Night Terrors

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

So the crazy years are here.

The problem with having a completely unreliable media who were raised in an educational establishment which taught them objective reality doesn’t exist, and reality changes according to what you believe, is that they’re trying very hard to create a narrative: a story.

They’ve been doing this forever, of course, but they used to do it “in the service of the revolution”, knowing it was their duty to lie. Now they don’t see it as a lie, but as “making the world a better place” by inventing reality and replacing reality they don’t like or which might have made them feel better with their crazy stories.

There are three problems with that. The first is, because they don’t believe there is a reality outside the stories they tell themselves, they believe that once they have put the story in place it is true, and they believe in it themselves.

Second, of course their bullshit spinning doesn’t make it reality. It just makes it …. strange and bizarre and incredibly non-functional. Reality is reality. Just because you believe oil is bad and solar can provide all the energy you need, it won’t work like that. Or that the white race is the repository of all evil, and if you kill them you’ll have paradise, none of that is true.

Third they’re really really really bad novelists. They don’t know enough about the world to tell a lie that makes any sense or accounts for any factors. They don’t know how to integrate the narrative. (To be fair, as I told some fledglings last week, it is almost impossible to. Because the real world is very complex, and other people aren’t widgets. I mean, my characters have a mind of their own, but I’m only dealing with ten or so at a time. And only for at most a few years. I assume I’m not telling you all the complexity that is there.) Actually they don’t know a heck of a lot about real life. And they tend to expect people to act according to their “class” or “race” or whatever. As a friend said this morning, we’re living in a strange world where flying the American flag is simultaneously a government sanctioned display and a sign that you’re a white supremacist.

Their lies can hold. Or at least pretend to hold, for a little bit. It’s really hard to tell which, because humans are social animals and will mouth what they have to, to go along and survive. I don’t know how much their much more competent forbears sold the lie to Russians and Chinese, for instance, and how much of it was going along to go along.

I do know that after a while — I’d guess the COVID will kill us ALL lie is wearing thin, so they’re casting around for better lies — the lie wears thin. Moreover, the next lie doesn’t take as well.

And you have a population — I’m not alone, though I’m part of a minority. But they estimate that 1/3 of American citizens has at least one foreign-born parent, and I can guarantee to you, given the twentieth century that at least half of us came from commie-sosh-bullshit wonderland — that is already ahead of this, that are seeing the lies for what they are, that are smelling the fear in the air and going, frankly, a little insane.

The compelled confessions yesterday got me. Or compelled denunciations, or whatever. Sure, perhaps the video of the President saying to be good boys and girls and be loyal to China Joe and the Ho and that killing commies in batch lots should never even be thought of I mean, that a protest by mostly desperate people was evil and violence, wasn’t obtained with a gun to his head. MAYBE. But it was obtained with a different kind of gun to his head. He has a wife and a son. And I want to scream through the screen that Louis XVI put on a revolutionary cockade. It didn’t save him. Or his wife. Or his son.

And then Betsy de Vos, and I’m sure others, standing there and resigning — with 13 days to go — because you know she must denounce Trump for inciting violence…. in a parallel universe, or perhaps because he didn’t immediately surrender to the commie fraud revolution. She thinks she’ll be spared.

And then supposedly Giulliani was considered for Biden’s attorney general. Of course he wasn’t. It was always going to be Merrick Garland, communist party member, and Obama’s failed pick for the supreme court (and to the people saying it could be worse, stop it or I’ll beat you. Though of course the supreme court doesn’t actually matter, their being in “well be good commie servants, if you eat us last” mode.)

And I’m now sure that Trump had no clue of the depths of evil he was facing. He’d only seen the evil in NYC pretending to be at least somewhat normal and civilized. I doubt he ever read the history of communist take overs. And his wife is too young to know or tell him.

All that Hopium that people latched onto, because he was arranging things to give the president mroe power? That was because he couldn’t imagine such a bizarre and fraudulent election standing.

But the worst part of all this is that as the pseudo reality breaks, as people realize these idiots will kill everyone, yes, even the traitors inside Trump’s circle, the ones who delivered this shit sandwich to the people, Trump had arranged for some things for his second administration that are giving China Jo and Commie LaWhorish more power than any president yet has had.
It’s going to get very very bad. And I expect rivers of blood.

I lay in bed, wishing I’d never existed. I lay in bed, unraveling my life to the beginning. Maybe I should never have made such an effort to come out of the continuous day dreams I was addicted to. If I’d stayed in them I’d have stayed in Portugal, where I’d be aging looking after my parents, and at this point, probably, having no idea there WAS a real world. Maybe I should never have worked to do well in school. At least I’d believe the lies and not know what was coming. Maybe I shouldn’t have worked so hard for the next breath, when I was three or four and lying in bed thinking I’d die before morning. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I curled up in bed, scared of the illusions being spun around us, and of what people will do in the grip of them, but most of all, in horror and utter pain at the death of my country, the last hope of mankind.

Afraid that I too will break. That I’ll confess to crimes I’ve never committed, to prejudices I don’t hold. Most of all afraid I’ll lie, I’ll forget the truth. Just to live.

And then I found a raft in the dark sea.

I believe in G-d, the creator. I believe He desired and ordained that man have free will, so that we might come to Him willingly, and not compelled.

I believe for the furtherance of those intents, He willed, Helped, Pushed and Cajoled the United States into being, that we might serve as a beacon of individual freedom to the world. I believe H will not allow us to be extinguished, not forever.

I believe the constitution of the United States of America, though flawed as all human things, is the best instrument yet devised for the governance of mankind.

I believe I and every other human being, of any color and any sex and any orientation and anywhere in the world was born endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I believe any curtailment of those rights by earthly governments are an artificial and evil infringement upon G-d’s will.

I will not forget. I will not forswear. On the other side there’s only debasement and ultimately a bad death.

If death must come I will die an American.

And until death comes, I will work for the restoration of the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America.

And there onto I pledge my life, my wealth, my sacred honor. So help me G-d.

972 thoughts on “Night Terrors”

  1. Family didn’t break me. I refuse to let strangers do it.

    We exist. We tell the truth. It matters.

    There are days I get through just reminding myself to keep breathing. In and out. While there is life, there is hope. I may not feel the hope. But there is the chance.

    We’re too close to the shock right now to make good plans. So I’m starting with the basics, a la a certain Stargate Colonel. “What do we have? And what do we need?”

      1. I keep wondering what I’ve overlooked, besides “Moar!”
        And the feedstock (both raw and machinery[1]) for.. Alternative Means.

        [1] Machinery does not have to be as generally thought of. As one example: A lathe can be made with a rope, a board, a tree with a good long flexing branch and a few more bits… though it would be Rather Obvious in many places.

        1. scrap bicycle parts
          Stens were not as often dropped to resistence as the plans for making a Sten.
          They wanted the Germans to find the excess plans too as a psyop

              4. Hello Sarah, I am not sure I am posting in the correct spot. I just wanted you to know I visit your site every day. It helps me feel sane and gives me hope when I am bouncing between grief and despair.
                So thank you.

          2. Don’t forget the FP-45 Liberators (not the bomber) made by General Electric Guide Lamp Division and smuggled by the thousands into Occupied France.

            A clumsy stamped-metal single-shot pistol that cost less than $3.00 including the 10 rounds of .45 ACP included in the box.

            1. There is a stacked flat plates plan receiver I have seen somewhere, made in a garage with no mill or lathe iirc a bit of change and it can be anything from a blowback to a a base for a parts slide kit. 1911 easiest as single stack.
              AR base plan as well. Though 3d has gotten to AR ability, metal is better.

              1. Though 3d has gotten to AR ability, metal is better.

                There is a (more complicated) sort of hybrid between worked metal and 3-D printed plastic — print in low-melting thermoplastic or even wax first, then use lost-wax casting to make the final metal… whatever.

                Currently (up to Covidiocy and other sabotage) there are multiple companies doing this, upload your 3-D file and get back (after a while) your 3-D printed in wax then cast thingumajig. (Even in metals like silver and platinum.)

                But if you had a 3-D printer and did your own lost-wax work well enough, then you could quietly make things that might, ah, raise eyebrows otherwise.

                  1. Cleanliness. Keeping screws from being utterly locked – without being an unwanted loosening agent. I’m sure there are others. Just none come to mind right now. Long-ish night. And a post-work Hamm’s.

            2. Making your own is a fun option. Sodium hydroxide explosions can be a good time.

              1. part of my job used to entail pumping 900lbs of 50% Caustic Soda into 10,000 or so of product at 100lb shots. The stuff would get to 145 degrees. This was in Texas, and the guys just loved it come August and it was already 104 or so in the warehouse.

                1. August in TX, pure joy. And everything that needs canning ripens in… August or late summer. Great times.

                  1. Summer kitchen FTW! Don’t really need one where I am, but kind of want one anyway. Brick barbecue pit with bread oven, right next to the summer kitchen. 🙂

                    1. Dreaming of artisan bread on the peel being pulled crispy and crackling from the oven on a late fall day.

                    3. There will come a day in the future when we’ll pull crispy artisan pizza from the oven and sit down, al fresco, and toast absent companions.

                1. Oh my gosh, hugs! And thank you.

                  I’m a wonderful teacher–working on my first Udemy course on making creams and lotions as we speak. Humorously, I avoided chemistry throughout my formal education. It’s only when I became interested in cold process soap making that I decided I’d better ramp up, at least a little bit.

            3. Two stores near me had limits on paper towels recently because of supply; one definitely also had it on toilet paper, and I didn’t check the other.

              Then, we had trouble with the supply longer than most people in the spring/summer.

            1. There are nice simplified plans where one really just needs the scrap steel bits, a hacksaw, drills and drill motor, files and/or a 4.5 inch grinder. A welder helps, but not really needed, but the plans show welding.

        2. You can do better… Several years ago, Dave Gingery did a series of books on making a machine shop from scratch. The machines start with aluminum castings, so the first project is a charcoal fired aluminum foundry. Use that to build a lathe, then a metalworking shaper, and so on.

          There are 7 books in that series, and it’s collected in a hardback: (Only a few copies at the ‘zon, but it’s also on Kindle.)

          Or, if that gets borked, gingerybooks dot com will point you to their bookstore.

          Disclaimer: I have the books, but haven’t done the projects. OTOH, the designs are sound.

          Failing that, there’s the Chicom 7 x 10″ lathe sold by several outfits, including Horror Freight. Village Press has a book on turning that thing into a useful lathe…
          .

          2. Significant Other has a Atlas lathe and a Cincinatti mill. The mill says it belonged to the us navy.

          5. When Roy “Woodwright’s Shop” Underhill started his show these many years ago he began with just an axe (okay, maybe a measuring device) and worked up from there. I strongly suspect he’s got a series of books for those inclined to do likewise.
            ~

            2. The wife of one of the characters in Lucifer’s Hammer preps for the comet by buying lots of frozen food…

              1. What? No one read “Alas Babylon”?

                First thing the hero does after he meets with his military older brother who is sending his wife and kids to the old family home to be with the hero and issues the code they developed (Alas Baylon), is 1) Up the milk order (book is old enough that home milk delivery is a thing). 2) Buy hundreds of dollars (again, old book) of meat, both frozen and fresh, to go into freezer. 3) Orders another freezer for more frozen food … don’t remember if the extra freezers get there before the balloon goes up or not. Do remember them having a huge barque for the neighbors of the meat they can no way get canned, dried, and stored before it went bad, and they couldn’t eat it. In a lot of ways, early prep parts are a road map for “don’t do this stupid” before it gets into “um, what about this” territory. Water, the old, still working farm well, connected to the old house, but not the new one, or the immediate neighbors. What about septic concerns? What if your vision glasses are destroyed?

  2. A CNN Idiot (yes that’s redundant) was decided that he has to remind people that Trump still controls the Nuclear Football.

    Right, the assholes tried to “throw him out of office” knowing that Trump controlled the Nuclear Football and apparently didn’t think he’d use it then.

    So why is Trump going to use it now?

    Idiots. 😦

    1. because for sure and certain if he was silly enough to call up a sub and toss out the codes, the targets would be where? Targets in the U.S.? Targets anywhere else with no outgoing launches of their own? I’d call them morons, but it is an insult to morons.

            1. I have had a theory for many years that either Obama accepted very large kickbacks from Iran for that insane “deal” or else they had something on him.

                1. That would be a fair sized accomplishment. They bastards are good, but not *that* good

                  Sent from Workspace ONE Boxer

              2. Humbert Wolfe:

                You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
                Thank God! the British journalist.
                But seeing what the man will do
                Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

                There was absolutely no occasion to bribe or twist Mr. Obama to betray his country’s interests. It was his passion, his heart’s desire.

                1. Theodore Dalrymple once expressed a wish that certain officials had accepted a bribe to choose a building design — and then said it was the most human motive that could have been attributed to them.

        3. What they want is a window where enemies believe that we CAN’T respond to an attack because Trump won’t be able to use the codes, and thus THEY will nuke US, or at the least nuke Israel and invade Taiwan, etc. Then they can blame Trump for what the CCP, the Mullahs, etc., plan to do anyway.

      2. Nancy Pelosi this morning called for the military to deny Trump access to the nuclear codes for the next two weeks; this is a coordinated gaslighting by the Democratic Party leadership and its media arm to make enemies think that we will not be able to use nukes to retaliate against a strike against us or our allies.

        1. too bad it doesn’t work that way, nor will some of our allies wait on us to respond in kind (Israel has the bomb, Taiwan might, Israel also has generally good intel)

            1. That’s… a rather ominous name for an operation. Guess it makes sense if they are within fallout range of all their targets, though.

                1. Oh certainly.

                  But I still prefer “Make some other poor SOB die for his country” to “If I go down, I’m taking you with me!”

                1. Either would be a last ditch action. Although Samson took a boatload of folks (Philistines?) with him.

            2. Actually read a non-fiction book a while back called Operation Samson regarding Israel getting the bomb, great reading. No one else can beat the capabilities of the Mossad.

        2. Not exactly. She called for the military to deny Trump the ability to launch a “military attack or nuclear strike”. I think the “nuclear strike” was just added as a cover to get all the headlines and ANY “military attack” is what she really wants to limit. I suspect the real thing she wants to limit is his ability to direct military forces, just in case Trump seeks to use them in some way to seize voting machines using his executive order on election integrity, instead of relying on the DOJ (which Pelosi could be assured would not obey) or some similar last minute action that various Trump allies and conspiracy buffs both have floated.

        3. Except that Nancy doesn’t have that authority. I’m going to enjoy submitting waste fraud and abuse cases against every person who signs onto that impeachment bill.

      3. The only person to call for using nukes against US Citizens was CCP House lackey Eric Swalwell, when he suggested nukes could be used in response to resistance to mass gun confiscation.

          1. Absolutely they would; it is now mainstream among their supporters to demand “cancel white people” which of course means genocide.

          1. Well, Swalwell did something improbable: He made me feel sympathy for a CCP spy. Poor woman having to seduce a twit like Swalwell?! Teh Horror. 😀

        1. In a bizarre way, I can sort of see her getting fed up with the commands from China and going “Fsck it, nuke the bastages.” The results… ugly (even ASIDE from the direct obvious [thermo]nuclear carnage). And, sadly, it might still be one of the least sh*tty timelines. Argh!

          1. Oh-oh. Not another Orvanian timeline…

            You have a way of showing that no matter how bad something is, it can always be worse.

            That “Second Armistice in WWII” timeline of yours still gives me the night sweats.

            1. “Orvanian” Well, first I’ve seen that one.

              And that timeline didn’t happen – at least, we aren’t in it if it did some[probability?].

              I suppose that is an effect of pondering how things could (even more) sideways. Or maybe it’s the result of being (slightly?) monstrous…

                  1. It was just a couple of comments between Orvan and myself, but if you’ve read much about WWI and WWII, almost every likely timeline after that is full of ugly.

                    WWIII with all major players having nukes, is not the worst thing that could have happened.

              2. I really hope that speculative fiction doesn’t cause alternative timelines and universes to split off. Be pretty bad that you might really be recording what’s happening in those alternates. So hopefully for their sakes it’s all imaginary.

          2. China expects the China Joe Muppet Show and That Easy indian Chick Pretending To be Black to stay bought. They will not stay bought. Thus the coming conflagration.

            “Après moi, le feu.”

            1. Apologies for the potentially bad French – I used Bing translate.

              Ooh, I like how it sounds in Klingon:

              “paS HItlhaQ, ‘ej paS HISaHQo’.”

          4. You have a point.
            There’s very little evidence that Harris *stays* bought.
            There’s a very great deal of evidence that she will do terrible things if the likely consequence is MOAR POWER.
            And she has a backstory so shamelessly contemptible that she’s effectively immune from blackmail.

              2. Specifically, in addition to her literally whoring for political appointments, as CA AG she extended incarceration of inmates specifically and solely to retain their involuntary labor production, so she’s one of the last active slaveholders in the US.

        3. I’m kinda looking forward to a covert behind the scenes war between Kamala and Jill Biden over who’ll actually be the power behind the throne.

          2. Yeah, but remember that the crash of the USS McCain was abetted by two female officers who weren’t speaking to each other.

            2. I was not aware (former Navy officer here) that these new ships had touchscreen controls instead of throttle and wheel. The Navy decided to stop doing this after the McCain crash apparently. Sounds like a recipe for disaster anyway. Everyone knows how to turn a steering wheel and push on a throttle.

              And in the file under “how embarrassing”, the following picture of the USS McCain being taken for repairs.

              1. Not only that, what happens when a Blue Screen Of Death suddenly pops up on your helm control? Or it gets cracked by the enemy? Because you just KNOW the contractor would take kickbacks decide to put MS-WIN-BLOWS on it.

                I know too much about computers to ever trust one that much.

              2. The Pentagon does seem to like going in the direction of more tech toys. I haven’t seen pictures, but I’d bet they were going for something like the SNG controls for the Enterprise. As someone that has spent a hell of a lot of hours behind the helm of a ship, it doesn’t take long to get the feel for how much you have to spin it to get to the ordered course. In rough seas doing something like an unrep, you’re constantly spinning the wheel, I can’t imagine trying to do that on a piece of tech.

