Dance to the Line

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

Were any of you brats, when you were little? Or did you ever observe natural-born brats in action?

Because I had a natural, massive problem with authority. Which had its issues, because you see, until my heath got better at about 9, I was a little, forever sick kid who weighed nothing, and if she launched herself at someone would have a massive asthma attack and probably die. (Not that I didn’t court death a few times.) But at around six, I discovered that people couldn’t get inside my head and make me do things. They could beat me, they could hurt me, they could yell really loud, but they couldn’t make me do things, or even say they were right.

And then I found techniques. Like, you use the fact bullies can’t stand to be defied against them. And you make sure when they hit you it’s right in front of everyone, and that you “weren’t DOING anything.” Remember that. this is very important.

So, say, the playground bully drew a line with his toe on the sand and said “you can’t cross this.” Okay then. Fine. Right and proper. You dance right up to the line, and then moon walk (even if I didn’t know what that meant, back and forth along it.) You’re not actually crossing the line, but you’re depriving the bully of what he really wants: your fear and submission.

The bully can’t help it. The longer you’re doing your moon walk and grinning at him, the more it’s going to aggravate the living daylights out of him. And he knows — he knows — people watching the scene are laughing at him. So he’s going to hit you. Now, if you’re smart you’ll be ready and duck, which makes him look even worse. And if you duck long enough, he’s going to take off running after you. And if you do time it just right, it will be when the teacher has just come out of the door, to call you in from recess. And she’s going to grab you. And everyone in the playground will say “she wasn’t doing anything.”

(Yes, it is in fact a minor miracle I reached adulthood and the edge of old age without anyone drowning me in an acid bath, isn’t it? But be patient, it might yet come.)

So over this weekend the left went after Parler for the high treasonous crime of letting Donald Trump have an account. They deplatformed them completely, removed their net access (Ah, Amazon); their lawyers quit; their advertisers and providers walked. They must be obliterated, you see, for allowing the POTUS to address the people of the US.

The Potted Plant pretending to have been elected as President then went further and claimed that no, we can’t talk about the protesters, because they’re rioters, insurrectionists, the worst possible in thing in all the possible worlds.

Which means the pseudodent will need to do very serious stuff to stop this very serious insurrection. (And btw, if you believe word ONE about the protesters breaking things, graffitying things or POOPING on things? You’re an idiot. We have footage. Or we did before they removed it. Also, there wasn’t ONE WORD about any of this on the day or after. It trickled out afterwards, like the bully explaining why he lost his mind and chased the skinny kid. You see, we weren’t horrified at what to them was an obvious desecration of their rule and majesty, so they just kept making up shit. Literally.)

What serious stuff? Well! This is a quote from the linked article:

    [Wall Street Journal] “Don’t dare call them protesters,” Mr. Biden said in remarks from Wilmington, Del. “They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”

    Mr. Biden blamed President Trump for inciting the violence, saying he had “unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy.” The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.     […] Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.

This link will give you all the times Trump incited violence, which is none.

So as you see, the bully can’t help himself and is throwing punches. Sometimes you’re going to get hit, like Parler — Hey, Parler guys, seriously? JUST open it up for us to fund you. I’ll buy stock, or even just throw $100 at you. $100 here, $100 there and pretty soon you have real money (and no, I can’t, but yes I will anyway.) And yeah, I know payment processors are refusing to process payments to conservative causes. So? Give me an address. I’ll send you a crisp $100. Getting hit is an accident. Going down is a choice — and sometimes …. well, I don’t even know what to say. But you should be aware that the last threat from the Potted Plant means he’s going to criminalize our ideology, because it leads to violence. They mean, our dissent is violence.

In other words, all is proceeding better than we could possibly have imagined.

Oh please, wipe that look off your face. Think about it. First of all there is something you should be aware of. The way they’re moving this fast doesn’t tell me there was fraud — I already knew that, because I’m not stupid and there’s proof everywhere, so much proof our corrupt courts had to pretend NO ONE HAS STANDING, otherwise the proof would come out in discovery — no. What it tells me is that the fraud was much, much bigger than we imagine. So massive in fact, that they know they’re an unwelcome and resented minority trying to hold on to a majority who doesn’t like them, doesn’t want them and has had just about enough of their sh*t.

All these massive, repressive measures? To quote one of you “It’s afraid.”

Which is very good news. You see, we thought that they were rational. We thought they were going to boil the frog. Perhaps keep the mask order in place (even though we all now know what a ridiculous piece of crap that entire thing is) and try to hector us about saving the Earth, but not make any fast movements. Because …. well, because for four years now they’ve been telling any human being in and out of the United States what a horrible man Trump is, and all the “crimes” he’s committed, but it’s all extremely vague. They tried to push him to give them a casus belli — that’s what all the burn, loot and murder, and standing on highways was ALL about. They wanted him to send troops. But he never did. In fact, he tolerated them, and let the locals deal with them or not any way they wanted to. People saw that. And if asked, they’ll have real trouble coming up with something he did that was that bad.

I mean, he picked on them constantly on Twitter, by saying things that while not illegal the left will cancel you for. Things they forbid de facto, if not in law. They had all those lines, and he was hopping back and forth across them. And it led them to crazed madness and made all their masks fall.

You know…. that’s what we need more of. Since they like Maoist sayings so much, let’s modify one of them: let a million Trumps bloom. Do you know how many people out there are itching to have a proxy war with the Bitchy Bolshie Bullshit Bandits.

Particularly since Queen Grey Goose Bitch Nancy The Hairy One (what, it’s what her surname means. Curiously, also a medieval term for the devil. I calls them as I see them) is already saying the protesters went to Washington because they love their Whiteness or some such bullshit. (Because, let’s. Yeah. Let’s take what is still — not on paper but de facto — the overwhelming majority in this country and demonize them. It’s the Vodka, innit? It’s killed half her brain cells.)

Our problem, of course is that only some of us are seeing all of this (although frankly, considering how badly they lost the election, it might be a very substantial majority.) We need the majority of the country to see it. We need them to see the evil, the horror these people are, and how desperate for power and how — honestly — raving out of their minds crazy they are. We have to keep the heat up. We can’t let up.

Okay, so, let’s make this clear: Ladies and gentlemen, strategy Dance to the Line. Or, you know, if you’re of a more earthy bend, strategy Braveheart which means dance up to the line, turn around and moon them.

There are three things to remember when dealing with the left: three irrational, absolutely visceral, inescapable impulses they have and they can’t do anything about. This type of trait in every movement is the thing that opponents can exploit to bring it down. Even one of these is bad enough, but they have three. Three glaring vulnerabilities. If we don’t push on them, we’re idiots.

1- They have a desperate need to be respected. You saw this in their outrage that conservatives dared — dared — walk into the capitol. Into the domain the left has claimed! How dare we! (Note that the capitol is routinely invaded by leftwing protesters that do all sorts of bad things, but this was terrible, because these protesters didn’t RESPECT them.)
Heinlein said (of petty government drones) that they demand respect because they have no self respect. I don’t think he was right. The left has both a brittle, inflated self-consequence, while at some level they know they are frauds. Their politicians fraud their way in, their professors don’t know anything, their women…. well, if you have to wear a vulva costume to tell us you have one, you’re doing something wrong chicky-honey.
In other words there’s a gaping hole inside them (no, no. It’s not a bad allusion. The vulva is the external part!) which they attempt to fill by demanding continuous and extravagant deference from everyone else.

2- They can’t tolerate dissent. No, seriously, they just can’t. They have absolutely no ability to tolerate it. Like the playground bully, they can’t just see you moonwalking back and forth on the line and go “whatevs. It’s not my job to deal with idiots today, and it’s just a skinny little girl” and turn their backs and walk away. Nope. They have to make you obey, otherwise they lose face, and there goes all that respect. Which they don’t have, from anyone, but think they do, and their captive media helps them keep the illusion. To themselves. They don’t know the rest of us see through them clear as day.

3- They have no clue who we are. The reason they had to resort to massive fraud, is that they keep campaigning as though they were in a country well to the left of Sweden. And sometimes as though they were talking to Chinese peasants. The divorce from reality is massive and yawning, and I don’t even know how to explain it, but it’s there. And when they come across a large enough dissonance from their beliefs, they try to destroy it, even if it’s a minor thing, like the fact say that a first generation Latin immigrant is in fact anti-Marxist. (They’ll foam at the mouth and say crazy sh*t, like “she’s a white Mormon male.”) They react in the ways the normies and LIVs see, and which make them start walking backwards, making the cross sign with their fingers.

This btw, is so baked in to the left, that they really can’t help it, anymore than cats can help chasing a moving string. Which is why it’s okay to share this and talk about it in public. Because they can’t help reacting in these absurd ways.

So, here we go:

So they insist on making a grab. They want to hold us? Okay.

Here’s what we do.

We know, very well indeed, that the Left cannot tolerate differing opinions. Moreover we know that their central drive is for control. We’ve seen this very clearly with the mandates to wear masks much thinner than their own studies justify– mandates that they themselves break anyway. We’ve seen this with mandates to stay home while Cuomo dances with his wife in Times Square. This is about control, and only about control. It’s the way they’re broken in the head. And it will be the way we break them.

Right now people live in the spaces between Leftist rules. Those of us who work side by side, undercover among the Left, know well that they themselves cannot live up to their own rules. That’s the point of all the rules– is to allow arbitrary enforcement on anyone by making virtually everyone a criminal. See the quote about the impossibility of governing honest men.

But there is a way to turn that tendency against them. Dance on the edge of the line.

BECAUSE the rules are about the feelings and desire for control of the rulemakers, they’re not grounded in any physical fact. For that reason they can and will be adapted when the feelings of the rulemakers change. The surest way to get rules expanded is to walk right up to the limits of the line and taunt them from there. For example: let’s say you live in a place where gatherings above a certain size are banned. Well, then you know the exact number of people to have over every night you possibly can.

Say they tell you to wear a mask in an establishment– “no problem, how about this Deadpool mask? It does indeed cover my nose and mouth”. You get the picture. The more ridiculous the rule, the better– find the weak point and work it. (This, btw, is why posting stickers challenging them is completely acceptable. You’re not doing anything wrong, truly. But they’re going to overextend themselves trying to stop you. With luck they’ll make rules where you have to show your ID to buy labels, and annoy the crap out of everyone who buys them for work. Just PLEASE be aware the game is fun but very serious. Yes, they could catch you and kill you. Or worse. This is a war. And they are not patient. But we still need to do it.) Remember, the goal is to stay as firmly legal as possible, but taunt the shit out of them in the process. The taunting is what they’re not going to be able to stand, and five’ll get you ten, they’ll give chase and expand the rules. No problem. Find the next edge and dance.

This isn’t about us. It’s about the people living between the rules. As this process continues they gradually are going to feel more and more of the pinch. (Under “know thy enemy” this is why Lenin said “the worse, the better.”) Odds are that some subset will resent us. Those people are utterly domesticated and would NEVER have been winnable so no loss. Another subset will in all probability join us once they see what we’re doing. But most? Most will get the point– that their leaders don’t give a shit about their well being or the liveability of their lives, only about dominating their enemies. That, in turn, shifts public opinion against the people in power. That, in turn, makes their position even more tenuous than it already is. (And judging by their behavior, it’s thinner than a gauze mask.) It would of course be very unfortunate if the few random hotheads statistically impossible not to have in any sufficiently large population were among those who are pushed to the brink, and I dread to think what they may do, (and do not fool yourself, please. You’re in a war. Some of us are going to get hurt. Say after me “better dead than Venezuela.”) but this is the most viable way of fighting them that we have right now.

This is how we win against the leftists without burning the country down beyond hope of recovery. We get them to play Napoleon Bonaparte to our Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly. They’re trying to push us into open battle, but the winning strategy currently is to retreat and burn the ground behind us until they’re too committed to the attack. Then we hit them with everything we have when they’re overcommitted and we’ve got a majority of people fed up with their sh*t.

Part of our problem is that people don’t actually believe that the left is going to go full Soviet/Maoist extermination. (And I know. I know you think I’m crazy. But the left is insane and sending the National Guard with live ammo to Washington DC in response to what was actually a mostly peaceful protest. They’re following the footsteps of their totalitarian forebears.) They can’t believe it, because normalcy bias is a thing. They’re more awake than ever though, because Trump basically used the strategy of finding where the line of the left’s influence is and standing just on the other side of it and being a loud and obnoxious person who refused to comply with any of their requirements. When the left got more aggressive and got more influence, he took a couple of steps back to the other side of the new line. Every time a new line got drawn and he moved back, the left moved forward and rolled over all of the people in that new space. It’s how Walk Away got started. As the left was getting increasingly aggressive, they started turning people against them. In four years, the left lost more social capital than they have gained in twenty. (And guys, we’ve seen this in science fiction. Only in SF the idiots can’t kill us.)

This is the social equivalent of Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly’s slash and burn strategy when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia. He got the Russian army close enough to be seen by Napoleon’s forward observers and retreated while the French advanced, burning the ground behind him. Napoleon had to chase him, because he needed a decisive victory against the Russians in order to obtain his objectives and get the Russians to sue for peace. What he failed to understand is that the Russians were never going to sue for peace under any circumstances.

I must ask you, please, and seriously to be very very very brave. Know in advance they can hurt you and kill you, even for silly jokes and defiance. Face it. Embrace it. And go on. Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.

We must also be unwilling to sue for peace, (peace? I hate the very word. As I hate hell, all fraudsters and thee!) and yet we also need people to see what the left is really doing, and what they really are. To achieve this, we weaponize Irish Democracy. We engage in malicious compliance. We stick our thumbs in their eyes by boldly telling the truth.

When they start to push us off a platform, we spread the word and leave it in a mass exodus and taunt them the entire way. We take our money with us. Failbook and Twatter can’t make money without eyeballs on their platforms, and if all we buy from Amazon are ebooks, they’re going to be a sad little Amazon. In the end as in their beginning. Whatever they want to believe, there are more of us than there are of them, and we have more buying power. When they pass some outrageous new law, we simply ignore it and continue talking about how stupid it is.

We don’t give up our guns. We don’t stop speaking out. However, we don’t fight either. We laugh and joke, and back up a step at a time, and pull that wave of totalitarian behavior that they can’t help but engage in over more and more people as we do. When we’re off their platforms, they will attack innocent bystanders and each other because they still have to prove dominance. When we fail to follow their dictates, they will ramp up enforcement efforts. The only direct clashes we should have at this point are skirmishes that we can’t avoid because they come after us. When someone has their back to the wall, they fight like a cornered cat and go all out. Take an honor guard.

Yes, we are going to lose people doing this. They’re after power and they aren’t playing around. They’re going to come after people where they can, and we need to make sure that they can’t do it in secret. Get on other platforms. MeWe, Parler, (TRULY GUYS. CRISP $100. To the PO BOX of your choosing.) Minds, whatever. Make phone trees and Signal groups. Get Proton mail, and make it a name you don’t use for anything else.

Keep in contact with people, and if your back is to the wall and you can’t avoid the fight, start livestreaming it to your groups and make people aware of what happened to you. Do not go gently into that good night, and make your last words to the world known. Others will spread the videos around and make sure that it gets seen. This is a war, and there will be causalities. Make plans now for what happens if you end up becoming one, and remember that history is very clear on the fact that your family and maybe friends will get purged with you, no matter what the leftists say. Don’t believe them when they offer to spare your loved ones if you cooperate. They won’t, because they can’t leave people alive who might tell what happened or come after them later.

The only thing I think that needs to be added in is that we follow all the stupid bullshit rules-barely and if possible incredibly stupidly (pretend you’re an utter moron) while taunting them, but no one should surrender any resource. Not guns, not food, not information. Give them nothing that they want. If they want to take something from you, make them come for it in person.

This is asymmetric warfare, and they prepared the ground for it over a long period of time. Don’t just think about this in terms of brass and beans, but in terms of the social connections that actually make a community and a nation. If you could kill every Marxist on the planet, you have still lost if those social connections are broken beyond repair. Give up who you have to, but fight like hell for those you can save. If someone you know sees the light at some point, don’t say, “I told you so.” Say that you’re sorry they had to find out the truth in so difficult a manner. Rebuild, educate, branch out, and create converts to the American cause. You are a missionary. Some of you have practice in this. Speak up, loudly and boldly. You will be despised. They will try to destroy your life and maybe kill you. If you want there to be an America left to save, that is the price you will have to pay. It’s the price we will all have to pay.

And trust me, guys please, it’s much, much better than communism.

As this war progresses, perhaps over a couple of months, (yes, it would normally be years. BUT the Covidiocy has everyone one edge, and I AM NOT JOKING, I want you to spread this to every single friend who might join in. We need a lot of us to do this before they bring famine and destruction to the land) the left is going to overextend themselves. They can’t help but do it. They will continually lose social capital by being the tyrannical monsters that they are. They will be more desperate, and more vicious. Support your friends and neighbors. Get everyone you can connected with one another, and armed. Don’t ever allow the idea that they’ll leave you alone if you cooperate to go unchallenged. They will reach the point that they are chasing us into our strongholds where we are prepared and they are weakened and separated from support. Then we destroy them from those prepared positions.

This isn’t a fast strategy. It’s not a pleasant one. But it’s one we can rebuild from, when it’s all over. You need to remind yourself every time you have to step back and allow them to keep attacking you that you aren’t giving up; you’re leading them to their doom.

Now go. Make your gut into a new heart and dance. Dance to the edge.

754 thoughts on “Dance to the Line”

  1. Wondering why the” like button” hasn’t worked for me here in a while.
    In any case, this is spot on and sums it up perfectly.

    1. WPDE and it’s been borked beyond the usual these last few weeks, erm, months, come to think of it.
      Half the time a comment needs to be copied and a refresh done then past and resend to go through. Notifications don’t. I’m now seeing an inability to like you comment though I clicky the little star.
      [and refresh, and resend]

      1. Logging in has been totally broken on iPads for a month. Have switched to using my laptop because of that.

    2. I am officially off Facebook today. Never was on Twitter, and dropped Google a while ago. Dropping Amazon hurts; and finding alternatives is tough.

        1. Yes, we did the same today. It’s really going to hurt. We live high and remote. I would estimate we spend 30,000-40,000 with Amazon ea. year. If we don’t stop this we have no-one to blame. They want to take peoples livelihoods away, let’s let them enjoy the squeeze.

            1. This article was the first good news I have heard this year. I had sent this list to Kurt Schlichter to try and reduce my sense of helplessness:

              Rather than bitching about a problem with no solution, I have been trying to retaliate against what I perceive as bias and disrespect:

              I have eliminated any presence on social media where I am the product
              In 2021, I plan on moving away from Google mail and have already switched search engines that provide privacy
              I don’t buy any products by Google such as video doorbells, or talking appliances in my home
              I haven’t been to a theater in years and intentionally not watch any entertainment by people who have such little respect for what I believe
              I have no idea who is on late night television since it’s a bash fest against conservatives
              Corporations that preach to me outside of the product they sell have no place in my home
              Politicians that are not ACTIVELY pursuing my interests, I am doing everything I can to remove them from office
              Thanks!

