Speak!

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

On the first weekend of this month, at the meeting with my fans at Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax, a young and enthusiastic fan/friend/adopted nephew got to talking about politics.

He is not a leftist, and he was speaking very loudly.

Pete’s is not exactly downtown, but it’s on the periphery, and area solidly liberal. It is also frequented mostly by people who have been taught they’re down and out because of those evil non-leftists. I never inquired, though we’ve been going there for decades, but it is quite possible, not to say likely, that our favorite waitress is leftist. (Going on clothing, demeanor, tattoos. Which could be completely wrong, btw. G-d knows I dress liberal (mostly through not giving that much of a hang about how I look most of the time).)

I started to tell him to tone it down. And then shut up.

Why?

Sure. It’s “rude” to speak politics loudly enough to be heard in the entire area (though to be fair, he could only be heard in the immediate vicinity which was empty except for busboys and servers.) Or at least I’ve been discommoded by conversations from the next table.

If you search my past posts, about 10? years ago, I went for a writing-weekend away and the table next to us was filled with people our age who should know better, talking about how stupid Americans were because we didn’t wish to give government more power. I HELPFULLY engaged them in discussion by telling them to keep their ignorant mouths shut about things they didn’t understand. Mind you, if instead of being offended, I’d be perfectly willing to discuss it with them.

And here’s the thing, okay? Think about it: of all the times, in every public place where you heard a table/group/party loudly discuss politics. How many times were the politics even vaguely center or the right of Lenin?

“But that’s rude!” you say.

Yes, it sure it. And yes, the left sure does it.

And then we’re surprised they have absolutely no clue who we are, that they buy into the stories the left and their pet media tell, that they think of people who don’t believe in socialism/communism as bigoted evil, and full only of hate.

Well, what would you think if those people were afraid to speaking up, of even mentioning their politics in public, much less defending their opinions.

But Sarah, you’ll say, what can we do? How can we do that if they will just cancel us/take everything we own/destroy our livelihoods/attack our families and loved ones?

You can stand out against evil.

Look, I know any number of you HAVE to stay quiet at work. I know any other number of you keep quiet around your aged parents, obeying the Biblical injunction to respect them.

I’m not saying to break that, not really. Not unless you have a place to fall should they take away your way of making a living.

But this is the stuff communist dictatorships is made of. And now we know — and I want to put this very bluntly to all of you out there who think that voting third party or not voting this election is cute — what waits us if Biden wins.

It’s not just the truth and reconciliation commission, the packing of the court, the destruction of the constitution by writing a “modernized” one. All of that and more is on the way.

Oh, it won’t look like it’s all gone, and my friends who are naive and count on the constitution and the forms of the republic protecting them will be thrown a sop. After all, all the communist regimes had a loyal opposition, who were given crumbs from the table and allowed to exist.

But you and I won’t be. Not as free people.

2020 has shown us exactly what is going on, and how far they’re willing to go, both for power and to hide their corruption, their vices, their utter debasement. What they’re willing to do is appalling, not just what the media is willing to do, but the elected democrats in various states, and the FBI and the agencies who took oaths to protect America (I wish on them the hell of oathbreakers.) It also amounts to selling our country out to the Chinese Fascists. Who are actual fascists and will destroy everything of value in the US as they remake us in their image. This will save the rule of the CCP and extend it all over the world.

Will we rise again? Maybe. But none of us reading this now will see it. Do you wish that on your children and grandchildren? Will you throw away your vote on a third party, or not vote, even if it might save us?

The worst part is that I can see this going on, and the right staying quiet. Because we have jobs and families and lives.

Until we don’t. If you give up your liberty, the government can take anything else from you at the drop of a hat. And will. Look at China.

Again, I’m not asking you speak out if it will make you destitute (not yet) or that you speak out if it will break your elderly parents hearts (not yet.) And I’m definitely not asking you to put your name on anything that will target you for reprisal. Yeah, I’ve done it, but at this point in time that’s just stupid. Because they will come for you. At least don’t do it, if you’re not ready to fight back.

But I know more mixed marriages than I care to mention. And the conservative is always quiet, even as the leftist spouse needles, attacks, and snarks on a regular basis.

“Because I love her/him” and “take our marriage seriously.”

No. No, you don’t. And in fact you don’t have a marriage. You never did. And don’t tell me “My wife/husband just thinks I’m stupid.” Some marriage.

It always baffles my friends in this situation when the children of the union then embrace the left. Well, why shouldn’t they? Did you ever defend your point of view? You have moral and justice on your side, why not explain that? Why not explain that we can’t go on like this? that we’re effectively being destroyed/invaded/perverted by people who mouth pieties and are in fact human horrors?

Sure, it might end your marriage. But if it does, how much of a marriage was it?

And that applies to friendships too, at least those that won’t cost you your way of life.

Look, many on the left are knaves, villains, horrible human beings. But a lot of them aren’t. They just never hear the other side of the story.

We’ve allowed leftism to become social signaling for being “good people.”

We don’t speak out against things like addicted ferals taking over our downtowns, because we don’t want to be thought heartless…. even though the policy of mollycoddling the mentally ill and anti-social is destroying livelihoods of business owners and property owners, and just working people who can’t afford to leave.

We don’t speak out against the COVID restrictions, because we don’t want to be thought heartless. Even though this is gutting the constitution and making us effective slaves, preparing us for take over by people who don’t respect individuals at all.

We want to be cool and hip, even as the left is making disagreeing with them unacceptable.

And we censor ourselves in public. In the rare times we don’t, sometimes we get weird looks, like people are going “but he/she is so nice.”

You need a lot of those experiences of reality to break through the indoctrination.

The hour is perilous. Win or lose — and be aware we might lose, because fraud will be unimaginable — it is time to speak up.

Yes, I know the potential costs. I’ve paid them.

They’ve removed their masks. Will you remove yours? At least a little bit?

Will you teach the children now? Before it’s too late?

598 thoughts on “Speak!”

  1. Well said, and yes, it IS time to speak up. Also to actually listen to what others are saying, not just automatically dismissing their comments. Facts do still ‘win’ over feelz/emotions/lies, IF the others are willing to actually do the same…

  2. It’s not rude to be impolite to the rude.

    Basic game theory requires returning tit for tat: they need to wear the shoes they’ve cobbled and we’re under no obligation to adhere to rules they break. Only when <DELBOTH ALL sides agree to tone it down can we return to status quo ante.

    But be wary walking through the parking lot.
    –

  3. Right now I’m afraid that if I start “Speaking Out”, I’ll go too far (by my standards).

    Sarah, I understand what you’re saying but the Politics this year is depressing and my very nasty side comes out when I’m fighting depression. 😦

          1. Honestly I don’t know how to convey the threads that I see which cash out as “Trump, Historic Landslide”. Many of them aren’t even conscious.

            If I’m wrong I’ll take my licks. If not I’ll gloat, once.

              1. Either way it is going to be a stressful week. I have a rifle that needs sighting in, and a bunch of other stuff to do.

                Hmmm, what are the requirements for a guest post?

                  1. Does it cover the margin of fraud?

                    That said, the markets have begun to think the big blue wave might not happen. They had been betting on huge monetary inflation and bailouts, essentially MMT. There’s some rumbling among the big guys. They’re all in favor of a Blue wave since they have first access to the newly printed money and inflation is good for them, not to speak of their investments in China and companies that have sold their souls to China. Taxes don’t matter to them since they own the people who write the tax code.

                    Also, the democrats aren’t acting like they’re winning. Even here in deep blue NJ our congress critter, spit, is running scared. If only I knew who the republican running against Booker was. I’m actually not sure if there even is one but I’m not going to vote for Booker.

                    What I’m hoping for is a Boris Johnson result. None of the polls were right and the ordinary people stuck a stick in the elite’s eye.

                    1. Newly printed money is great if you get it first.

                      You spent it into the system, so you get to use it at the old prices.

                  2. There is no such thing as a sure thing. You can always fail. Hillary was a sure thing, until she failed to appreciate just how vile people found her to be. Even 4 years later she can’t understand it; and neither can her fans.

                    A Trump or Biden victory isn’t assured at this time. The ball is in play. What we must do is make sure we have enough of us to push the President’s ball over the goal line. Until that happens, nothing we do arguing with the refs is going to change the bad calls.

                    Vote like your life depends on it, because it does.

                2. I find this listing of Minnesota going red suspect. Reagan didn’t even get Minnesota and he carried California in ’84.

                  Although if Trump does carry Minnesota, he can claim he did something Reagan didn’t.

                    1. That’s what gets me about the Democrats going along with the rioters (actually, I tend to assume they run them); what good do they expect it to do them? Even when it was ‘just’ bands of Antifidiots mucking up traffic, who is that going to convince to vote Democrat? Nobody who wasn’t going to already. OTOH, how many irritated and scared commuters are going to think, “Whatever happens, those bastards don’t get MY vote.”

                      Sure, if this was Weimar Germany, intimidation might work. It ain’t. Maybe the most isolated Liberals will knuckle under, but they were sure Democrat votes anyway. The rest of the Citizenry? They get pissed.

                      People are talking about Trump getting 20% of the Black vote. What I don’t see is analysis of how many will decide that if the Democrats will stab them in the back by burning their cities, screw voting, sleeping in is a better option.

                    5. Sarah, they THINK they’ve managed to hang it on right wing racists. Which beggars belief. If I see a bunch of left wing loonies tearing up my neighborhood, and no evidence of White Supremacists in sight, I’m voting for whoever DIDN’T leave the loonies loose.

                      And I suspect that a lot of moderately sensible people will feel the same way. And the nonsensical people were going to vote Democrat anyway.

                    6. Ummm…what parts haven’t?

                      Sarah: Right wing or left wing, it’s the Democrats enabling abetting their rampage. If it really was a bunch of ‘right-wing white supremacists’ the Democrats would be all over that, right? They’d be thrown in jail and paraded on the news every night for weeks. Instead it’s all left-wingers and the Democrats bail them out in an hour — IF they get arrested at all.

                      The racists and white supremacists are Democrats, as they have been for the last 180 years. Biden is one of them.
                      ———————————
                      The Democrats are willing to burn America to the ground, so long as they wind up squatting on top of the ashes.

                    8. I’m not sure if you are being excessively clever, or obtuse.

                      I’m talking about the riots. Big blue cities get torched. Podunk Redneckville doesn’t.

                    10. Yes, but Minnesota already proved it can steal statewide elections when they stole the Senate seat from Coleman and but Al Franken in the Senate in 2008. They have one of the most radical leftist AG’s in the country in Keith Ellison. Trump could win an honest election in Minnesota but I just don’t see him beating the margin of fraud.

                  2. Ronald Reagan carried California in 1980 and 1984. He’d been a two-term governor of the Golden State. Dems had a tough time convincing us Californians that he would Blow Up The World!

                  3. Well, he was running against MN homeboy Mondale, making us the *only* state to go blue*. That has a massive effect. Though, granted, it’s not a shoe-in, see Gore being rejected by Tennessee in 2000.

                    * How *did* it transpire that the Reps ended up represented as red? Considering the history, I’m convinced that the Dems should be the ones signified with red. I suspect it’s a not-so-subtle attempt at a syllogism-driven psy-op: Red = danger, lets associate Republicans with red so that people will have a subconscious association of Republicans = danger.

                    2. How *did* it transpire that the Reps ended up represented as red?

                      Florida.

                      Before the whole Hanging Chad junk, “red” was just whoever wasn’t in office.

                      After spending months with Red=Republican, Blue=Democrat, it kinda stuck.

                    3. Not whoever was in office. It flipped every year.
                      The left stopped letting it flip with CLINTON.
                      As they went more increasingly communist, they were afraid we’d realize it.

                    4. I figured the Marxists assumed ignorance and stupidity of Americans, and thought that we were only concerned about their programs and ideas because someone told us to hate the ‘Reds’. So they made sure the media switched the colors.

                      I have this idea for a comic, where the first panel is in the past showing the conspirators making the anti-socialist side red to fool the peasants. Then the second panel showing ‘today’ american Marxists attending a world Marxist convention, and cringing and wondering why everyone is a republican there. 😉

                    5. Bush/Gore.

                      The stations were in the habit of flipping colors every year, but that year they had red as Republican and blue as Democrat and we were REAL OBSESSED with it. So it stuck

                3. I hope that there’s enough “Hell No, we’re not going to support the eedjits that let Minneapolis burn” in Minnesota to make this prognostication correct, but this is the state that sent Al Franken and Ilhan Omar to D.C.. MN hasn’t backed a Republican for President since 1972. And that’s not counting the massive election fraud already documented by Project Veritas here . . .

                    2. I know, but I can’t hit people with the Wifflebat Of Hope over the intertubes.

                      Also there are reports all over the country of early voters looking for how to change their vote.

                    3. Sarah,
                      Something is scaring you, and your best explanation of it is the fraud.

                      Emotions are not the product of a state machine that weighs all evidence rationally and logically.

                      In a situation like this, where the evidence is not yet unambiguously 100% certain, we cannot use evidence to exclude models and conclude that “Sarah is worried, and should not be” or that “Bob is in denial, because he thinks he can pull the big project off.”

                      And if that sounds too sane to you, remember, I’m not necessarily a case like the Atlantic soap bridge guy, where you can infer that the structural calculations are hampered by the same factors hampering the buoyancy calculations. It may well be that I’m sane enough in cases where a) I’m not angry b) none of the physical issues have cost me sleep c) I’m not particularly fixated d) it isn’t one of the topics where I’m always going to have crazy/outside of the culture conclusions.

                      Of course, my very early childhood experiences, and personal troubles later in life, leave me very interested in the matter of maintaining mental health. And some later, but prolonged, experiences leave me grateful whenever I think I see a case where I might be able to give advice on mental problems, and I’m not sure to make matters worse. I’ve known people, who even if you saw things clearly, would do the opposite if you dared say something they didn’t want to hear. Very frustrating, well beyond my ability to help in a reliable or permanent way.

                      Folks here at least won’t jump off a bridge to defy me, if I suggest it is a bad idea, and make my case. And y’all don’t take me so seriously that I have to be careful in formulating advice so that people don’t take injury from it.

                      So, it may that I have not found the best combination of orthodox thinking and sound thinking on how to approximate sanity. Perhaps it is mind breakingly unorthodox, or profoundly flawed. Or maybe the specifics of my lower worrying about the election are wrong.

                      We are a week out, and there may be a little more that you can do with your political non-fiction. Maybe the emotional intensity helps with that. On the other hand, argument from a place of calm can also be very persuasive.

            2. I’m not generally optimistic. I like to think I’m realistic, though my husband says I’m a pessimist. I just rode through PA, VA, MD, and saw WAAAYYY more Trump signs than 2016 and hardly any Biden signs. Considering at least some of those are blue states, there should still be shy Trump voters. I’m feeling better about this. We’re still looking at the margin of cheat, so get out there and blow them away!!

              1. *No* political signs here, for either candidate. Less than a dozen in 2016, all Trump. I guess yard signs aren’t a “thing” here…

          2. I was amused when a young coworker thought he’d shock me by saying he knew how to make napalm. Shocked him when I recall the ‘recipe’ and informed him that anyone who was in grade school (in the US) in the 1970’s likely knew. It was quite literally one of those things I picked up by accident. And I suspect is at least part of the REAL reason a certain old-fashioned sounding household item is now made with a different chemical base.

            1. *Snort* Nobody has tried THAT one on me, yet, so I’ll share my “eye roll that’s old news” option– ask if they have found Al Qaeda’s magazine, yet.
              Called Inspire.

              My husband (the Force Protection geek) is the one that brought it to my attention, with much rueful laughing because it’s got higher production values than any of our military linked magazines.

