The image above was made by a friend as the election loomed and we were sure that Donald Trump was a moby. The “Unicorn Cavalry” is Larry Correia’s term for the Libertarian Party. Or was, when the party adhered to, you know, Libertarianism.
Unfortunately 2016 was when they epically misread the tea leaves, or perhaps consulted the world class brains of college libertarians and decided what libertarianism actually should be is “just like what Bernie Sanders is emitting out of his mouth hole.”
Liberty suddenly meant not liberty to pursue happiness with no hinderance, but liberty to pursue happiness because someone else was paying for your necessities. I.e. your liberty required the enslavement of others. (At least their fractional enslavement for tax payment, but that sort of thing always progresses and places like the Soviet Union had functional enslavement, in which you had to work at that which you were assigned. (For which the slaves rebelled as they always do, by merely pretending to work.) And this they called freedom.
Facebook kicked it up the other day as “a memory” because being designed for grandma’s to show off their photos, or people to post pictures of their lunch, they think it will bring a misty-eyed tear to my eye.
What it did was make me stare at it a long time and go “You know, the Libertarian party isn’t it, but we REALLY are the 16th division of the Unicorn Cavalry, us.”
Let me explain: In 2016, those of us who had had enough stuck our horn up and pierced the contented fundaments of the establishment. Since then they’ve been running around with saws trying to cut the horns off, but only succeeding here and there, temporarily, and causing more unicorns to appear amid the newly woken. Half the time, the left has resorted to tying pillows to their behind (the idiotic barbed wire and guards in DC, etc. But that only shows their fear.
But Sarah…. unicorns? We’re not air dreamers. In fact, we’re the ones who are in touch with reality.
Sure, sure. But imagine how the left feels. Unicorns are supposed to be non-existent or very rare. And suddenly, there they are, everywhere, chasing them with sharpened “let’s go Brandon” horns and with “We don’t believe you won the election, your fraudsters” horns, and with “no, I won’t believe anything you say” horns. (Which in this case is what “horny” means. I suppose it would be better as hornery, but eh. The pun is funny.) And everything they do to make the unicorns rare, only makes them come back in greater numbers.
Worse, unicorns are basically purity detectors. Yes, I know. “Virginity.” Meh. There are a ton of medieval stories in which being a virgin was not the point, being pure/good was.
And yet, we’re rising up against people who consider themselves pure and good.
And we’re the 16th because we started in 2016.
I’m here to make a sincere, heartfelt plea that you — quixotically, to the measure you can do it — join the 16th division of the Unicorn Cavalry, and sharpen your horn to a razor point.
It’s a rhetorical horn, because most of us are indeed “keyboard commandos.” Not — I emphasize this — because we demand we start a war, or that others shed blood on our behalf, but because most of our work is ideas and words.
And it is desperately needed. And yes, we might already be much too late.
Let me explain?
I have said before, (And Bill Whittle, who is at least as depressive as I am) agreed, that we’ve already won the war against the current wave of Marxist globalists.
We have won, because reality fights on our side. As it’s been increasingly obvious, these people don’t understand how anything works, beyond perhaps academic politics, and they keep trying to bring to life models that can’t and won’t work.
The problem is “We” and “Won.”
We, who are not globalists are winning and will ultimately win. A great fracturing is taking place. And the big conglomerate of the left will try very hard to impose their nonsense on us and fail.
But what comes next is not won. In most of the world, it won’t be the American model as it’s supposed to be. They never understood (and don’t wish to understand) our Constitution, for instance.
Will it be a return to a constitutional republic here. Well, one can hope and fight for it, but the chances are actually vanishingly small.
At this point, the overwhelming chance is that we’ll fall to the nationalist empire form. We’d already started to with Woodrow Wilson, accelerated with FDR and the movement that way has continued, slowed down by two notable presidents.
At this point, gut tells me, Starship Troopers is the best case scenario. And that, if you look at it, is ultimately globalist, just not short term. Because a society that oriented towards the military (lip service to other forms of service notwithstanding) will become an empire.
Honestly? I could live in the Starship Troopers universe. (Shrug.) It ain’t wonderful, and it will be war-inclined and tend to ossify and restrict improvement. But it could be much worse and probably will be.
That is the part — not the “they will impose world wide communism” or “The current elites have it all sewn up” — where I’m genuinely pessimistic. Yeah, we might change it, but it will take a miracle, or an army of unicorns.
Why? Because I know the rest of the world. I know Europe, know people in Africa (yes, including tribal members), and have a passing touch and go knowledge of central and South America (look, my cousins there are scary, okay? Mostly I get reports third hand.)
We’re thoroughly penetrated and corrupted by Marxism here. Even people on our side, gaming what happens next tend to default to the models they’ve seen in entertainment and read about in history books…. mostly written by Marxists.
I keep coming across bizarrely weird glitches in people who are otherwise rational. Like, someone will be analyzing the Regency in England and suddenly will say something like “Well, people were being forced to work in these horrible factories and live in horrible conditions in cities.” At which point I want to collectively grab them by scruff and bitch slap the indoctrination out of them.
In fact, if you read books written at the time, not by crazy Marxists like Dickens, or pay attention to the industrialization taking place in real time before our eyes in the third world, you’ll know that the Marxist bullshit about the Dark Satanic Mills was, like everything Marx made much of, basically bullshit and hot air.
People were having trouble holding onto tenants on their land, and servants in their manors, because conditions int he city were better. And working in factories was both less work and less demeaning than being a domestic servant. (Don’t believe me? Read biographies. Even the best make some passing reference to stuff that makes your hair stand on end, like the fact that your employer had a say over who you married.)
Of course the upper class also loved the Dickensinian portrait of cities and mills, because it might convince Millie-maid to stay in the manor, even though she gets up at 4 am to sew the master’s newspaper (trust me on this) and goes to bed at midnight after blacking the stove, and the master’s son is starting to get handsy with her.
But the fact that Marxism has penetrated that thoroughly means everything that the industrial civilization is built on is corrupted. Everywhere. (Yes, Europe too.)
It turns out the horrible things happening to the culture are not the result of decadence, either.
Okay, so Russia/the USSR is only ever good at one thing: propaganda and bullshit.
Mind you, they were never that good, but they had every writer, entertainer, journalist and academic on their side by the early-to-middle twentieth century, each one doing his part, in complete accord (a prospiracy, not a conspiracy) to help sell these narratives. And the narratives are simple. Once you have the outline, you can help build it without any profound understanding. (Which is why it’s also full of contradictions, and at war with reality but if you have enough adherents you can cover that up because none of them want to wake up. Waking up means losing friends, sometimes family, and becoming one of the pariahs. One of the “stupid.”
So, what the propaganda has done is sell the idea that a lot of things are “decadence” when what they actually are is the reaction of an invaded culture to having another culture imposed from above. Remember the idiotic mouse-habitat experiment, in which all these terrible things were the result of overpopulation and abundance? Turns out it was rigged (I know you’re shocked.) What it actually is is the result of individuals losing defined roles in society. Adjusting from mice: The women become whores, the men become thugs, babies become eaten, and adolescents develop all sorts of pathologies.
What you’re seeing, when you complain of our decadence has bloody nothing to do with decadence. It is the result of a foreign and very strange cult imposing its will on us, and therefore causing a loss of “role” for most people in the society.
The left attacked the idea of… well, everything that competed with dictates from the state: religion, marriage, family hierarchy, normal friendship, and on and on and on.
And humans can’t survive without a defined role and a defined purpose. We’re creatures who must see ourselves as part of the story.
The left’s idea was that everyone would buy into the great communist future and our role would be to bring that about.
Except since the USSR fell, most sane people know that’s bullshit, and only the terminal neurotics embrace that shit unironically with the kind of fervor reserved for death cults. (Which it is.)
And that’s the biggest thing we’re fighting against. The left’s grip on the culture is crashing. But there is nothing else for people to embrace. From the bizarre way even some anti-left people embraced masks and not-a-vax you can tell anything will do.
These are drowning people, trying to reach for something, anything.
Well, I don’t know what will happen in the rest of the world. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
But in the US it is imperative that we both mock and deride the left, before they can add more crimes to their toll. The ones they managed during the Covidiocy were enough, thank you so much. (Unless you call mass Gerontocide not a crime. And we won’t mention the cognitive impairment of a generation of babies and toddlers. Again, this is my training. Most of you might not realize that if you don’t form language before three, you never will. For a vast number of these children, the impairment is permanent.)
At the same time we need to push the model that works: The US Constitution.
It’s funny, you know, because in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, the Professor says that the Constitution was for an agrarian society and wouldn’t work for an industrial one. He was wrong, though I could see Heinlein repeating the “wisdom” of his generation. The Constitution would have worked fine, had it not been abandoned for the sexier centralized models of governance from Europe.
More importantly, the Constitution is much better suited than the centralized model (which is what is collapsing now) for a post-mass-manufacturing society. As both information and manufacturing diversify and individualize, the constitution is the answer to what ails us.
The rest of the world won’t embrace it — probably — but you know, not my circus, not my monkeys. We can at least provide a model and be a shiny city upon a hill.
So, what can you do? Be the unicorn cavalry. Be the keyboard commandos.
First of all, keep making what you think and feel known, to the measure of the possible in your position.
Look, even if all you do is show other people they’re not utterly alone by putting a “I did that” sticker on a gas pump, you’ve done good work that day. Steve linked this article in comments, and it made me giggle. Go read it, and then I’ll tell you what’s so funny. I don’t know if that gas station manager is a lefty or just congenitally stupid. (The answer might be both of course.)
Ready? The really funny part is that the writer echoes the managers sentiments without realizing how bloody stupid they are.
First, he says one or two people have “complained about the stickers.” and made his life miserable. But he’s scraping five to six off the pumps every day. Um…. that tells you how sentiment is running, but he doesn’t seem to realize that. (Unless he’s really, really deep.)
Second, he goes on and on about how Biden doesn’t shop there, so why are you doing this.
My giggle became a guffaw at that point. And that’s why I suspect he’s a leftist. He thinks any demonstration must be to attract the attention of and plea with/complain to the person in authority.
In fact, this one? is about letting other people we see what’s happening to the gas prices and we know whose fault it is. Considering the way the Brandon Junta and the mealy mouthed press report it, you’d think the rise in prices is inexplicable and strange, and not the fact of his stopping our oil independence on the first week in office.
It is important for other people to know they’re not the only ones who see it. You are supporting other people, some of them deep embeds who can’t speak. It’s an act of mercy and defiance both.
Defiance? Well, yes, because you’re countering the media narrative. And of course Exxon doesn’t like it and tries to repress it, because they are, of course, convinced that the future is on the other side, and that only hicks are against the globalists.