                1. When I heard that the Navy was using touchscreen controls, I flashed to a memory of an ST:TNG episode where Worf, in the midst of a nightmare, is called to the bridge during a red alert and “Someone has reconfigured my console!!!” and he can’t find the right button to fire weapons.

                  (One of my big beefs with that show was that the Enterprise is at least partly a military vessel, and military vessels get damaged, and therefore every part of the ship needs to be accessible by humans and every system needs a manual or at least mechanical backup. IIRC ST:TOS had one space battle episode where the bridge controls were damaged and phasers were being fired from the phaser bank room, but they were only twenty years post WW2 and still remembered how naval combat worked outside video games.)

                  1. Unless they’ve changed the bridge layout, there weren’t any weapon controls on the bridge itself. The people calling fire and weapons, yes, the actual controls were located in other parts of the ship. Ships also have aft steering that’s manned so if the bridge is hit you’ve still got someone able to steer the ship, you can’t see anything, but you can steer the ship if somebody is giving you directions. But agree, what Hollywood usually gets wrong is really bad.

                    I tried to re-watch the original BSG and couldn’t get through the first episode because the tactical decisions were horrible. They deserved to get their butts kicked because they were idiots.

                    1. there weren’t any weapon controls on the bridge itself

                      Not on IRL navy ships of most nations, I suppose, sure. However, on ST:TOS Sulu was helmsman/weapons, and on ST:TNG Worf was security/weapons.

                    2. yes, but they literally showed that Sulu pressing buttons was sending a message to crewmen who actuate the weapons, not directly firing them.

                  2. I think the episode is the one where Worf kept bouncing between alternate universes, and the console in one of the alternates was different from his usual one.

                    Re firing from bridge vs control room; that simply varies from episode to episode because consistency of scripts and shows that used to put annotations in the scripts of “tech the tech” cannot be expected, and simply did not exist.

        4. I wonder – if anybody (everybody) sent Texas Governor Abbott Attorney General Paxton Tom Kratman’s A State of Disobedience, is there any chance he’ll read it?

          I’ve this plan to finance a move by producing and selling T-shirts with the logo, “Y’all can go to Hell; as for me, I’m going to Texas.” Maybe some coonskin hats with the motto: “Hell or Texas?”
          ~

          1. “Hell or Texas?”

            –
            That would only prompt the obvious comeback, “What’s the difference?”

            1. “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell”

              —General Philip Henry Sheridan

      2. My understanding is there is a little card (referred to as the biscuit) which has several code groups on it. It is given to the president and he (or she) selects one of them which is then the go code and that selection is communicated to command structure. Odds on Dopey Joe either forgets which code group he selects or loses/misplaces the biscuit. Rumor is President Clinton lost his biscuit at one point for several months and was often without it in critical situations (the biscuit is supposed to be on the presidents person or within reach at all times) for extended periods. Who knows what the VP will do with hers, but I doubt she’ll do much better, probably will end up as a book mark in Das Kapital or Mao’s little Red Book.

    3. Maybe, like Congressman Swalwell, they assume an atomic bomb is something they can use like a hand grenade.

      1. Nobody post-Truman has that ‘excuse’. Truman could have argued he didn’t fully comprehend or believe, had he felt the need. But ever since?

      2. One can only hope.
        Alng with the suggestion that he be allowed to test one out on the Nevada proving grounds.
        The ultimate “effective blast radius is far greater than maximum deployment range.

      3. Well, there was kinda one like that. A couple actually. One was a really fat RPG. The other you carried between your legs (no really) while parachuting into enemy territory. In theory, it had a delay, but the guys who trained for it figured it was a suicide mission.

        A suicide mission is more willpower than I’ll ever have.

        1. Dead Uncle was trained on Davey Crocket.
          Spent most of his term in Texas, tried to argue that he was a “Vietnam War vet” and was not happy with my and typically as silly Aunt saying no, Vet of the Vietnam era, yes, War Vet, no.
          stompy stompy . . .”Where’s your service badge?” he dropped it. Closest he came to combat was deciding who went when with a hooker in Killeen, TX

          1. also the only damned thing he was ever in that was worth a carp. Houston radio show had a saying “Piscopo Poor” when something was particularly bad. They had worked with him on that silly karate kid type movie with Chuck Norris and were less than impressed.

    4. And where.

      I never had access to any launch stuff…I just pushed the boat around, but I would be very, very surprised if any boomer went to sea with targeting data for any location in North America, much less the US proper.

      Hawaii, maaaayyyyybbbbeee, but I’d bet the Marshalls or Puerto Rico is more likely. The idea of having targeting data for a state is a bit far fetched.

        1. If you know how and have all the information. Do we have the formulas and inputs on the boats? Don’t know. Can it be generated in the correct format? Don’t know. Can it be added to the computers that upload guidance? Don’t know.

          1. I’m not quite so sure… The military comes up with the most outrageous contingency plans.

            The commander may just have to crack the seal on the book titled “Alien Invasion.”

                1. Think of nonsensical Plan 9 was, and the earlier eight plans had failed. Now, there is a possibility to make 8 really bad “prequels.” So bad that even Star Wars prequels might look good not quite so rotten in comparison.

                  1. Not only that, Plan 9 was ‘Take over the Earth with TWO zombies, one old and male, the other younger and female’.

                    I’d much rather have Bela Lugosi and Vampira being sworn in next week…

            3. If I remember correctly, there are plans for attacking enemy invaders inside the U.S. But I don’t think any of them involve pre-targetting of U.S. cities or infrastructure. Not that it would be that difficult to do the reprogramming of a sub-launched missile; but much more likely would be the use of a tactical nuke dropped from a bomber.

              1. Or these days, a cruise missile.

                However, I don’t worry all that much about nukes if the boogaloo starts. They are dandy weapons, just the ticket – for taking out concentrated targets.

              2. Whether tactical or larger, gravity bombs would be the simplest to “retarget”, though they would still need the arming authentication proving the national command authority had said “Huh? More oatmeal? Shut up, Man!” when asked for his codes.

                Anything that needs a trajectory more complicated than “fall down” needs planners to build the guidance file.

                A lot of that is just math, but for some cruise missiles it includes terrain matching files for the onboard guidance system, which is non trivial and were originally (in the 1970s) done by hand. An automated system to generate those terrain match guidance files for long range cruise missiles was supposedly the primary driver for the Space Shuttle’s orbital synthetic aperture radar mapping missions – they needed worldwide terrain data to high resolution in order to enable an automated system to build those required match files to allow attacks anywhere.

          2. Herb, they would almost HAVE to. One of the specific scenarios that boomers were designed for was the ability to launch an effective strike even if cut off from NCA…. and there are no guarantees in war where an enemy will be.

            1. No, that why you don’t have any ability to feed original packages in, to prevent freelancing.

              You still need data from NCA to decode what packages you have, even if just fail safe codes.

                1. Not exactly. Dynamic retargeting based on loss of NCA and a standing final order (similar to the well known ones on UK boomers) are very different things.

                  Sending the boat with targeting data for every major city not in the US is very different from sending the boat with the ability to calculate targeting data for an arbitrary target.

                  I doubt any go with target data for US cities.

    5. They are the same idiots who say they don’t have a problem with the genocidal theocracy of Iran getting nukes.

  3. A lie told often enough does not become the truth. No matter how hard the b*stards try. They want you to speak the lie, even if you never believe, because to speak the lie is to die a little inside.

    I get the why. Hostages behind enemy lines, for one. But it is a short term solution to a long term problem. And the long term is what we need, more than ever, to work toward.

        1. I prefer the original, “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer” if only having the drink order more sensible to me. And then… the style is… more my style?

        1. Nah, bro. It’s winter. Time for a Dark and Stormy.
          Goslings Black Seal rum and Reeds Jamaican ginger beer.
          DG Ginger beer from the Mexican foods section ofba larger market or Vernors can substitute.
          John

      3. I’m on HCQ for my arthritis – can’t drink with it.
        As the saying was on Airplane! – I picked a bad year to stop drinking!

    2. I think that even Sleepy, Creepy Joe has enough mental capacity left to realize that putting The Wicked Witch of the East Wing in the line of succession isn’t conducive to one’s long-term survival chances. (Our Nero Zero got away with it, since she was planning to run in 2016.)

      Since the AG is #7 in line, that would require quite a few Arkancides. But I’m sure she’d be up for it…

      1. I know of folk on the left who would be right there with the rope to make #8 the person who got the office. Big part of her problem is the nuked bridges she’s left

        1. Naturally, as Number One on the Hit-List Parade, Commie LaWhorish would be exceedingly unlikely to confirm her.

          OTOH, I can just imagine the entire Republican caucus, popcorn bags in hand, voting to confirm….

      2. She would be ill and have to miss Biden’s first State of the Union. Six birds with one stone. And some acceptable collateral damage.

        1. Ah the “Debt of Honor” Maneuver (with hat tip to Tom Clancy). That book was a bit of a dog but the ending sure was exciting and may have given folks some ideas…

        2. All it would take is another “Right-Wing Riot” and she would be rising from her sick-bed to restore order to the nation, suppressing insurrection with the Right Hand, appointing replacement SCOTUS Justices with the Left Hand.
          ~

  5. There was a nice AMA post on Facebook from a guy who was at the protests. Nice and calm and actual reporting of what he saw. It was actually reassuring. (It will go private at some point, so screencap if you want to keep any notes.)

    1. There’s also a statement from an antifa guy who was trying to stir up trouble, when Ashli Babbitt was murdered right in front of him.
      It sounds like he woke the bleep up, and is now seriously redpilled.
      .
      I also saw a statement from one of the guys arrested in the capital building. He rejoiced about it, because it allowed he and his fellows to evangelize to the inner city prisoners who had never been exposed to the USAian message. (And the petty seething vindictiveness of the guards only aided them.)

      1. I should clarify that the antifa guy still has a “burn it down” mentality, but now it’s “because of what these bleepers did to genuinely good people”.

        He saw “privilege”, and it wasn’t what he’d thought it was.

          1. I still wouldn’t let them prepare my food or stand behind me. They’ve displayed entirely too much hatred and complete lack of integrity for me to ever trust them.

            1. The problem (from their perspective) is that at root they do not *understand* us. Think about it- every one of us could spout false leftist speak flawlessly, because it is everywhere and we *get* it. Not in the sense that it is sensible in any way, mind you. Just that Leftspeak is so *dumb.*

              That very intellectual hole is why the false flags stand out. You can’t just say “Rah! Freedom! MAGA! I hate brown people!” Because they honestly think we’re as dumb as they don’t realize they are.

              They can be smart about other things. Technology and so on. But this one is a broad blind spot, and it ain’t hard to spot if you keep them talking. Freedom of speech is a powerful tool.

              1. Agreed and have made the same observation in the past. It’s why watching them try to troll is so funny, you can tell by the things they say that they don’t get it. None of it is going to convince anyone not already inclined to agree with them.

                I work with quite a few of them, they aren’t really that good at technology either. I think it’s the main reason we give them access to social media, it keeps them busy not not working to minimize the damage they’d cause if they tried to perform the functions of their job.

                1. Eh. IT is chock full of lefties. Some are just sunk into their geekdom and go along to get along. Hard lefties, yeah, social media was made for them. *chuckle*

                  Reminds me of the callers back in the day that would get on Limbaugh, saying “I’m a lifelong Republican, but-” insert democrat talking point of the day. They weren’t that bright back then, either.

              2. This is Science.

                it has been shown in the lab that conservatives and libertarians understand liberals and each other, but liberals don’t understand either of them.

  7. ‘unreliable media’
    capricious
    deceptive
    dubious
    false
    fickle
    inaccurate
    irresponsible
    treacherous
    tricky
    uncertain
    unsound
    unstable
    untrustworthy
    undependable
    deceitful
    delusive
    disreputable
    erroneous
    fake
    fallible
    fly-by-night
    furtive
    hallucinatory
    hollow
    implausible
    inconstant
    makeshift
    meretricious
    mistaken
    pretended
    pseudo
    questionable
    sham
    shifty
    specious
    unconvincing
    underhand
    underhanded
    unfaithful
    unsure
    untrue
    vacillating
    wavering
    weak

      1. can’t say all, but then the ones I know/knew are dead or damned close.
        Ex-bro-in-law fell and broke neck, roofing, and “Uncle” has lung issues and will not attempt transplant.

        1. I changed it from bastards to Stasi because it is clear law enforcement from the street up is no longer based on legality, but political approval.

          Sure, maybe that is true to a degree all the time, but not as blatant as the arrests being made over Wednesday compared to any of the rioting over the summer.

          Also, the open informing encouraged and accepted by LEOs over COVID restrictions adds to the Stasi feel.

      3. I have known good cops. Deputies, sheriffs, agents. Men and women who honor their oaths. People who chose that path because they wanted to be paladins. They exist. Absolute statements are almost always wrong.

        There are *many* oathbreaking bastards, yes. Folks corrupted by power, warped beyond their innocent dreams or just plain wanting to be a thug with a badge. For them I have naught but contempt.

        But I do not tar them all with the same brush. Don’t lump them all together, as that makes it easier for them to face you as a group. The individuals that are guitly? Eff ’em. They need to *earn* their redemption. Don’t chase the good ones into the arms of the bad.

        Anyone willing to stand on the side of liberty I claim as my own. I cannot afford to cast aside one good American who wants this country to be better than she is.

        1. Fine, then let them cast off the badge of the corrupt authority. Let them pierce the thin blue line.

          There are good enemy soldiers. That does not stop them being enemy soldiers. By who they are willing to shoot and who not during political protestd LEOs as a whole have chosen to be agents of tyranny.

          Will those good cops warn you when they are comibg to arrest youbfor wrong think knowing you may chose to shoot back? If not their goodness does not stop the fact they are on the other side.

          1. Not as clean cut as all that. Things will get very, very messy if/when that happens. Recall that there were quite a few that refused to comply with unconstitutional orders these past few years. And if you find one uncomfortable man in a bad situation that wants to do *something* but feels trapped? Perhaps that man would be a friend when you need him.

            All I am saying is do not paint with the broad brush. Some will be legally sanctioned criminals. Some will be most definitely not.

            1. You may feel safe enough to bet your life on that.

              After Wednesday and the contrast to what constitutes justification for deadly force then and all the riots the past 7 months I do not.

              1. That is your choice to make. It is not that I feel “safe,” though. Just risk management. Some risks are worth taking. Some not.

              2. Remember you are talking about people who are hired and work in the heart of the swamp and whose superiors are controlled by Democrats-the DC Mayor and House Speaker. It is important to distinguish between the denizens of the swamp and LEO who are elsewhere and who do not agree with and have actively opposed the leftist swamp.

                1. Case in point: two Seattle PD officers who just attended the rally have been put on administrative leave by the Department.

            2. The problem is, many of those good cops won’t shift allegiance until a friend or neighbor is dead at their feet. That’s the level of tragedy required for them to have the epiphany.

  8. I have Puddleglum’s answer to the witch much on my mind of late and so I paraphrase the end here for us: I am on the Lord’s side, even if there isn’t an Almighty to lead it. I am going to live as like an American as I can, even if the there isn’t any America. And rather than seeking America, I will set out into the dark to spend my life building America.

    1. Mega City One is a dystopia in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. It is barbarism coerced to order by the effort of Judges, who if they survive to retirement go on a ‘Long Walk’ into the wasteland to bring Law.

        1. Yup. I like the 2012 movie.

          But the long walk, etc., worldbuilding is established in other sources.

    2. I like that scene in the book. Puddleglum saves them by his refusal to believe in a lie.

    3. Love the sentiment. Taught my kids and anyone else that would listen that America is an idea. That the relationship between governed and governor was turned upside down at Lexington and Concord.
      Further that our rights are solely from Gxx and are vested in each and every human on the planet, that it was solely accident of birthplace that gave us Americans the opportunity to excercise them fully.
      We have an unfolding tragedy of cosmic proportions. Our efforts to rebuild the Republic will be told in Heaven itself. I too pledge my life, my honor and my sacred fortune.

  9. I’m at the, comment at each and every, Irish wake; ‘He (civilization) had a good run stage.’ Our Republic was the last great hope.

    I’m not discounting possible resurrection but have been/am preparing for a long dark night.

    There is no John Galt, we need depend on ourselves.

  10. There seem to be some words missing at the end of the line that starts “But the worst part..”.

    I haven’t been sleeping well either. And I do think there was some very unrealistic hopes, by Trump and many of his followers, because it was hard to believe that *nothing* could be done about the blatant egregious massive fraud. I’m very disappointed in many of the people involved; I thought I was fairly realistic about human nature, but to find out instead that I was hopelessly naive… Sigh. I used to reject some dystopian novels because they didn’t feel realistic. Now I’m thinking that it was just that I didn’t understand the depths that people can fall to. And I include “attack me last” traitors who have been rushing to distance themselves from Trump. What is the f****g point of forcing him to resign or dumping him when there is less than 2 weeks left?? I guess they’re that afraid. Or maybe it’s the human flaw of dumping on somebody when he’s down.

    1. The point is power. Grinding the loss in our faces. The break-in at the Capitol actually scared them, and totalitarian personalities can’t have that. They must act swiftly and viciously to crush the opponent with the most status and prestige, so the rest of us don’t get any Silly Ideas about, you know, actually being able to oppose them.

      *Spits.* Yeah, I’ve seen this before.

          1. Yup Pilot Induced Oscillation by any other name. It’s why you NEVER control a system by positive feedback.

        2. Mischief. I’ve always been good at mischief. Enraging mischief.

          Wednesday I put a bright bold TRUMP 2020 bumper sticker on the plexiglass of the closest bus stop. Today I put up its replacement.

          I will paste these silly pieces of declaration next to freeway on-ramps (next) and along the 99 so the enemy has to see it.

          After the 20th, we’ll begin with “STOLEN” and “HEELS UP WHORE” and anything else I can come up with. Just a bit of bright paper here and there to enrage them because we are not going away.

