We, Magnificent Bastards

579 thoughts on “We, Magnificent Bastards”

1. Ah, the great P.K O’R. – he certainly had a way with words, and of not suffering fools, when in his prime.

   1. wow where can i find this quote?

      1. It’s in one of his books – can’t recall at this moment which. Maybe “Republican Party Reptile”? Or one of his other collections from the same period. The one where he reprised his account of a trip to Russia is priceless…

         1. The nice thing is that it’s an tribute and expansion of that big long Mike Fink-type rant that you see in various frontier American stories. (With the original colorful wording put back in.)

         2. I thought it was his …. give war a chance?

            1. There is always the Marine version of the 23rd Psalm.
               Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow,
               I will fear no evil
               For I am the meanest SOB in the Valley

      2. Holidays in Hell

      3. I first read the PJ O’Rourke quote in an 80’s edition of Rolling Stone. RS needs to be reminded of when it didn’t suck.

2. Good points all

3. Original comment was at Old NFO’s. I later added that I did not think the reasons the GOP had for folding in the late 19th century held now, or at least it doesn’t seem clear that they hold as strongly.

   If we whites are still damned for folding to Democrat Segregation then, how much more so if we fold now?

4. I am definitely feeling gaslighted, which makes me feel mean. No … no concession… ever!!!

   1. PRECISELY. Some of us are badger people. we’ll fight to the end

      1. And make sure our corpses are booby-trapped, hon, never doubt it…

      2. well *snicker* my last name may mean badger valley … Also badger was my mothers-mother spirit animal

      3. Badger? More like honey badger.

         1. lol Bright shining moon goddess badger lol

5. I’m a total ornery cuss. I do not take gaslighting nor betrayal well at all. I will continue to point out everything that I believe needs pointing out. I will yell from the rooftops. Including and especially to friends and family. Even if it’s only side remarks, like yesterday. A friend, born and raised in Franco’s Spain, made an aside about “that’s the US, not paying sick leave” in regards to somebody working as a substitute teacher…which is contract work. My comment was “no, that’s contract work.” I know I made a point because she shifted topic immediately. I consider it my duty to insert my observations into their gas-lit world.

   Let’s go all you ornery cusses!

   1. “A friend, born and raised in Franco’s Spain, made an aside about ‘that’s the US, not paying sick leave’ in regards to somebody working as a substitute teacher”

      Why is it an employer’s responsibility to pay people to not work? Shouldn’t it be the employee’s duty to anticipate, prepare, and provide for such eventualities?

      Folk might at least be grateful for employer considerations instead of taking them as privileges due them. When you get right down to it, if employers were not compelled to pay people for not working – sick leave, vacation, holidays – they could pay more for the work actually performed. All money employers spend on “benefits” is actually merely withheld from workers’ contribution to the business’ bottom line. Labor cost calculations include the indirect expenses as well as direct ones.

      Being grateful for employee benefits is akin to thanking the government for your tax refund. Talk about “gaslighting”!

      And yeah, you’re right about “substitute teacher” being contract work which does not merit “sick leave.” You’re on contract to cover for employees who do have entitlement to such pay in their contracts. For that matter, how could any employer rationally calculate the earned “sick leave” of substitute teachers? Do you think the government (who is the ultimate employer of the majority of teachers, substitute and otherwise) just effing prints money? The greed and intellectual dishonesty of some folk is staggering.

      And that, friends and neighbors, is why wallabies seldom get invited to parties.
      –

      1. They keep forgetting that “employee benefits” only exist as a way of increasing the value of total employee earnings because wage caps from WWII prevented them from directly giving them raises. I told my current employers they could keep their healthcare plan, I have a better one from the military, but I want the money they would have spent on it.

         1. The previous owner of the company I worked for did that. Also paid for time off not taken. Shipping manager had a sickly wife, so they only did a single short vacation a years, and if she had a good year, and didn’t spend time in the hospital or traveling to specialists, any sick and vacation time left over was an end of year bonus. Lab tech’s wife had a wonderful coverage plan (well until 0bama ruined it), and the portion the company would have paid of his coverage was given to him as a “Christmas Bonus”. Also over 15 years of employ (or was it 12? 10? forget) got you the top offered insurance policy for free, and both High Deductible-HSA ones for a single person were free as well (the total cost was actually a bit less than his share of all the others, so it cost the employee only what ever they put in the HSA itself) and that all went away with the new ownership. When he started the sale he did up everyone’s salary as much as he could get away with to compensate for all the added costs suddenly hitting us. The only good thing benefit-wise we got out of the deal was the new company matched higher amounts on Retirement and the HSA, though since the HSA matching dropped to his level.

            1. I’ve always been covered by hubby’s insurance*. Even after he retired. It was union family coverage, with no monthly co-pay for the insurance; while he was working. After he retired, it was less expensive to carry the retiree family coverage, than it was to add just him to mine for the co-pay alone. Plus we still had to cover the kid, another co-pay. As far as my employer’s insurance. It generally went one of the following 4 ways, depending on who:

               1) I declined my employer’s coverage and got paid, at least part of the premium the employer would have paid to cover me. +6k/year

               2) I declined my employer’s coverage, and didn’t pay the monthly co-pay to have coverage … couldn’t be forced to have coverage if had coverage from another source. +9k/year.

               3) Double covered.

               4) No coverage through my employer.

               The only time we felt the process “wasn’t fair” was when we both worked for the same company, each got family coverage (same company hubby worked at for his entire career), although the company paid premiums for both of us, the insurance wouldn’t double cover. It’d been nice to have had one of us get the premium instead, but couldn’t work that way, for some reason.

               When Oregon put into policy that everyone working 30 hours or more had to earn X amount of sick leave per hour worked. Two things happened:

               1) Employees ended up working 50 to 60 hours per week for multiple employers, but < 30 hours / week / employer. Result – No sick leave.

               2) Employees who used to get X weeks of vacation, 80 hours / year sick leave, + 10 to 14 days of paid holiday, now got a minimum of 120 hours Personal Time Off, accumulated. Still got certain holidays off, just didn't get paid for them unless they used their PTO. PTO also had to be earned based on hours worked. Once you reached your maximum hours, stopped earning any. OTOH if you used some, you could continue to earn back up to that amount, at least where son works. So technically he can earn way more than his minimum hours. Plus he can ask to just be paid for X many hours as he is hitting his maximum.

               Either way. The intent of the government requirement was to have people feel they had to go to work sick. Reality. Situation #1. They failed. People still have to choose between staying home sick & working for money needed. Situation #2. No one uses Personal Time Off, for sick leave, unless they are in the hospital. At least if the sicknesses kid brings home is any indication.

               Hubby’s employer didn’t change a thing. Their policy was already way beyond the new requirement.

               My employer the process was “take what sick leave you need, don’t come to work sick”. So the policy changed to “just record it to prove we provide sick leave.” OTOH we could work from home.

               If NOTHING else the last year hopefully has taught employers that they really, really, don’t want employees coming in to work sick.

               * Still covered by hubby’s retiree insurance. We can’t look at medicare supplements until next enrollment period. Well we can, we did. Hubby’s insurance rate would have been $0 (he qualifies for medicare, I don’t), mine was just under $800/month. We were paying $300/month … heck even next year it’ll only be $500/month for both of us, until I turn 65, then it will drop to supplement for both of us. At which point we should have more options.

               1. been years back now but Jennifer Granholm and her cohorts made some changes to min. wage and coverage laws, and as always, it causes those who it is supposed to help to be hit hardest. Folk I know have a small deli and went from multiple part time employees and a family friend managing things with them, to just the two of them running the place. iirc the “small changes for the better” the Canukistani transplant enacted cost them around an additional $20,000 a year, per employee. So as soon as it took effect, 0 employees, and a year after it went up for sale.
                  It is still for sale. Only reason it might survive Whitless the Wonder Stasi and her shut-downs, is they fully own it. My cousin’s bigger place is likely to not survive.

                  1. I’ve been reading the Northwest Observer (thanks to whoever point me to it!), and the restaurant owners association are gearing up to fight Despicable Kate Brown once again. Seems there’s documentation that a) TPTB *know* restaurants and bars have little to do with spreading the Chinavirus, b) know it’s the long-term care residents who get clobbered, but c) Kate wants to close entertainment/restaurant etc venues “to keep people staying at home”.

                     So, now I’m back to takeout meals eaten in the car. Again. If my to-go choices were more varied than tacos, I’d be less disgruntled…

                     As usual, it’s also the smaller businesses that are getting targetted. No gatekeeper at Home Desperate or Kroger, but I had to wait outside for the vet’s office to fill the Heart-Guard prescriptions. Cold and windy, too.

                     And yeah, it’s 25 people in a church, no matter the size. Freaking commie!

                     (There was an anti-lockdown rally in K-Falls this weekend. Not sure if there’s going to be resistance. Kate’s OHA/OR-OSHA Geheim Stats Politizei have a lot of business owners intimidated. Still… The Stasi-recruitment is another nice touch. I mentioned rope and lampposts to a worker at a small store last week, and the response was “burn them at the stake”. Hmm.)

                     1. I had to wait outside for the vet’s office to fill the Heart-Guard prescriptions.

                        –
                        Our veterinarian clinic has been curbside service since the lock downs started. Show up for the appointment, park, call in to let them know where you parked and what vehicle you are in. Wait to get call back, and wait technician to come out. Technician comes out picks up your pet and takes into office for appointment. This is whether you are bringing in a pet for appointment or just picking up prescriptions.

                        The ONLY exception our veterinarian makes (this is middle finger to HRH K Brown) are EOL appointments. They ask you to mask up and have you take your pet, and your family, into the back room where these procedures are done. Once in the room you can remove your mask where you can cuddle your pet while the procedure is completed. Tears & all.

                        I don’t like the way the regular appointments are being handled. I like being there while the veterinarian is going through the exam process. OTOH I make dang sure I’ve written everything down that I am concerned about before the animal goes in to see the veterinarian.

                        1. Same restriction on exams here. I was told that the restrictions are coming from OHA as part of Kate’s plan to conquer the world, one pissed-off person at a time. Slight differences with the two vets we use (one vet is overly busy, but the backup has been gooood.)

                           Now, it’s modified curbside. Vet A, strictly curbside. They’ll get the pet and return. I walked in the office and was told to leave, though I could at least give my prescription order.

                           Vet B is a bit different. Supplies are still curbside, or at the door. Appointments, you call ahead of time to set it up, and call when you are there. When they’re ready, they’ll get you and the dog/cat/lemur, but you still have to cool your heels. I never new dogs could spread the Chinevirus. Haven’t hit EOL situation yet, though we thought we were going to lose the Border Collie. She screwed up her RF leg something fierce, but nothing shows in the X-ray. Sigh. Painkillers and lots of love for the while.

                           1. Oh, when the lockdowns ended in May, I could go into the Vet B store and lobby, and could wait inside while the dog was getting checked out. This last one had a lot of data-dumping, and a comfortable place to talk was important. Vet A has been swamped; he bought the practice, and we don’t think he can afford to hire another vet to back him up. Not easy to get information from him, now.

                              Obligatory typo: “I never *knew* dogs could spread…”

                           2. Not here. Because Polis is an asshole.

                           3. It isn’t about animals spreading the virus, it is keeping people apart.

                              Our veterinarian clinic has been swamped. They always have 1/2 a dozen or more vehicles parked outside. Staff running ragged. Not the only clinic either. One of the reasons is the County Clinic is shutdown 100%. That means no low cost spay/neuter, or low cost vaccinations. They are usually the ones swamped.

                              Also, because of the no critical surgeries and the low cost spay & neuter clinic shutdown, at least kitten factory has been in full swing … it is bad enough under normal conditions.

                           4. Unfortunately not puppy factory. I’d like a puppy….

                           5. Where’s that sarcasm font when I need it? 🙂
                              Yeah, keeping people apart seems the entire goal of the latest fatwah from Kate. I noticed that in honor of Gavin Noisome’s curfew edict, peaceful protests were being held in his neighborhood. Starting at 10PM. [VBEG] Sleep well, Gavin!

                        2. Our vet is also curbside, which is why I haven’t taken Havey and Valeria for their annual.
                           I’m just grateful they let me go in to say goodbye to Greebo.

                           1. Yes. We lost Thump last May.

                              I still miss him. Kittens help. Don’t replace him. But they do help.

                     2. NWOB is one of the best sources for reasonable reporting that I have found locally.

                        And yeah, there is the general and broad consensus that we are bad Oregonians, so we are being punished.

                        The hell with that.

                     3. when the average worker american starts getting to that point, something somewhere can easily make the Blackshirts and Batch of Lying Marxist protests look positively mild mannered

                     4. by the by, loving [/sarc] the latest WP update. Now ALL my browsers (home too now, not just work) don’t allow seeing notifications in the home site of the browser, and even under Reader, I don’t get many notifications (like for this one) until a day or so later.

      2. Do you think the government (who is the ultimate employer of the majority of teachers, substitute and otherwise) just effing prints money?

         –
         Well, yeah, it does. Where do you think all that ‘COVID Stimulus’ money came from with the economy shut down? Like I always say:

         Governments can only print money; they can’t make it worth anything. They can make it worth nothing.

         1. They don’t just erffing print money — they also take it away from people who do create wealth.
            –

            1. Well, duh, that’s the only place they can get it.

               Leftoids believe that the primary purpose of government is to take money from people who earn it, and give it to those that do not. They ‘love the Poor’ so much they want to make everybody poor.
               ———————————
               How can Leftoids create a better world when everything they do makes this one worse?

   2. YES

   3. Side remarks are the most annoying. In my experience leftists do it all the time (to be fair, maybe I just don’t notice when conservatives do it). You are left with a) have a witty one line rejoinder that shuts down the discussion (I almost never do) or b) get into an argument that you started, not them, because side remarks are never seen as an invitation to debate.

      My favorite was a side remark that “someone at the grocery store was openly carrying two guns and a knife”. I managed to come up with a) “was it the open carry or the two guns that really bothered you?”. He immediately backed down with “well I don’t really want to talk about it”. In my head my rejoinder was “But you already did”. Instead we let it slide, point made and presumably taken by the others sitting around.

      1. A generally effective parry t such ploys is, “So? What’s your point?”

         That puts them on defense, forcing them to actually engage on the issue or acknowledge they were trying to score cheap unanswered points.

         Alternatively, you could inquire about the type of guns, or the size/type of knife, thus opening the topic or forcing the person to admit they were virtue signaling hot air.

         Response not recommended: “Oh? I usually carry at least four, myself. Where do you suppose he had his concealed piece(s)?”
         –

         1. I go even simpler: “Yes, and?”

            This is one of the ways that you can tell for all leftists talk about how liberated they are, they’re often quite, well, conservative. If they *really* believed that there was no shame in indiscriminate sex, their response to being called a slut would be “Yes, and?” If they *really* believed there was nothing wrong with homosexuality, they wouldn’t make a big deal about how Lindsey Graham’s never been married or even has a girlfriend, wink wink hint hint. That’s why you see so many leftists who actually have power are married heterosexually with kids — they know what’s actually best for the kids, even if they preach the exact opposite. As for the hard-core activists, they seem to be projecting their self-loathing on others and using their activism as a way to silence their own issues.

            They can’t imagine the self-confidence and self-honesty of Nell Gwen telling her coachman in a brawl over another coachman who called her a whore, “I am a whore. Fight about something else.” “To thine own self be true” is not saying that there is some deep, inner self that you must find and express and demand other people acknowledge; Polonius was not a proto-hippie. “[A]nd it must follow, as the night the day/ Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Rather, honesty must start with being honest with yourself.

            1. “If they *really* believed that there was no shame in indiscriminate sex, their response to being called a slut would be “Yes, and?” If they *really* believed there was nothing wrong with homosexuality, they wouldn’t make a big deal about how Lindsey Graham’s never been married or even has a girlfriend, wink wink hint hint.”

               It’s just another way they don’t understand conservatives. We’re supposed to be so reflexively appalled by sex / gay people / whatever that we’ll shun them without thought. Which is why the instant follow-up when we don’t is that we’re a) hypocrites and b) are using our religion as a “cover for bigotry”.

               “Rather, honesty must start with being honest with yourself.”

               Which anyone who believes the lies of Leftism can’t be. It’s practically a requirement.

               1. I find their charges of hypocrisy marvelously ill-informed. They’ve created a caricature of conservatism (and Christianity) and get huffy when real people do not conform to their stereotype. Indeed, much of their thinking seems to reflect an incapacity for connecting dots, such as asserting Catholics are anti-sex without explaining how those huge families come about.

                  Or the uproar over a Christian woman, 24-years married, being unembarrassed to post a picture of her husband’s arm around her with his hand on her boob.
                  
                  Duh! She says “sex is a blessing of marriage” and of course she enjoys her* husband’s appreciation of her body. (I suspect she enjoys his** body, too!)

                  I suppose it would be okay if they were clad in Dom/Sub fetishwear, but the idea that such affection is NOT kinky?

                  Outrageous!

                  * “The ‘Fuller House’ star, Candace Cameron Bure is reflecting on backlash she received from Christian fans who took issue with a photo of husband Valeri Bure cupping the actress’ breast on Instagram.”
                  pagesix . com/2020/11/21/candace-cameron-bure-calls-sex-the-blessing-of-marriage/

                  **Given he is a retired NHL player and considering the quantity of skating hockey players do, I daresay she enjoys a bit of grabbing his butt from tme-to-tme.
                  *

            2. “ As for the hard-core activists, they seem to be projecting their self-loathing on others and using their activism as a way to silence their own issues.”

               In fairness, their self-loathing is well-merited, even if not for the reasons they believe.
               –

6. The one set that worries me is just that society only has so many ways to fight back. At some point the only route is to remove consent and there’s only two real routes for that I can see.

   1. Yeah. I know.

      1. Yes, and it is going to come to that. We are not going to win this battle for civilization through a thoroughly compromised court system and a GOPe that does not wnat to fight and think things will just go back to what they were before Trump.

         1. Court is useful battlespace prep.

            1. Yep. “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people….”

         2. Welcome to the party, pal.

            I have been saying exactly this — and getting vilified for it — for nearly 20 years.

            Ah well.

            I suppose, like Cassandra, I’m getting the kicking around I deserve.

7. Sitting in the allergist Wed. I overheard a nurse telling someone, “…and it’s a hideous way to die.” I wanted to yell at the nurse for irresponsibility, but decided it was possible that as a nurse she might actually have known someone who died. Still, it seemed like fear porn.

   (Happily, my sense of taste is just fine, but I really don’t feel like doing much today).

   1. It is fear porn.
      Dying of a respiratory infection (I came this close!) is not PAINFUL. It is slow.

      1. I’m That nurse was right. It is a hideous way to die. Because of wpmen like her. Not because of the disease itself (unless you’re phobic about drowning, etc.) but because of the lock down.

         Locked up your with “caregivers” who physically, dying alone without anyone you love allowed to see you…

         Pretty damned hellish..

         1. Okay, that was a doozy even for me:

            IThat nurse was right. It is a hideous way to die. Because of women like her. Not because of the disease itself (unless you’re phobic about drowning, etc.) but because of the lock down.

            Locked up with “caregivers” who physically abuse you, dying alone without anyone you love allowed to see you…

            Pretty damned hellish..

         2. sounds like you described a hellscape

         3. Canuckistan had article recently in one of national sources about elderly taking their own life (physician assisted suicide) because they didn’t want to continue. Think was here had reports of failure to thrive in nursing homes as well.

            But Karen too scared of the neighborhood kids. Reason I’ve stopped talking to my mother. She was more scared over my father popping positive (asymptomstic and then twice negative) than when I got phone call from doctor that I needed an emergent hep test after exposure.

   2. Meh. Most ways of dying throughout history have been hideous.

      You want a hideous way of dying, try Alzheimer’s, progressively dying over a decade or more while your body keeps chugging along unoccupied.

      When I die I want to go quietly in my sleep, like my grandfather, not screaming in fear like the passengers in his car.
      –

      1. But you can be the president of the USSA with it

      2. Terry Pratchett made a documentary about that. Well worth watching.

   3. Dying from anaphylactic shock is a hideous way to die. Dying from lung cancer is a hideous way to die. Point they miss is that dying at all is pretty hideous; it’s the ultimate insult. But the odds of dying from COVID are miniscule.

   4. Tell her that instead of covid she’s welcome to take a bottle of tylenol washed down with wine. That is painful and horrible. Respiratory is always fearful when you are conscious. Once rsi’d you don’t care anymore

8. I’m fortunate enough (not “lucky”) to have kept my job through all this. So I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone whenever I realize there are people who are convinced that Armageddon has come. The slowest, most boring Armageddon ever. An Armageddon that, if it were pitched as a story plot, would be rejected and forgotten faster than anything that came before or since. But still — I meet people who are deathly afraid, and have no problem living in fear for the REST OF THEIR LIVES. Which is fine by me; just don’t expect everybody else to do it, too.

   So, yeah, it’s clear that this year’s Doom LARP is a power grab, and the only relief I can foresee is that someday soon, it will be acceptable to start hurting people who deserve it. I’m tired of pretending that they’re civilized. Soon, enough Americans will realize that they’re not.

   1. I don’t care if people want to hide under their beds the rest of their lives. I mind their imposing it on us and crashing the economy.
      FYI I have friends who were BARELY making it, and the new round of lockdowns just killed them.
      I think this is part of the left’s accounting too. If they make us poor enough, we’ll embrace socialism, right?
      IN A PIG’S EYE.

      1. And they really are insane. Now and then some Twitter person will scream irrationality at me, usually some version of, “This stuff will kill all of us in 22 days!” This was, of course, 80 or so days ago.

         When we left for our summer run my husband had friends (real friends, not, “you’re only my friend if you agree with me,” types) sincerely afraid for him. He told them, “Yes I’m afraid, but I’m not letting fear rule my life.” It’s hard for me to remember just how crazy some spots are.

