Warnings and Plans

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

You know, this is getting fairly old. When I say something that can be construed either as a warning or a direct threat, say: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, your head goes on a pike, someone contacts me, either via email or via unapproved comments on this blog, asking me to “give the signal” or asking under what circumstances is it right to shoot back, or–

There are only two explanations for this: either these are glowing in the dark (and all of these seem to, to be fair. And one of them that I answered and asked what the heck he thought he was doing, immediately punted to “ah ah, I didn’t mean anything”) or … insanity?

Let me make this clear, right now, once and for all. That was a direct warning, but not a threat. What is the difference? Well, the difference is that it was a warning in the sense of “if you don’t think that this will have any consequences, you’re insane. Try this again, and there’s a good chance you’ll unleash a wave of retribution that you cannot under any circumstances stop. And it will end badly for you.” Not in the sense of “I have minions all over who will heed my command, and start taking random heads. Mwahahahah.”

Because, you know, the second is crazy cakes.

If the people sending me these aren’t actively glowing, they’re deluded, and they haven’t been following the news. They also might have missed some meds.

Sure, we’re in bad shape. We’re in bad shape, because they have seized the visible levers of power. But they are in worse shape, because …. the levers don’t work. Or they work randomly. And there’s levers of power they can’t see and by their very nature don’t understand.

They’re doing “Well” at breaking things, but not at imposing the control they seek. And their attempts at establishing control are in fact likely to lead to the opposite of what they want. And they might very well provoke the boog they think they want. But not the one they want.

The one they want is one in which a handful of people who read blogs go out and do something uncoordinated and stupid that they can point out and say it’s a legitimate right wing conspiracy. (How can you tell it’s a conspiracy? Why, sir, they conspired right in public, on this blog. Because that’s how conspiracies work, when you want to entrap someone.)

In fact, every time there’s a shooting, or any type of attack, they descend on it like sharks, to point “See, dangerous right wingers.”

And it’s never true. It’s always crazy left wingers. And there’s usually evidence, right there in public, because they’re crazy left wingers. They’re getting desperate.

If you’re not in fact glowing in the dark, why would you want to give them what they want???

Sure, time might come there will be violence. How do you know when that will be? Well, for one it won’t be a late middle aged woman on a blog telling a bunch of people who mostly work with words to go out and… what? kill anyone suspected of being a leftist? Or what? Commit horrific acts that lead to nothing?

No. If things ever get to that point, they’ll get to that point through a sudden, overwhelming response. Think Christmas in Romania. It will be a many-points at once, everyone explodes because things have become intolerable.

But the truth is there is an overwhelming chance we don’t need violence.

Look, the other side is drinking its own ink. Or if you prefer, they’re cultists, in the power of a bizarre delusion. They think their win is inevitable. They don’t understand why it keeps failing. And chances are it will continue failing.

They desperately want to shift it to a state where they know they’ll win, because they’ve won before: the demonization of the other side, allowing it to be shut down.

And it keeps failing.

There is a good chance they wouldn’t succeed, even if they got what they wanted. Because they don’t have the power or the control they think.

Chances are it wouldn’t change anything about history, except kill hundreds of thousands, or millions of people.

Nothing else.

Yes, people will die anyway. Thorough famine, likely — though likely not in the US. It will be tough, not that tough — but playing the left’s stupid game will only get more people killed. And nothing will change, except rivers of blood. And possibly changing the republic in a way we don’t want, forever.

And if you are a glowy? If you’re an agent-provocateur trying to get your fellow citizens to say something incriminating so that you can run a horrible and improbable plot?

I feel stupid even typing that, except that in this day and age, after the “Whitmer plot” after January 6th, nothing — absolutely nothing — is beyond the corrupt cockroaches of our secret services.

So, if you’re one of those corrupt insects: You think you know the game you’re playing. You think you can trick people into doing what you need to set off your twisted plots.

But you won’t get it here. And it’s unlikely you’ll get it elsewhere. You will lose. You might think you have all the power, but you’ve picked the wrong side. This is not a game. You can’t win. Everything is against you. If you achieved your ends, the world you’re trying to build wouldn’t function. You’re at war with reality. You only have dreams and illusions on your side. And they’re evil ones.

Think of what you’re trying to do. Think what it means. This is not a game.

Stop now. The soul you save might be your own.

381 thoughts on “Warnings and Plans”

  1. I will give you a third option because you have been directly targeted by certain parties before: Were any of these typed with a Russian accent?

    3. While it is generally possible, given a large enough sample, to tell non-native-English bad English from native, it does generally require a large enough sample, and typical errors are not specific to one language.

  2. For those “Glowies” who seek to build the Left Utopia:

    If you are actually useful to the “Revolution” or “The State” you are not the sort of person the Revolution or State wants as an ongoing participant. No. Not hardly.

    Your Masters will expunge you immediately if you achieve their goals. You prove you are a threat by your success.

    Heh.

    1. ESPECIALLY if you really believe in their goals. Because you will be among the first to be disillusioned when the people you supported don’t even try to achieve them in any way that makes sense. Which will make YOU an enemy of the state.

    2. True. Plenty of historical examples of “effective loyal party members” being purged after the revolution succeeds. These are also usually the good, well-intentioned people who have (misplaced) faith in their fellow revolutionaries. Unfortunately, the unscrupulous, power-cravers who have no morality other than to self, have no problem with eliminating the no-longer useful, and possible threats to their new found power.

      1. Yup just ask a Menshevik, if you can find one that doesn’t have a hole in their head from a 9mm or an icepick. Heck even the Spell Checker knows it suggested Bolshevik as the correct spelling of Menshevik (really truly !!!).

        1. Well the programmers who wrote the spell check program are quite likely loyal Bolsheviks themselves, so no wonder.

      2. No different from the mistress that marries the guy whose home she broke up being shocked, shocked, when he sleeps around on her and eventually leaves.

      3. Eh, they’ve got an insatiable need for jackbooted trigger pullers with no conscience.

        Should the leftists magically succeed, the glowies will mostly be fine (for Concentration Camp Guard in Alaska values of fine).
        Unless they have ambitions. Then they’re gone in the first purge.

        Of course, that’s far from a given, and it’s virtually certain the glowies will face a high degree of turnover on the way.
        It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

    3. Yagoda begat Yezhov. Yezhov begat Beria.

      Every lefty thinks they’ll be Beria when in reality almost all of them will be Yezhov.

      In the end, all of them got their final nine-gram lead ration in the head anyhow, because leftists always always always turn on their own. (For a less violent version, ask Mercedes Lackey right now how much her woke bona fides have helped her with the SFWA.)

      1. Lackey has written some things that show she’s not “woke,” per se. I remember a short she did for an anthology where a mage is waiting for the police to come for her, remembering how she thought their first efforts at “helping,” were reasonable and watching it turn into, “all magic must be destroyed.”
        The mage/writer releases her magic to land wherever it will as the police arrive.

        1. “Wet Wings”. I remember that one. And I am livid at Lackey’s treatment, despite the fact that I gave up on her about five books ago. Now I will start buying her again, dammit. If the sequel to “Beyond” pisses me off like I expect it to, I will just buy some paperbacks of her old stuff and drop them in Little Free Libraries.

          1. Exile’s Honor.

            People need Grownups in their reading, and the hero there is definitely a grown up. As is the mind control not-a-pony.

            1. She’s picked up a habit of shoehorning thinly veiled Trump caricatures and their wish-fulfillment comeuppances into her recent books, which was enough to sour me on new Valdemar for quite some time. But I’d been waiting for Beyond for literally 25 years–my college roomie and I used to breathlessly fanfic out the possibilities. And THEN she set up Beyond’s antagonist as “The Emperor”, who was blond, corpulent, gilded everything, had a literal alien (well, extraplanar) child in a literal cage, and died messily. The…blatant-ness…and the wish-fulfillment of the whole thing both made me roll my eyes and left me feeling oddly hurt.