So what you’re doing too is slowly chipping at those assurances implanted by the universities in the minds of educated people. Do it enough and their fear will swing the other way, and they’ll start putting the stickers on themselves, to try to appease the majority of people. Because that’s how craven managers act.
Heck, do it enough and maybe they’ll ignore Brandon, tell him to take a hike, and drill, baby, drill before the children are crying for food in the dark. It’s unlikely, but we can hope.
I need you to be the people who don’t exist: Believers in life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and our Constitution.
I need you to join the Unicorn Cavalry, and explode marxist myths, media narratives, and the evil, dark doings of the global cabal.
I need you to produce pithy sayings, interesting memes, narrative-stopping polemics, and rude gestures.
I need you to step up. Yes, it will take a miracle. (But then we’re only mostly dead.)
And who best to produce a miracle than us, mythical and Odd beasts who aren’t supposed to exist?
Sharpen your horn, lower your head.
Hands comfortably on the keyboard?
It’s time to charge.
According To Hoyt 
This is your calling.
to an extent. I’m supposed to be working on novels d*mn it.
Books pay the bills. Some of them, at least. And the bigger your backlist, the bigger the paycheck, if I’m not mistaken. Write books. Throw up cat pictures or meme posts or whatever is quick if you need to. This place won’t burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp.
…are you sure? There are dragons
Yes! Please! I give up! I’ll write stuff and put stickers on gas pumps if you’ll finish the damned Darkship series!!! Eden is just sitting there at the mercy of the Mules. You were the one who created the name for the ship, Je Reviens… so when will you be returning? The Revolution needs you!
(There. I said it.)
But reality is too strange for fiction to make sense
Just remember, if you get a large animal on your horn, be sure to get it off before charging another large animal.
Note: Some earlier stories about unicorns had them getting large number of elephants stuck on their horns. [Crazy Grin]
He’s right, you know?
And never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
I don’t know. I’ve heard a giant flaming bench stuck of your spike does make an effective and terrifying battering ram.
Also, do not charge anyone or anything that is standing between you and a solid tree.
Or any other large solid object or a cliff. 😉
Trees are worst because you get stuck.
Still beats going off a cliff.
Just because: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmAIGI_N41M
Good voice and dynamic range. Hits the Christian music pattern without turning campy. That isn’t easy to do but nice when it’s done right.
I’d be interested in a write up of how they rigged the mouse experiment. I’ve just seen the original write ups and it would be good to know how they jimmied it.
The funny thing about the stickers, I’d think the simplest solution would be just to stick some of your own up in a spot that’s easy to get them off again, and just leave them there until this is all over. Then you’ll know you can get them off pretty easily after all this is said and done.
Might even just get some with magnetic backings, so you can pull them down when the inspectors roll by.
The analysis and expose has disappeared from online. (Sigh.)
Is this the writeup you were talking about?
https://fee.org/articles/john-b-calhoun-s-mouse-utopia-experiment-and-reflections-on-the-welfare-state/
From the article:
<blockquoteAs Kubań notes,
The “behavioral sink” of self-destructive conduct in Calhoun’s experiment (which he replicated on numerous subsequent occasions) has since been mostly interpreted as resulting from crowded conditions. Demographers warn that humans might succumb to similar aberrations if world population should ever exceed some imaginary, optimal “maximum.” Others like Kubań point out that the mice utopia fell apart well before the mouse enclosure was full. Even at the peak of the population, some 20 percent of nesting beds were unoccupied.
That was supposed to be an embedded blockquote, but whatever.
Sounds like one of them, but not the one I remember.
From what I remember, it was things like the assumptions of what a mouse “needs” being iffy, not correcting for noise/light, interpretation issues…. I’ll see if I can find it in the old comments.
/wry
This week, Duckduckgo seems to work best for things actually showing up!
Well, can’t find the point by point debunking, but did find an earlier rhyming article where she mentions skin-space discussion was involved, too:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/01/16/role-playing/
And a thread with several links to the prison experiments /authority experiments being debunked
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2017/10/10/but-for-wales-richard/#comment-482583
Zimbardo. weirdly I read about Zimbardo when son took Psychology in college.
The man is a complete insane freak. I spent years having nightmares about Zimbardo kidnapping me for his rigged experiments.
Yes, he should have stuck to ice-management machines.
And I had totally forgotten this tidbit about the Zimbardo experiment, he said that he carefully selected anti-war activists for the guards…
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/09/03/curing-our-common-cold/#comment-113331
I actually ended up switching to DDG few years back. When we found out we were having a girl, I’d tried to Google the old “rules for dating my daughter” joke. Couldn’t get Google to show any links to the base joke, just reems and reems of feminist critique of the joke.
I mean, I know the girls aren’t helpless, but I can’t help but feel that any father who hasn’t put the fear of God into the first dozen boyfriends or so just hasn’t been doing his job.
Left google a long time ago, when it stopped giving me results when I had an exact quote, accurately, that was in quotes, adn required.
Bing works…fairly well, although it gives too many synonyms it isn’t too “here is what you want, shut up and take it.”
DDG’s results only seem to really shine when it’s looking for old results on a specific site or series of sites– which I do a decent amount of. 😀
Man, do I miss Hotbot….
Rodney Atkins has a country song about dating a daughter. “Cleaning this gun”
(Oops, the damned thing was on auto-start. Just woke up $SPOUSE and Kat-the-dog.)
FWIW, I use Qwant for searches. Their map application is tolerable, but Bing’s is better. And yes, they have a hit for the rules. I’ll tweak to avoid moderation hell…
daddygotcustody dot com/rules-for-dating-my-daughter/
Is there anywhere that has good substitutes for places that won’t allow serfs to bear arms? Would be a good gift for family.
I haven’t seen a list of places that restrict weapons for our area, even though TPTB in Oregon gubmint decided that violating a “no weapons” sign is a felony. In Flyover Falls, the big medical establishment (hospital, a variety of clinics, and doctor’s offices where the establishment owns the building) has the signs. One independent doctor has the prohibition, but his competition is with the establishment, so for most of my medical visits, I go unarmed, with my head on a swivel.
Beyond that, the credit unions I’m familiar with do *not* restrict arms, barring one branch of one CU. The other branch in town allows it. I can’t recall any other businesses around here that go for the free-fire zone. (I’ve no faith in the OR courts, but I’d love to see lawsuits over adverse results from such policies. If an entity is going to bar my right to self defense, one would think it should be responsible for problems.)
Haven’t seen anything on such in the more mainstream gun news, but I don’t read much of the dead-tree versions and only occasionally online. The Truth About Guns would be the only one that might do it (not familiar with the site much, beyond Insty-linked articles), but a more specialized forum might do such, or a list/resource could be started.
You might want to check out Andrew Branca’s site. He’s an attorney specializing in Self-Defense law, occasionally writes for Legal Insurrection, and has lots of good stuff.
https://lawofselfdefense.com/blog/
The overcrowding conclusion was not at all justified by the experiment..The most obvious conclusion would be that a life of ease with everything provided (socialism for mice) is extremely destructive.There have been proposals to redo the experiment with no crowding…
Ordinary lab mice in smaller cages and in breeding colonies also experience a life with no predators to avoid and plenty of food and water for free. And yet those breeding colonies… breed, despite having just as much lack of “healthy challenge” as the mice in the experiment.
Redoing the experiment with no crowding would be a way to more thoroughly confirm or bust the competing “overcrowding” and “life of ease” theories.
I don’t think it was “life of ease” It was not a well designed experiment in terms of what they were fed, and what the habitat read as for MICE.
Sarah, that cat in the banner has to go, because WuuuuuFluuuuu!
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2022/03/04/COVID-19-Delta-house-cat/8921646408471/
mwahahahah. The cat (Pixie) STAYS
He also looks like a cat who would come and live with me part-time. Sadly, I’m pretty sure he got eaten by coyotes or something last year.
Until curiosity gets involved
I feel like I am being outmaneuvered by the tons of money being poured into pushing the “Convention of States” or the “Con-Con.” Utah has a nice piece of legislation sitting in limbo for now, that argues there are enough outstanding State calls for an Article V Convention, that Pelosi should be convening one any second. (The argument goes to there being no time limit on the state calls-the 27th Amendment was ratified over a period of 200 years, also under Article V.) Yes, our Constitution is great and if we are called to be keyboard warriors, so be it. It also helps when you find the state guy pushing the legislation had a cozy two week vacation to Hawaii paid for by the re-write the Constitution crowd. Thank-you for keeping everyone rallied!
That stuff has been pushed for decades. I remember hearing about it back in the ’90s. I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere anytime soon.
18 states have passed it, with WV just doing so.
I’ve followed this project for some years. I think you’re mischaracterizing the latest effort:
https://conventionofstates.com/
In particular, take a look at their video “How It Works” (https://youtu.be/td7SXuv1LG8) and their take on limiting the scope of such a amending convention:
OUR APPLICATION LIMITS WHAT CAN BE PROPOSED AT THE CONVENTION
Our legislation calls for a Convention of States “limited to proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress.”
The Convention that gave us the US Constitution was to improve the Articles of Confederation not to create a new Constitution. 😉
You do realize that calling an amending convention, a Convention of States, is a completely constitutional act, right? If you toss that out you’re guilty of picking which bits of the Constitution to accept and which to ignore, yourself.
There are things that are constitutional that Might Not Be A Good Idea.
Then work against what you think is a bad idea, don’t just reject it out of hand.
I believe the applicable quote is “You decided you CAN do it without asking whether you SHOULD do it.”
Since the only precedent in our system resulted in a complete rewrite, I am leery.
Here’s the Convention of States description of what they’re trying to do:
This is how they believe a “run-away” convention (which can only propose amendments for ratification by the state legislatures, not actually amend the Constitution itself) can be limited:
OUR APPLICATION LIMITS WHAT CAN BE PROPOSED AT THE CONVENTION
Our legislation calls for a Convention of States “limited to proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress.”
Vatican II was supposed to just finish up Vatican I (which ended early on account of wars) while further encouraging a higher standard of Latin education in seminaries, parishes, and schools. And in fact, Vatican II did mandate that everybody use and learn more Gregorian chant at Mass, because that was the default, and secular or non-sacred music at Mass was supposed to utterly disappear.
And yet, what actually happened?
If you have a time and place where people are sane, you might be able to have a nice sane constitutional convention with nice sane results. Maybe.
I suppose Vatican II had to be ratified by majority votes of the parish councils of 3/4 of the Catholic parishes in the world, right? No? Then it has absolutely nothing to do with this.
“ratified by majority votes”
That you can still say this with a straight face after 2020 is an even better example of “the triumph of hope over experience” than multiple marriages. Sigh.
