty-ness?
Uh…. Do you remember the penalties for saying boo?
But no. I mean, giving pallets of cash to Iran. ADVERTISING our awesome welfare programs in Mexico to encourage illegal aliens. Etc. etc ad literally nauseum
NEVER UNDER A REPUBLICAN.
The uniparty lie only works if you’re standing on “No government at all” or “absolute Stalin is the way.”
Otherwise, no. And these days not even that. Seriously, the left is now Stalin all the way.
I will remind you I once voted socialist because the communists were worse and also shutting down every other party. SOMETIMES “the same but slower” earns you time and is essential.
The choice is NEVER cake or death.
And sometimes “same but slower so we don’t lose it all” is the happy lie someone tells themselves so they can pretend they didn’t weld the chains on their own arms.
Oh hell. Yeah. Sure Ian. Whatevs.
When I’d been SHOT AT. When the headquarters of every party to the right o Maoists were burning down, the leaders of everyone opposing the Maoists on the ballot, sure.
I vote to weld chaaaains. What have you been doing? Stop watching the view.
Look, back in the 70s, say. Nixon was a horrible statist, sure. BUT compared to people who wanted to disarm so Russia could invade?
Yeah. Good chance if you continuously voted for the other guy (or abstained because “uniparty”) we’d now be speaking Russian.
You’re not ten. This argument is not becoming of a thinking human being.
Sure, the Republicans have a lot of corruptocrats, but at least they have to pay court to patriotism and decency. The left doesn’t.
If you honestly see no difference at all, or think you can “think us free” you are doing the equivalent of going to a seafood restaurant and refusing to eat because steak isn’t on the menu.
You do what you can do, when you can do. And you move the needle. The left has done this MASTERFULLY for 100 years, which is why we are in the pickle we’re in.
But sure — spits — keep shouting “uniparty” that will change everything.
I guess I just hallucinated all those bills during Bozo’s tenure that the Rs submitted to get rid of ACA. And then how they instantly stopped the moment there was a chance one might get signed.
Mmhmm. Very honest people.
Did I say they were honest? READ THAT AGAIN. I said they at least have to pay lip service to NOT hating us.
Look, they’re not very bright, not very honest, and until Trump believed the media implicitly. So, of course…
Also they had to act a certain way or the media would demonize them and they’d lose. The amazing thing is that SOME resisted.
BUT they don’t ACTIVELY hate us and try to take America down. And if you think that makes no difference, you don’t really understand the left and their plans for YOU.
If they don’t actively hate….. why do they have to pay lip service?
BECAUSE THEY WERE AFRAID OF THE WHOLLY DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED MEDIA, as I said.
Is this on. Am I typing in Mandarin, again?
Ian, you need to learn to distinguish between fools, poltroons and knaves. Republicans tend to be the first two, Democrats the second two.
Historically politics was a game fought between the Forty-yard Lines, where poly-sci majors were taught the majority of people were. The Progressives learned to move the goalposts, enabled by the MSM. The GOP lacked ability and understanding to fight that tide. Reagan demonstrated the drift Leftward could be restrained, Gingrich proved it could be pulled back, with difficulty. The main lesson learned by the GOP was that movement rightward was difficult, ephemeral and unappreciated.
There are always plenty of people on the sidelines eager to criticize, slow to help, refusing to recognize the Overton Window’s effect. Trump has proven our Achilles, able to ignore the slings and arrows of the Left, refusing the gaslighting and fighting on against odds against which most candidates would quail.
Sarah – I propose a temporary ban on defeatism. Suspend the ISP of anyone persisting in spreading the idea there is no difference between the parties, no distinctions to be made. Whatever their flaws, the two parties do differ; one plays by the rules the other games the rules (as in the court-packing scheme). Inability to tell the difference between the parties says far more about the observer than the parties.
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Seconded; especially for those who turn defeatism into accelerationism.
(And I wasn’t talking about your situation in a 3rd world hellhole. I was talking about our home grown traitors)
Translation: so long as someone mouths nice sounding words while doing it they can do whatever the hell they want.
That right there is good argument for burning the ideology of Patriotism to the ground (ignoring the Christian position that it is idolatry). Because it mostly exists to make people feel good about getting raped.
Wait, the fuck what?
Why burn the ideology of patriotism — being loyal to where you live, or as it’s known around here, dance wit the one who brung you or vote for the people who influence your location, and don’t want to do good to people across the world — down?
Are you making any sense? Because you aren’t TO ME.
Ok, I’ve tried and tried. I can’t parse this one. Is the “don’t” a typo?
IAN:
BRUTALLY, okay?
Get the fucking wax out of your ears and read what I first wrote.
WHAT THE HOLY FUCK DOES PATRIOTISM HAVE TO DO WITH THIS FUCKING SHIT?
ARE YOU OFF YOUR FUCKING MEDS?
STOP MOVING THE GOALPOSTS.
You’re getting me SERIOUSLY angry. If you weren’t a regular, I’d think you were a troll.
Patriotism: Loving one’s own country. Nationalism: believing in self governance of one’s own country and being better to your own people than foreigners.
Idolatry – by your definition,Ian, loving your spouse is idolatry.
I don’t know where you got that patriotism was the culprit, except out of your ass.
The uniparty is a LIE.
One side hates America and Americans. The other doesn’t.
If you vote for the ones who hate you don’t be surprised if they destroy you.
ANYONE ELSE want to explain this to Ian in words of no more than two syllables, before I start cussing in seven languages?
If I go by my basic reactions to stuff (9/11 makes a clear cut test case), yes.
Outside something that extreme, it gets abstract to the point of meaninglessness very quickly. “Is the US the best country in the world?” gets a “obviously yes”.
At least as long as I don’t think about anything.
From what people say it sounds like they feel a kin relationship, slightly abstracted to anyone under the same banner. Well that is a problem….. because I have zero extended family kin relationships, so I don’t have the faintest clue what that is. I don’t even know if I get k-r with closer family, or if it just hasn’t been put to the right kind of test to activate.
OTOH I do get a faint tribal effect for subcultures that I voluntarily joined.
As I said: everything works semi-great as long as I never think about anything. That is not a practical way of going through life, even if it would be oh so much easier.
Well… yeah. Kind of the definition of a nation.
I honestly don’t know of any personal situation (aka: not setting government policy) where I would have reason to use a different standard of morality based on nationality.
Actually I was just slow in remembering: the reason is that patriotism is a religion.
I think we’ve established that your reactions, like Freud’s, aren’t typical.
There are normal* reactions under there. It’s just that they are tied up or cauterized to the point of barely functioning.
[*] which of course triggers the “anything most people do *must* be evil” layer. That’s a fun one.
Humph. I think I’m starting to understand why people turn to alcohol or drugs. Unconsciousness would be far simpler.
You, sir, are broken. This is not a moral judgement on you, but you must recognize how far from normal your feelings are, and never extrapolate from yourself to others.
Broken is one thing; to a first approximation you can just copy other people and mime it.
Maybe-maybe-not-broken, with latent programming telling you that what everyone else does is evil is a whole ‘nother ball of wax.
Copying other people requires observing them somewhat accurately. Your comments on this post suggest that itself is more difficult for you than you seem to realize.
And this is part of the reason I’d by that HOWTO American book.
And this… I can’t remember the exact reason now. I *think* part of it might have been the “render unto Caeser, etc”, and loyalty / veneration having a different target maybe?
I wasn’t raised to hate this country. Just…. every single individual piece from top to bottom.
You and your feelings are your affair. I am unclear on why you think anybody else should care about them.
So, which is it? Is Sarah from “a third world shithole country”? Or is such a characterization “abstract to the point of meaninglessness”?
You can only pick one. Unless, of course, you want everybody to ignore everything you say and just point at you and make duck noises every time you mistake an eructation for a Very Deep Thought.
If your comments are any evidence to go by, it’s safe to say that you don’t actually think, you just play with phrases, with little or no concern for any consistency.
“From what people say it sounds like they feel…” is something that makes me want to ask if you’re on the spectrum, but your comments are too incoherent for me to believe that you are.
And once again, you invoke your own personal feelings to justify something or other as a wider abstraction, but you were early disdaining abstraction.
Allow me to illuminate you with knowledge of our culture, given to me by someone from another culture. Perhaps this will help, although given your stubborn refusal to understand a single thing Sarah said in the way she intended it, I have no expectation that you’ll even try to “get” it.
I lived in Mainland China for three years, a bit over a decade ago, mostly in the city of Shanghai. One of the most curious things about being there was that everybody knew I was American without me telling them. This is strange, because there are many foreigners in Shanghai, not even remotely all from the US. Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Britain, you name it. Even leaving out the “all laowai look alike” factor, unless someone was good with accents, they should not have been able to know for a certainty what my nationality was. And yet, they always did.
Finally one day, I struck up a conversation with one of these Shanghainese who knew I was American without having to ask, and I got around to asking how he could possibly have known.
He smiled and said it was very easy: Americans help people. If you see a laowai asking someone on the street if they’re lost or need help, or helping a mother carry a baby cart up steps, or anything along those lines, they are, without doubt, American.
Culture is what you have that, often, you don’t even know you have. It never would have occurred to me that just helping someone, when it was no penalty to me except for a few moments out of my day, marked me as being from my culture and no other. That’s not a thing I would “feel” about other people, or think to think about. But it is there, and it is real, and it is, to observant outsiders, extremely obvious.
That’s a kinship, no matter what you personally feel about it.
Again, nobody gives a hang about your feelings. And going by your comments, you would really do well not to use them as a guide to other people’s feelings or thoughts.
Where, pray tell, did Sarah suggest to use a different MORALITY based on nationality?
She didn’t. She said “be better to”, which is not even remotely the same thing.
It’s like parents with children. A father is going to be better to his own children than to someone else’s. That does not mean that he will use a different morality with those other children, nor that he will be evil, awful, or abusive to those children. He can be perfectly moral to all the children, and still be better to his own. People do that every day, all over the planet.
You keep talking about thinking about things, but if this is evidence of your “thinking”, then you purely suck at doing it.
Tried. And only proved that I fail whatever the requirements of being an American are.
That there is a distinction between “my children” and “everyone else’s children” is known. What I’m missing is the boundary “everyone else (inside same borders)”, vs “everyone else (outside borders)”, and how the analysis changes in any way when dealing at the personal level.
I’m not saying it doesn’t exist; just that I can’t see something that everyone else seems to take for granted.
For all of Nixon’s faults, it was either him or the commies. That is how I felt about Trump in 2016. This time around, I am voting FOR him.
Right.
Same/same.
And hell, I feel dirty I voted for W. second time around, since he seems to be a “Christian socialist” but compared to fricking Jean Kerry? Yeah.
Presumably, you know and like personally a lot of people around you, or you respect their work. And other people know you, and respect you, or know your quirks. You have a problem, and people stop and ask if you need help. You smile at them in the store, or their cars look vaguely familiar. You have similar civic ideas, even if you disagree on religion and politics, or do not share ethnic backgrounds. So if there is a tornado, people show up.
Patriotism is a broader version of love for family and neighbors and one’s city. We share ideas about self I government, illustrated by common history, and we supposedly hold similar ideals.
Huh?
I tried to find the last place with a “reply” option.
The not wanting to do good around the world is the warning from CS Lewis that those who abuse you for your own good never rest. Not only is it unnatural to have a real attachment to strangers (though we pretend we do often enough) but the chance of being right about the “help” given to people you don’t know is really slim. You’re more likely to become the person, given permission by their own conscience, to be tirelessly abusive and destructive.
Ah, that makes more sense.
Also jumping on the last Reply link, for lack of a deeper one…
Here is a major difference between the parties:
GOPs will occasionally vote as their constituents would wish. (Some do so quite reliably.)
Dems will always vote as the Party dictates. (Exceptions are rare enough to be remarkable.)
This has become such a stark difference that even absent any other negatives, I will no longer vote for any Democrat at any level — because no matter how honest the man, he’s still beholden to the Party first and foremost. A corrupt Republican is likely to do less serious damage, if only because he doesn’t march in lockstep..
Here’s something else to consider, given how it’s gone with both law and media: A few years back someone tallied professions among congresscritters before they went into politics:
GOPs: 50% businessmen, 50% lawyers and journalists.
Dems: 10% businessmen, 90% lawyers and journalists.
This explains much about their relative attitudes toward people who actually work for a living.
Another reason not to EVER vote for a dem: the press covers up for them. So they could be anything from kiddie diddlers to total corruptocrats, but you’ll NEVER KNOW.
However, if a GOP steps out of line? They’re on that like flies on excrement. Good reason to vote GOP if you’re not a trusting sort. (And I’m not.)
Replying to Reziak. Yes, exactly. This is why the Democrats will run groups of “moderate,” candidates, veterans if they can find them, and tout their difference from the mainstream Dems. Then, when people elect them they go to Washington and vote however the leadership tells them to. Then they lose next time, but they have served their purpose if they’ve helped push through some cherished “progressive ” goal.
Is there a lot of similarity between the two parties? Of course there is because, get this, they are trying to appeal to a lot of the same voters. Whichever party “loses”, if it wants to win, has to get the votes of people who voted for the other party last time. That’s going to create a lot of similarity. (Example: “coverage for pre-existing conditions”, doesn’t matter how much you explain how economically unviable that is, people want it. They don’t understand, or ignore, the economics, and any politician, “R” or “D” saying “you can’t have it” is going to lose a lot of votes, more than they can afford to lose, for doing so.)
But by focusing on the similarities one blithely ignores the differences. Would Hillary, would _any_ Democrat, have issued an executive order requiring two regulations to be repealed before any new one could be enacted? Would we have 300 new miles of border wall under a Democrat president? Would we have renegotiated NAFTA under a Democrat? Trump may have proposed the tax cuts which boosted the economy, but they had to pass Congress and who voted for them…and who voted against them?
At root, however, the problem isn’t the politicians or the parties. They are the symptom. They are doing what is politically profitable for them and most people…well there’s an “Aragorn” meme I created but don’t know how to post easily here. The text is “The day may come when low-information voters do not decide elections; but it is not this day.”
Yes, there are a lot of similarities between the major parties because they are trying to attract a lot of the same voters. But there are also differences because they are also appealing to different segments of the population.
But there’s more. We are winning the cultural war. Why do you think the Dems are full on “all vote fraud, all the time?” Fraud is the only hope they’ve got. What do you think is behind Pelosi’s “establish a commission for 25th Amendment removal of the President”? Seriously, even if she were able to get such a thing passed, by the time it went through both the House and Senate and Trump (for reasons of his own) signed it, or they overrode a veto (yeah, right), It would likely be close to inauguration day and a moot point…unless Trump won. The only reason it can possibly be an issue is that their internal polls are showing that, yeah, Trump’s probably going to win.
They’re losing, and they know it. The culture is shifting. Part of that is freedom-loving people realizing they are not alone. And part of it is that a lot more of us are willing to speak out and what we say (if I may claim some small influence there) is making sense to others. Remember, four million brand new people who have not settled on one position or another enter the arena every year. And we have more ability to reach and influence those people than ever before.
