The left has a plan so cunning that if it were a person, it would be teaching cunningology at Oxford. And the ones who get the reference will also know that their plan is about to go pear shaped in all sorts of interesting ways, and at the end of it there might very well be a turnip or two involved, but not as the only item available in the shelves of the grocery store.
Look, someone pointed out in the comments the left are trying to follow the “plan” for other communist revolutions round the world.
He’s right. They’re trying to follow it to the letter. Partly because it’s worked before, and partly, because to be fair, they’re a cult, and cults don’t know the reason for the ritual, they just follow it.
…. but it’s already going wrong. And it’s only going to get worse.
You see, part of the problem is that the cult of communism and the procedures for “the revolution” were set in the early twentieth century. And it’s designed for the early twentieth century. To the extent they worked in places like Venezuela, it is because the underlying structures of the society were still very much “early twentieth century.”
The US? Well, not so much. In fact we never were much like the early twentieth century in Europe, which is why they’ve had a hell of a time getting a foothold here.
The communist revolution is designed to work in a country that is mostly urban, with a vast urban underclass that can’t rise above for reasons both internal and external despite working unreasonable hours. It’s designed for a country with a firm aristocracy of the hereditary sort (even if that aristocracy is often from trade), it is designed for a country with a conscript army where the plum assignments go to the “good families” as a matter of course, it is designed to work — most of all and very importantly — in a country where they ABSOLUTELY control all the means of mass communication and do so without the vast majority of the people being aware of it.
The last time they could have pulled that off in the US was in the mid seventies. And my guess, honestly, is that they tried. I don’t know for sure, since the news of the time were all reported by biased sources, and besides I’m too lazy and too busy (yes, it’s weird. Often happens to me, though) to spend my day chasing down hints. I bet they did try, though. I bet they gave it a sporting try. And I bet part of the issue back then — as now, btw — is that they were pinning their hopes on a race war, having both not realized how much of a minority people of African descent are in the US (last estimate is what? 14%? Sizeable, sure, but not a large minority and certainly not a majority. Also, and seriously, a lot of that minority is middle class and whatever they voice from the mouth-out as uninterested as the rest of us in having the apple cart overturned. Apples are tasty. Genocide not so much.) Mostly because that sh*t was so successful in Africa, and again the left doesn’t think. It ritualistically applies “what worked” without being able to account for changed conditions.
Anyway, that was the last time they could have MAYBE credibly have followed their little red map to revolution and have it work. And even then Americans were just too darn contrarian. Why everyone and their parents were telling us that Republicans were so dangerous, that they were going to start the nuclear war, that– And we went and voted Reagan in. (Well, not me. I only worked towards it. I didn’t vote. I wasn’t a citizen and I’m not a democrat.)
In fact, America could have engraved on its door lintel “authorities can go f*ck themselves.” The left keeps forgetting that. And sometimes justifiably. Take their Covid-psy-ops. It worked. And it was all run on the “experts” and how important it was.
Uh uh. So, they think their control is back! They’re golden again, baby!
Yeah, not so fast. That one worked because a) even the most cynical Americans (born and raised) couldn’t imagine that anyone would be so evil and unprincipled as to cause famine in the third world by crashing the American economy solely to win an election. (The rest of us laughed in “man, you don’t know commies.”) b)it was coordinated and orchestrated all over the world, and they had a little help from China (and for the love of Bob why isn’t anyone questioning those “leaked” videos of people collapsing and dying in crowds that stopped coming from China the moment the virus hit America? HAS no one asked why these scenes haven’t happened anywhere in the west.) And Americans kept going “other countries wouldn’t close up only to manipulate American elections, right?” (Laughs in “you really really don’t know commies, do you?”) But of course they would. It’s the same elites in control everywhere, and Trump scared them.
The other thing they miss is that this is a trick that works only once. As it’s becoming glaringly obvious that the danger was grossly exaggerated and that this is utter and complete bullocks (yes, yes, people died. People die of the flu every year. And of other things too. “Tested positive on ridiculously high-gain test known for false positives” doesn’t mean they died OF Covid-19) the media has just burned another huge chunk of their credibility, even bigger than what it took to attempt to force us to vote for Hillary. Oh, and by the way, to the extent that Biden had real voters (a distinct minority of his counted-votes) and that those were lied too and told reassuring pap by the press, the press is already burning its credibility with them, like gasoline soaked paper in a bonfire. Mind you, for now the utter idiots might still believe that “ORANGEMANBAD” but the cognitive dissonance won’t long remain.
The media has been burning increasingly larger chunks of its credibility since it put everything on the pot to get the messiah, Barry Soetoro elected. Even they, with all their devotion, slavering lies and knee pads, couldn’t make people believe him a great president, or convince people they were prosperous when they were not.
They could convince people the Clintons were brilliant and their tenure a time of great prosperity WHILE THEY WERE IN OFFICE even if it crumbled afterwards. But with little Barry the simple, they couldn’t even keep it going while he was in office. (And partly this was, nota bene, because Clinton does love America. It’s a bit like a vampire loving humanity because humans are tasty, but he does love us, and he didn’t want to destroy the country as such. Barry however wants to punish us because in his deranged red-diaper mind, we’re responsible for his cool African daddy leaving him. People sense when they’re hated.) And he was an utter economic disaster, and that’s hard to hide. So, in the face of the greatest press in history, and the push for his handpicked successor, people shrugged their shoulders and voted for Trump, a dangerous wildcard as we thought at the time.
In fact, people did it again in 2020. The fact that they had to fraud massively at the last minute, and that the fraud was so blatant they won’t let any court investigate it is your million watt flashlight shining a danger sign to them in the night.
But they won’t heed it.
I’ve come to the conclusion most of the people manipulated by the media manipulation of the social and mass media are at this point…. the left. Which is kind of important to them, because at this point, the vast majority of the left (which are a minority in the country already or they wouldn’t have to fraud, fraud, and more fraud.) are not even useful idiots. They’re “go alongs.” They’re the people who — humans being social apes — instinctively attach to the strong horse, because it’s the ‘nice’ thing to do and they want to be in step with their times.
But their big problem is that the play they’re running with requires them to have FULL control of the means of communication and be able to sell — in full — their version of reality. And have people take it, unquestioningly forever.
It’s already falling apart. Oh, how they must have cackled and danced with glee as the 6th of January became tainted as “riots” even though compared to BLM and the rest it was barely bad behavior. (And even though there’s indications it had already gone massively wrong, since Trump started his speech late and spoke later than they expected, and didn’t lead people to the capitol. ALL of which they counted on. Oh, also, buffallo man? not a credible insurrectionist or revolutionary.)
You can tell that’s not sticking in various ways. First, they immediately got the expected reaction from the Republicans, which was to cave all along the line and start talking about the disgraceful riots. (Look, it’s not QUITE uniparty, Bitch McConnel notwithstanding, but the right are ABUSED SPOUSES. They reflexively cower when the left flexes its muscles.) But even as the left, hysterically, pushes the rhetoric to “attempted coup” and impeached orangemanbad for having a golden weasel for hair (unless you can come up with a better explanation) and having more votes than they could dream of, thereby forcing them to fraud in plain sight, the right is finding its spine. Don’t bitch slap Rand Paul. At least he’s saying our lying eyes are right.
The left is no longer controlling the narrative. Their lies are increasingly crazy and less credible, and people see that. At the same time people are losing trust in the press over the covidiocy and in the left, because six days into the usurper’s reign it’s becoming obvious the junta not only doesn’t have the best interests of America at heart, but doesn’t LIKE America much.
Sure, they have their five year plan. It includes purging the army of dissidents, and demanding their personal loyalty. In their echo chamber this is perfectly reasonable, you know. All the upper echelons who attend parties in DC will tell you this is perfect, and the grunts will do as told. Yeah.
And they’re going to confiscate guns. No, they’re really, really, really going to confiscate guns this time. Look, on facebook some weaselrat crawled out of the wood work to yell at us a propos nothing that everyone laughed at our redneck love for guns. (head desk) You see, they really think what works on them — insults and social shame — works on us too. Hell, I can’t claim to be a redneck, but my instinct was to smile and say “why, thank you kindly. We’ll see how they laugh when those guns are pointed at them.”
Gun control might have flown — did to an extent fly — in the seventies, but hell, these days we know what happens when you give up your guns. Again, they missed their window by, oh, fifty years or so.
Then they’re going to destroy our farms, our factories, our lives in the name of Global Warming, because, well, all their friends are scared sh*tless of Global warming. Except that well, we’ve been told we were all going to burn up so often even the short-term-memory bunnies no longer buy it. Except for the exquisitely indoctrinated and the media, it’s become a joke. “Excuse me, I have to go shovel some global warming off the driveway so we can go to work.”
They need FULL control of the press for this. They ain’t going to get full control of the press. In due time even Parler will be back, and besides most of us have already flown to different arrangements (I’m so fortunate to have kids in their twenties. There are so many places the left doesn’t expect us to be.) And people are ACTIVELLY working on alternatives to Amazon, to social media, to hosting sites. Because they “done pissed us off enough.” and Americans are always prone to trying to wade into the problem, even if all they have is a rag and a bottle of windex. (“Well, at least it can be a clean dumpster fire.”) I guess in world terms we are the guy. We see a problem, we solve, instead of sitting around the UN bitching and emoting.
SOME part of their addled, brain-damaged cult gets that it’s already not working, hence the brazen, bizarre attempt to pass all vote by mail, no challenges allowed, do as we say, peasant.
Well, maybe it will work. Bitch McConnel will try to help them, that’s for sure. But if it works, I declare it a wonderful opportunity to play the game on them. Let’s see, I have….. Counts again…. 300 characters in my head. Most of them are voting age. Do you discriminate against the differently existent? Then there’s the cats. Dead relatives. And– What? If they’re going to make the voting a joke, they should get a taste of their own medicine. And one of the things we are WAY better than they are at is COMPETENCE. At anything.
My guess is that an election under such rules will end up with a billion votes and nervous breakdowns on the left.
IF they’re smart, they’ll backoff before we get there, but alas, I’m very much afraid they ain’t smart.
I predict the next move on their part will be trying to make an example of someone like me — in fact someone exactly like me, you know, not big enough that everyone knows me, not willing to shut up under any circumstances, and …. weird. I.e. most of the people won’t get the science fiction thing–and my guess is they will fail, just as they have failed to sell us that Kyle Rittenhouseis white supremacist. In fact, our response to the Kenosha Kid should have served as their warning. And it sort of did, but only very briefly.
Mind you, we’re taking steps to be physically out of reach and hard to find, but my guess is whomever they attempt to destroy will instead become a folk hero.
Oh, and they will try very hard to purge the army.
And it really does seem they’re going full speed ahead with attempts at gun control.
And they’re going to attempt impeachment part two, while the nation looks in awe at how ridiculously insane they are. Because they really really really need to sell us on the idea that orangemanbad attempted a coup. But the more they poke at that narrative, the more it falls apart. And no matter how much they’re going to try to demonize Trump, they’ll also been dragging him to the limelight. Only idiots think this is a good idea.
From here on it only gets crazier. Their response to “well, that didn’t work” is NEVER “maybe I should examine why not.” Their response is always “double down.”
Am I saying it will be a piece of cake? Well, no. They have all the structures of government, and until they go far enough they have the force to enforce it. Besides, they’re importing more “caravans” which are mostly military age men, and by the way, from research Bill Reader did, members of communist organizations in their native regions.
But my guess is “real” immigrants, the vast wave they’re counting on, will fail to materialize. They’ve seen this show before, and they were already leaving under Obama, for the same reason.
And gang members and commies simply aren’t used to Americans. Nor are Americans about to turn in their weapons like good boys and girls. That doesn’t happen even in the North East.
But–
It’s going to get chaotic and very very ugly. Briefly. On the good side, they’re continuing the good work that Donald Trump started. When this is done, it will be a clean sweep of both houses of congress, the courts (all of them) and yep, the agencies. Because the FBI and the CIA have revealed their hideous partisan faces.
On the bad side, so have most mainline churches. I don’t know what comes next, but I know that at this point a snake-handling pastor who is not afraid of having in person meetings or preaching from the gospel has a good chance of capturing a vast chunk of America, no matter how strange his theology. Bad? Well…. maybe. A religiously unified America would be very scary to the rest of the largely atheisticworld. Never frighten a little nation.It might kill you.
However, a word to the wise, if there are any, in the corridors of power, from the so called legislators, to the judges: Turn back now. You’re living in an echo chamber. You don’t know the real opinions of real people, because you’ve made it impossible to tell the truth without losing your livelihood, your family, everything you hold dear. And you have absolutely no clue how quick the preference cascade turns when the “go alongs” realize the majority isn’t where they thought it was.
If you throw your lot in with the left, you’re going to lose.
I grant you the most likely follow up to this is a Generalissimo Franco, but I bet you that too is temporary. Americans are too American for that to stick. Yes, even those of Latin ancestry. Only bloody racists would think otherwise, and the entire country isn’t the left.
Contemplate the fact that in the face of a barrage of demonisation and fear never before seen in the west, Americans hunched their shoulders and voted Donald Trump in such numbers the left had to fraud hard at the last minute and in plain view.
Contemplate that in no other country, not even the other anglophone countries is political blogging a big thing. (And it has to do with us being the citizen-rulers of this country.)
Contemplate that the people — THE PEOPLE — refused to turn on Kyle Rittenhouse.
Contemplate the fact that the narrative on January 6th is already in such tatters even lefty publications are admitting it wasn’t a riot, much less an insurrection.
Contemplate that the left put all its cookie chips on the right showing up to burn things and throw a fit at the FICUS Fraudoguration.
Contemplate that the public opinion is such they keep having to turn off comments on White House videos on the tube of ewes.
Contemplate that we’re really, really, pissed and you have our attention. And that the leftist narrative and that of its captive media are increasingly either ignored or seen as a contrary indicator.
And then go look at pictures of the Ceaușescus.
That’s what happens when a preference cascade occurs. In the morning, beloved leader on the balcony. In the evening, cooling meat.
We don’t want it to get there, but heaven knows the left is bound and determined to push the nation there. And they have absolutely no idea what they’re trifling with.
They’ve convinced themselves America is just like every other nation they destroyed.
They are wrong. And they’re creating mortal peril for themselves akin to driving blindfolded towards an abyss.
Throwing one’s lot in with theirs is highly inadvisable.
Not only is their map not the territory. Their map is written in crayon, includes imaginary lands, and is signed “turnip.”
According To Hoyt 
Someone I know has floated the possibility that Chyna *may* have dropped a chemical weapon on Wuhan. Whether accidentally or deliberately unknown.
That fits some of the scuttlebutt coming out of the country at the time all of this kicked off. Not a lot more than RumInt, but…
They were having trouble putting down “Christian insurrection” there. Ie. people who refused to stop worshiping.
Bitterwinter covered it. So quite possible.
I’m willing to believe that the videos are real because I also know someone who has connections leading into that part of the world. I have no reason to think they were anything but real news smuggled out.
Also the way China is overreacting now, far more broadly than just Wuhan. You think our little tin gods went overboard with stay-at-home orders, you ain’t seen nothin’.
It doesn’t mean it was COVID. They have a sh*tton of other issues.