         I do like Richard Grennell’s comment that Thanksgiving dinner was forbidden but funerals are not, so he will be hosting a funeral for his pet turkey next Thursday, refreshments provided.

         1. The worst part is, no matter how many times they are proven wrong they just go on to yammer the next stupidity. Do you remember, “Coronavirus is going to kill 2.2 million Americans by summer!”? They don’t. “COVID19 has killed 120 million Americans!” followed by hasty stage whispers, “No, no, Joe, it’s 120 thousand, not million.”

            It’s still not as many as the 2009 flu season. They’re whipping up hysteria over next to nothing. Pants on head AND hair on fire.
            ———————————
            People can make stupid mistakes, but only the government can force everybody to make the SAME stupid mistakes.

            1. we were first gaslighted by the Chinese: people dropping in the streets, being boarded up in their apartment buildings, etc., but since then, we have learned better. I understand the fears at the time, but now? Meh.

               1. THIS.

               2. The dropping dead in the street seems like pure gaslighting, but I suspect the door welding was real, with “Enemies of the State” selected to be the lockins.

                  In our flyover county (the people in Oregon’s capital seem to hate us; we never vote the way they want and ask difficult questions), I ran into one person who demanded I back up for “social distancing”. He was masked, I was shielded, but the guy (my age, mid+ ’60s or so) sounded genuinely afraid. Poor dude. I told him, “I’ve had it. Can’t give it, can’t get it, but OK.” (Nasty case of not-a-flu, though I don’t recall ever getting influenza.) (The vet mentioned distancing when I had a dog in for treatment, but the OR health-stasi are far worse than the disease. Shooting them on sight is still frowned on. Give it until she bans Christmas.)

         2. My response to those is going to start being going back and saying “Are you dead yet? I’m getting bored of waiting.”

         3. “You can’t live in fear”

         4. Lily pads1111!1+1+!1! ZOMGROFWTAFBBQ

      2. I think it is more to impoverish us and destroy the middle class so we won’t have the resources to fight them. The Marxist dream is a ruling elite and a proletarian mass that just subsists while the rulers live in luxury.

         1. Indeed – a hard-working and fairly comfortable and substantial middle class is a thorn in the side of aristocrats of every stripe, both the old feudal kind and the new oligarchical kind. A middle class has just enough energy and sufficient clout and connections to demand a say in public affairs, whereas the impoverished proletariat have all they can do just to stay alive.

            1. As the tax collectors know, the middle class is where the money comes from.

               And they’re generally harder to buy with cheap government gifts.
               –

            2. Too bad for the wannabe elites that Joe Schmoe can rig a trebuchet from castoff junk and even the pacifists know how to make napalm. There is no such thing as disarmament.

               1. cia.gov and army.mil have freely downloadable instructions on guerrilla fighting, “resistance”, improvised and easy to make weapons, propaganda, and other useful subjects.

                  “Your tax dollars at work!”

                  1. Sounds like something to read though a VPN/proxy chain, if at all.

                  2. Gun shows sell old Army manuals on all of those subjects, and more. I got the official manual for ‘Rifle, .30 cal M1’ for the M1 Garand many years ago.

         2. Lawyers are expensive. Bullets are cheep. Once we stop valuing our own lives, God help their souls.

            1. Bullets are cheep.

               HAVE YOU SEEN THE MARKET THIS YEAR!?

               1. Still cheaper than lawyers.

                  1. Bullets won’t turn on you like lawyers will, either.
                     –

               2. Plan such that you can acquire them from the jackboots that get in way.

               3. If push comes to shove, there’s cast bullets. OTOH, my last experience with doing such was back when lead wasn’t more toxic than fentanyl and lead alloys were easy to buy and or make up. There are places that sell the usable alloys, and while bullet molds ain’t cheap any more (as in Yikes!), they last a long time with reasonable care. I still have some of the equipment. Hmm, .30-30 on *my* schedule sounds attractive. (Hen’s teeth are more popular out west than most anything for the -30.)

                  Not all bullets have to go downrange really fast.

                  1. There is also the Big Game Rifle option: who cares if you only have 6 rounds in the magazine or it costs $5-10 per round, when it will go through the whole riot.

                  2. Only bullet molds I have are .45 ball, and .45 conical for my black powder Colt Army revolver and my flintlock.

                     Both of them military grade weapons in their day, which means the anti-gun Prog-Socs probably want to confiscate them too.

            2. I value my life quite highly. But there are some things I value higher. More highly. Whatever.

      3. It’s a forced transfer of wealth.
         Small businesses go under. Megacorps gain market share. Centralization makes control easier.

         And lampposts start looking lonely.

         1. Yep.

         2. I dunno. Around here, the really small companies are hanging in there with local support. A whole bunch of larger businesses are looking pretty shaky. The mid-sized companies will rise or fall, depending on loans and the the cost of their premises.

            No matter who wins, 2021 will be the Year of the Bankruptcies. How bad it will be will depend on an economic recovery, which will depend on who’s president.

            1. It will be Donald Trump’s doing whoever ends up in the White House. Because if Trump pulls this out he will deregulate the hell out of the economy and free up businesses to innovate. If Biden is in charge it will a be Trump’s fault that the economy fails to reignite because he left Joe a mess, because he didn’t agree to the Pelosi Stimulus boondoggle before the elections, because he’s a big doo-doo head and because there’s no freaking way the NY Times, Washington Post, nor the svants at CNN, ABD, CBS, or NBC will ever admit otherwise.
               –

         3. Exactly. Big companies get bailed out and get governments to make rules for them. Small companies get smashed under govt jackboot

            1. And Bezos and co help promote fear and pay off govt

      4. I’m to the point where I don’t want to go anyplace, because they insist on masks, even when the EO used as the basis specifically exempts people like me. And I’m not quite ready to get arrested yet. I just point out that telling me to send someone else to the store is the same as telling someone with a legit service dog that because the minimart serves hot food they can’t bring the dog in, ADA be damned.

         I’ve spent a lot of my life being gaslit, and I’ve never responded well to it. If you’re into astrology, in the Asian version, I’m an Ox, and it’s a pretty good description, except I talk way too much. If I know something is true, (and just telling me I’m wrong while ignoring my proofs won’t cut it, show me some damn facts!) my heels dig in. So you all know how I’m feeling about the “the mask won’t hurt you”, “it shows you care”, and all the other platitudinous lies.

         I’ve got online grad school work to do, a subject I love (accounting and this session is auditing!) and I absolutely can’t get myself to actually do much of anything except watch Inspector Morse, other Brit mysteries, and some sci-fi.

         As far as businesses? I’ve heard from housemate, who heard it from someone working security at the casino, who heard it from friend in upper management/tribal, that if CT goes into lockdown again, they’ll probably be shut for good. Before this mess, they were the fifth largest employer in the state.

         1. “I’m to the point where I don’t want to go anyplace, because they insist on masks, even when the EO used as the basis specifically exempts people like me. And I’m not quite ready to get arrested yet. I just point out that telling me to send someone else to the store is the same as telling someone with a legit service dog that because the minimart serves hot food they can’t bring the dog in, ADA be damned. ”
            Same place I am, with the downside that I become extremely depressed if I don’t get out of the house every once in a while.
            I don’t think there are that few of us.

            1. I get out nearly every day, if only to pick housemate up from work since the busses don’t run that late. I don’t really miss shopping, but I do miss the ability to go to a museum or concert.

               At least I haven’t had a melt down for a few months. Yay prozac. (and there was great rejoicing, yay) It’s just this general pervading sense of dread.

               1. I miss the zoo and the gardens and the museums.

               2. The problem is that with any record of “psychoactive” prescriptions comes an automatic entry to the “red-flag” list. Prescribed Chantix for weight loss (to reduce stress eating)? On you’ll go. Same thing for your household, because “access to firearms”.

         2. If the casino is owned/operated by an Indian tribe, they should fight the lockdown based on lack of authority of the state to impose a lockdown on Indian property. Federal law supports that position (it is why their are tribal casinos in states that otherwise do not allow casinos).

            1. The problem is going to be getting the customers in. My friends in CT are utterly convinced of whatever their authority figures tell them.

               1. Sounds like my parents. 😦

                  Housemate works Wednesday – Sunday, swing shift. He said that the Great Cedar casino had maybe 60 people in it on Wednesday evening. They’ve had to shut Rainmaker most of the week because of not only lack of customers, but also lack of staff. I think they’ve lost a lot of people who came back when called and then discovered that they couldn’t really deal with wearing a cloth mask 8+ hours with only an hour of break.

                  I broke down and bought tickets for the rescheduled Judas Priest/Sabaton show (from this September to next October), but I’m not holding my breath on the place even being open then, never mind being allowed to be full to capacity, which is pretty much what the ticket situation is for that show.

                  1. Borgata Poker room, which is the only casino poker room open in New Jersey or PA is packed. They are limited to 30 tables (they usually have double that) with 7 person per table (they put plexiglass barriers up, it feels like being a seated bank teller playing), but have had loooong waiting lists on weekends, and even during the week they are very busy. That is even with the no indoor food or drink service from 10pm to 5 am.

                     The main casino floor about 2 weeks ago was pretty busy.

                     1. This is a link to their live game report (updates every 2 hours from noon to 2 am):

                        https://www.theborgata.com/casino/poker/game-report

                  2. Not counting on casino shows being allowed in NJ or PA anytime soon, or any shows for that matter. Casino shows can be nice, because they are a smaller venue then the big arenas and stadiums, and if you get a room you can basically get to the show by simply taking the escalator.

                     1. This show is scheduled at the Grand Theater, which seats 3000. The casino up the road has an arena, about 10K seats.

                        I just wonder what they’ll do if they’re allowed to have shows but only at x% capacity, when they’ve already sold 100% capacity tickets which is the case for this show… I’m not sure that JP/Sabaton, or for that matter any large show, can be done financially at half or less capacity

            2. They considered that back in March with the initial shutdown. However… while the governor can’t order the tribes to shut down (we have two casinos less than 10 miles apart, different tribes), he can order the state police to put up road blocks. We’d have been open but with no customers or staff.

               1. Roadblocks to prevent people from going to tribal territory. That is also illegal under federal law.
                  If states could do that they could render the autonomy that such lands have under federal law to be be meaningless.

                  1. Just because it’s illegal under federal law wouldn’t stop the state from trying it. If they put the road blocks in the right places….

                     And remember this is CT, the idiot state that sent DaNang Richard to DC, even after his lying came out. And voted in Lamont, the man who ran for Senate as a (D) and lost resoundingly to the former (D) Liebermann, then running as an (I), because the (R) no one had heard of and at least Lieberman had some morals. I know I voted for Lieberman because he was known quantity who actually did do some good for CT over the D party.

                     1. No, there is no question about rad blocks being right out.

                        Road work, however … especially as they can rely on the media to not bring up Gov. Christy’s little kerfuffle.
                        –

                        1. The thing is, Mohegan Sun is pretty much the only thing on tribal land, I don’t think anyone lives on that piece, and it’s easy enough to block off Foxwoods casino entrances without blocking the entrance to Mashentucket residential areas. I think there’s one, maybe two, small roads on the reservation between the residential and the casino sections, but they wouldn’t be suitable to bring in all the customers and workers.

                           But since most of the state thinks that everything coming out of Hartford is God’s Word (TM), even without physical blocks, if Hartford says to close, almost no one would go anyway.

                  2. They don’t care about Federal law. They’ll happily arrest and convict you under state, county, or municipal law. Then you get to file an appeal with the relevant Federal court, which is likely to sit on it for years until it decides not to hear your case, because [pick a reason].

                     1. Yet again, the process is the punishment.

               2. Gee, little groups of cops scattered about….. “Fort Apache: The Casino” comes to mind.

      5. “I think this is part of the left’s accounting too. If they make us poor enough, we’ll embrace socialism, right?”

         If they abuse us hard enough we’ll thank them for easing up? Fuhgeddaboudit!

         They may say we got to get our minds right, but Americans ain’t never gonna get our minds right, no matter how many sets of chains they load on us.
         –

         1. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

            Not a joke to the left.

            As for the “We have 2024.” crowd? May your chains rest lightly upon you, but may history forget you were our countrymen.

            Is it getting cynical in here or is that just me?

            1. No, the, “wait until 2022,” folks see themselves as mature, sensible, stable people who understand that It Can’t Happen Here and people who think it can are overreacting and a little silly.

            2. If somebody started beating the left, my morale would improve.

               1. What do you want them beaten with? 😀

                  There are so many possibilities…

                  1. Cudgels. But ripe fruit would also work.

                     1. Rotten Fruit. (Why waste good fruit?) 😉

                        1. I meant overripe, so same thing.

               2. You are not ALONE. Sigh.

      6. I’d say it’s far more about the sniggering control than explicitly about “making people poor.” Other than the truly insane “drastically prune back the human population to save Mother Earth” would-be genocidal monsters, leftists don’t actually want to destroy wealth — they want to slurp it away from everyone else and then condescendingly dole out rice, beans, toilet paper, and the occasional driblet of cash to the beggars that result. Haven’t you gotten the memo? Leftists are totally superior people who just naturally know better what’s good for you.

         Of course, if spreading poverty is necessary to crush morale and provoke widespread calls for a radical solution, then, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking scads of eggs. As far as the leftists are concerned, it’s gravy if the poverty especially hits those prideful kulaks with their private farms that have not one but two cows. How dare they!

         I once had a short conversation with an otherwise nice young lady who among other things indignantly denounced the existence of vacation homes for the wealthy. I didn’t bother to point out that if it weren’t for demand for such homes, they’d never be built. How would anyone inherently benefit from building fewer residences? Did the young lady want the wealthy not to transfer their money to carpenters and bricklayers and plumbers?

         Hiding under the misguided invective was the implication that the wealthy should … what? Simply give away their money to the poor? Why would the most productive folks amongst us then even bother to produce wealth in excess of sheer survival needs for which other folks voluntarily pay money without force or fear? Should bright, productive folks huddle over piles of gold bullion late at night behind closed curtains? Spend the money on frightful sculptures that scare the pets and horrify art critics? Even in the latter case of arguably pouring money down the drain, the money goes to untalented sculpturists who buy bread from the baker and pay the gas bill and plink cash into vending machines run by hard-working independent contractors.

         No … I didn’t bother to say any of this. What’s the point? Some people have envy on the brain. Was the young lady a leftist at heart or merely misguided by years of brainwashing in the public schools? I honestly didn’t want to know. Fighting every minute of every day is wearying. -_-

         1. it comes from their believing in absolutely fixed pie. So if you have an extra home someone will go homeless.
            The problem with this is that they’re being educated that way by our public schools.
            So, yes, you absolutely should have SAID SOMETHING. People, start challenging this stuff, because it’s actually retarded. Ask them where all this wealth was when there were three cavemen in the world. They must ALL have lived like Bill Gates, right?

            1. Handwiggle. The presence of folks with more money than sense can price residences out of reach of locals. Its common anywhere you see Californians fleeing and buying houses. Same reason I’ve seen folks in pnw all in on hard leftism decrying the Chinese buying houses to launder money (although not recognizing why they are doing so and putting 2 and 2 together)

               1. Lots of ChiCom money in Vancouver

                  1. Thats exactly where I saw at least one of them.

            2. Hmmm. Three cavemen huddling over a flickering fire in their ragged furs as the dire wolves howl outside, eh? That’s actually an excellent approach. I shall employ this concept the next time I’m in the mood for an extended rant on the ugly fallacy of a limited or — as you pointed out — utterly fixed pie that fundamentally never changes for the better, no matter how many rare geniuses discover how to harness fire, or invent the wheel and the mathematical concept of zero, or hammer out intricate mechanisms for exploiting steam and electricity, or raise binary computers into a sublime art that threatens in the not-too-distant future to produce so much wealth that no one will ever again have to engage in hard, dirty manual labor to earn astounding oversupplies of his or her daily bread. -_-

            3. Yes, the idea of a fixed pie is what drives most of them. They never took macro economics in school and don’t understand even the basics. I’m thinking that a good response should be “so, did you pay extra in taxes this year? You know you can, right? Why didn’t you? Do you hate the poor that much?”

            4. “So, yes, you absolutely should have SAID SOMETHING.”

               Waggles paw. Sometimes rolling on the floor laughing is the best possible response. As the saying advises, you can’t reason a person out of a position she didn’t reason herself into. She thought she was signaling virtue, debating her would likely have hardened her position Mocking her, albeit mildly, might have served to make her suspect the virtuousness of her stance and opened her to reason.

               If nothing else, it would have been beneficial exercise for you.
               –

            5. If they had an answer it would probably be that wealth comes from civilization and civilization comes from government. So wealth ultimately comes from government, and the more and better government a civilization has, the more wealth it will produce. In short, they mistake “organizing and cooperating” for “obeying the orders of the Lords and Masters” and vice versa.

               Of course along with the “fixed pie” idea they also greatly overestimate the amount of wealth available, and believe that “peak other people’s money” is a myth and a fraud. They believe that “the rich” are sitting on huge hidden piles of wealth, and that it will only take a little legal and social fracking to get “the rich” to disgorge their “fair share” – which will be enough to pay for everything they’re asking for, and more besides.

         2. > indignantly denounced the existence of vacation homes for the wealthy

            I’ve encountered many of the ones who denounce “single-family dwellings”, which here in Arkansas we call “houses.” We should burn our houses down and huddle together in Soviet-style rabbit hutches like good little proletarians.

            I’m always reminded of Asimov’s “Caves of Steel”, which carried that to the extent of communal bathrooms and cafeterias. Why duplicate all that functionality when it would be so much more efficient to stand in line for the crapper or the day’s slop at the trough?

            Meanwhile the nomenklatura would have their dachas at both Lake Placid *and* Jackson Hole… it’s only just compensation for their work and responsibility, after all.

            1. Yeah, that stupidity.

            2. And they’ll do that for sure if they get power. All part of the green new deal, yah know?

            3. Here’s hoping the giant crocodiles in Lake Placid* make their stay a really interesting one. 😛

               *1999 movie with Bridget Fonda and Bill Pullman about, yes, giant crocodiles in Lake Placid in upper New York State.

               1. Ah yes, one of those “evil animal” movies where after meeting the protagonists, you start rooting for the crocodile/ shark/ tarantulas …

                  1. It’s not that bad; there are only one or two characters you want to see the crocodile eat. Bridget Fonda starts off as a stereotypical tofu-eating citified Leftist encountering ‘those uncouth rednecks’ for the first time, but she gets better. Bill Pullman is good as the down-to-earth “We don’t know what’s going on here. Let’s find out the facts.” guy. Brendan Gleeson and Betty White are both a hoot.
                     ———————————
                     “That is not a happy cow.”

                  2. I believe Betty White was the audience stand-in there. “I’m rooting for the crocodile. I hope he swallows your friends whole.”

   2. Lack of real trials. I think at some level our primitive monkey hind-brains expect more strife and chaos, in modern America, outside some progressive cities, there really isn’t a whole lot. Without actual chaos and danger their minds either invent it or latch onto any excuse to feel afraid.

      Kinda like the mask Karens. I bet most of them don’t even believe the mask bs, but take that away and you take away power they can wield like a club to force people to do what they want. Looking at the pathetic dregs that make up the progressive left, these are not the best, brightest, and only barely pass as human.

9. Meanwhile I can’t spend much time on Twitter without having the urge to scream. Especially at the people saying, “You’re being played. When are you going to admit it?” One of this group is Jewish, sees the antisemitism among the Democrats, and is advising people to stop supporting Trump and concentrate on winning the Georgia runoffs so the Senate stays Republican. Because it’s just too unlikely that there could be this giant vote fraud conspiracy and there are obviously rational explanations for everything.

   (Arrrgh.)

10. Those who most anger me are the RINOs. I expect the Demonrats to be evil, and act as they do. They have declared me their enemy, both by their public political statements, and by the insane accusations of some of my former friends, “you TEA party bastards are as bad as Isis”, “you climate deniers just want everybody to die”, and “the facts you cite are just irrelevant data points”, and we climate totalitarians don’t use the 8000 year compiled European archeological tree ring climate data records for ‘reasons’.
    The damn RINOs like Ryan (spit), McCain, (where is his grave, again?), and Romney (damn him to Hell), anger me with their condescending pretense to support of American individuaism, and of those who, like me, believe that we each are best able to decide what is in our interests, limited by our membership in our Civilization.
    The left wants to break our civilization, and replace it with totalitarian vaporware. I don’t think that they realize where our social structures are robust (people will individually work together in their own interests), and where they are fragile (think Bosnia/Yugoslavia) and how opposing groups have dealt with each other absent the rule of law.
    Live, love, and survive. Piss on their graves. We need to be there to build and re-build our nation and Western Civilization.
    John in Indy

    1. The RINOs are like the Chess Club President who got on the Student Council by kissing Jock and Cheerleader butt, weeks before the Team got busted for underage drinking. They figured out how to get SOME position before the status quo got seasick, and they don’t have the spine to break free.

       But keep in mind, right up to Reagan, the RINOs WERE the Republican Party. Nixon, in terms of most of his policy, was a RINO. Ford was slightly better – any President who vetos as often as he did can’t be all bad – but couldn’t have won an election against a talking dog.

       Since Reagan we have seen a gradual rise in the number of actual Conservatives elected to Congress or high State office. Gradual. It’s a sing of how much things have changed that pillocks like Romney stand out.

       1. This. We have come a long way (baby.)

          1. The thing is, the process of social change is SLOW. If you see rapid change, it should be suspect. Especially political change in a system like ours. Our Republic was DESIGNED to be ‘inefficient’; to move slowly. An efficient government is an authentic menace.