No longer is Walter Cronkite able to put on his fake-sincere “trust me” voice and lie to the American people with impunity, with no-one to call him on it.
We’re winning a battle we were barely in until recently.
A lot of the old guard politicians are still in that “we’re losing so make the best deal we can and hope to at least slow and soften the fall” most but the key there is “old guard.” They’re being replaced by a generation of Ted Cruzes, Mike Lees and others. Sooner or later the “old guard” will see the tide change or they’ll be swallowed up by it and replaced by folk who will.
Because we’re winning.
Dude…. any definition of “Uniparty” that includes Trump in it is idiotic.
> variations on “Because we’re winning.”
Yes… that is what I have to whack people upside the head with every other day.
I just think it is happening despite the best efforts of the GOP. Kind of like how restorations of the second amendment happen despite the best efforts of the NRA.
And Jim Jordans.
[deepest link]
Before declaring, Trump did what sensible businessmen do, and supported whichever party could further his interests. However, come the election… I think he decided which ticket to run on largely thus: “Hillary is a Done Deal. But I can beat the GOP field.” And he was right, and has since had that decision reinforced in every way possible.
Re: ”
“Here is a major difference between the parties:
GOPs will occasionally vote as their constituents would wish. (Some do so quite reliably.)
Dems will always vote as the Party dictates. (Exceptions are rare enough to be remarkable.)”
Joe Manchin is the perfect example. The ONLY time he votes against the Democratic Party line is when his vote doesn’t matter.
I should note that, here, your blog, your FaceBook, I always like your analysis. Thank you.
(Foxfier, too. You guys come from about as different places and approaches as possible, but there’s this… core of “make sure everything actually fits together and integrates with the whole without squishing” that I don’t see as much as I’d like.)
Again and again what are the facts – RAH
Ian, darling, bubby, baby, put down the crack pipe and step away from the internet for just a minute. Try, if you can, to imagine a world where we’re not all covered in shit. You can stay covered in shit if you want, that’s your choice, but the rest of us are not obligated to indulge your hateful views anymore than the other hateful views people have tried to choke us with.
I’M TRYING
*ahem*
It doesn’t come naturally.
Yeah, buddy, the Never Trumpers like George Will and William Kristol and Jonah Goldberg are marching in absolute lockstep with Trump, who by the by is just exactly the same as the religious social con faction of the party, and the last Repub candidate for Pres, Mittens Ream-me, also toes the line with utter fastidiousness.
Dude, what the fuck are you smoking?
Your reading comprehension needs some work; “uniparty” means democrat+republican, not “all the factions in the party are in lockstep”.
Mittens and the NeverTrumpers are Exhibition A of the uniparty.
It’s not my reading comprehension that needs work, honey. I don’t give enough of a shit to read every comment you made to find the super sekrit decoder ring definition you used.
So, okay, you think both parties are one. That totally explains why the propaganda arm of one of those parties has, for decades demonized anyone of the other party who might gain power. People still think Sarah Palin said “I can see Russia from my house!”, for gods’ sake. Swamp creatures are swamp creatures, and politicians are politicians, but if it was all one big happy oligarchy, then members of this supposed uni-party would not be made into a constant stream of Emmanuel Goldsteins held up for the daily Two Minutes’ Hate.
In other words, even taking it from the other side, your point is demonstrably wrong.
But, you know, keep trying.
If I actually saw the GOP doing anything noticeable to oppose the Democrats, I would be open to changing my mind.
Oh, dear Lord….. you too?
Look at all the things Reagan and Trump have done. Look at the ridiculous level of flack people like Cruz, Nunes, Mike Lee, everyone who backs Trump takes. Look at how the media hates them.
Do nothing to oppose them dems. SERIOUSLY? Did any republican VOTE FOR Obamacare? (No they didn’t know how to back out of it, in the face of media demonizing, but seriously. That’s cowardice.)
DO YOU SERIOUSLY think the GOP HATES America and wants us to go full on Communist?
SHOW YOUR FUCKING WORK.
THAT’s a difference. A massive one.
Regan and Trump are the exceptions that prove the rule: the establishment loathes(d) them, and the voters elected them despite the best efforts of the party.
Why don’t we just cut the charade of elections and all the resulting hassle and admit that the media run the country.
Ian, that isn’t even the stupidest thing you’ve said today. The media do NOT run the country, but they do shape the environment, just as trees (or the absence of them) determine how the wind blows.
But such arguments as what you’ve just said tend to empower them.
–
Oh, for you and Ian: you want to see the difference?
Look at states with republican vs. democrat governors. I think there’s ONE exception (and I don’t remember where) but even the republicans who fell in line and ordered “mask mandates”? THE STATES ARE MILES FREER than anywhere under dems.
For the love of heck, I considered moving to OHIO. Ohio feels like a paradise of freedom and order compared to Colorado.
Your argument is invalid.
If someone is taught to hate everyone -of- a country, how can that differ from being taught to hate -the country-? What remaibs to be loved? The land? The laws? The weather? The commemorative postage stamps?
Someone once wrote that there are two ways of being ((?something?)): To love individuals and hate mankind, or to hate individuals and love mankind. When either attitude enters lawmaking or law enforcement, you get a lot of fardled laws and a lot of fardled people.
The twisted hearts of the rulers become the tortured lives of the ruled.
“((?something?))”—misanthropic, maybe?
DeWhine was the R with the most oppressive mask mandates to my knowledge.
yeah, but I’d put up with the mask mandates in return for not having the idiot’s nose in everything and COVID “mandating” all sorts of homeless bullshit.
Yeah, but even he was “of course we want you to play outside without masks, and use our parks and go fishing, which is perfect for social distancing!” The Amy Acton woman made this face when he said that, IIRC.
And he wasn’t a hypocrite about it, so of course nothing he did was good enough for the crazy governors.
Heh. My goal was always to settle down West of the Mississippi and East of the Sierra Madres (with Texas being a strong contender). But Murphy ran things his way and now family obligations have in Ohio for probably the rest of my life.
Not the worst place to be (even if the local “pizza” would get you shot in Chicago or New York) and the bland watery spaghetti sauce they call “chili” would fall under the Texas “needed killing” doctrine).
If you ever make it this way drop a line!
We have a lot of friends there, so on the run up, we stopped in Dayton for a night and dinner with friends. (I was an exchange student in Stow, Ohio, mumble mumble mumble years ago.) 🙂
I’d NEVER considered Ohio because I have SADs. BUT damn it, it felt FREE.
That’s where I am. If you make it back definitely drop a line.
To see the difference requires pulling your head out of your arse.
Frankly, this reminds me of William F Buckley’s argument about “ether way you’re still talking of shoving little old ladies about.”
As you note, the proper measure is not “How close to (my concept) of perfect is the party” but “How does the party do compared to the other party”?
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I don’t know if Mississippi is R or D at the moment, but at least the area around Oxford is more “closed,” than anyplace we’ve been since Illinois. But Oxford is home to the University of Mississippi, so it may be an anomaly. Certainly Tupelo last week seemed a bit saner, and the governor just dropped the “mask mandate.”
Right now I’m being grateful the camp manager didn’t Karen us into working in masks.
Anti-communist is a good description. Along with all it implies: anti-socialist, anti-marxist…
I have issues with certain “Republicans” who are nothing but small minded grifters. You know. The ones that vote to repeal Obamacare over and over again… until they actually have the votes, the House, the Senate, the President and all to do it. Who vote to cut spending… until they actually have the power (read: the responsibility) to do so. Who *say* they are for term limits… until it is *their* turn. And so on.
So it happens that I vote for “not incumbant” nearly as often as not-democrat. I voted for Romney and McCain because Obama was, demonstrably, worse. Much as I see some democrats saying they will vote for Biden because Orange Man Literally Hitler! …Okay, not the best comparison, because sanity matters.
I’m willing to give Republicans, stupid as they sometimes are, a *chance* for several reasons. Republicans do self police. Viz. Steve King- gone. There are *limits* to the political right, points they won’t go past. There aren’t any on the left. There are those with principles on the right that actually *do* the things they say they will do.
I’m not a single issue voter. Law and order. Second amendment. Economy and taxes. First amendment. Foreign policy. Every democrat fails on every single one of those issues (and many, many more). I would very much like to see more Donald Trump Republicans, and Ted Cruz Republicans. Heck. More Ron Paul even. I’ve seen too many Romneys. Lindsey Graham and Mich McConnell both have black marks in my book as well, despite their recent changes of faith.
Is there corrption in both parties? Liars, cheats, slimeball swamp dwellers? You’re damned right there are. How often does the left call out their own for such? Ever? I can think of several on the political right that have.
The “right” is a big tent. A big tent full of fractious, squabbling people, but by and large we get along because the idea of personal responsibility is so inextricably bound up in the idea of freedom. Most of us just want to be left alone. But we have to be politically active to preserve that. Even if we disagree on the fair tax. Or the federal reserve, or spending (cut what and where), or the like.
The left? The left is a howling mob. Eager to eat its own when they step out of line. If you make your living by sitting on your couch collecting money from other people’s taxes, minus Uncle Sugar’s cut, and are happy about that, you’ll want to vote to keep your dole. That is the left. And the people that profit from that attitude are many- also the left. The anti-Semites? The real racists? The ones that gleefully explain, they *do* want to take away *your* rights? The left. Effectively, mind. They don’t think of themselves that way. But, then again, nigh every brigand imagines himself Robin Hood and the pitiable poor combined.
A reminder that Robin Hood was robbing the government because of its collection of oppressive taxes and returning it to the oppressed taxpayers.
Funny historical fact my wife brought up. Why was King John imposing all those harsh taxes? To raise the money to pay ransom for Richard, who had gotten captured while off on the Crusades.
Which led me to imagine a scene in a “trying to be historically accurate” rendition of the Robin Hood story (if such a thing were possible) where Richard returns, and says, “But you know, my steward has done the math. It turns out that you and your men personally delayed my return by at least a year and a half. So you are pardoned of almost all your crimes, but I’m going to put you in prison for a year and a half. Fair’s fair, after all.”
“Why was King John imposing all those harsh taxes? To raise the money to pay ransom for Richard, who had gotten captured while off on the Crusades.”
Well, that was the reason JOHN gave. There’s actually a fair amount of evidence outside the legend that he was actually at the same time trying to get the Duke(?) of Austria holding Richard to never release him…..
Yeah. There are letters.
In some variants of Robin Hood. 0:)
And what did the government do in response to that? Raise taxes. AND hire more sheriff’s men and soldiers to protect the tax collectors.
I want a story in which Robin and Nottingham are in a conspiracy to beggar the paupers … err, pauperize the beggars … err … you know what I mean!
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“How often does the left call out their own for such?”
Whenever one of their own gets out of step with the Party. Vote against the leader’s edicts and expect a primary fight.
OTOH, stay in step and (vis. Ilhan Omar) the Party will find ways to protect you from the most stupid, most vile things. The only crime they recognize is not following the leader.
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Or they’ll overlook it if it means keeping “their guy” in the position of power, if calling them out would result in a R taking control…
Gov. Ralph “Blackface” Northam anyone? And the fact that the next guy in line ALSO had items in his past that the Left would normally break out the tar and feathers for, which would’ve handed the Virginia Governors office to, you guessed it, a Republican…
Also when someone needs to be thrown to the wolves because it’s not Utopia yet and that means SOMEONE must be wrecking it — the kulak. (Unfortunately this generally requires running through all the more obvious suspects first.)
“… executive order made all the voting in Colorado be by mail only, and also registration be by mail, no …. existence needed.”
“Some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government’s confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?”
― Bertolt Brecht
That has been the Democrat plan all along. Propagandize through the schools, workplaces, and media, fill in any gaps with uncontrolled immigration, and the old reactionary voters get edged out as they shake their canes and wonder what happened to their country.
but the thing is it hasn’t worked very well.
Look, OUR generation was also propagandized, but we woke up.
My kids’ generation is now waking up. Why do you think they keep talking of letting people vote at 16?
I sort of thought that maybe they were sincerely impressed with the historical perspective, patience, education, and intelligence of the sixteen year and younger cohorts.
(Yeah, yeah, I did realize long ago that unethical political movements seek out young supporters precisely because the lack of experience slows down the rate at which they see through the bullshit.)
Our generation remembers the USSR and M.A.D. We remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and why it was important. We weren’t that hard to wake up. But that happened 3 decades ago. To the 35 and under crowd it’s ancient history that they were taught by advocates for the losing side.
Venezuela and imprisoned Uighurs in China don’t have the same mental impact as thousands of nukes pointed at your country. Not that those nukes are gone, the PTB just decided not to talk about them anymore…
They’re still waking up. Obama and now Antifa are great alarm clocks.
BE NOT AFRAID.
Not afraid, precisely. Annoyed, yes. I really expect the Democrats to have seriously blundered on many fronts. And I’m resignedly looking forward to several years of them whining that it ISN’T FAIR that they got their metaphorical mammaries caught in a wringer of their own making.
Please, God! let next disaster finally discredit Her Shrillness to the point that even the Democrat Propaganda Organs no longer pay any attention to her. Let her dissolve into the sack of blubber and bile she’s clearly headed for out of sight.
We must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller…
I wonder if Covid is going to be a wake up call for some people. How many college kids, immured in their dorms when they aren’t in class, are going to notice they know a ton of people who had it and weren’t very sick – or get it themselves and realize they aren’t dying in agony after all?
Not until it’s proven to be bullshit. For which we have to win first.
Happens over and over. How often do we get and AG that is *willing,* a president with a *spine* and the DILIGAF? attitude to root out this stuff? The things that are coming to light just now… makes me wonder just how much happened in the *past* that we will never know because it has been buried so deep.
The FBI scandals, the IRS scandal, the botched transfer of power, Carter Paige, Kavanaugh, Fast and Furious, email server, Burisma, and so many more. Those are just the ones we *know* about- and we don’t have anything close to complete information on them, either from what I can tell. The more we find out, the more I wonder just what it is we *don’t* know that has gone on, and is going on now.
Botched? I went exactly as planned. The right got to play act that they were in charge while the fibbies and bureaucracy ran everything.
What I meant by botched was they got caught doing it, not that they failed their objective. Apologies for the miscommuncation.
Not sure if failed or succeeded though. Yes, they were identified and some had to retire but no jail, no loss of pension, plum jobs at News agencies and book deals, and showed the peons that there was two levels of subject and ruler in terms of laws
Be truthful. You bring up Venezuela and they say that only right-wing extremists talk about it. Really. It happened to me.
And what sort of defense is that, that they admit they are trying to paper it over?
In your world Gamergate never happened.
Or in our circles, Sad Puppies, or kids don’t see rampant political discrimination in schools. Or–
The period between now and the Fall of the Soviet Union is greater than that between the end of WWII and JFK’s assassination. It’s as if the schools “Boomers” attended had been taught by Nazis and Imperial Japan sympathizers.
–
We also remember Mao’s Cultural Revolution which is why I dubbed the current insanity Mao’s Cultural Revolution Redux.