Why is it every time Article V comes up we go into paroxysms of panic. Here is the Text of Article V IN FULL
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
Basically the article V gives a way to make an end around run on an uncooperative or indolent congress. The Convention may create amendments (which admittedly could include nullification of existing amendments or part or the whole of the existing constitution), but those amendments then need the assent of 3/4 of the states (38 at present). If the current Legislature were so disposed and could get the 2/3s of both houses they could do exactly the same thing IF they could get 3/4 of the states. The only real limitation is changing the representation in the Senate (see the final clause of the last senate) without the consent of the state or states affected.
As for the argument of nullity of the existing constitution due to violating the unanimity clause of the Articles of Confederation Rhode Island was last to ratify the Constitution in May of 1790 so unanimity was achieved just 2 years later than the 3/4 limit of the initial adoption of the constitution in 1788.
If the article V convention is a hole then the existing amendment process is a hole just as large. A system without an ability to reform rots and fails, so the ability to amend is a must or you end up with things like the rotten boroughs of the English Parliament. Ultimately any system falls back to the 4 boxes of Liberty, Soap Box, Ballot Box Jury Box and Ammunition Box and the will of the people to use their Rights.
Not panic. Well-advised skepticism about screwing around with the manual, especially given the type of loonies who routinely get to be in charge, and the corruption of voting.
And btw, the corruption of Vatican II by liberal crazies started while Vatican II was still in session, and still discussing and passing highly conservative documents.
Benedict XVI was there as a priest-theology expert (“peritus,” meaning “experienced person”) for his bishop. He went home to his university and found priests and monks basically saying Mass in the vernacular with hippie secular songs and chocolate chip cookies, in a way mostly highly illegal even now, and proudly announcing that all this stuff had been commanded by Vatican II and their highly placed sources had told them to do it.
So he tells these guys, “No, the bishops didn’t say anything like this, and what the heck are you doing? Please stop.”
But they knew better than him, because he’d only been there working, whereas they knew The Truth. So they kept doing what they were doing. And then when told to stop, they tried to use the protection of “this is now our community custom.” Some of these people never did stop, and that’s part of why Catholic Germany is full of so many horrendous churches and monasteries. And a lot of the sexual abuse stuff was closely tied to “all the rules have changed, and we are following the new spirit of Vatican II.”
The point is that there didn’t even have to be any vote. There just had to be a possibility.
Now, imagine people who think BLM and Antifa are good ideas, listening to Twitter for information on what the new Constitutional Convention is mandating, while it’s still in session… and then acting on their collective imaginations. Not just on Sunday. Not just in a church.
And btw, the corruption of Vatican II by liberal crazies started while Vatican II was still in session, and still discussing and passing highly conservative documents.
“Spirit of Vatican II.”
IE, “make up stuff out of whole cloth that generally directly contradicts what they actually said.”
Drove a lot of the good lay-teachers out of teaching, including my mother, so YES I am incredibly steamed, and that’s before screwing up an entire generation with I-can’t-even-tell-if-it’s-malice-or-just-selfish stuff on hard teachings.
Heck, the initial concon was a convention of states to modify the articles.
If the govt was willing to follow the constitution, a requirement necessary for a concon to work, we wouldn’t be in this position. If it isn’t willing all you are doing is giving names to the orgs willing to disappear those names when ordered to, three letter agencies, military, etc.
Problem is that the 1791 crew was ‘only supposed to revise the Articles of Confederation’, and ended up tossing the whole thing. As we have seen since that time, limits are worth the paper they are printed on.
And yet the product of 1789 had to be ratified by 3/4 of the states to take effect, or in abstract terms, had to be accepted by a supermajority of the nation as legitimate.
If a new convention goes off the rails and writes a whole new crazy-stupid document, and half the country says “nope, you broke the rules, that’s a big no from us”, then it’s not legitimate and will not succeed, even if it’s pushed down our throats, because that absolutely would trigger the boog.
But if Constitution v2.0 is accepted by a supermajority, then it by definition becomes legitimate and if we disagree then we’re the ones with a problem, and that problem is with the concept that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.
Perhaps you have forgotten that the Articles of Confederation required *unanimity* among the states to be revised. Therefore, the 3/4 rule adopted by the convention directly violated the original document that they were supposed to be revising.
So much for limitations on a convention.
The other issue is that the Articles of Confederation required changes be approved by ALL the states. The Constitutional Convention conveniently fudged that part. There is no way the Constitution would have ever been approved if it required unanimity among the states to go into effect.
Yup, it could be argued that the Constitution was illegal. Basically the states went with it because it worked, and because George Washington was trusted. But it was definitely put across by finagling, and history books used to make a point of that.
The articles were illegal. High treason in fact.
Like “stolen land”, too much pursuit of historical legitimacy is folly.
The Articles came after the English accepted that the Colonies were Independent.
Now the Declaration Of Independence, That Was High Treason and the signers knew it. 😉
Yep, keep your pecker up (Different meanings in English English & American English but…) but as we break out of the 1984 acre/era unicorn corral, I expect we’ll prick each other a bit as well, make allowances for that as it helps us develop heard immunity ‘gainst 24/7 propaganda.
I’m ready to cut you some slack and take the occasional horn in the brass, even though, of course, I know I’m right & your absolutely wrong on some specific point, -as long as it keeps us all moving in the right direction. Hope you’ll give me, and him, and her, but not necessarily she/he/it (Say it fast) , the same leeway.
Unicorns of the world unite, you need lose nothing but your blinders!
There’s a line in the Gilbert & Sullivan one-act Trial By Jury that goes like this: “Is this the Court of the Exchequer?” (“It is.”) “Be firm, be firm, my pecker.”
The last time we did that, we changed it to “Is this the Court of Civil Matters? My heart, it pitter-patters.”
I mean, we could have left the original wording, but it’s good to have people giggling for the correct reasons.
“Even the best make some passing reference to stuff that makes your hair stand on end, like the fact that your employer had a say over who you married”
That’s one of the things that caught my attention about the ancient Chinese. Probably the most famous betrayal in Chinese history is when Lu Bu turned on his adoptive father, Dong Zhou, who had seized control of the Han Emperor. One of the biggest reasons for the betrayal was that Lu Bu was having an affair with one of the maids, and was afraid that Dong Zhou would find out and have him executed. So he killed his adoptive father first.
Apparently the maids belonged to the one in charge, and no one else.
And of course all of the men who worked in the palace were eunuchs.
So you had huge palaces staffed by women who were forbidden from having a relationship with anyone (unless they caught their boss’s eye, without drawing the jealous ire of his wife), and emasculated men who weren’t interested in that sort of relationship.
.
That sounds perfectly healthy.
Um. Well. Actually, it was pretty universally acknowledged that eunuchs could have an interest in relationships with women; but on the eunuch jollies side, it usually it involved the eunuchs doing a lot of combing and brushing the woman’s hair. (There are various theories about this, but most associate it with the eunuchs dimly remembering their moms.)
But yeah, lots of places with eunuchs had lots of punishments if they allowed themselves to be used by women, and there were lots of spying eyes.
That’s primate grooming behavior. I’ll bet that’s an alternate pathway to triggering all the various bonding hormones that’s still available when the main systems are no longer available.
I also seem to recall a lot of cultures have women bonding through hair combing as well.
And I wonder if this might be part of why women even have long hair? It always struck me as curious that women are expected, need to be able to grow their hair long to be considered feminine, but for guys it can simply all fall out. I figured there had to be some reason for it, but have never been sure what. For a while when we believed humans had a water ape stage, I’d figured it was tow hooks for the infants, but if that wasn’t a key stage, that would end that theory, and even so, why would we still have it now?
But if it is instead a big social bonding mechanism, that may explain a lot of things, including, potentially, the impacts of hair styles. I.e. are shorter hair styles universally perceived as less social/approachable than longer styles? For example, if the old guy with a loose ponytail and bushy beard universally perceived as more laid back than a close buzz cut?
So much opportunity for sociological research there.
IIRC using Eunuchs in the Chinese Civil Service was to prevent Civil Servants from enriching their children.
While they didn’t have children, they enriched themselves and gathered more power for themselves.
On a plus note, however, assuming you dealt with existing offspring and made it such that on death all bureaucrats belongings were taken and use to pay down govt debt would be a good way of dealing with our current rulers in dc.
If the testicles are removed after puberty, the male can still have a normal sex drive and his genitals will be properly developed. More than few young men came back from Vietnam minus their testicles but with rest of their genitalia intact. Many overcame the psychological shock and enjoyed a more-or-less normal sex life though, obviously, they never fathered any children.
Castrating grown men to stop then from banging the houris doesn’t make much sense.
They removed all the external genitalia, not just the testicles.
Just prescribe em ssris
They didn’t castrate grown men.
c4c
c4c
c4c again, with the box clicked
“Russia/the USSR is only ever good at one thing: propaganda and bullshit.”
Hum. One of the first things Putin did upon taking office was go to flat rate income tax. Just a few days ago they banished the vax tax on gold, citizens can now buy, sell exchange gold without any 20% surcharge/tax and as I understand it the ruble is now backed by gold, not the good word of the government. “President Putin has announced the return of the gold standard in Russia which could make the Ruble the single most stable currency on the planet.” This, of course is unacceptable to all of our movers, shakers and oath breakers, stay tuned, war at eleven.
Like him/them or not, in my opinion we could learn more than a thing or two from Putin about messing up the New World Order.
Assuming they’re not lying thier asses off like they did about their population, thier military, theier tech capacity, their GDP, and so on.
Sarah, I’m going to have to disagree somewhat. I do think we’re looking at the “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” stages of the old society. I agree that the Constitution is the foundation stone on which to rebuild.
But I think that the other cornerstones must be the promotion of patriotism, the restraint of economic bullying, the limitation of the scope of government, and not abandoning our countrymen.
Promotion of patriotism: Patriotic sentiment has been undermined since the Second World War. Heinlein spotted it in the 1950s. Kindly note that Communism is explicitly globalist, and always has been. When people feel a loyalty to their countrymen of ALL classes, they don’t feel a loyalty to their class in OTHER countries. And the United States, because of the varied backgrounds of its citizens, is especially vulnerable. The cohesion of the 1940s came from an aggressive assimilation campaign…after shutting off the immigration valve in the early 1920s. This is the sort of thing that has to come from teaching our history – you won’t get it from half-asleep students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance by rote.
Restraint of economic bullying: It’s easy for rich men to make themselves richer by bribing the government to legislate them richer. Adam Smith caught onto that in the 1700s. Anti-trust laws, truth-in-advertising, and honest contracts have to be made and enforced firmly.
