I Wake Up Screaming

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Guys, we’ve been thinking about this all wrong.

We’ve been thinking like these are normal American grifters and idiots. In other words, Democrats and their useful idiots.

And then I figured it out.

Okay, so you guys remembered how we laughed during the campaign when every one of the democrats raised their hand and said he would tax us higher to pay for health care for illegals?

And you know how even a week ago, I was scratching my head and going “Why the hell do they think naturalizing every illegal who is here will work? Most of these people come from countries where this type of bullshit is old. MOST of them will already be beating feet towards the border at speed.”

Ah, but I was thinking in terms of their replacing the population. I was being, what do they call it? Naive. Also American.

Shake the snowglobe of evil. Again.

Now let the dust settle.

Like this: They make illegals citizens. They don’t care if they stay here. This is their chance to send money AND ballots abroad. FOREVER. So the rest of the world can vote them into power in perpetuity FOREVER. While Americans are kept imprisoned, working themselves to death to feed, clothe and pay the third world to keep these people in power FOREVER.

And if you complain? You’re an insurrectionist and enemy of the state and everything good and proper who must be destroyed.

And they think that will work. And it will. Five, ten years before Americans discover what’s really going on. Which is long enough for everyone involved in this at the international level to be rich beyond the dreams of billionaires. And if they play their cards right for our army by then to be composed mostly of people born and raised and speaking the language of those third world countries.

So, no matter how well armed Americans will be fighting back against a — granted third world and therefore poorly trained — army equipped with the best armament in the world.

And with luck, they can make us like Imperial Rome with them in power forever. (Americans would never devolve into imperial Rome, but this won’t be America. Or largely Americans.)

This is the most extraordinarily well planned invasion in the history of mankind. The Trojan horse is nothing to it. And they did it co-opting our institutions, already destroying our election process, and using as stalking horses some of the most corrupt politicians the world has ever seen.

So, who is behind it? EVERYONE. Ever single bien-pensant Euro asshole, Winnie the Xi who doesn’t want us stopping his enslaving of Africans and South Americans and who can in fact get us to feed their slaves, international billionaires who will suck us dry as we die.

There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but best of all, with a little care, you can take that ruin and make yourselves beyond unimaginably rich.

AND you can do it while turning off the gas of the peasants (note the keystone pipeline and the ban on fracking) confiscating their food for what is soon to be a world famine (Don’t you care about starving people, you evil man) and in general destroying America to make sure it never rises again.

And our media will applaud, and — already — talk about the godlike qualities of the invaders. Our courts, including supposing conservatives, will facilitate this. Our congress, both parties, will roll over for this as they have for the fake election.

And our army will stand by because — oh my — we can’t expect them to do anything about it. Why, that would be evil. These aren’t invaders, and we’ve had crooked elections before.

<Applauds in the direction of hell.

Well played. Amazing gambit.

Looks upwards. And now, what do we do?

770 thoughts on “I Wake Up Screaming”

  2. As you say, we build under, over, aside, around, invent, etc. Think sideways, parallel, inverse, and inside-out, and make M.C. Escher queasy. And then, when “all is lost”.. leave the bastards wondering WTH happened as we laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh…

    Now, do I have an expect prescription for this? No. But as long as we can still laugh and smile, it will still count as a failure amongst them. That, if nothing else, buys time. And time… well… that stuff can work miracle, given even half a chance.

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    2. Did you mean to use the clip from the end of ‘Doctor Strangelove’?
      ———————————
      “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here — this is the War Room!”

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        1. “We will all go together when we go,
          All suffused with an incandescent glow…”
          That’s a nightmare I could do without.
          (But I never did believe in “the end of history”).

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          1. In the 80s Sting had this hit and while it is a bit closer to the mindset of “Imagine” than I like, it has a valid point.

            The men who faced off in the Cold War, and not just the big guys like Ike, Reagan, and Kruskev, but men face with horrific choices like Stanislav Petrov and, most notable of the bunch, Vasili Arkhipov.

            But what about Mrs. Keithleys? The stories we hear about Stalin’s death range from the Politburo members present either denying treatment to Stalin or outright murdering him under guise of illness. The common theme among many of the stories is a belief that Stalin intended to order a nuclear strike on the US as he died, so the USSR would not survive him.

            I look at the childless by choice leaders here and in Europe. I look at their choices about life and policy. I cannot help but wonder if they are Stalins not in the easy to assign way of purges and show trials, but the more horrific ways as a would-be ultimate Cain.

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  3. In the end “we throw rocks at them”. The blue cities depend on infrastructure that CANNOT be defended. WE send them power, water, and food. When the boot on our necks gets too cumbersome, we cut them off. There will be a general trucking strike this year in response to the rapidly increasing fuel costs. Once unemployment reaches 20% the illegals here will HELP us hit back at them.

    The Blue cities are unbelievably fragile, and once cut off their own citizens will destroy them.

    It sucks that it’ll be the only way, but in the end we will have to “throw rocks at them.”

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    1. I don’t even want to TYPE some of the ideas that I have for how fragile certain infrastructure is, because it’s really very easy to cut off some things if you have people capable of hiking with a normal weight load on their backs. I am NOT giving people ideas.

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      1. No worries, we’ve already HAD all those ideas, and then some.

        Further, we have defensible borders; they don’t.

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        1. Even those of us with zero knowledge can still think of things. That was part of the patheticness of the Capitol Green Zone: they showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can be completely jammed up with near-zero effort.

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            1. Now we hear some of those poor troops have been sleeping in the Senate cafeteria. Which at least gave a few Congresscritters and Senators the chance to offer them office space.

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                    1. And if asked by the governors to stop Federal efforts to compel those states to do stuff that those states deem illegal or unconstitutional, expect that many of those national guard members will be willing to do so, much more than before they had been treated so poorly by the Democrats.

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                    5. Biden is mentally incompetent and is rubber stamping a bunch of unknown unaccountable sorts who have no doubt already started feuding.

                      Federalizing the troops is more responsibility on Biden’s part.

                      Normally, someone could say “Sir? If you keep these people here indefinitely, and do not keep them busy, they will have time to figure things out and get really angry”.

                      Not with Azathoth in the chain of command.

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                1. It was actually the Democrat from Arizona who offered her office. Arizona’s legislature is fast tracking Second Amendment sanctuary state legislation. Apparently Arizona has some politicians with guts still around, even if they were gutless in stopping election fraud (although as a practical matter unless the fraud in Georgia Michigan and PA had been defeated, Arizona’s actions were mathematically irrelevant as far as the electoral college went.

                  The reason Democrats are pushing to expel Cruz, Hawley and others from the Senate is fear that there are a couple of Democrats who are willing to vote with Republicans to keep the filibuster in place, prevent Court packing and to prevent new states from being added. Since the Democratic Party is committed to these things, they intend to rig the Senate and House to enable them to go through without any effective opposition.

                  If the effort to expel enough Republican Senators and House members to give the Democrats the ability to push things through without even having to consider compromise with recalcitrant members of their own party is unsuccessful, I expect Republicans in states with Democratic Party governors to be Epsteined/Enemies of Hillaried

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                  1. I’m pretty sure expelling members of Congress would be one of those things that would trigger secession, and this time it would be completely justified. The Democrats would get their packed court, with ZERO power over the people they need to control.

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                    1. Democrats want states to seek to secede because they think it would prove their claims that their political opponents are insurrectionists and thus justifies the actions they have always wanted to take to eliminate political opposition. I do think there are some Democrats who would literally nuke political opponents. They most certainly want those political opponents held in “re-education centers”, i.e. concentration camps, so that they can “cleanse” them. More and more of the Democratic Party media is openly calling for a “mass re-education” of EVERYONE who voted for Trump.

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                    2. I’m sure they’d love to nuke us, but I don’t think they’ll be able to actually get their hands on them. The only nukes in a blue state are at Bangor sub base, and I’m not sure they’ll be able to get them out.

                      The basic question is one of motivation of the seceding states. If people generally saw it as justified it would be hard for the Democrats to get any traction, especially outside their urban power bases. And the secession of states opens the door to the red portions of blue states – i.e. most of the states – seceding from their states a la West Virginia (but backwards) which would leave the Democrats ruling over a few dozen isolated urban areas. Which then begs the question of who seceding from whom.

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                    5. As best I recollect, we have a long history of admitting states in pairs, one Democrat, one Republican. Admitting states for partisan gain might well be a Union sundering event.
                      ~

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                    7. I don’t know about the other services, but I think the Navy’s nuclear weapons on the left coast are still stored at Long Beach Naval Ordnance Center. That’s where the ship always went to load 5″ ammo, torpedoes and ASROCs, and to unload it all again after deployment.

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                    8. I don’t know if the Navy even has any nuclear gravity bombs in its inventory. If they do I doubt they’d spend the money on the kind of security needed to keep them safe at more than one location per coast. There’s just no good reason to keep them anywhere other than Bangor and Kings Bay.

                      It’s different with conventional weapons. Those are used frequently enough that it makes sense to have storage and loading facilities near where the ships are homeported.

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                    9. As best I recollect, we have a long history of admitting states in pairs, one Democrat, one Republican.

                      –
                      That tradition started in the early 1800’s when the proto-Democrats demanded that a slave state must be admitted for every free state. By the 1850’s it became clear that they would be defeated by their own demographics in spite of such measures. Free states tended to have larger populations and stronger economies, which attracted still more settlers…positive feedback. Slave states tended to have a few rich property owners and little opportunity for outsiders.

                      Sort of like today. Free states have stronger economies, which attract people disgusted with Democrat-communism-fascism. Unfortunately, the communist-fascists follow them, bringing along the same stupidities that ruined the states they flee from. Now they’ve taken over the federal government and will try to impose those stupidities on the entire nation from the top down.
                      ———————————
                      Governments can’t create prosperity; at best, they can refrain from destroying it.

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                    10. I’m pretty sure it applied when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted; I am not sure about New Mexico and Arizona’s admission in, respectively, January and February of 1912. Wiki says the first governor of New Mexico was a Democrat, as was Arizona’s.
                      ~

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              3. Then moved them to a parking garage.
                Because that’s totally appropriate shelter for troops not issued the full load of winter gear.
                .
                Oh, and Biden signed an executive order federalizing the national guard for the duration of the kung-flu “emergency” as one of his first acts.
                .
                Sociopaths sometimes get exactly what they deserve.

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                1. It gets worse. Apparently COVID is spreading among many of the National Guard Troops. Now admittedly most of these folks are probably in good condition, but still there could be some that run into real issues. Love the care the Democrats show for the troops. They’d better hope these folks are far more patriotic than I would be…

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                  1. This is exactly what happened in 1918 with the flu. It was spread among the military jammed in bases and transport for WWI. They wore masks and most of the other things that are being repeated even though they don’t work and never have.

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                    1. I suspect they don’t have COVID. I suspect they caught cold, and then they were sent to quarantine. Apparently they didn’t have much in the way of testing equipment.

                      However, apparently a lot of the Guard were being told to work while sick, so….

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                    1. Of course when Trump did that to defend the southern border, states like California refused, to the cheers of the Democratic Party media arm.

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                  2. Same way Eisenhower and Kennedy did it in AR, MS, and AL during civil rights era. The President can call the National Guard up at any time.

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                    1. But wasn’t Trump still president when they were called out? So did *Trump* federalize the guard?

                      On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 5:51 PM According To Hoyt wrote:

                      > snelson134 commented: “Same way Eisenhower and Kennedy did it in AR, MS, > and AL during civil rights era. The President can call the National Guard > up at any time.” >

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                    2. Apparently senior military leadership public statements to the contrary, in which they said that Pelosi couldn’t insert herself into the chain of command and doing so would be a coup they wouldn’t allow, it was Pelosi who directed the national guard to DC and in fact she did insert herself into the chain of command and those senior military leaders allowed it. Proving yet again that regardless of their public statements, they are compromised and are part of the effort by the Democrats and establishment to “fundamentally transform America”.

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                    3. What they ACTUALLY protested was her inserting herself in the NUCLEAR chain of command. Not the same; troops being sent to US cities has been almost normal since 1958.

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                  3. They have to. It’s how the Guard gets paid out of federal funds. The states sure as hell aren’t going to pick up the bill for FICUS’ stage props.

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      4. There are good reasons that we censor ourselves. And there are things you just don’t *do* on American soil.

        That said, the right to self defense is not one given by mortal man and easily taken away. much though they try and make it so. Plan, prepare, look out for your own. Beware, beware the Bubbe Effect.

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  6. I’d love to dismiss your hypothesis, but can’t. It’s plausible, and ties in with other speculation I’ve read.

    Thoughts on what to do? First response seems to be to do our best to deny them income. We’re trying to wean ourselves off of the ‘zon to deny *that* billionaire money. That approach will need a lot of people doing the same to have much of an impact. I’ll skip the whine about how tough it is in rural counties… [sigh]

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      1. I got inspired by Nathan Brindle’s article last week and am looking into getting a Ham ticket. (27 years as a semiconductor engineer means I know *some* of the necessary bits.)

        Haven’t considered Amazon for any of the equipment. Actually, my plan is to join the local club and ask around for used equipment first. OTOH, if I go new, there are places that aren’t Amazon where I can get what I need.

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          1. I keep thinking about it myself. I looked in 8th grade, but in those days you could only stay novice for 2 years and then you needed to move to technician or general. Problem was the requirements for either of those were beyond what even a rather precocious 8th grader could hope for, and the hardware cost was prohibitive.

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            1. I’m curious why so many think we should follow the government’s rules for Ham radio in order to protest the freaking government!!

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              3. The purpose of becoming a ham isn’t to protest the government, it’s to develop the skills and contacts to maintain a means of communication the Tech Giants can’t shut off.

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                1. This. And, besides, with a largely self-regulated service like Ham radio, it’s an exceptionally bad idea to run your Spark-o-Matic with the Megawatt RF amplifier all over the bands. Insert Mr. T quote here: “Ah pity the fool.”

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          3. I’m scoring over 80% on the Technician sample tests cold, and most of my wrong answers are “doh!” mistakes, so I think I’ll be able to swing that as soon as there are tests again here. I need to try the other levels cold – it would be cool to pull the hat trick.

            The online tests that don’t require a live test proctor all look a little overparanoid, requiring things like continuous camera coverage of your entire working environment preferably from an angle where they can see your physical desktop and watch your hands, three online scorers staring at your eyes on camera the entire time you take the test, and an automatic fail if anyone else enters the frame while you’re taking the test.

            If they handed out stacks of gold bars when you passed I could see this level of precautions, but for Technician class license?

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            1. A lot of the paranoia seems to be either directly written into the FCC regulations, or derive from the fact that the examiners are seriously liable if a testee is found cheating and isn’t failed. Part 97’s section on the examination is interesting. (97.509–yikes!)

              I know how long it takes me to to the Technician test, and at the current level of study, it’s about twice that time to do the General test. Even if I had the video setup, I’d not want to spend the bandwidth to do so.

              A few years ago, I’d have to drive over the Cascades to take the test, but now there are local exams every month.

              As it stands, I have a few weeks to study. I’m more-or-less at the point where memorization is important, stuff like band boundaries and where various activities/services are running. Mercifully, I find I can memorize this stuff, and I’m not adverse to looking at the test question pool to make sure I have it down.

              FWIW: http://www.arrl.org/find-an-amateur-radio-license-exam-session
              will do just what the URL says.

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              1. The HAM test givers in silicon valley, and indeed statewide, are all locked down for the duration, so nothing is available in person – Though I note with interest that now that 扒殿周 (谁不是我的总统) has been coronated, our county hospitalization stats have unexpectedly improved, jumping from 8% ICU capacity available up to 12% overnight. Occupied ICU beds dropped by only one, but local hospitals suddenly found staff to open a chunk of ICU beds. I presume the word has gone out to the Party faithful that C19 is now to go away, so the hospitals will staff back up to their max levels that had over the summer, up about 15-20 more than now, at which levels our ICU availability stats would drop below the state lockdown criteria and businesses could start to reopen, so maybe the HAM testers will soon be able to schedule new sessions.

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    2. Back to the 70s and establish co-ops, maybe? Requires like-minded neighbors, which I realize is the sticking point for lots and LOTS of people. Just randomly thinking.

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    3. Why does your line of reasoning remind me of the dystopian future in RAH’s “Friday”?
      To paraphrase something he wrote in the book, “How do you wage war against a company who’s location is a P.O. Box in Delaware?”

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    1. Last night Tim pool had Matt Braynard from Look Ahead America. He thought that we were beat on numbers and organization instead of fraud. I agree on the numbers and I don’t agree on his “evaluation” of the voter fraud. He says each of us should become lobbyists in our on States. He had a few solutions that sounded really good. He is also training on his website in several ways to inform legislators and get more educated voters.

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      2. Continued–

        For those of us literally sick and tired, we may not be able to do this stuff. But we need to build communities. I am seeing a few people get together and are building their own websites, and communities in rural areas. Compounds if you will. That does take money and time, which some of us do not have. But we may need to pull together in real space… I was thinking of this recently.

        The Dims are trying to fill the dying cities and yes, they’ve been trying to get control for a long time.

        But we can’t give in to Despair. The one thing I’ve learned from my own personal Armegeddons is that sometimes I can only take one step at a time. No more… no less…

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        1. Seconded on the sick and tired, but always remember this. Every day we’re alive is another opportunity to do mischief unto the enemy. Just because we don’t see a way to do it this minute, we shouldn’t give up. You never know what will turn up tomorrow.

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        2. Save the page as a pdf file (~1.5M)! For when it gets blocked. All of the footnotes are spelled-out URLs, not hyperlinks, so a pdf will work fine.

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          1. The footnotes are indeed live links. Might be your browser doesn’t see ’em cuz of the associated vglnk style.

            Page appears to have been exported from Word or the like, hence the odd formatting.

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            1. I clicked on the first link to the LA Times article. I’m practically speechless. The authors, AARON C. KAY AND MARK J. LANDAU, completely discount any possibility of there being fraud and attribute it to all of us being delusional.

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  8. Tax compliance is largely voluntary. Just like all other laws. The powerful have this fantasy in their head that they will MAKE you do this or that. The reality is they don’t have one cop for every citizen, yet. Thus when taxes hit about 20% they stall. People find ways around them. Black market/underground economy. Most people would rather pay off the police to ignore them than send it in the rat hole that the national taxes are. An excellent example is the taxi business. It’s a government racket. The licensing fees are insane. So here in Detroit you have neighborhood ‘jitneys’ that will pick you up and take you to the store or doctor for $5 or $10. They speak English or whatever language prevails in your neighborhood – Spanish, Polish, or Chinese. They are polite and help you carry your stuff in. You have to be recommended from people who know you aren’t a cop or a stink or a head case and it’s a cash business.

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    1. It would be relatively trivial to drop the jackboot on that sort of thing. One of those mass “John Doe” warrants to collect all the cellphone data over a wide enough area, a fairly simple number-location-matching script, and issue warrants for “unlicensed taxis”, plus, hm, maybe tax fraud, that’s always good when going after cash transactions.

      Whatever you’re doing, if it involves a cellular phone, the Warden can see it.

      The USSR didn’t quite make it into the cellular age. If the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti had had such a powerful tool, rooting out dissent would have been trivially simple.

      Even “private” organizations in America have power the KGB never dared dream of.

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        1. China hasn’t had quite the spread of the technological tools of surveillance spread as fast as the USA. Even rural areas of the US have smartphones, internet, and all the other means of perpetual surveillance, along with an ever increasing use of drone fleets by federal and state officials. Those drones used to “catch forest fires early” can very easily send their picks of people’s daily activity to Big Brother as well. No doubt Amazon’s fleet of delivery drones already do the same thing.

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            1. And this is where the trade-off comes in: live rural where you’re an isolated target vs in a city they can’t afford to nuke.

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            2. They couldn’t put Hong Kong down because they had a US administration that was actively opposing their effort; now they have an administration that thinks the CCP are the good guys and are actively trying to figure out how to do to their political opponents in the USA what the CCP does to theirs.

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      2. there are ways to cloudy that that even John Doe warrants can’t deal with. You can make it so all they know is burner phone number XXX called burner phone number YYY at XX:30

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          1. get burner phone for the chip card, degoogled phone, none in your real name or address, don’t use your old number, pay via cash or pay as go debit or start with a flip phone and stay there, buying time as needed, cash . . . some VPN work can be done as well, using a degoogled smartphone. But a burner flip bought and not registered to you by name or a degoogled phone is too much work for jigsaw to do much more than acknowledge a call was made from number X to number Y.
            A home VPN would be needed too, so if you connect to the wifi your IP isn’t associated with that phone. I’ve seen some recomend using a degoogled smart phone to tether an internet connection and a VPN on that hides a lot. If jigsaw can’t associate anything, the warrant has nothing to go on

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            1. and all that requires is the FCC to decide that you need to do X Y and Z to have a phone and if you dont do it they cut you off

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            2. That’s fine as long as they aren’t looking for you specifically.

              Once the phone goes on the air, they can match the IMEI to the store that sold it, and to your face on the store video, and then work their way down likely hits in the facial recognition database.

              And every time the phone turns on, it broadcasts its location. They can cross-check against all other phones in your area, just in case your other phone, car, or tablet are talking, and check the area for CCTV.

              You’re calling from your car? License plate recognition is everywhere. Not just governments; Wal-Mart was an early adopter. More data points.

              Pretty soon there are enough data points to start focusing on individuals.

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              1. “Pretty soon there are enough data points to start focusing on individuals.”

                No, because by that point there are too many data points to allow you to focus on individuals.

                “they can match the IMEI to the store that sold it,”

                They have to know that’s an IMEI they’re interested in.

                “and to your face on the store video,”

                If they can get to the store soon enough after you bought it that the video is still around.

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              2. you are not going to get rid of data points, even if you stop using a phone. What you need to do is cloud the points. the more doing so, the cloudier it gets.
                Or you can just give over, buy an iPhone, shop at Wallyworld, and know every step of your day, all day, every day, is being monitored (which is why iphone battery life is so minuscule) because your phone includes GPS data (ever visit a restaurant or shop and Google or Apple ask you to leave a review, moments after you’ve left?), instead of “this number was in range of these towers at this time when a call was made”
                make them work more for it

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              3. Seriously? Conservatives will complain endlessly about the left rubbing things like Folsom Street Parade in their face, or oversexualized advertising, and then pull this garbage.

                Hire a dominatrix and deal with your fetishes in private. We are trying to have a serious political discussion here.

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              4. “License plate recognition is everywhere.”

                Yep, it sure is. They tried using it for red light cameras in AL until some good elf leaked the “cover tags” politicians got issued so they can’t be tied to their real license plate when sneaking around ignoring various laws. Real soon, said cover tags had enough tickets to paper city hall. The cameras went away. When enough people realize the issue, those license plate printers will fire up again.

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                  1. Usually the police department that covered the jurisdiction, because they were intended for use on unmarked police cars for undercover operations. If someone was able to check the license plate database (and private investigators, employers, et could do that) then a tag with the cover name and address would pop up.

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                  2. I know this because my dad was in insurance and two high school friends were in law enforcement and private investigation; all three had the ability to check even as non-cop investigators. One went to work with US Customs later; this practice also happened at the Federal level.

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      3. It’s always a trivial effort to be brutal if that’s your end goal. No explanation needed.

        But if you want to nail someone for a crime while keeping the semblance of a working legal system… well… I’m no criminal, but even I can think of ways to get around that!

        Always remember that the Left is trying to stop you from making their own lives harder, not crime prevention. It’s taxing their juvenile minds to the max to come up with a decent excuse for what they’re doing, and they have already failed.

        The country is not what it was. Do not pine for something that is not there. Live with vegeance in mind.

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      4. What eventually happens is you just insure nothing happens over celluar. Too much use of that power will the opposite of “Fight for $15” in relevant areas: push for de-automation.

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      5. Not power, resources.
        Unanalyzed data is only useful in potentia.
        Analysts are a limited resource. You have to prioritize their use.
        .
        There are reasons oligarchs are pushing so hard for AI.
        This is one of them.

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  9. This is, perhaps, the most depressing thing I’ve read in a while. However, given the anti-human belief system of the opposition it is plausible. In fact, it makes sense in a fiendish sort of way. They wish to make a fortune, die without children and take the rest of humanity into extinction.

    For some reason it puts me in mind of the umedvirk brain parasite in Harry Harrison’s _Planet of the Damned_.

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    1. Amen. We pray and know this is part of God’s plan to make people turn to Him. No matter how sad we get.
      We’ve been waiting six or seven months for God to deliver our home (He found us an apartment in town), which sits on our property in two sections, with four days of rain in our future.
      Then the ground needs to dry.
      But I know He will provide in His time, not mine. Give Him the praise and glory.

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    2. I am reminded of another bit of wisdom from my Catholic education. This time from a letter by St. Thomas More to his daughter Margaret written while imprisoned in the Tower of London awaiting execution

      > And, therefore, my own good daughter, do not let your mind be troubled over anything that shall happen to me in this world. Nothing can come but what God wills. And I am very sure that whatever that be, however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best.

      Maybe this crap **is** God’s will.

      Even if I assume the reports about God’s interventions are reliable, there really is no reason to assume that She/He/It is playing an honest game. Maybe the whole salvation thing is a con and our reward in the afterlife is determined by when we die — odd numbered souls go to heaven, even numbered souls go to hell. I am not aware of any conception of the Middle Eastern God that requires She/He/It behaves as we humans expect.

      BTW, Thomas More is the patron saint of lawyers, civil servants, politicians, difficult marriages, and adopted children. There is considerable irony there.

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      1. Maybe it is God’s will, although I have my doubts. We are not Israel and even with them he seems to avoid the nitty-gritty most generations.

        God gave man one thing that distinguishes himself from all the rest of Creation: the ability to create. The animals can build and it is reasonable to believe the Host can as well, but they build only that which is taught them either by instinct, parent, or command. Even the Host has free will, but if used to turn from God it can only create mockeries and not new things, hence no matter how long Satan rules in Hell, not a new Heaven.

        I suspect this situation is of man’s creation and it is his to get out of. Only if it gets so out of whack that it risks condemning all of humanity to a second rebellion and thus thwarting the planned New Heaven and New Earth will he intervene directly.

        I won’t say we’re on our own, but beyond spiritual aid and comfort I suspect he’ll let us figure this one out on our own.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. God gives nations chances to repent of their evil, and their pride, and their rebellion.

        If they repent, then they don’t get destroyed.

        At some point, though, nations that don’t repent run out of time.
        And then they get destroyed; by natural disasters, by barbarian invaders, by their own society collapsing from the inside, any or all of the above.

        That’s… just historical fact. I couldn’t say whether that’s what’s happening here and now, but our coalmine canaries (as described in Romans 1) have been dying for 10, 30, 50 years now. They’re only getting worse, and there’s no sign that our leaders want to repent of their wrongdoing on behalf of the nation.

        So… if we have run out of time, it’s not going to be the end of the world. Just the end of our world.

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        1. I have long believed that God has blessed America, and withheld punishment for the millions of murdered babies over the past 50 years, because we have (so far) been a staunch ally of Israel and thereby defenders of His chosen people, and he promised Abraham that “I will bless those who bless you” (Genesis 12:3, ESV).

          Who wants to bet that our government continue to be a staunch ally of Israel over the next four years? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

          “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” – Galatians 6:7, ESV. In context it refers to individuals choosing to do good rather than evil, but the Bible shows over and over that God applies the same principle to nations.

          But keep Psalm 91 in mind also. “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. […] You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only look with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked.” Over and over in the Bible we see God punishing a nation for its sins but sparing individuals (Lot, Rahab, etc) who didn’t deserve the punishment the rest of the nation had earned. So even if I’m right and judgment is going to fall on America for turning away from Israel, that doesn’t mean that those individuals who are still doing their best to support Israel will suffer the judgment falling on the nation. Even if all they can do is just a little bit, God looks at the individual’s circumstance, and doesn’t compare the outcome to others: look at Jesus’ praise for the widow who gave her two little coins.

