First Slow, Then Fast by Orvan Taurus

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

First Slow, Then Fast by Orvan Taurus

Consider Activation Energy

One thing I recall from an old chemistry text is that if hydrogen and fluorine gasses are combined, they will explosively form hydrogen fluoride, pretty much no matter the condition. However, if hydrogen and chlorine gasses are combined, in darkness, there is almost no reaction going on. Some hydrogen chloride does form – slowly. But, shine light into the mix and the hydrogen chloride forms explosively. The seemingly small power of light is enough to push things over a threshold and start a potent reaction.

Many things seem to “do nothing” until some thing, some seemingly little thing, triggers a reaction.  The classic example is the idiom of “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”  The camel starts unburdened, or close to it. The first straw is just a bit of straw, light, insignificant, of no consequences by itself. So is the next (if we presume someone so silly as to load the camel single straw by single straw – but even by the handful, the story is the same – or close enough) and the next. But, each light straw, while almost nothing by itself, is not quite nothing. And is not by itself. The weight is ever increasing and the camel will strain under the load. And, if the loader doesn’t have the sense to stop (and it seems likely the camel would raise some objections even beyond the usual), eventually the weight will exceed what the camel can bear. The “last straw” wasn’t that different from the first straw – a light thing, insignificant, and of no consequence by itself. Only, it wasn’t by itself. And that meant it had great significance and dire consequence indeed.

There are other analogies:

A capacitor (or an arc gap…) can be charged, the voltage increasing. One volt? What problem? Two volts? Nothing seems to happen. Eventually the voltage gets high enough the dielectric breaks down and things arc over. That’s not nothing happening anymore.

A boiler might take 1 PSI just fine. So why not 2? And it will take 2 PSI just fine, so why not 3? And each additional PSI seems to do nothing. Right up until the boiler explodes in a disaster of great and horrific spectacle.

Another analogy could be made for fissile materials – even if there is no true nuclear explosion, it’s quite possible to make a deadly mess (for a while anyway) by assembling seemingly safe bits together until quite suddenly they aren’t safe anymore. And this can even happen by taking what had been safe in one geometry (a long, thin tube of solution) and putting the same amount of material into a dangerous geometry (a short, squat ‘bucket’) This is not theoretical. This very sort of nuclear accident has happened – and more than once.

Whatever analogy you prefer, it’s fairly plain that in the USA of 2021 (and for some time earlier), the straws are accumulating, the voltage is increasing, the pressure is building, the neutron flux is rising… slowly – so far.  Things are tense, but many seem to be willing risk another straw and another straw (or equivalent) as nothing has happened. And since nothing has happened, nothing will continue to happen.

There is even some shock when ginned-up events fail to get the activation energy as they are seen for what they are – ginned up events designed to entrap. All those gatherings at state capitols that failed to even happen, let alone failed to become riots to point to, are one example. Or fifty. This likely causing both some frustration – propagandist aren’t getting the Event they hope to spin into something more. And some relief – “Well, if THAT didn’t do anything, it must be perfectly safe to…”

“They treat it like a dial that can be turned up and down, but it’s really a switch.”  And it seems the perfect analogy is the thermostat. Yeah, the old goldish round thing that was on the wall at that old house. It seemed like a dial or close. It could turned up and down. But inside, it was a switch. It was OFF or it was ON. Turning it up all that way didn’t heat the house any faster, it just eventually made it uncomfortable.  It is possible to turn the thermostat down before the heat gets excessive. Possible is not the same as easy, especially if there are fools constantly turning it back up as far it can go.

But it is an increasingly explosive atmosphere. Eventually the mix will be enough that some little, seemingly insignificant thing will be the spark that sets it off.  When will it happen? No idea. Other than, the time is getting ever closer. What will be the spark? Again, no idea. Other than historians will one day look back on it, see it, and opine that had it happened in less explosives conditions, it would have been one little, insignificant straw of no great consequence.

That’s if things go utterly unchecked. And it seems now, that the people many once thought nutty for calling Democrats and “establishment” Republicans a ‘uniparty’ were not nuts at all. Thus the one thing that should be a check on “adding straws” is if not adding straws itself, failing to remove straws. Sure, a precious few are making an effort or at least appearing to be making an effort. It seems unlikely that they will be enough. It is just possible. Miracles do happen.

It’s a Big Problem. But almost all Big Problems are really so many little problems all ganging up. Solve one little problem after another and, if enough little problems get solved fast enough, the Big Problem falls apart and ceases to exist.

Do I know The Solution? Nope. Can I work the Big Miracle to magic away the Big Problem(s)? Nope.  Can I do my damnedest to work what tiny efforts I can, in hopes of enough others doing the same, that if we are really fortunate, enough little miracles happen? Yeah. I can do that much. So can you.  Now, let’s see if we can all grab away at least one little, insignificant, inconsequential straw.  Maybe we can rescue the camel this time. Maybe we fail, but at least we’ll be the SOB’s who tried. It’s a long shot…  maybe a million to one, at best.

[And, as we all know, a million to one chance is a sure thing. – SAH]

203 thoughts on “First Slow, Then Fast by Orvan Taurus”

    1. And our modern “social justice” types would tell her she should just start her own bus company . . .

    2. Except her refusal and the support of it, were not random.

      She was a trained activist. She was not the first, as several other women had done the same in the prior months. Other activists specifically decided to make a stand behind her because she was a perfect case…no kids out of wedlock, employed, no criminal record. In fact, the biggest different between modern activists over police shootings and MLK and company then is the later understood optics. Philando Castile was the Rosa Parks of the police shooting world yet he was the one most quickly forgotten and whose name is not chanted.

      Sadly, until recently we are more like modern anti-police activists instead of MLK and company. Sure, we never have the press on our side so the optics will always be bad, but we aren’t planning and training to be ready when the right thing happens.

      2. I’ll point out that I think the reason Rosa Parks is always credited by the media instead of earlier protestors like the Wichita counter sit in, is because they were individuals acting on their own initiatives while Rosa Parks was working with the NAACP. Of course every time the NAACP wants to celebrate the gains they credit themselves and their in-house activist instead of the actual trendsetters who might not reflect glory on the NAACP

        1. Well of course. Organizations are just that, loosely associated, multi-celled organisms. And like all organisms, seek to survive, grow, and reproduce. It’s what drives Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. My God, you even see it in project management. The project takes on a life of its own, even after it succeeds in its original goal; the only way to terminate them is to break up all the players, and remove all the resources. Starve it to death. Even then, the players will often have formed an informal organization of former project members, if only to celebrate annually and reminisce.

