Nobody Knows The Trouble….

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

I’m becoming excessively fond of MeWe. It’s providing almost as much fodder for posts as FB used to, only from the other side. Maybe. I mean, these are at least purported non-leftists.

The problem, of course, is that due to both the American people’s tendency not to agree with anyone, including themselves individually, there are more sides to this argument than there are to an infinitely folded pocket universe.

Anyway, this person was self identified non-lefty, genus impatientus, species moronic. No, seriously, I didn’t realize how moronic, until I was talking about it to friends and realized what he had used as examples of countries that were rebelling against tyranny. When I went “Say what?”

So, it was late, and we were making last minute plans for trip today, and I was feeling a little irritated, when I came across this post on MeWe (where I was for legitimate reason of doing writing sprints with my writing-children.)

“In countries like Taiwan and Cuba people are revolting even though it might mean death, while here we sit still for fear of being cancelled and losing our jobs.”

I did mention I was feeling a little irritated, right? And also that it was late and I’d been doing sprints, which means I was dog-tired. So for Taiwan I read “Hong Kong” as one does. (Well, this one does.) But because I was irritated, I answered with “Well, they’ve been under tyranny for decades, so now they revolt. I don’t think we’ll take as long as they did.”

And then he comes f*cking back with “It’s been almost 100 years.” At which point I fired two warning shots. Into his head.

Okay, I didn’t. That’s a Chicago reference. And besides, the only super power I routinely pray for is the ability to reach through the screen and b*tch slap the living daylights out of people who badly need it.

Like this one.

Instead, I was rude to him on the subject of “What the hell are you talking about? Do you think you’ve been in the kind of tyranny Cuba has experienced for 100 years?” Advised him not to blow smoke up my nether orifice, and left.

It wasn’t till I was talking to friends later, that I realized he thought TAIWAN was no rebelling against tyranny. What tyranny? No, seriously. I mean, dude, what?

Sure, they don’t have US-type freedoms, but look, governments can be different without being utter tyranny.

Which brings us to “it’s been almost 100 years.”

Sure it has. As Bill Reader is fond of saying “If America finally succumbs, Woodrow Wilson and that bastard FDR will have their fingerprints all over the murder weapon.”

He’s not wrong.

But there’s tyranny and tyranny, you know. It’s a sliding slope to hell. But mostly the American frog has been boiled. And to an extent, for a while, there were benefits to it.

Before you start shouting and get all up in my face, look, Heinlein was right. The Constitution was designed for a rural nation not involved in world affairs. For the industrial giant of the 20th century corners had to be cut.

Stop. don’t throw things at me. I am a constitutionalist. I believe the sky can boil away, the stars could turn to dusk and not a comma will be obsolete in that immortal document.

BUT that’s not what people in the early 20th century believed. Read the stories they told themselves, the books of the time. Centralization of decision was necessary for the every increasing “savings” of more and more mass production. And they thought it would be like that forever. So…. well, the only distinction was “do you or don’t you want mass graves with that?” Heinlein HIMSELF believed that was inevitable.

It was assumed the era of the individual had passed. Dead. Gone. Ever more massive super-states were the trend of the future. So, the constitution was SLOWLY shredded to get us there.

A funny thing happened on the way to that future. Turns out superstates aren’t more efficient. Chaotic economic activity is better at everything particularly innovation. And it turns out that the Constitution is actually the path to the future.

Of course, you and I know that. Knew that all along.

So–

Sure, we’ve been under increasingly shredded Constitution and suffering abuses and infringements for 100 years, but let’s be real, okay?

We have not been — weirdly still aren’t. Weirdly, because it’s what the Junta wants — under the kind of oppression Cuba has seen.

Yes, normal people here sit on their asses, instead of rebelling against a government that wants to force everyone to take an unneeded vaccine and keep their mouths shut so they don’t get cancelled and lose their jobs.

Do you know the difference between them and Cuba? They still have something to sit on, and jobs they can lose. (Not to count those who have no clue anything is wrong. Fortunately I think there are fewer of those than we think.)

Cubans have nothing. And they have nothing to lose. They might get crushed, but what difference does it make, between slow and fast suicide.

Now, I don’t think we’ll get to that point without revolting. That’s because our culture is very different, but also because our focking idiots have forgotten to boil the frog slowly and have turned the temperature to a million while laughing evilly in public. Even a frog isn’t stupid enough to sit in that bath too long.

But it will be a while longer. Even political addicts expect the next elections to work. (Sweet summer children.) Because they sort of have in the past.

But the point is, don’t tell me Americans are uniquely passive or some crap. It’s easy to fight when you have nothing left to lose. We have too much left to lose. And at some point everyone will realize we’re losing it.

Not long now. How bad it gets after that is anybody’s guess, but the people who want to take everything away from us are afraid. That’s the measure of how bad it will get: their frantic panic.

Keep in mind that in a century we had precisely two presidents that didn’t go along with the left. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

Two. Three terms.

The first put paid to sacred cows of the left that EUROPE is still mired in: managed decline is the only option! Controlled wages/prices/everything. Communism wins in the end.

The second just ripped the masks off the bureaucratic swamp, the geriatric kakistokrats of the left, their collaborators on the right, and the complete mess that is our electoral system. (I notice no one argues any longer when I say mostly the democrats win by fraud. But they did argue 8 years ago. Bah.)

I’m watching in fascinated horror as the MSM now reports on Hunter’s corruption. This is of course part of the palace war between Jill Biden and Commie LaWhorish. Commie is firing for effect.

But she’s too stupid (no, seriously, that woman is denser than the cores of some planets) to realize that every time she does that she’s burning away what remains of the credibility of the media the left needs to keep them in power/return them to power/make us believe they have legitimate power.

Is the situation grave? Sure it is. It’s dangerous, but not serious. Not serious because everyone on the left and the agencies bending to them are complete and obvious clown shoes. I mean, the WSJ now reports that yes, the Hunter laptop is real — duh — even though they denied it before. Our vaunted FBI REALLY IS THIS STUPID. It’s not so much that there are no adults on the left, but that there is no evidence of brain activity on the left.

The leftist ideology suffered a fatal stroke when the USSR fell and Reagan upended all their cherished notions. Since then it’s been hooked up to life support — race! Climate! Race Again! China! More Race! — but it’s all artificial, and the moment it’s disconnected, we’ll realize they’re dead.

The flurry of activity is really the corpse of communism being consumed from within.

All over the world, inchoately, blindly, people are revolting against the failing centralized model of government and living. And like some species of plants which can’t even think but turn to the sun, they might not know much about us and our current troubles, but they know the stars and stripes stand for freedom.

And sure, they’re getting crushed. So was our revolution initially.

But bless them, now they have nothing they’re trying to fight their way out.

I suspect in not very long we’ll join in and then the tide turns.

I have children and adopted/ish grandchildren, and hope of bio grandchildren.

I very much hope this moment can pass without fire and blood.

I very much am afraid it can’t.

So, do what?
So….

The American people will ultimately fight as they first did for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and for our prescient, miraculous Constitution.

And thereonto I pledge my life, my wealth, my sacred honor. And I’m not alone.

Which is why as we stir and wake, the tide turns.

Which is why the animated corpse of communism (yes, that’s a long way to spell Joe Biden!) is terrified, and going full Jackboots in record time.

We won’t experience what they have in Cuba, because they’re trying so hard to bring it here so fast.

Be not afraid. In the end we win, they lose. Because we are fighting for life and freedom.

And the world knows it.

In the end we win, they lose.

Under old glory, which they fear.

463 thoughts on “Nobody Knows The Trouble….”

  1. Yes, normal people here sit…instead of rebelling against a government….

    I’ve read that only about a third of the colonial population rebelled / participated (on either side I suppose) in the Revolution. Is that right?

    1. It is generally believed that perhaps a third of the colonials were rebels, about the same were loyalists, and the remainder simply wanted all that nasty business to end so that they could get on about their daily lives.
      The loyalists naturally wanted to maintain a system under which they gained wealth and power. The rebels wanted to end that same system which denied them access to those same benefits. But the average citizen simply wanted to go about the business of living their lives, providing for their families, and working for a better future.
      Currently I suspect most Americans fall into that third category. As the heat under this pot gets cranked ever higher this ratio will inevitably change.

      2. I have been going through land grants and deed transfers in North Carolina ( along the New River area-think Daniel Boone) for the 1774-1784 period, and was struck by just this thought. People were really busy just trying to live. I have also read that some of the Baptist pastors were keeping quiet on the Revolution due to fears of British repercussions. (No, I am not a history buff, I preferred reading Heinlein to school work.)

        1. I’m going to get roasted I suspect. But. …. Catholics too, John Carroll of Carrollton and the Boston mob to the contrary. The relationship between the Catholics and the whigs was not a good one and we can’t forget that one of the primary reasons for the trouble was the Quebec acts, which established a certain amount of religious toleration, The flags all said down with the king and no popery.

          It’s a really good conversation to have with your children. Objectively, what side would you have been on? It’s all very clear now but wasn’t as clear then. I suspect as fairly bourgeois, Roman Catholics from New York that we would have been loyalists. Really it was a question of who/whom and it’s only in retrospect that we see how it turned out. It could easily have been different.

          Please note, this is not a reflection of my views now, I think we have rights that need defending against arbitrary power, and that’s what it’s all about — rejection of arbitrary power, everything else is detail.

          1. Nowadays, I think we all tend to forget about the religious aspects of those conflicts. Well. Because they’re pretty much entirely glossed over in schools, for one. But still, at least for those of us not on the lefty “all Christians are TEH EVUL” wagon, it’s still easy to forget because it’s rather an alien viewpoint by now. (Which is also probably why we struggle with understanding the Islamic terrorist mindset–and that one the lefties fall into even harder. No, really, guys, IT IS BECAUSE OF THEIR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS.”

            1. It’s glossed over in schools at least partially because people want to believe in the secularity of the Founding Fathers, contrary to evidence. They put their personal faith differences aside to make an agnostic Constitution not because they weren’t religious, but because they WERE, and were generally all believers in natural/higher law, which elevates human reason to interact with Divine law according to *each person’s understanding of it*. They’d seen the way that religion could tear apart a country (and how politics could tear apart a faith community), and wanted people to be free to reason, and understand on their own.

              It helps that they also restricted the franchise, so they figured that those who would be voting and participating in government, being wealthy property owners, would have at least a modicum of education.

              1. It’s glossed over in schools at least partially because people want to believe in the secularity of the Founding Fathers, contrary to evidence.

                That one goes both ways. One side tries to make them into completely secular entities with no influence from Christianity. The other tries to make them into borderline theologians.

                1. When I was a junior in college in the mid-’80s, researching a paper about the Dutch Revolt/Eighty Years War, I ran across a history written in America in 1824, and being shocked at how much of it was damned Papists this and idolatrous Popery that. It’s easy to forget how religiously tolerant we are these days.

                  1. There’s a Catholic bishop on record having threatened to burn down NYC. Many historians commend it because there was a pattern where agitators would move from city to city touting the riots and arson in one city to incite it for the next. This break after the threat (if they burned down a single Catholic church) meant it lost all momentum and stopped.

                    1. ” there was a pattern where agitators would move from city to city touting the riots and arson in one city to incite it for the next. ”

                      Gee, sounds real familiar.

                      Of course, the reason the bishop’s threat worked is that then the agitators knew that Catholics would actually carry out that threat, because they had within the agitators’ memory.

                    2. Dagger John. Archbishop Hughes. he told the city he’d turn it into “another Moscow” if a single church was burned. They believed him.

                      If you go to old Saint Patrick’s, you can still see the rifle loopholes in the walls.

                      This was not isolated. Orange marches went on in NYC until the riots of 1871. The elites sneered as they always do that more of the Irish scum should have been killed. Anti Catholicism is as American as apple pie I’m afraid and remains the only real socially acceptable prejudice in the US to this day though it looks as though evangelicals are starting to find out what it’s like being deplorable and all.

                    3. It’s still considered cool to hate Mormons, too. :p Also possibly a reason why historically the Catholics and the Mormons have been fairly friendly with each other (and also Mormons with Jews), despite some rather huge differences in doctrine.

                    4. I thought of that later. As bad as the RC’s had it, we didn’t face a genocidal invasion by regular troops like the Mormons did after being driven out from several other places. I remember the first time is was in SLC looking at the surrounding mountains and being glad I wasn’t an 1850’s dragoon.

                    5. Yes. And as a friend of mine commented (in relation to a Fallout New Vegas quest line that deals with Mormons in a refreshingly accurate way), the LDS religion has never had any sort of tradition of pacifism…

                  2. Heck, I remember shocking a Muslim neighbor in college when I mentioned the persecution the LDS faith had encountered for a large chunk of its history. His reply was “I mean, I know stuff like that happened/happens elsewhere in the world, but I didn’t think that would happen in the US!” So our current religious tolerance is even a byword amongst people from other nations (and even in a religion that often claims persecution here. Or has it claimed for them.).

                  3. Oh yeah. I boggled a bit at reading the Congressional Record (Senate Version) and the arguments against statehood for New Mexico. A lot of them came down to “the place has too many brown Catholics,” with the emphasis on the Catholic part. This was 1908-1910.

                    2. IIRC Must of the official push for “School Prayer” was in part anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish bigotry.

                      For that matter, the first Religious Schools in America were Catholic & Jewish because of the Public Schools were strongly anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish.

                      Because of this, many US States had laws forbidding public funds going to Religious Schools, IE Not “Separation of Church And State” but bigotry toward Catholic & Jews.

                      Oh, I find it “interesting” that the Anti-Catholic/Anti-Jewish Banner has moved from Protestants to Secular Lefties. 😦

                2. Well, they were borderline theologians. Any educated man of the time was. In English society, Christianity was far and away the dominant intellectual mode of thought during the 17th and 18th century. Similar to the way economics dominates intellectual thought today–any intellectual exercise now will grapple with your choice of Adam Smith, Marx, Hayek, Keynes, or some combination thereof.

          2. Well, Catholics were afraid that things would get worse, but mostly the law either stayed the same in states (inheritance laws for Catholics stunk), or things got a lot better, because religious freedom improved and a lot of crown taxes for not being in the established church went away.

      3. I’ve actually come to despise the ones who just want to get on with their lives. I think I hate them even more than the activists. Again and again during 2020 I heard them going on, looking at TV Box and saying everything would go back to normal once Orange Man was out and China Joe was elected. The only way to stop these rioters was to give in to them. Why won’t those Trumpers just go away and let us go back to normal? We just want everything to go back to normal.

        They didn’t or wouldn’t understand that they were frogs mad that the water was being turned up too fast and wanting to go back to the slow boil, and mad and the hopping frogs for telling them something was wrong.

        They just wanted everything to go back to normal.

        So they voted for China Joe.

        Now see what they get.

        Damn but I hate them.

        1. That’s the story.
          I have my doubts about its accuracy.

          Biden did not get 81,000,000 votes.
          And it’s laughable to claim that he did.

          1. Biden got about 35M real votes, 20M switched votes, and 25M manufactured votes.

            Trump got around 95M real votes, minus 20M switched votes.

            This should tell you all you need to know about what is really the “average American”.