I remember even at the time the speculation that it was cover-up for massacre.
Report today they’ve got Beijing locked down. Methinks this is sheer overblown paranoia on top of a culture that’s somewhat OCD. Reportedly ran 2 million tests in Beijing and got like 3 positives, and are now repeating tests, a dozen times if necessary, until they finally get a positive. Meanwhile in some other city that’s welded shut, no one is allowed out even to get food. Spiraling madness.
If it were just handy waste disposal, it’d be mostly out in the western provinces. Tho they did decide no vaccine if you’re over 55, or how to get rid of that aging problem.
Yeah. This is insane.
Hmm — one does have to consider whether they might gain some advantage from a false report. . .
“I have no reason to think they were anything but real news …”
Except the fact that incidents like that were never replicated anywhere else in the world, only the most totalitarian country on Earth.
Funny that ….
I suspect it was poison gas attack or something.
Unless there was something else going on there beyond the flu….
The communist revolution is designed to work in a country that is mostly urban, with a vast urban underclass that can’t rise above for reasons both internal and external despite working unreasonable hours. It’s designed for a country with a firm aristocracy of the hereditary sort (even if that aristocracy is often from trade), it is designed for a country with a conscript army where the plum assignments go to the “good families” as a matter of course, it is designed to work — most of all and very importantly — in a country where they ABSOLUTELY control all the means of mass communication and do so without the vast majority of the people being aware of it.
So…. places they already control, in the US?
I’m not even sure they control THOSE that much, honest.
Even our “underclass” doesn’t work sun up to sun down for so little pay they can’t get ahead.
I suspect most of the blue cities are caused by machine fraud.
I was looking at places like colleges, and the companies they control.
Sure. But you know the companies are partly “follow along” with what they perceive as the strong horse.
AND universities have doomed themselves with the covidiocy.
Yep, most companies are influenced because pain avoidance.
I was thinking of stuff where they really control it, stem to stern, like…oh… unions? Or most of the feel good companies that chew folks up and spit them out.
My daughter has to be in a union because of her job. She’s already annoyed because she’s getting a smaller raise, when she’s due, than the merit-based raises she earned at her last job. Of course, her last job was a dumpster fire or she wouldn’t have left it. Still, she’s been on the job for about six months and would already prefer not to be in a union. But then, Ohio is already Right-to-Work, so word has gotten around that unions aren’t all that. The union bosses will cling to their high-paid worthless jobs until their last breath, granted.
I submit to you the time I saw some folk protesting outside of Winco with signs saying that Winco didn’t have unions.
The humor comes in when you find out that Winco is an EMPLOYEE-OWNED grocery store, as in the only stockholders are those with jobs there. Which—short-circuits the need for unions, doesn’t it?
It gets better– those folks are hired by the union.
…
They are not in a union. Nor paid union rates……
Regionally – BiMart
Locally – Jerry’s Home Improvement
We have WinCo’s too. I’m waiting for them to open a new location in the old ShopKo location on Chad Drive near Petsmart and Costco. This would be ideal.
Both are employee owned. No unions. Haven’t seen any protests …
My husband and I were required to join and be accepted by the company union for our first job, before our first 6 months were completed. That union was one company only. While union officers were voted in, mostly volunteers, and they got paid nothing for being union leadership. Union paid for pay lost when doing union business, but no union salary. They still have that small union (very small … when we were hired there were 279 active employed members, now there is around 60, even with employment running 40 to 60 … takes a year to lose seniority).
Thanks to policy changes regarding single employer pensions, the union had to partner with the Carpenters & Joiner’s union, and combine into their pension system. Now the representative with the bigger union is salaried. Not sure of the other changes, I’ve been out for 40 years (part of the first major employment decline, 279 to 160 in a year), and hubby retired 9 years ago. Oregon is also right to work. Don’t know about Washington which is where we started. Otherwise, in general neither of us are favorable to most unions.
Pay. There is ONE job type, 5 pay scales: Trainee, < 5 years, 5 – 9 years, 10 – 14 years, 15+, with salary and vacation time increases; 20+ with vacation bonus pay instead of another week, paid when took last week of vacation. Otherwise any increases were changes to the rates at the various levels during negotiations, were essentially minor and not even keeping up with inflation in the '80s, let alone the Clinton and Obama years. I can blame it on the Owl. Sure in the heck didn't help, but not to blame, not really. The union slit their own throat a year or so before we started working there; just took a decade or so, with owl's help. If the Federal and State governments had made certain requirements of all timber coming off of public land, things would have changed. But big timber nipped that.
The one change that didn't occur was Salary + overtime and overtime was anything over 8 hours a day, and if no work on Friday, but worked on Saturday, Saturday was still overtime. OTOH at least between '96 and '02, hubby had to work a pile of OT to meet or beat my salary. After that, his salary was way higher than mine, but that is a different story.
That damned owl.
❤
OTOH it got me into a career I never would have considered … not in a million years.
When it was clear one of us had to get out of timber. I tried going the craft route. Eh, not fun if I had to work at it. So, why not accounting or at least start with bookkeeping. It was easy (for me). If can’t do what I wanted to do, do something easy. Went back to school. Councilor insisted I’d be good at programming. I laughed. At the point I’d had one required computer class in ’75. To say I despised and hated that class is to understate my position (I did eke out a C). I had to take 4 classes to get started. One computer introduction. The other 3 first level accounting classes. Accounting classes were easy for me (too easy really. Granted basic level. Later in my career when programming accounting stuff, I was explaining things to the bookkeepers and accountants, which was/is weird. Not the legal stuff.) The computer class? OMG! Fun times. Made a 35 year career out of it. Hadn’t planned at that time to get a second 4 year (programming degree was 2 year program), after all already had one of those; but eventually did because first employer wanted employees’ with that credential. Mostly it just taught me the terms for what I do naturally working projects. Learned as much or more with the Woodbadge team/leadership training through Scouts.
Not to mention the fact that it took less than a week for FICUS to stab some of the Really Big unions in the back–namely, those associated with the O&G industry–and they’re already screaming “WTF we endorsed you?!”
Yeah, ya dummies, and what did you THINK was gonna happen? The unions gettin’ what they voted for, good and hard…and they’re shocked about it.
A lot of people who voted against Trump are going to find they were sold a lemon and get what they voted *for*.
I’d feel better about it if I didn’t have to suffer with them.
#metoo
The unions may have believed they had a deal. They’d support Biden/Harris, and in return the Biden/Harris regime would make noise about pipelines and fracking without actually doing anything about them.
It’s more that the public employee union members, the ones who most support the radical left’s agenda, vastly outnumber union members who have jobs in industries and trades. They know the blue collar union membership is already not voting for them in a lot of cases, so Democrats only pay lip service to what those union members want. It its the government employee union members who are the straw who stir the drink.
They’re starting to lose the government unions, too.
NBPC endorsed Trump both times.
And some because their leadership imbibed the Kool-Aid. A cousin of some cousins is a Fortune 500 CEO, and I’ve run into her a few times at events for my cousins’ weddings. I don’t know her well, but overhearing some of what she was saying makes it pretty clear she swallowed much of it – either that or the best job of virtue signalling evah.
Because they went to “the best schools” Hard left is social class signaling, remember?
Yep. Class signaling. And the whole concept of “luxury beliefs”. If you want to position yourself as being “elite”, you *can’t* believe the same things as the mass of people. You have to differentiate. Which is why they sign on to some pretty repellent beliefs.
Part of this is selection bias– remember when we were talking about how women who sleep their way to the top are insecure and thus vicious at destroying threats?
Same sort of thing works if you’re hired for Saying The Right Thing Louder, but with the evil twist that if what you’re screaming isn’t actually showing you’re a good person– then not only are you a cheat, you’re a fraud.
On the subject of pain avoidance, have you seen what’s going on with Superbowl ads? Coke, Pepsi, even Budweiser aren’t running any ads on the theory they can’t run something without pissing off half the country. It’s not quite a preference cascade, but the example of Gillette and others is making it clear that the woke Twats are not the only people who can effectively kick up a fuss.
I’d lay money that the Super Bowl was also charging five years ago prices for “oh wait we’ve been slapping at LEAST half the country for the last several years” prices.
Last year’s 30 second price was $5.6M; this year $5.5M. It’s the first time prices are down since 2010, and only up .5M from 2016.
Whoof.
our “underclass” WORKS??????
I know that Illegals work and are an underclass but they are doing so much better than they are used to that it is hard to see them being the shock troops. Also most of them (as you say) have seen this before and want no part of it.
The “Urban” underclass may be getting a little pissed that the teachers are REFUSING to go back to school (while getting paid) while their children are NOT getting anything from the Online BS, it is just not working for them.
Even the wealthy overclass is getting pissed. Wealthy Bellevue, WA, across the lake from Seattle (once reddish but now only slightly less blue) is suing its teachers to force them back to work:
https://komonews.com/news/local/bellevue-school-district-takes-teachers-to-court-in-attempt-to-return-to-the-classroom
Oh, HELL yes to this!
Stuffy Old Medina my ass. Get back to work.
No, of course they don’t. That’s the whole point.
According to Kim Strassel at WSJ the Administration shafted the blue-collar unions in favor of the “service,” unions, which are big on “climate change.” Firing the head of the NLRB to put in a hard-core Democratic partisan is supposed to toss them a bone, on the theory he will make lots of pro-union decisions.
Hey! You think selling dope isn’t work? You don’t believe running a string of hos is work? You think being a
hosex worker is a soft life? It’s hard, man, really hard.Maybe you think standing out on a corner all day, in all weather, providing customers with dime bags, is not work?
~
Dear Hostess at least example here in deepest blue Massachusetts seems to argue that the Blue Cities and Blue High end Suburbs here seem to have limited fraud (not none mind you). The “intelligentsia” really seem to buy into the virtue signalling nonsense. They seem utterly ecstatic that this No account grifter with a coke addled grifter son is in charge and many of the reversions of the executive orders are viewed with greater affection than Moses with the tablets of the Law. Part of this is that this is a population with a LARGE incidence of Secondary degrees (Burbs are like 40-50% +) combined with many of the lower classes that vote for their bread and circuses. There is a core of Blue Collar and independent merchant types who view this with a jaundiced eye, but at least within the 495 belt in MA they’re not a physical majority. It seems similar in other New England states with the Blue sticking close to the cities and corporate sections. New Hampshire has some distinct departures and with Durham and Nashua your theory may be hold more strongly. But in general if you’re conservative (or even libertarian/classic liberal) here you’re quiet or running a maskirova or both.
And if they weren’t on board…. would they say it aloud?
I remind you for many years I PASSED in deepest blue SF/F
That is possible. However given the sheer glee and schadenfreude they seem to express I’d say at least 75% of them are for real and maybe closer to 90%. They’ve all drunk the kool aid hereabouts. Admittedly they could be very good actors, but having put my own maskirova on for 30+ years (software has a tendency to lean left or libertarian) they would all be candidates for Oscars. I do have issues with out and out lying and so my avoidance is more of the lie by omission kind not positive support.
It’s similar among my acquaintances here in Austin. Secondary degrees, consider themselves the cream of the crop, utterly ecstatic and don’t even pause to consider I might not share their ecstasy… even though most of them warned me years ago not to express my own political views on pain of losing their “friendship.” I think they’re for real. I also think it’ll be really hard to bite my tongue when the effects of FICUS’ policies start hurting them and they complain to me about how hard times are getting.
I won’t express my political views if you won’t express yours. Except they can’t help themselves.
yeah, sounds like my brother-in-law who seems to forget that the primary source of income for his employer is DoD contracts….
I’m watching a creepy thing happen amongst the well educated: euphoria. Weird, mindless, unsubstantiated euphoria. All because they got someone else to tell their neighbor “fuck you!” That’s all this is. They couldn’t care less what positions and policies we cherish and that POTUS Trump enacted. They couldn’t care less than the pedophile and his raging whore are communists. They are euphoric because people they hate have been crushed.
Jordan B. Peterson and Douglas Murray just joined that group. They aren’t euphoric–they are dismissive of the people they call “rednecks,” they think people who know the election was stolen are dangerously insane…. All because they are so educated, so aware. And all they want the pedophile to do is “make sure this never ever happens again.” They think Trump told us that the election was stolen and that’s the only reason we’re all angry.
I… it just makes me feel horrible.
I’m sorry to hear about Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray. I think the cognitive/emotional pain of continuing to believe in *what actually happened* is too much for some people. They move to dismissing the evidence, and there’s such a sense of relief that they cling to it and just close their eyes. The choices A) realize that a huge percentage of our government is corrupt and on the take and that we’re on the slippery slope to a totalitarian left taking complete control or B) brush off the claims of election fraud and go back to the “normality” of a year ago … are in such stark contrast, and B feels so much better to people who don’t heavily weight “the truth” as important that it exerts a really strong pull.
Be fair, though. We also don’t know if they are being correctly quoted.
We can be pretty dang sure they’re not, given evidence thus far.
I know Peterson is Canadian, but then agian the left is dying to drive a wedge between him and his fans. The left already hates him. so…..
Haven’t even heard what they’re saying this time, but…. If they had a nice long video showing him doing whatever they say, they’d push that. Not quotes.
No. Compelled expression is a lefty thing. I’d go 50% and a lot of the ones on the other 50% are “go alongs.”
I think dear Hostess I shall have to agree to disagree. I suspect far more of the locals around here are ridden by parasites round these parts. Darn shame there isn’t Venerian 9 day fever around to help sort things out…
What I don’t get is how, if long considered DJT Executive Orders were reversed in court because they did not have enough backup justification, Day One New Administration Nobody Even Knows Where Their Office Is Executive Orders could on their face possibly be remotely considered valid?
I assume that’s a rhetorical question ;-). We all know that some people are more equal than others. Democrat privilege, in other words.
Yeah, my real point is an Alinsky one: Make them live by their own rules. They raised that bar on EOs, so they should be forced to get over that bar themselves.
Double standards are their natural defense against that form of Alinsky attack.
Yes, but they also worship at the altar of Unbreakable Judicial Precedent, so their heads should explode.
They should. But double standard means Unbreakable Judicial Precedent doesn’t apply to them.
There’s no double standard! Their standard with judicial precedents is the same as their standard on Catholics: they only support the ones who advance their agenda. Everything is only valuable to the extent it is a useful tool for them.
Catholics Are Bad, Catholics Are Good
When President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, we witnessed a media meltdown. Though Democratic senators largely managed to avoid their past mistakes and didn’t suggest that Barrett’s Catholic faith made her unfit for the bench, progressive critics and liberals in the media made it no secret that her religious beliefs troubled them.
Nearly every major outlet published a story scrutinizing the lay Christian group People of Praise, of which Barrett was once a member, falsely claiming that it was the basis for the misogynistic nation in The Handmaid’s Tale and asserting that Barrett’s membership meant she must sympathize with Christianity’s supposedly anti-woman tenets. One prominent feminist commentator suggested that Barrett’s religious views were disqualifying because Catholicism is inherently sexist. Another insisted that Barrett’s “personal faith” was fine but asserted that the judge should not be confirmed because she would attempt to impose her faith through her rulings.