             The Left has been losing its position on the high ground for decades. This didn’t start suddenly in 2016. It started, to my mind, when the Left pulled down Nixon (for whom I have scant sympathy, btw) and only got four years of Carter in exchange. They couldn’t STAND that their golden boy McGovern lost so badly, so they expended vast amounts of political capitol on taking down a Big Government Republican and got Jimmy because they couldn’t agree on a better candidate. Since then, it seems to me, they have won many battles at too high a cost, and wasted much energy on making themselves unpopular.

             Even where I agree with a stated goal of the Left – such as recognizing Gay Marriages – I frequently think they have undermined themselves with their attitude. Recognize Gay Marriage, fine, but realize that you have to get along with people who believe you are wrong.

             I said, often, while that fight was going on, that I suspected the Left had no grasp whatsoever how many (for example) devout Catholics believe their grandchildren are bastards because their son or daughter wasn’t married in the Church. So they thought, “We got the law changed, now everybody must agree with us!”

             Phooey.

             So they go and (as an example) hammer on a baker who doesn’t want to celebrate Gay Marriages by crafting a cake that implies that he approves. They don’t let the change SETTLE, they have to push.

             And then they wonder that Evangelicals would rather vote for Trump.

             Idiots.

             I could go on, issue by issue. There ARE environmental issues. But the Left isn’t materially helping. There ARE inequities in our immigration laws. But the Left doesn’t want to address them through the representational process; they want to punish those who don’t agree with their ideas.

             Since Vietnam, they have spoiled any real issue they touch, and now they realize that they are on the brink of losing power and position, and instead of taking stock and moderating they have gone bugshit.

             1. I agree with you. Even on goals I agree with them on, they go and poison it all.

             2. Even where I agree with a stated goal of the Left – such as recognizing Gay Marriages – I frequently think they have undermined themselves with their attitude. Recognize Gay Marriage, fine, but realize that you have to get along with people who believe you are wrong.

                The “correct” way to do that was always to get rid of the government issued marriage licenses.

                But then if they did that they would also be for removing minimum wage laws. And repealing gun control. And affirmative action, etc, etc, etc.

                But then the left’s “anti-racism” stance never does cash out to anything concrete does it?

                1. Marriage and some form of government recognition or license have been entangled for so long that getting them separate would be a vast undertaking. In any case, to my mind the two primary points for recognizing Gay Marriage involved government.

                   A) Recognition of a Gay Marriage as a form of enforceable contract, so that partners who cheat on their supposed monogamous relationship face some penalty.

                   And

                   B) Having a State recognized relationship that entitles one partner to, for instance, visit the other in the hospital. That is really why I shifted from my earlier position of favoring Civil Partnerships. In any bureaucracy there will be toads who say “ no” not even because they dislike homosexuality but because saying “ no” gives them a feeling of power. And recognizing Civil Partnerships might sound like it would solve the problem, but unless you get every organization to explicitly re-write all their policies to accommodate it, the toads would still say “ no” whenever they could.

                   I’m astonished at how FEW such incidents there were even with Gay Marriage being recognized. I thought it would take a decade of lawsuits to get the idea across. I also thought that with Civil Partnerships it would be much longer.

                   1. My big problem, CS, is not with civil partnerships not being quite equal, but with what I’ve seen happen in Europe, where straight people start forming civil partnerships, instead of marrying. And lacking the weight of tradition that even “civil marriage” carries, it is less valued/respected, and becomes like the eternal “engagements” we see nowadays, but legal.
                      Keep in mind, though, that no religion should be forced to recognize a marriage that doesn’t meet its rules. this to me was simply a legal thing.

                      1. I still worry about Lawsuits against Churches that don’t want to Marry Gays.

                         With Trump’s Supreme Court picks they’re less likely to win (in Courts) but many Churches might “give in” (by likely not having wedding services) rather than spend the money to fight it.

                         Oh, this “court packing” scheme that some Dim-ocrats talk about worries me for the above reason and more. 😦

                         1. BAH. My church iisn’t having ANYTHING, so….

                      2. Of. Purse, if the goddamned courts treated civil partnerships AND marriage as contracts at least as binding as the one you have for your cellphone service, people wouldn’t treat them casually.

                         Which would HORRIFY the Left. Peasants don’t need stable home lives! They might start thinking about alternatives to listening to their Betters!

                   2. Recognizing gay marriage is one thing – put it to the vote, either by plebiscite or legislative/executive action.

                      I realized the gay marriage issue was done when I read about a couple in which the man underwent conversion — leaving the state a choice of recognizing gay marriage or requiring dissolution via conversion.

                      That isn’t what they did. Persuading people is hard work (especially when your head is up your whatsis) which they are unwilling to undertake. They’d much rather persuade a few judges who believe the Constitution would be much better if they could rewrite it at will.
                      –

                2. The Obergfell decision was completely unnecessary overreach.
                   Marriage is not included in the Federal Government’s defined powers so it’s a State matter. Some states legislatively began allowing same sex marriage. Under the “full faith and credit” clause all states must recognize those marriages, but State courts can not change their state marriage laws – legislating must be done by the legislatures.
                   That’s all SCOTUS needed to rule. The several States would work out their own policies through the normal procedures.

                   1. State matter. Some states legislatively began allowing same sex marriage. Under the “full faith and credit” clause all states must recognize those marriages

                      –
                      Guessing because the state issuing the marriage certificate means there is a marriage certificate.

                      Don’t know if it is still true but in relation to Common Law marriages. Other states recognized civil “common law” marriage. Oregon does not. It came up in a legal discussion on how state borders & workman’s comp works. Say 1/2 of a common law marriage, recognized as such in Idaho, dies in an industrial accident working in Oregon. The surviving 1/2 has no survivor compensation rights from the employer’s insurance.

                   2. “Under the “full faith and credit” clause all states must recognize those marriages, ”

                      They definitely didn’t want to go there….. because it leads in about 4 steps to New York City being required to honor Texas CHL and allowing Texans to conceal carry there.

                3. Yes. This (Ian’s comment). The state only got into the marriage licensing business because it saw a way to make money from something the church had started (giving permission for men and women to live together for the purposes of having children to carry on). The state watched and said hmmmm…if we add our necessary sanction to this we can charge money! Hey! Brilliant!

                   1. Also it was a tool of the original progressive social engineers to prevent miscegenation. Which is why I compared it to all the other progressive causes that were build to screw over anyone of a race they didn’t like.

             3. Even many pro-abortion people agree that Roe v. Wade is horrible case law, and was far more damaging than just leaving abortion in the hands of the individual states.

                1. The things that bother me about the Pro Choice camp are;

                   1) Opposing parental notification is political poison. Further, given the attitude displayed by the Pro Choice camp, I figure it’s simply a matter of time before some True Believers smuggle a minor across State lines to evade parental notification, and the girl dies. And the Pro Choice camp will be loudly outraged at the reaction.

                   2) Defending late term abortion isn’t QUITE as poisonous, but the more abortion looks like flat out infanticide, the more undecided people will turn against it.

                   3) They covered up for Kermit Gosnell’s abattoir for YEARS! What the FUCK were they THINKING!?! And given how badly they have reacted to the backlash that mess generated, I am very afraid that there are similar operations just waiting to be found. I see no evidence that Pro Choice organizations are making any effort to find and expose such.

                   Those three points are why, even though I believe abortion should be legal, I fully expect to see it broadly banned in my lifetime.

                   1. Opposing parental notification isn’t political poison here in California. The excuse is always that the pregnant minor might be afraid to tell her parents that she’s pregnant. But the most recent ballot resolution on the matter (which was several years ago, iirc) included a provision for leaving the decision up to a judge in lieu of a guardian in certain instances, and it *still* failed on election day.

                   2. Everyone knows between life and death, sometimes hard decisions get made. What bothers me about pro-choice is that they are PRO-DEATH and the cheapening of human life sickens the entire society.

                      1. They are not pro CHOICE. They are pro abortion. The same people who insist on abortion on demand also insist that salty food, sugary drinks, and anything else they deem “not good for you” be banned. They are ANTI choice.

                         Also, they consider unborn babies to be “clumps of cells” notwithstanding the plain evidence to the contrary. So much for the so-called “party of science”. They are mass murderers whose premier organization was created for the purpose of facilitating genocide of blacks, Jews and everyone else they considered to be “weeds to be culled”. F-em.

                         1. Both sides need to recognize that abortion at eight days, and abortion at eight months, are two very different issues.

                            Left-wing extremists demand that it be treated as only a clump of cells up until the minute the mother goes into labor. Sometimes, even after that.

                            Right-wing extremists scream that it’s a fully developed infant practically ready to walk and talk the instant Daddy shoots his load.

                            Both sides are lying.

                            1. I don’t think both sides are necessarily lying. Thing is, the difference between a ‘clump of cells’ and a human being is a matter of opinion about when a fertilized egg becomes human.

                               For myself, I can name several individuals of considerable age that hasn’t happened to, yet. Shrillary springs to mind.

                               This isn’t a matter of development of the brain, but of the MIND (to avoid the term Soul). And while we are learning, albeit slowly, about the brain, what we know (KNOW) about the mind could be written on the head of a pin.

                               With a cold chisel.

                               Anti-abortion people believe in the Soul, and that the soul exists from conception…or that they are unwilling to bet that it doesn’t. Pro-abortion people don’t believe in the Soul, and think babies are blank slates that have yet to be written on. Therefore, no mind.

                               Are there people in both camps who are lying about what they believe? Sure. And as somebody who thinks abortion should be legal, I fear that many in ‘my’ camp are in favor of legal abortion because they are eugenicists.

                            2. That’s it exactly. This is a major reason why the so-called “pro-life” forces have such difficulty pushing their ultimate agenda — an outright ban on all abortion — beyond a hard core of true believers. As soon as they hysterically, desperately, mindlessly refuse to acknowledge the tiniest difference between a zygote — a newly fertilized egg — and an actual unborn baby seconds away from meeting the world with wondering eyes, normal folks — meaning non-fanatics — tend to instantly tune out the screaming and hollering, At best, they sigh to themselves and think, “There they go again.” Credibility is shot, crushed, plowed into the soil, and covered with salt.

                               In a very real sense, a beefy cohort of self-professed “pro-lifers” bear personal responsibility for the existence of little shops of horrors like the abattoir run by the conscienceless monster Kermit Gosnell. The arrogant, endless lying of extremist religionists directly paves the way for disgusted indifference on the part of substantial numbers of low-information voters who otherwise would be more sympathetic to the fundamental message of protecting innocent human life. It also repulses informed voters who understand very well that notwithstanding happy propaganda to the contrary, any pregnancy carries a certain risk of serious medical complications such as death. Mind you, I do not claim myself to possess the wisdom to know exactly where to set the line — but there is a line, however fuzzy it might be in real life as opposed to a pseudo-moralistic fantasyland, and it’s fucking well not conception.

                               And that’s not even getting into the topic of — yes, I must put it that way — forcible rape. Like a great many others, I’m vehemently against the idea of violently terrorizing a forcible rape victim under the force of law into serving as an utterly unwilling gestation machine. Sure, it’s rough on what might have in time been another human being, but tough titty. The sole moral responsibility for the subsequent abortion lies with the sociopathic doofus that committed the original act of sexual violence with which to begin.

                               I could say much, much more on this ugly, unloved, no-win topic, but screw that. It’s too early in the day. -_-

                               https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/09/reason-why.html

                            3. @ Grim Leaper,

                               I suppose there are liars on the Pro-Life side, but OTOH I don’t find it too strange that people might want to avoid drawing the line between zygote and baby in the wrong place. Protect the zygote and you KNOW the baby’s are ok.

                               As for their being responsible for the Grand Guignol that Gosnell ran, I really think that’s all on the Pro-Choice eugenics fans (which is NOT all Pro-Choice folks). The Pennsylvania Department of Health’s excuse for not inspecting any abortion clinics for years, and specifically for letting Gosnell slide on several violations during their last inspection of him (1992) was that they feared negatively affecting poor women’s access to abortion services. In short, screw all the blather about protecting these women from back alley abortionists, as long as their spawn are being terminated.

                               *shudder*

                               And then the Pro-Choice side is loudly outraged that there’s a political fallout.

                               Idiots.

                            4. “I suppose there are liars on the Pro-Life side, but OTOH I don’t find it too strange that people might want to avoid drawing the line between zygote and baby in the wrong place. Protect the zygote and you KNOW the baby’s are ok.”
                               It’s actually MUCH worse than that.
                               Leaving aside the things that always drop in, like ectopic pregnancy termination (which has never been legal, and which mean saving one life, instead of choosing two) what no-limits, legal abortion ENCOURAGED (which btw it is by our education) means is “mom chooses whether you’re human” which is a hellofacorrosive thing to throw into society.
                               And it’s not mom, you know. over a half century of being a woman and listening to women 90% of women “choose” abortion so as not to disappoint their parents and/or lose their boyfriend.
                               I have seen more women whose lives were forever poisoned by having “chosen” abortion (and then not managed to have any kids) than by anything else. Their gloating defense of what they did is chilling and bizarre and mostly shows the depths of the regret they can’t admit even to themselves.
                               People who meet you and ten seconds later are “shouting their abortion” are NOT well people. They are also wholly owned slaves to the democrat/commie party.
                               I started out pro choice, until — weirdly — I got pregnant. I knew I was pregnant with #1 son on DAY ONE, which is bizarre as I’d been trying for six years. BUT I KNEW. And I knew he was a boy. There was a sense of his presence.
                               Now, with #2 son I didn’t know I was pregnant for SIX MONTHS.
                               If you knew their personalities, this would make perfect sense, though.
                               Well…. You know the guy in France that only had a brain stem but led a perfectly normal life?
                               There are things we just don’t know, can’t guess, can’t even imagine.
                               After that first — objectively impossible — knowledge that “there is a person there” with #1 son, I say until women are proven to give birth to other than humans, “do no harm” involves respecting the potential child, unless life of the mother is at risk. (In which case it should be left to the mother, as they spent time from the third month of first pregnancy trying to PRESSURE me to abort.)
                               I fail to see how this makes me responsible for Kermit Gosnell, who was kept in business by people so desperate to abort black children that, hiding under the cloak of “reproductive rights” (or lack thereof) they were willing to kill the mothers, too.

                            5. Oh, but let’s not forget affirmative action in medical schools which has been increased since then by Obama the angel of death. Gosnell should never have had the white coat. He was a peculiar combination of malicious and dumb evil. HOWEVER the fact he had a natural tan made them make sure he graduated. PFUI. Imagine how many more Gosnnells we’re graduating. Only probably Gosnellas, since the medschools have to graduate something ridiculous like 60% of women, thanks to president pen and phone.

                            6. IF we are going to engage on this, let us not overlook whassname*, that “doctor” serving Satan “patients” across the Indiana/Illinois border.

                               WHAT the [espletive] is it with these [expletives]s that they feel compelled to keep trophies of their serial killings? What is wrong with societies that cannot see these monsters for what they are? I can accept those who defend abortion as an unfortunate but “necessary” optio, even while disagreeing with them – but those who glory in it, who brag about harvesting fetal parts for the prizes it beings? Yechhh.

                               *I could look up the name but why? Erase his name, remember his shame.
                               –

                            7. There’s also a reason that many of us gave up on exceptions for rape and or “life of the mother”: the absolutely proven result that abortion providers lied about the health of the mother, and the mothers who wanted abortions lied about being raped.

                               Personally, I haven’t given up on either….. but then again I support absolute physical evidence requirements in both cases. No he-said, she-said.

                            8. Well, now that Virginia has crossed the line to after-live-birth “abortions”, I don’t see why that can’t be carried forward through adulthood.

                               If it’s not murder when it’s “abortion”, I need to start working on my little list…

                            9. There’s another reason to be cautious about “Day One” abortions. It’s a poorly understood reason that’s not often addressed, and is swept under the rug by the pro-abortion side. Having an abortion has an emotional effect on the formerly-pregnant woman that in many cases seems to last for the rest of the woman’s life. You can argue about whether life begins at conception (and I’ll note that I am in the group that would prefer to act as if it does). But the forgotten participant in all of this is the woman having the abortion. We desperately need a better understanding of what the effects of having an abortion are on the woman, herself. And until we have that, there’s reason to be cautious about Day One abortions even if you’re not arguing about whether life begins at conception.

                            10. General catch-all reply;

                                The issue of long term effects on the mothers doesn’t seem to bother the Pro-Choice side much, which is another reason why I think they are setting themselves up to lose. I think that abortion, excepting perhaps precautionary D & C before pregnancy is known, is a sad decision. Maybe a necessary or at least preferable one, which is why I would on balance prefer to see abortion remain legal. But I’m good with recognizing that an abortion kills something, and believe that one of the weaknesses of the Pro-Choice campaign is the broad denial of this.

                                I don’t think the majority of abortion supporters are eugenicist in their motivations. I do think there is a core of the Pro-Choice side that is, however. Perhaps not consciously, and probably not mostly motivated by race (they want poor white women to have access to ‘abortion services’, too). But the shadow is there, just as contempt for brown people underlies a lot of Fascist Left positions.

                                The ‘Pro-Lifers want control of women’s bodies’ narrative has never struck me as especially convincing. It is, at least in part, a lie the Left tells itself to avoid thinking about the unborn as babies at all. I suppose there may be some nasty misogynists out there who oppose abortion because they do want women barefoot and pregnant, just as there are sad deluded fools who still believe THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION. But I think most Pro-Abortion people why repeat the Narrative are trying to fool themselves.

                            11. Sigh.

                                I knew it was a horrible, no-good, very bad idea to hold forth on abortion. I will repeat my earlier observation — it’s an ugly, unloved topic for the excellent reason that the very nature of the thing means someone will lose. In extreme cases, it’ll be either the lady in question being violently enslaved by the State into being an obedient, pregnancy-bearing meat puppet or the possibility of the birth of what most would consider to be an innocent child, notwithstanding that it originated in part from the physical acts and genetic materials of a violent rapist. In less extreme cases, it means holding a gun to the head of the lady in question and yelling, “Shaddup up, you baby-killing bitch! We don’t care if you’re at grave risk of dying from this (hat tip to Mrs. Hoyt) ectopic pregnancy — you’re damned well going to march to the beat of our specific religious precepts! You’ll be a good little girl and not whine as our pet doctors slice into you with knives, and screw the inevitable deadly risks of any surgery, let alone pregnancy itself!” There are other special cases, but I’m not in the mood to research them all right this very minute.

                                One notices here that I’m not addressing the legions of far more typical cases in which, say, some selfish **** simply wants to look good for the beach, and besides, Daddy would be so upset, so it’s better get rid of the thing quick before the next round of parties. That Justin is so dreamy! Or the case of a solemn mother-to-be in her nineteenth week suddenly deciding that she’s changed her mind and prefers after all to build a high-flying, childless career even if it means arbitrarily crushing the hopes and dreams of her devoted husband and excited immediate family. Or the lamentable case of a young lady who finds herself having to decide between very likely motherhood from a whirlwind romance or an extended, sponsored education that will deeply color the rest of her life. These and other cases fall into the vast grey area that harbors so much agony one way or the other for well-meaning folks. For the purpose of this limited treatment, I flatly refuse to address such cases and insist on repeating my assertion that I’m just one more ordinary schlub who struggles like everyone else to make sense of difficult moral issues. I make absolutely no claims to superior insights.

                                Let’s see: some clarification. The thread focuses on Mrs. Hoyt’s typically illuminating commentary on gaslighting. I have special personal reasons for being explosively angry about gaslighting, or as I would have called it in the decades before the meteoric rise in popularity of that word, “mind butt-fucking.” I’m still extremely touchy about this, so I’ll leave the personal history at that. Suffice to say that when religious extremists try to butt-rape my mind by hysterically conflating a zygote with a late-term fetus or even what can only be described as — yes — an “unborn baby,” I react very badly to these zealots trying in essence to make me a meat puppet for their frantic propaganda. My gut reaction is, “Screw you, and you, and you. My mind is my own, and I know what is true and real when it comes to the specific stages of development of a human zygote into an eventual baby, assuming it’s not mysteriously resorbed or killed and ejected as a miscarriage along the way by one of thousands of genetic or other maladies. I do in fact intensely resent cynical, self-serving attempts to emotionally hijack my revulsion against the idea of abortion in general into a mindless rejection of all abortions, regardless of grave medical threats to the life of the woman and regardless of savage, violent, forcible rapes by sociopathic thugs. I especially, ferociously resent the snotty, nasty implication or outright, shrieking accusation that if I reluctantly support abortions in such extreme cases as mentioned, why then, I must be a … (pause for effect) … lousy, dirty, BABY-KILLER! REEEEEE!!!”

                                The extremists would hold that it’s One. Hundred. Percent. Their. Way.

                                Or you’re Kermit Gosnell! Or, of course, from the other camp, you’re a mustache-twirling villain from The Handmaid’s Tale. Nothing in between! REEEEEE!!!

                                Fanatics will fanatic. What is there to say?

                                Onwards … ah! I suppose it was a low blow to slabber moral tar onto a shred of responsibility and then slap the sticky mess onto the more extreme opponents of abortion. I mean, if they’re so eager to resort to viciously offensive mental tactics, then what the hell. Why not retaliate in kind? The logic, however arguably threadbare it might be, is that if anti-abortion extremists absolutely, positively insist on engaging in the kind of manipulative lying I’ve described, then by valuing their self-indulgently one-dimensional moralizing more than what I’d call the urgent moral imperative of being honest with potential allies, they’re abandoning the high ground to the “pro-choice,” arguably even pro-death sleazeballs who use the endless lying of many extremist anti-abortionists to gleefully declare, “Would you just look at those frothing zealots — they don’t even know the difference between a zygote and an actual baby! You should totally listen to us instead. It’s all about being free to take care of your own health in any way you see fit and to engage in smart family planning, mmm’kay? No, no — don’t look over there at the Kermit Gosnell clinic! There’s nothing to see, and besides, it’s all ridiculous rumors and fake news. Hah-hah, those religious nuts. They even claim that Planned Parenthood sells bloody baby parts for fun and profit. They’re crazy!”