            This should also inform one’s trust of lesser elections.

            Most of us regarded =Trump= as “getting back to normal”… or at least closer to the America we remember.

              1. In spite of everything they threw at Trump over a period of four years, the XiDen Obama Junta still had to shut down the count to bring in thousands of fake ballots at 3:AM AND they had to run them through multiple times.

            2. I’m not so sure about your numbers. The number-crunching I’ve done suggests that the Democrats manufactured a LARGE amount of votes for both Trump and Biden. Statistically-excess votes amount to about 11.5M for Trump and 18.5M for Biden. I have no personal knowledge about “switched” votes, though.

              1. Mine are back of the envelope based on two different guys who demonstrated vote switching (independently reaching the same result), plus a reasonable assumption that all the post-pause vote counting was bogus. However, I did not see any evidence that there was vote-manufacturing that benefited Trump (tho the most recent physical counting showed that there may have been some, just accidentally included in the stacks that went into the machines more than once, but on a much smaller scale than you cite… maybe about 2%). Show your work??

                1. There’s no reason to believe that the vote-manufacturing benefitted Trump. It happened only in counties that voted more than 50% for Biden. Counties that went for Trump follow a nearly-perfect Gaussian curve, but above 50% Democrat votes the vote tally almost doubles magically. My speculation is that they fabricated large numbers of 60/40 Biden/Trump ballot batches.

                  I wish WordPress would let me attach a graphic.

                    1. I wasn’t suggesting that it did. I have a lovely bar chart with county-level presidential vote data that shows a Gaussian distribution of votes among counties that voted for Trump, and a crazy impossible massively-too-many-votes distribution among counties that voted for Biden.

                      It doesn’t prove any particular act of fraud, but it’s prima facie evidence that about 30 million “votes” were manufactured with a 60/40 split for Biden.

                    3. The statistically anomalous “extra” votes are split 60/40. ~11.5 for Trump, ~18.5 for Biden. They’re not 90% for Biden, I speculate that would have been too obvious.

                    4. ….yeah, going to need citation on that, because my memory was that it looked like the dependable Dem voters had looked at crazy-Biden and scary whore and had a massive “Well, we’ll take the 90s Democrat running as a republican, I guess.”

                    5. There is no cite. This is from my own data-crunching of county-level vote data. Total votes from counties that voted Republican form 1/2 of a lovely Gaussian curve. The other half of the curve (counties that voted D) is anomalous. My 11.5/18.5 “extra” votes are the excess D and R votes above the normal distribution.

                    6. You might want to look at the counts as they were being announced.
                      It points to a much different specific pattern.

                    7. I’ve paid attention to that. My method of analysis is silent on that. But I suspect that what I’m detecting is the bulk of the fraud–7M excess votes to Biden–the other stuff is what they resorted to when they realized it wasn’t enough.

                    9. Especially that priceless moment caught live on CNN, when Biden’s vote count went up by about 6,000, and Trump’s count went DOWN by exactly the same number.

                      How can any candidate’s vote count DECREASE during ‘The Most Fair And Honest Election In American History’?

                      Saw that video clip again, Biden proclaiming taking an oath to ‘God, America and the Constitution’. While not mentioning violating that oath within two hours.

                    10. Why would we assume that we can extract a normal distribution from some results, and match that to other results to calculate excess?

                      That would imply assuming a single fraud technique, carried out with discipline and organization in some but not all counties.

                      The pattern of the cover up, and the pattern of the recklessly obviousness of the fraud, speak to more than one technique carried out without much discipline and organization.

                      The accusations of fraud were pretty scattershot. If one knew that some were true, and others were untrue, you could discredit the true ones by investigating the untrue ones, and showing that they were untrue.

                      Now, possibly there was only one true set of fraud accusations. Possibly the only reasons that they could not discredit untrue accusations is that Joe Biden no longer has the leadership capacity, and nobody in his campaign has it either.

                      Me, I think the degree of refusal to permit investigation of the electronic voting machines implies that such would show some pretty damning evidence.

                      There would have been electronic voting machines in some of the counties that went Trump. So the distribution from counties that went Trump, probably includes some tampered counties.

                      My suspicion is as follows: There were two or three stages of fraud effort.

                      One, pre registration, early voting, and shenanigans with voting rolls. Stuff that has to be done in advance, and cannot be changed on the fly.

                      Two, something with the electronic voting systems. One possibility, with storing votes as a float, is that you could monitor in real time, and change the distribution a little. If you have a pretty shrewd guess how the votes will go.

                      I’m not sure how to describe this, but if you have your Gaussian distribution of actual votes, and you have a certain chunk of each bin that you can fiddle with, you could shift the apparent distribution. If ‘your’ slice of voting machines is in the extreme part of the Trump tail, you shift a small number of votes, and basically move a small number of counties to the next bin over. Out of the tail, you move a larger number, and then if you slice of machines is in the middle, you move a lot of those over, maybe moving the center a good distance.

                      This theory of the manipulation would explain why there might be an actual need for outside monitoring, and outside in the loop adjustment.

                      Third stage, what if you can tell that stage two has failed? Well, you don’t have access to all of the counties for dumping massive amounts of fake ballots. The counties you do have for that are probably going to correlate with both the real democrat votes, the expected democrat results from polling models, and the false democrat votes. Well, if you are checking the actual votes in real time, one sign of a problem might be a lot of real Trump votes in place of expected Biden votes. And, created fraudulent ballots that are mixed D/R after a surprise risks failing to steal the election. You would need tight discipline, and C&C to pull that off in a rush, which translates to evidence that could show up in court.

                      What if most of the Trump votes in the ‘Biden’ counties were real, some of the Biden votes in electronic voting counties were switched, and then a bunch of fake Biden votes were pushed through the system on top of things?

                      Wouldn’t that also match what you have seen?

              2. I saw some Georgia Democrat, all worked up, complaining that there was no need to investigate the election because they had 2 recounts and they all came out EXACTLY the same.

                That’s REAL suspicious.

                First, we are expected to believe that a bunch of fallible humans counted through millions of votes 3 times without making a SINGLE mistake, OR they made EXACTLY the same mistakes every time. I would expect dozens to hundreds of different random mistakes each time they undertook such a large project.

                Second, there is now absolute, conclusive PROOF that hundreds of ballots, at the very least, were counted twice in Fulton County. Did they count the SAME BALLOTS twice in EVERY recount? How would it be possible for them to know which ballots to count twice?

                The fraud is gradually being exposed, like a whale carcass at low tide, but the Democrats are still pretending it doesn’t stink.
                ———————————
                Elections are far too important to be left up to a bunch of uncontrolled voters. The Party MUST exercise oversight and management to prevent mere voters from electing the wrong candidates!

                1. Of course, we know from whistle-blowers why the numbers came out the same. They got a different answer in the recount, but re-released the original numbers anyway. They really aren’t very bright.

        2. I want things to go back to normal. I want to let my kids play at the park in front of my apartment without worrying that someone is going to complain that I’m abusing them. I want to not have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet. I want to be able to afford the house I’ve been saving for.

          I didn’t vote for Joe.

          I almost managed all of those things under Trump.

          I want liberty and freedom and to not have to sacrifice my children and grandchildren on the altar of the state. Voting for Joe was not the way to do that.

          Yes, I want things to go back to being normal. And I know that’s not likely in my lifetime. I didn’t vote for Joe. I don’t know a damn person who did. I do know a lot of people who are pissed as hell and not saying anything yet. Yet.

          The television tells you they voted for Joe. It. Lies.

          2. “I almost managed all of those things under Trump.”

            I’ve been working at it for years before Trump but 2016 accelerated the process of getting out of California gracefully and into a decent state where I could live out my life. In less than 100 days, the BidenReich has made it clear they will destroy as much of that as they can.

      4. A LOT of normal people were just NOT affected by what others thought intolerable. Just didn’t affect them.
        Kind of like someone who is a Fud and has a shotgun and a deer rifle. He can’t imagine that the anti-gunners could be after HIS guns, so he believes he doesn’t have skin in the game, so ignores it. If you don’t have children and don’t plan on having children what does teaching CRT in the schools mean, they just don’t see that it matters. The people like that are VERY FAR AWAY from any idea of Revolting because they see no reason to. In Revolts it is ALWAYS this way and WILL always be this way.

      1. He’s right. About 3% of the population on both sides (Tories/loyalists vs. revolutionaries). It’s one reason why it took a little over seven years to prevail against the British, because had the entirety of the military-age population fought against the British they would have been soundly defeated fairly quickly. They just wouldn’t have been able to deliver near the combat power it would have taken to put down the Revolution. However, most Americans in the colonies occupied the vast middle and, like noncombatants or nonpartisans everywhere, did their best to just keep their heads down and make a living.

      2. I believe it was about 3% who actually took up arms and fought. But those also served who provided support in whatever forms or fashions were within their abilities.
        And I also seem to recall something of a mass migration of the loyalists back to England or up into Canada once the Brits were forced to settle. We were a drain on their military at a time when they had bigger fish to fry with France amongst others.

        1. Some Tories were given land in Canada. That’s the story on my husband’s side of the family.

        2. The problem is that if you are running a Revolutionary War era hardscrabble farm mostly alone, you can’t just leave. No matter how strongly you feel about it, you can’t just let your animals and crops and family die.

          Of course, if you are burned out and have your beasts stolen, serving in the Continental army becomes a good choice.

      3. 3% actually participated in the fighting, out of roughly 30% supporting the rebellion. That makes perfect sense–the usual figure of merit for mobilizing a population for war is that 10% of population is the maximum armed forces that can be supported.

    3. Lots of numbers get thrown around. In his “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” Winston Churchill claimed that half of the population of the newly-independent United States were unhappy enough with the New Bosses to pack up their stuff and head north to still-British America. The “offences” laid out in the Declaration of Independence were seen as rich men’s problems that had zero personal affect on the majority of the population, except Washington’s tax men were far more rapacious than George III’s; men who had put up with the King were angry enough to start Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, and Fries’ Rebellion against the new government. They weren’t Royalists; they were “Taxed Enough Already.”

      Apparently there’s indirect evidence of a Canadian population surge after the American Revolution, but again, no hard numbers are available.

      I think Churchill’s claim is exaggerated – the loss of such a huge chunk of population should have very visible second-order effects – but it wasn’t all tricorn hats and kumbayah after the war.

      1. Arguably the history of this country is best summarized as “no, really, you do actually have to follow those inconvenient documents”.

      2. I mean, really, Americans being annoyed with their government SHOULD be how it is. Of course people weren’t happy with the new government–there were probably a great many who’d interpreted it all as “no taxes ever!” and got upset when that turned out to not be the case.

        I mean, c’mon, we’re all STILL upset about taxes (income tax is unconstitutional, dammit! Or it should be). It’s just that there’s a whole lot of other stuff we’re irked about on top of that.

        One of the funniest lines in the Sleepy Hollow tv show was in the second or third episode, where Ichabod Crane is looking at the receipt for the donut holes they just picked up on their way to the police station and is outraged at the sales tax rate, which was WAY higher than what they threw a revolution over.

      3. Well, I’ve heard that they swamped the English-speaking parts of Canada, but that may just indicate how scarcely populated that part was.

    4. About a third had a rooting interest.
      A bit over 10% actually put themselves at risk in some fashion or other.
      About 3% picked up a musket.

  2. That’s the great thing about right-leaning Americans. They’re law-abiding and peace-loving, right up until they’re not. And then all bets are off. I think the right is close to the “until we’re not” phase of things, and the left isn’t going to like it one bit.

    1. Typical meek mild inoffensive American, willing to go along to get along right up to the point where the clueless idiots push him over his imaginary yet very well defined line. Once crossed it’s hoist the Jolly Roger and start slitting throats.
      Never forget, we told a King to sod off, not once but twice.
      And we are at least so far the only country to pay back a sneak attack with nukes. Once with actual bombs and several times now with 30mm depleted uranium slugs.

      1. Remember, these meek and mild Americans, once they reached the ‘enough is enough’ stage, crossed a frozen river at night to slit British throats on Christmas morning.

    2. Look at what’s been happening in South Africa this past week. Shop owners have started shooting back in defense of their livelihoods. Where they haven’t, it’s a disaster of scope similar to if the city had been bombed out.

    3. Starting to reach that point it seems. Went back into work on a new project a few weeks ago, and a longtime friend was shocked by my insistence that, if somebody wanted to know if I were vaccinated, they’d have to get a warrant.

      1. I’m sure that my medical providers would all, after consulting with their legal departments or advisors, would abide by a properly issued warrant. I’d still tell them to FOAD. Depending on how far things had already fallen, perhaps help them with the AD.

        1. If the Federal gov. wants that info they already have the names of those who are on Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare Advantage insurers are easily pressured and the regular insurance companies would only require a bit more pressure, maybe, unless their management is already woke. Though I expect that the names and other info is already in the Fed. system through forms filled out when getting the shot[s].

          2. “If the Federal gov. wants that info they already have the names of those who are on Medicare and Medicaid.”

            They also have the massive amounts of info they were authorized to gather under Obamacare and its offshoot regulations. Are they organized enough to actually DO anything with it? That’s another question. But if they want it, they have all manner of legal cover to ask for it.

          3. And look at the MASSIVE amount of Medicare/Medicaid fraud that is done more or less constantly. If they were remotely organized, I would think it would not be so easy to commit said fraud. But they seem barely even able to track it beyond “Well, we know it happens…”

            1. That would require they care. More fraud means more money which means more functionaries in the “middle class”. Fighting fraud is counterproductive

    4. Neither will the Right. Even those who participate in it, and think it’s the correct action.

      Which is something I don’t think the Left understands.

  3. There’s tyranny and they’re tyrannical rule. I think a lot of people are beginning to rebel against tyrannical rule – the idea that there is someone else in control of your personal destiny is abhorrent to the majority (I hope). Even when it’s couched in the rather insulting terms of “we, the people YOU voted into power, know what’s best for you” They want to abolish autonomy, beginning with removing personal responsibility. Without personal responsibility and accountability, it’s much easier to control large swaths of people, at least until total anarchy descends and the inevitable collapse of all they hold dear slaps them in the face. Of course, they may hold nothing dear except their private domains, but even those will be gone. I’m not a fan of “trust the plan” and believe in personal readiness when SHTF – I just hope I’m ready enough! Right now, I’m reminded of a CS Lewis quote:
    “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” C.S. Lewis

    Oh, I hope we throw off the yoke soon!

    1. There are three sets of Three Words…

      “Hold My Beer” – This is the MILD one. It might even be funny, from a distance.
      “Oh Hell No!” – Medium. NOT Funny. Keep well, well back. Do NOT get in the way.
      “Well, F*** It!” – REVERSE COURSE AT FULL WARTIME POWER, even in peace.

      We are approaching “Hold My Beer” but it might just go right to “Well, …”

      1. For the left it has always been story time, but their stories only play to the captive audience firmly fixed within their liberal progressive alternate reality bubbles.
        We the people have just received a year and more of stellar examples of why it is in our best interest to believe our lying eyes as opposed to a passel of talking heads all regurgitating the same fake narrative.