OI!
What is the quote. “If you don’t vote democrat under 30, or until you learn about that money you’ve earned but don’t get, you don’t have a heart. But if you vote democrat, and you are over 30 or earn a pay check that you don’t get all the taxes paid back, then you are an idiot”. Translation if you have the common sense God gave everything then you know when someone is blowing smoke in your face to blind you. Sure the republicans are people, want money & power, graft. I take it like the analogy of holding water, or even sand, in your hands. The tighter you hold it to control it, the more both flow out. We know the democrats by deed and word believe in the fist tight control. They show it in deeds. They show it in their regulations, rules, & moving goal posts. To the point where you are in the wrong/dammed if you follow one because you are breaking/shattering another.
The saying goes back to, or before the French Revolution, under 30, no heart, over thirty no head.
Personally I’d like to see voting age raised to 82, but a lot of you young whippersnappers would disagree. 😉
no. That demographic still believes the MSM.
I’ve noticed. My fiance’s grandparents are like that.
So did my MIL.
My father, who introduced us all to Rush, and my mother, who campaigned for Reagan. Both moved so far left in the last 10+ years that I have a very limited list of topics I can discuss with them.
Honestly, it’s mass media. They sit every day in front of the news, and they buy everything they’re sold.
A republic is not a democracy. We don’t have mob rule- there are still electoral college votes that elect a president, not the popular.
For all its faults, and they are many, the republic is the best idea out a mountain of bad to genocidal ideas that have demonstrably failed their peoples.
Headdeskheaddeskheaddesk
If only more people realized that. There is a lot of information as to whether the founders wanted direct democracy. Between EC, senate, and the way that the house breaks a tie all show that intent was a confederation of states. And with a nation geographically massive, the only options are to either to let the states decide or to allow Orwell vision of future. Sadly 90% of pop has never heard of federalist papers
Our kids have had to learn how to live in the belly of the beast and I think cynicism is the most likely outcome of this stupidity. We need to remember the total moral collapse that continued past the end of the old Soviet Union. Those people, rightly given their experience, believed in nothing.
I don’t hold with Putin, but God and the Tsar is a better program than becoming a hard currency prostitute, which was the goal of many attractive Russian graduates under Yeltsin’s government.
Extreme, unrelenting cynicism that refuses to see good even when staring right at it.
Comrade Yuri warned us.
Because “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart…” and it’s easier to convince the average kid that free-stuff-for-all is doable if only we sufficiently punish the rich. So vote for the party of free stuff! And unfortunately that sort greatly outnumber those that have awakened to “… if you’re not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.”
“Eat the rich. The poor are tough and stringy.”
They have a bit of a problem with immigration that I don’t think they see. They think that If they are seen as the party that welcomed immigrants then immigrants will be lockstep democrat voters for generations. I don’t think that is true. Many of the cultures these immigrants come from are far more conservative than the modern democrats and much more so than the far left. The empowerment of the LGBTQ gestapo will not play well to South / Central American and Islamic sensibilities. The attacks on Christianity and the more vitriolic attacks on Catholicism will not endear democrats to Central and South American church going families. Many Hispanic immigrants are fleeing Socialist regimes or violence where one side calls itself socialist / communist.
This is always what has confused me. What the far left is proposing is Cuba, Venezuela, heck China. They are fleeing the cartels from Mexico, Central America, Russia. The far left thinks they are going to want those outcomes again? Just because “they’ll do it right”? What? The Heck?
I can maybe see Islamic states thinking maybe they can come in and take over … even that is far fetched. They cannot understand how BIG the United States is. New York isn’t Oregon, isn’t Montana, and sure the heck isn’t Hawaii or Alaska, or Ohio, or New Orleans or Texas. If you were to take all the Arabian Islamic States AND Israel, how many states would that cover? Start with Texas and go out.
And that is what will happen if we lose or allow the country to be stolen in this election.The borders will be opened, mass immigration that will be legalized so that there will be no chance of a Conservative victory ever again. More likely, however, will be a full on Marxist dictatorship starting next year so elections will no longer have any meaning and the middle class/small business population will be destroyed. What will be left is the Cuba or Venezuela model.
>But the problem is saying “I love America too much to want to see her rent by a civil war, or destroyed by loss of confidence in elections” is no longer an option.
—
What’s at the end of that may be unscarred by a civil war, but it won’t be America, either.
You can fight, and maybe lose. Or you can “take the high road” and give up, which is just another way of losing, and the victors will dance on your face.
So true. We will be faced with either fighting for freedom win or lose,or submitting to serfdom or worse.
May. May be faced. We could win you know.
I will continue to pray.
> “well, that’s a conspiracy theory.”
trans: “Thinking about that makes me uncomfortable, so I’m just going to ignore it instead.”
Theories can be true as well as false.
Everybody denies it’s a conspiracy — that proves it IS one! 😛
As if they haven’t provably conspired against us.
One of the great problems is that ONLY the Candidate has standing to challenge the election. If he doesn’t have the stomach for it, the fraud stands.
Just like only the State Secretary of State(State head of elections) has the standing to challenge the Candidates Qualifications for office. I believe that Obama attended college as a Foreign Student. That was why he was in a Foreign Student Dorm. His College Records would show that. Him doing that means that he decided to be Foreign NOT a US Citizen. Therefore he was NOT eligible to become President. But the only people who had standing were cowards and those that tried didn’t have standing.
We can hope, pray and do everything we can but I don’t know if it will be enough unless Trump is really ready for a Fight.
Sadly, I think the facts on the ground support Obama having been born in the US, and his attending college as a ‘foreign student’ is merely proof that he has always been ready to lie for advantage.
I disagree. To me, Ockhams’ razor says that regardless of where he was born, he became an Indonesian citizen when he was adopted there.
This would explain his travel to Pakistan at a time when a US Passport was not valid for such travel.
I suspect that he got a Fullbright Scolarship, and that is why he hid his college records.
Both produced birth certificates (Hawaii and Kenya) were obviously Photoshopped, as bait so that he could “prove” the Hawaiian birth, and say that in his book, he was lying. No one ever seemed to successfully call him on his lies, as he was and is protected by the media.
I do not believe that Obama is now a US citizen, regardless of whether his father was Obama or Marshall Davis.
Citizen Trump dodged that bullet by saying “okay” and not picking that fight.
Under the laws then in place at yhe time of their birth, andbin yhe case of Cruz, the actions he failedbto take within six months of his eighteenth birthday, I do not think that either Romney or Cruz are “natural-born citizens”, and so, like Kamala Harris, are nit entitled to serve as either President or Vice President.
In the original government of our Constitution, the vice-president wss the second place vote getter for President. Then we got political parties. Oops.
John in Indy
What actions did Cruz fail to take within six months of his 18th birthday, that would rule him out as a natural-born citizen? I’m not as familiar with the relevant laws as you are. I thought Cruz, being the son of one US citizen, was automatically a citizen at birth and thus eligible even though he was born in Canada. I’ve had an argument (a friendly one) with someone who held the “natural-born citizen comes from the ‘natural-born subject’ concept in Blackstone and thus if you were born overseas, you’re not eligible” position. (Which would apply to me: I was born overseas, so although both my parents are US citizens and I become one at birth, under that theory I would not be eligible to run for POTUS, and neither would Ted Cruz). But I’m not familiar with the laws applying to people with only one US citizen parent, because they doesn’t apply to me or my kids so I’ve never needed to learn about them.
Number 2 son has a Consular certificate of a birth showing that he is an American citizen from birth. Other than Paris, the American embassy is always easy to find. Look for a brutalist building that looks like a prison filled with badly dressed persons and there you are.
Familiar with the CRBA (Consular Report of Birth Abroad): in about ten days, we’re going to the local consulate to submit the paperwork for our second son’s CRBA. He was born in April, while the consulate was closed due to COVID, so he’s getting his CRBA later than he normally would have. Are you saying Ted Cruz wasn’t given a CRBA when he was born? Or are you just mentioning it as an item of interest that has nothing to do with the previous discussion of Cruz?
Cruz doesn’t seem to have one. I remember that coming up during his campaign.
Actually no. It all hinges on when his non-American parent became a citizen. or something.
Uh. I can’t remember the consulate, but to me it looked beautiful and inspiring. Consulate in Porto.
HOWEVER perhaps it was because from the time I started having reason to go there, at about 14 (do you know if you ask them for material on the US in English they hand you a massive pile of stuff?) I was mad in love with America, and love colors everything 😉
You do have better than average odds with consulates that have been in place for a long time though any that have been built since the war are monstrosities. Embassies tend to be rebuilt more often and are almost without exception hideous. Grosvenor Square is a beautiful Georgian London park with a brutalist carbuncle at one end. They built a new embassy n nine elms on the water in 2018. It’s foul, though it fits in with the ugly buildings around it better than the other one did.
Berlin is a Stalinist pile, Singapore looks like a bunker. The crown for me is Dublin. Down in Ballsbridge the most Georgian part of that Georgian city is one of the ugliest buildings built anywhere, ever. It looks like a brutalist coliseum. Any people fed to the lions there would be grateful not to have to look at the damned thing anymore.
I suspect that any beauty you found in the US consulate came with you. The American ideal is beautiful but the products of American officialdom tend to be ugly and opppresive.
There’s other evidence of his birth in Hawaii, tho: the dated newspaper birth announcement, preserved in widely-distributed microfiche, which given it gets scattered across every library with a newspaper archive, and has since been digitized and further scattered, would be effectively impossible to retcon (you’d never find all the copies). I found said birth announcement in such microfiche, back when the controversy was in full swing.
Yes, the released birth certificate(s) had been (badly) photoshopped, probably because of a very shallow understanding of what constitutes a copy of a document (hey, we fake shit all the time, they’ll never notice). The microfiche had not.
It matters whether the President is a citizen because only a citizen can be prosecuted for treason.
However, there’s a different argument available: whilst in Indonesia, he at least temporarily embraced Islam. And funny thing, there’s no fatwa on him as an apostate. A Muslim cannot swear allegiance to anything other than Islam, and therefore under our law cannot hold high office. I doubt he actually believes, but he sympathizes and supports, and AFAIK has never formally repudiated it.
[In an AMA his nominal half-brother Malik Obama (a known Muslim Brotherhood operative) was asked, “Is Barack a Muslim?” and Malik said: “He is whatever he needs to be.” Which is the essence of taqiyya.]
I doubt the courts would agree with that; it sounds too much like the anti-Catholic arguments that were brought out against JFK, and the courts would probably say “That’s a religious test prohibited by the First Amendment”. Otherwise, someone would have challenged Ilhan Omar’s seat already. Not to mention Keith Ellison. So I don’t think that argument actually flies.
Rather, the law has not been *enforced* because no one there understands what Islam demands of its adherents, and because of its claim to be a religion.
Of course, one may note that many such laws are not being enforced… *cough* Insurrection Act *cough*
The bar on religious tests to hold office are actually in the main body of the Constitution, and is placed so that the bar applies to Congress in connection with its consideration of nominees for executive and judicial positions, although the ability to enforce it as to Congress is rather questionable if Congress refuses to police itself.
That bar is only on religious tests – there’s nothing in there against religious pop quizzes.
–
ROFL
Nah, it’s banned by Article VI, Clause 3:
There’s stuff, actually…. If he took dual British citizenship due to his father (or Kenyan) he would have to actively renounce it after 18.
This is why (that and because the US doesn’t recognize it, and I wanted to foreswear all other allegiance) I don’t have dual Portuguese citizenship. No muddying the waters. I mailed back the passport (and shook my sandals.) Most Portuguese immigrants are dual citizens though.
The caveat there is most kids MIGHT NOT KNOW they need to renounce that if the parents have it. Obama…. who the heck knows?
I’d argue that he was socialized Indonesian and has the emotional conviction that of course the leader is a strongman who harasses and eliminates all opposition.
It’s kindof funny how voters in a region don’t have standing to sue to ensure that their votes are counted correctly, but the candidate they want to win does have standing.
That’s the twisted logic of the Courts for you, though.
Which is a problem when the ybing being disputed in court is a ballot proposition.
This is basically the argument that was used to kill attempts to appeal the Federal Court’s decision against Prop 8 in California (which rebanned SSM).
Hmmm … what if I use the argument that my having contributed to a candidate gives me standing?
–
Works for class action suits…
Doesn’t work with ballot propositions.
As I always say, and pray, in these contexts (because I am a Canadian and can do nothing else), God bless the United States of America and all her people.
Pray we are in the first part of the trilogy.
Not the prequel.
We’re in the gritty reboot.
I presume all have by now heard reports of an FBI bust of a Michigan “militia” plot to take out (kill or kidnap, reporting isn’t clear) Gov. Whitmer.
My ears perked up on an early radio report of one of the conspirators being from Delaware. Delaware? Pennsylvania’s governor is nearly as tyrannical and far closer, what’s a Delawarian doing consorting with Michiganders?
¿Qué pasó?
Qui Bono?
Very provocative, some would say. Effing idiots making an in-kind contribution to the Democrats’ campaign.
–
Also, seriously,who actually would even make that plot. I mean, the feds would just step in, what’s the point?
And why DO we trust the FBI?
My guess is an FBI undercover suggested the plot, and other people shrugged or nodded, as you do around crazy people. And were arrested for it.
SERIOUSLY this is a stupid farce, is all. There’s no there, there.
According to one article I’ve seen on this, the plotters were communicating over social media. Social Media??? Seriously, what idiot imagines that such venues are not monitored? Especially: What kind of idiot is sufficiently paranoid to belong to an antigovernment militia AND doesn’t think social media is surveilled?
Which prompts this advisory note to such among the Huns depressed enough by MSM gaslighting to contemplate action beyond blowing off steam: Shut. The. Eff. Up. Take it elsewhere. If you imagine this place is secure you are too stupid to be allowed on the internet.
–
I know we have an FBI agent assigned to read this (and I presume a cluster of other) blogs. I’ve met one of them, some years ago.
BUT again, is this the equivalent of their “boog boy” bullshit, where a FB group was plotting revolution? PFUI
Wouldn’t that agent be on danger of succumbing to the L#Right? I imagine they rotate and are frequently re-indoctrinated. (Or else one of them gets a laugh out of this.)
LOL. What I was told is that we’d already converted his two predecessors…. and him. 😉
Never think your efforts are fruitless! Your contribution is valuable. Even Colonel House (may his name be reviled forever) could not elect Woodrow Wilson without others lending voice and vote.
It looks like the FBI hasn’t quite reached the level ogmf the KGB. Why do KGB agents travel in threes? One who can read, one who can write, and one to keep an eye on those two dangerous intellectuals.
Supposedly the Fibbies also sent people to SCA events. The Society is allegedly termed, “a harmless monarchist group.”
Sadly, since it seems to be going earnestly woke…
I kind of thought that went without saying?
I’ll see if this posts. The leader of the “right-wing militia” group has an interesting background. Note the “A” flag behind him.
https://gab.com/JohnRivers/posts/105000675024206124
I see….