          2. I’m late to the game here, so I don’t know if anyone will even see this to reply. Is WalMart a reasonable alternative to Amazon for online purchases? I don’t mean in terms of quantity, scope, etc. I mean, have they participated in any of the purges?

            1. I’ve been wondering that too. There was that one nasty tweet which was disavowed pretty quickly. It does seem like a majority of Walmart’s business might be among the deplorables, though I’m really not sure. But considerations of profitability and customer base don’t seem to have stopped any of the other woke companies from shooting themselves in the foot.

              1. Kroger owns Fred Meyer, so QFCs, Krogers, and any stores they own are full throated BLM, Inc. Employee unions are pushing especially hard to let staff wear BLM swag at work.

                I’m looking for a private grocery.

            3. Walmart tweeted Hawley was a sore loser for stating he would object to the EC certification. That was before the 6th. They deleted the tweet after a big backlash.

              But I have not heard them do the “we won’t give money to Trump supporters” kind of stuff yet.

              I went to BJs for the first time yesterday. inferior in service, not as bright and clean, not as inexpensive, but a wider selection of products.

      2. I’m dropping twitter tonight, but before that, those of us who still have it have been asked to post the following:
        “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”
        — BH Obama
        And see if it’s banned as an incitement to violence….

        3. I’ll see if I’m still up. (I *had* been trying to cancel my account for the past four years, but they keep reactivating it. Now, I’ve actively been trying to get them to close it *for* me over the past couple of days. By doing more or less what you’re advocating. Changed the handle to “I am Donald Trump” and started pissing in the wheaties of cucks and would-be commisars with great enthusiasm.)

        4. Done.

          Also asked someone on his high horse about “perverting the rule of law” if someone has perverted the rule of law all over him, back when he was riding the short bus.

          Turns out my Facebook account actually stayed deleted at some point. I think largely because I deliberately flooded it with misinformation, and then didn’t check it for 6+ years

      3. I deactivated my Twitter account today (which I had never been active on because I’m a long-form blogger) I was mostly camping on it because of another writer Celia Hayes (Who does Brit-style Rom-Com, and why didn’t she ever do a search for authors of that name I ask you – and I wanted to keep it from her. But she can have it now. I’m done with the Twits.)

      4. Been working on memes and quotes and links to start deploying on my Facebook account. I have to have one for work. It is also in violation of FBs terms of service, the which I informed the PTB thusly.

        Interesting times.

      5. I never buy from Amazon when there is an alternative source for the book. Yes, sometimes that means Amazon. Remember that everyone has to deal with life.

      6. Ditto – just deactivated Twitter. Be interesting if it’s noticed. I’m nobody, but do some editing for a DC based vets group. Someone might say something.

  2. “It’s the Vodka, innit?”

    I’d say don’t demean vodka, but maybe she’s using the stuff I wouldn’t even use to clean tape heads.

    Want not overly expensive, but still damn good vodka? Western Son. Made by Texas folks who likely learned fractional distillation in the refineries and are damn good at it. The plain is good. The lime is good. Other flavors, as you like. Warning: “Prickly Pear” might be right, but so help me it *tastes* PINK.

      1. Hmmm… Is there something clear that tastes and/or smells really, REALLY bad, that can be put in vodka?

        Could we trap a few skunks and re-introduce them into the wilds of a Leftroid politician’s back yard?

        2. The de-naturant of choice these days is denatonium benzoate (the saccharide will do). It is.. bitter. Very bitter. Insanely bitter. IDEAL. You wouldn’t need much at all. An entire drop might be severe overkill. Getting it to the right place would be the real trick.

        3. Asafoetida. Available from Indian groceries or online.
          Not as bad as corpseflower, but oh, my.
          John

    3. I’m reminded of the videos from 2017 where she kept talking about some guy named Bush who was supposedly the current president of the United States. I wonder if it’s going to take her a while to get the name right this time around, and if so, how long?

      1. I bought some Prickly Pear jelly, figuring I should finally get around to trying it. The flavor is very delicate and maybe a little floral and I couldn’t really place it. Pink is exactly right. It tastes pink.

  3. Has Sarah been reading Sun Tsu lately? Some of the advice sounds awfully familiar . . . not that that’s a bad thing . . . jus’ sayin’ . . .

          1. AAR == After Action Report

            “Erin Smith” is a conservative activist m2f trans who has done a lot of ops against and infiltrating of antifa.

              1. We are pissed. We are very very angry this morning. We think the same should happen to the corrupt institutions as happened to Rome when the Goths came in.
                And btw WE are highly suspicious of sudden and bizarre problems with our internet access.
                We thought we were small enough not to have to deal with this shit. And we’re starting to think we need fall back plans to get online. WE ARE NOT HAPPY. When we are not happy the world should tremble.
                <Does that answer your question?

                  1. Big. I saw that earlier.
                    And FYI it’s like one of a sudden massive variety of these projects I’ve seen.
                    The right has gone CREATIVE.
                    G-d have mercy on the left, because I won’t.

                    1. One of the commenters on that post wonders why the right isn’t talking about this more. If this works out well we might need to start shouting about it from the rooftops in a few weeks.

            2. I’m assuming time travel is involved. As Douglas Adams pointed out, that’s where grammar tends to get REALLY complicated.

    1. Minds and Odysee are minor platforms that, for some reason, have been growing over the last few months as YT keeps demonetizing, shadowbanning, and banning people.

        1. Gab for me, though I don’t use it much any more. Not a big fan of social media. But I was on it during the very early, shall we say, growing pains days. It was pretty scummy. I did my time in the SM content-producing mines, and now we just have the Social Galactic account as a back up secure comms tool.

          I can say that Gab is pretty friendly now if you aren’t big enough to attract the hired filth-mongers.

      2. also the guy I got my phone from has some places like that too. brax.me
        I overcomplicated my password there though and need to sit at the computer at home to get it right on my phone.

        1. I used to wonder why folks who had so-called “smart” phones were so resistant to entering a password. Then I had an opportunity to use the interface. It sucked so hard it pulled the pixels off the screen with enough suck left over to start a Harley.

          I still refuse the offer of a company owned tracker phone (I still use a $50 flip phone from Consumer Cellular) so I cannot claim to feel your pain but I can understand it.

          1. Mine is a service via Trac/Net10/Straight Talk, and the phone is a Lineage OS degoogled “Android” and uses ATT networks, because even though Verizon has most of the towers in the area a non-verizon phone using their network gets no service in Marinette and possibly Oconto county.

          2. I’m using an Alcatel flip phone from Tracfone for my basic talking, though the travel trailer wants a smart phone. The only choices were an iOS or an Android app, so I bought a reurbed iphone 6 from Trac. Apple keeps wanting me to update to iOS 14.3 (rumor has it 14.4 will come with the Emergency Broadcast System notifications turned off, presumably to silence President Trump from using that communication route in the near future.

            14.3 is a 2.5 Gb download, and I assume 14.4 will be similar. Don’t want to spend the bandwidth. Yay satellite ‘net. I really only need bluetooth, and it’s a pity the Alcatel can’t do the trailer app.

            OTOH, the iphone is usually off.

            1. New around here.

              I’ve got a TracFone which is not a whole lot of helpful because cell service does not exist where I live, but the thing is useful if I’m out in the car and break down. In the meantime, the phone lives in one of those Faraday cases so that (hopefully!) it cannot be tracked when I’m not using it. The cases aren’t terribly expensive either.

              As for anything more complicated, I am woefully incapable of doing much of anything complicated cyber-wise, but I did switch to Proton Mail (simple!) and Dissenter browser (also ridiculously simple) so others here might want to look into them. Maybe I should close the Amazon account now too.

              1. I’ll be glad when we’re done with the COVIDiocy. I miss fencing in Vermont. Even if half the adults on the strip are lefties.

                1. Only half? You must have been in one of the more conservative parts of the state.

                  Vermont – stunningly beautiful, really friendly people, severely low crime rate – is an ocean of woke with a scattering of sane islands. That said, Trump did get around 30% of the votes in 2016 and 2020 and that’s not nothing. It takes a little effort to find non-lefties here, but it’s possible. The key is to start looking amongst the native Vermonters, not the transplants from cities (NYC, MA, CT, NJ); they’re usually rich, smug, and incompetent.

      3. I’m on Minds too. Not very active, but then I’m not all that active on FB either. Mostly some friends&family stuff and two private groups, one for convention vendors and the other for indie writers.

        Right now I’m finding that a lot of my time is going to reading the comments on several very active blogs, which have suddenly gotten a lot more active since the digital purge. I do think a lot of people who used to hang out on FB et al are coming back to the blogosphere.

  6. Quick note/data point … Second City Cop (SCC) went dark this morning, Blogger/Google sayings, “this blog is open to invited members only.” SCC was the only reliable source for day to day news on the bad guys. Sure CWB is good, but only SCC kept up with rising car-jackings, Michigan Ave wildings, and the insider stuff happening at City Hall. They’d posted about the “DC walk and False-flag,” supporting Trump based on their observations as veteran cops. Now they’re gone. The Coup is in full swing in Crook County.

    1. Probably related to the Chicago Police Union president making a statement pooh-poohing the Capitol incident as any kind of riot, on the grounds that he’d seen plenty of real riots and that wasn’t one.

    2. Yep, getting the “sign in with Google” message at SCC.

      First time I”ve ever seen that. Most blogs, they let you look, but you can’t commant without bowing to the Google-master.

    3. I noticed that this morning (love that blog and I’m not in Chicago or Illinois) and a quick Google search turned up that they may have taken it invite-only because CPD top brass might have been going through the (usually very non-pro gov) comments trying to dox the commenters, especially those who are CPD.

      1. I’ve put out some feelers to “people who know people,” kind of thing and nothing’s come back so far. Expect word will leak out over the next few days. BTW – “Death before Venezuela” would make a GREAT sticker

    5. And Rantburg has been offline for over a week, which I find quite worrisome.

      Actually, I think it will be quite easy to goad the proggie leftists into a massive overreaction. “The Devil, that proud spirit cannot endure to be mocked.” And for certain China Joe the Potted Plant, and Heels-up Harris are monumentally mock-worthy.

        1. Not sure why, but Michael Yon hasn’t given any updates to his website since morning of Jan. 6. I would have expected to hear SOMETHING by now.

          1. Yeah … his coverage of the DC Walk was surprisingly sparse. Michael has been in much tighter spaces, but never on his home turf?

          3. On a similar note, I’m wondering why ESR hasn’t gotten a new blog yet if he can’t get the old one fixed. I’d have loved to hear his thoughts on current events.

            Has he just given up blogging?

                1. I share a private communication channel with Eric, and Orvan pointed me to the comment.

            2. Eric says he is thinking of blogging elsewhere, “but I haven’t had time to pay attention to this recently.”

          4. He posted something yesterday or today. Just a picture and a quick sentence that whatever happens will not be involving the insurrection act. But he’s still up.
            For now.
            He expects to be shut down in the relatively near future, but says he’s got plans to keep the data flowing.

          5. He is viewable on patreon and Twitter and his mailing list. He is aware all do these might go down and is diversifying platforms.

    6. Borderland Beat— they basically reposted news stuff from Mexico but in English– went silent in November and hopes to come back in January because, I kid you not, a Mexican drug lord sued that they posted his California driver’s license info.

      It’s public information.

      But…..

  7. Not 30 years ago we survived just fine without “smart phones,” Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Netflix, or Amazon.

    We don’t NEED them; we’re addicted to them. Like any addiction, withdrawal is, and will be, painful. But it needs to be done. So…

    Quit. Quit Social Media. Quit Amazon. Quit Netflix. Go to local stores; utilize local places. Y’know, the “bricks and mortar” places owned by people in your community. Not Walmart. Not Lowe’s. Not some national franchise (OK, Raisin’ Canes excepted). Go somewhere where the owner, or someone who works directly for the owner, is the person serving you.

    Live like it’s 1985. Communicate like it’s 1985. Shop like it’s 1985. Eschew globally; act locally.

    1. No. Screw that. Then you’re at the mercy of the party line in the mainstream media.
      If they’d pulled this THEN we wouldn’t have the means to fight back.
      “Live like it’s 1985” turns into “Live like it’s 1984”
      YOU’RE NOT THINKING. You’re standing on your front lawn screaming “I don’t like this new stuff. GET OFF MY LAWN.”
      Without this new stuff, they would already have won. We wouldn’t have had the Trump insurrection.

      YOU NEED THEM. GET THE HELL OUT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. It wasn’t great.

      1. I saw some dumbass on arfcom the other day telling people to get off the internet because, among other reasons, “there are no borders”, and therefore it is globalist.

        I guess borders are ascended to an end in and of themselves…..

        1. These people are insane.
          They know they don’t like it now, but they liked it forty years ago, therefore we must go back.
          They don’t realize 90% of the unrest is because we are THANK HEAVENS finally fighting back, which has to do with the internet. They controlled everything before. That’s what they want again. And some on the right are stupid enough to think it’s a good idea.

          2. Plus the ever present question: why are we the ones that always have to cede territory? Why must the height of civilization always cash out as maximizing barbaric territory?

            1. “Dear LEFT, Here are the terms: UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. Yours. Not ours. Don’t like it? Too bad. The other choice is Even Worse – for you, that is. As in ‘Nobody LEFT left.’ No, we won’t kill you. But we’ll drive you to kill yourselves. And we’ll have FUN doing it!”

              What, me a monster? Damn straight!

              1. No. Surrender will not be accepted. That leaves them able to poison our Republic again. They are rabid dogs and should be treated as such. Perhaps leave them alive, but barred from voting, any job in the legal profession, any elected office, any job in education. And all these for life.

            2. Say I gotta question – maybe I mis-viewed things with the Nov 4 elections and then the Atlanta elections, but it looked to me that the Conservative “Election Monitors” had to stay 10-ft. away from the ballot counters, or denied access entirely. WTF? Why were the “good guys” restricted from up-close observations, by -who-? Why were Republican monitors restricted by Democrat ballot counters???? Did I miss something, or was there some obscure law that permitted that basic vulnerability????

              2. 10 feet were the lucky ones. Many were kept 100 feet or more away.

                COVID ya’know. And anyone who objected too much got arrested and thrown out to general cheering.

              3. In Philly R observers were kept 100 feet away and then after a SCOTUS ruling allowed in 6 feet…of the first rank of tables while all the counting happened in the second and third ranks. Close family were observers, some were not even allowed in.

                1. If they’re afraid to be watched while counting the votes, they’re up to no good.

                  All vote counting should be live streamed in HD and recorded. Witnesses should be welcomed. Those are OUR votes, we have the right to see them counted. Elections must not be decided by shady cabals in back rooms, or by thugs in the streets.
                  ———————————
                  Some folks can be taught. Others can learn by example. The rest have to piss on the electric fence for themselves.

          3. Not to mention that that local store may not have the item you need and will tell you, “Try Amazon.” For that matter, the local Best Buy didn’t have a screen protector for my new tablet (which just went toes up anyway) and said, “Try Amazon.” I rather expect BB to go toes up soon.

            1. Would not surprise me. A while back I was looking for something and it was no longer available on Amazon, nor Home Depot, or another other national chain place or two I tried. Hrmm… what about more regional? BINGO. Menards had it in stock. And, while not a MADE IN USA item, at least not Chinese. Made in Thailand.

            2. I remember Dennis Prager condemning people who came into businesses, asked help for things, and then say “Thank you, I’ll go buy this at Amazon now”. If you’re not going to buy from the business (assuming they have what you need at a good price), you shouldn’t be asking them for help.

              It’s ironic for us to go to a store needing something right now, or at least as soon as possible, ask for help to find an item (knowing it’s likely to be overpriced compared to what it will be on Amazon, but hey, we need it RIGHT NOW darn it!) only to be told “Go get it on Amazon.”

              Indeed, I have expressed this frustration to my wife many times over the years: “I’d rather get this locally, but I’ve tried three places, and the only place I can find it … is on Amazon.”

              While I appreciate local businesses, after having this experience over and over again, is it any surprise that I go to Walmart or Amazon for things?

        1. First- AHAHAHAHAH.
          Seriously. You’re making the assumption they’re super-efficient. Will they track high target values? Sure. But the number is limited.
          Second – the tracker ain’t too good and there’s spoof programs that confused the issue further.
          Third – TRX, seriously. Would we even know the election was stolen or that others agreed with us if we didn’t have the net? Would we have videos not approved by the system without phones? Etc.
          So, yeah, you can come up with solutions for the tracking. Saying “do away with it all” just says “I’d like to be a prisoner again.”

          1. You seem to be conflating “the net” with “social media”. Yes? No?

            Like buttons and animated emoticons don’t seem like pressing reasons to avoid SMTP email and usenet.

      4. Live like it’s 1985? You mean shop at Radio Shack, Sears and K-Mart? I wish.

        Go out for nachos & drinks at Chi-Chis? But they’re only operating in Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait!
        ~

    2. Not 30 years ago we survived just fine without “smart phones,” Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Netflix, or Amazon.

      Yeah, and my parents were shocked to hear the common sense they talked about to their friends on the radio, with Mr. Limbaugh.

      Fast forward thirty years, and the cousins who were fine with being the only voice are STILL pissed off by stuff like “quote what they said two days ago, and three inches above where we are right now.”

      I’ve spent roughly 25 years with local companies copying the bad aspects of national ones, but demanding I use them anyway– booger that.

  8. Yes they will overreach. Not only is it their nature but they have recruited the very fringe. They must placate them or purge them. The blow-back is going to be huge and – different. They are progressively going to piss off a different class of people who really wanted to stay out of it.

    1. 59.35 Million active Twitler users. Out of 330.8 Million US citizens (according to the census). That’s about 18% of the population. Of *that* 18%, 6% of Twitler accounts for almost 3/4s of ALL political tweets.

      Now. Who has been censored by Twitler, as a group? Who has been kicked off? Who is marginalized at nigh every turn? Compared to that, which tweets are spread far and wide, which ones continually one-up each other to push the Overton Window further? So what group is going to have the lion’s share of that 6%?

      From this, you get where I am going. Small percentage of the population. Public policy is being pushed by the radical left, not the average liberal democrat (though they don’t complain about it much, if at all- they know who holds the leash on the mob). Far left speech gets encouraged. Anything to the Right of Pol Pot gets attacked. Also, leftism is a social/positional good in most social circles, present company excluded.

      So the average Conservative (not TruCon, not NeoCon, NeverTrumper, or otherwise false faced crony criminal-in-office) looks like this clean cut, normal looking guy. Whereas the average leftist is this overweight, green haired, nasty looking thing screaming into a phone while driving. Yeah. Let that sink in for a bit.

      The left *can’t* purge their far-left foot soldiers. That sort of thing rarely works. It’s the intellectuals and the rich that fall along with the Kulaks. Just a matter of time. All they are doing now, now that they’ve got the power, is putting off the inevitable.

      The irony is the only thing that could save them from the mess they created is… Us. Trump Conservatives. Absent a return to Constitutional law and order, they won’y be able to flee to Sweden fast enough. More to the point, there won’t be anywhere to flee *to* before long.