        1. It worked in January. At least enough to get some desperate people to try something very, very stupid, extremely tame compared to what had happened before, and handed the left a little ammunition that they’ve been doing their best to make seem like a lot for months.

          I’ve become very disappointed in my parents in the past months. They hang on every word TV Box says, call those talking heads by their first names as if they were old dear friends, go on and on about ‘the worst thing since 1812’ and rant and rave about all the unmasked people in the supermarket (not a word about the unmasked lefty gatherings, unmonitored migrants who might have the rona, and they don’t know about the NY nursing home deaths and wouldn’t believe me if I told them).

          I sent them link after link debunking the Covington kid hoax and they still think those kids all but assaulted that activist. They go on about pi$$ing prostitutes and Bunker Boy telling people to inject themselves with bleach and calling war dead losers, then talk about how stupid and brainwashed the Trump cult is.

          I tried to bring up Hunter’s laptop once, my father dismissed it out of hand: “You know how easy something like that is to fake?” Then went right back to Rachel Maddow.

          I gave up on him.

      2. Never trust The Plan.

        The Plan is a fever dream of technocrats and everyone else who thinks that they are that much smarter than everyone else.

        The thing that may be worth trust is the character of those who practice your own religion, and those who share your own culture.

        I, broadly, trust in that for my guess that we will win. It is not a calculation that we will win, it is not based in many many measurements, with all the ramifications carefully understood. (My proof to myself that I cannot calculate such things is partly supported by such calculations.) I have faith that either we will win, or that we will have an appropriate opportunity to die fighting.

        1. Been re-reading Peter Nealen’s “American Praetorians” and “Maelstrom Rising” series. In several of the novels Nealen defined a “plan” as “a list of (crap) that ain’t gonna happen.”

        2. Trust a plan? Heck, the class I had planned out is changing as I work on the actual lessons. If one teacher-type can’t keep her own history class from shimmying around and changing a little, how in the name of little green lizards can anyone keep The Plan on track?

          Aside from the Great Author Himself, and He’s probably shaking His head at some of the directions the characters take.

        3. “Plan” comes from a Sanskrit phrase meaning “list of shit that isn’t actually going to happen.”

          1. ‘Plan’ was originally an architectural term and nothing else. Building plans work, if the engineering is sound, because bricks and stones and timbers stay where they are put. Live human beings don’t, so any plan based on using them as building material is destined to fail.

            Dead human beings, on the other hand, do stay where they are put. This explains why Communist regimes go to such lengths to manufacture more of them. Mountains of corpses, to them, are not a bug but a feature, because they will Follow The Plan.

        4. Bob–WP wouldn’t let me reply to your post about my histograms above, so I’m doing it here.

          I think that what you are suggesting is plausible, but I don’t think that it is sufficient to explain the disparities I’m seeing. For example, the largest anomaly for Trump was in counties that went for Biden between 50.5% and 60%. That is almost certainly in part because of large numbers of Trump votes being shifted one or two bins toward the Biden side, but the disparity is something like 4.5M votes for Trump over a normal distribution. I think it’s quite clear that they were manufacturing votes for both, but with a large weighting toward Biden, to keep it more or less hidden.

          The biggest anomaly for Biden was in the bin for counties that voted 75%-80% for Biden. There was a smaller anomaly for Trump there as well, but I think that most of the outright vote manufacturing for Biden happened there.

        5. Addendum: The analysis I did wouldn’t catch a method of cheating that carefully preserves a normal distribution. I have no personal way of detecting that. It could also be that when they said Trump’s turnout “broke the algorithm”, they meant that it produced these detectable statistical anomalies. Meaning that there were enough Trump votes that manufacturing enough batches with a 60/40 split to reverse the outcome caused a detectable deviation from the norm.

          1. I’m not saying Reziac’s theory is correct.

            I do not know that any specific theory is correct. I am certainly not saying that I have an expert* opinion on what happened.

            I am asserting that some estimation techniques are not sufficient to say anything conclusive about fraud.

            I presented a hypothetical three stage cheating methodology, and asserted that the second stage might defeat your estimation technique. I tried to describe a scheme which might create or preserve a normal distribution. However, if the number of electronic voting machines is small enough, they would not be capable of creating a normal distribution.

            I think the three stages could be explained by historical development. Originally, they only used stage one, fake registrations, plus out right wholesale ballot stuffing. Then, around the time went they put in electronic voting machines, they realized that with ready information access, and cheap computing power, people were in a position to readily do what you have done, and detect the prior stage one fraud. I think the sole purpose of the electronic voting machines might have been the need to insulate the fraud from statistical detection.

            So, they put that in place, possibly 2005, and were fiddling with results from 2006 to 2016 using a two stage scheme. With fake registrations/bused in voters being stage one, and the computer statistics system being stage two. Which they screwed up by being too heavy handed with information warfare, damaging the utility of phone polls, and then Trump was wildly more popular than they had planned for.

            Then, the desperate vicious morons doubled down. 2018 and especially 2020. Determined to cheat their way in at any cost, instead of taking the L, they had a bunch of people go all in on a more ad hoc stage three, and they were stupidly obvious. Some of the messaging had to have been prepared before hand, but some of the legal strategy for managing the appearance of fraud was probably prepared afterwards.

            Okay, I’m certain that they are idiots, and doubling down. But beyond that, and the Trump win explanation for 2016, these are not strongly held opinions.

            Anyway, there are four ways this hypothetical of mine might be tested. 1. Conspiracy falls apart. 2. Digging into the pre 2000 numbers for signs of obviousness. 3. Access to the voting machines. 4. There are fields of computing that study how you calculate an output from inputs to achieve a desired result. There is also scientific literature in statistics.

            It might be possible to reverse engineer from the literature when or if doing this manipulation in real time became theoretically possible, and practically possible. Obviously the specific personalities involved in political polling are a bit suspicious. But, this technique, if possible in real time, would have requirements that are useful for other things. I think they may not be paying experts capable of inventing the theory for such a scheme enough for exclusive access, so there should be other traces of it, and the experts, in the literature. Of course, if the theoretical work was done under a classified federal grant, it would be hidden from this.

            *I am not an accountant, I am not an auditor, I am not a Statistician, I am not in computer forensics, and I am a rather terrible programmer. I am a lunatic on the internet, I like trolling, and I talk to a bunch of people who I do not really know.

            1. I am something of a traditionalist. I remember when vote fraud meant ward heelers *physically* stuffing the ballot box. I have a rather…intrinsic…feel for how many votes that can change or create. I am also a man of my time. I can “big data”, and I observe that some…many…of these “big data” types are, well, “clever”. In the worst possible sense.

              When I see ward heelers brought in to physically stuff the ballot boxes in full view of security cams, I know that things have gone to heck for the people that are actually making the decisions. So I start looking deeper. I do not have router logs. I cannot send teams of “operators” to snag retrieve hard drive images of suspect devices.

              But I know how people behave, and I know how to see the hidden order in the chaos. And I know how to detect the thumb on the scale.

      3. Those who said, “Trust the plan” never had an answer for “So what IS the plan??” … but apparently we’re supposed to know what it is intuitively, and wait for all to be revealed.

        Yeah, right.

        1. If there *were* a plan, it wouldn’t survive contact with the enemy.

          Small groups of pissed off paratroopers, moving towards the sound of gunfire, and looking to make mischief.
          Very effective, and drives generals nuts.

          1. LGOPPs, the scariest thing in the Army. A Little Group of P-ssed-Off Paratroopers. A small herd of 20 something males with lots of weapons, training, and nooooooo adult supervision.

            1. I mean, I think lots of folks fail to realize that at least in some arenas, the extreme youth of the bulk of the military is a feature, not a bug. Heavily armed, no adult supervision…

      4. Yeah. I’ve been seeing some out-of-nowhere, very bizzarro “QAnon has gone underground and is attempting ” shrieking from a few MSM headlines this week. They made me chuckle they were so ridiculous.

        I’m fairly sure one of them was “Really, it’s QAnon that’s trying to oppress everyone by taking over school boards and getting CRT thrown out! Reeee!!” and it was just so…absurd.

        1. I sometimes (okay many times) snark that progs need an Emmanuel Goldstein to seethe at. Someone like Trump or someone else. Then I snark further and point out that they need an army of Emmanuel Goldsteins to seethe at… and now I just realized QAnon has to be that army. For now, at least. O_o;;

            1. That was another thing Orwell was optimistic about. The hatred lasts a lot longer than two minutes. It’s more like they occasionally pause for two minutes to catch their breaths and resume the hatred.

              1. Oh, the hatred goes on all the time. The Two Minutes’ Hate is just the part that you will be shot for not participating in with sufficient enthusiasm. Everyone must contribute to the Hate, because those who don’t are hateful haters who hate the wrong things.

      5. I found the Q stuff a fascinating and entertaining rabbit hole, but I always wanted to know just whose plan we were supposed to be trusting. Nobody ever got around to answering that question.

        By now, though, I think the answer is obvious . . .

        1. Supposedly, it was Trump’s master plan to overturn the election fraud. It sort of fit into the claim I kept hearing about Trump as a 4-D chess master, always ten steps ahead of his enemies.

          He’s good. But he’s not *that* good.

          1. And even if he was, my response to any such phrase as “trust the plan” is “No. Make me.” I’ll trust G-d’s plan, but even that one has me scratching my head and going “Really…?” most of the time. The plan of a mere mortal? Hah. Nope. I might follow it, if persuaded it is a sensible course, but I’m still not gonna trust it.

          2. From what I saw, his strength was keeping dozens of irons in the fire and being willing to switch which ones he was working based on yield.

            Then his entire legal team quit on him during the election lawsuits. I’m not sure anyone could survive having nearly an entire industry blacklist them at a time like that.

      6. That does explain the oddity of “Q-Anon” being a conspiracy theory where things were getting better. I had never come across one like that before.

        2. A Game Designer’s Analysis of QAnon

          QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering.

          There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at.

      7. Q-Anon has always felt a little off. Not that the Right isn’t capable of being dumb and chasing squirrels on their own. But the way the media Cathedral has fixated on Q-Anon, how the group sounds like a bad parody of modern conservatives, and the fact that they have lied to us constantly, makes me very suspicious.

  4. I can’t believe it’s Day 4 and they’re still in the streets. It’s impossible to get news you can trust, but the ‘people are missing, people are being killed’ parts, at least, are incontrovertible.

    It is agony watching this and feeling helpless.

    1. “We are the friends of freedom everywhere, but the defenders of only our own.”

      One of the truest of Jerry’s quotes. It’s also one of the saddest ones because he recognized the futility of trying to impose freedom from outside, especially as a government. We can contribute to the revolutionaries as individuals. We should never contribute as a nation as that leads to entangling alliances.

      1. That quote, actually a paraphrase, goes back to John Quincy Adams in 1821: “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/jqadams.htm

      2. “Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.”
        — Lloyd Biggle Jr.

    2. It might help to read about Damas de Blanco. These ladies have been disappeared for years because… Cuba. But they still don the white.

      Cubanos are proud. They are in it for the long haul, for the win. Try not to worry too much about them.

    3. I know, but they’re not stopping. At some point sheer desperation overcomes guns. Pray for them and be not afraid.
      (I always have felt an affinity to Cuba, more than other Latin American locales, because a lot of boys from my region were sent there during the Spanish occupation. There’s a ton of resonance in the culture stil.)

      1. It has been awful listening to the cellphone conversations and the short videos, because they speak with the accent I’ve heard all my life. It makes it too intimate.

  5. Our Founding Fathers didn’t fight until they actually had the Regular Army breaking down their doors and raiding the pantry for dinner. And still, Captain Parker ordered his men to disband when Pitcairn told him to–Lexington Green was completely FUBAR. Texans didn’t really start fighting until Santa Anna had genocided two provinces and made plain his intent to do the same in Texas. (But oh, yeah, it was about slavery.)

    1. I don’t know how long it will take, but our betters in Washington are issuing some dire threats these days. It’s quite plain now that the states are pushing back on The Party’s illegal actions on multiple fronts. If The Party responds to this with violence, then it’s Katy Bar the Door.

      1. My daughter and I have talked about this. The rebellion (maybe violent) will kick off when some a-hole in Washington decides to make a show of authority over … something. A gesture of defiance on the part of someone or some party in a red state over some more than usually stupid federal ruling. The federal authority will decided that someone must be made an example of, to encourage the others. The locals, and more importantly, the state authorities involved will take a hard line: No, you won’t … and it will escalate from there.
        Don’t know what will be the issue, or the state involved … but it will happen. And then – Katie, bar the door.

        1. Depending on how stupid they get, the local branch of Federal agencies may join in the “no, F you, I’m not being your warcrime enforcer!”

        2. As you know, there have been cases where local branches said, roughly, “If that is what you wish done, you go do it yourself. Here is the chapter on verse for why we are not doing it. Do you want to give us that order in writing?”

          1. And yes, one can conclude that I am expecting *someone* to decide they do, indeed, wish to give that in writing AND enforce it themselves.

            1. Depends. The higher up one goes–and one does not have to go very high–the more, ahem, conflict-averse they get. So…it would take a real fanatic.

              1. *nod*
                Which means that either they purge and install fanatics at a level where they’re actually the ones making calls like this, or we get really super lucky.

              2. There are a lot of people in high places these days who have been very, very bad boys and girls. To the point that losing power means a jail sentence, if not a death sentence. That changes things significantly.

          2. Hell, for some things in my office it is (or really, REALLY should be) standard practice to ask the manager asking you to Do The Thing That is Technically Against Regulations in writing. If they balk, usually it doesn’t get pushed. Thing is, too many folks aren’t *quite* brave enough to really push back when they do balk. (My father, who is in a multi-year feud with his boss–my father works in the same field office I do–is really bad about not getting it in writing, and then complains when she stabs him in the back *again.* I’ve been telling him for years “Get EVERYTHING in writing.” He’s gotten better on some things, but for whatever reason just won’t push it as far as it ought to go. And so keeps getting thrown under the bus with some things that, in fact, the boss pulled. And mind you, if I were his boss and he was as stroppy with me as he is with her, I’d want to throttle him too–but. BUT. He follows regs and laws. So not doing so just to get him in hot water is, in my view, a stupid thing to do. Which is why he should get everything in WRITING, dangit.)

            1. Honestly, almost EVERYTHING should be in writing, and I only say almost because I’m sure I am not thinking of something relevant.

              1. And, “Could you send that in an email? I can’t seem to remember anything that’s not written down anymore.” is very useful. Also, I can’t remember anything that’s not written down anymore. The hazards of have three to five jobs all at the same time.

                They’re cool jobs, mind you, so I’m not complaining, but when they say the memory is the second thing to go, they mean it…

                2. Likewise, but also because my *supervisor’s* memory is terrible, and I get really tired of hashing over the same conversation six times in three months, trying to get her to remember “This is what you have decided EVERY TIME we’ve discussed this…” And she’s around my age, for crying out loud (ie, early 40s.)

                  1. That can be dangerous, my husband upset one lady (pregnancy brain) by getting in the habit of emailing her the email thread they’d discussed stuff in, instead of responding to the new bi-weekly email.

                    She didn’t *do* anything about it, but it did upset her a bit, and he felt bad.