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      3. If you can conceive of something good, there must be a being of ultimate Good. And since existence is the first and most important good thing, without which there cannot be anything else good, it argues that Ultimate Good Being is also Being That Started the Universe Existing.

        Vastly simplified, because I don’t do philosophy.

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  11. Maybe, maybe not.

    The problem (with their probable plan, not your theory) is that uneducated third-world conscripts — which is what this new Army would almost certainly be comprised of, emphasis on “conscripts” — and high tech, cutting-edge military systems aren’t exactly compatible. As in the conscripts don’t have the technical know-how to properly operate, let alone correctly maintain, their weapons, vehicles, etc. So they’ll have the most advanced military in the world…. for a little while. Certainly nowhere near the 5-10 years it will take for Americans to figure out what’s gone down. Then things will start breaking as things do, and the People’s Army will find itself unable to fix them, and Our Betters ([SPIT!]) they’ll find themselves with an army equipped with lots of shiny whiz-bang weapons that don’t work and can’t be used.

    Hell, the Armed Forces we have RIGHT NOW is having a damned hard time keeping their toys up and running as it is (Navy’s in especially bad shape from what I here). Replace the competent folks we have now with third-world conscripts and I give it six months tops before the whole works grinds to a screeching halt.

    Granted, that opens up a whole ‘nother can o’ works (and probably more than one), but still…

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    2. Ponder the stories of the ‘Arab’ military who won’t let underlings see the *instruction manuals* for the gear they have to maintain, but/and also will not ‘lower’ themselves to maintain it themselves. Israel doesn’t have to be good. Israel just has to be ever-so-slightly LESS INCOMPETENT – and that’s more than enough.

      Now, ponder a few ‘good ol’ boys’ with a just a wee of an …. attitude… and despite what coastal elites claim, more genuine basic competence than all of Harvard.

      Those poor bastards.

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        1. They’re not very good. They’re embarrassingly incompetent. They don’t do the little things very well, like deconfliction of friendly forces, or making sure people get enough sleep.

          Remember when Hizbullah whacked the Hanit with an antiship missile in 2008 or so? They’d actually shut off the ESM rig because it kept warning that hostile radars were tracking the ship. They never detected the damn missile until it went KABOOM!

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          1. They’re reasonably good for a more or less citizen militia. It helps that their most frequent enemies are completely useless.

            Liked by 1 person

      2. Little brother is a PhD student (astrophysics, so thankfully not Woke) and sometimes-teacher of Undergrad at Harvard. He’ll be the first to tell you that there is little actual competency there, just a MASSIVE superiority complex that has been mistaken for competency.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. That said, he himself has fallen prey to the Harvard Superiority Complex at times, though thankfully he’s self-aware enough to recognize it and l, when called on it, own up to it.

            Less thankfully, he’s drunk at least some Liberal Kool-Aid, though that was inevitable after over a decade in academia.

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            1. Get a shovel. Hand spade 2000 sq feet of vegetable garden any time you get feeling that superiority complex again. Sweat, busted blisters, and aching shoulders do wonders for humility realignment.

              Alternatively, build rock walls, by hand.

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              1. Drystone walls are cool. It’s like Jenga meets jigsaw puzzles. I want to do that someday.

                The really cool things are the big drystone wall fortresses/palaces down in Africa. I mean, yes, very much behind the times of even Ireland’s drystone buildings, but holy crud do they look cool.

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        2. Yep– We used to have to work hard to become electronic techs and especially troubleshooters. Then the next group that came only had to change out modules. Didn’t even have to do their own troubleshooting. Then in the 2000s we were getting techs who couldn’t do that… they had to be told each step… It’s amazing how repair techs have gone downhill in training and uphill in ego.

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          1. Main problem is that it’s much cheaper to have a new widget built with slave labor than to have a skilled technician figure out what’s wrong with the old one, find the necessary parts, and fix it.

            Liked by 1 person

      1. And they already don’t trust the military.

        There are films of NG units with their backs turned to the motorcade, although that could be an ordered position so I’m not reading too much into it. But, given what some of the “dangerous” items flagged from social media among troops including (NRA and Gadsden flags) they are already going for Imperial Guard levels of conformity. That’ll start hitting mainline NCOs soon and once that happens they’ll have gutted the armed forces.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Apparently on inauguration day, Biden was given instructions by his handlers through his earpiece as he came to the Marines to “salute the Marines”. Biden instead of saluting verbalized the instructions and said out loud, “salute the Marine.” Now that he has been installed, the Democratic Party media is no longer denying or trying to hide these episodes that show severe mental decline. They know Harris is President in all but name and the only real question is when she officially replaces Biden.

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        2. Gutting the armed forces is their goal. They think the USA is the world’s source of evil and that the US military is the primary instrument of that evil.

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        3. I keep hearing tales of leading Democrats demanding underlings avoid eye contact — e.g., reports from the Clinton White House that Hillary insisted that, when she traversed the halls, all staff had to vacate the area and, should they still somehow run into her, avert their gaze lest they make eye contact.

          That does not seem an effective way to build loyalty.
          ~

          Liked by 1 person

    4. Look at the Iranian military and how it has survived under US Embargo. Now consider that isn’t a third world conscript army in terms of educational base or tradition and it is operating in a world where spares are available even if by underground markets.

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  13. This is my FB post from Dec 2, 2020. I think it is relevant to this convo.
    It is a grievous thing to be so helpless as to have to rely on the incompetence of your enemies

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  14. On the plus side, it’s a big, complicated plan. Such plans both tend to fail and generate unintended consequences. Hubris blinds people. And there’s a certain herding cats aspect as well. People united by greed tend to fall into killing each other fairly soon.

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    1. Antifa didn’t make it a full 24 hours before breaking from the coalition. The Democrats promised too many people too many conflicting things for their coalition to work for long… and they’re only going to be able to deliver what Dominion allows anyway.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Antifa’s upset because their paychecks stopped coming. Some of their people were happy to go back home and work real jobs, but others weren’t. I think it’s the less well-to-do ones, the ones that aren’t making money from mommy and daddy, or getting those big money corporate/non-profit jobs, or going back to grad school.

        Being made an example of in 3… 2… 1….

        Liked by 1 person

  15. Scott Lowther posted this today on “Upship”, it’s revealing.
    Foreign-born population in the US from 1850 to 2019.
    “Note the rather sudden spike starting about 1960, becoming clear in 1973, and a massive wave in just a year or three after that”

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    1. Yes, but seriously. I am one of those. My kids usually have friends with one foreign parent.
      What you and a lot of “nativism uber allas” people miss is WHY we’re here.
      I’d guess 2/3 of the non-Mexican/central-South American immigrants are here escaping some form and severity of socialism/communism.
      Don’t throw us under the bus when we’re already like cornered wolverines fighting for our last place on Earth.
      The illegals? Sure. Mostly economic. I’d bet you even so a good half of them don’t want this shit.
      These are natural-born-American Marxists a lot of them 3rd generation red diaper babies.
      NOTE this doesn’t mean I want open borders. Having acculturated I know how hard it is, and I think each immigrant should be CAREFULLY vetted for his/her desire to be Americans. AND they should Fit In Or Fuck Off.
      Our standards for citizenship are FAR too lenient as is.
      BUT place of birth means fuck all.

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      1. my commie great uncle and his nearly as leftoid brothers were all born here. The people I know who hate the leftoid B.S. the most are all immigrants, most having fled said same B.S.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. CAREFULLY vetted for his/her desire to be Americans. AND they should Fit In Or Fuck Off.

        That sounds great, but once the country is flooded with enough foreign born, a significant contingent of whom refuse to conform, and a constant demonizing of attempt to tighten up standards prior to one finally being enacted there will be neither the manpower for the patience to do that.

        I don’t like it. It’s one reason I’d like to have had the GOP build the damn wall, not so much for effectiveness per se, but for the power of the “come here to become an American and do it legally” statement it would make to potential immigrants, to people already here, and to natives wanting to shut down immigration from the most welcoming to the least.

        The past four years have done more to strengthen the hardcore nativists, by making them the only game in town outside of full open borders or worse, than anything I’ve seen.

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        1. Yeah. Ask me how happy this makes those of us who are on our last redoubt.
          Because after Usurper Joe, we’re going to be as hated as the freeloaders. And our kids, if they’re visibly different (well, mine tan. They’re all big and ugly) will be hated as well, even though they’re Americans and have nowhere else to go.

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          1. I gotta nit. “We can tan” means you started off white. It’s exactly the opposite of being a “brown person” who started off brown. And it’s hardly unusual:

            My 100% British dad could tan so dark he outdid the naturally-brown Mandan Indians (at the time handy to compare). My 100% Norwegian [maternal] aunt and uncle could do almost as well (and reportedly so could their dad). We used to see a LOT of this with us pale northern European types… back when most people worked outdoors and sunscreen didn’t exist. You’ll still see it out in farm and ranch country.

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            2. My Ex, descended at least partly from Bohemian Jews, would get flak from the Ojibwe Indian kids at her school on the edge of the reservation for not going to Indian class. Nope, she just tans that brown.

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              2. Cynthia Applegate’s family of origin were French Jews from the Alsace. Cynthia is my great-great-great grandmother.

                FYI. We were raised by the religion of fishing, hunting, and camping. Checking in with the Episcopal Church at Christmas, Easter, and a few Sundays between.

                Her great-great-grandsons, dad and his two brothers, all tan extremely dark. To the point where one Uncle gets detained at the US-Mexico border regularly. Less often now that passports are required. After all driver’s license can be fake, don’t ya know.

                I tan (or did) easily too. Just not as dark. My poor sister got the blond blue eye genes from mom’s side of the family. She barely tans.

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                1. Unlike my dad, who could notice the sun had come up and get three shades darker, I don’t tan easily. But neither do I burn easily, so I’m just weird. Tho I did develop some permanent tan from 28 years as a desert rat… been almost 9 years and it’s still not entirely faded away.

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        2. “That sounds great, but once the country is flooded with enough foreign born, a significant contingent of whom refuse to conform, and a constant demonizing of attempt to tighten up standards prior to one finally being enacted there will be neither the manpower for the patience to do that.”

          Recipe for constant domestic violence, chaos, and rule by iron fist.

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      3. I am foreign born with American parents. I’ve also lived several years outside the US in Japan, Panama, and Germany. There is nowhere to run outside the US. Maybe one of the Eastern European countries– because they still remember being under the Soviet thumb.

        Liked by 1 person

              1. It really is! One of the tour group in Poland observed me staring out the window as the train rolled north from Krakow to Warsaw and asked what I was thinking. I said that “It’s easy to see why this is such a good invasion route for horse-cavalry and modern armor.” When pressed, I pointed out some of the visible reasons. She . . . was rather uncomfortable.

                Liked by 1 person

                2. One of the Pournelle et al. War World anthologies had a prologue story of a group from a planet colonized by Poles, with a character who said it was a shame to have to leave because it was a nice planet that was defensible, unlike the original homeland a/k/a “The Land Without Frontiers”.

                  Liked by 1 person

      4. “What you and a lot of “nativism uber allas” people miss”

        Boy that’s a lot of assuming going on about me!
        It’s just a well done graphic showing the stunning results of policy changes over the years, there is NO judgment whatsoever as to the desirability of these changes or not. Geeze.

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        1. I wasn’t assuming anything ABOUT YOU. Except that you were showing the graphic for a reason and the reason being you believed people coming in at all was a bad thing. If not, why share it?
          BUT I am tired of that point of view onto the eyebrows and past.

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  16. I’m in The UK. Look what they’ve done to my country. In a generation there wont ‘be’ a Britain any more (it lost the Great decades ago).

    30+ years of fighting, and collecting ballistic body piercings, for my country with ‘maybe’ two years total spent at home, only to return and find that every one of the ‘enemies’ I’ve been fighting has been given a council house and benefits (and that me and mine aren’t ‘eligible’).

    I thought all was lost, then I stopped moaning and looked about. And just like there, outside of a few enclaves, ‘we’ are still here.

    Look, no I mean really look, at those campaign event photos. Look at the real results of the election. Those are what illustrate the real situation.

    You aren’t a tiny, embattled and embittered minority fighting a rear-guard action. You’re a massively overwhelming majority that’s being hoodwinked. You’re being sold a lie. Look behind that curtain Dorothy.

    Just why are they so manically happy yet patently terrified at the moment? They know they’ve gotten away with it, yet fear you’ve noticed. They’re desperate to get away with what they can before you stop them.

    You’re suffering Gell-Mann amnesia. You ‘know’ the results of this election are so false as to make the devil wince. So what makes you simply accept that all those other elections, from local dog-catcher upward aren’t? You ‘know’ that all the poll results are fabricated, so why blindly accept that there is an almost 50:50 Repub/Dem split? Even in the so-called Dem strong-holds, you really believe the numbers they spout? Why?

    You’re all already looking around and noticing there weren’t/aren’t that many Biden supporters in your towns. What makes you think there ever were? And yet almost all the elected posts ‘will’ be filled with leftists, right?

    I’m a loner, but quite sociable (don’t need anybody, but enjoy a chat). I’ve spoken to many people and barring the rarest exception (purely coincidentally I’m sure, all who work for the government, local or national) everyone expresses ‘right-wing’ (ie. normal) views. The base assumption that a population is 20% left, 20% right and 60% middle/don’t know/don’t care is false. It’s more like 5% (or however many in your locale work for ‘the man’ or personally benefit from the system) left, 35% openly right, 40% quietly/go along to get along right, and 20% don’t care.

    But they own the system. They own the media. They tell you what they want you to believe – but it’s ‘all’ lies (not just the bits you recognise as such).

    What they fear above all else is that we will wake up, start seeing the truth. DJT could have screwed up everything else in his tenure and still be the greatest President ever because people (all around the world) are now looking askance at their elections, asking questions and doubting the answers they’re getting. He twitched that curtain back just enough.

    So? They know they’re vulnerable. They aren’t going to use force they haven’t got. They are going to claim they do, and browbeat you into compliance. If enough don’t comply they wither and die. If nothing else, ‘work to rule’, follow their play-book and obstruct whilst looking like you’re complying.

    They own the voting. Hmm, if you can’t think of ways to negate that then you aren’t trying. Dominion is an electrical machine. Election supervisors and counters are positions chosen – so make sure they are honest (whatever it takes).

    Contrary to the narrative, there really aren’t that many of them. They’re that class president, the only one who wants the job, that nobody likes, not some leader of a mysterious hidden majority. It’s not that “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” it’s that “power attracts the corrupt and corruptible”. Normals don’t want those jobs, we want to live our lives, not meddle in other peoples, unless pushed too far and as a reaction to the abuses. That is what DJT was/is (what, you think he wanted the money, power, celebrity?), so be like him. Take back what’s ours – they didn’t build it.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I think you might be new here; because what you are saying has been a continual theme of the blog. Even before the completely honest election proved it true.

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    2. Would you do be a favor and explain in simple terms even a slow ox might understand, just what a “council house’ is. I assume (and might well be Quite Wrong Indeed) it is slightly less lousy ‘public housing’ than the apartments that were attempted (with predictably disastrous result) in various US cities. Thank you.

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        1. Gee, I just figured your nose was stuffed up. And then, it went to your hooves and affected your typing… :-P

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      4. Ah, apologies, two nations divided by a common language issues again (there I go again and whenever I’ve visited I’ve deliberately not worn my red coat, only tried to buy Durex once – ouch, and was only arrested the once when I sat in a bar where large hairy gentlemen were waxing loquacious about their new red suspenders – I only sang the first few verses of “I’m a lumberjack” after all officer. Well, if you discount the time I was cross-training at Eglin and ‘acquired’ one of your red, who knew, road lights and ‘accidentally’ left it outside the female officers quarters – I still think the complaints were more about the inflated amounts on the price-list I left too).

        A council house, or more commonly now a housing association property run by, you guessed it, the council, is any property (many of them quite salubrious, from small apartments/flats up to many room mansions) which are let at below market rates to officially favoured persons.

        Think Section 8

        They were ‘meant’ to be an alternative to unscrupulous private landlords demanding exorbitant rents (and incidentally only willing to rent to people who’d, you know, actually pay them). What we got though is properties only rented to whichever demographic the PC idiots favour this week (ie. if you are British, white, especially if male or an intact family, they wont be able to stifle the laughter as they kick you out).

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        1. Ah… so where “Compo” (Last of the Summer Wine… dated, I know) would live…IF he were looked on upon Just So – which he would not be in This Modern Age. Thank you.

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          1. Compo?

            I resemble that remark (unfortunately more than I care to think about. I ‘know’ I’m still 21, trim, svelte and fit. Then I look in the mirror and wonder why my father is looking back at me, or walk past a darkened department store window and wonder who the doddery old guy following me is … Oh Sh..)

            Not necessarily, when it was set you could rent privately or buy for reasonable amounts. then they changed the mortgage policies (to be fairer – to the bankers and rich) and it went from three times your yearly salary, to three times your combined salaries or the income from renting. So prices, predictably, went up (think Saturn V). So women who worked a few hours ‘to help out’ then ‘had’ to work full-time, all of them. Now only landlords or the rich can afford to buy, or the council, and rents are now so high couples both have to work to pay even that. throw in the massive Labour encouraged and rewarded immigration and competition for properties is just silly. so? only the rich or the unemployed (who get everything paid for) can afford anything. Welcome to socialised Britain

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            2. some years back a lady I chatted with in Cornwall and her hubby/partner/whatever were buying half an old townhouse, and were working on a few improvements (cistern in attic needed something, iirc and other minor things).
              For what they paid, at the then exchange rates, they could have gotten a large Victorian, on a good sized lot, with views of Lake Michigan in the third largest city (small, pop. 12,000+) here in the U.P. of Michigan.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. So it’s like Seattle or San Francisco then? (Growing population from immigration, restricted geography.)

                I think people in flyover country have no real concept of how insane the real estate market is in the West Coast cities. When Ex and I bought our West Seattle house in 2009 (deliberately: I was waiting for the inevitable crash and bought at the bottom of the market) her parents in Minneapolis were appalled at how much we spent, and we had to convince them that no, you can’t buy a tarpaper shack for $100K around here, and that $220K was a once-in-a-lifetime deal even for a fixer on a short sale. (Also it’s not 1974 when they bought their house for $40K).

                When we applied for a mortgage, the bank said “you qualify for $400K” and I literally laughed at them. Nowadays even $400K gets you an older townhouse outside of Seattle city limits — if you’re lucky.

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                1. likely. or they know, but it really doesn’t sink in.
                  My place, though needing work (little or a lot depending on what one can put up with) was a whopping $23,000. Though a Texas coworker quipped that $76,000 for a house trailer on ¾ or so acres was a bit high . . . until I showed him the overhead and the back yard was the Green Bay. One of my options was 12 acres, with the acreage backed into Escanaba State Forrest lands for $69,000. I was looking at finance via payroll deduction, (forget if it is the same company as retirement plan and HSA or not) and low end of market rates, and they refused to lend me that little.

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                2. my grandparents bought their house for $85k in the 80s, and a decade later were insisting that ” the new house next door went for $240k it can’t be worth that much out house was $85k…”

                  (yeah, at that point their house was valued slightly north of 300k…)

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                  1. Um. We paid $78k for our house Nov. ’88 … As is, now, it is worth north of $350k. OTOH for us to buy property (1/2 acre-ish) and build our dream home, with good quality, excellent value, but not expensive, materials, we’d pay $350k; and pay the property taxes on $350k. While our property taxes aren’t based off of our original purchase price, thanks to Prop 35 (equivalent in Oregon) it is considerably less than the current value. Doesn’t mean we wouldn’t make the leap should we find the correct property in the right area. That has been the problem. We’ve know where we don’t want to be locally. We don’t know where we want to be.

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                3. Restricted is an understatement!

                  Britain isn’t that tiny but with its population it is crowded. I’m used to more ‘under-developed’ areas where ‘wilderness’ means you can walk for a week and not see a paved, or unpaved for that matter, road. In Britain there is, I believe ‘one’ small area in the north-west of Scotland where you can, just, manage to be more than two miles away from a house/farm/road. In most of the country wilderness is somewhere where the trees temporarily hide the next farm.

                  People elsewhere can’t really understand how ‘cramped’ a country like this is, most people here can’t seem to conceive of anything different.

                  Whilst growing population and immigration hasn’t helped, the financial shenanigans are the real cause of price increases. My parents bought a house in 1882 for £10k. In 1994, on leave, I almost bought a house 3 bed mews in (expensive) Hampstead for £60k. Parents house, not theirs for some years, just sold for £190k. The house in Hampstead is now listed at £60million (and yes I kick myself regularly and forcefully). Still with that £60k I bought a quarter near Orofino (wish I still had it).

                  There are more people fighting over a limited supply but in 1982, as a wet behind the ears 2nd Lt. I couldn’t get a mortgage with 25% down even if I begged. Now I receive 100% confirmed agreements ‘just sign by the pencilled mark’ through the post weekly and I’m not unusual. Anyone can get a mortgage, but no one can afford anything. go figure.

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                  1. My brother and sister and I visited the Lake Country in 1976, and were kind of boggled to see all the warning posters in the youth hostels that we dossed down in – warning about the ‘wilderness’ that was so dangerous, all around! The high hills, the sudden weather, the horrific cliffs, etc! And we had grown up in country that made the Lake Country look like a well-manicured park in comparison. We came to the realization that just about all those people were urban folk, and who came to the Lake Country having never, ever, actually been in wilderness. True wilderness, that we were accustomed to. A little fog, a couple of hundred acres that hadn’t been paved and fenced … well, that was … something that the average visitor to a youth hostel in the Lake Country (or the Highlands of Scotland) were not mentally prepared to deal with.

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                    1. The Lake District (really not sure why it’s called that, We’re a little strange like that. I’m currently in Cumbria, or Cumberland depending on who you talk to, the time of day, and phase of the moon) is beautiful but when you have to (literally) queue to go up a mountain (that’ll be hill or possibly a slight gradient to you) you know it’s really not a wilderness.

                      People do regularly die there (I was part of Mountain Rescue as a teenager before joining up and rescued/recovered a number) but as with hypothermia (people don’t die of it in really cold weather. People aren’t stupid, they stay in or dress appropriately. They die in mild weather. Something happens, maybe lost, maybe an injury. They get wet, and dressed for a mild day … they die) it’s the ‘almost’ safe that lulls them into a false sense of security (Hey, it can’t really be dangerous I can see a farm and a town from here). Falls, bogs, blown off cliffs, silly minor problems and as you say, they aren’t prepared equipment wise (don’t get me started on the numbers rescued walking in T-shirts and training shoes because it was a nice day when they set off, this is Britain where if it doesn’t rain for two consecutive days there is a hose-pipe ban and panic in the streets), but more importantly mentally.

                      It isn’t exclusively a British thing (I hope), I know Bear (Grylls) and the only reason he ‘exaggerates’ is because American TV wants it so. I remember watching one (Oregon) episode where he ‘struggled mightily and desperately’ to survive until … I suddenly noticed/recognised where he was. Where I and the locals went for a quiet stroll when the weather was nice once. Then it struck me, aimed as it at the American market, he was playing to the city dwellers.

                      Pah, townies lol

                      (Forgive me I wont be replying further, not bad manners, but I apparently fell foul, somehow, not sure exactly, of Foxifier and will thus not be visiting, even to lurk from now on. Amazing that our side is every bit as bad as the side we complain about, sigh. So I’ll bid you adieu.)

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                    2. Er. Foxfier has her hot buttons. You don’t need to disappear from the blog for that. The answer is to say “I won’t be discussing this anymore.”
                      I was about to say “Hey, drop it,” anyway, only I’ve been busy elsewhere.
                      Believe it or not people in this blog have had knock down drag out arguments and remain friends and part of the community. Sometimes even arguments with me.

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                    3. This place is indeed a place of magic. It’s old school. You can fight like dogs, like we used to be able to do. Then you take a breath, shake hands, and have a beer.

                      I’m very new, but that seems to be the way of things here.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    4. Fighting like dogs means being willing to expose your throat — and willing to not rip open the exposed throat of another.

                      We fight to generate light, not heat. That means we abide by rules, using reason, evidence, and logic.

                      Our chief weapon is Reason, reason and evidence. Evidence and Reason. Our two weapons are evidence and reason. And logic. The three main weapons of the Hun Inquisition are evidence, reason, and logic …. and mockery.
                      ~

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                    7. Don’t quit. Admit when you are wrong. Agree to disagree. Agree to Agree.

                      Some of the most Fun I’ve had is reading Vigorous comments, some would say arguments, where the commenters were arguing past each other, from the same-side/point-of-view! But none caught on. Unless others took pity and pointed it out – but where is the fun in that? I mean really!

                      Just my 2 cents.

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                    8. Foxfier likes to argue, and she also likes to agree vociferously. If she’s arguing with you, she probably thinks it’s a worthwhile argument. Occasionally she notices something weird and thinks it’s a false note, and sometimes she’s right and sometimes she’s wrong. But she’s worth arguing with.

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                    12. Lots of people here like to argue. I personally hate arguing and most people are better at it than I am so I don’t argue. Also, I’ve been hanging around on this blog since 2012 and I’ve never had anyone try and force an argument on me.

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                    13. Lots of people here like to argue. I personally hate arguing and most people are better at it than I am so I don’t argue.

                      –
                      #metoo

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                    14. Having seen (photos of) signs warning that it is dark after the sun goes down, I think I’m inured to how ignorant people can be.

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                    15. Ian and Foxfier agreeing? Yikes! (Makes me want to run for cover.)

                      –
                      Not only that, Bob’s been making sense again. So, soooo scary! :-o

                      Liked by 1 person

                  3. Compared to the USA, Britain is that tiny. It’s a platitude that most Europeans have no idea just how huge and how relatively empty the United States is.

                    And that doesn’t even cover Alaska, where I grew up.

                    (Likewise I think US westerners don’t compute how densely populated the greater East Coast is. It’s like the exurbs just go on and on and on and never stop until you get to the next urb, but even that isn’t nearly as dense as the UK. BTW https://randomstreetview.com/ is fun.)

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                    1. East coast has no idea how empty the West can be. Even I’m amazed when we drive freeways where there are exit/on access ramps (multiple) explicitly for One ranch.

                      I’ve been part of conversations where someone responded “Wait? There is no cell coverage?” or sadly where I’ve responded “Yes. GPS reliance for roads in Oregon has gotten people killed.”

                      Liked by 1 person

                    3. Right — I have relatives (my brother’s wife’s family) from Germany who came to visit them in Utah a couple decades back. As they drove across Nevada towards Oregon and California, the Germans just could not fathom that they were looking at places where nobody actually lived. (Of course, in much of Nevada, nobody can easily live there anyway!) The Germans could also not wrap their heads around just how extensive the forests they saw in the Western USA actually were. Their own forests are much smaller, and they had been taught that the naughty Americans had cut down all their trees.
                      Their eyes really bugged out when they came face to trunk with the California redwood trees! ;-)

                      Liked by 1 person

                    5. I follow a number of home builder Youtube channels and websites (Essential Craftsman, Matt Reisinger’s Build Show, This Old House, etc.), and British and European commenters are always coming on and saying “I can’t believe you Amis build garbage houses out of wood and tear them down in 50 years — we build our houses out of brick and concrete block to last forever.” The real response to this is “we didn’t cut down all our forests 300 years ago, and we manage trees like farm crops so wood is inexpensive enough to build much bigger houses than you do and then throw them away when we’re done.” Also, “I thought you guys were supposed to be superior to us in all this carbon nonsense. Do you have any idea how much carbon goes into making concrete?”

                      Also, as a West Coaster: “Ahem. You don’t have earthquakes. Shut up.”

                      Liked by 1 person

                    6. “we build our houses out of brick and concrete block to last forever.”