[SNIP]
… In her first press briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki hand-waved away questions about Biden’s abortion policy by reminding the press that the president is a “devout Catholic.” Ahead of his inauguration, Biden received fawning media coverage for attending morning mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in D.C.
On Saturday, the New York Times published a lengthy piece by a religion reporter entitled “In Biden’s Catholic Faith, an Ascendant Liberal Christianity,” calling Biden “perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century.” In the piece, we are told that Biden’s “Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies” and exemplifies “a different, more liberal Christianity,” one “less focused on sexual politics and more on combating poverty, climate change and racial inequality.”
In other words, Catholic public figures who champion nearly unlimited legal abortion, Christians who use their faith to promote the progressive cause du jour, are perfectly acceptable. Not only that, but they will be lauded as exemplars of their creed, praised for allowing their deep, personal understanding of Christianity to guide and inform their progressive policy stances.
Christians who embrace sexual morality on the other hand, those who believe in the dignity and value of every human life, including the lives of the unborn, will be dismissed as backwards bigots who want to control women’s bodies and impose their outdated religious views on the rest of the country.
~
If they didn’t have Double Standards they’d have no standards at all.
(Too much?)
Current rule is: If they can do something, it is illegal for everyone else. But they can do everything, so everything is illegal for everyone else. (My head hurts.)
Thus …. Oh, hell. I guess “I aim to misbehave.”
Assumes fact not in evidence, that lefties care about incompatible beliefs or that they ever experience cognitive dissonance.
Alas, no. Because the only real, core belief this lot actually adheres to is “Rules for thee, not for me.” That’s it, that’s all. THAT is the only tenet of their religion that they actually follow faithfully.
As I mentioned in the comments a few days ago, there were at least a couple of instances in which the courts flat out stated that they were blocking Trump’s EOs because Trump issued them, and therefore the motivation and reasoning behind those EOs must be bad.
I judge not by that, but by the fact that even the Yankee states were at 60% Trump until fairly late in the count, then magically shifted over to Biden. And remember those “intelligentsia” mostly control the media and pay for the polls. Naturally they’re the loudest voices.
THIS.
Part of that is that the little towns are efficient, using paper ballots counted by machines with either fill in the dot or connect the line. Their returns are ready literally 15 minutes after the polls close. The cities (Likely intentionally) use old methods, as recently as the early 90’s Waltham was using a mix of hand marked ballots and mechanical machines (depending on your particular ward). I think Lawrence and others (New Bedford? Salem) still had some wards on that and some had gone to paperless electronic systems (which hasd it’s own issues). Looking at a local example (Boxford)
https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/chronicle-transcript/2020/11/05/election-2020-in-boxford-tale-of-two-towns/43004559/
Interestingly it also points to the town site which is a PDF of the outputs of the counting machines. I believe they use a fill in the dot model like most of the north shore, old stuff got tossed when we had some REALLY close house rep races in the ’90s, like 10’s of votes. Tallies are reported pretty quickly 20:13 is the time on the tape from the first ward
You can see about a 1000 vote lead for Biden which roughly (within about 100 votes) matches the votes for Congressional Rep (Moulton) and Senator (Markey). Markey is considerably lower than Moulton, he’s really despised in these parts although he still wins overall. I’ll have to poke around and see some other towns, and some of the local cities (Lynn, Salem, Lawrence.Lowell) if they provide it although they may not. So yes they’re slimey, I deeply doubt that Boxford actually went for trump, Danvers. Middleton probably did their more blue collar. It may be worth poking around to see…
“… example here in deepest blue Massachusetts seems to argue that the Blue Cities and Blue High end Suburbs here seem to have limited fraud”
Limited is all they need. The Fix is put in by picking candidates in the primaries, when only the party faithful turn out and vote. Doofus de Blasio won the 2013 NY mayoral election primary with a turnout of a mere 282,344 votes in a city of ten million, drawing less than 41% of the vote with turnout of only 28% — a “endorsement of about eleven and a half percent of eligible NY voters.
In the general election fewer than 800,000 voted for de Blasio.
No fraud required.
~
Oh, to clarify please permit this expansion and revision of my remarks, in order to assert I do not insist de Blasio actually wo a majority of votes legitimately cast. I merely mean that in such deep blue polities there is not much need for major fraud. A little petty fraud is sufficient.
~
That wounds like Worldcon voting percentages…
Good point.
In fact, America could have engraved on its door lintel “authorities can go f*ck themselves.”
A lady I know makes cute door-mats.
One of them says, in pretty vaguely cursive script, “Come Back With A Warrant.”
She says that they’re incredibly popular…. with uniformed police officers. 😀
“Come Back With A Warrant.”, nice, I laughed out loud.
I used to have that one, but right now? Don’t want to give them ideas.
You should have one in Portuguese. Tell’em it is a traditional greeting.
Bing Translate says it’s: “Volte com um mandado.”
I don’t think so? Maybe Brazilian.
I shall ask my parents.
About five years ago I was tasked to make sure our international public-facing website would work in Chinese, so I used Google Translate to convert all our text strings. The website worked just fine, although our Chinese DBA commented that it was “mostly nonsense”.
(BTW, the equivalent to alphabetical sorting in Chinese is … difficult. I had to figure out how to do that too, without being able to use any of the handy libraries in existence because making sure they were installed on all our servers was Too Hard, according to our IT engineers.)
I had to do that in ’01. Be able to store and reliably retrieve, from ascii text file, double byte character strings regardless of the actual computer character string was using. Plus had to export it to C code ascii text file to be compiled into a program with one of 3 C compilers to run on a DOS machine. Took about 6 weeks to find the correct functions deep in the C++ library. It sure wasn’t documented anywhere. Don’t remember the functions now. I knew they had to be there, it was just tracking the functions down. Once I had it I had the code done and tested in less than a week. For reasons made sure the library in question was compiled in so didn’t have to be installed. Although could have required it as part of the installation of the program. Had to support two variations of Chinese, and Japanese, so three double byte character sets, as well as English, Spanish, French, and German.
I never had to mess with that, or DOS “code pages”, or even UTF. I never even had to deal with Windows CP-1252. Ther than writing an EBCDIC to ASCII routine once, just plain old 7 or 8 bit ASCII, for which I am truly grateful.
Every now and then I see an announcement about yet *another* extension to UTF, and wonder if the “solution” is worse than the original problem…
I haven’t had to deal with it since ’02 when the software released. Two months later the hardware company went into bankruptcy proceedings. Six months later I was hit in the 4th or 5th rounds of “cuts”. Company that bought out what was left, eventually shelved the software with no additional updates or patches.
“… our Chinese DBA commented that it was ‘mostly nonsense”’”
In my experience, most corporate websites are mostly nonsense.
~
Well, it’s Bing, so I’m not shocked it’s wrong, but the Brazilian Portuguese Bing translate comes out the same.
I think a doormat with the same message in a cascade of different languages, skipping English for deniability, would be great – basically thus (all below from Bing translate so probably wrong, but you get the idea):
Regrese con una orden.
Volte com um mandado.
Vrať se s povolením.
Tar ar ais le barántas.
带着搜查令回来
…
tangqa’ targh
I think Klingon would work…
Hmm. If you want to have conversations that are not understandable to others, weird languages are not a bad way. Lots of work for those who aren’t linguistically inclined, though.
My usual flow is to run whatever I get in an online translator back through the same one in the other direction. When BIng translated “Come back with a warrant” into latin alphabet Klingon as “ha’ yItlhej” which came back the other direction as “Come with me!”
Notably the Portuguese “Volte com um mandado” reverses correctly as “Come back with a warrant”.
Yeah, I see what you mean…
I ran “come back with a warrant” through to Klingon(Latin) and got what I posted.
Which when I run it through the other way, comes out as “buffalo dogs?”
Time to dig around the bookshelves, see if I still have my ancient copy of the “Klingon Dictionary”
Klingon Language Institute might tell us if they HAVE a word for “warrant.”
…and shouting “Buffalo Dogs!” at them in the warrior’s tongue as you slam the door is not a bad way to go.
One of those above came back to me as “They are with the lambs.”
Klingon equivalent to warrant could by council or imperial order
Does that translate literally as, “I’m siccing my targ on you”?
‘ach jIHeghchugh jIH
is supposedly “Get off my lawn”
And if I run that through the other way (Klingon to English) I get “But if I die.”
Usirudi sina hati. (Don’t come back without a warrant.)
I think German would work well, all things considered. If you have a large enough doormat.
Kommen sie mit einem durchsuchungbeschluss zurück.
In case the link doesn’t work, because I’m terrible with links in WP…
“Tell someone you love them today, because life is short. But shout it at them in German, because life is also terrifying and confusing.”
According to my trusty Collins German-English-German dictionary, “search warrant” translates best to “Durchsuchsbefel”, unless you are seriously expecting trouble, in which case you could use “Haftbefehl”, translating to “arrest warrant”. According to 50+(!) year old lessons, nouns get capitalized, too.
As it turns out, in this usage (formal for “You [redacted]”) you need “Sie”.
German is so fun. Sometimes.
Ich habe das sehr gern!
oder
Kommen sie nicht, mit keinem Durchsuchungbeschluss zurück.
having looked at Portugal v Brazil in GHS labeling, that is probably it. I mean English and American(sometimes Canuckistani) oft claim two countries separated by a common language, but holy cats does Brazilian have some far different words for the same action or concept than the Portuguese
Even in Portugal it’s not standardized. Things like “strap your seat belts and bring your seat upright” can and are often said three different ways in the same flight.
Possible DIL from Brazil says at least half the Portuguese translations for Brazil are “off”.
Meh. Half of Brazil if off. I’ve translated their tax forms. “DEAR LORD DON’T YOU HAVE STANDARD WORDS FOR ANYTHING?” 😀
could be worse, could be Welsh. I think Scrabble tiles and a Yahtzee cup were involved in their word formulation
“Even in Portugal it’s not standardized. Things like “strap your seat belts and bring your seat upright” can and are often said three different ways in the same flight.”
They are Portuguese heritage. So no.
Welsh is very sensible. It just has very conservative spelling. And lenition.
Welsh is no worse than pre-late 20th century Irish. Or even the later “simplified” spelling that was in use when I lived there in the late ’70s. It didn’t help that they’d change bits every year or two without telling anyone. A friend was an elementary school teacher, and every few years would have her class asking why she spelled something differently from the book, and she’d find that TPTB had changed the spelling between the edition she was using and the one the kids got.
So basically Portugal and Brazil share the same “two countries separated by one language” relationship as the US and England 🙂
I still understand it fine, because I read a lot of books from Brazil.
Kind of like I tend to use britishisms
Whatever you put o that mat in Portuguese be sure to inform them it is a traditional Porto blessing on the house and all who visit it.
If they say anything disputing you, denounce them as racist and anti-immigrant. Depending on your assessment of them you might want to accuse them of homophobia arising from suppressed homoerotic leanings.
~
Our Hostess said
In fact, America could have engraved on its door lintel “authorities can go f*ck themselves.”
A physical reality of this seems apropos. The Mezuzah (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezuzah) of the Jewish faith seems an apt example here. Perhaps USAians should have something similar, but what text ought to go in it? The Preamble to the constitution? The “When in the course…” section of the Declaration of independence? Or Heinlein’s “Bad Luck” quote?
I figure 1776 covers it…..
What “Sit Down John” 🙂 ?
“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
That said, the second sentence does include why masks have worked so well, especially early when most places were closed.
This is especially good because, contrary to popular belief, the mezuzah is NOT a protective talisman; it is actually a reminder of the Divine Presence. I think the Usaian equivalent would be a tiny flag, though.
Yes. By the door.
I like it. Fold the scrap of flag into a holder similar to a mezuzah.
A pewter model of a supine fist with an upraised middle finger.
Tempting, the scroll or other item could be hid in the fist. Although better to keep it less obvious (the USAians are supposed to be an underground movement mind you). Perhaps keep it closer to the traditional object but replace the traditional Shin(שׁ ) with
Waw/Vav (ו ) for Washington (as in the president) or Aleph (א) for America.
“the USAians are supposed to be an underground movement mind you”
We will be….
Made me laugh
I looked for “unwelcome mats” …. got an earful. My favorite is
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here
(If you have already abandoned hope, please disregard this notice.)
However, these have a lot more, uh, potential:
http://bearsmartdurango.org/unwelcome-mats/
Yeah, this.
Am doing a little bit better with words, weekend’s brainstorm below, abbreviated.
Heavenly Father,
Thank you, O Lord, for the blessing of American culture.
Thank you, O Lord, for whatever it is that lets us trust strangers not blood related.
Thank you, O Lord, for the knowledge that this has brought us of every civil war going back very far, so we are perhaps the population most informed about civil wars in general.
Thank you, O Lord, for giving prior generations the gifts to make America safe from communist revolution, thereby providing a home to the refugees of communism, and hence blessing us now with more knowledge of communist revolution than any other population has ever had.
Thank you, O Lord, for the many, many, many gifts you have given us to prepare us for the current challenge.
In the name of Jesus Christ we pray.
Amen.
Thank you, Dear Papa, for Foolish Bob.
[Quote] On the bad side, so have most mainline churches. I don’t know what comes next, but I know that at this point a snake-handling pastor who is not afraid of having in person meetings or preaching from the gospel has a good chance of capturing a vast chunk of America, no matter how strange his theology. Bad? Well…. maybe. [Quote]
If you need me to preach, ma’am, I can preach. And I guarantee you that my theology is better than theirs.
Will you preach in the park, Padre? Will you do so in defiance of religious and civil authority?
Where do we come to hear?
Funny thing was that Jesus of Nazareth apparently did most of his preaching out doors, away from the towns. Which to me would translate as less noise, less filth, fewer distractions, and possibly greater social distancing.
You’re not in my town. I desperately need in-person worship.
I can’t help with in person. But I can probably start preaching on youtube or some other media, if that’s something people would be interested in seeing. I’ve been thinking about it.
Come to us in Lenoir City, Tennessee, folks. We never closed, our church is full every Sunday. I honestly don’t know what the Tennessee state government is telling people to do–it’s none of their business how we worship and we aren’t paying any attention to them at all.
Same here at my church in Charlotte. We did small masked services when everyone was panicking, but now we’re at one masked and registered service for high risk folks on Saturday and a mask-less, no-registration-needed service at the regular time on Sunday.
Early Christian Agapes; I suspect one could find 6 or 60 (However many the law will allow and however many more are willing to dare.) including a priest and/or a preacher or two willing to meet in various homes (A floating church game?) on Sundays sharing meals and the Good Word.
The time we lived in Denver was the time period we weren’t going to church. The nearest one—and it wasn’t that near—was massive and apparently had schedulers who held grudges against one another, based on the fact that someone scheduled the church *for the exact same time as the wedding rehearsal we needed to do*.
They also had 1980s-modern murals with backwards elbows. It was disturbing.
(Yes, Catholic church. I wouldn’t expect it to be much better at this point. Maybe the Mother Cabrini shrine in the foothills.)
I need in person worship, but refuse to give them contact info to attend a church service. Name and phone number? Nope. So home worship it is! At least we get to laugh at Paul’s sarcasm as we read at home.
“My name? Polly Carp. 555-1212.”
We’ve come up with a few of those pseudonyms.