              Not exactly a secret, here, they covered it in GQ of all places, since the Marathon bombers may have gotten tech tips from it:

              https://www.gq.com/story/inspire-magazine-al-qaeda-boston-bombing

                1. I’m pretty sure the poetry, fiction and imagination magazine I got as a child was Inspire, and I know there are at least a couple of other magazines with the same name.

                  It’s like the bad guys don’t see the value in avoiding trademark infringement!

            2. I know at least three ways to make a car into a bomb but lack any practical experience. Spending time with my Antrim cousins had interesting effects, not that they had practical experience either but it was what you talked about in the six counties when I was young.

                1. The incendiary grenade type would seem to be trivial (but I shall not go into any details, just to avoid ‘aiding and abetting’ fools). I have mixed an alcohol (potable ethanol, dear spooks) cocktail and found that the result was unworthy of the ingredients. Even *bottom shelf* vodka deserves better.

                  1. Well,pshaw! I spent the ’70s underground with nuclear missiles. Never ever got the chance to launch any of them. Always had the hankerin’, though.

              2. Any rural folks who were paying attention growing up know how to make ANFO. Good for clearing stumps, don’t you know… (For those not in the know, “ANFO” is ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, both items in common use on pretty much any farm, which combine to make a dandy low-brisance explosive…)

                1. And as a public service message in praise of our conscientious unbiased Federal agents, due to certain historical uses of this mixture the Feds now closely monitor the various ag supply chains for large or even medium-sized spikes in purchases of diesel and/or ammonium nitrate fertilizer.

                  1. They also add taggants, just like the ones in more obvious explosives like smokeless powder. The fertilizer in your garage can be traced.

                1. Under the driver’s seat? Hell, it’s right in the driver’s face!

                  Front passenger’s face, too.
                  –

            4. *shakes head*

              There are things that old men know that the young never even wonder about. Men of a Certain Age and those of Certain Work History know a few other things, too. This has been true for many a generation, but I do wonder if there ever was a generation so insulated from the sweat, blood, and grit than this latest.

              And in all those many, many years, the -REDACTED- remain un-REDACTED-. Life goes merrily, blissfully along. Grim talents remain unused.

              I get the temptation. I really do. To say. To do.

              But we do not and will not. Not unprovoked, and even then, a response not out of proportion to the threat. There are enough training manuals for little would-be devils out there. Some of them even have a bit of accurate information. I see no need to add to them.

              In the coming business, which will happen no matter which candidate wins the election, may the instigators and the opportunists get what’s coming to them, good and hard. I’ve no patience for violent fools. But neither do I wish to create martyrs. Capture, prosecute, sentence, and serve. It’s high time the rule of law was laid down properly.

              1. Not sure why “men of a certain age” triggered this thought, but– I wonder if the move away from 100 proof alcohol of all sorts is related to this knowing stuff thing, in any way.

                1. Hrm. Possibly. May not be the proximate cause, but could well have something to do with it.

                  I quit drinking twenty years ago, so I only use it to cook with these days. I do recall carious whiskies, vodkas, and rums of decently strong proof. And moonshines of absurdly strong proof, but the less said of that, the better.

                  There are other pressures on the sale of and consumption of alcohol. Wars, Prohibition and its aftermath, the economy all likely had greater overall impact.

                  Also, good high proof alcohol that’s drinkable tends to be not cheap. Those that acquire the taste for it had better have the means, as it were.

                  But the knowing stuff, yes, I do believe it results in a higher likelihood of the possessor of said knowledge desiring a drink or three more often than your average fellow. *grin*

                  1. I would like some high-proof alcohol that isn’t drinkable, as long as it’s clear. Stick it in a spray bottle and it’s invaluable for dealing with stinky costumes that maybe can’t go through a washing machine. (Or there isn’t time to put them through a washing machine.)

                    2. In theory; in practice, the bittering agents are “iffy” and the “so people don’t drink it on accident” stuff stinks worse than BO.

                    3. Bottom-shelf vodka’s what my mother always buys.

                      And you can always add a little bit of detergent to it if you’re worried about the dressers sneaking sip between scenes.

                      I’m sure you already know that, though. ^_^

                  1. I, uh, kinda know about the whole “nothing is 100 proof anymore, there’s just Everclear and 40% alcohol by volume” because setting it on fire is usually more fun than drinking it……

                    2. *mischievous grin* I feel like I need to start explaining my price-point is way, way low…..

                      More seriously, whiskey use to be something where if you couldn’t set it on fire, you’d get in trouble. At least in the high desert of Nevada…. and now it’s 80 proof.

                      Hm, come to think of it, may be an attempt to avoid various laws about what proof can be sold in different markets–Washington state is so insane my mom smuggled everclear in for the vet for quasi-medical use, and I know several breweries got hit with being over-X-percent-alcohol on their beer, so why not something trying to backdoor outlaw whiskey?

                  1. *ear perk* Oooh, where? I know that Jack Daniels dropped to 80, and when that went over poorly started releasing various “special” cuts that were closer to the old can-actually-burn levels, but I literally couldn’t find anything over 80 that wasn’t everclear or similar in all the states I’ve tried since at least six years ago.

                    Not like I’m going to be able to spend a lot for stuff to set on fire, but…..

                    1. Southern MN. I figure Sazerac rye has always been 90 proof, but Bulleit is 90 as well, and the Redemption was 92 or 94. Even the classic Old Overcoat (Overholt) went to the 100 proof of Bottled-in-Bond. I *think* there is one rye available locally that might still be 80 proof. And I recall seeing one, a Canadian brand, that was “light” (their claim) that was diluted down to 70 proof.

                      $HOUSEMATE’s favorite bourbon (Woodford Reserve) is 90.4 proof.

                      On a recent trip to Wisconsin I did pick up a bottle of 190 proof rectified spirits (not the Everclear brand – why pay for the name?) but that is NOT for drinking. It’s cleaner/solvent/fuel/disinfectant…

                    2. In my world, Everclear is pain killer for cows.

                      …like, normal cows.

                      If you splash it on the area you need to cut, and then rub like you would normal disinfectant, and splash a bit more, they don’t feel the knife going in.

                      Been to several c-sections where everclear was the primary scent.

                      Never had the least desire to touch the stuff for anything but setting it on fire. (I like alcohol, but prefer stuff that likes me back– say, R&R, or at least Fireball.)

                    3. I wonder if it’s the result of some direct anesthesia (rubbed in alcohol) and evaporative cooling since bovine body temperature is a bit high and ethanol readily vaporizes. Have NO desire to experiment on myself in that regard.

            5. My 70’s high school Chem I text book had the formula for making thermite. A much more useful tool IMHO.

              1. In middle school (40 years ago), the Encyclopedia Americana had fairly detailed instructions for the production of nitroglycerin. Recent editions not so much . . .

      2. This is why it is always better to keep things civil when out in public. Because you don’t have a plan for what to do with the bodies.

        Only half kidding, this being 2020.

      1. Not me. The worst part of lying in the ER is next week is National Light Rioting Leftists on Fire Week and I might miss it.

        2. I’ve purchased popcorn, and I have plans to caramelise it and some pecans.

          Good luck, y’all. Prayin’ for you.

          And I’ve had to drop out of pretty much all social media that brings up politics, because it’s depressing and annoying. My mother tells me the Communists back home in the Philippines are making hue and cry about a would-be terrorist’s baby having died because the child was taken from the mother and died while being cared for by the woman’s mother. “Sanctity of life,” they cry, but then refuse to talk about the teacher who was heading into the provinces to deliver teaching modules, and was killed by the ‘New People’s Army’ (the local Communists. “New” since decades before I was born, mind.)

        3. Nah. You’ll wake up in the ER, with nobody around, and it will be like the first episode of the Walking Dead.

    2. Heh, the first thing I thought of was the Queensryche song, from Operation: MindCrime.

      Speak the Word
      The Word is all of us

      Seven years of power, the corporation claw
      The rich control the government, the media, the law
      To make some kind of difference, then everyone must know
      Eradicate the fascists, Revolution will grow

      Dayum, that’s a great album.

  5. Several years ago, right after Libya got taken off the “don’t go there” list, independent journalist Michael J Totten went there to see what was what. One of the things he discovered while there was that literally 20% of the people are paid government informants, so no one dared speak to him unless they were alone.

    He returned to his home in Portland, OR and went to a local coffee shop where there were several loud conversations right out in public complaining about what a horrible police state we were all living in under Chimpy McBushitler.

    He said he was *sorely* tempted to go over to one of the tables and say “Secret Police! You’re under arrest!” to point out just how ridiculous the idea that we’re in a police state when one openly disdains the government and president without fear, but he forebore and instead just put it in his daily blog post, ruminating that the people in that coffee shop wouldn’t last a day in Libya as they had no clue what a real police state was like.

          1. Eh … I got my ‘Michael who is an independent and self-supported freelance genuine reporter’ commonly linked by Insty all mixed up.
            I got stuff going on – serious home reno project and hand-holding the Daughter Unit, who is expecting my first grandchild.

            1. I started reading him way back in the day when someone linked his essays on traveling in eastern Oregon—the part that’s basically a whole lot of nothing and geology. Then several months later, he wondered online “What’s really happening in Iraq?” and it went from there.

    2. The idea that a mildly Right President in any way resembled the Despicable Austrian always struck me as one of the sillier assertions of the Fascist Left.

      Not that they aren’t constantly coming up with new silly.

      1. To them anyone to the right of Lenin is considered no different than the Despicable Austrian

      2. Based on the fact that he vanished completely from the moonbat collective consciousness as soon as he left office, their main problem with W was that after being elected he actually was in office, and quell horreur was even reelected, serving his full two terms.

        His quiet and unmolested retirement indicates his Hitlerness was apparently reversible and transitory, to the extent that it’s now okeydokey for W to be palling around with Bubba for their charitable efforts.

        2. Mostly. Remember that certain folks were trying to cancel Ellen for merely having a polite conversation with him at a football game. Which just goes to show the extent of their idiocy.

        3. The Left analyses everything in power dynamics. Just as their definition of racism entails possession of power, so too with their definition of Hitler. To be a Hitler requires the person a) be conservative (sort of – mostly it means Republican) and b) president (although for local application it may involve governorship, mayoralty, sheriff, or even student government office.)

          Thus Trump is Hitler because he is a Republican in power; nothing more is required. He is denying the ice cream and lollipops that constitute the Progressives’ wish list.

          Once he leaves office he loses Hitler status and becomes just one more Rethuglican, not socially acceptable except when he criticizes current Republicans for not giving Progressives everything they want.
          –

          1. But, all these Democrat governors ruling by decree are the ones acting like Hitler! And they didn’t even bother with the token formality of getting an Enabling Act passed first!

            2. When as Governor you accept that laws are simply set decorations for fooling the little people, you are free to disregard those “laws” when you really, really want to, and can transform your entire state into a prison with you as the warden – as long as you keep the guards (all state employees) in line.

              Gretch simply failed to preposition sufficient dirt on her state supremes to keep them in line. If she had photos like someone does on Roberts she’d still be set.

                1. 1 ea. Lamp-post.
                  1 ea. Rope.
                  1 ea. Crooked Politician.
                  Some assembly required.

                  There ARE limits.

                    1. Naw, piano wire makes it quicker! I’m with the Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman):

                      “I’m going to cut his heart out with a SPOON!”

                      “Why a spoon, cousin?”

                      “Because it’s DULL, you twit! It’ll HURT more!”

              2. And in an “odd” bit of timing, guess who’s raising the spector of locking down the state again?
                Why it’s Gretch!

                Hmm, prognostication time for me…
                Nov 1st Gretch gets on the various media and sorrowfully states that the state is going to have to be locked down again, HARD. Sorry, we’re going to absolutely restrict the number of people in any space, minimum 6ft spacing between people, all that happy horse-hockey. And, oh yeah, that includes polling places.
                Nov 3rd, lines at the polls stretch hundreds of yards, and wait times are several hours at a minimum.

                Also on Nov 1st, would you look at that? All the polls are indicating that the early / mail-in / drop box ballots will be giving Michigan to sleepy Joe! Isn’t that a coincidence that we’re going to have to lock down right after that?

                Ugh, what does it say that I can see this happening?

      3. Consider that people like the Flunked Artist need a large scapegoat class to blame when radicalizing people. Now consider the video of the 20+ people screaming at a woman for not raising her fist in a heil BLMler.

        This isn’t new silly, this is the same old thing. Except Americans aren’t Germans, and the Right is far better armed than the Jews were.

        -Albert

        1. > the Flunked Artist

          The preponderance of evidence is that the headmaster at the art school rejected and insulted young Adolf because he didn’t think much of Adolf’s parents and had the opportunity to take it out on their kid. Later in life, Adolf was actually able to support himself by his painting; commercial art, and not much money, but better than 99.99% of “artists” ever manage.

          That ought to be a warning about gratuitously shitting on people.

          1. Great – In addition to actually protecting Hitler, now the Time Police also have to protect that headmaster from time-traveling-assassins so young Hitler does not become a successful happy well-adjusted illustrator.

      4. Yeah, that.

        Are you in jail or a camp for speaking your piece at this moment? No? Then this President is not ‘literally The Despicable Austrian’.

        1. I’ve been saying, since back in the Bush administration, “If ‘x’ was in any way like Hitler, you would be hiding under your bed, too scared to speak.”

    3. I was recounting to a friend how bribery was common behind the Iron Curtain. We practised it too – on the people regularly coming into our apartment and going through our things, because y’know, Diplomats = Spy allowed in. Needless to say, it’s hard for a person to imagine what it was like then, or to be bribed with something as small as being allowed to make a good cup of real coffee, and eat the biscuits and candy left out, or partake of the liquor laid out… to NOT do your job. Or instead of searching through the kids’ toys and wasting your time, have a coffee, some Swiss butter biscuits, and read in the library. Full of books and newspapers from ‘outside.’

      Everything was left unsaid.

      We always knew, of course, when they’d been by. There’d be a washed cup and saucer that wasn’t there before, in the drying rack.

        2. Makes sense. If they were polite about their petty theft they could count on getting more real coffee next time, where if they caused trouble with a diplomatic family they would come to the attention of multiple levels of their Stasi superiors in a situation where the subjects were not under the direct control of the GDR, and thus not available for retribution for reporting them.

          And no matter what, causing trouble would end their participation in what seems like a cush detail, and cause extra work for their supervisors.

          Go along to get along happens in every bureaucracy.

  6. all of the mixed marriages i know of are the wife is liberal and husband conservative. husband is always quiet. Always needled/henpecked esp on politics. Always told they have been trained out of their ridiculous/stupid/uninformed conservative ways.

    And yes. Loud conversations are 99.9% liberal. Conservatives have been taught not to be rude even tho others are doing so. And it’s always liberals who assume everyone at the table is a liberal. I have been in multiple conversations where I have said no that’s not some rednecks truck outside, that’s mine. Why would you assume that I would buy into the nonsense you are spewing? Why would you be so rude as to assume that everyone at the table agrees with you, and start off with statements that denigrate anyone who holds a differing viewpoint?

    Fortunately I’ve done that early enough in my life that most ppl who truly know me know that i am a staunch conservative. It is not often I get to stomp on liberals who assume that because i am female and strong that I must of course be a liberal (although i do have GREAT fun whenever the opportunity presents itself!!!). I still do it every chance I get, unless of course it looks like it might erupt into violence with someone at another table (i.e. more of them than me). Like so many others, I am conditioned to avoid potential violence. On any given day I do prefer not having the crap beaten out of me. I am also careful on social media as I don’t need people coming after my family. And where I used to live, that most definitely would have happened.

    I am however engaging people one on one whenever possible. We have to. We have LOST the public education system because so many of us have not understood the crap that is being taught in public schools.

    Thanks, Sarah, for using your platform all these years to speak up whenever possible.

    2. You’re edging into the problem: most of the wives are liberal because the vast majority of women are liberal – by inclination, encouragement and momentum, and men have to either go along or go without.

