I’ve been gaming stuff in my head, mostly in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep. (Though I wish to brag that last night I managed FIVE hours! Whoo! [Struts])
It’s actually not unusual for me to game out stuff in my head, though usually not at the national level. More at the field/industry/individual level. Sometimes for books, sure, but more often for real life.
There are several things you have to remember when gaming out any situation in your head, particularly one as complex as the one we find ourselves into — extending at least 100 years back and probably more, and in space over a vast and very complex land — that this is not a novel. If this were a novel, the rather apocalyptic vision I had last week would be true.
In fact, the hardest thing possible is to get ourselves away from all the narrative we’ve been fed, from the cradle, some of it in the form of “real history” which wasn’t.
The left is in the grip of a very powerful narrative, for instance, which has been taught to them as history: the whole Marxist insanity of the war of the classes (there are no real “classes” in the Marxist sense, and the fact they refused to go to war is what brought us the entire insanity of the Gramscian reboot of Marxism, in which the proletariat was now supposed to be other races, and countries far away. Bah.) and the ultimate revolt and win of the “exploited.”
They were taught this complete falafel as history, and have seen it working out on screen in movies and documentaries on the various “glorious revolutions” from France to Russia (I don’t think there have been many about China, because even to us that’s just wrong.)
So they think that the upper class oppresses the masses, till the masses rise in a glorious wave and institute freedom, equality and reasonably priced love.
None of that picture is right. You have to step back A LONG LONG LONG way and squint for it to fit kind of the general movements, but none of the causes are right, and the results are not what they have been sold either.
I mean, usually revolution happens when the pressure lets up and things are getting better, and the result of anything Marxist is often worse than the oppression before, etc.
But more importantly they haven’t been taught how those glorious revolutions were sustained. Yes, yes, they think this time they’ll do it right, but the thing is that nothing about the end of a Marxist revolution is even functional, and that all of them that subsist as regimes do so only as parasites. But more on that later.
For now suffice it to say that everything the left has been doing is out of that narrative. They’ve been trying to get the right to play along with what they think is the inevitable course of history since Obama’s administration, which frankly was the beginning of the leftist movement I’ll call academic left taking over the entire party.
Obama’s understanding of society and of other human beings was that of a college freshman, which is why so many of his unguarded ideas like higher taxes being bad for the economy but good for people, or his imposition of Obama care, or his printing money in overtime — standing astride the economy hitting it in the face with money to prevent it rising — to his making it NASA’s primary mission to make the Muslims feel better about their culture, or… well, all of his faux brilliance, had the feel of a freshman late-night bull season in the dorm. “What’s wrong with you know, the war on terror, is that what we need to do is bolster their cultural confidence, you know? [inahling sound] … Man!” Or “We need more positive rights, like everyone gets a house and food and can work or not[deep inhaling suck] Pass the bong man, you’re boggarting the oxacan ditchweed!”
This movement, encompassing Obama and his entire administration, lock stock and screwed up barrel, is composed in its entirety from people who were at least upper middle class and never had to work one day at anything that mattered in their lives. As such, they really don’t know much about life or history or people, except what they’ve read in books.
Instead of thinking of words as ways to describe reality, they think of words and feelings as ways to create reality.
So Obama, as the good little red diaper baby he is, tried to create the great big revolution by inciting, financing, probably starting Occupy Wall Street. Because in his narrative-addled mind the proletariat SHOULD be rising.
And just like, oh, someone giving a broody chicken a doorknob to sit on, he got the brilliant idea that encouraging astroturf of the angry proletariat would show those idiot bitter clingers lacking his excellent Marxist education what to do. So he seeded OWS in every major city, after telling bankers he was the only thing standing between them and pitchforks.
And he waited. For the revolution that would crown him king.
Instead he got the tea parties good and hard, because the people who actually worked, did things, and made the world go round had had just about enough of his sh*t.
The thing is the left hasn’t given up on this Academic Socialism.
Because they’re so convinced the narrative is right, and why shouldn’t they be, since it pervaded everything from their first formal learning, to the movies they watch for fun, they act like a cult in danger of discomfirmation, and double down, which is how we get Occasional Cortex and the Green Nude Heel.
The thing to remember is that we too have been brought up with this narrative. We don’t view them as the oppressed or their revolution as glorious, but we expect them to win and take full control and stay in control forever.
We see 1984 as a nightmare, they see it as a training manual.
But no one growing up in this culture in the last 100 years can see it for what it is without stepping way back and taking facts into account. And what it REALLY is is impossible.
This is what I realized in the middle of the night. We say things — casually — like “all socialist regimes, absent outside intervention seem to last 70 years or so.”
What we don’t take in account is that this is true, but there’s a little publicized and absolutely necessary bit for them to last that long: there needs to be a healthy non-socialist regime that produces enough food to give them (or nominally sell them) in vast quantities; to innovate and supply them with better technology; and to at the very least refrain from destroying them, if not outright defend them.
Even the soft socialism of Europe and their less drastic version of the Green Nude Heel which the softer (headed) socialists in the US view as their beau ideal survives ONLY because the US subsidizes them MASSIVELY. And not just in defending their heads-up-butts polities. Oh, no. We subsidize them by the simple fact that we produce SO MUCH food that they can buy the surplus, again at nominal amounts. They survive because we innovate better and cheaper ways to do things. They survive because we even produce the more expensive things like entertainment that keep their populace amused. (And unfortunately teaches them to hate us as Hollywood does.)
NO socialism is possible without massive outside help, without a vastly wealthy and mostly free country to leach from. And the fact that we sustained the USSR and are sustaining socialism in Europe, while understandable in its own terms, and given what we knew and the geo politics at one time, is in the end a horrible act of evil, for which I hope we may eventually be forgiven.
But the Academic Socialists don’t understand that.
To be fair, in the long list of things they don’t understand, that one is minor and almost endearing. For instance in the covidiocy lockdowns, which were dreamed up and demanded by the class-that-would-be-rulers, we found they had no clue where food comes from; they didn’t know that food needed to be transported across the country; they had absolutely no idea that our food production is dependent on very sophisticated machine parts, so they didn’t take that into account when declaring essential businesses and services; they had absolutely no clue you can’t close a shop or a restaurant indefinitely and then just open up like it’s nothing….
In fact, in the vast number of things they don’t know, I’m having trouble finding one they DO know. The only thing they seem cognizant of is that if they lie loud enough and often enough, and tell people they need to do this FOR OTHER PEOPLE’S SAKE the American people will comply with the most absurd sh*t. So, for instance you don’t tell them that leftists are exempt from wearing masks and not having gatherings, etc.
HOWEVER they think they can do that forever, and they also think — with almost autistic fervor — that if the economy is bad, people turn against the president. And they don’t understand most of the people saw it was the left driving the lockdown. Which is why Trump got an actual landslide, which the dumb bunnies weren’t counting on. Whatever level of fraud (“the most unprecedented”) they’d planned to crown their potemkin campaign with, it rested on the idea they’d get a basic number of votes from their captives, and also that people wouldn’t go out and vote for Trump, since the economy was hurting.
Because among the many things they don’t know is how humans work. Or at least not humans who live in the real world, where you have to earn your bread through the seat of your brow. So how could they have anticipated we wouldn’t react like a computer program and respond to a certain input with a certain output? (Which suddenly explains their fascination with “models.”)
I don’t mean to rag on them, not really. They were raised very wealthy in a society and class wealthy enough to insulate them from real world consequences, so all they have to fall back on is what they were taught, which at this point is the dreams of others like them for the last 100 years.
And as I said, in some things, despite my effort to extirpate it, I find myself thinking in their memes. Because I was trained professionally in their milieu and amid them, and like anyone with a graduate degree had an extra dose of Marxism served straight up.
The only thing that saves me, to an extent, was growing up in the village where everyone, even my family, was subject to the laws of root, hog or die. And, of course, having had several moments of wakening.
My son was telling me about this — younger son — how most people on the right have had to come to their beliefs on their own, and how it usually happens either with a series of minor shocks, things that don’t fit the theory, or that should be good according to the theory, but actually turn out evil or with one major thwack wake up shock. 9/11 was that for a lot of people, and weirdly this election is having that effect on those who either aren’t straight up psychopaths, or who look outside the main sources of propaganda, even accidentally. (Which is why Twitter and Facebook are taking their censorship efforts to the next level.)
So I was gaming all this in my head, in the middle of the night, and kept coming back to: there is no way we get out of this without a butcher’s bill. None.
Best case scenario, Trump fixes the fraud, gets four more years (yes, probably the court. And stop saying Trump should be on twitter telling you what he has. Have you guys NEVER been in a court case? first thing the lawyers say is SHUT UP.) And the left goes insane. Being idiots they’ve “gamed” this in advance and decided that the next step is for blue states to secede.
Which fills me with no end of joy, since I live in one.
But the thing is, I don’t think it goes the way they think it will. Hell, given they’re not even living in the real world, that’s guaranteed. But I don’t think it goes in either of the two ways they think it will, which is either they get to play socialist republic and show the world how it’s done, or bad evil orangemanbad crushes their glorious revolution and proves that he’s evil, and then the people rises as one–
I am honestly afraid that Trump is evil enough to let it play out, as he has done so far with the left destroying their own cities. But I don’t think they realize what that means in terms of food or energy or…. Yeah. Or the fact that most of the states that are nominally blue aren’t really, and there’s some (possibly massive) amount of fraud involved. Such as in mine which only went blue after all vote by mail.
But in either case it doesn’t last.
And if G-d forbid they get power over the country it really doesn’t last. Because they have clue zero that people aren’t widgets. They will try to move us around on the board, and it won’t work.
Part of the problem is that now their ideal and model is China, and they fail to get that the Cultural revolution worked in China (I mean in terms of Mao keeping power, and the vast massacres which they dream of) because Mao was dealing with not just a disarmed population, but with people who were part for centuries of a compliant culture. And that for their cultural markers, Mao read as “new emperor. Kowtow.”
America is none of those things. Even though the Republicans suffer from abused wife syndrome, there’s a hard-headed “I’ll fix it” among those who do the actual work.
If they seize power I predict they get a year and probably less. Make no mistake, they instinctively expect SOME revolt. Which is why Biden in his “made for Hollywood faux acceptance speech” announced three new wars. This both keeps the military they know (which are only the very top, and very political officers) happy, because it makes them relevant, but also gets the armed people who might not like their dictatorial commands out of the country. They are of course forgetting the many millions of armed veterans who took an oath to the republic.
But the problem is that even in a year, as we found in 2020, they can break things that will take decades to fix.
In either case, there’s a butcher’s bill. There’s people’s who will die, in either strife or hunger, of either problems that the medical establishment suddenly lacks the resources to treat, or of cold (as someone in the snow belt, the Green Nude Heel and the idea we can just have two hours of electricity a day also fills me with joy) or of heat, or of a hundred other things that haven’t visited our society for at least 100 years.
But, and this is very important to keep in mind: We can lose, but they can’t win. Because what they want to install has never worked, ever, not even in more compliant nations and when run by people far, far smarter and more practical than the Academic Socialists.
The important thing is what comes after. If it all tips in the pot, there’s more than a trivial chance we end up with a dictator, though I expect it will be something in the mold of a Franco, seizing the reins until he can let go.
Unfortunately I don’t like dictators, even temporary ones. But it might be the best case scenario, honest. And even in that best case scenario, the restoration of the republic depends on our reclaiming the culture as fast and hard as possible. Because in Spain this didn’t happen and they came out of dictatorship only to whore themselves to the EU.
It shouldn’t be hard. The left really isn’t competent, and have wounded themselves near fataly with the covidiocy. Hollywood and trad pub are hurting, and now, in their attempts to herd us, Facebook and Twitter are in the process of committing rather public suicide.
But it is work. Long, constant work. And as hard as we can.
In all those scenarios we need to pierce through the veil of Marxist narrative, and remove it, if we want to restore and/or keep the republic
Because these promises of heaven on Earth are as corrosive as they are false.
So, even though I expect if we really drop in the pot and things really get bad I won’t have very long, given my general issues, (and it doesn’t matter. The Republic does) I think I figured out why G-d or my subconscious, or whatever you want to call it, was pushing me to write fiction as hard and as fast as possible.
If only I hadn’t been too depressed by being tied in the strands of leftist narrative.
But better later than never.
The boot — or even the Green Nude Heel — isn’t going to stomp on the human face forever. We’re going to punch it aside and break it, with substantial help from reality. And then we’re going to fix the damage.
And now I — whoo, whole five hours of sleep — am going to go write fiction.
You too go do what you can, from earnest discussions, to casual remarks to, yes, fiction and music and art.
The storm is coming, but it will pass, and if we work really hard, the Republic will abide.
Be not afraid!
I find your ideas strangely interesting. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
–
*clickies the box*
*clickies on your clickie to clickie the clickie*
there seems to be a lot of Click clique kink going on here
I’ll add to it.
[facepalm]
I clicked the box that time but used the wrong e-mail. It’s always SOMETHING.
the clickie box is a little hard to see. I saw the “Sign up for Newsletter” and tried clicking on that. No luck Chuck. Make that a link for signing up, Duh! Otherwise, get rid of it.
It has an actual link. Honest.
But there will be other things.
It may not be a novel, but the Democrats/left are obsessed with turning it into one or two, namely 1984 and Animal Farm.
I suspect a large faction want a “green” version of Brave New World and are mind-damaged enough to believe that 1984 is a how-to for getting there.
“Now repeat after me: ‘I’m so glad I’m a Beta.'”
Yeah, they seem to imagine they’ll end up being the pigs who rule.
And forgot the conclusion of the story.
Honestly, Trump winning this in SCOTUS is the best scenario. But there will be blood no matter what.
Or should be, if he doesn’t win. Some people might think that I’m being cavalier in saying this when I have no skin in the game, being foreign; those people shut the fuck up because most of my friends are there in the US, and I love you guys and I fear for your futures. And I’ve seen what happens there try to trickle over to Australia. (Surprisingly, it’s not been taking, despite the generally more leftward leaning society here.)
China’s got it’s fingers in all of this. But it’s really getting my goat that the fraud is obvious.
I’d never think you were cavalier about this.
I sometimes think of your dad, pursuing good journalism despite other journalists being disappeared. (The story you told about only a belt buckle being found of one sticks with me.)
Between that and your time in East Berlin, it feels much more like I Know Where This Road Goes….
…along with a big helping of Why Can’t They See The Cliff, Fer Chrissakes?!!
———————————
“The bridge is out!!”
“Bridge out, only idjits beyond this point!”
‘Dancer needs to write *something* and then send it off among the relatives for each to add their memories. Such a man should not be forgotten.
The absolute tragedy of the Marcos dictatorship was, before he extended martial law … before all the abuses?
Marcos was a decent President who wanted the best for the Philippines; wanted us to be a world economic hub, like Hong Kong. His wife, Imelda, for all the flak she gets, honestly wanted Philippine culture and goods to be as appreciated and feted and well known as Chinese or Japanese was. You know the baro’t saya dress she’s iconic for? That’s known as the Philippine national dress NOW because of her.
The threat of the Communists and their terror attacks was real. Hell. Those same damn commies are still active NOW.
His children are really good eggs, and the province/s the Marcoses govern/s are loyal to them. It wasn’t until later that things started going bad.
And yeah. I feel like that. And I don’t know what will take for the war to happen, because there already have been deaths on the ‘All lives matter’ side of things, and that didn’t kick it off.
I think everyone was waiting for the election–and now, are waiting for the courts. There’s… a bone-deep feel, I suspect, that one should give The System every chance to work.
I am not altogether sure it has many more chances.
Yes. Because what comes after is not the Republic, and we know it.
Shadow, Americans are different. Were from the first, before the revolution. We know what we have and don’t want to jeopardize it.
We’re extraordinarily slow to anger.
BUT when we hit? We destroy everything.
Shadow,
Yeah, Woods has the right of it, though I might quibble on details of how to explain the mechanism.
Politics and law in America have always been a performance for the crowd. Now, these days we like to make the law technical and boring, because emotional investment creates problems. But there is still a great deal of unstructured public oversight and deliberation.
One of the later narratives about the Holocaust was the claim that it was done concealed from many ordinary Germans. That is not the case for the great systemic misconducts in American history. Segregation/Jim Crow? There were people locally who hadn’t figured out that the electoral and legal frauds involved were occurring, but the frauds were only able to happen with the knowledge and approval of a local majority. People figured it out, and decided that what the organizations involved were offering them was more important than fixing things.
So, formally, the Supreme Court is the higher power over the lower federal courts where this will be litigated, but informally, interested members of the public will be reviewing. And the informal, unofficial practices that we don’t have down in writing exist, and are sensed, for all that the stuff we haven’t described yet is hard for us to describe.
We have a certain preliminary attempt to feel out the battle space, negotiate allies, figure out who is reliable and who isn’t. We want the outcome controlled; when things are tense, a careless word can spark a consensus mob to do something they will regret later. We don’t have this stuff formalized. The formalized stuff, written down, the Left has understood well enough to corrupt.
Some of this is cultural. See Kipling’s Norman and Saxon, there is a youtube video of it being spoken. “My son, leave (the man) alone”. Creepy Baidou is a Jiangshi, and incapable of heeding that advice. Harris is basically accustomed to the wielding power in the way of that young nobleman’s fellows. In the ‘well’ of California, she is a ‘toad’ like Bull Conner. So, they are very likely to push past what they can persuade the American people is just.
So, if you’ll recall the first series of Yu Gi Oh, with the possessed kid? This is like that. The asshole of the week has been established, they’ve cheated someone else in a gamble, and they’ve been convinced to double down on a new gamble. They know they are a cheater, the possessing spirit knows that they are a cheater, and has figured out how they will try to cheat during the gamble. Asshole doesn’t quit when they are ahead, “penalty game”.
In the past the Democrats would accept losses, to avoid tipping their hand, and to preserve the ability to cheat effectively in the future. Do you think Hillary didn’t have people who would have done this stuff for her? Look at the places in 2020, and look at the places where Trump won EVs in 2016. Somehow she retained the judgement to tell when certain tactics would not be productive.
I may have mentioned, before, in this venue, this little “vision” that keeps hanging in my head, of John C. Calhoun – a man reportedly blessed with *so many* good gifts and talents – standing before His Lord needing to answer for what he did with his life.
This picture of Marcos starting out with all good intentions and going so seriously wrong – makes me want to know more, even though I know the tale will be ultimately infuriating.
The overall summary I gather is, greedy inlaws and relatives, and a military that enjoyed the power they had too much.
My father knew someone who supposedly overheard General Ver begging Marcos for the order to fire on the civilians during that EDSA Revolution rally where people lined up in front of tanks and soldiers to block them.
Marcos reportedly shouted that he would NOT go down in history as giving the order for that, and shut his bloodthirsty General down. (Ver is the one most of the abuses and atrocities are attributed to.)
Marcos left the palace and went into exile soon after that.
The Cory years … looking back, really? They shouldn’t have put a housewife on the Presidency just because she was the wife of someone who died. There’s actually some speculation now whether Marcos really did order Ninoy Aquino killed – it seemed inconsistent with someone so politically savvy.
The hard part is to figure out ho much of what we “know” about those years everywhere WAS actually USSR sabotage and disinformation, still active via local communists, even after the USSR fell.
We won’t know that for…. centuries. And there might always been debate.
The left ocntorls the press so much, a lot of what we know are probably lies.
This is especially true in the Philippines. My mother regularly rants to me about how annoying the press is now, over there.
After reading a comment thread over on TheNewNeo about why Jews are Democrats, I went and looked up “tikkun olam”, which is the catch-all excuse for any and every prog stupidity.
I learned that the phrase acquired its social justice connotation in the 1950s and 60s. Well, isn’t that an interesting bit of timing? Right when liberation theology was infecting the Catholic Church. And right when the KGB were in full subversion-through-front-group mode. Curious.
Since indentation went away I don’t know if you’re replying to me, but I was referring to your father, who seemed like a worthy man.
The more I see of people, the more extraordinary he was, despite being so very ordinary, y’know? It really is a shame he died so young (at 58.)
Well, he’s in good (if sad) company — Roger Zelazny and Frank Zappa both died at 58.
I turn 58 tomorrow….
I just turned 49 today, ijs
I don’t think you are being cavalier about this; (insert terrible joke here about infantry, artillery, archers, or sailors)
Seriously, I think you weren’t quite calculating the American thought process right, but I’m sure I can’t do that either, and I was born here.
I figured you were sincere, and weighing things carefully, but maybe very closely informed by societies that couldn’t afford not to start shooting immediately.
And maybe I’ve been too cautious.
I do know that I’m really short on sleep, and that I’ve deliberately not paid close attention to avoid distracting myself from work too badly.
Also, Atlas Shrugged.
Impossible!!
These are top men, I say. Top Men!
On the secession of the “blue” states, I recently had a thought about it.
The libs love to crow about California having the worlds’ “5th largest economy” or some such crap. Sure sounds great, CA can *SURELY* go it alone, right, they’ve got TONS of “money.”
Except.
How much of their own FOOD does CA grow? How much of their economy is things like “entertainment” (Hollyweird,) or easily shifted elsewhere (Silly Valley?) How long will that economy last when the “rich” flee from the taxes and the food growers crank their prices as high as they can get away with and the truckers start refusing loads to CA?
Same thing applies to the East Coast lib havens (NYC comes to mind…)
In the mean time, the “heartland” of the US keeps growing food and eating heartily, manufacturing (what’s left of that) goods, etc.
/me fixes a big-ol-bucket of popcorn for this
Um… actually, California grows quite a lot of food. Most of it luxury food, to be sure, but some absurd percentage of the food variety for the country comes from California.
You can figure out which parts grow food by looking at a district electoral map.
And good luck to them holding the still productive parts 😉
To truly appreciate the distribution one has to look at the US red/blue map at the county level.
When you do the nation becomes a sea of red with islands of blue, those islands almost exclusively being high population cities and a few of the tiny New England states that have been taken over by progressive leftist Democrat administrations.
As for California, hard left policies have turned what was once one of the nation’s bread baskets into what is fast becoming a landscape of desolation as productive farmland becomes brown and dead from lack of water (must save those snail darters and salmon don’t you know) and residents everywhere live under rolling blackouts every time the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
Fun fact, mention to any Greenie that the source of all of their vaunted sustainable renewable energy is a thermonuclear reactor. It’s just 93 million miles away so they can pretend it’s Mother Gaia at work.
what? A leftoid leadership turning a green grower to a famine factory?
Again?
[insert the certain Princess Bride character here]
INCONTHEEVABLE.
We get even MORE blackouts when the wind does blow, and the sun does shine!
There’s this phenomenon called a Santa Ana, when wind blows from the north and east. First the air goes over a mountain range, which wrings all the water out. Then it descends the western slopes, being compressed and heated at the lower altitudes. We end up with hot, dry winds over 50 MPH in places. A major contributor to Southern California Fire Season.
A few years ago, under those extreme conditions, a fire started and burned a large area. Houses and whole neighborhoods burned down. The cause was traced back to high-voltage electric wires brought down by a falling tree. PG&E was sued, and had to pay a LOT. Over $100 million?
SOOOO… Now, when the sun shines, and the wind blows, and the PG&E executroids worry, they shut down the power to whole regions so they won’t hang for ‘starting’ another fire. Santa Ana winds can last for days; so too do the blackouts.
———————————
Some folks can be taught. Others can learn by example. The rest have to piss on the electric fence for themselves.
As far as I can tell as an intermittent visitor, California has three seasons: Pleasant, Fire, and Mudslide.