  9. Blank T-shirts are cheap, but blank scarves and masks are currently cheaper. I’ve seen some fairly astonishing messages on both kinds of apparel items in the last few months. (Although it’s probably best to make sure you don’t demean your cashier by implication. You want your cashier to enjoy your tactics.) Feel free to wear something bland while walking in, and then don the controversial stuff once inside.

    In other news, the second snootiest local area just had one of their privileged children spray paint the main doors of the high school with “F___ Distance Learning”. It did my heart good, it did. (Of course they are pointing out that they could slap the unknown perpetrator with a felony. Oh noes!) Talk about your literal cry for help.

    1. Oh, and read Ben Macintyre’s interesting WWII books.

      Here’s one of the implications: If you have time on your hands, why not have a lot of different online handles? I’m not saying you should lie about anything, but there’s a lot of ways to LARP characters and also spread interesting ideas. It sure worked for that one guy from Portugal, and he had to do everything by letter.

    2. That’s “tagging” or “street art” when they do it. And in some places, they even get legal protection.

      And their minions can burn cars and buildings on video, and it’s “freedom of speech.”

      “One law for you…”

  10. Re: mockery, remember that it’s Biblical to call other people’s literal false gods by funny names. Today’s society has a lot of figurative false gods, so it’s a target-rich environment.

    1. Yes – three examples from the NASB… I bring these up when someone clutches their pearls over Trump’s “vulgarity”:

      Elijah – I Kings 18:27: And at noon Elijah ridiculed them and said, “Call out with a loud voice, since he is a god; undoubtedly he is attending to business, or is on the way, or is on a journey. Perhaps he is asleep, and will awaken.”

      Jesus – Matthew 23:27: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.

      Paul – Galatians 5:11-12: But as for me, brothers and sisters, if I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? Then the stumbling block of the cross has been eliminated. I wish that those who are troubling you would even emasculate themselves.

          1. What? I was mocking them!

            Wait a sec…

            [looks up the word “chinelo”]

            Did… did you just hit me with a “traditional costumed DANCER?” What, do you just carry one of those around in your pocket? Congratulations on your gainz, then, ’cause you’re in great shape for your age if you can use one of those as a weapon! 😛

            1. No. Chinelo is a slipper in Portugal.
              I know you were mocking them, but you shall not employ bad philology in my house you young …. thing. (Can’t remember DGM’s sex.)
              OR you’ll get the chinelo again.

              1. >> “No. Chinelo is a slipper in Portugal.”

                I know, but apparently RES is a bad influence on me.

                >> “I know you were mocking them, but you shall not employ bad philology in my house you young …. thing. (Can’t remember DGM’s sex.)”

                Well, you did call me “sister” recently so I suppose “thing” is technically an improvement. 😛

                2. Ok, so, what *is* the reason for that? Because I’ve seen references / jokes about La Chanita many times, but no explanation for why that particular weapon is chosen.

                  1. Because it’s used in– as best I can tell– Spanish influenced countries.

                    The picture I linked is Mexico; Sarah says it’s in Portugal, too, and I’ve heard of it in some Asian countries but that may be Portuguese influence because it was Catholic flavored.

                    3. Because Mama can grab it off her foot and fling it across the house in a second.

                      Why this is supposed to be funny instead of child abuse is unclear to me.

                    4. Depending on the mom: mine wasn’t that hard, it wasn’t even a flip flop. It’s a symbolic hit. But kids get scared of it.
                      Also, for the record, all great apes spank. If you do it judiciously it’s NOT child abuse, and it prevents the need to supervise them every SINGLE MINUTE.
                      That kind of supervision is a luxury of our age and wealth.

                    5. I should have been clearer: Why is the “chancla” (Mexican Spanish, where I’ve run into it, but “Momma’s shoe” is also a joke in black culture) so funny to people who would be horrified by an Anglo-American spanking their child.

                    6. It’s convenient. Doesn’t cause permanent damage. Use it when kids are little and later you can stop the kids from acting up in public by adjusting your shoe 😀

                    7. Regarding “all great apes spank”, I have sometimes wondered if we have done ourselves a disservice preferring jail time over fines and corporal punishment. With the latter, you get out and get on with your life, aware of what awaits you if you misbehave again.

                      And for fines, I find it repugnant that they go to the State. They should only be paid to the victims of the crime, or barring that (say, for a parking violation), to victims to a related crime (such as victims of drunk or reckless drivers).

                    8. Fines don’t hurt a lot of folks, and physical punishment only works if consistent.

                      The problem is that, for an IRL example, the crime ring that broke into my car to steal my endtity was caught with several hundred pounds of pot, harder drugs, thousand of dollars in car electronics, several thousand more in tires (including mine, which was returned), and got…. six months community service, suspended.

                      For a solidly organized crime network of dozens, which victimized hundreds.

                    10. And for fines, I find it repugnant that they go to the State. They should only be paid to the victims of the crime, or barring that (say, for a parking violation), to victims to a related crime (such as victims of drunk or reckless drivers).

                      ….a few seconds of thought should tell you why that is a HORRIFICALLY bad idea.

                      Think IRL, not poetic justice.

                    11. >> “….a few seconds of thought should tell you why that is a HORRIFICALLY bad idea.”

                      While you may disagree with him on how to dispose of the money, he’s right about one thing: letting the government legally profit from crime does create perverse incentives. Are you saying there are no better alternatives?

                    12. Adding extra layers of perverse incentive does not improve it, all it does is make it harder to correct the problem when it shows up.

            3. Every so often I miss the old TiaT. Drawing the mouse-that-roared beating a fool torling about the head and shoulders with a “traditional costumed dancer” tickles my funny bone.

        2. I forget if it was here (doubtful), Mad Genius, or perhaps a TXRed post where ‘bus’ vs. ‘buss’ was discussed and some recalled reading works mentioning an electric(al) ‘buss’ or ‘buss bar’. After a bit of wandering about a hardware store, I can see one way that have come to be. Who makes many fuses? BUSSMAN.

  11. I am filled with courage at this essay. We might have to print out pamphlets and read Sarah’s words to each other, like they did with Patrick Henry. Patriots need words to fortify them and my, do these deliver.

    When we go to stores now, my husband and I joke and laugh with each other. We realized everyone in the store scutters along not looking at each other. So we decided we would act like we always do, which is like teenagers in love. Hey, it’s our thing. Shopping is boring and this livens it up. I’ve noticed people eyeing us as we laugh and put our arms around each other and joke around. It’s a tiny rebellion, but it’s a start.

    My father told me long ago that the devil hates laughter. He wants fear. Deny him fear and you deny his power. So I’ll be pointing and laughing as much as I can. Onward and upward!

    3. Plus with the assaults on stable, healthy relationships and families coming from all directions people need to see that there can be good ones. Even if it is only fleeting.

    4. I’ve recently been wanting to get two color laser printers (we currently have a black-and-white one), preferably used, so that “dithering” cannot be used to track it. The first one would be to print nice, color documents of innocuous things. The second one so that I could print stuff with invisible UV toner, so it could only be seen using a black light — although, come to think of it, I could get a single UV/color printer and still use it on black and white printed pages.

      I am also interested in the digital equivalent of this — steganography — where you can hide information in the “insignificant” digits of a digital photo. You won’t be able to tell the difference between old and the new photo, but you can hide the works of Shakespeare (among other things), decrypted or encrypted, in a single photograph.

  12. “Which means the pseudodent”

    I keep wanting to read that as “the pseudo-rodent”

        2. ….slowly raises her hand.

          In the secret language of the veg, in letters written three foot high, over the doors of my home are written these words: lasciate ogni sperenza voi chi entrata.

          Pfft. Aspidistra. Last a couple weeks…

      2. Rats and mice are inherently honest creatures. They just want to eat your food and not get caught. The psuedodent wants to trunalimunumaprzure, and lies about everything. Do not disrespect honest thieves by calling them politicians.

        2. There’s an ad on TV, where a dog sets his dish out in a park, and people drop money into the dog dish, until some asshole in an expensive suit takes the dish and walks off.

          First time I saw it, I said, “That was a Democrat!”

          The ad is something about how most charities eat up 90% of the donations in ‘administrative expenses’ and hardly any money gets to the, uh, charitees. Which is also a valid point.

        3. I recall during the first year of Trump’s administration, I had a friend who was loudly denouncing Trump as a charlatan, grifter, and conman.
          He did not appreciate when I cheerfully agreed, and pointed out that Trump had already kept more promises than both Bushes put together, and that Romney and McCain didn’t even make it to the election before disavowing many of theirs.

          That was not the answer he was fishing for.
          (Nor was he looking for my impassioned rant about the perfidy of professional politicians, and how they were a blight upon the Republic. But he got it anyway.)

    2. You’ll wonder where your freedom went
      when you’re under the rule of the Pseudodent!

      1. Well, his are unnaturally white, but given his vanity, they’re probably porcelain veneers and not dentures.

      1. He’s the nation’s chief executive, clearly lacking executive capacity, so perhaps: pseudecutive?
        ~

      1. Commander in Thief, Leader of the Leaf Mold, Thief Executive/Thief of State, Thief Law Endorsement Orificer, Bed-Wetter of State, etc…

      2. Fraud-In-Chief of the United States — FICUS 😛

        Which brings us back to the Potted Plant.

        Like a Ficus tree, democrats get their roots into everything and make the sewers back up…

        1. Quoting Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent, a ficus has a Grylls rating of 0.9. Not sure if the Fraudulent-Elect has a rating that high.

        2. Got the decimal point wrong, it’s 0.09, likely much worse if Commie La-Whorish selects the menu.

  13. We’re also fighting an action against the Quislings. As I just posted on Twitchy – supposedly a “conservative” site – in response to a thread by Caleb Hull that purported to show an officer being beaten by the protestors (lengthy quote, sorry, there’s a lot to unpack):

    If there is one thing you always have to remember, it is to read or watch things that purport to contradict your view of what happened.

    There is another thing – whether it is contradictory or supporting, look at it with a critical eye, and verify it.

    This is no exception.

    This video shows people trying to enter the Capitol Building, against opposition from people (reasonably assumed to be officers, either DC Metro or Capitol Police). That is a truth.

    What it also shows is that mace was being sprayed from inside. Reasonable. It also shows batons being wielded from inside. It shows what appears to be an officer down (there is a typical arm patch, although not completely identifiable). It shows him on his face, pointed OUT of the building entrance – which says he was struck from BEHIND. Ah. Who was behind him that might have struck him? Only other officers. Slightly later, as the batons were still being frantically wielded, it shows a protestor standing over the fallen officer, holding up his crutch as a makeshift SHIELD over the officer.

    Doesn’t look at all like the claim that this was a beating BY the PROTESTORS, does it?

    Then look at the source of the video. You have to go to the Twitter account of Hull, where he attributes it to one Ron Filipkowski. Hmm. Look up that name, and his posts elsewhere. Ah. This person is a rabid TRUMP HATER from Florida. Registered as a Republican, true – but that is meaningless in this day and age. What is he doing in DC, among the protestors, when he wants nothing more than to demonize and destroy Trump? No, he’s not a “journalist” either official or citizen – he’s a lawyer that had a political appointment to a judicial selection committee (which he resigned from when one of the CoViD panic scammers in his State was raided). There is also one INDIVIDUAL voice that comes clearly in the video – one that had to be very close to the camera, and most likely Filipkowski himself. That voice utters one phrase – “Get that son of a b**** out of there!” That was undeniably an incitement to further violence – but by WHOM?

      1. I’m not sure WHICH link – so you got several, from those that were in my research.

        The analysis was mine, I just used it several places, including here.

        I apologize for not adding time stamp info, but I was doing that on two hours sleep. It’s a short piece in any case – I suspect, but cannot prove, that it was carefully edited by Filipkowski to not show what happened to put that officer down. I have not yet found one that does show that.

    2. I suspect that was the video that was playing on my morning news. I couldn’t see it very well since a) morning … before food and caffeine. b) didn’t have my glasses on.

      Thanks for the breakdown.

        1. That was to me, I believe?

          The breakdown is mine – and I have never figured out how to create a link to a specific Disqus comment. It is my most recent post as RealityObserver – https://disqus.com/by/RealityObserver/ Feel free to attribute however you like, either under the handle or the name Mother gave me (and used in full ALL too often…)

          That’s my very old handle on Disqus, when I was employed and did not want blowback on them. The WPDE handle was supposed to be a separation from that one, where I discussed only writing related things – and then gave it up.

          I might – no promises, I need to get on morning KP and general household stuff now that the $SPOUSE$ classroom in the living room is shut down for the day, and I can bang around – clean this up, add timestamps, and put it on my own blog.

  14. Everytime Ryan turns up the heat, I know I’m a little bit closer to beatin’ him at his own game. But now the game’s changin’ — Ryan’s boys are comin’ in heavy — lookin’ to knock down my door and take what’s mine. Like this is the first time I had to dodge a bullet. They’re comin’ to my house expectin’ a show, but they’re gonna get a disappearin’ act.

    — Audio Log in Bioshock 2 (with last sentence that contains spoilers clipped off)

    1. This is correct. But more important than being from that reportedly execrable movie (never seen it myself), it is a meme.

      A catchy meme; especially since interest in Starship Troopers has spiked in the last couple years.

    2. The other scene from that movie that frequently comes to mind, is the moment Lt. Rasczak looks over the wall of the Planet P outpost and realizes he’s not going to hold off the bugs this time.

      I’m reminded of that scene, when I come upon highly-Progressive-infested comment threads.

      1. Look at it this way, that movie is so not Heinlein riding on his name that it owes we Heinlein fans anything we can steal from it.

        2. In a review I wrote for the local SF club newsletter, I said that it was not, as claimed in the title sequence, “Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers,” it was “Paul Verhoeven’s rebuttal to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.”

    4. Sargon of Akkad (vid blogger Carl Benjamin) does a long, powerful video on “Starship Troopers”, Movie and book, to refute the claim of “Fascism” stuck on it by the Left.

      Last seen on YouTube. Powerful, compelling, and combines lots of research into a delightful resource on like topics, elsewhere. So, can I say…dividends for your time spent? Yes.

  16. By the way, for anyone who is interested in line-dancing with firearm laws and has money to burn: look into rare breed triggers.

    Obviously a couple weeks after buying one you sold it. You didn’t like it. And ammo is too expensive these days.

    1. Heh, thought about getting one when they were first popping up, didn’t have the funds, now they’re out of stock (I wonder why?)

    2. I wouldn’t. I reeeeallly wouldn’t. one of those, or a binary trigger or anything. The thing that defines those as being legal is an administrative decision, not a written law, and we have recently seen how well the ATF will stick to those.

        1. Hmmm. We did go to Yellowstone this last fall … Hubby did trip and fall. Not into a geyser, or into Firehole Canyon (thank God) …

          ——–
          He did too. Right in front of 4 nurses on vacation. Luckily right at the wider part of the edge of the cliff at the top of Firehole Canyon swimming hole stairs, which were blocked off because swimming hole was closed due to you-know-what.

          My comment after “scream”, “are you okay”, “I’ll get the first aid kit from the truck” (nurses took over first aid) was “Don’t do that! I don’t want to have to figure out how to tow the trailer”; figured someone would help me hook it up. OTOH as mom noted later, I’d only had to figure it out once.

          He is okay. A lot of bleeding, from the road rash. Thanks to medications and old people skin. Even better yet. He didn’t damage his camera or any of the lens. 🙂 Which is what he was worried about. 🙂

  17. An old Jew is on his deathbed. With weak voice he asks to call for a partorg because before his death he wants to join the Communist Party. A happy partorg rushes to him with filled out membership form to sign and a ready Party membership card. As the Jew signs the form he carefully takes the membership card and presses it against his heart. In a peaceful and happy voice he whispers: “Today one more communist will die”

    I don’t want to be this guy.

    1. LOL!

      Reminds me of the notable pastor who called a notable politician from each party to his deathbed – so he, like Jesus, could die between two thieves.

  18. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Polish Solidarity movement. Yes, a somewhat different situation in a different country, but they were able to run rings around the biggest collectivist government of the time. Might want to take a look at how they did it.

      1. Poorly formatted, ere, but….

        dancing on the line=>

        Public defiance=>

        they’re not really that strong=>
        YOU are not really alone.

        they need the illusion.

      2. THIS.

        In dark blue Seattle (just north) I’m starting to see… TRUMP 2020 stickers on cars. I didn’t see a one before the election. Now? People are telling each other where they are.

      3. I have a hard copy of Candles Behind the Wall, which details the church’s part in the overthrow of East Germany and the Warsaw Pact, that I bought for a 20th C Europe class in college. I should go back and reread it.

  19. Hmm. I like the idea of buying nothing but ebooks from Amazon. It isn’t easy but it could be effective. My old rule was “if I go to two stores and no one has it, I click Buy it Now on Amazon”. Perhaps I’ll start spending more time finding it elsewhere on the web. Anyone tracking Amazon sales and/or is that information even available?

    WO: Can you give us a link? I’m always a little skeptical about “videos show” but it’s worth actually watching the videos so that at least you can argue rationally, starting with “yes, I have watched…”

    1. THIS.
      I often use Amazon to find an item or class of item, and then do a direct search to see if I can find it directly from an American maker / supplier.
      John

  20. And btw, if you believe word ONE about the protesters breaking things, graffitying things or POOPING on things? You’re an idiot. We have footage. Or we did before they removed it. Also, there wasn’t ONE WORD about any of this on the day or after. It trickled out afterwards, like the bully explaining why he lost his mind and chased the skinny kid. You see, we weren’t horrified at what to them was an obvious desecration of their rule and majesty, so they just kept making up shit. Literally.

    As the meme puts it:
    “Break into Capitol. Stay between velvet rope guidelines.”

    It’s worse, we have video of people who were trying to start stuff with cute little hints about setting the place on fire… posted by the people who were trying to start stuff… because said guy was already facing charges for doing it in Utah, with BLM. -.-

    1. So Bret Weinstein (we know who he is, right?) had on Jeremy Lee Quinn (lefty but anti-Antifa independent journalist at publicreport [dot] com). Quinn reported that over the course of the afternoon there were at least three separate “breaches” of the Capitol building and he was in one of the first and one of the last.

      In the last one, just before the cops flushed them out, he specifically said he was in an office with a couple guys breaking up furniture to create a barricade, and also said that he witnessed people inside brandishing table legs. And that as video filters out over the next week or so we’ll probably see that.

      So I’m willing to accept that there was some damage, although obviously there was no BLAMTIFA-type toppling of statues and graffiti and arson. Pooping on Pelosi’s desk? That one is pics (ew) or it didn’t happen.

      Quinn faulted the protestors in general for not policing their ranks — like the guy with the Camp Auschwitz t-shirt, or the guy with the Confederate flag inside the Capitol, or the guy who called himself a federalist but talked like he was a neo-nazi — but he did not invoke the Law of Invidious Metonymy and presume the whole crowd was like them. He also specifically reported that not one person he interacted with the entire day said a word about race.

      It’s 2 1/2 hours, but worth a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFJdjO0fD4E

      1. So Bret Weinstein (we know who he is, right?)

        Don’t know, or care.