                1. Cynically, I want it in writing because what they WRITE is often not what they MEANT and I get tired of being scolded for doing what I was asked, not what someone wanted.

                  1. Cynically, I want it in writing because what they WRITE is often not what they MEANT and I get tired of being scolded for doing what I was asked, not what someone wanted.

                    –
                    ^^This^^ 1000%

                    1. Seriously, I thought I had the worst memory on earth, with Issues when it came to even just writing it down myself minutes after the request.

                      Nope, just end up around a lot of people whose deadlines, desires and formats change…..

                    2. Let’s just say I was burned a few times. Even with written proof. Although people were confused why they needed a signed change order for internal stuff … (because TPTB expected your project to take X amount of time and now that time is being added to because you don’t know what you needed, and I wasn’t experience to know how to ferret out what you *needed VS what you thought you *wanted, causing someone else project to be slipped back).

                      * Something I got dang good at too FYI. Best complement ever was “Not what asked for but what I wanted.” Because it was what they NEEDED!

              3. I have just lately been rereading Churchill’s WWII memoirs. This passage leaps to mind, a minute that Churchill issued soon after becoming Prime Minister:

                ‘Let it be very clearly understood that all directions emanating from me are made in writing, or should be immediately afterwards confirmed in writing, and that I do not accept any responsibility for matters relating to national defence on which I am alleged to have given decisions, unless they are recorded in writing.’

                Wise counsel for leaders, and a wise standard for their followers to hold them up to.

        3. I think they tried once with Kyle Rittenhouse, but it didn’t work quite the way they thought it would. But he’s still behind bars/awaiting trial, if I recall right, so I wouldn’t put it past them to try again with him.

        4. I think TPTB see that coming, and are trying to avoid it. There has not been significant pushback against many of the state actions taking place right now, and I think that’s why.

          I think there’s going to be a rather nasty incident of right-wing violence before winter, even if the FBI has to plan and execute it. Then the real crackdown begins, and you’ll see a lot of people who formerly had a lot to lose no longer so encumbered. I’m sure you can write the next chapter of *that* story.

    2. You’re right about Lexington being a fustercluck, but only in the morning, and the British were more interested in the powder stores than the pantry.
      Isaac Davis’ men got rather serious at Northbridge later in the day, too.

    3. It took a time to work up to it. As to Parker, he knew his unit couldn’t stand in the open and trade shots with Brit regulars, which was why they paraded to the side, not blocking the road. So they started moving back, and then that first shot came, from which side nobody knows(and the British REALLY wanted to know). And then, for real and “This isn’t going to go away because we order them to”, things got real skippy.

    1. A very liberal woman I know got the vaccine and feels betrayed by the people who pushed it into her and is deeply worried about her health. Thing is, she now rages against the unvaccinated and wants them all to die. She doesn’t care anymore. That’s a powder keg.

        2. How has this whole past year not been “I have to isolate because I’m vulnerable to Covid, therefore all of you have to also”?

      3. The truly indoctrinated never learn.

        Never.

        As shown in the movie Green Inferno: you can literally rescue an SJW from a cannibal’s cooking pot and she’ll STILL slander you and defend the cannibal.

      1. I like that idea.
        For a moment I thought, but wouldn’t rebuilding Cuba take a lot?
        Then I realized it would take very little – just LET the Cuban people and stand well clear as a “Miracle” happens.

  8. Sure, we’ve been under increasingly shredded Constitution and suffering abuses and infringements for 100 years, but let’s be real, okay?

    More importantly, it hasn’t been always getting worse– look at gun right protections, where “may issue” has shifted to “shall issue” as a norm.
    Homeschooling, which was unthinkable, is now in double digits of households. (Actual homeschooling, at that, not distance public school.)

    1. THIS. In many ways we’re getting stronger while the enemy destroys itself.

      1. Back in my old college Cultural Anthropology course (hey, I had to take 6 credit hours of “social science” to get my degree in physics) one of the things covered was that cultures under existential stresses will often have “revitilization movements” where they basically double-down on core beliefs in the hopes that somehow this will save them from the cause of the stress. An example given was the “Ghost Dance” of certain Native American nations.

        I do think that’s what we’re seeing here, a “revitilization movement” of the American Left.

        1. I look at Extinction Rebellion and the other hard-core religious Environmentalists as the Ghost Dance and as a Millennial movement. That makes them . . . worth watching very closely, in some ways. And why their influence on US energy policy bugs the [rude word] out of me.

    2. Yup, in 1968 Federal Wage & Price controls were a mainstream policy from a Republican President.
      Forty years after the backlash that led to Reagan, the left is still afraid to admit they want to touch price controls.

      1. The year’s off slightly. R M Nixon wasn’t president until 1969. As memory serves, W&P controls came into effect in either the summer of 1971 or 72. The steel company I worked for/with (it’s complicated) carefully backdated its price sheets to the day before the controls came into effect when they did their price increase. IIRC, it was about a 10% increase.

        1. Isn’t 1972 the year most classic went to trash? I seem to recall that year being the “don’t buy after” date for a lot of classic rifles, cars and other collectibles.

          1. 15 August 1971, a day that ought to live in infamy. Tricky Dick and the economists — should be a hardcore punk band name — ended the convertibility of dollars into gold. They believed in their ability to manipulate the economy, the Phillips Curve, and guns and butter. The French believed none of it and forced the issue by converting their dollars into gold, which was precisely what should happen to discipline a badly behaving state. Too, the goal was to break the US’s “Exorbitant Privilege” as a later French President was to call it. In that they failed, but they did cause a lot of problems, leading the US Sec Treas Connally, who put the theft through, to quip that the dollar “is our currency, but your problem.”

            Nixon blamed it all on gougers and wreckers like a typical tyrant.

            1. And so far as I can tell, the like-minded have been telling all those who want to go back to Gold Standard ever since that they’re just crazy conspiracy theorists…

              1. Just so. Lenin would be proud of them,

                The dollar has declined in value versus gold by roughly 7.79% CAGR since that time, which coincidentally is very close to the increas in the money supply and, thus, true inflation. The lying, liars who lie CPI had increased at about half that.

                1. It’s not all ‘lying liars who lie’. The CPI is bound to increase more slowly than the money supply when there is real economic growth; and the price of gold in terms of real goods and services is bound to go up under the same conditions, since gold does not obligingly come into being to compensate for increased production in the economy.

                  The Western world was subject to chronic economic depression, frequent debt crises, and full-scale financial panics about once a decade in the latter half of the 19th century – that is, the period of slavish adherence to the gold standard. Only sheer luck, in the form of the Klondike gold strike, saved the system from collapsing before 1900.

            2. I saw Tricky Dick and the Whiz Kids open for Smashing Pumpkin at Lincoln Hall before they sold out.

      2. According to The Intertubes, Nixon’s wage and price controls started in 1971. Nixon went on to be re-elected in 1972, then resigned in August 1974 during impeachment. Agnew had already been sacked and replaced by Gerald Ford.

        Ford did a wizard job of cleaning up the mess, but Jesus Christ Himself couldn’t have been elected as a Republican in 1976. Thus we got ‘Jimmeh Cahtah’.

        Ever since Carter, the Democrats have seemed determined not to leave the most recent Democrat as The Worst President Of All Time by putting up an even worse candidate.

        Bite your tongue before you blurt out, “They couldn’t POSSIBLY find a worse one than Biden-und-Harris!”
        ———————————
        “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here — this is the War Room!”

        2. Ford did a wizard job of cleaning up the mess

          I was only 9-11 years old during Ford, but even at that age “Whip Inflation Now” seemed pretty weak. That was also when we got the betrayal of South Vietnam, the Church Commission, gas lines, and the Mayaguez Incident. For my money the mess didn’t get cleaned up until 1981.

    3. I’ve been noticing that, and Hoyt’s comments about the Constitution being built for a rural country put it in focus.

      The Constitution was built for a decentralized society. And it becomes strained when society centralizes, while things return as it decentralizes.

      Right now we seem to have both going on at the same time, and I’m not sure where the end result is going to be. But the decentralization of the news is a large part of what is destroying the left, why they are so desperate. And it is the centralization of social media that is giving them the ability to retain the power they have.

      Not sure how it will go in the end.

  9. “And thereonto I pledge my life, my wealth, my sacred honor. And I’m not alone.”

    I’m with you.

        1. And now that you’ve provided a quote that the Left can show as admitting Fascism…. 😎

          Which is why Sarah’s fear about what we post giving them ammunition is both true…. and absolutely pointless.

          “No matter what this sign says, you’ll claim it’s racist!”

          Those of us who were involved with the Tea Party know in our bones that’s true and has been for long before now. Our opposition is incapable of honesty, and views ours as weakness. Why bother debating them?

          1. Yep. A man could be a poor, overweight black, gay, cross-dressing left-handed, Jewish Amerindian inna wheelchair… And if he’s got the Gadsen flag hanging off the back with his rifle rack…

            He is a cis-het patriarchal white-supremacist opressor.

            Which is why there is no point kissing Sancta Racisma’s pimply buttocks – left or right cheek

              2. A gentleman must always pay strict attention to the caliber of his response after all.

  10. animated corpse of communism

    Jiangshi Baidu, amirite?

    Yeah, broader point, against the glowies and the doomers, is also correct. The regime is a Gu jar of vicious morons. They have no ability to run a sustainable tyranny, because they have no internal discipline, and no ability to judge how far they are pushing people as they ruin everything that isn’t solely for their own benefit. If the Dems had an ambitious talent somewhere who could seize power, and push through things competently, that talent would have won the nomination, and have successfully concealed frauding themselves in.

    I still have concerns about collateral damage, personal hope for a future, and do not want to mess up the boog for everyone else.

    At this point, it is still worth considering the trade off of another day, or week, or month under the jackboot, for the sake of a better peace after the boog.

    I haven’t been paying attention, but the BLM riots seem to be less than last year. Possibly this is simply the Dems trying to implement carrot and stick, and they have not quite gotten to maximum power lashing out at everyone in rage. Possibly it is a result of quietly realizing what a bad idea things were.

    There are a bunch of little quiet bits of evidence that people are thinking things over, and not reaching the conclusions that they jumped to just a few years ago.

    Every day we calmly, sanely speak the truth, is a day where the regime’s insanity drives more people to quietly shift to supporting our side of the boog. From neutral to ally, or from enemy to neutral, or even from enemy to somewhat of an ally. Every person we can win over, is a more decisive victory, and fewer people that we would have to kill to remove ‘the roots of trouble’.

      1. I took better care of myself yesterday, and had a good night’s sleep! 🙂

        Basic thing is, Steve noticed that things were going this direction decades ago, and you years ago. So we’ve had time to hash things out properly, that most people haven’t had because they were not aware that the problem was even possible. We’ve made the mistakes people do when they first start studying this problem, seen that we need to try other things, and have come up with better answers. Eventually. 😛

        Most of what I’m doing* is synthesizing what others have said, and I’m not even doing that well because I didn’t keep the notes for proper citations. 😉

        *When I’m not clearly full of nonsense. XD

        1. I’m also seeing a selective blindness on certain things:

          “The Founders had actual troops breaking into their homes, unlike us.”

          Leaving aside what happened to Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani, that’s because they no longer have to physically break in. A few clicks of a mouse and they can search your private papers, steal your bank accounts via civil forfeiture, destroy your livelihood by cutting you off from your technological tools (Hi, Amazon!), etc. AND I HAVE PROVIDED COUNTLESS EXAMPLES OF EXACTLY THAT. But I’m gullible.

          Just because it’s not following the form, doesn’t mean that the effect isn’t identical.

          And just because we have the “form” of a Constitution doesn’t mean we actually have those rights when the reality breaks in.

          1. How is that blindness? I said that primarily as a response to the people who post stupid memes about how the Founding Fathers revolted when the principles of self-government were offended *in theory*. But in fact, they had the Army sitting at their dinner tables eating their food and going through their personal papers. We are not lesser men than they, thus far we’re on a very similar schedule actually–the Intolerable Acts were a response to the Tea Party. And now the states are pushing back effectively with vote audits and nullification.

            Up to January 6, The Party was very selective about when and how they used the unconstitutional powers that they had arrogated to themselves. *In theory*, it was easy to predict that state of affairs would not last. But comfortable people with much to lose do not take action over theories–as the examples I provided show, most people have to have the redcoat literally eating their lunch first.

        2. What was that line? “The Americans will always do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else first.”

          Ironically also shows the difference between the British and American mindsets. He assumes we know what the right thing is before we try it…

          1. That, and “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

            1. Illustrated brilliantly in the journey of the Children of Israel to the promised land in the Old Testament: they’re being disobedient, they get struck with a plague. Moses is told to make a brass serpent and lift it up where the whole camp could see it. Anyone who looks at it is healed. Anyone who doesn’t, dies.

              An astonishing number refused to look at it, preferring to turn their face to the wall and die rather than admit they were wrong/do one simple act of humbling and obedience to be healed.

              We’re seeing this in the lefties right now too…

      2. To be fair, Bob has been making sense at least twice a week, lately, so reality seems to have caught up with him.

        Or perhaps he crossed the legs of the Pants of Time.

          1. Thing is, I’m pretty sure that if I freak out about this stuff any more than I already am, there’s a pretty good chance that I will just fall apart and go mute.

            Okay, there are other issues in my life right now beyond politics. Some of those I may even manage to address usefully, ‘soon’.

              1. Yeah, but there may have been some points I didn’t make about how I am a poor instrument for ‘how bad things are’.

                a) If things get really bad, I may talk here at a low enough rate that I don’t produce enough statements, much less reasonable statements, for the level of bad. b) Personal stress might result in both very wild thinking, and enough fixation on stringing together words here that the rate of nonsense spikes without any connection to good or bad things happening in the wider world. c) ‘Making sense’ may be an artifact of going crazy from the broader stresses first, finding the path back to approximate sanity with a coping mechanism, and then holding on dearly to that coping mechanism tightly when I am having trouble, and just barely in control or out of control.

                c1: When I get a lot of things very well managed, and am functioning wonderfully, I usually forget to pay attention to the coping mechanisms that got me there, outright forget one of the dozen or more, and then gradually develop the problem again until my performance is impaired again. c2: When I get overwhelmed and crash, it is usually by dropping the ball on a bunch of coping mechanisms. Then I usually have a period where I’m mostly eating only because of people putting food in front of me, etc. Maybe I recover in some way, and start pulling myself by the bootstraps.

                My life used to be a fairly steady cycle of crashing. Fairly unhappy period in my life.

                I got a lot happier after I got my fundamental health improved enough to sustain extended periods of function, and found some goals to chase, or worthwhile things to fill my time with.

                Recent events have sucked for a lot of people. Including me. I’m a bit concerned about some of the implications for my personal situation.

                I’m pretty sure that any correlation between my behavior and wider politics is mostly coincidental.

                And, as you might have gathered, accuracy of measurement can be of psychological importance to me.

      3. This is where you give Bob to your parents for mommy’s night out to try and claw back lost sanity before it all leaves.

        That Bob creates a death ray in their garage is not your problem.

        …there’s a reason I’m no longer allowed to babysit.

            1. Dear Lord. Dad is largely sane. In fact mostly sane as a brick, but in the current world that’s very disruptive. And Bob is Bob.
              It would be weird.