              But nobody’s gonna give a damn if I’m Literally Shaking over a bit of fiction. Nor should they. Any shaking I experience is my own damn thing to deal with.

              1. Yeah, that was pretty dumb. And the sad thing was that there were plotholes that she apparently ignored in favor of chortling over her own cleverness. There’s a reason I just check her books out of the library nowadays, when I used to own her every book in first edition.

                But at least she had a story, instead of just “Trump bad” or “Rowling bad.”

                1. I was talking it over with Anonymoose, who puts up with my occasional fantasy digressions, and I think the thing with Lackey is that yeah, she always leaned left, but she was never nasty about it. I remember being oddly touched at one of her urban fantasy books, when she carefully balanced two equally clunky “occultist” stereotypes. The thing with the Trump caricatures is…well, everybody ELSE who uses them clearly hates me and mine, so most likely she does too. Which makes me sad.

                  I literally pulled over in a parking lot on a trip from Atlanta to Greenville, SC, because I’d made the mistake of cracking open “Black Gryphon” at a stoplight and I HAD TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED NEXT. (in my defense, I was 19.) She’s got a good style for her stories, and that makes her much more enjoyable to read than most.

                  1. Ms Lackey started out fairly well with her Valdemar books, but then she got too weird for my tastes. I don’t think she understands actual working societies very well.

                    1. Not a fan of government by mind control ponies? ^.^

                      Honestly, she’s definitely on the fantasy side of scifi/fantasy– she has a story she wants to tell, and the world only mattes in so much as it helps do that.
                      That doesn’t do so well for long running series, or if you look too hard at how things work– look, you will NOT have casual sex in a culture where it’s entirely possible to be starving when you’ve got both parents in good health, and that’s just a start– but it’s a perfect fit for things like the 500 Kingdoms, which literally runs on narrative weight, and if you can avoid looking to hard it’s immensely emotionally satisfying.

              2. Long past time we made our “Literally Shaking” just as valid as their version.

                I’m happy by just making their version as invalid as mine is now. However, if they’d prefer I insure I have their attention…

                1. The problem with our version of “Literally Shaking” is that it requires our hands around their necks and their heads whipping back and forth.

                  That’s harder to do over the Internet than their version.

              3. I hadn’t thought of it that way (I’ve picked up “Beyond,” and skimmed it, but obviously not read it all). OTOH, I can’t complain too much given how many of Weber’s villains have been named variations of, “Clinton.”
                (My favorite was in, “Echoes of Honor,” and wasn’t quite named Clinton – he was a smarmy Havenite lieutenant named, “Guillermo Rodham”).

                2. MWW does tend to have snarky name references, doesn’t he?

                  *cough* Rob S. Pierre *cough*

              4. Headdesk

                Seriously? The woman is an utterly brilliant writer when she puts her mind to it. Ok, the villain of the piece being a child abuser is exceedingly predictable, but what you’ve described is *well* below her abilities.

                Ok, half of the major Valdemar evil sorcerer villain types being reincarnations of Ma’ar was a bit lazy, but she even made that pay off in the end.

                That’s just sad. Kind of a “how the mighty have fallen”

        1. Some of it is Twitter.

          Larry Dixon has/had statements in defense of her.

          May not surprise you some of the folks on the attacking side.

          Apparently, saying colored person instead of person of color is a racial epithet now.

          1. Oh, that’s been a raical epithet for years…one of their classic traps.

            Given I assume they are still married of course Larry Dixon defended her.

            I’m still disappoint she didn’t jump on the urban fantasy bandwagon with new Diane Treggard books (yes, I’ve heard the stories and think she’s a hothouse flower because of them). I haven’t read much new in years although have the first few of her Victorian/Edwardian stuff (alchemy series?).

            I’ll check Twitter.

            1. To be fair… there were shenanigans going on at Dragoncon, with that crazy guy running it. So it’s possible that she confused some of the weird stuff directed to her, with the much worse weird stuff directed at kids, and just sort of went into a generalized panic. Or she could have been smelling bad stuff with her publishing companies and editors, because God knows there was a lot of hinkiness that was starting at just about that time.

              There have been times when I’ve suddenly felt there was bad stuff going on, and I was wrong to flee when I should have stuck around and helped. But there was bad stuff going on. And sometimes I really was right to flee.

              Sf fandom is very confusing sometimes.

              1. Also, coming into fandom as part of Darkover fandom, in early adulthood, had to have been the fandom most likely to mess up your emotional reading of situations… ever. Leslie Fish is a benevolent person, but she’s not anybody’s best/most normal guide to life, work, and romance; and that was Lackey’s songwriting partner. MZB was flat out evil and criminal, and that was Lackey’s writing mentor.

                So yeah.

                1. Basically, I think Lackey has been used as a doormat, shield, and so on, by an awful lot of her colleagues. I think she has done admirably despite that.

                  But this Sudden Drop of Damocles’ Sword is nothing but mean girlism of the highest type of malice. And I bet any viewing of the actual panel footage, or any unedited audio, would lead us to the conclusion that either this was overblown, or the audience misheard what was said.

                  So I find it interesting that SFWA has refused to release any footage or audio.

                  1. Larry Correia had a post up about it on his Facebook page yesterday (while he is once again temporarily unbanned for the next few days). According to him, the person she said it to didn’t care. The problem was a third party witness who complained to management.

                  2. “nothing but mean girlism of the highest type of malice.”

                    And that sums up why I despise these people. They simply enjoy inflicting pain on people, while relying on our manners / respect for the law / whatever to keep them from suffering any consequences.

                2. I’ll confess that I’m wishing Leslie Fish would chime in on this. She’s got a sharp side to her tongue when she wants. (what I REALLY want are more Hyperintelligent Cat stories, but that’s a whole ‘nother ramble…)

                  1. I often disagree with Fish, but she is generally at least worth listening to.

                3. Actually, I was in that fandom for a while. I must have moved on before things blew up and part of me wants to know just how bad it was.

                  1. Yup, there was a weird situation where some people got sucked in closer to the center of the suck, often based on whether they fit certain parameters. I had a friend who actually went to a lot of the events, and then didn’t want to talk about it. Since she was an alphabet person college kid of wide experience and the desired political and religious views, this made me feel pretty uneasy, even as a young stupid college kid.

                  2. MZB and Walt Breen were abusing kids.

                    They curated their social circles like an onion, carefully selecting inner circles that were increasingly vulnerable to the stories they were telling about it all being okay.

                    Lackey was in Oklahoma, and there is no evidence that MZB trusted her that much.

                    California fantasy and science fiction fans apparently didn’t realize what was occurring, the secrets were so closely held.

                    1. Yup. The whole situation was pretty terrible, and a lot of drama apparently occurred just to.keep observant people from poking in their noses and asking questions. In retrospect, people realized this, but not then.

                    2. That’s a pretty standard pattern, FWIW.

                      I think it’s called “boundary testing” — and it’s the non-evil reason that folks “over-react” to “simple mistakes.”
                      Because predators transgress to test if a target is vulnerable to exploitation– as a victim or as cover.

                      And if you respond “wrong,” they keep you at a distance, and it’s just this One Weird Thing.

                      ….

                      It works kind of like that scam where you send letters out to, oh, a thousand people. Saying this or that team will win next week, half each.

                      Then you send a letter to the half you got it right with.

                      You repeat this until you’ve built up a long track record of being TOTALLY reliable– and send a letter saying you’ll give them the winning team for next week, for just $50.

                  3. Bradley’s own daughter was one of the children they abused. She wrote a book about it and was roundly condemned by All The Right People.

                    Most of them didn’t even pretend it wasn’t true; just called her Eeevul for exposing them.
                    ———————————
                    Count Vordarian: “What? You’re a Betan! You can’t do—“

                4. I’ve wondered on occasion if Lackey had any inklings about MZB. It would certainly explain her recurring trope of villains all being pedophiles in her books.

                  1. The “relationship” between her villain Falconsbane and his “daughter” Nyara in the Winds trilogy sounds an awful lot like what Breen and his daughter would have had.