          1. I’m planning to leave postits with scathing references to China Joe and Kammie the Ho in various public places as well … like on magazine covers at the grocery store checkout. Demonstrate our contempt for them, every chance that we have. Let a million minor Sabos run free!

          3. If you’re going to do something that will get you thrown in a re-education camp, for Pete’s sake make it something useful. Silly symbolism will get you nowhere but arrested.

              1. Wisdom but not too much.
                Sorry, Tom, you’re imagining the big, perfect machine. Commies project that but never are. This sort of prank is very hard to CATCH someone for, and they’ll have bigger problems.
                AND this type of prank tells others they are NOT alone. And that’s important for the future rebellion.
                It was the sort of thing I did as a teen. A LOT. That and remove their posters (which it was illegal to remove.) I’d do it inch by inch, and come home with a purse full of them, which made mom shake her head and burn them. 😀

                1. What do you think all the surveillance cameras are for? They’ll arrest little people for little infractions long before they will go after anyone actually dangerous.

                  Remember, the penalty for doing nothing at all is ten years. If they catch you doing nothing on video, twenty-five: a wrinkle that the Soviets lacked the technology to implement.

                  1. They’re not everywhere yet.
                    We’re not Europe.
                    Also have you watched the lives of others. Because there is such a thing as “overwhelming amount of information.”

                    1. You’re not Europe, but you will be in a matter of months. It doesn’t take long.

                      And ‘overwhelming amount of information’ in this case is not a bug but a feature. They want to be able to arrest people at random for trivial or imaginary offences. That’s how they keep the masses in line. Big Brother is not always watching you, but you can never be quite sure at any given moment that he is not watching.

                    3. I mean that it only takes a few months to establish the kind of surveillance state they have in Europe, given the abundance of the technology and the will to impose it.

                      They can’t turn the people into Europeans, but they can damn sure turn the state into a European-style police state.

                    4. You know, I don’t think they can?
                      We’re far more spread out, etc.
                      Heck, do you know most of our traffic cameras are fake, because it’s too expensive to have a ton of real ones. And they’d need that, because of the size of the country?

                  2. And if it becomes widely-known that they’re arresting people for pranks and identifying them based on surveillance cameras, how long do you think it will take before various cameras start “malfunctioning”? I can think of several ways to cause that without even trying hard.

                    1. Sure, some of the cameras will be sabotaged. But the point of the exercise isn’t to keep everybody under surveillance; it’s to keep everybody afraid, because anyone can be arrested at any time for any reason or none.

                      Martin Amis, in Koba the Dread (a fascinating look at Stalin’s terror), suggested that the Gulags should really have been called the Zachto, or ‘What for?’ Because according to widespread eyewitness testimony, nearly everyone who was hauled off to the camps was utterly bewildered, and they nearly always asked that question.

                      They will get you, especially if you don’t do anything dangerous. There is no psychological value in only making the dangerous people afraid of them.

                    3. This. Or getting shot out.

                      Check the size of the camera on your phone. How far away can you hit a target that size, even with a sniper rifle? Now put those on every lamppost, every street corner, every public building. And remember, once again, is that the purpose is not to catch the guilty, but to harass the innocent, and if even 10 percent of those cameras are working at any given time, they have all the data they need to gather victims by the millions.

                    4. The target is not the cameras, but the people doing the watching.

                      Sent from Workspace ONE Boxer

                    5. Tom, you do realize that every hunting rifle made in the last fifty years or so basically qualifies as a sniper rifle, right? Heck, super-cheap bolt actions that come boxed with a scope are 1: more accurate than pre-1970s sniper rifles and 2: have better optics than pre-1990s sniper rifles.

                    6. Re: Sniper rifles.
                      IIRC, some military-issue sniper rifles are basically hunting rifles. If it’ll bring down a deer, it’ll definitely bring down a human.

                    7. The more such cameras (and internet platforms) become associated with the oppressor regime, the lower the cost of creating an EMP event.

                      Especially if (when) some clever boffin figures out how to do a restricted area EMP.
                      ~

                  3. Cameras need power.

                    Which means batteries and external power lines.

                    Battery volume is limited. Watching all the line gets a little difficult. Even with a truly absurd amount of cameras, and lights (which make power issues worse), you have sensor processing challenges, and maintenance problems.

                    1. Sure. But as I keep saying, the point is not to have eyes everywhere to catch the guilty; it is to have eyes in as many places as they can, to harass the innocent.

                    1. Those targets that are too small to see at the distance from which they are effective at watching you? Yes, those. Can you hit a sitting housefly at 50 paces?

                    3. “Can you hit a sitting housefly at 50 paces?”

                      Sure – piece o’ cake, although I prefer a larger margin for the blast radius.
                      ~

                    4. People can get very creative – it doesn’t need to be a long range rifle. I t can be… something else. Might be a series of unfortunate accidents of various sorts.

                    7. Tom, when I lived in Arizona I could hit a dime at 100 yards, with iron sights. Used to do it every weekend. 200 yards with a scope. Little dime-sized orange stickers on my targets. (But now I live in Canaduh, so my skillz are no doubt rusty.)

                      This sounds really super-duper and everything, but it isn’t. Plenty of people can do things like that after a couple of hours of training. It is a normal level of competence for sportsmen. Just takes a little practice.

                      Besides which, it is a waste of perfectly good ammunition to shoot a camera. (Not to mention, only idiots shoot guns into the air.) You don’t shoot them. You paint them.

                    8. Tom, when I lived in Arizona I could hit a dime at 100 yards, with iron sights. Used to do it every weekend. 200 yards with a scope. Little dime-sized orange stickers on my targets.

                      That’s nice. Modern spy cameras are a lot smaller than a dime, and they are not conveniently painted orange for your viewing pleasure. Hard to hit a target when you don’t know where it is.

                  5. Tom Simon, you know what the locals do to CCTV cameras and speed cameras in Europe? They toss a tire over them, fill it with gas and set it on fire.

                    The things have a life expectancy of hours some places.

                    Did you know that lots and lots of small town and medium sized city police stations get burnt to the ground in Communist China? They do. The cops commit some outrage, and the locals burn them out to teach them a lesson. Rinse, repeat. And this is, I repeat, Communist China.

                    You know what started the Green Vest Unpleasantness in France? Fuel tax. You think Americans will wait for the tax from HeelsUpHarambe and Mr. Sniffer? I really don’t think they will.

                  7. and if even 10 percent of those cameras are working at any given time, they have all the data they need to gather victims by the millions.

                    Please explain how they will handle that many “crimes” if people refused to be cowed by the threat?

                    Show your work.

                    1. They can’t keep up in Europe, where speed cameras get vandalized much more often and more creatively than they do in the US… and where there are a lot more actual surveillance cameras.

                      The obvious solution is to assume everything is watched, and for your more nefarious activities, dress up as Antifa.

                    3. Most people will be cowed. The human social instinct is very powerful, and only courage and reason can overcome it. Most people nowadays have been carefully taught not to reason, and indoctrinated in an ideology that despises courage, in an environment where they have never had to cultivate either courage or reason to survive.

                      Read Solzhenitsyn. The OGPU arrested a quarter of the population of Leningrad, and considerably more than ten percent of the whole population of Russia, with no popular resistance. The victims froze or tried to hide. Those who tried to fight back were few and far between.

                      I believe the U.S. contains a much higher proportion of people who would fight back; but you don’t find them in the blue enclaves. Your new masters are not counting on that. They think a pointless charade like the 6th of January is as much resistance as they ever need to worry about. The thought that Americans are not like Russians does not occur to them, because their ideology forbids them to entertain any such idea.

                      They are vulnerable. Exploit their vulnerability; don’t volunteer to be vulnerable yourself. Act as if you were in danger of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and make every act count.

                    4. Tom, we’re not Russian Peasants.
                      As I was reminded of today, we’re not even Portuguese middle class.
                      Americans really really really value comfort and convenience, that’s why our society functions so differently from the rest of the west.
                      When those go away we get pissed.
                      They’d have got away with this for ten years, but they had to do the covidiocy dance, because they’re dumb as rocks.
                      So we’re already at “seeing red.” And they’re going to set us off.

                    5. @Tom (dratted nesting)

                      Just talked to a friend in Arizona, outside of Tucson. He says the whole area sounds like the 4th of July all day long, so many people are out there checking their aim. And reloading like crazy.

                      City dwellers and natural Democrats may be cowed, but they underestimate the rest of us.

                      Remember Bundy Ranch?? and that was just for one guy.

            2. No, silly symbolism will get you where they will ATTEMPT to arrest you.
              Plan for it, use it.
              Even if the protest/break in gets called an insurrection by the media and the courts, it was not.
              But it can be the the trigger for one, and a revolution, if they make it so.

          5. I’m not going to say don’t do it….. but be aware that bus shelters are routinely camera equipped, and prepare accordingly.

        3. You can order custom made bumper stickers.

          Applying “I support Joe and the Ho 2020” bumper stickers over more official ones at Whole Foods could be fun.

              1. Then you have to buy the debit card, and just doing that will put you on the alert list to be tracked.

                You may be quite certain that Master will keep a database of all ‘anonymous’ debit and credit cards, and will regard possession of one as prima facie evidence of subversive activity. It’s much easier than trying to keep track of guns, and a lot more effective.

                    1. Well, we can assume everything is tracked and nothing can be done with Big Brother knowing with absolute knowledge.

                      In that case why even bother doing anything.

                    3. I think for some of us the path of courage is the path of foolishness. There is every reason to pretend I’m safer doing nothing. I am not safe. Not anywhere. Not any more.

                    5. You bother doing things because your arrest and incarceration will have produced a tangible result. Sabotage is a tangible result. Pasting up bumper stickers is not.

                    1. Who knows.

                      Tom is right, that won’t be true tomorrow.

                      We need to accept just typing here is signing our death warrants. The cops will shoot us and members of Congress we voted for will applaud their actions as happened Tuesday.

                      If I’m going to be accepting acting is a death warrant, why bother with funny bumper stickers?

                      Isn’t it better to make it worth the price we’ll pay?

                    3. Because my role is subversive bumper stickers. Today, anyhow. Tomorrow? I might be doing my imitation of Joan of Arc.

                    2. Pre-paid ‘Gift cards’ (inclujding generic ‘credit card’ company gift cards) are *easier* to buy without identity connected to them. Stores *expect* fraud in their purchase so refuse checks and credit cards and insist on debit card with PIN (traceable, yes) or _CASH_ (not traceable). Cash? No questions. “Thank you.” Just do NOT use any store ‘loyalty’ card when making that purchase.

                  4. dirt up the high points on your face, and apply highlights elsewhere, that also throws facial recognition off. And it can be very subtle as anyone who is good at makeup can tell you. (I know, you’re a guy, and unless you’re into theater or cosplay, probably not that experienced with makeup.)

                    1. The only people who believe in the wonders of facial recognition are the ones who don’t know anything about it.

                      One of the many reasons you will not hear about the flaws from the media — aside from the obvious ones — is that it veers into hatefacts.

                    3. VIB?

                      Very Important Bastage? }:o)

                      By your choice of image (which might or might not your own…) I assume NOT ‘Very Important Bovine’ or Bull.

                2. You do realize that there is no such thing as “not being on the list”, right?

                  All of the things you are saying just add an underline to the existing status quo of not caring because your actions don’t change your risk level.

                  2. I still say you should make your actions count. Any given thing you do could be the one that results in your arrest, and every other thing in the database being thrown at you.

                    No point in being hanged for a bumper sticker.

                  3. I’m already on their damn lists. The only question is how high or low they set the filters before I pop one.

                  4. I am a life member of the NRA so I am already “on the list” along with several other qualifiers…donated to the Trump campaign and other Republicans, posted conservative thoughts on Facebook, etc. When the left gets to the real cleansing then I am already a target for the gulag or worse.

                    1. They don’t have enough people to get to that level. They might not have enough to get to MY level. Honestly, they’re counting on US running scared.
                      (Cues up These Colors Don’t Run and holds middle fingers up.)

                    2. Well, if people want to make useless symbolic gestures and get disappeared for no benefit, I suppose that’s their loss. It certainly isn’t anyone’s gain.

            3. Those large address labels and a laser printer… stuff any business or home office already has on hand.

              1. Now that actually makes sense. Much, much harder to track – and easier to carry around discreetly, and paste up in odd places without being noticed.

                I’m not trying to pooh-pooh everything. I’m saying, don’t settle for the obvious ideas, because those are obvious even to the enemy and they are watching for them.

                And whatever you do, weigh the probability of a tenner or a quarter against the benefit of your actions. Keep your risk-reward ratio favourable.

              2. Laser printers “watermark” each page with a pattern of speckles, normally too small for people to notice. Any page from a particular printer can be matched to that printer.

                Even if a printer doesn’t have internet connectivity on its own, it’s likely hooked to a machine that does, and its drivers can talk to the internet to pass that identifying information along behind your back.

                Some newer HP printers won’t even install their drivers from the provided CD; if they can’t connect to the mothership via the internet, the install will fail. They really, *really* want to collect that customer data to improve their product quality, you know…

                You can pick up a used printer at yard sale or thrift store and exercise caution about how you use it, but “let’s be careful out there.”

                BTW, for those who are inclined to discount the warning, printer watermarking was the major evidence that got “Reality Winner” arrested and convicted.

                  1. If you don’t need much detail, half a potato, suitably carved, makes a tolerably good stamp.

                2. While true… you can find info on where your particular printer does its watermarking. Dunno about now but it used to typically be just up in one corner.

                  https://www.eff.org/cases/foia-printer-dots

                  Used printers are a dime a dozen, at least in metro areas.

                  And there’s always magic markers and a stencil (to avoid handwriting cues).

                  And manual sticker printers exist — I used to run one of these at long-ago work, for labeling product bottles. Create the stencil, add the roll of stickers, fill the ink, and sit there cranking til you run out of stickers.

                  Point really was that you need not rely on a print shop that might be manned by a turncoat.

            2. YES, this is the book of the moment! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_%28novel%29

              Wasp, by Erick Frank Russel.

              Reading this book is one of the reasons I started out on the Interwebz as The Phantom in Nineties instead of using my name on everything. Harry Harrison’s “Stainless Steel Rat” is another reason, and the Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith is yet another.

                1. There’s no reason you can’t have your own well-established identity (buffs nails) AND your super-secret decoder-ring identity (whistles innocently).

                2. I’m conflict-averse. Once upon a time I posted “Semper Ubi Sub Ubi” on a school message board as a joke response to some Terribly Important Thing and got the hugest blast of verbal abuse back. “The very nerve of you not taking Terribly Important Thing seriously! How DARE you!!!!11!” Good thing I didn’t post using my real name, said I.

                  And thus The Phantom was born.

                  That’s why I publish as Edward Thomas too. Watching the -bullshit- that you and Larry Correia put up with, there’s no way I give the assholes a free swing. I don’t have enough working nerve cells left to spare any for that crap.

              2. I just reread WASP. It has not only held up wonderfully well, it’s now better than ever.

                For those who can’t find a hardcopy, it does float around out there in the dark.

                1. Don’t forget his “Plus X” novella, which was also collected in “The Space Willies.”

              3. Yes, that is the one I meant.

                I am going to humbly submit that due to the exceptional circumstances of the Present Unpleasantness we make this the Hun’s book-of-the-month effective immediately. We could all use the emotional support.

                But Herb in particular needs to put down whatever dystopian teen vampire romance he’s reading nowadays and escape into this before he goes off of half-cocked.

                Bring a highlighter.

                1. I particularly remember the uproar the MC was able to create with stickers. A politically incorrect sticker tied up a dozen cops for hours. He had some that etched glass when you dried to wash them off, that was a nice touch.

                  I can see that working on any college campus in 2021. So very tempting. >:D

          4. Yes, but with your real name on your credit card verified with your real address? How to avoid that?

              1. Get ’em while you can. There’s been talk in some places of changing the rules, because of allegations they are used for money laundering.

        4. Oh, I do know that. And it goes in an ever-tightening spiral of destruction, until someone is dead or escapes. This will not end well.

          …*Snrk* Do I win understatement of the week for that one?

    3. I think I’ve figured that out – if they impeach *and convict* him, he won’t be eligible to run again in 2024.

        3. I would be were I in their shoes.

          The only reason Biden “won” the election is those six counties where blatant, over the top fraud was committed. And there’s reason to believe that Trump had already beaten a fairly hefty amount of fraud to reach that point. If I were in their shoes, I’d be scared to death of anyone opposing me who can attract that level of support.

          And to top it off, a Rasmussen poll conducted two weeks after the election found 47% of the 1000 voters polled (including 30% of Democrats) believed it “likely” that Trump had votes stolen from him, or otherwise suffered due to voter fraud.

          They have credibility problems, and there’s someone out there popular enough to beat their basic level of fraud. If I were them, I’d permanently be wearing brown pants while Trump is still alive.

            1. I mentioned the laptop to one of my co-workers, and how the news media was suddenly discussing it after the election, and he seemed to think that AG Barr had indicated that the laptop wasn’t cause to bring charges against Hunter. I asked him for a clarification – i.e. whether Barr had said that there wasn’t anything illegal on the laptop, or whether he’d said that he just wouldn’t bring charges, and my co-worker didn’t know.

              Then I did a quick search a little later, and couldn’t find any statements by Barr that suggested he’d said either one.

              Whatever the truth of that particular matter, it suggests that at least some people out there are already convinced that the laptop is just Republican lies.

            2. Meh – they might have cast their ballots differently but I bet they’d have been counted exactly the same.
              ~

        4. They also want to break him (arguably done) so that his supporters will abandon him.

          Many have abandoned him for breaking. They haven’t abandoned him in the direction the left wanted/expected/hoped…….

          1. Thing is, he didn’t have the correct inborn and developed abilities, for what in hindsight seems would’ve been necessary.

            He did good for what he was able to do.

            And he leaves us no doubt that he was correct about the irregularities.

            I know I’m beating myself up for not having the right abilities to do better.

            He was worth backing against the Dems, but the same malfeasance that makes us distrust the Dems reduces the ability of ‘leaders’ to compel us to surrender to the Communists.