Limiting the scope of government is another matter. Protect the borders, maintain the roads, operate honest courts. Never forget that the coin of government is force – the Rods and the Axe. Everything else comes from that force. The more you ask government to do FOR you, the more it gets to do TO you. Meaning they beat you up, chop off pieces you really wanted to keep. I’m not a Libertarian fantasy-land dweller – but government needs to work on staying out of people’s business, and operating through contracted services whenever possible.
Finally, there is Not Abandoning our Countrymen. I’ve seen too many people, claiming to be on our side, who were willing to leave decent people stuck in Leftists states to the mercies of the crypto-Communists. They shout about ‘muh feddelism’ and turn away. The Left takes ground because we don’t bother to put up a fight. The best example of this was the COVID panic-demic. Trump got sucked into playing the ‘muh feddelism’ game, turned over the response to state and local authorities…many of whom were Leftists perfectly happy to kill their own citizens in order to drive up the death count. Which they then blamed on Trump, of course. Ditto for the civil unrest in 2020.
Damn. This is the time I wish I had the money for a Presidential run.
What are the limits of Federalism? Granted, the national government has carrots and sticks, namely money (or at least used to have money), but there’s supposed to be “state things’ and “national things.” Disease control was a local and state “thing” for a very, very long time, with some national involvement at ports.
I detest what NY, WI, WA et all did. I still detest those governors and state governments. However, I also believe that Trump erred on the proper side by letting each state do what its elected leaders thought best. *shrug* I suspect we could argue that until the cows came home.
The problem is that the airplane and the automobile have blown a hole in old school federalism a mile wide. I can get up tomorrow morning, get on the road at 0800, and eat lunch in any one of SIX states. Supper in another eight or so. And I live an hour’s drive from the Interstates.
On top of which, you have the willful and malicious mishandling of problems. Not just the panic-demic…remember Hurricane Katrina? Hurricane Maria? Democrats are the political equivalent of a crooked auto mechanic…they will “fix” your car, while quietly breaking something else.
Honestly, I’d think that the car and the airplane make federalism more important than ever, since it allows more vigorous competition between the states.
Yes. It works two ways. And given how people are voting with their feet, again, it makes federalism as “experiments within the states” crystal clear. The failed experiments are chasing off people. Now, that does open other worm cans, and questions like “Can the country as a whole afford to have failed states?”
Not on any of its’ borders, either land or sea….. which is where our problems are with some exceptions.
President Trump couldn’t effectively control much of the executive branch. This was due to a combination of GOPe twerps limiting who he could appoint, an entrenched and nearly unaccountable senior executive service, and lack of protection from impeachment conviction if he strayed too far from GOPe whims. Given those constraints, an attempted federal approach would have likely been worse than what we got. With federalism, at least some states had a sane response. Until something is done about the Communists infesting the federal government, that’s probably the best we can hope for.
Finally, there is Not Abandoning our Countrymen. I’ve seen too many people, claiming to be on our side, who were willing to leave decent people stuck in Leftists states to the mercies of the crypto-Communists.
We have to respect peoples’ freedom to choose to stay in cruddy places.
Do our best to stop anything actually illegal, up to and including “keeping people in state by force,” but ….
I don’t think you’re disagreeing with me. You’re unpacking a lot of things I see coming as part of what’s happening.
I wasn’t saying these other things don’t need to happen,b ut we NEED to rebuild the culture.
Have you ever looked at the new _American Essence_ magazine from Epoch Times? It’s a nice blend of culture, history, art, education (what’s working, philosophies of learning and teaching), crafts and business, and a very pro-American miscellany. With neat nature photography. It’s not perfect, but things like that are a good start.
It is; even persuaded me to subscribe.
Thank you!
I guess the phrase: “FIX BAYONETS” will need to morph into “HORNS UP” for our battles.
I’m sort of off on my own but really try to help with what I can when possible. Passive resistance is still resistance. I was a lucky kid as my high school Government teacher had crawled through the minefields and cut through the barb wire on the Check boarder as a young man and escaped to America to get an education and to be a teacher. Boy… did he get it. That got passed on to me (supported by my family too) so I am in a ‘good place’ from that perspective. Thanks (again) to our host and also to all who are here, and other places, that support, work for and believe in our future.
I am just going to keep on being that quiet retired guy who will be able to shoot when needed both metaphorically and actually when time comes. In the wait – keyboard locked and loaded… ready on the left, ready on the right, commence!
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams.
We have to stop tolerating lies.
T shirt? Want!
Aye. And maybe a patch as well?
NOT to be confused with Special Task Force Unicorn, of course.
On the other hand, a little bit of crossover might not be a bad thing there, either…
“I was a founding member of Werewolves for Liberty, back in the Terrible Twenties…”
(And feel free to take that as a Sunday-eve vignette hint, if anyone wishes!)
Keep this in mind. I’m going to announce a couple of anthologies here later this year and one of them is “monsters who are allied with humanity” in the wars of the 20th century. with heroism, and stuff.
Now that sounds interesting. Of course, I might just be a tiny bit biased.
Wrong twenties. Was real wierd calling capone alpha
We had one at some point, I THINK. will get it setup again.
Huzzah… hopefully before $WHATEVER (so many MORE horrible choices..) hits so we can all get our uniforms/enrich the BBESP/Farm Martian Squids…. well, maybe not that last one. Then again, getting to Mars might be worth attempting squid farming.
Sarah needs to sub out a tee shirt business based on the ideas that float here.
The Constitution works fine; the problem is judges and politicians, and the people indoctrinated by them, who believe that the Constitution doesn’t mean what it says and that it says a lot of stuff that it actually doesn’t. That is intentional. In order to rule the way they want to rule, the Constitution must be eliminated. They have in many ways succeeded for practical purposes.
This is how you get Team HarrisBiden negotiating a secret “treaty” with Iran that will enable Iran’s nuclear program and give them full ability ti finance Jihadist terrorist again while not only not seeking Senate ratification but also seeking to keep the “agreement” secret from Congress.
It is also how you get abominations like civil forfeiture and all the other infringements on due process and constitutional protections as well as the bloated and dictatorial administrative agencies which act as legislator, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner.
And sadly, as Sarah notes, and as I have noted for quite some time, Starship Troopers is the best case scenario at this point.
Marbury v. Madison (1803) is the source of judicial review. A lot of the “why did the judge just do that?” stuff regarding Constitutional matters goes back to _Marbury_ and to McCullough v. Maryland.
And Marbury v. Madison was an unwarranted extension of judicial power by Federalist judges, which has caused a great deal of mischief in our society…
If Congress wanted to strip them of that power they could have done so anytime in the past couple centuries under their authority to set jurisdiction of the courts, which applies to both subject matter and geography except where specifically spelled out in the Constitution (i.e. suits between states go to the Supreme Court).
Except once the courts grabbed jurisdiction any attempt to circumvent would be an unconstitutional end run according to the court. Only those with the cultural clout to flout the court (Jackson, fdr, Obama, Biden, etc ) get to push back, usually against black letter constitutional law that our ruling class dislikes.
Sarah, Can I use the artwork to make shirts for my husband and myself (vinyl iron-on)? Also, can I have it turned into a machine embroidery file for my own use? I wouldn’t sell anything with it, unless you tell me it’s ok. Thanks!!
You may, as long as you don’t sell it. I’m going to try to set it up for purchase, and give friend a cut….
I would love to support your friend!! Please let us know when and where we can purchase!! Hopefully patches for our hats?!
I need to go looking for a place like, or perhaps even Zazzle, and I don’t know if they do patches.
I gave up on the Libertarian Party a long, long time ago. All they seemed interested in was legal weed.
This. For most of my life I considered myself to have a foot in both the conservative and libertarian camps, but the cons nowadays only seem interested in conserving their seat at the hog trough to the exclusion of all else, and the libertarians aren’t much of a factor now that they got their legal dope.
When Bill Maher could plausibly describe himself as a “libertarian,” I gave up on them.
I suppose now I’m a hemp rope and streetlights populist.
Except for a few regrettable episodes in which I fell for statist/Marxist propaganda and supported something horrible and/or stupid, I’ve always been oriented toward maximizing individual liberty — but at the same time have been frequently confused as to the who, what, and how of it (which I guess explains those regrettable episodes and why I voted for Democrats for years).
I had just started describing myself as a libertarian when the Libertarian Party showed it was anything but. Now, with things as you’ve described them, my political orientation is simply “whatever it takes to get all these m-f’ers to leave the rest of us alone.”
Hemp rope and street light populism definitely strikes a chord right now. That may be exactly what it takes.
Can I call myself a National Populist Libertarian?
1. Natural rights
2. Small strictly-limited government
3. Voluntary association
4. Free markets not crony capitalism
5. Strong borders but streamlined selective legal immigration
6. Massive regulatory rollback (see #2)
That seems like a reasonable label to me.
F8CK it. I am now a Rational Anarchist.
So you really *are* Professor de la Paz!
At BEST I’m Mannie.
Ok, but that’s a pretty good role too.
Just itchin’ to work a few fools over with the old Number-3 utility arm? 😀
Every day. And twice on Friday when the stealth news come out.
Yeah, why didn’t RAH get any credit for including a disabled character way back in 1966? Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis was an amputee with interchangeable prosthetic arms. RAH just didn’t make a big deal of it. He’s missing an arm, so what? He got over it and went on with his life.
Same reason I don’t get credit for having a sex changer in my fist published novel.
Wrong writers having wrong thoughts.
Problem is that free markets beget two things. 1. Monopolies of thought and 2. Trade with unscrupulous.
As for 1, if I have a single company that sells oil but isn’t running a cartel or using the govt to harm competitors I’m probably safe. Opponents can pop up and disrupt. But if you have thought Monopolies such as the mainstream media, social media, etc who can so twist reality that God himself would be branded a satanic liar for saying different it is nigh impossible for opposition to do more than sit in the gutter and be ignored. Between covid, Trump, Ukraine, and everything over the past 10 years it’s obvious that there is still a massive amount of power inherent in the DNC press that we have not found a functional means of fighting. Blogs speak to the already converted and even folks that say they distrust media pick up the flag when the propaganda matches. Without massively weakened libel protections the media will continue to poison everything.
As for 2, we have no compunction against sending money to countries that steal, dump, invade, and even kill our nominal countrymen. Free trade is only free between nations of similar interests. A country cannot survive as a nation of baristas or engineers. It needs to extract wealth and convert that natural wealth into product. We refuse to do that since “free trade” means we can have China or India do it, skim off a percentage, and then resell it. You want to understand why US quality is at a point where I would prefer to use foreign products and I will point you to the current “free” trade scheme
I know whether I’d rather belong to a nation of engineers or a nation of… well, anything else really.