                      Kinda makes it a problem to update your wiring, plumbing, and insulation, doesn’t it?
                      ~

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                    7. I’m getting a kick out of watching the show on HGTV (? might be Discovery), “Escape to the Chateau”, where the English couple bought and is rejuvenating the French Chateau for a home, Bed & Breakfast, Wedding destination and venue. “Kinda makes it a problem to update your wiring, plumbing, and insulation, doesn’t it?” You must be joking? Right? big grin /sarcasm-jic … Must admit however … What insulation? The way it was put on the show, the 4 foot walls are the insulation. They have a lot of window seating, you know those little niches in expensive homes in the US that are considered a “luxury”. Then interior. Those interior walls and floors must be easy to manipulate? Right? You’d think? Just ask the couple. You might get an answer when the get done ROFLOL and done crying. That is just what they show on the show.

                      FYI. Love what they’ve completed so far (shown on the show). Not all my choices (I hate wall paper, not for the look, just when it has to be redone). Love what she did with the fabric walls (OTOH our cats would love us … it wouldn’t last). Looking forward to the in-law suite reveal in the old stable complex.

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                    8. When I came back home after being stationed in Germany one of the first things I did was point the car toward the Cascades and drive. And drive, and drive…. Until I got tired of going in one direction.

                      Germany is the size of Oregon–you can blaze across a huge chunk of the EU in a day. They have no concept of the sheer space involved in America.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    9. In 1994, I drove from Spangdahlem (western border) to Neuschwanstein (far southeast), did the tour, and drove back in 14 hours.

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                    11. I lived in Germany for six years– you could get to one side to another in a couple of hours. To get to the Netherlands it might take 4-6 hours, crossing three countries. So yea– they have no idea of the sheer size of America.

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                    12. Netherlands it might take 4-6 hours, crossing three countries

                      –
                      We left Eugene, Oregon at 6 AM. Took Hwy 126 to Bend, Hwy 20 to Ontario, Oregon (short part of the triangle, 842 total, VS I-5 to I-84, 924 total, to Ontario, average speed the same) then freeway I-20/26/84 to I-25 into Wyoming and West Yellowstone, 2 PM. The. Next. Day. Besides gas and rest area breaks (restroom), 4 hour rest area sleep (we had the bed with us, RV), and an hour breakfast the next morning. That is 14 hours driving, average 65 MPH. Can drive it slightly faster in a non-RV setup (with fewer gas breaks but not fewer bathroom breaks, stupid bladder) and no over night stops, if only because we have two drivers (I don’t drive the RV).

                      According to Google Maps it is 45 hours, 2975 miles from Pacific Oregon Coast to Atlantic Ocean New York. How far is that in Europe? How many countries?

                      Note. People don’t realize how far East the Pacific Coastline is as one travels south to LA and Mexico. LA to NY? Is 2724 miles!

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                4. “I think people in flyover country have no real concept of how insane the real estate market is in the West Coast cities.”

                  Oh, we do. We also have a real concept of how much is self-inflicted by West Coast attitudes.

                  Went to San Diego when I worked for SAIC in 1993. 2-bedroom starter home in what my co-workers admitted wasn’t the “best neighborhood.”: $102k.

                  And that was before they imported illegals by the gross.

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                    1. Oregon, particularly Portland, Bend, Sisters, and somewhat Eugene, has suffered from the “sell in CA and buy in …” housing prices. Redmond and other areas surrounding Bend are suffering too. La Pine prices? Really?

                      In-laws didn’t benefit they left San Diego too soon. Their property on Zillow is listed any where from 100 to 200x what they sold in early ’70s. The also missed out on the huge jump for Bend area. Their home in the La Pine State Park area, which could not be built now at it’s location, is listed for over 5x (on Zillow) what they sold it for in ’86.

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                  2. I actually meant mostly internal immigration. Metro Seattle has grown incredibly over the last 25 years, and is set in a fairly narrow coastal plain. People already commute from 60+ miles away, and they’re not making any more real estate. That said, there’s absolutely a bubble effect induced by unnaturally low interest rates. Even with the beginnings of the pandemic exodus*, the market here is still super hot with multiple offers on any property.

                    (* WA has gone from the #5 U-Haul state destination to #39)

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                  3. I remember back in the earlier eighties a very good pizzeria a short walk from our house turned out to have been owned by a family who sold their California home, moved to NC and invested the proceeds from that home sale in a new, larger home and the restaurant.

                    California real estate was also in the news back in the late Seventies, when passage of Proposition 13 presaged Reagan’s election.

                    For the young’ns around here, Prop 13 limited the state’s assessment of higher property taxes based on reappraisal of market values of residences, forcing folks to sell their homes because they couldn’t afford the taxes — only to pay a considerable portion of the proceeds to the state.
                    ~

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          1. It’s not my fault, your 7th lot got me slightly inebriated and encouraged me (and I didn’t need it, restraining occasionally, moderating consistently, encouragement never).

            A truly terrifying ordeal, drawn up on parade and then advised to leave poste haste before said ladies got their hands on me. Who knew that had such a grasp of invective, or would really have done ‘that’ to an innocent led astray? (I still flinch when I hear ladies heels approaching)

            Liked by 1 person

            1. oh yea– the female officers are tough… I think if it ended up at the enlisted female barracks there would have been laughter as you found yourself hanging from some random lightpole. :D

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    3. I know elections are jacked. I’ve been screaming it since at least 2012. (Before that I had not seen it with my own eyes.)
      But they have the power and a significant enough portion of the military.
      And normal human beings refuse to believe this level of evil.
      And the more time passes, the more they destroy us.
      As for Great Britain — Jaysus, the snow job — I like British Mysteries but I can no longer watch them for various reasons, including propaganda.
      One of the things I did not at first notice, but which started intruding more and more? EVERY couple in these things is inter-racial. I finally asked friends from Great Britain and they said “No, not really.”
      So, propaganda. (AND note, I don’t care about race. I truly don’t. But I despite the race propaganda, too.)
      AND THEN there’s them now making historical movies with British noblemen being black, and the howling harpies of tolerance telling me it’s accurate. “There were always black people in Great Britain.”
      Well, yes, in a small number, but not NOBLEMEN. And really not that many. I can read nineteenth century works in which PORTUGUESE — hi. Born and raised in Portugal. Name is citizenship plus marriage, because Americans can’t pronounce my first name as the Portuguese do. And I hated the name anyway — as blackamoors. Which tells you where the color bar was.

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      1. Ian

        No, been lurking long time. It just seemed to bear repeating yet again, as demoralising as the constant pretence is. And … to point out that (and I really have a lot of friends that I’ve checked with in all the least salubrious areas of the globe) we are kind of (yes I know, again) counting on you. Whither you go, and all that.

        Sarah

        It’s embarrassing, my current (lockdown) base (retired/medical discharge again, recalled twice so far) is a small northern city pop. 100,000. There are literally, I checked, eleven black people here (one who is the mayor, go figure. Resident for two years, I kid you not. She stood unopposed as ‘they’ didn’t want us to be rasis). Lots of Polish and Portuguese (not your best I’m afraid, those recruited to work, who come, work six months then demand benefits and housing and … retire). We have tiny little ‘ghettos’ of foreign territory, self isolating but according to TV and films we’re a majority ethnic country. That’s representative of most of the country, barring certain areas in certain cities (except London which is effectively a minority British, let alone minority white area).

        OK, in London (where most of the TV is made) there are a lot more but interracial couples are ‘scarce’ because … the blacks atta… I mean discourage any such (the ladies are worst – competition?). Quite a few biracial children though (go figure) to those type of woman who view ‘gangsta’ as fashionable (yes even when the male in question is an accountant).

        I simply can’t watch any new films or TV (ours or yours) the obligatory 90lb women prodding butt and the completely irrelevant and probably impossible wise, super-intelligent, just so much better than anyone with less melanin, character just ruin it for me. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t not see it. (Just once I’d like a not an imbecile, married, white male character who wasn’t corrupt and/or incompetent and who isn’t ‘saved’ from something by his smarter wife, teenage daughter or ethnic friend/neighbour/superior/passer-by. is it really asking that much?)

        The thing is, as someone who’s spent way more time working for/with Americans, we’re just like you (with better accents, better beer, and unfortunately less rights and not coincidentally guns). You could exchange the average rural/flyover person and if they didn’t speak you’d hardly notice. I’d have retired there if the O’s minions hadn’t refused me (I’m white, hetero, Christian and ex-military so a definite no no according to them – although my unit E and record ‘may’ have had some further effect too).

        Portuguese as blackamoors, yes, but that just showed how tribal we all are. Portuguese as allies, the best (surprisingly even now). You have to remember those writing blackamoors would have described my ancestors, white mixed Irish/Scots/English and Welsh working class, in equally flowery terms (perhaps more so). Your ancestor was unknown, exotic and may be rich, mine was a known quantity of scum.

        I guess, as I said above, my only real intent was to make clear that the rest of us dmn furriners actually don’t just care, and support, the US (despite our globalist elitists bad-mouthing you, but less so than your own of course) but that we recognise this will affect all of us (nobody, not even the Chinese people want the American hegemony replaced with a Chinese one). A bit of, biased self-preservation inclined I admit, moral support if you will.

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        1. Oh, yeah, the Portuguese you get are MOSTLY gypsies. Seriously.
          And some dead beats. But mostly gypsies. On account of most Portuguese aren’t reproducing. PERIOD. I’m fertile fanny for my generation, wtih 2 kids.
          Yeah, but I wasn’t talking about run of the mill foreigners.
          I’m talking about “international elites” (who aren’t.)

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        2. And now I long for a proper Yorkshire Porter. (Hambleton Ale’s ‘Nightmare’ was a revelation… once I finally let it come up to the correct [still cool, just not frigid] temperature, some time ago.)

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      2. There were always black people in Great Britain

        Grr. Arrgh. Twitch. I know Mary Beard is a respected historian, but her public pronouncement that there have always been black people in Great Britain so can your racism, prole, was based on the “argument”:

        1. Even though the empire never encompassed areas where Nilotic or sub-Saharan “blacks” lived, we know some of them immigrated and lived in Roman territory.
        2. The Roman legions recruited from everywhere
        3. The Romans moved legions around
        4. Therefore, some black immigrants could have been recruited into the legions and transferred to Britannia (but hard numbers are beside the point and don’t ask, prole)

        So does maybe a couple thousand black soldiers in the whole province over 300 years count as “always been there”? And if they married locally, how much of an imprint did they leave, or did they just genetically vanish? (Maybe, none, and yes.)

        Yes, Racism Is Bad, Mmkay, but it bugs the hell out of me to see historians rewrite history to “prove” a point that doesn’t matter except as a stick to beat your enemies with.

        Liked by 1 person

        2. Now that I think about it, a couple hundred over 300 years is probably more correct, and even that is probably an overestimate. Pretty sure that after the 3rd Century Crisis most legions recruited and replaced locally as the Roman army transformed from a general-purpose military to a border garrison force with a small dedicated striking arm. So the overwhelming majority of legionaries in Britain after 250 CE would have been … British.

          It’s akin to the Africans brought back by the Portuguese from Senegal and Ivory Coast during their first explorations (whether voluntary or involuntary). They assimilated and intermarried and disappeared like a drop of grape juice into a five gallon bucket of clear water.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. There were lots of Irish and Scottish and Saxon slaves sent to Africa and Arabia, during medieval times. (Norse slaver network, and then the Irish slaver network, which the Norman English actually did stop. But apparently we don’t talk about that.)

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      3. By the time we’re dead, or if not, not long after, we’ll find out there never were white people in Britain until the reign of Elizabeth when they emigrated and enslaved all the natives.

        Not kidding.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. And there’ll be a whole new royal geneology, showing how there have never been any female monarchs of Britain because of $PATRIARCHY, and a competing geneology claiming all the “male” monarchs were females passing as male, because of $GRRL_PWR.

          “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past. . . . The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.”

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          1. I actually want to see the “no white people in Britain historically” just to see how they explain where white people come from, because they’ll have already been abolished from French and German history by that point.

            Liked by 1 person

            2. And won’t THAT make explaining the events of the 1930’s and 1940’s interesting?

              Then, Reality is Seriously Weird and that Nazi’s allied, even with plans to backstab, with… Japan has long been a “Say what?” kind of thing. Yeah, same malicious ambitions. Still… huh?

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            3. Genetic mutations caused by chemicals that remove empathy and melanin which is true super gene. Ya know, like the DOJ Civil rights head believes.

              Liked by 2 people

              1. A lot of it comes from the spewings of Elijah Muhammad the founder of the Nation of Islam (he of “the white man is the devil” credo) and his assertion that white people were created by the devil. That is the foundation of Nation of Islam ideology. Critical Race Theory and the other related nonsense is simply that ideology with Marxism stirred in and gussied up in academia-speak. It’s why the rhetoric from the left is increasingly eliminationist and reminiscent of 1930s and 1940s Germany; because CRT literally IS an ideology of racial superiority, its just the reverse of the one the KKK has.

                Liked by 1 person

          3. I’ve already seen somewhere (and ran away screaming) some serious scholarly paper that pasted a fanciful black lineage into the British royal pedigrees. And meant it as factual: British royalty have always been black.

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            1. Well, a lot of Spanish royalty included some Moorish ancestry. But it was “the Moors married/enslaved a bunch of blonde and redheaded Visigothic ladies for their harems, and then their kids did the same thing, and eventually Granadan Moors were a bunch of redheads and blondes.” There were Moors who looked like Moors out in the countryside, sometimes, but a lot of them went back to Africa when Ferdinand and Isabella took over. There was a lot of obsession in Spanish royalty and nobility with proving “pure blood,” but it is not convincing.

              Liked by 1 person

        3. It was the Sixth Century Saxon Invasion that rendered Britain “White.” King Arthur was, of course, Black and gave his life trying to stop the Saxons, but was betrayed by his bastard son, Mordred. Really, it is the basis for the Black Panther mythos, slightly modified to eliminate Arthur/T’Challa’s knocking up his (half) sister.
          ~

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      4. The latest edition of Chivalry & Sorcery, the RPG so into being authentic in its medieval nature that it included quotes for 14th century rules for jousting to explain just what the rules and scoring were, includes this gem:

        Brittannia Game Designs and the designers of C&S 5th Edition celebrate diversity among gamers and in our games. In this edition of the classic medieval fantasy game we have drawn on modern research to present the Middle Ages as they really were; diverse and rich in cultural influences and visitors from outside of Europe. If this does not reflect your vision of the Middle Ages, this is not the game for you.

        Had that put that in the Kickstarter, I probably would not have bought it. “Modern research” too often means “exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies to make the past conform to progressive narratives.”

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Well, they were diverse and full of outside cultural influences. But that’s more like “the bones of the saint are wrapped in fine Islamic cloth brought home from the Crusades as war booty or a good buy.”

          St. Columbanus and his monks were befriended by a Syrian Christian merchant woman in the city of Orleans, when King Theuderich was expelling him from Frankish Gaul and nobody would sell them food, as if they were outlaws. She invited them to her house and gave them food for the journey, and St. Columbanus prayed and her blind Syrian husband’s sight was restored.

          But I know that’s not what people mean by “diverse” or “outside cultural influences.”

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      6. “And normal human beings refuse to believe this level of evil.”

        This is how garden-variety cluster Bs – sociopaths, narcissists, the works – get away with doing so much damage. Unless you’ve dealt with evil face to face, over a long enough time or stark enough incident you can’t deny your own eyes, most people choose to believe they’ve… misunderstood what happened. Because surely it couldn’t have been that bad, you must be exaggerating, no one could do such a thing.

        Believing evil is out there would mean they’d have to live with the fear that others are evil – or worse, that they themselves might be evil. Normal people will do anything to avoid that.

        In a freshman English class: “But don’t you believe most people are inherently good?”
        me: “No, I believe most people are inherently evil, and the ones that haven’t done something truly heinous haven’t had the right opportunity yet.”

        These days I’d say most people are inherently lazy about checking who’s evil. Which may be worse.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Weird how Pelagianism keeps cropping up. Pelagius was an Irish monk who taught that people were, essentially, good and Christ had not so much come to redeem Mankind as to provide the model of how humans should behave. St Augustine had serious issues with Pelagianism, which boiled down to, “If all men are inherently good and only need to try hard enough to achieve salvation, why did I have to have Divine intervention?” Basically, the doctrine of original sin was part of Augustine’s response to Pelagius.

          Life makes more sense if you go with original sin.

          Liked by 2 people

          3. Original sin was evolving before that, arising because people wanted explanations of why they baptized infants under the age of reason.

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        2. Eh, good and evil are not on par. It’s like a ladder. It’s not a good ladder if half the rungs are good. Indeed, a very long ladder with three rungs missing may be a completely bad ladder.

          Liked by 1 person

      7. “And normal human beings refuse to believe this level of evil.”

        That’s where many of my relatives are. Far too many of them voted for Biden. Mom, thankfully, is not deceived but she thinks only a “Behold his mighty hand” event is going to get us out of this fix.

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    4. I don’t see much happiness on the other side. I see a fair amount of posturing, and a lot of “now we can punish those awful people,” but not much happiness.
      The woman on Twitter who posted an ironic bit about waking up happy because she realized we were now living in a racism-free country now that Biden is in got 10000 likes and had to tell people it was a joke. There’s no humor or sense of sarcasm over there.

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    5. One, I don’t accept the results of this election. The problem is, I’m retired military and the default mindset is to shoot the enemy becasue that’s the most efficient means of removal. Lawfare won’t work since the Supreme Court proved that was a useless avenue for correction. Might be able to correct via local and state legislation; but if NH is the only state to get fixed, 2 electoral votes won’t mean much.

      As for Biden supporters in town, fewer Registered Dems voted blue, and more registered GOP voted red for Trump, but the number of registered Dems is higher that Republicans, and the votes turned that way too. And the ballots were hand counted to check totals, so no fraud at that point. We’re there fraudulent mail ins? Probably. But the numbers weren’t there either.

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      1. I wonder if a Dem who voted Red was switched in the machine because obviously if a registered Dem voted Red than it was a mistake… obviously. (/sarc)

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      2. The issue is there needs to be a definitive event, such as the Massacre or Lexington/Concord, to allow the 4th to be opened. Until that point, and Ashli Babbit, while a a martyr, is only one woman. It needs to be a large gathering, by official hands, not the Antifa goons, as those happen consistently and naught happens.

        Liked by 1 person

    6. Excellent summary. Most regular people are on the hamster wheel of 9-5 or some other time on the clock variant trying to get by to pay bills, keep food on the table, lights and water on, pay insurance that is required, pay taxes that are required, pay back student loans if they were taken out(except these are on hold for right now), raise kids as best they can. Or the other variation, those who are sweating it worse with part time work or minimum wage or struggling to get by because of loss of job from the current plague and housing insecurity. In any case not everybody has the time or energy or money to be able to be like DJT and fight the machine that just wants us to be chewed up in the cogs and replaced as soon as we become defective. Plus there is no desire to associate with tptb because of the hostility toward outsiders and the derision and dragging up of every mistake made in life or association by tptb against any new potential person trying to get into office. So in idea it is good but practicality unfortunately it is not. But we have to prioritize and hope for the best.

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  17. As you say, “Now, what do we do?” This is like a dystopian novel. Come back in a thousand years to an ordered of cloistered monks who are trying to reconstruct why an entire civilization collapsed? Hope for a huge armageddon like disaster – pick one or two to change the course of history such as that island in the carnaries sliding into the Atlantic and causing a tidal wave that scouries the Eastern seaboard along with a giant eruption tsunami on the West coast, astroid strike, etc. Pray for divine intervention? Beat feet to somewhere where the light of freedom continues?

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      1. Thanks to the retreat to Low Earth Orbit for four decades after the lunar landings. Blame it on Nixon, blame it on Proxmire, blame it on the beancounters, the key thing is that we could’ve had cities on the Moon, bases on Mars, a thriving asteroid mining operation by now, instead of Elon Musk just barely starting on the spacecraft and boosters that could take us there. And he’ll be shut down (and quite possibly executed after a show trial) if we lose, because “There is no Planet B” is a core tenet of the other side.

        Liked by 1 person

        2. The politicos are just the symptom of the penetration of “why waste money on $FOO when there are poor people I can exploit for votes help with that money.” scam mindset by 1970.

          That and the fact the whole program was just about the Cold War. If the Soviets had beat us to the Moon, we’d have gone to Mars by 1980.

          Liked by 1 person

  18. The unaccounted for wildcard in this scenario is Putin and Russia.

    The cold warrior in Putin certainly wants to see the US fail; the pragmatist in Putin can’t allow that, because if we fail it’s just a matter of time until Xinnie the Pooh starts thinking about all those wonderful natural resources just sitting in that sparsely populated region north of the Amur River.

    Vlad needs an at least semi-functional US to balance out China, especially if he wants to continue rebuilding Stalin’s Soviet Empire.

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    2. The cold warrior in Putin is helping us.

      They had free speech used against them, destroying their system. They think that using it against us will destroy us. It destroys the woke, but they aren’t us.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. There’s a rumor this morning that Russia is on the move in Syria.

      True or not… the Potted Plant’s pick for Sec of State, while otherwise tolerably sane (at least per his hearing, which I watched) and obviously no dummy, historically has expressed a desire to turn Syria into a smoking crater.

      It occurs to me that wars can be re-ignited by rumors, and that this one doesn’t seem to be substantiated by any official sources.

      And as you say, China has been eyeing Russia’s resources for a long time. And Putin has been dealing with his own Swamp.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Obama had a bee in his bonnet about removing Assad. It was never exactly clear *why* he wanted to do so. But it was something he kept pivoting back to.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Assad’s family had not been properly welcoming to the Muslim Brotherhood. Which (via certain donations) seems to have been the driving force behind all of the StateDept-and-Hillary ‘encouragement’ of the Arab Spring and similar debacles.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Hell, I was in favor of removing Assad early on. I kinda thought he should have been removed in 2003 same time we did Saddam Hussein*. Right up until it became clear that the relatively-sane Color Revolution backers couldn’t find their ass with both hands and the ISIS types took over. Assad in power but kept in a box is better than those wackos.

          (* Joke quoted in the media at the time: “Q. How long would it take the US Army to beat the Syrian army? A. Six weeks. One week to do it, and five weeks to stop laughing.” Taking Syria out in 2003 would have removed all the sanctuaries and ratlines into Iraq that gave us such trouble. Jordan and Turkey wouldn’t have been interested in taking up the slack.)

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Yeah, taking Syria out early in the game likely would have been something I likely would have welcomed. We were naive enough back then to think that nation building was something that we could do in that part of the world. By the time Obama was in office, though, we knew better. And our failure to properly secure Iraq led to the vacuum that allowed ISIS to rise. Obama, though, kept pivoting back to the idea of deposing Assad, even while we were fighting ISIS in Syria.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. I’ll be honest, I should have known better looking at aftermath of vietnam. Doesn’t matter how good the victory they will pull defeat from it and dump people we promised to help.

              Liked by 1 person

        3. It was frustration at the failure of the Arab Spring. They were all ready to gloat that their soft power was more effective that Bush’s idiotic military blundering and then Hillary flushed strategic ambiguity right out the airlock and made it clear that we wouldn’t intervene to get rid of Assad, which allowed him to consolidate power and kick off the civil war.

          It’s also part of the reason why later on Hillary over corrected and helped take out Qaddafi.

          Hillary is not a smart person.

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      2. Here we go again…

        https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/middle-east/1611293792-us-military-convoy-enters-northeast-syria-report

        ===
        A large US military convoy entered northeastern Syria on Thursday, Syrian state news agency SANA reports, citing sources on the ground.

        According to the report, the convoy included some 40 trucks and armored vehicles and was backed from the air by helicopters.

        It entered Syria from Iraq via the al-Waleed crossing to bring arms and logistical equipment to the bases in Hasakeh and Deir Ezzor provinces.

        Other local media report that such maneuvers are not unusual as the US often moves transfers equipment between Iraq and Syria.
        ===

        Maybe not unusual, but awfully coincidental.

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          2. When the term is not being used metaphorically, the more ethical members of a profession just have to bear that not everyone lives up to their standards.

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        1. Democrats who are now claiming that Trump was doing Putin’s bidding by “inciting insurrection” (Pelosi stated this earlier this week), are not only enacting policies that help Russia via the fracking ban, but Harris/Biden have stated that they intend to extend the nuclear arms treaty with Russia that Trump wanted to end for another five years. Thus Democrats are rewarding the very country they have spent over the last four years was “Trump’s puppet master”.

          As usual, Democrats were projecting.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. I think it’s worse than that. I think they’ve never been serious about opposing Russia and Putin knows it. They picked Russia as the “evil country that controls the Bad Orange Man,” because they figured the ignorant redneck rubes in flyover country are paranoid about the Russians and would automatically reject Trump if the “Resistance,” could get the idea to stick.

            Liked by 2 people

            2. Yep. You could get whiplash from all the “we’ve always been at war with…whoever”. I’m pretty sure that a requirement for being one of the Dem’s useful idiots is a bad memory for what they were saying six months ago. Hell, last week.

              Liked by 1 person

            3. It is the same game they play with the Constitution when they want Republicans to fall into line, or the way they quote The Bible when attempting to browbeat Christians into not opposing their agenda.

              I’d denounce them as cynics but they give cynicism a bad name.
              ~

              Liked by 1 person

        1. The enviros want it stopped (they want anything that can provide inexpensive power to the masses stopped). But there’s also been some foreign meddling where fracking is involved. For example, the anti-fracking “documentary” released a while back that had Matt Damon involved turned out to be financed at least in part with Saudi money.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Russia has been heavily involved in financing the anti-fracking groups; but because it is helping leftist causes, the Democrats have no problem with it.

            Liked by 1 person

        3. Never underestimate the Left’s willingness to appease multiple entities with a single act.

          Never underestimate the environmentalists’ appetite for appeasement.
          ~

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  20. Not to be too obnoxious about disagreement, but I think you may be overthinking this. As nearly as I can discern the intentions of those who practice Orwellian doublethink by watching what they do more than what they say, I think the intention is to create a permanent domestic underclass of housekeepers, janitors, gardeners, and other proles, even if they have to import them from abroad. This underclass has to be lulled into security and submission, given a sufficient dole to keep them alive but not allowed to accumulate or invest, kept ignorant and uneducated, and innocent of dangerous notions such as freedom of thought or speech, and trained to believe that American ideals of “liberty and justice for all” were always myths designed to oppress the underclass.
    Yes, I mean that Orwellian doublethink is real and prevalent among leftists. It enables people to believe six mutually contradictory things before breakfast, and switch off to whatever set of claims is most convenient. The side effect is that its practitioners lose the ability to discern truth from lies or reality from fantasy. (For instance, I saw an article that claims that evicting Trump was a permanent victory over climate change deniers. ???)

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    1. Overthinking is quite possible.

      This is a bunch of knotty intelligence problems.

      Excessive ntuple thinking is a normal hazard of the business.

      Frankly, groups of people cannot share a single plan, because of telephone and personal differences in understanding. So, the opposition has a lot of plans. But, those plans will all tend to have features informed by the belief that simple models dictate reality.

      Time spent figuring out their plans is still useful. But it is at least as critical that we do not lose hope, and do not stop being alert to opportunities to screw up their plans with nonlinear behavior that they do not forecast.

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      1. I haven’t lost hope. Their moral blindness means that they will fall into the ditch and get hit by obstacles…and ruin…they don’t see coming, and I’m not omitting the possibility that Providence will provide means we cannot yet see. There are too many people who better and stronger than Winston Smith for Orwell’s dystopia to come true here, and too many people wiser than Huxley’s Stranger for his to come true, either. While I do see people bemoaning the death of the Republic and claiming that the current crop of incoming administration officials and new majorities with their bold plans to defeat Trumpism forever and secure permanent advantage and extend lockdown theatre indefinitely means the death of liberty in the country, my own opinion is “It ain’t dead yet. It might be in critical condition, but it ain’t dead.”