              1. Well we currently have a senile cucumber and a sex worker in nominal power here so how much worse could it be…

                1. Well, if Minions are generally sane, why do they work for crazy villains? [Puzzled]

    2. A – Only a few people in Portland and other cities are getting paid.

      B – A lot of black people who were going along have realized they were duped nd their fundraisers stolen.

      1. I had a black acquaintance of mine ask who the hell BLM were at the time of the Ferguson MO thing and wonder how the whole academic, intersectional agenda got into it. he said they certainly didn’t represent him and who the hell are they anyway. Funny, since both his parents are academics and he’s fairly lefty. Nice guy though, I used to wind him up by pointing out that I was “urban” since I grew up in the city and he was not, whatever the usage might be, and no he’s not Cory Booker though it fits since Cory grew up in Old Tappan, which shows you just how dishonest the narrative is.

        In my experience, black people aren’t really down with the gay thing and, of course, the vast majority of BLM/ANTIFA are upper class whites.

        BLM was just a meme that caught on and made the founders rich because the corporations are cowards and the tech moguls are satan.

    3. I think they backed off the BLM/Antifa wagon because someone realized they were about to hit the singularity where the conservatives would have armed up, marched in, and done the job the police and National Guard were prevented from doing. Which would have destroyed the Commie-Dems.

      1. They tried to expand it beyond blue enclaves.
        That didn’t go very well from their perspective.

        Things are still smoldering in the blue enclaves, but the media has no interest in highlighting that, as it refutes the claim that Orange Man and Evul Conservatives are responsible.

        1. it ain’t covered as much because it is hard to blame the orange man when he is ‘retired’ to FL and the Fa-Fools/Dumb Lies Matter are still trying to get burning gov’t buildings and the leftoids are now the visible Gov’t. I mean what do Big Lies Marxist and Actual Fascists have as incentive to stop? The 2 biggest gripes they claim to have are represented by the latest ElPresidente and his VP (especially Buncha Loony Marxists . . .Joe has as his singular achievement in DC his Crime Bill they are protesting against, and corrupt D.A.s like Kommie Lawhorish, too)

      2. At least in Oregon, when the BLM-ifa crowd realized that they weren’t going to make progress in redder cities (even the biggest city in our very red county isn’t totally red, but close enough), they went to plan B, which was arson attacks. September 2020 was noteworthy for the fires that attempted to separate West-Progressive Oregon from East-Deplorable-not-quite-Jefferson–yet. $TINY_TOWN was targetted (and from what I remember from Foxfier’s comments, many others elsewhere in the rural East were, too.), though the fire got caught quickly.

        FWIW, the unofficial word from the state people working the Bootleg fire was that it was most likely a lightning strike that smoldered for a day or so before taking off. I’ve run into a similar situation, though that one took weeks of smoldering in duff* before it triggered a fire.

        OTOH, people are a) paranoid about strangers and fires, and b) inclined to use ballistic means of persuasion. (Some fire refugees took their party lifestyle to a riverside park. The hip-hop music-oid stuff playing at 1:30 to 4:00 AM got a .38 cal warning shot the first night, and after the second night, one of the people nearby decided to do a shitload of target practice during the day. It was quiet last night. The shooter wasn’t me, and I’m not naming names…

        (*) Not that kind. Noun: “Organic matter in various stages of decomposition on the floor of the forest.” — Dictionary dot com

        1. *nod*

          Once the rumors started, folks started keeping an eye out on places that made fire for starting fires, and lot of little fires got stopped early.

          I heard of a couple of arrests, besides the objectively crazy arsonist guy.

          1. Once the rumors started, folks started keeping an eye out on places that made fire for starting fires, and lot of little fires got stopped early. I heard of a couple of arrests, besides the objectively crazy arsonist guy.

            –
            Yes. Small fire started west of us was acknowledged as arson by TPTB. If it had taken off, it would have not only threatened Veneta, west and north Eugene, probably Junction City, Monroe, etc., including the airport. Cutoff west hwy 126, and southern hwy 99; essentially the south-western side of the Willamette Valley.

            By “west of us” … only a little over a mile …

              1. These idiots come in two flavors. One that doesn’t realize how destructive fire is (eg I didn’t think having an unattended ceramic firepit in yard could nearly light up four houses) and the folks that do. I go back and forth as to which more dangerous.

                But like cattle rustling or horse theft being capital offenses people don’t realize why arson was on that list too

            2. If, as was claimed, there were instances where Mysterious Fires were being set and the setter *wasn’t* ever found…. I’m not even sure I can blame them.

              Fire is terrifying.

        2. Ah, I was relying on old information. The hot-headed but decent people who used to live near us had medical issues, and the rowdies are the renters who moved in. Right now, our neighbors are trying to use the emergency reaction team to help until the sheriff’s office can come up for air* and read the riot act. OTOH, I’m not discounting ballistic persausion.

          Not sure if it’s the renters or one or more of the few trailers who are partying at all hours. Acoustics and the peculiar geographic features nearby make it difficult to assess where a gunshot is coming from.

          (*) The Bootleg fire hit 275,000 acres this morning. It’s crazy, especially with new areas needing to evacuate every day.

    4. Bob, I hope you are right (scary thought that). But I don’t believe you are. Delaying the boog may keep the casualty count from booging down, but the only thing that comes after is separation. The Deep Blue is not reclaimable. We are going to have to watch it crash. And when it does, it is going to make the current genuine misery of the Cubans look like a day at the beach. I’m convinced people are going to die of thirst in SoCal and freeze in the dark in NY MN and elsewhere across the northern tier of blue states and not in small numbers. It is too late to stop it.

      1. Separation/succession as a path forward is a nonsense theory.

        It was the theory of the CSA, and would not have worked for the CSA. There would not have been peace between the CSA and the Union, because if the Union could not force the CSA to remain within the CSA, neither polity would have been able to bind their hotheads from continuing the war.

        It cannot work now, as we are much more mixed, and have no viable path to geographic separation.

        Furthermore, there is no Deep Blue. The appearance of support for blue is fraud and disinformation. Their only power base is money they have scammed out of us, and security forces paid with that money.

        Killing the few actual blue fanatics is viable, where separation is both not viable, and a betrayal of those who risked so much in supporting Trump.

        This theory that there is enough blue to separate, is exactly the problem of overly wide targeting that is why we should not boog immediately. You form that estimate now, based on the information and signals you have now. But if you keep paying attention, wait, and think, you will find that the estimate you have of the opposition will shrink. Eventually it gets to where it is a reasonable amount of people to kill. Possibly, waiting longer than that may be worthwhile, to get a few more innocents out of the targeting criteria.

          1. Well, I’m actually advising in favor of violence, just against the violence that is immediately most satisfying in the shortest possible term.

            My intended audience isn’t the opposition thuggery, so if I counseled non-violence, and if it were implemented, that would be meekly sitting around letting the thugs carry out the mass murder. (Okay, the opposition is incompetent enough that they could manage to screw up carrying out a mass murder even if no one tried to stop them, but…)

            If someone thinks the opposition is 50%, and I say “yeah, kill them all”, that would be much too broad a killing.

            I’m pretty sure 25%, 10%, maybe even 5% are much too broad.

            In my eyes, I have some behaviors that I would take as evidence of leftist sympathies. If my metric says that 95% of conservatives are left, then I clearly need to calm the hockeysticks down, search and wait for a better metric. Okay, I’ve found better metrics than that, since, but my gut says that we need to wait longer.

            I’m always in favor of killing violent drug addicted criminals, which is violence because most of them are not pacifists, but there are very few violent drug addicted criminals. I am always an advocate for violence.

            I am backing off a little, on pushing for killing all of the druggies, because the situation is confusing, and the security issues are the most important reason to be killing people right now. We will have plenty of time later, after things calm down, to revisit that issue.

            Yes, it is a wonderful opportunity to convince y’all that I was always correct, because we are stressed and not thinking clearly. a) It is not a real victory for my ideas if you are stressed and not thinking clearly. b) You can’t actually be that picky about allies in a civil war. c) We could not be sure that we got all of the stoners in such confused circumstances.

            The more people you kill during a civil war, the harder it is to get the war shut down and peace restored. Significant acts of killing have an inertia of their own, and are very difficult to tightly control, so it is far better to set minimal goals.

            Capturing criminals, confining them in prisons, and carefully deciding to execute them is violent, and is the status quo in a peaceful society.

            We cannot avoid violence. We can to some degree choose which acts of violence, but very much not entirely. It is a bad situation, and we really are making trade offs.

            1. Ouch. Well for starters, it was the Soviet (not Societ) I have no idea what Societ and Rome have in common. Mea culpa.

              What Rome and the *USSR* had in common was being empires with a core national identity that gobbled up a lot of other nations and held them together with both force and a unifying idea. Granted, putting Latin and the gods in the same category as the wossname of the proletariat seems counter-intuitive, but bear with me. In both cases enough people could game the system so that actual Roman and Russian appatatchiks could stay ahead of the unruly peasantry. Order was maintained, even though it was all based on lies and rubbish economics and a tough army.

              When the bill came due and the empires fell apart, the non-Romans and Russian possessions were shed. But not quickly. And also, not completely disastrously, because in both cases, Aslan was / is on the move. We’re too close in time to tell whether Russia will recapitulate Rome in that way, but I’m hopeful, because God loves his children.

              1. But Rome was a city-state, not a nation-state, and the city of Rome itself was part of the ‘non-Roman possessions’ that were shed when the empire collapsed. What survived was a largely Greek state in Byzantium. Moreover, it took Rome over 200 years to go from the first condition to the second, whereas the entire history of the U.S.S.R. was only 74 years.

                I’m not seeing any resemblance at all.

                2. The U.S.S.R. was Russia’s empire and the Rodina’s story is still unfolding. As for the rest: The map is not the territory.

                  No worries if you do not see the resemblance. The point is that that things falling apart are not as important as Christians building up.

                  1. You’re darned right the map is not the territory. Soviet history has been an interest of mine for over 40 years; Roman history even longer. What has happened in Russia is the replacement of one regime with another; the empire itself remains in being. (Yes, Russia is an empire; has been since the 16th century.) What happened in Rome was the long, slow breakup of a whole civilization triggered by at least three successive waves of foreign invasion.

                    Giving me a condescending little pat on the head and telling me ‘no worries’ does not support your point – whatever that point is. The story you told in your comment upthread (‘When the bill came due and the empires fell apart, the non-Romans and Russian possessions were shed’) bears no resemblance at all to anything that happened to the Roman Empire. Your cryptic comment about a fringe political party in Russia sheds no light.

                    Frankly, I have no idea what you’re talking about, and you don’t fill me with confidence that you do, either.

                    1. Well, I bolluxed that up right and proper. To begin, with I hope you’ll permit me to expand on a side issue before I proceed with the original question: What do I imagine the breakup of the Roman and Soviet empires to have in common?

                      I should have written: “No worries if you do not see the resemblance that I do [as I am not wedded to the idea]; [my] map is not the territory. [The only bit that really interests me is] the part that… etc.

                      As ever “brevity” [as I touch type] is not [for me] the soul of wit.

                      So back to the idea that the current breakup (still on-going) of the USSR / Russian empire (and yes, I agree with you it goes waaay earlier than the Soviets) and the Roman one… I told you why I thought they had a commonality. You disagreed with “why should Mrs. Hobbit imagine they have anything in common and pointed to things they have different.

                      I do know what i am talking about: I’m like the person who sees a dog running down one hill and a coyote down the other from a distance and wonders: “What if they are both running from a fire?” It’s the fire that interests me, not the possibility (probability, even, I’ll trust both you & Mrs. Hoyt on the history before myself on this, at least until/unless I dig into it myself) that the dog is a bobcat, the coyote is a wolf-dog, and one of the hills isn’t really a steep hill.

                      So may we cry peace? I did not mean to sound condescending.

        3. Eh, there are true blue strongholds where the rot is to the point of tear it down, have a bonfire, dig out a foot of soil, replace and rebuild. There isn’t a denazification option for a lot of areas

    5. My only concern about a boog is there is no guarantee of a better peace on the other side. There’s the hope of a better peace, but no guarantee.

      After all, our last one resulted in an overpowered, far-too-centralized fed gov. It’s taken this long to really feel the problem behind that, I think, but…was it a better peace? (Granted, if we hadn’t had the first one, I’m not sure we wouldn’t have ended up in a worse state. That’s just it: no guarantees, ever.)

      But. That does not mean I think it’s a good idea to bow down to tyranny, either. I’ll take the hope of a better peace without any certainty over the guarantee of a jackboot any day.

      1. “My only concern about a boog is there is no guarantee of a better peace on the other side. There’s the hope of a better peace, but no guarantee.”

        As I recall, the Founders didn’t have a guarantee either.

        To quote St. Heinlein: “Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet you can’t win.”

    6. True.
      And it terrifies our would-be tyrants.

      They’re fixing to do something really stupid in an attempt to get control.
      I expect times to become interesting as a consequence.

        1. So far we have only had complete imbecile level stupidity. Not “are you trying to get every single person on the planet gunning for you?” level stupidity.

        2. Yes.

          They know they won via fraud.
          They know how badly they had to cheat to do so.
          They know what’s about to come out.
          They know they’re finished if it does.
          They know they have no legitimate means to stop it.
          And Will to Power is what gives their pitiful lives meaning.

          1. Except:

            They know that it isn’t fraud, because whatever makes them win is right.
            They know they didn’t have to cheat, because History and The People are inevitably on their side. They only ‘fortified’ the correct outcome.
            They know that nothing is about to come out, because ‘The election was our revolution’ (verbatim quote) and they have already won forever.
            They know they will never be finished, because their revolution was historically inevitable and there can never be another one.
            They know that whatever means they use are legitimate, because they are the Good Guys.
            And Will to Power is what keeps their shrivelled minds from taking in any information to the contrary. It is a basic axiom of information theory that you cannot transmit and receive information at the same time on the same bandwidth. So long as they are screaming orders at the world, they cannot listen to the world to find out what is actually happening.

            1. Those are the things they are SAYING. Desperately. Because they hope that saying it enough will make it true.

              Their fear makes it very evident that they KNOW otherwise.

              1. They know that they are absolutely right and that their plan, if followed, will inevitably lead to a perfect society. They haven’t got their perfect society. Therefore they know, with absolute certainty, that some all-powerful conspiracy must be out there working against them, motivated by sheer evil.

                Paranoids have real enemies – but they insist on fearing the imaginary ones just the same. Their emotional state does not spring from a recognition of reality, and you give them too much credit if you suppose that they are actually aware of the relevant facts.

    7. The seemingly fewer BLMtifa riots might also be due to the press not giving them the same level of coverage.

      1. Well, considering that BLM/Antifa is systematically beating the crap out of any reporter that tries to cover them (see Andy Ngo), and has been for years, you’re not getting coverage they don’t approve of most of the time.

        1. They can extort what the coverage will be if they get it. They can’t extort coverage itself.

          1. If there is no coverage, they win. No coverage at all means no one knows about them, their allies in government can deny they exist, and no one has images of what they look like to identify them in the next town over. It’s an intelligence victory. They’re fighting a war.