                                Need I spell it out further? I’m tired of this and want to wrap it up.

                                Next … yes. The soul. I have no idea if souls exist as envisaged by priests, philosophers, and mystics. It’s apparently outside of my physical ability to discern and discover. The physicists have found nothing as far as I know. Highly trained physicians seem in general to have a dim view of the notion. Y’all have your own opinions. Who knows who’s right? Not I.

                                So, to encapsulate. You pays attention to these issues and makes your decisions about who is responsible for what and how. I cannot say who is wiser.

                                (And did I miss replying cogently to every single point raised in the thread? I’m mortally certain that the answer from the Magic 8-Ball is, “You sure did, buddy!” Don’t care. I’m done with this for today.)

                            12. Might I remind one and all that this is the La Brea of tar pits and discussion of it generally discouraged except under very constrained circumstances — limits which I think have long since been passed?

                                Even were it likely to be a productive exercise there are more immediate matters demanding attention.

                                Isn’t fomenting internal dissension through distraction a form of trollery?
                                –

                            13. Wildly points in random directions.

                                Wasn’t me! I didn’t started it! O_O

                      2. Heh – remember the furor when Progressive TV character Murphy Brown decided being “pro-choice” meant she could choose to have the baby without marrying the baby’s daddy?

                         They were on the verge of going nuclear until Dan Quayle distracted them by pointing out being a single-mother wasn’t an option available to most women.
                         –

                      3. Much against my better judgement, I’ve written more on the inherently explosive topic of abortion elsewhere in this thread, but the cheapening you’ve pointed out is frankly what sticks in my mind. It’s worth quoting that benighted Virginia governor again:

                         “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” — Ralph Northam (30 January 2019)

                         I can feel the my hair standing up on the back of my head even now. That statement is … positively ghoulish. Notwithstanding a mess of wildly conflicting moral, ethical, and theological arguments for and against, scraping out a tiny mass of cells is one thing. Utterly ignoring the undeniable humanity of an outright baby while discussing its fate as if it were nothing more than an item on a dessert cart strikes me viscerally as creepy and evil. Perhaps this extremely jaundiced view will make me unpopular at all the best social events. Can’t be helped. -_-

                         1. That’s because it IS evil. it is murder.

                         2. It is horrible, and ghoulish. But that, on the one hand, is eugenics, which, in my personal view, is a significant portion of the abortion market (on the provider and worldview side of it), and a ghoulish convenience on the other hand (the mother’s side). All of which I have issue with. Due to my belief in YHWH, however, I firmly believe that gestation on is human life, and as such is made in the image of God – which is why murder is wrong. Which, following, means that the intentional termination of a life, no matter the time frame, is murder. However, there is also the co-equal and necessary issues of self-defense, not causing/doing harm, etc. My worst fear has always been to have to choose between my wife’s life, and my unborn child’s. I have been blessed to not be faced with that.

                            A thing to note, in as humble a manner as possible on the interwebs, is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, or more, of people who would be overjoyed to be able to raise a child, to have an infant, and so adoptions at birth are something I strongly support.

                            Again, with all humility.

                            1. There’s nothing whatsoever morally wrong with anti-abortion volunteers trying peacefully to encourage a forcible rape victim to nonetheless bear the significant medical risks and physical burdens of pregnancy with adoption in mind. I don’t think any but the most addled “pro-choice” propagandists would object to that.

                            2. There are medical risks and physical burdens to abortion, or even natural miscarriage. Trust me on this. In many ways worse than carrying to term. I know because I had a lot of miscarriages, and this gives me a few…. risks. One of which almost came through when I was 53.

             4. On the process of social change being SLOW, Democrat pollster in the WSJ last Monday (no link because of their paywall):

                America’s Shockingly Moderate Electorate
                Polls predicted a landslide, but the result was close and split because voters reject radical changes
                By Mark Penn
                The more things change, the more they stay the same—or so it seems in American politics, after the electorate returned the Democratic establishment to power after rejecting it for a rogue outsider four years ago. The surprise finding of the exit polls is that moderates and men provided the crucial swing voters who put Joe Biden into office.

                Has the American electorate changed? The answer is that despite billions of dollars spent on persuasion, massive increases in turnout, a media with an agenda, and racial unrest, the changes in American voting patterns were minuscule.

                We are one country divided by two parties. The nation is largely moderate, practical and driven by common sense over ideology. Most voters prefer compromise on health care, immigration, stimulus and other thorny issues that the extremes of the parties have pushed to the limits. Only 24% of voters identify as liberal, while 38% say they’re conservative, according to CNN exit polls. Another 38% are moderate. Despite the widespread publicity given the left, since 2014—a good year for Republicans—the percentage of self-identified liberals declined 2 points, while the share of conservatives increased 3 points.

                By now everyone has heard that President Trump did worse in the suburbs and better with minorities than in 2016. While technically true, the suburban swing occurred before the 2018 midterms, and the minority shift was relatively small, except for Hispanic voters in Florida and the border towns of Texas. Some surprising findings have been overlooked. Mr. Trump’s margin of victory among white women increased from 11 to 13 points, according to CNN’s final adjusted exit polls. But his advantage among white men narrowed from 30 points to 23.

                Mr. Biden won almost all the liberals and Mr. Trump the conservatives. But Mr. Biden expanded the Democratic lead among moderates to 30 points from 12 in 2016—the single most significant change. Moderate men swung the race to Mr. Biden.

                There were some offsetting changes in the overall demographic landscape. The white share of the vote declined from 71% to 67%, while Latinos grew from 11% to 13%. The electorate was older, with fewer young adults and more than 1 in 5 over 65.
                [END EXCERPT]

                Emphasis added.

                Wallaby Warning: how is “moderate” defined for purposes of this identification? Further, those “over 65” would be a considerable portion of Boomers who’ve still yet to grow up – a larger portion than before Granny Killer Cuomo began his reign of terror.
                –

                1. They forgot about all those Democrat voters older than 120. And the ones that appeared from nowhere to vote, and then vanished again.

                   1. And the millions of clean unfolded ballots arriving bundled together, filled out only for China Joe with no downticket votes at all.

                      And the scramble to bring in the shredding company trucks while recounts are underway.

                      It’s also become clear some of the conspiracy participants have realized they have been selected to be thrown under the bus, and disagree with that choice – see the voting machine company lawyering up and skipping the government hearing in PA.

                      “I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”

                2. Here’s another article, this from RCP, on the polling inaccuracy issue, though in GA, PA, WI and MI they do not note the obvious answer of “pollsters failed to poll dead people.”

                   I’d imagine the Trafalgar numbers the article holds up as “inaccurate” down a few paragraphs are pretty believable for living voters.

                   Hemingway also skips right past the “partisan pollsters weighting artificially in order to push-poll” issue, averting his eyes and whistling madly:

                   https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/11/23/help_the_pollsters_have_fallen_and_they_cant_get_up_126088.html

                   Help! Pollsters Have Fallen and They Can’t Get Up!

                   By Mark Hemingway, RealClearInvestigations
                   November 23, 2020

                   Weeks after the 2020 elections, several races have yet to be called, but a clear loser has emerged – pollsters. The polls understated the percentage of the Republican vote in 48 of 50 states, and 15 of the 16 Senate races, according to an analysis from Ohio State University political scientist Thomas Wood.

                   At the national level, President Trump outperformed the polls significantly. Major surveys in the last week before the election, including Economist/YouGov, CNBC/Change Research, Quinnipiac, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal, all had Joe Biden winning in a landslide – by 10 percentage points or more. Biden’s actual margin of victory in the popular vote is less than four points

                   The polls also underestimated Trump’s support in most swing states, where around 100,000 votes in a few battlegrounds account for Biden’s victory. In particular, Biden won Wisconsin by some 10,000 votes — less than a single percentage point — but polls from Reuters/Ipsos and the New York Times/Siena had him up double digits. An ABC News/Washington Post poll done in the Badger State the week before the election had Biden up 17 points.

                   Polling failures were also manifest in key Senate races. Republican incumbent Susan Collins was trailing in all 14 major polls conducted in the closely watched Maine contest. A Quinnipiac poll in September had Collins down a whopping 12 points. She won by nine. North Carolina’s GOP incumbent, Thom Tillis, ended up with a clear win despite trailing in the last five polls taken.

                   In the House, the final projection of polling experts at FiveThirtyEight showed Democrats expanding their majority. Instead, Republicans have picked up nine seats and are leading in several of the still-undecided races.

                   There’s simply no way to spin the terrible performance of pollsters this year. “Let’s just call a spade a spade here: this was a bad polling error,” said New York Times’ polling reporter Nate Cohn. “It’s comparable to 2016 in size, but pollsters don’t have the excuses they did last time.”
                   …

          2. A few weeks B.E. (Before Election) we had an argument about “Uniparty”.

             I don’t know what the hippies or members of the Fraternal Order of the Black Pill mean by it, but this is how I’ve always seen it used and used it myself.

             And treasonous slime-weasels like Romney literally the same party as AOC? No. They merely refuse to fight them, and attack anyone who does.

             1. sure. BUT we have some good ‘uns. And some have woken up, for certain values. See Graham, Lindsey.

                1. Don’t forget Cocaine Mitch, Ted Cruz and Dan Crenshaw!

                   1. I don’t know the details as it was a just a news flying by while I was paying attention to other things, but reports are that Crenshaw has outed himself as a scumweasel.

                      Mitch and Barr are the surprising ones. What happened there is the one piece of evidence I have for Barr possibly being useful.

                      1. Are you perhaps referring to Crenshaw’s suggestion that he was willing to “discuss” gun control? As the poo-flingers of both sides went ballistic over that there’s no way of knowing whether he seriously considered trading away our Second Amendment rights or whether his intent was to engage gun grabbers in dialogue i order to convince them their dreams had no chance of being workable.

                         A quick [searchengine] reminds it was over “red flag” proposals, which he agreed to discuss but has, apparently, crammed up the butt of every grabber who’s attempted to meet him intellectually.
                         –

                         1. The red flag stuff was a long time ago. This was in the A. E. (After Election) era.

       2. Noticed this with Gavin Newsom. Born in 67. So, 53, what does that mean?

          Means he could have been writing about wanting to be Ceausescu in 5th grade in 1977. And badly traumatized about the late eighties as a result.

          I hadn’t really thought about pols as young as their forties and fifties having views of the soviets that they internalized as young children, and haven’t revisited since.

          Anyway, games media has been going delightfully apeshit about the new cold war Call of Duty. /I/ found myself wanting to play, and I’m not shooter player, am not a fan of throwing down that much cash for a videogame, probably would dislike the DRM, and very likely have neither the time nor the money.

       3. To be fair, I would be very tempted to vote for a talking dog no matter what it said.

          1. THIS

          2. At this point I’d vote for the real cabbage, rather than the sniffing, groping, cabbage-like thing they’re trying to foist on us.

          3. Likewise. That might just be my love for dogs talking though.

          4. Hah! Shows what you know! This wallaby has met plenty of dogs, and not even the talking ones are smart enough not to shove their noses into another dog’s butt. Hell, I knew this one talking dog, when asked who was the greatest hitter to ever play baseball, instead of answering Williams claimed it was Ruth.

             Talking or not, every dog is still either a bitch or a son of one.
             –

             1. Well, you could say DiMaggio was a better player than Teddy (who also said the same) – who also had a few records the Splendid Splinter never matched.

                If we are talking about the greatest player who ever hit? I would say DiMaggio or Ruth.

                The greatest hitter who ever played? Williams.

             2. I wouldn’t want a talking dog. One can only imagine the conversations.

                “Master, master! I wanna stick my nose in your crotch! Pleaaase?”
                “No, doggy. No, no, no.”
                “Why, master? I love you! I love you! Pleaaase?”

                Let’s not even get into the bits with stinky, smelly dog food and whatever you’ve got on your own dinner plate. -_-

                1. Then there’s the “Hey Boss, if you don’t take me out, I’m going to have to poop on the rug. You don’t want to clean up that mess”. 😀

                   Oh, my Beagle Lilly had loose bowels last week and did just that. (The pooping not the talking.) 😉

                   She did it again today, but at least she did it on the bathroom throw rug. 😆

                2. ROFL

       4. I’m not sure I’d consider Nixon a RINO in his context. A northeast republican of the 40’s-70’s was fiscally conservative (for some values of fiscally conservative) and Socially old style liberal. There were some firebrands (e.g. Barry Goldwater) of social Conservancy and true fiscal restraint but there were rare beasts. Reagan and others like him started a shift in the 70’s.

          And yes Nixon did concede the 1960 elevtion. However, he knew that on average (minus the big city machines which had been weakening through the 50’s) his opponents could be trusted to play fair. And indeed he won in 1968. In todays Democratic party Richard J. Daley could we resurrect him (and don’t be too sure they didn’t to get his vote) would be considered a pantywaist in his rather mild pursuit of fantasy votes. It is unlikely once in power again the insane left (but I repeat myself) will ever let go short revolution. If there is 2020 Biden/Harris I fear we are looking at somewhere between Mr Schlicter’s divided USA and the pendulum swinging back via something closer to Col. Kratmann’s Caliphate. Biden/Harris are weak and there are parts of the world where that will be seen as a sign to push again. I fear a combined Chinese attempt at a greater asian co prosperity sphere and a resurgence of Iran and its insane Islamic end times goals. Either of those (should we survive) could lead to a swing to oppose /depose those in power and it will not be pretty. I kind of wonder that the heck the Demoncrats are thinking but that presupposes a though process.

       5. Ford was House Minority Leader, so he did hold elected office before he became Vice President. It’s anyone’s guess what might have happened if he’d been able to run for the White House without having the ball and chain of Nixon’s resignation attached to him.

          I’m listening to Kissinger’s book about China right now, and Ford just became president. Kissinger gave a very brief description of him as a man who looked amiable and guileless, but was actually quite sharp.

          1. Ford was an Eagle Scout, back when it actually meant something.

             1. Most of the public image of Ford as being of non-remarkable intellect and ability is due to the Saturday Night Live portrayal of him. In the same way that Tina Fey’s “I can see Russia from my house” was attributed in the media to Sarah Palin, who Fey was portraying in sketches, SNL’s portrayal of Ford essentially replaced the reality of Ford.

                1. Yup. He was a former football player who had the misfortune to slip on camera. And Chevy Chase somehow managed to get it to stick.

    2. You are not alone.

       1. We all used to be isolated. Now we are not.

          We will be isolated again. The enemy controls the means of our communications.

          The loss of comms will be the signal.

          We all know where to go and what to do, and we’re not real big on “structured activity” anyway.

    3. “You want everyone to die!”

       “No, not everyone, just some specific individuals,” then look at them like you’re considering whether it’s worth the hassle to expedite the Grim Reaper’s arrival for them.

       1. As an alternate reply, short and simple: “Whatever.”

          Congratulations, you’ve just dismissed them, their self-importance, and their hysteria in a go. Feel free to insert a hand wave or eye roll.

          1. If young enough, pop your bubble gum as you roll your eyes.

       2. And ask them, “How do you spell your name??”

       3. That amount of people who don’t realize that the mortality rate is 100% boggles my mind. No one gets out of this world alive, everyone will die, the only question is when.

    4. “ RINOs like Ryan (spit), McCain, (where is his grave, again?)”

       I believe it to be right underneath the John McCain Memorial Latrine … although his body is probably interred at Arlington.
       –

11. The other point of the lockdowns is to go Genesis 47 on flyover country. During the seven lean years, the children of Egypt signed over their livestock, then their lands and homes, then their lives in return for grain from Pharaoh.

    1. Pharaoh is in the cities, where they don’t have grain. The U.S. Army is not going to rob the farmers for them, either. If they tried, that WOULD be ‘the shot heard round the world’.

       140 million Americans armed with 600 million guns. We can be hurt, but we can’t be beat unless we fail to fight.

       Even then, the farmers would refuse to farm. Truckers would refuse to drive. Refineries would shut down. Are a bunch of tofu-eating left-wing dingbats going to ‘take over’ from highly trained and experienced working professionals? See John Ringo’s ‘The Last Centurion’ for a discussion of how that would play out.

       Hell, the Leftoids would cave the first time their toilets back up and the plumbers say, “Go fuck yourselves.”
       ———————————
       Did the Left drive them barking mad, or were they drawn to the Left because they were already batshit crazy?

       1. Yeah, but remember the left doesn’t realize any of this. They think people are widgets they can move according to their wish.

          1. Taught in every MBA course of study that ever was: a good manager can manage anything whether they understand the underlying process or not, and your workers are all interchangeable parts that can be reassigned at random will no ill effects. Held as gospel in spite of countless catastrophic examples that prove them false.

             1. Yes. I’ve had the misfortune of working under far too many of those. Ambulatory examples of Dunning-Kruger and the Peter Principle.

                1. I did work for one of those genius managers – a prior-enlisted officer who had the peerless ability to turn unsat units around. He was an AF navigator, who went from sorting out a couple of support units, to commanding the public affairs office, and I think to the family support activity at Mather AFB after I moved on. He was the wing’s trouble-shooter genius manager, and he was good at it, really good. But his thing was that he would latch on to those subordinates who really knew what they were doing and essentially pick their brains down to the microscopic level. He would do this with everyone in the unit, he would study the regs and practices, and figure out where the problems were, and then do something about it. Half an hour with the Major, and being cross-examined by him was exhausting. He was the one manager I ever encountered personally who could skip from activity to activity – but he worked at learning every one of them from the floor up, he just didn’t sit behind a desk and issue orders.

                   1. So the exact opposite of thinking they “can manage anything whether they understand the underlying process or not, and your workers are all interchangeable parts!”

                      1. Rather, he can manage anything whether he understands the underlying process or not, because his first priority is to learn to understand it.

                         1. You realize those managers are one in a million?

                            I’ve had the full spectrum of managers in my life and the good ones were very scarce and the great ones are myths to keep our hopes up. And warehouses full of seat warmers, tyrants and idiots.

             2. Exactly

             3. Not in the program I took. But then, it started as “Management of Technology,” and took for granted that might be “different.”

             4. I dunno…I make a point of mentioning in the MBA (and undergraduate) classes I teach that most forms of capital are far less fungible than people realize. People are flexible and can learn new skills and roles…but only up to a point, and ramp time is real. If starving time starts before ramp time ends, you got you a real problem.

                1. Forgot to add: I tell ’em I consider the terms “human resources” and “human capital” pernicious, and that scale tends to be inimical to human values. For all the good it does.

                2. In Marx’ day “labor” was factory workers or day workers. Day workers stood in line, foremen picked them out and gave them a chit, and at the end of the day they swapped the chit for their day’s pay. Their employers didn’t even know the names of the laborers most of the time; why should they? One could push a wheelbarrow and work a shovel as well as another.

                   *Very* shortly after that, the Industrial Revolution shifted into high gear and employers didn’t have as much use for unskilled labor. They wanted pipefitters and machine operators and welders and mechanics; skilled labor. The trade unions and guilds made an abortive attempt at regulatory capture, but the new skilled working class mostly avoided that.

                   Yet management in general still tends to view all labor as unskilled and all workers as interchangeable. While each manager is a unique snowflake… that’s why so many companies have shipped impressive aircraft, computer systems, and major engineering projects once, then foundered on the next, because all the skilled labor that did the first projects was expensive, so they were riffed out. “Hey, we want to build a new satellite launch system, we’ll just hire another batch of engineers, one is as good as another.” Oops.

             5. Funny. I had a conversation with my manager yesterday about interchangeability. I work in a quality office with about 11 other people and each of us bring totally unique skill sets to the job, and perform specialized tasks day in and day out. We pretty much have no backups if one of us is out for any reason. She recognizes that we are not interchangeable widgets. And she knows it would take six months or more to replace any of us.

                1. We pretty much have no backups if one of us is out for any reason. She recognizes that we are not interchangeable widgets.

                   –
                   I’ll have been retired from my job 5 years come Jan 31, 2021. They STILL haven’t replaced me. Not fully. (I have my sources.)

                   Just might be a little bit of ego boosting. Not much, because I wouldn’t know what to do with a lot. But just a little.

                   1. It amused Ma, when she finally retired, that the most physical part of her job was ‘outsourced’ (to the print shop across the street) as *nobody* cared to do that much physical work. She’d done it for 30 years. Might be where I get some of it from – *ox* (ponder that…) move at twice of many half his age. Heck, this past night I put in almost 5 hours on ‘off’ night – which got me up to 40 hours even for the week – and, well, did something I hadn’t done in ages… and did it in less time than the one has been doing that of late. Of course, knowing ho to do setup to make it trivial helps. It’s *amazing* how many want ‘fast now’ but could spend a few _seconds_ up front to free up *minutes* later. I might have ‘wasted’ as much as 5 minutes… and saved an hour.)

                   2. Had a job back in the ’90s testing semiconductor wafers and repairing the equipment as well as all the other roles. Basically ran the department solo on 3rd shift. When I left, they had to hire 4 people since I spent 5 years to get to that level of performance and none of the folks on 1st or 2nd shift wanted to work nights.

                      And it was a performance every night. Showtime not Slowtime!

                   3. The last corporate job I had was as a Unix admin. They replaced me with three new admins, and were looking for a fourth… word was uptime wasn’t good either.

                      I had everything automated, and extensively documented in three-ring binders, and 99.lots uptime. Everything was purring along smoothly when I was disemployed, but their rockstars apparently felt the need to change everything, and it bit them hard. A year later, they were still floundering.

                      I offered to come back and fix things for them at the current local consulting rate – far less than they were paying telco consultants, etc. – but for some reason they felt that was too expensive. Probably remembering when they had my services for cheap…

                      1. When I left the Army Materiel Command, they replaced me with three people…but one reason I left (aside from the frustration and growing bitterness at not be able to do my job the way I felt it should be done) was I didn’t have enough to do.