I tend to use ken.olsen@digital.com when I need to enter an email address. It doesn’t actually go anywhere (anymore) but HP has kept digital.com alive probably mostly for the Class A network (HP also has one, so 16.x.x.x and 15.x.x.x are threirs). My one fear is should I get to heaven I may get a stern talking to by Mr. Olsen 🙂 .
I always use 303-499-7111 when I don’t want to give people my real number.
SAME.
There is a church in West Linn that we just started attending… I’ll email you into.
Nehemiah Scudder where are you??? Not really likely, that bridge has been burned.
Fosterites, that could work! Think back to the description of the visit. Now THAT is something Americans of today could get behind.
We need a Prophet Foster.
I wish my personal church could capture a good chunk of our city, but I don’t see happening. No masks necessary, no comtact info necessary (that’s insane!), communion from a common cup. However, no rainbow flag, no woman pastors, “closed” communion. Our pastor chants, even though raspy and slightly off-key. We don’t offer pictures with Santa at Christmas time; yes the mega church down the street from us did that a couple of years ago. We’re dull and boring. 🙃
Our masked service on Saturdays has registration, but I think that’s more about making sure there’s enough room to keep social distancing.
On Sundays, the service is mostly back to normal: only adjustments are that the pastor and deacons are masked while serving Communion, and communicants come up to the rail by pew instead of “how many can we cram in” so that the servers can use sanitizer between each family.
Our registration is on line. Public.
No. Jut no.
I very much hope that their theft of the election (and the senate runoff theft too) is a pyrrhic victory. I have dreams that the people rise up and reject them totally and they dwindle into a yapping little rump party that nobody votes for.
Really, one of the saddest parts of this farce has been realizing that so many of my countrymen are blind idiots. I pray that their eyes are opened and they realize what they’ve done, and who they’ve voted for.
Union whinging about Biden doing what was utterly predictable to Keystone… after the union endorsed Biden.. Gee, some really do have learn by peeing on the electric fence themselves.
Actually I’m wanting to point and say “I told you so.” But if one of them comes to me, I’ll pat him/her on the back and say– there is another way and you don’t have to follow the scapegoat into the slaughter.
Eh … I’m enjoying the spectacle of the Mainstream Establishment Press turning themselves into Gordian knots trying to convince us all that Kammie La Whore is the most admired woman evah! and that China Joe is the kindest, bravest, most wonderful President evah! I mean – who are we supposed to believe – them, or our lying eyes!??
Ummm yes– I keep remember that Biden quote about having a kid rub his hairy legs. After that one I do wonder about Biden’s proclivities. Kammie? well even her smile makes me shudder.
Totally OT: Bought and thoroughly enjoyed your new book. Will there be a sequel? When their plantation gets nationalized?
Frankly, both them AND the GOP need to dwindle into the annals of “what not to do” history.
Or we take over the GOP 😉
This. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether a new “patriot” party or the takeover of the GOP is the best thing to do. Looks like DJT has decided to go for the GOP route. And the way our system is set up, it does seem like the option more likely to succeed — unless the threat of a third party is just used to get the GOPe to fall in line.
DIg out the old Tea Party articles on how they came up in strength, then do the same thing, in spades.
I suppose. Though I do remind all my fellow history junkies here that political parties HAVE come and gone in this country’s past–the Democrats only date to Andy Jackson, and the Repubs to Lincoln–it’s just been in the mutual best interests of the current two to convince everyone that ousting them is doomed to fail for the last century or so 😀
The antecedents of today’s Republican and Democrat parties split in 1854 over the issue of Abolition vs. slavery. Guess which one was pro-slavery?
The Civil War was mainly Republican vs. Democrat.
“Really, one of the saddest parts of this farce has been realizing that so many of my countrymen are blind idiots.”
This. So many relatives as well.
Yep. Same here.
Me too.
Please, don’t compare this bunch to Edmund Blackadder (except for maybe the first). Whatever Blackadder’s sins are, he was somewhere in the range of competent, even if his luck went from “wonderful” to “terrible” with very little in between with a side order of cosmic irony. This crew is mostly a combination of lucky, stupidly persistent, and have far too much free time that most of us were doing things like raising families, working careers, trying to find love, and being busy living our own lives without other people interfering in them.
I think this will be another ’70s rerun, with worse music and more dope. There will be this “wave of history”-probably involving the PRC this time as the avatar of how the world should work, and far too many stories and shows that try to show that we need to adopt more “Chinese” things. Meanwhile, the rest of us are going sideways until the money people realize that they’re riding stinkers (go Google “Supertrain” and realize that they thought this would work as both a show and reality), and look for the Next Great Thing.
Meanwhile-keep calm, carry on, get into alternatives, and ignore them when you can. They aren’t even smart enough to keep Harris/Biden from alienating half of their base and do it in a way that shows exactly what these people think of that base. Not going to be a fun couple of years, but we’ll make it as long as we don’t lose.
(And, Sarah used the “abused spouses” analogy for the E!GOP. Squee!)
The Clever Plan was never Blackadder’s plan, and he always viewed the announcement “Milord, I have a Clever Plan” with ancestrally justified healthy skepticism.
THIS.
Compared to the current lot of leftie plans that they are trying to foist on us, most of Baldrick’s seem positively genius.
Very true, but Blackadder did keep Baldrick around far too long…
I recall the lie being uttered by Edmund Blackadder in the first series but will not be tasked to support that claim. Okay, I probably can …
https://blackadderquotes.com/i-have-a-cunning-plan
This article, while undeniably authoritative, does not seem to clearly answer the question. First usage appears to be by Sir Percy, not Baldrick nor Edmund. As Percy was a capital t Twit …
~
“They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn.”
Y’know, the left is really addicted to the narrative of themselves as scrappy resistors against “the Man”, when of course they actually *are* the Man now. I’m not a meme maker, but it seems like somebody who is could make good use of that, where “good use” means it would make lefty heads explode.
The Left has been “The Man” for twenty years at least.
35. They were installed when I started my professional life.
I would argue that the Left has been the man since Kennedy … All the ’60s were protesting against themselves … mostly. Doesn’t mean changes weren’t needed. But still …
Since FDR.
When Ike was president the Dems controlled the House six of the eight terms (missing only 1952-54.) Dems held House all except two two-year terms (the other, 1947-48, was during Truman’s first term) from 1932 until Gingrich’s “Revolution” in the 1994 election. They similarly held the Senate, although Reagan carried it for six of his eight years.
Most of that time the margins were not even close, running 60 to 70% Dems.
~
It is always much better to be the “scrappy resistors against the man” when you am the man, not like those suckers protesting on January 6th.
The kick-off to the “erection” was when when Trump called for his supporters to “peacefully protest” — and we’ve seen what the Left considers a “peaceful protest”!
~
Sigh. These geniuses are so sharp they’ll cut themselves.
~
Meanwhile,
that rough caravan,
its hour come round at last,
Slouches north towards America
to be sword voters.
I suspect most people here at least sort of follow PJMedia, but in case you don’t:
Biden’s people called a lid on Day 4: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/24/its-happening-already-joe-biden-calls-a-lid-four-days-into-presidency-n1407860
Quote: “Probably the only person who doesn’t think of this as a problem is Kamala Harris.”
Who had 7 days in the betting pool?
I gave him 2 months, not to kill himself.
Got to hold out at least two years, so Harris has her “two” terms as President. Any earlier, she can only run for one more term.
Personally, I’m not convinced they’re going to go for the 10 year plan. I’m not sure they’re patent enough, for one. Also, she’s a pretty damn irritating person, and my guess is she’s going to stick her foot in something, so they’re going to want to move her aside eventually. Or else she’s going to get into a fight with the “real” power people.
I might be wrong, but my guess is that she won’t last that long and they’ll come up with some other sockpuppet to take her place.
I don’t think so, either and I think they’re hitting the point where they can keep the worst idiots (like their street soldiers/ANTIFA/BLM and the Squad in Congress) from doing something VERY stupid. There isn’t any good “intermediary” candidates between the Biden-era and the AOC-era. That was what got Clinton in as a candidate for the Democrats-he wasn’t an old man, but he wasn’t “young and stupid” (at least in a serious, public manner). Pelosi is getting up there, Feinstein isn’t much better and is showing some dementia issues, and outside of some highly gerrymandered districts, they have to not sell what they’re actually doing.
Like I said, going to be the ’70s all over again-with worse music, more weed, and even more terrible TV.
She can be “acting” president for two.
You assume they won’t simply get a simpatico court to ‘deem’ the 22nd Amendment repealed. Harris will be President for Life if she wants to be – provided she gets to count the votes.
Depends on how much power she actually has.
I did specify that she has to be the one counting the votes.
Perhaps the “lids” will enable us to get a clearer picture of who the handlers are. I suppose there is a pretty infinite supply of flunkies and minion in DC, so I assume they will use them. But things might leak out…
Now that “President Pelosi,” is a bit less likely my paranoid projection is: Biden leaves, one way or another. Harris is immediately put under strong pressure to name a new VP. Eventually, she does. It’s either someone we’ve never heard of, or a minor Democratic apparatchik. We’re told he’s a colorless, unambitious technocrat, a placeholder.
Just like Stalin was only general secretary of the Party. Ewwwww.
Gavin Newsom. Mark my words. Saves ’em the bother and expense of grooming him for the office.
Thanks for adding more fuel to the nightmare fires.
Mine was three months
Heck Dopey Joe made it through inauguration, My estimate is long gone…
Mine too. I predicted the Potted Plant would ‘retire for health reasons’ by Christmas. I don’t think they can prop him up until this Christmas.
So basically they are publicly announcing to foreign adversaries that the President has reached the point of exhaustion and thus neither nor the nuclear codes are available for the remainder of the day.
Sir they nuked Dallas.
Nuke Dallas?
Ye-
Then nuke dallas
One note on the glorious communist revolution clever plan: Before it was the Russian imperial colonization, it only really ever took root where a country had been at full-mobilization total war for an extended period, which war the powers that be were then currently losing.
In 1917 Russia it really almost didn’t work, and only the utter and complete incompetence of initially the Tsar, and subsequently his aristos leading the White Russian armies (plural, divided, and under no coherent control), allowed Lenin and Trotsky to win.
In 1918 Germany their revolution kicked off in the Kaiser’s un-used fleet (hey, just like the Tsars – unused navies are just trouble) and spread a fair amount, but the authorities were able to stamp it out at the cost of having to accept the Armistice, leading to The 20-year World War Halftime.
And later when it was the USSR driving the revolutionary bus as a cover for Russian Imperialism, it was still only effective in places that were under major societal stress, as in the African ex-colonies after all the competent colonial administrators were pulled out, or in China where a combination of incompetent warlords, long civil war, and complicity by the Soviet agents who had thoroughly penetrated the US state department (Senator McCarthy was a blustering publicity-hound fool of an a$$ of an idiot, but he wasn’t wrong) that Mao was able to win.
But aside from scooping up ex-colonies, all they managed everywhere else was to move the Overton Window in Europe and Asia leftward and fund a lot of terrorists – and if you don’t believe that last, note right after the USSR collapsed how the PLO and the IRA and the rest of the major terror-centric groups all gave up and signed treaties and tried to go mainstream, while the smaller groups like the Red Army Faction and such all just vanished.
So in non-colonies, the Clever Plan only ever worked (or almost worked) where a long full-mobilization war was in the process of being lost.
The Clever Plan not actually working explains the outline of the current Dem actions and their efforts to completely destroy the economy (through purposefully losing the “war” on “Covid-19”), and why they are so self-evidently panicking when things don’t follow their Inevitable Arrow Clever Plan.
So yeah, Turnips.
I do believe that. And they’re convinced the US is basically the academy…..
China also had World War 2 to give the Communists a boost. The Nationalists were working on modernizing and unifying the country, and Chiang HATED the Communists (the most notable legacy of time he spent in Moscow as a guest of the Soviets). As far as he was concerned, killing Mao was more important than liberating Manchuria. But the Japanese invasion (ironically, neither Tokyo nor Nanjing wanted the war) brought all of that to a screeching halt.
HAHAHAHA!!!!! What a BEAUTIFUL rant!! My respect and liking for you grows by leaps and bounds with each blog Sarah. I regret not finding this/you sooner. Bigly. You are SOOOOO correct…….. “They” know not what they are creating and releasing into the wild. What a wonderful thing.
Also, re: the hardworking but ignorant and ineffective troll. It is afraid. Drawing enemy fire means you are over the target.
China, Iran, Germany, Russia, and Qatar are all very interesting foreign polities where certain things are concerned. Such as information about how badly they think Biden is botching the steal.
1. Caedete Eos. 2. Sic Semper Tyrannis 3. Cartago Delenda Est.
And even in Commifornia, the prosecutors are suing the Soros paid for DA’s with the public’s approval. And citing that obscure document, starts with a C, ummm, oh yeah, constitution.
Also in Glorious Gavin I’s Bear Flag Peoples Republic, the Dem Party has officially pronounced that the effort to Democratically Recall Gavin is a coup.
LOLOLOLOLOL!! Every. single. governor. of California has faced a recall bid, since around Reagan or Pat Brown or earlier, I forget. Grey Davis was simply the first recall to succeed (or first governor to fail to stave off the recall bid). And, wait…he was a Democrat! But, I don’t recall anybody then calling that a coup (and I lived there then).
The larger purpose is that they know that Republican AGs are going to sue to stop Biden executive orders and regulations the way Democrats did as well as investigations at state level of Democratic Party corruption. They are trying to prepare the battlefield so that those lawsuits and investigations can be declared by Harris/Biden to be “insurrection” and “sedition” that amount to a coup so they can use the DOJ and Federal force to go after those AGs and any private civil litigants in the cases. I suspect they will criminally charge some of those AGs (far-fetched-recall that a Democratic Party county prosecutor in Texas (in Houston if I recall correctly) indicated a sitting governor for exercising his legislative veto on the grounds that it was criminal for him to do so for some absurd concocted reason). Basically it was because he vetoed a bill the Democrats liked and they couldn’t get enough votes to override the veto.
Not only that, everybody who signed the petitions is a neo-Nazi. We are all genocidal racists for trying to vote a rich white guy out of office.
Well, duh.
It isn’t just the White House web site needing to censor comments. The local TV station WDIV here in Detroit has to stop comments or have the embarrassment of every third one or so removed because they mock and scorn the lockdown and closure of businesses – the lack of any actual data except shrill bleetings that it is ‘science’ and the open contempt for working people.
The Seattle Times blocked comments on pretty much anything political or Covid-related almost a year ago.
I still think that they will off Biden in such a way that Trump people are blamed, an AR15 is used, they make a Martyr of Biden (then Saint), Get the real Commie in office, get a call for an “assault weapon ban” steamroller going, And blame Trump for planning it.
It pushes so many buttons for them, I just can’t see how they could pass it up.
I don’t think it would go well for them, “they are the smartest people” and it will be easy for them.
It is much like the plan they had for the 6th.
If Trump had not been late, gone long on his speech a lead the way to the Capital.
The break in and everything else would have been happening “JUST AS HE GOT THERE”.
Just think how the Optics of that would have worked for them?