        A quick look suggests he might be the married-to-a-woman white guy who got canceled for being far left but *not quite* enough of a radical racist for Evergreen in Washington, but that really isn’t a reason to trust his judgement.

        Second problem being:
        we have arrest reports showing that known antifa activists were inside at the pointy end.

        We have _video_ showing known trouble makers making trouble exactly like they have all summer… and we don’t have video of the folks that are supposed to be blamed doing it.

        1. biggest thing pointing to infiltrators is the FBI insisting there be no proof of Antifa or BLM aggitators being involved, that they can find . . . .
          oh yeah, I’ll believe that! /sarc

          1. Had a cousin try that on me.
            Didn’t have a good reaction to the “you mean other than the guy who was already facing charges in Utah who was next to the gal who was shot, and who posted the incriminating stuff himself?”

      2. Yeah. Based on what I’ve heard, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were multiple groups that got inside. The main group – the one that’s turned up in the videos that I’ve seen – appears to have been pretty orderly and peaceful. You can see videos of them entering a narrow, easily barricaded, hallway, and walking past multiple uniformed security standing on both sides of the hallway. Or in other words, it was a location that the cops could have easily blocked up if they’d wanted to, and any violent protestors would have had a very difficult time getting past them. The video that I saw of Ashli Bobbit was also fairly calm. If it weren’t for Bobbit herself bleeding out on the ground, and the broken glass along the left side of the video, you’d never know that you were looking at a “violent insurrection”. And the relative calm didn’t appear to a reaction to Bobbit getting shot, either.

        But I’ve heard enough odd-ball stuff to make me believe that not everyone was peaceful.

        As for protestors policing their ranks as Quinn suggests – you can only really do that if the protest is an astro-turf.

    2. As the meme puts it:
      “Break into Capitol. Stay between velvet rope guidelines.”

      –
      Or the National Park/Monument version: “Worst rioter’s ever. Took pictures. Didn’t even leave footprints. Stayed on the trail between rope guides.”

      1. Well, some of them left the trail and took selfies with the statues.

        Leftroids are screaming INSURRECTION!!

        Looks more like an unguided tour to me…

    3. I have heard it said that aliens looking at two Italians talking would conclude that they are using a sign language with verbal noises for emphasis.

  22. Sorry, Sarah, but some of us MUST fight – and to the death – in order to give the police a reason not to go after others of us.

    Eric Flint once commented on the whys of Stalinism, basically that Stalin was someone tossed up by the bureaucracy to preserve their perks, prestige, and power. Go watch this, and realize that the only difference between those Stalinist bureaucrats and our supposed “Feminist Interpretive Dance” pseudo-elites is that the latter haven’t been hired yet but expect to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYWUkQkOKBM&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0Ntpcw_8oufupddlHirQtTDd_D_ji7PwHltSssnxkV5eUTvogWcPaGhbo.

    That, that combination, is why I posted, a few days ago: “Let me give y’all a little nightmare material. With the current administration, the control of the house and the senate, and the lefties’ wildest fantasies of revenge about to come to pass, if you are on the right, and known to be, you cannot – not if you have two brain cells to rub together – submit to arrest. There’s every reason to presume it’s merely a pretext and you will end up with a very unenviable death after a good deal of screaming.

    My advice? Be armed, well armed, all the time, and be prepared to fight to the death at a moment’s notice.”

    I think FB deleted it without even informing me, so, yes, expect the secret police in the night. Me, my normal carry is going up to 50 rounds and two guns, plus an AR in the car.

    1. Ah! A most venerable name!

      I went looking the other day and didn’t find anything: do you have any sort of blogging presence outside of the demon-book with a face stitched to the cover?

          1. Thanks. I don’t know if I am, though I appear to be living rent free in the heads of the subhumanity of vile 770.

            2. Well, on the one hand there’s plenty of room, since you don’t have to share the inside of their heads with a brain, but on the other half the place is such a dump, littered with trash from a 19th century German who almost never paid his own way for anything but thought he was an expert on everything.

              1. Which wouldn’t have been such a big problem if a bunch of fools hadn’t read/listened to him and declared “Brilliant!”

      2. Make them lose face. Trip them and giggle. Spill coffee on their trousers and giggle as you help them clean it up. Anything that makes them feel goofy and inept is fair game. And loads of fun.

      3. Mockery.

        Grey Goose Ice Cream Botox Nancy is fine with the ‘blood’ and severed pigs head in her SF driveway – but mockery she cannot abide.

          1. There are just so very many opportunities for Sabo-esque work – from little stickers on gas pumps saying “everyone knows China Joe really lost” to “have you seen my brain” stickers placed on vodka bottles in stores, to “they stayed between the velvet guide ropes” stickers slapped on glass store fronts below the Visa-MC-AMEX stickers – all small and innocuous, and all very, very subversive.

    1. I mentioned yesterday that Gab was getting 60-100K new users daily. Gab was in horrible shape yesterday, down a lot for problems, but this morning they announced that they had 600K(!) new users sign up on Sunday.

      BTW, they say they are getting a lot of feelers from Silly Valley techies who figure Gab is better to work for if you are to the right of Lenin.

      1. I’ve been getting the “Down for maintenance” 404 or simply not loading for a day or two here. Got on once yesterday, no luck today. Time to get into ham radio maybe?

        1. As long as people are flooding in, there will be issues as they keep adding servers. It *might* be better in a few days once the Parler refugees get absorbed.

  25. Concur with Tom. Us old farts that are already on a list (or multiple lists), are already across that ‘line’ and are already in the crosshairs of the left. I’ve watched the hacking attempts go up almost daily against my blog, and FB took down my live stream capability a month ago.

    1. Sure. And honestly, I might be come for sooner than later.
      BUT this is a plan to drive the beast mad before the coup de grace.
      And I’ve updated my guideline. We have two or three months to give them (literal) merry hell before it all breaks loose.
      Go read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress again. It’s been called “A Manual for Revolution” for a reason.
      They’re already overreaching. Let’s make it OBVIOUS to the unengaged.

      1. The enemy has always shown wisdom in thoroughly preparing the battlefield before a fight so that it is nearly impossible for them to lose. I see no reason why we should not do the same.

        It might offend Romney though not sure I have the heart for that.

      2. > The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

        The entire original serial novel, online: https://archive.org/details/1965-12_IF (part 1)

        Worlds of IF was considered to be a “down-market” publication, but if you look at what they printed, that reputation isn’t supported by the quality of science fiction they published. Which is probably why they were looked down upon…

        1. Remember that in the 1960s, If and Galaxy were both edited by Frederik Pohl, who was a good old-fashioned leftie himself. Galaxy was his pride and joy, and printed everything that he thought good SF ought to be. If was the red-headed stepchild, got all the stuff Pohl didn’t think was good enough for Galaxy, and — won all the Hugos, because in those days most SF fans were still ornery antinomians and would not eat oobleck and pretend to like it.

      3. How long before not only Moon but the rest of the Heinlein catalogue is banned, if not outright, at least effectively?

        2. I would give a limb to have the Virginia collection, but we don’t got that kind of money.
          I actually considered appealing to the huns for it, but it’s SUCH a frivolous thing.

    2. Sarah’s been reading my mind about “Harsh Mistress.” One thing stands out in my memory: organization and planning. The DC Walk suffered from lack of leadership and forethought. It needed a cadre of good sergeants following a tactical plan with reasonable goals. Bill Whittle frothed mightily about people’s bad behavior, their lack of discipline. I like Bill, but I’m not sure I can agree. This was one part lark, one part protest, and one part mob with a side of professional false flag agitation. Consider a different day: a leader with decent staff – again, see Harsh Mistress – would have foreseen and controlled/directed the troops on the ground. What do I mean? It was clear that have entered the Building, the other side was going to respond. So dance to the line and plan your withdrawal – in and out. Get out of the building. Stand on the curb and smile, kind of thing. I don’t see that happening realistically on Jan 6, but rather as out after-action review.

      1. If it hadn’t been a lark to a hell of a lot of those involved, they wouldn’t have been saying things (captured on video) like “Woo hoo I can’t believe we’re in the Capitol!” “I know, right?” “Don’t damage anything!”

        1. Precisely… The first rule about moving with and in a crowd is to watch for a time when “woo hoo” turns into “yippe,” and thuggish behavior starts. Crowds are funny animals and do their best with even minimal leadership. I warned my kids about this and of course, they just rolled their eyes at me. LOL

          1. Watch the males. Look for them to go what I call “jumpy toes.” That’s when he starts moving back and forth, on his toes, back and forth like a boxer might. He’s crossed the mental rubicon and is no longer thinking but reacting. Males are dangerous when they’ve reached this state.

            You can watch for it, and use it to get away, or get to a better place so the violent ones can protect you.

            Mobs are scary. But you can keep your head.

            2. > jumpy toes

              I’ve heard it described as “the chicken dance”, but, yeah, it’s a common tell.

      2. I think the lack of planning helped in a roundabout way.

        Most of the people in the building were……. harmless goofballs being silly. They accidentally did what Sarah is talking about in this post: even though they crossed the lines they did it in a way that most sane people can’t get overly worked up about.

  26. Also coming are economic disasters from the Dems: spending trillions on imaginary global warming, trillions in taxes, etc. Make sure everyone you know blames tha Dems for the disasters that follow!

    1. Biden[‘s handlers] have been talking up another crow flu stimulus. Hey. If they want to pay to get more guns into the hands of more Americans I can’t fault them for that.

      The difficult question for me is “ACOG? or Eotech and a better scope for the 20″?”.

          1. Over the years I put a lot of moose and caribou on the table using iron sights.

            I’m not faulting glass and am playing with red dots but overall I put my trust in iron.

            1. Cataract surgery with fixed focus lenses mean that iron sights on rifles aren’t a good combination. OTOH, I have a lever gun in .357 that should have something better than iron. Don’t want a scope on it because reasons, so I really need to look at what’s out there in a low profile dot. (A laser on a Win ’94? Maybe.) Maybe.

              1. Got the same, cat’ surgery, fixed focus lenses. Have no problem with open iron pistol sights or iron peep sight on my FN (eye automatically finds center of circle). Should rephrase that; had no problems, lost all my guns when the canoe tipped, lot of those freak accidents happening lately.

                    3. I’m just one of those internet poseurs. I never had any guns to start with.

                      In fact, I’m not even a real person, just a bot. “Pay no attention to the device behind the curtain…”

      2. At current prices, if not at the top of your list ammo should be pretty high up on it. The longer you can maintain a good rate of fire, the bigger an escort you’ll have.

        (Granted, precision targeting also has its place in making an ammo stash stretch.)

      3. SIG Romeo and Juliet, for close to medium range. Not grossly expensive, but 4x is the limiting factor. Primary Arms 1×6 or 1×8 scope with the ACSS reticle gives a lot more range. I have both on different rifles.

        1. My 20″ AR *has* the ACSS 1-6. One of the choices under consideration is trading up to their much higher quality 1-8 model.

          The 20″ is set up as a DMR-oid. 16″ currently has an RDS+3x. But I want to kick that RDS down to my CP33.

    2. No, they will blame it all on Trump. They have to destroy our economy to clean up his mess, don’t’cha know.

      The Democrats hate hate HATE the middle class. Because someone with a good job, a house and a stable family doesn’t NEED their ‘help’. They have become a party of elitists, Dolists and perpetual ‘victims’ and nobody else. Lifting the poor out of poverty was an attack on their core values!

      1. It’s so strange to apprehend that attitude. Aggressive solipsism can take such weird forms in reality. Still, one is reminded of the old royal classes. They did insist by and large on grovelling obeisance from what they saw as their “inferiors.” Are the “new elites” at all different in substance from those strutting historical overclasses?

      2. Line from the first episode of King of Kensington, the only funny Canadian sitcom ever:

        ‘It’s our Liberal government. They get a lot of support from people on low incomes. So, the more people they can keep on low incomes, the more support they get!’

        1. Or as I put it, here in the U.S. “The Democrats love the poor, so they want to make us all poor.”

          Of course they hated Trump. Lifting poor people out of poverty was a SIN!

  27. Mockery is like wounding the enemy. You don’t get just one, you get all of them because they weep and wail and can’t do anything by themselves.

    Win win.

  28. Yes, moondance the line but

    “They” control communications so we must find/develop alternatives.

    “They” control the mediums of exchange. For example I just dropped A’Hoyt a couple of dimes via paypal but we all know paypal’s woke and, at any moment, may decide Sarah’s just as evil as those dirty gun dealers and refuse to transfer money to her. Credit card companies, ditto. Major banks, ditto, Chase Manhattan, Wells Fargo, et al refuse to handle Alaska development loans/bonds ’cause petroleum causes global, the horror of it all, warming. So we must develop alternatives.

    “They control the education system. My savage teenage granddaughter just started home school, including a practical ballistics course I’m teaching her.

    “They” control book publishing. I’m not faulting Sarah for going though Amazon, one can’t market without a marketplace, but I strongly suggest seeking/developing alternative marketplaces (I know many writers are working on that, but it may be more urgent than we think.). When, not if, Amazon decides it’s time to silence, it’ll only take them a few keystrokes to do so.

    having said that, “They” do not and can not control where we go from here. Have a plan D.

      1. Have a plan. Have a backup plan. Have a good idea what you’re going to do when the backup plan goes Tango Uniform.

        1. Bear in mind that one plan must be “throw all plans to the winds because something happened that wasn’t factored in.”

  29. We need to gather this kind of post, and a lot of others, into a book format. Hell, I’ll volunteer to put it together into that format, if you don’t have the time. An e-book form that can be lent out (normally, I’m not all that in favor of freebies, but this wouldn’t be primarily to make money, but to educate).
    Maybe Lessons for Modern Patriots, or something like that. The goal would be to get these ideas into the hands of many who are looking for help, but have no idea where to go.

    3. I REALLY LIKE this idea. I’m red-pilling people on all kinds of chat boards. Or, maybe I’m just acting like my POTUS Trump. But I always point them here.

      “Go there. You’ll feel better.”

  30. The International Lord Of Hate has graced us with another post:

    Bow Before AppGoogleZon

    And, I have been blocked from commenting on Monster Hunter Nation. Not by the ILOH, I’m sure. Something I posted must have stuck in WPDE’s craw content filters. I can’t even ask Larry for help, because I can’t post anything!
    ———————————
    Elitists are those that would give up much of what they have, if it meant that everybody else would have even less.

      2. I just posted a comment on Monster Hunter Nation! Either your post helped, or Melvin The I.T. Troll fixed it for some other reason. Either way, thanks.

        I have this little scene in my head:

        Owen glanced at the door to Melvin the Troll’s basement lair. “I always wondered. What does Melvin do when he’s not working?”

        Franks closed his eyes with a grimace. “Troll porn. Don’t ask. There are things the Old Ones don’t want to know.”

    3. I just tried again. Same error I’ve been getting since October; “ERROR: Comments have been temporarily disabled to prevent spam. Please try again later.” Yet an hour later there will be dozens of new comments.

      I guess Larry’s still pissed off.

        1. Mine got a ‘awaiting moderation” note with a little countdown to I don’t know what – I bet he’s not sitting there waiting around to approve my post, so it may show up when he gets to it.

          Note however WPDE that it allowed me to go back and do edits, WPDE.

    4. I love reading Larry’s posts but he get so many leftwing trolls that I usually don’t bother with the comments.

  31. I am profoundly irritated to hear anything associated with government described as hallowed or sacred. It is only holy if you make government your religion. Do trump or Biden either one fit your expectations of minor god, angel or even a prophet? Government has no more ability to recognize or promote the sacred than a pig can appreciate poetry.

    1. Exactly. Government is most emphatically NOT sacred nor hallowed. Nor is anything associated with it. I keep reminding everybody of this, but I know it’s to no avail (meaning my cohort of friends on FB). I am keeping my FB account for personal contact reasons, but it will become my facade. My blog is on a separate server (ionos) and I am creating email lists. Said lists will be stored on thumb drives in case my provider decides to nuke our email accounts. I am also setting up email on Proton or somewhere else. I plan on working behind the false fronts I create.

      1. I’ve used 1&1/Ionos for 17 years now, ever since their “3 years free” unbeatable hosting deal. German company, and far as I’ve seen is still apolitical. Hopefully they’ll stay that way; I’d hate to have to move.

        [Unlike, BTW, Backblaze, who recently went Woke.]

          1. True, but the effect seems to have mostly been to make affected companies be rigidly correct, rather than rushing to eject wrongthinkers.

            Well, we’ll see. I don’t use mine for anything patrio– er, nefarious, and I don’t blog (pretty much what I’ve got to say winds up hereabouts), so am unlikely to suffer a wokely ejection.

            I do have a Protonmail (same handle@) but so far haven’t used it.

      2. You shouldn’t rely overmuch on USB thumb drives for holding critical data. They suck at long-term storage. People who deal with thousands of them as part of their daily jobs typically seem to encounter horrific rates of sudden failure. Consider maintaining a cloud backup (email lists take up little storage space and fit easily within the limits for free accounts at Dropbox and similar services), a DVD/Blu-ray optical disc backup, and a backup to a good-quality external USB 3.0 hard drive case with a high-quality SSD like the Samsung EVO 860 500GB. The SSDs have smart wear leveling, which I believe is sadly lacking in ordinary USB flash drives. The Samsung EVO 860 500GB SSD costs only $54 now at Amazon, and smaller capacities are even cheaper. A good-quality (Samsung/Crucial/et alia) 240GB SSD can be had for about $20.

        1. That recommendation doesn’t even make sense. the memory in a current USB drive and the memory in a current SSD of almost any type… are the same kind of memory. If the thumb drive would fail, the SSD would to. failures on thumb drives are likely dead cells, which happens with flash memory. *this is why you usually verify a backup)

      3. The problem is that most of the current government folks act like they are feudal lords/nobility who are above the population of serfs, and that those serfs exist to serve the government and its nobility rather than the government existing to serve the citizenry. Indeed, this is the essence of problem with government today.

        2. The point of the awe-inspiring classical architecture of the Capitol and the White House are to remind the temporary occupants of the grandeur of We The People, not the other way around.

    2. But if you take the buildings as sacred to a cause?
      Then all of us should be grabbing scourges and heading to DC. Because the current occupants are profaning the founding fathers legacy.

      1. THIS.

        I do wonder how long before they start removing the artifacts of our history. The “riot” may have actually done some good, since there was a cry raised afterward about how the “priceless artworks” had been saved from the mob… makes ’em that little bit harder to blithely dispose of.

      2. To quote the song Farewell to Kings by Rush “The hypocrites are slandering the sacred halls of truth”

    3. Referring to President Trump as the God Emperor of the United States (AKA GEOTUS) is *supposed* to be a joke…

      1. Referring to Harris that way WON’T be.

        Got a little scene in my head, in which MaligNancy has dragged my main characters in to testify before a House committee.

        Pelosi: “I represent The People Of The United States Of America!”

        Tovala: “No, you represent the people of one Congressional district in San Francisco. I don’t live in San Francisco, and you don’t have any authority over me.”