            1. Like I’ve been saying for years. He wasn’t necessarily the best President, but he was the best we could get at the time; and a damn sight better than we expected.

              And yeah, Don Trump can be an ass. But we needed a good strong mule to pull this country back in the right direction; and it was worth putting up with the donkey do, the braying, and his stubbornness.
              This election put him on the ropes and then knocked him down. I can’t say what went on in his cabinet meetings and campaign meetings; but I think he was given strategically bad advice; starting with the entire fraud by mail business. One day saying yes vote by mail, the next saying hell no. That alone screwed up over a million voters, many of which mailed their ballots right into the dumpster after mis-recording their vote and mailing a receipt back to them. Should have pulled the voting machines in before the election with a demonstration of their vulnerabilities. And yeah, his cyberczar committed treason with his most secure election ever before he left; election secured for the Dems.

              1. Trump is still fighting the good fight. I’m seeing people notice deplatforming Parlor.

      2. Yeah, that’s a possibility. Also some of those people (and I include many Republicans) hate Trump, and do not want to see him become the head of the Republican party or a kingmaker or whatever. So I think they figure if they badmouth him enough it will take away his power to do that.

      3. Yes And No.

        The Senate can tack on a “Thou Shall Not Serve In High Office Again” to a removal from office but it is not Constitutionally Required.

        IE An Impeached President could be removed from office but the Senate’s removal didn’t state that he couldn’t run again.

        I seem to remember some High Official who was removed from office but was able to run for Federal Office (and won).

        On the other hand, the Senate Democrats would WANT to forbid Trump to hold High Office again. It is possible (remotely) that they’d have to settle for just kicking him out of Office early.

        2. Marion Barry, mayor of DC perhaps?
          Implicated in a coke and hooker bruhaha, booted from office, then re-elected by his worshipful constituents.

        3. Federal judge Alcee Hastings, impeached for bribery and convicted by the Senate in 1988. Elected to the House in 1993, where he still sits.

          [spit]

            1. He was selling info about drug warrants he was reviewing for signature. He should have spent the rest of his miserable life in prison.

        4. You are thinking of Judge Hastings I believe, he was impeached for corruption and then won a House seat as a Democrat, of course, in Florida. He is one of the more radical leftists among the leftist mob among the Democrats.

          1. Now, if Trump could find a way to run for that House seat in 2022…

            Sort of like bashing a cockroach with a 10-pound sledge hammer but, it DOES kill the cockroach.

            1. Probably not. Too low on the totem pole for Mr. Trump. Now any of his kids, that’s a possibility. I think the Don could do a better job guiding the Trump dynasty than Joe Kennedy did with his family.

        5. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) Impeached and removed from office as a federal judge, currently a member of Congress.

        6. “The Senate can tack on a “Thou Shall Not Serve In High Office Again” to a removal from office but it is not Constitutionally Required.”

          Except that ruling is not actually enforceable. It falls into an obsolete category of restrictions referred to as “laws”, that primitive peoples believed applied to everyone and could not simply be disregarded through the application of Power.

          1. Alan Dershowitz is arguing that they cannot impeach an ex-president — the power of impeachment only extends to removing him from office. As far as banning him from future office, that would be an interesting question for the Courts to decide.

            Also, his speech to the crowd did not meet the definition of “incitement” which might also cause some interesting legal issues.

            Discovery ought be fun.
            ~

        7. The folks at National Review are not warm i my heart at present (too many suppressed Never-Trumpers taking victory laps) but give credit for this:

          It May Be Impossible to Start a Senate Trial before January 20
          onsent for the Senate to start a trial before January 20. Assuming the House moves ahead with impeachment, Chuck Schumer might try to get unanimous consent at a scheduled Senate pro forma session next Thursday, but if so, a Republican will almost inevitably object.

          This would push an impeachment trial past Trump’s presidency, and mean that Senate Democrats would have to largely spend the initial days and weeks of Biden’s presidency litigating Donald Trump’s misconduct, rather than confirming Biden appointees or passing Biden legislation.

          They may decide that it’s worth it anyway, but it will mean that Biden’s promise to turn the page from Trump and return normality to Washington would be delayed, when a president usually wants to rush to get things done in the early days when his influence is at its highest.
          ~

          1. Further analysis from Byron York:

            … t’s not that impeachment is a real fear. Even if a majority of Republicans wanted to do it — which they don’t — there are just 12 days left in the president’s term. To deprive him of even one day in office, the House would have to pass articles of impeachment and the Senate convict in 11 days. That is crazy. Just from the standpoint of due process, would the president be offered a chance to defend himself sometime in those 11 rushed days? The only way impeachment could be done is through a reckless, radical;. corner-cutting, unjust process that would set a terrible precedent for the future.

            Nevertheless, many Democrats want impeachment now, unless they can pressure Vice President Mike Pence to initiate the 25th Amendment removal process. “Give Pence till noon tomorrow,” Democratic activist Bill Kristol tweeted Thursday night. “If nothing, have an article of impeachment ready to go to the floor.”

            Among the more practically minded Democrats, the idea is not to actually remove Trump from office — they’d love to do that but concede there isn’t time — but to issue a rebuke to him. He would become the first president to be impeached twice.
            https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-trump-acknowledges-his-situation
            [End Excerpt – emphasis added]

            Even worse than turning impeachment into lynching by eschewing any sort of due process, the use of the 25th Amendment as they propose would mean that ANY future president would hold power at the mercy of popular rage. This would be to effectively emasculate the president’s Constitutional role.

            It would also incentivize political loyalty as criterion for cabinet nominations – and as an issue in confirmation battles.

            Unlike, for example, the Speaker of the House or Senate Majority leader.
            ~

              1. That’s why I think they’ll do it.

                They don’t understand the consequences, even as they see our POTUS’ approval rating climb higher after the 6th.

      4. There’s nothing they can convict him of to stop it.

        There’s no Constitutional prohibition against a convicted felon holding public office. There have been plenty of Federal Congressmen and Senators, and governors, and state legislators with felony records.

        They can’t vote in elections, but that doesn’t bar them from being elected.

        1. At this point, most of them are unconvicted felons anyway…

          Just need to find a court to deal with that last little formality. 😛

      5. Trump is a negotiator. I’m pretty sure some of the negotiations around this election steal involved some version of “If you don’t give me my fair count I’m going to use my Presidential power to declassify all the dirty secrets you and your organizations have.” Or “I will appoint someone to prosecute your corruption regarding XYZ”. Well, they screwed him over. If he is to have any credibility in future negotiations he has to make good on any threats he made. I’m sure they want to neuter of those threats that require presidential power before he can pull the trigger on them.

        1. Would you negotiate with Sauron? Because that’s how they view Trump. “Hey, keep the Ring for now, that’s fine. But if you destroy it, I’ve left a deadman switch to unleash every Orc in every mountain range to go burn down everything. You’ll win, but you won’t be very happy about it.” You’d still try to destroy the Ring, right? That’s how they feel.

          1. I have actually thought of the Democrats/left as being Sauron; everything they say is a lie, their goal is absolute power, and they intend to use that power to crush us in perpetuity.

            1. But of course. But then even Hitler thought he was doing the right thing for the German people.

              My liberal cousin once FB posted a meme that looked like a Jack Handy tableau with words to the effect of “Whatever the outcome, at least I know that I always had good intentions.” So of course I had to comment, “signed, Adolf Hitler”. She thought it was funny, but I don’t think she really took the point.

              1. This is a lesson I learned by watching my late mother. She was the sort of person who wanted to feel that she had good intentions, but could never be bothered to figure out which intentions were good. So she frequently made a nuisance of herself by doing things for people that they did not want done; and like C. S. Lewis’s Mrs. Fidget, if she was doing things for you, you had to help her do the things for you that you never wanted in the first place.

                The idea of asking people what they actually wanted, of course, never occurred to her. My mother was immune to information.

            2. The Democrats/Left project like World War II searchlights. If they’re Sauron, then they’re Sauron in drag, claiming to identify as Lady Galadriel.

              1. Someone over on Instapundit said this was going to be like inaugurating Sauron.

                I replied, no, it’s more like Lotho Sackville-Baggins, a jumped-up, clueless little Hobbit under the thumb of malign, powerful figures.

                  1. Believe there’s more than one Sharkey, and his men have nigh saturated DC. We’ve elected Lotho and the Ho. We missed out on Gollum four years ago.

                    Now we’re headed in to Mirkwood, and no Sting to save us. Not so far.

                    1. ‘Even in the Shire there are some as like minding other folk’s business and talking big’ – but there is only ever one Sharkey.

                      Or, to vary my Tolkien quotes: ‘ “Saruman,” I said, standing away from him, “only one hand at a time can wield the One, and you know that well, so do not trouble to say we!” ’

              1. Donald Trump looks like a very unlikely Tar-Palantir, but that’s him, all right, under the orange face paint.

                Now, I fear, you folks are in for Ar-Pharazôn and the Downfall. Sauron is already directing the new King from Beijing.

        2. Declassification was slow-rolled by the permanent GS bureaucracy in curiously advanced knowledge coordination with the China Joe* Muppet Show steal.

          President Trump should have done one the week after the purported “election”, but today he should just do a Friday data dump of absolutely everything he wanted to declassify.

          What are they going to do, threaten to impeach him, threaten his personal safety, or threaten the safety of his family? Those arrows have been shot.

          Declassification and more pardons are pretty much what he has left. I even think it’s not too late to formally submit the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Deal as treaties to the Senate so they can not pass them before the new commies are seated as Pence is still the President of the Senate, so until the inauguration he would be the one breaking ties.

      6. They also think that will taint him in our eyes and destroy his influence.

        For people who try to make every two-bit thug they can into martyrs, they really don’t understand how that would make him more even more than the steal did.

        2. Saw a blurb this morning that Trump’s approval ratings went *UP* after Wednesday. And he’s always had rock-solid 45& or so approval ratings throughout (which you can figure are low, given how crooked the polls are).

          What they hope to do is destroy Trump as a credible leader of the opposition. What they’re liable to do is create a martyr. Like they did Ashli Babbitt.

          1. The media’s trying to smear Ashli Babbit. This morning I heard a story that she had felony convictions and a restraining order out against her. (I don’t blame the family member who told me this — he doesn’t realize he’s being gaslighted, and I’m not sure what will get him to see through the lies).

            1. “Even if that’s not a blatant, provable lie, well, so did Jacob Blake. What do you have to say about that?”

        3. Apparently Mitch McConnel has put the kibosh on that at least before the Inauguration.

    4. I think the progs are going all out because they’re scared witless. I wonder if the ruckus in the Capitol didn’t scare them into leaping into action. They’re realizing that they are essentially disenfranchising better than half the country, and they have to squelch all this loose talk about stolen votes now, before we really get going, decorating lampposts.
      They’re not coming off as confident and calm, not a bit of it.

      1. I’m not so sure. I have to wonder if they’re convinced that they’ve now seen Peak Deplorable, and so no longer have anything to fear from any future servile rebellion.

        1. As much as they yell about “assault weapons” and routinely try to disarm us, I don’t think that’s the case.

          1. Building my AR-15 tomorrow.
            And yeah that means this is a flag for them.
            Reminds me, I need to send a e-mails to all 4 of my Democrat non-representatives that I am instructing them to not submit, or vote to approve, any legislation that restricts, taxes, or infringes in any way on ownership and use of firearms. At least then Jeanne Shaheen and company can’t say I never told them not to.

        2. I’m actually fairly sure of it. You see, they know their ideas are RIGHT so if they just show us that we can’t win, we’ll desist our evil, and follow their ideas.
          Let me add AHAHAHAHAHAHAH

          1. They’ve certainly stated that often enough with their “my biggest fault is that I’m just not good enough at explaining what I’m trying to do” nonsense that we’ve heard from Obama and others over the last several years.

          2. I get a feeling that 1) this wasn’t supposed to happen in THEIR neighborhood. That’s why they have gates and guards and are nice to their gardener and nanny. 2) It’s a wounded beast thrashing around. It’s still got some life, but it hurts, and it’s going to bite anything that gets close – the radicals vs. the less radical, the crooks vs. radicals.

            Alas that we’re stuck in the swamp with the beast, for now.

            1. Not really on item #1. There are regular “near riots” in the Capitol. It’s just that it’s always lefties running amok and trying to terrorize the Republicans. Case in point, the people haranguing Republican Senators in the halls and elevators during the Kavanaugh hearings.

              Also, there were the (actual) rioters – termed “protestors” in the press, of course – who tore up DC during the 2016 Inauguration. Instapundit had an item up today noting that despite Trump’s attempts to get all of them convicted, most (if not all) of them were eventually released after considerable pressure by various political and “grass roots” *cough* organizations.

      2. If you notice, they always seem to massively overreact when things don’t go exactly their way.

      3. I don’t see fear in the Left; I see jubilation, and getting high off what they perceive as the lamentations of their enemies. They think they’ve won it all, and all that’s left is a little cleanup.

        Which will equally predispose them to making mistakes, and failing to see what’s coming for them.

    5. As for the “attack me last” traitors, they may succeed in getting the left to do so, but once open violence starts I’m after them first. I cannot risk them being behind me when I confront the left.

      1. So true. Oddly they are so arrogant and certain that they seem to think that we deplorables can neither read nor write. Nor apparently make lists.

      2. Yeah, no way – there are groups on the left that will go after any target that gets them the most media coverage, especially if they can also pull a Jussie Smollet and put the blame on those red hat extremists.

        That means any lefty pol who trots about in their district sans security thinking they are safe since their district is safe-lefty is just being an easy high-value target.

        Also note that the targets of the GWOT are not by any means gone, and could very likely mount an op to take advantage of the current distractions using the people they’ve been moving in over the border from Mexico.

        As a hypothetical, taking out any of the members of The Squad would definitely make the news, and the three letter media could be counted on to jump to conclusions and blame MAGA.

      1. They aren’t that coherent. Their main motive (I have known too many people like them) is to kick him while he’s down.

        Remember, they are absolutely convinced that Trump could never win an election. They feel in their bones that he is no possible threat to them. But he stood against them and now he has fallen, and that is exactly the kind of enemy they like to attack.

        What’s more, they honestly think they can score a PR victory by humiliating a beaten man, and it will make them look strong and in control. It is the same elementary mistake that Kaiser Wilhelm II made in his propaganda in 1914. Here is what Chesterton had to say about that:

        As most people know, his words ran: ‘It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French’s contemptible little Army.’

        The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality; the train of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space. If French’s little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and valour of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated as contemptible.

        But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once. He wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same moment, in the utter weakness of the British in their attack; and the supreme skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such an attack. Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England; and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these contradictory conceptions simultaneously, he got rather mixed. Therefore he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of this almost invisible earwig; and let the impure blood of this cockroach redden the Rhine down to the sea.

        The Democrats want to think of Trump as a small thing; but they also want to think of Trump’s defeat as a big thing. This affair must be made a common and obvious collapse for the Republicans; and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for the Democrats. That, of course, is why they stampeded out of the Capitol in a panic when a gaggle of unarmed protesters found their way into the building, and why the standard Newspeak for the event is the ‘storming’ of the Capitol. Fools, that is not what a storming looks like. People who storm a building are armed, dangerous, and centrally coordinated. But these folk will never understand it. As Our Hostess likes to say, they would rather drink their own ink than understand anything.

  11. All the lefts victories are pyhrric. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be any fun for us. I’m curling in a fetal position and going back to sleep for now. Then I’ll do some prepping.

    1. No, there is nothing fun about this at all. Technically speaking, planning for insurrection is not a crime, unless thinking something is a crime, which it’s not, because it’s protected speech under the Constitution. Even gathering materials for one doesn’t count. It’s not until someone actually ACTS that it becomes a “crime”; and whether it’s a just rebellion or not depends on whether something like a Declaration with enumerated reasons exists. That’s one of the reasons why the FBI loves inserting agents provocateur into groups like that Michigan one that allegedly was going to kidnap their governor. Get them to plan, provide them with materials, or what appears to be materials, and then pounce just before they can think of acting. And yeah, I know, that’s not what “the law” says. But the law itself isn’t Constitutional, despite any court pronouncements.

      Heck, any one of us could be one of their agents; although I’d venture that there’s only someone reading and not posting.

      1. “Technically speaking, planning for insurrection is not a crime, unless thinking something is a crime, which it’s not, because it’s protected speech under the Constitution. Even gathering materials for one doesn’t count. It’s not until someone actually ACTS that it becomes a “crime””

        Look up “Conspiracy to commit” and get back to us.

  12. Concur with all. We are not alone. I hoped and prayed it would not come to this, but I don’t see the powers that be doing anything but continuing along their paths to power. Once the cities fall, it will be open season on all of us. What they don’t realize is us peons out in the hinterlands won’t go peaceably, nor will we give up. They called us bitter clingers, clinging to our bibles and our guns. Little did they know how right they were.

      1. You will have to be very careful, unnoticeable if possible. So far, most of the leftist riots stayed in fairly small areas. But I’d recommend moving assets out of the city, and taking a lot of camping trips on weekends.

        1. We’re considering getting a storage unit in our ultimate destination, so we don’t have to leave in the middle of the night with my fricking research books.

          1. That right there. What other country has an entire BUSINESS SECTOR dedicated to providing people with a place to store the stuff that won’t fit in their houses? No communist country, that’s for sure!

            Also, how rich do we have to be, as a people, that we can buy so much stuff it won’t all fit in our houses, and then PAY for a place to store it?

            Yes, I watch ‘Hoarders’ as a cautionary exercise. I could DO that. I keep more stuff than I should, but at least my house is functional.

            2. Or sh*t got weird and you’re broke, living in your sister’s back bedroom with your household stuff in storage, working and praying to build the business, save your money, and get the hell out of the Pacific Northwest. So you can get your stuff out of storage and into a real house.

              I feel both grumpy and blessed beyond measure. The situation is ideal for creative thinking.

          2. As you intend to visit the new locale regularly to become known among the natives you could easily transfer a load every trip, greatly facilitating the final move.

            There are worse ways to do it.
            ~

        2. Live in a large suburb that’s city size. I stay home so I think I’m under the radar. Me and camping trips don’t agree.