Fire, Fog, and Allergy up in the Sacramento area.
–
Wait for it. We’re headed that way in Oregon too. The Holiday fire was supposedly triggered by down power lines during the “freak” fall wind.
The fire that destroyed Detroit & Idanha Oregon (near the Detroit Dam east of Salem) was a “let it burn” wilderness fire that blew up when the winds hit. Let’s see what that fallout triggers.
Don’t know what started the fire in Hood area, Clackamas County, that threatened eastern side of the greater Portland metro area. I’m sure there will be consequences there too.
One of them was started by a downed line at the RSG mill outside of Molalla.
–
Well then that is 2 out of 3 fires in Willamette Valley, started by downed electrical lines … Not sure exactly where up hwy 126 the Holiday Fire started, just legal ads locally for lawsuit regarding the down lines that started the fire. Plus, for reasons, the screaming about the Detroit Fire and “let it burn” wilderness fire policies. Not to mention “they didn’t put the fires out fast enough” screaming (like they could).
Note. We were out of state when the fires started & blew up. No news. Aware of the fire out of Molalla, because niece’s home was under level 1 evacuation notice in Clackamas area (rescinded). The Detroit Hwy 22, and Holiday Hwy 126, fires affected our routes home … we normally come home Hwy 126 through Springfield. We discussed Hwy 20, but didn’t really want to tow the trailer that route, plus unclear how far east the hwy 126 fire really was (our phones were on power life support). We came home Hwy 58 instead. Then paid attention to the Holiday fire because it was close. Umpqua fire because spent a lot of childhood weekends camping that corridor. Smoke was so bad in Eugene that our night street light was on during the day. Ash was more than gritty. It was hot. We’re close enough to get heavy ash with the smoke, but not close enough for the ash to have started fires under the conditions. We’re 30 miles (ish) west of Leaburg the western edge of the Holiday fire. Note, the eastern neighborhoods of Springfield were under level 2 & 3 evacuation levels, which are only 15 and 20 miles east of us.
I got to level 2 where I live.. it was interesting. For a few days when I went to work it was like I was living in Hell, or a Lovecraft novel. Not happy making
I lived in CA for 30 years and now I’m in Philly. I STILL marvel at cool winds in the summer and fall here on the east coast. Wind in the heat of summer? I fully expect to feel Santa Ana conditions when I step outside. And, I’ve lived here for 20 years. Those Santa Anas put a deep mark on you.
Water wars. They will be intense.
Forget it Jake, its Chinatown.
How much will they grow when water stops flowing across the California state line?
Calexit. Recommended:
I know I’ve said this before but take back the Colorado River!
Damn skippy! They stole that water from Colorado, dangit!
And all electric cars by, what, 2040 or some such. But notice how they neglect to discuss how to produce all electric farm equipment.
Hell, they neglect to discuss how to produce ELECTRICITY.
their grid is going to melt down
They can’t keep it up with current demand (sorry about that pun)
The whole ecological movement is a perfect example of the tendency of Leftwing movements to to the exact opposite of what will help. It’s tempting to ascribe this to deep laid conspiracy, but I have to suspect that it’s simply widespread idiocy.
What tips me toward “Evil ideas planted by the Soviets bearing fruit” is the way the Greens keep warning about the horrible effects of disrupting the balance of the natural environment, while at the same time being entirely willing to clear-cut and pave over the economic environment.
Or demonic possession? I mean how can it ALWAYS end up being harmful?
Yeah. The alleged party of “Mom and Pop stores,” and hating “evil corporations,” routinely do things that help big corporations at the price of tormenting small retailers. Or save the environment by destroying it.
I mean, low flush toilets MUST be flushed 6 times. Low water washers have to be run three times. ETC ETC ETC. In the end, they use more and do the job worse.
Eco energy of all sorts must be collected by things that use rare earths whose harvesting kills children and turns Africa into (more of) a hell. ETC.
Pfui. You can no more believe what they say, than you can take a “male feminist” at face value.
–
“Efficient” appliances and plumbing that aren’t. Required by government edict.
MAGA: Make Appliances Great Again.
Herr Fuhrer Gavel Nuisance issued an executive order banning gasoline-powered cars by 2035.
Note that there is no Enabling Act granting such power to the governor. If we live in a sane world, the courts will determine that it’s unconstitutional under both state and federal law. If we live in a just world, they’ll call him a naughty boy and whack his pee-pee.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for either justice or sanity.
———————————
“Oh, no. You can’t-a fool me. There ain’t-a no Sanity Clause!”
And they won;t build hydro dams.
And they are closing Diablo Canyon.
So these are going to be natural gas powered cars.
And just to add to the gestalt of incoherence, last night this hit the local news:
But wait, isn’t everybody supposed to eat beans instead of meat?
In SF they will soon be transitioning to a grass-based diet.
or mushroom-based
70% of the water in California comes from the northern half. (70% is *used* in the southern half. There… may be some resentment directed towards Palm Springs.)
Blue California is trying to destroy its embarassing, non-organic, productive agriculture. Properly irrigated, they have the most productive farmland in the world. Yes, in the world. The Blueocrats have been doing everything in their power to shut off the flow of irrigation water, and turn the place over to illegal aliens who dump trash everywhere. Did I mention that trash here includes the corpses of drug and murder victims?
Most productive? By what measure? Because everything I’ve read (admittedly not a comprehensive list) indicates that the soil is poor. How do they compare on per-acre yield with, say, Iowa (where the soil is splendid and deep) or Japan, where they have VERY intensive farming practices.
Not that California COULDN’T be productive, if the imbeciles in charge would allow it to be… it
They grow a lot of food (especially vegetables, citrus, nuts, etc.) in California, and at least had at one point a sizable dairy/cattle industry, but a significant portion of their agricultural dependent upon water from the Colorado River flowing in from other states.
They’ve been curtailing their agriculture with “green” crap though, and most of the water goes into the sea to save Nancy Pelosi’s delta smelt. (Not a joke.)
And they’ll still manage to starve, even though all you have to do is spit and the food comes up.
Yes, I know. And the LA area steals a lot of water that could be used for agriculture. They likely have the climate and land (and maybe, water) to feed themselves, but their political morass that even now causes them grief would likely be even worse in an independent California.
good Lord. Venezuela has FOUR HARVESTS A YEAR. I know, I had family there (still have some.) AND THEY’RE STARVING.
Socialist miracles.
California probably has, in terms of resources and technology, the potential to feed itself. It is mostly hampered by politics, which I would NOT expect to improved in an independent California, as I would expect it to shift farther Left.
I’m afraid to ask what happens to the food.
Four harvests a year. Dear God.
Farmers have to trust their crops won’t get stolen by mobs or socialists before they’ll grow much. Assuming they haven’t fled or been executed as evil capitalists. And socialist usurpers would need to know what they’re doing, and have seeds and such, to grow much.
Remember kids: Agricultural Reform = Famine!
(The fact that the “reform” is so frequently “remove the farm from its owners and give it to people who haven’t so much as grown potted herbs” doesn’t help, but there are an amazing number of other very creative failures one could point to as well…)
If you haven’t read ‘The Last Centurion’ by John Ringo, read it! He debunks ‘organic’ farming along with dozens of other farm-related Leftoid idiocies.
Q: What is perhaps THE greatest advance in/for agriculture in (relatively) modern times?
A: The Haber-Bosch process.
I would argue internal combustion against that, Orvan,
I grant that is a helluva good point. Having seen up close what a mere *12* horsepower steam tractor is…. the internal combustion engine is downright miraculous. I suspect either is not that great sans the other… and let us NEVER have to run that nasty experiment in either direction. Too many calories, too cheap, is the BEST problem to have, considering ALL the alternatives.
Interesting factoid, does everyone realize that all modern train engines are driven by electric motors?
Hell of a long extension cord, what? Nope, those very high gain motors are fed power from diesel engine generators.
Uncle Lar, I believe a few locomotives are now using natural gas generators instead of diesel, and their are modern electric locomotives in the Northeast, though I believe all of them are in passenger or work service, not freight.
I worked f or C&NW Railroad for ten years, but that was 1974 – 1984 so my knowledge is a bit out of date.
Just ask the South Africans about that…
Putin offered Russian citizenship and land grants to the disposessed Seffrican farmers; many of them took him up on that. The USA has allowed a handful to come here, but apparenty they’re not the kind of Africans the State Department wants.
Over the course of the last Century, the way to bet has always been that the State Department is wrong, unless being closely driven by Presidential policy…and often even then.
Hm. Well, it’s not a great deal, but I guess if Putin wants to play New Yekaterinburg, he’s in a position to do it. And I bet everyone wants their own Hong Kongers.
these places tend to kill or chase off the farmers. Betting those Cambodians there are thrilled with what they are seeing (those that didn’t escape a second time to places like Texas)
Most of it probably rots in the fields, because there’s no gas for the harvesters and they’re broken down anyway. Or it rots in the granaries, because there are not enough trucks to move it. Even if there were trucks, are the flour mills running?
Can the farmers get seed, fertilizer, weed killer and bug killer in the first place? Can they get gas and spare parts for their tractors? Tires for their wagons? Constant electric service, for all sorts of necessary farm functions?
Modern industrial farming depends on all sorts of things working reliably. Break just a few, and you’re back in the Middle Ages when a farm produced enough food for the farmer’s family and maybe two non-farm people, with the whole farm family working their asses off. Farming may have been the biggest change of the Industrial Revolution.
Including the children. Making it hard to educate them. Making it hard to get the technical people who could run the factory that would make the stuff that meant the whole family wasn’t needed.
Libs and most city folk have no idea how real farming works.
It should mandatory for everyone to spend a summer/year on a real farm. Or at least watch the YouTube videos of a few farms and be forced to calculate the amount of money, work, fuel, tech, chemicals and equipment involved to feed the cities.
Here’s a small sample:
Fast Ag Montana: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXjxLLb5dpeX-pWzD6ejQNQ
10th Generation Dairyman: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNgolUwyOgZZDUoIeSyojpw
I’ve only include a grain and a dairy farm. Nothing about cotton, livestock, veggies, rice, etc…
My guess would be a lot gets wasted, a lot goes to Cuba (to pay for all those advisors helping to keep the Army in line) and a lot of the rest goes to the Vigilant Guardians of the People to be used as they see fit.
I’m going to guess, unless they kept the farmers as slaves with valuable hostages, which history of socialism/communism that answer is “no”, because “widgets”. There isn’t enough being produced to cover even 1/3 your list. I think most the former cultivated land is laying fallow and is reverting to native grasslands and/or invading jungle.
> natural as generators instead of Diesel
Properly set up, Diesels will run fine on natural gas. Mostly done on stationary engines, like you’d find at power stations, though there was a big push for NG in over-the-road trucks in the 1990s. The Clinton Administration raised the tax rate on NG used in that application and that was pretty much the end of that.
A Diesel can be designed to run almost anything flammable. Rudolf Diesel’s prototypes ran on pulverized coal. Some big engines will run on crude oil. You can even run them on alcohol.
The state could probably build enough water desalinization plants to support itself. But that would require funds that could otherwise be earmarked for illegal aliens. Also, the greens would likely scream and kill any such project with a never-ending stream of environmental impact statement requests.
it would require power generation they don’t have.
My state *could* have it… if it was willing to permit nuclear power plants.
eery state could if they would do such, and even the quake zone places could if they put them in the more stable places and built to withstand, (and not like the gulf coast getting a 29 foot storm surge so lets make a 27 foot high storm surge wall . . . what could go wrong?)
They won’t build desalination plants because those would be in view of the coast line…and those Malibu types don’t want that icky reminder of what it takes to support them.
Oh, you haven’t seen the greenies suing to stop desalinization plants because they harm coastal life?
San Diego put one in anyway. It apparently works great, too, and provides enough water for 400,000 people a day.. Sadly, I’m not aware of any others in operation in California right now.
Not really. The moment you stop watering any crop in California, it stops coming up. Much of the ground is poor (nitrogen and organic matter entirely absent, and alkali off the scale; as the local extension agent put it, “we don’t have soil, we have dirt”) and needs a great deal of fertilizer. And it sucks down a LOT of water. The main reason it works is if you feed and water it enough, thanks to a ten-month growing season you can get 2 to 4 crop cycles per year.
If you look at the sateliite view of the Antelope Valley east of Lancaster (north L.A. County) you’ll see this mystery grid all over the middle of nowhere. Long parallel lines everywhere amid a harshly arid and mostly-naked desert landscape. Those lines are irrigation ditches, and sometimes pipes. Everywhere that is cleared used to be farmed. (Where it was never farmed, it still has Joshua trees. Once cleared it takes them centuries to regrow.) Mostly onions but sometimes other row crops. Over the hill in Santa Clarita, it was carrots. The onion fields are now dry and have been sold off as small-acreage ‘ranchettes’ to investors (who if they ever visit the property will go, “I bought *what*??” and promptly sell it to the next sucker). The carrot fields have been completely built over. To the north and further south were all strawberries and potatoes and avocados. Those are now all gone too, either paved over or starved for water. Not so much because water was restricted as that it was all pumped from the ground (ag doesn’t get to use the Aqueduct), ag wells are mostly deep (400 to 1500 feet) and the cost to pump it got too high… restrictions mostly came later, when everyone was already struggling. The last remaining profitable crop in the area is hay, because dairies and stables can still pay $650/ton for what costs around $100/ton anywhere else, and CA restricts hay imports to certified weed-free.
And I’ve been quoted pumping costs as high as $100,000 per acre per month. Some years ago my well guy told me of a local golf course that decided to test their new electric well pump system during prime hours — he warned ’em!! and that 15 minute test cost them $15,000. Diesel is not so costly but try getting a new pump permit. Not to mention that about ten years back, L.A. County confiscated all the private wells. Affected my desert property so I was part of the resulting class action suit, where they graciously agreed to return 3 acre-feet to the hapless owners — enough for household use, nowhere near enough for any sort of ag operation. (Note that this was not a small taking; my well cost $56,000, almost half the value of the property. 4th Wut??)
California grows a huge amount of food by the DOLLAR (something like a 5th of the U.S. market), but by the CALORIE, only a tiny fraction (at a guess, somewhere around 5%, and even then it’s mostly in the remaining rice and potato crops). You can’t live on strawberries and wine grapes. There’s still some beef, dairy, and a few migratory commercial sheep flocks, but nothing like it was before urban sprawl. Eggs were big but new regs are slowly running ’em out of business.
Aside from living down there 28 years, I noted contrast during the occasional length-of-the-state drive up the central corridor: In 1982, ag was everywhere. In 1999, the core was still vibrant but the contraction was becoming evident as marginal areas became unprofitable. By 2006, the orchards were 90% dead and the row crops largely gone. Couple years ago (per a client in the business) the last avocado orchards near Escondido finally hung it up, because they couldn’t get water at any price, and those trees are now dead. This despite that the Sierra snowpack produces on average 150% of the state’s water total needs.
Yeah, CA is sure poised to be self-sufficient. And I can fly to the moon without a ship or a suit.
PS. Ain’t just the delta smelt. They’re also “preserving” some variety of salmon that is actually an invasive species.
And one guy with a loader and a dump truck could disrupt the Aqueduct.
I suspected water was the iffy part, but from what you’re saying it sounds even worse tha m I thought. I was just reading last week about Mulholland and the L.A. water system, and I knew ag water was in short supply some years, and about the Colorado. It sounds like it has all just kept getting worse. Are California’s “leaders” smart enough to realize it?
CA has plenty of water, what it doesn’t have is water rights. It’s first-come first-served (or so I’m told, tho I haven’t been arsed to look into it, since I no longer have a dog in the fight). L.A. went nyah-nyah we’re taking it, and now the Owens Valley is a desert. When I was last up there, there were still tales from old-timers who remembered when it wasn’t, and still pockets that show how lush it once was.
And if the state wants to be the grabber and dump it in the ocean, sucks to be you.
Meanwhile Colorado will flourish with the water we won’t send down stream….
California has water rights.
Many of them were stolen by judge’s order.
The “Ask a Mortician” YouTube channel has a great video about the St. Francis Dam disaster, which explains a lot about the anxieties in your favorite childhood action cartoons. Also a lot about the Owens Valley.
1) that FINALLY makes those cartoons make sense,
and
2) Dear heavens, my late grandmother was our daughter’s age when that happened. /sigh #california
Rights that can be stolen are not rights.
Bullshit.
That’s the argument that holds that if someone can murder you, then you don’t have a right to life.
It’s just a sub-set of the idea that any property you have isn’t yours if someone else can take it.
In reality, any right that can’t be violated doesn’t have much of a reason to be enumerated.
You have no rights that you won’t kill to keep. Especially when dealing with people who have proven they will kill YOU.
Still a false attempt to redefine “right” via equivocating on what having them means.
A thing that is stolen is still yours.
In fact, Inalienable.
If you allow a right to be taken, did you ever have it? Or was it a privilege you lose.
Steve? people can take your life. Does that mean our founders were wrong?
It means (and the Founders recognized this) that unlike the Law of Gravity, “rights” must be constantly defended. Lethally. Gravity simply is.
Sure. of course. Hence the right to self defense.
What part of “inalienable” is giving you trouble?
Trying to redefine rights to depend on them not being violated is both bass-ackwards and waves a big, red flag of “look out, route of attack is here.”
You are essentially asking:
if someone can be killed, were they ever really alive in the first place?
Being alive does not depend on being unable to be killed.
They also refuse to build any new reservoirs which could hold the water from the times they get a lot of rain and snow melt so that when it is dry they don’t have to start rationing water; like they do now. Instead, the lefties are trying to dismantle the reservoirs that still exist.
I suspect many on the left think the mass starvation that is the natural end result of their policies is a feature as they think humans are an invasive species across the entire Earth that needs to be drastically culled “to save the Earth”. They are pretty much Agent Smith from The Matrix when he calls humanity a virus to be eradicated.
There is no hatred and loathing like self-hatred and loathing, and leftists have it turned up to 11.
Sometime in the 1980’s I saw a strange documentary that was about some desperately poor… destitute.. area somewhere in Africa. It seemed to have nothing but problems. The soil was full of rocks. When the rain came, it was a huge burst.. and nasty mud, and on, and on… but there was a fellow who looked around and was truly an Engineer. The land could be cleared of rocks. The rocks could be built into a reservoir. The nasty mud… was at least part of a decent mortar, and so on. The problems were solutions, when someone realized that they could aimed at each other. Did the place get RICH? Probably not. Not by most standards. By theirs? Odd how I never saw that again.
And like as not that engineer was able to solve a lot of problems.
Until the engineer went away, and the locals went right back to the traditional ineffective ways of doing things and let all the systems the engineer had built decay and fail.
There are lots of examples of locals improving their lot through technology — ubiquitous cheap cell phones enabling microbanking in rural Africa, for instance — but it seems to have to be at their initiative. Parachuting in and fixing things for them never seems to take.
or the UN got involved with “Helping” them and the ‘leadership’ started their skimming
It’s like all the little villages in Arabistan that fade away when their well needs repair. Allah willed the water to stop,so they leave. That their ancestors drug those wells – probably by hand – in the first place, is irrelevant. In their new culture, the effort required isn’t something they’re willing to do.
Sometimes you get a lecture about how old the wells are. Yes, they probably *do* predate the Prophet. Which is why they were willing to dig them in the first place…
Kipling saw all of that happen…. and he had savage words about both sides of the equation.
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/white_mans_burden.htmlhttps://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/pagett_mp.htmlOr the engineer fixed them, everything was great, and the neighbors decided that since it was so much nicer here they’d move in.
Over the engineer’s dead body, if needed.
Which you can watch happening in Israel, when land is handed over to the outcast terrorists.
I still want to sob, thinking of that lovely, productive greenhouse that was just destroyed.
THIS.
If I had any shred of something good to say or think about “Palestinians” that pointless destruction (rather than claiming use) of the greenhouse killed it.
There’s that odd patch in the Middle East that manages to do well agriculturally despite the climate and geography being against it and in contrast to the poor showing in neighboring lands.
They’ve been aggravating the whole system’s problems.
Let us no forget Gilroy, where so much of the garlic crop is grown!
OK, so there’s really two Water Californias: From north of LA up to Oregon it’s pretty much water self-sufficient, to the point it is able to export water to LA, and then LA southward which is a desert and imports water from northern CA and the Colorado River, basically draining the Colorado dry before it reaches the Gulf of California.
Down south it’s a desert straight up – what little water there naturally is vastly oversubscribed, and all that Colorado River water goes to basically greater Los Angeles.
They also get water via the big canal system that moves meltwater from the Sacramento River Delta and carries it down to LA, so that water does not flow into San Francisco Bay.
The southern central valley gets a fair amount of rain, though less as you go south, but there enough from rain and snowmelt from eth southern Sierra Nevadas that there’s the San Joaquin River that flows north to join up with the Sacramento River to flow into the San Francisco bay. Southern central valley agriculture needs more than they have, so at one point they tapped water from that big canal running south. That got limited because the idiots in Sacramento think food does not need water to grow and tiny baitfish are more important than growing food. Major continuous irrigation of otherwise dry areas for decades also has caused problems with salts being brought to the surface, which has ruined significant amounts of farmland, but most of the southern Central Valley is still majorly productive if they can get water.
The middle coast gets a fair amount of rain in the December-to-March rainy season, with none in the other months, so reservoirs are all over from back when they could be built, and a few pipelines pull water from places up in the Sierras which get snowmelt to bring water to SF. There are major agricultural regions outside the major urban hub of the SF Bay Area, where a lot of produce is grown, including lettuce, strawberries, and garlic. The area north of the SF bay mirrors this agricultural use with the ag there being mostly wine grapes.
And the northern central valley and mountainous areas up along the coast and around Mt. Shasta get a ton of rain, and a lot of runoff snowmelt from the northern Sierras in the spring flows into the Sacramento River. There are really big reservoirs that have been purposefully neglected maintenance-wise because idiocy, and Agriculture there just uses that river with no importation of water.
So if a meteoric event were to depopulate the LA basin, California would be pretty much water self-sufficient.
I have such a nasty idea of what to do with an obscene amount of Jell-O powder. (Yes, I know where it comes from.)
Not to mention that those field pumps sit by definition out there in the fields and have a lot of copper tubing and wire in them, prime target for a little foraging by illegals and other indigents looking for a small payday.
And now I ponder a different take on a Classic Story:
Adam and Eve never physically departed Eden. It was just socialized.
1. California is not energy independent.
2. California is not water independent.
Now Wikipedia goes on and on about national resource independence being one of the several key features of fascism. Thing the Prog-Socs and the Antifools are too blind to understand is that resource independence is also a key requirement for being a free and sovereign nation; if you’re dependent on something to another country, you can’t just tell them “No”.
NH, Vt, and Me are all water independent. It’s possible for them to be food independent. They are not energy independent, and unlikely to ever be such without more nuclear power plants, or space-based solar energy. Ma, RI, Ct, water independent, not likely to be able to be food independent, and damn sure not energy independent.
Point is, most of the states in this country can’t go it alone, and even if we tried, we’d still be dependent on other states and nations for something essential.
I just moved to NH six months ago. I was very happy that the Republicans took back control of the legislature, but I started wondering about the gulf between the votes for governor and NH legislature and the president/senators. Is that leftist voter fraud too, or do people just split their tickets like that a lot? I was pretty appalled by how easy it is to just show up and vote with an “affidavit”.
NH is a hot mess. Point your “fact-challenged” sons at this.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/7/voter-fraud-alert-over-5000-new-hampshire-presiden/
NH was one of those I kept an eye on, because early on it was going heavy for Trump. Then suddenly it developed this huge tilt toward Biden. I conclude that NH first had a vote, then had a fraud.