      Without connections, without intimacy, without even close friendships since all close male friendships are suspected or declared to be gay.

      Also, they’re too tired from working and want a little bit of domestic peace (which often becomes ‘peace’ in the Islamic sense) not to mention approval (I remember in the early 2000s, saying to myself if I see another tough guy father defend the excesses of his disgustingly feminist daughter I’m going to vomit. No worries there, since they’re mostly all raised by single mothers now).

      As for education, again, look to the sex of the preponderance of educators.

      I suspect you’re something like an albino zebra in terms of rarity.

      1. You’re edging into the problem: most of the wives are liberal because the vast majority of women are liberal – by inclination, encouragement and momentum, and men have to either go along or go without.

        Nope.

        The vast majority of women don’t care, and the current social status games favor liberal. Very different.

        Liberal men are both less likely to bother to marry the primary woman they are having sex with (deciding factor is basically if she does all the work so it’s easier to just go along, otherwise it’s the eternal fiancé show), and far more likely to leave. Even without political disagreement.
        They are also much more likely to the passive-aggressive BS where they sabotage everything, but it’s the fault of whoever calls them on their BS. (I know at least two of the guys here got the female version of this, usually involves insane credit card bills, obvious cheating…anything they can do to make it so that the other person leaves and they’re the poor, wronged victim.)

        It frequently doesn’t occur to us, here, because we are all at least aware of the importance of politics– but a lot of people simply don’t care. They’re able to be swayed. Guys are more likely to be swayed by a female they’re attracted to, gals are more likely to be swayed by a group they trust or value.

        1. Also, I know few, if any, conservative women dumb enough to tie themselves to a liberal man. When I was on the market, my logical “examine for mate material” reasoning was largely overwhelmed by instincts going “EW NO.”

          1. We do tend to not show up on guys’ radar, because they’re looking for the signals of liberal or socially-expected women– especially sexual availability.

            1. Conservative girls are good looking but left wing girls are easy. Every guy knows that but the smart guys know that you don’t put your thang in crazy, which gets rid of the left wing girls. It was a real puzzler back in the day.

              Number two son is going through it now. I feel sorry for him.

              1. I HIGHLY recommend the Beautiful but Evil Space Princess Relationship Matching Agency. A very satisfactory outcome.

                Because while conservative men may be looking for conservative or not-leftist women, it is hard for them to find those diamonds in the rough, and vice versa, just because of the self-censorship and protective coloration practiced by both potential partners in this era of doxxing and cancellation.

                  1. When I was back in Japan, I sent a card to the Bugbear every week or so expressing the joy of talking to him and being with him even without being with him. Now we’re on the same continent, and should be all moved in together by the end of the year (assuming these constant delays with closing ever ease up).

                    It’s hard with everyone being so far away from you. I only have one other friend in Oz, and while he’s politically fairly sensible, he is very far from sensible in other areas of his life, unfortunately.

                    What we need to do is make it safe for our children to be able to look for others like them without fear of being called out, harassed, shamed, or fired.

                1. There’s bound to be a sensible, smart, good looking redhead with a quick wit, who’s a bit arty, likes dogs, and is tolerant of table top games and rugby football somewhere in the world. I found one after all. Sensible seems to be the sticking point right now.

                  1. Blink. I thought you were talking about #2 son and what he’s looking for, until you hit “table top games and rugby football.” For #2 son, it would be right wing podcasts (well, ish. I mean, he likes Shapiro.) and computer games.

                    1. Sorry. Number one son likes Shapiro. Number 2 son is a bit more serious, which is the root of his problem I suppose.

                    3. It was his preferences. He needs to find a girl who’s tolerant of table top games since that’s a real clue to the rest of him. Objectively, girls should be falling off him, he’s tall, very fit, smart, kind, not poor, and is actually a nice person. I think it’s the underlying geekiness that gets in the way.

                      I was watching a video not long ago where a pretty girl was playing Napoleonic table top games with her boyfriend, She was winning too. I called my wife in despair. “Honey, I found her, she exists, but she’s taken!”

                    5. We produced a daughter. She’s married to a ginger, genius level computer programmer who loves cats, computer games, and D&D. They are very good for each other. He’s still is infatuated with her and she with him.

                      Yes, we have a thing for gingers in my house.

                      Looking at my daughter’s courtship gives me hope for #2 son. She decided that this guy was the one and that was that. We hope that some suitable girl will do the same for #2 son. Number #1 son is mildly autistic and will probably never marry.

                    9. I seem to have two of those kinds of daughters. Both redheads, evangelicals.Both like computer games would probably adjust to like/tolerate tabletop games, No real sports leanings at all. Younger one is fond of first person shooters and is quite effective at them. I sometimes wonder at the local male populace, most of the young ladies at church are single (until they’re not ) but no action. Similarly most of my younger daughters apartment mates from college were unattached. This was at an engineering school with a 4-1 male female ratio. I was wondering if they’d added saltpeter to the diet at the cafeteria…

                    11. Younger one is fond of first person shooters and is quite effective at them.

                      –
                      So is #1 (okay only) son … He put together his own gaming computer. Has upgraded it at least once … graphic board gave up, thus it was time to upgrade everything … He’s on computer game boards between 3 AM and 5 AM nightly (10 hour days on swing = off at 2:30 AM). Have no idea of what handle he is using, let alone what specific games.

                      I mean really. It is like he is an adult or something. *Works. Pays his own way. Helps with household stuff. Takes care of the cats. (Dog is my responsibility, but he’ll help if I need.)

                      * You’d be surprised. Niece married, then divorced someone (partly, not 100% reason, but symptomatic of problems) because when he worked it was his money. She was expected to pay everything else, including rent. Because his part of the rent was the discount they were getting from his folks. (Uh? No?) Including her paying for his adopting her daughter; adoption didn’t happen. They didn’t make their 2nd anniversary.

                  2. Rugby football is the superior sort of football. Though I did have my first game of speedball with NSW types last Friday. That was interesting.

                    1. Association Football is a gentleman’s game played by ruffians. Rugby football is a ruffian’s game played by gentlemen as, Oscar Wilde probably never said. This does not explain the Wallabies.

                    4. *pushes glasses up nose*
                      It is as close to the original football as is currently popularly played. Gridiron football and soccer — society football, which from the news reports etc nobody had an issue calling soccer until fairly recently– are both roughly as far removed.

                      My uncle’s rant about how there really should be spiked weapons is left as an exercise to the reader.

                    5. I could see spiked shoulder pads at the very least.

                      The ball is already spiked. At least occasionally.

              3. Conservative girls are good looking but left wing girls are easy.

                Which makes for a perfect filter if someone if someone is looking for a wife.

                  1. It’s been a while since I’ve told that story here, so I’ll hit the highlights. My wife decided a year ago that my reading AceOfSpades and According to Hoyt is an intolerable burden to her. I don’t think I was henpecked even though I was supportive of many of the things she did, but I was in one of those mixed couples that people have talked about here.

                    As it happens, my change in status was precipitated by my attendance at the 2019 “Texas Moron Meetup” (colloquially “TxMoMe”) which is the annual Texas gathering of Ace of Spades readers and commenters. I was at the 2020 TxMoMe last weekend and some of the people there seemed to find it odd that the only two quasi-political blogs I read are this one and that one. I was asked at least three times which blogs I read, and I don’t really.

                    Anyway, we’ve reached the point where I’m signing documents and getting them notarized and it’s almost all over except the signing by a judge and the making of a large payment to my attorney. When I said I was taking notes, I wasn’t kidding very much because I’m about ready to get on with my life.

                    2. I know. WestminsterDogShow talked about it as part of why there were a bunch of Colorado folks in Texas this year because there isn’t Moron a gathering in Colorado.

            3. Yep. I was somewhat boggled in my early twenties that the only passes I collected were very, very Odd ones from other geeks (“Hey, SheSells, I know you’re not planning to give it up, but if you change your mind, gimme a yell, OK?”) until I realized how hard (and unconsciously) I was projecting Not Available. Most of ’em were too present-focused to analyze the entire signal, which was Not Available Without Serious Effort.

          2. Coughs.
            I plead European. Dan was “normal” for men in Europe in my generation.
            Though in his defense, he was a Reagan democrat.
            SO MANY nights spent in long discussion of things like why gun control is evil and does nothing to reduce gun crime.
            The thing is, he’d make a statement and I’D COUNTER IT.
            He honestly had never heard a counter argument.

      2. Nah. Most women are leftist because it’s a positional good. Women are by inclination more social than men, and want the approval of the peer group.
        If you make it clear you do not approve and put your foot down most will change.
        Curiously, I married a liberal man. (His mother was an ahead-of-her-time SJW.) He changed.

        1. Fits with what I’ve seen. Most women I’ve met are more the default liberal type. Not politically aware, but find it useful because social status.

          That said, the women who *are* politically aware, and are conservative, tend to be more attractive. By about a two-to-one ratio. Anecdatum. But the sample size is… not small. The job involves meeting people of all tribes and one tends to learn things in the process.

        2. This is my lefty sister all over. Her husband isn’t nearly so lost in illusion. pity my father isn’t living since he’d be able to pull her up on it though she farther down the road than I thought possible. Damned fool.

            1. Thank you. She always cared what other people thought about her and is willing to eat the crumbs that fall from the rich people’s table.

              That she’s a lefty bothers me less than the fact that she seems to have become a Karen. We haven’t broken with each other, yet, but it will never be the same.

              1. Hard to say. Is she going through menopause? Menopause plus external drama = upset lady who isn’t thinking what she’s doing and saying. Sometimes people get their hormone levels adjusted and suddenly become sweet. Heck, I knew somebody who turned out to have had a medicine intolerance for years that made her nasty.

                2. Could be though she’s younger than me. I suspect it’s her sons and he social position. Both her sons are at an Ivy and are full blown lefties. Her oldest spent a significant part of the lockdown in the guesthouse at his friend’s compound on Cape Cod. This guesthouse is larger than my sister’s house, which is not small. She sees herself as a member of the ruling class with all the techsters and financiers. I see it as her eating the crumbs from the rich man’s table.

                  What’s funny is that she never worked on Wall Street and even though she lives in quite a nice area hers has always been a B+ life. She has very limited experience with these people. She’s a Civil Engineer and a PE. I worked there all my life as did my father. What we learned was to stay the hell away from them. My father made a deliberate decision not to move us up where the rich people live since he saw how their children turned out in too many cases. Don’t get me wrong, you will find good, bad, and indifferent on Wall Street as much as you’ll find it anywhere but you don’t often get to the top of a big firm by being nice people or good parents and the good people there aren’t living in compounds on Cape Cod.

                  What would break my parents heart is that she’s abandoning the faith. My mother was a democrat until they sold out the Catholics on abortion. At the end of the day I, like my parents, am a single issue voter and abortion is that issue. I don’t expect the Republicans to,do,something about it but I won’t see the Little Sisters of the Poor (e.g.,) made to pay for it. My sister dropped on me that Barrett would mean that women wouldn’t be allowed to have an abortion. First, why is that supposed to bother me and second, how ignorant is she about how the law works? gah.

                  Thank you for the opportunity to vent.

                  3. “My mother was a democrat until they sold out the Catholics on abortion.”

                    Thanks for the excuse to hang this out”

                    –

        3. That makes a depressing amount of sense for me. I am weirdly personally *hurt* by all my liberal used-to-be friends spouting the usual proggie “everybody to the right of Mao is evil” dreck. After some clarification, I think it’s primate instincts shouting that my offspring and I will be ostracized and DIIIIIEEEEEE, while my Odd brain is examining its middle fingers and wondering if I can learn how to elevate my middle toes…

            1. Kid and I were riding a golf cart once when it jolted and I instinctively flung one arm around her and grabbed the supports with the other. She was mortally offended that I thought she couldn’t keep herSELF in the cart. I shrugged and told her it was monkey instincts and “my kid might FALL” is a pretty damn primal fear as descended-from-brachiator terrors go. Now she (mostly) puts up with my overprotectiveness if I tell her “monkey mama”. She knows there is no escape. 🙂

              …if I were still a brachiator, maybe I COULD extend my middle toes. Hmm.

      3. Funny, I don’t feel like an albino zebra. And there seems to be a fairly even distribution of men and women who comment here. And I know personally a number of other females of the “don’t care” up to “conservative” by persuasion. The difference is it’s much harder to get them to talk about it than those who are aligned with the SJW group. I’m a bit odd in that I treat politics like other women treat the Bachelor and think it’s interesting to read and talk about. (Broken that way, what can I say. Now if I could only be persuasive… pretty sure I’ve never changed anyone’s mind).

        2. It’s kind of like when folks tell me there aren’t any women who are geeky, or openly Catholic, or “nice girls who are available”….

          I know it’s usually yelled in pain, but maybe the problem with what one finds is related to where one is looking?

          1. Yeah, I’m very probably the exactly wrong person to look to for advice, but I always figured when looking for girls at bars you’d find bar girls.

            1. Since my advice is generally “stop looking for a date, start looking for a friend– and not just to get in her pants” and usually devolves into what being a “friend” means, that’s about the limit of my advice, too.

              I just get so *TIRED* of seeing nice folks, who I like, making the same terrible mistake over and over and then doing the probably-in-pain howling about how “all women” this or “all men” that.
              No, really, you just have terrible taste in prospective mates!
              Which isn’t helpful. So I keep my teeth shut. And usually try not to be in the room, too, because I say nothing louder than almost anybody you’re going to meet…..

          2. Right?
            My niece; beautiful, slender, video game playing, gun toting conservative. Wear’s costumes to Comic-con.
            Finished college-career in nursing.
            Sweet and smart and still single in her twenties.
            Granted-she’s a Mormon in Florida, but WTF?
            She can’t find any decent guys?
            (I know, the Mother/Grandmother’s lament.)

    3. And it’s always liberals who assume everyone at the table is a liberal

      This. So much this.

      The blind assumption that “everyone is like me” is grating. Doubly so from diversity tards.

      1. Everyone underestimates just how political their political views are. It’s a common failing. Liberal fascists suffer this failing much more deeply than those on the right, less due to right-wing virtue and more due to those on the right getting schooled with hard knocks.

        1. Or feels they are so important that they need to inject it because people don’t call them sir when wearing a dress and with EE floatation devices

          1. Yeah, I’d say give up on linking to Farcebook. They can censor anything at any time, and the things we’re interested in are the most likely to get expunged.

      3. The blind assumption that “everyone is like me” is grating.

        Oh, good heavens, my sister in law being surprised that I recognize the biological humanity and thus human dignity of the unborn…. *facepalm* I do not _get_ how on earth she thought I’d be pro abortion.

      4. Smart people are Liberals, and everyone at this table is smart, ergo everyone at this table must be a Liberal.

        *spit*

          1. Maybe they’re smart, just not particularly observant or they’re deeply ensconced in keeping their status such as it is.

          3. Sadly, they really are smart, some of them. Probably many of them.

            Once upon a time I knew a woman who was a medical doctor AND a PhD biologist of some description, doing AIDS research. Very rarefied stuff. Big Brain territory.

            I chanced to be ranting about gun control one day, as I used to have a habit of doing, and she was 100% all about banning guns. Terrible things, guns you know. So I trotted out all my research analysis, demonstrating just how bad all the medical literature was. Her eyes got pretty wide after a while.

            But what I found most interesting was her complete lack of knowledge on the subject. She not only didn’t know the difference between bolt action and semi-automatic, she did not know which part of the cartridge came out of the gun. She really thought that the whole thing came out of the gun. Brass and all, not just the bullet.

            Turns out a lot of people think that. They look at a 7.62 NATO cartridge, and they think that whole thing goes flying downrange, not just the little pointy lead part at the end.

            But -smart-. She followed my explanation about correlation not being the same thing as causation, but couldn’t bring herself to believe that ALL the gun studies in ALL the journals were bullshit. Too big. Why believe the weird old Phantom when the whole medical literature is telling you he’s wrong?