          2. Found it.

            All I can say is she choose those friends over someone like Larry, who tried to warn her.

            It’s wrong, but the sympathy well is a bit dry.

            1. I can disagree with her choices about whose opinions to respect, and still very strongly feel that the stuff done to her was vile.

              I guess I am finding her sympathetic.

              I’m not entirely confident in the quality of the emotional investments that I have made personally.

              Internet alone is not enough, and I don’t entirely trust the institutions I have met people through.

              1. I don’t trust much of anyone any more. Faith in anything from politics to getting feedback on a short story is misplaced.

                “Trust not in princes” was specific to princes, not exculpatory to non-princes.

                Still, I don’t have much sympathy.

                1. I can see myself winding up where Lackey may be now.

                  I can see myself winding up where you seem to have.

                  I’ve been in some pretty bad places at times in my life.

                  I’ve gone very near to getting stuck in bad places that I have avoided, somehow.

                  I’m on a slightly good trend now.

                  And, almost always, people have been nicer to me than I started to dread that they would be.

                  But, some stuff in the future I will probably need to handle, that I don’t have answers for handling yet.

                  1. Misty did drop by here a few times during Sad Puppies, and in a good way.

                    She puts up with Elisabeth Waters to the extent of pubbing her stories.

                    So when she plants her feet, they stay planted, for good or ill. I think she is mistaken in many of her choices, but at least she makes them.

                    1. Exactly. I respect her for her raptor rehab work, and the first Herald books helped me out a LOT back when I needed them the most. I don’t like the way some of her stuff has gone (and that she got “too big to edit” for a while), but I admire her and Larry D’s skill at world-building and their consistency over time.

                    2. Last Herald Mage and Serrated Edge got me through chunks of high school. And I *highly* approve of her hatred for child molesters.

                      Honestly, what I’m hearing about her more recent work is just saddening.

                    3. and that she got “too big to edit” for a while

                      Of all the lazy cost-cutting measures trad publishing embraces this is the saddest.

                      Between fear of someone being willing to jump ship and not wanting to edit them and the cost savings of “they always sell, who gives a damn” authors from Stephen King to Robert Heinlein have been allowed to publish inferior work from this.

                      And good artists know they need editors, as Ricardo Montalbán admitted on the set of Wrath of Khan:

                      Discussing his work with the various Trek actors, [Star Trek II and VI director Nicholas Meyer] revealed that his relationship with Leonard Nimoy was often plagued by misunderstandings as “for some reason, he made me feel or act clumsy.” Regarding William Shatner, Meyer dispelled the public perception that Shatner was egotistical, noting that, off-stage, he was very engaging and didn’t need to be the center of attention. On Ricardo Montalban, who played the infamous villain Kahn, Meyer recalled that he was initially worried about trying to direct the accomplished actor. However, those fears were alleviated after he approached Montalban with notes about his performance and was greeted with the response, “you’re going to direct me? That’s really good, I need direction. I have no idea what I’m doing up there.”

              2. Yep. My fury surprised the hell out of me, and appears to be threefold:

                1) She’s contributed far more toward “woke” and genuinely goodhearted left-leaners than any of those emotional hemophiliacs ever will*);

                2) This reminds me SO much of earlier analogies on this blog about “step on the wrong tile, which They know and You don’t, and catch hell for it”;

                3) She’s seventy-damn-two years old and piling emotional abuse on her is CRUEL. And I imagine no few of them are getting off on the cruelty of it.

                I am livid. I will never buy or read any two words in sequence from this year’s Nebula noms. For what miniscule amount of good it may do.

                *term stolen from somebody on the Lackey twitter thread. Can’t find it, too good to let it languish.

                1. I’d call them emotional hypochondriacs. Hemophilia is a real, and serious, medical condition. Nothing about those whiny babies in adult bodies is real.
                  ———————————
                  ‘Progressives’ suppress free speech because they don’t have the means to suppress free thought.

                  Yet.

                  1. Yeah, but… “You have wounded me! I’m bleeding! Lookit me bleed! I cannot POSSIBLY stop bleeding and am therefore a victim whose every demand must be indulged!”

                    It’s better than trying to tease out the weird D/s vibe I get whenever something injurious-to-progressives makes the news. The resultant proclamations of FEAR, LOOK AT MY FEAR are…intriguing, in a pathological sort of way.

                    1. Less like hemophiliac and more like someone with a cutting disorder or Münchhausen by proxy. They want attention and so they turn an emotional scratch or pimple into a huge gouge or a seppuku like injury. A lot of folks on that side of the aisle really seem to have emotional issues, I wonder how many experienced abuse or neglect as children. I mean look at the daddy issues of Obama and Clinton, something seriously wrong there.

                    2. Thing is, if it was purely early experiences, we would expect a lot more conservatives who are bad unstable.

                      Because of the number of former left conservatives.

                      Issue seems to be, ‘conservatism’ is good for sanity, and ‘leftism’ is really bad for it.

                      One reason, a lot of what conservatives like is the behaviors and customs of a society that actually existed. And, that society produced a culture, that is what we tend to define sanity and insanity in terms of.

                      Second reason, left is chasing after a society that never existed, and the closest approximations were deeply at war with themselves. Soviet Union was an imitation of the French Terror. a) the terror was not really a state of internal peace. b) Stalin, et al., were basically at war with everyone else, with their efforts to ensure that the tyrant could dine on the suffering of his subjects, at his leisure. So, c) they do not tolerate followers with mutual peace agreements, who can not be played off and set to warring against each other. Hence, why the inner party is not ever willing to accept ‘doing nothing’ from the outer party. Thus, d), left crazies are left without much in the way of psychological stops to slow down murder impulses, or cruel schemes.

                  2. People who are basically bleeding all over the place, emotionally, are not functional enough to actually be interfacing with a bunch of people at an organization.

                    People all, “yeah, I’m a major sales rep, and ever so easily wounded emotionally”? Lying, and needing to be removed, and not lying, and needing to be removed.

                    It is possible that mental hypochondria is a part of this crud. The competitive self-diagnosis crowd overlaps with the folks mushing together all mental variation and dysfunction, in ways that are harmful to mental health, and which are also being weaponized by organizations trying to enable predators. All this “X offensive behavior is a mental illness and you have to accommodate” stuff? That is being used to protect pedophiles, and public school sponsorship of student on student rape.

                    But, the vicious people playing the canceling games are not actually injured. The deliberation with which they select victims to cancel, it definitely is not real hurt, it is only a pretense of being hurt, that is not motivated by a real vulnerability.

                  3. Offense kleptomaniacs. They will take any offense that isn’t nailed down.

                2. And how many of them have sold even a fraction of the number if books she has or made a fraction of the money?
                  How much is plain old envy?

                  1. Interestingly, Reddit’s r/fantasy is standing up for Lackey. They have a lot of deleted comments, though, so I suspect that either the mods are Lackey fans, or the comments are horrible beyond the bounds of reason.

          3. Yeah, I’m going to work that into a story:

            “So, what do you call People Of Color, huh?”

            The look she returned was slightly puzzled. “People.”

            1. A black Youtuber lady said last night that “they lump.together minorities as people of color, so that we’ll be easier to control.” Because individual ethnicities want different things.

              She also said that “everybody is a person of color.”

              I think it was the Midnight’s Edge livestream about a Kenobi actress warned by the studio leeches that Star Wars fans are all racists. And I think the streamer was La Reina Creole.

              1. On the disability end, this is my view of ‘neurodiversity’ ideology.

                A lot of the foot soldiers, like me in highschool, were weird bookish kids, who looked to the academic theory of psychology for understanding of their challenge. Unlike me, many of them were incredibly badly advised as to how to be discerning when it comes to psychological theory.

                But, there are enough coincidence that there is probably malice buried in their somewhere.