No, not really. Engineers can add value in the sense of how to process stuff but we (BS, MS aerospace) do not perform the actual addition. We simply say how. The guys on the shop floor adds more value than I do. The difference is that in theory I can direct dozens of them so as an individual am more valuable, but without the shop I produce nothing of more benefit than the DIE consultant or college administrator.
A nation that takes in raw material and puts out real product has much more power than one that thinks up new product. Especially today. A lot of knowledge is already out there. Being able to deliver a dc-3, a tech nearly a century old is much more significant than providing plans for a 777 that cannot be built since you don’t have raw materials or the people to mold them.
Another practical difference between engineers and technicians:
Technically true, although there have been some spectacular cases of shop decisions festering for years, same as engineering. See the Taiwanese 747 that disintegrated in midair years after a repair not meeting engineering soecs or the jetliner that caught fire because a mechanic omitted a washer.
I need to look at free fall again…
I use “engineer” in a more abstract sense of “someone who understands the physical universe and can make purposeful changes in it”, i.e., similarly to the way Scott Adams uses that term.
Except that isn’t what the term is used as in reality. Engineering is a white collar field that writes instructions (this is how the guy that writes twitter code and kelly johnson are both engineers). They do not necessarily understand how to realistically enact those instructions and rely on the constructive trades to do so. Engineers go from Mind to paper and technicians from paper and resource to product. A country needs both, in addition to resource extractors to be able to thrive. Otherwise you will rely on someone else and they will have power over you.
Of course you are correct; I was oversimplifying.
Not trying to be a pedant, just see it too often where we try and split “knowledge work” and physical work between cultures. Usually dine by people who have no idea if either and who think that by decreasing that someone is a tech or engineer makes them so.
I’m certainly not trying to downgrade technicians. I’m very appreciative when my friend who is a tinkerer and can fix just about any machine comes to my house and fixes my equipment.
And to put it much more broadly, I consider all those who gain subjective profits by sole action or peaceful trade to be on the same side.
An engineer with some awareness of how the widget will be manufactured is much more useful. Design-for-manufacturing is an important consideration.
Honestly probably multiplicitively (stopping a squawk is worth probably 3 engineers and techs). Recognizing a risk and solving it before it squawks back saves untold hours and real risk. I’m lucky. I have worked machining and done my own repairs as well as shipside. Once again why I think the application side is more important than the knowledge side and shouldn’t be outsourced
aacid14 is correct.
Engineering students don’t necessarily come out of school understanding the limits of their training.
There are a lot of international grad students in engineering, from brahamandarin cultures, or just cultures where intellectuals/aristrocrats are too proud to touch manual labor. Not all of them get past their original culture. There are a lot of HR personal with no real world knowledge, who are afraid that thinking about culture is racist.
US culture nationals aren’t necessarily the be all and end all either, because they also get the degree hanging around academics, and American academics can be pretty prideful.
Engineers are useful when they have humility with their confidence. They can be a destructive force without the humility.
Knowing the actual distinctions, etc., is important when helping inexperienced engineers move into true competence.
I guess I was just lucky. I was a design tech for almost 10 years after being a radio tech in the Marines for 3, then became an engineer, got my degree (yes, in that order) and worked as a radar test engineer with Westinghouse (later Northrop Grumman after they bought Westinghouse Defense) for 30 before retiring as a Senior Engineer. And it was a *very* unusual week when I didn’t spend far more time on the shop floor doing “hands-on” work with both hardware and software than I spent at my desk. *Exactly* as I preferred. As I said, just lucky, I guess. 🙂
Another alumni of Westinghouse Defense. Aren’t that many around any more.
Ditto.
Got my Data Processing (“programming“) degree. Went to work as a programmer. Got the Computer Science (“engineering/design“) degree. Got two jobs where I did do the Computer Engineering/Design, but had to follow through concepts to execution, delivery, training, and support, for next 12 years. This gave me 20 years of programming and engineering experience. Even with the final job I had, which was really execution, delivery, and support, knowing the engineering/design concepts meant the execution, etc., went a lot cleaner and easier. What I termed micro engineering/design. I think (actually “think” is the wrong word, for reasons, I know, he was not happy, but done deal) the person actually in charge of the engineering/design methodologies was surprised at some of the things I squeezed in without breaking what was there. “That can’t be done!” and “Yes it can. It was easy. See I just …” were interesting conversations. Actually it wasn’t “easy”, just I found loop holes, added what I needed to get whatever to work and ran with it. By the time he found out about it, years later, there would have been a dozen unhappy clients if the process was prevented, including a couple of very large accounts. But I found the way because I knew design and engineering concepts. Our mutual boss didn’t care. As long as it worked, was reliable and consistent …
I used to describe myself as a libertarian back in the UK. Didn’t rake me long to realise the folly of doing that over here.
These days I tell people “I’m just an idiot who believes all the stories, like True Love, or Salvation, or Truth, Justice and the American Way. But I believe them as hard as I can.”
Sometimes, I put a hint of a snarl into the final sentence.
Apropos of nothing, WordPress just tried to recommend to me “The Libertarian Case Against the Traditional Family.”
Nice try, WP. Nice try. I’m on to your tricks.
Little “L” libertarians are now politically homeless. The Democrats are Commiescum, the Republicans are at best morons and at worst working for the other side, the Libertarians are being skin-suit puppeted by Marxists and the Green Party is crazycakes of the left.
I’m for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, small government, local government that’s kept worried and under close watch by their constituents, less spending on absolutely bugnuts crazy stuff (ideally ZERO), deregulation, closing several departments and bureaus at the fed level, and supporting a military that nobody in their right mind wants to f*ck with.
Term limits, balanced budget, cleaning up the lobbyist slime pit, common sense language for legislation and requiring legislators to actually SHOW UP for the votes they supposedly cast is good stuff, too.
Call me a Constitutionalist if you must call me anything other than an American. Just not ever a hyphenated American.
>> “Call me a Constitutionalist if you must call me anything other than an American. Just not ever a hyphenated American.”
Not even if I call you a Constitutionalist-American?
>> “I suppose now I’m a hemp rope and streetlights populist.”
That brings up something I’ve wondered recently: why DO Americans favor hanging from streetlights as the best way to dispose of corrupt officials? I figure you need a tall ladder to tie the high end of the rope, and that might not always be handy.
If I’m going to pick a piece of public infrastructure to hang people from, it seems like the side of a bridge or overpass would be more convenient.
Who needs a ladder? Toss the rope over and hang one from each end. 😛
Maybe it’s a tradition we picked up from the French Revolution? Aristo, aristo a la lanterne!
Today’s Aristos seem to be going out of their way to copy the 18th century French aristocracy. Useless, entitled and tyrannical.
There are a lot more street lights and power poles than bridges.
Yep, socialism with a lot of weed…Idiotic
I mean the running slogan was effectively grass, a**, and Mexicans. They’re at 2 of three.
Not pure, mostly good, but I’ll sign on… LOL
c4c
While Democrats scream about the need for “green energy” and continue buy Russian oil while cancelling drilling rights in the USA, Team HarrisBiden cancelled two domestic mining leases that were for the purpose of mining the very minerals needed for the Democrats Green Leap Forward.:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/domestic-mineral-supply-chain-minnesota-mining-leases-biden-canceled
They don’t want energy independence or even sufficient energy supply. They WANT energy shortages so they can use those shortages as pretext to institute rationing. The rationing of course will be based on “woke” ideologies racial preferences, which is why the left rejects use of nuclear power specifically stating that such power does not “further social justice”.
They truly intend to utterly wreck the USA in pursuit of their goal of their insane totalitarian racial group Marxism.
Pretty much this, I think.
They want us all to be poor, starving and freezing in the dark,
Or in the case of CA, poor, starving and out of water.
Don’t be short-sighted; they can make you ALL of the above!
It is hard to freeze to death in Southern California. OTOH, the trajectory CA is on for power and water will soon have the 24M people living in SoCal on power and water for 15M. It won’t be pretty to watch. People who live there have forgotten that they live in the world’s nicest desert.
And this is why I want my own atom power converter. I’m not even asking for a full-on reactor. A properly shielded RTG/RPG (P for Photoelectric) would do… if the capacity was high enough.
I’d take a Mr. Fusion if I could get it.
Pay attention folks!! Find all those parents out their being told “no you can’t see your kid’s curriculum” and “no we won’t allow your kid to tell you we’ve subverted their gender identity” and welcome them to this cavalry.
The leftists controlling education are generating a lot of new believers for our movement with their “who do you believe, us our your LYING children” wails.
We have legislation pending in Kansas that will require the curriculum to be posted online.
Did you check out that “horrible neo-nazi school bans Maus” story in depth?
When you read into it– they’re pissed because that comicbook was the one resource listed in the curriculum for “teaching about the Holocaust,” parents noticed, and objected, especially since it required buying all new books from the curriculum publisher.
And that was with a “show us your curriculum” page that would’ve gotten a homeschooler laughed at, if they’d tried submitting the same thing..
There are a lot of people who really, really, really do not want parents to know what is being fed to their kids.
Why does this remind me of the “closed classes” in Sheckley’s “Status Civilization”, with the current crop of “educators” taking the place of the machines?
Not familiar with it, but patterns of self-interest do tend to rhyme.
Yeah, and all you’ll need to make sure that the curriculum posted bears the slightest resemblance to anything taught is?????
Hint: you can’t, without allowing parents unrestricted access to classroom monitoring that can’t be disabled without the administration and teachers getting fired on the spot if it is.
Parents ask the kids. Take a look at the homework. Glance at the textbook and inquire if that’s really the book being used. It takes parent involvement, but it can be done.
The kids who lack the judgment to report accurately are in the most danger.
The curriculum having been shown to the parents also gives them a baseline of what to check for– my parents didn’t know most of what we were taught because they just kind of assumed we were Being Taught, with occasional “how did they not know that?” or “no, that’s not how it goes.”
After the first five or six times a relative horned in on my homeschooling to insist that schools could teach it better, and both my husband and myself (plus any other similar age cousins) very loudly explained that NO, we were NOT taught what I had just been teaching the kids… well, some folks are still in denial.
Since Portugal was advanced in bullshit, I was where you are. My parents assumed I didn’t know X because I was retarded, not because no one taught it. (I SWEAR. Too much.)
So I watched my kids like a HAWK.
Paraphrased conversation.
Dad: “[makes a reference to old sing-song about Charlemagne sending kids to school].”
Me: “You realize that the only thing I ever heard about that guy is that he was where D&D got the word Paladins from, right?”
Dad: “What?! Didn’t they cover it in history class?”
Me: “The same history class that insisted you either hated the government or were insane because you got drafted? When I told you that your Jimmy Horton Sings History record taught us more than we learned in six years of history class, I was not exaggerating. We went from cave men to Mesopotamia then slavery, Holocaust and Japanese internment camps. Oh, and the Red Scare, remember that teacher getting pissed at mom because I brought in the unclassified documents showing the Rosenbergs weren’t innocent, then we did the Vietnam-was-evil thing. That’s why I have the kids singing those annoying history teacher songs.”