            That’s what makes the Big Lie thing work. People who know nothing of the subject, who are experts in other fields, -assuming- that the Big Lie is legit without looking into it. Because it’s so BIG, so all-encompassing, so ubiquitous. If they dig into it they’ll see the lie immediately, but they’re busy so they don’t.

            What I find very comforting this year is that even “normal” people are rejecting the Big Lie about Corona. They’re looking at the haze of smoking bullshit delivered byt he press every day, at the lock-downs, at the businesses being destroyed etc and they’re not buying it.

            Many, many people are digging into the Big Lie and seeing it for the first time. And the first thing out of their mouths after shouting “I can’t believe they LIED like that!” is “What the hell else did they lie about?!”

    4. Just going to join in here and say that I had to go through an awful lot of girlfriends in Toronto before I found one that could do basic arithmetic. Such as:

      Phantom: “If I buy you another drink I can’t buy gas for tomorrow.”
      GF: “You’re so cheap!”

      It depends a lot on where you live. If you’re in a blue city and you date hot chicks, you’ll have to go through a lot of them to find one with a clue. Hot chicks put a premium on fashion, and Leftism is certainly in fashion these days.

  7. My husband is about to lose two long friendships (and they were genuine friendships back in the day) because the others involved have tried to emotionally blackmail/manipulate him into rejecting the President. How can he support a criminal? With his children profiting from his office on such a huge scale? They have lost all respect for my husband after seeing him descend to this level. And be clear, they mean Trump, Jared and Ivanka. Why, even if Hunter is guilty, his acts are miniscule compared to the massive lies and fraud…well, you know the drill.

    I know one of them and he used to be an honest, witty person. Now he’s a…I don’t know the word.

    I do know my husband has basically told them he is not changing his mind. This is on FB, so others will read it. But the, “I will do anything I have to do -shame you, guilt-trip you, threaten you with the loss of my respect, whatever – to make you what I want and if you still don’t Imreject you utterly,” is an ugly, ugly thing.

    1. The word you’re looking for starts with “a” and ends with “hole.” And he most likely didn’t actually change, he just now feels safe in dropping the mask.

    2. The answer to allegations re DJT’s adult children is one very polite word: “Hunter”.

      Given the Biden family’s remarkable run of financial good fortune over the period Gropey Joe was in poorly renumerated elected office, that’s really not someplace they should go.

    3. Not too long ago my mother begged me, on the verge of tears, to vote Biden. Now she’s convinced Amy C B will take away her social security and insurance. She looks at me like a stranger, and calls people she’s never met and only sees on the TV box by their first names like they’re close friends. “Brave Rachel! What will Andrew say tonight? Heart goes out for poor Gretchen when those Proud Boys tried to kidnap her!”

    4. Yep. One mystery is why craftswomen (potters, weavers, etc) are often very, very progressive, see it as moral superiority and assume if you do, or are interested I’m, their craft you must be a fellow traveler. I had a basketry class a few years ago turned very uncomfortable when the allegedly midievally re-creating ladies started holding forth on current affairs.
      (For Herbn)

      1. Income?

        Not hurting for money, plus lower requirements (internal or external) for a practical skill, means a higher number who are willing and able to burn out a group that won’t let them be in charge (call it queen bee syndrome?) means that they’re overwhelmingly common?

      2. I’m never gonna forget the time one of the staff at a sheep and wool festival I was working had a “I knit so I dont kill [strikethrough]people[/strikethrough] REPUBLICANS” pinned to her *staff vest*. -_-

        There are several right-wing vemdors–my MiL has been doing them for decades and at least the ones she’s found all gripe to each other… but it’s just like this post, they keep it quiet because it’s *improper*.

        There’s no shows right now, but I think particularly after Ravelry that’s gone off a big old cliff.

          1. FWIW, the WordPress, (actually html code) version of strike uses ((left caret)strike(right caret)) words to be struck (left caret frontslash strike rightcaret))

          2. Arggh, messed up a close tag:

            To get these are the struck out words
            ((left caret)strike(right caret) these are the struck out words ((left caret)(frontslash)strike(right caret))

            1. I have tried <strike>. Didn’t work. <s> and </s> works.

              Now how, you are wondering, did I get that to show up as text? It’s simple, but a bit tedious:

              &lt; shows up as <, &gt; for >, and / is /. The whole strings are &lt;s&gt; and &lt;/s&gt;.

              Fun with HTML!

              (now to see if I got everything right)

              1. Nuts. / is &#47; — I guess it digested the &amp; first and converted #47; into a / so you have to watch out for parse order.

              3. According to the ATH FAQ and BBQ, it should be “del” between LT and GT signs.
                Testing…
                Using s: strike this
                Using del: strike this

    6. > I know one of them and he used to be an honest, witty person. Now he’s a…I don’t know the word.

      “Pod person.”

      1. A word-coining that amused me recently, which I offer to anyone who can use it, is “undear”. As in, “my father has undeared himself to the rest of the family”. It’s great fun to use it and see who notices. 🙂

  8. I’m in a “mixed” area politically, so I’ve seen lots of different viewpoints shared publicly. Interestingly enough, most of the campaign signs I’ve seen, even on private property, are for the hyper-local elections. Apparently, it’s more important to state your preference for city council or on whether or not you want a proposition to pass than it is to state you are for a particular Presidential candidate.

    1. At least I’m getting a clue on whom *not* to vote for on a local level by the signs grouped with the Biden placards in he neighborhood.

  9. I’m polite to the polite. If you’re rude to me, I’ll be rude BACK to you.

    Right now, I’m in a place where I’m going to have to be careful because I’m working to get back into the job market in a few months. Careful thoughts and time and such. Once I get a job, it becomes a bit easier, but not until then.

    But, I had this idea, and I wanted to throw it out to the people here. Chris Pratt and Warren Ellis have been some of the latest people to be canceled by the Woke mobs. And, I was thinking about it for a moment and realized…what drowns out the Woke the most?

    (Besides cannons firing grapeshot and belt-fed machine guns?)

    Money. Namely, if somebody is making a studio or a production company money, you’d be amazed at what gets hidden under the rug. So, I’m looking on Amazon for things by both that I don’t have yet. Why? Amazon probably provides the publishers and producers sales numbers the fastest. And, if you have a sudden spike (and a sudden amount of money) going into people, the logical thought is “we need more of this, so we need more of what they can make.”

        1. They did that to Taylor Swift as well after HC lost. I think that’s why these last 4 years she picked a side, strongly.

        2. You’re either in the mob or target of the mob; indifference is not an option.

          As they proclaim: if you are not anti-racist you are racist.
          –

      2. Note also: they went after Pratt’s defenders, even Ruffalo who surely thought he’d secured his leftist cred.

        What was said to Saldana I da’st not repeat, but it certainly belied any claim of enlightenment from its tweeter.
        –

  10. And then we’re surprised they have absolutely no clue who we are, that they buy into the stories the left and their pet media tell, that they think of people who don’t believe in socialism/communism as bigoted evil, and full only of hate.

    They think that when we do speak up, too, though.

    Just then we’re RUDE, evil, bigoted and full of hate.

    We do have to think about what our actions do to them– and yes, there are times when we need to be rude, because it’s good for them.

    But I don’t like it when folks talk politics in non-political areas because it’s something that is important, and it should be serious, not signaling.

    …and now I’m musing about that line about how small time politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small, and how Step 1 seems to be act like a thing isn’t worth a cent, and then murder anybody who disagrees, and….welp, I’m depressed.

  11. Did you ever defend your point of view?

    Note:
    do not respond in kind. “You’re a poopie head” just empowers the progressive method of argument.
    Use facts, and logic, and even point out when someone is being emotionally manipulative.

    I got lucky and ran into a few folks like that, when I was being stubborn and still looking around after the loudmouths on the right were as bad as on the left. (No, it wasn’t relatives, either. I am still annoyed with my parents for never bothering to actively teach the stuff they expected us to know, for philosophy. Even that fake Francis quote about “preach constantly, if necessary use words” recognized YOU USE YOUR FREAKING WORDS.)

    In a household, you have a golden opportunity to get their attention without having to be loud. Use it.

    1. *nod*

      There are many moments in the talking points one can interrupt the chain of perverted logic. My favorite used to involve tax the rich. “I don’t agree with that. I want to be rich someday!” And people laugh. Which is good, because humor always helps us out. It’s harder to hate the people you have fun with.

      Humor and irony can slowly change a person, a little bit.

      A violent change tends to happen when someone feels they’ve been lied to. And the opportunities for *that* are legion. Folks do *not* like being betrayed. That sort tends to run farther to the other side, as they hunt down and realize how *much* they’ve been lied to. Not everyone on the left is completely lost in the cult.

  12. “And I’m definitely not asking you to put your name on anything that will target you for reprisal.”

    Too late.

    “At the same time, open-source materials, such as donations tracked by the Federal Election Commission, are being used to invite the targeting of Trump donors, either by name or address on a hostile site. ”

    https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/26/7-open-leftist-threats-that-political-terror-is-coming-to-america-whether-trump-wins-or-not/

    1. Already getting reprisals. Started with the political signs being stolen, multiple times (game camera isn’t the best surveillance tool even in PIF mode.) Escalated this week to having bags of excrement throw over the wall onto my property. Guess I should be thankful that it’s raining out and making it hard for things to burn.

  13. Speak up, if it’s germane. Before the Kungflu there were a number of venues I attended where politics was never ever discussed.

    Speak up if it’s useful. Upon meeting with strangers I usually interject something into the conversation that’s reasonable, logical and rational but that drives the woke a bit bat offal. I find such useful in so far as it helps avoid later contact with said folks.

    Speak up if with folks you can influence or with whom you can have a discussion. Do remember ignorance can be corrected but you can’t fix stupid.

    &, of course, speak up anytime you dang well want to, any time it makes you fell better, any time you feel it might help you or others, anytime, for any reason. It’s your natural right to do so. & as such it’s noted in our Constitution, for now.

    1. It’s going to be an epic battle between massive vote fraud and yuge enthusiasm. That’s what makes it a nail-biter, and why “interesting times” is a curse.

      1. The way the Democrats and the Media (but I repeat myself) are waffling about mail in vs in person leads me to hope that something with their fraud machine has gone horribly wrong.

        1. I don’t think so.
          That Project Veritas video?
          http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=391006
          she says she’s a “consultant” for a republican, which confused poor Tim, but I figured out what that meant.
          “Consultant” is her giving herself airs.
          She volunteered to GOTV for a REPUBLICAN and is using it to flip the votes for the dems, because they pay her.
          I think this is all through the GOP GOTV campaign, which is why I think we’re done, lost, gone.
          I really didn’t plan to live out my life without toilet paper.
          At least due to how far I’ve stuck out my neck, it should be “short.”
          Unfortunately I suspect also brutish and nasty.

                1. No. It means Get Out The Vote. When you volunteer, they gave you list of addresses.
                  BTW, notable here, the last RELIABLE list of addresses to go door knocking on was Bush’s in 2004.
                  I volunteered through Romney’s campaign, and his campaign was so DEEPLY infiltrated that the list we had for GOTV efforts was ALL democrat. (If he wasn’t complicit, this does explain why he’s gone insane.)
                  So people are “volunteering” and getting a list of GOP votes, and then “chasing the vote” which means flipping it for the democrats. This chick in TX did SEVEN THOUSAND votes.
                  The guy talking about it estimates they manufacture 10 million votes for the dems every election, and this election might double that.
                  This is why the democrats feel confident campaigning from the basement. And aren’t afraid of Trump enthusiasm.
                  THE FIX IS IN.

                  1. and this election might double that.

                    Ok, double fraud over normal. That is still not enough to deal with the margin of victory we are looking at.

                    This is why the democrats feel confident

                    Where the bloody hell are you getting that one!?!? If you don’t watch CNN the left’s confidence is rapidly melting.

                    2. NO IT ISN’T

                      *ahem*

                      Look; of all the candidates they had this election Biden was the only option they could go with: any other choice would have split the Dem bases into full blown warring factions. Biden wasn’t the Glorious Super Candidate, but a desperation play.

                      Now they dare not let him go in public lest he either shits himself on stage, or yells at a Corn Pop shaped cloud.

                      Kamala is hated. She has to be kept away from the public as well.

                      They have done this before where they hide candidates (cough Hillary! cough) because every time the candidate appears in public things get worse for them.

                      Every single thing they are doing reeks of utter desperation. Meanwhile Trump could disappear from the face of the earth and there would still be daily bottom-up rallies.

                    4. Possibly?

                      If so it points to where the mistake is: you are still trying to use Old Rules for your predictor.

                      Any attempt to predict politics right now has to start with the premise “Trump is The Mule”. If you don’t start there you can’t even retrodict the 2016 result.

                      Also something I forgot: in the wake of the ACB confirmation the left are tearing themselves apart again. Because in their view the Democrats betrayed them by not making any attempt to fight.

                    5. Every time Kamala talks her popularity drops and Biden is collapsing like a Murphy bed. I share your fear about fraud but I also think that the power brokers got arrogant and deliberately ran candidates who are weak. They thought it a sure thing and neither Kamala or Sue Biden will be able to interfere with their looting.

                      Evil will oft doth evil mar.

                    6. Well, here, for one thing.

                      https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=46184

                      ““Our journalists discovered a voter fraud system positioned to swing Texas in 2020,”
                      he said.

                      “These so-called ‘ballot chasers’ use a mix of gifts and coercion to work down their list of targeted voters and make sure they vote for their paymasters,” he said. “The actions violate both federal and state law and constitute a direct threat to the integrity of our election-based republic.”

                      One of the capos in this ballot racketeering operation is Raquel Rodriguez, nominally a political consultant for GOP House candidate Mauro E. Garza, the owner of the San Antonio’s Pegasus Nightclub, which is located on the Main Avenue Strip, he said.

                      Raquel Rodriguez: “I can honestly say I’m bringing at least at least 7,000 votes to the polls.”

                      Journalist: “Seven thousand—and that’s for San Antonio for this area too. It’s a lot.”

                      Rodriguez: “That’s a lot. It’s a lot, period. Just so you know–have an idea–so this is what I do.”

                      Rodriguez pressures voter to change her vote from Cornyn to Hegar”

                    7. And ‘pedes have infiltrated the Biden phone system…..

                      Everyone keeps acting like the fraud is unknown. I know there is fraud. I already factored crazy levels of fraud into the predictions.

                  2. They’re running two people who, when they are out campaigning, do insanely stupid things.

                    So they try to frame the failures as a great thing.

                    If they were confident, I wouldn’t be hearing Joe Biden ads that sound like he’s trying to run as an independent, or as Trump. Like Greenfield– the Dem trying to take Iowa’s Rep Ernst’s seat– who I didn’t realize *IS* a Democrat until fairly recently.

                    1. YES.

                      They don’t get to choose sending candidates out on the campaign trail. So they try to make up for it by driving the spin machine way past its structural limits.

                      Also that small problem where the overwhelming majority of Dem rally attendees are Trump supporters……

                    2. I don’t think there was ever much enthusiasm for Romney who has the charisma of a week old fish. What you had was opposition to Obama. I voted out of duty not enthusiasm and wasn’t at all surprised when he lost. Romney morphing into Pierre Delecto shows that God looks out for children, drunks, and the United States of America.

                      Same thing with McCain and remember that McCain was winning before the FRB broke their recent, bad, precedent and didn’t bail out Lehman Bros. That was the level of “fraud” necessary to get the most charismatic democrat candidate since JFK into office. With all they’ve done, all the gaslighting, the lockdowns, the press, impeachment, all of it, Trump is going strong into the finals.

                  3. Interesting about Romney’s list. His campaign’s ORCA thing was supposed to have been an amazing piece of software… that ended up completely not working. Makes me a bit suspicious – not about Romney, but whoever was heading his campaign’s GOTV efforts.