          1. also depends on the cities. Even Austin is not going to get much going outside the city center. The RIFs tried carp in Plano and got their asses handed to them. All the troubles in DFW tend to be in a few spots as trying that further out gets responses that do not end well for the leftoids.

            1. Definitely depends on the cities.

              Downtown Eugene. Worst west they got was Washington Street Bridge at 7th. The bridge that has been under reconstruction and semi-closed (major traffic PIA so avoiding that intersection was SOP at the time). There march from Beltline River Road interchange, might have been from Silver Lane, down River Road. They might of made it to Chambers/River Road/Railroad Blvd/Expressway intersection on south end of River Road; all two (tanned challenged) of them.

              Springfield main street. They detoured very politely veered into Thurstan subdivision (where Thurstan HS is, where the gun massacre took place early ’90s). Very politely because there were roof top veterans armed with spotter scopes visible.

              As far as I know. Everything has been very polite locally. Don’t go downtown. Few times I have, if they trashed that I wouldn’t know. They didn’t the Washington Street intersection, or Springfield, or Thurstan.

      4. “What about those of us who live in cities?”

        When asked about politics, lie. Ditch the flags, lawn signs and bumper stickers.

        Keep a go-bag packed, and move anything you can’t live without to a secure location. Aunty Macassar’s prized wedding china? Store it.

        Own a vehicle. Keep the gas filled up in it.

        If shit happens, LEAVE. Don’t wait, just get out of Dodge before everybody else does.

        If your city is on a river/lake, get a boat. For in case the highway is blocked. Recommend kayaks, because they’re small, easy to carry, survivable in winter on rough water, and they never run out of gas.

        The boys and I used to game the Get Out Of Dodge scenario for Westchester County when I live in NY state. Consensus was that the Hudson River was about the only way anyone was going to get out without a head start. Highways become parking lots on normal days. Imagine an emergency. Hovercraft was the only way I’d contemplate the Hudson in winter. Lots of ice. So we hoped for the Apocalypse to come in nice weather.

        And then I moved to Arizona, and lived on the outskirts of town. The better to GTFO if things became spicy.

        1. Unless you’re me. Fly three flags. Wear you three percenter t-shirt. Be so blatant they think you’re a setup and are afraid to touch you. Even better if you’re a tan chick with a latin accent. TRY IT.

          1. Ha, yeah. I’m huge, old and weird. Different kind of weird than you, Sarah. I attract trouble just by standing there, no need to paint a bulls-eye on my head. Karen loves trying it with me.

            I prefer to deal with Karen by misdirection. If they can’t see me, they can’t f- with me. Sun Tzu has lots to say about the concept.

          2. You aren’t taking advantage of your strengths. You should dress in “artist colony hippie” and carry a piece of chalk and a stack of subversive Dirac Angestun Gesept.-style stickers. Wander freely amongst the Tory enclaves and sow division and fear among the enemy. Put your imagination to work playing on their worst fears, insecurities, and ramshackle coalition.

        2. If your city is on a river/lake, get a boat. For in case the highway is blocked. Recommend kayaks, because they’re small, easy to carry, survivable in winter on rough water, and they never run out of gas.

          Pardon me while I laugh sadly, thinking of my own situation. (We aren’t at a flashpoint here, but who knows how quickly that can change? Even in Canada, things can get ugly.) I live in a city on a river, all right, but it’s the kind of river you get on the Great Plains – ‘a mile wide and an inch deep, too thin to plough, too thick to drink’. And not even a kayak can navigate it in winter, because of the low water and the ice.

          These are good ideas for those who can use them, certainly.

          1. If you’re able to, go mobile – scooter, motorcycle, even bike.
            Know the streets (my husband is the expert there). Get a HARD copy set of maps – learn to use them. In a pinch, a dedicated GPS (one of the portable units, not a cell phone) might be handy.
            Get HARD copy reference manuals for the endpoint location – you will not be able to depend on consistent internet. And, if Amazon wants to F*** with you, they can ‘erase’ any of their books on some specious excuse.
            I’m not even sure about using text that I’ve downloaded to my Kindle, even offline.
            I have multiple backups – but, Linux is the ultimate fallback for me. Apple’s deplatforming of the Parler app shows who controls them.

            1. Get HARD copy reference manuals for the endpoint location – you will not be able to depend on consistent internet. And, if Amazon wants to F*** with you, they can ‘erase’ any of their books on some specious excuse.

              –
              So can Nook. Not that they are known for pull this, unlike Amazon.

              One of the reasons I have everything downloaded and backed up original source, plus imported to Calibre to pull any locking mechanisms. Most of the books gotten on sale are one and done. Doesn’t matter. I Paid For Them.

              Depending on the “how to”. Some are going to be dead tree version. Otherwise I’m think one of those backpacking solar chargers, for you know, emergencies …

              It was years before we bought Anything from Amazon. Costco OTOH. I digress. I dare them to decide we’re dangerous based on our Amazon purchases (dog toys, cat toys, dog harnesses, return & repeat … finally found one that fits right!)

          2. Shallow rivers will support a kayak. I’ve boated on the Grand and on the goofy little Beaver River next to Blue Mountain, which is essentially a wide creek. Plenty of trips in Algonquin too. A kayak with your pack in it will float in three to four inches of water, ankle deep. So you get out and pull it. Not great, but better than carrying everything. And you can cheat by putting wheels on the stern. People do that a lot.

            But if you don’t bring the kitchen sink, you can carry everything in one trip. I’m approaching retirement, and with the bad knee I can still hump the kayak over a shallows. I don’t -like- it, but I can do it. If people were trying to get me I could do it in the winter.

            The idea is to get out early, and stay ahead of the zombie horde who are going to eat everything and kill each other in job lots. The zombies are less likely to chase you down a river than the highway.

            More important is having someplace to run -to-. Maybe think about that a little instead of worrying how hard it is.

            1. Finding somewhere to run to, without just up and moving there permanently, is the problem. I live in the People’s Republic of Seattle, and as long as I can I’d prefer to stay here, because leaving means abandoning Daughter and because I actually really like my job and I don’t want to lose my nice little house that I’ve worked so hard on. And maybe the horse will learn to sing and it’ll become a safe place for normal people again.

              So where to buy a bolthole? Lots of people have suggested Eastern Washington, but a five-hour drive makes it hard to visit frequently and build up infrastructure and supplies. And if SHTF in a natural or political disaster, it seems to me that trying to drive over one of three passes through the Cascades at the same time as a couple hundred thousand other mostly panicked people, potentially in the middle of winter, sounds like a really good way to end up out of gas, starving, freezing, and ultimately dead in a ditch.

              So that means looking in the slightly saner parts of Western Washington (Mason County mostly), but in the last year all the affordable property in a couple-three hours’ driving range has vanished because everyone else (with bigger tech sector salaries and bigger budgets than me) has had the same idea. So now what?

              1. Some of us are poor. I can barely afford the mortgage payments on the small townhouse I live in now. There is certainly nothing left over for buying land or any other property anywhere else.

                1. I hear you. I’ve been there most of my life up until a few years ago. I know I’m in a better than average position now because I make good money in a tech job. Which is one reason I’m aware I’m probably parroting Jews in 1933 saying “well, the Nazis say they want us dead, but they haven’t really done anything yet, and our Berlin townhouse is so nice it would be a shame to leave it.” But if the Eye of Sauron focuses on me for half a second, a few minutes’ offense archaeology and a phone call saying “I feel unsaaaaaafe” and the Very Large Very Woke Household Word Corporation that I work for will kick me to the curb, and then I have to sell and get to live off my savings probably forever.

                  When I scout properties on Redfin I always go to the county GIS system and look for wetlands, power lines, anything else that might make it unbuildable. (Search for “[name] county taxsifter” or “[name] county tax parcel search” and plug in the APN or address from Redfin.) I confess I have occasionally looked at houses in the boonies and made note of which ones have out of state owners. I figure if SHTF in a big way, I might be able to evacuate there and squat, because the owners aren’t likely to arrive from Alaska or Nevada or whatever, at least not until the emergency is over.

            2. As I said before, our river is not navigable at all in winter. Furthermore, it is interrupted frequently by dams and weirs, and it doesn’t go anywhere. The land downstream is semidesert for hundreds of miles, usable only for irrigation or grazing. The irrigated land is fully occupied, and grazing is not much use unless you know how to fit a cow on a kayak.

              Maybe you’d better accept that the situation is actually difficult, and there is no easy solution that will work for everyone.

              1. Bicycles can be surprisingly versatile, although Canada in winter would not be my choice, and anyway I know you have health issues.

                Hunkering down can also work. There is no single solution.

  13. One thing that makes my stomach clutch is when Trump describes them as “sick people”. He is absolutely right – it’s not possible to reason with them, or even have a shared reality.

    1. Son Two fits that description, unfortunately. Son One might still be redeemable, if he doesn’t stick his nose in the wrong place and get it lopped off at the shoulders first. He likes going to protests and helping the folks that get knocked down, gassed, or beaten; rather misplaced good Samaritanism.

  14. So I take it the prohibition on discussing the Civil War on this site is over now? At least with regards to the Current Unpleasantness?

    Have we decided what we’re going to call it yet? My suggestions:
    Civil War II: The Colbys
    The New Leave it To Texas
    Civil War 2: The Wrath of Marx
    Revolution #2
    Return of the Swamp Thing
    and
    We Warned You Bastards to Get Off Our Lawn

        1. Middle-easterners have a reputation for being lousy shots, especially compared to USAians. Almost to the point of us being able to brag, “Our inner-city gang-bangers are better shots than that!”

          The bad news is that this cuts both ways: The 21st Century Hessians under King Joe the Fraud are going to be relatively good shots too.

          1. They may be good shots, but they still have trouble dealing with ‘asymmetric’ small-unit tactics. I’ve known a lot of Canadian soldiers who have firsthand experience in the matter, and they pretty much all agree: the U.S. Army has good troops, but they are spoilt by their superior firepower and never-run-out logistics, and tend not to fight effectively in situations where those cannot be brought to bear. Street fighting in an American city is not exactly a situation where you can simply blow up the enemy by calling in an airstrike.

            Afghanistan vets, in particular, have learned to compensate for that deficiency, but something tells me most of those will not be on Master’s side if and when the shooting starts.

      1. …and Mikhail Timofeyovich Kalashnikov, Dieudonne Saive, Nicholas Brewer, Peter and Paul Mauser, Ferdinand Mannlicher, Mike Walker, Carl Benson, David Williams, John C. Garand, Ole Krag, Hiram Berdan, Sergei Mosin, Leon Nagant, Oliver Winchester, Eliphalet Remington…

        “If a single person was responsible for the design of your firearm, and you know his name, you might be a gun geek…”

            1. “We will cancel the healthcare policies of employees who ride motorcycles” Ruger.

              He might be dead, but I still don’t deal with his company.

        2. Dieudonne Saive made my favorite rifle, the FN-FAL. Still in use almost as many places as the AK. Third most widely distributed post-WWII military design after the AK and the M-16.

          2. Mine too. It’s just everything you need in a battle rifle, and nothing you don’t.

            My Fan Fiction alternate ending to John Wyndham’s ‘The Chrysalids’ (or ‘Re-Birth’ in the U.S.) features the FN-FAL. The new civilization that’s forming considers it the best automatic rifle made by the Old People before Tribulation.

  16. I try to recall a line from Walter Jon Williams’ “Hardwired:”

    “He had called himself a free man too long to accept that his piece of sky had a cage around it.”

    (Mistakes due to my memory)

    1. Too bad WJW chose to make his stand on the other side of the Puppy line. I liked most of the stuff he wrote before he started getting Woke.

  17. What the radical leftists in control of the federal government don’t seem to realize is just how real people will react to their gaslighting. They’re trying to make anyone who doesn’t believe their extreme leftist dogma into not just the opposition, but evil, immoral others not deserving of basic human rights. What they won’t do (and don’t realize) is convince us that we’re evil. What they WILL do is convince an increasing number of us that if we’re going to be persecuted for violence against them that we haven’t done, we might as well do that violence. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb…

    1. Exactly. What I have warned for a long time is that one day, conservatives will act just as violently as the dems shriek about. Finding out that their diatribes inflame us rather than cow us will be a shock that most of them will never recover from.

        1. Come out to farm and ranch country. You’ll see very different Americans.

          And consider that the main reason they had to cheat the election by millions of votes is because We The People were not nearly as ‘flexible’ about bending before their gale-of-BS as they’d expected.

          2. I grant you farmers and ranchers. Alas, they’re down to two percent of the population. Your average suburban couch potato nowadays is made of pretty feeble stuff.

            1. The thing is, that softness is paper-thin. When properly motivated, the average American gets a “F-U” attitude right back. We tend to handle our own problems without waiting to be told what to do.
              Think of the last time crisis happened in your own life – didn’t the people involved immediately start grabbing emergency supplies, saying “You get the blankets, you call 911, you get the car started”. We don’t helplessly watch someone die right before our eyes. First aid knowledge is common, even among kids.
              We may grab a friend or two and hide when the bulllets start flying, but we also look around for things to use as weapons or defensive shields, figure out how to communicate with potential help, keep the panicking people calm, and make sure that everyone who is able has a job to do.
              We don’t wait for the ‘hero’ to save us, we work as a team, even among strangers, to solve our own damn problems.
              In other countries, they don’t do that, for the most part, unless they have been in the fighting part of the military. Except Israel and Switzerland – ALL of them know the drill.

              2. In some respects, Israel is a version of America. Some ways better, some worse. But most Israelis still understand that they exist solely due to eternal vigilance, and eternal readiness to repel enemies bent on their utter destruction. Too many Americans think foreign countries are “friends”, when in reality we only have some common interests of the moment; and the moment and interests can turn in a heartbeat.

        2. Uh huh.

          We have this quaint national tradition of taking other nations who thought that and playing IRL Death Metal with them.

          Then we rebuild them because we are polite and sheeit.

        3. “Americans are softer than throw pillows.”

          They’re not soft. They’re waiting.

          Canadians too. We’re all just waiting for them to do that one thing we’re not going to forgive. We don’t know when it will come, or what it will be. But we’ll know it when we see it.

          Personally, I hoping they realize that and back off. Life is too short to waste it on this crap.

          1. Canadians are wicked fighters when they get there. D-Day Normandy, Point du Hoc, Canadians distinguished themselves.

            1. Canadians, taken as a group, are meaner than shit. You offend them, they will beat the crap out of you. The Canadian Forces is full of young, hard, mean sons of bitches. You let them off the leash, they’ll go and go and go. I’ve seen it.

              That’s why visitors think Canada is such a polite and well mannered place. Because people who live here know not to step out of line. The guy in line behind you will smack your head.

              But as a consequence, things move pretty slow here. As long as the proprieties are observed, normal play will continue.

              However when the authorities step over the line, as they have been with the COVID lockdowns and as they did with the gun registry in the 1990s, Canadians will simply stop doing what they’re told. If the authorities keep pushing, as they are in Montreal, then one day there will be a BIG response.

              For example, if Trudeau steals an election this year as it seems he’d like to, I expect things will get pretty spicy. But maybe not, you never know. It might take closing the beer store to make them finally move.

            2. They performed well in Afghanistan, too.

              Problem is they had to hitch a ride to the battlefield.
              ~

          2. This. Because there are a lot of people that have seen this coming for a decade plus. We hoped we were wrong but we could see the divide getting ever wider and no remedy to shrink it. Yes, I’m softer now than when I moved off the farm and when I got out of the military, but that’s more a function of Covid. Even that is being worked on.

            The number of people I see at the range, the problems buying ammo/guns, finding survival type supplies? People have an idea what’s coming and preparing for it as best they can. No one sane wants it, but that doesn’t mean they are going to roll over and die because some ignorant twit with a college degree thinks they need to die.

        4. Even a throw pillow is a deadly weapon at relativistic speeds. And they don’t show up on radar in space very well either.

    2. They can’t convince us that we are evil. They are progressively convincing us that THEY are evil. The process in nearly complete.
      ———————————
      Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

        1. I try to not be a bigot, since it’s stupid to broadbrush smear entire groups of people based on the acts of a few. With progs, I’ve found that… difficult. The overwhelming majority of my encounters have been of utter hatred from them, the accusation that I’m evil and a hatey hate-filled hater (who hates!) once they found I didn’t agree with them on something or another. Even people I’d had cordial (even friendly) relations with in the past. It’s like a switch. It’s one reason why I think Orwell was an optimist when he came up with the Two Minute Hate.

          I still try to not be a bigot, since it looks like the progs have gone down that path rather gleefully and it doesn’t look overly healthy.

          1. I’ve been saying this for years:

            “In the future, everyone will be Emmanuel Goldstein for two minutes.”

              1. I do consulting work for a webzine that has been the target of a Two Minutes Hate. It doesn’t last much longer than that, but it’s usually long enough to make the target curl up in a fetal position and shriek that he loves Big Brother. (Didn’t work in our case. Boss lady is a mensch.) Then they lose interest and move on to another target.

                The hate is eternal, but the attention span is that of a mayfly.

    3. Exactly.
      Granted, I’m an ordinary citizen who reads the Constitution and supporting historical papers, and not a lawyer; but I think it will be interesting if if, and when, the Biden-Harris Administration begin trying to pass ex post facto laws or executive orders in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution. Technically, those clauses only apply to Congress, however, since the Executive Branch is only supposed to enforce the laws, any executive order is a violation of Constitutional checks and balances, and therefore unlawful in it’s own right.
      It is entirely possible that they come after us for not just sudden firearm possession violations, but also for hate crimes consisting of previous postings, letters, and books deemed “whatever-ist”.
      Again, the question being whether they are going to try to do this all at once, or if they’re take the boil a frog in cold water approach.

      1. The Harris–Cortez faction is doing its damnedest to ensure that they try to do it all at once. They are functioning as the equivalent of NKVD blocking troops on the Russian Front, shooting from behind to ensure that the front-line grunts continue advancing at a suitable speed. And just as in the Red Army, leading Democrats are much more afraid of their own extremists than they are of the opposition.