          In today’s environment, the NAACP would be considered an insurrectional organization and would be targeted by the FBI and other government agencies. One of the reasons I think the NAACP succeeded is because they had sympathetic national news. We have some too, but we’ve also seen how vulnerable we are to news disruption. Further, the number of people on the left who are willing to listen to both sides, much less actually thing about them, is vanishingly small. Conservative Democrats have the same problem as most conservatives, they are reluctant to act without having a LOT of skin in the game.

  2. One wonders, if there were a “armageddon clock” indicating how likely people felt the US was to another civil war, where they’d put the time at…

    I’d suspect conservatives (and pretty much any group to the right of Tulsi Gabbard) would put it somewhere within 30 seconds to midnight. Maybe less.

    The left? Somehow I feel the mindset would be “aw, it’ll never happen” and they’d set it several minutes (or more) to midnight.

    But they (the left) are ignoring all the less overt indications that the pressure is building in the boiler room. As you said, they think it’s an on/off situation, when instead, there’s going to be small events leading up to the big kaboom. A rivet pops out here, a joint starts leaking there, a weird noise elsewhere, and all the time, the pressure is building and building…

    And then, you get this, just when you thought everything was fine:

    2. That show, and the welding tank show had me yelling “Fools” at the TV. I knew everyone survived, because it was shown but they had no clue what they were #@(%ing with.
      Okay, all their shows had me calling them fools. . . .

        1. From what I understood, the shift over the course of the show from “urban myths” being tested to “will it play well on TV and attract eyeballs” is one of the reasons Jamie wanted off.

          They went from “is it really possible for a car with JATOs in the trunk to embed itself in a mountainside” to “how big of an explosion can we get?”

            1. The first time I saw it, I was annoyed as it seemed to not really address the issue, whatever it was, but if it could be made to “blow up real good” ala a Second City TeleVision skit.

              Later, I recall their attempt at a steam cannon and trying to get it to fire perfectly timed with valving and such and failing, thus the idea was “BUSTED” — and a night or so later seeing a bit on the History channel (when it still had least a slight relation to history…) that showed a working version without excess complexity. It wasn’t able to be fired at a commanded time, but it’s not as if the castle wall or such would get up and run away.

        2. “can two hammers hit face to face be dangerous? Well, lets take a new hammer. and hit it on an anvil and see!”(-_-)
          “Is it possible Carlos Hathcock shot another sniper in the eye through his Soviet PU Sniper scope? Let’s buy a Tasco 4-12×40 with 3 times the glass and test it out.”

          1. oh yea– funny thing is– they didn’t have the “expertise” to prove or disprove the sniper story. (Possibly unbelievable… with impossible chances). Hammers hit face to face? Dangerous? hahahaha of course.. if you can get the probabilities properly and depends on how hard they hit. … It’s like women who watch the bachelorette. Please don’t get mad at me… but from my view point it was man TV. Nothing gets the men more excited then explosions.

            1. similar to the exploding CD/DVD story, there are other issues they totally missed or ignored. SloMo guys did the CD one too:

              (Dan when he was still in the Army!, also YT gave me a a mythbusters vid when I opened it to search for this. chrome at work)
              I had one blow up. It was cracked in the center but not yet near the data portion, and I decided to copy it . . . then put it in the wrong drive. I had a 52x drive that spun to full speed then slowed to fastest read speed. I was aiming to put in in an old 8x drive.
              It shattered, fired bits out the front, and stuck them into a box (next to where the cat had been sleeping but had just leaped down for food) also it hashed the internals of the drive.

          2. That one was a laugh. The problem was with hammers was they USED to be SURFACE hardened. The Hardened Surface would chip off sometimes when you hit something hard. They used modern hammers that don’t chip that way.

            1. Also very new, alsoalso they then hardened and flame quenched just the head, and the haft was now more normalized and when they smacked the anvil (an item made to be struck by hammers) the haft no longer was stiff enough to hold and bent. cue that commercial “That’s not how any of this works!” the whole show.

      2. They performed a valid, and valuable, public service by using science to show what really happens. I’ll give them lots of credit for that.

        1. and other than hitting a house with a canon ball, and other assorted “oops” they got very lucky on, it was a decent How Not To show
          Though the Disappearing Cement Truck does make me giggle like a schoolgirl

        2. Their “science” was not very well done, but they were just about the last champions of “let’s do an experiment” left (Bill Nye decided leftist posturing was easier). I don’t expect a reality show to get things like well designed controls or identifying other variables that need to be held constant or a thousand other things that matter if actually doing science. They were selling the idea of science as a process instead of YAR.

          Hell, they even rejected the priestly rainments of the religion of science, which is more than can be said of bureaucrats pretending to be doctors.

      3. I didn’t watch it too much, but they seemed to take reasonable precautions for people engaged in de facto destructive testing.

        1. If you watch the first season, you wonder how they survived to make a second season sometimes…

          I’d say second season on, they really started to implement safety procedures and steadily improved them as the show went on.

        2. I’m about as anti-safety as one can be and have common sense. The welding cylinder gave me the willies when they pulled that. It definitely got their attention too, but after it went through their target wall, stop-wall, and the wall behind that, some distance across the test yard . . .
          Also, once, they managed to hit a house with a canon ball (possibly during the duct tape cannon show, or maybe a steam canon. Home owner was no amused)

            1. Looks like the cannonball episode might’ve been filmed sometime in 20111, and I think they withheld it from the air until a couple seasons later, when they aired with the B-team (Tori, Kari, and Grant) explaining what happened and calling a mea culpa.

              I’d bet when it went to air, the insurance companies had finally settled things regarding damages and such…

              Not sure on the welding cylinder episode, though, when that might’ve been…

              1. the welding cylinder one was after the cannons, a season of two maybe before they stopped. I only watched them when visiting the parents and Dad would turn Science channel on while we were grilling and sitting around BSing.

              2. I dunno, if the Mythbusters shot a cannonball into my house, as long as they paid for the damage I’d brag about it. “The Mythbusters shot a cannonball into my house! Is that cool, or what?”

                1. Seen on a real estate listing:
                  “A nice, well kept, 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath home in California, attached garage, central air, fireplace, recently updated kitchen, only hit by a cannonball once fired by the Mythbusters”

                  1. Cue the scene in The World According to Garp where the couple is about to buy a house, and a small place crashes into it. Garp decides that if the damage is repaired for them, they should buy. After all, the place was now “pre-disastered” and what’s the chance of such a thing happening again? (Presumably NOT too near an airport…)

                    1. That’s like always going out on the ice to fish after Billy who lost his new F-150 ten years ago because he went too early and it broke through.