        1. And, in any case, no representative has authority over anybody. The Speaker has authority over the rules and structures of the House of Representatives, nothing more. One-half of one-third of the branches of government. That’s it.

      2. A bunch of us use it a lot, to poke the enemy in the eye.

        It’s a delightful joke because we love him so much we call him God Emperor and Daddy and all kinds of fun things. We are affectionate, not worshipful. 🙂

      3. >> “Referring to President Trump as the God Emperor of the United States (AKA GEOTUS) is *supposed* to be a joke…”

        If my wish comes true and Trump doesn’t step down, I suspect we’re going to get a lot of mileage out of Fox’s heresy meme collection.

        Incidentally, according to He-Who-Wordpress-Thinks-Is-Fucking-Voldemort, Trump is supposed to make a speech in Alamo, TX tomorrow. Here’s to hoping he drops something BIG on the bad guys.

            1. Even those of us who don’t live in the Valley are motivated by and remember the Alamo. Verily, even unto the Metroplex and beyond.

          1. I don’t know. Vox has pointed out – correctly – that in that supposed concession speech Trump never actually said “I concede” or that we would be transitioning to a BIDEN administration. If you wanted to make the casual listener think you were conceding without actually saying it, that’s one way to do it.

            And yes, I know there’s a very good chance he really will step down. But it’s not set in stone until the 20th.

    5. It is sacred to the Left (when they run it) which is why they can burn courthouses, topple statues, and deface monuments but we right-wing infidels aren’t allowed in and desecrate government with our presence.
      ~

    6. Before the riots broke out, I wrote to my Congresscritters telling them to take the challenges to the Electoral College seriously. I checked the “I want a response” back, and one of them — my Representative — did. He said that he was going to respect all the State certified votes, and that it wasn’t up to him to challenge what goes on in another State, and that the halls of Congress are sacred and it was distressing that they were violated.

      I responded to my Congresscritters, I pointed out that a legitimate Republic is more hallowed and sacred than a building, and that the appearance of election fraud does more harm to that than a little riot, as awful as that might be.

      I then wrote again saying “Trump succeeded because he fights. The Republicans got the riots because they don’t fight.”

      Today I wrote saying that they had better not vote to impeach or censure President Trump — or that if they couldn’t help themselves, show video of President Trump’s calls for riot, and show that the words happened in a reasonable time before the riots.

      I’m in Utah, so I fear that my pleas and demands will fall on deaf ears. Senator Romney is almost a given — I was pleasantly surprised when he voted for Amy Coney Barrett — but I’m even fearful of Senator Lee and Representative Curtis.

      Time will tell.

  32. Malicious compliance. For starters if the government is going to owe you a tax refund I suggest we all.file.on the first possible date. If you owe them, I suggest that everyone who.owes waits to file on 4/15. Crash their servers, bury the USPS which has been playing games for months trying to build up hate against trump by dialing back service.

    1. Hubby and I were talking about this the other day. We have a metric ton of student loans (two PhDs…) and if they really do start a loan forgiveness program we plan on taking full advantage. Break the freaking system. Also, get rid of a large chunk of debt that consumes a large portion of income enabling us to do more elsewhere.

      1. I have my own PhD whose loans have been millstones around my neck. I will oppose it before it is passed, but if it happens anyway, I agree it would make sense to make use of it, both to try to break the system, and to get some breathing room.

        In principle, I would favor getting rid of Federal student loans and their guarantees in exchange for loan forgiveness. The student loan program has created a vicious cycle where college administrators can raise rates, students can ignore the raising rates, and lenders won’t have to fear bankruptcies afterward, which has created a lot of bondage for students. The cycle needs to be broken, but I have little hope that the cycle will be.

        Which makes me wonder: will we really be breaking the system, regardless of what we do? Or is it merely the natural result of our politicians and their stupid decisions?

        1. I think that a system similar to what medical schools have…where you spend four years in an underserved area and get your loans forgiven might work…but I’m not sure how.

          As to breaking the system, I think our actions would accelerate the process as opposed to initiate it. I agree that it is more likely a natural result of stupid policies.

            1. If they succeed in imposing socialized medicine, they won’t need anywhere near as many doctors and nurses.

              But they’re not ‘death panels’! Just a few bureaucrats wisely allocating scarce healthcare resources!
              ———————————
              Those who do not remember the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes. Those who do remember are doomed to watch everybody else repeat them.

    2. Fill out the W-4 so you don’t overpay in the first place. That used to be easy; just put in 6 or 8 exemptions. This year there’s a ‘worksheet’ and you have to fill in dollar amounts. Do it anyway!

      I always drop tax payments in the mailboxes outside the post office, a day or two before the deadline. Don’t know if they still do, but they used to keep one post office open until midnight on April 15 just for terminal procrastinators. Traffic was backed up for miles around it, too.
      ———————————
      Procrastinators Anonymous
      Next meeting: Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Tuesday Soon
      Don’t be late!

    3. only anecdotal, but I knew a small biz guy who was audited every time he filed early.
      after the 3rd time, he might have his taxes done at the earliest moment but he drives past the Post office and dropped it on the at 4 pm on April 15th.

      1. Point is to trash their servers and employees as hard as possible late January as well.as sucking cash out. While the owers don’t pay until the last minute, also trashing servers and overloading employees and the United States Postal Storage.

        1. We efile federal. No way am I waiting until the last couple of weeks. We’d never get filed. Servers are already jammed. OTOH the minute they want to charge for the privilege/convenience of efiling is the time they get it snail mail posted April 15 with any money owed.

          State tries to charge for efiling. No. Not interested in paying to do their data entry. State gets snail mailed (early because we get a refund). In theory that means we get our refund back fast … not 2020.

    4. If the government ‘owes you a tax refund’ they have your money, and you’re begging for it back. They can keep that ‘refund’ by claiming you owe them for something else. Anything else. They can make a ‘mistake’.

      Fix that W-4 so you don’t overpay in the first place.
      ———————————
      Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

  33. Was looking at footage of what purports to be ??Pelosi’s office with papers all over the floor.

    And I’m thinkin’ … funny, those papers are pretty much evenly distributed. That’s not the work of someone grabbing and tossing by the handful; it’s the work of someone walking along dropping papers at regular intervals, to make sure the entire floor is dramatically littered.

    IOW. staged.

    Makes me wonder about that laptop Pelosi claims was stolen from her office; more likely it was conveniently disappeared to avoid becoming evidence. (Tho I’ll be gratified if it does reappear, say, as a public data dump. There oughta be some fascinating emails…)

    1. Is she stupid enough to put incriminating information on her laptop? (Even if encrypted.) Magic 8 ball says “Only on days ending in Y”. See Weiner, Anthony. OTOH, most of the police who’ve seen that laptop have met untimely ends.

      1. True… it does occur to me that I did not see anyone cavorting on the premises with any object similar to a laptop. I won’t be surprised if once the witch feels safe, it magically reappears. (Not that most people can tell same-model units apart.)

        And given their manifest stupidity about all things electronic, there’s is much opportunity for weaponized autists.

      2. >> “OTOH, most of the police who’ve seen that laptop have met untimely ends.”

        Perhaps the lesson here is: if you get dirt on democrats, mail copies to every right-wing journalist or blogger you can find BEFORE turning it in to the authorities.

    2. I have my doubts about the cop who died. At first it was reported he was FOUND unconscious. Then the story was he had a stroke. Then the next day he is reported to have been beaten in the head with a fire extinguished and made it back to his office before collapsing. The sequence of elaborations aren’t normal and fit lies. If he’s dead he can’t testify to his injuries and we know they let no crisis go to waste. This will allow them to charge those they arrest with being an accessory to murder – or at least threaten them with that to get them to plead out. It smells to me. Not even mentioning the officer that suicided. Details on that are awfully sketchy. Are they still working on his note?

      1. I want to see the coroner reports. So far that’s the one office I’ve not seen corrupted (judging from those I’ve read — Floyd, Seth Rich, a few others).

        The initial rumor was someone got bashed with a fire extinguisher, but… show me the weapon. Now tell me why we later heard no, guy had a medical issue and was helped out by patriots. Now we’re back to OMG murder by blunt instrument.

        I did see someone blasting away with an extinguisher (looked like a smaller wall model), but it was pointed AT THE CROWD. So WHO used it??

      2. EXACTLY THIS. Also, why mention the officer that committed suicide?
        Like the teacher who says “I always wear a condom while teaching” you wonder WHY they felt the need to tell you that.
        Americans will have to learn how to read the news.

        1. I find it significant that they’re using the passive voice: “N-people died at the event” rather than anything specific about by what cause. Oh wait, we’re supposed to assume it was us doin’ violent murders. Never mind!

        2. Because they took forever to add that he killed himself.

          Which… dear God, please help him, and his family.

          that’s the kind of thing you’d expect of a guy who loves his country and realized he’s being used to harm it.

      3. From what I’ve read, three of the “five” people who died in the “riot” died from medical issues. It wasn’t clear that they were near the Capitol, just in the protest.

        The death toll numbers seem to resemble Biden votes, inexplicably increasing as time goes by.

        1. And number 5– God rest his soul– was a suicide.

          A guy with deep roots in DC.

          …. you know, like a guy who is already on edge, and realized he was involved in a thing that’s going to be used to destroy the country he loves, that his family is meshed into.

          Which makes the half-staff from Trump make sense.

          A “please, don’t kill yourselves for being dragged into this” thign.

      4. > Not even mentioning the officer that suicided.

        Saw something he shouldn’t have, reported it to the wrong person, and got Arkancided.

        “Change my mind.”

    1. You can get reproductions of medieval bascinet helmets, including with various sorts of full-face, off eBay starting at about 15 bucks. Should be easily adaptable.

  35. Sarah, great essay, and thank you for it. Since the putsches began I’ve been coming to your site two or three times a day for the inspiration and the comfort of hanging out with like-minded folk.

    Making fun of Them is a great idea; unfortunately my sense of humor is currently consumed by a white-hot blaze of fury. All I can do right now is put up posts spelling out and denouncing the evil that’s going on for those who may not have noticed. Maybe later I’ll be able to be funny. I used to be funny…

    1. Mine too. And I’m not saying make fun of them. I’m saying taunt them, which you can do from complete anger. You raised toddlers. Channel the “Make me.”

      1. Oh, good suggestion! My toddler granddaughter will be here later today; I’ll study her methods.

        2. >> “My toddler granddaughter will be here later today; I’ll study her methods.”

          “Would you like to help Grandma bring down a corrupt, authoritarian government, sweetie?”

          “NO!”

          “Good start!”

            1. DGM, you nailed it.

              Daughter: “Oh, you’re going to help Grandma, Zara!”
              Zara: “No!”
              Me: “Just observing you is helping me, darling.”
              Zara: “Don’ watch me!”

              Natural talent here…

              2. I already like this girl. 🙂

                >> “Zara: “Don’ watch me!””

                Boy, is she going to be thrilled when she grows up and learns about the NSA…

                  1. Smile all you want, Sarah, but you’re not getting the image of you chasing people around thwacking them with a costumed Mexican dancer out of my head.

              1. Look, Imaginos, I have no clue what DGM looks like, or even if DGM is male, female, confused or a yellow dragon and also an ornate building. I don’t know if DGM knows what DGM is.
                BUT one thing I know for sure. It’s mean to say DGM looks like the Squinting Swedish Squawker

                1. >> “I have no clue what DGM looks like, or even if DGM is male, female, confused or a yellow dragon and also an ornate building. I don’t know if DGM knows what DGM is.”

                  This sounds a lot like the way we talk about RES. Exactly how pleased and/or disturbed should I be?

                2. But…but… I didn’t mention DGM at all! I wasn’t even THINKING about DGM! I was just pointing out one of the ramifications of your comment.

                  And now, back to the Carp-proof bunker. Nice and cozy in here.

  36. An interesting little fact has popped up. The break-in at the Capitol building actually started while Trump was still speaking. Several news stories bury the timeline.

    1. By amazing coincidence, at this moment I’m watching a Greg Kelly from the 8th, and he points out that the first reports of “violent protesters clashing with police” were from 9.30 AM.

      So, apparently conservatives have the magical power to be in two places at once.

      1. Later: occurs to me this 9.30am “clash” might be the video with the cop getting squished against the wall… which didn’t much match our people’s behavior later in the day. Anyone got a timestamp for that vid?

  37. When the sign says ‘Masks required’ I put my Medieval Plague Mask on at the door, and take it off when leaving. I tell everybody who will listen (or doesn’t get away fast enough) that it’s all Political Plague Theatre and all the masks and ‘distancing’ and shutdowns are worthless. If the shutdowns worked, why is Kaliforia being shut down MORE because of another ‘surge’?

    I ask, “How many times do they have to lie to you before you stop believing them?”
    If they protest “They’re not lying” I give them a logic lesson:

    First they told you A.
    A week later they told you B, which can only be true if A was a lie.
    Then they told you C, which if true means A and B were BOTH lies.

    Why are criminals and junkies at the top of New York’s vaccine priority list?

    Why is Cuomo letting the vaccine sit until it goes bad? I thought that scene in The Last Centurion was fiction!

    1. For the Finnise version of Masked Singer, Marko from Nightwish used a plague mask inspired costume.
      He won by the by.
      the judges must be deaf, they couldn’t figure out who he was by his voice

                2. I did. Today is March 318, 2020.

                  Still makes me think of Ray Bradbury’s ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’.

    3. It was. In “The Last Centurion” they just held meetings while the vaccine cooked. In New York they were forbidden from using it by the threat of million dollar fines. The first is incompetence, the second is malice.

  38. Except that sending cash through the mail is illegal. Seriously, it’s a federal crime for Grandma to send a $20 bill to her grandkids.

    And this will be used against us.

    The Stalinistic/Maoistic/Castroistic rules are and have been in place since the reign of terror starting in 1995 and ending early in 2001. And got further enhanced during the 2009-2017 reign of evil (and terror.)

    Stupid. Just stupid. Illegal to mail cash.

    So send gift-cards…

    1. My understanding is it is illegal to send cash for illegal purposes. Which supporting unapproved people and organizations could become – retroactively.

      1. So you put your payment inside a birthday card for Sarah. Or one for her husband, or her cat… 😛

        Say, cats have nine lives, that means they should have nine birthdays every year, right?

        How about cards for Sarah’s characters? She could put up a calendar of their birthdays.

      2. And unless it’s rather well disguised, experienced mail clerk fingers can tell there’s cash inside a sealed envelope.

        Would not be surprised if the metallic ink sets something off too.

    2. Meh. FIND IT. I get it all the time. And no name on the envelope.
      BUT SURE, let them come after us for that. Publicize it. Make sure Grandma knows they can come after her for that.

  39. You seem to think people will stand up and fight. Silicon Valley has already taken down Parler. The rest of the Twitter alternatives won’t be very far behind. Biden’s handlers are already developing our own social credit system.

    If you criticize your betters, you will not get a loan from the bank. They’re a private business, after all. You won’t be able to fly anywhere. Your children will not be allowed to attend college. You will receive no government benefits. Business will not allow you to purchase their products, because after all, the First Amendment doesn’t apply. When they see real consequences, most will knuckle under and obey.

    People don’t stand up to bullies. They turn their heads and pray the bully won’t turn their wrath on them.

    1. I suppose if you gouged your eyes out and burned your ears off with a blowtorch you wouldn’t have seen all the people standing up to bullies, and doing it more frequently.

      *Why* you would do that is beyond me.

    2. YOU might not stand up to bullies, and that’s your problem. But most of us here DO stand up to bullies and Sarah most emphatically does. I think you underestimate the resilience and determination of people.

            1. Yes. I encountered a lot of shocked looks when I worked outside the house. I routinely refused to do anything I didn’t feel like.

      2. Here is my experience: at a private club we had this short-stuff bully who liked to do verbal hit-and-run. He’d get right up in people’s faces and was just obnoxious (apparently the only way he knew to get attention, which was a shame because he was smart and talented). He also stiffed everyone he owed money to (including every landlord he ever had… he’d scrape up the first month, then coast for the 6-12 months a CA eviction takes).

        I’d done some computer-fixit work for him, now and then. Didn’t expect to get paid, because above.

        When he’d do his figurative shin-kicking, everyone else would just back away, over and over, then complain about their sore shins. Not me. He tried his crap on me ONCE, and I was like — you ever say that to me again, and I’m done fixing your computer. That’s all I said. He shut up, blinked, and walked away.

        Miracle of miracles, after that he was nothing but polite to me (tho still a bully to everyone else). And far as I know, I’m the only person he ever paid every cent he owed.

        A very small example, but goes to show… better to resist, using whatever leverage you’ve got, than to just take whatever they dish out.

    3. They cut us off, make us pariahs like the Chinese “social credit” system that prevents the unpersoned from even buying food? Then the tipping day comes when we stop feeding the bullies. Block the roads, close the pipelines, cut the power. Most of what they need to live comes from us. Why should we accept a kick in the head in return?

      2. Experience from a 4 day shutdown of the EBT / foodstamp cards in Birmingham about 8 yrs ago was that it took 4 days or less before the urban dependent class began rioting and looting grocery and other stores.
        There are not enough enforcers to directly hold down a distributed resistance. Expect governmental terrorism to be the coming rule.
        Look to infrastructure and Command and Control nodes, read and apply the CARVER matrix.
        If you can’t be safe, be effective.
        John

      3. Just remember that a lot of farming is done by the huge agricultural mega-corps, who will certainly go along with the left’s power grab. The huge multi-state utilities likewise will go along with the grab. Unless a state is willing to call up the national guard to help carry out such a blockade, it has slim chance of success.

        2. *points out next to her house*

          Yeah, no, the “huge national” whatevers are a house of cards.

          Bottom card is still stuff like Mr. Paul across the road, who has a gobsmacking amount of land and fusses like a mother hen over it.

          The “corporations” bullshit is just a “let’s you and him fight” thing.

          You have to make a unified enemy to make this stuff work– but they’re *not*.

          The problem comes in where folks decide that Joe over there not ripping off his pants to moon the guys threatening his kids is now an enemy, because he didn’t conform to when the folks decided to fight.

          Like Sarah pointed out, but rephrased– keep the idea that someone is trying to stay alive in mind.

          1. How much of the “agricultural megacorps” crop is from fields owned and operated by corporate personnel directly, and how much is contracts with a zillion small farmers growing on their own land?

            Occasional road trips through the countryside have never shown the kind of standardization I would expect from top-down control, but I’m a city boy, I literally have no idea.

              1. I’ve been a D&Der since 1977 and I want the game world I’m always designing in my head to be realistic, so I observe and study landforms and patterns of settlement. Being interested in military history adds to that too.

                Machiavelli wrote that the prince should go hunting, so as to familiarize himself with the hills and forest of his territory, the better to defend them in war.

                1. *wry grin*

                  Have you any idea how many of the profiler related guys are also long time D&D folks?

                  Makes me wonder how many of these wish-casting folks have actually played, and thought….

              2. We used to tell Officers who didn’t have the benefit of prior enlisted service that as long as their instincts were good, they would be fine.

                That’s what I’m reading here. Good instincts. Look. Think. Respond. Plan.