BTW Rhode Island did the same pattern.
Yeah. Was just reading Breitbart about NH. Would be nice if they’d do a recount or check here too.
The question is, did the districts keep the envelopes with the ballots for all the mail ins, and did the keep the registration information with the provisional ballots? If not, and they’re all mixed together, we can’t tell which ones to disallow at this point.
Yeah, convenient, that.
Absolutely. hell, here it was all fraud, because I guarantee there is no love for the zombie.
No way in hell did RI go Trump. That was just providence and cities overwhelming everyone else.
And yes, I know ironic to say a clean election by the state owned by the mob
During Hillary’s run “she” (her people/supporters if she herself didn’t know/order) pulled a fast one on Bern with folks supposedly showing up in MA registered cars registering and voting and then driving off (claims of off to the next poll were wailed by the Bros). Also a lot of the late, claimed to be falsely dated (signed affidavit stating so), ballots here in MI and elsewhere are supposedly Biden Only votes. Not even party line voting, just Tick Joe and go. Some did Joe and Senate here (James is contesting the count as well) so yes, that sorta thing is indicative of possible to probable fraud.
No. Ballots always show up marked only for the dem for president. MILLIONS if needed.
Yeah.
I was annoyed that Arkansas requires the full ballot be completed, when I don’t *care* who some alderman or county judge is.
Seems like there might be a justification for that…
Yep.
Would be easy to solve by printing a ‘Not voting for this office’ bubble to fill in, any of which being missing would invalidate the ballot.
I didn’t have registered write-ins available for the two state offices that only had D candidates, and I certainly wasn’t voting for either of those two!
Somewhere had a “None Of The Above” selection (remember it from around the time of Brewster’s Millions) and it went away for being the winning vote all too often
Texas eliminated straight ticket voting this time. Not sure why. Which is why I was standing outside a polling place with a big sign chanting “Fill in the whole ballot”.
WI had (last I voted there.. last century) the option of ‘Straight Ticket’.
MN does not.
I am unsure which is truly better, but I do find the absence of the OPTION annoying.
Michigan has Straight ticket but much of the ballot is not partyline so that part has to be looked at and filled.
oh, iirc a lot of the flipped to Joe from Trump votes in the “glitch” were partyline votes
This is perhaps the best reason to vote by race (not skin color race nonsense, election) – make the bastards have to WORK at “fixing” things.
Yes, it is.
It seems to come and go in my county. Back when we had the big lever-operated pinball machines in the early ’80s, there was a ‘straight ticket’ lever. That went away when we went to paper ballots, then has come and gone a couple of times after the touchscreen machines.
You can’t say ‘Straight Ticket’! That’s Homophobic!
Do they then have at least a ‘none of the above’ for various races? I figure NOT filling out the stuff I don’t KNOW about is better than randomly filling in and experiencing “Oh crap.” And not every race is party aligned, or I could go by that – it’s imperfect, but it’s at least *A* data point.
“None of the above” is not a thing here. Nor are “write in” votes.
No write-ins? WTF?
The fact that Trump had coattails long enough to help Republicans flip multiple state legislatures, narrow the gap in the House in a presidential election year (and likely take it but for fraud) and absent fraud clearly hold the Senate shows that Trump himself, but for fraud, had a landslide win. Losers of even close elections do not have the lengthy coattails that Trump had.
That difference in the number of votes is an indication of possible fraud. Typical voting pattern is most people vote the races at the top of the ballot (in this case President), and then start to skip races farther down the ballot, with the fewest number of votes cast for say, local dog catcher.
As you see, that didn’t happen this election, and the difference is noticeable in many key districts in NH. By the way, we need to get bills introduced and passed in the state legislature to overturn same day registration with provisional voting. There should be zero provisional votes. You either provide all the required documentation on the day of registration, or you don’t get to vote period. This is not disenfranchisement. People too stupid or too lazy to get their stuff together to vote should not be allowed to vote. And this is a major avenue for fraud in this state. Hillary most likely won NH in 2016 solely to do fraudulent provisional votes.
This sums the blatant fraud up quite nicely:
I worked in NH for 20+ years (though have lived in Massachusetts for a variety of reasons). NH Politics started to get odd in the 90’s as hordes of Massholes emigrated to NH. What had been a solidly Republican state started to get bursts of Democrat oddities especially along the Mass. Border where people had popped over to get rid of the Increasing MA income tax. At some point in the early-mid 2000’s the balance swung to the Democrats for a season or two and they quickly changed the relatively strict voter registration rules (90 day+ of residency before you could transfer voting to NH, basically no out of state students voting unless they were self supporting) to the very loosey goosey ones that exist now. This has swamped the state with a combination of transplanted Massholes, UNH students in Durham, and even some outright fraudulent importation of voters for same day registration. Population wise the Mass border area is fairly high (Nashua, Manchester, Merrimac, Durham, Derry/Lodonderry) and swamps the
rest of the state, so for now national slots tend to be slightly Blue. The Republicans have in past elections also found some really godawful candidates AND the Dem’s have lied about their positions so some of the more socially liberal traditional Republicans have gone AWOL either Voting Blue or voting various 3rd parties in protest.
That is one thing about Oregon. If you work in Oregon you can’t evade Oregon Income Taxes if you don’t live in Oregon. For those that only work part time in Oregon … required to track the hours worked in Oregon. Not sure how the work from home but employer is in Oregon is going to work. I’m sure Oregon has that captured too, but not in a position to know. Note, if you live in Oregon, and work in Washington, you pay Oregon Income Taxes on the income from the work in Washington. (The reason when hubby was transferred to Washington we changed his residency, even though we didn’t move as a family. OTOH the vehicles were also in my name, a legal resident of Oregon, so we didn’t pay Washington’s
extortionUse Sales Tax on our existing Vehicle that he had with him there. Would have only applied to his living situation, our RV trailer, at first, but that wasn’t an insignificant amount. Allowed one existing vehicle, < 6 months old, per licensed driver when moving to state. Does not apply to RV's or other "recreation vehicles", including ATV's. But, given he ended up driving a new 2004 compact … nope, just no.)Log Scalers, at least with Columbia River Log Scaling, used to be exempt from the above rules. Grandfathered in for decades. Oregon Income Tax was strictly on residence location. Came from when log rafts on the Columbia could be in motion between Oregon & Washington jurisdictions, often not knowing which one the raft was in. That disappeared in 2000 (scaling on log rafts in the Columbia River disappeared way before that). Not that it applies anymore, the company is down from 280 scalers spread from north of Longview/Kelso to Scott Valley, south of Yoncolla. To about 40 to 50 from Cottage Grove to south of Portland (maybe). When we were in Longview a group of us got with an accountant to see which was better Oregon Income Taxes or Washington Sales Tax (including Use Tax, which other than Vehicles, few pay anyway). Surprisingly it was a push for most of us. Slight advantage to Washington if you took out the Use Tax on anything that didn't have to be licensed, and no new vehicles or RV's were purchased. Biggest advantage, and this was County and Utility District, went to those of us in Washington because our property taxes and utility (electric) was way less. Note. Even I came around. I was raised in Oregon. Sales Tax is "just wrong". For us, the analysis made Oregon look expensive, then.
If you live in NH but work in MA you pay a (somewhat reduced) MA Income Tax. But you pay NO MA Sales tax unless you buy things in MA. Housing costs were (though maybe not so much here 20+ years later) considerably lower than MA as were many other things. Property tax varied, Many of the NH border towns were a wash with average Ma towns though considerably less than greater Boston (Cambridge, Brighton etc). One thing I wonder about is remote work. MA only taxes you IF you are actually working IN the state. People that had offices in both MA and NH prorated by the days they worked in state. If you’re telecommuting into a MA Company I don’t think you have to pay MA Income tax for thos days. 2020 taxes may be VERY dicey as most people are still probably having it withheld but they will probably claw it back when file next april. Couldn’t happen to a nicer state Government 🙂 .
Doesn’t happen anywhere else, on the Oregon border states. Show your Oregon Driver’s license in Washington Retail, sale tax is waved. Doesn’t apply to fuel, service (restaurants), or lodging (hotel or camp fees). Oregon has similar type fees on the excluded list so WA doesn’t feel they have to give Oregonians a break 🙂
Nope, In Massachusetts you pay the 6.25% use tax no matter where you’re from, I don’t think Vermont (6%) or Maine (5.5%) will give New Hampshirites a break either. Which is why NH border towns (and the NH State Liquor stores) are so gleeful about advertising in the neighboring states. One thing the MA tax is a USE not a sales tax. If you buy it in NH you are officially required to pay use tax on your MA Form 1. Precisely how many folks do that is probably pretty low except in the case of large traceable purchases (Vehicles not an issue, if you buy a car and its out of state you have to pay the use tax to get a registration/ Ma title).
–
Technically. WA has an Form 1 for Use Tax to fill out too. Only reason for residents to file. Again, unless you have to register something, then you’ll pay it. How many do? Unless the item is shipped or delivered? I would say, other than Counties*, zip to none. Especially if you live on the Columbia River.
* Worked on Cost Accounting Software for governmental agencies, main target is Public Works Modules, but also had modules for Facilities, Utilities, Engineering, that is installed in over half the counties, plus a few cities in Washington, Oregon, and California (note there are exactly 3 installs in Oregon, 4 if you count the PNW area reservation system). Joke was when Sale Tax issues come up is “What’s that?”. Few of our clients knew we were in Oregon. Good for a joke once in a while. But regarding Use Tax? I had to ask what that was. Hey, Forester & Programmer, not an accountant. Raised in Oregon. Lived in Longview for 5 years. We paid the
extortionSales Tax (which now I know was really Use Tax) when we bought used vehicles in Portland & registered them in Washington. Knew technically we owed some type of tax when we brought other items in Oregon, but never reported, nor paid. Not that we bought any big ticket items in Oregon anyway. No way to transport them then unless delivered, would have paid sales tax on. Why bother? Oregon merchants on the border won’t do Washington’s paperwork; apparently Oregon officials don’t care.Imports. If Cali bumps off, why would we pay them for our imports when we could just as easily get them from, oh, Texas, say. Texans would thank California, gratefully.
Also, would it leave as an entire state? Doubtful. Pockets and large swathes of Northern Cali and some Eastern would jump ship, I’d wager.
Military bases? Nope, those would be gone, too. Edwards, Irwin, Camp Pendleton, thrity-two in all counting the Coast Guard, I believe. Bases support the local economies. Base towns would suffer.
Without the easy trade, the loss of parts of the state, the bases… California would not long survive as itself. I know there are those without common sense who would dearly love the state of California to become its own nation… But the path there ain’t likely and is full of dumb. I just don’t see it happening.
Texas ag is as water limited as CA, just in its own way. Granted, we can go back to high value produce in the Black Waxy (eastern part of state with best soil and water). We also need electricity from outside, thanks to the [redacted] twits who decided to tie us into the national energy grid. For many decades, TX was independent of the national grid. Not any more. Thppppth. Up here, we can run the water pumps on natural gas, but that works only for ag, not for muni water (at the moment.)
I think that Colorado would stay “seceded” until a bunch of Coloradans got to Polis. The end.
Like Nicolae Ceaușescu?
That’s my thought. we have SO many veterans.
“…and one day the veterans had had enough.” We are moving closer and closer to that point.
I still recall Mark Russell’s take on that one:
“Even though Nicolae Ceaușescu is dead, his life is STILL in danger!”
And if you want to know why, go to Romania and stand on the balcony where he could look out over the (coerced) masses. And at the streets designed to hold those coerced masses, and the hideous, standardized public housing blocks disfiguring a lovely 19th century city (Bucharest was once known as the Paris of Eastern Europe).
Who says we have to pay CA for anything? If they want to eat, they play ball with Flyover Country. The countries they have something to trade with are all food importers. We will graciously allow them to buy their dinners from us, and broker our food and fuel exports, in exchange for getting us the best deal on whatever we need to import.
And yes, pretty much all of CA outside of the metros is on our side (and more of L.A. than it looks like from the map). Seen that map I like to post showing the 2016 vote by county and by precinct? A few blue zits and a vast swath of red.
The nation of Ectopia can’t exist without 95% efficient solar power cells. And yes, those are pure fiction right now.
The Fed – that is, us, owns almost *half* of California. The US Forest Service owns 43% of California just by itself.
Looking at how Federal land works, it may be within the borders of a state, but not being subject to the state’s laws, it’s not *of* the state, and the way I see it, shouldn’t be counted as part of a state. Sometimes the Fed lets a state administer Federal land, but it’s a one-sided deal, subject to revision at Federal whim. When you subtract Federal land, the ranking of states by size is *very* different. Hmm…
Yeah, Nevada shrinks to the size of a postage stamp.
and Texas doesn’t
So does Alaska.
Oregon isn’t much bigger than the postage stamp. Between National Park, National Monument, USFS, National Forest, and (technically) reservation land, almost 53%. This really hurts counties that have north of 60% federal land that is essentially laying fallow because commercial activity isn’t occurring. Both State & County get a cut of any income off of Federal land. No income, no cut.
Oh, California grows plenty of food. Now, where the water comes from… could be a point of Nasty Enlightenment.
I’ve maintained that the ‘blue cities’ (what it comes down to, really) are TARGETS (and not just of the Strategic Nuclear Device variety) that have so much external dependence that they would not last very long should external supplies be cut – or even… shall we say.. modulated… more than trivially.
California grows plenty of food, but it doesn’t grow plenty of calories; nowhere near enough to keep those cities fat and happy. Mostly it’s high-dollar, low-nutrient stuff like wine grapes and berries and a shrinking citrus crop. Nut orchards used to be big down where I was, but when last the walnut trees aged out, they were not replanted and the orchards are now developments. Used to also be an olive area but the last (long-abandoned) grove I knew of was recently cut down and is now a solar farm.
*Almonds. Acres of Rows of Almond trees uprooted through the I-5 corridor in parts of CA (I’m sure other areas too). At least in ’15 (when I went down with hubby on his first winter golf trip).
* We were told Almonds when we asked. Other areas passed could have been other types of nut/fruit bearing trees.
most of the live stuff was almonds and oranges last time i drove thru.
Let them. Then invade, conquer, give red counties West Virginia rights, and reconstruct the rest.
Um, no. We retake any red and purple areas that want to come back and say “You can keep the rest.”
Seriously, why are people here so hellbent on holding territory by force and keeping our enemies as countrymen? Is doing that last time NOT how we got to this point in the first place? What am I missing?
And I still haven’t heard anyone explain how holding the states prisoner is consistent with OUR principles or the constitution.
Because having foreign nests in our country gives our enemies too easy access.
And I don’t think you can blame our current problems on the Late Unpleasantness.
>> “And I don’t think you can blame our current problems on the Late Unpleasantness.”
1) Once the option to leave was taken off the table it was probably inevitable that the federal government would grow into a leviathan. The threat of secession and loss of territory or of losing a civil war would have been a powerful check on it. But once it was established that you couldn’t walk away or even shoot your way out, what was to stop Uncle Sam from doing whatever he pleased?
2) Do you really think that keeping a bunch of pro-slavery types around and giving them the vote helps? If we did cut a bunch of them loose, how much easier would it be to preserve American liberty and prosperity?
You can argue that these things weren’t the only causes of the current mess, but I don’t believe for a second that they weren’t major contributing factors.
I will grant you that having enemies on our doorstep is a valid concern, but unless you’re willing to resort to measures like mass exile or mass murder to get rid of the hard left the alternative is having traitors inside the house. Has that worked out any better in the long run?
And I repeat YET AGAIN: how is holding them by force consistent with our principles or the constitution?
“”Has that worked out any better in the long run?”
Well, it worked pretty well 250+ years ago. Ask Ben Franklin’s bastard son. Tories were encouraged to leave rather vigorously.
THIS.
That was the SHORT run. I asked about the LONG run. And the long run is right now. It’s the crisis and impending second civil war we’re looking at as we speak.
Do you really think this would be happening if we had let the democrats go instead of fighting a war to keep them?
YES. A lot of this is foreign interests pumping money into our elections.
I’m not convinced.
Look, I get that money from hostile foreign interests would have made things worse in any case, but if we had fewer people who hated America and its liberties I think the money would have accomplished less. And the threat of the honest parts of the country seceding and reforming under a new federal government would have done a lot to hold Uncle Sam in check, or even let us replace him altogether if necessary.
It still wouldn’t be all wine and roses, of course, but resisting the corruption would have been easier. And a national divorce, if needed, is not nearly as bloody or risky as a civil war.
Because I think if you strip away the fraud, leftist are: the academic left, the indoctrinated students who haven’t grown out of it. Some millionaires. A bunch of status seeking suburban chicks.
Frankly, I think ONE city would be too much territory for the #realleftists.
It would be cheaper to pay them to immigrate and give them start up money.
The real question is WHY should we cede territory to crazy leftists?
You know, a question occurs. How many of these “leftists” are true Marxists who genuinely are willing to risk death for their twisted beliefs? How many of them are merely weak-willed, if noisy in crowds, followers who think it’s fun and cool to be all for “social justice” and “equity” but who would change their minds in a tearing hurry when faced with a firing squad of outraged survivors of the murderous ideologies of Communism and socialism? How would you test for that, short of actually ramming a gun to their heads and possibly snipping off a few fingers beforehand?
A LOT of them are status seekers and virtue signalers.
A lot. We know this because whenever the “defund police” lot face a non-compliant victim, they scream — for the police.
True Marxists? Practically none. They skim “we get to be in charge” and “gimme free stuff” out of the morass of wishful thinking and pseudo-economics, and most of them just pick that up by assmosis.
I’m far enough to the Right that Reagan looked pink. But I’ve read the Manifesto, and I’ve at least made a stab at Marx’ tail-chasing Das Kapital.
I don’t need magic sunglasses to identify Communists. Even the ones who would be shocked that that drivel they babble is straight out of Marx.
>> “Frankly, I think ONE city would be too much territory for the #realleftists.”
Maybe, but that’s an assumption. The way to prove that is to let them vote on it in a fair election.
>> “It would be cheaper to pay them to immigrate and give them start up money.”
If they’re actually willing to leave and there’s some place that will have them, that works for me. But it still doesn’t answer the issue of whether people should be free to secede.
>> “The real question is WHY should we cede territory to crazy leftists?”
Because it’s not ours or Uncle Sam’s to keep. Land belongs primarily to the citizens or private landowners in the region. And not only do I reject the notion that all land in the country belongs first and foremost to the nation, but I think that accepting the principle that it does is an impetus (if a subtle one) towards tyranny.
And I can’t help but notice that people keep ignoring me when I ask why we should accept that view either philosophically or constitutionally. If people keep dodging the question I’m going to start thinking that they’re afraid of confronting it.
Seriously, a free and fair election is devoutly to be wished for.
Do you have ANY clue how we get ONE of those?
I’ll repeat what I said to you personally in the previous post’s comments:
“As for fraud, RES just hinted at what I had in mind when he mentioned the Voting Rights Act. The strictest voting integrity measures imposed from the top, with federal troops looking over your shoulder as you count the votes ready to bust you if you play any games, and all of it on cameras broadcasting live.”
Yes, it’ll mean cracking the skulls of people who would rather rebel than have a fair election. But IIRC you’ve already said yourself that we’re not getting out of this without some violence anyway.
Paper ballots, publicly counted. By more than one group. Each legally liable for the accuracy of the count.
All voting and counting out in the open, under scrutiny of sworn poll watchers (with stiff legal penalties for fraud), the National Guard, any citizens who care to watch, and – since we’ve provided that service for so many other countries – any other nation’s officials or (unarmed) military who care to show up for the festivities, on special visas.
Interference, fraud, or “mistakes” raised to Federal crimes, with double-digit prison terms. At Leavenworth or Gitmo, not Club Fed.
Any time *any* part of the electoral system is out of the spotlight, it is no longer trustable. In 1789 the Founders assumed trust and good will. Unfortunately, we now have to assume any hidden action is malicious.
Every election worker must place in escrow an amount proportionate to their level of responsibility, and everyone gets their money back only if the entire election reconciles to within some allowable margin of error, as established by an auditing firm from another state. That way every person involved has an incentive to keep every other person involved honest, and therefore draconian punishment can be avoided. If an election doesn’t reconcile, increase the amounts that go into escrow the next time.
The problem with that is, their Party would post the escrow, so if they’re caught they have no personal loss. The Party’s pockets are deep; without restricting the counting to billionaires, they can laugh off being discovered.
The Constitutional basis is found here:
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason”
Taking up arms against the government is treason. The Government is empowered to arrest and punish treason.
“Why doth treason never prosper? Because if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
Winners set the rules. Win or die.
Still as eager as ever for others’ blood to be shed on your behalf, eh Steve? Throwing about random epigrams from the inventor* of the flush water closet does not constitute an argument. Try reasoned discourse:
Clearly the Founders of this nation wanted a less brad definition of treason than anything you’ve suggested. It is notable that even after the War of Southern Secession there were not treason trials.
*Sir John Harington. From History Today:
I do not think, Steve, that the appropriate response to our political opponents is to become their negative image as you seem to be demanding. Of course, I have won arguments without having to resort to brute force.
–
Note that unless I leave prosecutable plans, I’m not willing to shed my own blood. OK.
Nothing was said about your willingness to shed your own blood, Steve, just noting that (like Aaron Burr, you happily incite others to shed blood.
From Hoover treatise quoted above:
“Chief Justice John Marshall … [in] United States v. Burr (1807), … rejected constructive treason, but did so by holding that Aaron Burr, if not physically present in an assemblage of men, could still be convicted of treason on the testimony of two witnesses that he actively helped effect or aid such an assemblage—in effect, aided in the levying of war.”
–
Sigh – editing after posting …
… noting that (like Aaron Burr) you happily incite …
–
RES, you haven’t won jack against anyone except a college debate opponent. There are rules there.
Steve, your ignorance is remarkable. How could you conceivably know whether I’ve ever won any argument or what opponents I’ve faced? You do not know what arguments I’ve engaged in except in this venue, and you ignore all arguments made with others than you. Thus you speak, as so often the case, of matters beyond your ken.
I will acknowledge your admission that you recognize no rules, not of evidence, nor of logic. In this way you are indeed a mirror of our progressive foes. You’ve stared into the abyss far too long.
–
Steve, a minor point you seem incapable of observing: if there are no rules, there is no argument, merely a shouting match which is “won” by being the biggest arsehole.
–
>> “Taking up arms against the government is treason.”
So if China takes up arms against the U.S. government, that’s treason?
Of course not. To qualify as treason the hostile action has to come from someone who owes you allegiance. At the time of the Fort Sumter incident (which I assume is what you’re referring to) the Confederate states were no longer under the U.S. government and owed us no allegiance. It might have been an act of war, but it couldn’t have been treason. And I suspect we’d disagree about which side was the initial aggressor as well.
>> “Winners set the rules. Win or die.”
In other words, your philosophical justification is “might makes right.” Given your argument over the nature of rights with Fox and Sarah elsewhere I can’t say I’m surprised. I doubt I’ll get anywhere arguing with you on that point, so I’ll just state for the record that I COMPLETELY reject that principle.
“So if China takes up arms against the U.S. government, that’s treason?”
Lovely non-sequitur. Has China ever been part of the US? No? Then you can take your dishonest argument and sit down.
>> “Has China ever been part of the US?”
[rolls eyes]
I see why RES and the others get so annoyed and dismissive with you.