                      What are the odds he’s too early twice.

    3. I’d put it at 11:00 PM. But that’s to outright warfare. What we’re getting now are small spots of induced fission from a few neutron agitators. i.e. Anarchist and Leftist rioters. What needs to happen is business owners to call the police, and when/if they fail to show up to protect those businesses, the owners and employees slaughter the rioters who smash the windows to start looting and burning. That’s the only message that is going to be effective. Right now, the message is, the government isn’t going to do anything to protect you from these people.

      1. The only problem with that is, look at the cities / states most of the “mostly peaceful protests” took place. EXTREMELY unfriendly (if not outright hostile) to the 2A.

        Any business owner who defended their business that way would be crucified (possibly literally) by:
        1. The MSM
        2. The various and sundry prosecutors
        3. The mob… Sorry, “peaceful protestors”

        Heck, look at the situation with Rittenhouse (granted, not quite the same, but) on video defending himself from getting brained by a skateboard, a second schmuck (bicep boy) had a firearm (and I believe was a convicted felon and thus a prohibited person,) and Rittenhouse gets hit with 1st degree murder charges?!?

        In your suggested case, I’d half expect the prosecutors in whatever area this happened to first charge them with 1st degree murder, then get their state legislature to put in to instate the death penalty and make it retroactive so they could push for it!

        1. What I would suggest being done to those corrupt prosecutors would probably constitute a crime to print. So I won’t say it.

  3. Ah, but you see it is an almost religious belief with a certain segment of our population that if you just break that camel’s back it will burst into flame and out of the ashes shall rise a wondermus unicorn.
    And no matter how many times that very scenario has played out and resulted in utter failure and much death, destruction, and suffering, this time it shall surely work if only the nay sayers will sit down and shut up.

  4. One of the things that may have driven left statists so nuts about Trump was the effort to deregulate. Perhaps that is why they see the need to unperson Trump and restore the GOPe status quo ante victoriam.

    Pulling straws off is worthy, but there are two other mitigating tasks that we can also pursue.

    One, working on our own very tiny corner of society, to make it tougher and more robust in case of a broader failure.

    Two, we don’t actually know that all possible failure modes are catastrophic. We do know that the mechanisms are so nonlinear that we cannot forsee every outcome. When the ripples through the structure are making it seem to liquify, we can try to shift it locally, to a locally stable situation that we would find more desireable. This isn’t as insane as it would be in a mechanical structure, because, as a country, our stability may mostly be bottom up anyway.

    1. There is a third method: burning their straw before they can put it on the camel. This can take the form of shutting them out of positions of power whenever possible.

  5. I seriously find this surreal when Alex Jones turns out to be the sane one to this party. I’m trying to figure out what my little bit is– I guess this time around I’m support.

    1. I’ve concluded that most of what Alex Jones does is schtick, because that’s what best makes money (outrage addiction, but in the He-Man direction instead of the Soyboy direction). I wish we’d see more of the serious reporter that sometimes emerged during the Bundy Ranch incident.

  6. Great little piece. Your analogies seem to be correct. My only real disagreement with this is that the back is already broken. We have been in a cool civil war for some time. Our side did not know it in part due to the inertia of trust in inistitutions that are a result of simply living in a high trust society.

    One of DJTs super powers has been to take the blinders off of all of us so that we can see clearly the machinations of an embedded autocracy. Was speaking to daughter this morning about how her circle of trust has been reduced because of seeing actual reality and the motivations of people. We discussed ways to begin to make things more resiliant and robust around us.

    While the breakage is true, the building follows the same path. One small step, one act of service, one relationship restored, one mind changed, one book saved all are the things that build civilization over time. That building is already beginning as we each embark on our little piece of it. Our host helps with her insight and I think all of us have read many things that show the way. I know in the end we win they lose, but crap I really did not want to have to do this!

    2. While true, this cannot be repeated enough. Right now trust still breaks faster than builds because the system’s inertia and increasingly its structure are designed to be low trust.

      Part of the problem is low trust societies are to the Left’s benefit. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a country they have taken over outside of conquest that was high trust. I can think of several they have engaged in deliberate trust destroying acts to cement their win. The Labor open immigration into the UK is the classic example. The Democrats in the US have tried similar, but have had less success over a longer period because of very different immigration traditions in the two nations.

      1. Yeah. We tend to focus on encouraging immigration as importing Dem voters, but it could be that breaking trust was the more important aspect.

        1. What I mean was historically immigration was a normal part of US culture, with an expectation of assimilation. Even though the sixties changes were in part designed to provide more Democrat voters they have had to fight the inertia of that assimilation expectation and still have not completely overcome it.

          The biggest change historically is numbers being sufficient to maintain ethnic ghettos for immigrants over several generations. Even then, I think that worked in part because the principle group, Mexicans, always had a strong cultural influence and continuity on the border. It would not have worked with massive Thai immigration (to pick a random example).

          Meanwhile, the UK’s was under that “everyone is a European, there are no nations now” ethic.

  7. I am somewhat ashamed that I would like to see a bunch of straws added at once. Admitedly, I am not a patient person.

    But I just want this to be over.

    1. Over? I’m going to skip the Bluto quote here…

      But…the only way it’s going to be over is after the nation-shattering kaboom. I think that if we don’t go through the massive suffering inherent in that kaboom, the needed lessons will not be learned.

        1. The feeling is real. This feeling of suspension, of waiting for an unknown amount of time for an event that may well not look like what we expect, is its own kind of slow torture. I’m struggling with focus and concentration, and know very well that “can we just get it over and done with?” feeling.

          I also know that trying to force the issue would only ensure a less than desirable outcome, at least partly by turning the “silent majority” against us.

          2. Hmmm. The fire isn’t burning fast enough. Let me just poor on some more gasoline out of this bucket…

            Please, no “Hold my beer” moments as we try to combat this.

            2. We’ve already won. The football yobbos are just burning down the town. Again.

              We had a long run between games. We will again. Or our grandkids will. I need to reread the Endless Steppe.

      1. My dear, my people had power over mortals in the dark ages. Of course I want that back. 😉

        As an American tho’, no, I just wan’t the inflaming incident to hurry and get here already so I can fight.

        1. If so, then we are related because my family was always top dog (mostly Scandinavian). But I don’t see anything good coming from a complete collapse.

          1. Being a jarl or holding the thing is a little different than hoping the priest comes in time to christen the baby before we steal it away to our hills.