                1. Yeah, I was done with most of “Neurodiversity” after a couple of collisions with their nuttier side. Or rather, core.

                  One Fb page dumped me as “a racist Trumper! Reeeeeeeeeeeee!” for posting an NR article about how gun control laws wouldn’t have helped in Sandy Hook and followed up by shrieking about how “bigoted” and ist-o-phobic I was, a regular Emmanuel Goldstein for the mod’s 2minHate, for having used a “Straight Pride! It Makes Babies!” meme for a temporary avatar a year prior. (Turned out the Activist running the page was not just an Aspie, but a tranny living out of her van somewhere… Oy vey.)

                  Another group was up in arms for my argument that treating Autism and transgenderism on the same terms was a category error– not even getting into any moral assessments– and when I messaged the mod to make a case for presenting alternate viewpoints rather than an echo chamber, she said she wanted an echo-chamber instead.

                  The one group I do still follow was only brought to my attention when Miss EchoChamber whined on her page about their unpardonable negligence of the BLM cause in 2020. By a group out of the U.K. But I like that one because they’re both Aspies and parents-of-Aspies, and be your politics left, right, top, bottom, charm, or strange, if your post isn’t somehow about Asperger’s or autism, they don’t want it. And with participants from most continents (no penguins yet, I think), most political arguments are irrelevant to at least half the group or so.

              2. Beige is a color, after all.
                I keep adding to the list of people who can kiss my rosy beige….keister. If I wanted them anywhere near my keister.

                1. I’m with you sister. We people of pallor need to stick together. Next thing you know the “Man” will tell us we can’t have our SPF 50 sunblock any more.

                  1. I don’t understand sunblock, much less SPF 50. My kids were puzzled when they went with friends to the lake or game, and the parents slathered them with sunblock.
                    We just tan, yo.

                    3. Sorry, my household had/has 3 Redheads and then me. I should have bought stock in Coppertone. Of the 4 of us I’m the 3rd fairest in skin tone surpassed only by my younger daughter. SPF 50 is not sufficient in some cases for this crew 🙂

                    6. People of Pallor unite! Just not under bright lights, or between 10:00 AM and 6:00 PM if we meet outdoors, even in the shade, please.

                1. Nah, they’ll be willing to join up with blacks ’cause on account of they’re all white man’s victims.

              1. Had a Current Events student write that as “Congressional Black Cactus” in a position/policy paper. The boss teacher and I agreed not to take points off. The student wasn’t wrong . . .

            1. You’re going to have to go down the spiral stairway and through the third door. The eyes roll on, down the tubes, and land there. What’s more, the eyed can’t descend that stairway. Fortunately, there’s a back door that opens out.

                  1. That’s what I wanted to know. I sent Bob Kroese an e-mail about it, but I haven’t run across the reply yet.

                    1. FWIW, Webroot has had false positives in the past; all antivirus programs have.

          2. Doing it the same day they made her a Grandmaster is like the paper straw in the plastic wrapper…a perfect encapsulation of modern Leftism.

            1. So she misspoke (or possibly said something in a historical sense), and instead of somebody saying “Oh, you mean POC,” like a normal crazy SJW, they hissed in shock and threw her out.

              Instead of what they did to actual rapists and child abusers, which was to be all shocked if somebody even thought about throwing them out.

              Frankly, for all his literary gifts, I’m shocked that anybody mentions Delany these days as an admirable figure instead of as an admitted pedophile, or possibly as an example of how a trafficked child ended up emulating his abusers and becoming a pedophile. But they’re not criticizing that.

              1. I thought he wasn’t an admitted pedophile, but someone who had sex with adults as a pre-teen/teen and said it wasn’t traumatizing for him.

                Those are very different things.

                1. No, he joined and stayed with NAMBLA and has made all kinds of comments about his various sexual partners in adulthood. I think he mostly stuck to ephebophilia, technically, but it has been a long time since I read the stuff.

                  If I’m incorrect, I withdraw the charge.

                  1. You are more likely to be right than me. Once I learned the NAMBLA stuff and read the one essay I was like “oh, gay teen with adult partners who contends he’s not f’ed up by it” (which, btw, is the contention that got Milo cancelled…so even if I’m right only black leftist gay men can claim it). I didn’t dig deeper.

                    Plus, never much into his stuff I read.

                  2. But given the number of pedophilia-positive, pornographic books he has written, I think it is surprising and creepy that he has not been canceled, when so many other writers have been canceled for literally nothing. I don’t know that I want any authors “canceled” for fiction content, but… it’s strange to make one egregious exception like that.

                    1. I read The Motion of Light in Water, which is partially about his early career, and there was some other book I skimmed that was letters and essays or something with autobiographical content; and I got certain impressions based on what was essentially a quick skim when I found out that the book was not, not, not what I expected it to be about. So it’s very likely that I’m wrong or working off intuitive impressions.

                      I don’t know the man and I don’t know his family or friends.

                      Apparently some of the boys who grew up in the neighborhood, and who were friends with his daughter, have said he never bothered them. So maybe he is one of those guys with damage and theories, but who is more circumspect in real behavior.

                    2. This whole Lackey cancellation thing both torques me off and worries me. So I’m posting too much about all the things that bother me and are vaguely related.

                    3. Ditto.

                      The cruelty of it, the viciousness of it, the public slandering of the lady when they (as has been repeatedly mentioned) have no issue with defending actual child rapists….

                      And I’m sitting here, wondering if it is because even with all the binders of the viewpoint, she can STILL write good stories.

                    4. I’ve said it in a number of places – they are gnats swatting at a damned giant. Her work is extensive and *good* (at least up to the early 2000s, when I kind of moved away from her)

                    5. I have only read some of his Cthorr stuff, and I think I am glad of it. It sounds worse than the Piers Anthony books where I needed a shower after.

                    6. @Amsel Chtorr was David Gerrold, whose writing I liked before The Asterisks. Recent Stuff, however, (nothing in particular, just a gestalt) is making me really, really side-eye the third Chtorr book. (Sexual activity with prepubescents while the protagonist was mentally compromised. Side. Eye.)

                2. You might be thinking of Milo Yannoupolis, who said something along those lines.

                  Given that he has since announced he’s no longer gay, he might have changed his mind about what happened to him as a teenager…

                  2. Last I read from Milo he was still identifying as gay, but he’d decided to live within the bounds of normal human sexuality.

                    Has that changed?

                    Seems improbable.

                3. IIRC he was at least somewhat associated with NAMBLA…

                  I may be wrong on that, though

              2. Good grief, I keep learning things about authors here. The only thing I’ve read of Delaney’s is “Babel-17,” and that’s quite tame by current standards.

                  1. It suddenly occurred to me last night that Lackey might have said something like “highly colored” about the imagery and flowery language in books like Neveryona. SJWs are notorious for mishearing that sort of thing, so it’s possible.

                    I still haven’t seen any comments by anyone who actually attended the panel.

                    (Also, if something questionable really was said and nobody from the panel or the audience spoke up, this shows yet another weakness of the East Coast panel discussion format. Because Midwestern audiences do ask questions and make comments, right in the middle of things, and it helps a lot with clarification. But of course this is another side issue.)

                  2. I picked up a copy of “Stars” when I was like thirteen, because I loved the sound of the title. My father glanced at it, turned white, and confiscated it on the spot. One of the very few times, in retrospect, that I agreed with him about What I Should Not Be Reading.

                  3. I read a review of Dhalgren, and decided I really didn’t want to read the book.

                    Does NC-75 mean ‘Not suitable for readers under 75 years old’? 😀

            2. I’m not a writer. I’ve read deeply in fantasy and science fiction, but never visited a con. What is happening to the fields right now is terrible. I recently visited a book store to buy books, but didn’t find any of the books I hadn’t read appealing. The current thing seems to be a Manichean view of any world as divided between victims (good) and oppressors (bad.) Cherishing the status of victim is means the plots seem to be hunts for things to be outraged over. There’s also a masochistic lingering over descriptions of suffering.

              This defenestration of Mercedes Lackey is the act of ambitious nonentities. I suppose after anyone with any knowledge of how evil Stalinist tactics are decided not to attend woke cons, the cultists were hungering for someone to throw out the window.