Really just think of that for a while. They HAD it planned, they had their timing working but Trump just didn’t DO what they thought he would. The crowed that entered the Capital didn’t either.
Just ONE picture says it ALL. The RIOTERS walking between the RED Ropes. Does THAT scream Rioters or what????
Re “rioters” staying between the ropes – You cannot be saying you believe your lying eyes over what your betters are telling you, are you?
It takes a highly trained expert to determine when something is a riotous attempted coup and alternately when it is an arson-filled murder-rampant mostly peaceful protest. That is what we have CNN for.
And it WON’T work.
As I commented to a co-worker this morning, if they had been ACTUAL “peaceful protestors,” DC would’ve looked like some re-enactors had decided to do the most realistic re-enactment of the War of 1812 EVER.
The fact that:
A) DC is still standing
B) Damages could probably be paid out of Congress’ petty cash
C) The MSM dropped the story (but not anything about trying to *find* the “insurgents”) only a day or two after
Is all rather telling…
It’s via Fox, but it has some choice quotes by Nancy Pelosi from 2011 calling the union members who stormed and took over the Wisconsin Capitol Building for days as representing “democracy in action” as she expressed vocal support and encouragement for stuff far worse than what she now declares to be sedition and insurrection. As usual, for Democrats “its different when we do it” is one of their guiding mantras.
Forgot the link:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nancy-pelosi-praised-unionists-wisconsin-state-capitol
Of course when legislators get chased out of a building so they can’t hold a vote by members of Democratic Party supporting public employee union members, it is “democracy in action”.
There wouldn’t have *been* any damage if they’d just opened the damned door.
No, preventing citizens from observing them stealing an election by declaring the building “closed to the public” is not a valid reason to lock them out.
THIS.
Ordinarily I would say the SS would have to actively be in on the assassination for someone to use an AR-15 successfully against Biden. For one thing, there’s no place in D.C. within a half mile of the Mall that the SS shouldn’t know every single point that could be used for a sniper. However, if you remember Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, who sprayed the White House with gunfire in 2011, during the Obama Administration, they totally bungled the entire search, and investigation. Although he is in prison for 25 yrs for “destruction of property” and “discharging a firearm during a crime of violence”; NOT attempted assassination of the President. (Obama wasn’t even in Washington at the time.)
Bungled the investigation, or he bungled the *wink* assassination attempt?
Cuz I’ve been saying for years that the original plan was to off Obama to put the unelectable Biden in office. but O was such a good popular figurehead that he was left alive to continue being a rubberstamp. I also think that when O found out about this is when Shadow-President Hillary suddenly had “health issues” and resigned, and after that O did nothing but play golf and goof off… I think the deal was: You resign and keep your mouth shut, and I won’t out you for conspiracy to assassinate me.
The problem is that the Secret Service had some noteworthy screw-ups during the previous Democratic administration, and not just Colombian hookers. They *should* know all of that stuff. Whether or not they’ve actually gone ahead and figured it out, though, is another question.
Schiff has already introduced a bill that would essentially treat political opponents as terrorists, and the Democratic Party media mouthpieces are waxing poetic about the 1789 Sedition Act and how it needs to be revived in order to deal with “misinformation that led to Trump”. They aren’t bothering to hide their desire to impose totalitarian control and to crush all dissent and dissenters.
I’m not sure. If Trump had been at capital he’d probably have decried the damage and destruction. Want it in the middle. Damage while marching but before he’s there
Learn from the enemy- Antifa – there’s strength in numbers. This video is great – how go into a market without masks – https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/the-liberation-of-sprouts-farmers-market/. In fact, I’d recommend even more people, but you work with what you have.
Tangent: The other day there was talk of a ATH/Hun’s D&D game. I was setting up a Discord friend JIC when I thought, “Why not just open my Discord server to the Huns to provide a place for anyone who wanted chat not controlled by big tech.”
So, for those interested, here’s a Discord invite: https://discord.gg/2bUBbfqEZu
Sarah, you’ve given me the answer. I’m not Latin, so it took you to open my eyes.
We need to weaponize the vuvuzelas.
Those POS noisemakers almost made me kill a slew of my neighbors, the one year I was living in San Diego and Mexico was in the World Cup or something. Dear Lord in heaven, those things could destroy minds, machinery, and concrete.
We surround each state capitol with a thousand vuvuzela blowers, then let fly. Even if the buildings don’t collapse people will run screaming just to get away from it.
I like that idea– our version of the walls of Jericho. 😀
OK, I finally stopped laughing. That was great. Or insane. Or both.
The ‘rioters’ of Unguided Capitol Tour should have had those. Imagine the acoustics of the Capitol dome filled to capacity with that racket! Awesome and horrible at the same time!
I’m glad others are enjoying it. ^.^ Was made during the olympics where they were really obnoxious with those…..
OMG, that “Beauty and Lord Voldemort” trailer. Ow ow pretty ow ow.
That is… amazing….
0.0
EWWWWWWW. Oh my. Brain bleach needed.
That guy reminds me of John Saxon…
That made me laugh so hard I cried which was something I clearly needed. Thanks, Foxfier.
Oh, help! laugh THIS IS THE BEST VUVUZELA VIDEO EVER MADE.
It perfectly captures the essence of the vuvu and its… followers.
Endorsed.
No signs, no slogans, no shouting, just noise.
The bass kazoo is a mighty weapon of trolling.
Well said, Patriot. We must include them in our arsenal.
A Vuvuzela is like a bugle in Q-flat.
And it’s never just one, it’s an entire stadium full of the things.
Bill Whittle did an epic rant against vuvuzelas a few years ago. He said “F***!” so many times a huge part of the video was the bleep. I laughed myself sick.
I had never heard of/heard them until the olympic games in…. the 90s?
They weren’t a Portuguese thing.
I was 14 going on 15 in 1976. We had moved to the boonies so got most of our news through radio. However, I do remember when a certain group tried to tell us that the Constitution was too old in these modern times to rule modern people. They wanted to rescind it. I’ve been looking for info, but it has strangely disappeared. The people showed up in such vast numbers for the celebration on July 4th of that year … that the idea was stomped on at that time.
They’re trying to follow it to the letter. Partly because it’s worked before,
It did?
No, seriously, it did?
Certainly not Marx’s plan. Communism in the real world occurred in two circumstances. One, it was imposed by an external power (the Warsaw Pact). Second, it occurred during a revolution in an agrarian society which either had not tried to industrialized or had tried and failed. The big industrial countries of Communism that had revolutions, the USSR and China, industrialized primarily AFTER the communist revolution. Yes, the Communists did successfully build things. That a political structure designed for an industrialized society circa 1870 could take someone prior to 1870 and get them there and maybe even 1920 should not be surprising.
Just remember, the most popular programming language in the USSR was PL/l in large part because their computer revolution claim from copying western computers like the IBM System/360 (and the PDPs quite often).
So, clearly Marx’s revolution never succeeded. It took Lenin’s reframing to agrarian societies.
Then, none of their creations have lasted a century to date. The PRC might. It has tied the USSR as of last year, but the USSR, the first communist nation, fell after 72 years by the most generous accounting.
The conquered nations lasted less than 50. The unaligned communist state outlasted them almost hitting 50. Cambodia didn’t last 25 even if you consider the Vietnam installed communists a continuation of Pol Pot’s commies.
So, no, it didn’t, not for more than three generations to date. That’s the shortest run of any system outside of fascism (without getting into quibbles about the PRC being communist or fascist, although if we consider them to have become fascist sometime in the 80s they are almost the longest running fascist government if you consider Franco’s Spain fascist, which I do not).
They think it worked but then went a bit wayward because “They Just Didn’t Do It Right™” and “This time, This time! it’ll go the right way, just you wait and see”
The takeover worked, to a lot of countries ruins.
it’s the Ruin staying for ever that they are convinced is a bug from the others not doing it quite right. Do it right and of course the perpetual motion machine will work . . . this time, no really for sure.
Others I am sure are just happy to be atop the dung heap, as long as they are the ones in power. The problems with Pol Pot and Hugo Chavez is They themselves were not the ones in control, and they want that control.
yeah.
I may be wrong– I thought Stalin changed a lot of the plan to make it work for him. But then he was a tyrant.
Lenin initially changed a lot of Marx’s assumptions…like an industrial-based economy. Lenin had an ag economy (about 80-90%) so he had to fiddle with it a bit. Stalin continued that and forced industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture that Lenin started. The 1921-22 famine was manmade and caused by Lenin’s policies.
No, the takeover plan. Someone outlined it in comments. Hold on. I think I copied it to a page. I don’t have the link to the comment itself.
This is going to sound crazy and conspiratorial, but here goes. This all makes sense in terms of a classic Communist revolution. The Democratic Party, “peaceful” BLM, and the other ethnic/LGBTQ/women’s/etc. groups are the front organizations. Antifa, “non-peaceful” BLM, and the thugs recruited by the likes of Robert Creamer are the vanguard of the revolution. There is likely a small core group, possibly partially foreign, that engages in more direct violence as well as planning and organization of direct actions. So who is the Politburo/Central Committee/Revolutionary Council? I hesitate to name any names due to lack of evidence, but some of them had influence in the Obama Administration, while others have been ensconced in universities and left-leaning think tanks. There are fellow travelers, useful idiots, intelligentsia, all the trappings of the Russian Revolution (Cuban, Iranian, etc.)
These people (including ValJar) are red diaper babies raised on this history. They intended last year to be 1905 — knowing they would not win, but they would use the street violence to create the seeds for the future victory. Instead, it unexpectedly became 1917, with Biden as Kerensky. Biden cannot last, as Kerensky didn’t and Bani-Sadr didn’t. For these folks, the next several months are going to be about toppling the Biden Administration, to be replaced with the equivalent of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Paradoxically, the weakness of the Biden regime works in their favor.
The near-term program (“Five Year Plan”) is already laid out — Green New Deal, Medicare For All, student loan forgiveness, moratorium on evictions, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, confiscation of “assault weapons,” evaluation of economics on the basis of race, free college, etc., etc. The Bolsheviks were never more than 5 percent of the Russians, but they managed to consolidate power over about a 5-year period starting in 1917. It was a period of turmoil, but in the end they prevailed over the Russian Empire and maintained their grip for 75 years. These people are engaged in an enterprise every bit as bold as that one.
A big difference between now and the 20th Century Marxist revolutions is that the Marxists and their useful idiots have had control of media and education apparatus for decades and have indoctrinated an entire generation of people who are either eager comrades, useful idiots, or terrified of being targeted for cancellation by the first two groups, not only of expressing wrongthink, but of not clapping long enough for Stalin.
A Marxist “revolution” thus really is not the model they are using, it is the “long march” model that they have been and are using, with some degree of success. What they are trying to do now is consolidate that control and to start getting rid of those who resist. They will make “examples” of people to keep the third group cowered even more and to rile up the enthusiastic comrades and useful idiots.
It’s NOT working, Cardshark. I know your pessimistic view, but it really isn’t working. Yes, they indoctrinated. But it didn’t take.
Depends on where you are. In states Democrats have dominated for years, it has taken.
No. It really, really, really hasn’t.
Remember machine politics and “preference falsification.”
Except I deal with these people on a regular basis, and a lot of people regurgitate the kool-aid; whether out of belief or fear, they are utterly mentally closed off to anything different than the party line narrative pushed by the left.
Sure. A lot do. But again, how many are “go alongs”
I agree with Sarah. Election fraud and machine politics have put and kept Democrats in power in the Democrat cities and states. I live in Philadelphia. The fraud here is a running joke. Everybody knows its fraudulent, and 2 mayors ago, he ran on an anti-machine platform…and couldn’t do a thing to kill the machine. It’s just so embedded. The Marxism isn’t embedded, but the machine is. Even the Republicans in this city play in the machine. Truly pathetic.
Odd thing about Philadelphia — I have done some looking into the history of machine politics and Philly is the only city/state to have had a Republican machine. Every place else the machines have been Democrat.
I thought the reason that the show “Boardwalk Empire” was set in Atlantic City was because Atlantic City politics was dominated by Republicans and corrupt. Is that wrong or is Philadelphia the only place with a machine or have I made some other mistake?
According to Wikipedia,
Lewis was Republican.
My thanks for bringing to my attention the existence of a second GOP machine.
The history on political machines seems to be somewhat sparse, although that may merely be a matter of my having only casually looked into the political affiliations of such operations. It might be very ripe for some enterprising PolySci student’s thesis.
~
Additionally, I ought acknowledge that I do not subscribe to HBO and haven’t in over twenty-five years, so I am woefully lacking in certain areas of Poop Cultural knowledge/awareness.
There is only so much Time and Money in this universe and I haven’t generally found HBO a worthy expenditure of either. I figure that such shows as they produce worth my attention will (like Rome and Deadwood, eventually become available on DVD — occasionally at reasonable prices.
~
Well it was the New York and Philly mobs that were the big supports of Johnson and they were pretty much equal opportunity employers in that they didn’t care whether the local machine was Democratic or Republican, as long as they allowed the rackets without undue interference.
Yep. Now there are R machines outside the city as well. Parts of Delco you have to be a registered Republican in order to have a say in any election because there are no D candidates.
When we moved here and I started looking at Philly politics I was astounded. I spent a few years in grad school researching political machines, but I thought they were mostly over and done with. Then I lived in Chicago for six months, and a few years later moved to Philly. In Philly, the whole “cement shoes in the Delaware River” is a thing. I know ward leaders who handed out “walking around money”. As someone who teaches political science I felt like I was living in a history documentary. It’s pretty crazy.
Their “weapons” action will be the key. Read something earlier about Red Flag laws being up on the agenda for 25 states, and the NRA supposedly folding over it. I need to use my Life Membership and put my shoe up La Pierre’s butt about this; because that’s precisely the avenue they’re going to exploit and use to start whittling them away.
And right at this critical point, the NRA decided to get distracted.
Well, yeah, if you define “distracted” as “fleeing to a jurisdiction that won’t jail them all”.
They waited until now. This was evident for many months, and just when wee have The China Joe Muppet Show to deal with, they are entangled and distracted.
They should have moved to Texas two years ago.
Hi dear! Injecting your daily quota of silly.
Do not forget the states who already have Red Flag Laws.
I’m not really a church-goer after I left home. I did go to the Salvation Army for a year before my late-hubby’s death. BUT I’ve been looking for a church in LV that is open. I would go to anyone of them. Not for God’s word, but to show my support for peaceful assembly. I’m really tired of the lockdowns and consider it a good way for civil disobedience right now.
On purging the army – OK, take a whole bunch of people who a) swore an oath to defend the Constitution against its enemies “foreign and domestic” and b) actually know how to fight an insurgency, and cut them loose with nothing in particular to do, and no longer required to obey the President’s orders?
Truly a cunning plan! I can’t imagine how that could go wrong for a ruling class that wants to gut the Constitution and keep power forever. (Really, have these people not heard of Germany’s Freikorps? Not that Americans would follow that model, exactly, but any Leftist aware of their history should be expecting such things.)
See the battle of Athens Tennessee
I think your mistake there is presuming any leftists are aware of ANY history whatsoever. So far as I can tell, for the vast, vast majority history began in 2008. Or 2016, whichever is more convenient to their current narrative.