        Perhaps I’ve read too many stories where the forces of life and liberty were on the verge of destruction, with defeats, failures, and betrayals but prevailed in the end. I’ve also read stories where they were defeated, but the seeds of new life were sown. I don’t believe in a grimdark ending to the American founder’s dream of liberty. I have not forgotten nor forsaken the pledge of allegiance that I recited every schoolday for eight years when I was a boy, and I pay special attention to the last phrase. There may be little I can do about the plight of the country except write things few people are likely to read, but what little I can do I will.

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        1. The problem that doomism ignores is “what was America before it was founded?”.

          If it is so impossible to build freedom out of tyranny then America could never have existed in the first place.

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          1. Doomer view has some valid points, but the center of gravity of this conflict is in a) how completely fucked in the head the left is b) getting our own heads unfucked enough to beat the left.

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            1. Half of my family came to what is now the U.S. after getting entirely sick of one, two, maybe more homelands. We now appear to be out of homelands until Musk gets his act together. Also, my family has the distinction of having an ancestor who was the only person in his township to be singled out to NOT be pardoned for participating in the Whiskey Rebellion. So I have absolutely no problem with doing what’s right even if it’s not technically “legal.” The law is there to ensure peace and prosperity, and when it’s used to serve some other purpose, it is immoral.

              I am surely not the only one.

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              1. An interesting comment seen on youtube:
                ===
                Still not sure why WE patriotic citizens of America are not organizing to take this country back. Batman isn’t going to do it for us. What are we waiting for? It’s in our Constitution to organize militia and overthrow a tyrannical government. We are not breaking any laws by doing so, we are not conspiring to commit acts of treason, we are only defending what made this country what it is today. By doing nothing, we are spitting on the graves of our anscestors, who fought and died for everything we have today. Everything.
                ===

                Liked by 2 people

          3. True. The major difference I see between then and now is that many Americans have forgotten or lost faith in the Biblical roots of the thinking of the founders, On the other hand, the Revolution occurred when the British attempted to impose stricter controls on a population that had become accustomed to comparative neglect from a king and Parliament that were far away,,,and the current political leadership is attempting a similar dangerous overreach by threatening liberties we have taken for granted.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. And bunker hiding in DC blinds them to the information they need to reliably pull things off.

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              1. That’s not even the biggest thing that blinds them. Even if they had the information, they lack the wisdom.

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          4. The result of a long period of building the basis for belief in individual rights.

            Even the Magna Carta, which was not everything it was made out to be sometime although it also wasn’t just “the King can’t stop the Barons from screwing over who they want to screw over” (as I heard it characterized once) was only a step in a long tradition. I’m still trying to tease out how much of the Anglo-Saxon nobility remained as low level land lords under the Norman family (William I, William II, Henry I, and Stephen) because a lot of their goals seem to come from a more English background (perhaps parallels from their Norse heritage).

            Either way, the common law whose standardization began under Henry II was very English and would shine through over the centuries.

            That is the problem. When American became America it not only had the traditions of rule dating back to the Glorious Revolution, but to the English Civil War and beyond arguably to Alfred’s initial rollback of the Norse. Even the Danelaw looked forward towards the ideas of America’s founding more than anything on the continent did. Despite happening in the same era, there are reasons the French Revolution, dedicated to equality, liberty, and brotherhood ended in blood and tyranny. As much as I’d like to blame Rousseau and other idiot thinkers who still wield influence on the Left, it was less them alone than the tradition that lead to them.

            When the Left destroys all history and memory from Alfred on and what ekes through is raciss, sexiss, homophobiss, etc we’re back to 700 in philosophical terms on a trip to 1776.

            That’s a lot of darkness.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. When the Left destroys all history and memory from Alfred on and what ekes through is raciss, sexiss, homophobiss, etc we’re back to 700 in philosophical terms on a trip to 1776.

              If we assume Hitler had infinite power we are speaking German as well.

              Why not keep it to plausibles?

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            2. The fundamental difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution and others, is that the British colonists fought for independence because they were fighting for the rights they were supposed to have by virtue of being British but were denied to them. If the British Parliament (and it was Parliament much more than King George III, but the Declaration would not have had the impact it had by denouncing the tyranny of Parliament rather than the King) had simply afforded the colonists the same rights that British living in Britain had, chances are the American Revolution does not happen.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Very true, but there was nearly of millennium of history behind their belief they had those rights, with a high intensity since about 1620.

                The French, having no long tradition about the rights they were demanding nor experience in exercising them, took a very different course.

                It’s a great example of the journey being more important than the destination.

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              2. Eh, Parliament gave up on fighting us, and the king drew up an instrument of abdication to try to pressure them out of it. It was only when his ministers broke it to him that they would not CARE, they would just crown his son and make peace, that he managed to give up.

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          5. Tbh, England had been reforming for centuries and really wasn’t too bad for the era. Was more a case of Americans wanting to be equal to those in isles rather than a colony.

            Liked by 1 person

        2. That’s about all I can do too. It’s something. I imagine us minor bloggers as a community of groundhogs, popping our little heads above ground just enough to thumb our noses at Them*, then disappearing before they can react. The larger the community, the crazier we can make Them*.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. For a refresher on Orwellian doublethink: (in case it is needed)

        “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

        Although in many cases, there’s a simpler explanation. I recently had a couple of bruising encounters with artices from a leftist POV, and one of my thoughts was “You really are stunningly ignorant of how the other side, thinks, aren’t you?” It’s rather like the mind-readers I have all too frequently encountered (since I am an *odd*) who inform me of what I am *really* thinking…and then proceed to elaborate a fantasy that “explains” my misconduct. but has nothing to do with what I was actually thinking. Once they have this explanation firmly in mind, anything I say about what I was really thinking is either *blah, blah, blah* or self-serving BS. It’s dangerous to fall in love with your own pet theories.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. ALMOST every time I fail to fall into line. Jeffrey Landis recently on facebook “argued” with me. Only arguing with me involved reading my mind. Let’s say he shouldn’t quit physics.

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          1. The “Argument from false absurdity” fallacy. “The idea that you actually believe the arguments you put forward for your position is obviously absurd. Therefore you must hold your position for other, evil reasons that you don’t want to admit to.”

            Liked by 1 person

        2. They are. This is Science. It has been shown in the lab that libertarians and conservatives understand each other and leftists, but leftists don’t understand either of them.

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          1. “… but leftists don’t understand either of them.”

            I perceive very little to be gained by determining what leftists don’t (and won’t) understand. For one thing, we’d need a bigger blog.
            ~

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  21. If you have an investment in the long term future (ie, children) you prepare to preserve as much as you can: books on acid free paper, teaching and inculcating the need to teach, what machine tools that can be made out of corrosion resistant metals made (some cannot to my knowledge, but those are advanced anyway), troves of raw materials mapped out (and be creative, one day a car graveyard will be an iron mine), and so on.

    Because in the long term we all lose, although it will be the children of those billionaires who can’t understand why they lack the riches of their grandfathers who lose on their level. Us and all our descendants lose on ours.

    Because they are creating a neo-feudal culture and, decades of space opera not withstanding, feudal cultures cannot sustain an industrial, much less a technological, society.

    Why? Because the social systems need to be flexible enough to make it possible to get the right talents and interest to the right place to keep it running. Not to keep it growing and improving, but just to keep it running.

    They reject that mobility. Looking at their trajectory, their goal is a society that makes the worse periods of Tsarist Russia look like a libertarian fantasy in terms of social mobility. As such, it won’t take two generations before the internet becomes dial-up again and two more before computers become women with math degrees who aren’t married yet again.

    Or, to sum it up:

    Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

    This is known as “bad luck.”

    One of the genius items of the English speaking people was a system which from Alfred on (and even under the early Plantagenet, although maybe not the actual Normans) until the post-war WW2 period and then stable for two generations after tried to promote into higher social status members of that extremely small minority in exchange for some degree of “behaving”.

    That is, it was the one strand of culture in history that made a sustained, multi-generational effort in carving out room for odds.

    I think our generation was the last where that was even partially true. The millennials were promoted on behaving alone, which not only makes no room for odds, but works to exclude the most useful ones (which currently celebrating the useless “look at me type” to cover up the conformity).

    If you don’t have such an investment in the future, you get to choose (well, you get to choose if you do as well, but you’re the one who made the investment) if you want to work or enjoy the decline. I still maintain encouraging most westerners to not invest in the future (which succeeded beyond their wildest dreams outside the US and is finally doing so in the US) was their smartest move. Not only does it make what you’re describing easier by the numbers, it creates a huge swath of people who are at best half interested in fighting it, because in the long run they have no dog in the fight.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. one day a car graveyard will be an iron mine

      I recall reading a weird bit (TV Guide? Oooold deserving Hugo/nebula short?) about those hailing “Johnny Litterbug” as they went searching for those glorious pieces of petrochemical-derived plastics that weren’t utterly inaccessible. Silly story, but I recall that much, all these decades later.

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      1. I believe it was in Asimov’s S/F/ Magazine, referred to plastics as “dragon’s blood” Probably between 1990 and 93ish.

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        1. If it was in that magazine, that is the timeframe in which I had (optimistically) subscribed to such things for a while. I think we can eliminate 1990. It had to be late 1991 or 1992-3. I think I subscribed to all the readily available (read: cheap) SF mags of ‘Reader’s Digest’ size for a while. A very short while. Generally, I do not recall much other than the short-form bit ‘Probability Zero’ in one of them was often more amusing than ALL of the rest… of ALL of them. And I recall two of those. Recall as in, I can tell you the key bits – NOT as in “can name the title and author and tell you names of characters.”

          [One thing I would tell Younger Self, if I could: “That stuff about keeping a ‘journal’ or diary is mostly crap. *BUT*.. keep a log of interesting books and articles you read. No stupid ‘book report’ nonsense, just Author, Title, Subject, and a *brief* Summary. Even the crap, really… it *WILL* come in handy.”]

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  22. I don’t know what we do exactly, just yet. However, we will figure it out and we will win. Our descendants will be talking about us for a long time of how took on tyranny, took on the World! Think of the books, the movies,and the legends that will come out of all of it. After all, who else could pull off something like this but Real Americans!

    Like

      1. The sad thing is, with MSFS2020 finally getting VR support, I really wanted to do a VFR circumnavigation of the globe, and possibly live stream it.

        Depending on how things go, I probably won’t be able to do that, even though that’s what I’d rather be doing.

        That the thing about turning everything into a zero sum game: it create opponents who would have been perfectly happy to let you win your thing, if it hadn’t involved destroying their thing. It didn’t have to be that way.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Sadly, after a certain point, you can’t ignore other people making the personal political, because their politics gets into your personal.

            Of course, those who will pay the most are those who personal was appropriated to do it: genuine trans people (not the look at me crowd, but people like my friends T and S) and gay people. Regimes that require conformity to survive cannot accept public homosexuality or even much garden variety gender variation much less gender f**kery.

            I may live to see the gay leftists who told me the US was more dangerous to gays (an opinion based on the “religious rights”) than Iran (nope, be told that to my face) be proven correct…by their supposedly allies.

            Maybe they’ll live long enough to tell if the knife hurts more in the back.

            Liked by 2 people

    2. I want to believe.
      BUT HOW? They’re moving very fast and by the nature of the invasion have OUR military on their side.
      I’m very afraid our epitaph will be “the individualists failed to organize.”

      Like

      1. And how is the situation any different from your previous predictions? The ones where we win?

        Also HAVE YOU SEEN what is going on with the military in DC? They continue to have the officers, at most.

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        1. Can’t gut the NCO Corps fast without gutting service capabilities.

          Same reason I concluded that killing the foreign populations of the world would require building a new service from scratch. Even then, you would need to make the other services less capable to prevent them from stopping the new service.

          So things are not as simple as Obama believed.

          At worst, the military is neutralized, and we will have a lot of rebuilding to do before we can take the fight to China. Which is hugely demoralizing for me, personally, but the civil war isn’t lost.

          The problem Sarah and I share is a little complicated.

          We profoundly distrust human things. So, we are forever analyzing, trying to find truth and Truth.

          Analysis isn’t entirely uncoupled from emotion. Emotion isn’t entirely uncoupled from health.

          The analysis we are currently doing is fresher in memory. So, when the current sequence of projects gives negative results, that skews emotions and health, which bias the next analysis in the negative direction.

          So, over time, we have periods where things line up on positive and periods where things line up on negative.

          Answer is to continue struggling. Even when it is hard.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Analysis isn’t entirely uncoupled from emotion. Emotion isn’t entirely uncoupled from health.

            I have a solution for this!

            It *ought* to be uncoupled. Therefore it is. QED.

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            1. I’m told April and September are the most viable time frames for a cross Taiwan invasion.

              That said, we are already in a digital war with them, and that’s probably where a lot of the fight is going to be. Conventional war is really expensive, and they don’t have the manpower to really fight one. I mean, these are the guys who took machine guns to a fist fight and still got themselves trounced by Indians with spiked baseball bats.

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              1. Digital war, and potentially biological.

                One of the things keeping me out of a more vicious frame of mind is knowing that Winnie would mind more the Chinese population surviving him, and living in freedom, than he would mind the extermination of the Han.

                Han are perfectly capable of living free and self governing.

                Liked by 1 person

            2. Formalizing the war we’re already in? They own the Fed, lock, stock, and voting machine. There’s nobody left with authority to make a declaration.

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                1. Yeah, but the mustached one declared war on his better friend, uncle Joe. Not sure who that would be wrt Xinnie

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              2. I’ll disagree with that, not so much that they don’t own a ton of US gov’t debt, but that they’ve reached the point of John Paul Getty’s famous quote: “If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”

                Add in that it’s still the petro DOLLAR, despite recent Chinese and Iranian attempts to make it otherwise, and they cannot afford to destroy the Fed. Their great hope was the Euro.

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                2. One of the Jodies we sang in boot camp had the line “world’s finest Navy.” Several times on the ship I would look around, realize that the line was still correct, and wonder how ^$#%ed up every other navy was.

                  In a similar vein, the dollar may be screwed but it’s still the best currency on the planet.

                  Liked by 1 person

            3. I’d argue we have been since December and maybe October of 2019, especially if we believe the Leftist version of how dangerous the Kung Flu is.

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          3. Can’t gut the NCO Corps fast without gutting service capabilities.

            That’s what I’ve believed. And you don’t gut the NCO Corps just by politicizing the top NCO positions like Master Chief Petty Office of the Navy/$SENIORCOMMANDS (think COMSUBLANT and higher). Most career NCOs don’t want to be more than MCPO of USS $WARSHIP or equivalent then go to some final duty station to serve out their 30 make heel and butt prints on a desk and chair.

            Hell, most want to get out at 20 so don’t even aim for command MCPO.

            Smart JOs listen to their NCOs or don’t get the FitReps needed to become middle grade officers, so only the most politically ambitious at 22 are going to try to push BS more than enough to make the paper work. Most will let the paper work and do the politicking outside of the machinery spaces.

            Those NCOs will make it difficult to be an effective force against other Americans. Even the highly politicized Senior Command told Pelosi to get the cabinet to remove Trump, it wasn’t their job.

            As you get worse and worse seamen, however, the quality of the NCOs will go down to match that of the enlistment pool of a decade earlier. Then you’ll have ones who do the political bidding, but generally that subset won’t intersect with the high quality US military of today.

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            1. Re USN, the major issue is the one you brought up above – the JOs don’t get trained in seamanship, and the COs & XOs are letting crap like “It’s deteriorated to the point that female JO#1 will not speak to female JO#2 anymore, so lets put them both on bridge midwatch together during tonight’s transit of major shipping lanes – oh and the CO should definitely stay in his rack and not be on the bridge” happen.

              It’s all fixable through training on other than the PC crap. Will that happen in a China Joe* administration? That depends on the Admirals.

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              1. …and 0bama replaced as many admirals (and generals) as possible with ‘politically reliable’ chair-fillers.

                Like

              2. Its fixable with an “I don’t care who is on the other end of the line. Do your job.” And enforcing it. I had someone on a department that I wasn’t fond of. Personality clash. But if it would take a truck out of service otherwise I’d volunteer for the shift. Its the danged job. Same with my full time and two of the people I’ve worked with that I was actually scared of are my closest friends

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          2. To a degree and to a degree that makes engaging a peer opponent in the near term as nasty a proposition as war was in 1942, especially what the Army experienced. I think the Navy is just as unprepared prepared this time.

            However, the Joint Chiefs told Pelosi if they wanted Trump out of the chain of command to do it herself by convincing Congress or the Cabinet to do so. It wasn’t their job. They were to follow lawful orders.

            The Bamster may have politicized appointments and the next generation of JCS may be politicized enough to be willing to choose a political side, but institutional momentum seems to be keeping the current generation in check somewhat.

            Note, non-Navy people…I contend the Navy of 1942 was more prepared for one reason only…the Navy does more wartime type things daily than the Army and, at the time, the Air Corps. A ship at sea is very much the same shooting or not and many of the dangers are present regardless, as the US Navy showed too much in the past few years (see below for the less publicized entry by the USS San Francisco). We are not teaching or engaging in seamanship as much as we did 80 years ago and it shows.

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            1. A ship at sea is very much the same shooting or not

              I remember a quote from a carrier crewman back during the Iraq War saying that if the ship got involved in an actual peer conflict his job would get easier since not as many planes would be coming back.

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            2. Right the ocean is an implacable enemy all the time. Navies that forget that are in deep trouble. The recent seamanship issues seem worse than the crap in the late 70’s when all the arms of the military got a little shaky after the mess that was how Viet Nam was handled.

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        3. They didn’t make a lot of friends by deciding to heave the NG out of the nice warm Congressional offices where they’d been spending their 12 hours off, and making ’em go back out to sleeping in their cold tents in the streets.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. And then Trump said that they could stay in his hotel. Even if they didn’t actually get to stay there, the fact that he offered – and the fact that it forced Congress to bring them back inside – will be remembered.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Absolutely.

              The Dems are just comically bad at all of this understanding-the-commoners stuff. They’re starting to remind me of extinct French nobility.

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      2. They only have the senior military leadership but still have a long way to overthrow the culture (can’t say how I know publicly). I am normally not optimistic but I think the individualists will organize, probably at the point it’s almost too late.

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  23. Even if that is their plan, that does not mean it will work as intended.

    My younger brother has been a bit more plugged in on China’s attempt as colonizing Africa, and it’s been a dismal failure for them. Basically, the countries they were trying to rope into debt servitude have a half life of about five years, and everyone in them, even the war lords running them knows it.

    China would loan ridiculous amounts of money to them under ruinuous terms, the current warlord would spend it all on parties and booze, and by the time China came to collect, they would have been overthrown and the “government” that owed them the money would no longer exist.

    So, they’d make a new set of ruinuous loans to the new warlord, who would again, spend all the money of parties and booze, and again, woe have been overthrown and gone by the time China came to collect on the debt.

    They ended up having to shut down most of their Belt and Roads program because so much of their money was simply being vacuumed into the phonograph warlords of Africa.

    China does not understand how any culture not China operates, and because they are a top down command country, they do not have the cultural flexibility to adapt.

    Same thing with Democrats and mass amnesty. You are correct that they are importing illegal immigrants to use as a new chattle class; they’ve used them as such for decades in California, but that comes apart if they make them citizens. Suddenly the immigrants gain all of the legal protections and access to all the legal avenues that citizens have, and the masters lose all of the extra-judicial powers they currently have over illegal immigrants.

    Instead of being able to freely threaten to deport them whenever they misbehave, it becomes and evil corporation mistreating it’s poor minority workers. Do you think there wouldn’t be lawyers for days ready to run class action lawsuits against some white septegunarian for forcing her poor Hispanic workers to bring in the wine grape harvest under a wildfire evacuation warning? The lawyers would be rich for life after that suit.

    Nothing ever goes according to any plan, and the bigger and more centrally controlled the plan is, the less likely things are to follow it. The only things that survive contact with reality are what can adapt and be flexible.

    Stay flexible. Stay mobile, and never stop moving forward, which ever direction forward may be.

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    1. Note that is not what I’m saying. what I’m saying is they expect the “new Americans” to run home to spend/live like kings.
      THEY WANT TO GIVE THE THIRD WORLD VOTES IN OUR ELECTIONS.

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      1. I think I see what you mean now, but I doubt that’s going to work according to plan either. While there are a lot of 3rd world people coming here for work and money, a very large number of them are coming here because living in the 3rd world is also a great way to wind up dead. I’m thinking they’ll be more likely to migrate inland as the border states turn into cartel lands and work in gray industries than return to their home countries. A lot of them are able to live very well here by collecting state benefits and working gray market jobs off the books.

        If most of the systems move to online only, I could even see them “living” in the States with the most generous benefits while actually being in an entirely different part of the country. I.e. “living” in California, while actually working on Idaho as an off-the-books barber.

        That said, that’s likely just going to accelerate the devaluation of the dollar and break our tax collection system, because once enough people are side-stepping their taxes while also dipping in the till, you just can’t print enough to make it work at all.

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        1. That won’t work–the claiming benefits in one place while earning under the table in another place–very well or very long, unless both places are really big.

          In smaller towns, everyone knows everyone, you know? Or they know a guy who knows a guy. Mine-about 60,000-you don’t go to a new barber or hairdresser, you go to the one you went to since you were a kid, or your friend, or your friend’s friend. Being anonymous only works in the big city. The worse things get economically the more the network will apply.

          And as currency gets worth less and less, barter’s going to pick up. Right now it’s along the lines of ’85 chevy pickup with parts truck, will trade for working riding mower’. And again, the worse things get economically the more the network will apply: if you’re working mainly for direct barter you want to be sure that you trust the folks swapping you food for your services.

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          1. Given how many west coast states paid people in Africa unemployment and stimulus funds and the contempt California has garnered in other states I can see a lot of not caring by people in Idaho or Texas about people who work under the table in their town screwing over California benefits systems.

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          2. And when things get desperate, people start to notice you have nicer stuff than you would have with the source of income they know about.

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      2. Which would result in the US becoming the Third World, essentially the US of Atlas Shrugged and while I doubt there would be a Galt’s Gultch and heroic short term rebirth, The Strike would happen.

        Destroying the US is starvation for the rest of the world, however, as Peter what’s his name loves to point out the rest of the world starving will not starve the US. If that is their plan, they’ve got a narrow timeline to walk to make sure the US outlives them without rejecting it and closing off the borders.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. They don’t have to, now. Dominion will make the elections come out any way they want. No court will hear any case against them now.

        I think the “immigrant” thing is either inertia from the pre-Dominion days, or they have some other use for them. But they’re of no more use as voters than you are; voting is *done*, though they’ll probably go through the motions anyway, like the CCCP did.

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          2. The purpose is so they can use illegal alien votes to take control of all the state legislatures to, or at least enough to amend the Constitution to eviscerate it, get rid of the Bill of Rights (remember the Senate Democrats voted in lockstep to do so during the Obama years). When they mean “fundamental transformation”, they mean “fundamental transformation”.

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        2. And in typical Dem practice, they CANNOT CONCEIVE of that functionality being made use of by anyone but them.

          If you break security, it stays broken, and with an open back door, you can never tell who will wander in.

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        3. I think there are multiple reasons for the Democrats being in favor of uncontrolled illegal immigration. But a big part of the reason NOW is because they’re against whatever Trump was against, and the wall was a big feature of his campaign. They constantly use weaponized compassion, and they’re always talking about how mean it is to not allow illegal aliens to flood into the country. Also they like having servants and they don’t give a rats ass about what bringing in a huge bunch of competitors into the lower paying job markets does. In fact, since they want client identity groups, it’s probably a net benefit to them.

          To be honest, I think the grand conspiracy is *possible*. Certainly after seeing the utter corruption of our “ruling elites” (spit), I’d believe any evil of them. But they’re incompetent, thankfully, and reality tends to be resistant. So I’m hoping that their evil will be just a tad more banal.

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      4. While I have prior coworkers who moved back to India so they (ahem, spouse) could have a proper number of servants again as befitted their position and class (and I assume caste but I’m not versed in determining such), I also have prior coworkers who never, not ever, wanted to go back to India, married a busty blonde coworker from Sweden, bought a house and started having lots of kids.

        Similarly, I am aware of folks from south of the border who are here so they can earn enough to go back and be comfortable in their home village, and others who, while they send money to relatives back home, don’t ever want to live where they came from again.

        Guess which families kids are fully assimilated in spite of all the elite crap intended to maintain heritage ghettos.

        The Great Plan may be to somehow give the vote to only those who are A) reliably controllable and B) intend to move back home, but I’m just not sure how they can successfully discriminate between those and the folks who will assimilate in spite of pressures and obstacles to give their own kids the best shot – see the Vietnamese community for examples – first-gen picked strawberries, were deck hands on fishing boats, and took any and all menial job; second-gen are dentists and programmers and lawyers and starting to get into politics.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. There are tales of houses in Mexico’s interior built by people who sent money home while working in the US never occupied by their builders because they decided to never leave the US.

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    2. They ended up having to shut down most of their Belt and Roads program

      Yeah, I never understood the pissing and moaning about how China now owned all the port facilities or rubber plantations or tantalum mines or what have you in Inner Elbonia. So what? If they got too stroppy, the Elbonians would just nationalize the assets (not like nationalization isn’t a Third World sport) and then what’s China going to do? Elbonia is basically “judgement proof” financially and China doesn’t have the military to punish them.

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      1. Well, most of us operate on the assumption that the norms are how things work.

        I mean, if the war lords actually expected to be around long enough for them to collect, it would be silly to just waste it. Why kill the goose that lays the gold eggs afterall? But, if you know that tomorrow you’re probably going to be dead, what does it matter to you whether or not the goose lays another egg tomorrow? Just spend the egg you got and feast on goose until you’re stuffed.

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      2. I think a lot of Americans operate with US assumptions about power projection capabilities the US has now and how it used those it had a century ago during our numerous occupations of Central American and Caribbean countries to get loans paid/end nationalizations.

        So I think most people suspect China, lacking the restraint of the US, would just sail a carrier in and land marines to take it back.

        The reality is only one nation has power projection capabilities the US has and I’m not sure we have what we had three decades ago. The PLAN is building up, but while they have a carrier the most junior seaman has within three years the same experience as the most senior CPO. The Chinese could not do that, regardless of how ruthless their government is.

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        1. Conscript navies don’t work very well. I’m told that is why some of the WWI naval engagement lost battle assessments ended up classified until only extremely recently.

          Conscript carrier strike groups work even less. I recall one Soviet detector pilot who specifically asked to see a US carrier deck operation before he fully could believe that the US was a free country. There are just to many parts that require you to have absolute confidence in people who can kill you just by screwing up for it to work otherwise.

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          1. And if you don’t have a free country you may have an expensive and shiny carrier but, wellllll…….

            It’s hard to launch an air strike when the entire flight deck is a raging inferno.

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        2. Yeah, the PLAN is basically where the US was at with the Langley, albeit with an example from us of what can be done. Big gap between that and deployable CV Task Groups.

          From a strategic perspective the PLAN looks to be trying to extend the reach of land-based PLA air in a denial role against the USN, with only vague aspirations towards any ambitions of true power projection.

          Gunboat diplomacy by inference and threat one thing – actual power projection in the face of, well, us, is something else.

          Now, absent the USN, well, in such circumstances I would not want to own any container shipping or port operations stock, and I’d sell all my shares with any exposure to Chinese mainland manufacturing really fast.

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          1. Even without the USN, I doubt PLAN power project across the Pacific or into the Indian Ocean. Distance will foreclose the former. Even if the era of RN and then USN dominance the Strait of Malacca retained the most piracy in the world. Bypassing the Strait means heading over the Indian Ocean and we’re back to the same problem with the Strait.