            1. apples — oranges? My family came to America too … but yea, holding onto power and wealth– the need to pick up and travel was too deep in the blood. Priorities… I suppose.. Freedom vs. Duty

        2. I hear you. I have to ignore the news a lot because my response is straight out of Fiona from Burn Notice, “Shall I shoot them?”

          1. We are moving out f the awkward stage. Working within the system was a bad joke. So , yes. 5 Senators volunteered today to act as bellwether ( Judas goat) encouragers.

        3. Me, too.

          And I’m mad about it because I don’t want to do what I know I’m capable of doing. These people are feckless, and we pay the price. Makes me mad.

      2. Forbid…

        I am not sure if the world would come out of a present day collapse as well as the Europe managed when the Roman Empire collapsed.

        (This makes me think of the the first episode of the lovely 1978 British series Connections titled The Trigger Effect. The series was hosted by James Burke a former science writer for the London Times. I keep wishing someone would make it available for purchase at a reasonable cost. Thank you for sparking that memory.)

        2. The series is on Youtube as “James Burke Connections” (search for that and they’ll all come up). There are 20 episodes plus some peripheral vids under a playlist named “Connections”.

          1. Due to circumstances beyond our control we cannot run Youtubes on our TV. The Family finds crowding everyone around one of our laptops not exactly the viewing experience we enjoy.

            Moreover Connections is a program I would like to share … for those who like to think science and history it is a joy … for those who never really learned such it can be a revelation.

        3. I think I’d agree with you on the world coming out of a collapse like that.

          If you use the “classic” definition of the “Dark Ages” of the 5th through the 10th century, I’d suspect if we fall into another sort of “dark ages,” it’s going to be a lot longer (there’s a lot farther to fall…)
          Maybe, hopefully, there’d be some areas that wouldn’t fall and would serve as the nucleus of new civilizations, but with how interconnected everything is, and how much is stored electronically now, I wouldn’t be too hopeful…

          1. Maybe, maybe not.

            The one between the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Near east was about the same length as the one Western Europe suffered. Depending on your dating, it might have been a bit long (1300-700 BC vs. 500-900 AD). A big determiner is how universal the fall is. There was not contact with other large civilizations in the Bronze Age collapse…everyone in regular contact fell together. Western Europe remained in contact with the Eastern Empire the entire period.

          2. And two different models of this come to mind. Issac Asimov’s Foundation Series (original not all his retconning 🙂 ). And Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller. Neither is a pleasant thought.

            1. And the Foundation series is what I was thinking of. The longer the period of “(relative) peace and prosperity,) the longer the dark ages after the fall…

          1. Yup.

            And then there is a anime series in progress — interrupted by Covid-19 I believe — Dr. Stone. One of the major plot lines is the attempts to recreate technology from scratch.

            1. Dr. Stone was not interrupted; the first season ended in February 2020. The second season has just started, now 2 episodes, subtitled. I don’t see any dubbed episodes yet.

              I have a major disagreement with Senku’s priorities. Instead of building radios, which require more than a dozen enabling technologies, I would have gone for something far simpler: cannons. Senku has already made black powder once. They have clay, and a kiln, they should be able to make fired clay cannons. Make the chambers thick enough and they will withstand moderate powder charges. Maybe wrap them in strips of wet hide which will dry and shrink to put the clay under compression.

              Such cannons would be bulky and heavy, but that’s okay. They’re not knocking down castle walls or engaging in field maneuvers, they’re defending their village. Clay cannons firing case shot — a couple pounds of rocks wrapped in uncured hide — would be devastating against a bunch of spear carrying savages. Add clay grenades, fragmentation and incendiary, flung with something like a jai-alai cesta for greater range. Napalm should be much easier to make than vacuum tubes.

              For communication, flags and bugle calls. If the enemy doesn’t know what your signals mean, you have a big advantage.

              Send a squad out to engage the enemy, skirmish and run back to the village, where the enemy finds a wooden wall in their path. They charge, intending to scale the wall, and are shocked when it drops in front of them revealing a dozen cannons which blast them with hundreds of high-velocity rocks. Make the first battle devastating enough and you might prevent an even deadlier protracted war.

              The key is to make weapons of overwhelming force that can’t be produced or countered by the enemy. Use the advantages of technology and industry that Tsukasa and his ‘Empire Of Muscle’ reject.

              1. Cannons? Maybe if you can drill the firing teams well enough. I suggest mines, triggered electrically.

                Heck, he could probably contrive a noxious gas more easily than cell phones, but that isn’t really what the series is about.

                Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim ran a dubbed version of the series.
                ~

        6. It’s on Youtube, or was. There was supposedly a DVD set once, but it was low-grade VHS quality from what people were saying.

      3. The bad part about a new dark age: no painless dentistry

        The good part: the local political boss doesn’t know where you are, what you are buying, what you are gossiping about, and who all you associate with without sending other human beings to go into the woods and fields to find out the hard way.

  8. I see the American Left are calling for Nuremberg style trials for Trump. I admit I don’t watch the news much these days, so I must have missed where Trump started a world war and committed genocide. When was that?

    1. It’s not just Trump they want them for; they want them for everyone who voted for or supported Trump, because they are “worse than Nazis”. Yes, that is the new leftist party line.

      I anticipate a Reichstag fire type of false flag effort to “stop” the impeachment trial that will then be used as a pretext to impose a national “state of emergency” with accompanying lockdowns, “suspension” of constitutional rights and an effort to mass confiscate firearms in the name of “protecting democracy”.

      1. Did you see the posters for the armed Inauguration protests with simultaneous armed protests at the state capitols? That was like the Nazis putting up signs for a torch rally at the Reichstag. They really think we’re morons.

          1. Yeah – the cabal meeting after nothing happened that weekend: “It’s not my fault! It would have worked for Antifa!”

          2. Among the ideas Leftist cling to (bitterly, of course) is that they are smarter than most people.

            Just like most people think they are better drivers than everybody else.
            ~

            1. That’s annoying to those of us who are often the smartest person in the room.

              Especially because we know just how little that matters. Sure, it’s a consistent 165ish when tested (although is probably starting to decline with age), but what does that mean.

              I’d love to know the percentage of MENSA that is left wing. My exposure to MENSA has generally resulted in a low opinion except for their game SIG. Yeah, they’re all geniuses.

              They’re also the dumbest and most useless people on the average. They have great minds on paper but haven’t done a damn thing with them.

              I’ve got more use for a creative plumber of average intelligence than a genius who just spouts BS all day.