For those not able to get to gab, it’s the Anarchist “A”, and the leader likes to trash police on the Tubes of You.
Rightwing my ass.
It isn’t as if the Left doesn’t have a lengthy history of manufacturing “racist” and “sexist” incidents in order to defame conservatives. Not that any of this matters: this narrative’s now set in stone.
–
It’s a Reichstag Fire Drill!
And of course, Biden blames POTUS. https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2020/10/08/biden-blames-trump-for-gretchen-whitmer-kidnap-attempt-why-cant-the-president-just-say-stop/
Looks like Biden’s abilities to lie haven’t diminished.
Given that Whitmer has just lost a crucial court case and has lost much of her power, why bother? Her wings have already been clipped.
Which makes it also seem like a classic leftist/Democratic Party false flag operation.
She will try different ways to get around the court ruling. She’ll drag things out and annoy the courts, and tempt them to the great grandpappy of all benchslaps. And if she gets it, she’ll wear it as a badge of honor.
She already is, now the MDHHS is issuing, essentially, the same orders as the court slapped down.
This is probably the case. IIRC, the plotters had decided that they didn’t have enough people yet, so they weren’t actually going to do anything until they could bring more people into their group.
Ergo, this doesn’t even appear to have been at the “wannabe terrorist buying non-functional bomb from undercover FBI agent” stage.
Yep, this. Best way to take down a plot is to be the one instigating it.
Would that be the same FBI that escorted the Muslim terrorists to shoot up Pamela Gellar’s “Let’s draw Mohammed” event in Garland Texas?
Why, yes it would:
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/04/fbi-had-undercover-agent-at-scene-of-draw-muhammad-shooting-in-garland/
Right?
I believe Jack Posobiec tracked down who the ring leader of that was. Turns out the guy is a left wing anarchist: https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1314288403740078082?s=20
The whole “right wing” thing is just the press projecting again.
Impossible!
The earliest reports from media are always completely and perfectly reliable; DeWayne Antonio Craddock was a white supremacist terrorist.
And while I do so dearly wish that my state’s esteemed governor [*SPIT!*] would be removed from Harrisburg on a rail, preferably after a liberal application of pitch and down, he hasn’t garnered a small fraction of the national media attention that Obergrupperfuhrer Winter has.
*Obergruppenführer.
Damn tiny smartphone keyboards!
I know someone who says her nickname there is, “Governor Whitless.”
I know when we were there I saw a couple of signs saying, “My Governor is an Idiot.”
I wish I’d read you guys’ post before my younger brother blew up on me when I expressed skepticism. Every so often he blows up and has a rant (much like I do!), and this one was about how the FBI were always right, and Trump was always evil, and he must be getting something for himself out of being president, and he’s one of the most evil presidents, blah blah blah.
But I did point out that one of the groups had six people of whom two were undercover FBI agents, according to the legal charges… and he wouldn’t believe that, either. Even though I know I’ve talked to him about the good and bad of the FBI, as everybody knows who does the true crime thing, and why Fibbies are not always super-good.
Sigh. I didn’t even blow up at him in return. It was hilarious when he said that Bill Clinton was a man who thought mostly of helping others, and never was concerned with money. Also blah blah blah Trump was crony capitalism, okay, both parties are crony capitalism, blah blah blah.
Yup, the president who doesn’t take a salary is the greedy one, the sinful one. I just couldn’t help laughing, and I know mostly it’s him blowing off election tension because he knows his party is going to lose, and that’s he’s voting for pro-choice and anti-Constitution stuff he doesn’t believe in.. but come on, dude.
I WISH I knew they were going to lose.
“… the FBI were always right”
Tell that to Richard Jewell.
David Koresh is unavailable for comment.
–
Nor Vicki Weaver.
Ten bucks says the “masterminds” of that particular boneheaded plot were undercover Feds who had a budget review coming up.
Nah bra. Antifa. https://preview.tinyurl.com/y2mzp34u
also: https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Frobbystarbuck%2Fstatus%2F1314283692928438272&data=02%7C01%7C%7C72a859b7c2bf4eb91d1908d86bc11a30%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637377824389745987&sdata=HI%2FLobE0vg%2BzyyEY8VFzX5%2B1eafXNsuRd7hQrNNR%2BxI%3D&reserved=0
Eh, looks like I lost.
OTOH, it’s possible that the Feds still provoked/”radicalized” him. Hosam Smadi was a wannabe-jihadi who the FBI found online, radicalized him in chatrooms, convinced him that it’d be a good idea to bomb carry out an attack (Smadi chose the Fountain Place skyscraper in Dallas), provided him with a fake truck bomb, and then arrested him when he tried to detonate it.
So I can totally see the Feebies finding Mister Caserta online, reaching out to him, eventually saying “Hey, that Witmer chick sucks. You should do something about her.
Here, have these guns and explosives.” and then busting him when he and his buddies actually start to do it.
Rumor has it that there are a fair number of suspected undercover fed agents (aka “glowies”, for glowing in the dark as wrong) who try to incite people to violence on places like 4chan and 8kun. The self-described weaponized autists seem to be able to avoid the incitement.
As someone pointed out, that it was a kidnapping plot (per what I’ve seen) is sufficient evidence that it’s a false flag. As the commenter put it, “Assassinate, sure, but what idiot would want to kidnap her?”
THIS. What the heck is the benefit of taking a governor to a “secure location” in another state? SERIOUSLY. What are you going to demand for her? And sure, you know, other states don’t have extradition treaties.
THE HECK.
It’s Jussie Smollet.
What did they have planned if no one wanted her back? The response to the kidnapping was “Thank you”?
Seriously? What are they “Marx Brothers Kidnappers R US”?
100% Jussie Smollet; and all that implies.
Right? Seriously? This didn’t make any sense. Also all you have to do is watch Whitmer’s triumphant look when talking about it.
She doesn’t look like “this was really scary and they almost got me.”
SERIOUSLY. I mean, the idiots who tired to SWAT us five years ago failed spectacularly, but I still get shaky and weird when talking about it, because someone essentially wanted to murder-us-by-police.
BUT Whitmer is like “Ah, So, this is how great I am.”
The Ransom of Red Chief in real life!
Click to access The%20Ransom%20of%20Red%20Chief.pdf
This is like the dilemma every time one of the aka lackas threatens a crazy dem. Like when they said they’d kill Obama.
I mean… seriously, what do you do?
We finally settled on “we’d attach the thank you card to a killer missile, because we’re grateful, but the POS is/was president and we can’t let that shit pass.”
“He might be a (fill in the blank), but he’s our fill in the blank. Bug off.”
Goes back to someone’s (RES?) argument that Republicans are known for playing by the rules. If you’re going to execute someone, they should get a trial.
I don’t know as it was me what said that but …
a) being known for playing by the rules and0always playing by the rules are not the same thing, sort of the way jalapenos are hot but every now and again you draw a dud.
b) nobody is claiming assassination is playing by the rules; the argument here is that assassinating Gov. Whitmer is not as dumb as kidnapping Gov. Whitmer. Repeat: Not. As. Dumb. Still wrong. not as dumb.
c) I would even argue that Whitmer should NOT be executed. Tried, yes. Convicted, almost certainly. Sentenced to death? Too easy on her. Put her in a 10 X 12 concrete cell, keep her there until death of natural causes, only permitting her to come out to
give the parole board a laughapply for parole every five years. Maybe only keep her in until she’s written “I’ve been a very bad governor.” on a whiteboard a few million times.d) most relevantly, those plotting putzes were not Republicans.
–
No, they were what the Left thinks Republicans are. Kind of like the “bearded Spock” universe: Kirk could play barbarian much better than his counterpart could do civilized.
Ah yes, a “militia”. I’m beginning to think that a militia is their name for a grouping of three or more conservatives*.
*Or what they feverishly imagine conservatives to be.
Mark Steyn, guest hosting for Limbaugh, reported on a story about some clown using a false DL and a post office box to solicit absentee ballots “on behalf” of nursing home residents. I believe it must be this item:
Carrollton Mayoral Candidate Zul Mirza Mohamed Arrested, Charged With 100+ Counts Of Voter Fraud
mayoral candidate in Carrollton has been arrested and charged with voter fraud.
Denton County Sheriffs have Zul Mirza Mohamed in custody and have charged him with 109 felonies related to voter fraud.
The investigation began September 23 when Sheriff’s were notified by the Denton County Elections Office of possible fraudulent activity related to absentee ballot applications.
Officials say absentee ballots had been requested to be sent to a PO Box in Lewisville, that was supposed to belong to a nursing home facility. When investigators made contact with the Carrollton residents whose ballots had been requested they learned that none of the residents had asked for ballots be mailed to the PO Box.
Further investigation revealed the PO Box had been obtained with a fictitious Texas driver license and a fictitious University of North Texas student ID.
[READ THE WHOLE THING]
In other Limbaugh related news, those not regularly listening should be advised that Friday (October 09) the guest host will be Donald J Trump himself (Democrats will doubtless denounce this as an illegal in-kind campaign contribution, dereliction of presidential duties. proof Trump is deranged by steroid use and cause for activation of the 25th Amendment, a sign of desperation and of no value — the fact that several of these are mutually contradictory will be ignored by the MSM.) QUESTIONS for the president’s stint on Limbaugh’s show can be submitted through a form at the show’s site.
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Minor observation, preceded by a warning to clear all comestibles from mouth before proceeding.
Can you imagine Joe Biden undertaking such a campaign move?
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I can’t imagine Joe making [i]any[/i] campaign moves at this point.
He already proclaimed today that he won’t announce whether he will support packing the Supreme Court until after the election.
Indeed.
“So, Joe, you believe that the American people don’t deserve to know the answer to that critically important question. You either don’t trust the American people, who you will have to take a solemn oath to serve and protect, or you’re just trying to pull a fast one. Which is it?”
I wait, without expectation, his answer to a question of how many justices is the ideal number for the Supreme Court.
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IOW, his handlers absolutely support it but are smart enough to get him to not say anything until after the election.
Myth. Never happens
You seem to have misplaced your [sarcasm] font. 😛
c4c
FTR, in the Bible story referenced above, the women were not wives of the same man, but co-workers in the Oldest Profession, negotiating their virtues from the same house. (1 Kings 3:16, “Then two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him.” And so on.) But I can well believe their credentials would be bowlderized from any book marketed for children.
Um…. not in any version I read?
(shrug.) And I have read the Bible. It usually says “Two women.”
For questions like this I like the biblegateway site, which lets one bop around many different versions – here’s that passage with the “Orthodox Jewish Bible” selected, but scanning through others corroborates:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Kings+3%3A16-27&version=OJB
“16 Then came there two nashim, that were zonot (harlots, prostitutes) unto HaMelech, and stood before him.”
OK, I tried a post copy-pasting the Hebrew for Melachim Alef 3:16 from https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/15887/showrashi/true/jewish/Chapter-3.htm Torah Online and it vanished because WordPress delenda est – the English there is:
Then came two women, harlots, to the king, and stood before him.
All right.
Definitely the NIV, ESV and NET (3 independent modern versions with mostly evangelical translators) have prostitues, Douay-Rheims 1899 has harlots. The Vulgate has this for 1 Kings 3:16
Tunc venerunt duae mulieres meretrices ad regem, steteruntque coram eo:
meretrix, meretrices is the Latin for prostitute. I happen to know this because one of my high school chums and I both were in the Latin class. We fished through the giant Latin English dictionary for “naughty” words and found that. We always used it as our example for declining the 3rd declension (yeah sorry 14/15 year old nerd boys…). Can’t say about the Hebrew, that is fully incomprehensible to me.
As a side issue there is some thought among interpreters that Solomon told this as a kind of warning to his son(s) who were likely to be king some day. One train of interpretation is that he was using the baby as an stand in for Israel warning them not to split it. Apparently they didn’t get the message as Rehoboam promptly split Israel into Israel and Judah. It appears the Democrats get the point almost as well as the lying woman and the sons of Solomon.
FYI, the “Orthodox Jewish” Bible… isn’t. It’s a rather ludicrously-bad translation of the Christian Bible (including the New Testament) into pseudo-half-Yiddish aimed at missionizing to the Jewish community.
I suspected as much from the name. That’s why I went looking for a Torah.
BLINK.
I do own an annotated Torah, (I LIKE the annotations, which tell me so many things and make things fall in place I never understood, like why my family used Abel, pronounced funny (with a V) for someone who was …. inflating his credentials) but that was last read before the ridiculous mental collapse of 8 years ago (not total mental collapse, and I’m recovering, but the white matter abnormalities made some memories vanish. (I didn’t realize how many till weirdly we rewatched Midsommer and half of the seasons were new to me.) I have it on the TBR pile again, but it’s not something one reads while eating or cooking. So I haven’t got to it in this horrid year. I will. And maybe if I live long enough and there’s leisure (or if I retreat from online completely which might yet happen) I WOULD like to learn Hebrew. Will have to figure out how.)
Yeah “Abel” = הבל hevel, the same word that Ecclesiastes uses for “vanity”, literally “breath” or “air”.
See, because of secrecy, family crazy and such, I’m left to piece these things by myself.
Like figuring out why grandma almost kicked dad out for bringing in a take-out dish with eel in it. “We will die!”
She settled for making him eat it AT THE END OF THE YARD, leaning into the neighbor’s property.
I only fully figured out why she was so upset and thought it was poisonous/a curse when I read the Pratchett scene where the restaurant is using chicken instead of rat.
Yes, I know about the law, but for the love of bob, we ate pork. (Though granted on grandma’s side not much. If a dish could be done with beef, no matter how much the neighbors would find it funny, it would be.)
My guess is something she learned in childhood and didn’t fully understand. Also if you were hiding, eating pork might be needed not to attract attention. (Hence the whole farinheira, which mom’s family still bought in original formulation. Actually I miss it rather terribly. But that’s because comfort food. Farinheira was often lunch. In the US I can buy it but it’s made with pork, not chunks of chicken. It came about BECAUSE it looked like sausage. Eel and seafood, on the other hand, were not as well known, and the prohibition lingered.)
I’ve been checking on why they chose harlot. The etymology is interesting and it originally meant disorderly person and often referred to males.
Rabbit, meet hole. Hole, meet rabbit.
I do NOT want to fall into it. I have a short story overdue. They’re (LITERALLY) waiting the anthology for me. I need to finish editing Kate’s book. And I MUST finish the three books hanging by a thread.
Honestly, this week has been such a waste due to to the back thing.
Do other people also rage at their own bodies, or is mine peculiarly obstructionist.
ThreeSix translations handy: all say “Harlot” or “Prostitute”. Original King James (Mormon copy), New King James, Revised Standard Translation, Living Bible, New Living, Today’s English.Haven’t looked at online sources.
How’d I get so many Bible translations, he asks himself.
LOL.
Mine are downstairs in the library,which hasn’t been cleared of debris of older son move out. (I might have a Mormon edition too.)