                    2. Er, um, no.

                      I can’t speak about whether or not ORCA was a complete mess or not, from all accounts it was a complete CF, but I sincerely doubt that “infiltration” was required.

                      Similar things happened to recently to at least one candidate during the democrat party primary process. The problems had a lot more to do with people not really understanding how to write software that works than it did with intentional sabotage. I suspect that some consultant’s cousin wanted to be a programmer (how hard can it be? It’s all just ones and zeroes, right?) and the consultant doesn’t care because he gets paid whether or not the candidate wins, so he said “sure, why not?” Maybe there was some remuneration involved, too.

                      The point is that you have to understand how to tell whether or not what you got is what you ordered. I suspect that DJT has the knack of doing that, but a lot of other people don’t.

                    10. I have thought, ever since Al D’Amato lost his Senate seat to Chuck Schumer in 1998, that his campaign consultants (who also “steered” NC senator Lauch Faircloth into a loss to John Edwards) had to be taking money from the Democrats. It made far more sense than the idea they could have been so incompetent.
                      –

        2. There are limits to how much voter fraud you can generate. For one thing, the vast majority of people sincerely want free and fair elections even if they have preferences for who they want to win. For another, once your fraud gets large enough, there’s a nonzero probably that many of the people who promised to commit fraud for your side, won’t. Call it the “isn’t there anyone at this triple-K meeting who isn’t an FBI agent?” syndrome.

            1. Rekieta Law had a guy on last night about voter fraud, and he said the margins are very small in some precincts. One or two votes in every precinct make a big difference. But OTOH, this works in favor of honest candidates also.

              Bad news is that Michigan changed voting procedures to be horrible on purpose. And they are making poll watchers stand six feet away from tiny laptops, and telling partisan poll workers to call the police on them if they challenge anything much.

          2. … the vast majority of people sincerely want the illusion of free and fair elections …

            FIFY

            Sadly, most do not actually care.
            –

  15. “The worst part is that I can see this going on, and the right staying quiet. Because we have jobs and families and lives.”

    Explained this to the teens yesterday. People who have too much to lose don’t revolt.

    Except, Ma, what about George Washington and John Adams and all?

    Anyone want to help with that one?

    1. They were put in play by G-d.
      Dear Lord, do you think I meant to come out of the political closet? But it was that or go insane. That’s what “instruments” was about.

    2. It’s like lethal defense.

      It’s the step you take when the alternative is unthinkable.

      So you have to accept that, in order to do what you must, you might kill someone.

      1. Agreed.

        One of the things that got me in trouble in Religion class was I did not hold with the pacifism of one of the teachers. Argued her into a corner and got her to admit she thought it was more moral to allow yourself to be raped than to try and kill your rapist.

        To which I said, no. There are some lines I will not allow anyone to cross.

          1. I didn’t used to, until I thought it through and realized they were pushing their own defense onto others, with the blackmail threat of, “Surely you’re not such a bad person you’d let me get killed, right?” And feeling morally smug and superior because they’d never stoop to violence, oh no, they were too civilized for that.

            I respond very badly to blackmail. Give me an honest Conan the Barbarian any day.

            2. The flip side of this is, are you willing to stand by and see your loved ones hurt/degraded/killed so you can keep your own hands clean of violence? And are you really a moral person if you do this?

              Why did Jesus tell His disciples to “go out and buy swords”?

              1. Most of the Pacifists I’ve known have been American Buddhists. That is to say, they claim to be Buddhists, but follow a faith that has about as much to do with root Buddhism as the depiction of Catholicism is Japanese Anime has to do with the Catholic Church.

                I have been told by these pillocks, “Buddhists are never violent”, to which I replied, “Go look up the Japanese word ‘yamabushi’, and get back to me.”

                1. Yes, Buddhists are so pacifist that pragmatist Oda Nobunaga’s biggest atrocity involved setting the castle of a militant Buddhist sect on fire (with the women and children trapped inside) because he was sick and tired of them marching around and attacking everyone, and then retreating to their castle in the mountains.

                  Some Buddhists are peaceful. Some most definitely are not.

                2. A few headlines that popped up in response to a search on Buddhist Attacks On Muslims In Myanmar:

                  Why are Buddhist monks attacking Muslims? – BBC News

                  Buddhist mobs attack Muslim homes in Myanmar, one dead (Reuters)

                  Why are Buddhists in Myanmar killing Rohingya Muslims?

                  Dalai Lama Decries Buddhist Attacks On Muslims In Myanmar (HuffPo)

                  Buddhists Go to Battle: When Nationalism Overrides Pacifism: A call to arms for Sri Lankan monks. Ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar. A Buddhist faith known for pacifism is taking its place in a new age of nationalism. (NY Times)

                  Wikipedia: There is a history of persecution of Muslims in Myanmar that continues to the present day. Myanmar is a Buddhist majority country, with significant Christian and Muslim minorities.
                  –

              2. Funny how no one ever wanted to answer that one when I asked.

                Once I figured out what pacifism entailed in cost to other potentially innocent bystanders, I decided that as much as humanly possible, I would live so as not to ask of anyone else what I would not be willing to do myself, if I had the skills to do it.

              3. This is where I fell off the smugly pacifist wagon – Oh, yeah, you’re willing to see your children abused, degraded, murdered, without lifting a hand? OK – for yourself – on your head be it. But for your kin and those you claim to love?
                Yeah, you’re a sanctimonious SOB, and I’m done with you and your ilk.

          2. Yeah, the “I will gladly sacrifice your life, fortune and sacred honor” sorts really get to me.

            The ones that are personal pacifists – they will not fight, and they work to limit it so that they are not responsible for anybody they’d have to do violence on behalf of– I don’t get, but I can respect.

          3. I respect some. Desmond Doss, for instance, is someone that I can respect. He saw winning the War as important, and managed to find a balance between his two conflicting ideals (i.e. serving as a medic, and being willing to risk his life on the frontline to save his fellow soldiers). Or in other words, he appears to have recognized that his ideals didn’t mean that there weren’t reasons for fighting.

            I don’t have much patience for pacifists who refuse to accept that.

            1. Yes, I worked for a guy that when his number was called for Viet Nam stood up and said “NO”. He didn’t believe in it and was not going to serve. So he went to jail. Him I respected, those that ran off to Canada and places, I will NEVER Respect.

              There is another thing that is not talked about. There are people who simply cannot shoot others. When forces to shoot, they shoot blindly or miss on purpose. The military thinks they can train or get these people to fight but I don’t believe they can. That is why the all volunteer services are so good. Everybody knows what is required and WANTS to do it. If they have trouble, they want to fix it.

        2. It takes two to make peace. It only takes one to make war.

          Pacifism will, at best, get you a nice peaceful trip to the slave pens. At worst — tell me, have you ever heard of the Aztecs?
          ———————————
          Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

          1. The Spanish conquistadors may have been ugly, bloody and brutal – but they had the right idea. The “reconsecration” of the Aztec’s main pyramid, about 7 years before Columbus got there, took our current estimate of about 54,000 human sacrifices.

            …Yeah, tell me again the Spanish were wrong to wipe that out. Grarrr.

            (Not to mention the Spanish Inquisition, unlike some of them, made serious attempts to gather evidence and let people off if it was just “he said-she said”.)

        3. “… it was more moral to allow yourself to be raped than to try and kill your rapist.”

          Thing is, you are not just compliant in your own rape, you’re abetting the rape of numerous others. Orwell had it right when declaring pacifists in Britain & Germany in WWII were objectively pro-Nazi.

          I do believe true pacifists exist, just as I believe altruistic politicians exist — but I believe them far rarer than those donning the robes.
          –

    3. Washington put it something like, “It’s too late now, we have to go through with this, because otherwise we’ll all hang regardless.”

      From what the leftists are saying… that’s where we are. Might as well speak up, and at least be known to those who might be on our side. They also serve who only provide a barn to hide in.

      2. I have terrible vision and hands prone to carpal tunnel. Barns, I got. Food and the knowhow to garner more, also got. Praying none of this will be needed.

    4. They had more to lose by NOT revolting than they did by revolting. They had tried, several times, to reconcile, but as the Declaration says, a long chain of usurpations had occurred, and there was no reason to think that it would get better if they stayed quiet.

    5. Adams and Washington, et.al. were able to project into the future what the trends were; and could see that they’d lose all ownership of what they had. Look at the Bill of Rights to see what they were going to lose staying under British rule. Look at the enumerated violations committed by the Crown in the Declaration of Independence for the rest of what they’d already lost. They meet the criteria of people who had nothing more to lose than their lives and their sacred honor. THAT’s why they chose to revolt.

  16. My wife I talk politics. We mostly agree and more express consternation at the stupid of government dependency, failure of morality, and crazy being embraced.

    Fun side effect is our kids understand it to, apparently. I’ve been working on my middle schooler on time and place, and how people who disagree with us are not necessarily stupid or evil, because her passion level may make enemies if I don’t get ahead of that train quick enough.

    1. how people who disagree with us are not necessarily stupid or evil

      I am having so much trouble with that one lately.

        1. The evil will always be outnumbered by the stupid. And the willfully stupid are also outnumbered by the just plain dumb that either have never even heard the other side (other than as caricature), or don’t think about it too much.

          That said, there are enough evil, and stupid-evil, here and now to be worrisome.

          1. I keep reminding myself that most of the neighbors with BLM signs probably are focusing on that phrase, and despite the organization clearly stating it was founded partly in response to Zimmerman’s acquittal, probably most of them do not even think they’re expressing support for attacking people and trying to smash their skulls on the street, let alone make a habit of doing it personally.

            On the other hand, they did choose to put the signs up.

        2. That’s why I put the “necessarily.”

          Main example is the parents of her friend (wife is also my wife’s friend). In hearing them talk I pretty certain:
          1. They only get info from MSM, and are convinced any thing the right of CBS news is extreme right wing misinformation, so they never read it.
          2. Mom’s dad, who raised her, was a probable Cluster C (maybe touch of B) personality disorder. He was a Republican, so has a deep emotional response to Republicans as bad people who are emotionally neglectful to abusive.

        1. Sufficiently advanced stupidity is worse than malice. Vincible ignorance may mitigate guilt, but not when it’s supine (because the person made no effort to remove it), and when it’s studied (the person actively kept himself ignorant), it may aggravate guilt because of the hardness of heart entailed.

  18. Btw, the podcast and YouTube channel, Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, has an amazing episode called “Death at the National Hotel,” about how President-Elect Buchanan almost died before his inauguration. Worth it just for the summary of why he got nominated in the first place.

    The US has had crazy and evil politics before.

    1. Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World is like the eidos of how to engage with batty ideas! There’s not an episode on there that the Horde wouldn’t love.

      1. Fail would be all conflict and no resolution. And letting the bad guys win.

        Book, meet wall.

          1. I will stipulate that, theoretically, such a thing as a writers’ group could be good, but I cannot conceive it as credible, any more than I can conceive a High School Guidance Counsellor recommending a career in cat herding.
            –

  20. You’ve got a good point.

    I’m mostly online these days (my back gave up on me and recovery is… SLOW, possibly not helped by 1.5 year old who really does need to be physically removed from trouble A Lot. (ow!) And so much thank you to whoever did the Bob and Brad link, it’s been helpful.) But I haven’t been saying anything there outside of friendly rooms because all of the leftist politicking all the time gets on my nerves.

    Which is dumb, you’re right.

    So… I commented on a friend’s post and shared a FEE article on my main page. (I do really like FEE.) It’s a small start (though… telling a stringent BLM supporter that “it’s a pity he [Philadelphia police shooting guy] didn’t value [his life] enough to drop the knife” didn’t feel small o_o; ), but a start all the same.

      1. Oh hell. I still cry over all the friends I lost, not to mention my destroyed career.
        I’m not a happy warrior. I’m profoundly conflict averse. But I have kids and might have grand kids. My time here is limited, but the future is worth fighting for.

        1. Himself does not choose the most perfect when He needs human tools. I am convinced He often chooses the *least.*

          I fear He has got a certain sense of humor, too. *shudder*

            1. *sigh*

              One of the nuns that trained little me, she tended to say that Himself gave out no burdens greater than our shoulders could bear.

              Of course, little me being the brat I was, tended to mutter back that there had to be an accounting error somewhere, and some angel was going to get a telling off when He realized how screwed up things had got!

            2. When I was having a bout of temptation toward “high-minded,” agnosticism He put sand fleas in my shorts. You cannot maintain a mood of high-minded agnosticism with a butt-load of sand fleas.

              He has no pride, and no shame. I’m very grateful for that.

              2. My sense-of-humor story is, thankfully, not as dire. But.

                I was very close to my mother and it hit me *hard* when she died about 15 years ago. There was a favored but *obscure* old hymn that bounced around our family (Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing) and I used it often as a lullaby for my toddler.

                Dragged myself back to church eventually, sitting in the back so 1) no one would bother me and 2) I could dash for the bathroom as needed. Gooooood sermon one week, saying all the things I needed to hear…and I was too depressed and angry to listen, and sat there telling myself it was a coincidence. “If God really MEANT it He’d do something stupid and obvious like get “Come Thou Fount” in there.”

                Cue the recessional. Cue extremely familiar notes.

                Cue me stopping in my tracks, looking up, and snarling “FINE, then.” 🙂

        2. Yeah. And the fact is that this particular useful idiocy–that putting down assailants before they put you down is Wrong–is the point of the spear that justifies anything against the Wrong People, and any action by the Right People. That lionizes the mob and prosecutes any who dare to not meekly submit to violence. That, in short, would gladly fall in behind show trials and cattle cars so long as they deal in acceptable target.

          So yeah, it’s that important.

          But ugh, I hate it. >.< Thank you for the push as I surely wouldn't otherwise.

        3. This. Lamenting friends and relatives lost.

          Would like to just live in peace. But, I can’t will the battle away. And He won’t let me be ignore it.

          Ultimately, it’s a spiritual battle. And a spiritual test. Do you love me, He asks?

            1. Neither am I vaguely saintly. But, then again, He says, “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways.”

              And “God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty… that no flesh should glory in His presence.” I’m good with that, being an instrument and leaving the glory all to Him.

              As you say, be not afraid. Follow His leading, prompting, pushing.

            2. I am agnostic, but you would seem to fit the St. Nicholas mold well. He of the “I am here to give gifts and hit people” reputation.

        4. I won’t trade away my soul for the world; Wales isn’t even an opening offer.

          Speak Truth and shame the Devil. A moment’s peace bought for the price of a lie is not but leprechaun’s gold.
          –

      2. *hugs*

        I know. I know.

        You always feel like if you’d been smarter, or more clever, or said it BETTER, or even just put up with it because was it really any worse than what they did when you weren’t a passive target….

        It’s human.

        Keep thinking of this song:

        I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then
        I wish I could start this whole thing over again
        I’m not sayin’ it’s you could never be true
        I just don’t wanna know how it ends
        You’d still have my heart in the palm of your hands
        I’d still look like a fool in front of your friends
        Yeah I wish somehow I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then

                  1. You keep a good lid on it– but your kids are being threatened.

                    Not even subtle about it, either, they’re talkign full soviet.

                    If I was in Des Moines proper, I’d be in much worse mental state– if I were in Colorado, I’d probably have left for my family in rural Washington!

                  1. I was meaning more the way it’s hard to hate, and it’s like hating part of yourself.

                    …

                    It is entirely possible to hate yourself, too. /sad.

                    2. *e-hug*
                      Aacid, my worldview is that in all of humanity, there’s been four that didn’t start broken. Two broke themselves, one was a literal miracle, and the prime was the manufacturer.
                      There’s more broke, and less broke, and fixed funny or broken again– but you know you’re broke, and that’s a big part of figuring out what you can fix so it works.

                      Hard to fix what you won’t recognize as broken. Which loops back around to the folks who hate themselves…but have to push it outside.