                1. If we had a bunch of Mensa actually working on FTL concepts and engineering, or regeneration therapies, or longevity treatments, or nuclear energy development, or, well, you get the picture. My SAT scores would all easily qualify me for membership; but their organization does nothing that I find of interest. I get more out of VFW, Legion, or even the local Republican committee.

                    1. My experience also. My first chapter was a good social group, I made a number of friends, and many of the movers and drivers were libertarian/conservative. It started getting infiltrated by new grad SJW types who excelled in setting the members against each other. When I moved to AZ, I attended the monthly Games nights for a couple or three years. The hosts were fairly conservative, but the more vocal attendees were all leftists and would give me odd looks when I dared to quietly disagree with something they said. Eventually the hosts “retired” and I dropped my membership completely with no regrets.

                2. Oh, I know they are. But I would argue those who think IQ alone, without any other factor, has meaning self-select into it.

                  I wonder if that is why the Left, who seem to think IQ alone is meaningful and a measure of goodness and value as a person, get so upset about IQ research. They assume “IQ research” = “raciss/sexiss/homophobiss” while a lot of people just assume it’s looking at how the world is.

                  Then they love to use IQ as an insult and use disagreement with them as proof of a low IQ.

                  I swear, the real cure for leftism is just getting them to be honest with themselves. No wonder Orwell invented the term “doublethink”.

      2. Because nothing will unite the country quite like persecuting half the population.\

        Do I really need a sarc tag?

        1. If they were half the country they wouldn’t need to cheat so blatantly. 2020 was their high-water mark, circumstances get worse for them from now on.

    2. As I said at Insty: “When people call for treating you as though you are the defeated enemy in the most deadly war in history then believe they are your enemy and act accordingly.”

  10. The pressure has been building for a while. I think the electoral fraud in 2020 and the institutional response to that fraud were one of those bigger leaks/rivet pops that makes you go, “huh. Guess I really better call the handyman today.” A number of Democrats (ordinary folk, not politicians) saw that, saw family members response and started pulling off their own blindfolds off. No, a lot of them are not all the way eyes open yet, but they’re getting there (this is purely based on anecdotal evidence, so no need to start spouting statistics at me). BUT, and here’s the big BUT…outside of conservative non-squish circles, people are still afraid to speak out about what they saw and are seeing…they believe they are alone in their circle of friends/work/family/neighborhood. Because everybody “knows” that everybody else buys into Democrats on the side of all that’s good and right, they are afraid to look like they’re now on the dark side. When they lose that fear, that’s when the rest of the rivets will pop.

    That “knowledge” that they are alone…that’s why we have to keep speaking up. Let them know they are not alone and they are not crazy.

    1. I saw a post on Gab (maybe also on Insty), screenshots on the Twit from Dems who are deeply disappointed and are regretting supporting the Fraudulent in Chief.

      Right now, I’m trying to get ready for when there are too many straws.

        1. Just point out that this isn’t a surprise to any Republican and ask them if they’re reconsidering the sources they use to make political decisions.

      4. The state of those believing dems reminds me of a scene from Animal House, Flounders brother’s car has been wrecked by the Delta house boys:

        D-Day: Hey, quit your blubberin’. When I get through with this baby you won’t even recognize it.
        Otter: Flounder, you can’t spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You ****ed up – you trusted us! Hey, make the best of it! Maybe we can help.
        Flounder: [crying] That’s easy for you to say! What am I going to tell Fred?
        Otter: I’ll tell you what. We’ll tell Fred you were doing a great job taking care of his car, but you parked it out back last night and in the morning, it was gone. We report it to the police, D-Day takes care of the wreck, the insurance company buys your brother a new car.
        Flounder: Will that work?
        Otter: Hey, it’s gotta work better than the truth.
        Bluto: [thrusting six-pack into Flounder’s hands] My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.
        Otter: Better listen to him, Flounder, he’s in pre-med.

        Like Bluto I recommend those Dems take up heavy drinking. It’s going to be a long 4-10 years and they’re on the chopping block right after us unless the internecine sivil war in the Demoncrats cranks up faster than I expect.

          2. True Antifa seems to have finished their task as useful Idiots and are now being disposed of. I do wonder when the internal bruhaha between the idiotocrat AOC wing of the democrats and the corruptocrat Biden/ Schumer/Pelosi wing takes off. Most of the corruptocrats are fossils (nearly literally in Nancy’s case). Not clear to me which side Ms. Harris falls on. My own opinion is she’s a menshevik/idiotocrat plant so It could be exciting.

  11. Trump has created an “Office of the Former President”:

    https://nypost.com/2021/01/25/trump-officially-opens-office-of-the-former-president/

    Some have compared this to a government in exile. I say it’s a durn good thing he doesn’t gracefully accept defeat, and there’s a sane rallying point for those who believed all is lost.

    He’s also decided against forming a new party, and has decided to primary out RINOs instead. Methinks that’s going to run head-on into the Dem fraud machine, but the more it gets exposed, the better.

      1. Well, it’s usually the “Presidential Library Office of Donation Collection and Otherwise Unemployable Minion Sinecures” – the naming is a very nicely aimed poke in the eye for the first-ever “Office of the President Elect” that FICUS set up and the three-letter media fawned over.

    2. I’m not sure the Dem fraud machine doesn’t help primarying RINOs…and then defeats them in the general. “Look, people reject MAGA extremism!”

      2. No – they’re going to do exactly what they’ve done i the past, select the most Far Right and/or outre candidates they can, as they did with Christine “I am Not A Witch” O’Donnell’s senate challenge in the 2010 Delaware race, Sharron Angle’s 2010 challenge for Harry Reid’s seat, or Claire MacAskill’s 2012 challenger, Todd Akin.

        Of course, they also “selected” Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump through that same process, so it does not always produce the results they expect.
        ~

  12. Personally, I think everyone is missing the point about what the Left is doing. They aren’t doing the post-exit-impeachment to “Make sure Trump can never happen again.” Sure, a lot of them think that’s what they want, but that isn’t the real end-goal. The 2022 midterm election is the thing. They are doing all this (and more to come, I’m sure) to foment division within the Republican party. If they can keep all the parts of the Republican party – Pro-Trumpers, Never-Trumpers, old school moderates, extreme Right-ers, etc. – at odds they have a better chance at coming out on top in 2022.

    My personal opinion is that is what killed Republican chances in the GA Senate run-offs. Huge numbers of Republicans who voted in the main election skipped the run-off. I think a lot of that was because they lost interest in a quickly dividing Republican party. Until and unless, the Republicans can heal that rift, they might as well give up. They won’t attract independents, and candidates will lose whole chunks of R voters depending on which factions they are in, who will abstain from voting. Given the Lefts penchant for graft, the Republicans can’t afford to leave those votes on the field.