            Air cover probably leaves them in a position to be able to neutralize the USN in close support of Taiwan, but doesn’t neutralize long range support by USN and USAF elements. With FICUS they might have enough for the invasion to work, but I wouldn’t want to be the troops used in that bet.

            Further targets such as the PI are similar but even more tilted against China.

            Now, there is a lot of road and rail building in Asia by China. I’m not sure that is having the problems the sea connected parts did. I suspect the PLA is able to enforce better along some of that.

            Back to the Strait of Malacca, a huge amount of container shipping transits it as well and I agree with your assessment there. I wonder how much a post-American naval presence trade between Japan and Korea on one side and Europe on the other will transit on PanaMax container ships or use the US land rail land bridge (a good amount already does).

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          2. They’re better off than we were at the time of the Langley. They have some ideas about what doesn’t work. As an example, there’s a reason why exactly TWO carriers had their island on the port side of the ship. Those two carriers were built that way for good reasons (the intention was to pair them up with carriers with islands on the starboard side, and the opposing islands were supposed to allow for an increased operational tempo). But then it was discovered that pilots suffering an emergency during take-off or landing tended to veer to the left…

            But, yeah, there’s still a lot of practices that they’re going to need to work out on their own.

            The bigger problem for the PRC right now is the lack of logistical capability. Even if they could project force, they don’t yet have the capability to support the force projectors. The PLAN could send Liaoning or Shandong (which was commissioned in December 2019) to go bomb particularly aggressive pirates in Somalia (and I’d love to see them do something like that, actually, so people could start to get an idea of what the PLAN carrier capabilities are like). But landing marines at the pirate village and occupying it for six months would probably be out of the question without local support.

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            1. It’s debatable whether they have the transport to supply an invasion of Taiwan, and that’s only a hundred miles away.

              (Anecdote: my dad was stationed in the Philippines in 1946 as an Army photographer. He knew a guy who had been transferred there from the occupation of Taiwan for the crime of liberating a DUKW and driving it to China and back.)

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      3. See the documentary “Empire of Dust” (or the trailer still on YT, which about covers the basics) on how “well” it’s going for China in Africa. Basically pushing chains uphill, even when the local government isn’t ducking out.

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    3. No. Those lawyers will find themselves canceled if they take the cases when it is not for the benefit of the Deep State.

      Remember there is absolutely no consistency when a tyrant enforces the law.

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    4. I think the key question is why the Democrats didn’t ram through amnesty in 2009/10? They had more votes than they do now, and they used those votes to cram Obamacare down our throats, but they didn’t do anything about immigration despite spending pretty much all of the Bush administration calling for comprehensive immigration reform (AKA amnesty). Was it because they thought they had it sewn up forever and didn’t need to legalize the illegals? Or was it because amnesty would cause them problems, either with their supporters losing an exploitable workforce or losing the carrot keeping many Hispanics on the Democrat plantation?

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      3. There were also more GOP supporters of amnesty (preferably by some other name.) McCain supported it, and as the last GOP presidential nominee carried considerable weight (especially in MSM reporting of the issue) as did Senators Isakson, Alexander, Grahamnesty and others.
        ~

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  24. a) Yeah, that fits their flavor of profoundly crazy. Down to the large complicated plan, relying on linearity of human behavior.
    b) Thing is, visas issued under the Biden administration, and probably naturalizations, are not valid. Ergo, international travelers after a certain point are legitimate military targets.
    c) I had little in the way of sound action items for this. I’ve since noticed that it can be brought to the attention of airline pilots that international flights are soon an act of criminal conspiracy. Once the pilots on these flights are only internationals and hardcore Dems, direct action would possibly be defensible.
    d) China’s victory lap over renewed/increased international travel seemed an indication that targeting international travelers might be a desirable idea. Except that Winnie the Pooh obviously cares nothing for human life, and hence killing folks is no way to hurt him. The purpose of the lap was to rub it in our face.

    Beyond all that, it is obvious that things are breaking down in ways they cannot predict, and will not account for.

    These people are not Americans as we previously understood them, and restraint based on the idea that they participate in the American peace is intellectually bankrupt. But destroying the culture of the white left may suffice in place of killing all of them.

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    1. Or as a gentleman in the local deli run by vaguely hippie-like sectarians put it, “Everything is slowly coming unglued.”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. It isn’t just the glue. Things that should slide or rotate are binding. Dry joints that are supposed to hold by fit have the inner bit too small, or the outer bit too large.

        Smooth isn’t, straight or flat isn’t, and curves are not what they are supposed to be.

        Periodic signals aren’t, digital signals have the wrong number of bits, and the voltages are too far from the nominal values.

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          1. So we’ve got to put ourselves together again. I still think your advice to write, write all the things, keep writing, is one of the best ways we’ve got to start things gluing again. It’ll reach the most reachable. And once we have more of a critical mass, things will snowball.

            Liked by 1 person

              1. Us knurd types gotta stick together.

                I’m not hearing much on any channel; just one-foot-in-front-of-next at the moment. Finally seem to be getting over the latest crud. Plan now is to finish getting last wanted things out of the house – hopefully will be able to do that next week. Then we set up with a real estate agent to get the place cleaned out, yard tended, etc. And then listed.

                Once we get that sold, we’ll have resources to weather a lot of storms. So that’s our next step. *Fingers crossed.*

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                1. IF plans align (we’ll learn today) so we can bugger out this summer, instead of next winter, we’re going to scrape money together, drive down (it’s two days away) and put down a down payment on new place. Either find a property management company, or tap a localish friend to come by periodically and make sure everything is okay, and plan on being there a week a month.
                  This would allow us to drive down several u-haul loads and get a feel for what we need of what we currently own. Which means we can then be ready around July to do a final on this house, tossing everything we DON’T need to stage for sale, then drive down final time.
                  And then wait. The disparities in real estate are such that we get out of this house should then pay off the other.
                  EVERYTHING CROSSED.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  3. Arranging to be out of the house when selling it is a good plan, for those who can manage it. The expectations for interior orderliness, decluttering, and staging make it painful to sell a house while living in it.

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              2. Hey, even I’m drawing schematics in KiCad again.

                We’ll make it. I’m not sure we’ll be okay in the “nothing left behind, nothing changed” sense, but we’ll make it.

                Liked by 1 person

        2. In an old house that’s neither flat, plumb, square, or true, it’s often easier to demolish a piece and rebuild it properly than it is to try to fix the existing and to spend all your time and energy planing, filling, and sanding joints to make it look nice. You might lose some of the patina and historical curlicues, but if you do it right it will look like it’s always been there.

          (Ask me how I know. :-D )

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          2. I do remember that time my old man had to rebuild the down stairs bathroom. Apparently the floor has rotted so much that the toilet was solely supported by the plumbing.

            The hilarious thing was he actually enjoyed it, even with having to wear a gas mask the whole time…

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            1. Whenever I open up a wall or expose some structure I regularly exclaim “OMG how has this house not collapsed or burned down yet?”

              Liked by 1 person

              1. The things I have found that were clearly there when the original inspectors inspected – yeah, pretty sure money changed hands.

                Liked by 1 person

                2. Inspectors? WHAT inspectors? Other than the once-over visible-stuff-only “home inspectors” you hire at sale time, I don’t think an official inspector from the city or county has set foot in this house more than once or twice in the entire period 1930-2009.

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              2. Our volunteer group does a lot of maintenance on larger facilities. Same thing, though. I still shake my head over the place where someone had “fixed,” a dryer by putting chicken wire in the lint trap. Or the “corridor,” maybe two feet wide and 20 feet long, full of pipes needing to be replaced. (Two different work sites).
                And the building where the camp manager said, “Oh, while you’re sheetrocking and taping and painting the room, could you jack up the back corner so the floor’s level?” No, we replaced the rotted joist instead. *Sigh.*

                Liked by 1 person

          3. I spent two years fixing plaster and other stuff in a 150 year old Victorian. It worked out in the end, I guess, but it was a horrible job. I still kind of miss the 10.5 foot ceilings. 8 feet ceilings feel claustrophobic to me.

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          4. Not in California, where you may not be able to afford the new building permits. You’re better off to remodel endlessly. (Used to be you could get away with leaving “one wall standing” and rebuild everything else, but I hear that’s changed.)

            When last I cared, about 15 years ago, a house permit alone was $38,000 in L.A. County, and up in the Bay area permits totaled around $125k before you even break ground. My neighbor out in the desert built a barn that cost him $14k for materials and construction, but the PERMIT cost him $18k.

            And you can’t get a well permit for new rural construction anymore either, and you can’t get a house permit without water to the property, so it better be on a local water system.

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            1. It is rare I will endorse anything said by Bill Maher, but I will note that he is more sensible* than his peers:

              Bill Maher’s Surprising Remarks About Trump Supporters and the Capitol Building Storming
              I know conservatives don’t like Bill Maher. I don’t mind him on certain topics like free speech, radical Islamic terrorism, and political correctness. On the latter, he feels the Democratic Party has become a bunch of crybabies who don’t want to be offended. Too bad. he calls out the illiberal tendencies while also bashing Republicans. He did wish for an economic recession to help boot Trump from a second term. It’s disgusting wishing that on American families, but it worked. It happened. And yet, while many in the liberal media were gloating and celebrating the end of the GOP following Trump’s exit and the January 6 riot that engulfed Capitol Hill, Maher knows better.

              His new rules and special commentary segment that ends his show Real Time on HBO was nuanced during the January 15 episode. He rehashed how this isn’t the end of the GOP. The GOP didn’t end with Nixon. It didn’t end with Bush and Katrina. He noted that 74 million Trump supporters are not self-deporting, and neither are liberals. Maher aptly noted that you can think someone is an a-hole while not becoming one yourself, that it’s possible to dislike Trump, even hate him, but not hate those who support him. I’m sure many in Maher’s audience surely disagreed with this take—he wasn’t popping champagne.

              [SNIP]

              … he also took a swipe at Democrats in California, who he says probably instilled a feeling in Babbitt that her being a white person was more of a problem than her financial situation. Oh, and they didn’t do anything to stop her from accepting what could be described as a predatory loan.

              The liberal comedian noted this is why everyone wants to burn something down. He also noted that California is a swamp too, a deep blue state held together by red tape. He noted how it’s taken him four years to install solar panels on his roof. It still hasn’t been approved and the shed that’s part of Maher’s home edition took three years to be up to code. No wonder why people are fleeing the state.
              [END EXCERPT]

              *An admittedly very low hurdle.
              ~

              Liked by 1 person

  25. Jesus. This crap is depressing as hell. So many evil turdheads in the Democratic Party, in the mass media, in academia, and in every rotten little corner of society where human roaches can scuttle with so little regard for ordinary folks who want nothing more than to live in peace and quiet. I simply refuse to accept resigned pessimism as the path forward.

    Screw it. I’m gonna ask a complex question. Maybe no one will answer. Who knows?

    Suppose you could sell your books and stories over a heavily decentralized network that bypasses censorious tech giants in automatically pushing early copies of your work to experienced right-wingish beta readers for thoughtful reviews and then in automatically notifying the personal software representatives of potential readers of upcoming finished versions of said books and stories? Suppose the network also automatically implements additional payment methods as necessary to bypass shithead attempts to shut down the economic activities of conservative, libertarian, and objectivist writers, aided substantially of course by the parent corporation’s reputation-management and financial-instruments experts?

    Suppose you could search for information of any kind over a memetic network that bypasses the subtle and not-so-subtle censorship of Google and other search-engine firms and that massively encourages much higher-quality information presentations that efficiently collect critical ideas that formerly would have been scattered over dozens or hundreds of websites in the Old Web?

    Suppose you could simply wait in a comfortable armchair for genuinely viable business opportunities to be automatically assembled for you from a world wide network of relevant experts and potential co-founders and coworkers or else pick and choose from the most attractive gigs and outright jobs that automatically find their way to you based on your life skills, formal education, and business experience?

    Suppose that you could casually scan extraneous belongings with your smartphone and almost instantly get the best offers over an automated network that matches buyers with sellers with no need to screw around with crushing fees or the formatting of a seller’s page on eBay or similar auction services? Suppose you could simply put those belongings into an outside locker for pickup by a roaming freelancer who trucks it over to an inspector who cleans it up and fixes it for passing on to the buyer or who disassembles it for the desired spare parts that otherwise would be impossible to obtain at reasonable cost from the original manufacturer?

    Suppose you could let your virtual software representative automatically boycott haters like anti-MAGA zealots and favor like-minded folks in the great bulk of your economic activities with little or no effort as part of a wider system that also automatically bars from your extended community known rapists and murderers and robbers and other violent, dangerous people such as communists and socialists?

    Suppose you could relentlessly push back against censorship and political persecution with slick, polished mini-movies and other multimedia presentations that forcefully make the case for your own side in a blaring tone that almost rattles your teeth as it emerges from your smartphone? Suppose that each tiny public or otherwise attempt to frighten and terrorize you into not being a free man or woman was met with angry, determined opposition from a force of like-minded fellow citizens, tens or even hundreds of of millions strong across the country and the planet?

    Suppose you could engage socially and commercially with family, friends, and the public at large through an efficient, integrated alternative to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Zoom, and virtually every other form of social media with powerful tools for contemptuously screening out the hate-filled whinings of scuttling leftist vermin and seeing only the communications of right-minded, decent fellow citizens who don’t hate you and want you dead?

    Suppose, suppose, suppose. It goes on and on and on like that, hundreds of included services large and small. Would you be willing to pay up with a flat fee of $35–80 monthly, mostly depending on optional enterprise features aimed at mid-sized and larger businesses rather than individuals or small businesses, for that kind of utterly overwhelming relevancy engineering just like with any other professional services such as from lawyers, doctors, plumbers, and so forth and so forth, all of whom very, very reasonably expect the fuck to be paid for their work and the years they put into learning how to do their jobs well? There frankly, bluntly seems to be this extremely common attitude that one should hand over an entire lifetime of research and development under oftentimes very difficult circumstances for free, free, FREE. :/

    I probably will regret this post. But the times are frightening, and I’m all out of patience with myself and the public. I’ve been preparing for a long time to implement this. I’ve spent considerable money on the last bits of hardware and software necessary for a proper software development effort. So! Is it worth the effort, or will people greedily demand all this for nothing?

    I await an answer or no answer at all. Whatever. -_-

    P.S. Yup, this is harsh. But it’s still way less angry and bitter than the other post I recently wrote and then deep-sixed. Deal with it.

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    1. I’m not sure what you are asking, honestly.
      Your supposes — sounds great. Quibbles on the details.
      As for price, yeah, no. It will be more than that.
      Let me say I know things going on for ALMOST all of those. But they’re independent and unorganized.
      And I still have NO idea what you’re trying to say.

      Like

      1. FWIW I think he’s trying to sell us his new network idea. Or at least do market research on demand for the services he wants to provide.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. I want to know more. I like and appreciate the intensity–I’m sick to death of the lukewarm sentiments.

      I just can’t figure out what you’re saying or asking, quite. Can you continue?

      Like

    3. Back when music piracy was all the rage, I’d suggested that rather than whack-a-mole it, the PTB should have enlisted those ‘sharing’ : for each copy shared, pay ’em a little bit, and charge the recipient a little bit. Automated micropayments. Pennies per each, but incentive.

      But no, they preferred to hold onto their monopoly, and make examples of a few unluckies. Sound familiar??

      Like

  26. If One decides to move to a red state keep in mind that it can change overnight. During the hitlery scare my Wife and I dropped everything and moved to center/west Idaho only to have a serious rino get voted in as governor. We sunk everything into our little farm so we are stuck here. Dont make the same mistake. IDAHO!! Going libdem!!! Hell truely has frozen over. (Thanks for these blogs Sarah, it helps)

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    2. To be fair, the only reason Idaho was ever Republican, is because the DNC left it behind.

      All of those supposedly red areas still have strong union presences, especially in the mining industry.

      And Sun Valley is where Pedowood keeps its winter cottages. That’s why that particular county had such high Chinese Lung Rot numbers; Californians fled the plague and brought it with them.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. When I lived a year in the Boise area (2013ish) the whole area was blood-red. But shortly thereafter, they SOMEHOW managed to elect a bright blue local official (I forget the details). Gee, how did THAT happen??

      Still, at least you’re well away from where it’s likely to get really ugly.

      Greetz from eastern Montana :)

      Liked by 1 person

  27. Between malicious compliance, nusance tricks, and downright dirty deeds there are things that will put a stick in the spokes of their ecologically sound bicycles. But it takes folks willing to get their hands dirty.

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      1. Had A friend I’ve lost touch with who was SF in Vietnam; his phrase was, “When I go down, I plan on sending side boys ahead of me to pipe me aboard.” Or words to that effect.

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  29. I don’t watch TV, etc., has the MSM shown or discussed the National Guard in DC sleeping on bard concrete floors in a DC parking garage is is this a don’t see, don’t tell situation?

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    2. Doesn’t fit the narrative.
      “No thanks for coming all the way out here to guard against an imaginary threat. Go home, scram, beat it, and don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.”
      Not that I watch the major media either, but such reflections of its coverage as I do see give me impression is that they are too busy giving puppy tongue baths to Dear Leaders to report any such thing.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. It showed up on social media, everybody normal got torqued off, and all of a sudden the Democratic leadership/Schumer were Shocked and Appalled at Such an Oversight.

        They got thrown out of the Capitol because D-Keating saw somebody eating! with his mask off! at Dunkin Donuts in the Capitol! He previously had gotten somebody thrown off an airplane for bad/sarcastic maskwearing technique, and was apparently still drunk on his Karen powers.

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  30. Sarah, if you hadn’t heard, one of the last pre-inaugural announcements was that the HQ for the Space Command will br in Huntsville, AL, not Colorado Springs. Polis is not happy about that. What a shame.
    (OTOH, I hate to think about just how many nukes are pointed at Redstone Arsenal. It was three before they started consolidating logistics commands there).

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    2. likely more than 3. way more.
      got them pointed here. conveniently 2 gov’t contract companies with campuses butted together and even a shared parking lot

      Like

    5. Ya. I won’t be surprised if it relocates purely for politics. Its like I Inslees histrionics when BCA moved all 787 to the only site that could build all 3. Its a straightforward decision, not like they are obviously playing favorites, but because it hurts progticians it becomes a big deal. There will probably be another unionization push within 6 mos in SC as well to either drain cash from site or give excuse for uncle fed to step on em

      Like

  31. Interesting thought, and definitely a possibility. What HAS to occur is for the Hispanics who are here legally to pitch a fit, as they’ve started doing, and KEEP doing it. They don’t want to see their culture here sullied by the left, as they lump ‘all’ illegals into that Hispanic bucket. I know the locals I know are NOT happy…

    Liked by 2 people

    1. It was to counter this that “multicultural whiteness” was created. Granted, the concept is absurd drivel, but it’s what will be flung in the face of any Hispanic who gets uppity.

      Like

      1. “Multicultural whiteness” is just a fancy woke way of saying “Uncle Tom/Tio Tomas”. It’s not new: Engels called it “false consciousness” and it was just as stupid in 18whatever as it is now.

        Like

        1. “Multicultural Whiteness” equals “Does not do as they are told by their betters.”

          Those so accused should be proud, as it simply confirms that they, like all true Americans, have no “betters”.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. I was already confused that Indians north of the border were “Native Americans”, but Indians south of the border were “Hispanic”, even without a drop of Spanish blood, culture, or language. And people from Spain were “Europeans” and not Hispanic.

          Then came “non-Hispanic whites”, which I never found a sane explanation of. I guess there are non-non-Hispanic whites by now. The Fudd seems to make it up as it goes along.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. MultiRACIAL whiteness.

        I can understand the impulse to remember something that makes sense, but it’s important to be clear that they really are that insane.

        Like

      1. As I told some students last week apropos of the First Gulf War, “A president can decide ‘I’m going to be a domestic policy president’ but the rest of the world always gets a vote.”

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Speaking of policy: I seem to recall courts informed Trump that he could not undo Obama’s executive orders by way of another EO. So why is Biden being allowed to undo Trump’s EOs by way of more EOs??

          Liked by 2 people

          3. The rationale for some of the anti-Trump decisions quite literally came down to, “Yes, a president does have power over this particular thing that you want to do. However, everything that you do is motivated by your bad intentions. So it’s unconstitutional for YOU to do this.”

            Like

            1. Grrrr. The Second Axiom of the Balzacqian Ethics is “You can’t read minds; words and deeds are all you have to go on.”

              Like

    2. As I’ve noted over the last few weeks, no one ever expects something like 1989, the year that the Iron Curtain completely collapsed. And yet, events like that happen anyway.

      Though we ought to arrange to be in a position to take advantage of them if at all possible.

      Liked by 1 person

  33. Oddly, now *I* have the weird Sense of Calm you mentioned in earlier posts. I have NO IDEA how it will come to be, but the Deep Unconscious is bubbling up with a simple, “No, it won’t work out how they expect. Be not afraid.” I do not pretend to understand.

    Gonna spend the next week or so stocking up what and where I can… and then hunker down as best I can. It’s maybe Summer 1914… and I don’t know if the the Archduke has been shot or not… but it’s not Nov 12, 1918. Not yet. But… time is compressing. LSD trips are gonna look tame, for a time.

    Like

    1. This. My emotions can still shoot up into space if I’m triggered, which doesn’t take much. But I’m not un-calm. I’ve been around insanity before and that’s what the communists are doing is acting insane.

      What to do? Remember what is true. Remember who you are. Then do the next right thing. And that means we get to be ourselves.

      Our foundations include our faith, our families, and our own spirits. Nurture and strengthen these with good words of wisdom, prayer, caring for ourselves and each other, and remembering we are Americans. We do not compromise with communists. Not ever.

      Be pragmatic: look at the world around you and harden and reinforce your life where you can. Lots of food and water, medicines, cash, animal food, all those things you need should be well supplied and ready in the home.

      Be creative: In all things, act like you’re made in the image of God, the Creator. Have fun with things. Be mischievous. Be wicked. Downvote the pedophile’s you-tube videos, make nasty comments. If you can post some happy graffiti, do so. On the street, in the stores. Make their lives a living hell with mockery.

      Be aware: I’m afraid the insanity is going to get really, really bad, as in Inquisition-like bad, gulags bad. It will be shocking to watch. Understand that you’re going to feel traumatized and shocked and know how to care for yourself so you can see clearly and keep your head.

      There are tons of other things already happening–movement away from the tech commies, alternate banking systems because we’re going to be shut out. If this is your skill, create something, make a new system.

      Do what you can to stay integrated, stay hopeful, and stay true to yourself. We’re made for struggle and this might be just the series of events necessary to pull all of us “comfy” Americans out into the battlefield.

      Like

    2. I’ll be honest, the things I wake up with in middle of night are usually not …. optimistic.
      And I know it will go wrong for them. BUT we must be aware of their plans, to be able to circumvent.
      And we don’t have much time.

      Like

      1. Not just circumvent. But also to take advantage of the personal opportunities that might arise when things go awry for them.

        Like

    4. Yeah, people are not widgets, and they so very often behave according to their own priorities and imperatives rather than those of their “betters – as evidenced by the voting pattern of the Hispanic vote in November, which created oh so much consternation in the canape cart circles.

      The other thing I’d note is to observe that if they make all that effort to construct a military that has no allegiance above that inculcated to itself by the military training regimen, they won’t end up with a biddable robot army that will do only what the elites tell it to do. A military that’s only allegiance is to itself is simply fertile ground for one of the oh so many politically ambitious general officers to move themselves up in authority. The first time those oh so clever turnip-plan elites import 30,000 troops from THAT army into DC for “security” they will find that out.

      Like

      1. I’m still curious as to why Guard units were called to DC instead of the regulars. We’ve already seen the massive fail of their logistics chain; they don’t seem to be getting much in the way of support from the regular Army.

        One thing I’m sure of, most of them are going to be seriously pissed off when they get back home.

        Like

        1. Me too. I never did see an explanation of exactly how that happened, except that Trump had approved it. Which he probably just shrugged about. Was it Nancy Pelosi? The FICUS handlers? Because it was crazy.

          Like

          1. I even saw a suggestion that Trump himself had called them up, though I’m skeptical.

            But yeah, the whole thing was very strange. The only things that I can think of are 1.) they didn’t want a repeat of BLMtifa running riot through DC streets as happened four years ago, and 2.) they were worried about right-wing protests that might embarass the incoming administration, and so decided to do something that would cause anyone with a smidgen of intelligence to keep his or her head down.

            Like

        3. Because they wanted to use the call up as a pretext to screen all those national guard troops for political correctness so they can use that information against them; expect to see stories in the next couple of months about how guard members are suddenly losing their regular jobs or being otherwise unpersoned, subsequent to those FBI checks. The Democrats want the military to be an arm of the Democratic Party.

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        4. My wild unsupported guess that the Guard units were called so that the Democrats could pretend to themselves that this was merely a law-enforcement/riot-control action against despised criminal terrorists. Calling in the regulars would grant the rebel scum a degree of military respectability that the Dems really wanted to avoid granting.

          They want to fight a straw insurrection that they can easily kick and stomp, with just enough blood to let them waive a few bloody shirts. A real insurrection that posed a real threat has to be a nightmare scenario for them.

          Like

        5. Word today was they don’t even have enough portapotties, as they discovered when they got ejected from camping in the Hallowed Halls. And no generators. Somehow this seems planned by someone who has never once had to live rough.

          Like

          1. And several governors, including mine, said enough with D.C. dissing our troops, and called ours home.

            Deck ’em again, Greg!!

            Like

    5. Likewise. Ever since late December, and more so now, I have this sense that I need to focus on writing, and Day Job, and doing Alma things. I’m to pray for the country, but not to worry. (Not that it stops me, but I suspect the Great Editor has worn out a lot of blue pencils writing “stet and I mean it” on the margins of my chapter.)

      Liked by 1 person

  34. A tangent…not a happy one, but not unhappy either. I’m not sure of what it is. It’s the conclusion of something I told the Huns about over the summer, so I figured I’d share the conclusion.

    The body of my murdered friend has been found. Her roommate has been charged with murder one. The story includes some implications I’m ignoring for now, but the ones I will look at lead me to believe she was killed in her sleep (based on some earlier facts I know).

    I know how to respond to this about as much as I do every other part of having known a murder victim. The best I have is what Z said last night when we found out, “At least instead of resting in a freezer in the woods in Arkansas she can be laid to rest with Tom” (her husband who died suddenly three years ago this past Christmas).

    I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

    Liked by 1 person

    3. I hope the knowledge brings you, and all her other friends and family, comfort. *virtual hug* A little peace, no matter how little, is better than forever not knowing.

      Liked by 1 person

    5. I don’t know what to say, because I still don’t know what to say about the murder victims I’ve known. Why do good people suffer, and crappy killers live?

      “They will hunt after the life of the just, and condemn innocent blood…
      But the Lord will bring their iniquity back on them, and He will cut them off, in their malice.
      The Lord our God will destroy them.”
      (Ps. 93/94:21, 23)

      Like

    6. I’m sorry to hear that. You have my condolences.

      And I’m glad you now definitively know what happened to her.

      Like

      1. I hope for Larry Niven’s Outsiders to sell us designs for cheap fusion reactors and antigravity, too. Ain’t holdin’ my breath.

        Like

      2. Oop, that’s not really appropriate for this thread, is it? Don’t mind me, I’ll just sit here with foot in mouth for a while.

        I don’t see how anybody can do such a thing. There will be a line in a story I’m writing:

        “No! They’re much worse than animals. They choose not to be better than this.”

        Like

  35. Sometimes you just have to take the beatings while awaiting a opportunity to take more effective action. I always liked the tale of Conan ailed to a cross, catching an impatient vulture in his teeth and drinking its blood.

    While there’s life, there’s hope. America’s too great an idea to simply fade away.
    ~

    Like

  36. “This is their chance to send money AND ballots abroad. FOREVER.”