If you learn history, you know that the first POC to serve as the vice president was Charles Curtis, which interferes with the Narrative.
Yeah, I hear the entire Special Operations Command all voted for President Trump – they should fire all of them and slot in some diversity hires to send over and beef up the war in Syria.
On the post-WWI German Freikorps – note that both the commies and the nazis basically had a bunch of combat vets battling it out in the streets with up to crew-served weapons, and the Weimar police doing post-battle cleanup and ineffective keystone cop chasing-around of both sides.
By not forcibly suppressing these heavily armed street gangs, the Weimar Republic alienated a major fraction of the German public, which alienation eventually was leveraged by the nazis to gain power. Mussolini made the Italian trains run on time (no mean feat), while Hitler made German streets safe again, at least for a while.
You must also remember that they will know WHY they were forced out, the are NOT going to like that.
They will also see the Officers going along with it, plus the changes Biden is forcing on the Military, they may feel that leaving is the best thing.
I wonder if paintball is going to get real popular? Can be really good group training if done well.
Or Airsoft.
My nephew’s getting out of the military. It’s not politics that’s driving him out (at least that he’ll mention). But he’s sick of so much of what he saw at the institutional level, particularly the massive levels of waste.
On the subject of not keeping your data in the cloud: I’ve been using the Evernote app for a while now to keep useful bits of info, because it automatically syncs between my computer and my phone, and the usage limits on their free plan are way more than I’ll exceed since I’m not saving pictures, just snippets of text. So far I haven’t heard anything about the company threatening to kick conservatives off or anything, but a quick glance at their careers page (not linked because I’m trying to keep this comment to one link) shows standard liberal boilerplate about diversity (and a very telling background image), so I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to happen sooner or later. So I’ve been setting up TiddlyWiki (https://tiddlywiki.com/) on an old desktop computer that I’ve turned into a low-power Linux server. It’s a great tool: I can keep my notes in it, and organize them however I want. It can also be a todo list, and can do more advanced stuff too: thanks to its plugin system and its advanced filter system, you can make it do pretty much any data-organizing task you want. (I plan to use it, among other things, to keep track of NPCs in a Star Wars RPG I plan to run.) It can run from a single HTML file with all your notes saved into a single file (very convenjent for putting on a USB stick), or if you’re technically inclined you can run a server version of the software that runs as a Web page and saves each note as a separate file (which I prefer since I can then check my notes into a Git repo).
All in all, I recommend TiddlyWiki highly as a tool for organizing your brain, not least because it puts you, not some company you don’t trust, in charge of your own data.
Yeah, losing Evernote would be annoying.
Thanks for the rec! I started using Evernote for the current WIP and I was already feeling insecure about my data. TiddlyWiki sounds like a much better solution.
The one drawback to TiddlyWiki is that since you’re hosting your own data, you’re responsible for keeping backups. If you keep everything in one HTML file and then your computer crashes mid-way through saving it, it’s possible to lose data (specifically, anything that hadn’t yet been written to disk when it crashed). Which is why I keep my TiddlyWiki backed up. My preferred backup solution is SpiderOak ONE, because like ProtonMail it’s a “zero-knowledge” solution: they encrypt your backup data on your computer before it’s ever transferred to their servers, so they have no ability to know what’s in your files and therefore can’t reveal it even in the face of a valid court order. (It also means that if you forget your backup password, which is used to encrypt your data, they can’t recover your password for you, so be appropriately responsible with it). They also have a Dropbox-like syncing solution called SpiderOak Hive, which I haven’t used yet but which might be a good solution for your TiddlyWiki files.
Hmm, I wonder if there should be a section of the perma open post for “keep control of your data” solutions, and/or cloud services that are deliberately built so that they cannot know what data you’re keeping there.
I pay $35 for two VPSes, one each from two providers on opposite ends of the country. I run DNS and Wiki and a Web server with a Drupal instance. Each one backs up to the other. Of course, I’m a reasonable experienced system administrator.
Yes, please. I’ve been reading the suggestions for securing things but haven’t had time to actually do anything yet, and it’s pretty hard to find information from “some post that I read three weeks ago”.
Same.
Go to noip.com and get a free domain name, and you can access your stuff from anywhere. And you can use sshfs to mount the Linux box onto your local filesystem if your favorite file manager doesn’t do ssh.
You can also enable ftp if you want to make files available without using Dropbox or some other service.
My Pi 3B+ is doing that, plus running the Pi Hole DNS server, plus lighttpd for my teeny web page. Well, it’s serving the “under construction” page; I haven’t moved it from its existing host yet. Whatever old desktop you’re using probably has considerably more cowbell than the Pi, which mostly sits there wavering between 0 and 1% processor utilization…
Yep. Already doing both of those (dynamic DNS and SSHFS), though I ended up going with dynu.com for my dynamic domain name since they allow me to use the DNS system for Let’s Encrypt certificates. (For anyone who doesn’t speak tech-ese, that translates to “I can get an https site automatically without having to pay for the certificate, in a secure, industry-standard way.”)
There’s a church near us that is only limiting how many folks come (500 a service) with Sunday school etc. It’s in West Linn ish, so that might be a drive….
(Warning, random thought stream ahead!)
Started re-reading “The Last Centurion” over the weekend, and through the first 10 chapters so far, I keep thinking, “This was only off by a year-ish,WTH?” My best guess is, if there’s any sort of deity out there watching over us, or guiding us along somehow, they took that book as a “how-to” guide…
One thing I came across in the book that I really should take the time to try to find out if it’s real or just something Ringo came up with, was the supposed study that showed that “multi-culturalism” is WORSE than mono-culturalism. Which also got me thinking, it seems to me, in past years (OK, way past,) the goal of immigrants to the US was to become Americans. Now, the left pushes something along the lines of “keep your old culture, don’t become “Americans,” but instead “hyphen Americans.” You don’t NEED to become us, stay you!” And, well, look at some of the stories (oft not covered by MSM,) out of European countries that go that route…
One hopes there’ll be a few D’s in the Senate either with the brains (and spine) to realize how much of what they’re trying to ram through is BAD and will lead to, let’s call it unrest, and vote against, or realize that they’re in a purple district and voting for these things will get them kicked off the trough…
I don’t have citations, but there have been a number of studies that show exactly that — multi-cultural societies are low-trust societies. All that blather about “diversity makes us stronger” is total bullshit when it comes to cultures. Diversity of experience and thought and perspectives can make institutions stronger if they have processes to handle it. But cultural diversity beyond a certain point just leads to friction. The United States actually did it better than most, despite the urge of the communazis to clamin that it is uniquely evil.
The kind of multiculturalism that I like is the kind that is like the English language. “Ooh, I like that custom, it is mine now.”
This is why tacos and sushi are comfort foods for many Americans. (Uh… probably not at the same time.)
Betcha I can find a place in Austin that offers sashimi tacos, though.
…
California fish tacos, seared Ahi tuna, soya, wasabi, and avocado.
Except for being a Cali import recipe, not bad.
” probably not at the same time.”
You’re not the boss of me!
Depends how much I pay spawn of ficus
My parents now use S&B Oriental curry spices for their simmering soups, because I got them hooked on Japanese curry. 😀
Cultural appropriation is the core of American culture. Everyone who complains about it is a bigot.
This. Or more likely a virtue-signaling brain dead moron.
You say potato, I say potato.
Cultural Purity is the worst kind of racism.
~
It’s racism piled on racism. Not only does it assume that culture and race are linked it then demands that the cultures/races remain distinct.
Hitler would have LOVED it.
He’s probably be pissed he didn’t think of it himself.
Should there be laws barring Cultural Miscegenation? No Cultural INtermarriages?
~
I don’t have citations, but there have been a number of studies that show exactly that — multi-cultural societies are low-trust societies.
Gut level response that may be of use:
Well, of course they are. When you’ve got computers using different operating systems, they don’t integrate very well. More OS’s, more complications, and the wider the variety (Say, apple, android and windows vs different flavors of windows) the harder it is.
Which is why I sometimes scream at a science fiction show on TV: “Isn’t it convenient that even the aliens are running Windows 10!”
Haha. I’ve been re-watching SG-1 and there are a number of alien devices running various versions of 20th century operating systems. Pretty hilarious.
Well you see, humans make the best programmers in the Universe….
after seeing the mess the Asgard made of programming the replicators…
Are any of the blue-ray box sets of SG1 any good? I am looking at getting one before they are deemed politically incorrect because they show that rebellion against the System Lords can succeed.
Define good? I probably won’t rebuild them but I own em all on DVD and don’t see reason for blu rays of an SD series
Later seasons were actually in hi-def (8-10) and some earlier seasons were shot in widescreen/hi-def even though they were not aired in hi-def originally.
That time a BSOD set off a naquadriah chain reaction.
My favorite is the one where they blew up an entire solar system. Not even 007 has caused that big an explosion 🙂
Ya blow up one star…
It was Rodney’s fault.
Oh gads. _Independence Day_. The aliens are using the Apple OS.
shud up. I LOVE THAT MOVIE. 😀
The Independence Day speech is worth the price of admission.
And the “The Americans have a plan” “Finally!”
Yes.
I rarely watch the entire thing. Need the clips that cover the Independence Day speech and “The Americans have a plan” “Finally” along with the other reactions. I mean having the Russians ask “When?” is also priceless. As well as the CCP commander showing in the door stating “We attack at *”. The latter lists would be fantastic .GIF’s for FB or text reactions. Right?
Me too. In fact I particularly like that stupid anachronistic alien computer bit where a Windows virus takes down the mother ship. 😀
Point of order (’cause I love that movie a ton too): It was an APPLE OS virus, not Windows. The hero who wrote it was, of course, entirely TOO COOL to use WINDOWS, gasp. (I never bought into the nonsense about only cool people using apple–frankly, I found Apple’s various OSs to only be different enough to Windows to be annoying, most of the games I wanted to play couldn’t be had on Apple, and also they wanted to charge me a ton more money for what amounted to having something with their logo on it, but which was functionally rather less useful than most other, similar tools. There was a brief period of time where their thing was the best, easiest to use thing–ipod, and ipad when it first came out–but that was a very, VERY brief time, and once I found out that they refused to continue to support my ipad–to the point that apps I PAID MONEY FOR can no longer be used on it unless I shell out another 900 bucks for a new ipad–I’m pretty much done with ’em.)
Er…please excuse the side rant about Apple. It’s shaping up to be one of THOSE days, and apparently I couldn’t stop myself.
But yes, I hollered about the whole “Wait, they did what with what now?” but I still didn’t care, I loved the movie.
And I hadn’t heard the fan theory about the Apple OS being the result of alien code from Area 57. I *like* that theory!
Because real life is utterly ridiculous.
ALSO I could totally see my husband bashing something together that looks like a Windows virus BUT takes down a mothership. I’ve seen him do similar magic (of the constructive kind.) I’m a believer.
Well to be fair the aliens had been to earth eons before, nheroes knew that in ID1, and were using their tech to integrate with earth tech. Who is to say that the aliens didn’t invent the thing in the first place … just saying.
FYI. I too gave up on Apple for the same reasons. Only I gave up when the Mac replaced the Apple IIe. Never have had an iPad, or iPod. I don’t play computer or video games mostly only use what is free on the platform (since don’t use Apple, don’t know what is/isn’t) and open source. (I know bad example for a programmer.) Thus compatibility isn’t driving my decision. Cost is. Not into the “upgrade to get more”. Not for a long, long time. By the time we upgrade a laptop, there are multiple points of failure, and isn’t worth more than recycling components.
Yeah, that’s why, generally speaking, I still prefer a desktop PC (though at the moment I am using a very nice laptop, but): I can upgrade/replace parts as needed. And Microsoft, at least, was wise enough to take the debacle that was Windows 8 (which I skipped entirely, as did anyone with sense) and offered Windows 10 free to their users as an apology. And while there are aspects of it I’m not a fan of (you can’t turn off updates, for one thing–not an issue for me, with a pretty new laptop, but older computers it causes problems), it’s proven relatively stable.
Heh. We had an Apple IIe. I played Zork and Moonmist and Kings Quest IV on it until the monitor became unusable (and, of course, since it was all one with the actual machine, just replacing the monitor wasn’t an option, alas).
I like modern tech stuff because I love computer games–but yeah, not a fan of Apple’s behavior, nor Microsoft and Adobe’s push to the subscription model for their major programs. No, I don’t WANT to pay you an exorbitant yearly fee to use the damn program. I’ll keep using my old ones, thank you.
I only became comfortable with the mac when they went to Unix (MacOS X), probably because I worked for a couple decades at Sun.
Now I’m about to transition to Linux, because Apple is becoming stupidly political. It was mostly fun while it lasted.
Apple: Nobly changes “master-slave” terminology for hardware. Also fights tooth-and-nail against laws that require it to not use slave labor for its products.
THIS.
Better than windows
There is the fan theory that says the aliens run Apple OS because an Area 51 scientist deciphered their programming language and went to work for Apple. It’s at least better than most fan theories …
One of my favorite stores about Independence Day is that the studio balked at casting Wil Smith. “The rubes can’t handle a black protagonist!” Did anyone complain about a black protagonist? Of course not. Like all blue enclaves, Hollywood is a cesspool of racism and misogyny that it projects on everyone else.
Yeah, I have been staring in baffled astonishment at the recent years of Hollywood going “Oh, we’re so racist. our AUDIENCE is so racist, they won’t watch a black lead in movies!” and here’s me over here going “Erm…did they erase the fact that Will Smith was probably THE biggest action star of the mid 90s/early 2000s…? And a huge tv star of one of THE most popular 90s tv series before that?!” But then, of course they did. Just like they erased what a big action star Denzel Washington was (and to some extent, still is). Not to mention Samuel L. Jackson.
Not to mention “people won’t watch a black actor in a white role.” Apparently they missed Kenneth Branaugh casting Denzel as Keanu’s brother in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” Of course, he’s in the woke doghouse for not casting any Asians in “Murder on the Orient Express.”
Pretty sure the majority of that lot isn’t cultured enough to have even SEEN Much Ado, let alone understand it enough to realize that Denzel and Keanu were supposed be brothers, heh.
Well, they do describe John as “the Bastard.” 😀
Wesley Snipes, before he self-destructed.
Blade was a Marvel movie starring a black dude *decades* before Black Panther
Meh. Check Wesley Snipes’ films in the Nineties – the man had a great decade! For that matter, i the Eighties Eddie Murphy was a box office giant.
It isn’t that Hollywood is racist (okay, they are racist, but that isn’t the issue.) It is that they are a) convinced their audience is racist (also stupid, sexist and religious zealots — because those are the people the fled to Hollywood to escape) and b) highly risk averse. Audiences might accept Snipes but they would SURELY accept Ahnuld or Stallone; why take the chance?
Add in the fact that for over half a century Southern theatres would demand “racially acceptable” movies (which sometimes resulted in films being assembled so that Southern exhibitors could excise inconvenient scenes featuring Black actors) and it is easy to understand Hollywood’s lingering caution.
That such caution also aligned with their prejudices against minority actors, regional audiences and blue-collar Americans just makes them harder to shake.
~
Fat Albert and the Cosby kids was in the 70s, pushing the bar back further!