    1. There were left wing sponsored “They didn’t support Trump so why support them” billboard here in Georgia (yes, I actually saw one, so they did exist…it was on I-75 North of the loop).

      Here’s the thing, though. That only worked because the divisions were there. Hell, Trump only won the GOP nomination because those divisions were there between the GOP, especially between state wide and national officeholders and the GOP voters.

      It is old enough that people thought in 2014 when I first started commenting here I was a troll because I was pushing my “Whig the GOP” idea (which I’ve brought up at Insty since the election). So the idea, both that the divide was bad and that it was something leftists would try and exploit, were common then.

      Here in GA the governor and the Secretary of State both set out to exacerbate it in the time between the election and the run-offs. Kemp refused to even call the legislature to meet to vote on the electors. The SoS not only allowed the ballot drop boxes he’d agreed to in the general, at the request of the SPLC among others, to continue, but expanded them.

      When your own side is determined not to win, why go out of your way to support them?

      The last big case the GOP had for “us over the Democrats” lost standing due to a variety of GOP judges, especially six GOP appointed justices.

      Maybe impeachment is to keep that up, but that only works if the Liz Cheneys and the Mitch McConnells let it. They are so determined to be rid of that troublesome priest they will allow anything to accomplish it. They will wind up performing penance just as Henry II did.

    2. No, it was fraud. Nobody did anything to fix the November fraud so the Democrats just did the same thing again. The same pattern repeated — the Republicans were ahead until piles of ballots for the Democrats appeared in the middle of the night. They even used the same Don’t-minion vote stealing machines to count them!

      You know what they say about doing the same thing again and expecting different results…
      ———————————
      Talia Winters: “I hadn’t sensed so many lies since I worked for the political bureau.”

      1. Nobody did anything to fix the November fraud so the Democrats just did the same thing again.

        Despite the entire country screaming at them that it was going to effect their own races.

        At some point being a battered wife stops being a valid defense. When he starts raping the kids makes a good rule of thumb.

        1. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. It’s like those GOPe losers were paid to take a dive.

      3. It occurs to me that if an individual or small group wanted to go kinetic, Dominion C-level employees and a couple of tiers down would be a lot softer than governmental targets.

    3. At this point I don’t think you can effectively merge the Trump, Gaetz, DeSantis types with the Romney, Bush, Cheney types. The voters (if that means anything anymore) want some folks with guts taking action, not running from the enemy and playing placate and defense. If they stay together, the weaklings need to get behind the fighters. If it’s the other way around they are toast.

      2. I think most people who voted for Trump don’t think of Romney as even being in the same universe, let alone the same party.

        1. Romney should just come out of the closet and be a Democrat openly. We couldn’t possibly think any less of Mittens, so why not?
          ———————————
          Bring out yer dead!

          1. Because there’s no way he’ll win reelection in Utah as a Democrat. Maybe if he loses his primary he’ll switch and move back to MA.

    4. Anti-Trump factions in the GOP were always going to betray Trump in an attempt to restore status quo ante victoriam. A futile attempt, because of the level of unmasking.

      Dem strategy isn’t anything within the bounds of normal political calculus.

      The ordinary bounds of normal political calculus includes elections carried out under circumstances that can tolerate inspection at the level of admitting material evidence in court.

      Disregarding all the important subsequent evidence, the refusal alone to permit material evidence would show that the normal political calculus does not hold.

      GOP ‘unity’ is definitely not any sort of effective strategy. Both the JDs with humanities BAs, and the MBAs are mostly incapable of the thinking required to be able to be an ally in the current circumstances. Unless the GOP is purged of those naturally blind, it is not a viable organization to act through. The folks who are staring career death down, and going nuts, are going to try to tell us to disregard our lying eyes, and drive off honest numerates if they are not driven off first.

      Only the possibility of very few Biden voters at all would permit a feasible path to gluing together any sort of conservative working coalition. To recruit that coalition, you have to present an appearance of working to address the fraud.

      1. Right the GOPe once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s stuff like this that makes me want to believe in the UNI Party concept.

    5. > at odds they have a better chance at coming out on top in 2022.

      Uh… with Dominion voting machines counting the votes the the courts denying “standing” to anyone who complains, how do you think that election is going to turn out?

  13. “And it seems now, that the people many once thought nutty for calling Democrats and “establishment” Republicans a ‘uniparty’ were not nuts at all.”

    I find that statement of yours Sarah, amazingly ironic, given how many times you have played the “you are insane” card at me. Conservatives, who used to be progressive or liberal, have a benefit that those born in the Demoncrat establishment do not have. An understanding of the lower viewpoint. Conservatives, however, are not the apex of this scale of consciousness. There are higher levels and even higher levels than that.

    I can understand your pov quite easily, because I was once at an approximate level near eye level. But you cannot reach my current realm so easily.

    1. Edit: the point remains, even if it is not your statement but merely something from another author source that you felt important enough to reproduce here.

  14. Thermostats…Reminds me of some work done by a German researcher named Dietrich Doerner who studies decision-making, especially what he calls The Logic of Failure. One of his experiments was the temperature control simulation. Subjects were put in the position of a supermarket manager and told that the thermostat for the freezers has broken down.

    They had to manually control the refrigeration system to maintain a temperature of 4 degrees C–higher and lower temperatures are both undesirable. They had available to them a regulator and a thermometer; the specific control mechanism was not described to the subjects. The results were often just bizarre. Many participants failed to understand that delays were occurring in the system (a setting does not take effect immediately, just as an air conditioner cannot cool a house immediately) and that these delays needed to be considered when trying to control the system. Instead, they developed beliefs about regulator settings that could best be described as superstitious or magical: “twenty-eight is a good number” or, even more strangely, “odd numbers are good.”

    1. > failed to understand that delays were occurring in the system

      Even when you *know*, and you’re counting “thousand-one, thousand-two…” it can still be very hard. Every single time I tried changing altitude on the 747 simulator, I wound up in a positive feedback loop before augering in.

      1. I finally told my Dad I wasn’t going to try his home simulator again. Not ever. I was tired of going upside down and crashing on takeoff. And I wasn’t getting any better.

        1. Simulators are much harder to fly than real airplanes. I impressed my flight instructor when I told him that I could reliably land an airplane in simulation.

        2. That was a full-motion flight simulator at a major airline. (it helps to know someone on night shift…) Saw off the front part of a timed-out jumbo jet fuselage, mount it on thirty-foot-long hydraulic rams, and use adapted planetarium technology to project the “outside” (night only) view. Old-school stuff, now. But realistic enough, there were barf bags.