              The revolution eats its own.

              Anyone remaining in the organization is a fool. The only way to stop such terror is to condemn it with action. Of course, organizations rot from the head down. Looking at the board of SFWA, I don’t see any writers of note. If they had any honor at all, they would resign en masse, which is the traditional thing to do when a board has totally lost the plot, such as defenestrating their own grand master.

          3. Also interesting was the list of Grand Masters she was joining:

            “with it, she joins the ranks of the likes of Gene Wolf, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock and William Gibson just to name a few.”

            Now, I’d be proud as a writer to be named with those four, but who is missing, the first decade plus of the award, is telling.

            1. Looking, they bypassed the first 33 years of the award and the majority of recipients to make that list, including several women. Also of interest of they ignored the two people I know for a fact fit the LGBT label on the list.

      3. And even Beria didn’t come to a good end. The Death of Stalin might not be completely accurate depicting his final hours. But it’s close enough.

        1. “Death of Stalin” is worth it just to see Jason Isaacs chewing scenery as Zhukov. “Spit it out, Georgy, stagin’ a coup ‘ere.” That whole movie is just brilliant.

  3. Well said. The regime must shoot first, probably second and third too, otherwise you’re a brigand destroying that which you claim to defend. That’s just how it is.

    They used to say there’s always a Chekist. No regime has ever lacked for killers and torturers.

    1. Indeed, one need look no further than the ATF and the Fascist Bureau of Investigation to find them even here in America.

  5. Yep – the progs are absolutely panting for a violent reaction from someone whom they can provoke into it. That practically everyone sane and thoughtful is refusing to play glowie games and win stupid prizes must be sending the progs absolutely spare with frustration.

    1. Don’t worry…by October they’ll have a Reichstag Fire if they have to start it themselves and sacrifice a subset of Antifa in the process (or BLM…if Georgia voting says what I think it will they’ll want revenge on blacks for going off the reservation).

      1. Ahhh…the whole point of the Reichstag Fire is that they did light it themselves, and then blamed it on their political enemies. The Leftroids have been trying to start Reichstag Fires for more than 2 years now, but so far they have only managed Reichstag Fizzles. Remember Confederate Flag Dude from the Unguided Walking Tour Of The U.S. Capitol?
        ———————————
        “There’s something I don’t understand. Why do you adhere to the political party that enslaved your ancestors, rather than the party that freed them?”

      2. All it needs now is for MaligNancy to introduce some sort of Enabling Act that allows the President to rule by decree, and then dispose of Harris-und-Biden. Profit!

        2. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again you have to get down to 6th in line Sec Def Lloyd Austin before you hit anyone with even limited executive skill and all the way 11th in line Marty Walsh before you hit someone that has actually been elected to an executive position (albeit Mayor of a medium sized city) and honestly Marty was no great shakes. Better than Ms Wu the current idiot, but not a win…

  6. Of course, after that, we all want to be your minions.

    But not like the cartoon, nor the stupid leftist imaginations.

    Thank you for reminding us what it means to be an American in “interesting times”.

    2. Of course Huns (or pretty much anyone on the more libertarian/classic liberal side of the world) as minions would make herding cats look simple…You’d be better off with those crazy yellow dudes.

    3. Hey, I liked the cartoon Minions, at least in the first movie. Cheerfully, inventively, and wildly destructive. Like to see any of THEM muzzling up “to be nice”. 🙂

  7. Also worth pointing out to our outstandingly glowing yet surprisingly dim readers that many of the regulars here have had careers where opsec was a thing and most of the rest of us have read about the concept in books, such as those by our esteemed hostess and other Baen/indie writers.

    So if we were planning to decorate DC with deep staters a la lamppost we wouldn’t be talking about it here in the open.

    2. Yeah, I think everyone here is waiting for the crucifixes to go up on Pennsylvania Ave and be decorated with some politicos before taking any mention of a boog seriously.

      1. I’d guess half, if we include real bullying and assaults in school, domestic abuse, jobs in the military/law enforcement/what-have-you/being in rough places trying to help good people . . .

    4. Or would we? We MIGHT be using that for a cover for something else and REALLY diabolical!!! (man the tiny little brains in the glowies will explode 🙂 , of course damage from the explosive equivalent of lady cracker really is about all the brains they’ve got will do).

      1. Shhh.
        The first rule of Project Mosquito, IS NOT TO TALK ABOUT PROJECT MOSQUITO.
        I shouldn’t hand to remind you of the second rule.

                  1. A Note to our luminiferous visitors. If you haven’t figured it out we’re mocking you. Go, Scram. To quote a Klingon proverb “Only a fool fights in a burning building”.

                    6. I do not know dear Hostess. Much of what once was geekiness has moved more mainstream. Thinks like comics (including Japanese Manga) Scifi movies and TV went from only geeks to most of the population at the High school where my daughters went. I took them to PAX east in its 2nd-4th years and their peers were jealous of going to what was essentially a board and video game con. The older written stuff (Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke etc) not as much but that was still more common than when I was in High school and I went to a weird high school with lots of hippy and geek types.

                    1. Nah, some posted on Twitter after Jordan Peterson’s book was canceled that he fully supported it because of those drone strikes and the children they killed — oh, no, that was Obama, whose book was not canceled. Peterson was the guy who tried to make him be a good lobster and make his bed.

    5. The only reason that I talk here about how I think things will go down, including direct action possibilities, is that I have carefully considered my options for direct option, and the consequences, and concluded that I also serve who says true things on the internet.

      With all of the wide variety of crazy, there is a need for people to think, and say ‘that idea is nuts’.

      There is genuinely cause for hope that does not run along only the path of direction action.

      But, if direct action were appropriate a) one of the prerequisite for successful results is public support, and someone saner than I would know when there is public support of the correct level b) the timing, target, method, etc., would not be discussed with untrusted individuals on an insecure channel (b1 most internet channels are insecure b2 blog readers include the public, who should be untrusted) c) giving blog watchers an idea of one’s emotional state wrt to direct action would be contraindicated.

      But, yeah, I have been depressed to the point that death in battle sounded very attractive. That was a temporary state of being ill. It is possibly that I am completely unique in my experiences. But, my expectation is that people may be ill, and then maybe I owe them whatever I can do to help, even if I can’t fix things for them.

      1. When I was younger, I was on about an 18 month manic depressive cycle. I realized this after reading the diaries I used to keep. Get a new boyfriend during the upswing, hit the downswing and break up. Things have really settled down since menopause.

        1. Hugs. And that’s a very good use for a diary, even retrospectively.

          “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gi’ us
          Tae see oursel’s as ithers see us.”

      2. Right-wing people in general are more stable and have more to lose, so I don’t think a revolution will start on the right.
        It’s more likely to start in the big cities during an economic crisis, maybe when they have serious food supply problems. It will be left-wing, but well-off left-wing people won’t enjoy it as much as they believe.
        Anything right-wing people do will be in response to that.

          1. I don’t necessarily think it will be “the poor”, it could be neighborhood gangs, “Antifa”, and people like that.
            The left’s present-day favorites. Even though Marxist theory views the lumpenproletariat with distaste, in practice during the 1917 Russian revolution they released people from prison. Look at what has recently been happening in Brazil (maybe Mexico or France too) and since the Black Panthers in the US. Modern Marxist thought embraces the lumpenproletariat, maybe under the influence of Mao.
            You can’t ignore the actual purpose of criminal justice reforms, drug reforms, homelessness reforms, immigration reforms, etc.. It’s the hope for an alliance between the traditional left and drug dealers and even more distasteful people. Starts with a p, but it’s not “poor”. The left hopes to provide the leadership, but is also accepting of career criminals in the leadership, as long as they embrace the “right” ideas.
            I repeat, well-off left-wing people won’t enjoy it as much as they believe, but this doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

            1. “Homeless reforms”. OMG Eugene is about to tip into fantasy land, even worse that it is now. To comply with some federal/state(?) HB land bill Eugene is about to approve high density parameters for building on traditional single family plots … even smaller than they have been over the last 30 – 40 years. (We wouldn’t buy or build when we were looking in ’85 to ’88 because the lot sizes were halved from the non-acreage sized lots of prior decades. So at least that long.) The new parameters go way beyond the HB land bill requirement. There theory being that more housing less the rent will be. Because rent is not affordable because of supply. ROFLOL … oh wait. They are serious. Partly correct. But still won’t house those on minimum wage. AND raising the minimum wage raises rent. Every. Single. Time. Way back when we were on minimum wage, we couldn’t afford rent without multiple roommates (or two household income wouldn’t cut it, at least 3 people sharing rent and utilities). Hasn’t changed.