It doesn’t matter whether the Confederate states were PREVIOUSLY a part of the US. The point is that they weren’t part of the US any longer at the time of the Fort Sumter incident. They had severed political ties and owed no more allegiance to the US at that moment than China did.
Unless you can point to an act of war or betrayal they committed BEFORE they seceded, or something in the constitution that says the federal government can decide not to let a state go, it’s absurd to call it treason.
Have you also seen how little I care what you or RES think?
You cannot break a contract you voluntarily entered into, as the Confederate states did, and expect the other party to simply accept your breaking it. Especially when your reason for breaking it was to perpetuate slavery.
China did NOT enter into that contract, and therefore you’re presenting a straw man… dishonestly.
You cannot break a contract you voluntarily entered into, as the Confederate states did, and expect the other party to simply accept your breaking it.
Yeah. Even if it is somehow set up so that there is nothing of value/interest under contested condition, this is a big problem in contracts.
>> “Have you also seen how little I care what you or RES think?”
Well, you seem to expect us to care about your insults.
>> “You cannot break a contract you voluntarily entered into, as the Confederate states did, and expect the other party to simply accept your breaking it.”
Except that the Confederate states didn’t break the contract; the federal government did. The states didn’t voluntarily agree to PERMANENT union.
I repeat: show me where in the contract it said the states could never leave, or that the federal government was the entity empowered to decide whether they could leave. And no, the part about treason doesn’t apply unless you can name acts of war those states committed against the U.S. BEFORE seceding.
>> “Especially when your reason for breaking it was to perpetuate slavery.”
I agree the Confederacy is to be despised for that, but even our constitution recognized the institution of slavery at the time. And even if it hadn’t it isn’t the federal government’s business if an independent nation has slaves.
>> “China did NOT enter into that contract, and therefore you’re presenting a straw man… dishonestly.”
Contracts END. And once they end they no longer restrict your behavior.
I’ll say it one more time, for the slow kids in the class: the point is that once they seceded, the states owed no more allegiance to the U.S. or to the constitution than China did. Therefore it was no more an act of treason for the Confederates to fire at Fort Sumter than it would have been for China to do so. If you can’t grasp this point then you’re not up to debating the subject. And if you intentionally refuse to acknowledge this point then you are the one being dishonest.
“Contracts END.”
If the contract defines an end date, they do. I look at the Constitution, and I don’t see one.
“Well, you seem to expect us to care about your insults.:”
Nope. I’m just underlining what a couple of pissants you are for the people who drop by. I expect nothing from you.
>> “If the contract defines an end date, they do. I look at the Constitution, and I don’t see one.”
Exactly my point. Since the terms under which membership in the union ends aren’t stated, it goes to the 10th amendment. Which means either states can do it unilaterally or it takes a popular referendum.
>> “Nope. I’m just underlining what a couple of pissants you are for the people who drop by. I expect nothing from you.”
Be grateful I’m not the one running this blog. If I were and you treated my guests this way you’d be getting a time out right about now.
Since the terms under which membership in the union ends aren’t stated, it goes to the 10th amendment. Which means either states can do it unilaterally or it takes a popular referendum.
It would mean the states can’t do it unilaterally– the states can choose to dissolve the union, as a mutual agreement.
A contract that someone can unilaterally leave just because they feel like it is extremely unusual, and would need to have that qualification pointed out.
“A contract that someone can unilaterally leave just because they feel like it is extremely unusual”
A contract? You mean, like “No Fault” divorce?
A contract which does not allow dissolution seems an absurdity — but the Confederate states made no effort to challenge their contract at law, thereby rendering the actions they did take a violation of that contract.
BTW – it strikes me that the word “contract” in the preceding is inapt; the better term would be “pact” but this discussion has already proceeded overly long with “contract” in use.
–
I used “no fault divorce” as an example myself, exactly because it is such an obvious perversion of the agreement. There were existing methods to end the contract that boiled down to proving failure to fulfill obligations (varying by state), and then the brilliant fairness and emotional argument types rewrote the whole thing. And were shocked when it went badly, to the point of insisting no, it’s great, not a total enabling of abusive users.
The usual set-up for ending an agreement if there’s no “how to do it” rule is that both sides agree to end it.
>> “A contract that someone can unilaterally leave just because they feel like it is extremely unusual, and would need to have that qualification pointed out.”
The 10th specifically says “reserved to the States RESPECTIVELY” (emphasis mine). That means each state decides for itself (unless you want to throw it to a popular vote).
And “contract” was Steve’s choice of word, not mine. I was just putting it in his terms because I didn’t consider that detail worth arguing about. Unilateral withdrawal may be unusual for a contract, but a constitution isn’t a normal business contract either.
That was meant to be in response to Fox. I hate it when we run up against the indentation limit.
Except that “the right to decide it all stops right now” has the opposing right of “the right to NOT be left holding the bag,” in as much as either can be called a right.
That’s rather the point of agreements. It’s what makes at-will divorce so destructive.
Which is why, when you intend a thing to be able to be dissolved, you have explanations of how to do so, not just figure “oh, well, if someone decides to go it’s all good.”
>> “Except that “the right to decide it all stops right now” has the opposing right of “the right to NOT be left holding the bag,” in as much as either can be called a right.”
That’s a fair point, but I have two counterpoints:
1) It’s not a case of one side failing to pay for goods they’ve already received; both sides benefit constantly for as long as membership goes on. The state is better protected from outside attack due to national common defense while the nation as a whole gets additional territory, taxes and manpower. Neither side has been cheated.
2) I never said that separation had to be instantaneous. I’m fine with the actual split being delayed by a year or two after secession has been declared so that both sides have time to prepare for the change. Although there would need to be protections in place to prevent retaliation. That would require a more formal and explicit secession process, though.
>> “Which is why, when you intend a thing to be able to be dissolved, you have explanations of how to do so,”
This part I completely agree with; there should have been a formal process written into the constitution from the beginning. But there wasn’t, and I don’t believe that holding one side prisoner forever on Uncle Sam’s arbitrary say-so is a better idea. Especially when the 10th amendment says that the Fed doesn’t have that authority.
For 1, both sides have to agree on that point. Collaboration isn’t zero-cost, especially for things where you have to prepare ahead of time.
For 2, the guys who wanted to unilaterally dissolve it also wanted to set the timeline, in addition to dissolving the agreement unilaterally, without dealing with any of the disagreements.
False choice on the end part– the alternative to “this was not intended to be dissolved” is ending by mutual agreement, same way that things as basic as a rental agreement can end early by mutual agreement.
That, however, requires that the party that wants to end the agreement persuade the other party that their sunk costs have been accounted for in an acceptable manner.
(There’s always the option of moving comments down to the bottom, linking to the last prior, and chaining that way; I’m responding off of email so I can “break” the limit. There’s also that you can open-in-a-new-window a response to a different comment, click on the link for the post you want to respond to, and copy the numbers over the end of the respond-to-post; for example, your comment would be #comment-719530.)
They didn’t offer to pay off their share of the national debt, so — left holding the bag is exactly right.
Indeed, at the time, it was pointed out that by that logic, every other state in the Union could secede and stick whichever one was left with the debt.
The answer to pretty much all of your arguments here is the same: “Where IN THE CONSTITUTION does it say that?”
I think we;re talking past each other a bit due to coming at this from different angles. You’re thinking of it in terms of good contract law and I’m focused on what a plain reading of the constitution actually says. And I freely admit that what it says makes for terrible law on this issue, but it’s still the constitution; if you want to keep things legal then it’s the final word.
The proper way of handling this would be a new amendment that spells out a reasonable procedure for leaving the union. I still say territory should have the power to secede unilaterally, but I’m fine with severe restrictions and penalties for doing so to prevent abuse.
You’re thinking of it in terms of good contract law and I’m focused on what a plain reading of the constitution actually says.
Other than the part that you assume it does say states can leave at will, but not that other states can stop them.
Rather than reading it in the context it was written in, which would hold that if they wanted a not-by-mutual-agreement out, they would have written it in. Lacking that, they’d have to use mutual agreement– say, by amending the constitution, if you want to look at it only as written rather than in terms of “how these agreements worked at the time.”
>> “Other than the part that you assume it does say states can leave at will, but not that other states can stop them.”
It says quite explicitly that other states can’t stop them. I refer you to the final paragraph of Article 1: “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress… engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”
And as for the power to leave at will in the first place, the 10th says “are reserved to the States RESPECTIVELY, or to the people.” “Respectively” means that each one can decide for itself. Again, I agree it’s a bad rule, but it is the way our constitution is written.
>> “Rather than reading it in the context it was written in, which would hold that if they wanted a not-by-mutual-agreement out, they would have written it in.”
That is exactly backwards. The 10th amendment explicitly applies to powers NOT assigned or forbidden elsewhere. And rules of secession are not mentioned elsewhere. If you don’t want the states to have unilateral power to leave and you don’t want to put it to a popular vote, then your only constitutional recourse is a new amendment.
*dryly* You realize that declaring you’re not part of the US anymore would generally be recognized as going to war, right?
>> “They didn’t offer to pay off their share of the national debt, so — left holding the bag is exactly right.”
Show me where the constitution says that they were required to do so before seceding. Or that the federal government gets to set the terms.
Again, I’m not arguing that the constitution is fair on this issue. But it’s still our highest law. Either amend it, live with it or admit you’re willing to ignore it.
>> “Indeed, at the time, it was pointed out that by that logic, every other state in the Union could secede and stick whichever one was left with the debt.”
If they saw the problem back then, they should have worked out a formal secession procedure and ratified it with an amendment.
Show me where the constitution says that they were required to do so before seceding. Or that the federal government gets to set the terms.
You are the one that is insisting there are non-standard understandings of how such agreements between states are understood.
You have to show that mutually assumed debts can be abandoned, along with the agreement itself, at will.
>> “*dryly* You realize that declaring you’re not part of the US anymore would generally be recognized as going to war, right?”
First of all, even if I accepted that secession was an act of war it wouldn’t matter. The trigger for a state to start shooting without permission isn’t “somebody declares war on the US.” It’s the state itself being “actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” So unless the seceding territory comes gunning for your state first, you still have to wait on congressional approval to go after them.
Second, if someone equates non-violent departure in accordance with the constitution as written with an act of war, I’m not obliged to agree with them.
Third, you do realize you just committed the fallacies of Argumentum ad populum and Argumentum ad baculum, right?
.” So unless the seceding territory comes gunning for your state first, you still have to wait on congressional approval to go after them.
Say, by looting via running up a tab and booking without paying?
Second, if someone equates non-violent departure in accordance with the constitution as written with an act of war, I’m not obliged to agree with them.
You are assuming your conclusion.
There is nothing there that says “this agreement may be vacated, at will, unilaterally.”
That is your conclusion.
Against the way agreements worked at the time, without any evidence that doesn’t boil down to “it doesn’t say you can’t.”
Which is not how agreements, treaties, contracts or bargains work.
I admire your patience.
Fort Sumter
>> “You are the one that is insisting there are non-standard understandings of how such agreements between states are understood.”
What I am insisting on is that we acknowledge what the constitution actually says.
And as for “standard understandings,” the people who created the union and the constitution were themselves unilaterally seceding from their mother country. Per their actions they obviously rejected the notion that political union is permanent. That has to be considered part of the understanding of the agreement between the states.
>> “You have to show that mutually assumed debts can be abandoned, along with the agreement itself, at will.”
Either at will *OR* – as I have repeatedly pointed out – after winning a popular vote on the matter. If you don’t want the states seceding unilaterally then you can require a referendum and still have constitutional cover.
And I’ve already explained the logic of that.
What I am insisting on is that we acknowledge what the constitution actually says.
No, you are insisting that I agree with what you read into it.
You then go on to seemingly confuse the American revolution with the French revolution. One was fought to protect the established order against over-reach, explicitly building on existing structures; the other overthrew existing structures and assumptions.
If it is as you assume, you should be able to find lots of writings from the Founders about how this is a temporary thing, or otherwise indicating that someone wishing a change in state would be able to simply leave at will.
And as for “standard understandings,” the people who created the union and the constitution were themselves unilaterally seceding from their mother country.
Violently. And they themselves understood their position to be analogous.
>> “Say, by looting via running up a tab and booking without paying?”
Don’t bullshit me, Fox. I know you’re smarter than that.
The trigger isn’t “refusal to pay a debt” or “danger, no matter how remote.” The trigger is “danger AS WILL NOT ADMIT OF DELAY.” As in, shoot NOW or your people will die.
But I don’t remember anything about northerners suddenly dropping dead when the south left, do you? With a non-violent secession you can wait for congress to weigh in.
What you’re effectively arguing is that it’s okay for states to wage their own private wars against secessionists even when the constitution explicitly says “No.” Are you sure you want to take that position?
Don’t you bullshit me, DGM.
I know you’re not stupid enough to go with the “you can’t value someone’s life more than property!” cry, beloved of the defender of thieves and thugs.
We know how that one goes, in real life– it’s only stuff, it’s only money, it’s only rape, it was only a beating, he only had a knife, the guy trying to run you over was unarmed, how dare you fight back? There had to be another way!
You’ve built up an elaborate justification for the idea that, unlike every other agreement at the time, this agreement was meant to be voided unilaterally and at-will.
A reading based on what is not there, with the kind of massive weight on phrase splitting found nowhere else in the document, and that you have yet to support with evidence from the time.
Now I’ve walked you through exactly why agreements exist. Because people set mutual expectations of behavior, and limits, and how to deal with the costs that are run up as part of the group.
And now you are standing here demanding that I agree with your interpretation that the Founders designed the United States in such a way as to make sure that people can run up a debt as part of the group, and then declare they are no longer in the group and absolved of all debt. And to disagree is “bullshit,” because taking the benefits and leaving before the bill is paid didn’t cause those left behind to drop dead where they stood.
>> “There is nothing there that says “this agreement may be vacated, at will, unilaterally.””
You’re right. What the 10th amendment actually says is that “it can be vacated EITHER unilaterally OR by a popular referendum; pick one.”
And don’t think I haven’t noticed how you keep ignoring that second option. You’re happy to argue against unilateral secession, but whenever I point out that the matter could simply be put to a vote you act like you didn’t even hear me. What is it about letting the American people decide that you can’t even bear to consider?
I did not ignore it, I pointed out up above that they could use the same method used to amend the constitution to reach a mutual agreement on how to have a state leave.
From the start, even.
That wasn’t “the state can just ditch without any kind of organization on how to disentangle from the alliance,” so you’ve been ignoring it.
We’re not ignoring it; we’re acknowledging that the South didn’t propose one because it knew it would lose it.
All you’ve done is acknowledge your belief in the tyranny of the majority.
Why don’t all y’all read the FAQ section on Forbidden Topics and go find something else to argue about? It isn’t as if any state(s) contemplating secession is going to pay your points any mind, nor any court’s ruling the least bit influenced.
It just doesn’t matter!
All y’all are achieving is wasting time, working yourselves up and antagonizing people with whom you ought be building alliances (well, that and irritating onlookers.)
Caesar Rodney: [a brawl has broken out] Stop it! Stop it! This is the Congress! Stop it I say! The enemy’s out there!
John Dickinson: No, Mr Rodney, the enemy is here!
Caesar Rodney: No! I say he’s out there! England! England closing in, cutting off our air! There’s no time!
–
Since this thread has been going on for days without our hostess saying anything to stop it, AND it has a certain relevance to current events… I’ll treat your taking me to task with my usual respect.
Steve, I expected no less of you and had directed my comments to people with greater sense. Your thinking this is in any way relevant to current events demonstrates how loose is your grasp on reality.
Events are going to happen as they will without regard to anything said here, and I perceive no predictive value i the comments that have been made, just the usual peevish pissing match that manifests when the comments crush up against the right-hand wall.
–
Steve,
Actually you’re not the one annoying me with that thread. I’ve been trying to ignore the goal post mover, which is why I’ve failed to ask for this to stop.
Sarah, if you want it stopped, I’ll be happy to.
I will say that the objection that discussing the ACW has no relation to where we are now has been OBE.
OBE?
Honestly, it grows tedious, and I don’t think anyone is convincing anyone, that’s all.
And we all have WAY too much stress in our lives just now.
I’ve stopped sleeping again.
OBE = Overtaken By Events.
And I’ll drop it now.
I have been trying to ignore it because I like him, but he’s running while holding weaponized autism, and he’s going to put his eye out.
>> “No, you are insisting that I agree with what you read into it.”
I’m the one taking the constitution’s words at face value. You’re the one who keeps bringing up things it doesn’t mention, such as paying off the national debt. Right or wrong, you’re the one reading things into it.
But speaking of the national debt, an an ugly thought has occurred to me. The current debt is somewhere around 25 trillion, yes? And it often increases by well over a trillion a year. Tell me: how many states could pay off there share in any reasonable time frame? How many could EVER pay it off if the fed keeps borrowing at this rate?
Here’s the point: if states can’t leave until they pay off their share of that debt, what’s to stop Uncle Sam from holding them prisoner indefinitely just by continuing to borrow in their name regardless of their objections?
>> “If it is as you assume, you should be able to find lots of writings from the Founders about how this is a temporary thing, or otherwise indicating that someone wishing a change in state would be able to simply leave at will.”
You’re the one who keeps insisting that it’s either unilaterally at will or nothing. How many times have I pointed out that letting the country vote on it instead is also an option, only for you to pretend you didn’t hear me? I’ve lost count.
The way to leave in that case is the same as it ever was:
Start a war (Civil, Revolutionary, what you call it matters not) and win it. Victory answers all questions of legitimacy.
Or you can wait for Christ to return and fix it…. because absent that miracle, winning the war is your only option to embracing martyrdom.
>> “Fort Sumter”
Not an example. Fort Sumter was in South Carolina, which was a Confederate state. And if any state had a claim to be suffering “actual invasion” it was SC, because the Fort Sumter troops were kept there without permission.
Which Union state was under invasion or immediate threat at the time?
>> “Violently.”
Only after being attacked first at Lexington and Concord.
If you are breaking off an agreement, and decide that some of the property held in common in yours, and the employee in charge of it refuses to hand it over on your say so, you have no right to try to kill him.
Fort Sumter was a federal installation, on federal land. Owned, built and staffed by the federal government, that is to say, all of the American people. One state does not have any right to claim ownership of property owned in common by the entire nation. If Kentucky seceded, would they have the right to take over Fort Knox, and the nation’s gold reserves? Would Colorado instantly own Cheyenne Mountain? Would Nevada own Hoover Dam?
———————————
“Your Honor, I move that this case be dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiffs are full of shit.”
Would CA own 45.8% of the federal land?
https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state
What were the pioneer’s thinking? They didn’t claim, or abandoned, all that worthless unusable land …
>> “I know you’re not stupid enough to go with the “you can’t value someone’s life more than property!” cry, beloved of the defender of thieves and thugs.”
That’s not the angle I’m coming from, but Sarah’s started making throat-clearing noises so I’ll have to leave it at that.
I will note one thing, though: I didn’t call bullshit because you disagree with me on the issue of secession. I called bullshit because you’re arguing for the states to wage private wars rather than waiting for congress, even when the constitution explicitly forbids it. It’s one thing to argue that a war to stop secession is justified, but something about this issue seems to make you bloodthirsty. I didn’t expect that and I don’t like seeing it.
. I called bullshit because you’re arguing for the states to wage private wars rather than waiting for congress, even when the constitution explicitly forbids it.
Again, that’s because you are assuming your conclusion that not allowing someone to take your stuff is violence.
If you assume as a matter of course that “what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine and if I decide to leave then anything I want to take is mine” as a baseline, you will find people are extremely “bloodthirsty” when you are “just” trying to take “your” stuff. There’s not a thief alive who doesn’t think he’s entitled to what he wants.
Declaring war on someone and attacking them? They are allowed to fight back without it being “waging war.”
Once again, instead of going off what “the constitution says” from your modern-eyes interpretation, go look at what THEY said they meant! Or at least what has been WRITTEN about it!
https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/49/declare-war
>> “I have been trying to ignore it because I like him”
Given your use of the male pronoun I have to assume you’re referring to me.
While I wasn’t the only one to do so, RES is correct that I forgot the rule against arguing over the ACW. I apologize for my part of that.
>> “but he’s running while holding weaponized autism, and he’s going to put his eye out.”
Warning acknowledged.
Perhaps I should bow out for a while and let tempers cool. I already don’t have time to read all the comments anymore due to the holiday rush and that’s only going to get worse, so now’s as good a time for a break as any.
Just one question before I go: in what way do you believe I was moving the goalposts?
Meh. My temper is cool. Or rather it’s not, but I’m not going to blast YOU because I’m mad at the commies.
I don’t think you realized you were. You just kept digging further, in the same way I do when I’m falling down a rabbit hole. “But this is more logical” and another level down “And then there’s this reason.”
Meh. Hang out. JUST leave the ACW alone. As RES has put it, where we’re going we need all people more or less on our side.
Deep breath. Let it go.
>> “Meh. My temper is cool.”
Fox’s might not be. But as I said, that’s not my only reason for backing off for a while. I’m just busier than I was before and that’s not going to stop until the holiday rush is over.
>> “I don’t think you realized you were. You just kept digging further, in the same way I do when I’m falling down a rabbit hole.”
You don’t have to just ignore it when I do that, though. It’s your blog and you’re entitled to enforce rules to keep things civil. If I start going off the rails again I’m not going to tear your head off for pointing it out.
>> “JUST leave the ACW alone.”
Easy to forget when the issue is secession, but I’ll try to remember next time.
Fox’s might not be.
Fox is perfectly fine.
Fox likes dragging out disagreements of fact, and beating them to death with evidence, even if that causes assumptions to squirt out.
The discussion was much better when it was focused strictly on succession as theory, rather than the civil war.
Succession as theory has the advantage of fewer buttheads to deal with. (What? There are always buttheads. It’s a human condition thing. ‘s why antihero stories always have A-Hole-Victims and have started to have the twisted moral of “it’s not bad if you do it to bad people.”)
I think that the Declaration of Independence lists a collection of philosophically/morally defensible reasons for “secession.” Thus, it provides a model for deciding whether the desired “secession” is philosophically and morally justified.
As I recall it, the analogous CSA document leaned heavily on their “right” to continue *and spread* the institution of chattel slavery. *Not* morally defensible (and I am convinced that in their secret hearts, most of them knew it, and that is why so much effort was put into the public rationalizations).
>> “Thus, it provides a model for deciding whether the desired “secession” is philosophically and morally justified.”
The question, though, is WHO get to legally decide if it’s justified. The constitution doesn’t mention secession or permanent unity, so per the 10th amendment the issue goes to the states respectively or the people. Meaning: either the states can secede unilaterally or it requires a national referendum. But in neither case is it the federal government’s decision.
I have long wondered what might have resulted had the Confederate states sued for secession, arguing that the United States had broken the terms of the Constitution and thus nullified it.
Things likely would still have ended in war, but the Confederacy may well have managed to claim a moral high ground enabling their success.
–
Re: “they had absolutely no clue you can’t close a shop or a restaurant indefinitely and then just open up like it’s nothing….” Marxists like DeBlasio are even worse; they don’t think restaurants or shops should re-open because their existence is inherently unfair because some people can afford to eat out and shop and others cannot (he very expressly said this in response to people complaining about his refusal to open indoor dining). He and his ilk would much rather have all things run and owned by the state, with people dining at government run cafeterias and standing in line for bread, Soviet Union style, at the government commissary. It is why the Bernie bros was poetic about Soviet breadlines as being “fair”.
These people are fully aware of the evils and tyranny of Marxism and think that those evils and tyranny are a feature, not a bug.