          The escape slide simulator was also fun. What they don’t tell you is that the gentle slope of the slide is a lie; you drop straight down most of the way as you take the slack out, and then it boots you horizontal at about Warp 2, so your tumbling skills need to be up to date. Everyone wanted to try the slide; almost everyone regretted it.

    2. The other thing about thermostats is that, as Orvan observed, they aren’t really dials at all. They turn heatig/cooling on/off at predetermined levels. What the analogy supposes is more like a rheostat or volume control. A better analogy might be a car’s gas pedal vs a rocket’s engine. In the first the flow of gasoline to the engine is gradually increased/decreased to affect power through the drive train; in the second you’re either blasting or ballistic.
      ~

  15. One lesson I’d add to your chemistry are us class, Ox is upper (UEL) and lower (LEL) explosive limits:

    Room with oxidant (oxygen will do, so will chlorine), safe.
    Tank full of combustible (say natural gas as an example) safe won’t explode.
    Leak a little gas in room, safe. mix too lean to burn
    Keep leaking, oxidant combustible ratio hits LEL, a spark can set it off.
    Keep leaking, no spark, mix passes UEL, too rich to burn, too much combustible, not enough oxidant to support combustion.

    OK, room’s full of gas, safe, can’t explode, but to be useful as a room, need to drain the gas passing a second time through the danger zone, twix UEL and LEL range.

    Our benevolent rulers think all’s safe having passed beyond the UEL with the ousting of President Trump. All deplorables are masked and locked down, combustion is impossible.

    However the room’s useless without some controlled combustion, gotta let em out, let em work, else rulers might have to do so, do the work themselves, losing the free and easy life on the backs of us peasants.

    So, sooner or later things gotta move from UEL through E to below LEL.

    No matter what, spark or not, it ain’t over, the fat lady hasn’t sung.

    2. You know, that analogy matches with Sarah’s saying that things are more likely to explode socially when they start getting better. (My paraphrase may be a bit off.)

  16. There is also hysteresis. It takes a LOT — a WHOLE LOT — to cross the threshold from ‘Normal’ to ‘Boog’. Once that switch has flipped, though, maintaining that state takes a whole lot less. The forces that led to breakdown must be reduced to a much lower level before there is any chance of return to a stable condition.

    Since the forces pushing our society to breakdown are a bunch of lunatic Leftroids, that would mean reducing either the lunacy, or the numbers…
    ———————————
    “Don’t open that!! It’s the original can of worms!”

  17. A great article.
    We’ve already had Reichstag Fire (TM) One with the Capital Insurrection ( so called Riot).
    We have also had a major real meltdown with the the 2008 market crash. The Media sold it as a market crash- Bad Capitalists!! 2008 was instead a credit crash, caused solely by 100s of Billions of $ of bad mortgage loans. The bad loans were caused solely by Federal laws from around 1980, sold as a correction to racial “ red lines.” The term red line came from Federal rules from the 1940’s. Banks before 1980 actually based loans on creditworthiness, not racial discrimination. The 1980 Federal rules required lending based on racial outcomes, not creditworthiness. This created an ever growing pile of non creditworthy loans. Each one was a nothing.. But they went boom in 2008.
    We now have seemingly countless Executive Orders and proposed laws with the exact same rationale. Nothing learned in 2008. It should take less time to the New Boom (TM)…but I really have no idea.
    Opening peoples eyes to all this needs to be done, but the Media will not say word one about the problem of unintended consequences, just more “Racial Justice” stuff. So yes, many more straws…..

    1. Actually, the ‘mortgage crisis’ was caused by Bill Clinton’s ‘Community Reinvestment Act’ changes in 1998. First there was a bubble, as people were approved for loans they could never pay back and artificially inflated demand drove prices up in a positive-feedback spiral. When those mortgages turned bad, that started another positive-feedback spiral and drove prices down.

      Here’s a hint: when you see the same items — be they stocks, real estate or tulip bulbs — being bought, sold and re-sold, over and over, at ever-higher prices, even though there is no corresponding increase in value, the associated economy is about to go thundering off a cliff. Get out of the herd before it’s too late.
      ———————————
      Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

      1. You have the CAUSE right but the trigger wrong.
        It wasn’t making the bad loans. If that had been the case the Banks would have just stopped making any loans.
        The trigger was that the Banks were able to bundle and SELL the loans to others. Because of the past such loans and the fact they were backed by land and a house they were seen as SAFE and GOOD investments. The Banks no longer had any skin in the game. They became middle men, making loans and then passing them on to others. They made their money no matter how good or bad the loans were. They made loans for any amount, on anything, to anybody. They didn’t care, they made their money on the Transaction, NOT the loan and they HAD NO RISK, selling the loans to others who were HAPPY to buy. Then the bubble burst, people realized that a large portion of the loans were no good. The Banks couldn’t sell the loans any more, they stopped making loans, then the bottom dropped out of the market. Banks and others had bought a lot of these loans and now found that their value was way down, nobody wanted to buy them. THAT is what the bailout was about, to many Banks and Investment Companies had to much invested in almost worthless loans.
        It STARTED with RED LINE loans but once the Banks found out they could sell the loans, they made loans to anybody for any amount, after all THEY were not risking anything by making the loans.

        1. That too, the ‘bundling’ and the ever-more-esoteric ‘derivatives’ that allowed them to reap huge gains from small changes in interest rates, but turned into even huge-er losses when the sewage backed up and started flowing the other way.

          The banks should never have been bailed out, rewarding the shitheads that caused the problem. ‘Too big to fail’ means it SHOULD fail, or be broken up until it’s not ‘too big’.

          1. I’ve got a theory that every time we have a new financial invention, commodity trading, joint stock companies, derivatives, etc. we get a bubble in that invention. People seem to have a hard time differentiating between “This has no history of failure because it’s safe” and “This has no history of failure because it has no history.”

          2. There is an additional factor. The government had issued a letter that indicated that it would be looking at the loans given by banks and that if they failed to meet the Community Reinvestment Act Requirements, they would be fined up to 1/2 million per loan or up to a percent of their net worth. The same letter also gave a whole list of things that banks should not consider impediments to loans; things such as source of downpayments, lack of traditional income, etc., all things that were basically stuff that a lender issuing sound loans would not consider.

            If you were a bank, you’re choice in deciding a questionable loan was give the loan even though it had a better chance of defaulting, or risk harsh government punishment. They made the choice government wanted them to make.

        2. Yeah, back in that era I got a credit-card like “line of credit” for $100,000, totally unsecured. Used it to buy a house, then refinanced.