              1. This definitely doesn’t contradict my point, that the revolution may start in the big cities and will be left wing, at least initially 🙂
                Concerning myself, where and when I grew up, especially in my family, ever since I really became aware of politics, “communist” was a swear word. I also have some personal reasons to loathe communists. True, it’s more complex than that, but it would be getting into even Stalin did good things territory and I don’t want to go there.
                I am a monarchist and a liberal (most US liberals aren’t).
                To use some common references, I read (some) Hayek, Orwell, Heinlein, Van Vogt, and Herbert (when I was young), Rand, Niven, Wright, Chesterton, some of your novels, etc., etc., and really liked them.
                I used to like Asimov, but understood more about him after reading a certain short story about world government and that novel where he makes a big deal out of the Three Mile Island incident. I learned even more later.
                I kind of found Clarke interesting, but only because he was one of the greats and my father bought him a lot. I found him a bit strange and never really enjoyed him (he was too sententious and preachy). Later I found out why.
                More controversially, perhaps, I like Gerard Klein, Tolstoi, Lem, Efremov, some of Le Guin (especially Rocannon’s World, which was her first novel I read), Wells, Mieville to some small extent, but I am aware of the Marxist influence in their work and don’t approve of it. They just write well. Lem had quite subversive stuff too.
                I won’t go into serious literature, but am aware that things were not necessarily as bleak as Balzac and Dickens sometimes showed them and I never dreamed of a revolution based on such stuff. Your and other people’s pointing out the obvious really helped.
                I am not free of left-wing ideas, as I sympathized and continue to sympathize with Popper, who was somewhat of a social democrat (but anti-Marx). More seriously, I studied Marx in college (in a history of modern thought course, together with Kant, Hegel, Foucault, and others), and tried to understand him, though I strongly disapproved. Same for Foucault and Hegel. I definitely did not approach either of them with an open mind and ready to be convinced, I was forewarned. I liked most of Sartre’s literary writings a lot when I read them, more than Camus (I am an existentialist), but hated how he tried to shoehorn Marxism and US hatred into it. I don’t think existentialism leads to Marxism naturally.
                You are right, Marxism is everywhere and influences many people’s thoughts in non-obvious ways, but I try to be aware of its influences on me and actively fight it. Maybe this was your point, that I need to fight harder, in which case I agree.

              2. Oh, only now I perhaps understand your point, that maybe poor people in the big cities will get tired of the Marxist establishment and their venomous and destructive ideas and rise against them, together with the right, or at least stay out of it.
                Hope you’re right. I could argue against it, but I sincerely hope you’re right.

  8. it took them a committee and six months to come up with the slur “ultra-maga”, and thirty seconds for it to be proudly emblazoned on tee shirts and hats. i’m not afraid of them, just what they can screw up in the meantime. they prove every day that their minions have the collective brain power of a gnat.

      2. Unfortunately, that damage is to real people. But then they don’t consider anyone other than themselves to actually be people, do they?

              1. Eastern Europe it is explodin’
                Blame it on Biden and Putin
                Elections are stolen after the votin’
                All this talk of racism, what are they smokin’
                And at the Rio Grande illegals are crossin’

      4. Indeed, they’ve screwed up various minority groups having them backslide for well nigh on 60 years, they’ve totally debased the family and are doing things with sexual behavior that would make the Marquis De Sade blush, they’ve turned major government sections (FBI, IRS, ATF etc) into MiniLuv, they took a military that took apart the 5th largest military in the world in 100 hours (plus air war) into one that worries more about pronouns than about properly conning a multi million (or multi BILLION in the case of the seawolf class USS Connecticut) vessel or how to fight a war. Let them go much longer and we’d think Pharoah or Simon LeGree would be an improvement.

        1. Ummm… I’d say either would be an improvement, as least in competence.

          And FWIW, the “3-letter agencies” you cited were already hopelessly lost to the Iron Rule.

    3. They haven’t figured that we grab most of the names they give us, and make them ours. OTOH, they run from the names that they have given themselves, and try to pin them on us.

      1. I will give them this: they have a pretty good sense for naming.

        Just not the way they think they do.

      3. Which is odd given my first experience with that kind of claiming was Queer Nation and their embraces of queer for gay, although the in the three decades since queer has wandered into stranger territories and become more generally “sexually non-conformist” with “ordinary gays/lesbians” no longer considered queer.

        1. Apparently the new definition of the Q word is having sex for political reasons, rather than for fun or reproduction or money or what have you.

          Of course, when I pointed this out online, I was accused of making it up, and then I kept seeing it everywhere. I can’t wait to see the same people quoting it back to me, not remembering their previous outrage.

          1. LOL.

            I’m not sure I’d quite agree with that although Queer is increasing a political identity. I think there is still a “I’m having fun sex in a way normies don’t” connotation, especially in things like S&M circles. Maybe a bit of snowflaking to it.

            1. I think they want to shock the squares, and “normal” gays and lesbians (hell, most of the less extreme kinks) no longer do that.

              1. “Normal” gays and lesbians have lived long enough to be squares. That was the price/side-effect of gay marriage.

                And I think the average gay man/lesbian is happy to be a square and just get one with life.

                1. More or less all the ones I know have jobs, mortgages, and pensions

          3. having sex for political reasons

            … That’s like… I dunno… adding lutefisk to an ice cream sundae, or something. (Yeah, I’m sure someone has done exactly that and decided it’s the best way ever to eat either one of those things.)

            It’s hard to imagine a more effective way to suck the fun out of anything than by doing it “For political reasons”

  9. They can’t even play their own game correctly.

    The best “insurrection” they could forment boiled down to an unauthorized, unguided tour around the Capitol that ended with an unarmed woman – one of our own, not one of theirs – being shot dead. And the Whitmer Plot was so improbable that even a C-grade action movie writer would’ve laughed at just how unrealistic and over-the-top their ideas were. And didn’t over half of them turn out to be Feebee CI’s? The moron who pushed the “blow the bridge!” idea was IIRC. Or the the “Proud Boys affiliates” who all show up at rallys trying to instigate trouble… all wearing the exact same golf-shirt-and-khaki-shorts-with-tactical-shades uniform and carrying unlit tiki touches, and all sporting military hairstyles to boot. Might as well cruise in on a neon-lit parade float with flashing signs that read “UNDERCOVER FEDERAL AGENTS!”

    I’d worry about attempting an actual false-flag, but if their current efforts are anything to go buy, they wouldn’t be able to make it the least bit convincing.

    1. I’d worry about attempting an actual false-flag, but if their current efforts are anything to go buy, they wouldn’t be able to make it the least bit convincing.

      If they were capable of actually learning from prior failure, I’d be worried. But clearly they are not or each plot they instigate would not be more farfetched than the last.

      If the moron media wasn’t all in for them they wouldn’t get as far as they have.

      So , think about that. TPTB, the media and low information voters are all pushing for them. And yet, and yet, they still get no traction at all among at least half the country.

        1. Hell Ed Wood could plot way better than these bozos. They Haven’t got nine plans. They barely have one, it always starts with “Look there is a conservative white Heterosexual male oppressing X !”. That’s been their battle cry since the end of the 60’s at least.