                   4. I bailed from an office admin job which had been giving me migraines … and about a year after I gave my notice and left, I had contact with another person at that office (it was to do with the 401K involved) and discovered that in the year since I left, they had burned through five replacements.
                      Small family-owned commodity-supply business. The wife and ostensible owner was a peach, her husband (and brains behind the whole outfit) had the personnel-handling skills of Atilla the Hun. He was never so pleasant to work with as in my last week there, between giving my notice and my final day…

             6. And thus is ‘MBA’ considered about as useless as a degree in $Bilge Studies.

          2. What would happen if a whole lot of locomotives just got taken out of service for maintenance?

             “You want a train engine? There it is. Just put it back together and you’re all set. You do know how to drive one, right?” Then sit back and laugh.

          3. And that civilization, and a comfortable, safe, high-tech civilization at that, just IS : like sunrises and rainbows.

       2. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics tried using forced labor for agriculture. It was so effective they had to import food or starve.

          Not that the Leftists would have heeded that lesson.

          1. The USSR isn’t by any means the only catastrophic failure of that idiocy. I think most nominally Communist countries have tried it at one time or another.

             1. Look at Zimbabwe. Sadly, I could see AOC and her ilk doing something similar, removing all those nasty racist midwestern farmers and giving all the farms to folks with the expertise of CHAZ.

                1. Like South Africa in 2020…

                   1. All part of the Schlichter prophecies – the unqualified and resentful of color, taking over formerly profitable and productive rural properties, with the expected results…
                      see Zimbabwe.

                   2. Which is why the other day in one of the other threads referred to the Democrats as seeking Mugabe style communism:

                   3. I’ve seen stories of some of those who received the redistributed farms asking the original farmer to come back and take his farm back because they don’t know how to work it effectively. I remember in one story, the recipient who asked the farmer to come back genuinely wanted to make the farm work. Remember, none of the people “resettled” and “given” the farms had any choice in the matter either (at least in the case of SA or Zimbabwe).

                      1. Apparently there’s already a “let’s starve Americans” bill underway….

                         1. Yes, I saw that. But, it has to get out of committee first and it started in the Senate, so it’s doubtful that will happen.

                            1. All dependent on the Senate run-offs in Georgia.

                               In the 1800s, the Democrats wanted to keep blacks enslaved. The modern Democrats want to enslave everyone.

                2. Hah – they couldn’t find ten people willing to work one-tenth as hard as your average farmer.
                   –

                   1. I encountered one fellow who claimed to have a Master’s and was supposedly from Hong Kong.

                      His first questions were, “When do I get paid?” (didn’t H.R. tell him?) and “When do I get my private office?” (Ha!) and “How do I get Netscape to display Chinese?” (Yes, it was a while back. This ‘Masters Degree’ person from HK didn’t how to set up Big5? *Ox* looked it up in 5 minutes – this before Google, mind.) Now, I’ve met a good (bad) many others who claimed to be from USA who were about the same.

                      1. Then there was the “experienced Unix admin” HR sent my project in 1995. He lasted three days before quitting claiming his “religious beliefs” wouldn’t let him work with an operating system that used “daemons”.

                         /headdesk

                         1. …
                            …
                            …
                            Fhat the wuck?

                         2. Blink … multiple times.

                            Wait! What??

                            Only /headdesk? That seems more like – go stand at invisible office wall, take head, and lightly pound head on it, at the same time take (invisible) desk phone receiver, and hit head with it.

                            I know why I got the job in ’90 over those with Masters or PHD’s in Computer Science, over my lowly BSCS, and relatively low experience. The fact the job was targeted to be in *Gardiner Oregon wasn’t it (the job was moved for me to Veneta/Eugene-Area). Wasn’t (just) salary requirements, either. (Hint – if they’d also had Forestry degrees, I’d been in trouble.)

                            Never did find out why I got the job in ’96, then again ’06, over same type of candidates especially in a university town. Work experience had to be a factor in ’06, but never did find out.

                            * Initial interview: “Any problems getting here?” Ans: “No. Folks fished out of Windy Cove in season. Dad was project engineer when the pulp plant was rebuilt late ’60s.” Plant (was then) across the street; it is gone now.

                            1. “Only /headdesk? That seems more like – go stand at invisible office wall, take head, and lightly pound head on it, at the same time take (invisible) desk phone receiver, and hit head with it.”

                               25 years have worn the edges smooth; at the time my reaction was somewhat stronger…..

          2. About the only times that I’m aware of something like that working involve Chinese peasant rebellions in which the surviving peasants were sentenced to agricultural work. However, the reason why it worked in these specific instances is because the peasants were revolting due to a lack of food, and the farmland that they were sentenced to work was fallow farmland that was – in practical terms – gifted to them so that it would become productive.

             In essence, the punishment inflicted on the rebels removed the reason for the rebellion (and also helped the government, which needed people working that farmland).

       3. “Even then, the farmers would refuse to farm. Truckers would refuse to drive.”

          On the first item, “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”

          On the second item, I pity the fool what’s never handled a four-speed with a clutch yet tries to take an eighteen-wheel rig out on the road … but not so much as I pity anybody on the road with that fool.
          –

          1. I drive a 5-speed stick as my “daily driver” and I’d be mighty cautious where I to need to take control of a semi tractor. Never mind dealing with the trailer.

       4. “See John Ringo’s ‘The Last Centurion’ for a discussion of how that would play out.”

          Amen, amen I say unto you, I’ve read The Last Centurion twice. Remember, these are plans made by people who’ve never seen empty shelves at Whole Foods and think everything they need can be grown by progressive boutique “farm to table” operations around college towns.

          1. Only twice? I’ve read it about a dozen times. There’s always more you can get out of it.

             ‘In a time of suckage…’
             ———————————
             The Democrats trust criminals with guns more than they trust you to defend yourself.

             1. exactly.

       5. Just remember, the first to resist are going to get clobbered, unless the rest of us have their backs.

          1. Don’t I know it. I’ve been trying to hold my people back mostly because of that. They’re too valuable to waste quickly.

    2. We know.

    3. They’ve got a thing about that in Bob Brier’s History of Ancient Egypt thing in the Great Courses. Apparently rich people were giving land and money to the various temples, so that they would get favor with the gods; and they were leaving land in perpetuity to funerary pri fests, so that they’d say prayers at their tombs for perpetuity. So the temples owned a good chunk of Egypt after a while.

       And then, at some point, the kings also started getting large amounts of land from the landowners. And apparently this was about the time when they started having state granaries for famines, and for paying workers on state projects.

       (And after a long while, it was pretty much the lords and rich people, and the king, and the temples, owning all the arable land in Egypt. At which point Akhenaten invented a new religion, which would allow him to take over the temples’ land and add it to the king’s land. (Which is also a lot of what Allan Drury’s Akhenaten historical novel duology is about.))

       So basically, the Joseph story is actually pretty plausible for how the kings started to catch up with the temples on land ownership, and it’s exactly the sort of inauspicious famine that they wouldn’t like to talk about in Egyptian history written by Egyptians.

       1. IIRC, Pharoah had Joseph married to the daughter of an important Egyptian priest. Make of that what you will.

          Also, my vague recollection of European history is that there were similar issues with noblemen granting Christian monasteries in Europe large grants of money and land.

          1. There were.

          2. I think Black Adder had a scene like that.

             1. Yep – Blackadder S 01 E 03 The Archbishop

                –

       2. Sounds a bit (in a way) about some of the things James C. Scott wrote about in The Art of Not Being Governed.

12. Picking up on the lies that the establishment keeps piling on is second nature for me since picking up on bluffs (i.,e. lies”) are an essential part of playing good poker. So is a good understanding of math and probability theory, as well as good money management. All skills which are quite useful in many areas of life.

    My cardplaying BS detector’s alarm has been going off constantly with the nonsense that media and the establishment of the political parties spews out on a daily basis.

    1. Also anyone with Jewish ancestry does this as second nature. Or as son puts it “You know what they called naive and trusting Jews throughout most of history? Dead before having kids.”
       Which is why….. well, let’s say some American Jews have denatured.

       1. The other thing is learning that those who scream “death to the Jews” mean what they say and will act on it given the opportunity, no matter how much establishment gaslighting downplays it. Of course for many Democrats, that is why they were so eager to appease Iran, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the PLO, etc. They agree with their goals in that regard

          1. THIS.

       2. I wonder what Dictators Cuomo and de Blasio think of this: https://nypost.com/2020/11/21/secret-plans-helped-synagogue-pull-off-massive-maskless-wedding/?utm_source=maropost&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=coronavirus&utm_content=20201121&tpcc=coronavirus_daily_update&mpweb=755-9178326-711682868

       3. Moses didn’t leave enough of our kindred in the desert. Although forty lifetimes wouldn’t have been long enough for some to learn that lesson.
          –

          1. I figure that’s why God picked ’em. Nobody could possibly imagine that it was anything other than Divine Intervention with that tribe. Remember the giving of the Law? They’d just seen the Red Sea part, and had been following a literal pillar of fire. So what do they do five minutes after Moses heads up Sinai?

             On the other hand, which ought to give some of us cheer: No matter how much you may come from the cultural short bus, no matter how much of the genetic short stick you drew as well, it’s not the last word. A stubborn faithfulness to God, toward aiming for Virtue (no matter how odten you muss the mark) can result in heroism that transforms the whole world forever.

             Or just your corner of it.

             1. To be fair, a bull was one of he traditional animals associated with other El gods’ images. And the party was the sort of worship that Egyptians and many Middle Eastern cultures used for gods of the El and Baal type. So yeah, a lot of it may have been people assuming that this newfangled or old-fashioned stuff just wasn’t the right way to go. Or not wanting to worship God in a new way that involved less of the drinking and “playing.”

       4. You are the historian Mrs. Hoyt: What did the Danes figure out that they and their Jewish population got it so right. Can we bottle it?

13. Trust but verify. I had to check out the P. J, O’R’ quote and yep, that Magnificent Bastard really said that! 🙂

    1. And remember another of his statements when someone calls you a Nazi:

       No one has ever fantasized about being sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.

       (Perhaps paraphrased a bit, it’s been years since I’ve regularly read PJO.)

       1. You mean Pajama Boy *isn’t* the exemplar of Leftoid maleness?

          I’m shocked, I say! Shocked!

          1. He is, which is why leftoid girls go for assholes and criminal scum and ignore the leftoid males.
             Conservative girls mostly seem to be married and off the market by their mid 20’s.

             1. *ahem*

                

       2. It was the Hugo Boss designer uniforms.

       3. Funny how the same leftists who keep calling everyone who disagrees with them Nazis are the same ones who openly support the people who routinely shout “death to the Jews”.

    2. I first read it in one of his books, and laughed so hard I couldn’t speak when my family came to see what was happening.

14. I think the Left is going to find that there is a fatal flaw with gaslighting. In the play from which we get the term, the subject of the gaslighting is a stereotypical ‘needs to be rescued’ heroine. I don’t think that the majority of American Women, even when the play was first produced, were such weak sisters. And certainly, the people who voted for Trump are not now. We won’t doubt our sanity. We’ll get angry and stop believing our ‘betters’.

    And if they push it, they will quickly wish they hadn’t.

    As an aside: could y’all help me run something down? I remember reading (or possibly seeing in some video) the statement that the (then) estimate that there were three hundred million guns in private hands in the United States was based, in part, on an assumption that a firearm could be expected to wear out in 20 years, or some similarly absurdly short time.

    I’m trying to run this down, and having trouble. Does it resonate with any of you? Have you seen something similar?

    1. I’ve seen variants of that all over the place. It’s just wishful thinking. I have guns made in the 1800s that work perfectly.

       There were the old “pot metal” (cast iron or zinc) “Saturday Night Specials” that were only marginally safe when new, and didn’t last long. And some .22 rifles that were shot out. But by and large, if a gun wears out or breaks, it’s valuable enough that it’ll get traded off to someone who will fix it, or at least break it down for parts to fix other guns. One of my rifles was once a barreled receiver that had been repurposed as a floor lamp. Like the Bionic Man, it’s now much *better* than new…

       I’ve never “retired” a gun, and as far as I know, I don’t know anyone who has.

       1. I’m not saying I believe it for an instant. But when I suggest that the estimate that US citizens own four hundred million firearms is a gross underestimate, I want to be able to point to it as a basis. Any idea where it comes from?

       2. There are also guns chambered in barrel burner calibers. But often even a “worn out” 6.5 creedmoor (admittedly on the low end of barrel burning) barrel will still hit minute-of-tyrant at extended ranges.

       3. You ‘know’ me!

          It’s actually an antique of my dad’s, a double barrel 16 gauge break action that has to shoot lead or the really expensive substitute, and when you load it and close it one barrel sometimes fires. And we haven’t yet found a local enough gunsmith who wants to work on a family heirloom of this nature, so it’s retired.

          For now.

          1. Probably either a broken firing pin or crude built up in the firing pin “bushing” in the receiver. Just need to find a ‘smith who knows what he is doing.

       4. my newest rifle is old enough to be a C&R and shipable without dealing with an FFL
          now my pistol and carbine are not nearly as old.

    2. I recall reading recently that one number is around 434 million, and the upper is around 600 million.
       https://laststandonzombieisland.com/2020/11/19/go-ahead-spitball-how-many-guns-are-in-circulation/

       1. Most of those numbers come from post-1968 ATF manufacturing records, 4473s, and lots of handwavery. As in, nobody knows how many guns were sold in the USA between 1868 and 1968, within maybe a hundred million or so. Not even the factories kept records of everything. And nobody knows how many guns are no longer in service. We do know that imports and exports have been roughly equivalent since 1968 though.

          “How many guns do you need, anyway?”

          “All of them?”

          1. I tend to assume that ANY figures out of any government involve a degree of handwavery. Even where the government is, or should have been, involved in minute record keeping from Day One. The estimate of the number of privately owned guns doesn’t even come within shouting distance of that standard, and when I struck the idea that guns ‘wear out’ that quickly, I KNEW it meant the estimate wash unusually ripe dung.

             I just wish I could point to the government paper that says that idiotic standard was used.

          2. This looks like a good start. 😀

          3. 1968 was 52 years ago. Sales are way up this year, 17 million guns sold in the U.S. and still more than a month to go. If the average was a lot lower, say 8 million a year, that’s still over 400 million guns sold since 1968. 99% of them should still be shooting today.

             I remember back in 1995 when Kalifornia passed the big ‘assault weapons ban’ there wasn’t an AR-15, Mini-14 or Mini-30 to be found ANYWHERE. Buddy of mine called a big gun store in Alabama and was told, “Nope, we shipped everything we had out to Kaliforny and doubled the prices!” Base model AR-15’s went from $530 to over $1,400 in a month. I saw one for $2,200 at a gun show three weeks before the ban went into effect.

             Larry Correia said his gun store had a picture of 0bama on the wall labeled: “Gun Salesman Of The Year”

             Contrary bunch, ain’t we?

             1. yeah, the 400 million estimate is based off of wear rates that don’t happen. lets put it this was: i wandered into Cabelas and bought a 118 year old S&W revolver i am going to refinish- mechanically, it works perfectly.

             2. Sadly the lesson Democrats learned from this is not that the people don’t want guns banned, but rather that instead of doing outright bans, they should effectively ban them through massive taxes and onerous environmental and business rules that make it impossible for anyone who is not wealthy to buy guns and ammunition while choking off their manufacture.

                This is directly related to Roberts’ awful decision in Obamacare, where he basically approved of outright constitutional violations provided that the government used a tax to accomplish it.

                1. The term “alternate technology” comes to mind. And I do not mean a replacement of/for firearms, but changes in the exact mechanism. Sure, the trade-offs will not be an overall improvement (at least at first) as the current models the current models for a reason. But, “there’s more than one way to do it.”

                   1. “But— but— that’s not what we mean by Alternative Technology! You’re doing it wrong! Bad Ox!!” 😛

15. “And yes, RES Trump lawyers might have filed some wrong lawsuits. I wish I could believe it was a diversion, and it MIGHT be, but seriously? You know what cases like this take to file?”

    Yes, I’ve a fair idea – which is why it is important to be realistic: this may not be a winnable battle. Like WWII, the critical move occurred well before the war started, when Germany broached the Treaty of Versailles by retaking the Rhineland in 1936.

    But it does not mean this is a unwinnable war, it merely means it will be a long and destructive war. Which means we must be clear-eyed and realistic, why we must not let the rising and falling of our hopes nor the changing tides of conflict.

    Take not counsel of our fears, because losing this nation is not an option. Fight well, fight smart and remember that the innate advantage of terrain is ours.
    –

    1. Well said. Thank ‘ee.

16. Yes, we have. The Brits, War of 1812. The Japanese, thousand mile war.

    However, You’re a Peons have no clue what we are, and I tire of them,often.

    1. Note you’re replying to O’Rourke, not me?
       And also I love your typo.

    2. “In 1814 we took a little trip…”

       1. Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip

          1. We took a little bacon
             And we took a little beans…
             .
             .
             I’m now trying to think of the last time I heard Johnny Horton on the radio.
             And I’m pretty sure it was when Country and Western were two completely different genres of music.

             1. And we caught the bloody British near the town of New Orleans.

                Anyone for Sink the Bismarck?

                1. La Marseillaise

                   1. “La Marseillaise”

                      Only if it’s the version played in Rick’s Café

                2. So hit the deck a runnin’ boys and swing them guns around!

             2. And we fought the bloody British at the town of New Orleans. (IIRC)

             3. 97.3 Oldies on WSWO-LP. You can listen to it online.

       2. or:

          “But Jackson he was wide awake, and was not scar’d at trifles,
          For well he knew what aim we take, with our Kentucky rifles.
          So he led us down by Cypress swamp, the ground was low and mucky;
          there stood John Bull in martial pomp, and here was Old Kentucky.

          A bank was rais’d to hide our breasts, not that we thought of dying,
          but that we always like to rest, unless the game is flying.
          Behind it stood our little force, none wished it to be greater,
          for ev’ry man was half a horse, and half an alligator.

          They did not let our patience tire before they show’d their faces;
          we did not choose to waste our fire, so snugly kept our places.
          But when so near we saw them wink, we thought it time to stop ’em,
          and ‘twould have done you good, I think, to see Kentuckians drop ’em.”

          1. Many like to dismiss that battle as occurring months after the Peace Treaty had been agreed — which overlooks that it had not been ratified by either side and, had the Brits won that battle and claimed control over the Mississippi the terms of that treaty would certainly have changed.

             OTOH, when people point out we defeated crack British troops at that battle, the same troops who had beaten Bonaparte they overlook the effects on combat effectiveness of a lengthy ocean voyage with no chance to re-train upon arrival.
             –

             1. Not to mention they were at the ass end of a very long supply chain. Jackson built up supplies close by.

             2. Those troops were trained to fight en masse, in big European set-piece battles, on clear land. They had no experience in “wetlands” and original-growth forest, and the Americans weren’t lining up to be shot like Napoleon’s troops.

                1. Well, there were good reasons for the British Way Of War (based on the types of weapons) and basically the Battle Of New Orleans was an attack on Fixed Defenses which always go worse for the Attackers.

                   Note, one problem with the rifles of that time was Rate Of Fire. They took much longer to reload than the muskets of the time.

                   Of course, both the rifles and the muskets had to reloaded standing up.

                   1. One secret of the Kentucky rifle is that by using patched balls you didn’t have to hammer the bullet down the barrel. It’s ROF was a lot higher that European rifles of the time.

             3. Heh – at the moment I am reading a very good book about the battle at New Orleans – part of an early American history series written by Brian Kilmeade. Goes into very great detail regarding the lead up to the battle and the significance of it.

       3. I am in more of a Seek and Destroy kind of mood tonight:

17. c4c

18. I’m stuck in the situation of having one parent that has a risk issue due to the Crow Flu, and another that has two risk issues (age and a single lobe transplant). You can’t help but be careful, by necessity.

    Still…

    What really gets me is just how blatant the gas-lighting is these days. Not just how much of it there is, but how clearly you can see The Agenda(TM) on display. It’s lazy, more than anything else. Worse, it’s a satisfied sort of lazy-the sort of lazy that someone who thinks they have nothing to worry about does.

    And, there’s people like me who are tired of these jerks. Come on, a chance to find and bag possibly large-scale fraud in a Presidential election? That would keep most news networks in high viewership numbers for months! Think of all the ad copy you could sell! It’s got drama, it’s got comedy, it’s got tragedy, possible foreign elements…add some actual blood and you’ve got a great story here. But, because investigating it would help the OrangeManBad…

    Right now, all I can do is all I can do. And keep track of the fastest way out of California that I can find.

    1. Yeah, we have risk issues in the family. But “being careful” is not the same thing as “lock down everything” or “CURFEW!”

       1. Very true. Is there some magical reason why they think that cutting things off at 10PM will make a difference? Or, are they just getting off on the power trip?

          1. Well, yeah – isn’t it obvious? The sickie authoritarians are getting off on their power trip. They love-love-love their ability to order us peons around.
             For our own good, of course.

             1. And, it’s no longer traditional to run idiot politicians out of town on a rail, covered in tar and feathers.

                I think we lost something when we couldn’t do that anymore.

          2. I think the aim – at least initially – is to go after house parties. Pretty much everything outside of a private residence is closed at that time anyway due to the various shut down orders. But anyone staying late at a house party can get tripped up by the new curfew when they try and return home.

             1. So they turn the house parties into sleepovers?

             2. Except that several sheriffs in California counties (Orange, Sacramento, El Dorado have gone public) have said they will not enforce the curfew, nor will they respond to any calls regarding the curfew. And, several NY sheriffs offices have said the same with regards to Cuomo’s Thanksgiving orders.

                1. Thirteen counties, at least count. Even the LA County Sheriff has announced that his department won’t be enforcing this. San Diego County, however, has explicitly announced that it will be sending out two-man teams to enforce the ban.