Dad: “But.. .it’s Charles the Great. How did they skip the Holy Roman Empire?”
Me: “Look at how bad they did on everything else, it’s probably just as well.”
Dad: [sighs]
>> “You realize that the only thing I ever heard about that guy is that he was where D&D got the word Paladins from, right?”
Heh. My first exposure to Charlemagne as a child was a little different:
Aand history apparently triggers moderation, now.
You must be trying to post WrongThink History that proves how full of shit the Leftroids are. That is not to be allowed!
———————————
The Democrats trust violent criminals and terrorists with guns more than they trust you.
It might be the link to the History Teachers channel on Youtube– the guy writes history filk of common songs and this lady dances around in costume singing it.
When I was in school we actually had a science teacher show us one of the moon landing is a hoax type videos. And then noted that the questions asked were reasonable to be asked by layman (eg flag did wave) and gave us the methods to answer the why to our satisfaction(how dies momentum work). Today it would he a because I say so and so does the textbook.
Same with a lot of history. You can only look at it thru the prism of today, cannot compare situations, etc. The fact that the north didn’t need to purchase slaves because they had boats full of immigrants who cost nothing in acquisition, direct food or housing, etc and could be tossed aside in favor of the next guy off the boat if they died was a complete non-issue when I had classes on civil war in college, although the class did at least try and point out that there were a lot of fuses that got lit on all sides and were not playing the ‘side A’ were angels fighting ‘side b’ demons that seems to be the current ‘why war happens’ instruction method.
Be sure to welcome the parents being told “who are you going to believe, us or your LYING kids.” The left is chasing them our way.
Their doubling down on demanding that they be able to keep indoctrinating and grooming our kids is pure EVIL and people are noticing.
Worse, unicorns are basically purity detectors. Yes, I know. “Virginity.” Meh. There are a ton of medieval stories in which being a virgin was not the point, being pure/good was.
Kind of like how they’re visibly shown wearing white, with blonde hair and blue eyes; it’s a useful shorthand.
Plus, if a gal is isn’t to work hard and make sacrifices to avoid immorality, that is one of the easiest shortcuts.
Implying that their eyes and hair will turn brown once they have sex? 😛
*thumps with a large stack of Anime*
No, implying that the folks who put giant gold pans around holy folks’ heads would’ve used florescent pink for hair, if they’d had access to it, to get the idea of LOOK HERE across.
On the “keyboard warrior,” sparked a memory.
The works of mercy.
The corporal works of mercy
To feed the hungry;
To give drink to the thirsty;
To clothe the naked;
To shelter the homeless;
To visit the sick;
To ransom the captive;
To bury the dead.
The spiritual works of mercy are:
To instruct the ignorant ;
To counsel the doubtful ;
To admonish sinners ;
To bear wrongs patiently;
To forgive offences willingly;
To comfort the afflicted;
To pray for the living and the dead.
The first three, and the sixth, of the spiritual works are very well done by keyboard.
If you frequent certain location ‘pon the ‘net, you will get to practice the forth and fifth right quicklike. Minor wrongs and offences of the spoken and read kind, but sure enough you will find them.
Then there are the places where one can learn patience and humility if one’s a mind to do so. Here is such a place, in my opinion. There are many folks here with greater knowledge than I on many things. And it takes little to get them to start talking. Then I can just read learn new things.
People were having trouble holding onto tenants on their land, and servants in their manors, because conditions in the city were better.
For the tenants– there were a lot of owner-type who were, ah, having difficulties with understanding why they should have such large costs to meet the obligations they’d incurred for already gotten the good from the tenants. Upkeep is so expensive, maybe if you just ignore it, it’ll fix itself.
>.>
(Grandmother’s family was turned out because the land-owner was going to get rich on sheep.)
According to Plutarch, Cato (I believe the elder Cato) sold his slaves when they got old and worn out, so he wouldn’t have to support a useless slave. Charming. Not.
Well, the other side of that is Columella’s De Re Rustica, which said that it was a false economy to send all your oldest and worst slaves to tend your farms, because you needed a slave who was smart and active, if you were too cheap to employ free men or too proud to learn and oversee the work yourself.
But in his description of the necessary farm buildings, he includes an underground prison for slaves receiving punishment. He wants it to get enough air and to be clean and healthy, but it’s a freaking basement prison.
As a Constitutional lawyer, I believe that if we had a rule of absolute free speech (obviously, within the bounds of decency), and people had remedies for those who abused their free speech rights, a lot of what is wrong in America would be mended…In this respect, I agree with Musk….Censorship is the bane of a free society.
remedies for those who abused their free speech
I propose dueling.
Yes, that has been proposed, e.g., in the April series (terrific SF), and makes sense to me.
RAH “Beyond This Horizon”. Also included a ‘brassard’ to say ‘I am not armed, you cannot challenge me’.
Though wearing the brassard generally meant accepting a lower social status.
Yeah. I read that one in IIRC 6th grade (along with Puppet Masters, Door Into Summer, all the skinny ones) and I was basically too young to understand it past the top-level story.
Yes. Back up your manners with your life. I rather liked that book.
Tricky…and I’m an advocate of the Code Duello. The problem is the “lets you and him fight” crowd. You start to realize that the medieval system of having to ask for a Field of Battle was wise. The king (or other superior) could deny the field if he didn’t think the offense warranted it.
Cool. Now define decency
On unicorns and purity/virginity, I have a scene in my head from the book I never manage to write (because I can’t figure out what the main plot should be), in which there’s a unicorn running around a small rural town, and people who see it from angles where the horn isn’t visible just think it’s a horse. In this scene, a husband and wife, who have been married for twenty-plus years and have been faithful to each other, both try to approach the unicorn at different times. In each case, the unicorn shies away and won’t let them come near. Then the wife has an idea, runs over to where her husband is, and they try approaching the unicorn with their arms around each other’s shoulders — and this time, the unicorn calms down and lets them approach.
The idea the wife had had, as she explains to her husband later, was that the Bible describes physical intimacy as “becoming one flesh”, and she thought, maybe the unicorn could sense in each of us that some part of our soul, our self, was elsewhere when we approached it alone. But if we approach it together, maybe it will sense a completeness, where the other part of our self is right there. And that, indeed, turns out to be the case.
This being a fiction book, the explanation would stop there, and I wouldn’t go on to talk about oxytocin and what modern research has learned about it: how it’s released, the feelings of bonding that it induces, and so on.
I have a project that I might be able to fit this into.
Mind if I steal?
Sure, go ahead.
This is great! I love it! …Also, what Bob said. :slight_smile:
And my response will be the same: if you want to steal the idea to use elsewhere, go ahead.
Thank you! 😀
Oooh, that works so well…
That’s really sweet.
What a lovely story. Always bet on a woman who really, really wants to pet a unicorn. She’ll figure out a way.
Oh, unicorn girls won’t you come out tonight,
come out tonight, come out tonight?
Unicorn girls won’t you come out tonight,
and dance the night away?
Ummm…I believe the originals in that ditty have *two* horns. Just sayin’… 😉
More brilliance from the Babylon Bee:
That’s so close to a lot of reality that it’s painful. The Bee stings again.
The Bee is also still publishing spoilers:
Is it any wonder Putin has decided to try to conquer the old Soviet-Tsarist Russian empire?
If we have to have Starship Troopers, can we have the book version, not the movie version?
They copied the title and a few character names for the movie. Not much else survived.
RAH knew how to calculate orbits. Those scenes of Federation ships ramming into each other…AARRGH!!
The producer had another story in mind (concerning humans vs giant bugs) when somebody told him about Heinlein’s book. 😦
Which, if you read the portion of the book dealing with the Klendathu drop, was actually faithful to it. Short version, apparently the Bugs had a navigation jammer, causing one ship to lose helm control and hit another which “was still launching capsules when she was rammed.”
Worse, unicorns are basically purity detectors. Yes, I know. “Virginity.” Meh. There are a ton of medieval stories in which being a virgin was not the point, being pure/good was.
Reminds me of one of my unwritten story ideas, where a knight tames a unicorn, and some of the other characters get snarky about the implications, and yet another character says, “You have it all wrong, the unicorn’s just drawn to the purity of his desire to protect others,” or words to that effect.
Try Green’s “Blue Moon Rising” et. seq. for a rather…ummm…*unique* take on unicorns, princesses and dragons. Excellent series (IMHO).
“…and places like the Soviet Union had functional enslavement, in which you had to work at that which you were assigned. (For which the slaves rebelled as they always do, by merely pretending to work.)”
This points to what might be (out of so very many worthy candidates for the title) the central irony of Communism…
Marxist theory: “To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability.”
Marxist practice: “From each according to our needs, to each according to our whims.”
And that “central irony” would be that the second reality (Russia Cuba China Venezuela Vietnam etc etc etc) is not only nearly the opposite of the first fairy tale, but also the “our” in it isn’t even some nebulously defined “collective” or “proletariat” but is really and functionally a newly-minted and dogma-approved ruling class of “Marxist” Party members, apparatchiki, nomenklatura.
Communism (in deeds) amounts to the very disease it claims (in words) to cure: create a “ruling class” that exploits and coerces “the workers” the entire bloody horror show is supposed to… set free from that instead.
Rejoice, Comrade! Meet the new boss… worse than the old boss.
The thing about the Marxist creed is it is a sentence without a noun or a verb.
By its nature, there is someone who decides what everyone’s abilities, and what everyone’s needs are. It is not an irony, rather, it is the dagger baked into its heart.
Reading the AmWire article and thinking about this as an Alinskyite might — i.e. revolutionarily — the whole contretemps over gas prices is a good thing, because it agitates the populace against the junta regime, which is what we want.
Don’t let them get away with it. Don’t let them try to cool things down as we get closer to the mid-terms. Keep up the pressure. Do all you can to agitate for fuel supplies to tighten and prices to rise. It may hurt in the short run (trust me, I drive for a living; I know how fuel price hurt), but it jabs at the zeitgeist and keeps forward in everyone’s mind that the junta regime is responsible for this pain we MUST make it abundantly clear for now and as long as it can be made to stick, that this behavior is unacceptable. Unforgivable.
It is 1972/1973 come again, *early stages. Gas lines. At least at Fred Meyers and Costco. People trying to get filled up before price jumps, again. Fred Meyers was $4.499, Friday. Costco, Gas Buddy reported it at $3.999 Friday, but it was $4.169 at the pump today, Saturday.