                Country living is mostly about doing things that work in a very live and let live frame of mind. And if someone needs help, you’re there for them, in spades. At 2 AM.

                2. I knew very early on that I could never be an infantry officer (constant “allergies”, really nearsighted, etc.), but if in some other life I ended up a 2nd lieutenant, the best order I could probably give other than “follow me” was, “We’re going to do X. Platoon sergeant, deploy the men,” and then keep my eyes open.

                  I still don’t have an explicit answer to my question about Ag corps though. I’m inferring that “contracts with small farmers” is correct, am I right?

                  1. The best thing any new 2LT can do is ask his platoon sergeant “What is the best thing for me to be doing right now?”

                    1. It was in some TV show – maybe a novel? That there was one right answer to the question of what a Chief of Police ought to do, when faced with a violent urban riot. And the right answer was for he/she to say to his subordinate commanders, “Take care of it,” and turn and walk away.

                    2. And ask it, in private, *before* he acts the fool. The butter bar stereotype exists for a reason… But the shiny new minted things, all clumsy and cute, grow up to be officers, so a *smart* NCO has his information network on top of these particular pups non-stop.

                      On the one hand, being willing to listen is always a good idea. On the other, never underestimate the capacity for human stupidity to strike in spectacular fashion the very *microsecond* your attention gets pulled elsewhere.

                  2. Got some friends, family potato farm. Technically corporation. Grandma is the boss. If she says “we’re taking a year off” that’s 650,000 acres out of production. Other friend, cattle, a mere 10,000 acres owned, and I don’t know how many of grazing rights-probably a couple hundred thousand from herd size. Grandpa’s the boss there. Three other ranchers, similar size, my generation running those now.

                    All of them are incorporated, though. Have to be. Inheritance is a mess and the state takes it all if you don’t have the corp done right.

                    Does that help any with ag corps question?

                    1. A thousand square miles of potatoes owned by one family? Wow!

                      Of course they’re incorporated, anyone over a certain size has to be, that’s not what I was getting at. I meant, does Archer Daniels Midland or the other megacorps directly own large amounts of farmland and tend it with hired help, or do they contract to independent owners like your friends?

                    2. Not sure about square miles, but you’re right next to a big chunk of acres owned by one family– check back in local news about the guy whose son was hit by a train pulling long hours at the potato farm. I think three years back?

                      He’s practically neighbors to you, and that’s one dude in the “corporation.”

                    3. Hell. My writing is incorporated, because it’s the family business, and easy to transfer book ownership when I die, etc.
                      Also, the guys do writing stuff too, and it all goes to the corporation. TINY corp, but…. helps.

                    4. Uncle’s family ranch is somewhere in that range. I got bored of adding patchwork land from the state Cadastral when I was about halfway through one county’s list, and was already up somewhere around 300k acres. It’s big enough (and old enough) to be a USGS named place.

                  3. A goodly quantity are. Most farmers belong to co-ops. Take Sunkist Citrus. I am using Sunkist because I am familiar with it. My father was a Sunkist grower of oranges.
                    Sunkist is owned by several thousand orange, lemon, and grapefruit growers through local packing houses. The acreage each grower owns can vary between as little as 5 acres up to hundreds of acres. And most of those larger farms consist of scattered pieces of land here and there. A lot of the larger farms are family corporations that were set up to mitigate tax liability and death taxes. Make no mistake, the family still runs the farm, this means that they won’t lose the farm when the parents die.
                    The local house will set up harvesting, packaging, and cold storage of the fruit. Sunkist as the blanket organization handles marketing and sales. They are in charge of making sure the growers get the best price they can. As such, most of the fruit is sold in tier ranking.
                    When they say only the very best fruit is good enough for the Sunkist logo, they mean it. This is the caliber of fruit that is exported to Japan to be sold for the equivalent of $5 per orange, etc. It is also why any box or bag of Sunkist citrus is more expensive. The fruit has to be the right shade of orange, the right shape, and/or the right size.
                    Now this doesn’t mean that the not so great fruit isn’t marketed and sold. Fruit that is too small or too large or has a minor blemish like the navel being too big, or has a small amount of scarring on the peel are marketed in the second tier. This fruit is what you see with the name of the packing house on the box or bag. A little bit cheaper and just as tasty.
                    If the fruit has a lot of exterior scars, splits, or other blemishes it will be sold for juicing and the resulting peels end up as cattle fodder.
                    Most growers will have oranges that will fall into all of these tiers. It really depends on the weather or the market. If you’re lucky, you will have a large minority of Sunkist fruit, a small minority of local house fruit, and a very small percentage of juice.
                    Sorry, not sorry for the length. We need to share who grows our food and how it is marketed.

                    1. Information about how the world works is, even if not immediately useful, to be filed away in the brain for later correlation. Thanks!

            2. Far as I know, dairy, beef, root veggies, and wheat are all contract. (Key on the packaging is “Grown for Megacorp” or “Whatever Cooperative”.) I don’t expect it’s much different with the other megacorp crops.

              After all, why the hell would megacorp want to pay what good cropland costs, then pay for the taxes and labor and equipment, when Farmer John already owns it (well, he and the bank) and ever since centralization shut out the smaller aggregators, has to take whatever market he can get??

              1. Thanks. I kinda thought so. So the actual producers could have a say in interdiction in a CW2 scenario, contra the wishes of presumably woke crony-capitalist ag megacorps.

                1. Yes. And right now the real difficulty for small producers IS the centralized market. Friend has railed about how unless you’ve got at least 25,000 head of beef, you can’t even get them to market, because none of the megacorps can be arsed to deal with such piddly quantities. (Remembering that the U.S. uses something like 30 BILLION pounds of beef per year.) Since the local slaughterhouses are mostly a thing of the past, this puts a pinch on the small producers. Who then sell out to larger producers, but those are still local.

                  Local would still have to do a lot of gearing up to replace facilities that have been lost to NIMBY and centralization, but that’s doable enough.

    5. People won’t stand up and fight. They’ll dance and fight. Make faces and fight. Up middle fingers and fight.
      Battles are not the war. and the anger is next level.
      You don’t believe it? Cool, bro. Get out of the way or you’re liable to get trampled as we run up to resist. BAH
      Fricking concern trolls. “Abandon all hope.”
      You know what this does? We see how scared the other side is. That’s all.
      Boys and girls, let’s make with the It’s Afraid memes.

      3. Think of it as being the last man standing in a game of dodge ball. Nothing pisses off the other team more than that ONE opponent they can’t quite nail. And then they start making mistakes.

        [Speaking from experience. I was tough to hit.]

        1. Me too. I was small and agile. I couldn’t throw or catch to save my life, but I could sure prolong the endgame. 🙂

            1. I hated it. There was a reason we called it “warball”. Being the youngest, smallest, least athletic boy in the gym for your entire school career is a sure way to teach you to hate other boys.

    6. You’re right, some of us won’t fight. Some of us will stand there, eyebrow raised, while they yell and rage and try and force us to do something we have no intention of doing. Some of us have several decades of experience doing just that. And, when they try and lay hands on us, the crowd of bystanders that gathered to watch the shouting will make sure they’re in the nearest dumpster. I’ve never raised a hand to someone trying to bully me. I’ve never had to.

      1. A proper lady knows the value of poise, diction, and a few good friends. It is always a good thing for a man to stay on the good side of the proper ladies in his life.

    8. There is some truth to that. That’s why there’s such ferocity when people actually retaliate against the bullies, which happens when bullies become dangerous to their victims’ existence. We are so close to that line now, no one’s sure if it’s been crossed. When it’s crossed, the goal is not to teach the bully a lesson.

    9. Additionally, people who are on record in the past as having expressed nonconformity with leftist orthodoxy will be required to engage in Maoist self-denunciations. John ‘I illegally spied on Trump” Brennan, along with many other Democratic Party establishment types have called for this. Harris/Biden will use Operation Chokepoint style tactics to compel businesses to impose it. When the left says they want to “re-educate” and “cleanse” all 74 million+ Trump voters, they mean what they say and intend to pursue it forthwith.

  40. regarding “Dancing up to the line”. — Go find a decent translation of “Good Soldier Schwiek” (spelling may be a little wrong). Read it, get inspired, and embrace your inner “Good Solder”. [insert exceptionally evil grin here…]

      1. Got the whole thing peeled off the site… need to clean up the formatting a bit. I don’t think the author would much mind us putting it to good use. Everyone needs a good literary education!!

      2. One of the best Czech meals I had in Prague some years back was at a bar/tavern/food place called Good Soldier Svejk. Turned out to be a regional chain, but good, solid, not too expensive food. It helped that I knew about the book (even if I am an Austro-Hungarian sympathizer 😉 )

  41. “Failbook and Twatter can’t make money without eyeballs on their platforms”

    you don’t understand. they’re not businesses, they’re social control tools. they’ll be – they already are – top-down funded by subsidies.

      1. Word is that there’s going to be a FB, TWTR struggle session for their being too late in suppression and their enabling the rise of Emmanuel Goldstein. They haven’t managed to eliminate all dissent yet. Both company’s stocks got hammered today.

    3. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/idaho-internet-provider-blocks-facebook-and-twitter/293-867cc22b-fb90-4142-a296-8d800d2a03fb

      Apparently this was customers asking for twitter and facebook to be blocked, and will be on a per-user basis, not global:

      “In an email posted to Twitter by a customer, Krista Yep, the company says it was fielding calls from customers asking that the service not display the sites on the internet, and that they didn’t want their children to be able to access them.”

  42. My prediction is that they will start widespread surveillance of emails and telephone calls, for the purpose of “stopping hate speech and the spread of misinformation” and they will do it by getting the email and cellphone service providers to impose a “terms of use” that allows them to do so and then will result in the same kind of purge of politically incorrect thought currently occurring on social media; simply put those put on “the list” will be barred from not only have social media accounts or financial accounts, they will be barred from having phones and email as well.

    It”s coming, the only question is when. They have made it clear they are going full totalitarian and that they are going to let nothing and no-one stand in their way.

    4. GMail has from the beginning. At first they were open about it: they said flat out, we will parse your inbox for keywords. Gee, I wonder which keywords they’re now parsing your inbox for…

      [Which is why I only use it for blatantly public or incestuous stuff, like disqus and youtube.]

  43. Democrats/Communazis with their slim majorities are now going to try to expand them by expelling every Republican who has supported Trump or questioned the election results:

    https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/01/11/rep-cori-bush-introducing-resolution-to-expel-lawmakers-who-incited-a-white-supremacist-coup-attempt/

    If Democrats go forward with this, this should result in the states whose senators and Representatives are removed seceding.

    It is really is starting to look like military intervention is the only thing that is going to stop the Democrats from going full totalitarian tyranny, mass purges of opponents included.

    1. Indeed, given that those states would no longer have equal representation, as guaranteed by the Constitution. Oh, yer gonna elect a commie to replace the reps you run out?? We’ll see about that.

    2. Well, first, it’s a resolution, to get Pence to do their dirty work. Next, Pelosi tried to have it go through unanimous consent which wouldn’t have required a vote on the floor. That was tanked by Mooney (R-WV) so now Pelosi has to bring it to the floor for a vote. We’ll see what happens from there. Even if it passes, it’s a tactic she said she’s trying to do to avoid starting the impeachment process because she knows that won’t go over well and she doesn’t have the time for it.

      https://www.theepochtimes.com/republican-blocks-house-from-bringing-up-25th-amendment-bill_3652031.html

      1. Well, good. Anything that obstructs Democrats, or costs them time. I suggest impeaching every damn one of them, so they literally don’t have time to do anything but defend themselves.

        “Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Democrats in the House have virtually no chance of succeeding.”

        And in the event….

        https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/533446-dershowitz-says-hed-defend-trump-again-in-impeachment-trial
        =====
        Alan Dershowitz, the controversial celebrity attorney who defended President Trump during his impeachment trial, said Friday that he would be willing to defend the president again should the House impeach him a second time.
        …
        “He has not committed a constitutionally impeachable offense and I would be honored to once again defend the Constitution against partisan efforts to weaponize it for political purposes,” Dershowitz told The Hill.
        =====

      2. There is more to it. They are going to use votes against the resolution and impeachment as grounds to remove Republicans from Congress who vote no; just watch. They intend to purge any opposition so they can effectuate single party CCP style rule. The first step is making sure their slim margins are enlarged so they can ram through packing the Supreme Court, adding states, criminalizing “hate speech”, arresting “climate deniers”, etc.,

        1. Well then, maybe it’s time to form our own government. They can stay there in that great echoing chamber if they like, pontificating to no one much.

        2. 5 U.S. Code § 3331. Oath of office

          An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” This section does not affect other oaths required by law.

          There’s just enough people who remember their oath to make the Pelosi Purge difficult to achieve, I hope. That’s why I really fear a false flag, they need to get it done on the bounce. Time is not their friend.

        3. Based on what Pelosi said in an interview, her goal is not to purge Rs, but rather to make certain that Trump cannot run again in 2024 (I thought it was on Epoch Times, but now I can’t find it. I’ll keep looking).

  44. Moi? A brat? Never!

    Both my parents are dead, and my younger siblings lacked capacity to judge such things and are thus unreliable witnesses.

    And whatever my older brother says is a lie.
    ~

  45. One thing I’ve been turning over in my head about how to enable indie writers to make their books discoverable and sellable… Do you remember the old twentieth century “web rings” where people would link all of their websites and there would be arrows to move from one to the other? It has scalability issues, but… Thinking about it, maybe what we need as an “easier to implement” thing is an author/book registry, where it doesn’t necessarily sell the book, but lists the books, covers, authors, and links you to the author’s website, or wherever the author sells the books. Then features could be added as they are implemented.

    Of course everything becomes more difficult when you have to worry about the Corporate Fascist Tech Lords taking you down. And I’d really like to know more about how to find ISPs and other internet support things that are resistant to the CFTL. Does anybody have some pointers? websites where that stuff is documented? All those illegal ebook distributors are hosted somewhere, right? In eastern europe?

    1. Discoverability is a huge problem for small indie authors. Unfortunately, often our friends are just as much small fry as we are, so trying to promote each other’s books ends up being just promoting to the same small circle of people, which means it never gains real traction.

      And that was before the Donks went totally off the rails and look to be ramping up a program to silence all wrongthink, all dissent, every voice save those that parrot their own.

      1. So… just a permalink page for authors’n’books, on a relatively high-and-wide-traffic site like this one? then we’d be all discovered for whoever passes by, instead of ’em having to paw through Amazon. (Lightly curated by our host might be wise.)

  46. I shared and bookmarked this page, then copied the text to a file in case “something happens” to your platform. You are rare with your clarity of mind paired with eloquence. Thanks.

  47. Say they tell you to wear a mask in an establishment– “no problem, how about this Deadpool mask? It does indeed cover my nose and mouth”.

    This also gives cover to folks doing nod-at-the-rules stuff— like my mosquito hat “mask,” which DOES actually conform to the idea of stopping sneeze drops, but doesn’t have a risk of bacterial pneumonia.

    It breaks the ratchet effect.

  48. Pingback: Almost time to dance,,, | Dio's Workshop

  49. This is a quick test to see if WordPress.com is still blatantly censoring any and all of my comments to this blog. Just to be sure of a reaction, communists and socialists need to be stuffed into labor camps and forcibly worked to death in exactly the way that they’d love to inflict that totalitarian horror on decent, non-leftist Americans.

    1. No, that’s too quick for them – they need to be sent to labor camps and worked until retirement, and then sent to retirement camps, all on the north slope in AK so they can enjoy the summertime mosquitos for many, many, many years.

  50. WHAT? I AM wearing a mask! It’s on my head! OK, my forehead, but I’M WEARING IT!!!111!!!

    I am reminded of one of my favorite novels, Eric Frank Russel’s “WASP” (first paperback printing, February1959) “He was sent to make war against another planet, to terrorize and destroy it–single-handedly.” By putting up stickers on things, messing with their minds. A pin prick here, a pin prick there, here a prick, there a prick, everywhere a prick, prick, prick… Let’s all do whatever we can…

    3. One amusing difference between Mowry’s situation and ours: Mowry had to assassinate a few people to get the enemy to take him seriously. We probably won’t need to because the enemy is already doing the work of making us into a bogeyman themselves.

      “The list is short.” 😛

      1. I think they’ll start taking each other out first.

        There are too many groups with too many divergent goals under Dominion’s thumb. The Democratic Party, the mass mesia, “big tech”, Soros, the Chinese Communist Party, various actors in Venezuela, Spain, Germany, and Italy… and the Democrats are just a bunch of diverse hate groups flying in the same general direction; their Party is a complete disorganized fuster-cluck. They’re *temporarily* united in their hate for the likes of us… but if their puppet gets sworn in, the knives will be coming out that evening.

        Dominion is the linking factor… but it’s far from enough to hold that mess together.

  51. The Democrats are trying to impose ‘1984’ on us. What they’re going to get is 1784 — in France!

    Plenty of space to set up guillotines in front of the Capitol building…

    1. OK, off topic sort of, but:

      Best title card in any movie ever, from an otherwise forgettable thing about the French Revolution with Donald Sutherland and Gene Wilder called “Start the Revolution Without Me”:

      Later That Day, 1789

      OK, one other not forgettable thing: It’s narrated by Orson Wells, with narration such as:

      The Narrator:

      Paris, France, 1789. Thirty years later, under the reign of Louis XVI, longstanding grievances between aristocrat and peasant were about to boil over. The pot in which these troubles boiled was kindled with the firewood of oppression and injustice and heated by the flames that sucked the air from gasping peasants. Would the pot cool off, would it merely simmer, or would it boil over in the kitchen of France – to stain the floor of history forever?

  53. when every bank in the USA and the EU (and the UK) demands that a business shows a certificate of carbon neutrality AND a certified plan for race/gender equity before they do business with it , what will you do?
    and by “you” I don’t me you personally but the unwoke normie

    1. THAT is going to be required for every type of business activity; want to have a cell phone, you need to show you support leftist dogma; want to have groceries delivered, same thing, Want to send stuff by UPS or Fed Ex, well that also. It’s coming. Indeed, it will be mandated by Harris/Biden DOJ under the guise of showing compliance with civil rights laws. and failure to impose such requirements will be deemed a civil rights law violation subject to fines and imprisonment.

        1. It will be a “dear colleague letter” interpreting an existing law the same way that the Obama administration used Title IX to impose kangaroo courts on colleges.

          1. Remember, though, that with the universities they had administrators that possibly wanted to go even further than the “dear colleague” advice suggested. Other industries will have very different view of that sort of thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the HR departments at major corporations fall in line. But smaller companies are going to be more reluctant to do so.

            1. That’s what government auditors/tormentors are for-to compel the smaller companies to toe the line because it is prohibitively expensive to fight it.

              1. 1.) Auditing takes time and money. And there are a *lot* of businesses in the US. Or in other words, it’s going to require a ridiculous number of auditors, at a ridiculously large expense, to properly supervise such a thing.
                2.) The thing that such a group of auditors will be best at is pissing off small business owners.

                1. The Democrats hate small business. Not poor enough to need their ‘help’ and not big enough to squeeze efficiently for huge ‘donations’. Which is why the government makes it so hard to start and run a small business.