    They don’t need to do that – they’ve already demonstrated willingness to fraud their way into office, manufacturing votes as needed. Sending ballots abroad would merely make their lack of legitimacy overt.

    Take not counsel of your fears – things are already sufficiently bad without conceiving of worse.
    ~

    Liked by 2 people

    1. It’s a question of control: How do they prevent all those offshore voters ballots from electing the wrong person?

      As a general rule, all organizations which achieve success proceed to slavishly do exactly the same thing next time around. Having put together their world-class voter fraud organization sufficient to falsify a Presidential election, they will not do anything to dilute its power, especially by adding ballot-filler-outers that live outside their urban center imaginary-pipe-breaking control.

      And this is how they can be beaten – assume they will do the exact same thing and work around and under and bypass and subvert. The CA districts which were flipped back used this method.

      Yes, it will be hard, but it is not impossible. I second what RES says: Take not the counsel of your fears, and remember the words of a wise white Mormon male with a great rack: In the end we win, they lose.

      Like

      1. > How do they prevent all those offshore voters ballots from electing the wrong person?

        Dominion Voting Systems. And the old-style fraud systems where Dominion has yet to take over.

        Like

    2. They don’t care how overt and open it is anymore. They are confident their control of the institutions makes being open about unable to harm their efforts. Indeed, their indoctrination of schoolchildren is designed to create cheers of approval by the indoctrinated as to what they are doing and to gaslight those who have not bought into the indoctrination. They are counting on their media arm to demonize those that they intend to ship off to the camps for being members of the wrong group or for being “unmutual”. The people now in charge of the Democratic Party are those who think their pal Bill Ayer’s belief that millions of those who don’t accept the revolution will need to be liquidated is a policy to be implemented.

      If the Democrats’ will to power is not stopped, they WILL put people in mass graves.

      Like

  37. Day 3 it’s already happening. 5,000 NG troops put into parking garage.
    All United States citizens hang our heads in shame.

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      1. HOW IS THIS EVERY CITIZEN’S FAULT?

        I think that is supposed to be part of that “national consciousness” thing.

        Don’t agree, but then I never understood the group mind thing anyway.

        Like

    2. You mistake the Sinal Salute for shame. You know the one where you pinch the bridge of your nose with two fingers because someone is being just. That. Stupid. See also the mass face-palm. Sometimes followed by the the mass head-desk. None indicate shame.

      Like

    3. No doubt the national guard members who complaint will find themselves shipped by Harris/Biden to Iraq and Syria in the same way non-front line troops and officials used to get shipped off to the Eastern Front by Germany during WWII.

      Like

      1. Guardsmen Feeling Betrayed and Used After Getting Kicked Out of the Capitol
        The thousands of National Guardsmen stationed at the U.S. Capitol and nearby congressional buildings were abruptly told to vacate the premises on Thursday.

        A new report in Politico says the Guardsmen were told by Capitol Police to leave the Capitol premises and set up mobile command centers outside or in nearby hotels. The Guardsmen were also told to take rest breaks during their 12-hour shifts either outside or in nearby parking garages.

        The report cited a Guardsmen whose unit was suddenly told to vacate the Dirksen Senate Office Building where troops had gathered following a long couple of days at the Capitol complex. The 5,000 troops in the unit were reportedly forced to “rest” on the hard floors of a parking garage that lacked internet reception, contained a single electrical outlet, and a lone bathroom with just two stalls.
        ~

        Like

        1. Hey, Dems, You Won’t Have to Dig Deep to Get to the Bottom of the National Guard’s Eviction at US Capitol
          Bronson wrote about this last night. It’s a total disgrace. It’s unforgivable. It’s how this town treats the military. Thousands of National Guardsmen were evicted from the grounds of the US Capitol. They were caught resting in the nearby parking garages. They were deployed to protect the capital from any attack during the inauguration of Joe Biden. The January 6 riot that engulfed the US Capitol was the cause for what could only be described as a military occupation of the city. Luckily, nothing happened when Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. Yet, for the troops who stood guard, this eviction notice reeked of betrayal (via Politico):

          :Thousands of National Guardsmen were allowed back into the Capitol Thursday night, hours after U.S. Capitol Police officials ordered them to vacate the facilities, sending them outdoors or to nearby parking garages after two weeks pulling security duty after the deadly riot on Jan. 6.

          One unit, which had been resting in the Dirksen Senate Office building, was abruptly told to vacate the facility on Thursday, according to one Guardsman. The group was forced to rest in a nearby parking garage without internet reception, with just one electrical outlet, and one bathroom with two stalls for 5,000 troops, the person said. Temperatures in Washington were in the low 40s by nightfall.

          “Yesterday dozens of senators and congressmen walked down our lines taking photos, shaking our hands and thanking us for our service. Within 24 hours, they had no further use for us and banished us to the corner of a parking garage. We feel incredibly betrayed,” the Guardsman said.

          The news sparked outrage. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vowed to get to the bottom of this mess. Other members of Congress sent messages of thanks to the troops while offering their office space as a place for them to rest. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) delivered food to some of the guardsmen. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) appears to have worked hard to ensure all of the guardsmen are cleared from the garage.
          ~

          Like

          1. Sen. Tim Scott Livid Over Treatment of National Guard Troops
            National Guardsmen who had been stationed at the Capitol were reportedly kicked out and told to set up mobile command centers outside or in nearby hotels on Thursday.

            “Yesterday dozens of senators and congressmen walked down our lines taking photos, shaking our hands and thanking us for our service,” a Guardsman told Politico. “Within 24 hours, they had no further use for us and banished us to the corner of a parking garage. We feel incredibly betrayed.”

            It was a shameful sight considering these troops had been on the front lines the past few weeks defending our nation’s capital in the wake of the deadly riots on January 6.

            Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) was among the lawmakers who are absolutely livid over how the National Guard had been treated. As he captured, 5,000 troops were forced to underground parking lots. As Bronson reported, they were reportedly forced to “rest” on the hard floors of a parking garage that lacked internet reception, contained a single electrical outlet, and a lone bathroom with just two stalls.
            ~

            Like

            1. Finally, that Politico story:

              ‘We feel incredibly betrayed’: Thousands of Guardsmen forced to vacate Capitol
              Thousands of National Guardsmen were allowed back into the Capitol Thursday night, hours after U.S. Capitol Police officials ordered them to vacate the facilities, sending them outdoors or to nearby parking garages after two weeks pulling security duty after the deadly riot on Jan. 6.
              [SNIP]
              All National Guard troops were told to vacate the Capitol and nearby congressional buildings on Thursday, and to set up mobile command centers outside or in nearby hotels, another Guardsman confirmed. They were told to take their rest breaks during their 12-hour shifts outside and in parking garages, the person said.

              Like

  38. “What now?” I’m going to start the ball rolling on my publishing company. For now it’ll be just me, and in a bit the hubby. Maybe more later. We’ll see.

    I’ve got 2 books I need to find a copy editor for. 2 more to finish. A hundred or so more to write. As soon as I finish this I’ve got about 30 min to get on the writing.

    When they’re done I’m going to put them up wide, since I can. I’m just starting out. I’m not locked into anybody’s ecosystem. Then I’m going to write the next one and do it again. And again. And again. One story at a time.

    I’m going to build. Maybe it’ll be nothing… Maybe. Maybe it’ll take 100 years to pull us out of of this, maybe the Almighty will pull us out sooner. I don’t know. The future and I are old enemies. I’m going to focus on a foundation of stories. It’s not fast, but neither was what got us here. Along the way I’ll collect other bricks in this foundation: Stories by people who write to build not to destroy, including the present company. Brick by brick. Story by story.

    There may be other things. The garden will get dug. If things get too crazy… I have a gully and a Marine. But foremost, I’m going to build as best I can. We’ll see what comes along the way.

    Like

  39. “What now?” I’m going to start the ball rolling on my publishing company. For now it’ll be just me, and in a bit the hubby. Maybe more later. We’ll see.

    I’ve got 2 books I need to find a copy editor for. 2 more to finish. A hundred or so more to write. As soon as I finish this I’ve got about 30 min to get on the writing.

    When they’re done I’m going to put them up wide, since I can. I’m just starting out. I’m not locked into anybody’s ecosystem. Then I’m going to write the next one and do it again. And again. And again. One story at a time.

    I’m going to build. Maybe it’ll be nothing… Maybe. Maybe it’ll take 100 years to pull us out of of this, maybe the Almighty will pull us out sooner. I don’t know. The future and I are old enemies. I’m going to focus on a foundation of stories. It’s not fast, but neither was what got us here. Along the way I’ll collect other bricks in this foundation: Stories by people who write to build not to destroy, including the present company. Brick by brick. Story by story.

    There may be other things. The garden will get dug. If things get too crazy… I have a gully and a Marine. But foremost, I’m going to build as best I can. We’ll see what comes along the way.

    Like

  40. And in other news…. now its apparently A-OK to arrest Antifa for attacking the courthouse in Portland.

    Like

    2. Night of the Long Knives. Twitter is blasting their accounts too.

      Being less useful than the Brownshirts, they didn’t last so long. Also, they didn’t need so much violence to be put down — one wonders why, and then remembered it’s not done yet.

      Like

  43. Until the knives come out, everyone is screwed. Once the knives come out, everyone is still screwed, but at least there’ll be a small chance. If everything goes in our favor at the right times, and HE wills it, we’ll get a republic again. Many of us will not see it. Even if we win, there’s a good chance we just end up under a different kind of tyranny.

    Liked by 1 person

  44. I’m trying to be polite. But, I have to say this.

    It’s not all doom and gloom. It’s not going to be good, mind you. Not for a while. But, I’m already seeing a lot of quiet push-back in places. Several state governors are already filing suits against the polices being proposed. The days when insults and personal destruction worked isn’t as much anymore…Andy Ngo’s book gets banned from the shelves at Powell’s Books in Portland, there’s protests that the bookstore was still selling it electronically. Book now hits best-seller status on Amazon-and him and his publisher are laughing all the way to the bank.

    There isn’t enough money to keep Hollywood afloat if the Crow Flu continues for more than a few months. Most people have gotten out of the habit of movies, and that’s where they make most of their money. People are canceling their streaming services, especially as they keep seeing that a few tiny little bones have been tossed at them, thinking it’ll keep them quiet while they do what they have always wanted to do.

    (The current “tiny bone” for fans? Luke Skywalker’s reappearance in The Mandelorian and reports that the groundwork is being put into place to relegate the Sequel Trilogy to Elseworlds/an alternate timeline. Fan were happy, overjoyed…then reports started to come out that they’re looking to “sideline” Gina Carano and her character for more of an emphasis on Rosario Dawson. Fans are already not happy about this rumor, especially since Carano has been one of the highlights of the last few years. They like Dawson, no question, but Carano has been the strong female character that most of them have been wanting to see for years.)

    Been seeing some side-chat on a couple of boards that I look at that goes something like this-

    “Talked with the union, they’re not going to push Biden on the Keystone cancellation.”
    “Man, that’s bulls(YAY!)t! You know they’ll use that as an excuse to cancel our jobs soon. And, the union donated all that money to him, and they aren’t going to do anything?”
    “Nope…”
    …
    “I was talking with some of the company brass. Law says that this has to be a union gig for our trade.”
    “Yea, so? The union bosses want to be big shots in DC, not help us.”
    “…it’s not that hard to form a new union in this state. There’s some legal paperwork and such, but nothing says we can’t form our own union with us and the guys on the other job sites. Company brass would pay us only 90% as much-not as much collective bargaining power, but those are solid numbers. They’d put them in writing before we formed a new union, I made that very clear. I think I could get them to take it to 95% with a bit of arm twisting. Best thing, we would decide where the money went if we made contributions, not the national union.”

    The current people in charge are idiots. They’re great at getting to power…but not good at running the things that they’re supposed to be in charge of. They believe that because they want a think to happen, it will happen. Too many people have seen the fix, know it’s in, and are ready to start dealing with things. It’s just not obvious because the usual “reporting” institutions are too invested in having “access” and they don’t want to lose the good thing they have.

    And, they have less power than they think they do. It only looks huge because it is-but it’s hollow. Fragile if you know how to hit it right…or hard enough wrong and continuously.

    Right now? Stay sane, stay safe, and keep calm. Divest from the dangerous tech companies as much as you can, have backups when you can’t right now. Start working at the local level on things like election reform to prevent fraud-hopefully by 2022 and definitely by 2024. Save money where you can, don’t buy from the big woke companies if you can help it. And, do the worst thing you can to them-ignore them, unless they’re a problem.

    Like

    1. And, they have less power than they think they do. It only looks huge because it is-but it’s hollow. Fragile if you know how to hit it right…or hard enough wrong and continuously.

      It’s like local car dealers (or gun shops, or a thousand other examples). They used to be able to swindle and bullshit their customers with impunity; no one knew any better.

      That changes when everyone knows *exactly* what the real market looks like.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. The great irony is that they have examples of what the blind spots can cost them, yet maintain them firmly.

        My personal, best example-Ragu was once the only spaghetti sauce you could get. If Ragu didn’t make it, you didn’t have it. Prego wanted to get some of that market share, so they asked a marketing guru (Malcom Gladwell, I think) what the perfect spaghetti sauce would be to beat Ragu. Gladwell realized that there was no perfect spaghetti sauce, only perfect spaghetti sauces. So, he ran a taste-test program and they went through about thirty or so flavors of sauce and discovered that that people liked three kinds of sauce, mostly-regular, spicy, and extra chunky.

        Ragu didn’t make an extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. They weren’t serving a third of the sauce-buying market and there was a completely un-sold demographic out there, just waiting. So, Prego went in on making extra-chunky spaghetti sauce, toppled Ragu from it’s throne, and soon enough you had dozens of different kinds of spaghetti sauce on the shelves because everybody wanted to catch lightning in a bottle.

        Seeing this now with comic books-eight of the current ten top sellers are manga compilations in the US. American comic book “pros” are crowing that there isn’t any problems in the comic book industry at all! And are still producing the same crap that nobody likes, nobody buys, and lingers on the shelves like a bad odor.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. That was what Fox News used to have: they made a product for the part of the viewing audience that wasn’t being covered.

          Liked by 2 people

        2. “… the same crap that nobody likes, nobody buys, and lingers on the shelves like a bad odor.”

          While it lingers it is also soaking up owner capital, reducing profits (or, if you prefer, rate of recoupment of investment) and increasing business fragility. Old-timers will remember the great Indie-Crash that nearly wiped out the comic book stores in the late-eighties, leaving store inventories glutted with (typically) B&W books that nobody was buying, having given up on finding “the next” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Or the mid-Nineties crash as comic stores, compelled to buy every crossover, event (even if the current Secret Crisis War tie-in had no more than a quick two panels cameo of the “event”) and guest appearance of Lobo, Wolverine, Punisher, Deadpool or whichever “hot” character of the month week.

          Marvel & DC had little risk as comics stores had to order three months in advance (with no recourse if books were delayed), buying the books with no right of return if sales didn’t meet predictions. The big-2 nearly collapsed the marketplace under the load of their efforts to soak up all store capital in order to squeeze independents like Dark horse and Image off the shelves.

          Anybody thinking only comics producers use that tactic isn’t paying attention.
          ~

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I think people are, and hopefully the new round of indie comic book makers are doing their best to avoid getting caught like this. They’re either selling directly to customers or to the stores, avoiding the bottleneck of Diamond distribution.

            Not good for the comic book stores, but still…

            Like

    2. “Most people have gotten out of the habit of movies, and that’s where they make most of their money.”

      Correction: that’s where Hollywood *launders* most of its money.

      Gotta be doing interesting things to the dark side of that economy.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. I’d be cautious with talk of Carano being pushed out. Pressure has been put on Disney for quite a while now to drop her, but there were no indications anywhere either in front of or behind the scenes that suggested that Disney intended to get rid of her. If anything, she played a bigger role in Season 2 than she did in Season 1. Further, there are suggestions that Disney is doing at least some pushback against the woke crowd with Star Wars. Kathleen Kennedy is reportedly quite unhappy about The Mandalorian, and Disney’s refusing to let her touch it.

      Or in other words, rumors of her being forced out might just be wishful thinking on the part of those who would like to see her gone.

      As for Dawson –

      I was disappointed with the episode that she appeared in (not necessarily her fault). And I really hope the show keeps the jedi appearances to a minimum.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. What I’d heard (and take this with a grain of salt) is that they can’t find someone to replace her with. It’s Star Wars, and it’s a super valuable property (if handled correctly). So you don’t want to just hand it off to some rookie. But the people who are good enough to properly handle it and can be trusted not to make rookie mistakes that screw it up don’t want to be stuck with a known property like Star Wars. They want to have the freedom to play in their own sandboxes, and do their own things in front of the camera.

          And so Disney is (supposedly) stuck with Kennedy until the Mouse finds a way to resolve this dilemma.

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          1. That is part of it — there is also the problem of eliminating Kennedy’s followers “root and branch.” There are so very many many ways for a film to be sabotaged that it almost a miracle anything good comes out of that sausage machine, so anybody replacing Kennedy would have to spend a tremendous amount of time watching his back, not only for Kennedy acolytes’ knives but for those of the people who don’t want the successor regime to succeed. The House of Mouse has enough money coming in even from damaged goods (they’re a lot like China that way) that they can afford to lose money.

            So long as they’re only bleeding out slowly they can hope to recover or outlast their competition.

            Of course, they are so dependent o their Chinese amusement parks and ticket sales that they won’t dare challenge things there.
            ~.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. OK, all rumor:

            Disney exec suite have basically retired KK in place, with her and her pet “writing room” out of all development for all the new Star Wars properties now in production except for some comic books. Jon Favreau is reporting directly to the new Disney CEO on The Mandalorian and all the other (10+) shows headed for Disney+, with deeper rumors that they will end up leading together, in MCU fashion, into a theatrical-grade movie.

            Deeper rumor is they (Favreau, Filoni, and George Lucas) are going to use the “Veil of the Force” to retcon the last three “Rey” movies out of canon, restoring Luke as a hero and changing everything so the end of the Skywalker saga is no longer about Rey Palpatine completely destroying and erasing the legacy of the Skywalker family.

            One can only hope.

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      3. Kathleen Kennedy is the EXECUTIVE PRODUCER of The Mandalorian, for heaven’s sake. Seriously, this stuff is coming from the same YouTubers who said Star Trek: Discovery was cancelled during its first season, twice during its second season, before and during the third season and now are casting doubt on a fourth season several months after it started filming. They’re BS artists pandering to disaffected fans. If they get anything right it’s by accident.

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        1. I’m not getting my news from YouTubers. Kathleen Kennedy is the Executive Producer of *everything* with the Star Wars label on it, and not just The Mandalorian. But having a title and having actual authority aren’t always the same thing.

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        2. Solo lost money, ep 7 8 and 9 each made less than the prior, and the main moneymaker for the franchise, toy sales, has been approaching zero – until The Mandalorian.

          KK inserted herself into the making-of vids Favreau did for Mandalorian season 1, to the point of pulling up a seat at the directed-an-ep table and spouting off out of turn, but she is conspicuously absent in the making of for the second season. And go look at this still with George Lucas, Filoni, and Favreau sitting up front on the set during season 1, and KK scowling away in the back row, and tell me again how she’s really in charge:

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    5. Unions though have to be certified by the Federal NLRB even if allowed under state law, and there is no way the Democrats who control the NLRB are going to certify a union that is formed because they oppose “friends of the program”.

      Liked by 1 person

  45. A critical race theorist is a ‘holy race war’ nutjob with very good public relations.

    Like

  46. I have been seeing headlines about China’s Covid problems growing significantly, and in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal I note this (paywall restricted?) head & lede:

    Anger at China’s Covid-19 Response Smolders in Wuhan
    One year later, Beijing tries to portray pandemic’s starting point as a symbol of victory, but many residents aren’t buying it.

    Snippets from the article:

    When Vice Premier Sun Chunlan visited during the city’s quarantine last March to show the situation was under control, she was heckled. Some residents shouted “It’s all fake!” from their apartment windows. Anger still simmers to the point that some are willing to openly criticize the government when such candor is rare, and potentially dangerous.

    “We are very angry,” said Zhang Hong, a resident who lost her father to Covid-19 in February. “We used to have a lot of faith in the government—we assumed they’d handle matters like this properly and not put us in danger.” Instead, officials initially tried to cover up the outbreak rather than confront it, she said. “Now we’re much more skeptical when it comes to trusting the government.”
    — – — – —
    Ms. Zhang said the victory narrative now being presented by state media obscures the lethal blunders, which she accused the authorities of making in the outbreak’s early stages.

    Though doctors told Ms. Zhang that Covid-19 likely killed her father, he was—like many people who died during the Wuhan outbreak—never formally diagnosed or included in the official tally of cases, she said.

    The authorities recently acknowledged that the official count of 50,340 citywide cases doesn’t reflect the true scale of the Wuhan outbreak. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in early January that its testing found Covid antibodies in 4.43% of the city’s population, putting the total number of cases Wuhan likely experienced at around half a million.
    ~

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    1. This is third-hand hearsay from a friend of mine of similar politics, so give it whatever weight you feel it deserves, but the friend is on the spectrum and I’ve never known him to lie.

      One of my friends and former college roommate is president/chairman of this company.

      [ link to RotorWay helicopter factory]

      The point is…
      He just told me this morning something interesting. He has friends, family, and employees in China. He was in China for a bit during 2020.

      He told me…
      “In China no one wears covid masks or social distancing
      But the us news is blocked from those images
      Last summer they ditched that shit
      It’s a scam
      China wore them for 3 months
      That was it
      They have only the flu”

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      2. In my experience, hearsay *is* truth re: china.

        If you are “reading the headline” about china, it’s propaganda. And the people in the article are very specifically telling you untrue things.

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  47. While I don’t often disagree with your points, I do have to wonder that you seem to think the keystone pipeline and fracking are good ideas. Really? You know what’s really holding us back from sustainable and renewable energy, for probably something like a hundred years? Big corporations, like the oil industry. You know we could have had renewable fuel for cars for ages? Henry Ford had begun manufacturing cars that ran on hemp fuel… That is until the greedy oil industry bribed government to ban hemp fuel. At the same time, the tobacco and alcohol industries joined the oil industry efforts to ban all hemp and cannabis. We can’t have a cheap alternative, now can we? We don’t need fracking and risky pipelines. Hemp takes about 3 months to grow, meaning regular harvests that don’t have to be damaging to the environment. Solar, wind, etc are also options. Electric cars are finally becoming more common. My partner and I are in an e-car sharing co-op in our rural German village. The e-cars take only minutes to fully charge, they drive fast enough, like any practical car (not a sports car). E-car charging stations are popping up all over the place. All that needs to happen to make it realistic for people to make the switch, is for e-cars to be made more affordable for middle and lower income classes. Why can’t conservatives get it through their heads that you can be conservative and still support clean energy and take better care of our planet? And why can’t progressives get it through their thick heads that we also belong to this world, and we can live in nature, not separate from it. They’d see us all rounded up in residential zones and nature blocked off to humans. Alienating us from nature even more won’t make anything better. Getting out into the wilderness, learning bushcraft and loving this world is what will lead us to make better choices.

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    1. Energy cost whether in dollars, lives, or pollution, is a direct function of energy density. At the moment the densest source of energy the powers that be are allowing us to use is oil. Replacing a reasonably high density source with any combination of very low density sources is a bad idea. Doing it for the purpose of reducing costs is absolute madness.

      Now if you were to suggest replacing oil with fission reactors, that would be a good trade.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Long past time to flip their script on them and ram it where the sun don’t shine.

          The Science is Settled. If you aren’t supporting Nuclear Power you don’t care about the environment and you want people to die so the lobbyists can line their pockets.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. Aye, “All those miracles that fusion could bring about? Fission can do almost all of them already. And the waste issue wouldn’t be one with proper recycling. Dangerous? Not nearly as dangerous as the nerve agents we used to stockpile.”

        Liked by 1 person

    2. > Henry Ford had begun manufacturing cars that ran on hemp fuel…

      You can run an internal combustion engine on almost anything that will burn. Rudolf Diesel’s original engines ran on crushed coal dust.

      However, just because you *can*, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And things are a lot more complicated than Henry’s day; you have fuel economy and emissions laws, distribution chains, and a vast amount of regulatory overhead, and some fuels are either corrosive or build up deposits, which can substantially increase maintenance costs, shorten effective lifetime, or both.

      > Why can’t conservatives get it through their heads that you can be conservative and still support clean energy and take better care of our planet?

      We like the idea fine. But the only practical path toward that is atomic power, and that’s something the “environment” lobby seems to hate with a pulsating passion.

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      1. Pointing out that nuclear power is one of the best forms of “Green Energy” makes them practically glow with rage.

        I’ll see myself out.

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      2. I don’t know all about the technical details. But I do know biofuels are commonly used here in Germany, including for cars. Though there are some car models which shouldn’t run on the biofuels.

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        1. Again, TRX’s statement here about good or bad ideas involves study of the details at the engineering level.

          The German government may spend a lot of money building a Potemkin village that is a really bad idea at the engineering level. A lot of governments have put a lot of money into these frauds.

          I am not persuaded by what the German government does, and manages to conceal from German residents. I think the Germans are barbarians. The argument of “look at what the Chinese are doing to the Uighers. We should do that to the blacks and the Mexicans.” is as persuasive as the argument ‘this is happening in Germany’.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. You probably know just how right you are.

            I was stationed in Stuttgart from 1985-89. The environmental insanity included turning your car off at lights if they lasted longer than… 30 (?) seconds. Even in the dead of winter. Then blasting them back on when the light turned yellow so you were ready for the green.

            Oh, and the tax to even get and operate a vehicle? Don’t ask. Cost of petrol? I had a ration book for gasoline it was so bad.

            Liked by 2 people

        2. Biofuels!
          Starve the POOR. It’s good for them. Let’s burn food.
          You know what your ecar runs on? COAL. Ultimately.
          You don’t know ANYTHING but the fucking propaganda you were taught.
          I’m tired of Europeans thinking they’re superior while acting like indoctrinated sheep.

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          1. You know what your ecar runs on? COAL. Ultimately.

            In the spirit of Proper Pedanticness, this can in theory make sense.

            Because a fixed power plant optimized for efficiency can get a lot more out of its fuel than a mobile power plant that has to worry about things like power to weight ratio and has a very limited cold sink.

            But when we are talking fixed coal vs mobile oil any theoretical gains are gobbled up wholesale by transmission losses, and conversion losses, and battery losses, and probably a few dozen other losses I’ve forgotten about.

            In the immortal words of Jayne Cobb: “I’m smelling a lot of ‘if’ coming off this plan”.

            Liked by 2 people

          2. A quarter of Germany’s “renewable” energy is generating BY BURNING WOOD.

            Somehow they call this “carbon neutral”, but it sounds a lot like the “what did socialists use for light before candles” joke.

            (Wood, fer chrissakes. [shakes head])

            Liked by 1 person

            1. And they are still openly talking about moving to a rationing system because there is not enough electricity generated and the grid is too unstable.

              It’s not about CO2 free energy (if it was they would be racing to build nuclear plants); its about artificially creating scarcity so they can justify rationing, because the goal is totalitarian control, not energy production.

              Liked by 1 person

          4. Well, takes one to know one. And I’m not European. There are so many power sources in Germany. I’m not pretending to know what’s best, right or most cost efficient. But there is wind, solar, nuclear, coal I’d expect, water, biofuels. So, again, why not drive an e-car if it’s possible? Is it really such a bad thing in and of itself? Arguments for what sources of energy is one thing, but what’s your beef against e-cars? To say it makes no difference, ok, but still not an argument against. Only a reason to have a neutral stance at best… Or am I missing something?

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            1. German power sources. ((snicker))

              You guys can be thrown into a major blackout by Gazprom getting tetchy (as happened in IIRC 2012) because your domestic production is so low.