  18. It strikes me that someone interested in restoring the Republic might set aside the issues of malfeasance and treason from the two Parties and the judicial and legislative branches, and concentrate their efforts on the true center of power:

    Dominion Voting Systems has shown that it is the true government; the Fed is just its bureaucratic sock puppets.

    Dominion is a *much* smaller target than the Fed.

    We now know we have a *specific* enemy, not just “the government has gone crazy.” We know its name, and the names of its minions and fellow travelers, and the shape of their evildoings. The enemy has *one* power; to manipulate the results of elections right at the polls.

    It is a great power. It is also a great vulnerability; it subverts the process at the very first step in the chain… and that’s the only step we have any control over. We got your “local” right here.

    My county is one of the handful in my state that uses Dominion equipment. My new hobby is to do what I can to have that changed; preferably back to our previous system of cardboard ballots counted by hand in public view, right there at the polls.

    It’s not spectacular, but it’s what I can do. If we can deny the enemy control of our electoral process, there’s still a small chance that we might be able to vote our way out of this mess. And if not, well, I was doing something useful instead of crying in my beer.

    1. Now that is an objective. But for those of us in states that are fraud by mail (case in point – oregon – and I just bought a damned house so I am not quite ready to run), we need a FRAGO.

      1. I’ve been considering this question, and what I’ve come up with is a letter/e-mail to the appropriate people (local, state, and yes, congress) suggesting the following improvements:
        1. All ballots must be physically marked by the voter. You can count with a scanner/machine, but you must have a physical ballot, retained for an appropriate length of time (at least the duration of the term of office).
        2. All ballots must be counted in the presence of the public–anyone who wants to watch can (made much, much easier with webcams). If the public isn’t there (or “technical difficulties” cut the feed, counting stops).
        3. Any registered voter in a jurisdiction has the right to request an audit of the results if there are indications of irregularities.
        4. Mail-in ballots must be specifically requested, and only for a clearly defined set of reasons. Signature matching between the ballot envelope and the request likewise takes place in public. Counted either first or last in the stack, and kept segregated.
        5. ID, at least similar to that required to open a bank account, required to prove your identity.

        I’m sure there are other ways to make the system more secure. My thinking is that if all levels of election administration get flooded with the suggestions, on a regular basis, someone might pick up one or two of them.

        1. 1. Every ballot has a unique serial number printed on it. Every valid serial number must be logged before the election. No ballot not on that list will be accepted FOR ANY REASON!

          2. The ballot’s serial number is duplicated on the little tear-off strip, which the voter keeps. You always know which ballot is yours.

          3. All votes are mirrored on a public web site. Anybody can look up any ballot by serial number and check the votes recorded for that ballot. Anybody with a LOT of spare time can re-count the entire election for themselves.

          4. The State is prohibited from making or keeping any record of which ballot was sent to any absentee voter. A ballot was mailed to Joe Average at 42 Side Street, Apartment 12. Doesn’t mean some crooked election officials WON’T, but they’re breaking the law.

          5. Absentee ballot requests and the mail-in envelope are both checked against the signature on that voter’s registration.

          6. Only those ballots filled out by a registered voter and received by 8:00 PM on Election Day are to be counted. All ballots received after the deadline or not used are to be marked VOID and so are their database entries.

          7. All vote counting to be streamed in HD on a public web site which anybody can watch. If there are ‘technical issues’ the count STOPS. Non-compliance is automatically considered a willful criminal act committed by everybody cooperating in the illegal counting.

          8. In addition to official election monitors, any citizen can observe the count in person, limited by available space in the counting rooms. No citizen witness can be barred or removed unless for blatant violent or disruptive behavior.

          Those rules would make election fraud almost impossible to hide, or deny. Correcting it might still be hard, but at least everybody would know where to look.

          1. Serial numbers, especially with any way to tie to a voter, give me pause. At least for day-of, in-person, you can issue a set number of ballots to each precinct, and they have to account for each one–voted, spoiled, not used. This SHOULD be standard, but… Also, it’s easy to do.

            I suppose mail-in you would have to sacrifice a layer of secrecy for the option. I wonder if you serial number the privacy envelope, and keep meticulous track of how many ballots go out?

            1. Unique ballot serial numbers are essential. Without them you get ‘Pallets Full Of Ballots In The Middle Of The Night’ or 2.6 million mail-in ballots counted when only 1.8 million were ever sent out. You get some ballots with bar-codes, and some without. Phony ballots run off on laser printers in the night, complete with votes for Democrats already filled in. People being told on Election Day that they already voted. With serial numbers, if there are bogus ballots you at least know HOW MANY.

              Maybe we should extend Election Day, from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM. Give everybody 16 hours to vote, and if voting is at all important to them, they will. If it’s not, that’s up to them. Didn’t Stalin force people to vote? Because it would be embarrassing if they had an election and nobody showed up.
              ———————————
              “Elections are not decided by votes. They are decided by who counts the votes.”

              1. With serial numbers, if there are bogus ballots you at least know HOW MANY.

                Assuming they tell you how many there were to begin with.
                Assuming they let you audit how many were cast, spoiled, not used.
                Assuming they give you any information at all.

                It’s trivially easy to devise an ironclad voting system, but when the voting officials are the ones committing the fraud and when the response to any irregularity is “can’t prove nuthin’, sux to be you, luser”, there’s not much point.

                2. You might say, “but observers!” But when the observers are denied access, and when they complain and the officials say “sux to be you”, well…

                  You might say “count before the eyes of the public!” But the “public” in the counting room just happen to be 100% Democrat activists, because oops, somehow all the Republican voters who might show up just happen to have their tires slashed, or their kids threatened, well…

                  You might say “chain of custody!” But the people who transport the ballots and sign off on the receipts just happen to all be Democrats, and complaints and requests to see the receipts are met with “too bad so sad. sux to be you”, well…

                  I read somewhere that the highest proof of loyalty in politics was the willingness to perjure yourself under oath, with the implication that it happened all the time with no consequences other than a promotion. If dishonesty is always rewarded, it will proliferate.

                  1. I won’t say absurd argument; but I would counter that 1 slashed tire is one thing, multiple things causing absence is proof of a crime being committed.

                    I don’t yield to threats against me or my family; so don’t bother trying. And don’t even think of trying to cause harm to a member of my family. You’d be safer just putting a bullet in my head.

                    1. Well of course it’s proof of a crime committed. And when you report it to the Democrat cops and the Democrat DA and the Democrat mayor and the Democrat judge, and complain to the Democrat media, I’m sure they’ll get right on that and punish … the …

                      oh. right.

              2. Penalty for disclosing who got which ballot would need to be sufficiently severe to deter disclosure, but I suppose I could get behind that.
                16 hour election day works for me.
                I’m not sure the actual number of bodies mattered, but was (still is, in some places) embarrassing to have anything less than a 97% victory.
                Hmmm…now all we need is some legal group to put these ideas together and start circulating as a “model law” for states to consider. Like I said, flood the field and someone might pay attention.

              3. Randomize the serial numbers, so blocks of numbers MMMM through NNNN can’t be ID’d as a block of XXXX precinct, full of pesky opposition voters. (This is already done with stuff like software serial numbers.)

                Absolutely no centralized counting, and no moving of ballots until after they’re counted. The purpose of centralized counting is to allow convenient injection of boxes of mystery ballots (van leaves the precinct with 20 boxes, arrives at the counting house with 21, or with one swapped along the way). Count at the precinct, immediately after the polls close (like we used to do). Report the tallies under the collective eye of mutually hostile partisans.

          2. #3 removes the anonymity of voting. Also, as long as picture ID is not required to vote and same day registration is allowed, none of this means anything.

            1. #3 — No, because nobody knows which serial number corresponds to which voter except that voter, who has the tear-off strip. You can check that your own ballot was recorded correctly. You can check any other ballot, but you have no clue whose ballot it was.

              I was only addressing election fraud perpetrated after the vote. Dead voters, imaginary voters, repeat voters, and ineligible voters are outside the scope of those measures and will have to be dealt with by other means. Requiring valid ID for registration, ensuring that each voter is only registered to vote in one precinct, and having a meaningful registration deadline, are all obvious prerequisites for a secure election.
              ———————————
              Why do ‘progressives’ believe their anointed victim groups are too stupid to fill out the same simple paperwork as everybody else?

          3. Good list. I wish we could do this. The Dems will never let us fix elections in areas they control though. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try though. What I don’t understand is why every single person who’s hit with that stupid “voter suppression” claim doesn’t always hit back with “you want to cheat on the election by reducing security”. And say it over and over and over.

            1. “How can it be ‘voter suppression’ when it applies equally to everybody? I am not ‘suppressed’. Do you believe that [victim group] are too stupid to fill out the exact same paperwork as everybody else? I guess I have more respect for them than you do.”

              To be a Leftroid, you have to believe that treating everybody the same is RRRAAACIIISSST!!!, and treating people differently based on their skin color is not.

            2. Another thing — registration deadlines are only for the current election. If they’re late, they can still register, they just have to wait and vote in the next election. Is being too late for ONE election such a terrible hardship?

            3. Wrong. You go with these fixes. You push the legislation. When you get to the debates, you hammer them for deliberately enabling fraud, for conspiring to commit crimes, for taking babies candy, beating pregnant old grandmothers, and spitting on sidewalks. YOU NEVER COMPROMISE AND NEVER SURRENDER. You DESTROY them and their reputations if necessary. We tried playing Mr. Nice Guy. That’s what got us here in the first place.

              2. Their vote against ballot integrity is basis for attack ads next election: “Representative [Hoyer] doesn’t need you vote. Representative [Hoyer] doesn’t care about your vote. Representative [Hoyer] can make his own votes. This election day tell Rep. Hoyer your vote counts. Vote AGAINST Rep. Hoyer.”
                ~

          4. You’re making things much more complicated than they need to be. All you need is a paper ballot, a writing instrument, and some warm bodies to do the count.

            The election volunteers counted them by hand, right out in front of the voters, every half hour, and posted the totals. You could stand at the table and watch, and make your own count, which you could then check against what they called in. I never thought to ask who those people were; the counting tables looked like they’d raided a senior citizen center. But they could have schoolchildren do it, or draw lots; there are lots of ways to get warm bodies for the job.

            The totals were called in to a central office. *There*, I don’t know how things went. But any organized group of consequence could count every vote as it was cast, if they wanted to.

            That’s our old system, that I will be working to get back. Oh, and even with the Dominion machines, we still require state-issued photo ID, and you have to be pre-registered to vote at your assigned voting place. You can’t just waltz in on Election Day, or go from poll to poll, or even vote twice at the same location. They used a pen to cross your name off the fanfold printout of assigned voters before they gave your a ballot, now they look it up on a laptop. I’ll be pressing for a return to paper.

            Nothing electronic can be trusted.

            1. Even with paper ballots and counted on the spot (yes, I remember when…), I like the idea of serial numbers (randomized to avoid identifiable blocks), if only because then there’s another point of cross-check in the event something goes awry, such as someone pulling a fire alarm.

              When there are enough witnesses to the local count, the combined tally can be checked for identical numbers at the end of the day. We sent you XX, Joe sent you YY, why does your tally not total XX+YY??

          5. “3. All votes are mirrored on a public web site. Anybody can look up any ballot by serial number and check the votes recorded for that ballot. Anybody with a LOT of spare time can re-count the entire election for themselves.”

            Doesn’t actually take that much; every testing tool such as LoadRunner can capture the HTML and use a regular expression to parse the values out.

        1. Wholesale is better, but if it doesn’t work entirely… retail is backup. But it needs to be something that doesn’t cause immediate failure, but in a fairly short time.

    3. Interesting targeting. But I don’t think the legislative solution is likely to get anywhere in places Dominion is entrenched, unless they’re literally swamped out by too many warm bodies flat out preventing Dominion “votes” from being counted: either you show up, vote in person on paper, and we count it right here and now (not in some centralized location where it’s easy to inject boxes of mystery ballots) or these votes simply will not be tallied, because we physically won’t allow it, and if we have to destroy Dominion equipment, so be it.

      But that takes a majority who understand that they’re being robbed, so it can’t come back on you as “voter suppression”.

        1. I like how you think. 😀

          Oh, and be sure to leave an Antifa calling card spraypainted on the wall.

    4. First, try to avoid The Name Which Must Not Be Posted, at least in connection with election fraud. I call them Don’t-minion vote stealing machines.

      Second, it’s not just the screens you see at the polls. There are also the tally machines at the vote-[mis]counting centers, the company in Spain that owns them, and the servers in Germany that might or might not have been raided in the middle of the night while guarded by the CIA. It’s the not-so-SmartMatic software that was originally written by three Venezualan hackers to steal elections for Hugo Chavez.

      Computer forensic investigators have also found that Don’t-minion vote stealing machines were in continuous communication with some entity in China, both during and after the elections.

      Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as you think!

      No, it’s MUCH worse.
      ———————————
      Wing: ”Have you ever heard the phrase, Living well is the best revenge?”

      Miles: “Where I come from, someone’s head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge.”

            2. I’ve read that female aspies present differently too. It’s not so obvious. I wonder if that includes a more “masculine” slant of mind. Seems like women in general are somewhat more inclined to go for the “socially constructed” policy positions.

                1. That would explain the Daughter Unit and myself – we both have always felt that we have a more practical and masculine attitude towards things. Like – yeah, we’ll listen to our strictly female friends moan about their current problem – but then we expect them TO GO OUT AND DO SOMETHING POSITIVE TO SOLVE THAT PROBLEM!

                  2. A useful question there – for anyone involved – is “Are you just venting to blow off steam, or are you going to want practical advice for this?”

                    You can calibrate the level of attention you pay to the particulars based on the answer. ^_^

                    1. My husband and I have that phrase, and use it. It helps that I can forthrightly acknowledge that, sometimes, I just want to Bitch!

              2. I too have noticed this subset of females who think more like males, tho they are not exclusively aspie. (It’s an inherited trait in dogs, so no doubt in humans too.)

                I’ve also noticed that most male-minded females assume that all females think like males, often do not understand standard-issue females, and generally object to their “socially constructed” (safety-first, liberty when convenient) positions.

                2. They MIGHT be those people who have Northwestern European heritage; a high percent of them have Neanderthal DNA. Or, maybe it’s the ‘hill folk’ DNA; tends to skew towards those that are independent and self-sufficient. Weeds out the useless females, who are prone to drama.

              3. One thing I read from a random guy on Twitter was that autistic women have an obsession with truth that most women don’t. This mostly just amused me except that obsession with truth is spot on for me.

                  1. I resemble that too. I like other women, but when reviewing my better female friends, they mostly fall into the more male minded category. I like some traditionally female things too, I guess… Though on aecond thought I collect and fix sewing machines more than I actually sew, so that’s kind of a more male approach too. Amyway, I’ve spent my entire life in male occupations: fixing typewriters for IBM followed by 34 years programming.

              1. And what can he do about it if the test indicates autism is likely?

                A great number of people seem to *want* to be “special, just like everyone else”, but the only real result of taking such a test might be to put you on a list that could bite you someday.

            5. I wish I had been brought up in a hyper-social and connected culture. Only child and mother and father all Aspies. My mother raised me well, and I can go through introductory social actions with ease, but if things go off script I just freeze up. It’s hard for me to make friends, I think people think I’m uninterested or cold.

              Everyone goes for the how can we fix this conversation in the house, when others want to vent. But I’m good at math, often better than all but 20% of the boys, when I’m not self distracting with worries about if I will ever get a life at all, and about the potential fall of the Republic.

              I think that the left has bitten off more than they can chew. We will win. I’m just anxious about the journey to victory.

        2. Way ahead of you, Cyn. >:D

          Why do you think they had to steal the election so sloppily that we all know they stole it?

          Apropos of nothing, did all you nerds and code-monkeys know that the DerpMinion machines have Bluetooth and WiFi connections? Uh huh. And USB ports. They aren’t supposed to, but they do. They also have guest accounts with default passwords, which unionized government employees are often too stupid/lazy/criminally incompetent to change.

          And I’m not even a software guy. Imagine what a bored software engineer could manage.

          1. Glad to hear it. Now what can I do? Yes I knew there was a connection to the outside world. I figured USB ports because of the missing votes on thumbdrives. I didn’t realize bluetooth and I suspected WIFI, but they don’t give us any info. TO BELIEVE that these elections weren’t rigged is to believe in the tooth fairy. Oh yea– too easy… I’m not a software (hardware when I did electronics)… I do have an imagination.

            1. Imagine the fun you could have with a Pirate Box that masquerades as a DerpMinion machine. That way you don’t have to do anything illegal yourself, like hack a DerpMinion. You just leave an Altoids tin at the voting location and collect evidence on other people trying to hack the DerpMinion machines.

              Or a Wi-Fi packet-sniffer. Gather evidence of the machines being hacked in real-time.

              Why give the bastards an easy ride? Come at them sideways. Catch them doing shit, don’t do shit yourself.

          2. Also I’ve been speechless at the stupidity of people saying that the DOM machines were not a viable way to steal votes. How dumb are they? Don’t answer that… I watched it over and over again with being told they were safe and knowing that they could be connected to the internet (and now any friggin phone or device with bluetooth). We might as well said COME ON DOWN and play in our elections to every TOM, DICK, and HARRIET country…

            1. “Also I’ve been speechless at the stupidity of people saying that the DOM machines were not a viable way to steal votes. How dumb are they?”

              They’re not dumb. They’re on the opposite side. Any time I see something so stupid it strains my liver, I assume enemy action.

              https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/12/30/witness-testifies-dominion-voting-equipment-and-internal-data-hacked-live-during-georgia-senate-hearing/

              This is the video of the hearing. The guy got into the voting pad on WiFi, with a -phone-, while real live voting was in progress. And then from the voting pad to the voting machines, which are supposed to be air-gapped and not on a network at all. But, they were. In Georgia. So gee, I wonder how that runoff managed to go for the Dems, hm?

              Yes, Dominion machines are supposed to be stand-alone units that only spit out enrypted SD memory cards. But they’re not. And when you see somebody insisting they are, in spite of a guy proving they aren’t, right there in Georgia Senate hearing, during live voting, then you just mark that somebody down as playing for Team Sniffer.