I guess French and Portuguese, which are the ones I remember clearly were IMPLYING rather than saying. 😉
At any rate, I know not to go searching before I write posts. Because I look up and it’s 5 pm My impression from that child’s history was co-wives.
But the point still stands.
If it was written for children, the editors probably figured it was easier for parents and Sunday School teachers to explain polygamy than prostitution to innocent youngsters (although I think a lot of editors of religious materials way overestimate how long kids remain innocent of the existence of hookers).
Er… I’d read it in various versions of the Bible as well.
So, it’s probably my being me, and not being able to off the top of my head convince myself a baby would give whores an advantage.
Prostitution tends to have diminishing returns as one ages. A son to take care of his mother in her old age would be beneficial.
Perhaps. I don’t know enough about ancient Israel. Not as common in Greece and Rome.
Then again, Romulus and Remus
How much “credit” might one get from one’s madam/pimp by producing fresh blood to be raised in the business? (I did not think of it myself: See Sgt Bothari’s backstory)
…. probably not that much?
Foundlings were easy to grab. it was raising them that cost? At least in Rome. Again what I don’t know about Ancient Israel is….. a lot.
We have Roman writers commenting on the odd way that Jews raised all their children.
AH! Never came across that till the Christian era….
Not jockeying for advantage: the other woman’s child had just died in the night. She wanted her baby replaced, or at least, not to have to see her neighbor raise a baby while she was left with memories.
Yeah. Okay, that makes sense.
However for my purposes, jockeying for advantage works best.
“… easier for parents and Sunday School teachers to explain polygamy”
By the time they get to Solomon they’ve probably touched on Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Zil’-pah, and Bil-hah.
As for prostitution, how many little kids can understand that particular transaction. “Ewww – paying somebody to kiss you? YUCK!”
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LOL. Yes.
As to the mammal-burrow-dive that these searches turn into, why, yes, that has happened to me, so I get that entirely.
An LDS Holy Bible is merely the KJV with *lots* of footnotes, and a Bible Dictionary at the back.
There’s a chance that it’s bundled with the other LDS sacred books. But those tend to be expensive due to the page count.
Er. Our best friends for 20 years were LDS. Between us and the kids, we were given a lot of books….
We had an LDS member who volunteered in the free dinners at the community (nominally Quaker, sort of) church. This is a thin-paper vanilla KJV edition, no footnotes, maybe used in missionary work. Our part of OR has a lot of Saints.
Possibly pre-footnote. The first “LDS” edition – i.e. with the tons of footnotes and Bible Dictionary – appeared in the mid-80s, and was a bit of a big deal at the time even outside of the LDS Church (my understanding is that this may have been one of the first widely available editions of the Bible to be so heavily foot-noted). Prior to that, the Church made copies of the KJV available to anyone who wanted one. But there wouldn’t have been anything to distinguish it from any other printing of the KJV.
It happens when you start looking things up…
A friend of mine was a hardcore athiest who started reading the King James to get more ammunition for pig wrestling. After finding out various Bibles had rather different translations, he acquired a modest collection to mine for further ammunition. And somehow after a couple of years he wound up being a fair Biblical scholar, and he moved from pig wrestling to serious discussions.
His favorite line; “That quote [whatever], it doesn’t mean what you think it does. Let’s examine the text…”
If you’re online there’s https://www.biblegateway.com/ it has hordes of English translations plus many in modern languages as well as Koine Greek, the Vulgate and Hebrew.
Bible translations are like CDs and potato chips. You get one, then two, and somehow you end up with a whole bag. [Don’t ask how I know this.]
I only have about a dozen. What am I doing wrong??
You’re insufficiently acquisitive. I still prefer King James (for how it sounds) to ALL of the modern ones.
KJV for speaking, ESV/NKJV for reading and study. HATE NIV
The language of the KJV is quite elegant, MANY famous English proverbs/usages come from it (or Shakespeare). However, 1) Usage shift has made it so you often need footnotes to understand the text as in some cases there meaning shifts that create false cognates. 2) It’s dependence on earlier translations (Tyndale, Vulgate) and the use of poor basic text (Textus receptus, dependence on Koine greek Old Testament the Septuagint) give it some really odd translations.
Basically there are two general modern schools of biblical translation, Dynamic Translation and Formal Translation. The first is effectively thought for thought trying to get the gist of the semantics. The second stays closer to word for word with minimal changes to avoid doing something grammatically nonsensical in the target language. I like NET (Dynamic with some formal tendencies) and NIV (fairly full on Dynamic). The ESV tends to Formal translation and is also useful. Easy way to see this is in Paul’s Letters in the new testament. In Koine Greek there was effectively no punctuation. so sentences get broken up with larger spaces. In addition sentences starts are often indicated with the word Kai which is and. The ESV translates most of those ands to hew close to the text, the NET and NIV do not as that isn’t good english style.
I particularly like the version of the NET with its notes as it provides both notes on Translation (why something is done) and on Text Critical issues (major variants in the text or dubious sections like John 8 that isn’t in many early texts). For reading Dynamic translations are easier (less choppy, better flow). For trying to take the text apart Formal translations stay closer to the original language and may let you see parallels or other structure that a Dynamic translation may unintentionally hide.
Me too.
My dad and his older brother got into an argument at one of the family reunion cafeteria dinners (the K&W had really good food) because Dad insisted King James’ translators were directly inspired by God and therefore the KJV was the only true Bible in English. The opinions were pretty, um, emphatic. On both sides.
Well, good for Will Shakespeare, then.
(If he wasn’t the polisher of the final version, he was close to the polisher. There are textual tells.)
I’ve heard that theory before. Unfortunately, the “tells” I have heard cited also appear in old translations.
As an old Texan Baptist once said, “If the King James Version was good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for me.”
“The Bible in plain English, just like Jesus spoke!”
KJV calls them two women, and then adds “that were harlots,…”.
It’s possible that there’s some cultural context missing, or that the translation might be shaky. But that’s what the text says.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this detail mentioned when the story is being recounted, though. It’s pretty inconsequential.
Very much. Of course the historian in me is confused. I mean, I believe that is the correct version, but I’m still confused as in that case I don’t see an “advantage” to having a son. But meh, what do I know?
If they were two wives the decision would likely go to the man of the house instead emding up at the King’s open court day – it would be the common husband’s son either way, after all, so at a minimum dad would get a significant say.
Solomon’s story runs far cleaner without a common local authority, no women’s families to opine and shout at each other, needing to be weighed as to political influence – just a couple of women of publicly negotiable virtue fighting over a non-claimed little bordello bastard, so the lesson is clear.
Of course that begs the story question: What happened next? Who was the little guy’s dad? Was the reason the two women got in the door on open court day that the dad was at court? What adventures did he have when he got older?
What was his name?
Lotsa story fodder for that little fellow…
Well, harlots, so there’s a good chance that Dad’s name was only known to YHWH, though perhaps one could say “john” or “somedude”. I’ll plead ignorance about the prostitution business in Solomon’s day.
Perhaps the son was used to blackmail a client? Again, what do I know?
I checked 3 versions including an 1864 one and a Jewish bible off my shelves and all three say ‘two women that were harlots”
Not that that reduces in any way Solomon’s judgement.
Absolutely.
And I’ve read it in French, Portuguese and English. Arguably English is the weakest, because the latest.
I suppose our Jewish contingent might weight in.
The Bible is the result of an 1,800-year game of Telephone played by hundreds of people using 9 different languages.
The Bible is the result of an 1,800-year game of Telephone played by hundreds of people using 9 different languages.
Reminds me of an old joke.
Man is allowed to visit his monk brother for the first time in 20 years. The Monk explains to his brother how they spend their days in prayer and meticulously copying the texts of the Bible by hand using the original copy the Order had obtained over 1000 years ago.
“Do you actually have that copy in your work area?” “Oh no. It is much too fragile. It is locked deep in the vaults and only consulted if there is a discrepancy found between later copies. I tell you what. Pick any page of the copy I’m working on and I will go down and verify it is a word for word copy of the original”.
So the man points at a page and the monk descends into the vault. After 2 hours he becomes worried as he must leave soon. Finally his brother comes in, eyes red, almost sobbing. “20 years! 20 long, lonely years! 20 years with nothing but the company of men!”
“What is wrong brother?”
“The word was CELEBRATE!”
Old but always good for a laugh … every time.
Having studied a bit about Bible manuscripts through history, I know a little about this. And what’s amazing isn’t how many differences there are between various manuscripts. What’s amazing is how (relatively) few there are given how many times it was copied. And what’s really amazing is how very, very few differences affect major points of Christian doctrine. Questions about the role of women in the church? Yeah, there’s manuscript variations. Questions about whether this or that parable that Jesus told is found in the earliest manuscripts? Yeah, there’s variations. Questions about whether Jesus rose from the dead? No variations that affect the doctrine. (The last section of the book of Mark, that describes what Jesus did after his resurrection, is absent from the earliest manuscripts, but since its contents describe the same thing that other Gospels do, there’s no doctrinal variation from this manuscript variation.)
You’d think with so many scribes copying so many manuscripts over so many centuries, variations would have ended up affecting more core doctrine, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. The manuscripts are remarkably consistent on matters of core doctrine, more so than probability would lead one to expect.
If anything, too meticulous… once our ancestors discovered writing, they were utterly anal-retentive about recording and preserving every little thing… sometimes to excess:
Was reading at random (I think I was somewhere around the Book of Daniel) and it’s going on about the history of various kings and their wars, then suddenly stops to inventory some other guy’s livestock and tax payments. Picks up with the kings and wars a page or so later. Fairly obvious a random tax record got mixed in with the historical stuff, and the scribes duly copied it, word for word.
Of course one could consider that perhaps G0d wishes that we understand the concepts of taxes and inventories, and this was when it happened to come to mind.
???
I think I’m pretty familiar with the Bible, and I have no idea which part you’re referring to. The history of various kings and their wars sounds like the books of Kings and/or Chronicles, but I couldn’t find the part you mention where it goes and lists some random guy’s tax payments before resuming the history. Can you find it again, to tell me a book name and chapter number?
There is a part in Nehemiah where he records the census of those who returned, listed by their heads of clans all the way down to clans of 50-100 people, which means nothing to us now since we don’t know who any of those are now. But it was extremely important to people at the time.
Oh, and funny story. The Gospel of Luke spends two and a half chapters telling the story of Jesus’ birth, then it switches to his geneology. Lots of people in our culture just skim over that because we want to get back to the important stuff, the story of what happened. But I’ve heard of a Bible translation project where the people got super excited once they got to Luke chapter 3, because they were exclamining, “Look! A geneology! This isn’t just some made-up story, this is a real story, that really happened to real people! This is wonderful!” So different cultures find value in different parts of the same text. 🙂
Sorry, not sufficiently familiar to know more closely where I was, and I don’t seem to have left the ribbon there… it was pretty funny, tho. There are probably quite a few such “got piled together” if only we had originals to examine… just the nature of old documents and compulsively saving *everything*.
Genealogies from antiquity are sometimes fictitious, but are often enough true to be useful. Knew a lady who did American Indian genealogies professionally, and she mentioned that she found a lot of valid material in the Book of Mormon. (I have no idea about that one, either.) Anyway, I’ve heard that much of the pedigree from the NT correlates with other sources, with some gaps, so probably close enough for a government document. 😉
Absolutely. It’s amazing — says the translator — how much they agree.
But sometimes — and I know King James is more poetry than perfect rendition — things do drop out.
When Dan and I were first married he was joking about King David Playing with his hand (he had a routine. No, it wasn’t off color, just silly.) and I said “But he played THE HARP” Him “WHAT?”
This led to us staying up till four in the morning comparing translations in three languages.
The bonus on it? We’d been married about a month. When he went into work the next day practically falling on his face, NO ONE BELIEVED it was because of Bible study. 😀
Thank you, milady, for the best birthday gift I can anticipate receiving today.
Happy birthday!
I am now grinning both over Sarah’s story and because I’m now envisioning David soothing King Saul by making shadow puppets until the evil spirit departed. “Look, a bunny!”
THAT’s what Dan’s big joke was about. PRECISELY that.
Er, happy — if belated — birthday wishes.
Sure they believed it; they just figured it was “Song of Solomon”…. 😉
For the rest of his time at that job (6 years) they made jokes about it EVERY DAY. Like when Robert was born at the end of that period they said our Bible study had finally born fruit. (Rolls eyes.)
The interesting bit is that, it turns out when people go back again and look at the ancient mss, a lot of them were described wrongly. If the last pages are gone or fragmented too badly to see, the end of a book’s last chapter is not missing in any sense but physically. If somebody partially arranged a lectionary including bits from other gospels for saints’ days, the parables are not “missing” or “rearranged” in the actual gospel. And one of the major scholars who gets quoted a lot actually had made statistical mistakes about frequency of “missing” stuff that he later in the Eighties repudiated officially, but most people are still reading books citing him back in the Seventies.
Also a lot of ancient copies that move around parables for lectionary readings include margin symbols to indicate this, with blank sections where the parable actually falls. Scholars did not understand this until recently.
I would if I had not forgotten every bit of Hebrew I had ever learned. Pretty much forgot a lot of the Latin I had learned also. And I pretty much forget the Portuguese words I had learned when my Dad’s mom used to visit from Lisbon. Well except the food ones of course.
Oh, please, My family converted almost 800 years ago (for values of “converted.” Never mind) AND STILL MAKES FOOD THAT IS JEWISH-PORTUGUESE. And buys flour stuffed sausages with chicken fat from the place that uses the Star of David Seal.
On dad’s side conversion being far more recent, I thought you were supposed to have Christmas doughnuts.
I think food is the last thing to go.
Languages. I retain Portuguese and French, because I learned them before fourteen. I need to learn Latin again, I swear. And Greek. And I never learned Hebrew, but would like to.
I learned legalize, which was enough for me.
Meals were rather “unique” and quite good growing up as well. And I still have the taste for vinho verde (although the few times i do drink these days i generally stick to red wines-preferably burgundies), port wine and espresso.
The town where I live has a sizeable Portuguese community that has migrated from Newark and Elizabeth.
Vinho Verde is about the only table wine my husband likes. And our nearby alcohol provider has a manager who is crazy for ALL Portuguese wines. So when I go in I get pulled aside to see his new acquisitions. 😀
My parents when they moved to Northeast PA still used to travel in to the ironbound section of Newark regularly so my dad could by Portuguese wine and food to bring back to PA.
On another note, in town we have a Portuguese owned Italian style bakery which is in essence more of a Italian-Portuguese fusion bakery. Absolutely outstanding stuff.
That is what I had always assumed. Never heard the idea that they might have been cowives until today.
That’s the ESV (English Standard Version), verbatim. Granted, their precise relation isn’t terribly critical to the story (not even like Rahab’s in Joshua 2 & 6 — a whore’s house being the perfect place for spies to go to ground), but that’s what it says.
No insult intended, though the analogy to political parties might draw a little nearer.
I wasn’t thinking insult. But having read about prostitutes in ancient times, abandonment or killing were more likely than fighting over a child.
ALSO honestly? it might have drifted in, due to translators not understanding under what context women would live in the same house.