                    3. Thx. Honestly most of my energy runs to not indulging in the anger and hate I live in. I’m cynical to a fault on multiple levels but try and bite back the demons, so to speak. I figure St. Peter less judgemental on suicide than homicide.

            2. Except that we are “family by choice” to those who are American. When someone chooses to join another family that wants to destroy ours, they lose that belonging.

              TWANLOC. Plural You were family. You chose not to be.

              1. That has absolutely nothing to do with the family people already have.

                Great! You declare all true Americans are family. Lovely. That totally makes it so that people who you have loved, bled with, and comforted each other, now seeing you as a terrible person, doesn’t hurt.

                1. Not what I said, of course. Your opinion is equally as valid as anyone else’s; no less and no more.

                  Although I would point out that Christ plainly said that belief in Him means that family becomes something other than blood ties.

                  Mark 3:31-35:
                  31Then Jesus’ mother and brothers came and stood outside. They sent someone in to summon Him, 32and a crowd was sitting around Him. “Look, He was told, “Your mother and brothers are outside, asking for You.

                  33But Jesus replied, “Who are My mother and My brothers? 34 Looking at those seated in a circle around Him, He said, “Here are My mother and My brothers! 35For whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother.

                  1. Nelson, you were responding to me comforting someone who is upset that they responded to friends and family with a lecture on Americans being family of choice.

                    I told you that adopting those of shared philosophy did not make loss of family hurt any less.

                    And while America is really awesome, we are not the Kingdom of God. I hope and pray we echo it, yeah– but even then, Himself recognized that losing the family you have, hurts. He told us to keep trying to correct them, and guide them home– He wouldn’t have needed to if it was painless.

  21. A company I worked for a while back explicitly asked the employees not to mention their place of employment on social media so that people couldn’t use comments made there to damage relationships between my employer and the company’s clients. I’ve followed those guidelines since then. The last thing I want is for someone to spot one of my social media posts and try to get me fired because cancel culture didn’t like what I said.

  22. A witticism from my misspent youth is, “Give a leftist an inch and he thinks he is a ruler.” Therein lies a dilemma.

    Conservatives, as a general rule (there are exceptions), are willing to be reasonable and compromise in the interest of keeping the peace. That doesn’t mean they won’t come back later and try again but they seem to understand that a peaceful compromise is superior to a violent victory.

    OTOH, I no longer believe that leftists respect the virtues of politeness and compromise. They may claim to want both but they see it as a sign of weakness and, like any predator, will pounce when the victim is seen as vulnerable.

    I am not convinced that things have gone so far that the downward trend is irreversible before Western Civilization hits the bottom. I really do think the Left will self-destruct but the toll in destruction of wealth and human lives will be high. I would really like it if conservatives of whatever preference could adopt the ideas outlined by Mike Vanderboegh when he first talked about the three percent. I don’t think will go that way. It will be more like the Troubles.

    I rarely say this but I want to be wrong. I really do. However, I do not think I am so I callously plan to take care of me and mine first.

    Still, OTGH, I have that glimmer of hope the signs and portents are misleading me.

    1. I’ve long understood that the things that made a civilisation civil – manners, politeness, social rules, law, the concept of a common good, the value of life, etc – are just weapons, tools, to the Left, to beat you into place with, and then they ignore it themselves. Look at the things they celebrate, and it becomes clear.

  23. “Well, what would you think if those people were afraid to speaking up, of even mentioning their politics in public, much less defending their opinions.”

    Considering Progressives seem to believe all people right of Lenin are h8-crazed, rage-fueled, violent gun-nuts the real question is why aren’t they afraid to speak up about their politics?
    –

      1. Europa doesn’t show at that scale. Oh, never mind . . .

        Also, I’m not sure of Uranus. My derriere tends to red.

  25. Funny, I am verbotten to speak to spouse’s family about politics, personal responsibility, hygiene, philosophy, parenting, just about anything come to think of it. I am not shy about my opinions and have a love of engaging with others and will let those I engage with that I consider them a fool if they rely on emotion instead of reason. After a career in the Navy, and most of that in subs, I get told I am rude at the best of times, annoy me and it will be much worse. Fortunately I find myself settled in a fairly conservative area of Colorado and can insulate myself from the ‘silliness’ of the urban left, the results of that mix would be unfortunate for my continued employment.

    That said I am situational when I will engage with the NPCs on the street. The next town over the hill is a miniature clone of Seattle (pre-riot season at least). Listening to that pampered set of trust fund babies babble is enough to boil my blood, but I usually find these ‘brave’ thinkers will only speak loudly when surrounded by a large group of like minded clones and engaging with the family in tow is not anything I consider wise. Discretion at those times is the better part of valor.

    1. Way it is with my family. Father, brother and I cannot talk. Meanwhile mother and other brother talking about how evil EC is and rooting for assassination. I’ve twice come close to simply packing in night and disappearing

  27. I’m one ill considered sentence away from breaking with my sister. It just sucks. We came really close this weekend when she demanded I respect people who require I wear a mask. I don’t respect them and don’t see why my liberty begins where her fears end especially as her fears are endless.

    1. You’ve my sympathy. As the Right-most person in my or my spouse’s family I face similar problems although I seem to have largely convinced everyone who knows me that I do not tailor my views to others’ demands.

      The appropriate response to such demands as your sister’s is along the lines of, “You do me great disrespect to presume you can dictate who and what I must respect. You can reasonably insist on certain standards of behaviour when in your company, but demands on such internal dispositions as “respect” are tyrannical and beneath contempt.”

      Or, more simply, to quote Mrs Reagan, “Just say no.” It is an unreasonable demand and unless she is willing to grant comparable authority to you is not to be considered. She can ask you to comply with demands you mask but she cannot demand you respect the people making such demands.

      –

      1. Frequently, that’s the goal.

        If she can make HIM do the “last straw,” then she isn’t going to be bothered by him anymore, and gets victim points.

        ….

        I usually go the “completely ignore anything but basic manners” route, which usually means I don’t bring it up unless they do. Then THEY have to do the big screaming blowup when the sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

        A surprising number just stopped bullying everyone. At least when I’m around.

  28. “And now we know … what waits us if Biden wins.”

    It is worth noting that the other side holds similar beliefs about the apocalyptic consequences of a Trump re-election. But consider what each side is saying:

    If Bide wins they will pack the Supreme Court with Justices committed to rewriting law on the fly, eliminate the Electoral College, convert the Senate into a body just like the House of Representatives except for longer terms and no gerrymandered seating, raise taxes, destroy investment incentives, “phase out” fossil fuels, open the borders, establish a “Truth & Reconciliation* Commission” and national mask mandates & lockdowns until all disease is forever ended.

    A Trump victory means controlling immigration, reducing heavy-handed governmental regulation, reducing the power of unions to force members to join in spite of First Amendment assurance of freedom of association), appoint judges and justices who will rule according to the law and Constitution as written rather than as it would have been written were the authors only as smart, noble & empathetic as the judges imagine themselves to be, further reduce taxes and increase investment incentives, protect American energy independence while destroying the economies of opposing nations (e.g., Russia & Iran), and empower states to greater experimentation in the laboratory of democracy.

    A Biden win promises an increase in power for unelected activists, a Trump win promises a reduction in their power. A Biden win comes with imposition of restoration of America’s “soul” and “unity” as interpreted by one of the men who has done most to divide us these last fifty years (see: Bork, Thomas). And whose partisans openly threaten their political opposition as illegitimate.

    *Best reconcile yourself to spending time in a Reconciliation Camp getting re-educated.
    –

    1. The other side is afraid of a bunch of stuff that they imagineTrump would do. Its all projection.

      2. To the e tent that are right, they will have brought it on themselves. I’m sure the Antifidiots are scared Trump will thrown them in prison or send police to kill them. Well, sweethearts, when you throw firebombs and display grade fireworks at people, that is called ‘assault with a deadly weapon’ . The police may not be perfect (hard to prove based on the incidents YOU pick, though), but YOU lot belong in jail. Next to your lawyers.

      3. They are afraid that Trump and his supporters will do to them what they would do to Trump and his supporters if they had the power. And if they keep up with their shenanigans, they may be correct . . .

  29. And now for something completely different!

    I just bought two bags of Gluten Free! Potato Chips. All the bags of potato chips prominently advertise their Gluten Free!-dom now.

    I checked, just to be sure, and I was right. Potatoes do not contain gluten. So somebody perceived a need to proclaim that potato chips are Free! from something that was never in them.

    I swear we are asymptotically approaching Idiocracy.
    ———————————
    It takes a LOT of education to make somebody that stupid.

    1. Did you check the label section where they usually put “processed in a plant that also handles peanuts” or similar?

      Main-ingredients-don’t-contain-gluten isn’t the same as if-you-are-seriously-allergic-to-gluten-you-can-eat-this-and-not-die, but the fad makes it so that it’s more likely to pay off if you do all the work to keep an allergenic-to-gluten-allergy supply line AND write it across the front of your stuff.

        1. My mom can sing a duet on soy protein. The doctor told her to avoid it because it mimics estrogen, during recovery for breast cancer.

            1. You might already know this, Kirkland brand albacore tunafish works. It is just water salt and tuna. Chicken of the Sea has one label that’s similarly labeled and one that’s off limits (at my Costco, always read the labels, etc).

              I read lots of labels. Still can’t figure out the “perfect” diet to make all the go away, but I know a lot about creative cooking! At various times, figured out egg, dairy, wheat/gluten alternatives for go to staple foods (like brownies…). And friends/family care about soy free, so I pay attention to that too. Spices are fricken annoying… A relative said, “Hey, I can’t do garlic any more!” And all the savory recipes have to get twiddled. And the bulk of the prepared sauces, dressings, and broths are now suddenly off limits. Lol. A way I express care for people is to make food that they can eat too, so it’s worth the mental cycles to figure it out as much as I can. In return, I appreciate if the magnitude of the problem is clearly communicated (from “preference” and”mild inconvenience” up to “I might die”). Although if it is on the “I might die” end I’m less willing to jump in. That’s an enormous cost to being wrong after all.

              1. > A relative said, “Hey, I can’t do garlic any more!”

                Somehow I wound up in that group. And I *love* garlic. But garlic hates me now.

                Now I know why so many old people wind up eating mush. It’s not their teeth, it’s just that it’s the only thing left that doesn’t cause rash, edema, gas, or urgent trips to the loo with the walker.

          2. oh. soy milk, not soy protein, makes me throw up exorcist style.
            Do you know how many people tell you it’s in a baked good? yeah. Good thing I’m now low carb and don’t buy baked goods.

            1. My sister’s allergic to soy. How she hates to see a label with “New, Improved Recipe!” on something she used to be able to eat.

              On the bright side, after four decades, she no longer tests as allergic to it.

        2. my 23 and me says I have Celiac gene. This is irrelevant as I have something with wheat maybe once a year, but it CAN’T be that bad, as I don’t get deathly ill.

          1. I apparently have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. It is no fun at all, and even walking into a Panera Bread is off-limits ’cause of the flour in the air.

            (Seriously, I did that once, and a few hours later I scared someone I was chatting with into wondering if they needed to call someone professional given how depressed I was. Fortunately a quick dose of antihistamines knocked out the worst of it.

            I have not repeated this mistake. Uggggh,)

        3. The only spice on these chips is salt, as Mother Nature intended. WHAT is the deal there, what is wrong with potato chips that taste like, you know, POTATO!

          1. They are going the way of coffee flavored coffee and beer flavored beer.

            Sign in a picture posted on the internet, “They’re here! Pumpkin Spice brake pads!”

            1. I have a photo on my phone from last year of a vet’s office offering pumpkin spice rabies shots.

    2. It’s kind of like how I, who am definitely not Jewish, will buy Kosher hotdogs– because the steps that are involved in keeping something certified kosher also result in a product that superiorly fits my tastes.
      So even though keeping kosher is a very niche market, there’s a rather major payoff to labeling many of the products that are certified so that a non-Jewish customer can find them, which lets you get more benefit from the extra costs.

      1. I have read now and again, that there is and was (especially after publication of Sinclair Lewis’ The Jungle) a trend to buy kosher by non-Jews because of the assurance of sanitary processing of meat products.

        1. My family is weird so we do it for the quality of the meat (my mom can rattle off the things you can put in various meat products, or could twenty years ago) but I can definitely believe that’s a motive.

            1. More like “would require much more spices.”

              I dislike organ meat, but what amounts to “the stuff left on the blade while cutting” doesn’t have an inherently bad taste. Raw meat just looks pretty nasty.

        2. The Jungle is largely fiction.
          That said, for stuff like hotdogs I buy kosher because it’s less likely to have weird bulk ingredients from China that might not be anything like what the label says and might in fact be poisonous. (The Jungle would probably be true for China, but hey, Sinclair was a socialist, so I doubt he’d agree.)

            1. you know, I haven’t even planed TG dinner this year. I’ve been looking at the election day as how long I have to live.
              Can’t shake that from the back brain. I know it’s daft, but….

              1. We have so many around the house. This morning woke up to one outside the bedroom window. DON’T KNOW WHY. On the roof.
                Husband says we can’t bring them in and warm them up in the oven. I DON’T know if he’s named them. He might have. Sigh.

                1. I used to tell my ex fiance that the “photogenic deer” out by the dam would make fine venison jerky and stew meat, and the taking would be easy given how tourists had trained them to walk right up to cars…

            5. Shot my Thanksgiving turkey second day of the season. 17.5 lbs field dressed, 13.5# styrofoam ready. Only took 2 hours to pluck all the feathers off and cut it up. If you like dark meat, with no additives, wild turkey’s are the way to go.

          2. It’s not part of the major news stream, but I’ve been seeing comments about how much of the American pharmaceutical stream comes out of China now, and how often the label doesn’t match the contents. Some people *need* specific meds…

            1. I wonder if “the meds were made with stuff from China” might explain some of the inconsistent results in some drug trials and experimental tests.

      2. Same here. Not Jewish and don’t care who makes ’em, but Kosher hotdogs and sausage are just better. Enough so that I look for ’em. (And then I laugh with the ad where “we answer to a higher authority”.)

        Also, matzo-brei is just not the same without matzo crackers. But dang, those things are pricey…

        1. When we could eat carbs, we used to “clean up” the shelves after passover and freeze the matzo.
          To be fair, I grew up having them with tea. (My family is SO weird.)

          2. Eh, we grew up having Challah as a Christmas tradition, that my mom ‘borrowed’ from her best friend (who was half-Jewish, but herself a fellow Whiskeypalian). I still bake loaves and loaves of it each December. Which we then eat covered in Smithfield Ham, because Virginian.

            1. Challah was Sunday bread. Why? Well, Portugal. Bakeries were closed. Except Jewish bakeries. Who sold challah outside the church doors, on Sunday as Mass was letting out.
              again, when we could eat carbs, I made it every Sunday.

          3. Matzo is also another one of those things that can has a decent shelf life if properly sealed and stored and is not a bad emergency supply to have on hand if expecting food/supply shortages.

            2. Some like it buttered, but I prefer it with a tasty charoises and generous bit of horseradish.
              –

      3. It’s interesting what gets certified as kosher. BBQ sauce, for example.

        (And it warms my libertarian heart that “kosher” is not a government certification. “Organic” certifications ought to be the same, rather than an FDA responsibility. Because Organic is Kosher for New Agers.)

        2. The reason they made “organic” a government certification is because it outsources the costs.

          I don’t like it, either.

          Certified Natural by (XYZ) group is handled like kosher.

      5. In college, my father was what was called an ‘eating Jew’. He didn’t share the religion, but the cafeteria was superior, and he had the option of eating there.

        1. As long as I don’t have to make any faith declarations that go against my faith, and as long as I don’t know anything dubious about foods, I will patronize anybody who puts out a good product that I like. And I won’t make any assumptions about anybody else, except that we like food.