Additionally, even though socialism will inevitably collapse, we do not necessarily “win”, as socialism has left over a hundred million dead in mass graves already and will live hundreds of millions more in such graves before collapsing. Also, socialism is not the only ideology out there that is a threat; when socialism collapses, that may well just leave an opening for the Jihadists to finish imposing their global caliphate.
BUT those regimes only subsisted with our help and assistance, some of it humanitarian.
Trust me, yes, there will be a butcher’s bill, but they won’t have long enough to make it that bad.
Indeed. Without grain shipments, I doubt the people of the Soviet Union would have made it to the 1980’s.
Woah, a quarter of the harvest?
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/07/30/The-great-Soviet-grain-robbery-10-years-later/5162396849600/
That explains why the price of grain-based products suddenly went way up.
“The next year the Soviets quietly and suddenly bought one-fourth of the U.S. wheat crop. U.S. wheat prices rose from $1.68 per bushel in July 1972 to $3 in May 1973.”
PRECISELY.
And I’m not sure it was ethical of us. I know why we did it, but….. I don’t think it was ethical. Like the dumbf*cks who gave them the plans for the nuclear bomb to “balance things.” ARGH.
Sounds more like enablement to me…
Well, we’ve had traitors within a long time.
Remember when Ted Kennedy went to the Soviet Union and directly asked them to interfere in US elections in order to prevent Reagan from winning. He committed outright treason and even then establishment media lionized Chappaquiddick Ted, even after his blatant act of treason.
Tough choice. I mean, prop up an oppressive regime, or allow its people to starve when you have the grain that would have saved their lives? I’d hate to be the one making that decision, but I think I’d end up selling them the grain. Because eventually the regime will fall and the people will be free, but the ones who starve to death will never get to taste freedom.
But it’s very much a trolley-problem kind of situation.
There’s also the nuclear blackmail issue. If you’re going to starve and go down anyway, quietly suggesting you might an “accidental,” release might be worthwhile.
The other factor in that equation is that a desperate regime with food riots might decide to roll the Group Of Soviet Forces Germany West while they still have food for the troops and fuel for the tanks.
Even now, decades later and having learned a lot of information that I would have literally killed for when I was and Intel officer in the 80’s, I’m not confident who would have won had the Fulda Gap War Games kicked off. Even if the Nukes stayed in their bunkers.
I’m just happy that playing with ground launched cruise missiles for a year in Belgium paid off.
Yes. I know. but–
OTOH propping it up for 70 years, while it kills millions of people….. and poisons the world?
The upside to the downside is that with the (former?) USA screwed over, the production drops… and all those dependent upon the massive “overproduction” have the Great Starvation Problem to provide Horrible Enlightenment.
They figure they’ll still get the Golden Eggs even if they kill the goose? Fools.
I can see it. Doesn’t mean I want to go there.
They won’t, but while the socialist insanity is going on here, the rest of the world can make it that bad; China will take advantage of free reign to bid its empire will Erdogan continues to rebuild the Ottoman Empire. The Mullahs will receive a green light and more cash to continue their dreams of being the heads of the global caliphate, and both Turkey and Iran will race to see which one can “wipe Israel off the map” first. That’s not even taking into account the potential for Pakistan and India to lob nukes at each other, or China and India for that matter.
It’s not just what the Leninists due to us here that worries me; its how what they do here will enable the power hungry and outright evil overseas who will gladly do us harm if they think for even a moment they can get away with it.
I know. And what will happen to Israel worries me.
Amusingly, Erdogan is actually sitting tight and doing nothing for Biden. I guess that when you get bitchslapped by Trump enough times, you actually can learn something. (And yes, NPR was all shrieky about Erdogan also.)
Erdogan’s economy is in collapse, with spiking inflation, according to an article I recently read – and cannot now find, darn it – so this will have to do for support of my assertion
So Erdogan may be less adventurous.
–
History is full of empires that staved off economic collapse through conquest; the current CCP is a perfect example. Rome did it for centuries. There is no reason why Erdogan cannot do the same thing.
It would require more of a military than I think Erdogan can assemble.
–
The worst thing that could happen, for us, Israel, the world, and the mideast would be fir Israel to face destruction in war.
“Never again” also translates as “we will not go alone”.
In Paul Erdmans’ book “the crash of 1979” Israel is losing to a nuclear Iran, and the Israeli forced to help build the bombs substitutes cobalt as the radioactive casing material instead of lithium. 100+year half-life instead of 7 days half-life. Iran bombed all the oilfields to take control of them two weeks later. Oops.
If Israel falls, you may as well send in a crew to paint the stripes. The Mideast will be a green- glass parking lot.
John
I’ve thought for some time it would be a Very Good Idea to keep a close eye on cobalt and where it goes, if such could be done. I have another suspicion that I do not relay in public, involving a supposedly non-nuclear nation carefully placing huge amounts of the metal just in case.
I suspect Israel may be relatively safe for the moment — the big kids of that neighborhood a) know Israel can punch their nose if provoked b) will NOT punch their nose if unprovoked and c) is not the threat that Iran and Turkey are. Otherwise each is too busy figuring out how to make some money cooperating with Israel now that the flood of petrodolars is ebbing.
–
Right rumor was that this is referred to as the Samson Option. Give the history of the of the Jewish people (c.f. Masada) I would be very cautious backing them into a no win situation.
Would they use cobalt salted weapons? Beats me but estimates were they had 75-200 deliverable weapons. And there are some seriously ugly options (bomb the Aswan Dam) they they would certainly choose if they were going down. They don’t need cobalt weapons to make things really ugly.
China is using its position on the Human Rights thing at the UN to demand that we fight “systematic racism, racial discrimination, white supremacy, religious intolerance, and xenophobia.”
The Chinese communists are laughing so hard to themselves over the insane Yanks.
China IS the MOST racist nation in the world.
You mean the insane gwai-lo
So funny!
I believe the proper response to that is “You first, hypocrites.”
As familiar as I regrettably am by now with the “boo-hoo — it’s not FAIR” mentality, I’m still boggled at the spectacle of the mayor of one of the largest megacities in the world actually blubbering that out loud. In public, for all to hear in shock and disbelief.
So they think that the upper class oppresses the masses, till the masses rise in a glorious wave and institute freedom, equality and reasonably priced love.
The lords of high finance, high culture, education, “social justice”, entertainment, news, and communications oppress the masses, until the masses rise up against them …
They’re actually getting the revolution they expected. They just didn’t expect to be on the wrong side.
Yep.
That and they didn’t expect that the people rising up would be demanding more liberty and less government.
Precisely. When they see it, they refuse to believe it.
All the Biden partiers shocked out of their shoes when Anti/LM attacked them at their parties. AOC going after everyone with her ever-increasing demands . . .
It is like they never expect the tumbrels to come for /them/. When them eventually coming for pretty much everyone is more or less an obvious and common feature of the politics they endorse.
It will be interesting to see who are the Bolsheviks and who are the Mensheviks if Biden-harris come to power.
Unfortunately the rest of us will also be fairly f*cked. Unless it’s opposed immediately.
True dat. One bizarre scenario keeps popping up in my head. It is
1) Biden/Harris “elected”
2) Shortly after Inauguration and the Department heads are appointed (and confirmed? that in itself may be ugly if the Republicans grow a pair, but this is alternate history not fantasy) a 25th amendment document stating Biden is incompetent is presented.
3) Biden (perhaps pushed by Mrs. Biden who seems to long to emulate Mrs Wilson) contests it throwing it back to the Legislative branch.
And here’s where the real fun begins. To override the president contesting the issue you need a super majority (2/3 I think). The Dems clearly do not have that (they don’t even have a majority in the Senate assuming the Georgia slots aren’t stolen). So do the republicans help them? Not Fricking likely I’d say. Ms. Harris was quite the jerk to the various Republicans, and ultimately they may just want to watch the world burn. At this point I would suggest you go long on popcorn futures (presuming we haven’t all been tossed into tumbrels/reeducation camps by then).
Truthfully I would prefer this stay a counterfactual Alternate History due to step 1 but am not sanguine about that.
Yes there will be a butcher’s bill to pay, including interest, compounded hourly.
I still have a problem accepting that it appears almost half our population is Bat Sh_ _ Crazy.
Crazy though, for many, it’s psychosis induced by the ‘education system’, main stream media, the ‘entertainment’ industry, etc., they are, none the less psychotic.
Can those folks be salvaged? Perhaps a few, but I suspect a major cleaning of the gene pool is in order.
One hellofa butcher’s bill!
Yep. They’re not naturally crazy. They were DRIVEN crazy.
I think we are going to be surprised. Some of the apparently bat-#@!?crazy are going to turn sane(r), while some people we think are solid are going to fold like tinfoil. I just don’t know which will be which.
(I do know there are Never Trumpers out there who sincerely tempt me to spit. And having been spat on. I take that seriously).
So, IOW this thing of finding people who are sane aren’t and vice versa? 2020, as usual.
2020: The year the centaurs switched from wine to brandy – but didn’t change barrel size or quantity.
That’s effect (of 2020) NOT cause.
As for cause…. are such things as Tragic Mushrooms?
They don’t kill… but it might be better if they did?
To be perfectly blunt about it, every single Marxist in the United States of America needs to have its stinking ass stuffed into a brutal reeducation camp. The Marxists are fed a certain amount of bland, nutritious vegetarian fare each day with no seasonings whatsoever other than iodized salt. They’re also given seeds, potting soil, fertilizers, and farm implements for growing their own herbs for flavoring. The limited privilege of raising chickens and rabbits is given to select individuals as a reward for doing well in the mandatory, ten-hours-a-day reeducation classes that cover Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith, and so forth. The actual camp social system is entirely up to them. They’d learn, much like the Pilgrims did in their grim first year of starvation and mass death, that socialism kills.
To be perfectly blunt about it, I would contend 88.999% of school graduates in the last 5 years are Marxists.
Sad to say.
But they get better. Seriously. I did.
They wouldn’t learn. They could have brought about paradise, and you are just being mean to them.
Like a guy on Twitter who really thought that if renters didn’t pay rent, life would go on just as before, only without rent payments. He didn’t say that the landlord would go on doing upkeep and paying property taxes as before, he just assumed it.
We really have to do more to counter academia, the mainstream press, and big tech. My sons are fairly rational people (mostly) but they’ve *bought* all the bullshit about how the voting fraud is just a far-right conspiracy theory.
I think academia is too far gone. Somebody should certainly try to wind it back, but they take their woke religion really seriously. My guess is that we absolutely have to reduce their influence (and their money) by using alternatives. Homeschooling, online courses, alternative certification. More apprenticeships. Whatever. At least the covidiocy had the side effect of undermining the schools and familiarizing people with alternatives.
There’s a book, I believe called “How to have impossible conversations”
GET it. Use it.
That’s your part of the culture war. it should never have got so far, now make your bed.
Thanks for the book recommendation – downloading to my reader now. Part of the problem is that I lose my temper when they’re such idiots and just stop arguing because I do love them and don’t want to create gulfs. Being patronized by your sons is pretty infuriating.
That’s what I mean about learning how to do it, then do it. That’s all of our jobs with the people we don’t care to cut off right now.
“Make your bed” is the term around here. As in “put your house in order.”
And I know it’s easy to let happen.
Younger son could have turned. Did, I think, briefly in his teens. I never talked politics with him, because he wouldn’t let me.
Then I had to go on a trip with him, and he was listening to podcasts. And they were…. conservative. So I asked, and we talked.
Right now his biggest problem is studying for exams in this climate. “I can’t even think of politics, or I stop functioning.” Well, yeah. Join the club.
Reverse it. If Trump suddenly got boxes of “found” ballots that were 100% for him (most only for him, no other votes down ticket) and it gave him the lead and while counting all the ballots, the democrats were kept out, not allowed to see the counting or the ballots close enough to tell if they were being correctly tallied, do they feel it would be fine? Crowder and others were good at doing stuff like that. Presenting things as being Trump, or Romney, or McCain (back into GWB even) to college kids then playing them the Joe, Hillary, 0bama, Kerry et al videos showing them who it really was.
I recall that Jason Lewis (the radio talk show host that turned politician) used that trick a lot.
I have those every day. I call them “alien encounters.” I make a statement, place an order, or ask a question, and I get random gibberish back. Clearly enunciated, but gibberish. And then when I question that, they get angry. Every time.
The lizard people in TRX-land probably aren’t prime hatchlings.
TRX: [points to blocky object in cart] I need a replacement Size 19 battery. It’s under warranty. Here’s my receipt.”
Clerk: “We don’t have any eggs. You frumboh zazzle wit’ ‘dat?”
TRX: [feels headache coming back] “Battery. Exchange. Receipt.”
Clerk: “Can’t install that until after the service department opens.”
TRX: “Just put it in the *cart*. Like this one…” [headache is definitely back…]
Clerk: “Year, make, model?” [that almost makes sense]
TRX: “Size 19. Like this one.”
(unreel five minutes or so of that…)
A lot of retail folks are sleepy, and sometimes it is hard to hear. So don’t assume they are stupid or crazy, when it could be a desperate need for a snack, a drink, and a nap.
Point your sons at TrueTheVote.org, and remind them that there’s far more evidence of voter fraud than there ever was of Russian collusion by Trump.
Oh, and as for evidence:
https://pjmedia.com/election/megan-fox/2020/11/09/ronna-mcdaniel-presents-131-affidavits-2800-incident-reports-of-alleged-voter-fraud-in-mi-media-still-demands-evidence-n1134171
I keep envisioning a sort of speakers bureau for academics, like the Teaching Company™ but for live and in-person classes and tutorials. All of the academic chops, none of the political BS or expensive froo-froos of a college.
Yeah, I workshopped an sf story (thousands of years in the future) in which the children did not go to “school” because I would be astonished if this stupid paradigm lasts another hundred years, and one of the lefty twits critiquing complained that it was “political”.
Lefties lack imagination. This is why Hollywood and trad pub are in death spirals, once they got rid of 99% of non-left.
Well, we know that governments support public schooling and actively try to stop home schooling because public schools are how they train children into being loyal, manipulatable subjects.
John Lott wrote a paper on that subject: https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Lott-Public-Schooling-JPEv107S.pdf
Yes. We homeschooled (eldest son was a really bad fit for public schools) and I am so grateful. Still, too much of the general college and peer socialization pushes hard in a leftist direction.
The left is the most autistic-toddler-like in assuming that simple curve fits in vicinity of a data point are valid across the full space of possibility.
But /all/ the tools we have for forecasting are ultimately reduced order models, which hold in some circumstances, and not in others. This is why I’ve been banging the drum of non linearity, and unpredictable changes in system* of behavior.
Because “we don’t get out of this without blood” is only a fairly safe guess, not truth on the level of “Jesus saves”, or even a reliable observation like the second law of thermodynamics.
Sure, the arson makes BLM and Anti-Fa conspiracies full of common law capital felons. And the combination of the electoral fraud in a Presidential election, the media fraud, and the willfully malicious collusion of state and local governments in BLM/Anti-Fa, leaves enough doubt about the formal legal system to potentially justify a lone wolf vigilante movement. But there is information we do not have about other remedies that may be available.
We just had an election so nonlinear that the Dems had to fraud or concede. Which non-linearity happened precisely because of failures of media information control. That the Democrats failed to anticipate and entirely prevent, precisely because of their blinkered vision. That they are blind to flaws in the current plan is part of their lack of invincibility. Taking counsel of their confidence is wrong. When they say “surrender, there is nothing you can do”, that is a lie.
*Yeah, I remember, I don’t really like system in this context. I’m trying for ‘brief’ and ‘move on to other tasks’.
“You wish to surrender to me? All right, I accept.”
“I’m terribly sorry, but we haven’t the facilities to take you all prisoner.”
Also, “Nuts.”
No, but they can fine us, and compound the interest on the fines so we can never pay it off. Then they can round us up whenever they feel like it and claim it’s because we’re delinquent on our payments.
‘Twas a reference to The Battle of Arnhem, of “A Bridge Too Far” fame. The Germans demanded that the small force of British paratroopers who’d seized part of the town and one side of the bridge surrender. The Brits, deliberately mistranslating the demand, replied as above.
Can’t round us up without coming into range.
Blue states seceding seems marginally more likely than blue states succeeding, absent a large dose of common sense.
If they had that kind of sense…
Clue-by-fours would be needed to impart sense.
I fear you are being optimistic.
Regarding the Blue States seceding; I think that if the Fascist Left tries it, they will find the ideas far less popular with their own base than they think it will be. Maybe they have enough of a lock on things is California, but I think it’s gonna be messy even there.
If they think the looting and burning were bad earlier this year when they were promoting covid riots by rich white kids in black hoodies on behalf of other tints, they will be very surprised when secession leads to a halt in welfare payments.
I imagine they think they’ll just print money in silicon valley, but why businesses in the non-seceding states would even consider taking said laserprinted “money” is beyond me.
“Why won’t you take our money?”
“I can get better wallpaper cheaper from Schumacher.”
Prop 16 to reinstate racism lost overwhelmingly, last I checked. Haven’t kept up with the fraud possibilities. I watch nextdoor, which officially isn’t for politics but sometimes someone starts it anyway. There are more sane people out there than I knew. At least sane on some topics. Trump hate is common. But Prop 16 was massively talked down.
I did get into a ‘nextdoor’ discussion today about Voter ID and preventing fraud. rolled eyes at claims it’s not a big problem, nor is non-citizen voting. Found a 2014(?) article at WaPo about non-citizen voting and how it may have turned the results in a few elections. The thread has been quiet since.
Good JOB! Keep doing it.
I understand the anti-AB5 “save Uber” proposition succeeded?
Yeah, the ‘save Uber’ thing also succeeded, last i looked. There was a nextdoor thread on that one, too, started by a driver. He kept saying he didn’t want the benefits, didn’t want to be an employee… not everyone listened to him, but some in that thread supported him. I stayed out, just lurked.
“(Though I wish to brag that last night I managed FIVE hours! Whoo! [Struts])”
And now I am jealous. Very jealous. I must protest the lack of naps in this whole adulting thing. It ain’t reasonable. *grumble*
My wife has forbidden naps… I fall asleep for thirty minutes, 2 hours later I wake up and I don’t know what century it is, and it takes another 2 hrs to regain full function.
I wake up and I don’t know what century it is
I do not know if I should be concerned… or envious.
Snoring? Apnea? Or are you just that tired?
I am a carpenter, who works 50 ish hrs a week, and doesn’t go to bed until 2330 or later and gets up at about 0515
Ouch. Yeah, that’s not naps any more.
I gather some people get success from sucking down caffeine, napping, and then letting the caffeine wake them up. But you may be beyond that point.
That helps some times at work when I drink some coffee and then doze during lunch. That’s really rare tho. Otherwise I just … go. and go and go.
I’ve found that naps need to be an even multiple of 45 minutes — a full sleep cycle — or I’m the same way.
“9/11 was that for a lot of people, and weirdly this election is having that effect on those who either aren’t straight up psychopaths, or who look outside the main sources of propaganda, even accidentally.”
Minor objection. Even psychopaths aren’t (that) stupid. Well, no more than the ordinary person. One does not have to care about other people or social norms overmuch to realize that the last four years, even the Covidiocy, have turned out better because of who our president is. One can even be supremely selfish and realize that a booming economy along with the support of law and order is a good thing, personally.
No. But the left has a lot of stupid and hateful psychopaths who think they can do this, get along with it, and NOTHING WILL HAPPEN against their plans.
Since psychopaths think the class of “everyone else” is not actually made up of real people, I imagine they would not consider that “everyone else” gets to contribute a say in how things happen.
Even in combat, the enemy gets a vote.
I’m reminded of a social worker that actually worked in prisons saying something like, “I came here thinking that all these people needed to turn themselves around was a better self image, more self confidence in themselves. Turns out that’s the only thing they don’t need, they’ve already got it in spades.”
Exactly. What they need is less self-esteem, as they clearly don’t deserve if based on their accomplishments. They are fundamentally infantile–nothing bad caused by their actions is ever their fault (somebody else caused it), and they want what they want instantly, without effort. Both of those are signs of childishness, and the abilities to take responsibility for the results of your actions and to defer gratification are the signs of adulthood.
Yes. Friend’s late wife was a shrink who specialized in prison work. She said this: Self-esteem has always been an assumed Good, but that concept has never been really examined… until now. Someone had thought to rank self-esteem among various facets of the populace, and guess who had the most? Career criminals!! Well, d’oh… people who think they can do no wrong…
My cousin’s kid got stupid and arrested (after a good beating by one of his potential victims. Was using a 9mm pistol and loaded the mag with .40 cal first shot missed, gun jammed and big black fella grabbed him), and within a year of his term , during a visit by my cuz, he was quiet for a moment and then said “I realized something the other day . . . I’m the only guilty person in here.” everyone else was “set up, framed, didn’t do a thing” etc.
He’s been out a bit over a year now and was in tech school “Because weight lifting in prison doesn’t really qualify you for many jobs”
I’ve read the same thing about bullies. People used to go around making absurd claims such as bullies lacked self esteem, but it actually turned out to be the opposite.
Bullies have fragile self-esteem, because it’s built on sand.
No, they have great self-esteem, because it’s never been challenged. After you punch them in the nose, then it caves.
Nah, they throw the punch because you “slighted” them– that is, you, generally by EXISTING (k, that may just be me…), have made them sense that there may be an issue.
That hurts.
Therefore, you have slightd/microagressed/made them feel attacked.
Thus, you must be assaulted.
…and yes, they REALLY don’t like it when you don’t take the beating you “deserve,” especially if you fight back effectively.
“He was gonna hit me, so I hit him back first.”
— Billy Martin
It’s not just you.
And no, they don’t like it if you fight back… and often as not then proceed to use social pressure to make sure everyone else takes you down. Scum.
So to avoid recidivism, you need to go full Ender on them?
After all, “Dead men fill no jails.”
Don’t think I haven’t been tempted…. funny how much virtuous behavior resembles simply being too tired, as they say.
Ender’s Game is a good how-to guide for drastically reducing the pest problem.
Bandit: “You could let me go.”
Dilvish: “I’m afraid not. It has now become a matter of future self-defense.”
Dilvish wasn’t a nice man. Though considering what he’d been though, he was nicer than could be reasonably expected…
The Dilvish stories predated Amber. He recycled much of it for Amber, which was deservedly successful, but this is one of the few times where I would have liked to see an author go back to his earlier work and revise it. All the bits were there in the Dilvish stories, but he just didn’t have them arranged in the right pattern, so we got a handful of ‘okay’ novellas instead of something wonderful.
Real bullies don’t fight you directly. They have their minions do it, to show their power. So instead of one-on-one, it’s one-against-five, or ten, or whatever.
And when you’re put in detention or expelled for defending yourself, they’re smirking because, as far as the school was concerned, they weren’t involved at all.
+1, yep, this.
….you know, exactly like the “we must raise their self-esteem, give them false praise that even a very slow six year old can recognize is false” tactic produces.
…. that.
everyone gets a trophy
Y’know, part of what makes the trophy thing so insidious is that they don’t even try to fake it.
I won exactly one race in all my school years. Beat teh next up by so far that I was wrapped in the ribbon.
Someone else got the trophy for it, because she was next on the list to win.
So I knew it wasn’t worth even trying and never bothered again.
Man. That is some incredible crud, right there. If that had happened in my school, the coaches would have been rejoicing over somebody new to throw against other schools and hypocritical behavior might have ensued from the sports kids. But not that.