          3. Do you have to ask?

             1. Only for the purposes of intellectual integrity and consideration. And, who knows? I might even be surprised.

       2. It is astonishing how clever that little virus is: It only comes out at night. Mostly.

    2. I can’t and wouldn’t presume to if I could, speak for your parents but speaking for my over eighty year old self I said back in March: Why thank you world, frankly I’m quite flattered.

       However I do feel it’s a bit much that you put the majority of folks out of work, close schools, restrict travel, transport of goods, sell out all the rolls of toilet paper in the nation, cancel public discourse, shut gyms, restaurants, bars, churches, etc., all just to protect little old me!

       & the rest of my thanks to the world is here; http://www.ipernity.com/blog/319805/4730548

       1. There is a difference between being careful and being crazy. I’m careful. Gavin “I’m Going To Be JFK, But BETTER!” Newsom and Andrew “I Won An Emmy Award” Cuomno are crazy. “I Love Me” jacket crazy or “crazy like a fox” crazy? Not sure about that yet.

          1. Again, I only spoke for myself.

          2. Okay, gotta pass this along but remember: that which has been seen cannot be unseen.
             
             Heard on Greg Gutfeld’s show: Gavin Newsom is Die Hard‘s Harry Ellis.
             –

             1. Nah. Ellis would have done a much better job than Newsom has done.

             2. And, this guy (Hart Bochner) playing this looks a terrible lot like an older David Tennant or at least his brother. Spooky things.

                And, operating outside of their competence zones? Oh, absolutely.

          3. “I Love Me” jacket

19. > Trump lawyers might have filed some wrong lawsuits.

    No doubt. Shotgun every possible angle, drop any that look like dead ends. It’s what the lawyers are being paid for.

20. 

    1. If Biden has a hand, it’s two pair, aces and eights.

       1. Nah, it’s Uno cards.

    2. Which reminds me of W. C. Fields: “Gentlemen, I’m a fair-minded man. I don’t mind five aces in a deck of cards. But when a man lays down three, and I know I only dealt him two, that’s going a bit too far!”

       1. *snerk*

21. Hadn’t wanted to mention this before the election, because it sounds the sort of nutjobbery that turns off voters.

    Tedious discussion elsewhere of whether the insurrection act is applicable and desirable reminded me.

    Everyone remember the precedents of 1860, 1862, and 1864 where legislative seats and electoral votes are concerned? If those were improper, then so were the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments.

    Remember, if Trump only resorts to litigation, he is still playing by gentlemen’s rules wrt to the Democrats.

    The costs of establishing such precedent without the occurrence of as active a civil war would be high. And the last civil war sucked, and we were very fortunate to be able to put a stop to it.

    The things the Democrats are asserting we should hesitate at for fear of the precedent, are not anywhere near as extreme as the things that are worth hesitating at, for fear of the precedent.

    So, sure, it is nice that we are picking up seats in California. But, there are things I might like done, that probably are not worth the cost of doing.

    On the other hand, the Dems appear to have lost all ability not to escalate as if we had escalated, regardless of how feckless or restrained our behavior actually was. This has me a little concerned, and wondering if more extreme strategy, as in Jacksonianism, might be more effective and less costly in the long term.

    On the gripping hand, it isn’t like we can simply kill all of the small d democrats, leaving behind only small r republicans and eternal perfect utopia. The line between small d democrat and small r republican runs through the heart of every American. And the psychological cost of the killings would be a little bit bad.

    1. Well said. I WOULD, however, like to see actual opposition to one or a dozen Antifa/BLM riots. They haven’t gotten any, yet. Not really. When some group – police, local politicians, local citizens in a group – comes out flat footed and says, “Throwing a gasoline bomb at somebody is assault with a deadly weapon. So is firing display grade fireworks. So is swinging a bicycle lock or a skateboard at somebody’s head. People seen doing these things may be shot.” I will be interested to see the results.

       1. DeSantis did that in Florida- stand your ground now includes shooting rioters and looters! Attaboy❤️

    2. Don’t kill them. Convict them and strip them of the franchise for life.

       1. The Democrats are busy trying to give the franchise *back* to felons. And they’re succeeding, in some places.

          1. Ok, I’m a Crank. I see no reason why a convicted felon who has served his full sentence or, if placed on parole, live it out outside without running afoul of the law to a similar degree, shouldn’t have all the civil rights, including franchise, of any other citizen. Don’t want a certain class of felon ever voting again? Then admit their sentence needs to be ‘Life’.

             Naturally the Left is poisoning that position by agitating for felons still under sentence to be allowed to vote.

             They rot everything they touch.

             1. I’m a Crank too. The 14th Amendment does specifically allow (but doesn’t require) States to disenfranchise convicted felons. I support the principle of federalism here as much more important than the policy question of whether it’s a good idea to enfranchise/disenfranchise felons.

                On the other hand, prohibiting felons from possessing firearms, once they’ve served their sentences, has nothing in the Constitution to support it.

                And on the third gripping appendage, I’d like to see Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applied to certain local and State officials, for their support of Antifa and for some of their other actions.

                1. Section 3 of the 14th be damned. I want to see an aluminum bat applied to those state and local officials…

                   1. Depriving those State and local officials of political power will cause them greater pain.

                2. “On the other hand, prohibiting felons from possessing firearms, once they’ve served their sentences, has nothing in the Constitution to support it.”

                   Well, actually, it’s firmly in the Constitution. At the time it was written, felons were debarred from the militia for the very good and simple reason that you really don’t want criminals at your back with guns.

                   What’s expanded beyond anything the framers envisioned in their nightmares is the number of “felonies” such as not wearing a mask.

             2. Indeed. Felon needn’t be a modern Mark of Cain.

                1. Considering how “felony” is being screwed ever-tighter, it won’t be long before trivial traffic or violations or having your grass too tall will be felonies. A lot of things that were misdemeanors in the 1990s are felonies now, which has complicated a lot of things. There’ve been several cases of people denied concealed carry licenses because a misdemeanor they committed in the 1980s is a felony now.

                   If this continues, everyone will be a felon, and the country will be one giant gulag.

                   1. If everyone is a felon, then no one is!

                   2. See my comment above re disarmament and felonies.

    3. We’re not going to have a utopia no matter what we do; so don’t sweat it. Look for the most freedom, retaining as much of our wealth as we can, with as little damage as we can manage.

       That said, sadly, I know there are some democrats in my neighborhood that will require exterminating in order to sleep securely at night.

    4. The line between small d democrat and small r republican runs through the heart of every American.

       Yep. And that’s just fine. But it’s not left vs. right anymore (how much of that was real? Makes me a little crazy thinking about it) it’s artisto vs. plebe. And we know how that goes.

22. Teach your sons archery and horsemanship, and to despise all lies.

    1. “We are men of action. Lies do not become us.”

    2. There is Irany in the origin of that saying.

       1. True, but it’s still a good point.

23. The People’s Republic of New Jersey and its media arm urging people to be good little Stalinists and report their neighbors:

    https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/11/see-someone-violating-nj-coronavirus-rules-heres-how-to-report-it.html

    Murphfascist is of course on of the Dems who regularly denounces Trump as a “fascist” and as dictator, while he has been ruling by decree for 9 months and has his media allies promoting totalitarian communism spying for “enemies of the state”.

    1. Gauleiter Murphy. Spit. I despise him.

    2. If you see something, say something.

       Call 1-800-KAREN

    3. Here’s the link. Spread it far and wide. If everyone reports cat least one noncompliant rutabaga…

       1. Heh: https://covid19.nj.gov/forms/violation

    4. Sounds like a perfect use for a cache of burner phones of lists of the home addresses of politicians, reporters editors and judges that support this.

       But of course “That would be wrong!”

       1. Also a felony in New Jersey as the result of a law signed earlier this week.

          1. I said “That would be wrong!” 😉

             Also, who said you had to be making the calls from inside the PR of NJ?

    5. Start reporting the Cuomos, Newsom, etc.

24. “… people kept telling me I was crazy, stupid, deluded, which still pissed me off MORE.”

    One of my pet peeves (I really do need to change its litter box) is being told something has been debunked when it has merely been denied.
    
    –

25. “But even if this had been real, and a real danger for all ages the lockdown is f*cking stupid.”

    How many words is a picture worth?
    
    –

26. “I’ve in the past read enough Powerline comments to know the names/look of regulars. Now? Dear Lord. They have an infestation of trolls, ranging from outright “I’m going to celebrate when Biden gets sworn in” to concern trolls “You guys know there’s no way to win this.” I was disgusted (though I now understand why they’re waffling. It’s hard not to be influenced)”

    It is a little known fact that wallabies are cousins of marsh-wiggles. It doesn’t matter how many people insist there are five lights if I see but four.
    –

27. “Nixon conceded the election that JFK stole, but a) soviets b) JFK was at least reasonably anti-communist, and was not clearly working himself up to commit mass murder.”

    One important thing to keep in mind is that what Mayor Daley was doing in Cook County, downstate Republicans were doing as well too. Daley merely outplayed them, waiting for them to turn in their counts before his. Any challenge would have revealed fraud at both ends of the state and nobody could know whose fraud was greater / more likely to be seen through.

    So Nixon knew a) a thorough investigation would paralyse the nation at a time of Soviet ascension, according them a great propaganda victory and b) he might still lose.
    –

28. “Harris does not have a personal character that lays these fears to rest.”
    I laughed pretty hard at that one. Understatement of the century

    1. Harris doesn’t have the character of a Port Said Trollop.

       1. Or even close. Stop insulting Port Said Trollops.

       2. Harris has the character of an ambitious Gestapo officer.

          1. SS. They were more into promiscuity.

29. If they win this particular battle, I think I will push for them to implement their entire agenda – green new deal, Medicare for all, reparations, etc, etc. Do it all. Take all power for themselves. I think this will be the only way to get rid of them. We won’t have to kill them. Like eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, they’ll start their purges, crash the entire system and start killing each other. Eventually a 2nd revolution will replace them.

    1. Sir,
       pardon me but i am against your amiable intention. We share a country with them, and fighting back is much harder, lousy, starved in the dark and under the Chinese boot.

       1. Wonder if it’ll be possible to discretely meddle in Chinese internal affairs to promote chaos as revenge.

          1. The Chinese are very good at this game.

             1. Yep, and they have been doing it to us for years to the point where they effectively “own” many of our large corporations and a sizeable chunk of Congress and state government officials.

                1. More accurately, they “own” a number of individuals who happen to be in positions of power. The reason that distinction is important is two-fold. First, it makes it a bit trickier to just wholesale loot American companies. If the CEO just takes cash from the company accounts and hands it to the Chinese, that generally gets him arrested for embezzlement. Shareholders also tend to get grumpy. The resource transfer has to be handled in a more subtle manner. Second, that “ownership” relies – at least in part (there’s no doubt also some blackmail; I’m sure that the Chinese have a lot of disturbing info on Hunter that wasn’t on his laptop) – on continuous infusions of cash. When the bottom finally crashes out of the Chinese economy as we’ve been predicting for a while, it will complicate matters for the Chinese paymasters. The paymasters will probably still have access to money (they have large bank accounts). But that money will be much more finite than it currently is because it won’t be getting refreshed at the same rate that it is now.

                   1. There’s a lot of blackmail. Because that’s how the Chinese work. Honeytraps and videos.

                      1. Cheap, effective, and long-term. Stereotypically Chinese.

                   2. Except that the largest shareholders in many companies are government employee pension funds, run by people who share the ideology and goals of the CCP. The single largest investor in the world in the stock market is CALPERS. The list of other government employee funds that are up towards the top of the list is yuuuuge. If you wonder why so many corporations are moving to “going woke” its not just because of cowardice. Its because some of their most powerful and influential shareholdes are the vangaurd of the SJW mob.

                      1. But it’s not actually China. That makes it a problem that’s separate and distinct from the issue of PRC corrupting influence in the US.

                         Also, there are reports that CALPERS has been running out of money for a while (which is being hidden through creative accounting). Depending on the timetable involved, the problem of CALPERS might end up being self-correcting.

                         1. Not really, because California will just take more money from the populace to feed into CALPERS. The “running out of money” is that they have to pay more in benefits to the government employees than they are making, and the ever increasing benefit obligations are unsustainable. Yes, this will eventually be self-correcting, but not until the government employees and the Democrats who serve them have effectively looted the entire state.

                            Of course, if the Dems steal the Senate, the Dems will just print money to funnel to CALPERS and all the other Democratic Party “friends of the program” schemes.

                            1. MaligNancy’s $3.4 trillion ‘coronavirus stimulus package’ provides hundreds of billions to prop up CALPERS. So they want to loot the other states, too. That’s why they’re holding any stimulus at all hostage.

                               It’s like the European Union, propping up failed socialist economies by looting the ones that haven’t failed yet. Not doing anything to FIX them, mind you; just propping them up. The British woke up and got out while they still had an economy to save. Then they were sucked under by the coronavirus panic.

                               It’s all ‘bad luck’ in the RAH sense.

                         2. 1) I recall reported claims that the chief investment manager of CALPERS is a Chinese asset, in violation of fiduciary duties to the fund beneficiaries.

                            2) If I were a CALPERS beneficiary I think it would be interesting to brig suit for an audit of the fund. “Interesting” in a “fall down the stairs in the dark of night and break both legs, blacken my eyes and leave ligature marks on throat and wrists” kind of way, the kind of way which would leave people here murmuring, “The wallaby didn’t Epstein himself.”

                            N.B. – the “himself in that last sentence is a grammatical construct only and not – repeat: not — an assertion nor admission of wallaby gender. Because too many people these days cannot distinguish between gender and intellect and imagine the former trumps logic, the wallaby’s gender remains a closely held secret.
                            –

             2. Wonder how good they’ll be at the game if the Three Gorges Dam catastrophically fails and creates untold chaos and death. Of course they’ll blame foreign sabotage over their own incompetence. But who would believe them?

30. “they’ve made anything not utter liberal a sin in the public sphere.”

    They’ve made anything not utter liberal immediately compliant to their demands a sin in the public sphere..

    FIFY.
    –

31. “On the other hand, since Trump is fighting against greater odds (in terms of time, corruption, infiltration of law firms and courts, etc)”

    Emphasis added:

    Intimidation Tactics Against Trump Lawyers Undermine Justice
    Two-hundred and fifty years ago, a young lawyer named John Adams risked professional and economic ruin when he defended British soldiers who were accused of firing into a crowd of protesters, killing five of them, in the Boston Massacre. Adams’ representation saved all nine soldiers from murder convictions and execution.

    Today, both conservatives and progressives are disregarding Adams’ example and organizing campaigns to intimidate law firms who work for the Trump election effort. These efforts ignore lawyers’ role in our legal system as advocates for clients, including those who espouse unpopular positions, and confuse representation with approval of the clients’ actions or views. Regardless of how one views the Trump lawsuits, bullying the lawyers undermines the fair administration of justice.

    [SNIP]

    Today’s intimidation tactics are uncomfortably reminiscent of the McCarthyist, Red Scare tactics of the early 1950s. Lawyers were pressured to not defend people in anti-Communist proceedings and often suffered economically for doing so, losing clients who feared associating with defenders of communists, their jobs, and even their ability to practice law.

    The American Bar Association’s Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.2(b), comment 5, states that, “Legal representation should not be denied to people …whose cause is controversial or the subject of popular disapproval. By the same token, representing a client does not constitute approval of the client’s views or activities.” One need not agree with the validity of the president’s fraud claims or the merits of the lawsuits to realize there is something seriously wrong with trying to intimidate lawyers and obstruct the legal process. It is up to the courts to determine the merits of the legal claims, and courts always have the option of sanctioning attorneys who make frivolous or fraudulent claims.

    Despite severe criticism and damage to his home by angry neighbors, Adams went on to become our second president. A few years after the massacre, Adams wrote in his diary that his defense had “procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.” Regardless of political allegiances, we should all hope that today’s lawyers are as brave and principled.
    –

    1. That is effectively going by the wayside already. The ABA, which is very far to the left these days, is pushing an ethics rule nationally that would take the college speech codes and embed them into the rules of ethical conduct, even for speech outside of one acting as a lawyer. Say something considered thought-crime by the left and you would be subject to ethics sanctions which could result in the loss of one’s law license.

       They are also pushing the “diversity training” that in essence amounts to Maoist struggle sessions.

       1. At which point I’d have to agree with whomever it was that said, “Kill all the lawyers.”

          1. The “kill all the lawyers” is from Shakespeare. However, the term lawyer as used during Shakespeare’s time did not refer to lawyers as we think of them in the USA (indeed in England they are still called solicitors and barristers). Rather, lawyers as used in Shakespeare’s time referred to those who wrote the laws, i.e., what we now refer to as legislators.

             1. IIIR Lawyers also referred to Who Knew The Laws.

                IE: The people who could tell the “rebels” what Laws they were breaking and the people talking about “killing the lawyers” were “rebels”.

             2. Embrace the power of and

             3. Okay. I can work with that too. 😉

32. Offered without additional comment, in supplement of P.J.O’Rourke’s assertion:

    From Whitt Stillman’s Barcelona
    –

33. Once again Sarah thankyou for writing this. You are an inspiration.

34. I’d been wondering why Powerline was going all wobbly. You think they’ve been reading their own trolls and letting that influence them? Sheesh, I thought they were brighter than that.

    1. Yep. That’s my feeling.

       1. mirengoff has been a consistent never trumper from the beginning.

          1. He actually wavered just before the election. But seeing the others go wobbly…..

             1. I think his attitude was that Trump for all his faults was still better than the commies. Sort of like Hollis Mason and the new Night Owl in the Watchmen movie talking about Nixon:

35. One point I haven’t seen mentioned about the Mistaken Minnesota stuff in the Michigan filing: It shows that Minnesota had some serious vote fraud going on there, too.

36. What is still deeply disturbing me is yes, the ‘let this go and we’ll have 2020/2024’ attitude, like they think that letting them get away with this isn’t going to give them the all-clear to fraud EVERY subsequent election, from dog catcher on up…

    1. The only people stupider than Democrats (remember that includes AOC) are Republicans.

    2. YES.

    3. It may become necessary to give up on 2020 at some point, but not until every lawsuit has been put to rest, every political gambit tried, every bit of fraud exposed and punished, if not by law than by public pressure, and the voting systems cleaned up for the next round.

       1. This seems particularly appropriate:

          “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

          ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

          1. The essence of this passage comes to mind whenever my thoughts turn to when exactly might be the time to take direct … erm, legal and political action. Personally, I of course encourage all people to hew to the boundaries of law and to pay no attention to excitable folks who speculate on possible options for lone wolves with excellent aim and a list of outstanding pest problems. O_O

37. If any Huns want to live in a blue state, you can buy Buzz Aldrin’s childhood home in Montclair NJ, or Wodehouse’s comfy writer’s house and pool in the Hamptons. They’re both up for sale. They’re both pretty big. (Plum’s house has six big bedrooms and five bathrooms. Buzz’s house has seven bedrooms and four bathrooms, on three stories, but it’s smaller.) Usually I’m not interested in that part of the NY Post, but for once they dug up some good stuff.

    1. Taxes in Montclair are breathtaking and the town is one of the most politically correct in America. On the other hand, the cheaper by the dozen house is there too. Pretty town filled with lefty people. It’s a real shame.

       1. Yeah, the article warns that you have to pay something like $25,000 tax a year. Which is a year’s salary for normal people.

38. “Ultimately, the left is like a dog chasing a car. It probably won’t catch us, but if they do, they’re going to break their teeth on us, and then be dragged to their deaths, as we continue on our way.”

    One of the interesting things about reading a bunch of mystery stories is you come away with a fair amount of knowledge on how Not To Get Caught.

    I make a habit of scouting out locations. For writing mystery stories. Of course.

    (Why yes, I am A Bit Cranky over the continued gaslighting, how’d you guess….)

    1. When I was up at Trinity (Dublin, *not* CT) we used to sit around the Theological Society common room at lunch discussing things such as how to commit the perfect murder. We didn’t have a victim in mind, but it was more productive than the Times crossword.

       1. I see ‘Trinity’ and I think of a place in the desert southwest…

          1. One is a politically-correct school. The other is where, on July 15, 1945 at 0529 AM, America unlocked the power of the stars, and the light of ten thousand suns flashed over the New Mexico desert, visible almost three hundred miles away.

             1. And both, in their own way, are ostensibly connected to powers greater than us.

                1. Y’all are overlooking the third, most significant Trinity.

                   –

    2. Although dogs are much, much, much, much more sympathetic than leftists.

       1. Depends on the dog, but mostly accurate.

          1. Often smarter as well.

39. “…some of the people trying to get into a Biden administration are proposing to use state power to punish an actual majority of the adult population.”

    They don’t need to punish anywhere near that many. There are a lot of Uighurs in detention but only a small percentage of the total number. Cancel culture is childs play compared to the de-Trumpification they have in mind.

    It won’t be easy for them to pull off but I suspect a lot of folks will avoid fighting back and just hope the woke jihad doesn’t come for them. And keep in mind that civilian concentration camps were invented by the British in the Boer War. Just in case you think democracy is some sort of inoculation against it.

    1. This argues that we should go to the fourth box sooner than later. The Left is trying everyway possible to outlaw semiauto rifles and greatly limit magazoine capacities which would prevent an effective defense against their so beloved Marxist tyranny.

    2. Actually, it is pretty much every adult male, and many of them are dead now. A lot of women and teenage girls, who are allowed to go home after a year or so of getting raped. Some proportion of the kids, who mostly are allowed to live. And a lot of Uighur women and children have a Han Chinese guy quartered on them, often raping a good percentage of the family members.

       Same thing in Tibet, except that a lot of the valleys are so remote that the Chinese haven’t bothered yet. But all the concentration camps, yes. And similar things are going on with other ethnic and religious groups.