                  We need to overturn the incentives. To make business cost more the bigger it gets. Diminishing returns should set in about the time they start to grow Middle Management — of the Pointy-Haired Boss variety. Because the bigger ANY organization gets, the more corrupt it becomes. Just look at the biggest organization on the planet: the U.S. federal government.
                  ———————————
                  Leo Bloom: “Well, if we assume you’re a dishonest person—“
                  Max Bialystock: “Assume, assume!”

                  1. No. No ‘make it cost more the bigger it gets’. then everything that REQUIRES a large corporation gets hugely more expensive. Or do you plan on making your own mom-and-pop microprocessor fabs and OLED screen manufacturing facilities?

                2. Government can run a deficit and thus money does not really a limit a vindictive government. Remember the bunny inspectors that Dr. Pournelle always noted.

                  For a lot of businesses, the fear of being audited, especially when the businesses require a government license to operate, like financial services, is sufficient to ensure capitulation to government mandates, no matter how absurd. The cost of simply keeping records and responding to records requests can be incredibly burdensome, especially when those records in some cases must be presented in literally a day or two’s time, on demand. Such requests require on official sending one letter to the business.

                  1. Yeah, they can. But one aspect of “lockdown” is that more and more businesses are realizing that they don’t NEED that piece of paper to operate, and they still have to send out someone to actually enforce it.

                    And more and more of the “enforcement” people (including the people to actually do things like turn off utilities when the smart meters have been “bypassed”) are thinking about the term “hunting over bait”. Which is why they’ve had record numbers of resignations and retirements among CA health department workers.

                    https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/12/29/if-we-cant-work-he-cant-work-health-inspector-was-doling-out-covid-fines-s-n2582255

        1. Companies couldn’t jump fast enough to comply with Operation Chokepoint. Big companies are at best cowards like that and at worst on board with the ideology.

    2. One thing I did was switch to a bank that’s wholly owned inside my flyover state. Big enough to have branches everywhere (and starting to wander outside the state boundaries) but at least it’s not BofA or *spit* Chase.

      There are a lot of these little farmer’s banks, if you look. I’ve got two here in my little town.

  54. “…you’re depriving the bully of what he really wants: your fear and submission.”

    There is a trick to it, of course:

    ~

  55. Regarding living like it’s 1985 … I remember 1985 well … Better Half and i were young and gung-ho in our careers and all that “it’s the 80’s, everyone’s doing 3 things at once!” kind of culture. Anyway … there was a thing called M2M, for Many To Many, which was a primitive forbear of tumblr or instagram. I was in a circle with people from all over the world, including Todd Rundgren’s mother, just so you know. The idea was to provide a copy of whatever you wanted other people to see/read/thiink about and mail it to the next person on the chain. Everyone added on to the packet, and the coordinator of the circle removed the items that had been through at least one full cycle. I got a packet maybe every 2 months. There were several packets in circulation at a time, just to keep things moving. You got the oddest assortment of articles, artwork, original writing, music, just anything you can put on paper (no prrn). Most of the participants were probably raging lefties, yet it was still very interesting to communicate with them, they weren’t blatantly insane yet. I was sad when it just faded away.

    Then the internet came to life.

  56. I have an acquaintance at my Cigar Club … he’s pretty scary. A big man who probably boxed when he was much younger — he carries himself like that — and you definitely wouldn’t want to cross him. Heard him once talk about a fight he’d gotten into years ago. Ugly ….

    I’ve been holding an image of him bloodied, caught unaware, and he’s got that gleam in his eye, the one that says, “I’m coming for you, now …” Suspect we’re all going to want to hold onto and carry some of that energy.

  57. the plague is in both of your houses
    from sea to shining sea
    you’re coming for those who think ‘wrongly’
    so when are you coming for me?

    Still working on it. “Mercutio’s Lament.”

  58. We need to be very aware of false flags. If I were a democrat dark lord, and thank God I’m not, what I’d do is get me a Lee Harvey Oswald that I can claim is a Trump supporter, then use the chaos to suspend 2A. Good old spank me baby as president, a pronunciamento, suspend habeas corpus, little bit of killing — they like the killing — and they get what they want.

    That’s why I think the best strategy is to wait and watch. The left thinks they won, but Nancy and Chucky, the G-men, the tech lords, China and all the rest aren’t leftists, they’re mean girls and wannabe oligarchs and it’s all about the money and their ego. Trump was bad for their business and didn’t kiss their bums enough. everything else is bull shit. When the left discovers they’ve been cheated it’ll be epic. What we need to do is survive.

    Ammunition is good, gold is better, seed potatoes are better still. It’s gonna be a wild ride.

      1. People are stupid and there aren’t enough smart people who know what a false flag is. I’ve been asking people what Trump actually said that launched an “insurrection.” No one can answer me. Try it, it’s depressing.

        I think we need to remember that the only way the hard left can get what they want is an insurrection and the civil war that would follow and they need to get it fast or they lose since all they have is their little straw Trumpollini man. As the memory fades, the cracks will begin and the grand democratic alliance will shatter. They have nothing holding them together but Trump and their interests conflict.

        1. For Democrats/leftists, not clapping long enough for the latest ideological leftist cause is enough to be considered insurrection. Expressing disagreement with that cause is considered treason. The actual words spoken mean nothing. It is the thought crime they seek to punish.

          1. I’m talking about ordinary folk. The narrative works, alas. Ordinary folk believe all this BS. They believe Trump caused Wuflu and that it has already killed millions here in the US, all of them in their prime. yes, the lefties are evil little shits but the vast majority of people are just stupid with no imagination.

            2. Only stupid ordinary folk, or Trump wouldn’t have won in a landslide, as we all know he did.
              yes, people are scared and make mouth noises. But then they hunch their shoulders and vote Trump.
              BE NOT AFRAID.

              1. The only thing I fear now is losing my soul. I’m at the point where I wouldn’t piss on most of my neighbors if they were on fire. That’s not a good place to be.

                2. Lucky to have decent neighbors who are still rational and disgusted by the tyranny.

                  As far as other people and piss-, well if the pissing is part of placing a curse.

    2. Ammunition is good, gold is better

      –
      You got that backward. Ammunition has actual, practical VALUE, in addition to being a useful trade good. Gold is only worth what somebody else will pay for it. What are you going to do when looters come to take your gold? Now imagine some idiots trying to steal your ammunition.

      And, to paraphrase Machiavelli — Gold can’t always get you ammunition, but ammunition can always get you gold.
      ———————————
      That is OUR house. Congresscritters are just the help.

      2. You can’t eat ammunition. A shotgun would be useful to protect the potatoes and maybe take out some rabbits. Of course you can’t eat gold either but it does work well at a distance. Better to pay than to steal.

        In any case, If it gets to the point where we’re fighting over potatoes I’m going to find someone to take with me and go. I’m not really inclined to be a mad max pirate.

        1. You can trade ammunition, probably easier than gold. And then, it has…other uses.

          If the Leftroids use a fake ‘white supremacist’ to take out Doddering Joe, I’m sure another one can be found to take out The Ho.

          1. Curious. Mind you. Was wondering what happens if Pelosi (she is 85) has a stroke/heart attack and drops dead. Dippy Hippy Joe, who isn’t exactly a spring chicken, follows along, also drops dead. Someone takes out the Ho. (Presume no chance to fill-in the gap.) Who is next in line? Who is the designated survivor?

            1. Presidential succession is VP, Speaker, President pro tem of the Senate, Cabinet officers in order of department creation.

              Vice President
              Speaker of the House of Representatives
              President pro tempore of the Senate
              Secretary of State
              Secretary of the Treasury
              Secretary of Defense
              Attorney General
              Secretary of the Interior
              Secretary of Agriculture
              Secretary of Commerce
              Secretary of Labor
              Secretary of Health and Human Services
              Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
              Secretary of Transportation
              Secretary of Energy
              Secretary of Education
              Secretary of Veterans Affairs
              Secretary of Homeland Security

              The whole “designated survivor” thing is to make sure somebody can succeed in case of a mass death event, which is why the Secretary of Who Cares is never at the State of the Union address.

        2. There’s the ould “joke” – how many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman? None…

          If the Hunger comes again, we will survive. The ould Saxons were far more efficient than the new crop.

      1. Oh, It’d “work”. What “works” means depends on what your goals are. Remember that they’re stupid, vicious, and lack imagination. At the end of the day they only have to convince a very small group of rhinos and judges (i wonder what dirt they have on Roberts) and they can get the pronunciamento done. No one outside the Acela corridor will believe it, but they’re just dirt people and don’t matter anyway. The doing would be by CIA and FBI, they’re good at breaking things that work. The only time Chuck the Schmuck told the truth was when he blurted about the “intelligence community”. Our only hope is their incompetence.

        1. The only time Chuck the Schmuck told the truth was when he blurted about the “intelligence community”. Our only hope is their incompetence.

          One of the many points upon which I wish I could correct George Orwell:

          ‘Nothing in Oceania is efficient except the Thought Police.’

          No, George, nothing in Oceania is efficient, period. The Thought Police don’t have a magic immunity pill to preserve them from the rot. But you have to pretend they’re efficient – if you support the system, because the system won’t work without it; if you oppose the system, because they just might be efficient enough to get you shot and you have nothing to gain by arguing the point.

          2. A few days ago you were posting about how little cameras the size of your smartphone camera could be posted on every street corner, every lamppost, etc., and it only takes 10% of them working in order to catch the people engaging in BadThink.

            Thing is, in order to pull that off, the Thought Police would need to be efficient and have a vast store of resources. (Where did they buy all those cameras? How much did they divert from the supply going into smartphones, and how much did that drive up the market value? How much did they end up paying for all those cameras?) So if you re-evaluate your “cameras on every corner” idea from the point of view of an inefficient Thought Police, do you still find it plausible?

            IIRC, you’re in Canada. So although intellectually you might know the difference between Canada’s geography and that of the US, you might not know it deep in your bones. Canada has a huge surface area, but most of it is empty. Almost all the cities, and even the small towns, are along the southern edge of Canada. Whereas the US’s huge surface area is almost all inhabited. Pick out a hundred square miles anywhere in the US (with only two exceptions, the mountain ranges and the desert, neither of which is a huge proportion of the US’s surface area) and there’s at least a small town there, if not a medium-sized city. Okay, three exceptions: the mountains, the desert, and Alaska. But that still leaves almost half the continent of North America covered in street corners and lampposts. I suggest that there’s no way in Hades that the Thought Police can manage a camera on every street corner in the US as you’re suggesting, even if they could maybe pull it off in Canada.

            1. The whole point of having cameras everywhere is that the Thought Police don’t need to be efficient. It’s sea-floor trawling, not angling. The point is not to ‘catch the people engaging in BadThink’, but to prove badthink against the people they have decided to catch.

              As for the difference in geography, you’re basically off your nut. The population of Canada is 10% that of the U.S., and concentrated in 10% of the land area of Canada. And the wealth of Canada (which is what has to pay for those cameras) is considerably less than 10% that of the U.S.

              Making all the numbers in a problem 10 times larger does not make the problem more difficult to solve. If you have 10 times the resources as well, the equation is unchanged.

            2. Agreed. However…

              The point of ubiquitous surveillance isn’t to catch people in realtime, it’s forensic. Automatic video and still capture plus facial and object recognition (available on Google Cloud and AWS!) lets a very few people monitor the total system and watch for alerts to come in: face + spray paint can visible + camera goes black. Now find all other instances of that face and correlate to other people and objects. Now check their debit card transactions. Now send out agents/officers to arrest. The publicly available facial recognition systems aren’t that great — yet — but I’m sure the three-letter folks have much better versions, and the only thing holding them back is [wry chuckle] privacy laws and the Constitution.

              This isn’t 1970s East Germany, where they needed an army of Stasi agents monitoring CCTV screens 24/7.

              2. Facial recognition will never be good enough for what they want. There isn’t enough variation in human faces for the system to distinguish more than a few tens of thousands of people.

                From the machine’s perspective “we all look the same to it”.

                1. One of my fans of mostly Scandinavian extraction, but who is a (much younger) sister mentally, recently reported that FB tags her photos as me.
                  Look, I do have a strangely scandinavian structure to my face (2% but apparently direct matrilenial descent from some 9th century Norwegian bint) and mom even more so. But it’s obscured by olive skin, African nose, and generally “racial indistinct” features.
                  She has none of the later.
                  To FB? we’re TWINS!
                  And has anyone noticed Jack Dorsey is a fricking twin of Rasputin?

                  1. This is where the hatefacts start: that “tens of thousands” figure? That is for white europeans. The number-of-ML-distinguishable-faces count drops drastically for other ethnic groups.

                    Whatever it is that gives the anomalously wide IQ distribution also seems to effect faces.

          3. For every Winston Smith, how many Parsons are there who cheerfully go along, with children ready to turn him in for thoughtcrime and who thank the children for doing so.

          4. I’m reminded of this jape from the Soviet era:

            Place and time: somewhere in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

            The phone rings at KGB headquarters.

            “Hello?”

            “My neighbor Yankel Rabinovitz is an enemy of the State. He is hiding undeclared diamonds in his woodshed.”

            “This will be noted.”

            The next day, the KGB goons go over to Rabinovitz’s house. They search the shed where the firewood is kept, break every piece of wood, find no diamonds, swear at Rabinovitz, and leave.

            The phone rings at Rabinovitz’s house. “Hello, Yankel! Did the KGB come?”

            “Yes.”

            “Did they chop your firewood?”

            “Yes, they did.”

            “Okay, now it’s your turn to call. I need my vegetable patch plowed.”

          5. In the real world, the Thought Police would be inefficient. In Oceania, they can, because they are fictional. A lot of dystopias have problems like that.

  59. What I have been hearing about the late disturbance in Washington from those who are claiming leadership either of government or public opinion, goes along the lines of:

    I am peacefully protesting my legitimate grievances by throwing bricks and setting government buildings on fire.
    He is engaging in disrespectful and disorderly conduct.
    You are rioting and should be shot or jailed.

    I am exercising my constitutional right to petition for redress of grievances.
    He is being obstreperous and confrontational.
    You are a traitor and an enemy of the state.

    What? Self-centered bias? How could anyone possibly accuse them of such a thing?

    I have had enough experience with people trying to punish, hector, belittle, and bullyrag me into doing things for supposedly my own good that I object to it on a political as well as a personal level. If I can’t even make myself do everything I think I ought to, no one else can, and if it’s not something I think I ought to do, I can do a passable imitation of bedrock.
    I’ve never heard you can cure either a madman or a fanatic by arguing with him, and I have precious little ability to persuade anyone of anything, (except perhaps that I am obstinate…) but the notion that I hear being floated that nearly half the nation can be or should be punished for supporting, voting for, or agreeing with Donald Trump sounds either fanatical or insane. I’d call that a symptom of being drunk with power, and I don’t trust drunks. It will not win converts to whatever causes they favor.

  60. Speaking of fascist tyrannical overreach, latest from the Lord of Hate on Facebook is that ar15 [dot] com has been blocked on DNS. I can confirm that “ping ar15 [dot] com” returns “Unknown host”. Commentary seems to be unsure whether it was GoDaddy.com (the domain registrar), AWS (the server host and routing layer) or Google somehow.

    ar15-backup [dot] com is still up: it has a different registrar but is also hosted on AWS, so if it does or doesn’t go down as well then we’ll have narrowed the possible suspects.

    Also, Ron Paul has been kicked off his Facebook page.

      1. Ron Paul was kicked off his Facebook page for posting his op-ed denouncing censorship by Facebook and Twitter.

        1. I was off reading about that a bit ago.
          How’re they going to cover that as a violation of policy? AS looney as RP is, I know full well it isn’t any sort of violation or he’d been long gone. They do know a lawsuit will be in Texas, right?

  61. I thought I had written this earlier this afternoon, but not seeing it, maybe I didn’t.

    One of my favorite novels was Eric Frank Russell’s “WASP”. My copy is a 1959 paperback, first printing February 1959. Cover text: “He was sent to make war against another planet, to terrorize and destroy it–singlehanded.” How? By putting stickers here and there with nasty remarks on them. To spread dissention among the populace. Messing with their minds. A pin prick here, a pin prick there, everywhere a pin prick. That’s what we need to do to Democrats/liberals/progressives…

  62. It was DiBlasio dancing with his wife, not Cuomo (sorry, it was buggin’ me). Otherwise spot on. 😀

    1. Randy Andy Cuomo is the sexiest man alive according to People Magazine, and they would know, He had been married to a Kennedy and then was hooked up with TV bimbo “chef” Sandra Lee. They seem to have split. The DiBlasio ménage is, shall we say, interesting. His wife became famous early on with her I am a Lesbian article and the stories about their courtship are lurid.

  63. “the left will overextend themselves”

    When the ACLU, the Chancellor of Germany, and the President of Mexico all say they’ve gone too far with the “private” censorship, they already have.

    The tech Filter Bubbles have created an air of support for totalitarianism that does not accurately represent the electorate. Are we a minority? Maybe, maybe not. But if we are, we are not a small minority, yet they are acting like it.

    We don’t need anyone to storm barricades or burn down buildings or assassinate cops. Put another way, we don’t need to act like Antifa/BLM. The initial wave of Blue Inevitability is crashing down, but will recede far sooner than they expect. It always does. I’m reminded of the squees of “Permanent Democrat Majority” in 2008, followed by crushing defeat in 2010. Of course, the mechanics of elections have…changed…since then, which is why Irish Democracy, civil disobedience, Dancing to the Line and the whole constellation of passive resistance are available will be more than enough.

    The immediate danger to protests for our side is how to spot the false flags and provocateurs and run them off. These people are well-trained and well funded and present at every protest. They’ll do more damage to our cause than any of our folks.

    1. They’ve just stolen two elections. With those for practice, they’ll steal every election from now on. We can’t vote them out.

        1. Well, yes, the incentive, the precedent for what constitutes an okeydoke above-reproach not-allowed-to-even-say-vote-fraud you-never-can-get-standing-case-dismissed elections, and the how-to manual they just wrote for all to read.

          The thing about the left is they never ever think that what they are doing could be done to them.

          And it won’t be the demonized not-left like Ron Paul (?!?) that they are busy deplatforming – it’ll be that General after his armored task force finishes their thunder run into the DC Beltway, showing AOC and Grey-Goose-Ice-Cream Nancy what an Insurrection actually looks like, in order to get full electoral endorsement of his new President-for-Life position.

    2. This – we need, if we actively protest, to ID and sequester the infiltrators, and make it public who they were, and that they were up to no good. When I was a part of a local and vociferous Tea Party org in 2009-2010, we knew that there would be false-flag infiltrators. We had an active security and public affairs team, keeping an eye on … odd attendees to public events who seemed kind of “off”. We were prepped with signs with arrows pointing to them, tagging them as infiltrators, if and when cameras came out on them.
      Yes, we had all read Alinsky’s Rules, and we were prepared.

  64. Well crap, I think the blog ate my comment. Ah well, maybe I’ll recompose it later.

    An a different note, despite all the cries of despair, depression, and hopelessness I’ve seen from the Rightosphere, I’ve noticed far, far more activity and engagement than I think I ever have in the many places I frequent.