I ran into that in school, and then again in the workplace. “Yes, your performance was outstanding, but we have to promote a $PERSON due to $REASONS, sorry.”
—-
FYI, for anyone who might have wondered, the $ + capitals come from an early minicomputer command interpreter. The $ designated the following string was a “variable”, a placeholder you could read and write to later. The capitalization was just convention. If you created a variable $DOG you could later assign values of Alsatian, Beagle, Chow, Doberman, etc. In the ancient days of the internet it was one of the things people “just knew”, like “click on the X to close the window” now. So in common use, $”any nonspecific value”
Yeah, it’s more common in the workplace, because they can pretend better. Same thing with making people apply for another position, instead of just promoting people. If you don’t tell anyone that the position is open, unless you want that person to apply, you magically only promote the person you want to promote.
That really sucks. I much prefer the honesty I got in high school track: “No, you’re not fast. But so few girls enter the distance runs that even just having you finish earns us points.” (The irony being that puberty hadn’t quite finished my growth at that point, and nothing was aligning correctly—so if I’d stuck with track, I might have ended up with decent speed. Oh well, drama was more fun anyway.)
Thaaat…depends on the drama. The drama associated with this election is no fun AT ALL.
I got talked into track my freshman year HS. Not a period when everyone got a trophy or ribbon. Not that I deserved one. Pretty sure I got lapped, every race. Even the short ones. Speedy I’m not. The person I ran against went on to be an UofO track athlete. A lot bigger turn out for Girls Track the next year. I didn’t make the team 🙂
Son ran Cross Country in HS. He lettered. We give him a bad time. He wasn’t the last one on his team to come in. To Letter in Cross Country you just have to be the top 5 of your team to complete the race, for X many races during the season (it was over 10 years ago, I forget) … there were 5 team members, total …
Son still runs for fun (at 3 AM — he works swing …). I … um, don’t, run, period.
I probably wouldn’t have won if anybody else was taking it seriously– down side of not being “properly socialized” I guess. (meaning, I was raised by my family!)
I’m gonna miss Slappy Squirrel… even more.
Much of the Left’s core beliefs arise from a cargo cultist problem. They confuse effect for cause and proceed disastrously from there. Self-esteem that is based on achievement is secure and does not require defending; faux self-esteem must be violently protected at all cost.
The same confusion induces them to believe that providing middle-class housing to people will generate middle-class values, such as thrift, self-reliance, and foresight. Instead they value not what they’re given because it cost them nothing — and they demand more (to replace what’s been destroyed) at the same price.
–
I remember what Richard Pryor had to say about the people in prison:
“Thank God we’ve got penitentiaries.”
Though it ought be a given for a Richard Pryor bit: NSFW.
–
c4c
The leftists have no experience with reality, they are verbally skilled, and believe that whatever they say, can be true. In other words, their stories are reality. They took over our stories, and many people feel the stories are equivalent to the lived experience. So, the story you tell yourself, where the businessman is always the evil mustache twirling villain, and the poor single mother being evicted is always pure of heart, and did nothing wrong, becomes your reality. Until the world smacks you on the head.
The right tends to be the people who have to deal with reality. Doesn’t matter what the story is, if you don’t plant in the spring, there is no crop in the fall. Say whatever you like.
I would love to find out how to counter their stories. Teach people how to recognize when the emotional manipulation, and fitting reality into a story happens.
Yes, the back brain interprets stories as lived experience. Which is what we’re fighting.
I’m soooooo tired of stories that turn out to be all about “unfair discrimination”. The leftists disallow so many types of stories (such as about actual morality) that all they’re left with is a pitiful handful of situations, mostly about the evils of prejudice and discrimination. Very limited palette.
And most of the emotions are infantile.
You can be discriminated against (hi every conservative in entertainment) and still need to grow personally.
I remember coming home from school once, and telling my mother that the social studies teacher didn’t like Asian people (whether or not it was true, I can’t remember is the mists of time). Her response was “then work hard enough that he still has to give you an A, and don’t worry about it.” Clearly, mom was not woke.
Yep. Same with people making fun of the village accent, or hating that I talked back, or… “Make him/her give you an A.” So it became a game.
Once upon a time, at a work review… “You should get the top rating for this, but I *never* give that out so you get $SECOND rating.”
My reply: “So you know I do ‘A’ work but you never give out ‘A’, so I get a ‘B’. Tell me, why should I WASTE my effort doing any better than ‘B’ if that’s all I’ll get anyway?”
“Alright, YOU get the ‘A’. ” (I could HEAR the unspoken ‘DAMNIT!’)
I worked for the Army and in one place it was worse than that: “The top journeyman grade is 12, and you only need a “C” rating to get promoted to that, so we will rate you all at “C.””
Meanwhile, if a (rare) promotion above 12 came around the guys who worked for bosses who rated all their people as “A,”….well, you know the drill.
Try being constantly compared on a curve. I’m a dang good programmer. Excellent in fact. But I’m not Brilliant. I don’t *look at hex code “read” what is there, nor work at the OS layer* … I’ve had co-workers, at every, single, company, that can do former, and one company where the individual did both. OTOH I defy any one of them to be able to work with end users to intuit between what the end users say they want into what they not only want, but need. Guess which is considered more valuable?
Unlike larger companies, or military, step raises and promotions weren’t ever on the table. BUT the limited amount of money available for raises each year was. “I know you deserve more than X% raise, but …”
I’d hire you in an instant if my future software company were up with sufficient capital to make a real go of it without the risk of vulture capitalists squeezing my nuts over cash flow. And all raises would go to the people who deserved it for what they actually contributed to the company’s success, not to “checkmark” individuals. 🙂
❤
Retired, now. Haven't coded in almost 5 years. Don't have those dreams of "Oh. Wait. That's how it should be done!", now. Well, almost never 🙂
I had a boss that would pull this stunt.
It didn’t take long before I started working down to the level he was rating me, and eventually moved on to an employer that rates fairly and rewards fairly.
That’s when you mention “I recall a funny saying from a Soviet worker: ‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.'”
–
I’m not sure I’d consider “shrieking like a body snatcher” as “verbally skilled”…
I haven’t found any good answer to this, outside of “make sure people have access to stories that show a more realistic depiction of people and reality.” I.e., write more conservative-themed stories.
I’m willing to try carpet-bombing people with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert E. Howard, though.
I don’t think there have been many about China, because even to us that’s just wrong
————-
Based on my viewing of Chinese shows, I don’t know how much attention even the mainland Chinese pay to the “class struggle” thing. In the K-dramas that I’ve seen with a corporate head, that individual is invariably the antagonist. But if a Chinese drama has rich corporate types, then they’re quite likely the protagonists. Mainland Chinese shows with college students will mention a Marxism class. But the Marxist theory will never be discussed. And when I saw a series about the Shu-Han contention, class was never a topic. That was despite the fact that the outcome of that was quite literally a farmer ascending to the Imperial throne as the founder of the Han Dynasty. The writers were quite willing to touch-up certain elements of the main character’s life to make him look better (such as the time he kicked his kids out of his carriage while fleeing from enemies). But there wasn’t even a hint of class struggle.
> if a Chinese drama has rich corporate types, then they’re quite likely the protagonists
Which is entirely correct. They’re not going to *be* rich or corporate without Party sanction; their failure to behave properly reflects on the Party, not just themselves.
Having read up a bit on this, it doesn’t reflect on the Party unless the government outright owns the company. There are plenty of Chinese entrepreneurs who got started without involvement of the Party. The party will get involved once the company gets big enough. But the involvement at the upper levels of the company often consists of allowing corruption by giving connected party members well-paying make-work jobs, and not trying to upstage the government’s own company in that particular industry (and if it’s an important or lucrative industry, then there will be a government-owned company). Lower level employees will, of course, have their own party cadre stuff once you get more than a handful of employees in the company.
And if something goes wrong with the company, then the entrepreneur who was officially the head of it will get the blame.
But the important thing is that I’ve yet to see a depiction of *any* of this in a series. And I’m not talking about the obviously corrupt stuff. There’s been no depiction of party members at the company (not even ones that actually do the job that they were ostensibly hired to do). No discussions of socialism, or revolutionary thought, or class struggle, or any of it. Even the party representatives at the low levels of a company never make an appearance on-screen. The series in question are fashioned for Chinese consumption, and yet one could be forgiven for thinking that the shows are actually set in a capitalist country.
The *ONLY* nod to China’s current political environment is the Marxism class that gets mentioned (but I’ve never seen) by college students.
Contrast this with K-dramas in which, as I mentioned, any corporate CEO who makes an appearance is pretty much guaranteed to be a complete oppressive sleazebag, and probably has bought off at least half of the government officials (and/or candidates) that you meet over the course of the series. The takeaway from that is that rich people are always evil.
Erm. I’m not always clear what I don’t like about Mainland China dramas. I get this smell of propaganda; but I think I lose the subtleties of what the story is doing as propaganda, and what the writers might be trying to get away with.
What is notable is that notorious tyrants, like Empress Wu Detian, Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Cao Cao, etc., have gotten a lot of revisionism. Legalism sounds cool to today’s CCP. And yes, some of the baddies had some redeeming features, and a lot of the history was written by the winners. But come the heck on.
I think that the CCP is not comfortable with the traditional stories about “a good sage who works for his country and tries to defend the people and spread justice, even if it means working for some crazy evil emperor; and the sage always lives with the option to revolt”. It has to be the Misunderstood Evil Tyrant Who Is Actually Good, and the sage who is humbly glad to serve such a wonderful master.
The only series I’ve seen with Wu Zetian was the Detective Dee TV series from the previous decade. She’s not a main character there, and her role is largely an excuse for Dee to be sent off to wherever he’ll investigate the current villainous plot, so I can’t really comment on her depiction. On the other hand, this contrasts with her portrayal in the more recently made Dee movie I saw (which was a rather fantastical thing), where she’s clearly power hungry and scheming for the throne (her second husband is still alive).
The only series that I’ve seen with Shi Huang is the one I mentioned about the Chu-Han Contention. He’s pretty clearly a bad guy there, and engages in reprehensible stuff that he’s purported to have done, such as slaughtering all of the Confucion scholars and burning their texts. Xiang Yu gets a more nuanced depiction. He’s shown as a hot-headed idiot who’s an incredible warrior. But he’s not very good at anything else, including following the advice of his long-suffering sage advisor Fan Zeng, and does some reprehensible things, such as when he slaughters hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war by burying them alive.
Cao Cao is clearly a villain in the Three Kingdoms TV series that I watched (which, amusingly enough, has the actor who played Shi Huang in the previous series I mentioned playing Liu Bei). Even though he’s initially presented as a “good guy” (with his attempted assassination of Dong Zhuo), it isn’t long before you see him offering his “I’d rather betray the world than let the world betray me,” quote after slaughtering his relative’s retainers (followed shortly afterwards by his relative) following a misunderstanding.
As I haven’t seen anything else with those individuals, I can’t comment any further on their depictions.
There is an encouragement for appreciation of traditional Chinese culture in some of the series. There’s even explicit mention of it in a couple of the modern series that I’ve watched. But obviously socialist themes don’t seem to get brought up.
Yeah, they go gung ho on the “China is the bestest evar!”, to the point that I mistook a Chinese-mainland-funded video about the war over Taiwan between Chinese rebels against the Ming Dynasty and the Dutch, as a pro-Taiwan production advocating the defeat of China and the overthrow of the CCP, when I was actually supposed to take it as propaganda that Taiwan totally belonged to China forever.
One can see why. I was reading The Book Of Lord Shang and what struck me was not only the brutality of the laws and punishments but the stunning naivety. He thought his plan would really make people good as thoroughly as the most doctrinaire Marxist believes it of Marxism.
The past few days, your posts have been outstanding. The resistance is lucky to have you.
Akshully, wouldn’t soviet style have included a fair number of murders by now? Like this witness being arrested, beaten to death with rubber hoses, and all sorts of absurdities of explanations or of silences being in the records?
“Epstein didn’t kill himself…”
Oy.
Clicked through to the Twitter thread. Every time you start to think we don’t deserve a police state here…. Lord have mercy.
“… they had no clue where food comes from”
Okay, I’m in agreement with most of what you’ve written but this is just nonsense. Michael Bloombirdbrain hisself said that all farmers need to do is poke a hole in the ground, insert some seed, piss on it and then sit back and wait for harvest time. If that ain’t all there is to know about producing food then Twitter is corrupt, Google does evil and Democrats steal elections.
–
They *do* know where food comes from. It comes from supermarkets in shrink-wrapped packages! Everybody knows *that*!
I’m getting a “Last Centurion” vibe about next year. I should re-read that book, and buy more MREs.
Yeah.
I have a bunch of 1 inch diameter broccoli heads for for Bloomberg’s dinner tomorrow. Oh, and some wormy 3 inch cabbage heads for his coleslaw.
Generous, you are.
Be sure to give him some of that too-wet rye, too. In _his_ case, it might help!
Ergot-nomic?
Aye.
Hrmm…
Let’s look at some prep for seeding:
Notice the millions of dollars of equipment required?
I don’t want to give them an inch on any of their marxist dreams. Hopefully, Trump is able to drag the rest of the Republicans over to the realization that winning isn’t a bad thing, and fighting for the Constitution is the only honorable option. Here’s hoping the Dems, MSM & Big Tech can’t obscure things enough for the steal to succeed.
Unfortunately, even if Trump does keep the Presidency, the opposition will continue screaming and rioting, while their sheep believe that Trump has stolen the White House twice. At least he’ll keep pushing forward…
He spent the first term fixing the courts without which he could do nothing domestically. He he’s just given himself heavy artillery to clear the swamp (or maybe a D9 cat) in the order stripping civil service protections from people making policy decisions. Guess what he will be concentrating on in the second term.
DJT also has the nuclear option. He can take out his phone, waggle his thumbs, and peck out “TAKE BACK YOUR GOVERNMENT.”
Not all of “the unorganized militia” supports Trump, but it’s still the largest armed force in human history, larger than all the police and armies in the world. And it’s *pissed off.*
It would be ugly. And what’s left afterward might not be America-as-we-know-it. But what we have now isn’t the America we thought we were living in, and what they tell us they will make it into is definitely a do. not. want.
yes.
c4c
NPR ran a shriekfest about how Trump fired the Secretary of Defense, and some other guys got fired or resigned, and THEREFORE Trump is clearly planning an “insurrection.” (Not “coup” this time. Wonder why.) So I guess we can assume that somebody on the Dem side was trying to run a violent coup, and it didn’t work, as of yet. Because NPR projects more than a cinema multiplex.
It’s not just NPR. ABC, CBS, and NBC are going with this angle, too.
Which means they got their widdle fingers burned trying to reach in the cookie jar.
Not burned enough.
Soda (sodium oxide) cookies for them!
In theory, the firings could be because Trump wants out of Afghanistan, but is
a wimprelatively sane about mass murder of foreign populations.And the media could have been ready, primed with a story, because they so very much wish for a coup, and aren’t together enough to pull it off.
Yep.
If Trump was planning an insurrection, their pansy asses would already be up against the wall.
How can Trump have an insurrection? He’s POTUS! If anyone around here is going to throw an insurrection, it’s gonna be me! 😀
The President is not the supreme authority; the Constitution is. If the President leads actions that violate the Constitution, that amounts to an insurrection.
If those he’s leading the actions against are doing even worse things, that might still be the lesser of evils.
No, the Supreme Court is, since they’re now the priest caste who “interpret” the Constitution to suit their political leanings. And remember, they’ve called it “living document” and don’t feel particularly bound by it.
One of my personal beliefs is that someday (almost certainly after I die) I will know the truth about everything. Every lie that I was taught, every lie that was repeated by someone who didn’t know better, all the distortions will be gone. The truth will be shouted from rooftops and that will be a glorious day.
In the meantime, my mom and one of my sisters take me seriously and I will keep trying* with the people in my very small circle.
*This is hard because part of my brain is convinced that most of my loved one have classified my political opinions into Coast to Coast Radio section.
Evenstar, you strike me as a very smart, observant person, and I believe your facts even when I disagree with your interpretation.
And there will probably come a time when your relatives decide that all your ideas were always their ideas, and they start lecturing you about all this stuff they now think you didn’t know. Because obviously they know best. But at that point, they might start to realize dimly that you were right all along.
Thank you. ❤
In the West it is always about water– who can steal it and who can hold it. CA has taken a few defeats from AZ and NV, but mainly win most of the time. We need to stop allowing the water to flow to southern CA.
(I’m operating on the assumption that we are free to post combat memes, so long as we don’t go *completely* nuts)
I’ve also been re-read Matthew Bracken’s amazing “What I Saw at the Coup.” It really gives you a sense of how powerful a gun owning mad- as- hell people can be. I could be totally off base-but I just picture thousands if not millions of guys like him calmly cleaning and zeroing their rifles with an ear on the radio, waiting for now because they still have hope in the third box, but that won’t last forever.
Yep.
I had trouble finding that story. The website seems to have been zapped. The story did ultimately pop up at the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130117185955/https://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/what-i-saw-at-the-coup/
It wouldn’t work. Not exactly that way.
BUT……
I have a hard time not gaming things out too. My likely scenario looks like this:
1. My daughter becomes estranged from me. She’s 11 and has declared that she’s gay. Okay, fine, she hasn’t hit puberty yet, and can’t really know, but it’s okay if she is. Then she declares that she’s genderfluid and wants us to use xe/xim/xir pronouns. I know why this is: a. she’s scared to death of beginning her period; b. her best friends (fraternal twins) are gay and genderfluid (and I’m sure the fact that their mother is an activist/fundraiser for various LGBT non-profits has NOTHING to do with that at all. coughMunchausencough). c. her teachers are filling her head with age-inappropriate crap — her 6th grade “World History” class is all about redlining, Ibram X. Kendi, systemic racism, etc. to the complete exclusion of anything having to do with, y’know, World History, and god only knows what they’ve been teaching in grade school sex ed, and d. her mother is a progressive who even though we all live in the People’s Republic of Seattle is angry about everything and thinks any Republican in office anywhere is a straight line to Handmaid’s Tale. (She’s gotten a lot more radical since our daughter was born and especially in the five years post-divorce.) My daughter loves me and misses spending time at my house when I’m out of town, but I’m dreading the day when she’s fully converted to believing that I’m evil, and I can see that day coming in the next few years.
2. I lose my job. I work for a Very Large Household Name Corporation, that has officially implemented all kinds of woke policies and has demonstrated that it’s willing to dump highly valuable execs — never mind mere employees — to appease the mob. I have exactly zero faith that my ballot in King County was really secret, and besides I comment online a lot and our pseudonyms are the flimsiest of veils. And my employable skills are all in tech and the HR people all talk to one another.
3. Therefore I lose my house. Without my good-but-not-spectacular income, I’ll have to sell my Seattle property and live off the capital gains (which should last quite a while). I was hoping to keep improving the house and eventually retire to a mother-in-law cottage, but that’s looking less likely.
4. I get shunned by my community. A lot of people in the Seattle goth community know more or less that I’m not a progressive. It would only take one person who works at the club that is our collective living room to raise a snit and I’m 86ed. And nobody would give me any support publicly. It’s happened to another guy I know here who blackpilled and wasn’t secret about it and now occasionally “if you’re FB friends with him you must be a racist” witch hunts go around.
5. I end up living in a trailer in Idaho, living off whatever I can scrounge, alone. I don’t really want to live the rest of my life like that — I’m only 55 and otherwise have a good shot of living to 90, but poverty and loneliness kill.
It’s very difficult not to take counsel of my fears. And there’s nobody I can turn to who will tell me it’s okay and give me hairpats until I calm down. I don’t have a girlfriend, and my prospects for dating here in Seattle are frankly kind of dim when even the reasonably sane ones want to know who you voted for.
Sorry for the rant and sob story. I don’t know what to do, and if the good guys win at national politics this all probably becomes even more likely.
I don’t have children so feel free to disregard my advice but if my daughter was in the situation you describe I would use whatever influence I have over her to start redpilling/planting seeds of doubt NOW before she does something drastic and life altering like hormone replacement therapy or surgery. Try to induce skepticism towards her teachers and other leftist authority figures. (Chances are she already disrespects them and senses their bullshit at some level already even if it’s only unconscious) Remain an attitude of caring support while slipping her red pill information “ok honey you believe you are gender fluid, that’s fine, here’s some things to read that might help you” like studies about how transgenderism among kids clearly spreads like a fad, testimonials from people who regret transitioning etc.
I’m trying to slip in the philosophy that thoughts are free but nobody can read minds either, and what matters is what you and other people actually do and say. Which will apply when I talk to her about racism. In this case, my approach is likely to be, “Everyone is going to perceive you as a girl even if you dress butch, and do you really want to spend your life scolding people about using the wrong words, especially when most of the time it’ll be out of your hearing? Because that sounds like a good way to end up resenting people all the time, and people who resent people all the time are always very unhappy people.”
I’m hoping that when HRH Jay Inslee lets her go back to in-person middle school again, she’ll make more female friends who identify as girls and she’ll snap out of what I really hope is a phase. And hopefully she won’t accidentally end up in a pack of catty mean girls like she did at her old grade school (reason (f) why I think she subconsciously avoids identifying as a girl).
Ooh. Middle School. My memory tells me that Mean-Girlism is *more* common among that age group than either younger or older (most likely related to the effects of everyone’s hormones). I hope your daughter weathers that storm with her spirit intact.
Yeah, middle school sucks. I was a year young all through school, so when I was 11 in 7th grade and short and skinny and unathletic and not into girls yet and the smartest kid in the school, I got “accidentally” pushed into lockers on a regular basis and got called “faggot” about a hundred times a day. Junior high school was the only time in my life when I considered suicide for more than a couple minutes at a time.
I don’t know your religious positions… but you might want to have a full, frank, and free conversation with God about this. St. Joseph is a dad, and he’s good with employment and housing too; so you might want to ask him to join your prayer group.
None, I’m afraid. I’m apparently missing the spirituality gene, and neither of my parents was religious. (My mother considered herself a lapsed Unitarian.) Which leaves me one of those rare atheists that isn’t mad at God.
But thank you, and I appreciate the thought.
Talk to Him (or Her, or however you conceive) anyway. Can’t hurt, even if you feel silly, and just getting it out can lead surprising places. (Also, for reference, when “your own inner voice,” suddenly says something you never thought of before, pay attention).
I would also tell your daughter being scared of menarche/puberty is absolutely 100 percent normal for a girl, it doesn’t mean she’s a boy who got somehow stuck in a female body. I cried buckets when I got my first (at you daughter’s age incidentally) and I loathed puberty (who doesn’t really?). I had detailed fantasies about magically removing my breasts and hips so I could be skinny and energetic and “normal” again, not to mention wishing I could get rid of my uterus for all the trouble it was causing me once a month. If I lived in a later time and kookier left-wing place I might have been sucked into some weird delusion like many kids today are *shudder*
For what it’s worth, she’s otherwise very femme and hasn’t said anything about being a boy. Just “fluid.”
Puberty was no picnic as a boy (suddenly wanting to hit everybody who irritated me all the time) but I imagine it’s worse for girls. For now I’m hoping that this is a phase, and once she gets back to in-person school and has a chance to make more female friends, and actually irrevocably gets past the menarche threshold, that it will pass.
I forgot factor (e): insisting on pronouns is a perfect way to make adults dance to her tune for the first time in her life, and for a tween that’s not nothing.
“For what it’s worth, she’s otherwise very femme and hasn’t said anything about being a boy. Just “fluid.””