40. Saw this on the Insty open thread and had to laugh:

    

    One comment was “revenge is a dish best served cold. It is very cold in the Supreme Court.” 🙂

    1. I hope! What if the cases don’t even get to the supreme court? So many judges seem to be leftist idiots

       1. Then we fight on.
          Defeat is NOT an option, and we are Americans.

          1. Understand something: This is *not* the hill we are going to die on.

             This is the hill we are forcing the enemy to decide if they want to die on it.

             1. You do understand that us losing is a possibility. I agree with you that we MUST fight it. It is our very great honor. I even agree with you that htey can’t win. They never do in the long run, and this generation is incredibly inefficient and stupid.
                BUT they can drag us down with their loss.

                1. Yeah but I’m sick of the memetics being “look how we can avoid this loss!”.

       2. Then we fight in the shade.

          Consider the PA case before Brann. Nominal Republican and legal conservative, but appointed by Obama, so probably something seriously wrong with him. The hand-wringing over the procedure wrt Brann is misplaced if Brann is a pedophile, or some such.

          There are two kinds of information we can gain from this case. One is whether the Democrats submit any exculpatory evidence. Second is whether Brann is crooked.

          Right now, we are suspecting local conspiracy. We are testing two theories a) a theory of a local conspiracy can be falsified by sufficient evidence of an innocent explanation b) a theory of wider conspiracy can be falsified by local conspirators being exposed and prosecuted.

          This is also a test of the formal legal system. Formal legal system has appeals through to the supreme court. Informally, the general public is also a means, just one with costs that make it less than preferable.

          For local conspiracy, the alternative to the formal legal system is vigilantism directed at election officials for specific areas. Wider really broadens the list of legitimate targets. Common law felons are potential adversary foot soldiers. ‘Legal’ pot dispensaries were potentially frauded into law, and potentially a way to launder drug trafficking money to leftwing politicians. If the federal courts are crooked, then we cannot trust their conclusions about innocence in other areas, and about which criminals can be tolerated running freely.

          Step one of testing the federal judiciary is Trump’s litigation regarding the local conspiracies. Step two could involve pro se RICO filings, show whether there is one law for lawyers, one for judges, and one for the rest of us.

          The real purpose is persuading the general public as to the state of character issues in the judiciary. Major character issues include pedophilia, Satanism, or a similar grade of black material. Minor character issues can include the company one keeps. Lot of nominal conservative Republican lawyers are compromised, apparently because of trying to fit in socially with other lawyers. ABA is apparently a problem, but the rest remains to be seen and verified.

       3. You can’t prevent someone from appealing to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court doesn’t have to pay any attention to the appeal. But you can’t prevent someone from appealing, even if that appeal is a “The lower court needs to stop dragging its feet!” appeal.

       4. Well, that took an interesting turn:

          https://channel411news.com/2020/11/21/supreme-court-unveils-new-circuit-assignments-for-justices-here-is-the-breakdown/

          “Conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas were all assigned to crucial battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan.”

41. THIS:

    

42. Also via the Insty open thread, this one seems rather appropriate for the topic:

    

    Although from what I understand the actual word used was another one that is used in place of nuts.

    1. “Nuts!” was the actual word used by McAuliffe. The German courier was confused about the response, and while leaving McAuliffe’s headquarters, asked McAuliffe’s second in command what it meant. He was told that it meant “Go to H**l!”

       1. I had heard/seen differently.

43. DeBlasio seems intent on bringing back bubonic plague and other rat borne illnesses to NYC:

    https://nypost.com/2020/11/21/new-yorkers-take-charge-against-citys-surging-rat-population/

    1. The first rats that need to be exterminated are the ones in public office. After that, cleaning up the furry four-footed variety will be a cinch.
       ———————————
       You are much more likely to go to prison for shooting a burglar in your house, than the burglar for shooting you.

44. In other news, the Arecibo space telescope is slated for explosive demolition. The claim is that it is now “unsafe” due to lack of maintenance, and it can’t be repaired, so they’re going to blow it up. Nobody seems to be wondering what happened to its maintenance schedule and budget. Of course it could be a stunt to extort funds, but… anyone else have Lizard People on their 2020 bingo card?

    1. I expect the tendency is to attribute it to after-effects of hurricane damage (and blamed on Trump failing to seed all the aid needed.) There is no way our newest state-to-be could have squandered, stolen, misallocated or just pissed away the budgeted funds.
       –

       1. No, James Bond destroyed it in 1995, right? 😛

    2. I. Don’t. Believe. it. They’re trying to keep us out of space.

       1. They’re claiming replacing (or even properly inspecting) the cables is “too dangerous.” Yet simular repairs are done routinely on suspension bridges. For that matter, the suspended section could be lowered until proper repairs could be made.

          There are several ways they could make it “safe” even if they took it out or service, but the only plans they’re walking about involve destroying it.

          1. Yep. The left is ALL IN on not letting prisoners escape. And all of humanity are prisoners.

             1. It’s worse than that. While that dish is known publicly for its use in movies and for its role in space exploration, it was built and primarily intended as part of our early warning system against nuclear attack, and has continued to serve in that role. Not having it in service makes us more vulnerable to attack. Of course for Democrats, that is a feature, not a bug.

                I do note that the the high moisture environment, along with the hurricane and earthquake damage, makes it very difficult to maintain and repair. Can it be repaired? Yes. Is it cost effective? Likely not. However, there does not appear to be any plan to replace it either, which is an even worse choice than paying for expensive repairs that are needed for it.

       2. Space is too big for them to completely control, so we can’t go there “for our safety”.

45. Hi Sarah, quick note on that Powerline column you referenced. It was Hinderaker who screwed up, not the Trump attorneys. The lawyers who filed the lawsuit that contained the affidavit with the mixed up data was Lin Wood’s attorney. The Trump campaign was neither a party to the lawsuit nor, I believe, was it involved in the preparation of the lawsuit. See Joel Pollak’s tweet below for the response from President Trump’s attorneys. It should be pretty embarrassing to John Hinderaker, being an attorney an all, that he didn’t check basic facts like that, which are set forth on the face of the complaint, before he published his column.

    I have comment from Trump's legal team: “The Lin Wood lawsuit does not list the Trump Campaign as a plaintiff, so clearly this author didn’t actually read the suit as closely as he claims, or he is purposefully misleading his readers." (1/2) @ByronYork @jhinderaker https://t.co/q6CMhkSGmR

    — Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) November 20, 2020

    1. Ummmmm … actually, Hinderaker was quoting a Texas analyst cited in Wood’s filing. Hinderaker ought have noticed that Wood wasn’t representing Trump, although I am not sure that is true. In Georgia Wood filed suit as a citizen of that state (and still failed to achieve recognition of standing). The analysis cited addresses evidence of irregularities in Michigan, where Wood probably should be cooperating with the Trump lawyers rather than butting in as an outside party with an even harder standard required to assert standing in the case.

       Either way, I think it not unfair to expect higher standards in a court filing than in a blog post.

       It seems to me an awful lot of energy is being spent firing on our own for being insufficiently (or excessively) hostile to the processing of election results when the real enemy is elsewhere. There are plenty of foes on the Left and too many ostensibly on the Right (Lincoln Project violation of legal ethics standards, the crew at the Dispatch which is becoming ever more unhinged) for us to be attacking those not against but merely insufficiently for us.
       –

46. In early October the week I bought a Trump yard sign, it was messed with. When I put it in the middle of my yard, they stole it. We bought our house in May and let’s say that the neighborhood doesn’t know me yet. I bought 3 Trump banners and attached them to the porch railings.

    We took one down to heavy wind. My determination was to keep them up until the election was certified.

    Yesterday someone stole the largest banner. They had to walk up to out porch and cut the zip ties. I was so angry. I told my husband the secure the other banner. While we did that I made my own poster: THIEVES steal signs & banners
    votes & free speech
    Come and ring the bell if you aren’t too scared to talk

    Then I reported the thief and ordered a Trump flag. Guess what? I will keep them up as long as I like. Let’s see how they respond to being called out..I’m waiting.

    1. “Let’s see how they respond to being called out..I’m waiting.”

       I trust you’re staying productively occupier while you wait, and not doing anything foolish such as holding your breath or foregoing meals.

       Because you overlooked one category: people who furtively steal property are cowards and will never dare challenge you in open discussion without backing of a mob.
       –

    2. ‘Tis a shame they didn’t provide the sandbags and barbed wire you need for a proper Trump sign installation.

       Claymores would be just a bit overboard. And messy. And they disturb the neighbors.

       1. Nay, just leave one basket hilted by the door, and a quiet motion alarm.

47. PJ O’Rourke is a libertarian idiot who endorsed *Hillary Clinton* in 2016 and *Joe Biden* in 2020. Why are you quoting his ancient thoughts from a bygone era? Here’s some up-to-date stuff from him:

    “I can certainly see myself voting for Mike Bloomberg, I might even have voted for Pete Buttigieg.” (New Statesman, March 4, 2020)

    “…Conservatism easily drifts off into things that are easier to understand, like the sort of populist bigotry that Donald Trump represents…He’s a spoiled rich kid.” (Interview on Uncommon Knowledge, May 1, 2020)

    “Americans have had their fun electing a clown flapping around in huge shoes he can’t fill, honking incessantly on his Twitter horn, the little car of his administration spilling forth far too many buffoons, zanies and felony indictments. His greasepaint now looks nothing but greasy, his fright wig is too frightful. His antics cause the tightrope walkers of foreign policy to totter, the trapeze artists of domestic policy to lose their grip, and he’s scaring the children in the ringside seats, particularly the millennial voters. (Alarming their suburban moms as well.) He’s chasing the elephants out of the big top. Two notable Republican pachyderms — General Colin Powell and John Kasich, the former Ohio governor and erstwhile Trump primary opponent — wandered over to perform at the Democratic National Convention.” (The Sunday Times, September 19, 2020)

    What self-important blather! With friends like him conservatives don’t need any enemies.

    1. Because he used to be funny and interesting. And I like that quote. We don’t CANCEL culture. Pfui.
       Would you grow up?

       1. O’Rourke has drunk the Democrat/media kool-aid and now he parrots their propaganda: “Trump is a stupid buffoon and a clown, yet at same time he’s a ‘frightening’ bigot.” Here he is from the New Statesman article again on why he voted for the “conservative” Hillary Clinton — LOL — and not the Nazi/fascist resembling populist Donald Trump:

          “Trump certainly is not a conservative in the sense of conserving the status quo. Arguably Clinton was more so. He is a radical, a populist one, and I don’t like populism anyway. Populism is, like, ‘The government should give me things I like or get rid of the things I don’t like’… The Nazis were populist, Mussolini was populist.”

          Frightening. I’m surprised the fascist hasn’t gotten rid of him by now.

          It isn’t ‘cancel culture’ to take a second look at his former ravings in the light of all this, realize there was no there there, and put his offerings back on the shelf. He could turn a phrase which made him seem wiser and more interesting than the average societal critic, but it’s now apparent he wasn’t.

          Cancel culture involves shutting people down, deplatforming them, denying them services, banning them from public venues, getting them fired, refusing to even let them speak, sometimes destroying their livelihood and even driving some to suicide. The conservative/right has no power to destroy O’Rourke this way or anyone else — it isn’t cancel culture to no longer publicize him or give him any credence now that he’s lost his common sense, if he ever had any.

          I’m not advocating that you do anything to him. You have no power whatsoever to ‘cancel’ him even if you wanted to. But take a moment to ponder this: after seeing all the same events you and I have seen the last four years, THIS LITERARY GENIUS STILL VOTED FOR JOE BIDEN. There’s something wrong with him.

          I don’t need to grow up and O’Rourke is unlikely to. Both he and I are 73. I looked him up. He’s exactly two days older than I am. (No, I’m not going to ‘respect’ my elder and his demented political views. LOL) From my experience there’s little hope for someone that age to come to their senses once they have lost them. It would take a miracle.

          1. seriously, so many people used to be sane, and now are not. Why shouldn’t we use the stuff from when they were sane?

          2. I’m sorry if I thought you were about 20. You’re engaging in an awful lot of presentism. Apparently you don’t remember how “left” Republican establishment used to be. And O’Rourke was always a creature of the establishment.

             1. Only a fool lets the present blind him to the past. Even great men fade and diminish. Benedict Arnold was a hero of the Revolution before his innate flaws brought him low. The Alexander Hamilton who was shot at Weehawken was a sad shadow of the former genius who was among Washington’s greatest aides, who designed our Department of the Treasury and settled the states’ Revolutionary debt, and who contributed more of the Federalist Papers than any other author. Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis were heroes of the Mexican War.

                Caius Marcius Coriolanus was among the greats of Rome before envy drove him out — the essence of tragedy is how human greatness and flaws wreak terrible tolls.

                I endeavor to not let current disputes sour me on prior enjoyments — it does Susan Sarandon no harm that I cannot comfortably watch Bull Durham, nor me any good to spite Sarandon by eschewing that pleasure because I cannot forget her and just let Annie Savoy be.

                Besides, even the worst artists sometimes make admissions against interest and reveal a deeper truth than they realized. The author of 1776 is probably well left of me politically but I’m not sure he appreciates fully what his little musical wrought.
                –

                1. Watching movies is one of my favorite leisure activities. I recently rewatched The Shawshank Redemption. My IMBd lists hold thousands of titles of acceptable or outstanding feature films and television series. Trying to screen out those that include leftist morons in the actor credits would result in … what? Two or three double-spaced pages of titles?

                   Meh. I likewise ignore the alleged personal oddities of, say, John Scalzi when reading his highly entertaining Old Man’s War series of novels. The story is the point. Or so I tell myself. -_-

                   1. Tolstoy wrote two of the world’s greatest novels.

                      He then decided that it was wrong and bordered on idolatry to create appealing realistic characters and scenes, and did his level best never to duplicate his previous skill and success. Instead he dedicated his life to various political and religious theories, as well as farming.

                      So which Tolstoy do you believe in?

                      1. I hear you. The latter errors don’t invalidate the earlier work. Who am I to judge anyway? I don’t even know the details of O’Rourke’s life so I can’t fairly assess his behavior. I’m now sorry I even mentioned his name.

                         However, if Tolstoy had given up his former political views and become a Bolshevik, people might have looked at him askance. That might be a better analogy to what O’Rourke has done by supporting Clinton and Biden. Not that he’s become a socialist but this seems just about as bad. Now I really have to end this, so this had better be my last comment here.

                         1. Perhap you ought consider the case of David Horowitz, who as a young man was an activist for socialist causes, supporter of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers and editor of Ramparts magazine, where he published, among other things, stories revealing CIA ties to groups like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the Asia Foundation.

                            Horowitz later repented his radicalism, turning on the Left and writing such works as Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties and publicly supported a second term for Republican President Ronald Reagan. In subsequent years he has been a strong voice opposing Progressive efforts to “re-make” America.

                            Does his early work invalidate his later writings? Do his later writings disqualify his earlier activism? Or do we evaluate each phase on its own, standing separate as testimony to who Horowitz was at different points in his career?
                            –

                2. O’Rourke is purportedly a thinker and wise observer of our culture, not a clueless actor. Watching Susan Sarandon or Robert De Niro acting in some melodrama, and reading O’Rourke’s obsolete political satire and commentary are apples and oranges. I don’t read the political opinions of empty headed Hollywood entertainers very often, even the more sensible views they may have held years ago. I now feel the same way about O’Rourke. This didn’t begin just last week. He has been this way for years and it makes his all his thinking suspect for me.

             2. “Presentism.”

                The present reality is that O’Rourke is now a libertarian loon who chooses to vote for demagogues like Clinton and Biden, and he’s pleased enough with himself to compose articles about it. It isn’t as if he discovered the polio vaccine. He wrote some libertarian rants which were once entertaining, but which I am now leery of. End of story. What he did in the past is irrelevant. If at one time Stalin studied Scripture in a seminary, that doesn’t change my opinion of the old maniac now. I’m not going to look up sermons he may have written when he was “sane”.

                “Grow up? I’m sorry if I thought you were about 20. You’re engaging in an awful lot of presentism.”

                Why try to belittle me? I didn’t do that to you. I just asked why you quote him and, using his own words, gave you my reasons for asking. Based on how stupid his present ideas are and that they are likely to be his last word on things, I think he should be allowed to fade into obscurity. You disagree because he used to be “funny and entertaining.” Fine.

                You ask, “Why shouldn’t we use the stuff from when they were sane?”

                Here’s my reason. You complained about being banned by the PowerLine “gentlemen” while trolls are allowed to roam free, despoiling the comments section. I think they should get rid of them, although I doubt they ever will. You also said you were “disgusted”, by “the infestation of trolls” there. I feel the same way about the articles O’Rorque is trolling us with at this time. If that’s “presentism” so be it.

                1. All right. You’re allowed to feel disgusted.
                   I’m allowed to appreciate the stuff he wrote when he was okay.
                   Also, FYI I’m probably a libertarian loon. P. J. O’Rourke, OTOH is just an average male, who in his old age married a leftist woman and started thinking with the wrong head. he’s not the worst type.
                   Anyway, on your blog, feel free not to quote O’Rourke. JUST LIKE if you own a property with a confederate statue, you’re free to pull it down, but you should leave the ones in public places alone.
                   Get it?

                2. So the fact that Martin Luther was a syphilitic loon of an anti-Semite in his dotage I should ignore his criticisms of the Catholic Church?

                   I’m not sure I buy that.
                   –

                   1. “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler syphilitic.” Three hundred years after Luther dies someone comes up with the theory, without any evidence, that Luther had syphilis. But you say it’s a “fact”.
                      How can I take you seriously?

                      I ignored it when you clearly referred to me as a fool.

                      Only a fool lets the present blind him to the past.

                      True, but also true that only a fool lets the past blind him to the present. You don’t live in the past, do you?

                      Okay, I started this by referring to O’Rourke as a libertarian loon. I didn’t mean all libertarians are loons. And although he’s called himself a libertarian, even that’s doubtful now that he’s supported both Hillary and Biden. I’m annoyed with him for drifting to the left at his age when he should know better — there may still be some admirers of his who will be swayed by his opinions — but it wasn’t necessary to call him a name.

                      I apologize for being intemperate. I suppose it’s sullied the purity of this comment section as never before.

                      Seriously though, I take your point about not throwing out the baby Luther with his bathwater. O’Rourke is an lightweight humorist, inconsequential compared with the man who led the Reformation, but I hereby concede that any worthwhile ideas in his earlier writings are still valid. I’m done with them but I’m not going to complain if you aren’t.

                      As I said, there’s a political war being waged and the fate of a nation may be at stake. Fun though it has been, this is no time for quibbling about the follies of this has-been gonzo journalist. Adios.

                      1. “I ignored it when you clearly referred to me as a fool.”

                         No such intention was manifest. My presumption was that you would prefer to not be foolish. I had no idea that, presented with such a shoe, you would try it on for size.

                         As for Martin – the syphilitic adjective was the least of the criticisms and mainly used to conform to the rule of three. I personally find his anti-Semitism far more offensive and the loon component slightly endearing. As I understand the hygiene of the era, syphilitic was as normative as body lice.
                         –

                         1. Thanks for explaining. Let me know if I do this right.

                            Only a moron would assert, without any evidence, that it was a fact that Luther had syphilis, and then defend his unproven claim by saying it was as common as body lice at that time. Since the disease was only introduced to Europe in 1493, it’s unlikely that, by the time Luther died in1546, the number of Europeans with syphilis was much greater than 1%, if that. It certainly wasn’t “normative”.

                            My presumption is that you would rather not be moronic. But if the shoe fits…

                            1. RES: your call.
                               We don’t really need stress, and we already had ONE fake flounce.

                            2. Meh. He says he’s done here, and I don’t see as he’s contributed anything of merit. He can call me names all he likes, the fact remains I am a wallaby of couth and culture and he’s just a barking jackal.
                               –

                            3. Look, you’re obviously not a moron. Just now I tried to point out something you said to me that I didn’t care for, but I would be an actual fool to waste any more time arguing with you about it, or PJ O’Rourke for that matter, about whom I don’t really care all that much. Go ahead and have the last word if you like.

                            4. “I would be an actual fool to waste any more time arguing with you”

                               I am always happy to conclude a discussion on a note of agreement.
                               –

                            5. Nope. You’ve cocked it up completely.

                               You.ve made so many errors it isn’t worth the bother of detailing them.
                               –

             3. It seems you’re deliberately putting my comments into moderation. If that’s true, I don’t intend to comment here anymore anyway, so you needn’t bother banning me like the PowerLine guys did to you. I know when I’m not wanted. LOL

                1. deliberately putting my comments into moderation

                   –
                   Maybe? Maybe not.

                   Most of my comments go into brief moderation … where moderation = I click “Post Comment” WP changes to “Posting Comment”, but my comment doesn’t show up immediately. Shows up eventually. At least some do because others respond to them. Others? Who knows. Doesn’t matter the topic or comment. Is that “moderation” or WP being WP?

                   Just saying …

                   1. Nod.

                      There have been “missing comments” which can be “Word Press Being Word Press”.

                      True moderation IMO is when you get a message that your post is in Moderation.

                   2. I got a message saying my comment was going into moderation. Whether I offended our gracious host, or some algorithm, I do not know. That’s why I said “It seems…”. Either way it was deliberate.

                      1. Sometimes that happens if you included more than One Link.

                         But IMO It is still Word Press not Our Host Sarah doing it.

                         If She had reasons to Block You, She would have Told You. 😀

                         1. No link. Whatever happened — something I said, some error I made, or just some glitch — I’ve concluded arguing about the influence of this over-the-hill satirist is a tempest in a teapot compared with the war that is currently going on for control of the US. I hope Trump is somehow miraculously able to prevail, and with that said I think I’m done with this particular discussion.