            1. More like “If you can’t see how x is being oppressed you’re oppressing them too REEEEE!!!!”

          2. Rapidly dispensing with the “conservative” part. “Heterosexual white male” is now enough to trigger by its existence, and they’re chipping away at “hetero” in the “You Must Be This Oppressed to Speak” paradigm.

              1. Wouldn’t surprise me at all. Which is why I am keeping a careful eye on the Feminist Establishment and its growing insistence that white feminists are…well, just kind of substandard…Not Our Kind, Dear…they’re all right as long as they know their place…

                1. Yes, the ultimate (so far) pinnacle of the Victim Class is a transexual “lesbian” POC with a disability and belonging to the Woke religion. The disability must be cool, too. Alas, I figure there’s more that can be done, but what the hell, I’m a conservative white cishet male, so I’m not allowed to have, much less express an opinion. Note the matched fingers.

      2. There was evidence that I interpreted as meaning that the Christmas bombing was a federal false flag.

        I’ve been surprised at them not repeating the effort.

        OTOH, January 6th was clearly set up to be much more of an incident than materialized. It may be that their competent unethical bastards realized that they had completely misjudged things with 1/6/2021, and have volunteered to take on much less incriminating tasks that look as important to the deranged politicians.

    3. They’ve tried. With some name like Patriot Front. Disgorge polo shirted buys from U-hauls…. Took like 2 days to be laughed out of the internet.

      1. Yeah, and the names they come up with are so painfully obvious. They take something like “United Workers Liberation Front” or some such Commie nonsense, cross out “Workers” and replace it with “Patriots” or another “right-wing buzzword” and expect people to believe it’s genuine. Because “United Patriots Liberation Front” totally sounds like something the Founding Fathers would’ve come up with. /sarc.

          1. They think it sounds properly Nazi-like, and so should attract the (imaginary) white supremacist hordes they believe are put there.

        2. Are you implying that the Populist Patriots Front of Rightwingia isn’t bonafide? Oh, wait a minute you’re a member of the Patriotic Populists Front aren’t you? Ha ha caught you, you you faker.

          1. Uh…. uh… uh… I don’t know what you’re…. uh, I mean…

            I know nuzink! I vahs not heah! I did not even get UP zis mornink!

    4. Weirdly, the first few months after the Jan 6 protest, I kept seeing people posting about how we’ve all seen the videos of them doing horrendous things (I don’t remember quite what, defecating on statues, maybe?), etc. Since I had not seen any of those videos, I have to discount whatever they said, because if the videos existed (or could be made to exist), they would have been all over the internet, and I wouldn’t have been able to miss them.

      1. There were (and still are) videos of black-masked hooligans smashing in doors and windows, handing out weapons from backpacks, spraying stuff at the Capitol Police.

        For some reason the FBI has been too busy conducting SWAT raids on grandmas who were standing outside on the lawn to even look for those particular ‘mostly peaceful protesters’.
        ———————————
        The Capitol is OUR house. Congresscritters are just the help.

        1. Help you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…

          1. Reminds me of why I refer to Stasi Abrams as the would-be Governess of Georgia. Not a bash on competent female executives, but a reference to her platform and her attitude towards her constituents.

            Grown-ups don’t need somebody catechizing us on manners and spooning noxious snake-oils like Syrup-of-Wokékac down our throats.

      2. I have seen some videos– there’s a guy clocking a cop with a fire extinguisher, I was able to dig that one up when he was found guilty of assaulting a cop.

        By and large, though, they didn’t share the videos because they were before Trump had given a speech…..

        1. Many of the bad actors on 1-6 were just that…Military or FBI doing a bad acting job..Only by investigating their backgrounds, as Miles Mathis has done, do you find out they’re Government goons…

              1. Yeah, I’ve seen the evidence for the AntiFa.

                I’m not going to go digging to try to see how military and police gets slammed in, the last several times I saw folks alleging stuff was police, it turned out that they didn’t understand the term for “guy you arrested but he can get a reduction on charges if he helps you catch his boss.”

                  2. And Rosanne Boyland: crowd-crushed and beaten by a cop (not clear yet if she’d died by that time) and denied assistance for an hour or so…

                    But many sources still only admitted to one death until this past spring, and that was Babbit’s.

              2. Heck, there were warnings (leaks) before the event that the anteFa and BurnLootMurder types would be trying to cause/incite trouble and they’d know each other by the backwards baseball caps. Evidently word didn’t get around enough for such to be shunned and thus only (further) incriminate themselves.

  10. Like I’ve seen it said on other blogs – “Don’t Fed Post” – which is saying stuff that is incendiary (and is ridiculous) which could be used against you. I don’t see anyone here doing anything like that – we are just discussing the social and political issues of the day and seem to find them disagreeable.

    As for the observation made by Sarah:
    “…No. If things ever get to that point, they’ll get to that point through a sudden, overwhelming response.”
    As a student of history I agree with that. The response may be tomorrow, next week, next year or 10-20 years from now but it will be like Hemmingway going bankrupt – “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly”. It sure won’t happen because somebody on an internet site said “go” as that idea is just another symptom that the powers that be are insane.

    There is also the chance that, in our weird American way, social and political events will ‘swing’ back from what they currently are and without actual violence. I plan to be an interested observer and will continue to discuss my views and will happily consider the views of others.

    1. Yes. The only way the average white collar worker goes pop is if they’ve been hurt so badly they they care less about changing the country and are just pulling down the temple around them.

      Looking at the US’s history, all of the major conflicts have a strong character of most of the country simply wanting to be left alone and some power hungry faction poking them with a sharp stick until the conflict simply could not be avoided.

      Even the civil war probably wouldn’t have happened if the Confederacy had left Fort Sumpter alone.

      1. The only way the average white collar worker goes pop is if they’ve been hurt so badly they they care less about changing the country and are just pulling down the temple around them.

        Exactly. The most dangerous individual is the one who believes that he has nothing left to lose. What scares the you-know-what out of me is that Our Betters, The Powers That Be [SPIT!] don’t seem to understand that and keep tightening the screws and increasing the pressure.

          2. I use <blockquote>

            Quoted text looks like this.

            –
            If you have unquoted text before the <blockquote> WPDE will place a blank line in between, but I have not found any way to make it place a blank line after it, so I have resorted to using a hyphen ( – ) on a line all by itself.

            1. I replied too soon. The department of redundancy department sends apologies.

          4. format part of a comment as a quote?

            I prefer the html version of blockquote. Left arrow (cap comma)blockquote Right arrow (cap period) text following by left /blockquote right. It’s embarrassing if one forgets the slash…

              1. That I never remember. Going to try a backslash:

                \< was left arrow
                > is right arrow

                1. And the escaped right arrow looked perfect. No idea why the escaped left arrow got the backslash. WPDE!

          5. “How do you format part of a comment as a quote?”

            Well, it’s worked for me… 🙂

      2. But, but, war of northern aggression, etc.

        How dare you suggest that the Democrats then were active stupid theory minded morons, who fucked around, and found out.

        XD

        1. You know, I hadn’t thought about that, but accusing their opponents of what they themselves are actually doing is pretty on brand for the Democrat party, isn’t it?

          1. I may over value ‘Democrats then are the same as now’, and ‘continuity of organization matters when it comes to institutional culture’.

            Not sure my model is wrong.

            1. Of course sometimes a crab is a crab regardless of whether it’s genetically related to the crabs that came before.

              Also really weird how natural selection keeps turning everything into crabs.

      3. Really, the Confederates actually showed remarkable restraint with First Sumpter. As an shame/honor-based culture, the loss of face from allowing the Yankees to reinforce the fort, after letting the Yankees seize the fort in a most underhanded and dishonorable fashion, would simply be unthinkable.

        Not that it really mattered. Lincoln would have found another pretext if the hotheads hadn’t risen to the bait, and the South would have started in a weaker position if the war started with the Yanks having effective control of one of its major ports.

        (We’re such Subservient Minions that we honor our hostess’ ban on ACW discussions. Pay no attention to the elephant in the room.)