I will hold for comment from the Jewish contingent.
Not being fluent in Hebrew (let alone English) I can’t vouch for this but some comments on that verse note the Hebrew word for harlot is the same as the Hebrew word for victualler.
Depends on the appetite being fed, now don’t it….
Blink?
Meaning people who serve food?
Zonowt/zonoth is the plural of zanah, harlot, fornicator, one who acts as a harlot. Zuwn is yet another verb “to feed,” and some people think harlot is a related word, while others think it’s just a coincidence. Other people think harlot is a pun on armor.
That said, people in various cultures have made certain assumptions about women who owned inns or taverns.
Yes, on the later, of course.
Strong’s, on bible gateway, notes that the etymology of the Hebrew word is well fed. It’s always translated harlot or prostitute, but if such activity was associated with a ritual meal provided by the customer? Or perhaps because it wasn’t always a cash economy and such women accepted payment of food for the services? Judah thought he paid with a goat for the second, and there’s several Proverbs that draw a close relationship between eating and adulterous avtivities. (She eats, and wipes her mouth, and says I have done no wrong, for ex). They would be nicely full of double meaning if cultural custom around prostitution included a ritual meal in honor of an idol.
Anyway, those are two possibilities, but not sure how to dig further.
If the Bible can make a pun or.wordplay, it is made. And nobody is going to fight divinely inspired puns. But yeah, wordplay does not equal valid etymology, even if everybody jumps on the chance to include certain connotations.
Agree on the disclaimer. I’m not at all an etymologist in any language. hence my comment about digging would be needed. But it’s an intriguing possibility for word play that would not at all show up in a translation. Kinda like how Psalm 119 is going through the Hebrew alphabet, but the translation doesn’t show that well. It needs a footnote to explain. And I do like a good pun/word play.
As I noted in an earlier comment the word for prostitute is present in the Vulgate, so if the text drifted it drifted LONG ago. The Vulgate is from late 4th century AD. That’s actually older than the best complete Hebrew text we have, the Leningrad Codex, which dates from c.a. 1000 AD. There are minor variants in the Hebrew text but not sure if there are any in that vicinity.
Not that it’s important to the psychological mechanism. I’d just really like to know and if I go researching I WILL NEVER STOP AND WON’T WRITE TODAY.
Hey, Suburbanshe, (though not Jewish, she’s an historian) do you know?
You’re not the only one. I have avoided looking many things up because I knew they would turn into multi-evening E-ticket rides down the rabbit hole.
Sometimes you just have the slap the “Known Unknowns” label down and move on…
Deep Pink was born of a joke older son made while loading the dishwasher. “If Satan kidnapped a little girl, she’d take over hell.” AND a weird, totally unprovoked rabbit hole dive on …. Marian apparitions and why the church rules some inadmissible, and why some of them well…. are creepy as heck (among the inadmissible.)
Ended up buying five books on the subject. Took me three months. I think I wrote deep pink in shame at wasting so much time.
I think lots of people tell the story without the prostitution angle, like they’re just two women sharing an apartment or living in the same clan. But they’re not.
That said, “prostitute” is always a red flag that we’re talking about “Israel stinks at staying faithful to the worship of Yahweh” or “Gentiles need to get their act together.” And given that it’s Solomon, who had a bunch of pagan wives, I think it’s supposed to be a warning to Israel about bad lifestyle choices and loveless people.
yeah.
c4c
To save time in researching::
Chabad (an Orthodox Jewish organization) has both the Hebrew and English texts side by side for comparison. It’s at https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/15887/jewish/Chapter-3.htm (Melachim I, Chapter 3, sentence 16). Their translation is “harlots”. And note that if you take the fifth word of the sentence in Hebrew, and copy it into Google translate, you’ll get a reference to prostitution (remember that Hebrew is written right to left, not left to right, so the fifth word in the sentence is the characters before the hyphenated-looking word, since the two character word at the extreme right isn’t part of the sentence, but is the sentence number in Hebrew).
Thanks.
By the way, I don’t recommend taking that entire sentence from the chabad.org text in Hebrew and pasting into gurgle translate – I don’t think the gurglebot gets the gist.
Solomon?
No. Not Solomons. Davids perhaps.
And the Trump/David comparisons have already been made here in the past. But it ties in with my comment the other day about Trump and “Erin”, and the humiliation of the Church Karens. Tell the story of David but with the serial numbers filed off so they don’t know they are supposed to like him, and those people would be certain that David burns for all eternity.
indeed.
The Methodist Adult Sunday School book actually covered the story of David and Bathsheba with the author admitting she was appalled at David’s behavior.
As well she should have been; as we all should be. David was appalled at his own behavior, when he was confronted with it by Nathan.
(One of the arguments for the authenticity of Scripture is that the heroes of faith are presented warts and all, like David’s adultery and murder and Peter’s denial of Christ.)
Over at Instapundit, I see Glenn Reynolds constantly reminding us to “Don’t get cocky”. It’s easy to see the enthusiasm for President Trump, the lack of enthusiasm for Biden, the results of the riots, and other small signs, and think “There’s no way Biden can win.”
However, I also see the polls that insist that Biden is up 7 points*, the potential for rampant cheating, and other things, and think “President Trump doesn’t have a chance”.
So I have to tell myself this: “Don’t get cocky, and don’t despair!”
* I have to remind myself that the riots are likely to draw out people who don’t vote often, but don’t like riots either, and that many Democrats who are going to vote Trump are going to be afraid to say that to pollsters, and many Republicans voting for Trump are lying, because they are afraid that if the polls are accurate, the Democrats are going to use them to refine their cheating — so the polls probably aren’t accurate — but I nonetheless have lingering doubts of “but what if they are?”.
> polls
Even if they’re “honest”, for whatever values you care to assign to the term, I would need substantive proof (as in, multi-election track record of accuracy) before I’d pay any attention to them.
The numbers on most political polls seem to be designed more to influence the follow-along voters than to accurately relay information.
Follow-alongs exist; I have met a couple. They’re the ones who wait until the last second, to cast their vote for whichever candidate the news says is winning. (which is one reason why new news lies barefacedly all the way up until the polls close).
Anyway, if the Toob and Faceborg bleat that Biden is winning, some small but measureable number of people will go along and vote for him. I guess it’s their way of showing they’re of-the-body. Beats the heck out of me.
It’s the unfortunate tendency of people wanting to be on the “winning” side…
Even thought, if in no other human endeavor, POLITICS should NOT be a “winning side” thing, it should be a “THIS person / party best represents ME.”
That is a Should up there with the good old From Each / To Each skit.
When I was a kid, there was no reporting until the polls closed. What happened?
No reporting until the WEST coast polls closed was put in sometime after I started voting. Don’t remember when exactly. But there were a lot of complaints that “It was decided” before most people MST & PST even got off work to go vote. Maybe not as critical now as Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado, etc., have gone vote by
mailfraud … but you know …I think it was instituted after the 1980 election; you might remember the polls said it was extremely close … right up until Carter conceded while California was still voting and Democrat turnout tanked out there, taking down a number of down-ticket races..
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Jimmeh managed to tick off a lot of people with that stunt. I’ll admit that I was a Dem at the time (I’ll plead youth and ignorance, and not owning any firearms at the time.)
I notice that he’s largely shut up during the current campaign season. Good.
Jimmeh can’t force himself to support today’s Democrats, is wondering what the HELL has happened to them and when they turned into evil aliens. Maybe he found a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses in an abandoned building?
THEY LIVE!
No. He’s also evil. He shoots cats.
And absolutely hates Jews.
Yeah, but we did say he was a democrat, right? (I WISH I were joking.)
We were two who were unable to get to the polls until after work, which meant standing in line until 7 or so. I remember the concession while standing in line. People left the line. I didn’t. I was voting dang it. We were in Washington state.
The only excuse the local election commission could make for buying all those electronic voting machines was that it was *necessary* to know the count, second-by-second, because… well, *someone* needed to know. Yet the reported counts never agreed with the final count, so why bother to pay any attention?
Even though I think of myself as an informed voter, I learn the election results the next morning, as I suspect most people do. “Yup, election, been there before. Sleep is way more important.”
Time for the “Get Off My Lawn” Party of America’s annual picnic. Starts evening of November Third, finishes when everybody is off my friggin’ lawn.
In other news, did you know that the largest ammunition manufacturer in the USA is back-ordered so bad that they are running three shifts, seven days a week, and they’ve built new manufacturing lines? Yep. They are.
What does this tell us, I wonder? To me, looking on from the sidelines as a Canadian, it looks like Americans are not about to “go quietly into that good night.”
“All those people are buying guns so they can turn them in” as the saying goes.
Or take them on a canoe trip…
So many tragic boating accidents in Canada this year…
Remarkably unstable boats, canoes. Always ready to dunk you without even a moment’s notice.
Well, if circumstances require it, I can see ammunition being turned in. At least the lead and copper portions, usually at supersonic speeds.
Sub-sonic is also nice, and in a pinch it will suffice…
I think quite a few of the ammunition manufacturers and the firearms manufacturers have been running full-tilt since Obama. They started to get ahead a year or so after 2016, then late last year / early this year people started panic buying (first it was WuFlu “oh my god we’re going to be living in a dystopian nightmare world and we need to stock up on food and toilet paper and how’re we gonna protect it from looters lets buy a gun,” followed by the riots cleaning out the store shelves…)
I commented on another platform to someone, the only readily available ammo is in the “weird” calibers. 9mm? Hens teeth are easier to find. 223/5.56? Same. But, if you have a S&W500? Ammo aplenty! Barrett m82a1 or the like? Be the envy of everyone at the range, you can shoot to your hearts content (@ $5/rd, but still)
Oddball ammo is a survival thing. Last bullets off the shelf in the USA are .303, 6.5mm Swedish, 8mm Mauser, all those weird hunting calibers you never heard of. Because EVERYBODY else has .3006, .308 and .223. All pistols are .45, 9mm or .22.
So have an oddball in the back of the safe in case something bad might happen, and the store is empty of 30 cal. And make it a bolt gun, in case something bad might happen and it is hard to get parts for your 5.56mm wunderschützen.
.45-70
Sure, it’s a lever gun. But accurate enough and heavy enough.
The preppers are laughing themselves silly. And making a mint on selling, some of ’em, a little bit here, a little bit there- becuase they have tens of thousands.
Leverguns were the “assault weapons” of their time. In many ways the lever-action is America’s Gun (of yesteryear). And 45-70 is America’s Lever Action Caliber.
A modern lever in 45-70 with bear loads is as worthy a choice for defending America as any AR-15.
Easier to clean, too. And things shot with a .45-70 generally do not get up and keep fighting.
I’m not discounting the lever action .30-30. Yeah, it gives up 1000 feet per second to the 5.56, but the bullet weight is 2 to 3X, so a good hit is going to work. (The only time I shot a .45-70 was in a Contender pistol with mild target loads. Kind of fun and easier on the hands than the .44 Magnums.)
I really need to get range time to get the Marlin dialed in. Finding bullets for handloads was a challenge, largely because the round isn’t popular for deer in the area. Raw cases for .308 and .30-06 and the myriad variants based on them are a lot more popular. OTOH, since it isn’t commonly used, some factory ammunition is available in local shops.
Note to self; look for flat-nose .30 cal bullet molds and check out the alloy sales sites. A lot of things changed since I last did cast bullets. (Nineteen mumble…)
If one wanders through the wonderful world of ballistics one may be interested to see that .30-30 is ballistically pretty darn close to 7.62×39 – basically the same muzzle velocity and a bit more energy.
And modern defensive loadings using those cool flex tips to accommodate tubular mags are available.
I have sometimes wondered what would have been the result if the M1 Carbine had been designed for the .30-30 instead of the pistol-equivalent .30 carbine (I know, rimmed, so either a rimless version of 30-30 or just frigging engineer around it: 303 is rimmed and magazine-fed), basically inventing close enough to an assault rifle a decade earlier.
OK, “available” above is vastly overly optimistic given the current supply and demand issues, but such offerings are in the catalogs…
.30 Carbine is better thought of as an intermediate between intermediate calibers (5.56×45, 7.62×39), and pistol calibers. Which makes sense for its role as a PDW cartridge.
The modern equivalent is .300 Blackout.
Sure, and the M1 carbine was intended from the get-go as only a pistol replacement, and 1930s infantry doctrine required the reach of the .30-06 M1 Garand with support from the .30-06 BAR at the squad level – but just imagine what something evolved from a 30-30-power-level M1 carbine would have looked like. That carbine was already the weapon of choice in ETO for infantry just due to weight, and if it had had sufficient power to deal with heavily bundled PLA “volunteers” in Korea and been evolved upon further during the 1950s…
That one is a myth.
A lot of myths of the “this gun don’t work” variety originate among soldiers who simply can’t admit that their aim sucks.
re myth: Yes, I have seen the tests, though I still wonder about the quality of questionably stored 1942 ammo used in subarctic temps in 1950, but if the carbine cartridge was in the .30-30/7.62×39 power range instead of a souped-up 45ACP, the obvious “aim better then” reply would have been a lot more clear.
I recently finished reading To Hell and Back by Audie Murphy. And yep, once he had sufficient authority to make his choice stick he stuck with the carbine. Even when going out to settle scores with a German sniper, shockingly enough.
Sufficient speed and accuracy can beat power if you really know what you’re doing, it seems.
I thought the Russians had a magazine-fed .762 x 54R. The mag-fed .30-30 was done in the 1960s by Savage. Eldest Brother got one through a promotion at the auto parts store he worked at in high school. 5 round capacity, detachable magazine. Not legal for deer in IL, and EB wasn’t a hunter, anyhow. I bought it much later, but alas, didn’t keep it. This was IIRC the model 340. In the early ’80s, I recall them offering a similar 840(?) model. The 340 would have needed gunsmith attention for a scope mount, and I wasn’t going to try at that time.
Later, I filled that “need” with a customized Ruger #1. It started life as a .458 Win Mag until the original owner had a barrel obstruction. My gunsmith friend got it for cheap, rebarreled it in .30-30, and I put a high-magnification scope on it. Deadly accurate with cast bullets, but I really needed to pay debts, so I had to sell off most of my collection. Sniff.
If anybody did a semi-auto .30-30, I never heard of it.
The Soviet Dragunov is a semiauto from a detachable magazine in 7.62x54R, and there are various AK-actions in that caliber (I see there’s a VEPR). And of course the bolt-action Mosin-Nagant was magazine fed similarly to the rimmed .303 British in the SMLE. That same .303 British round was used in the BREN, feeding full auto from a magazine, albeit feeding from the top thus with a gravity assist. .303 British was also fed full auto from that cool rotary mag in the Lewis gun.
So a round being rimmed per se does not preclude its use in a magazine fed semiautomatic action.
And I don’t know of any .30-30 detachable magazine fed semiauto either, but I would be astonished if there was not one ever.
Remington .30 A rimless 30-30. Never popular but the case was used as the basis for several wildcat cartridges.