              They just lie. That’s all they do.

                1. It’s better to leave them to it. That way you get to see the looks on their faces when it all caves in on them.

                  The Puppy Kickers are going to be very amusing when Reality finally catches them. “But but but we’re on your side!!!”

                  2. Oh, dammit. She was one for the ages. I knew she was sick and soon to pass.

                    One of the greatest quotes I’ve ever stolen was hers. This is a paraphrase: If women had been responsible for creating Western Civilization we’d all be living in caves with really nice curtains.” I’ve used this several times with way over the top “girl power men suck” types; I lost patience, and it did no one any good to see their faces red-up and swell with anger. No one.

  19. The problem is the Republicans that caved had something to lose. What happens when people decide they have nothing to lose? What happens when people say “Well, today is as good a day to die as any”?

      1. Note the nifty correlation between large-scale famines and a regional shift to some communist regime:

        1. Starvation by killing all the farmers– has been a known tactic in the Communist Totalitarian worlds at least since Stalin (and maybe before).

  20. Actually they don’t know a heck of a lot about real life. And they tend to expect people to act according to their “class” or “race” or whatever. As a friend said this morning, we’re living in a strange world where flying the American flag is simultaneously a government sanctioned display and a sign that you’re a white supremacist.

    I think this explains their behavior two ways. One, it explains why they are “wrong” so often.

    But like the press reports or the USA Today thing I posted in yesterday’s comments, I think it is an attempt to goad us into behaving like we are “supposed to” so they can be right.

    Where those two bite them in the ass is their knowledge that the right is violent. They believe we are violent so everyday is what violence looks like. At its worst, Wednesday is what the violent right looks like. So they keep poking us to be violent.

    But if they get the right, as a whole, to be violent it won’t be like Wednesday. Hell, Wednesday won’t be 1% of what it looks like in just one city.

    1. Wednesday was just a summer walk. Now Antifa and BLM are learning that their masters think they are useful idiots. I wonder how long they will be under the thumb of the DEMS.

      1. I was wondering about that myself – I can just see BLANTIFA leaders watching the streams and muttering “If those wimps were able to get in, imagine what we could have done, with our ‘milkshakes’ and shields and fireworks and lasers to blind the cops! We could have launched the Revolution!”

              2. Consider the difference between intelligence and wisdom…I have no problem believing that many Antifa possess some serious candlepower. They just don’t think *through*.

            3. They aren’t able to process that they might be on the receiving end of unpleasantness.

              Like Moldlylocks, such a thing could never happen to them.

            5. Nah, they set the situation up and then fade back when the Babbitts are out in front.

      2. Supposedly someone planted a pipe bomb at BOTH the local Dem and GOP HQs. (Or at least something that looked enough like a bomb that they used fire hoses to scatter the pieces, or so I heard.) If true, I take this to mean that BOTH sides are being warned by the Antifa contingent — Dems think they run us, GOPs think they can stop us, here’s a middle finger to both of you and we’ll blow up whatever we like.

  21. “Of course he wasn’t. It was always going to be Merrick Garland, communist party member, and Obama’s failed pick for the supreme court (and to the people saying it could be worse, stop it or I’ll beat you.”

    I was expecting Keith Ellison (Muslim marxist) to be offered that job. Or that idiot Gascon who is about to decriminalize crime in L.A. like he did S.F. So yes, it could be worse.

    ===

    “But it was obtained with a different kind of gun to his head. He has a wife and a son.”

    That’s how his body language looked to me. Not quite defeated, but definitely gun-to-the-head. I hope he understands how quickly that can become literal.

    ===

    I don’t normally dream enough to notice. But back around August I had what felt like a prophetic dream… I’ve not said a word about it, being afraid to speak it into being. But now there seems no point in that. Anyway: the setting is just after the election. And I was offered a chance to meet President Trump. So there he is in that black overcoat, standing all alone and looking exactly like last night… and a Secret Service type comes up to me and says, he’s not talking to anyone right now. And that’s when I knew — he’d lost the election. Defeated and had given up. And then I woke up… feeling like the bottom had just dropped out of everything, a sensation that persisted for days.

    It is now altogether too real.

    Don’t give up, Mr.Trump. We have your back.

    1. LA is PISSED at Gascon right now. He’s doing a lot of things that he never mentioned during his campaign, and people are sitting up and taking notice. If he were to be pulled from LA, they might end up putting Lacey (Gascon’s opponent, and the previous incumbent) right back in.

      1. That’s good to hear. I left the area 8 years ago, but I liked L.A. and do not want it to become S.F.

  22. Trump has announced that he’ll skip Biden’s inauguration*.

    Previous examples:
    Andrew Johnson skipped Grant
    John Quincy Adams skipped Jackson
    John Adams skipped Jefferson

    Boo hoo your f***ing “norms” — why should Trump sit there to be abused. Honestly he should probably make sure that he and his extended family are out of the country — somewhere without an extradition treaty, just to be safe.

    1. Good. And it would be hilarious if he did a competing livestream. NTD would cover it even if Youtube bans it.

      And yeah, from somewhere safe. Because while everyone is watching the coup is always a fine time to disappear the resistance.

            1. There were various conflicts between his directly-employed security and the Secret Service that had to be ironed out when was elected.

              He still gets a Secret Service detail (for now) but were it me I’d be staffing up on those ex-Delta and SEAL fellows.

        2. Good point. Outside the country, he’s got only his own family and personal security. Inside the Deep Red U.S., any threat will bring a thousand armed patriots out of the woodwork faster than you can blink.

          1. Outside the country they can legally drone him. At least inside the country it is illegal.

            1. It would serve them right if he went to Israel.

              He’s popular there. Maybe enough to get fast-tracked to Israeli citizenship, run for the Knesset, and give the Usurpers his raised middle finger.

              I doubt it would happen, but it’s within the realm of the possible.

    3. We should have a big Trump rally right across the street from Biden’s fraudulent ‘inauguration’. Laugh at the pitiful few True Believers in face diapers warily keeping their ‘social distance’ from each other while listening to the Poseur Of The United States yell his confused way through a canned speech while squinting at the teleprompters.

      Maybe the stress will be enough to bring on a stroke? The Geezer-In-Chief certainly seems ripe for one.
      ———————————
      Frederick: “Whose brain was it?”
      I-Gor: “Abbie somebody.”
      Frederick: “Abbie who?”
      I-Gor: “Abbie…Normal.”

      1. I’ve been thinking that exact thing since Election Day. Except not right across the street, because that would confuse who’s crowd is whose. Do it at the Lincoln Memorial at the other end of the Mall.

        1. I suspect all the red MAGA hats and Trump flags would clear up any potential confusion.

          Hell, just looking at the crowds! Have you ever seen a clearer distinction between two groups of supporters? Trump’s are bright, colorful and boisterous; Biden’s are bitter and violent, cover their faces, and wear gray and black.

        2. You don’t want the media to be able to claim OUR crowds as “patriotic Biden supporters”. So… separation, sufficient that there can be no mistake.

          Also, to avoid getting set up for nasty incidents by the scum that will no doubt be trailing the Biden camp. If they’re gonna nasty-incident, make them very obviously come to us.

            1. This. No excuse to deploy the DC NG with attack helicopters “just in case” because Ice Cream Nancy is fwightened again if President Trump is on stage at a 100k attendee rally outside Mar a Lago.

  23. They say “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”. I’m at the point where I was on Election Night 2016, except this time my “worst” is now my “best”: four years of grinding awfulness, higher taxes, stupid wars, ritual abuse, mass unemployment, unaffordable gas, arbitrary edicts.

    I’m “prepared” … for a natural disaster. I don’t have the flexibility to prepare for a deliberate disaster. I can’t move away and abandon my daughter even if she’s being Carefully Taught (by her mother and the schools) to hate me. And I don’t know if I’m cut out for small town life without going insane, and definitely not isolated homestead life.

    1. I feel for you with your daughter. That happened to a friend of mine. I truly don’t understand women who use children as weapons. I really don’t.

      1. “Why wouldn’t you use the most effective weapon? That is all a child is.”.

        Passed through enough layers of self-deception that it comes out as “I’m a wonderful person doing what is best for my kid!”.

        *spit*

      2. Honestly, I don’t think Ex is doing it deliberately or even consciously. But she tends to bang on endlessly and unthinkingly about patriarchy and oppression and evil Republicans and all that in front of anybody including Daughter, while I never talked to Daughter about politics because I don’t think it’s an appropriate topic for children. And then of course public school doesn’t help, and since Ex and I are divorced we don’t have enough between us to send Daughter to private school, not that any private school around here in Seattle would be any better anyway. And since Daughter decided she was gay, she’s been taking part in Lambert House online get-togethers with other LGBT kids and god knows what they’ve been telling her.

        I don’t mind if Daughter disagrees with me about things. My mother, before she passed, once told me that my relationship with my father was great until I turned about 11 (Daughter’s age) and started having my own opinions about things and then our relationship went south and stayed there for decades. I don’t want to let that happen with Daughter, but according to Ex she doesn’t want to talk to me about issues because I once said “the US is the greatest country on earth” and that made her “feel unsafe” [eyeroll]. I don’t want to browbeat her into agreeing with me, I just want her be fully informed so she can make up her own mind.

        1. I never talked to Daughter about politics because I don’t think it’s an appropriate topic for children.

          –
          That train left the station a long, long time ago.

          You may have your principles, but your enemies DON’T. Children are being politically indoctrinated from the age of 5 — if they wait that long. If you remain silent, where can she get any hint that all is not as she’s been told?

          At least get her to question the Newspeak. Make her see what it actually means. Ask her WHY she ‘feels unsafe’ about hearing her father’s opinion on his (and her) native country. Is it because of what SHE believes, or because of how her ‘friends’ would react if they knew? Ask her if she really, fundamentally WANTS to have sex with other girls.

          You may consider such topics inappropriate, but THEY DON’T, and they have already started to poison her mind. At least try to make some antidote available.
          ———————————
          It takes a LOT of education to make somebody that stupid.

          1. Good idea – going meta forces examination of motivations and goals, leading to asking, “Why do they want me to believe that?”

            It also encourages attention to techniques of manipulation, inducing the kids to reach conclusions on their own, an excellent means of persuasion.
            ~

            1. It’s a survival skill, necessary for good mental health and stability. And one every person ought to possess. A healthy dose of skepticism is *always* warranted when dealing with persons in positions of power, and those that want something from you.

      3. I do.

        One of the reasons I know I am a bad person is I know how effective as a weapon or a tool for revenge a child is and just where the line for me to decide using one is acceptable.

        1. Since Wednesday is the first time as an adult I’m truly happy I did not have children. It radically frees up my range of action.

      4. Speaking as someone who ended up at ground zero of that kind of mess, all I can say is there’s something… broken, in some people. They see themselves as the center of the world, and their children not as mini human beings to be brought to adulthood and released, but as “Object That Reflects On Me”. Of course you use objects to get what you want.

  24. So, everyone breaks.

    If you can endure until the stuff you know is aged a bit that’s great, especially if you’ve arranged it so that people who could be vulnerable to things you know getting out have a way to know you are not at liberty anymore, but everyone has a breaking point, and there are plenty of people who are good at getting you to tell them stuff.

    It turns out one of the things that matters most for how you get through that experience is what you do after you first break, after you give them something you didn’t want to give them: You need to reset, and go back to making them work for it from scratch. Every time, make them start over.

    They will work really really hard to get you to give up and just cooperate. That, not the first time they get you to tell them something, is what you have to work to counter.

    Try to not be brittle – bend, don’t shatter. Be as much like water as you can – give them stuff if you have to, but try to flow around their efforts. Be dumb, be dense, be too tired to understand.

    And if the only thing they want is for you to lie about how many lights there are, tell them there are thirty damn lights. Then if they lied and don’t let you go, do your reset and go back to making them work for it.

    And don’t give up when you break, because everyone breaks.

    1. If I must give them something, I plan to do my best to boobytrap it one way or another.
      Good thing I’m… Not Evil. (CoWorkers: “Oh, wait…”)

        2. I read a memoir once from a man who defected from North Korea. Heartbreaking stuff, but one woman is my personal hero:

          Little old granny riding in from the country atop one of those electric-run trains, clearly en route to smuggle a bit of spare produce to the black market. Some bullyboy on the ground accosted her as the train stopped and demanded that she join him. According to the author, it was clear she’d be going straight to prison and probably thence to the body pit. “Sure, sonny. Just help me down.”

          This being fairly early days, he reflexively reached up a hand. She took it and reached up her own, straight to the live wire over her head.

    4. I’m reminded of an article (in Reader’s Digest, if memory serves) in the ’70s written by an American who was snatched by the KGB on fake “spying” charges and imprisoned in the Lubyanka and I think later sent to a camp until he was exchanged.

      One of the things he talked about was they were forever giving him documents to sign, and he figured there was no point in not signing them because he could refuse but they would just beat him until he gave in.

      But: he made a point of never signing two documents the same way, and never with his natural signature. Print, cursive, fancy cursive, Cyrillic, cursive Cyrillic, etc. That way they could never present the documents to the American government and say “see he confessed” when his signature would never match the one on his passport.

      Small things, but sometimes you can cooperate but still defy.

      It horrifies me to think that this could ever have any applicability to America. Horrifies me to my bones.

    5. One of the best briefings I ever received in the Army was from Captain Huber. He taught us Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE).
      He’d been caught by the enemy in South America, one of the cartels I think. He talked like he’d been given sodium pentathol.

      His first words to us were “Everyone talks.”

      He told us the same thing you did–don’t hate yourself when you talk because we need you. The enemy seeks to wound, and that’s inside and outside both.

      1. Command has to assume that the enemy gets everything out of you. Command can change what you knew so it’s no longer valid, but if you resist unto death, they can’t get you back.

        1. Yep. But until you’ve either been in the senior position or just figure it out, when you bleat you feel like you just lost the war and got all your comrades killed.

          1. I suspect its even worse when they take one of your men, or women, and torture them in front of you instead.

      3. Any anesthesiologist can tell you that they can completely suppress your conscious memory and get you to babble on and on about anything. One of the things they don’t want the rest of us to know about; and professional ethics and federal and state laws bars them from repeating anything a patient said under anesthesia.

        1. This is true.

          The issue is the subject then does not remember answering those questions, which in the end is the point – they need you to switch over to cooperating going forward because they will certainly not be smart enough to know in advance what all the questions are going to be that they need to be answered, so they need you as an ongoing cooperating information resource.

          But if they just need your ATM pin, they will get that using any of several methods.

          1. And they can find all the places your guns fell out of the boat, and all your storage caches, and bug out places.

            So don’t fall into their hands in the first place.

  25. The one bit of solace I’m taking in all of this is the clarity that times like this offer. To move forward, it’s best to see who really believes in all the words that have been pouring out of their mouths all this time, and who doesn’t.

    We know who the Left was and is. That much is plain, and for that – and that only – I can respect them. But the remainder on the Right, whose masks have been slipping for the past few years, I’m relieved to see their masks finally fall to reveal their snarling authoritarian faces hiding behind excuses of “decorum” and “principles” that fake recoils at the horror of a handful of people tossing some chairs around in a public building.

    The crocodiles will come for them soon enough, their appetites whet by their pleas of “But I said I hated Trump, and I have manners!!”

  26. The Doctrine and Covenants, one of the Latter-day Saint books of scripture has some important promises about the Constitution and the United States. God will not forsake us even when everyone else does.

    “77 According to the laws and constitution of the people, which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles;

    78 That every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment.

    79 Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another.

    80 And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood.”

    1. I just started the D&C on my personal study (first time since my mission, really), and I also think it is not a coincidence that it is also the one we’re to be studying overall this year…

      I’m finding it more comforting than I ever have. Though I am also noting that the Lord was *also* saying in a lot of the sections “And also there’s a really really rough road ahead, so buckle up and endure.” And as with all things, He wasn’t just talking about that moment in time…alas.

      1. I reluctantly admit I voted for him in 2012. I’m really, really sorry I ever did so. And I’m not sure that I don’t feel sorry for anyone under his purview when he was a bishop/stake president. Yeargh.

          1. I don’t think he has enough ambition to be WORSE than 0bama… 😛
            ———————————
            A politician is worse than a toilet. They’re both full of shit — but at least you can flush the toilet.

  27. They tell us to keep a beacon light shining.

    Am I wrong for wanting that light to come from a bonfire of the iron fisted fascists?

    2. No, it’s not.
      I’m going to keep candles on my windows till we find our way back to America. I recommend all patriots do the same. Let them see our lights and wonder.

        1. I was thinking of the phrase, Better to light a candle than to curse the Darkness. We need to think of ourselves as Followers of The Light.

            1. And should that torch fall from thy compatriot, seize it up and hold it high! Charge forward with the standard and do the same if its bearer falls! Should all other weapons fail thee, spear the enemy with the standard itself! If we must fail, then let the ground be soaked with the blood of our enemies; their bodies in piles around us as our payment to Death.

              I really need to stop reading or watching Shakespeare. Or maybe I need to read and watch even more?

      3. Until they decide candles are “hate symbols”, and urge their minions to heave bricks through your windows while their police stand by and snicker.

  28. I have been listening to youtubers and mainstream about those don’t -machines and I realized that most of the “normals” and that includes judges do not understand the implication that they votes went to other countries and that their was a line to China. They still believe that there is no way to prove that the integrity of those machines were broken. And how the hell did we let these machines have “proprietary” software? So 1-outside line to the world and 2- proprietary software … should have invalidated all of those votes. It is proof in my mind that the entire election was fraudulent. But then I worked as an electronics tech for ten years before my illness.

    I couldn’t believe that everyone dismissed this side of the “voter irregularity” issue. This is the kraken folks and the judges refused to hear it.

      1. The thing is, that means that any ruling by a judge is not valid. Legality is irrelevant when those making rulings are not competent to do so, and aren’t reasonably capable of being educated to be competent.