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              1. Fine by me. My boyfriend and I are used to going without electricity. We can rough it pretty well, even with babies and using cloth diapers, washing everything by hand, cooking over fire, pumping water, and so on. Country folk can handle such things. It’s the city people who will struggle most.

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                1. And how about those of us who would prefer that we don’t have to throw a refrigerator full of food in the garbage every few weeks because The State decided we didn’t need electricity for a day or three? They’re doing that in Kalifornia EVERY YEAR! and it will only get worse if the Leftroids have their way.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  2. Here in New Hampshire most people seem to have backup generators because the power goes out at least a couple of times a year for a few hours to a few days. But it being California, I suppose those generators are probably illegal. Not to mention impossible if you live in a multi-family building. And you need to pay an electrician to install the switches.

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                    1. New Hampshire most people seem to have backup generators because the power goes out at least a couple of times a year for a few hours to a few days

                      –
                      We just had that discussion last night. “If we had a bigger problem it’s be worth it to tie a generator big enough for fridge, freezer, and at least heat fans, in case of power outages.” We have a small generator we can run the fridge and freezer off of, because we had it for the RV trailer to recharge batteries (ish, really not powerful enough to charge to full capacity in short time).

                      Unless we get into rolling blackouts al la California, looking at a generator and conversion isn’t needed. If it gets that bad, might seriously look at solar (depending on when blackouts are happening and why). We are in the Willamette Valley, so power outages NH style can happen, once every 5 years, sometimes every year (’17 ice, ’18 snow, nothing since) for maybe 20 to 48 hours … granted some substation areas were out for weeks, and it wasn’t necessarily outlying areas. (Trees across power lines. Vehicles skidding into substations. Accidents.) Didn’t this last summer, but possible to lose power because loss of transmission lines from dams due to wildfire too.

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                2. So you are ok with the cities starving? Generalized poverty is what you get when energy becomes unreliable, and mass starvation is what happens when it goes away.

                  Personally, I’m ok with Germany freezing in the dark. I wonder if you are?

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. Nah, not really. But sometimes I think we’d all be lying to ourselves if we said we don’t sometimes think the world would be better off without some of the masses in the world. The weak would starve, while the strong survive. And I’d be lying if I said that I generally love the German people. What I’d really like is to see all people rise to their fullest and highest potential, and to see all of our collective struggles solved peacefully without compromising our freedom and integrity. But that’s a very unlikely fantasy.

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                    1. The weak would starve while the strong survive, eh? Improving the race, as it were?

                      How very Progressive of you

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                    2. No, because I unlike the progressives, I wouldn’t actually do something like that. And please, I see comments like that on this blog all the time about how great it would be to cut off everyone in leftist states and cities and watch them fall into ruin. What do you think they mean by that? Food shortages when rural conservative communities cut off the food supply, failing infrastructure, rising poverty. But no one complains about those comments. It’s not like only political opponents live in those places. Most, maybe, but not all. My point was we all have a dark side that, if we’re honest with ourselves and others, might not be too sorry if certain people just died. The question is are you willing to act on such dark thoughts? I’m not.

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                    3. “But sometimes I think we’d all be lying to ourselves if we said we don’t sometimes think the world would be better off without some of the masses in the world.”
                      To the extent you think this, you’re a barbarian.

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                    4. No. If I thought the world would be better without people, I’d have the courage of my convictions and off myself first.
                      I DO wish so many humans hadn’t been brainwashed into bizarre anti-human positions.

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                    5. Whatever you say. I hope since you’re judging that you are the perfect example of the ideal human being. Although nothing you’ve said to me so far gives me that impression. There is so much hatefulness in your “tone” to indicate that you probably have a mental list of the people you wish would die. I don’t. Even if I believe someone is truly evil… The worst I wish for is for them to lose power and influence over others, or maybe get put behind bars. Unless they’re a child abuser/murderer. I have zero sympathy for such monsters. But at least I can admit to my dark side. Everyone has one, but it’s not the ones who admit it people should be worried about. It’s the ones who don’t even know they have a dark side who are the most likely to commit atrocities under extreme pressure. My army friends have all witnessed that in action, from fellow soldiers and from civilians in war torn countries. Have you ever let your rage loose on someone? Lashed out without restraint in a fight? I’m no stranger to rage, but I’ve never let it loose on a living being. Never. Not even when under attack. I fought back against the bullies, but always with restraint, always only with the intention to convince them to back off. And I’ve never really had to hurt anyone to get the point across that I wasn’t going to take a heating, and as a result I never have taken a beating. But I’ve known enough people like you, all holier than thou, the first to judge, the first to caste stones. The ones spewing vitriol while hiding behind a mask, trying to convince the world how perfect they are. So, if you think your words are gonna make me lose sleep or stir an emotional reaction in me, think again. The only reason I haven’t already stopped replying to you is my hope that deep down inside every asshole is a real human being capable of decency and kindness towards others. And maybe that’s true, but there are some people in whom I unfortunately cannot find that pureness of soul. You appear to be one of those. So, good riddance to you. I’m done wasting my effort on your toxicity.

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              2. Oh, btw, when I talk about what I’m living with, it doesn’t mean I agree with everything or think it’s the ideal system. I have plenty of criticism for Germany and her overly domesticated, spoiled citizens. And the SJW culture is only exacerbating the problems. The fact that the States seems to be moving in much the same direction is actually rather disturbing to me. The far left have hatched an agenda in recent years to infiltrate the rural US communities in order to bring them under leftwing control, btw. Though you probably already know this.

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                1. when I talk about what I’m living with, it doesn’t mean I agree with everything or think it’s the ideal system

                  –
                  #ditto

                  Only because I just responded to one of your comments. Tried not to be critical. Just took your points and commented from my position and why.

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        3. But I do know biofuels are commonly used here in Germany

          Your chosen country started decommissioning its fission plants after Fukushima. We can therefore assume that nothing they have to say on the subject of energy production is accurate.

          Liked by 1 person

        4. The ONLY reason that biofuels are used ANYWHERE is that the government subsidizes them AND refuses to allow alternatives.

          Production of biofuel has been repeatedly shown to require more energy to produce than it yields.

          It is profoundly stupid, not to mention heartless, to mandate that food be converted to fuel while there is famine anywhere.

          Liked by 2 people

          2. Ok, if that’s true, then I can understand why it wouldn’t be a good idea. I can believe this of corn, since it takes longer to grow, but is that true of all plants which can be used as biofuel?

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            1. The conversion of high cellulose plants (i.e. wood- usually pine) to biofuel does indeed use more energy than you get out of the fuel. Hence why the process was abandoned after experimentation. Also, the chemicals you use to do it are pretty nasty….

              Liked by 1 person

              1. I would like your comment, but my app isn’t cooperating. I see entire fields of corn being grown here just for biofuels. A lot of corn in the States goes to biofuel, too, last I heard. Never heard about pine being used.

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                1. Right now, the only other major source is sugar cane cellulose after the sugar sap is pressed out. Has the same issues as wood.

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                  1. Y’all let me know when you’re done playing with this one.
                    I’m ignoring the bint who came to MY BLOG to lecture us and has the nerve to call me “arrogant.”
                    She needs what her parents never gave her. Upended and three swats on the bottom. I’ve no interest in administering it.

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                2. Corn is a terrible source of energy. It grows a 7-foot stalk, leaves, husk and cob to produce 4 to 6 ounces of kernels. 85% of the plant is just plowed under. It takes more oil to produce alcohol from corn than you save by burning that alcohol in a car. The only reasons corn is being used for biofuel are:

                  1. Stupid government regulations
                  2. Stupid government subsidies

                  The reason you’re getting so much bile here is that you’re spouting the same idiocy we hear day in and day out from the Leftroid mob. Take a little time and LEARN something about the issues before announcing that You Have The Answer, So There!

                  Draven was right; Kalifornia ‘environmentalists’ won’t allow construction of LARGE-SCALE solar power projects. We have to ‘protect the delicate desert ecosystem’ don’t’cha know, the one that is 99% gravel, sand and rocks. We do have small-scale solar power here. I have solar panels on my roof, as do many of my neighbors. Mine produce more power than I use; I haven’t paid an electric bill in 11 years. But the sun don’t shine at night, and small-scale solar is useless for industry. Other power sources are required.

                  Leftroids are rabidly opposed to nuclear power. We haven’t built a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. in 50 years, mostly because of government over-regulation and fanatical opposition from ‘environmentalists’. Lawsuits more than doubled the cost of the last reactor built in this country.

                  Think about WHY all those ‘obvious’ solutions are not in widespread use, something other than ‘superior technology is being suppressed by The Eeevul Corporations!’ If those technologies were viable, the Eeevul Corporations would be making vast fortunes selling them.
                  ———————————
                  Complex questions never have simple answers. Hell, most simple questions don’t have simple answers.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. It’s not even that I think I have the answers. It was more about looking at options. I haven’t heard good things about corn, so I’m with you there. Not sure what it takes to make hemp oil, but what I have heard is how great it is, although I haven’t looked deeper into it. The thing is, it must be p to find better solutions. Probably not a one size fits all kind of solution. Like what you said about solar power, that it meets your needs, but not enough for industry. A friend here powers his house with solar as well. In the winter, when the sun doesn’t shine very much, his wood stove in the kitchen is used for cooking, heating and for heating the water tank. It’s a really cool system, and he’s mostly off grid with his energy needs. But he built his house himself. It wouldn’t work for every house. Still, it’s cool! I’d love to have such a system!
                    As for nuclear power, instead of bashing those who are opposed, how can their concerns be addressed? Assuming we’re talking about reasonable people who are genuinely interested in solutions? For me, it seems like too great a risk, despite the benefits of lots of cheap energy. Risk of accidents, risk of environmental contamination due to nuclear waste. Or even exposure to radiation from working at a nuclear power plant. Knew some people in Idaho who used to work at the nearby nuclear power plant. Cancer, tumors. So, no, I don’t trust it, and I can understand that many environmentalists feel that way.
                    People everywhere are so divided, and that’s not doing anyone any good. If we could listen to each other and address people’s concerns, we might actually get somewhere other than one side shoving their way up everyone else’s ass.
                    Oh, and if there really was a clean, cheap, renewable energy alternative, I’d expect many corporations would be against it if it meant their profits would go down. Business isn’t in the business of doing a service to people put of the goodness of their hearts. They’re in the business of making money, and while that most likely equates to a product or service people want or need, it doesn’t mean there can’t be anything better. And maybe we really aren’t there yet, but if we don’t try, we’ll never get there.
                    But thanks for at least being somewhat polite. Honestly, I can handle constructive criticism. Just don’t like when people act like jerks about it. If I’m wrong about something, by all means correct me. I’d rather have my beliefs challenged rather than believe a lie, not knowing it’s a lie.
                    I’m sorry if you’re all feeling frustrated. Seriously, you’re not the only ones. I’m also frustrated and concerned about where we’re headed (in the US, in Germany, in Europe), and knowing if I don’t like it, there’s no where else to go. So, we’re trying to get by as best we can, hoping for the best, but aware that it looks like dark times ahead. We’ve talked about moving somewhere else, but we can’t because of our children. Moving means separating 3 of the children from one of their biological parents. So, we stay for them, as much as I’d love to get them all out of here.

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                  2. they also haven’t certified any new reactor designs in even longer, so every application to build a reactor is using early 1970s tech.

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            2. I would dearly *love* to see efficient cellulosic *butanol* (you can pretty much replace gasoline 1:1 with it and have no or almost no issue). Alas, cellulosic *stuff* is a tough problem and fermented butanol is also a tough problem. Mind, tough^2 is not the same as impossible, but I am not holding my breath.

              Liked by 1 person

            3. Yes. Biofuel mandates are, generally speaking, a rich man’s aesthetic fantasy foisted on people who actually have to worry about fuel costs. Also a giveaway to (usually corn, but not always) lobbyists.

              Liked by 1 person

        6. $HOUSEMATE had a diesel (loved it, such range) but would make a point of filling up out of state whenever possible. Why? State mandate 2% biodiesel for all – and almost every every diesel mechanic was screaming, “DO NOT DO THAT!” They’re busy enough. I do try to fill up, when out of state, at places that offer no-ethanol gasoline (not the same as non-oxygenated). Why? My costs go down as my mpg goes up. And I make a point of getting true non-oxy gasoline for the snowblower. You can ask any small engine mechanic why. Expect tree-wilting profanity.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Germany is trying really hard to phase out diesels and eventually ban them. But I don’t really understand why? Why phase out diesels but normal gasoline is ok? My dad always preferred diesel for his pickup trucks. He’s driven both, but always goes back to diesel. My dad is always doing what is most practical and logical, and with his work and the farm, he’s always needed a powerful pick-up. Economical cars might be great for every day use, but not for everything. So, it makes no sense to me to ban diesels.

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            1. Simple – diesel exhaust*looks* dirty, even though in many circumstances it is a superior fuel.

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      3. “The Gasoline Automobile” (1919) is on project Gutenberg. Worth a read. For all its faults, and there are admittedly many, gasoline won for energy density and convenience. History went they way it did for a reason, and this time, the reasons were mostly sound. Now, *leaded* gasoline…

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    3. Yeah, it is totally people with junior/senior level university thermodynamics training, based in calculus, who are preventing you from peeling off your skin.

      Alternative/renewable energy is an obvious crock of shit. Every sane engineer with industry experience can, if they want to, make the arguments that this is so. Excepting maybe disciplines like Civil, which do not really study thermodynamics or electricity.

      Education, whether primary, secondary, non-stem tertiary, and stem tertiary is carefully and deliberately mismanaged to make students think that renewable energy is at all feasible or desirable. Once you get real world experience with energy systems, you start having the tools to see through the disinformation. If you want to. If one desperately does not want to understand, one will remain poorly educated and ignorant to one’s dying day.

      Ian’s point about energy density is essentially true, but does not go far enough.

      Engineering is an art of technical decisions, that takes economics and human welfare into account.

      Energy, in the strict engineering sense, money, and nutritional calories in food are somewhat related, and can be looked at as proxies in some ways. If a population isn’t growing more nutritional calories as food than it takes to grow the food, it does not have a surplus to feed people who are not directly contributing profitably to the food supply chain. A population either needs to grow enough surplus to feed itself, or it is living off another population’s surplus, or it is starving.

      There’s similar brutal logic that holds for money and for energy, it is just that those concepts are abstract enough that many people do not understand them well enough for the arguments to be accessible.

      So, financial sense is a legitimate tool for understanding some of the hidden qualities of a choice of technique for producing, storing or distributing energy.

      In practice, alternative and renewable energy are defined as those methods that make no economic sense whatsoever. If you ever dig in to the nuts and bolts of these proposals, you see that the money costs translate to a lack of profit in terms of engineering energy. So they are just a way to be pointlessly destructive, in a way that is hidden from most of the population.

      What about ‘muh AGW’? ‘Climate Science’ apparently came out of meteorology. Engineers have a completely different approach to doing calculations in fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and thermodynamics. Many of the people who use the engineering approach would say that the publicly shown climate science calculations would never be sufficient for a problem relevant to human welfare. And the ‘address climate change’ or ‘ignore climate change’ decision is directly related to human welfare. Psychology, education, and sociology are still considered scholarly fields, so Climate Science’s work is sufficient to be considered scholarly. But that level of proof is far short of what is appropriate where human welfare is at stake. (The economic cost of addressing climate change is high, meaning a high cost in human welfare, so the level of proof required for sound trade off decisions becomes high.)

      So, yeah, ‘peeling off your own skin’ is an appropriate metaphor for alternative/renewable energy.

      Just like it is probably impossible to live long enough to finish the job, alternative energy is wasting the energy profit from the conventional methods, so you can only make alternatives look like they are working while you are also still using conventional.

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        1. Every once in a while I look into a personal photovoltaic setup or small windmill… and decide it makes no sense to bother. That might change if the grid become more expensive/less reliable. There would be rationing, but at least what was rationed how would be *MY* decision

          Liked by 1 person

    4. Why can’t conservatives get it through their heads that you can be conservative and still support clean energy and take better care of our planet?

      Now that I’ve looked more closely at your comment, I can see that my previous level of politeness was much too high.

      The only adults of moderate or greater mental function who believe that ‘clean energy’ is achievable are in a cult that carefully keeps them from noticing certain facts. You are in a country with university level programs in fluid mechanics and engineering, there is nothing keeping you ignorant. Go talk to professors and engineers about the properties of the Navier-Stokes equations. Go ask them what this implies for flexibly applying computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Ask their opinion of the ability of an unsupervised computer program to find fluid mechanics solutions for any fluid mechanics problem that an engineer needs a rigorous solution for. As in, one program, with no skilled changes in configuration, solving all problems well.

      The other fundamental defect in your understanding is ‘caring for the world’. This is impossible, and has the exact same conceptual problem as “If we do not kill all speakers of Spanish and German, the earth will heat up and then make the sun explode”.

      If you cannot follow these arguments, and then understand why being conservative might automatically make the ‘clean energy’ and ‘caring for the world’ absurd, then murdering everyone with Down’s has not eliminated the retarded from the German population.

      German residents would be well advised to stop meddling in the preliminaries of the next world war. The Germans were twice permitted to like after taking the opposite side to the United States in a world war. There was a third Punic war. There was not a fourth.

      I see hints from your comment that you are brain damaged, and should not be meddling in the business of adults.

      Go fuck yourself, and the horse you rode in on, sideways, with a rusty Eiffel tower.

      Cartago delenda est.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Why the rudeness and hostility? By all means, make your case, but there is no cause for insults and profanity. Oh, and for the record, I’m not German. I am American, born and raised, a country girl from the South.

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        1. I said residents deliberately, and knowingly, from your surname.

          After looking at what you said, instead of what Ian quoted, I noticed that not only were you an idiot, you were one that was not even bothering to be polite.

          Expatriate living in an enemy country during a war can count as an enemy, especially when they are waging information war on behalf of that enemy country’s government. See Lord Haw-Haw.

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          1. Eh. She thinks you were rude.
            In my defense, I forgot the antibiotic at bed time and my sinus is worse.
            ALSO in in my defense, having grown up there, I know she has reasons to be a dumbass, and she has no clue HOW America lives and thrives.
            BUT I put up with this from my family. They refuse to learn and are full of unearned superiority.
            AND I’M OUT OF FRICKING PATIENCE.

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            1. I was deliberately being rude to her, from my second response to original comment on.

              I found three things risible after closer examination. 1. The intellectual arrogance in being so confident about assumptions about energy systems, without even a hint of engineering study. Not to say that there aren’t many engineers so narrowly trained, so crazy, or so much moral cowards that they make the exact same oversights. 2. I am really tired of people mindlessly repeating German government disinfo during US politics discussions on US blogs. 3. The sort of hemp monomaniac who uses it as a biofuel feedstock example is probably a pot smoker.

              A pot smoker that refuses to admit ignorance or listen to the suggestion that they might want to educate themselves before doubling down deserves, at a minimum, being told to shut the hell up when the big people are talking about big people business.

              They may deserve to have their humanity disregarded until such point that they are killed. If they will not stay out of big people business of their own volition, killing them may be to most practical way to keep them out of said business. The more extreme argument is, of course, much less defensible.

              My patience likewise has its limits. Especially after Biden and Harris, who may be vindication for my theory that pot smoker brain damage is too disordering to be tolerated in a civilized society.

              At a minimum, I check off ‘why so angry’ on the internet arguing checklist, and conclude that the decision to be rude was probably not a mistake.

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              1. I’m ready with paragraph four when the time comes.

                I had to live around these POS’s when I lived in Germany. Everyone hated them.

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        2. See my subsequent comment:

          Long past time to flip their script on them and ram it where the sun don’t shine.

          The Science is Settled. If you aren’t supporting Nuclear Power you don’t care about the environment and you want people to die so the lobbyists can line their pockets.

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          1. I don’t think I’m superior. But you sure as hell seem to. I’ve got no problem listening to what someone with more knowledge on a subject has to say. But I do have a problem with people calling me retarded and slamming me with insults for having another opinion. And I take issue with all the assumptions about me, when none of you know anything about me as a person! I did not come on here insulting anyone, resorting to childish name calling and making bogus assumptions about any of you! So, yes, I’m lecturing those of you who choose to act like assholes about your behaviour. If you disagree with my views about the environment, fine, but I’m also not advocating forcing my views on anyone. Even when the environmentalists call for more regulations, my stance is always hesitant, because there are often negative consequences to laws and regulations.

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        4. I’ll add a bit gathered from a solar observer I met a few years ago. He was doing a demo on solar observation (I got to look in the filtered eyepiece as well as the image on the monitor, very cool) and I mentioned solar power to him. We have a solar panel on our RV, though to our disappointment it doesn’t appear to collect enough energy to keep the fridge running if we dry camp.
          His response was to note that solar energy is a constant, and if every usable square inch on the planet was covered in solar collectors, there would not be enough energy to meet our current needs. He was rather firm about it.

          Liked by 1 person

        5. You just made it worse.

          He was fully justified, and toned it down from what he had a legitimate right to say.

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    5. Grow up.
      Grow up today.
      You’re sharing an e-car in a co-op because a) you’re dumb as rocks and believe the whole “we’re going to burn from having an industrial civilization” myth” which is supposed to usher n the new feudalism. We have less effect than you think, and they were threatening us with ice-age back in the 70s and the answer is always “socialism” which btw destroys the environment and people too.
      b) you live in a tinker toy country and in an urban environment. Even your rural people can’t live without cars/gas. In the US? B*tch, come and see. And get out of the cities, do.
      c) Your “partner” how cute. Because grown up oaths and vows are not for the likes of you. Why should they be? You have daddy government who tells you the received truths and from whom all goodness comes.
      And this is why, ladies and gentlemen, our grandchildren will colonize the ruins of Europe.

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      1. Grow up.
        Grow up today.

        This is The Way.

        No seriously: it’s that script flipping thing again. The idiots have been running the social-shame-people-into-rightthink for too long. Time we treated the go-along-to-get-alongs to it from the other direction.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. Wow, you are an arrogant snob, aren’t you? How wrong you are with all your assumptions. Let me correct you. We are members of the e-car sharing because we occasionally need a second car, but my “boyfriend” (if you like that word better, to me sounds childish as we aren’t kids) needs our normal car that runs in normal gas to get to work. The e-car sharing was started by the eco progressives in the farming community where we live, so not a city. We joined because it is an affordable and convenient option for us. Another thing, I actually don’t really like most of the progressives around here for many of the same reasons you often bring up in your blogs. You do realise I’ve been following your blog for at least a couple years now, reading, rarely commenting. Not because I’m some leftist troll, but because I resonate with much of what you say. And only because I make a comment with the intention to challenge only a small part of your blog, you and your other followers go off on me like I’m worst piece of sh*t to ever live! Unbelievable. You can’t just have a civilized discussion, and make your case in a respectful way? I wasn’t trying to be rude with my comment, btw, whatever you all may have assumed.
        Next, none of you have any idea why I’m living in Germany. I spent more of my adult years in the States than here. My ex husband is from here, and before I finally decided to leave his sorry arse, we’d moved back, thinking being close to his family might help him. It didn’t, and I left. But we had a child together when we were still in the States. I was reluctant to go back because I’d be totally on my own with a 3 year old. Then before I even figured out a long term plan, I met someone unexpectedly, and we’ve been together ever since. To assume we can’t make real oaths and commitments is really ridiculous, only because I called him my partner! We have 2 children together, and 5 children between us. We are completely committed to each other and to our family. In fact we are very seriously discussing marriage, but you must think you’re a god, since you believe you know all there is to know about people you’ve never met, based off one little comment. Maybe I should have posted a trigger warning. Seems that’s not just a symptom of leftist identity politics anymore.
        Lastly, before I end this rant, yes, I am from the States, unlike you, immigrant. My whole family is from the South, and all except my uncle are conservatives. My father is a self made man who scored big time through hard work and smarts, built up his own business in farming and agriculture. I grew up working with him, in roasting hot greenhouses, and working cattle, and spent every free minute I got roaming the countryside and forest. I grew up wealthy, but no, my “daddy” didn’t give me a free ride through life. I was far less spoiled than many lower income kids who always had the latest and greatest name brands, gaskets, you name it. No, I didn’t go to college. I put myself through school to study massage therapy, and while you arrogant snobs might look down on my choice of profession, I’m quite proud of it, because I’m dammed good at what I do and love my work. So, no, I don’t know everything about everything, nor do I pretend to. But I still don’t see what’s wrong with looking for better ways to fill our energy needs, and at least reduce by some percentage our use of fossil fuels. And the reason for not wanting to use nuclear power is because of the massive risk when something goes wrong, and things do sometimes go wrong. Remember Fukushima? Still killing off the Pacific Ocean. Chernobyl. It’s still not safe to eat certain foods grown in some Eastern European countries that neighbour Germany. And maybe you’re all right, that currently there is no efficient and cost effective alternative to conventional energy, but that doesn’t mean you don’t try to develop an alternative! If mankind can develop nuclear power and all sorts of technology, why should we believe humans are too stupid to develop a realistic clean and safer alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power? Do you have so little faith in your species?
        But I still don’t see what your issue is with e-cars. As you’ve already pointed out, nuclear power supplies much of our electrical energy needs, so by that logic, e-cars are also being powered that way. Their just not using gas. Really, wtf is wrong with that? Plus, I never even said what my opinion is regarding global warming or climate change. So, quit making assumptions. Just because I care about the environment and want to do my best to not trash it, doesn’t mean I believe everything I hear from environmentalists. Especially, since much of the time it’s coming from people who probably never even saw the country and wild places they think they’re protecting. But good job making enemies with someone only for having a different opinion. You sound just like the left you so despise. Just another cult of a different flavour.

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        1. Depends what state you’re in. The state with the most electric cars has shut down most if not all of their nuclear power plants….. and won’t let you build large scale solar projects… and won’t let you drill for the oil that is literally leaking into the ocean on the ocean floor…

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Why the f*ck won’t they allow people to build solar projects? Unless they just don’t want people getting off the grid. Have you heard about bans on collecting rainwater? I don’t know if they ban it in Europe, but when I was still in the States, it was becoming a common problem, especially in cities. Don’t want the people to be able to water their gardens for free, apparently. Or banning backyard farming. Wtf!

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            1. Solar is useless, worthless, and a disaster to the land when you try to “recycle” the components.
              Oil. Natural Gas. Nuclear.
              We have the answers.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. I wonder if you’ll sing a different tune if you and your loved ones had to suffer first hand the consequences of an oil spill or a nuclear accident. BP oil spill in the gulf of Mexico. Why don’t you talk to the people affected by that disaster, or to the victims of Fukushima, those who are still alive, that is. I don’t know much about the impacts of natural gas, so I won’t address that. So, while your point about the disaster of recycling the components of solar may be valid, to say we have the answers is inaccurate. All I gather from this whole, nasty debate, is that no, we do not have the answers. We have temporary options, but we have nothing truly sustainable. That tells me we still have a long way to go to find the answers, and that requires the most brilliant minds putting their heads together until we do have a real solution to our energy needs that will not result in long term environmental damage.

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                1. Do you want us to ban dihydrogen monoxide as well?

                  If your criterion for anything is “never harmed anyone anywhere” you will have a long search.

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                2. I wonder if you’ll sing a different tune when your groundwater is poisoned from disposal of the chemicals used to etch solar cells, poisoning everything in the environment around you and resulting in a lake so toxic that there’s nothing living in it and the forest around it doesn’t even have any birds in it.

                  Oh right, said lake is in China just uphill from a major solar cell production facility, and thus isn’t a problem to someone living in Germany.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. Actually, I do think about things like that. I don’t know what the solution is, but nuclear power seems the worst of all. What about nuclear waste? And accidents with nuclear power plants don’t just contaminate a lake and a forest. Even the wind turbines aren’t without a negative impact. No one bothered to think about what they’re going to do with them when they are old and worn out. So, they just kept building, and now when the oldest ones are finally outliving their usefulness, the reality hits. Please don’t assume that I don’t know what environmental devastation looks like. I do. I’ve watched my home state be destroyed just in my lifetime. Entire ecosystems wiped out for big ag and unchecked development.