One of these days, I’ll get a lever gun, just to have one. I seem to be attracted to “weird” guns, although I can’t bring myself to drop nearly a grand on a used Calico rifle at one of my LGS…
Still hoping to score a Tavor X95 at some point, in 5.56 so I can share ammo with the AR.
And trying to figure out how to scrape up $10k to be able to say I have a Barrett in my collection…
And a semi-auto M249 SAW (ooo, and it can still be belt-fed)
Anyone want to buy a kidney? In excellent condition, only 50.5 years old.
I have the .22lr version of that.
If I remember right, that’s the one they have on the wall for sale, too. .22lr, 100rd mag Calico rifle.
I need to send mine in to Calico to be updated; it is an older model, and they have changed the feed geometry a few times over the decades.
I’m lusting after one of the Marlin Dark series of lever guns lately – something that can take a red dot for my oldering eyes but still punch more than the pistol caliber lever guns. I like the idea of a .45-70 Marlin but I think the .30-30 one makes more sense – so basically this:
https://www.marlinfirearms.com/lever-action/model-336/model-336-dark-series
On the other hand – I really like the looks of the 1895SBL – I won’t link it here in order to avoid moderation purgatory, but I’m digging that stainless with grey stock look.
I suggest a Serbu BFG(heh, heh) rather than the Barrett, as it’s about 3 grand less expensive
If .45-70 was good enough for Sam Haven, it’s good enough for this bunch of derelicts. 😉
There have been shortages of ammunition and components since 09/12/2001. The ammunition industry’s excuse is “military contracts” tie up their production, but that excuse quit holding water, oh, seventeen or eighteen years ago. And they lobby hard to limit imported ammunition.
Eventually those easy government contracts are going away, but with minor exceptions (Starline!) I’ll still be buying Serbian brass, Korean primers, Filipino bullets, and Finnish powder.
You throw away your customer base, some portion of them notice and don’t come back.
The Obama administration also made massive gun and ammo buys as well, because “the local clerks at the social security office needed the guns and lots of ammo”-I wonder how much of that is now in the hands of Antifa, BLM and other friends of the “glorious socialist revolution”. And also how much of that ended up in the hands of Jihadists.
What became beyond annoying after about the second time I saw it (3091586390 times ago) is how for the last couple years EVERYONE who was paying a lick of attention knew that a month or two before this election Trump would start pulling gloves off and dropping hammers.
We get a month out. Trump starts pulling gloves off and dropping hammers. And the reaction?
“ZOMGWTFBBQ WHY IS HE DOING THIS!?!? DOES HE THINK HE IS LOSING!??!!?!?!?!?!?!??!!?!?!!?!?!?”
It’s all I can do not not say “Listen here you little shits; go curl up and die in your pathetic holes like you so obviously want to. Without your constant morale drain we could even win.”
Yeah. The only thing that terrifies me IS fraud. The rest? Bah.
Unfortunately “Dropping Hammers” will have no effect on the true blue (of course 2+2 =5) or on the easily confused of the swing votes. I’m afraid that if there was a picture of Obama actually killing a puppy they’d deny it. believing two impossible things before breakfast is something at which they are quite adept.
What swing votes?
As for the “true blue”, where they aren’t openly defecting to Trump, they are disengaging from the political system and burning down cities.
I’m already seeing the fringe sites turning on trump, because of his “personality”
Head>desk.
Ah yes.
BECAUSE NO ONE IN THE ENTIRE DAMN WORLD KNEW HE WAS AN ASS.
I don’t find him an ass. No, seriously.
IF he weren’t who he is,and his public persona weren’t what it is, he’d have melted by now.
He’s damned either way. He is definitely a self aggrandizing loudmouth who thinks out loud. So you get the stuff like blood disinfecting, a lot of the “lies” which are more hyperbole, and so on. Pls he doesn’t always mince our use best words. But when he tries to be “presidential” such as not getting into a dick measuring contest with putin or Xi, not donning hair shirt and screaming that sky is falling from kung flu and so on he gets berated for that.
All the people who work for him, love him and I don’t think we realize just how funny he is. My lefty sister worked for him back when she was in Engineering school and even she can’t find anything bad to say about him or his company since they treated their people better than anyone else did. She’s a positional good lefty. She would have been a fascist if that was what was required.
Do please remember that Trump is just a guy from Queens with a lot of money. His opponents are from the suburbs and desperately trying to hide the fact that their grandparents, who made all the money, were just a bunch of guys from Queens, or Brooklyn, or some other working class neighborhood.
There’s none whose sh-t don’t stink so much as Trump’ opponents. Look at them. Nancy the mafiosi, Nadler the grifter, Schumer, whatever the hell he was, All the Timesmen and Posters. Bow ties and neo cons. The frauds, the corrupt cops, The generals who are pouting because Trumpy wumpy took their warsies away. Biden paying, supposedly, $4mm in tax when he’s never had a salary more than $230k. His wife taught high school for G-do sake. Where’d the money come from? And don’t forget the reports on how the Obama’s that the servants.
Trump is an ordinary guy made great by comparison with his opponents.
> Where’d the money come from?
“Anonymous Conservative” would point at The Cabal. Which would be laughable, except for the truly impressive amount of circumstantial evidence he has collected in support of his ideas.
My answer to people who attempt to argue personality is strictly pragmatic. He may be a jerk, but he’s getting things done that I very much want. I’ll take actions over words. Some things I am willing to argue about, personality hasn’t been one of them. Usually stops right there.
Good answer. My friends who are still in the left plantation aren’t sane enough on Trump to argue with.
There was a parody article (in The Onion, iirc) about a struggle over how to frame a series of horrific serial killings that then-President Obama was committing.
Easy. Blame the Republicans
“if there was a picture of Obama actually killing a puppy they’d deny it”
Did I not lack artistic ability I would soooooo photoshop a picture of a royal Obama sitting at table while servant lifts the lid off a platter, revealing a roast puppy* with apple in its mouth.
*Spaniel? St Bernard? Dachshund?
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Dachsund clearly. Then the left could claim that everybody eats hot dogs don’t they?
Media then: “ROMNEY IS HITLER 2.0! MORMON THEOCRACY! BINDERS FULL OF WOMEN!!!”
Media now: “ROMNEY IS THE ONE TRUE SANE REPUBLICAN!!!”
Do they notice? Does he?
No, he doesn’t.
Think. Likely knowing he was robbed, he now imagines that of COURSE Trump MUST have cheated. And he’s mad. In all senses.
Sigh. The fact the left was SURE Trump would lose and failed to maufacture enough fake ballots wouldn’t occur tot hem.
One of the (many) reasons that a civil war needs to be avoided if possible is that it is likely to include a pogrom of all the “allies” who have done everything humanly possible to sabotage resistance to the gramascians.
Want to see a river of blood? That’d be it.
I don’t want to see the river.
I’ve two brothers who are, I am confident, yellow-dog democrat voters. They are misguided, not evil.
Of course, as one lives in Massachusetts and the other in New York, my North Carolina vote probably counts for more than both of theirs combined.
Electoral College for the win!
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Given Cuomo’s perfidy regarding nursing homes and the rioting, if New York’s election were conducted honestly, Trump would have a chance there. If won’t be and thus he won’t.
That’s another thing that goes by the wayside if Democrats win and pack the Court. I can even see them trying to create enough Democratic Party states to create enough to get the requisite amount needed to amend the Constitution.
Five populated territories that could be turned into states: American Samoa, Guam, P.R., Virgin Islands, and (a bit fuzzily) Northern Mariana Islands. Plus *shudder* D.C.
Some one with abundant time to spare could write a history (or perhaps a series of blog posts) titled “Strange New Respect.”
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RE: New Black Panther Party voter intimidation –
IIRC, the DOJ under Dubya did go after this. But when Holder took over, it was dropped supposedly over some technical legal problem with the case. The fact that the DOJ had already obtained a conviction in absentia (and that such a thing would have made the DOJ’s claims irrelevant) was ignored.
They didn’t even claim there was a problem with the prosecution. They dropped it purely out of “prosecutorial discretion”. No Judge Sullivan to take over the prosecution when they did so.
There was a weak explanation given afterwards when people confronted them about the case being dropped.
Yes, but that was after the fact and not included in their motion papers when they moved to drop the case.
I pretty much know that if it comes to a formal “blue vs. red” split, I’m probably going to lose my family and most of my friends. And, brothers and sisters and Great Aunt, as someone that has trouble dealing with human beings, that is going to make me hideously lonely. Perhaps enough to truly learn to be bisexual (i.e. use either hand, instead of just my right).
I’ve been getting rid of stuff from storage and such so that if I have to move to a more friendly state, I can do so. Worse case in the next few years (barring massive overreach), as long as I haven’t burnt all of my bridges and can keep up enough for the move back, I can get back to the family if things fall apart.
I will miss the ocean. I went to Bodgea Bay on Tuesday and it was a proper day for Bodega Bay, cool and somewhat foggy. Fresh clams in the clam chowder and you can tell the difference. I got to see a friend of mine that I haven’t seen for at least three years and age has given her a maturity to her beauty that I realize how much I miss human beauty in that regard.
But…while I would be overjoyed if the moment Trump wins, all of the wokescolds heads explode like the guy in Scanners, I know that they won’t recognize what they’ve done wrong. They won’t quit. They won’t surrender, not really. They’re in this for the long fight, because I think enough of them know that they have nowhere else to go. They have no other skills than the fight, in one form or another. Most of us over here are reasonably fungible in skills and we can go to most places.
If there is a feeling for them, it is incredible pity for them and the people that they have raised to think that they were “right”-that the Western world and America were the source of all evil. That they believe they can run everything and make it “perfect,” forever and ever more. That things can be made “fair,” without imposing a massive head tax of extra work to make things “fair.” And, in that zone of shadow is where scalawags and frauds can make the most profit.
And, yet, you can’t explain this to anyone without an emotional reaction. Without the words being so bent and twisted that black is white and up is down. That if we say the right shibboleth, everything gets fixed and made “right.” Work is not a concept, just the right words said in the right way by the right people.
I hate to say this, but we’ve been overdue for bad times. I just wished they weren’t bad times that had us set at each other’s throats in the classic Hellenistic mold.
We’re cleaning up/selling/donating and having massive work done on the house, so maybe we can move without losing our shirts….
Fingers crossed for all of us.
Where to though? If the Democrat Marxists intend to turn the US into something like an old Soviet model with the middle class/small businesses destroyed and only a ruling elite and an oppressed underclass, where can we go?
I don’t know. But not within the reach of Polis’ boot. The bitch is stupid AND malicious, a lethal combination.
Agree. Harris will first crush everything that is America and then eliminate us over time. Just don’t know where to go either.
Sit on yer hand a for a few minutes. 😛
I’m sure there was rampant cheating in 2012. There has been rampant Democratic cheating since at least 1960.
That said, Obama won re-election for four reasons: Romney didn’t defend himself or make a good case to change horses midstream, evangelicals weren’t going to vote for a heretic, the economy wasn’t good but better than it was in 2008, and people didn’t want to see The First Black President be a one ‘n done failure a la Jimmy Carter or Bush 41. I also think that Obama skulking about post-Superstorm Sandy looking presidential and bipartisan with then Gov. Chris Christie probably helped him in the last week before the election. The white working class that helped Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump to victory didn’t turn out for Romney either. Why? Ads running in the rustbelt with the guy who lost his job due to Bain Capital (Romney’s old company) and with it his health insurance as his wife was dying from cancer. Remember that one?
If America wants screechy, condescending, and smug Kamala Harris to be the next president after last night, higher taxes, a sluggish economy, endless riots, open borders, the states of Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, 29 SCOTUS justices, more foreign wars, perpetual lockdowns and mask mandates, and White Fragility re-education camps, then Donald Trump wasn’t going to save it. None of us could save such a place.
REALLY no. It wasn’t Romney, despite everything (Evangelicals weirdly tend to split 50/50). It was FRAUD. Just Fraud.
THIS is what I mean. The right immediately blames their candidate/their message and thinks America “wants’ this.
THAT is the most stupid thing we CAN do.
Funny how an FBI that can’t seem to identify who is backing and running Antifa is suddenly able to find a bunch of right wing white supremicist terrorists in a battleground state. Funny that.
I think it will backfire. Most people living under Whitmer are thinking “Why didn’t these clowns have a better plan?”
It’s about narrative. They can now point to real live white supremicists trying to overthrow the government. that this seems to be the gang that couldn’t shoot straight makes it perfect for the Gmen who are just a bunch of clowns who couldn’t pass the cop’s test. Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime as one of their forebears said.
They are not white supremacists. They are morons.
Not that actual white supremacists can’t be morons. Its kind of a prerequisite, actually. But these guys? Morons.
Not Ace approved morons of course. AoSHQ has higher standards. They even require pants on Sundays!
As an ‘ette from WAY back, I thank you for that distinction. 🙂
(I’ve even attended a get together two years ago. Next one if it happens, I’m taking younger son. He needs to meet non-leftist chicks.)
They are white supremacists because the narrative demands they be white supremacists, just as the narrative demanded Lee Harvey Oswald be an angry white-winger.
The “facts” are what the MSM needs them to be.
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Anarchist Morons (I repeat myself). The leader is seen sitting in front of a black flag with a giant red circled A. Either he’s an adulterer or an anarchist 🙂 . There is also video of him saying he hates Trump. Looks like he’s another violent Bernie Bro (this seems to be a theme). There is another variant US flag off to his right in the pictures I’ve seen but darned if I can see what it is. This feels like more of the deep state section of the FBI having one last push (putsch?).
About the most sympathetic view of the coverage I can imagine is a) typical FBI gloryhounding b) confusion over whether the anarchists are right wing or not.
If you are a sensible FBI agent, you are going to predict the case could be seen as political, and keep it quiet to avoid giving copycats ideas, and avoid hurting the chance of keeping violent crazies confined. As it is, it feels like a bad attempt at an October surprise.
It’ll be interesting to find out about the records that will be produced in court.
And the “Trump is at fault” trial balloon overlooks a thing. If he had somehow directed this, would that really be wrong for the Executive during a time of civil war? This is one of the Governors who would, if we understnad this as a civil war, be backing the insurrection and preventing republican forms of government. Lincoln’s ability to authorize an assassination plot against Davis does not appear to have been struck down by a court; so it might be a licit part of the executive power. Note that I am confident that we are not in a de jure civil war, that Trump does not currently legitimately possess Lincoln’s civil war time powers, and that civil war may be avoidable.
well, I think someone — Wretched Whitmer — tried to make him look Trumpish, because there’s also a video of him in front of a Trump flag. But they forget in the internet age you cannot clean everything up.
I think* I caught Whitmer trying to blame this on Trump’s rhetoric because of course she would. It couldn’t possibly be opposition to her abuse of illegitimate power and in Democratland all bad things are due to Trump.
*Once I saw Whitmer on screen I tuned out mentally because really, life is too short.
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RES Says:
*Once I saw Whitmer on screen I tuned out mentally because really, life is too short.
This shows that Wallabies as a species show a great deal of wisdom.