Again I don’t have kids and obviously don’t know your daughter but that really sounds to me like she’s just experimenting/pushing the envelope. Normal kid stuff. The fear that she’ll see you as “literally hitler” dad and cut you out of her life is scary but I would just continue to calmly maintain your disagreement toward the left wing crap she’s surrounded by. Getting angry or forcing views would probably backfire (not that I think you would do that) but hopefully she could get a realization when the dad that she loves and who loves her being painted as the evil naziraycisswhitesupremecist by the shrieking leftist harpies around her and might very well conclude that they’re all full of shit.
Although if I told my dad at eleven that I was “gender fluid” and wanted special pronouns then all I would have gotten was a swift scoffing laugh and an order to make myself useful in something. Which might have induced me to outrage and heel digging but more likely would have led to squirming embarrassment and a feeling that I was being utterly ridiculous. So can’t say if my ideas are the best response.
When she came out as gay and joined her school’s Lambert House I sat her down and told her that she would almost certainly hear that conservatives/Republicans hated gay people, and that it was just an outright lie. That, sure, Westboro Baptist, but in reality that was like twelve people and all the other Christians think they’re idiots. And if Republicans hate gays, boy will my gay Republican next-door neighbor be surprised.
And if she ever wanted to hear the other side of anything political she might hear from Mama or her teachers or at Lambert House, she could always ask me. And since I’m a libertarian, I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the “other side”, but I would know it well enough to explain it.
But yeah, mostly I think she’s pushing the envelope. Both her mother and I are long-time goths, and all her — formerly “our” until the divorce — family friends are also goths, so she can’t really act out by wearing weird clothes and dying her hair green. In better times when she was little, my ex and I would joke that she can’t even act out by voting Republican; she’d have to become a cheerleader and want to hang out at the mall to really irritate us. 😀
Yes indeed 😀
Yep.
I recently saw a cartoon on 4chan (and I can’t find it damn it) of a fat prepetually scowling woman with feminist ugly-dyed hair standing next to a skinny crying soyboy while a young man wearing a strait laced suit yells “screw you mom and dad there are only two genders, and I’m starting a business!” Soyboy sobs: “where did we go wrong?” Underneath is the caption says: 2030 AD
Ha. Yep.
He’s going to grow up to be a Peter Lorre impersonator!
A friend had divorced shortly after his daughter was born; his wife had custody and moved to another state, so he had only seen her a few times by her early teens, when the ex’s new squeeze didn’t want any kids around to complicate their relationship. So suddenly he had a fourteen year old girl living with him. Mike was a decent guy, but he ran with a rough crowd, bikers, ex-cons, drug users. He did some heavy editing of his social life, trying to set a good example for his new (to him, anyway) daughter.
Eventually she wanted to date, which he permitted, and in due course a boy came to the door to pick her up. Mike was ready; he could talk motorcycles, guns, hunting, sports, drugs… feel the kid out. He’d been around, he could make a connection.
The kid who showed up was… not a Jehovah’s Witness, but some similar group. Slacks, short hair, sweater, glasses, called Mike “Sir.” In the early 1980s, he couldn’t have been more alien if he’d just beamed down from the Mothership. So he and Mike sat across the stable and stared at each other until the daughter came down from her room.
Weirded Mike out for *weeks*; he couldn’t figure out where his daughter had dug up someone so strange.
Older son acted out — we’re not goths, just industrial level weird and very laid back on clothing and such — by wearing a shirt and tie, and being more uptight than…. well…. anyone.
I joke that I’ve gone from poet-shirt-and-vinyl-jeans goth to jacket-and-tie goth as I’ve gotten older. In the land of “Seattle casual” goths who mostly wear t-shirts and combat pants to the dance club, I’ve always been … noticeable. (Honestly being able to embrace my vain inner peacock is one of the reasons I’m a goth in the first place, even if my feathers are black and white and red.)
The DJs at the club have been doing livestreams on Twitch since the pandemic as a fundraiser to pay the club’s rent. At one of them, one of my friends organized a dance party over Zoom, and when I logged in wearing a t-shirt and chinos she exclaimed that she had never seen me not dressed up. 🙂
Oh, also by listening to early 20th century music VERY QUIETLY in his room while we were shaking the whole house to our tunes….
I suspect my folks were quite relived that my Oddity was that… my preferred music was Glen Miller and the like. Of course, also so much Spike Jones, Weird Al, and various Dr. Demento stuff…
“Son, I never knew just how screwed up you were until I car with a tape deck.”
Of course, Pa proceeded to ask for his own mix tape with a selection of those ‘screwed up’ tunes….
“Rise up, gather round,
rock this place to the ground.
Burn it up, let’s go for broke,
watch the night go up in smoke.
Rock on, rock on…”
What’s funny is, while ‘Goth’ pushed the envelope once upon a time, they look downright conservative compared to the ridiculous fashions/styles of today. At least ‘Goth’ is an actual thing, and not this year’s marketing campaign…
Honestly, I think it would help to draw the line between sex and gender. She is a female person, and no one is going to constantly butcher the language for her. However, how she expresses her gender is up to her and totally acceptable to change whenever she likes. Supportive, scientifically accurate, but still an actual hard line. Which kids need and want, no matter how much they may think otherwise.
The can doesn’t NEED to match the contents IOW
Agreed, and that’s another of the gambits I was going to use. I have to be very very careful about how I do it, because she’s got a whole chorus of people in her life shouting “you go,
girlgenderfluid being!” and on the other side is just me. And outright saying or even hinting that I think most of transgender ideology is crap will get me canceled sure as the sun comes up.When she came out as gay, her mother posted about it on FB and got a whole lot of “yay! go you! you’re so brave!” I deliberately told her I thought that was nonsense, because her being gay is just part of who she is, like being farsighted or right-handed. (Right? Born this way and all that?) Nobody’s going to go “yay, you’re farsighted!”, now are they? (Plus coming out these days as far as I can tell requires zero bravery and is utterly commonplace, at least around here.)
Most males are attracted to females of their species; most females are attracted to males. That is a basic biological fact, baked into our DNA and reinforced by 550 million years of natural selection. Those individuals with other proclivities did not, by and large, produce descendants. That does not make those proclivities wrong in any absolute sense, but it does make them unusual. Traits that interfere with reproduction tend not to be conserved.
Teenagers are supposed to be confused. Their lives are changing in a multitude of ways which they have to figure out how to deal with. They’re not ready to be locked into a specific ‘identity’ for the rest of their lives. They don’t need to deal with external pressures, too.
Anybody that says you ‘should’ be gay is WRONG! Anybody that says gays are ‘better’ than straights is WRONG! Or, they are lying, because they want something from you. Maybe only relief from their own self-doubts, maybe something far more sinister. Either way, you should avoid them. Don’t let anybody else tell you who you ‘should’ be.
———————————
Cast Away: Only Tom Hanks could make two hours of talking to a volleyball great.
I was very clear with her that anybody who said “you’re gay, therefore you should believe X. You believe X, don’t you?” is trying to control her and does not have her best interests in mind.
Good.
That’s an important defense, if she’ll accept it.
I got my first period at 11. I knew it was coming. I read biology books. It still freaked me out.
*hug*
Well, I don’t know that I was so much scared as annoyed and nonplused. And I knew a lot about animals, pregnancy, etc., because I was just that kind of kid, so yeah, every girl is a little freaked out. It’s a time of life when girls are big into control, and suddenly you turn into Barbie Transformer, without a picture on the box to gude you as to how you will look when you’re twenty.
(Oh, and bruised on the hips, because I couldn’t fit past doors in the same amount of space. And jumpy around people, because hormones.)
Puberty in girls is a really really long process, and longer in some than others. Let your daughter know this, because some of the Transformer stuff continues into a woman’s twenties or even early thirties, when she’s an adult by anybody’s standards. (Voice maturation. Presumably because a courting maiden doesn’t need the strong, sustained mature voice of a mom, whereas a mom needs to be able to speak or sing for seven zillion hours a day.)
And of course pregnancy and menopause are also Transformer Barbie moments.
We are many. As opposed to men, who are just one, really, once past puberty.
I’m still discovering post-menopause me. She’s a weirdo.
*waggles hand* I’ve seen some impressive changes in guys when the I Am Responsible For Them flip gets switched, but they do seem to not notice it in themselves a lot more.
Compared to the, what, six different cycles trying to do a square dance to different songs all at the same time that is female hormones. -.-
But wasn’t pre-menopause you one too?
I wasn’t scared, but I WAS grossed out, and embarrassed.
Pretty much the next 5 or so years from that point on could be rolled into “vaguely embarrassed for breathing” without a lot of content missing.
Didn’t help that it did not flip on my “guys are reeeeeallly interesting” thing, I still noticed their personality too much, which did not endear; still don’t have anything like the reaction to my husband can get with a little smile, from looking at people.
The mean girls SUCK. At all ages and as both sexes!
I still bang my shoulders into doorframes, because even forty years after my super-growth spurt I’ve never quite processed my adult physical dimensions.
(When I was 14, I grew six inches in seven months, and once ripped out both shoulders of a pair of pajamas pushing up off the floor.)
I found Bruce Banner!
Dude, I was a stick — 5′ 10″ and 140 lbs. I didn’t get muscles until I was nearly 40.
I found Mr. Fantastic!
Yep, some teenage boys grow like amaryllis bulbs.
Periods suck. And they never stop sucking especially if you tend to get bad cramps. However, although I don’t have children myself, babies are amazing and worth the periods.
That’s something I wish society paid more attention to. There are a range of things that can help with cramps, depending on what’s going on with individual bodies and hormone levels. Some of them are pretty simple (walking or back exercise a day or so before, caffeine/avoiding caffeine, etc.) But they have pretty much all been abandoned, in favor of just taking various pills.
Oh, and “Let’s not wait and see how your natural cycles go, and whether any medical problems surface. Let’s just give you this pill instead, and let you suffer when it doesn’t solve the underlying problems we didn’t wait to observe.”
This. ^^^
Vitamin D can help. A lot. The 20K IU I’ve been taking daily for the past 2 years has significantly reduced the amount of ibuprofen I need.
and I would imagine that a certain amount of magnesium supplementation would help, either by ingestion or by soaking in a hot bath, given its demonstrated effects on easing pain in sore and cramped muscles.
Holy crap, 20,000 I.U. a DAY? Doesn’t that result in vitamin D toxicity? O_O
Hmmm, I Googled it. Maybe not:
https://mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/vitamin-d-toxicity/faq-20058108/
D is one of those vitamins that makes doctors twitchy because it’s relatively hard to hurt yourself, which is a Bad Teaching Moment if you apply it to a lot of other things like iron, or magnesium, or… well, most other vitamins!
The RDA for D is more like “minimum amount to make sure that you don’t have obvious medical problems directly from lack of D.”
The only warning I’ve gotten about D is that you have to watch out for calcium in your blood, the doctor warned me because if you don’t take calcium it can suck the calcium from your bones to do this. It’s quite rare, though.
On a practical level, taking 4000 (two standard supplements) tends to make me feel flushed and odd, and I don’t suggest it after noon because it seems to make me stay awake.
Yeah, it would be nice to have more information. I take a lot of ibuprofen myself.
Periods especially suck if your body is or becomes broken about them. Especially when things like hormones fix the issue—and bring on other unacceptable ones.
All I’m saying here is that it would be really nice to have been told parameters for “normal” so that when things started slipping into Really Not Right land, I would have noticed sooner. (NB: Problem has been resolved to my satisfaction. But that’s a year or two of my life that could have been avoided, including the unanticipated weight gain.)
Yup. There is a definite information gap when it comes to women’s health, and the crazy-style feminists are not exactly helping.
Gee. I was told “deal with it”, “it’s not that bad”, etc. All three of us girls had problems. I never once took a day off of work or school despite having double over pain AND summer seasons ’75 – ’78, I worked in the woods; ’79 – ’81 worked outdoors. Plus I swear summer camp & backpacking trips (where I was volunteering) … never failed. First time I heard someone was taking a sick day because of, “you know”, my response was “Wait! What?” OTOH that was my response when someone took a sick day for migraines too … guess what I was told about migraines. Oh the “solutions” caused migraines or put me to sleep.
Oh by the way. Hot flashes are irritating to be sure. Compared to alternative? I can deal.
Whaddya talkin’ ’bout? There’s fundamentally NO DIFFERENCE between male and female. IT’S SCIENCE!
–
REMOVE YOUR TONGUE FROM YOUR CHEEK.
Were I to do so what would prevent my blowing raspberries at such nonsense as that?
–
Riffing off of this–
if any of the ladies reading this have no idea where to go for information, look into “natural family planning” and “fertility awareness” resources. I like the Femometer thermometer and program if you’re going to go full in on What Is My Body Doing, but you don’t have to buy anything. Just the Fertility Awareness stuff will help.
Guys:
unless you’re really, really good about not being grossed out, don’t. There are pictures. They will not give you fluffy feelings. This is into the Things Man Is Not Meant To Know
Thank you.
I can put you in contact with someone else who is in “the Seattle goth community” and is highly non-woke, if you’d like.
Email me at ianbruene (DIESPAM) gmail.
Emailed, although I’ll bet I already know them.
* responded with direct contact info
weirdly the only goths I know are Libertarian…. Not in Seattle, though.
99% of all goths I know across the country are fully-koolaided progs. For my money, goths should be natural libertarians, because any subculture that the mainstream might consider “scary” should want the central government to have as little power to oppress them as possible.
After Columbine, in the who-to-blame phase, the Eye of Sauron alighted on goths for about ten very unnerving minutes (because the killers wore black and cut their hair weird, and goths wear black and cut their hair weird…) before turning on to something else. I was already pretty libertarian considering how the fedgov callously destroyed my dad’s business without even noticing when I was a kid, but Columbine just cemented it.
Re: 1: Change is hard. Don’t we all resist it? I didn’t like puberty either. Awkward, uncomfortable, messy. It seems pretty normal to have that reaction. What’s not is the idea that one can escape from it, but such is our present liberal dream of reality. I don’t subscribe to that dream, biology is what it is and we get to deal with it like it or not. You have my sympathy. Second the prayer suggestion!
It’s kind of weird, but your fears don’t involve utter apocalypse, so they’re not that bad.
On your daughter…. Gah. I feel for these kids.
I’m convinced if I were her age now they’d have convinced me I’m transexual.
I’m not. I’m female. Non-standard. Have come to terms with the non standard part, and am perfectly happy.
BUT ….. yeah. they’re destroying the kids. And given shared custody, I don’t know what to tell you about how to fight back.
Her mother and I are in sort of a mutually-assured destruction situation: she can make trouble by bad-mouthing me to our daughter or by going to officials of one sort or another, but I can easily retaliate by terminating the $30K alimony I continue to pay even though she remarried (because I wanted Daughter to have roughly even economic circumstances at both houses).
In case of SHTF or the Boog, of course, we’re all screwed. I’m prepped about as well as a lifetime city boy can be (mostly against natural disasters like The Big One), but I have no illusions about hacking out a life surviving in the wilderness or anything like that.
I’m not crazy about trailers, but they beat being homeless. I’m even less crazy about trailer parks, because I hate being crammed that close to other people.
Trailer parks are 1000% better than apartments.
And apartments are 1000% better than storage lockers. Don’t ask ….
On the plus side, living in a trailer in Idaho isn’t the worst fate in the world, and if you have such basic skills as “Showing up to work on time” and “being willing and able to learn” you can make a comfortable living over or under the table.
Sure your Seattle relatives will look on you with contempt, but from what you’ve said, they do that already.
So why not move somewhere with a low cost of living?
Just make sure to leave the Seattle attitude behind.
Because of his daughter.
I’ve got family members, three of them, convinced that Trump is trying to steal the election, that he’s an Evil OrangeBadMan and that we were better during Obama than Trump. It doesn’t matter what proof, what analogy I provide to explain my POV.
Weirdness going on with numbers? “Well, elections are different than business accounting.” (Oh, and doesn’t matter that the Mainstream Media hasn’t brought on the presumably thousands of experts on their speed dial to come and refute basic statistical theory and analysis.)
Postal workers and poll watchers swearing out affidavits that they were either told or saw things that looked wrong? You know, the sort of legal document that lying on one is a perjury charge and that instantly invalidates you for 80+% of any jobs you could ever want again? “Trump’s billionaire friends are probably giving them money to make false statements.” (Unless they’re getting six zeros to the left of the period, there’s no reasonable amount of money that could cover this kind of thing if you thought about it.)
Election machines going hinky and giving strange results that threw votes to Biden? “Putin was probably giving Trump help again, and you know the Russians can never do anything right.” (Wait a minute, weren’t the Russians the evil, multi-competent people that hacked the Matrix and gave Trump the election so seamlessly four years ago?)
Three source articles on issues with several polling places in Democrat-heavy counties? “It’s not from ABC/BBC/CBS/CNN/MSNBC/NBC/New York Times, so it’s fake news done by trolls online that just want to make a disaster so Trump can steal the election.” (The same people that have made no bones, start to finish, about hating Trump, trying to prove he stole the White House from Hillary!, and attacking him from every side?)
Tweets from Occasional-Cortex and some of her butt buddies that people should get lists together of everyone that supported Trump-even if they had a bumper sticker for them-and make sure they never have a job in public or private again? “Well, they should pay for supporting OrangeManBad.”
I’m in California. I like California for the most part. But, if Trump’s strategy is to let the big cities burn and that includes San Francisco and San Jose (where most of my friends are), I’m having a serious problem with seeing this as a problem.
I’m trying to get myself retrained into a marketing job. Creativity and writing and similar things, yay! But, all the jobs I’m finding are in San Francisco, San Jose, and in between and it looks like the rental cost curve is bottoming out. Assuming my previous job’s HR department doesn’t use weasel words to indicate that I might not be woke.
I remember when I was reading about the run-up to the Civil War, John Brown’s last letter before his hanging. There was one statement that he made that I’m beginning to recall-in horror, because it sounds so close. “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”
I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want to have to leave my family, cast them aside, and move to another state. Which is looking more and more like Texas (Texas is a nice place to visit-but I don’t want to live there unless I can afford air conditioning for at least four months out of the year.) But, I keep feeling like we’re being driven to choose between two sides-neither side I am fond of, but one I despise more than the other.
I’m not giving up, I’m not losing hope. But, I wonder at times if my hope is vanity.
Um… unless you are living in a one-room shack in the Hill Country that nobody has seen for fifty years, my understanding is that everybody in Texas has A/C. And yes, you can run A/C for three or four months a year if you have cheap electricity, and my understanding is that Texas electric bills aren’t that bad.
Don’t live there, but CA is just expensive on everything. And tiny houses.
How about twenty-five years and a decently sized Roman-style villa built for defense against infantry and light armor?
Heh.
So basically, you want a nice Frankish stone or brick barn. Well, that’s doable. Texas dairy cows raised by German immigrants got some nice houses.
I’m curious – how do they wave away the impropriety of tabulating ballots without observers from both major political parties being able to *observe*?
Don’t know, but on Twitter Lewandowski had a photo of an “excluded,” list of R poll watchers that included his name (he sneaked the shot as he was being removed) and someone responded by saying that since he’d seen the list, obviously he hadn’t been excluded.
If you get too many people in one place the Orange Entity might manifest itself and kill everyone.
Not reported in major news sources, thus “fake news.”
We don’t live in the same reality as they do; why would anyone think we can live in the same country?
You had it to start with – they just wave it away. “Nothing to see here, move along.”
I think they excused it as “COVID precautions”, and made them stand a distance away.
“If you’re afraid to count ballots because an observer is within 50 feet, I don’t think you should be counting ballots.”
THAT
EVERYTHING in TX has air conditioning. Seriously.
I’m not surprised…but…Texas.
More purging of stuff in storage. You’d be amazed at what you’re willing to let go at some point.
We’re assuming next move, we take our clothes, our books. minimal craft stuff. Some of the pieces of furniture that have a sentimental value.
Most of our stuff is from thrift stores. We can buy at the other end.
Oh, and the computers go in the cars with us.
Too bad about your altitude issues; you’re not all that far from Yard Moose Mountain. Having the International Lord Of Hate for a next-door neighbor would be cool.
Everything South of the Mason-Dixon has AC.
FTFY
And before AC most of the Deep South was hell on earth. People did NOT retire to Florida before decent AC took off other than as snow birds. You CAN build houses that are marginally tolerable (Big porches, straight through flow like you see in New Orleans homes, large shaded porches etc) but not fun. Of course New England is no fun in the winter, but heating is easier than cooling. Of course a bad day hot day in New England features humidity that would rival gulf states, so we like our AC too.
I hear ya I’m stuck in SoCal and afraid and prepping as best I can. I have fantasies about running off to some deep red state and joining a survivalist militia because I wonder if God is above America writing “Mene Mene Tekel” but hope isn’t a bad thing.
Stolen from Ace of Spades HQ:
“One Sunday morning at a small southern church, the new pastor called on one of his older deacons to lead in the opening prayer. The deacon stood up, bowed his head and said, “Lord, I hate buttermilk.”
The pastor opened one eye and wondered where this was going. The deacon continued, “Lord, I hate lard.”
Now the pastor was totally perplexed. The deacon continued, “Lord, I ain’t too crazy about plain flour. But after you mix ’em all together and bake ’em in a hot oven, I just love biscuits.”
“Lord help us to realize when life gets hard, when things come up that we don’t like, whenever we don’t understand what You are doing, that we need to wait and see what You are making. After you get through mixing and baking, it’ll probably be something even better than biscuits. Amen.”
Maybe this is the left’s last fatal mistake. Who knows other than God?
I just with that God, in all of his or her multitudinous forms, would at least give us a decent RSVP that isn’t parable and isn’t analogy for what the plans for dinner are.
Sigh. yes.
And being stuck in Denver…. I feel the same.
I think California is the only state in the union that accepts rolling blackouts and brownouts as normal.
All the rest of the states have reliable electricity.
UNTIL they get the Green Nude Heel.
I lived in Sacramento – the Capitol – in the 1960s. And Sacramento had “rolling brownouts” *THEN*.
I’m sure the government offices had electricity during working hours, but during the day the voltage dropped until my Mom’s TV quit, and sometimes the lights would just go off entirely. Mom got cranky without her soap operas.
This is why the Dems can talk about curtailing hours when electricity will be available, because for the last half-century the population has *already* been living with that… they’d just be making it official.
All the way back to the 80s, my parents said that the reaction to the Legislature not doing their job (passing a budget on time) should be to lock them in and turn off the AC. Mind you, now that they’ve got the super-majority, the budgets pass just fine, but they’re full of garbage.
I believe it was about that same time period when I first heard the suggestion that AC ought be banned in Washington, DC — at least in all government office buildings.
Do it for the climate!
–
….and apparently there are tens of thousands of ballots in PA that were received BEFORE their send out date:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/pennsylvania-100000-ballots-with-implausible-return-dates_3572942.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-11-10-4
OF course.
Ohmigod!!! It’s worse than we knew! Trump’s destroying the Space-Time Continuum!!!!! He must be evicted from the White House as soon as possible – we dare not wait until January 20th!!!!!!!
–
Posted that of Fakebook with the comment “Where’s MY TARDIS?” We’ll see how long it lasts.
They seem to *really think* they can just hit that”reset” button and everything will magically be like it was four years ago again, ready to just proceed with their plans to continue doing things. The world has totally not moved on, at all. Trump is a hated buffoon and our allies and adversaries will be glad to get back to the status quo ante where nothing ever changed.
And of course, anyone who tells them otherwise is brainwashed, deluded, and part of a cult of personality, so should stop watching Fox News and get out of their bubble. It CONFOUNDS me.
yep. they’re used to us being the abused wife, who pretends she wasn’t hit.