I was told by publisher after publisher that the fans couldn’t handle a gay male protagonist, much less a romance as part of the plot.
Then I wrote AFGM. I think I’ve had ONE complaint, and the person was fairly incoherent.
It helps enormously that it’s an actual romance and not just a) porn or b) emotional porn where the protagonist is made generic for audience self-insertion so they can believe that people will just love them for no good reason. Edward Cullen and Christian Grey are more unrealistic than the well-hung pizza boys who deliver to sexy, horny women.
Recently read a book where the aliens were criticized for having a standardized system on all their ships BUT it took a top-of-the-line superpowered mechanical genius AND a top-of-the-life superpowered artificial intelligence to crack it, and they had to distract the aliens to give them the time to figure it out.
(Bones of the Past by Drew Hayes for the curious.)
Robert Putnam paper from 2007: “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty‐first Century”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x
Of course, if you search on “diverse neighborhoods lower trust” you will find a slough of articles from the Usual Suspects to the effect of “NUH UH! It’s just white people!!! It’s all white people’s fault!”
[eyeroll]
I see that asserted as fact quite often, but I’ve never seen anyone point to a working example of it.
This is the study most often cited. He set out to prove the opposite.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FvFN8ACY6taivkcbzDGgYy1-EPb1kbbQ/view
I like the image of a chain of heavy strong iron or steel links… and one link is a mere paperclip. “Diversity is NOT strength.”
If people have more or less the same assumptions, or at least if they share the same assumptions about, say, the political/civics framework, or the religious framework, people can get along reasonably well.
But the fewer common cultural practices and values and assumptions that people share, the more difficult it is for them to bond civically, and to give casual trust.
It drives my mom nuts to see people sitting on a front porch, having a front door open, etc. All those things are considered perfectly fine by her if they are taking place in a backyard, especially if it’s a fenced backyard. I don’t know; maybe it’s a German thing.
I live in a neighborhood full of people with Kentucky or southern Ohio or Tennessee roots. A lot of people on my parents’ street, and in my whole hometown, are porch sitters. My mom is doomed to be worried about this. (Even though, logically, it’s safer to live in an area with tons of visible porch sitters, as opposed to a few unnoticed window-gazers doing neighborhood watch from a concealed vantage point.)
He is right.
John says it was “dictated.” Sometimes we gateway writers pull from a parallel world.
From some reports All Fiction Authors pull from Actual Universes (Past, Present, Future).
Of course, as Princess Ozma (in the Wearing The Cape series) says, sometimes the authors don’t correctly report what the Real History of those Universes are. 😆
At least gateway authors. But there seem to be “variants.”
Some of the things I’ve thought I’ve thought up must be be from nasty, nasty Abyssal (and Abysmal) places. I do not like that any idea any more than I like the idea my thoughts created such horrors. Speculative Monstrousness is… not exactly nice.
Well, Princess Ozma doesn’t believe that Baum created Oz (and she should know).
But she did say that Baum and the other authors were writing Children Stories so they “toned down” what they saw concerning the Land of Oz. 😀
The multiculti do-not-assimilate side wants secure walled ghettos by victim group. If nobody can ever cross over those walls, they can control the story within each ghetto and wild each victim group as a monoblock.
This is why the pink pistols and the conservative Hispanics are so worrisome to them – crossovers allow comparison of narratives, and that endangers their control of the monoblocs.
^^wield each victim group as a monobloc.^^
I had to go frelling hunt down autocorrupt settings again and turn it back off. Yeesh.
“Multiculturalism” is nothing but a destructive propaganda weapon, and I have nothing good to say about it.
I will defend cosmopolitanism, however. Cosmopolitanism takes assimilation and cultural appropriation in stride, and pays due respect to “When in Rome, live in the Roman way. When you are elsewhere, live as they do there.” And in a strange reversal of these strange times, the “rural hicks” of flyover country have a better claim to being cosmopolitan than the current crops of narrow-minded provincial urbanites with their 9th Avenue view of the world.
Also, a country as large as the US *needs* cultural flexibility. One of the evils of the Left is their attempt to impose the Washington DC Way on places as far apart as Maine, Michigan, Montana, and Mississippi.
Mono-culturalism need only adhere to a few core items to be successful. Most of the one’s for America are imbedded in the Bill of Rights. Stand by those and the other stuff* is mostly trivial.
Look at any organization – military, athletic team, band/orchestra – and you will find certain central precepts that unify it and coordinate activity. Most multiculturalism is of the fashionable sort, stylistic without effect o core values. For example, you hardly ever hear multiculturalism cited as defense of some group’s abusive treatment of women, gays, children. Note that when you do hear that defense it is primarily used as justification for not acting to halt the abuse..
*With the exception of BBQ options.
~
Take their Covid-psy-ops. It worked. And it was all run on the “experts” and how important it was.
A not insignificant part of that was the expert’s connection to government was downplayed. It was emphasized they were “doctors” and “scienitists”, not government buerocrats, much less politicians.
So they success traded on American’s willingness to defer to professionals, that is people they would normally hire for a specific skill set like they do tax professionals, be it H&R Block or a CPA. They were sold not a professional political doctor in Fauci, but someone like a specialists their personal doctor might send them to.
That will only work once. Now, by their actions, these people have done a lot to discredit their professions, at least when the professional isn’t in buggy whip range to be checked and corrected.
because Clinton does love America. It’s a bit like a vampire loving humanity because humans are tasty
I’m actually going to stand up for Bill. Bill Clinton really was a trailer park JFK. The author of Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America described why JFK and Nixon were both anti-communist in an interview. For Nixon, he saw the communists as destroying freedom in the sense hard working small family business people like his parents. His anti-communism was not far from Ayn Rand in source. JFK on the other hand saw them as destroying freedom which mean girls and fun and nights out and partying. Both were right both in their fears and their opposition, but it stemmed from different values.
Bill Clinton loved freedom and America the same way.
Now Hillary, yes, Hillary was a “drain what you can vampire”. But I think Bill was a “hey, this can get me laid/a good time in general” kind of guy. He would have been a better president and, more importantly, a better former president without his wife. The question is, would he have been president at all without her. He’d probably have been the George Wallace of Arkansas and been more than happy with the good times that brought.
Word around from folks in Arkansas was that Bill didn’t care one way or the other, but Hillary was determined to be Mrs. President.
My Aunt worked for the Republican party in Arkansas during the Clinton years. Bill did exactly what he was accused of. But it was Hillary that did the worst damage.
Gee, that sounds awfully familiar. That might be the one thing that’s keeping FICUS alive right now.
(As an aside, Kurt Schlichter’s Crisis has a darkly funny bit where he compares the FICUS VPs to Spinal Tap’s drummers. IIRC, anaphylactic food allergy for Commie, and death by donut for Stacey Abrams.)
So like Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer except not as handsome?
(Remembers some part from Season 2 where he says he won’t destroy the world because he actually likes the world: It has the Beatles, Manchester United and billions of people walking around like Happy Meals on two legs.)
That’s not a bad comparison, no. it also fits a bit with James Masters, who was supposed to be a one off character, but messed so well and was so easy to worth with he became reoccurring.
Dru, not so much.
So Bill and Hillary as Spike and Drusilla? Yeah, that works including the part about Spike being much better without Dru around.
Apparently people in The Netherlands have finally gotten to the “we’re not going to take it any more” stage in connection with CCP Virus restrictions:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/01/25/anti-lockdown-riots-erupt-netherlands-imposes-covid-curfew/
Let me know when they eat their Prime Minister again.
So many capable, connected, and wealthy enough to have options people, had to choose staying and fighting, or fleeing to the US to start a new (but peaceful) life.
Communists have never faced large numbers of those sorts of people…..
They are foolish to back those enemies against a wall.
The commies’ real mistake is that they couldn’t first disarm us.
Re. diversity does not lead to happiness. There’s a great book entitled “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise” about Spain (and Portugal) during the Moorish occupation. It draws from primary sources, and not only explains where the myth of the Convivincia came from, but shreds it to bits. (Totally politically incorrect, well written, highly recommend.)
You know, while I agree with that part, this book got walled.
It confuses the extreme North of Portugal — almost no Moors — with the South. SERIOUSLY it seems to think that the region my ancestors come from WAS in Andalusia or close by.
It’s nothing that any American would catch, but I just couldn’t take it seriously after that.
I have read original sources that say the same about the Convivencia being bullshit, but this particular author does the cause no favors.
Interesting. I liked the book, but it probably helped that I know almost nothing about Portugal.
It was SUCH a glaring issue.
Now, I’ve been known to confuse region names for lands I don’t know very well, but…
One does get the idea that the left is perhaps even more interested in reconstituting the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate than they are the Soviet Union.
Eh. Whichever they think will put them in power. What they don’t know is that it puts them up against the wall with their final request of “with blindfold or without?”
I just came across this last night:
I love that channel.
I haven’t read the book, but I was under the impression that “Andalusia” in this context meant “all of the Iberian peninsula”, not just the southern Spanish province. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus)
The reviews on Goodreads seem about equally distributed between:
5 stars: OMG I knew it!
1 star: Right-wing fake history.
3 stars: Well-sourced but over-eggs the pudding.
No. Andalusia is the Southern portion. He specifically makes a comment about everyone in the area my ancestors came from being “mostly moorish” and that’s nonsense.
I’ve read the book, and you are at least parlly wrong. The author uses ‘Al-Andalus’ or ‘Andalusia’ to mean all of Muslim-ruled Spain, not the small southern region that still retains that name. I don’t recall him saying anything about anyone being ‘mostly Moorish’; in fact, he makes the point that after the first couple of generations, the so-called Moors themselves were largely Spanish or Frankish by blood, because so many of them were the offspring of native concubines.
It’s not btw that I’d mind (or care) about Moorish blood. It’s just that it’s fairly bizarre.
I mean, Dad and I climbed all over Portugal to look at ruins and physical remains, and that’s just so wrong it’s not even wrong.
I must find this book. Thank you for the recommendation.
The author is Dario Fernández-Morera. You can get a pretty good summary from his interview with Gad Saad, from a few years ago. The Saad Truth channel on Youtube.
I bought the book and read about half (you’ve never seen so many citations in your life), but the interview did better at sticking in my head.
….and apparently DOJ being asked to investigate election fraud claims is now insurrection and a coup attempt: (also in perma-post)
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/a-doj-coup-attempt-no-an-honest-disagreement-about-the-election.php
The oldies are still the best: “Want to know what the D’s are really up to? Look at the claims they make against their enemies.”
So true! What they’ve done is a coup, so of course they’re going around accusing their opponents of that.
To point back to Sarah and the and the abused spouse syndrome, the R’s fall in line, quick to agree, quick to scuttle to a vernier of normalcy and perceived safety. If you’ve seen this in person, it’s not something you forget.
I pray someone will primary Romney and win.
That seems to be the current strategy in a lot of areas. In the last few days I’ve received a whole bunch of donation requests from Trump Republicans who are planning a primary run against a GOPe incumbent. Some of the opponents are Congresscritters who voted to certify, some of them are governors of states or state legislators who are seen as complicit in the steal, and no doubt some are local officials (mayors, sheriffs, etc). But the critical thing is that these candidates are trying to force a compromised incumbent out at the primary election, so no matter who wins the general election, it won’t be that person.
Our former congresscritter (Greg Walden) took the retirement route to get out of Dodge. He had primary opposition in 2018, but regional differences hurt the challenger (our district is huge because of low population, so what’s important to South Central OR may not mean a damned thing to somebody elsewhere).
OTOH, Walden stepped on his [redacted] when he endorsed a recalled county commisioner for state legislative office. Said guy lost the primary (badly), changed to Dem and then got curbstomped in the general. Didn’t help Walden one bit.
Talk about a creepy kind of character. Whew
Romney absolutely needs to be primaried. Would not surprise me if he pulls an Arlen Spector and switches parties to avoid it.
What makes you think there will be any more Republican primaries?
Oh, no, they LOVE Republican primaries. Because open primaries allow them to retain a veneer of squishy Republicans who will love losing.
We’ll not only get Republican primaries, we’ll see plenty of Republicans elected. They’re all Uniparty now, or will be once the last few holdouts are purged.
I think you underestimate the fervour of the blocking troops. There are already moves afoot to unseat some Republicans from Congress, and to classify opposition to the Democrats as hate speech.
If these moves proceed, expect the Republican Party to be completely outlawed.
“… expect the Republican Party to be completely outlawed.”
Nonsense. The dirty little secret is that the Dems need the Republican Party. As a minority party, admittedly, but they need it. First, it impairs development of a serious alternative party. Second, it helps keep their voters and party dissenters in line. Third, it justifies their fund-raising and disbursement of those funds to a vast array of consultants, advisers and campaign aids.
If they should be so insane as to outlaw the GOP (never a fully discardable propositio) expect the Democrat Party to schism within one campaign cycle, two at most.
~
Dictatorships don’t have opposition parties and don’t permit them to be formed. Once the Republicans are outlawed, the Democrats will no more allow opposition parties to form, or dissenters to leave their ranks, than the Chinese Communist Party which they are so obviously emulating.
Further to the above: There won’t be any more election cycles, either, if your country does go to one-party rule. ‘One man, one vote, one time,’ as they say in Africa.
“… expect the Republican Party to be completely outlawed.”
Nonsense. The dirty little secret is that the Dems need the Republican Party. As a minority party, admittedly, but they need it. First, it impairs development of a serious alternative party. Second, it helps keep their voters and party dissenters in line. Third, it justifies their fund-raising and disbursement of those funds to a vast array of consultants, advisers and campaign aids.
If they should be so insane as to outlaw the GOP (never a fully discardable proposition) expect the Democrat Party to schism within one campaign cycle, two at most.
~
“… expect the Republican Party to be completely outlawed.”
Nonsense. The dirty little secret is that the Dems need the Republican Party. As a minority party, admittedly, but they need it. First, it impairs development of a serious alternative party. Second, it helps keep their voters and party dissenters in line. Third, it justifies their fund-raising and disbursement of those funds to a vast array of consultants, advisers and campaign aids.
If they should be so insane as to outlaw the GOP (never a fully discardable proposition) expect the Democrat Party to schism within one campaign cycle, two at most.
~
“… expect the Republican Party to be completely outlawed.”
Nonsense. The dirty little secret is that the Dems need the Republican Party. As a minority party, admittedly, but they need it. First, it impairs development of a serious alternative party. Second, it helps keep their voters and party dissenters in line. Third, it justifies their fund-raising and disbursement of those funds to a vast array of consultants, advisers and campaign aids.
If they should be so insane as to outlaw the GOP (never a fully discardable proposition) expect the Democrat Party to schism within one campaign cycle, two at most.
[N.B.: Possible Duplicate Reply. WP is being … temperamental today.]
~
THIS IS A TEST! WP is repeatedly “posting” the following reply to Tom Simon without the reply ever appearing. If this reply does not get relegated to WP Limbo I will be astounded. WPDE.
“… expect the Republican Party to be completely outlawed.”
Nonsense. The dirty little secret is that the Dems need the Republican Party. As a minority party, admittedly, but they need it. First, it impairs development of a serious alternative party. Second, it helps keep their voters and party dissenters in line. Third, it justifies their fund-raising and disbursement of those funds to a vast array of consultants, advisers and campaign aids.