            1. ^This. Note Nadler claiming they were ‘just an idea’ when there was a ton of footage of them anywhere you cared to look. I think Biden has claimed something to that effect a few times since.

              It’s a stupid approach, because obviously we DO have footage of them, and we know they’re out there. But they’re still gonna run with it–and actual BLM/antifa is going to push ‘no coverage’ because they don’t want their faces out there, and also it will allow gaslighting of the less…observant.

                1. Unless there’s some News Coverage, the Terror they accomplish would only be very localized as in they’ll only terrorize those who directly witness their actions.

                  1. That is, in fact, the point. When Stalin sent the NKVD to arrest people in the middle of the night, he did not publish their names in Pravda. He did it to terrorize their friends and neighbours, street by street and village by village.

                    1. Stalin could hit every village. Terrorizing only places with compliant DAs is bad enough when outsiders can deduce their safety. When they don’t even learn of the threat…

                    2. Nod and Anti-Fa isn’t the NKVD.

                      Anti-Fa is more like the “street gangs” that Socialists used in the battle for power.

                      The role of the NKVD (& their counterparts) was to maintain power once it was won.

                    4. Antefa and BLM are the Brownshirts. Maybe that’s why they’re trying to erase history, so their street thugs aren’t made aware of what happened to the Brownshirts after they’d served their purpose.

                    5. And “localization” is relative. When a business owner has to call and either order extra stock or cancel orders because his shop was destroyed and he’s closed, what do you think the watercooler conversation sounds like at those suppliers / truckers / etc,?

                      But it doesn’t get “coverage”……

                  1. You gotta remember this lot is operating as if it’s still the 1950s and they CAN do things the way Stalin did. Sure, BLM/Antifa might be social media savvy…but it’s only to a point. They are a group that wants to terrorize people and escape all consequences, and also they think that secrecy in this day and age is a.) desirable and b.) achievable, because in their heads we are actually all terrified Russian peasants in the mid-20th century who have no reliable means of communication that the government does not have control over. (See also: their efforts to make sure the government controls all our avenues of communication. And the gov is trying, though I’m pretty sure they won’t succeed.)

                    1. “their efforts to make sure the government controls all our avenues of communication. ”

                      See also mail in voting. Not only is it a fraud multiplier, it lets them read who was brave enough to vote against Comrade Stalin…. and send SturmAntifa to “discuss” the matter.

  11. The USA had the Philippines… and put/gave them back.
    That was likely a very good, and indeed overdue thing.
    The USA had Cuba… and put/gave it back.
    Oops?

    1. According to friends and relatives in the Philippines, most Filipinos expected that they would become one or more US states, and were making plans for it. Truman’s unilateral announcement of “independence” was seen as abandonment. [more complex than that, of course, even without considering “the Philippines” spanned a lot of different cultures and former polities that just happened to be sharing the same island chain]

      Anyone in contact with Shadowdancer? She might have an entirely different view of that particular elephant, particularly if her father happened to talk about it.

      2. *takes a few moments to bitchslap the WP login process*

        The answer to this was ‘both.’ There were people who were indeed expecting to become either a permanent US territory or added as a state, like Hawaii. Now, like with all things, there were people against this, and for this.

        – There were people who cheered this, of course, happy to finally ‘self determine.’
        – we were effectively abandoned to fend for ourselves after the war while the US cozied up to Japan out of a sense of guilt but threw us who died with the US soldiers and fought with them, aside. *will add on this later a little; this was a bit my fathers pov while also being pro independence.
        -There are people who are bitter about the whole thing because the Philippines was invaded ‘because of America’s presence.’ Technically not wrong, while also not entirely correct.

        There are STILL people these days who think we should have become the 51st State of the United States of America. Guam is only a few hours away by plane after all.

        *According to what I was told by my father, my father’s father (Grandpa), in recognition of his fighting beside American soldiers, was entitled to at least a green card or citizenship to the US, as were his children – something offered to Filipinos who fought beside Americans, apparently. Grandpa didn’t go, neither did my Dad, and I am actually uncertain whether his siblings took advantage of that or immigrated as skilled workers.

        There are a LOT of people very bitter about how the Philippines was destroyed after the war and basically had to rebuild more or less on their own. The Philippines certainly didn’t get anywhere near as much aid as Germany or Japan did, so in the eyes of people who see it that way, America is not a nation to be trusted, and in fact is seen as a country that, per local slang, is ‘user friendly’ – uses friends, tosses them aside when you’re no longer useful. They became very useful for the communists that infiltrated and are still in the intellectual and political circles today. These same sorts also bitched about the bases (and really held up the atrocities done by soldiers to local women) being nothing more than something that was aggravating other nations around them (ChinacoughChina) so ‘we’re drawing unnecessary fire by having them here.’

        Unfortunately, this view was strengthened by the pull out of the US bases during the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, (I don’t agree; IIRC the bases were going to be pulled out – the volcano going off just sped up the timeline) – most of this was going on while I was in HS/College. But to give you all an idea how prevalent the concepts against the US was, I was the only one in my class of people studying International (Relations) Studies that spoke positively about the US and its’ effect on the world.

        It also helped that I was very, very good at arguing my point and explaining why ‘no, that’s not entirely correct.’ Fortunately for me, MOST of my teachers appreciated that I was capable of this and that they had a student that did this, and cancelling people for having opposing views wasn’t a thing then. (I’m sure most of them were very disappointed that I didn’t try to enter the Foreign Service. But I wouldn’t have made it – I don’t know how to people politic, and my body language is all wrong and sets people off to be automatically somewhat hostile to me there – not my observation, but something my friends observed watching me once. I’m more back-room analysis specialist, the one who spots ‘there’s going to be a terrorist attack in this area’ type. I had no patience for idiots. Still don’t.)

        1. Interesting, thanks.

          As both an old fogey and a map freak since I first figured out what they are (I was probably four) … when I was a sprout, most printed maps and globes (being too expensive to lightly replace) still had it marked “Philippines (U.S.)” I remember being surprised to learn that it was no longer a U.S. possession.

        2. Hmm. Given what’s going on in Afghanistan *right now*–with the FICUS Admin OF COURSE leaving those who helped the United States high and dry and like to be murdered along with their families–I’m not sure the ones labeling us ‘user friendly’ were entirely wrong.

          They are in one sense, in that it’s not the people of the United States in general doing this, it’s our damned politicians, who we can’t get to do anything resembling their jobs in a correct fashion (ie, what their constituents want, which would entail doing more than ignoring their constituents as soon as they are elected). Which will likely be another reason for a boog, if it happens.

          1. No, it is not the politicians. It is the party of treason which has discarded every victory since about 1960. Abandoning people who fought for us along the way. If I had my way, every employee of the Democrat party would be stood up against the wall for treason and possibly every registered Democrat.

            1. Thing is, I’m fairly sure there’s a definite non-zero number of so-called Republicans who are or would be on board with it, but couldn’t pull it off when Trump was in charge. I mean Trump *did* have that promise to get us out–but I think he realized what a crap show it would be if we just left, and so he set about trying to do something better (Abraham Accords.)

              Frankly, the fact that dems have basically scuttled the Abraham Accords is reason enough to shoot them for treason. Those bastards. May they be held accountable on Judgement day for every drop of blood spilled there hereafter because they couldn’t bear to have peace in the Middle East, and especially not with Trump’s name on it.

              1. While I believe the Abraham Accords are a good step, the idea that they would have brought ‘peace’ to the Middle East probably doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Instead, they are a recognition that there will be no peace until Iran is brought to heel and that the current circumstances require an ‘everyone against Iran’ real politic.

                1. Yeah, but that was a whole planet closer to peace than anything in, what, centuries?? And FICUS just flushed it down the crapper and is removing sanctions from Iran as fast as he can. Makes me furious.

                  1. The accords are just a rehash of the enemy of my enemy that we saw during the cold War. If the Jordanians calling themselves Palestinians can ever reidentify as anything but anti-Israel and Muslim nations accept coexistence with the state of Israel there is a chance but even if I lived a full natural life I doubt I’d see it.

            2. But on the devils hand, how is that different than what was done with Iran or Paris in 2016. The executive branch had given its word as to certain conditions and relaxation and then wham admin changes from a Tehran/MB centered one to a counter-Tehran one. Sanctions hit, “treaties” are withdrawn from, etc. The USG did go back on its word as the other nations understood it (that it was merely making the bloodsuckers ask nicely to dine is neither here nor there).

          2. Spouse saw a British article saying the Afghan translators will be brought out.

        5. I think we should have at least made a survey of the population in the islands to see whether they were interested in becoming a US state (or, more likely, more than one). Given what they’d gone through during the War, they deserved the option to make their voice heard on the matter.

          “America is not a nation to be trusted, and in fact is seen as a country that, per local slang, is ‘user friendly’ – uses friends, tosses them aside when you’re no longer useful.”

          Unfortunately, this complaint does seem to have some merit. The US will cozy up to a country and swear eternal friendship… and then a president from the other party will come in and essentially revoke the whole thing. I don’t mind so much when our guys revoke Democratic agreements, mind you, since those agreements are typically ones that I view as huge mistakes (such as the “let Iran develop nuclear weapons while pretending that it isn’t” payoff) with countries that actively work to undermine US power and influence both at home and abroad. But it is disturbing how quickly US foreign policy can seemingly turn on a dime and completely ignore countries that we were supposedly supporting just the year before. Or even worse, a (usually Republican) administration makes nice with a country when that country starts to do something positive, only for that country to get attacked (verbally or physically) by the next administration. Libya is a prime example of that. Yes, Ghadafi was a horrible man. But he was trying to play nice with the US, and his reward was the US essentially bank-rolling a European-led war against him when the Democrats took over the White House.

          1. That’s the danger of making a deal with any nation that has a strong democratic element in its government, any deal is ultimately subject to the whims of the public.

            1. The examples given are hard to blame on the public.
              The number of citizens who deeply cared about Libya might have been as high as 1%.
              The percentage that wants to make nice with Iran is likely much lower.

              1. There used to be a sense that we as a nation should honor our commitments regardless of which party is in the White House. Of course, there was also a sense that there should be a broad consensus on those commitments before making them.

                1. The cynic in me wants to say “I’m not sure that’s happened at any point since the end of the 18th century/very early 19th century.” At my most generous, I’m not sure that’s happened since the end of WW2 (or maybe Korea). It certainly wasn’t in place from Vietnam on. :/

                  (But I’m also such a cynic that anytime someone starts making noise about ‘unbiased journalism, like it used to be’ I want to point out that never in the history of EVER has such a unicorn existed 😀 )

                  1. No, Vietnam was when the idea that betraying allies for political gain was acceptable took hold. Nixon had won the Vietnam war, the South Vietnamese were at the point where they could – with basic support from the US – fight off the North. This, of course, was unacceptable to the Democrats who had won a massive victory in the midterms, so they cut off all aid for South Vietnam, ensuring its defeat and solidifying the myth that Vietnam – and opposition to communism in general – was doomed from the start. Absent that, South Vietnam would look a lot like South Korea today and China’s geopolitical position would be even more precarious.

                    1. China’s political position might have actually been better if the South had managed to survive the Vietnam War intact. A united Vietnam dislikes China, which has historically attempted to exert control over the peninsula from time to time, and has occupied part of it in the past. A distinct North Vietnam might have remained on better terms with the PRC as a means of support, and probably wouldn’t have spent time and effort going after the PRC’s Khmer Rouge allies in Cambodia.

                    2. Fwiw, I’m with junior on this. While Vietnam is not an ally, they are a much less unfriendly nation to the US position than their northern neighbor. The idea that we needed to trade with China didn’t work there but Vietnam is for lack of a better term, less of a 500lb gorilla and to my knowledge have been rather self contained as opposed to NK and China. We’d probably have two crazy Kim’s instead of one. There is a chance of them pushing thru feudalistic communism imo over time

            2. Except that ‘the public’ hasn’t really got any say in the matter. (If we had, we’d have been out of the Middle East a lot longer ago–but the dem politicians make money when we’re at war. And sure, Biden is pulling out NOW, but it in such a way that we’re likely to end up at war there again fairly soon, I think.) We elect the politicians, sure, but I can’t think of one–other than Trump, who doesn’t really count as a politician–in at least the last 30 years or so who actually made a real attempt to keep their campaign promises.*

              *Okay, the dems are also trying to enact all their most radical wet-dreams right now as well–but it’s important to note that this is NOT what most of their base actually wants (given how many actual votes Trump probably got? Betcha a lot of the real votes were democrat voters). It’s what the small, very noisy radical base wants.

              1. Biden is pulling forces out for the same outcome as when his predecessor pulled forces from Iraq. Iran gets proxy control. For better or worse a trumpian policy of deterrence such as st soleimeini of cuisinart could probably have functioned to at least keep the fight local rather than what we will now have where Iranian forces control the country thru proxies

          2. The US will cozy up to a country and swear eternal friendship… and then a president from the other party will come in and essentially revoke the whole thing.

            That’s why we shouldn’t be involved in international treaties. Our entire polity is set up to manage our own affairs and to not interfere in anyone else’s.

            1. There is a time and place for treaties. When you can get the votes thru the senate for ratification there is sufficient agreement and it should be maintainable at least for a few decades. These executive agreements that are nothing but wink and nod between potus and foreign govt are orvan leavings

        6. ‘we were effectively abandoned to fend for ourselves after the war while the US cozied up to Japan out of a sense of guilt’

          Objection: It was not out of a sense of guilt that the U.S. reconstructed Japan as a Western-style constitutional state. It was to combat the very real danger that the country would be taken over by the Soviets. F.D.R., because he was a romantic fool, saw China as the great stabilizing power in the Far East. The moment that was gone, Japan was desperately needed as an outpost against the Communist tide.

          Paul Johnson has pointed out that Truman’s foreign policy was based entirely on one calculation: There were five centres of modern industry in the world in 1945 – the northeastern U.S.; the U.K.; western Germany together with the Low Countries and northeastern France; Japan; and the Soviet Union. The survival of the free world was certain as long as the Soviets controlled only one of those five areas, doubtful if they controlled two, and most unlikely if they ever came to control three. Japan and West Germany were rebuilt and brought into a firm system of alliances to keep them out of Joe Stalin’s hands.

        1. But only if it’s Ivory….. which is probably both racist because it’s white and triggering to the elephants and their ecoloon “defenders”…..

        2. Let’s make it appropriate. Pilings made up of 1950s car shells and bathtubs with electric motors

  12. It’s just a slightly less the eye-roll-inducing version of the hyperbole the left was engaged in, while screaming about living in a fascist dictatorship under Trump and (rofl Bush).
    I kept asking them if it is normal for an opposition under Literally Hitler to publicly scream insults at the Dear Leader without the slightest concern for personal safety. What I got back was blank stares.
    Yes, we are getting to the point where the DNC is telling the carriers to censor sms, and we can all see people get cancelled with very real consequences.
    On FB I never post anything political other than in “Friends” mode because my kids like to eat.
    Yet here I am, in public, posting subversive and counter-revolutionary thoughts for all to see.
    The thought would have never crossed my mind even in late Gorbachev times.