  18. The old-style bimetallic thermostat is a good analogy: Two metals that expand at different rates are layered, producing tension that results in calibrated bending movement that a mercury switch can sense, with the knob adjusting the angle so that an effect happens at a certain angle of bend.

    Tension between opposing forces is a healthy negative feedback control mechanism in any system, including a political system. What the Dems are currently attempting is to eliminate one of those metals, so the knob directly controls things.

    The issue is eliminating the source of any counter tension results in a no-feedback system, and in a no-feedback system you are guaranteed to get too much effect and go out of control.

  19. The current government and media set has very little negative feedback. It’s in the basic reward system of the Swamp. Bad decisions reward major players: Gov- re-election, media- True Believers feel better, Gov drone, consultants- continue to get paid, and so forth. Providing negative feedback has fewer rewards, no patronage, fewer sources of corrupt fundraising, and endless Media and political condemnation. But providing negative feedback is the needed thing. We need to encourage the politicians who provide it.

  21. Physical sensors for physical events are relatively easy. You can calculate probability of detection, and probability of false alarm.

    Humans are much less simple. Intelligence and investigation are fields where specialist humans are sensing human events. Focusing on high probability of detection drives the probability of false alarm up, and tends to be hard on sanity.

    Ordinary people, non-specialists, have their probability of detection tuned way down, so that false alarms for all the problem human events that aren’t their business don’t drive them crazy.

    Specialists divide into employees, and hobbyists. Employees can have a detection failure if you compromise them through their employer. Which with intelligence is the Federal Government. (Going after local police, from this perspective, makes a huge amount of sense if you are in a position to corrupt federal organizations via control of their funding.) Hobbyists have a couple of failure modes. One is getting tied up in personal crazy. Second is not having better things to do with one’s life, and putting one’s self respect in one’s evaluation of the hobby ability.

    Anyway, the specialists are not a perfectly reliable guide to human events.

    The leftist position is ‘we can totally pull this off’. The doomer/glowie position is that a lack of violence now is a surrender that is eternal. Both of these are based in a theory of human behavior in general, and sensing and control in particular, being validly modeled as linear in all circumstances.

    We can say now that some of what is going on is definitely nonlinear in two respects.

    Mechanism one is flow of information through society. Public insanity and contradiction on the main channel is causing people to ‘fiddle with the dial’. They are getting less incorrect conflicting information from other, slower channels now. This information is approaching the higher thresholds that match their low probability of detection. But the information flow to these people is very slow, so there is a delay after the events themselves. There are so many different bits of information, so many subtly different people, and so many paths for information, that flow of final bits of information, pushing over the threshold, cannot be linearly modeled.

    We as a society have been pretty strongly stressed for some time. On the order of a year. Part of this stress is the uncertainty over the conflict between official channels and back channels. Stress is exactly what we would expect during the information movement phase, when people are moving towards their threshold, but have not reached it yet.

    Second non-linearity is what people decide to do once their personal threshold is reached, and they get their detection/false alarm. This is definitely nonlinear, because any large group of humans is well beyond what angle single manipulator, or small group of manipulators, can reliably foresee all the time. Eventually, the group will turn up unexpected behaviors.

    The information flow phase is the slow part, and uncertain. We can’t see what will happen, because you would need to be extraordinarily lucky to guess which seeds of novelty the new phase will crystallize around. First Slow, Then Fast.

  22. The Canary in America’s coal mine is keeling over. That is not a sign everything is just peachy, nor is it reason to switch to unsustainably sustainable alternative fuels. Our nation is founded on principles of “giving the other guy space” and too many people are unwilling to do that these days.

    All human relationships have their breaking points and in times of stress those relationships become more brittle. One factor underlying last summer’s year’s riots – and the January 6th explosion of this year has surely been the lockdowns we’ve had imposed — and the feeling that the reasoning behind those lockdowns is insufficient, that those imposing them do not adequately take into consideration the costs entailed. This gives rise to things like graphs demonstrating that for many of the nation’s “thinking” class work from home is no great strain, while for most others …

    There is a great storm coming …
    The nation needs a small vacation but it don’t look like rain
    And if it snows that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain …
    ~

    1. NONE of the government elite are out of jobs. None of the government elite are forced to remain at home. None of the government elite have the foggiest idea of what their edicts concerning COVID are doing to the American people; because none of them are experiencing it.

  23. Orvan I really liked this article, thanks for writing it.

    I feel better somehow. And I have a feeling major events, like the first state of the union (dear Lord in heaven) might be triggers for faux violence, emergency orders, and destruction of what remains of the Constitution.

  24. America has been heading towards another revolution since Reagan. With their latest antics the Democrats have ensured that the revolution will be violent rather than non-violent. I think we’re closer to 1765 than 1775, the system is dead but most people don’t realize it. The ones who do need to organize to make the death of the system more obvious and to have a replacement system ready to go once a critical mass of the population realizes the old system is dead.

    Our task is to keep voting for American candidates, ones that will flatly reject the lies spewed by the fascists (including the one that fascism is a right-wing movement), at all levels. Especially at the national and county/state levels (most blue states are large swaths of red ruled by large, deep blue, cities). Voting at the national level forces the Democrats to dig deeper into their well of crazy to stay in power, making the death of the system obvious to more people, while voting at the county and state level ensures that there are people in power ready to take advantage of the moment the Democrats go too far and pull their jurisdiction out of the rotting corpse that is the federal government and make new guards for their future security.

      1. Not going to happen. There’s a fundamental difference between your average American and your average 19th century Russian. Americans have too much stuff that they’ll know they’ll lose.

          1. Agree, but the CCP is playing by a different script and they have a lot of people here on their payroll these days.

              1. Not on their own but enough collaborators here can give them a shot at it. American tech monopolies are helping the CCP with its social credit system and pervasive surveillance. The media companies push their propaganda.

          2. Yep. But if they were smart enough to see that they’d be smart enough to not be leftists in the first place.

        3. Yes, but if they lose it, they’re going after the ones who took it from them, not the entire country.

  27. }}} Another analogy could be made for fissile materials – even if there is no true nuclear explosion, it’s quite possible to make a deadly mess (for a while anyway) by assembling seemingly safe bits together until quite suddenly they aren’t safe anymore.

    Kyshtym.
    Oklo-Reactor

    😉

    1. I was thinking more of Tokaimura 1999 and I do not recall the other incident, but I have heard of at least one more where mis-handling resulted in criticality that, had proper procedures and only the vessels called for been used, would have been prevented.

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