                            1. I also hope that Trump is somehow miraculously able to pull this off. I’m very worried for the country if he doesn’t.
                               And WordPress put this one into moderation, but showed it on the list on the side (it normally doesn’t.) WordPress is unfathomable.

                         2. And it happened again in my innocuous reply to you.

                            “Your comment is awaiting moderation. This is a preview; your comment will be visible after it has been approved.”

                            I won’t hold my breath.

                            1. It happens a lot and sometimes for utterly inexplicable reasons. There is a reason why the phrase “WordPress delende est” is commonly stated here.

                            2. “Pedicabo tibus tuis frustra WordPress amet”?

                            3. I’ve had the “moderation” comment happen too. Even when my comment was 😉 or 🙂 or ❤ … how are those bad? Oh. I know! WP misread my mind, again! 🙂 Like other, longer time posters than me have already written, WPDE.

                               If Sarah was going to ban you or put your comments into moderation, regularly. You'd know. Heck. We'd know. She's not secretive about it.

                            4. Why on Earth do you think I’m doing it?
                               It doesn’t make any sense.

                         3. And then I would have blocked him. Not put him in moderation.
                            However he’s starting to remind me of “I have Rousseau!”

                            1. Of course you can quote O’Rourke on your own blog. If I could prevent you I wouldn’t. Free speech is a very good thing. I’m glad O’Rourke can say what he likes even though it’s wrong and harmful. How it is that otherwise intelligent people can’t see through Joe Biden is passing strange.

                               I don’t know who “I have Rousseau!” is, but I’m sure he’s a pain. I came here yesterday for the first time from Instapundit and have no intention of sticking around. Except for that time you told me to “grow up”, you seem to be a reasonable person — although if you ever announce that you voted for Hillary and Biden, and start calling Trump a Nazi I’ll have to rethink that. Take care.

                            2. If I ever announce I voted for Hillary or Biden, I would have Huns headed for my house with guns, because they’d know it was a hostage situation.
                               I’ve done many stupid things in my life. Knowingly voting for communists wasn’t one of them.
                               I voted for a socialist once, when the only other choice was a communist.
                               Well, maybe twice, since GWB has announced himself a “Christian Socialist.”

                            3. Both real and tranquilizer, because if it’s not a hostage situation it’s a “thorazine and I-love-me jacket” situation.

                            4. Right?

                      2. I got a message saying my comment was going into moderation. Whether I offended our gracious host, or some algorithm, I do not know. That’s why I said “It seems…”. Either way it was deliberate.

                         –
                         Still voting for WPDE.

                         I have had that happen to me too.

                         1. FWIW. Case on point. It “looks” like I’ve posted similar responses. WHY? Because it “looked” like the first, longer one, wasn’t going through. It did. Eventually. Why would that one be delayed?

                            WPDE

                      3. No, it wasn’t deliberate. One of the people who regularly commented here from Finland is now BANNED by wordpress from commenting here, and I can’t unban her.
                         Wordpress is bizarre. I mean, she’s one of the few commenters I’ve met in person.
                         There’s not a ton I can do.
                         I will move off wordpress hosting when I can, but this is paid through September and they won’t refund, so it’s not urgent.

                   3. I’m not putting his comments in moderation. I disagree with him, but that’s not a reason to put him in moderation.

                2. I have posted comments that never showed up. Once I tried reposting the same comment to the same parent comment 3 or 4 times and NONE of them ever showed up. It’s why WPDE is a well-known four-letter word around here. (WordPress Delenda Est, ‘WordPress Must Be Destroyed’)

                   Unfortunately, it’s like Winston Churchill’s observation about democracy — WordPress is the worst blog host software in existence, except for all the rest.

                   So don’t take it personally when WordPress gets a bug up its ass and does something stupid to your post. Sarah would never do something so passive-aggressive; she’s more active-aggressive. If she has an issue with what you write, she will leave you in no doubt about it!
                   ———————————
                   Mollari: “Perhaps it was something I said?”
                   G’Kar: “Perhaps it is everything you say.”

                3. No, I’m not.
                   Wordpress is bizarre. RES has been commenting here for years, and half the time I go to look at comments in moderation, I get half a dozen of his.
                   There’s no rhyme or reason for it.

                   1. Affirmative: I’ve been posting here (some would say excessively) since before the 2012 election and last night had WP fail to process a post on two occasions.
                      –

48. My first experience with gaslighting. 4th grade social studies we were shown a film on the Depression and the New Deal. The film rhapsodized over how Roosevelt helped everyone. I’m sitting in class going “That was stupid, it doesn’t work that way” My parents, happily, did believe me, but it helps that my dad is at least as cynical and pigheaded as I am. Covid had the same it-doesn’t-work-that-way remedies. And the mindset behind those solutions is the same statist, Stalin-admiring, destructive evil.

49. From a soon to be unemployed professor of mathematics …

    Williams College Mathematician Flags up to 100,000 Ballots in Pennsylvania
    A professor of mathematics at Williams College, in a sworn affidavit, flagged nearly 100,000 ballots in Pennsylvania after analyzing election data and phone interviews.

    Steven Miller, who specializes in analytic number theory and sabermetrics, said that one instance of possible fraud involved potential votes that weren’t counted and another instance involved ballots that may have been requested by a person other than the GOP-registered voter.

    “I estimate that the number of ballots that were either requested by someone other than the registered Republican or requested and returned but not counted range from 89,397 to 98,801,” Miller said in the sworn statement (pdf), according to Just The News.

    Elaborating, Miller said that “almost surely, the number of ballots requested by someone other than the registered Republican is between 37,001 and 58,914,” and that “almost surely the number of ballots requested by registered Republicans and returned but not counted is in the range from 38,910 to 56,483.”

    Pennsylvania’s state data for early and absentee ballot requests showed 165,412 ballots requested in the names of registered GOP voters that were not counted as of Nov. 16, Miller stated.

    [SNIP]

    Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar’s office has not responded to a request for comment.

    Boockvar’s office previously said it has found no evidence of voter fraud or mass irregularities in Pennsylvania, while other secretaries of state in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan have said the same. Earlier this week, the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division said the Nov. 3 election was the “most secure” in U.S. history, saying there is “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

    Trump’s legal team, however, has said they have found enough evidence to potentially overturn the election.
    –

    1. “Boockvar’s office previously said it has found no evidence of voter fraud or mass irregularities ”

       Secretary of State Boockvar’s office has released this picture of its team of crack – crack, I tell you – investigators hotly in pursuit of vote fraud and irregularities:
       
       –

    2. Trust me I have reason to know this is driving mathematicians NUTS.

       1. “It makes a pretty line.” -I think that was what the one from Massachusetts was saying. Human actions are a bit more chaotic, it seems. (He went into more detail, but that was something that stuck at least.)

    3. I think it was Scott Adams who pointed out on Twitter – about a week or so ago – that in this case “the dog that didn’t bark” is all of the left-wing mathematicians and statisticians who are keeping shut about the election irregularities, instead of rushing to disprove all the work that’s been done by our side to point them out. Curious how they’ve instead resorted to censorship from the start, isn’t it?

       1. a) Perhaps they believe that statistics is on a shakier theoretical foundation than they would prefer to pretend? If the evidence for fraud is in a middle range of statistical application, it can be suspect, but at the same time one might have a financial interest in not persuading people to stick only to statistical applications that are really sound.
          b) The folks who claim to be statisticians in political polling were taking a bunch of victory laps.
          c) I haven’t been keeping up with Briggs, but at one point he was criticizing the application of Benford’s Law, because he thought that the fraud it is designed to detect is different from the fraud he thought would be smart to carry out.
          d) Statistics is actually an interestingly politically fraught topic. It is young, every wannabe technocrat tries to use it, it is widely misused, and has an interesting historical detail. One of the names you find all over the citations is Fisher. Whose statistical work was applied to biology (agriculture), and who had a theory of race.

       2. Not really. The social media companies were already censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story even before the election.

50. I am just angry. I am the person that everyone expects to be calm and reassuring. I feel hot magma rising up inside of me.

    1. You are not alone.

51. another example.

    People who are confident don’t run away from hearings nor lock out a “D” list blogger like myself 6 times in 18 days for trying to tweet out a post on Benford’s law.

    Trump has an uphill battle not because he has to prove fraud, but he has to prove that there was enough to compromise the election in enough states to force the election to the house AND prove it to satisfaction of hostile judges and cowardly pols who are the ones who can fix this.

    All the left has to do is keep that from handling however they instead INSIST that even the suggestion of fraud is insanity and that’s a tough sell.

    Or to put it another way. the left is trying to Convince us that Capone was not a bootlegger or gangster because he was never convicted of these crimes and that is the thing that is going to bring them down

    1. They convicted Capone “by the numbers”, in much the same way Trump is contesting the election results.

       1. Chicago would be much better off it it was run by Al Capone instead of Lightfoot.

          1. There was an SF story where competing nations had dug up the dead to get DNA from Steinmetz, de Forrest, Newton, Leibnitz… the clones were raised and educated as scientists for some vast Cold War project, which was overseen by “Al,” who had the respect of the other clones as well as good managerial skills.

             At the end we find that “Al” isn’t Al Einstein, but Al Capone…

             The squishyware is coming up blank on the title and author, though.

52. Excellent P.J. O’Rourke comment. I love it almost as much as Claire Wolfe’s:
    “America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, and it’s too early to shoot the bastards.

    I would say that if Trump is NOT elected/selected to serve a second term, regarding Claire’s comment,
    “The time is here. Lock and Load.”

    1. It’s never too early to make an example of a few, “pour encourager les autres”.

53. Pingback: Ridiculous Bits ……. – Freedom Is Just Another Word…

54. More and more I’m convinced COVID was the dry run for election fraud.

    If they could get us all to wear masks and cower in our houses while the homeless were fine then selling the open theft of an election would work.

    So far the American people are not proving them wrong.

    1. Um….. There is a lot of quiet resistance to both. REMEMBER the vote, when everyone told them not to.
       People are just still scared of speaking out. Depending on how bad things get, it becomes irrelevant.

       1. The long American fuse is in play here. We spent the entire year building a head of steam; now it is starting to leak out.

       2. If we are all afraid to act then we will cower when they come for us.

          We need courage to act to make the Leo’s willing to be agents of there by afraid when they start trying to round us up next year.

    2. You picked an interesting time to say that…..

       This what we need more of!

       California Patriots in Huntington Beach telling Newsom’s 10 pm curfew to piss off pic.twitter.com/xQNa3MipwS

       — Rogan O’Handley 🇺🇸 (@DC_Draino) November 22, 2020

55. Another thing that gives me hope, in spite of a striking yet typical case of media amnesia, is that poll that found a third of Dems and two thirds of Republicans think it likely or very likely China Joe stole the election through fraud. That this actually made the national news, past the “truthiness” filters, is remarkable in itself.

    But recall how incorrect the all the polls were just a few weeks ago – lots and lots of people don’t talk to pollsters, and while this poll result is being talked about, even in the web media, as if it’s accurately reflecting how the nation is thinking, that cannot be the case – the folks who talk to pollsters are the population that was the China Joe landslide Blue Wave population, and as we found out they are not representative of the real world population at all.

    If one third of the Dems and two thirds of the Reps, for a total of (conveniently) just under half of the population who deign to talk to pollsters think China Joe is trying to steal the election, then the actual proportions are more on the order of two third to three quarters of the US population believe that China Joe is a thieving thief who is trying to steal the election and deserves a long prison stay in the memory care wing.

    So even the three letter media polling results give me hope – I am not alone, we are not alone, the American public has not been fooled, and those loud idiots are not the majority at all.

    1. I don’t think hardly anybody believes Slow Joe is stealing anything. Biden is just a passenger being taken along for the ride, and will be booted out the door when they’ve got what they want.

       Definitely guilty of conspiracy, but not anywhere within reach of the steering wheel. Then Obersturmfuhrer Harris takes over.

       “We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in American history.”

       Because if it’s ‘inclusive’ that must mean it’s fair, right? Everybody gets cheated equally!

       1. Cheat you fair!

    2. Here’s another polling source of hope:

       52% of the people who will talk to pollsters (55% of men, 50% of women) support the appointment of a special counsel to investigate China Joe and his family’s corruption. By party, 80% of Republicans, 32% of Democrats, and 46% of “other” party members support a special counsel appointment, and by ideology, 29% of somewhat liberal and 42% of very liberal respondents support a special counsel appointment.

       Again, the population responding here is the leftward-skewed subset of people who will answer unsolicited phone calls and talk to pollsters.

       “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.”

       Of great interest to me is the 42% of “very liberal” respondents who say Yes for special counsel appointment, vs. 47% who say No. On the “very conservative” side that split is 87% Yes / 7% No. Even “Moderates are 44% yes / 38% No.

       Internals at https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-11/scct.pdf

    3. I am seeing multiple reports that Sidney Powell has been dropped from the Trump legal team and that Twitter has locked her account. Make of that what you will but it does not seem like there will be proof of Dominion revelations nor of any *on-80 proof) Kraken being released.

       It is possible to know a thing is true yet be unable to prove it in court.

       In other related news:

       Fighting Words
       It’s a war.
       Mon Nov 23, 2020 David “Radical Son: A Generational Oddysey” Horowitz
       By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us – against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity.

       Democrat radicals know what they want and where they are going. As a result, they are tactically and organizationally years ahead of patriotic Americans who are only beginning to realize they are in a war. The Democrats’ plan to steal the 2020 election was hatched many years ago when Democrats launched their first attacks on Voter I.D.s, and then every effort to secure the integrity of the electoral system. Those attacks metastasized into an all-out assault on Election Day itself with early- and late-voting grace periods, and a flood of 92 million mail-in ballots, hundreds of thousands of which were delivered in the middle of the night to be counted behind the backs of Republican observers after Election Day had passed.

       The result of these efforts is that Election Day no longer really exists as a day when the votes are cast and counted. This is a fact that offers generous opportunities for the election saboteurs to do their work. Those saboteurs’ opportunities were greatly enhanced this year with the installation in battle ground states of voting machines specifically designed to calculate how many votes were required to steal an election and then to switch ballots already cast and deliver them to the chosen party. Mail-in ballots were indispensable to the realization of this plan.

       I will not dwell at length on the years it took the Republican Party, and American patriots, to recognize what the Democrat Party had become or the threat it posed to our country as an enemy within. Suffice it to say that Republicans can still be heard referring to Democrats as “liberals” when it is obvious even to them that there is nothing liberal about their principles or methods. They are vindictive bigots who are actively destroying the First Amendment in our universities, on the Internet and in our once but no longer free press. Suffice it to note that while Democrats accuse Republicans including the President of being racists and traitors, the response of Republican leaders is this: “Oh, the Democrats are just playing politics.”

       This is not “playing” people. It is war. They are trying to kill us politically, and we need to respond accordingly, to fight fire with fire. …

       [SNIP]

       But the only reason Democrats are able to do this so successfully – even going so far as to justify the arson, looting and general destruction in more than 600 American cities this summer – is because Republicans, and conservatives generally, are too cowardly to confront them. This war will continue until patriotic Americans summon the courage to call Democrats the racists, liars, character assassins and aspiring totalitarians that they actually are. And to do so in so many words. Blowback works.
       –

       1. RES can you send me that to hotmail?

          1. Just saw your query, have complied. This also appeared with minimal introduction, at Powerline.

             I presume you recognize who David Horowitz is.
             –

       2. Further: Alan Dershowitz on Maria Bartiromo this morning, discussing the legal paths (and obstacles) facing Trump’s legal challenges:

          First half of interview only
          –

          1. Summary and longer clip of Dershowitz here:
             https://therightscoop.com/watch-alan-dershowitz-suggests-its-possible-powell-and-giuliani-can-win-but-the-bar-is-high/
             –

             1. Further: Toward interview’s end Bartiromo asked Dershowitz about efforts to target, harass and intimidate Trump administration staff. Dershowitz denounced them and said he is forming an organization (Foundation? I forget) to counter such attacks and provide legal support to the targeted.

                Yeah, I will believe it when I see them take the field, but I am inclined to believe he’s sincere. He’s a lefty but he’s one with confidence to believe he can win fairly and rejects dishonest means.
                –

          2. OT: I think it is too early to conclude that the judge selection program is rigged.

             We may end up needing an audit of it.

             True random is hard, and true security is hard.

             This is the sort of low profile system that, for all the lay public knows, could have a massive vulnerability somewhere.

             You don’t need to outright control the pseudorandom code if you can predict it, and control or influence the sequence of case inputs. So, audit is necessary.

             Controlling sequence of inputs could be tricky enough that the Dem jokers are not up to it.

             And I’m not sure the pattern of historical cases paints a picture of rigging being used heavily. So, if we presume someone has rigged it, they may be disciplined and cautious in using it. On the other hand, PACER. (Consider the matter of Aaron Swartz.) That paywall makes a big data analysis a little challenging, for good or for ill.

       3. Sidney Powell and her team have not had the Trump Campaign or President Trump as clients. They’re being funded by donations. They have been coordinating with the campaign legal team. As I understand it from reading elsewhere, the Trump Campaign was just issuing the press release to make clear the separate funding streams and to calm down GOP elements who might fear they’re funding legal cases that might catch a few Reps in the giant mess.

          1. SURELY though you understand that this is a problem in terms of standing?

             1. The way I look at it, every single citizen of the USA has standing.

                1. Sure. But the courts don’t let us.

56. Pingback: The ongoing snow job and spam. – Dark Brightness

57. Gas lighting. Yeah. There’s a lot of that going around. To wit:

    https://www.dailywire.com/news/california-dem-official-wonders-how-to-deprogram-conservatives-like-in-post-wwii-germany

    David Atkins, a regional director for California Democrat Party:

    “No seriously…how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?” Atkins asked. “We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.”

    My very brief Google supports that this David Atkins jackass is a real human and really is a regional director for the Dems in Kalifornia (People’s Republik of). His Twitter thread is really something to behold, I must say.

    But what’s interesting to me is the speed with which these geeks and freaks are being emboldened. Mr. Atkins here is acting like Biden got this in the bag, and he’s already moved on to the re-educating of the redneck masses. Plus, he’s not some random troll, he’s the fucking Democrat regional director in California.

    In other news, for those Dems who think this shit is all in the bag, Kyle Rittenhouse is free on $2,000,000 bail. Raised by the rednecked masses on the Interwebz.

    I’m not saying those two things are connected. I’m just sayin’. Two million bucks. Money talks.

    1. That’s funny – I was just contemplating the challenges of deprogramming seventy-five million Dems.
       –

       1. You will have assistance.

          Tiocfaiḋ ár lá!

       2. Have been. FOR YEARS.

58. Trump supporters are intentionally rallying throughout the night around Governor Newsom’s neighborhood to protest his ridiculous 10pm curfew 😂 pic.twitter.com/l6q0h9KNT0

    — JAMES BOND (@Charles28973069) November 23, 2020

    1. What’s with Sidney Powell? What’s with the insanity?
       Also I’m scared cranky and not amused.

       1. She has always been one of the independent lawyers working pro-bono (like Lin Wood). There is speculation about specific legal reasons why she might need to remain “separate”. But what you are hearing is just ink.

          Do you know how I know it is either a nothingburger or bad for the enemy?

          Because when it happened suddenly 10,000 brand new accounts flooded thedonald to inform everyone how the drumph’s strategy is in shambles and we’re finished this time.

          Uh huh. It wasn’t believable the last 49,999 times. It isn’t the 50,000th time.

       2. Also we have confirmation of Flynn himself that No, Things Are Fine.

          1. Here:

             .@SidneyPowell1 has been suspended from Twitter for 12 hours. She understands the WH press release & agrees with it. She is staying the course to prove the massive deliberate election fraud that robbed #WeThePeople of our votes for President Trump & other Republican candidates.

             — General Flynn (@GenFlynn) November 23, 2020

             1. So, has there been any reason for the 12 hr suspension? Because that’s just dammned odd.

                1. Was banned after tweeting this link (which is now blocked on twitter): https://gnews.org/577635/

                   Also you can’t correct misinformation when you are muzzled……

       3. Also also, the pedes and autists caught your SoS doing completely innocent things:

          https://thedonald.win/p/11QRtaZt9W/update-post-very-urgent–pedes-g/c/

          1. Yeah. we’ve been using it since 2008… when the dems won. AMAZING.

             1. I don’t think anyone will be allowed to criticize any writer for what “too obvious” names they give evil organizations for a while. Next century at least.

       4. God’s own Truth. I’m a bit annoyed, so.

       5. Yes, indeed and scared cranky is really very mild. The US is headed toward being a Marxist dictatorship which will take down the Western world and short of CWII which does not appear likely, there is nothing that is going to stop the transformation.

          1. Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

             1. I took an oath and meant it.
                I’m just not good for anything BUT words at this point.

          2. Fortunately I won’t live to see it. I’m too expensive to keep alive.

             1. Too expensive to NOT keep alive.

                1. meh. Not for the shoshies.

             2. You are not alone. If the Marxists in the US follow Britain’s National Health Care system, they will do our version of the Liverpool Care Pathway where they just let those patients die who they determined were not worthy of continued care. Supposedly they abolished that system after it was exposed, but, I suspect, it still exists.

                1. Like whole word reading, or all the other failed leftist bullshit.

                   1. “New Math.”

                      Which makes it damn near impossible for the kiddies to learn any math at all. It took geniuses 3,000 years to develop mathematics, and idiot ‘education’ bureaucrats 3 years to ruin it.

             3. If the Dems can screw this up, they will. The following article is truly frightening: https://nypost.com/2020/11/23/vaccine-plans-are-professional-and-good-to-go-unless-team-biden-screws-it-up/?utm_source=maropost&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nypdaily&utm_content=20201124&tpcc=morning_report&mpweb=755-9181721-711682868

                1. If the Dems can will screw this up,; they will!!!

                   FIFY
                   —
                   Me? Cynic? Nope. Not at all.

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