* Not running out of gas, yet. At least not locally. Why does 1972/1972 stand out? Because as a newly minted driver I was paid to take vehicles down to sit in lines to get cars filled/topped off. $2/vehicle. Except my parents cars. Those I did for the possible privilege of driving occasionally, maybe.
And yet the same elites who demand we give up fossil fuels are going to spend their weeks taking cruises on ships like this one, which uses diesel fuel:
https://nypost.com/2022/03/06/wonder-of-the-seas-cruise-ship-sets-sail-for-first-time/
That is of course the ones who don’t have their own mega-yachts, like DiCaprio, Bezos, etc.
And then they wonder why people don’t take their claims of “climate catastrophe” seriously,
Actually, Wonder Of The Seas runs on natural gas. A lot of the newest cruise ships do. Better for the environment than diesel fuel, but mainly because it’s cheaper.
I did some research on Wonder Of The Seas for a story I’m writing. My main characters make a deal with the cruise company and shipyard to fit the ship with a modified 120 MW Farnsworth-Hirsch-Bussard Fusor while still under construction. The Fusor will consume about 250 pounds of borax per year as fuel, leaving helium as a waste product.
———————————
“So, if she weighs as much as a duck, she’s a witch!”
“Burn ‘er! Burn ‘er!”
Well the embedded article states:
“It has a top speed of 22 knots (25mph) thanks to three 20,000 kilowatt diesel-electric thrusters under the stern and four bow thrusters, each generating 7,500 horsepower”
It refers to diesel-electric thrusters, not natural gas.
Well the embedded article is full of crap. Wonder Of The Seas is powered by… (scroll down the working file to my notes)
3x Wartsila 16V46D 16-cylinder engines, 24,780 HP, 18.48 MW each
3x Wartsila 12V46D 12-cylinder engines, 18,590 HP, 13.86 MW each
3x 20 MW/26,820 HP Azipod electric thruster units for main propulsion
4x 5.5 MW/7,400 HP transverse electric bow thruster units for in-port maneuvering
30% of the ship’s electrical power is required for the nightclubs, casinos, theaters and other passenger amenities.
There are 2 big Liquid Natural Gas storage tanks to port and starboard, and an even bigger one amidships, to carry fuel for the 6 Wartsila engines. The big tank is 96 feet long.
There seem to be a lot of articles copying the misinformation about ‘20,000 kilowatt diesel-electric thrusters’ word-for-word. Initially, I initially assumed the ship ran on diesel fuel, but I dug into the matter in considerably more depth, because I need some actual engineering specs, and read about the LNG tanks on the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines web site. I think they know what their ship runs on.
———————————
What’s more dangerous than a polar bear? A bipolar bear!
That pp is dual fuel so both. Diesel is more common internationally and there are likely setups in case of emergency. Lng better fuel environmentally and I believe energy density wise but you can get diesel anywhere.
…annnnd now I can’t find some of the articles I looked up earlier, and Royal Caribbean’s web site is announcing Icon Of The Seas as their first natural gas powered ship. Maybe results from Icon got mixed in when I was searching on Wonder? Grrrr. I need the right specs, dammit! Why can’t this internet thing just tell me what I want to know? 😦
I was predicting $4.00/gallon gas before Memorial Day – last year. Guess my crystal ball needs some recalibration . . .
I started out saying Summer, then Memorial Day as I saw our local prices hit 3.60. It changed to Spring when the prices hit 3.80 a week later.
We’ve already hit 4.00 with the Vernal Equinox still 2 weeks away. Now I’m wondering when we’ll reach 5.00 (and started to adjust my fuel budget to accommodate.)
Fred Meyers, $4.499 Friday 3/4/2022. ^ $.60 overnight.
Costco, $4.169 Saturday 3/5/2022 ^ $.16 overnight
Nearing $5, or over, by Spring Break?
Nearing $6, or over by Memorial Day?
Especially when they cutoff Russian oil purchases without reopening domestic options.
This is what they want!
We can adjust. But there are a lot who won’t be able to. The latter is based on experience. Been there. Done that. Been a long time ago. But I remember it too clearly.
It went from $3.39 to $3.65 between Thursday and Saturday. It had been $3.09 a week ago Friday.
We’ve seen unleaded as high as $4.65 at the “how in the heck do they stay in business” stations … usually across the street from, current $4.159 cash … These are stations that are well off the I-5 corridor, but on Hwy 99. I do not know what prices are on the coast routes.
Between Tuesday and Thursday unleaded jumped from $3.29 to $3.79 at one gas station near me, and I”m now seeing $3.79 to $3.99 most places.
Here, Sam’s waas $3.38 and I drove past one of the bargain stations that had $3.59 on the sign out front and $3.49 still visible over the pump island.
They need to open the reserves.
Please note. The > $4/gal cost is southern Willamette Valley Oregon. Not Portland Seattle, or California. I am afraid to know what California costs are now.
Around here it’s anywhere from $4.50 to $5.60 for regular. Prices went up twice this week.
Ain’t it funny how oil and gas prices started going up in mid-November 2020? Around the time it became clear that the fix was in and the ‘elections’ wouldn’t be overturned?
Idiot did. What he needs to do is open up DRILLING.
I had not heard that, thanks for the correction.
Here, for details on the most recent time:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/01/politics/us-strategic-petroleum-reserve-release-latest/index.html
For context, we’re screaming about the guy being an idiot because the US uses some 20 million barrels a day. At currently allowed production levels, we make half of that.
The suspicious part of my mind says this is deliberate – “they” want to force us to go to the electric toys instead of our “dirty” internal combustion engines. Never mind where the electrical for those toys from. Or that out side of urban regions, the infrastructure doesn’t seem to be in place. (at least not that I have notice.)
“out side of urban regions”
Or within them. As Elon Musk has repeatedly pointed out, we don’t have the generating capacity for that.
I see “plenty” (given value for pleanty, based on how many e-cars I see) in my region, but then I am just a hop-skip-anda jump from DC – where they love, love, love their e-cars.
But get a few more miles out (w or s) and those stations start to dry up. But then that is still rural area (for now)
Listening to the Omaha radio station, they’re talking about spending buckets of money because “young people want to live in town, and gas is expensive now so they’ll REALLY be willing to pay suburb-house prices for a closet in walking distance from some offices.”
(only slightly paraphrasing)
I don’t know if they’re TRYING to force it, or if they just have this idea stuck in their head since the 60s when “all the kids are moving to town.”
(…actually, that’s kinda 50s, isn’t it?)
The suspicious part of your mind is absolutely correct. The end goal is to destroy American’s mobility so we will be easier to manage as serfs. Eliminate fossil fuels and not add the power generation and distribution necessary for their ‘green’ electric vehicles to be marginally useful.
There is not enough lithium to build 300 million electric cars, anyway. Now, if we were to make sodium batteries practical there would be no limit to the number of electric cars we could build. Sodium batteries are perpetually ‘just around the corner’ the way fusion power has been for the last 50 years.
———————————
Governments can’t create prosperity; at best, they can refrain from destroying it.
I just took a run and the gas at Kwik Trip jumped over $4 while I was out. It was $3.97 for their 15% eth and when I returned a half hour later is was $4.19
And in other news. Is Philip Jose Farmer’s battery-capacitor about to become reality?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/motorcycles/quantum-batteries-could-become-a-reality-with-superabsorption/ar-AAUF8Is?ocid=msedgntp Unfortunately not up to Heinlein’s shipstones yet.
We were listening to ‘The Rational Optimist” by Matthew Ridley (highly recommend) and when he started talking about home-sized nuclear generators, I shouted: “Shipstones! Shipstones!” and we had to turn off the audible book so I could explain to my husband.
Oh how the left would hate Shipstones, wouldn’t they?
Those home-sized/spaceship/habitat sized generators designs are pretty safe for any normal use and abuse. Like anything else, they aren’t proof against deliberate destruction/sabotage. But unlike shipstones, they don’t explode with the force of a tactical nuke when someone tries to deconstruct and reverse engineer one.
I also found it of interest that Heinlein never pursued a story about anyone weaponizing shipstone’s explosive capabilities when tampered with.
Maybe that just wasn’t the sort of story he wanted to tell? I’m writing zombie fic where stuff like nanites and stasis field can be horribly abused and… Actually, I’m probably going to abuse them at some point. Horribly. And get stuff wrong with my sophomoric knowledge of medicine and the human body (injuries. LOTS of injuries. And sickness. and age related issues. and…)
So I’m not entirely certain why he didn’t make shipstone IEDs a thing. Because I would’ve. But then, I’m nowhere near as good a writer as the dude that wrote TMIAHM, Starship Troopers, and Friday. Eh.
And the unfortunate aspect of TIME. Damn grim reaper comes for just about everyone, doesn’t he?
Hey God!
How about adding another 20 productive years to the lives of all authors and inventors?
Someday, when we’re on the Other Side of the equation, I look forward to seeing what all Certain Parties have been up to. Many I never met in real life. I’m in no hurry for the meeting, mind. Just something to look forward to at the end of the journey.
‘Til then there’s much to do in this life. Books to read, y’know. And all that other stuff that supports the book-reading habit.
How about just giving us rejuvenation tech, already? I’m not getting any younger, and I’d really like that to change.
Nope. We just got through discussing why you should NEVER GIVE a human being anything. Point them in the right direction so they can find it themselves
Unfortunately, YOU would never benefit from it. The elitists would hoard it for themselves and their favored lackeys.
Imagine a world in which Queen Hillary, Mickelberg, Bloomberg, Soros, MaligNancy, Kamela and the Bidens live for hundreds or thousands of years.
Kosh was right. We are not ready for immortality. As one of my characters is going to tell MaligNancy:
“If I had ‘the secret of immortality’ I wouldn’t give it to you. I will not do anything to extend your life; in fact, you can’t die soon enough to suit me. At the end of a rope, if any justice remains in this world.”
I’m not sure they aren’t.
We do know a surefire way to rejuvenation and probably doubling life span: blood transfusions, weekly, fully blood volume.
What stops it? Well, barring artificial blood, it’s not tenable for the whole population.
And yet…. Nancy Pelosi, and people like RBG living very long with fatal conditions…..
I got suspicious and wondered “Is that what China has on them?” “Is that and transplants what they’re providing?”
I made a half-way serious, off the cuff comment in a post.
And my mailbox exploded, some of it threats and a syntax that sounded….. uh…. Others wanting to know how I knew.
Prank? Maybe, but the allusion was such, and so tongue in cheek.
yeah. Do you wonder if that’s why pudding heads like Gates want to reduce population? So they can live forever and be like gods.
Oh, hello, there’s that story again…..
>> “Do you wonder if that’s why pudding heads like Gates want to reduce population? So they can live forever and be like gods.”