If they should be so insane as to outlaw the GOP (never a fully discardable proposition) expect the Democrat Party to schism within one campaign cycle, two at most.
~
I suspect as a first term (possibly second term by Romney’s term expires in 2026) Representative Burgess Owens is unlikely to be ready for such a challenge, but Mitt probably, at his age, won’t want to be the one to deny Utah’s first African-American senator. Of course, Mia Love’s two-terms in the House would seem to have her ready to serve as the state’s first African-American Female (cis-gendered) senator.
Either would be more reliably conservative than Mitty.
~
I’d be very shocked indeed if Mittens gave way to anyone, even “first African American senator”–you are assuming that Mittens isn’t all about the power. Mittens is ALL about the power, and if he can hang onto it, you’d better believe he will. Why d’you think he lacks a spine and sucks up to the Dems?
I’d think that if he could, Mittens would be the next Orrin Hatch, and cling to power by his ever-lengthening fingernails for as long as he can fool people into voting for him.
(And according to people who encountered him–including my parents–his father was even *worse.*)
Romney has no power. He has office, and the perquisites of office, nothing more. He may cling to them all he wishes; but a man who has to beg his enemies for mercy every day is not a man with power.
Fair point. He *wants* power. Desperately. Which also means he’s unlikely to step aside for anyone else–to do so would be to surrender even the faintest chance at gaining power.
That also at least partly explains why he positions himself in between the Republicans and Dems. The pivot vote has more power than a solid partisan.
Yeah, the scuttling to a veneer of normalcy can’t be unseen. I kind of *understand* it. It was very uncomfortable when the timeline split and I realized I was living in a horribly corrupt country (reminded me of The Man in the High Castle. Very creepy…). So scuttling back to “there was no fraud, the dems just won the election with special get-out-the-vote efforts” got them back to a feeling of normalcy. But at the cost of a bit of their grasp on sanity and a lot of their moral standing.
I always thought there had to be a closeted conservative on the writing staff of that show — someone who was able to slip leftist talking points into Nazi mouths without the others catching it. The Nazi schools emphasize the Founding Fathers as slaveholders and the Indian wars as extermination. The Nazi propaganda push is for Year Zero and the destruction of American icons. The Nazi leaders glorify youth demonstrations and riots against the insufficiently compliant. Mutual Assured Destruction keeps the peace between the superpowers.
comment
Moo?
LOL: “the right are ABUSED SPOUSES. They reflexively cower when the left flexes its muscles.” OMG thank you for that truth-image. Best shot of the day!
Honestly, it’s been in my head a long time. It explains SO MUCH.
Be great to see this spelled out in a full blown posting and linked over at Insty. Maybe the kind of thing that sneaks past peoples’ surface defenses and sinks in at the gut level.
I’ll take it under advisement. I have a few guest posts this week, because I need to finish paying work.
Yeah … paying work first!
Frankly, the American Right remind me of abused husbands. Nobody on the Left is actually flexing any muscles, because they haven’t got any, but they are being verbally, emotionally, and financially abusive, and they are getting away with it because the stupid husband was brought up never to hit a woman and doesn’t know any other way to fight.
OMG so much this.
Ex: needle needle needle needle needle
Me: [resigned sigh]
Ex: needle needle needle needle needle needle
Me: BOOM
Ex: You’re scaring me! You monster!
(“BOOM” refers to me blowing my top, not the sound of an impact.)
c4c
And hare’s a C19 vax update in the category News Of Our Betters:
https://variety.com/2021/film/news/covid-vaccine-hollywood-skipping-line-1234891647
…at the end of it there might very well be a turnip…
Potato!
(I am, admittedly, began as a Tom Baker Dr. Who fan, and it was nice to get to see him ham it up in a different role.)
ham…..
In this part of the country that would probably be Smithfield … if you went north instead of east it would be Virginia. Both have their charms if you can digest them.
Given his seamanship I would think him a salty ham indeed.
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Bacon
I do not think the left is nearly as cunning as Baldrick. Nearly as noisome; but not as cunning.
Holy @!#%! Probably just a logistic cock-up but it could hardly be worse as a calculated insult.
‘More like a snack for a toddler than a meal for an adult’: How our National Guard troops are being fed at the Capitol
National Guard troops stationed at the Capitol famously have had to nap on the building’s marble floors, but that’s not the worst thing about their working conditions. The food is. The reason: The National Guard Bureau hired a food contractor to feed the troops, but the contractor simply messed up.
Here’s a picture of today’s “breakfast” as passed along to me.
IMG_6760.jpeg
Some of the troops didn’t get this filling breakfast of an apple (at least it looks like a good apple!) and a gross chocolate chocolate-chip muffin in a brown bag until after 10 a.m.
Here’s another meal, supposed to get a soldier through the day until dinner.
IMG_6757.jpeg
That’s a pair of Pop-Tarts, an apple, a granola bar, and a Capri Sun. As one source put it, “Are we asking adults to guard the Capitol, or are we sending 10-year-old kids to camp for the morning?”
Dinner arrived, and here it was: A miniature sub from Jersey Mike’s and a bag of chips. (To be fair, sea salt and vinegar is the best flavor.)
[END EXCERPT – PIX IN SEPERATE POSTS]
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“Breakfast” picture:
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Clearly this food operation is tied in with the “Apple-A-Day”!
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Here’s the (ice-cold) dinner for the troops defending “our” capitol:
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I’m reminded of the pile of fast-food burgers & fries Trump laid on for those college football players visiting the White House. It’s said that both God and the Devil are in the details, and a comparison & contrast between that event and this one would be evidence for those propositions.
They are BIZARRELY incompetent.
I wonder what the menu is in the White House Mess or in the Capitol Dining Room. You’d think they’d at least manage to cough up a few buckets of their famous Senate Bean Soup:
Senate Bean Soup
https://www.cop.senate.gov/reference/reference_item/bean_soup.htm
Bean soup is on the menu in Senate restaurants every day. There are several stories about the origin of that mandate, but none have been corroborated.
According to one story, the Senate’s bean soup tradition began early in the 20th century at the request of Senator Fred Dubois of Idaho. Another story attributes the request to Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota, who expressed his fondness for the soup in 1903.
The recipe attributed to Dubois includes mashed potatoes and makes a 5-gallon batch. The recipe served in the Senate today does not include mashed potatoes, but does include a braised onion. Both Senate recipes are below.
The Famous Senate Restaurant Bean Soup Recipe
2 pounds dried navy beans
4 quarts hot water
1 1/2 pounds smoked ham hocks
1 onion, chopped
2 tablespoons butter
salt and pepper to taste
Wash the navy beans and run hot water through them until they are slightly whitened. Place beans into pot with hot water. Add ham hocks and simmer approximately three hours in a covered pot, stirring occasionally. Remove ham hocks and set aside to cool. Dice meat and return to soup. Lightly brown the onion in butter. Add to soup. Before serving, bring to a boil and season with salt and pepper. Serves 8.
Bean Soup Recipe (for 5 gallons)
3 pounds dried navy beans
2 pounds of ham and a ham bone
1 quart mashed potatoes
5 onions, chopped
2 stalks of celery, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
half a bunch of parsley, chopped
Clean the beans, then cook them dry. Add ham, bone, and water and bring to a boil. Add potatoes and mix thoroughly. Add chopped vegetables and bring to a boil. Simmer for one hour before serving.
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He hasn’t lost the art of the troll.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Trump Mar-a-lago wgah’nagl fhtagn!
Oh, if only.
I wish I could claim credit but I stole it from Glenn Reynold’s emailer. https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/428208
Which has a comment:
“That is not politically dead which can eternal lie, and in strange eons even deplatforming may die.”
Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
All the cats of Kadath suddenly decide to come Fix Things.
This, and the picture of POTUS from his golf cart yesterday made me feel really good and happy. Stronger in a nice way.
Schumer essentially urging Biden to assume dictatorial power:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/01/25/schumer-biden-should-consider-declaring-climate-emergency-so-he-can-do-things-without-congress/
Anyone who didn’t realize that the CCP Virus lockdowns and decrees were simply a trial run wasn’t paying attention.
THAT will go well!
Damn. You ought to put *these* types of essays in a book. I’d buy it in a heartbeat even if it is only a Kindle book (don’t like ’em, need the tactile memory cues). Reading essays like this I have the experience I got from reading Nehru’s observations on history (he did a lot of them, too). Most of them were notes or explanations to his daughter, who was in school. Anyhow, they’re refreshing, original, thought-provoking. Not always totally right or agreeable, but a totally right or agreeable book is often the worst kind. Please consider it, and thanks for the occasional war-cries!
Reblogged this on The way I see things ….
They have a Cunning Plan… which reminds me of the blurb for “A Civil Campaign” by Bujold.
“He has a cunning plan…”
Hm. Progs are too evil to be Miles, so I guess they’re more like Cavilo.
When it comes to guns they – and “they” include the Feds, State legislatures, courts, banks and other financial institutions – will use lots of methods other than outright confiscation:
Applying horrendous federal and state taxes on ammo
Registration
Not lending to manufacturers or owners
Anyone on a Federal or State health plan could be asked by their doctor if they own guns
– They tried this already. Might try it again.
“Guns” will be considered a health risk and therefore disallowed under government-run health insurance
…and so on. There’s all kinds of ways they could gum up the ownership machinery. And the problem is that application of executive rules are instantaneous whereas the recourse for law abiding citizens are the courts – which are extremely slow, expensive, and not always certain.
You see, it’s always much easier to stop something (like gun ownership) than to start something – or restore something. And the Socialists are all about stopping…not providing…Freedom.
And, as others have said much better than I, we cannot sit around hoping that this or that GOP politician will do the right thing. You can’t count on that – as we know to our cost.
So we the citizens have to do it and the first step is to get to work on local legislatures….supporting, working for and voting for one who support individual freedom.
And if/when we find out they lied to us – as all too often happens – recall them or vote them out next time around. Without fail.
Don’t forget, however, that laws such as that still require the cooperation of the citizen to really work. And sure, there’ll be some who do cooperate. But to pull such crap as that…I point you at the success (or rather, utter non-success) of Prohibition. And that was a freakin’ Amendment, that supposedly had huge support.
Instead, the vast majority of the country paid it lip service, and did what they wanted.
How, exactly, can the government collect taxes on my guns if I say I lost them all in a tragic boating accident? How is the insurance company gonna prove I own guns if I say the same to them? Sure, bust into my house without a warrant, maybe…but that opens a whole OTHER can of problematic worms.
Rule of law in a country such as this requires a certain level of cooperation. I forget where I read it, but someone once pointed out that, thanks to countless stupid little laws on the books, pretty much all of us are lawbreakers at any given time during the average week, and we don’t even know it. We all chuckle over those lists out there of “silliest laws on the book” for given locations–apparently in one place it’s against the law to ride an ugly horse within town limits. Obviously, that’s not a law that’s going to get enforced, because it’s going to get zero cooperation (and probably had zero cooperation from the start of whatever led to some idiot getting that onto the books in the first place).
Or there’s that supposed military saying: “Never give an order you know won’t be followed.” Same principal, which the lefties entirely fail to grasp: don’t put into law that which people won’t follow. Even GOD doesn’t force us to follow His laws, and His are actually pretty simple and straightforward. But we have to cooperate–He’s not going to force us.
It’s telling, I think, that lefties think they can tread where even God won’t.
Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a-day)
That reminds me, I need to create another trust and move my non-NFA guns to that. (easy in my state; not so simple in others)
If I’m ever red-flagged, I can then honestly answer “no” when asked if I own any firearms. (and the trick to that is to rephrase their question, “Do you mean…[some legally-specific term]” that requires a yes or no, as opposed to a general question they might ask.
We’ve got a couple docs amongst the regulars of the weekly pistol league shooters. This should go over well. (Rural MN isn’t the Twin Cities.)
Try ‘if you own a gun, no Social Security for you’ on for size. The bureaucrats can make up any rules they want. You can take ’em to court over it, but…
Ah yes I forgot the mist insidious method they will use- TRX reminded me (thanks):
Some person brands you a danger and your guns go away.
Can’t practice with them either.
I was just wondering if you’d seen what they are doing to Brandon Straka, the founder of the Walk Away movement. Seems to fit in perfectly with your “make an example of someone” paragraph.
Shoveling Out from Snow and Political BS
W
W
Shoveling Out from Snow and Political BS
January 26, 2021 • 69 min
At measuring the historical significance of yesterday’s snowfall, we swerve quickly towards the arrest of Brandon Straka, Biden’s transgender military policy, and super important issues like what my son is listening to on his iPod.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/139-scott-voorhees-27091316/#
Am listening.
I’m considering getting a nice rope and having it near the door for the next round of elections. Republicans should hang, preferably by their own entrails, and Democrats/Communists should be shot on site. Do not suffer a statist to live is quickly becoming a more preferred motto than my current one (Evolution isn’t working fast enough, more dumbarses need to be shot).
With the Stasi/FBI already rounding up dissidents I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere unarmed anymore, even places I can’t legally. Because the law has simply become a fiction I see little reason to adhere to it anymore.
I am an occasional reader and I think I agree with most if not all of your political views. However, I am concerned that this post (as long and wonderful as it is) is too optimistic.
But it was a JOY to read and I shall save it and savor it for when I am feeling down.
Thanks for writing it.
No. the inflection point is confusing, and I’m not saing it’s not going to get bad. It is. But I don’t think they win in the end.
The annoying thing is, I don’t want to “win” anything. I just want them to leave me the hell alone.
That’s not looking like a likely situation, though.
That means we win.
I am an occasional reader and I agree with most, if not all, of your political views. However, I am concerned that this post (as long and wonderful as it is) is too optimistic.
But it was a JOY to read and I shall save it and savor it for when I am feeling down.
Thanks for writing it.
TEST POST
WP has been relegating to WP Limbo several efforts to reply to comments in this Post. This is a test of whether ANY comments I try to add here will be accepted. WPDE!
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Well, that’s that, then. WP is just being a prick. Here is the intended response to Tom Simon’s comment at January 26, 2021 at 1:27 pm:
“… expect the Republican Party to be completely outlawed.”
Nonsense. The dirty little secret is that the Dems need the Republican Party. As a minority party, admittedly, but they need it. First, it impairs development of a serious alternative party. Second, it helps keep their voters and party dissenters in line. Third, it justifies their fund-raising and disbursement of those funds to a vast array of consultants, advisers and campaign aids.
If they should be so insane as to outlaw the GOP (never a fully discardable proposition) expect the Democrat Party to schism within one campaign cycle, two at most.
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I have been saying, for some years now, that I don’t KNOW if the media is/are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Dem Party, or if it’s the other way round, but it’s OBVIOUS that they are in CAHOOTS.
I do not know if it is either way, but if it were how would it be any different?
Okay, first thought on that question is that the media would be less sycophantic due to a perceived need to disguise the affiliation.
But then, I long ago learned that the word best defining the media is not “smart” but “glib.”
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The PostModern Left are modern-day Jacobins. They will have their unFrench Revolution, with the same effectiveness. What comes afterwards — an American Empire, or a resurgent American Republic — is the serious question.