          As long as people don’t get an attitude about it, I will help people get whatever kind of food they want or need, and I am prepared to worry about their dietary restrictions as if they were my own.

  30. Yes this is real, it’s on the official channel…

    Don’t be drinking anything when you watch it.

    Better yet, the ad aired during an episode of “The Walking Dead” 😀

  32. Nothing to see here, move along, move along Pay no attention to that Mark Steyn column…

    Election Day Minus Seven
    [SNIP]
    Against [Biden’s basement campaign] are the GOP rallies. I don’t mean the Trump rallies, but rather the Trumpless rallies. They’re out there every day – events that a couple of fellows just decide to put together in their neighborhood. None of these make the news, but they’re happening all over the map. Byron York ventured out to the parking lot of Oil & Gas Safety Supply in Washington, Pennsylvania (just a hop-and-a-skip from the Ohio/West Virginia borders) for a “Trump Train” car rally:

    The cars from Ohio and West Virginia exited off the interstate, rolled past the Home Depot, then past Oil & Gas, and then, when the last car had passed, the Washington cars joined it, making one massive line of vehicles heading back to St. Clairsville.

    There were so many cars — organizers estimated the number to be 2,000, many of them with whole families inside — that it took a very long time to pass through the lot. As that happened, people honked and waved American flags, and Trump flags, too, and talked about why they think it is critical for the president to be reelected.

    As Byron reports, many of those cars had “whole families” inside, but presumably others merely accommodated couples or single drivers. So let’s be conservative and estimate it at 4,000 people. That’s a big crowd for a candidate event with no candidate, no surrogate, no celebrity endorser. Washington, Pennsylvania is a town of 15,000 people, so getting 4,000 people to turn out for anything is an accomplishment.

    For the purposes of comparison, consider a car rally in Philadelphia a couple of days earlier: the Second Coming of Obama played to an audience of two hundred – almost all of them Biden-Harris campaign volunteers – and the returning Messiah stood there in the chill delivering jokes that echoed off dozens of wing mirrors and died in the mirthless silence.

    Meanwhile, far away at the other end of the state, a handful of the unglamorous masses put together their own event and attracted twenty times the crowd, and without the aid of a national campaign looted by Brad Parsehole and his chums.

    Similar events are taking place every day, all over the map, on a scale never seen before.

    The legacy media and the woke social cartel are all in on the official fantasy – that there is a real “candidate” actively “campaigning” and that in a week (or so) the Democrat chad-danglers will have worked their dark arts sufficiently to deliver a landslide that makes the pollsters look non-incompetent.

    Against that are pinpricks on the map where an enthused base requires none of the above – no media, no woke billionaires, no Hollywood A-listers, no starry predecessors, no polls, no campaign funds. Just citizens, fired up and proud of it.

    Something is happening here.
    –

    1. My husband has a co-worker in a “nice” area of Des Moines proper. The city proper is under a mask order for…a whilte.

      There were Trump parades scheduled for Sunday and Monday.

      Saturday morning, at about 10, he gets a text on their gossip link– I mean, group connection– because a spontaneous Trump parade had formed and was going down this dude’s suburban street, which four years ago was full of Biden signs, and there are a bunch of happy people watching it. The coworker is probably vaguely liberal by marriage if nothing else, but they’re conservative where people are getting hurt, and their whole house was happy.

        1. I expect a lot of that this week as Democrats try to ramp up the fear level prior to the election because they think it will help them; they really just don’t get how angry people are over the lockdowns.

          1. They’ve forgotten the basic difference between the American Citizen and the European Masses. The Europeans hunker down and hope it all blows over. Given Stormtrooper and Gestapo levels of provocation, they may rise up in desperation, especially on the fringes, but mostly they cower.

            Americans get PISSED.

            Somebody should have made the Democrat panjandrums read about the Battle of Athens Tenn.

            1. If Democrat panjandrums did read about the Battle of Athens Tenn. they’d conclude that it was vigilante, white nationalist[1] terror overturning a legitimate democratic election – legitimate and democratic because the Democratic Party machine won by cheating fair and square.

              [1] Protesting when an old black farmer is kept from voting – and then is shot in the back – is an obvious sign of racist white nationalism. Obvious. White. Nationalism.

              1. I recall from back in the ‘80’s, when Mencken’s diaries were released, all the ‘viewing with alarm’ there was over his ‘racism’. Some years later I read with great pleasure an editorial the old ‘racist’ wrote, publicizing an open letter written by a Black preacher ( don’t remember which sect), warning that young Black men who had taken up arms in the Great War were likely to take a dim view of being pushed around at home. Mencken strongly approved.

                The Fascist Left has never been good at distinguishing between appearances and substance. Deliberately, one assumes.

          1. “A Vote For Biden Is A Vote For Unconstitutional – Not Legal – Federal Issued – Tyrant Nazi Lockdowns”

            FIFY

            Too Long?

        5. Spotted this at NY Post’s daily “other news” page; it seems applicable to Polis as well as Whitmer:

          Media desk: Creating a Costly COVID Narrative
          The “news media can still be a very formidable force” when “there is a panic, the subject is unfamiliar to the masses and they speak with a generally uniform voice,” notes John Ziegler at Mediaite. The pandemic gave the prestige press the opportunity to shape a “politically deadly” view of President Trump — and they’ve “taken full advantage of it,” though it has “unnecessarily cost our children very dearly.” The press, ignoring America’s “far better rate of deaths per cases” than many similar countries, is “cementing the perception” that Trump’s COVID-19 response “has been a disaster.” Harsh lockdowns in states such as Michigan are hurting Trump politically, “because a portion of the population there, thanks to the media narrative, has determined that their governor’s punishing actions were required due to Trump’s ineptitude.”

          Remember: most people do not pay attention the way we do.
          –

  33. Could this be why there is such grousing about Trump being “rude”?

    How the Left Is Using Americans’ Empathy and Decency to Destroy Us
    By Sarah Hoyt
    lot of people are upset and worried about how easy it was for the various state governments to perform illegal takings on the population by preventing businesses from operating or from operating normally for months on end, in the absence of an immediate and pressing emergency.

    Yes, I know COVID-19 was presented as an immediate and pressing emergency. But presenting it as such doesn’t make it so.

    Yes, it is dangerous, mostly to the very elderly and severely immune-compromised. Yes, it behooves a civilized society to protect those people.

    Which we didn’t do. Instead, we treated the virus as though it were uniformly dangerous and just as likely to kill the family’s four-year-old as grandma. We closed schools (and re-opened a number of them as daycare centers), selectively closed stores (because apparently, the virus is far less dangerous in pot dispensaries than in bookstores, say), mandated ridiculously low occupancy for restaurants (anyone who has dined out in both NYC and anywhere out West knows that in the West our tables are already “distanced”) and generally set our hair on fire and ran around screaming that it hurts.

    Which it very well should, because stupidity should hurt. Most Democrat-controlled states in fact seem to have gone out of their way to “make it hurt,” including Governor Newsom’s insistence that Californians not celebrate Thanksgiving.

    I’ll be honest: Both this and the embrace of COVID-chic masks—even though there is no scientific evidence they work, and scientific evidence that they don’t is being actively suppressed—has me in a funk and has been very bad for my productivity (both fiction and non-fiction this year).

    I’m mostly worried that the same media that has sold these stunts, and the absolute necessity for authoritarian government in America, will now sell the need to get rid of orangemanbad over the recession and unemployment the left themselves caused.

    But unlike most of the commenters on my blog, I don’t think this means something very fundamental has changed about Americans.

    Yes, Americans are in a panic and obeying nonsensical (mask) orders and outright harmful ones, like the closing of businesses that are no more or less harmful than the ones being left open.

    But they’re not doing this because they are in a panic for themselves. …
    –

    1. Yes, and because “rude” is saying “no” to a progressive. Because they are entitled to what they want, you see– so if you don’t give them what is theirs, you’ve taken it, and oh yes to raise a shielding hand is confrontational.

      /sad

      1. Progressives. Narcissistic personality disorder. Looooot of overlap in attitude and behavior. Both vicious and life-wrecking – and both get ahead because the average person “goes along to get along”. And if a sane scapegoat makes a fuss – well, they’ve got a life they need to take care of, sooner or later they’ll have to get back to work. A narc gets their feelings hurt? They make everyone’s life miserable. So much easier to just let the narc prey on the scapegoat….

        1. Progressive is a term that Marxists coined to try to make their noxious ideology more palatable. They should be called what they are: Marxist.

    2. I’ll be honest, I understand for cases where will be in prolonged contact with others for minutes. But when I’m a dozen feet and two dividers from the nearest person its a frigging talisman

      1. CDC guidelines:
        closer than six feet for more than five minutes.

        …do you know the kind of screaming that Iowa’s democrats made when we passed a law that you couldn’t sue people if you got sick, if they’d asked people to follow the Iowa health guidelines, which most of the time are the CDC guidelines?

        Was a big hint, to me, that they were NOT worried about people being sick.

  35. Yeah, I’ve been struggling with anger, and with wanting to make statements that I am sure will not end well for me.

    I’ve been wanting to make some rather specific statements about my own larger organization. It is an excellent example for making political hay on a certain issue. But politics is not so all important to me that I’m willing to burn my business to the ground for temporary advantage.

    I’ve been struggling a little with my temper.

    Anyway, finally got into my email today, and a certain leader is talking freedom of speech all of sudden. I do not believe, and my first instinct is that the organization is doomed. Hindsight, he may infer that the Democrats are badly doomed, and he wants to walk back the unmasking of the progs now that there could be consequences for him.

    It is fortunate that I spent so much of today napping, because my calm is greatly assisted.

  36. My problem is that I can’t talk when I get angry. I can insert songs, or yell argumentation at the top of my voice, or cry, but I get so angry and depressed. There have been times in the past when I have lost it and done some good, but generally this is not what happens.

    Mind you, I can argue just fine at home. Not so much with strangers.

    However, I have been following some of the Christian apologetics to Muslims folks, like Sneakers Corner, CIRA International, Acts 17 Apologetics, and DCCI Apologetics. And they find that shying away from confrontation, or even being polite in some cases, are counterproductive, whereas being confident and abrasive, or at least using a strong and somewhat impolite manner, are what help some people listen and trust! Very strange how different cultures work.

    1. It’s the “strong horse.” If you are serious, and superior, you will be aggressive, pushy, confident, and blunt (within the cultural confines of politeness). Quiet and polite is submission. It’s all wrapped up in the honor culture (external honor) vs. our shame culture (internal honor).

      1. Hoboy, yes. There’s an Arab guy with the pseudonym of “Christian Prince,” who essentially runs a call-in show on YouTube. So Muslim people Skype him to talk smack about Christianity, and he talks apologetics and smack.It’s very very freaky.

        Things have been fraught lately. There’s the linguistic study of Quran variants, and an interview on the Muslim Youtube circuit about Quran variants which basically exposed a lack of adequate Islamic theology on the topic. There’s the historical study of all the weird things going on with Islamic “history” versus any contemporaneous chronicles or physical evidence. And then there were a bunch of keyboard Jihadi threats against female Christian apologists and female relatives of male Christian apologists, which resulted in the apologist David Wood* doing Quran page origami, and then in eating pages of the Quran and using a drill press for Quran crafts. (Actually, this was a somewhat successful tactic, as apparently they are now just putting out death threats against the apologists instead of all the rape threats.)

        In the middle of all this, and right after the Paty beheading, one of the UK female Christian apologists, a Turkish-born lady named Hatun Tash, got clocked in Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park by a Muslim guy. But apparently this isn’t even the first time shes been physically assaulted for talking in a free speech area, and the guy who did it got arrested. But she went right back to apologetics as soon as she got out of the hospital from the concussion. Very brave lady.

        * David Wood is an interesting guy, being that he went to prison for bashing someone’s head, and was diagnosed as a psychopath. And then found Jesus. And then went to college and had a devout Muslim STEM roommate. And then argued the guy into conversion and becoming a minister, as well as meeting his future wife during a side argument. And then lost his friend to cancer, but still promotes his friend’s interesting videos. There’s a whole saga, all of which basically explains why Wood literally does not give a care about getting death threats. Very encouraging when you are feeling down, although the guy is not exactly warm and fuzzy.

        1. . And then argued the guy into conversion and becoming a minister, as well as meeting his future wife during a side argument. And then lost his friend to cancer, but still promotes his friend’s interesting videos.

          The guy who wrote something like… no God but one, I think it is?

          Was on Kresta in the Afternoon, probably more of the Catholic radio shows, too.

            1. When he was on Kresta, he sounded like a guy who was totally normal…except he’d run into something incredibly cool, and was a little miffed that people stuck their fingers in their ears and screamed at him if he mentioned it. 😀

        2. *has had coffee, now, though not enough and can think well enough to do the book search and a few minutes looking*

          Yes, the Dearborn Islamic festival guys, where for some ungodly reason the authorities thought they could claim that Nabeel Qureshi and co were doing things that video proves they weren’t.

          My goodness, there are a lot of “they should apologize for being accused” results that pop up on that search.

  38. I took my car into the dealership today and when the work looked to take longer than first thought, I accepted a ride home with their shuttle service. The driver was a pleasant grey-haired gent. Inevitably our conversation started with Covid, and I decried the shut-downs. He agreed and then he said Biden was totally incompetent to be president and he could not believe how people were being fooled. As the ride continued it was obvious he was frustrated with all the lies from the media but not sure where to find facts. I asked if he spent much time on the net and when he said yes, I recommended instapundit.com. I explained a bit what it was and the types of links he could find there, from sources that could back up their claims with hard, verifiable data. It was a short ride but before I got out of the car, I gave him the URL and Glenn’s name. He wrote down both and seemed willing to check it out.

    I go almost nowhere and see almost nobody, but perhaps this time I did connect with a total stranger and gave him information he could use and perhaps pass on in his turn. I hope so, because that would make my day, and almost make up for the repair bill. 😉

        1. It’s usually just basic “someone said something in the comments and I happen to find something that either supports or refutes their claim” type stuff– but knowing someone might be there is a big encouragement.

          I’ll try to make a point of harvesting the comments and sending them to you in the future, though.

  40. Happy St. Jude’s Day, everybody! And also Happy St. Simon the Zealot’s Day! This is a great day to pray about impossible causes, or lost and angry, violent people. So yup, election and civic prayers!

    The big 54 day super novena on EWTN, for the US, continues.

    Also, in a rare non-jerk move, Pope Benedict’s old idea of letting people do cemetery and church visit plenary indulgences for the dead every day, during the month of November, has been renewed this year by Pope Francis. Go out there and make some friends in Purgatory! (Any cemetery counts; doesn’t have to be a Catholic one.)

    Priests are also being asked to do three Masses on Nov. 2, All Souls’ Day. Usually priests can only say one Mass a day, although for priest shortage reasons some are allowed/ordered to do two or three on Sunday. It’s also allowed for priests to say three Masses on Christmas and Easter, which is why there are different sets of readings for different times of day. But doing three Masses on All Souls’ is something you don’t often see — although bishops in various places allow and promote it, to help people pray for the dead, and remember that we’re part of a communion of saints, within Christ’s Body.

    2. > in a rare non-jerk move,

      It’s a trick? Or “even a stopped clock is right twice a day”?

      I don’t see it much any more, but in the mostly-Baptist South, families would go to cemeteries and have picnics and let the kids run loose playing among the tombstones.

      Yankees thought it was disrespectful, but hey, the dead probably appreciate visitors who aren’t bummed out.

      1. Pope Francis likes to do things that people in Argentina like to do.

        Also, every so often he does something nice or devout, possibly to be seen doing something nice or devout, or possibly as a sop to others or himself; but also possibly because he likes it or sees it as right. Generally it’s devotions that are popular among normal lower-class people in Argentina. For example, he has promoted devotion to Our Lady Untier of Knots and for various popular Argentina titles for Christ, and has canonized several Jesuit and Argentinian saints. And he didn’t say anything nasty or dubious on those occasions; he was on his best behavior.