Reducing the population would work against them in that case, because where will they get all the blood and organs they need for that kind of rejuvenation technique?
Mind you, I’m not saying they didn’t just fail to think it through…
I don’t think they THOUGHT it through, no.
And maybe they have the ability (or think they have) to make artificial blood and organs, but not yet, because “overpopulation”
Reduce the population too far and they might run out of donors.
Again, I think they might have or think they have the means to create blood and organs artificially.
There is some really interesting work being done in that field – combining 3d printing and using a person’s own stem cells to crate replacement organs
I know. I follow it.
My brother in law was the first successful child recipient of the Ross procedure, he most likely *will* need a transplant sometime in the next couple of decades. This would be world changing for him.
>> “The elitists would hoard it for themselves and their favored lackeys.”
They’re not going to be in power much longer, I think. They’ve already pissed off the country too much and still don’t have the sense to stop pushing.
There was a movie about something very similar… In Time, I think.
Another aphorism from days of soviets past; ‘They pretend to pay me, I pretend to work.’
This caused me to recall my time in Chem 2 in 11th grade. The teacher declared that all students in good standing were honorary members of the 94th Aardvarkian Armd Bde. This essentially meant that you could come to his classroom before homeroom and use the lab equipment to brew up some coffee. Back in the day when it wasn’t unusual for the Chem lab to be the source of shattering Pyrex, noxious odors and blood curdling yelps…the good old days. Super heat a beaker of water and let fun commence.
I elected to take Data Processing* senior year instead of AP Chem (held before nominal class hours), but those students saved the coffee grounds to grow fungi. They told me the fungi had a great fluorescence under UV light. Sounded normal to me. Yes, this was 1969. Why do you ask?
(*) 80 column Hollerith cards, the room-sized computer had less than 128K RAM, and the last project was in COBOL. OTOH, the computer it replaced had 8K worth of core memory.
We are the dandelions on the establishment’s lawn… we are increasingly resistant to their herbicides and we are spreading.
We’re also functional, while their lawn is blue, glows and kills everything it touches. Except us, of course
Last Summer I applied some really good glow-in-the-dark paint to the edges of some steps. And about the same time sprayed weeds in the driveway and walk…. I can only what the neighbors thought, assuming they even noticed. Or if, by now, “It’s just him. Don’t worry about it, but don’t ask either.”
Their “lawn” is the ashen plain of Gorgoroth, a desolate wasteland where they plot their next power grab.
I want to live under a government in which they can’t require me to take multiple mRNA injections in order to fully participate in civic life. It’s not clear to me that the US Constitution, as interpreted by our judges, prevents this.
“as interpreted by our judges”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
I’d like to think we can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k9v2SkiTxU
Just a contrary thought.
If we have a Constitution that the Government must follow, we need an independent branch of the Government that has the authority to say (to the other branches) “You’re Not Following The Constitution”.
We don’t want the Congress to have the power (in ordinary legislation) to be able to say “the Constitution doesn’t matter”.
We don’t want the President to have that power either.
The Court’s valid role is to be the “Watchman” but sadly they have failed that role.
There’s the old saying “Who Watches The Watchmen”. 😦
There’s also the issue where the courts tell Congress and the President “You can’t do that!” and they go ahead and do it anyway.
Point. 😦
Not to mention creating law out of their asses. Witness the tax/not-tax that Roberts created for the Obamacare suits, plus Qualified Immunity. Insty has some great rants on that at times.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/01/17/is-this-how-democrats-will-steal-the-midterm-elections-n1550302
“There are tens of millions of illegal immigrants now in the United States, and it will be virtually impossible to get rid of them. The democrats wanted them here; they didn’t have the authority or support to bring them here or keep them here, but they did it anyway.
And that’s how the trick works. When they are stymied by laws that have been properly passed by the people’s representatives, Democrats simply proceed with their plans. Sometimes they get away with it indefinitely and sometimes the courts rein them back in, but by then they’ve already gotten their way. (Obama’s DACA beneficiaries are still here, and many have children of their own now, who are native-born U.S. citizens.)”
I’m reading a book about Henry Ford, “The Wild Wheel” by Garet Garrett. One of Ford’s beliefs about social theories has been born out by history. As Garret writes, “Nearly every social theory, he believed, was a formula for living without work. And the world being what it was, all such theories could lead only to poverty because they were not productive.” True words, concisely presented.
Communism in practice: Rewarding people for working is Eeevul, but punishing them for not working is perfectly OK.
The left desires to excommunicate from society, imprison and then ultimately “eliminate” in the fullest sense of the word all who disagree with their radical leftist ideology:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/03/06/left-wing-salon-we-democrats-dont-want-unity-with-gop-fascists/
Be guided accordingly,.
Wow. Almost everything they say is true, just attributed to the wrong party. Try reading it again, replacing every instance of ‘Republican’ with ‘Democrat’.
The Democrats have always been the party of the Southern slave owners. They never changed.
———————————
It takes a LOT of education to make somebody that stupid.
The VileProgs: Projecting more than a 12 screen drive-in theater.
Yes, that has been their playbook all along.
They’ve managed to do it several times under different names, e.g., Nazis and Communists.
But this time they are going to fail. We are ungovernable under their terms.
Some of us have been there a while.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/02/06/the-left-hates-you-act-accordingly-n2281602
c4c
So, anybody remember that weird deepfake duet between Biden and Putin I linked a few days ago?
This one’s not as good, but apparently dictator duets are becoming a thing:
Upon sober, deliberate, and careful consideration, I have decided that I don’t WANT to be a unicorn.
I’d much rather be a rhinoceros. Hit ’em below the belt and toss ’em over my shoulder.
Less likely to get stuck into a place that is extremely smelly.
Yep. Rhinoceros (not RINO) for me…
Rhinoceros is a form of unicorn. THINK ABOUT IT.
A rhinoceros is the SUV version of a unicorn. Unicorns are the sports car.
Well, yes. The Abrams tank version though, not the ATV.
Current rhino is the ATV – ancestor Elasmotherium was the tank. Ah, the good old days!
Maybe more like a BOLO?
I seem to recall that “Prehistoric Park” did an episode on them.
He’s got a point, though; unicorn may not be the right lifestyle choice for everyone. I mean, I may be on the side of good, but I can’t think of myself as a symbol of purity with a straight face. And if that God of yours is real I suspect He’s far more likely to smite me for trying to pass myself off as such than for my irreverence.
I’m pretty sure I fall into the “good-aligned monster” category at best. I just haven’t figured out which kind of monster I am yet (and boy am I leaving myself open with THAT sentence).
“Don’t make me go Cape Buffalo. You won’t like me when I’m Cape Buffalo.”
I myself am rather partial to dragons.
Perhaps you should opt for the Questing Beast.
Hmm, that would be cool. I don’t know that I’m NEARLY dangerous enough to qualify, though… unless you just mean I bay like a pack of dogs. 😛
Rhinoceros AKA Chubby Unicorns. Chubby, bad tempered, irritable Unicorns. Sounds like my kind of people. Think of the Rhinoceros battalion of the Unicorn cavalry division as the heavy cavalry, with emphasis on heavy…
Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that not everyone actually LIKES unicorns. I’m kind of amazed that no one’s brought up this video yet:
Only sometimes:
https://pin.it/Dk1RDt5
If we’re unicorns and you’re saying to join cavalry, who has the saddle and who the spurs?
People were having trouble holding onto tenants on their land, and servants in their manors, because conditions in the city were better. And working in factories was both less work and less demeaning than being a domestic servant. (Don’t believe me? Read biographies. Even the best make some passing reference to stuff that makes your hair stand on end, like the fact that your employer had a say over who you married.)
A little point: in the days before horseless carriages, if your housemaid married, then her husband would be moving in with you. Also, many of the maids were young and far from home, with the landlords exercising no more power over the female domestics than any of their fathers. In context, it’s not so unreasonable.
The big point: agricultural work and domestics are not the same sector. People were leaving the rural economy because the British destroyed their domestic agriculture with first the Corn Laws (where grain imports were outright banned until the price reached 5x the normal level), and then “free” trade (as in, no tariffs on grain at all). In other words, first the Brits let their ag sector grow fat and happy (and stupid) under a total ban on any competition, and then they subjected them to competition without any rad shielding at all (i.e., without any mutual tariffs).
This had three direct effects: falling wages for British ag workers (and thus factory workers); Britain almost starving during two world wars; and the retention of food rations until the 1960s. Quite a price to pay for “free” trade.
As the open source software people keep saying, it’s “free” as in liberty, not “free” as in beer. “Free” in this case means, you pay your tariff, you import the goods. No special permission needed.
The same argument applies to those H-1B and L1 visas issued after the following conversations:
Big Business: We need to import a ton of workers for a mere $4K each for paperwork!
Big Government: Can’t you train any Americans up into doing these jobs?
BB: Nope!
BG: Oh, all right, then.
Charging $35K a year per H1-B and L1 visa would put quite a dent in this (maybe more after The Great (Sh! Don’t talk about it!) Inflation).
Blink the f*CK? Are you under the impression the 19th century was the middle ages? Not unusual for Americans but truly and spectacularly bizarre.
No, housemaids were usually local and from local families, including the children of your tenants.
Also, the English destroyed their agricultural system.
Dear and fluffy Lord, we should CRUCIFY all academics, who swallow theories whole.
Lady, I grew up in a system much like the English agricultural system pre-enclosures, in the North of Portugal, when industrialization was coming in. People fled the countryside for the city because of the reasons I said.
GO READ BIOGRAPHIES.
Look at China, or India, or any of the countries now industrializing.
“The English ruined their agriculture” and next you’re going to fall on the floor in an epileptic fit over enclosures, a thing far more complex than you were taught.
I’m not in the mood. I’m not at home to indoctrinated children.
As for the evil enclosures, etc. they were a reaction to lack of agricultural workers, not a way to expropriate the tenants as you’ve been sold.
SPITS. Yeah. The old days with everyone being a contented field hand were GREAT. They could sing spirituals at the door to their hovels.
Go read the biographies. Go read first sources with no Marxist contamination. Keep in mind the interest of the person writing it, and be particularly sensitive to admissions against interest. THINK FOR THE LOVE OF HEAVEN. THINK. And please, spit out the beautiful line you’ve been sold. It’s killing civilization.
I don’t think we actually need to invoke argumentam ad Marxium here. Even accepting for sake of argument the truth of her claims about the English agricultural system, that fails to explain how peasants flocked to the cities in every other European country where they were not forcibly restrained from doing so.
The plain fact is that even though cities were and always had been disgusting, crowded, plague-ridden sinks of poverty and despair, it still beat subsistence agriculture.
Yeah, exactly that. But the counter narrative is PROFOUNDLY Marxian. Embedded Marx.