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                3. A: the BP spill was a very environmentalist-caused disaster. The idiot/evil greenies got it pushed offshore so that instead of going to a very well solved 500’ depth, they had to go almost 5km (IIRC), which is bleeding edge and way more prone to issues.

                  B: What Fukushima victims? Seriously – the guy who was at the outlet when the radioactive steam was released got a nasty dose, but the fact that he was right at a *steam explosion* was more relevant. The freaking evacuation (not even looking at the 10kish people killed by the earthquake and tsunami) probably killed more people and caused more health issues than the nuclear plant.

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                  1. I didn’t follow the long term effects of the BP spill, but if it was anything like the Exxon Valdez spill in my hometown’s backyard, in a couple-three years Mother Nature had taken care of it and you couldn’t tell it had ever happened.

                    (Except on the beaches that had been “cleaned”, which turned them into barren lifeless deserts.)

                    Oil has been seeping out into the biosphere for eons — how do you think we discovered it? — and the biosphere evolved to neutralize it eons ago.

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                    3. I remember seeing a disappointing estimate for the number of barrels that leak into the ocean off the coast at Los Angeles, every day…. and of course we’re not allowed to go put a pipe in it, ‘because environment’

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                  2. A: that makes no sense. Why would they want it pushed out to a place with more risk. Doesn’t sound like environmental protection is really their agenda if what you say is true.
                    B: that’s not what I heard. It’s been some years now since I followed the Fukushima disaster pretty closely, but those first few years, I heard of how the emergency workers trying to manage the power plant were getting sick from radiation. I wonder how many of them are still alive. The people who lived within the fallout zone will and probably already are suffering from cancers as a result of radiation. Everyone knows that even small exposure to radiation increases the risk of cancer and cell mutations. So, don’t try to brush it under the rug like the governments are doing in their attempts to assure people everything is fine, nothing to see here. The US raised the safe radiation limits after Fukushima to keep the public from panicking. Most people don’t look into things like that. The TV just tells them it’s safe and people go right back to their usual brain-dead consumerist lifestyle.

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                    1. Actually there’s some evidence that small amounts of radiation are actually good for health. And I’m certainly willing to believe any evil of the “government” at this point. The whole radon OMG!! thing looks like a scam to me, for example.

                      But there are always tradeoffs, for almost any decision or policy. And the environmentalist cult has gotten lots of attention and dollars and power from exaggerating environmentalist issues for decades. In my opinion nuclear power would do more to improve the environment that any of the current technology for “alternative” energy sources.

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                    2. A: of course it makes no sense. Have you paid attention to the enviro lobby? Most of what the idiots push for actually hurts the environment, but looks nicer to idiots who have no conception of lifecycle costs or second order consequences.

                      B: Factually incorrect. The fact that they tended to be chain smokers was a much higher cancer risk than the nuke plant. And if slightly higher rad levels lead to huge cancer rates, how do you explain the relatively low rates in Colorado and Ramsar (both areas with significantly higher than avg radiation). The cancer rates near Fukushima haven’t budged at all, though there was a relatively high pop turnover, what with the earthquake and tsunami, so the numbers may be less than reliable.

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                    3. A: I’ve been somewhat out of the loop with regards to the States these past few years being away. What really got me looking is how fed up I am with Germans and their holier than thou opinions. I’m so sick of them coming up to me and bitching about Trump or celebrating his defeat. Sometimes I want to scream at them to clean out their own closet and mind their own damned business. I’m not even really political, and I don’t vote because no one seems good enough to me. But still, that’s my country, not theirs. They don’t know the first thing about what it’s like in America. If they’d keep their opinions to themselves and just ask me what I think, I’m, fine. But that’s not the case. They’re just so damned smug. And I see the SJW culture and the identity politics and these useful idiots who stand on the environmentalist platform, but don’t seem to have a clue about nature. All they care about are is “climate change” and clean energy. And while I’m also for trying to develop a truly clean, renewable energy that has minimal environmental impact, it’s taking the easy way out for them, because they don’t really have to make any effort. Just protest anything and everything, but not really bother with making the realistic changes at the personal level.
                      B: you can’t make assumptions that all the workers at Fukushima were chain smokers, and then brush them off. I don’t know where you get your information, but that’s not what I read. But everything I’ve found states that the biggest environmental impact from the Fukushima accident is the radioactive water for cooling the reactors which gets pumped into the Pacific, and last I heard, with no end in sight. Although I hope they did get it under control and stopped dumping the water into the ocean. I don’t know anything about radiation levels vrs cancer rates in Colorado, but if it’s true there is a lower cancer rate there, before making base assumptions, one would have to look at all factors to discover why the rates are what they are.
                      As for cancer rates near Fukushima, how many people left the area afterwards? Do you really trust the Japanese government to report accurately? The government probably wants everyone including their own people to think everything is fine and all is back to normal. Go about your normal lives.
                      It would be great if we could trust that there was any truly honest, reputable reporting on anything that matters, but we’re living in times where we don’t know who we can trust. All major media is owned and controlled by corporate and or political interests. Any truly free and unbiased press will be unfunded and go mostly unnoticed, and should it start to gain a platform, it will be labelled fake news by the likes of Facecrack, Google, Twitter, and so on.

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                    4. Gotta say I quite agree re: non-USAians–especially Europeans or folks from the UK–who think they have a right to weigh in our politics, and who would pitch an almighty fit if we dared weigh in on theirs.

                      And also: there has never, ever in the history of ever been such a thing as ‘unbiased’ reporting. Ever. That was a lie that, so far as I can tell, really started gaining steam in the 50s/60s. Prior to that, it was generally acknowledged that Paper A had , while Paper B was opposed to that, and Paper C had their own crazy take on things, and if you really wanted to be well informed, you read all three (or however many) and drew your own conclusions from there. (Most people didn’t.) Anyone who tries to claim that there was ever such a mythical beast as the ‘unbiased, just the facts’ reporter is either lying or deluded. (I should know–I used to be one of the deluded. Then I really took a look at the history and went “Oh. Wait.”)

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                    5. Sad, I know, about biased reporting. I figured that out as a child when I realized how vastly different the same stories were being told on various news networks. Then when I was 18, I came to Germany for the first time, right after Bush took office. And woah, the BBC reporting, German reporting and US were soooo out of synch, that it was plain as day more than one was lying and in all likelihood, they were all spinning their own agendas. But the masses remain blind. Since then I believe nothing and no one with absolutely certainty until something can be proven to me. And I try my best to form the most informed conclusions as I can, but accept those conclusions can and most likely will eventually be challenged.

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                    6. Mmm. It’s worse now: NOW they are all sounding the same, right down to near-identical word choice and phrasing. Because they are all getting their talking points from the same source/list. When a UK news source and a US news source are using the exact same word choices…(I don’t speak German, and I have never bothered to track down Romanian news–I believed Romanians when they told me back in ’01 to never bother believing anything from their media, but I’d bet you’d find translated variations of the same)

                      And sure, the conservative media I read sounds different, but I still approach them from the “I know you’re biased–and you at least are being open about bias” and do not assume the truth lives there, either–but they, at least, are not lying openly to me and insisting it’s the truth. They’re reporting from their POV. (And mind you, I do NOT classify Fox as conservative news. They’re on the same list as other MSM, and so far as I can tell are just there to provide cover so the MSM can scream and say “You have your POV, see, we’re not biased!!”)

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                    8. Why single out Fox?

                      But seriously, does *anyone* here take cable/network news seriously?

                      Best response re Fox was the ILOH’s “I only watch it when I’m on it”

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                    10. Not me. I never understand how anyone does. On the rare occasion I catch a glimpse of those so-called news programs, it’s always so utterly ridiculous. The talking heads seem so totally empty-headed and blabber on about basically nothing, just a whole lot of mind diarrhea. I can’t turn it off fast enough! Haha!

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                  3. And we can’t control what nature does. If a tsunami, earthquake or hurricane wipe out thousands of people, that’s not justification for us thinking it’s acceptable when our actions cost lives. I get none of us are perfect, but I’m not making excuses for myself. The only thing I can change is myself and how I live. That’s what I’m trying to do, and still have a long way to go. But I’m not a scientist. I’m a naturalist. The big, world changing discoveries aren’t going to come from me. All I can do is work with what I’ve got. So, not driving a car when the distance isn’t too far for going by bike, not leaving electricity running when not needed… Like how Americans leave TVs on in multiple rooms in the house. Not happening in my house. We barely heat our house in winter. We have no AC and don’t want it. If it gets to hat in summer, we go for a swim in the river. No dryer. All laundry gets hung to dry. No food gets wanted. All kitchen scraps that can’t be fed to our chickens go to the compost. We do our best to minimise plastic waste, and always are trying to reduce that even further. We’ve started cleaning up others people’s litter when we go out into nature, be it to the lake, the river, the woods, mountains.
                    So, what are you doing, besides criticising the few people who legitimately do care about the health of our planet? Would you trash your own house? If not, then why condone trashing the planet? I suppose next everyone here would criticise organic. But there I’ve got you, because that’s where I do have skills and ample knowledge. I don’t need charts and stats and textbooks. There I’ve got hands on experience and have seen it put into practice even in urban communities. Our biggest challenge to feeding the world’s population is the stupidity of humans packing into cities like sardines. Spread out and learn to live with the land instead of against it and we’d do just fine. And if there’s famine, perhaps we should see it as a not so subtle hint that the population has grown to large for the area to sustain, so spread the fuck out!

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                    1. All kitchen scraps that can’t be fed to our chickens go to the compost

                      –
                      This is being encouraged locally. If you don’t want to your own compost then just add food scraps to the yard debris can instead. Backyard chickens aren’t new. Nor are bird feeders. All three together? First time in 32 years, well if you count that folks bought their house in same area in ’63 amend to first time in 58 years (this area used to be farmland), the area is having a huge problem with rats; visible in the daytime rat problem. This area is subdivision, not stacked high density (yet … that is a different issue), nor are the lots particularly small, especially in the older neighborhoods. Need anyone describe what comes with rat problems?

                      FYI. There is a very spirited debate in the Nextdoor App on what/who is responsible for the sudden rat problem. Those who feed wildlife (usually birds) with fat and bird seed, those who have chickens (feed, eggs, and chicks), those who feed pets outside, those who have firewood stacked (creating living areas), the fires from this summer forcing the rats out of the rural timbered areas. The latter I reject. Won’t disagree for the eastern side of the valley closest to the fire areas. But we are on the western edge of the valley, west of the river. Eventually, but not this quick, plus this has been a growing problem, not OMG fires, now we have rats this fall. Our immediate neighborhood doesn’t have a feral cat colony. Neighborhoods have a number of outdoor owned cats. All of whom hunt. But people putting out rat poison threaten the cats, both feral and domestic. Not to mention dogs even confined to fenced backyards. Thus the vigorous debates.

                      Our biggest challenge to feeding the world’s population is the stupidity of humans packing into cities like sardines. Spread out and learn to live with the land instead of against it and we’d do just fine.

                      –
                      Yet. This is exactly the opposite that environmentalists and most naturalists want. Must concentrate in smallest area possible to protect the environment. At least if you believe the articles written and reported speeches …

                      if there’s famine, perhaps we should see it as a not so subtle hint that the population has grown to large for the area to sustain, so spread the fuck out!

                      –
                      What about the areas where there is room to spread out but won’t help? I’m sure everyone here can list areas in their neck of the planet where no matter how small the group in their area someone is going to starve to death, without input from surplus areas. There is a reason why all the cleared homesteads are returning to the hardwood forests found when settlers first cleared and farmed them. There is a reason why Rockies, Cascades, Sierra’s, even coastal mountains in the west, are limited to timber and mining, not farming, beyond supplemental local fresh. Or most coastal hamlets, which is fishing or tourist. It is the modern age that allows any beyond small group substance in these areas living under nomadic conditions. I’m just describing areas in North America. N. America, at least US/Canada doesn’t have real famine. Food insecurity, yes. Real famine, no.

                      Personally? I’m NOT going back to the small cabin, or cave, or nomadic, lifestyle; or dropping dead to please others. Nor am I asking the next generation to not show up for the future (i.e. not have their own children). Not a sacrifice I was willing to make. Not one I will require of them either.

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                    2. I’m not suggesting such an extreme either. We’re not able in our current situation to revert to a completely self sustaining way of life, for the reasons you already mentioned. But many can supplement to take some of the pressure off the food industry and decrease in part the demand on other countries to import our food, which tend to be the poorest countries, btw, where those populations could benefit by being able to keep more of the food they grow.
                      Have you ever heard of the Bushmen? I’m not suggesting you need to do what they did. My point is only that many indigenous peoples were able to survive in terrains than we modern people can’t even imagine. We tend to think it’s impossible, but those people’s did it, and were reluctant to change their ways. But we’re forced due to colonization. It’s interesting, in my opinion. Personally, my family and I would like to live that way, but lack such advanced hunter gatherer skills. Even if we had the skills, places like Germany are too populated and domesticated to sustain that way of life for more than maybe a very small number of people. But there are still areas in that States that can.
                      What you said about so called environmentalists wanting humans packed into cities and separated from nature is true. I think true naturalists would disagree. I believe a lot of environmentalists probably truly mean well, but most probably have no experience living in nature. They only know urban and suburban life, and can’t imagine that’s it’s possible to live in nature without destroying it and wrecking the balance. Political organizations may have less noble intentions. I’m pretty sure the Dems are just using such platforms to gain support. I doubt they genuinely give a f*ck.
                      As for the rat problem… Well, maybe people shouldn’t be so intent on eradicating the feral cats. 😉 All my years living in the country, most people who kept any livestock, be it chickens, cattle, horses, whatever, also had a couple of mousers. We have 2 cats who are very good hunters. Too good, as they go for the birds when they’re low on mice. We only feed the birds a little in winter, and in summer we grow sunflowers in the garden, which the birds get to eat. The squirrels take the extra walnuts that fall from the tree. It’s a bit of a race to get our share before they get all of it, but in the end it balances out. Since we got our second cat, who lives also indoors, we no longer have a mouse problem, because he’s obsessed with hunting.
                      Anyway, there’s always a limit to what’s possible, or rather realistic and what isn’t. I get that. But there are always things people can do as individuals and families that work for them. As I’ve said before, I’m not in favour of legislation that forces people to do what some politicians think is the right way. Because they tend to just make things worse.

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                    3. Have you ever heard of the Bushmen?

                      –
                      Yes. The Bushman are adapted to their environment. They are also nomads within that environment.

                      Even the PNW natives didn’t live in the valleys or the mountains. Traveled through the mountains, hunted them, didn’t live in them. Even the non-colonizing natives did and can starve in the Cascades and Coast Range mountains. Traveled, hunted, harvested plants within the inner valley (Willamette), had summer camps, but didn’t live there (swampy).

                      my family and I would like to live that way

                      –
                      Homesteading … Not my thing. We don’t want to be tied down with livestock or garden. But have fun …

                      As for the rat problem… Well, maybe people shouldn’t be so intent on eradicating the feral cats.

                      –
                      Or discouraging indoor/outdoor cats. Both are a long complicated vigorously debated topic over in Nextdoor lately.

                      Point is. The world isn’t going back to hunter/gathering anytime soon. Anywhere. Not short of an world destroying catastrophic event. No. Just No. For all that I enjoy reading some speculation fiction on “what if” (Dies the Fire … because primarily takes place in Willamette Valley). I don’t want to experience the concept … nor do I wish it on my children or grandchildren.

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                    4. It wish it would be possible still to live nomadic as hunter gatherers, but that doesn’t mean I wish it on others. Anyway, I’m pretty much content with rural life. Now if only I had the possibility of having a totally self reliant homestead, but we don’t have enough land at our disposal to do it. Enough to supplement our food needs, and the rest we get from the organic commercial gardens and farms around here. But what I’m best at is raising livestock on the small scale, and that’s what I’d really love to do. I come from a long line of farmers and that’s all I ever really dreamed of. But I’ve always loved a simple life. 😉

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                    8. Hey, I didn’t say there was. Maybe it can happen in times of severe drought or whatever, but with all our international co dependency, it should be possible to get food where it’s needed. But thanks to government meddling, tons of food gets thrown away without ever making it off the farm. Or farmers subsidised to grow less so government can fiddle about with the price floor or whatever they tell themselves is the reason.

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                    10. ((shrug))

                      If you want to live like paupers, it’s none of my business. Your life, your call. Same with organic – if you want to get under a third of the crop yields (and significantly higher crop failures) than everyone else, go for it.

                      Just don’t expect people who are scraping by to applaud you for it, rich lady.

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                    13. Lol, whatever. And I’m not rich, not by a long shot. My dad is, but I don’t benefit from that. My younger siblings might, but I broke off and made my own way through life without any financial support from family. Anyway, I’ve worked on the farms, and in the fields. I’ve worked in the organic greenhouses and my landlord is also a professional organic gardener. His greenhouses are right there next to my backyard. Sorry, no crop failures. And everything I’ve seen planted is growing in abundance. It’s not just my community which is fed by the couple big organic farms and the few commercial organic gardens/greenhouses, but also the food gets sold to regional supermarkets, many in the bigger towns and cities, as well as at farmer’s markets, including Bremen and Hannover. That’s just what’s grown in two small villages by a handful of farmers and gardeners who are still the minority for farmers around here. My landlord always has so much food that he gives a lot of it away to us, his friends and neighbors and the community. It’s about to be taken over by a younger man and turned into a CSA.
                      All the may sayers to organic, in my experience, are the people with the least knowledge and experience. My dad, who is a farmer himself, thought I was crazy when he heard I was growing an organic garden. This was back when I was still living in Idaho. I didn’t understand what his problem was until my little sister told me that my dad thought organic gardening was throwing seeds randomly on the dirt and then doing nothing! 😅 When he came out to visit, my small garden was in full swing, and he was quite impressed. Look, I’ve seen conventional farms and I’ve seen organic. Whatever nonsense you’re being fed about how inferior organic is, just doesn’t add up. There is a little more to it than conventional farms, because the goal is to maintain soil quality, minimize ground water contamination, avoid toxic agro chemicals. Actually, if the world went vegan, that would hurt organic farms which rely on manure as fertilizer, amongst other things like composting. The use of nitrogen fixing crops via field rotation is also incredibly important. And organic farms are generally growing a pretty wide variety of crops for this reason. Monoculture is unsustainable. Permaculture is the best for environmental balance, but there the yields truly are lower. It can work, if enough people and communities utilized it, but that alone would require a total makeover to how our entire societies exist. Wouldn’t be a bad thing, but you’ll never get enough of the population actively involved in growing food and being self reliant. It also wouldn’t be enough to sustain city populations, due to their lack of undeveloped land. The cities are always dependant upon the rural communities. I saw talk on here about how easy it would be to cut off and defeat blue states/cities. There you go. Why do we assume rural communities are obligated to carry the weight of cities? We don’t really need the cities, but they sure as hell need us.

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              3. On a small scale solar is not useless.

                I have PV panels and a solar water heater panel on my roof; the PV covers all my electrical usage except in July, August, and September, (which it halves) and the solar water heater more than halves my gas bill, and the solar water heater system doesn’t have any of the enviromental impact on disposal you seem to be concerned about.

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          1. Hey Kathy, it should come as no surprise if people who aren’t already subscribers to your political worldview aren’t willing to consider your point of view when you resort to the same tactics the left have been using for quite a while now. It’s just as pointless trying to have a civilized discussion or debate with republicans as it is with Dems. You’re all the same, just a different cultish flavour. If someone doesn’t fit the box perfectly, then they’re your enemy. Conform completely or be outed as a heretic. Good job, you should be so proud. And here I was thinking you guys were the sane, rational ones. Guess I was wrong for being on your side, despite not sharing all the same political views. (Many, but not all) Most of my life I’ve lived amongst conservatives, and never had any trouble getting along with even the most die hard conservatives. But just goes to show, there are always idiots looking to pick at straws. What’s the matter? You got no one else to take your frustration out on? Do you really think I’m all for all this NWO shit?! Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to live amongst an entire population of people so brainwashed that I look like a right wing extremist to them? Hello, pro gun, pro freedom of speech, yes even to people I disagree with and dislike, opposed to over regulation by big government, and the list goes on. But since I didn’t fit into your pathetic little box, you think you’ve got me all figured out, huh. Well I’m done trying to talk to jerks like you, and I’m done sympathising.

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    6. No. No to virtually everything you said. Fracking? Brilliant. Pipelines, as opposed to trucks? Brilliant.

      I love petroleum and what it has allowed us to do.

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    7. Thing is, I partially agree with the anti-fossil-fuel fanatics. There are a number of very good reasons why we should not be dependent on burning coal, oil and gas for energy. They are finite resources. There is only so much coal, oil and natural gas in the ground. They will run out. They are running out. Every year it costs more to extract each ton of coal, each barrel of oil, each cubic meter of gas. Not just more money, but more energy. When it takes as much energy to obtain a barrel of oil as you get from burning it, you can’t run your economy on oil any more. You can’t even run an oil company.

      They are hazardous materials. Shipping millions of tons of them around the world poses an ever-present risk of disasters like exploding oil rigs, blown pipelines or derailed tank cars. Mining, pumping and refining all produce pollution. Burning them dumps billions of tons of excess combustion gases into the atmosphere, with unknown consequences.

      But for some, those reasons are not good enough. They have to have a ‘CLIMATE CRISIS!!’ to stampede us into doing the stupid things they want us to do. To allow them to take the absolute power they crave, because the CRISIS!!! absolutely MUST BE SOLVED BY DRASTIC ACTION RIGHT NOW!!! even though none of the actions they demand would do much good, if any. Banning internal-combustion engines by edict as the governor of California did recently was as stupid as it was unconstitutional. Every CLIMATE CATASTROPHE!!! they have predicted over the last 30 years has failed to put in an appearance. Is it any wonder reasonable people dismiss them as a bunch of hysterical Chicken Littles?

      New technologies can’t be summoned into existence by government decree. For the most part, they can’t be developed by government research projects, either. There will be dozens of possible approaches, but the government will pick one or two and focus all its resources there BEFORE anybody knows enough to determine which roads lead to dead ends. When a government project does reach a dead end, nobody will admit it. The bureaucrats will continue spending money and writing incomprehensible reports long after all progress has ceased.

      A business seeking profit will abandon a project when it stops producing results, and try something else. When a dozen businesses try different approaches is it much more likely that some of them will succeed than for one massive government program to have picked the right path by chance.

      The fact that some technologies are declared politically unacceptable, even though they are proven to work, simply compounds the problem. Consider nuclear fission power. The widespread ignorant fear of nuclear power is unfounded. We’ve been using nuclear power for more than 70 years, have built almost 500 nuclear power stations, and there have been 3 major disasters, one of which killed almost a hundred people. Many, many more people have been killed over the same period in accidents involving coal, oil, gas and electricity. Careless handling of any form of energy is hazardous.

      When the ‘common people’ have access to energy, we gain independence, and the Leftroids can’t stand that. They seek the power to control every aspect of our lives. How we live, how we work, where and how we travel, what we say, what we are allowed to know. our diets, our sex lives, and every decision about our medical treatment. They wants it, they wants it, and they will do ANYTHING to obtain that power.
      ———————————
      There is no shortage of people convinced they can create the perfect world. They just have to eliminate all those imperfect people who don’t fit in it.

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      2. PSSSSST: they’re not running out. With current tech we have something like 300 years.
        While it cannot be summoned into existence, in 300 years there’s a high chance better techs will come.

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  48. OMG. Apparently Pelosi has a podcast with Hillary Clinton, and a book together. Ugggggh.

    Also, the rather mild USCCB bishops statement released on Jan. 20, by Archbishop Gomez as the conference head (basically, “We are disappointed that Biden is a Catholic who supports abortion, and we hope he’s going to amend his ways and not sign all this pro-abortion crap he’s promised to sign”) was Horrible and Shocking to all the liberal bishops. Cardinal Cupich from Chicago apparently tried to nuke and then nerf the statement (“How dare they not send it through my bloated committee where I boss things around?”) but it got released anyway.

    Anyway, even before this statement Nancy Pelosi freaked out on her Jan. 18 podcast. Apparently, she has the power to say as a Catholic that killing babies is all right and contraception is all right, because, while married to her rich husband and receiving the best medical care in the world, she had five children in six years. So there’s another of her weird grudges coming up.

    (If she had a problem with being pregnant a lot as a young woman, why didn’t she just ask her husband to leave off having sex so often, or at least so soon after giving birth? Isn’t this a couples problem, rather than a national problem? Isn’t it easier to negotiate with your spouse than with a bunch of Congressmen, and avoid having the blood of millions on your hands? Why are leftists so passive or passive-aggressive with their family and friends, and so aggressive-aggressive with everyone else?)

    Anyhoo, she also said that pro-life people were all hypocrites who don’t themselves have large families (demonstrably untrue, if you look at the demographics of pro-life folks of all denominations — and of course, a lot of pro-life women physically can’t have babies anymore, because they were damaged by the effects of abortion and prescriptions of birth control as a cure for every female problem). She also said that pro-lifers “are willing to sell the whole democracy down the river.”

    Obviously not everybody agrees about the Catholic position on these things, but it burns my biscuits to see Pelosi constantly being so self-righteous, when it’s abundantly clear that she doesn’t actually believe anything that’s part of being a member of the Church. I have a lot more tolerance for people who have trouble with constant sinning but who keep trying, because they love Jesus. Pelosi is corrupt as they come, but she doesn’t love anyone, as far as I can tell.

    Anyway, Pelosi and Hillary’s nasty queen bee podcast is apparently called You and Me Both, if anyone wants to make a deep dive into their crooked little psyches, or watch them make crooked little jabs at each other. I assume Hillary is sucking up to Pelosi in preparation for Pelosi becoming president, because neither of them strike me as the type of people who have friends.

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      1. So basically if you have different views than Pelosi does, and vote based on those views, you are against “democracy”. They keep using the word democracy, but it does not mean what they think it means.

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        1. “… it does not mean what they think it means.”

          Few words do, few words do.

          Or, as Billy Jeff Clinton observed, “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
          ~

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    3. That . . . explains a lot. And it really makes me feel almost sorry for Pelosi, that she felt it was better to agree to a relationship that obviously caused her emotional and physical problems instead of getting marital counseling or leaving to get help. Now? No, I pity her a little, because she has chosen to carry so much pain and hatred in exchange for power. That does not excuse her from being wrong about what “good Catholics” can do. And wrong about so many other things in normal life.

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      1. Well, that is the thing. If she actually did anything about her problems, or eased away from her cruddy family and turned over a new leaf, you could understand it. But she makes everybody else more miserable instead.

        She was college-educated and she is hardly helpless or impoverished. She has resources.

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        2. Yes, as with so many leftists, I smell a strong stench of “I will change what actually happened–and my actual feelings about it at the time–to suit the narrative that will gain me power.”

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  49. We need an alternative to the cess pit that academia has become. Not only do our children get indoctrinated by the professors, they get indoctrinated by their fellow students, because people of that age are often eager to reject their parents’ ideology and cling to what their friends/peers believe.

    There are a handful of conservative colleges, and a number of online options. One of the dangers that I foresee is that any successful conservative effort in this area will serve to mark the graduates as people that lefty institutions will black ball. Another issue is that young people have acquired from the culture the attitude that getting away from your parents’ influence is a good thing, and are often eager to “go away” to college.

    I read about some entrepreneur who was doing a Covid replacement for the “college experience”, where he got space in hotels, and advertised that college students could stay in a young person’s community while doing remote college. Not a thing that will outlast the covidiocy (unless they extend it in perpetuity), but it’s an interesting concept.

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