They got one thing right: we ain’t watchin’ Fox no more.
Why? All you have to do is realize that they hate normal people and want us all dead.
“hopefully she won’t accidentally end up in a pack of catty mean girls like she did at her old grade school (reason (f) why I think she subconsciously avoids identifying as a girl).”
Oh Dear God middle school flash backs so much. I can remember being gender segregated for some activity and having to deal with all the catty bitchyness and just wishing so hard I was a boy at that moment because they just punched each other then laughed about it which seemed so much easier and more fun. Being a woman does not mean you have to be like or identify with that crap.
“I got my first period at 11. I knew it was coming. I read biology books. It still freaked me out.” yup my parents were always completely open and honest with me at an age appropriate level, plus I had a big sister but it was still bizarre and off putting. Imagine how hard it is on girls who are told nothing.
I was the odd boy out so there was no laughing following the punching except at me.
I don’t know where I read it, but it was a girl complaining about school: “Boys are mean with their fists, girls are mean with their mouths.”
The ones I dealt with believed sticking pins in your butt in passing was the way to go. ( I was reading).
Odd women tend not to do well with other women. Most women’s social mechanism is “hit the nail that sticks up” and “enforce conformity.”
I STILL hate all-women environments unless the women are as weird as I am.
ME TOO!! I went into medicine when it was all male. Now, it’s trying to turn into a mean girls party. Yuck.
I finally figured out that doing your own thing is seen as a power play, by girls.
YES. So they tend to react violently to people like us.
Is everything a power play? I grew up with rules are boundaries for your/common good. So rules as power play and power for it’s own sake outside of a fictional setting were a mental adjustment. But hey! I think I get the dress code fights in highschool now. I interpreted as rules for common good. Those resisting weren’t. Which it actually was, IDK.
To these very unhealthy emotional cultures, yes, they are power plays.
It’s sad, really, although not as sad as it would be if I wasn’t aware I might need to shoot the SOBs when they figure out that I really won’t kneel…..
Honestly, the only good thing about distance learning is that it’s keeping our eldest (who is autistic) out of middle school. I mean, he MADE friends in elementary school, and he seems pretty resilient, but middle school is a nasty crucible.
If he could see his friends in person outside of school, I’d vote for virtual learning until high school.
via Insty’s open thread:
Heh. I’ve just been reading Betsy McCaughey’s column (Trump-deranged Democrats endanger lives by blocking vaccines) and considering that from Cuomo’s perspective, COVID deaths just mean a greater supply of reliable Democrat voters.
That’ll probably come in handy when he runs for president in 2024.
–
And don’t forget fewer Medicaid long-term care payouts…
Of course people get a little bent out of shape if you use a shotgun on them like is traditional to resolve zombie issues…
Scarfed!
BTW, how exactly are you embedding images? Do they need to be hosted at an outside server? What code are you using?
If you have a url that ends in a picture-extension, it will auto-embed.
I do meme posts on my blog to GET those image URLs. 😀
Sarah; remember your initial doubts about “thedonald”? Well…. those were understandable because you have not heard of it before. But TheDonald is all grown up now!
We are the News now.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/breaking-exclusive-analysis-election-night-data-states-shows-millions-votes-either-switched-president-trump-biden-lost
https://imgflip.com/i/4lwzle
bah…
I want to believe.
Unfortunately, GatewayPundit is sort of … excitable, and their stories don’t have a whole lot of very firm sourcing. I remain hopeful but not holding my breath.
The data is from the weaponized autists on TheDonald, TGP is simply reporting on it.
Sadly, it is not the sort of evidence that will persuade those who don’t want to believe.
But then, what is?
–
I’m starting to believe that, for NeverTrumpers etc, no evidence will ever be sufficient.
I straight-out asked one family member, “What evidence would you consider sufficient?” I got the same silence I get whenever I try to pin this person down on task priority when they want to play musical chairs with the tasks I need to get done.
I had on the Fox editorial page this evening while accomplishing other tasks and there was one
GOPTrump strategist* explaining that the reason they’ve provided no proof as yet is they have to sue to get access to the ballots, and only once they’ve got that can they demonstrate fraud. Right ow, he said, they’re i the position of having to provide the number of jellybeans in a jar they’re not allowed to see.*I think it was former Nevada attorney-general Adam Laxalt
–
The latest from Scott Adams:
Once again he cheats by tapping into reality for his material.
How is an honest comic supposed to compete with that!
Exposes how the blanket dismissal of vote fraud claims by Democrats/leftists is absurd:
An agonizing number of leftist behaviors make sense if you start with the premise that Trump really is Literally Hitler.
…the fact that, under such delusion, purging supporters becomes darn near mandatory does a great deal to sharpen one’s resolve, however.
(Okay, fair cop, my back brain keeps trying to convince me that it’s a paranoid thought. But the Lincoln Project, AOC, Jake Tapper, Jennifer Rubin, and all the other mini-Maos are providing counterpoints.)
(Oh, they’re only talking about PROMINENT supporters, right. That totally makes it better. Even if it weren’t as blatant a stupid excuse as… everything else the left is saying. -_-)
I don’t know if $20 is PROMINENT, but it’s being tracked in my zip code.
https://donaldtrump.watch/
I’m wondering whether the proper response is to quietly make lists of our own or to loudly announce “We can make Lists too!”
Then they’ll arrest us for terrorism and threatening.
Yeah. Double standards. Gotta love them.
I think the proper response is to inquire, as sweetly as possible, why they don’t think the Trump State Security Apparatus is not recording their disloyalty?
Or simply to announce a donation of $25 has been made in their name …
–
Freshly crafted:
Oh, hey, Trump’s new SecDef is named Anthony J. Tata. He was Airborne and a brigadier general, and he retired to mess with people and write political/action thrillers. Oh, and he does a lot of snarking on Twitter.
So basically, he’s the alternate universe John Ringo.
Ooops. I fact-check myself. He’s only being appointed Undersecretary, Anthony J. Miller is the new acting SecDef.
Heh, Trump’s done a lot of firing. Or if you like it better, he’s avoided a lot of confirmation hearings by having an “acting secretary of defense,” and possibly has been bringing in various people focused on various tasks, or on different facets of the Defense Department.
Chief Operating Officer of the District of Columbia Public Schools??? So he ought be right comfortable dealing with Congress and bureaucrats.
I cannot help but suspect Trump selected him because of that last name, however. Because we all know how much Trump likes Tatas.
–
Res said
Chief Operating Officer of the District of Columbia Public Schools??? So he ought be right comfortable dealing with Congress and bureaucrats.
Only if he dealt with preschoolers and kindergartners …
Christopher C. Miller. Yeah, I think it’s time to go to sleep.
Impossible. Insomnia, stress, and death march working conditions makes for the best intelligence collection and analysis products.
and not “I hear you like crazy, so I put crazy in your crazy, so you can crazy while you crazy”
Yeah, sorry, I guess the sarcasm is a little inappropriate.
And I’ve stayed up too late for me, and have run out of words for my theory of limited analytical urgency.
our local dem congrescritter won reelection because she “found votes on a thumb drive”
i wish i was kidding.
If that, does not get taken away, the options for fixing this get narrower, and quite bloody
she’s supposedly ex-cia, and she acts like that’s a good reason for us to trust her…. and i think its a good reason to suspect that she knows someone who could exactly duplicate whatever data chunks necessary to produce authentic votes.
And who’s her spineless opponent who isn’t filing a challenge lawsuit?
Probably another democrat. Remember runoff ballots?
no, I’m in VA now….
From an IT security point of view “votes on a thumb drive” is Gotterdammerung-level Fail. You don’t need to know any more about it.
THIS
I heard recently that in some places ballots are scanned and then the scan “becomes” the ballot for official purposes. In this era of automated Photoshop and deepfakes, I don’t see how that can continue.
exactly. Someone could write an Action in photoshop that can increment numbers in an image in a few minutes….
on a different note on stormy weather.
The Surfers have been at it again back in Sarah’s land of birth
If the democrats were the only thing Americans were against, I’d believe you, that they can’t win.
Unfortunately the world powers are behind them, see international media blanket, social media censorship etc
They have the same totalitarian policies and the crazy left ideologies imported from American universities.
Some left leaning people in UK are waking up and fighting with the conservatives against it. People are protesting, reading newspapers outside MSM, and there is even an occasional article in the tabloids for freedom of speech and against crippling the economy with shutdowns.
They are also fighting against the cult ideology: People and many journalists are against the cancel culture and trans takeover of women’s rights. In the last year or so women have organised in grassroots organisations and movements and they have stopped the trans “self-ID” law, trying to protect single sex spaces, have pushed the NHS (National heath system) to admit and update their advice regarding hormone blockers, that indeed are not reversible and have known and unknown side effects. The gov has also instructed schools not to teach the “born in the wrong body” ideology, another win.
There are many law suits raised by women and a few by men, some for women’s rights, some for freedom of speech. For ex, One journalist was arrested then released bc one guy he interviewed expressed a racist opinion. He was released but a note has been added to his criminal record. While this is a note not a crime, any employer asking for his record will see it, so he is suing.
I believe if more and more people resist this totalitarian left there is a chance. But there is no automatic “they can’t win”. They might loose in 70 years but none of us will be alive so bc of that this would be a win and I rather we didn’t lose.
This is a bit ranty already but like to add few more thoughts.
I’m left and come from a former communist country. I’m politically homeless now because I see that the left now has turned totalitarian and I recognise the madness: people with good intentions think they can install utopia if only everyone thought like them. Because they are good people wanting good things for everyone then it follows (in their heads) that it’s good to suppress speech, it’s good to shut down debates (they have debated and reached the Truth already, you see, they are just imparting it now)
The next step, already started is to move on to “suppress” people (people are too stupid to understand what’s good for them).
People and women especially are already afraid to speak against ideology, looks what happens to the ones that do, women lose jobs when they say sex is real and important, for example. They couldn’t cancel JKRowling but they can cancel pretty much everyone else.
People are becoming non persons, denied banks accounts.. heir voices are shut down by social media.
As crazy as it sounds, next is physical suppression. Don’t worry, you won’t hear about it, it will be just rumours in the wind. The visible people in the media will be rightfully charged with this or other and punished behind closed doors.
You will be afraid to speak, even to your children (my childhood is full of silences from my mum when I was asking things like: why we have ration cards mum, are we animals? Why are they 20+pages with the party leader in every single book, not only manuals, but almanacs too? Why is he called our Father? Why dad can’t go out for a drink with that man? (An informer – my dad’s answer: exactly bc he is in informer I am nice to him!).
We started indoctrination in preschool, we were called the “eagles” of the country, then you were a “pioneer” and so on. Drills too, Then forced manual labour from high school (picking up fruit in farm for ex).
The outcome is not utopia but highly hierarchical society with Party people at the top, forever spewing ideology, the ideology getting crazier and crazier, with a lovely game on the side of who is behind in the ideology and can be punished (=cancelled), the rest getting poorer and poorer, bad widespread management of the economy (forget innovations, they were running loses on what they did have year on year)
I could go on. It’s so familiar it’s frightening… my friends who haven’t been through this can’t see it.. maybe you’ll have more success with your friends..
One last thing: People couldn’t raise up because the whole world was bearing down on us for a long time, not just the local government.. the USA either couldn’t or didn’t want to intervene for a long time, and we were surrounded and inside a communist world of many countries.. that’s why I’m saying because this is international now, Republicans are not fighting their democrats, they are fighting against the whole western world pretty much, but not fighting at all will be much worse..
If we lose now, I don’t know about winning in 70 years actually, because the technology is advancing and it is being brought to bear down on us..
In ways we can see now, and in ways that will be invented and implemented. In this future where there is no freedom of speech or information you won’t even become aware that more ways to keep you compliant have been deployed.
You’ll be compliant or die, there is no need for a lot of us to be here on this Earth, machines will take more and more jobs, even like general practitioners or lawyers (already in development).
You’ll have your circuses and drugs so I guess that’s good?
It sounds bleak because it is.
It was a shock to see Biden story censored so blatantly and now the election fraud, so yep, it’s here, the males have fallen.
Oh look! Another person who accepts The Enemy’s assessment of reality. It would be more interesting if it hadn’t already been done to death a million times before.
A bit sarcastic, but on point. It is difficult to push through this sort of thing when all one hears is one side, though. We come here for the counter-culture.
Do they still make that carbon-paper-like typewriter paper that can be mimeographed? Sarah’s Samizdat!
ooooh.
Marsh and I were looking for a name for our for-pay “newsletter.”
Hoyt Samizdat. (Though his will also have game crit, etc. but you know, from a conservative perspective, his being more conservative than I.)
Sarah’s Samizdat rolls off the tongue much better, though. nfortunately there aren’t many synonyms for “samizdat” and nothing that starts with an “h.”
*Unfortunately.
I know. But since younger son will be doing it too…..
Hazmat Samizdat.
Which reminds me, I was looking at a map this evening that had “S. Hoyt Ave.” on it.
*the masks have fallen
I forgot to say last night that, after the whole NPR shriek fest about a coming insurrection by Trump, and a list of possible bad effects, they announced solemnly that if worst came to worst, the Republicans would destroy Obamacare!
Rum, rebellion, and paying your doctor! Oh noes!
Yeah, I’m terrified of losing pretendcare.
WHAT ARE THEY SMOKING?
Mostly their own excretions.
Sarah, apparently victorygirlsblog.com has been taken down. None of their article links produce anything but 404 errors, and when I go to just victorygirlsblog.com, Dreamhost is giving me a message that I can create it by uploading my own blog. I don’t have any way to contact them, and was hoping someone at PJ Media did.
It’s back. Came up really slowly, but it’s back.
BLINK!
I shall do.
Comes up for me? Maybe it was temporary?
Must have been. I tried for 20-30 minutes before raising the alarm. What pushed me over was that message about “This blog is almost ready for you, with an “Upload your blog” button.
For anyone who doubts the commitment on our side:
https://thedonald.win/p/11Q8O8e13w/i-purchased-the-remaining-25025-/c/
We FBI now.
I see the other side is claiming that one of the election fraud whistleblowers has recanted.
One small problem: He hasn’t.
And an archive, in case the Puppet Masters disappear it: https://archive.is/LUcmn
Of course.
Some perspective on that:
Take the Washington Post’s report on the ‘recanting’ election fraud whistleblower with all the grains of salt
The Washington Post is going to have to provide receipts.
Absent hard evidence, readers have little reason to trust its anonymously sourced report this week alleging a supposed election fraud whistleblower has disavowed his own story.
[SNIP]
Unfortunately, the word of anonymous officials and a tweet written by a nameless Democratic staffer are the only evidence the Washington Post provides to back its central claim.
Meanwhile, the whistleblower himself, Pennsylvania postal worker Richard Hopkins, not only has gone on the record, but he insists also that he recanted nothing.
[SNIP]
When it comes to dueling narratives, we have to weigh the credibility of both parties. This is the part where the Washington Post’s slipshod and sometimes unethical reporting over the past four years comes back to bite it in the ass.
[SNIP]
As for Hopkins, there are at least two factors that work against his version of events, possibly casting doubt on his overall credibility.
First, a Pennsylvania newspaper reviewed 129 ballots and discovered that only two that arrived late were processed where Hopkins claimed he witnessed firsthand election fraud. This directly contradicts Hopkins’s characterization of the problem as being rampant and widespread.
Second, Erie Postmaster Rob Weisenbach is on the record calling Hopkins’s allegation totally false.
“The allegations made against me and the Erie Post Office are 100% false made by an employee that was recently disciplined multiple times,” the postmaster said on social media. “The Erie Post Office did not back date any ballots.” …
–
“a Pennsylvania newspaper reviewed 129 ballots and discovered that only two that arrived late were processed”
1) Which newspaper? Citation, please.
2) Who supplied the ballots? How were they chosen?
3) A 1.5% fraud rate proves that there was no fraud?
“Postmaster Rob Weisenbach is on the record calling Hopkins’s allegation totally false”
The guy who would be held responsible denies everything. Well, that settles it, let’s just go home.
I have seen the underbelly of PA Dem politics. (Relatives in Dem organization and in local elective office.) People fool themselves. “I’m not fixing a traffic ticket for the daughter of the councilman. I’m just giving a young kid a break.” “I’m not cheating the bidding process. I’m just writing the bid solicitation to give a local company a chance.” “I’m not stuffing ballots. I’m just compensating for an unfair deadline.”
The people at the top know what they’re doing. The worker bees at the bottom rarely realize what’s going on. They’re the switchmen throwing the rail switches routing the trains to Dachau.
“covidiocy” — I’d like to borrow that.
“The thing is the left hasn’t given up on this Academic Socialism.” Better term is ‘Collectivism’. To the young and naive, ‘socialism’ seems so, well. . . sociable.
The secret technique of the academies is to inculcate what Orwell called ‘Collective Solipsism’, a kind of brainwashing that leaves the mind open to the ‘narrative’ of The Party. See my post, ‘Back to 1984‘:
https://walkingcreekworld.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/back-to-1984/
If Trump wins this election everything will continue to degenerate. Just what Marx wanted: blood running in the streets.
The best outcome would be for Biden and the Demo/BLM/Antifa gang to win. Yes it would be painful and significantly damage the system. After 2 years of massive fraud and chaos the Republican party will waste away, Dems will eat each other and self-destruct, and Trump’s new party will rise and begin to seize control, In 2024 DT Jr. will be elected president.
1. Nonsense
2. and the horse you rode in on, sidewise
Guess how I know this blog is having an effect?
Oh, I know how I know. I keep having people approach me on FB wanting my kill list.
So, once and for all:
“Dear FBI the only kill list I have is redshirting list, and you have to donate to Liberty Con charities to get that on that. Also, go fish. Ever wondered why the only fools you rope in are antifa, boys? You ain’t too smart.”
Speaking of lists and resists; passing this along w/o comment: https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2020/11/anyone-seen-this.html
I was seeing what were pretty clearly these folks on an anime blog, last spring, when all that was done by the blog owner were comments about the flu and the mention of slavery in one of the story worlds.
Democrats paying for astroturf, or the ChiComs, I suspect.
Thanks, Bob.
My patience may be a wee bit short right now.
mine too
Sideways? Really? Seems a little extreme
What’s that line Orvan used to use? “With a rusty chainsaw, sideways, and twice on Sundays?”
The horse could be considered relatively lenient.
Orvan is an Ox, not a Horse. Big difference.
[blink]
Umm… We were talking about horses vs. rusty chainsaws. It never occurred to me to shove Orvan into anything, and thank you so very much for that mental image.
I am so glad THAT had not occurred to you.
If it occurs to anyone else, well, I’m NOT completely harmless.
Mostly Harmless?
Not with THOSE horns.
…but only Mostly.
I tend to put it, “…with a chainsaw, a rusty one, sideways – and twice on Sundays.” or close to that.
I don’t know if the claimed confusion is real, but I can certainly deal with being called a horse. It’d be bewildering, but hardly insulting.
And a trifle cruel to the horse.
–
Did Fred the Fed lose his job?
Fred, you have to put it behind you. There are other things in life besides watching harmless science fiction fans. You have your whole life ahead of you. Why don’t you write a science fiction novel?
*Mostly harmless.
*headtilt*
So, what color is the sky in your world, that they won’t keep cranking up the violence if we just lay down and die?
THIS.
Commies win UGLY.
Yes, the Leftoids are trying to blackmail us by threatening more riots, looting and arson if they don’t get their way. Your ‘solution’ is to give in? Let them take the power they want, so they can make even bigger threats in the future?
Are you just pretending to be stupid, or is that the real thing?
———————————
If you don’t want to learn, the best schools and teachers in the world can’t help you.
I’m reading this argument all over, including main articles in right side blogs.
Remember those. They’re AT BEST not reliable. At worst, moles.
Are you out of your mind?
A) what are they going to do they haven’t done.
B) SURE give them power to bake in fraud forever. AND destroy the country and starve our people.
NO. We do NOT reward fraud. Go fish.
A vengeful and vindictive Left will prosecute and imprison Trump and probably Don Jr as we… The New York AG and the Southern District of NY have made a career of trying to prosecute the Trumps and once he is out of office , they will.
I dunno – I’m seeing reports that
something which ought buy enough lawyers to let him counter-sue the state of New York and possibly win it although why he would want a fun-down, badly-managed slum is a question.
Note: that would be considerably more that the $65 million paid for the Obamas’ books.
https://pagesix.com/2020/11/10/donald-trump-could-land-100m-book-deal-for-presidential-tome/
–
Are certain parties attempting to convince Mr. Trump that he has no real reason to want to continue in the Presidency?
yep. So they can steal the republic.
FUCK NO.
> counter-sue
Or… just board one of his planes and leave. I bet Israel would give him a visa and expedite the citizenship process.
Then he could come back to the US as Ambassador from Israel, with diplomatic immunity.
We’d have to wear those plastic face shields to defend against all the Scanners-tyle head explosions.
Hey, it’s an SF writer’s blog. In some timeline, it has to happen…
Hmmmm … how about he makes a big public display of moving to Russia (if reports of Putin’s health are even semi-accurate they’re going to need somebody else to Make Russia Great Again … and the trolling of American Leftists would be EPIC!
Then Trump could quietly slip out the southern port and take up residence in the Middle East. If he finds Israel too noisy I suspect Mohammed bin Salman would welcome him i appreciation for not making a bugger thing of that Kashoggi disposal.
–
>> “Then he could come back to the US as Ambassador from Israel, with diplomatic immunity.”
That WOULD be hilarious, but unfortunately it wouldn’t protect him from assassination. And if Israel treats it as an act of war I suspect the left would happily to it as an excuse to nuke them.
* TAKE it as an excuse
Example of the next step from the 1984 “how to” playbook that the left intends to pursue:
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/11/10/nolte-new-york-times-kevin-roose-calls-accurate-stories-about-election-integrity-fight-misinformation/
Yes, telling people accurate information and providing accurate facts is now deemed an effort to mislead when the facts challenge the leftist party line.
I expect Harris/Biden if their fraud is successful to push this very hard by outright deplatforming blogs, etc., through things like the Operation Chokepoint and active collusion with the tech oligarchs who are already part of their “team”. Their making of enemies lists is not an accident.
One point of order, true stories can absolutely be part of a misinformation campaign. We actually see it a lot–puff pieces about someone’s grandchildren loving them and little else when there’s a scandal on, emphasizing response to a scandal over the scandal itself (“Republicans Pounce”), selectively quoting random Tweets to make a position seem more widespread than it is, leading with something incendiary and only including the explanation below the fold, not mentioning that something was an internal poll… each of these is carefully not a lie (the grandchildren exist, the Republicans pounced, the Tweets were tweeted, the incendiary words were just a framing), but misleading as all heck.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide sense. Most of the cited stories actually qualify in any reasonable sense, however.
…decide WHETHER MOST of the… agh, after the fact editing can go *bad*
The problem was that, when I saw a story by a sympathetic source about Biden’s grandkids, every single one of the pictures had the kids sorta cringing, or snarling, or leaning away from Granddad or other relatives.
It didn’t make me happy to see that. I was glad to see that most of them aren’t minors any more.
& since it’s 11/11, Lest We Forget:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Benavidez
Biden doesn’t remember saying that, or anything else. Certainly not about having ‘the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in history’ on hand for this election.
Because it’s SOOOO important that their election fraud be INCLUSIVE! Nobody was left out, so it’s fair!
EVERY state, I’d say. I mean, they ran a potemkin campaign, so 90% of the votes would be fake, of course.