  14. Turns out superstates aren’t more efficient. Chaotic economic activity is better at everything particularly innovation.

    Look at all the really powerful supercomputers of the last few decades. They all involve massively parallel processing. Lots and lots and lots of processors breaking down big problems into lots of little problems each dealt with individually.

    Look at command economies.. A commissar, no matter what kind of paragon you’re able even in the most ivory tower of theories able to find for the role, is only one “processor.” And there are sharp limits on how much “processing power” that single processor can have. Even a committee is pretty limited.

    But a free market? That’s a massively parallel architecture. Millions, maybe even billions, of individual “processors” each dealing with their tiny portion of the problem of producing economic output. Prices serving as a means of of carrying information between those multitudes of processors.

    No planned/command economy can ever match the performance of the free market.

    1. Massively parallel is how the universe looks. Just like the brain is a neural network.

    2. This. People are not processors- we’re massively more complicated. Which just makes the example work better, because even simplified, command economies are too slow and inflexible to react to stresses in real time, their responses are always too large and applied without the knowledge needed to address the problem at even a regional level.

      The free market may have its problems. Perfection is always a goal to chase, not an end to reach. It’s still the best, by far. And our system could stand to be quite a bit more free. *glares at bureaucratic bloat and regulatory morass that oppresses small businesses*

    4. No one, no matter how intelligent or exquisitely educated, is an expert on another man’s life.

    5. This, all this.

      And likely even a bit more; for instance, it’s not just computation that’s a bottleneck, but also communication — and often both ways.

      Bizarre as it may sound, this came up in (the background for) the latest Sunday vignette story; a late-21st-century writer (Robert de Violette, if it matters) called this “the three-legged stool of governance” — namely (in his fictional terms) Afferent Bandwidth, Appropriate Calculation, Efferent Bandwidth (yes, he’s mixing metaphors from biology and information science, and stirring in a bit of 18th-century style for spice).

      The upshot of this whole idea is, for “governance” to be possible from any distance, you have to have, at a minimum: enough communication to bring understanding to the “seat” of that governance; enough comprehension, calculation, wisdom to discern what actions can be taken that are better than (from such a remove) doing nothing at all; and lastly, enough “effective” communication in the other direction to implement these actions (with enough fidelity and/or flexibility to, again, do better than nothing at all).

      Without all of these in place and working together, as with a real three-legged stool, your backside is going to hit the floor and none too gently. (Or you get, in terms of the vignette, the Arrogant Eloi on top.) You might have government, but not true governance (where the people “at the seat of action” are better off with it, than without it — and they, of course, decide which it is).

      Yes, all fictional. Make of it what you will. And yet… where in “political science” is even such a simple and obvious-sounding thing to be found, here and now..?

  15. I can’t help but believe that the George Floyd mural in Ohio that was blown into smithereens yesterday by lightning is a sign that this will all soon pass away.

      1. Dang Jewish weather machines. I bet their mind controlled shsrks were running it.

        1. Hell, I’d be happy with Thor getting credit. That might make progtard heads explode on a few levels of meaning.

  17. A funny thing happened on the way to that future. Turns out superstates aren’t more efficient. Chaotic economic activity is better at everything particularly innovation. And it turns out that the Constitution is actually the path to the future.

    “Order”, and “Chaos” (along with most of their related terms) have at least two completely different sets of definitions.

    To make matters worse both are true. This is a flaw in the English language, but one which can never be fixed as long as there is political hay to be made in confusing them, which is to say “forever”.

    As for the boiled frogs, there is something which is always left out of that account. The Frogs which stayed had been lobotomized. Which completely changes the meaning of the story. Though I will admit that schools and TV were a damn good attempt at mass lobotomization while keeping the population useful.

    All over the world, inchoately, blindly, people are revolting against the failing centralized model of government and living. And like some species of plants which can’t even think but turn to the sun, they might not know much about us and our current troubles, but they know the stars and stripes stand for freedom.

    Something occurred to me on reading this. After everything is said and done, the stars and stripes have a decent chance of becoming the World Flag regardless of actual polity divisions. Or perhaps the Human Flag.

    1. A system that allows for local control, with a sharply limited federal presence controlled (in theory- I’d like to see it in practice more) by a document that tells it what it *cannot* do?

      It’d take a miracle. That it happened already, once, in one place on the planet, was.

  18. “Since then it’s been hooked up to life support — race! Climate! Race Again! China! More Race!”

    One of the most unforgivable things the wokists have done is throwing away the last 50 years of race-relations so they could expand their power. I noticed back around 2013 that our “entertainment” media became increasingly full of images of black slavery and suffering, which I thought at the time was odd, since this was still in the Obama years, after a black president won two elections in a row. Of course this intensified after Trump. Suddenly the country that elected Obama twice was the Fourth Reich. Recently I heard some media types who were very upset that the media was full black suffering. Gee, how could this have happened? Who could be responsible? It’s a friggin’ mystery.

    1. Nothing matters to cluster B types except what they can make other people do. Civility? Worthless unless it helps them grind someone else’s face into the dust.

      Not just the news, note; check out the commercials. Suddenly you’d think the U.S. was minority white, based on people shown.

      1. They’re just reminding us to embrace globalism, since the greater world is indeed minority-white.

        1. This is not a good thing for them to be doing. The instinct to destroy other tribes encroaching on your territory is primate-level.

          Stupid, hateful, and evil. AKA progressive all over.

            1. *Wry* I have Irish ancestors, among a Heinz 57 of others. There was a long time when they weren’t considered white either. This attitude of “Who is really X” makes me shake my head – none of these people pay attention to history. At all.

              1. Exactly. So far as I can tell the people using that term–whether they be lefties trying to hide their racism or actual white supremacists out there–are really meaning “not us, darling. And therefore inferior.” To which I–whose genetics are *heavily* Irish (and every other form of Celt, to the point that a professor in college once told me I was probably the most Celt-looking person outside of Ireland she’d ever met, heh) raise both middle fingers.

                Also the ones who start wittering about “but black people have lower IQ look at all the studies” (and UGH they seem to be all over the internets) make me want to cave their heads in. It’s the same garbage that was said about my Irish ancestors, and Welsh ancestors, and–and–and. And boy does that piss me right off. (Because for one thing, those studies are all garbage. And IQ is garbage. And it’s CULTURE that screws people up, not what color their skin or hair or anything else is.)

                1. Including cherry-picking the examples, failing in the most basic of study design questions, and being unwilling to address these issues when challenged.

                  My favorite is still the ones that say they can’t find a study, and then I find it. ^.^

                2. I lost respect for IQ tests when I learned one sequence of numbers you were supposed to predict was not random, but stations on the NYC subway line.

                  …Seriously, that’s supposed to measure IQ?

                  1. Everyone knows that only the best and brightest are familiar with NYC mass transit.

                3. Much can be made of a Scotsman.
                  If he be caught young.

                  My ancestors proved it. In both directions.
                  (None were ever transported. They skipped the country before getting caught Some, more than once. One notable individual lacked only Wales from completing the set.)

                  1. That jibes with the tale that one of my ancestors missed becoming an Australian by virtue of fast and fancy footwork. When under suspicion, he sent his family to the states, sold off the rest of the grain (he was a steward to a country squire with curiously underfed animals*) and buggered out.

                    (*) I know, but the family tree has a fair share of creeps, thugs, scoundrels and the occasional highly respected minister in it. I don’t admire what he did, but the way he played it out? Very interesting.

                  2. I think I agree with Sowell when he commented that the Scots, at least, had really turned their culture around by the time of the mid-late 19th century, and became known rather for their thrift and hard work instead of what they had previously been known for. It is notable that the Scots-Irish who hung onto the previous crab-bucket dysfunctional culture in the US had, if I recall right, settled in the *18th* century.

              2. The ancient Greeks and Romans considered people with blue or greys to be uncivilized barbarians.

                  1. Makes you wonder about the modern media’s obsession with erasing redheads, doesn’t it? It’s happened so many times recently that it almost can’t be coincidence.

                    1. Are they? I hadn’t really noticed (granted I don’t *watch* a ton of tv these days, other than stuff that’s already been out for years). I mean, I’ve been hearing most of my life that redheads are disappearing from the genetic pool, but they’ve been saying that forever 😀

                    2. Basically anytime there’s a remake, the red-head is turned black. Be they male or female.

                      It’s getting to be like a drinking game.

                      And disappearing from the gene pool…yeah, just like blue eyes.
                      *looks at entire horde of mostly blue-eyed children, whose mother does *not* have a hint of blue in her eyes*

              3. It’s all just a calque of Marx with Capitalist crossed out and White written in in crayon. Damn near word for word out of Kapital. Even the nonsense about how hard work and saving is white is straight out of Marx’s development of the theory of surplus value. They have no imagination at all.

                To quote Marx, first as tragedy then as farce.

                2. Not really. Tests like the one 23andMe run are based on the assumption that the subject is human. They work by identifying sequences in your “junk” DNA that don’t actually code for anything, which means they’re subject to random mutation without making the embryo non-viable. Other species may have those sequences in either their non-coding or coding DNA, it doesn’t mean the same thing as it would in a human.

  19. Reports are unsubstantiated that the Democrats fleeing Texas on a chartered airplane were flown by a pilot who had previously flown for Pinochet Airlines.

    I say again, there is no substance to the claim that the pilots had flown for Pinochet Airlines, or that the passenger crew had likewise so served.

    3. I flinched when I saw those tentacles ofon the cover: please do not fire that gun! But no, phew, it looks good. Too much anime.

      Definitely ordering a copy.

    4. I bought it and preordered the next 2. Haven’t read it yet but I did look at the preview. The first page was absolutely shocking.

      Did the words “benevolent empire” actually come from the pen (okay, keyboard) of Sarah Hoyt?

  22. The American Revolution can be seen in some ways as a series of geographically separate campaigns, largely divided by the physical limitations of foot marching and wind powered sailing ships. There was never a concentrated battle, really, until the culmination at Yorktown, when Washington’s concentrated American and French troops decisively outlasted the immobilized British.

    In the American Civil War, mobility of forces was dramatically improved by the railroad and the steamship, both capitalized upon by the Union to great advantage. The South was forced to spread forces to various fronts; the Union could move and remove them much more rapidly.

    We’re in a similar state right now. Our hypothetical “forces” are widely scattered. It may be that our hypothetical “resistance” is simply holding in place waiting for targets to show up. A thousand Horatio at a thousand bridges…

    2. The American Revolution was somewhat different than the foreign wars the Empire had fought up to that point. The Crown either had troops on-site already, usually involved in petty combat to keep them busy, or they landed in force and took some place over. In both cases, they were (usually) fighting natives who didn’t have arms or organization to effectively resist.

      In America, they were fighting fellow Britons who not only knew how things worked, but had up-to-date British soldiers and officers and a local industry that provided materials for the British military. It’s was another British civil war, like the ones they periodically had in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, but the while Scotland or Wales were sitting targets, the colonists were far away and couldn’t be *forced* into combat; as the British approached, they had the option of simply running to fight another day. And in the normal civil wars, the cities were the choke points; once you controlled transport you had them by the throat. America had cities to occupy, but the economy was decentralized. Taking over the colonial governments accomplished nothing because the colonists had been ignoring their appointed Governors for years.

      Still, I don’t think victory was as sure a thing as the schoolbooks implied.

      1. We had another advantage against the British.

        There was a strong political faction within the British-Powers-That-Be didn’t view “forcing us to behave” as a good thing.

        Of course, unlike Scotland and Wales, independent American colonies would not be viewed as a threat to the British-Powers-That-Be.

  23. I have to admit, the battle between Jill and Kamala is fun to watch. They’re really good at sticking knives in each other.

    Other the other hand, both of them are going to lose.

    Kamala, even with all the grooming she got, is just bad at this. So bad that she’s gotten herself mired in a pit fight with the First Lady.

    And the First Lady’s only real power is that she’s married to the zombie. She loses that the moment he shuts down. And that’s clearly coming, and nothing she can do can stop that. Even if she wrecks Kamala, she still loses in the end.

    The interesting question is who is actually going to win the power struggle? Who’s even in the running right now? When neither of the front runners can win, people have to be sharpening their knives, but who?

    1. At the rate he has been declining, Biden won’t last the term. That leaves Harris, who is (if possible) even less competent. So who is in the running to be appointed next VP? Any number of Democrats are quietly salivating over the possibility…but what if Biden lasts past the midterms and there is a electoral bloodbath in the Democratic party?

      1. Yeah, the decline has accelerated from speculative to can’t-miss-it.

        25th Amendment, section 2: Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

        Or why we really, REALLY need to take back at least one House of Congress.

        1. We don’t need to take back either House if McConnell doesn’t cave, because there won’t be a majority to approve any VP nomination. That’s probably why Harris isn’t already the Resident: if Biden drops out and she ascends to the throne, the Dems can’t pass anything through the Senate without a VP to break ties.

      2. The other question is, will someone push Harris our of the VP slot before Biden ends?

        Remember, she keeps getting disasterous jobs, and giving terrible interviews. If she fails spectacularly enough or the dem’s Pravda arm starts calling her out hard on her failings, she could very well end up replaced.

        It has happened before. Remember, Ford was never elected. He was a replacement for Nixon’s original VP was resigned in disgrace. It could happen again.

        1. I read some speculation that it could be Nancy Pelousi getting the FICUS slot. If Kneepads is forced out and Zombie Xiden goes 25th, San Fran Nan would get the nod. OTOH, I wouldn’t want to underwrite a life insurance policy on any of them.

      4. One rumor is that the puppeteers are priming Mayor Pete for the VP slot, on the assumption that Harris won’t last very long either. Or that she’ll make it to 2024, but won’t have a prayer of reelection so they get her to not run for reelection and Buttigieg runs without primary opposition.

      5. It feels like Biden is going to be hard pressed to last to the midterms. His level of disconnection reminds me of a variety of elderly folks that I knew when they were in their late 60’s and who have slid into (or died from) dementia/Alzheimers. Biden was NEVER the sharpest knife in the draw. Obama chose him for just that reason, he didn’t want to be outshined by his VP so he had to get a turnip with strong democrat party ties. Ms clinton would have been scheming for him to be removed by violence, others would have surpassed him because he had trouble rising to mediocre. Now that turnip is mashed turnip and his VP was chosen mostly because she was not going to go immediately rogue and steal from the rightful (snort) president (Jill). If this wasn’t so potentially dire the popcorn sales would be awesome.

        1. If they chose CommieLala because they thought she wouldn’t try to steal the throne, so to speak…::blinks:: They’re even dumber than I thought.

          Not that she’d succeed, mind you. She’s too dumb to succeed at it. But she’s already trying.

          1. I think the VP was chosen for 2 reasons. 1) she seemed most likely to wait the 2 years and a day to get the 10 year maximum term.
            2) If she went rogue she had plotting skills that would make a Repblican (movie company) Serial villain perform a face palm. Seeing she’s gone rogue I would expect her to be monologuing in the Naval Observatory Residence shortly…

    2. Frankly, while I haven’t got a very high opinion of “doctor” Jill’s brains, Kamala is pretty much dumber than a bag of hair. And incapable of hiding it. And while they can make her look pretty and approachable in photos, the minute she’s in front of either cameras or actual people, it’s really, *really* obvious that she’s even more unlikable than Hillary is. AND THAT IS REALLY SAYING SOMETHING :p

      What boggles me is all the fawning over here, when a few months earlier this is the woman who couldn’t get even ONE delegate FROM HER OWN PARTY.