    I don’t doubt for a moment those feelings that people have been expressing, but this tells me that there’s something deeper going on that maybe many people don’t realize. And I find that encouraging.

    I see momentum.

    1. I’m not despairing or hopeless. I AM depressed but only because the berserker is annoyed I don’t let her out to play. (Not yet.)
      So, you know. My blood is up, I’m furious, and I realized this mroning I might fall into the adrenaline addiction I developed last time I dealt with commies.

      1. I’ve been worried about my health so I stayed away pretty much yesterday and most of today. I read for escape. Adrenaline addiction is very serious for females. Can you chop wood? Or relief it somehow?

      2. You’re doing Yeoman’s work. I see you getting a lot more play around the net than I used to. And the responses are showing that people regard you with much more respect than a lot of “bigger” names.

        Keep doing you. It’s working.

    2. >> “Well crap, I think the blog ate my comment. Ah well, maybe I’ll recompose it later.”

      If you make a comment with a link in it and it completely evaporates, make note of where the link went to. I figured out a few days ago that WordPress is nuking any comment with a link to Vox Day’s blog without notice or explanation. I doubt he’s the only one.

      And note that this didn’t start recently. Many months ago I tried to link to an article at VD’s with the same result.

      >> “An a different note, despite all the cries of despair, depression, and hopelessness I’ve seen from the Rightosphere, I’ve noticed far, far more activity and engagement than I think I ever have in the many places I frequent.”

      No kidding. Comments here are coming in so fast I’m not going to be able to keep up.

      1. >> “If you make a comment with a link in it and it completely evaporates, make note of where the link went to.”

        That part was aimed at all of you. It might be good to know who WP (DE) is quietly censoring.

      2. Although the comment sections at Instapundit and Townhall are full of lefty trolls. Quite unpleasant.

          1. The Wallaby has never given us a straight answer. Or anything even close to a straight answer.

            1. Your definition of a troll must be different than mine, then, because from where I sit this entire post was about trolling the left. 😉

    3. There’s a sense that we need to do something. Things are rapidly coming to a head, and when that happens your instincts scream at you to fight.

      But it’s not time to fight.

      And as a result, people have lots of energy. So they put it into other things… like posting in blogs.

      1. So, like soldiers bitching, the time to be afraid is when we STOP…
        ———————————
        Artie: “Don’t open that!! It’s the original can of worms!”

  65. Were you a brat?

    I really wasn’t, but for strange reasons. Next best thing to oppositional defiance disorder, raised to behave without buying-in until I was darned ready and decided on my own. It’s actually possible to conform behavior without granting “authority” any actual authority. More the, “I was going to do that anyway, not because you told me to” sort of kid.

  66. “Remember, the goal is to stay as firmly legal as possible, but taunt the shit out of them in the process.”

    I generally like this article (it should be shorter). I wonder about throwing out illegal actions though; after all Gandhi and MLK did well with those.

    For one thing, how hard we can push depends on who we are and what we have to lose:
    https://ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle589-20100926-07.html

    I think you can push harder, cross the line more often than most people realize. One example, when I homeschooled my son I did not register with the state as an official homeschooler. As I stated on the homeschooling list, I had the opinion that my child was mine, not the state’s. That is, my responsibility. What’s more, I encouraged newbie homeschoolers to do the same thing, not register; and this was on a public list, mind you. Nobody ever gave me crap about it. Why? It might have been my warning there that I would not tolerate anyone fucking with my family, including the possibility of an armed response. You have to ask yourself, what do bureaucrats and cops want? They want an easy job with a nice fat pension. The last thing they want is to challenge an irate, armed father – who is morally and physically in the right.

    Also, they are well aware they are already backing us into a corner, and the ones who are not fools know well how dangerous that is:
    https://ncc-1776.org/tle2013/tle728-20130707-06.html

    1. >> “I generally like this article (it should be shorter). I wonder about throwing out illegal actions though; after all Gandhi and MLK did well with those.”

      Gandhi and MLK were seeking freedom from people who were basically decent. Our enemies are not.

  67. Historic words. Someday schoolkids will giggle over your work like we did over Franklin’s fart jokes.

    Shared on Facebook too.

    1. I will not follow a link to Twatter. I didn’t follow many before, and now it is Right Out.

        2. Never mind, it’s back.

          Antifa have forced Powell’s to close their store today and employees have evacuated the customers inside out the back door. They’re protesting them selling Andy Ngo’s book on their website. They announced earlier they wouldn’t put it on the shelves.

          And there’s a video of chanting “Stop selling Andy Ngo’s book!” while staff members pull the cloth-tape barriers around the front door shut.

          Antifa has always had a presence on the street corner across from Powell’s bitching and moaning and menacing passersby. Powell’s is Portland!Woke, but I hope they’ve got at least one shotgun under the counter.

          2. Which is ironic since Powells embraced the woke thing a while back. But now they’re a bastion of free speech. Well, better to find some balls late than never.

            1. Of course they did. Guys, the left imagines every store, every church, every corporation is the enemy EVEN AFTER THEY TAKE THEM OVER.
              As the idiots who helped them are about to find out.

      3. The text of the tweet: “Antifa have forced Powell’s to close their store today and employees have evacuated the customers inside out the back door. They’re protesting them selling Andy Ngo’s book on their website. They announced earlier they wouldn’t put it on the shelves.”

      1. Just because you stopped taking high doses of LSD doesn’t mean you’re not still a nutball.

  70. Here’s a link to a story I wrote almost five years ago, about safetyism and how society is splitting into groups: inspiwrite.wordpress.com/2021/01/12/i-dont-see-you/

  72. Know your enemy:

    New role for antifa: Biden’s ‘shock troops
    by Paul Bedard, Washington Secrets Columnist | January 11, 2021 08:20 AM

    The election of President-elect Joe Biden does not signal the end of violent anarchist group antifa, sometimes portrayed by sympathetic media as a national anti-Trump movement.
    Unmasked cover image.jpg

    Instead, according to a journalist who has tracked its every move, antifa is likely to feel emboldened to challenge pro-Trump critics of the new Democratic administration.

    And following Wednesday’s violent protests in the halls of Congress by Trump supporters, said Andy Ngo, “They will feel, in their own right, legitimized” to retaliate.

    Ngo is a self-made antifa expert and critic who has used his platform on Twitter, with 842,200 followers, and as editor-at-large at the Post Millennial to publicize the violence of the group, including his own beating and death threats from members.

    Next month, he is publishing his first book about the group, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, which includes excerpts from training books, identifies key leaders, and reveals a plan to recruit members through Major League Soccer fan clubs, including those for the Portland Timbers.
    [End Excerpt]
    ~

    2. Powell’s in Portland was shut down and the customers in the store guided out the back because of antifa protesting them selling Andy’s book.

    4. Soccer. Why did it have to be… Actually, soccer, Heh. I, like all true Americans, think of soccer as the sport that little kids play due to over-Mom-ing. Soccer fans in the US. Heh!

      Now if they were recruiting at Rugby I’d be more concerned.

      1. Girls’ soccer in high school and college is the reason so many young women tear their ACLs. I read somewhere that over six or seven years of playing soccer, the cumulative chance of blowing out your knee is around 50%.

    5. They ought to remember which group Hitler ordered to have wiped out just a year and a half after he assumed the Chancellorship…

  74. “… if all we buy from Amazon are ebooks, they’re going to be a sad little Amazon.”

    It was not that long ago when the Left was attacking Dept. of Defense contracting with Amazon for cloud storage. As we have seen with Chinese production of critical medical supplies it is highly dangerous to rely o third parties for critical infrastructure. It is essential that we petition Congress to withdraw from all such server farm agreements and instead buy or build their own server infrastructure.

    No tax dollars to tyrants!
    No tax dollars to traitors!
    ~

  75. I took Mr Nemo back to the oncologist today. The lymphoma has recurred and the vet says that we’re basically out of options. I’m not sure he’ll last until the weekend.
    He fought this off for almost 2.5 years. Never gave up, had some of the fewest side effects the vet said he’d ever seen from the chemo, but it’s time. His Christmas photo is how I’ll remember him.

    https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/four_feet.html

    I have done mostly what most men do,
    And pushed it out of my mind;
    But I can’t forget, if I wanted to,
    Four-Feet trotting behind.

    Day after day, the whole day through —
    Wherever my road inclined —
    Four-feet said, “I am coming with you!”
    And trotted along behind.

    Now I must go by some other round, —
    Which I shall never find —
    Somewhere that does not carry the sound
    Of Four-Feet trotting behind.

  76. One more note: Michael Yon posted the morning of the Reichstag Fire Capitol Open House Day Tour in anticipation of momentous events, and has been radio silent as far as I can find ever since.

    Has anyone seen anything other than his last post on his https://michaelyon-online.com site?

    2. I can’t find the clip of it now, but I prefer Ayn Rand’s answer to this: “better to see the reds dead.”

  78. Breaking: Parler is suing Amazon Web Services for breach of contract; copy of the complaint at the link. Which is absolutely the right thing for them to do at this stage; if the courts don’t give them justice, then other remedies might be considered, but the courts should be tried first.

    1. Now let’s see if their law firm is allowed to proceed with the case, or terrorized into dropping it.

      And, your link is broke. Did you forget to close the quote, like I did earlier?

    2. Email update from the Seattle Times:

      Pro-Trump social media site Parler takes step toward relaunching with Eastside firm

      Shortly after Amazon scrubbed Parler from the internet, the conservative social media platform moved its domain name to Sammamish-based Epik. But that doesn’t mean Parler is back. Here’s why, plus a look at Parler’s bumbling attempt to sue Amazon.

      [italics added]

      1. I’m surprised and heartened that right-friendly Epik is based in King County Oblast.
      2. “We’re a professional big-city newspaper! We don’t blatantly shade the news! How dare you!”

      (Note: ST killed its comments for anything other than local non-Covid stories sometime in mid-2020. Guess they couldn’t stand the feedback from the large number of angry readers who haven’t been gaslighted into submission.)

    3. 110%

      I know I’m not all that clever, so folks here are probably already thought of it– but Amazon may have been setting up to get sued.

      Amazon is disliked.

      This action made it so that they have publicly Taken A Stand with All Good And Right People…but did it in a way where there’s a good chance they’ll be “forced” to follow the standard of only removing actively illegal stuff.

      Basically, sue and settle for a private company.

  79. Remember this classic from Nancy Pelosi; back then challenging the election as rigged was considered “patriotic” by Democrats; now it is considered insurrection:

    1. But, that was when they FAILED to hijack the election! It’s totally different this time, when they succeeded!

      That’s what Trump should have said in his ‘concession’ speech. “The Democrats stole this election. We went to court, again and again, and they refused to hear us. Now Congress has sanctified the fraud. We have no legal recourse remaining, so Cheatin’ China Joe Biden is going to be inaugurated as President in two weeks. We can’t prevent that, but we can continue to work and fight for our rights, our freedom, and to take back our country from the usurpers.”

      Within a week, all investigation into the Biden Crime Family, the Russia Hoax, and the fraudulent election will be quashed in the most brutal, heavy-handed way possible. Like the election fraud, they won’t even try to hide what they’re doing. They believe they’ve won the war, for all time. Just like the Committee of Public Safety.
      ———————————
      Count Vordarian: “What? You’re a Betan! You can’t do—“

  81. I suspect that the defenestration of Parler is also as a thank-you gift (like arranging for somebody to plant hotels from “Go To Jail” all the way to “Boardwalk” so that the cheapest square on the home-stretch is “Luxury Tax”) to Twitter for their aid in Fact-Checking our Unfounded Suspicions about the new Potempkin-Of-These-Untied-States, and squelching any inconvenient truths about his heir-and-scion.

    Functionally, if not overtly.

  82. I heard Speaker Pelosi nattering about impeachment and the 14th Amendment being necessary to bar Trump returning to office. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment indeed reads:

    Section 3.
    No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

    So there is that.

    Here’s the question: why impeach? That’s a political trial, the sort of process the USA has here-to-fore disdained. Why not, as soon as Trump is no longer president, bring charges of insurrection (or incitement of, if that’s their case) against private citizen Trump? Let him defend himself out of his own pocket in criminal trial, convict (hey, if it’s such an open-and-shut case, right?) and thus disqualify him under the 14th Amendment from ever again holding elected office?

    Asking for a friend.
    ~

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  84. Hmmmmmm. I know many here have eschewed reading Power Line, but this post from Reagan biographer Steven Hayward seems to tread familiar turf:

    THE DEEP STATE IS RATTLED
    I had a conversation over the weekend with a senior career lawyer (who is a Trump supporter) with a federal agency who passed along some interesting information. He said career federal officials in Washington he spoke with on Thursday and Friday are seriously rattled by last Wednesday’s events. Among other things, the fact that apparently some Capitol Police were friendly with the protestors who entered the building have federal bureaucrats wondering whether they can fully trust their own security personnel. Will the feds start trying to screen security personnel by ideology? Oh, that’d be just great. Pretty sure there are a bunch of German names for a fully politicized police force, but I forget what they are right now.

    Beyond the security question, this person told me the mob action has been a psychological blow on the DC bureaucracy which didn’t think such an open expression of tangible disrespect for the government was possible. In other words, the capitol mob was a blow to their status, and Washingtonians believe the entire protest represents more than just anger at the election outcome: the disrespectful spirit of the day represents a real threat to their power going forward. This is one reason for the paranoia of Democrats at the moment, and they worry that more such protests are not only possible but likely. Part of the reason there is such fury on the left to run Trump out of office right away is that DC is genuinely afraid of him and his followers. Machiavelli might approve. Hence the calls to deploy national guard units in DC in large numbers for Inauguration next week.

    Right away a few observations come to mind. First, if you squint the right way, you can see that our leaders don’t really take BLM and Antifa protests very seriously, and hence the kid glove treatment they get. The property damage may be significant, but our government likely doesn’t think Antifa and BLM amount to a significant political threat. Hence the leniency of the government response at all levels to riot season last year. But if the government at all levels now tries to crack down on pro-Trump protestors, won’t they have to also tighten their rules of engagement with Antifa, or will there now be a political litmus test for rules of engagement? There is, this person said, a lot of hand-wringing going on about the fact that of the hundreds of people who invaded the capitol building, only about 50 arrests were made. (There may be more as law enforcement goes about identifying people.) But the point is: from the perspective of the Deep State, the mob largely got away with it.

    Second, there is a lot of controversy and conflicting reports on whether a national guard presence had been requested for last Wednesday. Here’s a certainty: if Trump had requested deployment of the national guard beforehand to stand by at the capitol, the left would have screamed that this show of force was all part of Trump’s plan to stage a military coup to stop the certification of the election.
    [END EXCERPT]
    ~

    1. the disrespectful spirit of the day represents a real threat to their power going forward

      Hurray! Because YES, you [unprintable] [unprintable]ing [unprintable]s.

      Also, it is revealed that enforcement of the law depends on whether political power is threatened, not because laws are broken and actual people get hurt. Good to know.

    2. There has been this update to it:

      UPDATE: Sure enough, it seems the government is going to apply stricter justice for the Wednesday protestors:

      Prosecutors weigh ‘heavy hammer’ — felony murder — for rioters in Capitol officer’s death

      . . . While most murder investigations focus on the person or persons who caused the fatal injury, former federal prosecutor Tim Heaphy said prosecutors could charge many rioters with felony murder, even if they were nowhere near Sicknick.

      Apparently they want even ramp the anger up to eleven, since they never even raised the idea of charging Antifa/BLM rioters with felony murder. Apparently Grand Moff Tarkin is the prosecutor’s role model.

  85. It appears that Democrats are going to do everything they possibly can to incite a full-fledged civil war:

    https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/01/11/dem-sen-brown-cruz-and-hawley-must-be-expelled-from-senate/

    Essentially, the Democrats are branding everyone who objected to certification of the electoral votes as being insurrectionists, notwithstanding the lengthy history of Democrats having objected to certification of every previous Republican President since George H.W. Bush.

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  88. Use sidewalk chalk to write “Biden did not win. And we know know it.” It’s probably not illegal.

    If you want to spend big money, see if you can rent a plane to pull a banner with that phrase over your town. Take photos and post them.

  89. Exactly right.

    You have pointed out how easy it is to infuriate the American Left, whether they are in power or not.

    Let us be the Party of Fun. We will mock them, and have a wonderful fun time doing it. Let people see that it’s much more fun to mock the humorless SJW scolds than to join them. Teenagers will be natural allies.

    And yes, we will take casualties. Every war does. So will they… because the Left eats its own.

    Many thanks for writing this. I needed to read it.

  90. I’m beginning to think the Left is trying to provoke something. Why else are they pushing so hard and so fast, just as they’ve “won”? And that was even before that suspicious “armed protest” flyer started circulating. Be wary, folks.

    1. Partly because they know they didn’t win, and they’re terrified.
      Partly because they’re a cargo cult and they don’t realize we’re not Chinese peasants.
      And partly because they think a confrontation can be used to silence us as they did with “militias” under Clinton. I don’t think it will work that way, but hey.

  91. Hey Sarah, thanks for the encouragement, brilliantly written as always.. I’m an outspoken, unafraid, lifelong corporate communicator with verbal and written acuity as my greatest strength. So I, along with you and all your readers, see what ‘they’ do and how they do it and I’ve never shied away from a conversation with a progressive (I’m married to a self-proclaimed hard left, radical feminist progressive so unlike many of you, I see the insane mental gymnastics and groupthink of the left up close and personal). But the truth is, I’m a a pessimist at heart and therefore a quitter. My spirt dries up in adversity. I’ve watched the cultural / ideological ratchet turn for decades. But only turns in one direction and the only way to correct it is to release the locking mechanism. When that happens, everything goes to hell all at once. The unlocking and the hell are inseparable, it’s part of the same action. Long story short, I read you via Instapundit, the only site I’ve ever read daily and I’ve done so since the it started back in the aughts sometime. Keep it up, and thanks again, I wish I could keep a bottle of that SarahHoyt branded defiance and perseverance on my kitchen shelf.

    1. You ARE a pessimist. I am one too. I cure it with reality checking.
      To point you at it, three facts:
      the internet even as it is is harder to control than a handful of newspapers staffed by j school graduates.
      I know several kids (under 40. eh) who turned right over the last few years and are keeping it secret from lefty friends.
      IF the left were BELIEVED by the people, they wouldn’t have needed blatant, middle of the night fraud.
      The left is acting like it’s scared and desperate.
      Now go figure out why.
      And be not afraid.

  92. How do I send you a (small I am afraid) amount to help a tiny bit? Preferably like you have suggested, PO Box? I am afraid I am not good with computers, taken me FOREVER to figure out how to find your past posts, which I have spent the morning and a ream of paper to print. Just as I am ordering through Amazon (unfortunately) any book I hear is banned by any school system in hardback just so my, so far, great grandchild(children) will at least have the opportunity to read them. I did order the first book you suggested (Comrade Don Camillo) and will try to dig up enough extra for a hardback copy. You are keeping me sane on the really bad days. Thank you.