I have to apologize for reading the press rather than finding out what actually is. They’re not white supremicists, they’re anti Trump anarchists.
I’m embarrassed by my error but I’m also laughing hard. Trump is so lucky in his enemies.
Next stop is pointing this out to my lefty sister who gave me masses of snark because I’ve been arguing that the supply of white supremeicists outstrips demand by a huge margin.
…ah, that explains why the story has been suddenly dropped like a bag of bricks. They’re not evil white supremacist Trump supporters, but the people that are supposed to riot and cause havoc…on other people. Wow.
The press still considers the Trump hating nut who attacked the Pittsburgh Synagogue because he hated Trump’s support for Israel to be a Trump supporter. The Democrats and their propaganda arm are so blatantly dishonest with their lies they have made it clear that they view Oceania as a model to be emulated.
Consider how the MSM would be waving the bloody shirt had a James Hodgkinson targeted the Democrat softball team and creased Steny Hoyer.
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Whitmer Jussied it.
If the Democrats take the Oval Office, you can guarantee that America will give it sovereignty away to the U.N. before four years is out. The Green New Deal will be put in place. Gas will be $10 or more a gallon, if you can get it. Heating oil? Ha! Oh, and don’t bother trying to burn wood to stay warm. Hunting will be dead. Self defense will be outlawed. Expect at least a 60% tax rate on all wages. And a VAT that kills everything else.
A lot of people who consider their self image as Law Abiding would have to start making some very difficult decisions.
THIS. And this is why people going on about the “uniparty” make me want to shake the hell out of them till their teeth fall out.
Given the results of Democrats taking power after the election, if the election is disputed and it appears that Democrats trying to settle the dispute by trying to have the military remove Trump, if it appears Trump would not be able to remain the best result may be the military int taking over entirely rather then letting the Democrats take power either. I would rather live under authoritarian generals than Maoist Democrats. At least the military would or should understand the need for affordable energy and food.
IF Trump can’t beat them decisively and clean up the frauding, the BEST option is Starship troopers, seriously.
Yep. Because it is a lot better than the commies.
Problem is that in Starship Troupers the Generals were not in charge. If the armed forces have a massive mutiny I don’t want to think of the result. Especially of who controls the nukes and how to maintain deterrence.
Troopers.
The generals won’t be in charge. TRUST me on that…. Most of them, boot, piss, instructions on the heel.
Which means mutiny. Which means breakdown of command control and communications. Which means chaos,
Which means “one day the veterans had had enough….”
BEST case scenario. Unlikely, but best.
At the end of the day it’ll be the senior NCO’s who decide. Coups tend to be led by Colonels and the generals are usually politicians and too far away from the troops to determine if they’re loyal or not. The key thing is always will the troops fire on the people you want them too. when you cannot count on them, you’re done. Look at Louis XVI or Hosni Mubarak.
Or, depending on how far the leftist rot has spread, will they start firing on each other as the lefties fire on the Democratic Party’s political opponents and the non-lefties are so appalled they try to stop their lefty colleagues from murdering non-leftists.
Question is how many of the current flag officers are Maoists due to 8 years of Obama, or so compromised so as to be manipulable.
There is more than one possible cause for behavior that has been observed.
Bob asks:
Question is how many of the current flag officers are Maoists due to 8 years of Obama
I fear the answer is MANY of them perhaps a plurality. Anyone with any spine seems to have got tossed unless they kowtowed to the “LightBringer”.
And as to options, yes Starship Troopers is well nigh a best case option if things fall apart. Bad results are Kurt Shlichter’s divided America, Col. Kratman’s Caliphate or his Timmocracy are a subset of some of the ugly ones.
We can tell the minimum Democrats want to do after the election by looking at what Nancy Pelosi is trying to cram through with her stimulus bill before the election.
Nancy Pelosi’s ‘COVID relief’ bill is mainly just a left-wing wish list
[SNIP]
0 – her bill would rewrite election law for 2020, barring voter ID requirements, forcing states to count absentee ballots that arrive as late as 10 days after Election Day and imposing same-day voter registration everywhere,
0 – Pelosi’s version would fritter away hundreds of billions of dollars closing state and city budget gaps, with nothing long-term to show for it.
0 – Pelosi’s bill promises school districts $225 billion, but only $5 billion, or 2 percent, would go to making schools safer by improving air quality or installing sinks and other hygiene upgrades. The rest is a teachers union protection plan. Astonishingly, school districts that economize and reduce per-pupil spending or change labor contracts are automatically ineligible for stimulus funding.
0 – in Pelosi’s bill, the $600 billion-plus allocated to cities, states and school districts — a staggering amount equivalent to the nation’s entire defense budget — would be consumed plugging budget holes and be gone at the end of a year.
0 – The bill allocates $120 billion in grants for restaurants. New York City needs this help, because half its restaurants are on the brink of closing in the next six months, taking 160,000 jobs with them. Unfortunately, the funding is saddled with unfair, and possibly unconstitutional, preferences for minority- and women-owned businesses.
–
Other thoughts on Solomon’s nation:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/elements-revolution-are-all-place-don-feder-0/
See also today’s from Jim of Jim’s Blog, and SurakVulcan’s blog.
Which is the answer to most of your comments: like someone on the spectrum I’m trying to figure out how normals function. With the bonus of being caught between mutually contradictory ideologies, none of which can be categorically declared false.
I am currently trying not to be depressed.
I had a civil* conversation with my brother-in-law where he earnestly stated that: a trillion dollars has gone missing because of Trump, there is no credible evidence of voter fraud, Trump is destroying our political system, I should read David French and George Will, and that my vote for Trump doesn’t matter because I’m in Utah but his vote for Biden counts because he is in Arizona. My brother-in-law is better at arguing than I am. This conversation made me realize that many of my relatives have slotted my political opinions into the “flat earth society” category.
It’s hard though and when everyone around me disagrees, part of my brain keeps wondering if I’m the blind one who is wrong about everything. I hate confrontation, I hate fighting, and I just feel like a miserable coward. The bright side this week has been realizing that if the Left gets into power, we might get Futurama style suicide booths so I could at least put myself out of my misery.
*I can’t have a civil conservation with my brother on politics because we end up shouting at each other. My other brother and I have come to mutually agree that we think the other person is wrong. My sisters are apolitical, independent, Mormon nice, and a public school teacher. I think most of my family will be voting third party or Biden. At least they don’t want to cut me out their lives for supporting Trump.
Anyway, this blog helps me know that I’m not alone, the Left is the crazy side. If WordPress gets more censorious I hope Mrs. Hoyt can move the blog elsewhere and let me know.
The concentration camps that the Democrats build will have chambers for “assisted suicide”, involuntary ones of course.
Also given the left’s demand that everything be recycled and that raising animals for meat will cause a “climate catastrophe” I think it is safe to say that they will be introducing Soylent Green to the masses.
Sigh.
David French and George Will are being financed by left wing millionaires….
In fairness, /I/ am crazy.
If consensus were all that was necessary for sanity, than the Imperial Japanese during the later parts of WWII would be sane.
Inflexibly and automatically sticking with a consensus position, not considering any alternatives, is not always a sane position. Some questions do seem to only have a single good explanation.* Consensus in all circumstances is a good way to wind up party to at least one predatory manipulation scheme. And even if the opposition is wrong, being able to consider things as they might calculate them is a useful tool.
Locally, the earth is flat.
The people who make a performance of sneering at the flat earthers, and at the others deemed conspiracy theorists or science deniers, are in many cases not skilled enough to carry out measurements of the earth’s curvature. When you are genuinely skilled enough to do the measurements yourself, you realize that there are so many wrong people that obvious consensus deniers are not actually notable.
*It is possible that there are exceptions to thermodynamics. Planning that assumes an exception to thermodynamics is bad planning.
And vice versa; inflexibly and automatically rejecting something because everyone else is in favor of it isn’t a sane position either.
Wow. Your brother-in-law has drunk the Kool-Aid. Your family is living in a bubble, and you are their tentative connection to reality. The only consolation is that this sort of person can come back. Usually by getting caught up.in a different consensus and forgetting their previous opinions. Like a reset button for opinions.
By which I mean that some people do not put much importance on having deep personal opinions, religious devotion, etc. It is just like sports or a hobby to them, but they value the social cues and acceptance. So it’s not so much that they are NPCs, as that they really like having a social bandwagon. It can be dangerous, or it can be adaptive.
Ironically the thing that full panicked peddle to the metal was the strategy of simply not bending the knee when they say boo.
Most of the benefits of acceleration. Few of the downsides.
Bah. Accidentallyed the whole thing
“…the thing that sent the left into full panicked…”
“people around you”, as in literally neighbors? Then no. There have never been neighbors, only people who happened to live nearby.
This is true, and in fact what is slowly driving me insane. Something positive isn’t if it contradicts foundational beliefs (or vice versa; if a required belief says something is wrong that appears to be necessary).
um
wat
Leaving aside for the moment that this is all in the context of a country about to tear itself in half, if people fundamentally disagree on religion and politics how can there be civic agreement beyond the basics of emergency response?
Meh. This is Illinois: there is no “love of one’s city”, only hating it less than Chicago.
The country is about to be torn in half by propaganda, misinformation and bad actors.
IF half the country were on their side they wouldn’t need to bus rioters.
DO NOT CONFUSE enemy action for actual evil in the country. BAH.
Pedantic note: enemy action is evil in the country. 😀
Doesn’t help the person who is required to believe the country is evil, purely because it isn’t the particular sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-variant of christian theocracy.
Past that, I…. want…. to love America. Even if it feels like blasphemy to say it.
Generally the best I can do without running into severe dissonance or tripping an override is to hate the people who hate America.
It is going to be awfully difficult to distinguish enemy action from actual evil in this country. Many on the Left may be clueless, but they are cannon fodder and just as dangerous as knowing enemies.
Vincible ignorance does nothing more than mitigate guilt, supine ignorance does not affect guilt, and affected ignorance, if anything, aggravates it (because of the hardness of heart involved).
if people fundamentally disagree on religion and politics how can there be civic agreement beyond the basics of emergency response?
Fun topic.
Religion. You definitely need some commonality on religious or cultural values for civic agreement to occur, but this is compatible with profound religious disagreements.
There are limits, probably, but exactly what they are is not a solved problem. There was an incompatibility between the state cult of the Aztec Triple Alliance, and the Catholic Church of hundreds of years ago. There may be a true incompatibility between Christians and Communists.
Political disagreement and civic agreement is a little simpler. There are several different kinds of political disagreement, which are of different degrees of importance. Forex, policy disagreements, factional disagreements, and disagreements about what political tactics are allowable.
Quite profound disagreements in some areas can be tolerated if there is a compatible consensus about allowable political tactics. The basic situation goes as follows: 1. Many Americans are a mixture of small r republican and small d democratic in their sense of appropriate tactics. 2. A majority or most do not fully correlate the contents of their minds, and hence do not observe conflicts such as that between being completely republican in tactics, and completely democrat in tactics. 3. Sense of tactics, generally, is a mish mash of beliefs learned by imitation, not rigorously tested to destruction, and bending to the influence of circumstance. An individual’s sense of tactics exists, but may well not be describable in closed form. What consensus exists, exactly, can not be nailed down in any definite way. 4. I forget what I was thinking about for here, but cultural consensus can definitely change, ‘non-linearly’, and not entirely predictably. We should be very cautious in expecting consensus to confirm to this or that theoretical model.
On the one hand… Protestants and Catholics killed a lot of each other.
On the other hand they mostly don’t now.
On the gripping hand Islam still does.
You might benefit from the Liogonier ministries DVD collection of Church history. Helped me understand why the North American/US denominational cease fire happened, which includes the relative peace now between Protestants and Catholics.
Islam? Presuming that peace with it is truly possible, I would observe that the level of influence on Islam of US muslims versus Mid East muslims is probably not yet on the level of influence on Catholicism of US Catholics versus, say, Mid East Catholics. France, Spain, Italy, South America, etc, are not the festering messes that the Mid East is, or at least, has been.
Many of the wars between Protestant and Catholic were tied to state established churches.
Islam has a lot of ambitions remaining towards state/church mixtures. Communism apparently cannot avoid state/church mixtures, because the promise of their church is realized through the state.
Mmhmm. The combination of Church and State is one of the shorter paths to creating Hell on Earth.
ANY ideology driven state is. Religion? Depends on the religion. Israel seems to be doing okay.
I don’t know enough about Israel. I thought it was an ethnostate not a ideostate?
Oh, dear.
I don’t mean in the #(^#@()#^#()&$(@^$ alt-right lunatic sense, but in the technical “If you are an ethnic Jew you get citizenship” sense.
Yeah, but a) they are making an attempt at being inclusive* of other ethnicities and religions b) don’t seem to be doing too terribly at it.
*inclusive is not the best word, but I’m a little bit poorly slept and stressed to be finding the perfect words. I know that there is some technical jargon that amounts to equal protection for residents and equal duties for citizens, and isn’t regularly used in leftwing propaganda.
The fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam vis a vis government is that Christianity (and Judaism) recognize a fundamental difference in turf that government and religion are responsible for; thus Jesus’ “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s”.
Islam has no equivalent. In Islam the concept of separation of church and state not only does not exist. but is heretical. The state in Islam is fundamentally a tool and instrument of the religion and exists only so far as it serves and advances the religion and religious law; i.e. Sharia.
Thus, Islam simply does not recognize free speech or free exercise of religion, and why there has been such an effort to impose blasphemy laws. Under Sharia, speech which is contrary to Islam is simply strictly forbidden, whether by a Muslim or non-Muslim and whether the speaker is speaking from within the Muslim state or not. Further, such speech is to be punished.
Sharia cannot exist within a system that recognizes rights such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights because any exercise of such rights in a way which is contrary to Sharia is not allowed, thereby rendering such enumerated rights meaningless.
There are hard left Democrats, who follow the political tribe, but at the same time have internalized a strong sense of the traditional American political tactical norms. The ones with little fear of ostracism can perhaps be trusted not to be wholly incompatible with civilization.
Oh, reminds me. The thing about the people who are following the hard left nutjobbery because they bow to consensus? It makes sense that they might also be persuadable to follow a hard right or a moderate appearance of consensus.
They will change so fast it will make your head spin.
<Has seen it.
And if someone has the nerve to show them their own before and after statements the screaming will start.
Such are humans.
I’ve been thinking about this. We can actually take some comfort that they’re psychopaths who don’t actually believe any of this nonsense and can be trusted to follow their interest. They’ll screw it up because they’re incompetent but they’re not going to want to knock over their rice bowl.
My wife was poll volunteer in 2012. We lived in New Rochelle New Yorkat the time. Obviously New York was going to the dems. What was jarring to my wife was that it didn’t matter they still cheated. It was obvious who the Democrat poll workers were vs the Republicans. They “helped” people fill out their ballots they made no attempt to validate peoples signatures. The GOP workers wer euniformally decent they respected the rules and believed in representative government. Regardless of who wins we are in big trouble as a society.