      3. I think an unpopularity contest between Hillary and Kamela (GAG!) would end in a tie, followed by the judges and audience racing for the exits.

        I think the ‘Biden Administration’ is a false front over chaos. Everybody and nobody is in charge. Today’s policy depends on who manages to get a piece of paper in front of the FICUS.

        Kamela can’t go five minutes without letting loose one of those hideous Wicked Witch Of The West Coast cackles. Biden is running down sooner and sooner after they pull the string.
        ———————————
        Jordan Peterson: “If I told you to cook in the bathroom and shit in the kitchen, that would be a new idea. Doesn’t make it a good one.”

      4. Another bizarre detail that Ayn Rand* got right. We should call her Kip’s Ma just to annoy and confuse them.

        *Another example of the truism that you don’t have to be a good person to make the world a better place. She was an unpleasant person, a few bricks shy of a load, but she grokked Leftists, and enjoyed humiliating them.

      5. all the fawning

        Remember that all the rank-and-file D voters who go on about how Biden is so wonderful were, 18 months ago, outright calling him a pedophile and and abuser.

        Rank-and-file D voters have been very well trained to be doubleplusgood duckspeakers. To confirm, you just need to watch how they spread around memes on social media that reflect the latest talking points (and were created by one of the party-and-or-Soros-driven meme factory organizations) and verbally support and defend them, regardless of whether they contradict any previous memes.

    3. The problem is the zombie has to last until after the mid terms … Then Kamala can be impeached, before she has a vice president in place, but we can’t have Pelosi!!! Or Yuck. Yuck.

    2. He’s 90 years old, fer chrissakes. Liches aren’t real; he’s got to die sometime soon, right?

  25. “Mr Reagan” on Youtube is doing a series on FBI corruption, worth your time, but so far the two salient points are that after 9/11 the FBI turned into the Domestic-CIA, and that the FBI actively gathered dirt on Presumed-Elect Hillary for the express purpose of blackmailing her into being the FBI’s puppet, and this included setting up a successful bribery incident. (Trump of course failed to provide enough dirt to be properly controlled, and could not be bribed.)

    His source goes on to say this was the doing of Obama-and-company, but Obama isn’t that smart (and appears to have been a well-controlled puppet, even if he didn’t know it himself). So the real question becomes: WHO is actually running the FBI ?? Because none of the people we’ve seen are that smart either. The conclusion I reached (more or less hinted at by his source) is that overt Muslim Brotherhood infiltration (as documented by Stephen Coughlin) has been replaced by covert Chinese infiltration, and the CCP is far better at it.

    1. > after 9/11 the FBI turned into the Domestic-CIA

      Domestic intelligence is part of their job. They’ve also run official spy ops in South America and North Africa, apparently without getting the CIA and Congress too upset.

      I don’t know that the proportion of the FBI devoted to their intelligence work is, but they’ve been backing away from the “Federal law enforcement” role for years, even as their budget has gone up.

  26. The speed at which the “Extremist” memes started spreading on FB gives me considerable hope. I haven’t even seen the FB messages that they are in response to (in the wild, so to speak), so I’m rather hopeful that they got laughed out of existence before they were fully rolled out.

    And am I remembering wrong, or did the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” memes start well before he did (or didn’t)?

    2. I don’t believe McAfee killed himself either, but the social media traffic on that hasn’t been as high.
      Amazing Assange and Snowden are still alive, but maybe they’d be too obvious.

      1. Suspect more likely McAfee got hold of some bad prison drugs, and instead of high, ended up dead. He was occasionally noisy, but not important to much of anyone in power.

      2. There’s no obvious reason to kill McAfee. Yes, he said that he had dirt, and it wouldn’t be a suicide if he looked like he’d killed himself. But the only real proof was that he’d said he had the dirt. AFAIK, there was no evidence beyond his work that it existed. He might really have just been a paranoid nut who fled the country because he murdered a woman.

        Epstein, on the other hand, is known to have lots and lots of dirt. You don’t need to speculate whether anyone would want him dead because it’s already a foregone conclusion.

  27. I notice that in Arizona, Georgia, and now in Pennsylvania, there has been a serious push to investigate irregularities in the voting, while the media is still saying “The vote was completely fair and honest and anyone who says otherwise is a liar and should be silenced”. And now we hear President Senile channeling Stalin about what matters is who counts the votes. And we have the rising stench of Hunter Biden on the one hand while Trump wanting the Ukraine to investigate the family of one of his likely political opponents was an impeachable offense. And we have the Texas Democrats who are conducting a courageous rear-guard fight for voter rights by running away to Mommy in Washington DC. (The Constitutional Convention saw that kind of thing coming from two hundred years back.) And we also have serious push back at the local level against the CRT madness “It’s the truth, what you get at the local level isn’t really CRT and nobody is pushing it anyway”. And then you have some of the Democrats saying that it was Republicans who wanted to defund the Police, when everyone saw the movement erupt in Republican strongholds like Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Baltimore, and Atlanta, and the murder rate where it was successful has “Surprise! Surprise!” doubled and tripled. Why does it look so much like the people screaming “Racist police brutality” the loudest was…the criminal class? As if that should have been unexpected? Black Lives Matter indeed, except it isn’t the police doing most of the shooting and never was. And the forked-tongue media are going around shredding what remains of their credibility by saying “Trump was a threat to freedom of the press by talking about fake news” out of one side of their mouths and going “What are you gonna believe, what we say now or what we said last month?” out of the other. I would ask, “Are you that stupid, or do you think everyone else is?”, except I’m already pretty sure the answer is yes. The increasingly desperate lies to cover up the lies to hide the cover-ups to hide secret double-dealing are coming so thick and fast that it looks like the whole “subvert the Republic” enterprise is coming unglued before my eyes. I just hope it does before there is (more) blood in the streets.

    2. The word I’ve started using is “hysterical”, but “desperate” works too.

  28. There won’t be an election next year. People will go through the motions of filling out ballots and sticking them in boxes, but that will have nothing to do with the results. The ‘winners’ will be decided by political hacks in locked rooms in the middle of the night.

    Was your full title for this post ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve been’? 😛

    2. My thought is to vote: “Other” (In Oregon it won’t matter). Then the write in candidate is “Democrats Cheat”.

  29. “I very much hope this moment can pass without fire and blood.
    I very much am afraid it can’t.”

    I’m feeling the same. If it can’t be solved by an awakening and elections, blood will have to be spilled to reverse course and save the country. They are not going to give up easily, and my faith in elections is weak at present. There will be some tipping points coming up. Which way will they go?

  30. Go ahead and tell me that I’m Crazy.

    Because I keep seeing the subject line in my emails from this topic and think the following: “Nobody knows the tribbles I’ve seen….”. [Crazy Grin]

      1. What crossed my mind was a scene from John Denver on the Muppet Show, where he’s surrounded by Muppet fungi, and starts singing “Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen . . . ”

        Then they all attacked him.

        Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find that as a clip.

  31. Yet another outrage committed by the HarrisBiden cabal:

    https://nypost.com/2021/07/14/antony-blinken-welcomes-un-probe-of-racism-in-us/

    Expect Democrats to use the predetermined result of this farce by the US hating UN to circumvent the Constitution: The fact that HarrisBiden invited this is proof of their perfidy and hatred of the USA. No doubt support for Israel will be declared to be one of the “racist scourge” issues that the UN declares the US is guilty of.

  32. As was said above by a few people, I think the “Silent Majority” is turning on the Ds. I agree that most people just want to be left alone to live their lives, and that’s becoming more difficult with each passing day.

    My completely irreproducible, anecdotal data scan of FB shows that my usually reliable sources (those who passed on every Orange Man Bad/Gross meme, those who put frames around their profile pictures for pride month, vaccines, masking, etc.) are NOT actively supporting the door to door invasion of privacy. They are NOT buying that the Cuban riots were about WuFlu. And, more importantly, I am not seeing any memes or comments or stories shared about what a wonderful job Xiden is doing. Nor am I seeing anything more about Harris being an amazing wonderful role model and example (thank you Jesus!). All of those things were out in force from November through about February.

    All of that leads me to believe that while there may not be active support for getting rid of the commie progressive policies, there will be no more than token resistance either (from the middle, not the activists of course). And, if the Left continues to push as hard as they are (and why wouldn’t they, they think they’re winning), they will run up against a solid wall of average Americans who simply refuse to budge.

    If we go with Alexander Dubcek’s statement, “If you are not against us, you’re with us” from the Prague Spring, we can come out of this without a lot of bloodshed. Yes, I think there will be some, but not at CWII levels. The blue cities will be a mess, which is why I want to get out of this one.

    2. On a completely random note, I noticed that SRW-30 is up for pre-order on Steam. Given that it’s not an Original Generation game, this came as a bit of a shock.

  36. It wouldn’t surprise me if they are calling for this to try to hasten a suggestion of having UN police take the place of our own “racist” police.

    1. Wouldn’t work. The US is just too big. It’s not an itty-bitty country where the UN can bring over a few battalions of loaned troops, and expect them to (not really) keep the peace. There’s simply no way that the UN would be able to get enough “police” to do the job.

      Also, if the Feds wanted to piss off pretty much every single local government out there, taking control of the police out of their hands would be a good way to do it.

      And, of course, the above also ignores the fact that US citizens wouldn’t take it kindly if the blue helmets were to get up to their usual completely corrupt shenanigans involving young girls from the local population. Shots would be fired very quickly *when* such a thing happened.

      1. I don’t think the Fed has enough troops to protect many blue hats. Even if they give their mercenaries like whatever-Blackwater-is-called-this-week badges.

      2. On the other hand, we are looking at lunatics may also be innumerate.

        1. Someone should have looked at the basic logistics, though. The UN would have a hard time finding the numbers to police just one major city. Trying to pull that off across the country, or even just in one of the smaller states, is like trying to feed a crowd with a few loaves of bread. Unless there’s a Jewish carpenter involved, it’s blatantly obvious that it’s not going to happen. There simply aren’t enough resources and manpower, even assuming that you’re talking about policing a friendly and docile population (which would not be the case).

          1. This is why the ’90s-era “UN black helicopters” conspiracy trope never made any sense to me.

            1. There was also one where you needed to live “outside the beltway” of a city (any city), because that is where the UN tanks were going to surround it.

          2. Other day I thought of writing a humorous story about Joe Biden dialing zero for the operator, asking for a ’80s SAC commander, and telling him to bomb a Cuba to prevent the spread of Covid.

            It might work better with Javier Perez de Cuellar. Biden called him up, and was talking about working with Andropov to supply the peacekeepers. Either Javier was shocked at Joe’s senility, and that finished him off, or the CIA killed Javier to shut him up.

          3. They could handle Portland as a “cooperative experiment”. It would be, uhm, interesting.

      4. And let’s not forget that a decent sized segment of the population has been fantasizing about shooting blue helmets for decades.

        Basically the moment there is the faintest excuse — and as you point out there will be good justification almost as soon as they arrived — the entire country would kill every UN soldier they could get their hands on.

        1. They might be smart enough to send our guys to be UN troops, again.

          …in which case the shooting will start before civilians can get there.

      5. ‘Twould be most fitting if sporting goods stores started selling skeet painted that particular shade of blue… 😛

  37. “But she’s too stupid (no, seriously, that woman is denser than the cores of some planets)”

    I didn’t watch it myself, but my parents saw the debate between Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez when the two women were running for the same senate seat. They reported that both women were equally foolish and ignorant.

  38. And before this July 14 quite passes into history, let us remember this Bastille Day, and the promise of the original, and all the good and the bad that came from it.

    And let us also (if we will) remember this day those Americans being held in our own “Biden Bastille” — which though it is only a special section of a prison already there, holds among its special and specially-mistreated prisoners not just likely criminals, but also many or most who are guilty (best we can tell) of nothing more than using their Constitutional right to petition their government for redress of their grievances — in a way the New Regime dislikes.

    As long as our country holds these political prisoners, let us never forget.

    1. And of course I missed posting this on actual (EDT) Bastille Day. But hopefully the point is still made…

  39. If the Democrats were smart they’d dial back the vote fraud in the midterms. Losing Congress won’t mean much as long as they hold the White House and it might enable them to discredit the vote integrity people as well as reinforce the normalcy bias of those who think that 2020 was odd but not fraudulent.

    If.

    1. On a similar note, I noticed something Robert Kroese said on Twitter yesterday: “How soon should I expect the “Election fraud was necessary to save democracy” think pieces?”

      I would say, when things get bad for President Harris.

      1. You’ve already seen one: Time magazine showing how the election was ‘fortified’ so Xiden would win.

          1. Akshully, Lincoln would have sent the The Lincoln Project to the gallows by now.

            (Yeah, I understand his actions were maybe not quite that extreme, but there is enough there for a joke.)

            1. Given that they’ve appropriated Abe’s name for their project, and their linkage with pederasty, I’m sure he’d be more than happy to go to extremes in this instance…

              1. It seems it would be more practical to note that a very strong parallel would be a The Wilson Project, complaining that Joe Biden is betraying the foundational principles of the Democratic Party. If little Joey were a real Democrat, he would have implemented Uncle Woody’s policies of burning down black neighborhoods and segregating the federal service.

                1. Joe would also have not forgotten about Wilson’s roving gangs of thugs intimidating and beating up opponents. Oh wait…

      3. I think they already tried that with the “This is how we fortified the election to defeat Trump” article in the Atlantic and the blowback scared them.

  40. > The flurry of activity is really the corpse of communism being consumed from within.

    I was thinking it was more like what happens when you shoot a small animal in the head (or cut the head off a chicken). Big flurry of useless activity before collapse.

    1. Meanwhile, LA County has announced that masks need to be worn indoors again, starting at 11:59pm this coming Saturday…

        1. Better not. You might catch something that LA County has. 😈

  42. The Democrats finally found illegal aliens that they DO NOT want to import, Cubans.
    I would like to hear Republicans start asking WHY are the Democrats RACIST against Cubans.
    WHY are they the ONLY group that the Democrats threaten to deport to Third Countries???
    Could it be that since Cubans KNOW what Commies are like, there is NO WAY any of them are EVER voting Democrat?

    1. Everybody knows that the only Cubans who ever want to leave the Workers’ and Peasants’ Paradise of the Divine Castro Brothers (Inc.) are wicked capitalists and 1%-ers. You see, there are still all these evil millionaires in Cuba, sixty years after the revolution (¡Viva la Revolucion!) in which they were all stood up against the wall. Just like the people Stalin was sending to the Gulag in 1950 were all Mensheviks who had been rounded up and shot by 1920.

      Obviously we don’t want any of those awful reactionaries, or for that matter, any people who would leave a Socialist Paradise like Cuba to come to a Racist Imperialist Hellhole like the U.S.A.!

      1. You think you’re joking, but I have heard exactly this from leftists. “only the privileged want to leave, because they’re afraid of losing their privilege.” NM that the privileged are party members.

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