        Shrug. If he does something normal or good, I’m not going to be ecstatic about it as a sign of him being holy. OTOH, I’m not going to rip him about it. And I will use it and run with it, if I feel it’s a good thing.

        1. Pope Francis likes to do things that people in Argentina like to do.

          I think that pretty much summarizes it, honestly.

          He’s just so… of his culture, I guess would be the way to put it.

          Argentina has good beef, and my shipmate who immigrated from there– as an adult– was a good guy, but a lot of their upper-class stuff, especially the upper-class-showing-how-in-tune-they-are-with-the-lower-class stuff, sets my teeth on edge– and I can’t really describe it better than that. We were the guys who worked on the ranch, so we were lower class, so there was…kinda the same way that some cultural Mexicans get fluffed when you don’t appreciate the effort they put into treating you as worthy of notice.

          1. Well, yeah. Argentinians can be really nice, but there’s a stereotype that they can be really snotty. Partly because they still use 2nd person plural (vosotros), but partly because they sometimes are.

            1. Kind of like Americans being uppity– because we are, if you look at it from the POV of even your poorest American seeing themselves as not lesser than a first family of whatever-country?

              1. Unfortunately, we’ve got a whole lot of wannabe royalty that WANTS knees bent for them. With even less justification than medieval aristocracy — there really were class differences then, starting with literacy.

                Trump doesn’t demand that anybody bend their knee. He deals with people as equals, which royally pisses off the Leftoids. He doesn’t kowtow to them, nor does anybody else kowtow to him. He upsets the Natural Order of their world. Kamala Harris is not stupid enough to demand the bended knee (yet) but sure as hell WANTS it.

                I guess that’s yet another failing of Marx and Engels — they were still seeing the world as it was in the 16th century, before the Industrial Revolution allowed everybody time for education. Their notions of ‘class’ were as full of shit as their understanding of economics.
                ———————————
                There is no shortage of people convinced they can create the perfect world. They just have to eliminate all those imperfect people who don’t fit in it.

                1. He deals with people as equals, which royally pisses off the Leftoids. He doesn’t kowtow to them, nor does anybody else kowtow to him.

                  I think that you’ve put your finger on the “rude” accusation.

                2. Yeah, people kneeling and bowing to me would creep me right the hell out, because I know how much doing that would piss ME off. I’d know just how much they hated me behind those meek expressions. I’d never be comfortable turning my back on any of ’em.

                  I suspect Donald Trump feels the same way.
                  ———————————
                  How can Leftoids create a better world when everything they do makes this one worse?

                    2. You’ve reminded me that while kneeling before one’s would-be overlord it is an excellent opportunity to punch up.
                      –

                    3. …and now I remember that scene from the cheesy Mortal Kombat movie where Johnny Cage fights Goro. A split instead of kneeling, but I suspect the same strike is possible. 😀

                1. Heard it as a joke, ages ago; took a lot of lectures on cultural body language, combined with what the activists want whites to do with blacks (notably, “white” means anybody that isn’t one of theirs) and how one uses body language with dogs to recognize the element of truth to that.

            2. Israelis have a reputation of arrogance but really, living in that neighborhood and being constantly pestered with the kind of advice they hear from Europeans and Americans, how could they not be arrogant?

              Well, and still be alive, at any rate.
              –

              1. Two irresistible reactions:

                It’s not arrogance if you can back it up.

                …who is calling them arrogant? The guys who want to push them into the sea and keep failing anytime they attack something more legitimate than a pizza parlor or a family home, or the guys who are pissed they keep hitting back when attacked?

      2. Cemetery picnics are something you still see on Memorial Day in many places. It’s basically our American Day of the Dead, except no sugar skeletons.

        Oh, and speaking of skeletons, St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Louisville had a normal crazy guy break in and attack their altar, but apparently the church has already been reconsecrated and the altar fixed or replaced. There was a special note on their Book of Face that the relics of Ss. Magnus and Bonosa hadn’t been damaged. I was like, huh?

        Turns out that in 1900 or so, the pastor managed to get hold of two complete relic skeletons that used to belong to a convent in Italy, and had all their provenance papers. (There was a point when Europeans were anxious to help Americans get relics for their churches, as well as clear out the storage in various dioceses and in Rome.) St. Martin’s had a project within the last few years to get their saints’ relics a more fitting renovated home, and a big Mass and everything, and so there’s some new devotion to them.

        I was always very fond as a kid of the natural history museum human skeleton people, so I bet this is just the coolest thing to have in church. Hopefully things get normal and I can visit ’em.

        1. In Portugal, Oct 31st everyone goes to the cemetery and lights candles for the dead (they usually go to mass too. It’s a holiday.)
          Then afterwards, families used to gather at the homes usually of the oldest member, eat roast chestnuts, drink red wine, and have a sort of mega wake for everyone who is still remembered…..

          1. In the USA, October 31st is the day that Democrats go to the cemeteries and harvest ballots for the upcoming November election.

            1. Yup, Oct 31 used to be a common day for candlelight processions and praying in graveyards, particularly in the northern areas of the British Isles, where the weather was a bit better on Halloween than a few days later on All Souls. Putting the kids in guising costumes collecting alms was just sort of a way to keep the kids out of the house while the prep was happening.

        2. Anyhoo, if you find out that a relic saint is from a catacomb, and he or she is not someone famous, anybody can be pretty archeologically sure that the person is an early Christian and that the name came from some kind of inscription on the person’s tomb niche. The provenance papers will probably be complete and accurate. Beyond that, nobody is going to know much about the saint. Many are believed to have been martyrs because they seem to have met violent deaths.

          Basically, during the excavations in Rome back then, there was a lot of concern about leaving body fragments around, in an insecure location, after catacombs had been opened and excavated, and there was also a lot of desire by Catholics around the world to have Early Christian relics in their churches, in a place of honor. All Mass altars are preferentially supposed to have relics of martyrs installed within them, as in the Book of Revelation. So as long as everything was documented, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The big problem is that people today are not as relic-conscious, so a lot of dioceses have been calling for relics that aren’t in nice reliquaries to be returned to the archdiocese for honorable storage.

          Under modern guidelines, people wouldn’t be quick to announce that catacomb skeletons were saints, but the late 1700’s and the early 1800’s were a different time. And to be fair, pretty much every catacomb saint has been associated with tons of healings and miracles. If the Church says somebody’s a saint, and if you believe that the Church has the power of binding and loosing, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s cool to have early Christian brothers and sisters around.

          If anything is known about the saint and it’s not something literary or archaeological, it’s probably from somebody having prophetic dreams or charismatic visions, back in the day, and that constitutes private revelation that you can believe or ignore.

          And yeah, there’s a lot of repetition of Roman names, so yup, there’s a lot of catacomb saints with the same names. The toddler St. Bonosa whose relics rest partly at Clear Creek Monastery and partly in Fontgombault is not the same teenage St. Bonosa who rests in St. Martin of Tours, Louisville.

          But yeah, usually “relics” mean a fragment of very fragile, somewhat disintegrated bone picked up from a tomb niche, not a whole skeleton. (Or an incorruptible body still dressed in Roman clothing, such as that of St. Cecilia.)

          1. And yeah, there’s a lot of repetition of Roman names, so yup, there’s a lot of catacomb saints with the same names. The toddler St. Bonosa whose relics rest partly at Clear Creek Monastery and partly in Fontgombault is not the same teenage St. Bonosa who rests in St. Martin of Tours, Louisville.

            *laughing*
            Saying “cousin Mary” or “cousin John” doesn’t narrow it down any in my blood-family, why should my holy family be any different? *grin*

            1. Like going to Wales and asking if anyone there is related to you and your last name is Jones . . . Happened to someone I know. The answer was along the lines of “oh, only 2/3 of the country. Which Jones are you?”

              1. *files away that Jones-es are from Wales*

                Came up in conversation with the half-elf that neither of us have a concept of Wales, other than “cool flag, that one rude poem talks about preying on their knees and their neighbors?”

    3. “This is a great day to pray about impossible causes, or lost and angry, violent people”

      So, an excellent opportunity to pray for Antifidiots and BLM thugs; “May God guide them, and reward them according to their merits.”

      1. Well, I didn’t want to say that right out, because I’m sure everyone has their own individual lists of zealots and hopeless causes, including themselves in some cases! But yeah….

        Amusingly, that’s the date that our university chapel was dedicated. It’s really a wonderful feast day for college students, when you think about it, especially since it falls during midterms.

    1. You’re a day late and a dollar short. The ‘woof’ thread is about six feet up the page.

      And, again: Meow!

    2. I’m forced to wait on the full moon … over London.

      Ah-hooo, werewolves of London
      Ah-hooo
      Ah-hooo, werewolves of London
      Ah-hooo
      –

  42. This is z, posting by request of Herb. He was admitted to the hospital last night and transferred for a procedure. He’s currently in surgery and I will update if anything major changes but at present, we expect at least a few day stay. He’s expected to be awake tonight, but to mostly be sleeping and recovering until tomorrow. He didn’t want anyone to worry if he was out of touch for a couple of days.

    4. Yeah, gonna be remembering him in my prayers.

      He is very well thought of here.

    6. Dang it, I hoped since he said he was in the ER that it was something like a fractured foot or similar.

      Prayers going up, and thank you for telling us.

    7. “… mostly be sleeping and recovering until tomorrow.”

      I am greatly pleased to learn he has his priorities properly ordered. I shall sacrifice a dark chocolate bar for his speedy and congenial recovery.

      I shall also mutter a prayer on his behalf but, frankly, based on observable effect, my prayers do not get much answered … on the plus side, I’ve yet to be struck by lightning, so there is that.
      –

    8. Thanks you, Z, for letting us know – our thoughts are with him, and with you. Take care of yourself, and here’s to a speedy recovery for Herb!

  44. Courtesy of Byron York at the Washington Examiner, I present you the Trump House, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

    Meanwhile, peaceful protestors in Philadelphia are constructing a house in Biden’s image
    –

  45. Oh, hey. Re: China, I was reading this Western “traditional Chinese medicine” guy talk about shame vs. guilt. And he said that yup, China is such a shame culture that a lot of Chinese have trouble understanding guilt at all, although of course they may sometimes feel it because it’s a human thing, just as people from guilt cultures sometimes feel shame.

    The thing is, there’s supposedly no reason to feel shame in Chinese culture if nobody knows about you doing something wrong. Shame is the feeling that everybody is looking at you censoriously because they know. If you can stop people from looking at you censoriously, you don’t have to feel shame anymore — even though that bad thing is still something that you did, or that you are still doing.

    So yeah, every time we disapprove of Xi and make a fuss about it, we makes wittle Xi feel bads.

    1. Westerners have -no- idea what the power of Face is in Eastern cultures. People regularly kill themselves over how things -appear- to others. Not the facts of the matter, but the appearance. If it looks bad, it -is- bad.

      I don’t understand it, at all, but at least I know about it.

        1. Of course, this also means that if you can disappear the people who make you feel bad for doing bad things, everything is okay! Bleh.

          I think a lot of the leftists and Twitter addicts have a shame culture going.

  46. Courtesy of PJ Media:

    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/10/28/unhinged-anti-trumpers-already-calling-for-supreme-court-justice-amy-coney-barrett-to-be-impeached-n1102330

    Democrats already proclaiming that unless Barrett does exactly what they tell her to do, particularly with regard to any cases involving the election, they will seek to impeach her. Never mind that Kagan participated in cases involving Obamacare when she was involved in Obamacare stuff prior to her appointment to the Supreme Court.

      1. This story was already exploding from pure Streisand effect. People were already looking for how to change their votes because of it.

        Now there is nothing to hold back the pressure.

        1. “People were already looking for how to change their votes …”

          Leave us hope they weren’t googling that info.
          –

          1. Of course they were googling it…. that is part of how we know they are looking; the searches have been trending since the Hunter reveals.

            Also calling polling places, etc.

            1. I’d think Duck, Duck, Go or one of the other alternative search engines would be more productive. Admittedly, as we all now know, Google would not ever suppress or bias search results.

              No, not ever.
              –

  48. Hi Sarah, Just wanted to add my 2 cent. I don’t comment often. I have finally persuaded my 21 year old college-indoctrinated daughter to vote Trump. It took a loonng time, but one of the pluses of the lockdown has been her coming home and living with us for the past 6 months. My husband and I both read the book “How to have Impossible Conversations” and used the techniques in the book to wake her up. She is not all the way there, but has become an avid listener to Ben Shapiro (hey, it’s a start). Thanks for everything you do. I love reading your daily columns and if you ever come to San Diego, I would love to host you or just meet you, from another Sarah

    2. I dropped out of the DVR’d program I’d been watching to discover the liberal commentator on a Fox News show (Shannon Bream, I think) arguing that the “youth vote” was going Democrat because they were so burdened by college debt, which she cited as proof the Capitalist System doesn’t work. Both the host and the conservative awaiting a turn boggled over that, pointing out that those loans were from a federal program and taken out voluntarily but the Demwit just blasted through their objections, insisting that allowing kids to accept large amounts of money from the Feds in order to attend private colleges was a market failure.

      It takes one hell of a heap of education to believe anything that nutty.
      –

  49. Yesterday I saw where some bigshot in France was saying that Moslems are in fear of being lynched, ‘just like Jews before WW2.’

    Hey, asshole, Jews weren’t going around chopping people’s heads off for saying the wrong words! That kind of makes a difference.

    And in New York, a Jewish car parade in support of Trump was attacked by a violent mob. The New York Times (spit!) implied that the Jews were at fault. Exercising their First Amendment rights in the ‘wrong’ way, I suppose.

    2. “The New York Times (spit!) implied that the Jews were at fault.”

      On behalf of the NY Times, they’re merely being consistent. They’ve taken that position since at least the 1930s.
      –

  50. This reminder: if the Democrats prevail Tuesday, this will happen; if Republicans hold the Senat and White House, it may not happen:

    Democrats’ deadly strings on new COVID-19 aid
    Families and businesses are watching their bottom lines and stretching each dollar. But House Democrats are pushing a plan to prevent America’s schools from doing the same thing.

    The proposed HEROES Act, laying out their demands for the next federal COVID-19 relief package, pledges $175 billion to K-12 public schools to help cover pandemic-related costs and backfill lost state revenues. But to qualify, states must keep spending as much on education as they averaged during the past three years from now until mid-2022. That condition was a priority for teachers unions, which claimed that otherwise states might shift funds to other priorities.

    But there’s a real chance that state tax receipts won’t rebound to their pre-pandemic levels until 2023 or later, meaning states should be looking for long-term fixes instead of short-term bailouts. …
    –

  51. Addition to the “rude” thing– “mean spirited.”

    Seen people who I know are philosophically conservative, agree that the President acts in a manner that seems “mean spirited” at times.

    …the only thing I can make that fit is in the sense of not being nice, you know, the same style complaint that inspired the “When people ask you WWJD, remind them that flipping tables and chasing people with whips is an option.”

    1. Andrew Klavan has spoken of Trump’s style being recognizable to all New Yorkers – he’s a guy from Queens. They raged about the swagger of the Texas fighter pilot in the White House, and before him about his father’s “Patrician” airs.

      In a similar way, people from the South where manners are still routinely employed, are often criticized as being cloying, phony, and annoying for saying such triggering terms as “Sir,” “Ma’am,” “Please,” and especially, “Thank-you.”
      –

      1. The closest I’ve been to New York is the maybe an hour we spent on the interstate in Pennsylvania, and even I noticed he’s a “guy from Queens.”

        Even Spiderman has that spirit!

    1. “There’s a good chance they’re lying to themselves …”

      The Left – delusional? That is un-possible.
      –

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