        These paragraphs in particular ring true right now:

        – He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

        – He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

        – He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution,

        – For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

        – He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our ‘fringes’, the merciless Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

    2. Yeah, there was this damn fool child using the name Nemo over at MHN.

      I quote:

      (an open source system, publicly created and audited by some of our finest universities would be a potential option)

      Either a liar, or a sub-moron level retard.

      No time to unpack why, for the normies, this is insane nonsense on the order of cutting out hearts to preserve the Fifth Sun. Will do so later.

        1. Left off: apparently at least Georgia election machine adjacent, and /proud/ of it.

          There was a reason my enraged off the cuff response to the fine example of somebody’s school system first discussed the issue of why universities as an institution were not people that all the American persons can afford to trust on this issue.

            1. Even if you have a genuinely conservative graduate student or professor, who is actually strictly honest about what they say, to be able to stay in the hell that is academia they shut their mouths about certain untruths, even in a university located inside a conservative state.

              So, from the outside, if you are not personally skilled in the hardware and software engineering design arts, where the function of a computer system is a controversial political question, you absolutely cannot trust someone with the right credentials if they are at a university. You cannot assume that they would give up their job and their reputation among their colleagues in order to speak up about a technical issue that is not perfectly reliable.

              That is before the questions of engineering professors with research agendas to push with regard to their pet design tools.

              Of course, engineers in industry are where you would find more of the right sort of design experience for a secure system. Those guys are also problematic from a trust perspective, because politics is so wealthy that there is a lot of funds available for bribing people who had previously only done good work.

              There are a whole lot of people who you should ignore rather than trusting, if you do not have the skills to personally verify what they are saying. Then there is the subset where you have the skills to show that they are probably wrong, if you took the time to study it to the point of being able to prove it.

              1. Even if you have a genuinely conservative graduate student or professor, who is actually strictly honest about what they say, to be able to stay in the hell that is academia they shut their mouths about certain untruths, even in a university located inside a conservative state.

                Define “the right credentials”?

                One of the greatest values in open source is anyone can make a push request, from a 9 year old hacker to me. Conversely, the best credential to audit a major program is a huge number of accepted pull requests on stable projects in widespread use.

                I’d trust Linus Torvald, Richard Stallman, or Dan Boorstein (he’s got some modules in CPAN and is a good less famous example) to audit software more than any professor I had in my CS classes for just that reason. They’ve not credentialed academics. They are people with thousands of publicly available lines of code in use by millions of people every day.

                But even I wouldn’t trust them for a voting system because I don’t trust computers for that.

                Lever action voting machines are like Unix Version 7, superior to everything that came before and came after.

                1. Right credentials is a much broader question than that specific case. Pretty important one. Doctors have been much discussed this year.

                  But yeah, professors spend a lot of their time on teaching and research, neither of which counts for much in the way of design time for these specific hardware and software issues. If I were to trust a designer, I would trust TRX and Steve Nelson before trusting a random professor. Or even a competent trusted professor who just doesn’t have the industry design experience, and whose expertise is in some rarified area that isn’t voting machines. And academics specializing in voting machine design would themselves be inherently suspect. I would trust esr, RCPete and Larry Corriea as auditors before I trust an academic.

                  All these statements of mine are hypothetical, as I see no reason to trust any combination of people to design electronic voting machines, or to audit them after the fact. Even if I had the skills, I probably would not want to trust myself.

                  Mainstream consumers use smartphones for banking. There is no way on God’s green earth that they know enough about the internals of electronic voting machines to keep anyone using them honest.

                    1. I had the impression that you could at least hum a few bars of hardware engineering better than Larry (accountant) and esr (programmer). 🙂

                      You would know your own limits much better than I could.

                    2. Yeah, I can, but who am I to pass up a perfectly good straight line? [VBEG]

                      One of my super powers is the ability to break software systems. Don’t need a computer, either.

                    3. Dratted nesting.. Bob: speaking of esr, anyone heard from him lately? his blog has been dormant since September. Couple months was normal but this is getting worrisome.

                    4. I asked this very thing yesterday; answer was that there are technical issues with the blog that he can’t get fixed (since it’s not on his server).

                    5. There seems to be a lot of blogs gone sideways due to server issues. Especially those with viewpoints right of center Lenin. If I weren’t a cynical bastard, I’d say it’s an amazing coincidence. But I am, and I’ll go with “enemy action”.

                    6. Us at Chicagoboyz have a regular weekly zoom meet-up, and last night two of us noted that the conservative site Rantburg had been down for a week. The proprietor has a back-up site on a personal blog, but even that is down. A suspicious coincidence. I’ve followed Rantburg for years – they link to all kinds of national and international materiel, with an eye towards following international terror networks.

                2. Back in the olden days there were questions about those lever action voting machines too.

                  Having argued with Stallman a few times back when, I concluded he’s basically a communist, to be trusted when his goals align with yours.

                  1. Back in the day, the Chicago machine had people “helping” those unfamiliar with those machines. There was a big lever you threw to close privacy curtains, then you’d flip the levers to select your vote. Throw the big lever again and it a) opened the curtains and b) recorded your vote.

                    They’d show people how the machine worked, registering a straight party ticket vote for every demonstration.

              2. This is why the only secure voting system is a no-tech system. Hand-marked ballots only, hand-counted only, totals from each polling station written by hand and signed by the returning officers, aggregated by hand for the county or district.

                Those who say the elections are too big to handle this way are idiots. Yes, more votes are cast now than 100 years ago when there was no mechanical help. Yes, you have a bigger population. A bigger population also means you have more people to count the votes, and more people available to serve as watchdogs. Nor is the management problem insurmountable; the number of layers required to provide oversight such that one person is responsible for x subordinates increases with the size of the organization n as logx(n). If you can manage 1,000 people with three levels of management, you can manage 10,000 with four – and the growth in size and complexity of the elections has not been a full order of magnitude since 1900.

                Remember what Doctor Who said (the real Doctor, the old series, not the Zombie Woke Reboot): ‘The more advanced the technology, the more vulnerable it is to primitive assault.’ Plenty can go wrong with paper and pen, but it requires active human malice to do so. Computers, once programmed maliciously, will perform evil actions autonomously until someone pulls the plug.

                1. Heh, heh. Next thing you know, somebody will open up one of those Don’t-minion vote stealing machines and find a tiny little Dalek inside, running it.

                    1. Thanks to their defamation suit against Sidney Powell it is likely that the discovery process will compel them to prove her theory wrong by exposing the software coding.
                      ~

                2. Paper ballots, ink pens, and ink finger. Inky finger? You already voted, get out. Simple systems, as you say, require different methods to subvert.

      2. The open-source part of that is correct: if you’re going to have electronic election systems, they MUST be totally open so anyone can look at how they work. It’s well-known in the software field that encryption systems that are closed source are ALL flawed, because even if nobody has deliberately inserted a back door, encryption is so hard to get right that it’s almost impossible to get it right without thousands of experts looking at it and trying to find its flaws.

        Where he fails totally in that sentence is how he attributes credit to universities. Even leaving aside the poisonous political nonsense they’ve been infiltrated by, these days practically no good open-source software is coming out of universities. (It did in the 80’s and 90’s, but if he’s still stuck in the 90’s mindset he’s in for a rude awakening.) All the good open-source tools are coming from companies who built them to get their main profit-making work done, and decided that it’s in their best interests to open-source the tools because then other people will help improve the tool “for free”. (Scare quotes because it’s never free for the company: they always end up paying the salaries of the main developers, and the lead devs have to take time to integrate the community contributions into the software, and so on on… but they were paying the devs’ salaries anyway, and they do end up benefiting from open-sourcing their tools). Examples: VS Code from Microsoft. Seriously good software, far better than any software that ever came from any university, even in the 80’s and 90’s.

        1. Open source is correct as a prerequisite, but there is a implication that IT security, CS, and EE types overlook when they don’t analyze this fresh.

          Open source code is straightforward enough. What about the hardware?

          Okay, suppose we have an open hardware design for a programmable board. Possibly a 4 layer PCB, so that a really large number of people can freely audit it.

          TRX was speculating about the possibility of a design with proprietary connectors, that are not user accessible. Problem is, he is thinking what makes sense when you can control access to the hardware enough to prevent people from swapping hardware.

          If the hardware design is open, someone can change the design, say, by adding a memory card slot, and have a bunch of compromised boards fabricated. Can we trust ‘our’ observers enough to conclude that they could prevent board substitutions?

          No. From the outside, a multilayer board could look the same, and have different internal functioning. Inner layers of the board. With political stakes as high as they are, and with a nation state backer of China’s ability, we have to assume that if we are checking labels on IC chips, that the fraud is concealed at the IC level, and that the labeling is forged.

          There are people with the skills to inspect an electronic voting machine, and verify legitimate functioning. But not so many of them able to do so as easily as we would need for political elections.

          So, paper ballots, or maybe Herb’s mechanical lever machines if the auditing and inspection skills can be demonstrated as widely accessible.

          1. Simple solution to the hardware problem: the hardware is off-the shelf, standard commercial hardware that can be purchased anywhere, e.g. a standard PC. Bonus points for using something standard and cheap like a Raspberry Pi. Then if there’s any question about one piece of equipment, pick a random store, drive down and pick up a new unit off the shelf and plug it in, and replay the same inputs through the new machine to see if the same outputs come out. Someone might be able to insert compromised boards into the product lines of a specific factory, but for something like the Pi that’s mass produced by the millions? There are going to be LOTS of Pis out there, and it’s impossible to know at the factory which ones are going to end up in the voting centers you’re trying to target.

            So you can’t go with corrupting the specific machines, you have to insert a corrupt chip into every single Pi that comes out of your factory. And how is that corrupt chip going to know how to spring into action? A message received over the Internet? That’s easy to defeat: just do the smart thing and don’t plug your voting machines into the Internet in the first place. (The fact that there were voting machines online and downloading updates on Election Day is prima facie evidence that the people running those machines were either incompetent or corrupt, and I know which way I’m betting.) But you have to plug them into the Internet to send in your totals, you say? No, you don’t. Phone the results in, and stick the data on a USB stick with the appropriate electronic certifications and have it hand-carried to DC to confirm the numbers you phoned in.

            But back to the point of view of the attacker trying to compromise the system… it’s open-source, so although he can’t insert malicious code without someone seeing it, he can reproduce their build and know the binary signature of the build, and have his corrupted chips spring into action when that specific binary signature is run, and do nothing else on other software. (If the chips produced wrong results all the time, they’d be rejected at the factory and nobody would install them, so you have to design your bad chips as “sleeper agents” that only spring into action when the right conditions are detected.) Thing is, that’s trivial to defeat once you have any clue that that plan is in place. If the chips are detecting a specific signature, it’s trivially easy to change that signature by simply changing the version number of your program, adding a couple lines of text to the “How to use this software” instructions that pop up on first run, or whatever.

            Shorr version: yes, untrustworthy hardware can be an issue, but the answer is totally simple. So simple, in fact, that there’s no way a government procurement process would go for it. Use a $35 computer for our voting? No way! We have to spend tens of thousands per machine on snake oil! That’s a much better use of taxpayer funds, right?

      4. That one is a liar. Either from China Mike’s vile hive or the flopping camel’s. Larry had a flood of them.

        Do yourself a favor and don’t give either one of those bastards a click. The stupid will burn your eyes.

      5. According to Nemo *wince* they did a ballot count to verify the paper ballots matched the scanning machines. What isn’t stated is whether they just counted the number of ballots and the total number of ballots registered by the machines, or whether they tallied the actual individual vote totals to see what the machine said.

        Regardless, that ignores the fact that the machines could be programmed so show the correct totals, yet save the modified counts to the transmission media.

    3. Well, allegedly Democrat senators have been complaining about and decrying the use of Dominion machines for years.

      Until now, when it benefits them, of course.

      I wonder if there’s some secret union of Democrat Vote Counters that was holding them back before. “You can’t bring those machines in here! It’ll make my job of fraudulently counting ballots obsolete!”

      2. Yep, and their media arm was publishing stories about how the machines were subject to fraud until right after election day. Had the Democrat’s fraud effort been unsuccessful, they would claimed that Trump had fixed the machines, demand that the military act to remove him, and all the other stuff they threatened in the John Podesta wargame scenario.

  29. I live among so many people who consider themselves rational, middle-of-the-road people. They don’t follow blogs like this. They don’t even always watch the MSM, but it seeps into them anyway. Yes, the MSM is a MAJOR problem, but so is the culture in general. Ever notice that when a Dem is president, you get movies and TV shows about wonderful presidents? But let’s focus on the MSM for a moment. They set the narrative, so right now it’s full-time conservative-trumpfollowers-insurrectionists-bad. You will never see any effort put into gropey-Joe or women who tell about sexual assault. And just forget about Hunter. So it will never reach the consciousness of the average person. I’ve been aware of this for 20 years now, trying to figure out a solution. I can see only two paths to solving the problem of the MSM. 1. A long-term concerted effort at hostile takeover, or 2. just let the whole system burn down – do everything to hasten it (Cloward-Piven combined with Galt). For the past 50 years we’ve been going thru the death-by-a-thousand-cuts. We must take over the narrative in order to survive.

      2. At least The West Wing was occasionally self-aware. From one of the early first season episodes, Donna says something like “why don’t we just let the people keep their money” and Josh (her boss) says “We’re Democrats. We don’t believe people should be allowed to spend their own money.”

        1. I am sure that line is going to be edited out of it at some point soon-goes against the narrative.

          Meanwhile, Disney/ABC’s boss is expressing outrage about the Jan 6 protest, while remaining silent on the CCP concentration camps run by the CCP’s version of the SS that he thanked for its assistance in filming Mulan.

          https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/01/08/disney-ceo-bob-chapek-condemns-capitol-riots-after-staying-silent-on-mulan-filming-near-chinas-uyghur-concentration-camps/

    2. The major media organizations are collapsing on their own. I suspect we’ll be subsidizing them before long.

      2. Yes they are, but we’ve been hearing that the legacy media is being supplanted for 15-20 years now. Yet here we are and they still set the narrative for the majority of Americans.

      3. Canada is subsidizing our media already. And not the CBC, either. All the big media TV and the newspapers are getting big money from Ottawa. Because they’re all going broke due to most of us not buying their crap anymore.

        1. That, plus they have a legislated oligopoly. No foreign media company is allowed to open up shop in Canada, and no one in the country has enough risk capital to start up a new competitor. Bell and Rogers are a duopoly in many lines of business, and they don’t even pretend to compete against each other.

    3. Politics is downstream from culture. Many of the writers here have been writing damn good stories. It is still hard to take over something when you are on the outskirts. Those that go into the system get corrupted and can’t get out. The few that do say we need to take over the system. I am now of the mind to burn it down.

    4. Other option is a news agency and channel dedicated to truth. The problem with that is funding, people pay more to be told what they want to hear, and not necessarily what they need to hear.

  30. How many lamp-posts are there in D.C.?

    Just asking out of idle curiosity, you understand… 😛

    1. From ddot.dc.gov, “more than 75,000.”

      We might have to double up some to fully drain the Swamp.

      1. One way to drain the swamp: Move the capital to Independence, MO.

        Not only is it close to the geographical centre of the country, and the centre of gravity of the population; the symbolism of the name is just as good as Washington. Best of all, it’s spang in the middle of flyover country, in a flat, boring place with undesirable weather. Thousands of swamp denizens would rather lose power than move to a place like that.

        Then give D.C. the statehood that the Democrats keep whining about, by returning the territory to Maryland from whence it came.

        1. The swamp would follow the power and re-establish itself before you could blink. The same hell would grow up around the new seat of the federal government, the same corruptocrats would flock in and displace the regular folks. If we can’t reform the government where it is, moving it won’t do a bit of good.
          ———————————
          What the protestors should have told those Congresscritters: “This is OUR house. You’re just the help!”

          1. If memory serves, they actually drained part of the swamp in Bolivia exactly the way I described. The one added wrinkle, which I should have mentioned: When moving several government departments to the middle of nowhere, they offered the civil servants therein their full pensions to stay behind and take early retirement. Thousands did, including most of the mere time-servers and go-along-to-get-along types. Since those are the natural followers of the tinpot tyrants, that left the tyrants outnumbered when the move was done.

            Bolivia had a few very nasty decades of coups and political ruckus, far worse than anything you’re going through right now. Other Latin Americans called Bolivia ‘LP country – 33 1/3 revolutions per minute’. They haven’t had any of that sort of trouble since they paid those bureaucrats to quit.

            Remember, some bureaucrats are motivated by power, but most of them will sacrifice anything to keep their pensions.

            1. They shouldn’t HAVE pensions. They should have 401(k)’s like us proles. So should the politicians.

              Better still, they should all have to depend on Social Security for their retirement. 😛

              I’m not depending on Socialist Stupidity. I’ll apply for it; they took about $150,000 from me and I want at least some of it back, but it will be bankrupt before I get even half. I’ve saved my own money, and made investments.

              Allowing politicians and bureaucrats to vote for their own raises and benefits is beyond corrupt.

              1. I agree, they shouldn’t have pensions. But they do, and they can be threatened with the loss of them or bribed into retirement by vesting them early.

                Of course, none of this is more than play-acting in the present situation. But it could become a live issue if, for instance, enough Americans raised enough ruckus in enough red states to start up a Constitutional Convention under Article V. I think Independence would be a very good place to hold that, don’t you?

            2. Bolivia: “We didn’t fall as far as Venezuela because we were already at the bottom!”
              Surprised Morales is not still El Prez but it is one of his lackeys

        2. > undesirable weather

          Uh… have you spent much time in Sodom-on-the-Potomac?

          There was good reason why the various states were willing to donate that land…

          1. “The various states” heck, three’s good reasons *my family* was willing to donate 1/3 of that land.

          2. The point is not that K.C. has much worse weather than D.C. – they are actually much of a muchness, except that K.C. is colder in the dead of winter – but that swamp critters don’t want to go anyplace that actually has weather. They would be all in favour of moving the seat of government to L.A., I’m sure.

            For bonus points, swamp critters think a tornado is a movie special effect with sharks inside.

        2. Goodness. There’s always that *one* thing you forget to purchase at the store, and it’s always the thing you really need.