        As applied to present day, those trying to provoke us, don’t understand us well enough to do so effectively. Which in and of itself should scare the beJesus out of the attempted instigators.

        1. Hmmm… As I understand it, Congress was on the verge of accepting the split as a fait accompli, since there’s nothing in the Constitution forbidding it, when the SC hotheads fired on Ft. Sumter and gave Lincoln the excuse he needed to declare it a rebellion, which is covered in the Constitution.

    3. /laugh
      Sure. Sarah, or anyone of us who said, “Get yer gear and go pop off the nearest Lefty tonight at 1800 hrs” is likely to generate a whole lot of “Huh?”, “What?”, “Why?”, and “Are you nuts?”

          1. Our political leanings are Oppositional Defiance, with a hint of snark

    5. Almost all the people “Fed Poasting”. are indeed Feds, since we’re not that stupid…

        1. Ox smarter than damn-fool Feddies, so smart enough. Yeah, yeah, I know; “low bar” and all that. Still…

  12. “Glowies.” Heh. That is the perfect way to describe these wanna-be provocateurs. And mocking and laughing at them is doing some good. They keep getting more desperate by the day.

  13. The ‘Spirit of 76’ is the high ground! I’ll be flying my Betsy Ross American flag just torque their jaws.

  14. Yes, they are destroying their own and supporters are figuring out that they (the supporters) are considered useful idiots. This will not end well for the progressive left. I have family members who have always considered themselves staunch liberals who are now trying to figure out where they went wrong. A friend reports that her daughter and son-in-law are disgusted with Xiden and stating publicly that “this is not what I voted for.” Of course, it is, but they don’t want to hear that. At least they’ve opened their eyes.

    It will definitely get ugly in terms of economy and politics, but I don’t think it will go full boog. At least I hope not. But I am stocking up and we have moved to Texas, which I consider to be a safer state.

    1. The question is whether the disillusioned voters will vote for the other party, or stay home. If the former, it will represent a breach in their “I only vote for Democrats” thinking. There’s a good chance that it will result in a party switch. If the latter, then depending on where they live, a “helpful” poll worker might notice that they didn’t come to the polls, and cast a “right-thinking” vote for them.

    2. A friend reports that her daughter and son-in-law are disgusted with Xiden and stating publicly that “this is not what I voted for.” Of course, it is, but they don’t want to hear that. At least they’ve opened their eyes.

      –
      My middle sister’s kids. The other sister and her kids are not there, quite yet. No, they definitely not ready to hear it yet. What we get is “Just because we’re 20/30 something we’re not Stupid. You think we are!!!!” Cue the waterworks. Response. “Of coarse not. You haven’t learned to read behind the teleprompter.” Teleprompter gets a WTH response and they generally actually listen to the next parts.

      “We were once you. We really were.” We also say “Biden is our president. We just didn’t vote for him, his backup, or his policies. Because we knew what would happen.” VS what the PTB leftest say about President Trump.

      Followed by, and I will admit might have been a mistake. “Carter was our generations mistake. Obama and Biden are your generations mistake.” Without admitting we weren’t naive enough to vote for Carter. OTOH I did vote for the independent, and that was as naive.

      1. I’ll admit to voting for Carter, twice even. OTOH, by 1982, the masks had come off the Cali-F’n-ornia democrats and I could extrapolate, so I got the red pill. The implied (at that time, it wasn’t quite explicit) message that I had no right to defend myself got my attention.

        1. Hubby tried to tell me I was making a mistake. Did I listen? No. So much for him controlling my vote. 🙂 Because naturally as a married woman, that is what he did when I voted for President Trump … What is the saying? Oh. Yes. As If.

      2. Don’t feel Bad D I voted for Anderson too. Stupid young voters. We lucked out dude big time…They did the first time with Hilary but even the Author has only so much patience with us.

          1. The last one I actually voted for was Reagan, although tot be fair that was also a vote against The Peanut. Since then I’ve voted against the Leftists, not for anyone else; I never voted my actual preference of libertarian, since none of the “Libertarians” who ran were worth a bucket of warm snot. Republicans it was, holding my nose (and very surprised and pleased with Trump).

            1. That wasn’t entirely correct; I also voted for Trump for his second term, as well as against the current occupant installed in the WH. So there have actually been two, not one.

                1. 🙂

                  He still won handily, though, just as Trump would have if the election had been honest.

      3. The first election I was eligible to vote in was ’76. I voted Ford. I had college friends from Georgia who let me know about Carter. Nice man. Would like him as a neighbor. But no ability to actually get things done.
        And I admired Ford for biting the bullet & pardoning Nixon to stop the endless Congressional Watergate hearings/investigations that were keeping anything else from being accomplished. He knew it would not be popular but thought it necessary, That’s a good quality in an executive.

        1. ’76 was my first presidential election too. I turned 18 just in time to vote for Oregon Governor in ’74. Got registered. Mom had to come get me to bring me home from college so I could vote (100 miles round trip). I voted for Atiyeh (R), he lost.

  15. Akira Kurosawa, in one of his samurai movies, has Toshiro Mifune, playing a wandering ronin trying to make a buck and save a village. In one scene he’s sitting atop a watch tower looking down as the bandits battle in the village below. From Mifune’s, the camera’s POV (point of view) the dark clad and light clad fighters look much like the black and white stones on a Go board, moved, surrounding, surrounded removed.

    Sitting up here atop the world I often feel I’m watching the happenings from that POV and if only the good guys would wear white hats and the bad black, as they did back in the Saturday western matinees days of my youth, I might be able to make sense of it all!

    1. He was also the one in Yojimbo too, right?

      That one was glorious. He’s crashing at a shrine and wakes up to a whole pile of young bucks plotting to overthrow the local government.

      “And who told you this was a good idea?”

      “Why the second in command of the guy we’re going to topple!”

      facepalm

      That was such a dark dark comedy.

    2. yeah, Kurosawa films were great. His first feature was the prototype martial arts film, if you haven’t seen it….

  16. But the truth is there is an overwhelming chance we don’t need violence.

    Need? Probably not.

    Want? Well, that’s another kettle of fish.

    Let me explain.

    Last week on Twitter there was an ongoing attempt to unperson a regular posting about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with an emphasis on the Dragonlance setting. He’s a pretty knowledgeable guy. I’ve never heard him say anything controversial beyond thinking Dragonlance is the best official D&D setting (we all know in our hearts it is a tie between Greyhawk and Mystara).

    He was being unpersoned for following someone who followed a declared bad person. Since “bad person” is now transitive we needed to unperson him or be “bad person” ourselves.

    Now, my Twitter is for three things, in this order: Indie books, RPGs, and art. I have a lot of muted people and words. I have a few blocked people, mostly people who run these smear campaigns.

    Yet every day despite hard filtering I had to see more of this BS. Eventually, I thought, “I can’t wait until we’re shooting leftists so I never have to hear these people again and they pay for making an effort to make me hear them.”

    I guess I’m that proverbial guy who wanted to be left alone. The only hobby where it hasn’t reared its head yet is retrocomputing and maybe woodworking. When Adam Neely stopped calling it “music theory” and instead “the theory of 18th century white composers” I knew they’d come for hobby music (it’s the “white” in the sentence that gives up the game). He’d done plenty of theory discussion on modern jazz, but now that is apparently 18th-century white guys too…I guess because the language was standardized to describe that. I see something in woodworking, but nothing out in the open yet.

    So, need violence? Nope. Want to shut up the people who in order to prove their virtue made every single space about their bullshit forever? Yep.

    Will I? Two years ago I would have said a resounding yes, but now I less and less see the stain on my soul is a price I’m willing to pay (heart attack plus bypass appears to have aged me and reset my thinking).

    1. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of that ‘want’ for violence.

      I hear a lot of crap through my main ‘hobby’. And, the secondary hobbies.

      My experience, I have been pretty nuts a long time. I’ve learned to watch my thinking, and do basic sanity checking.

      So, my response when I keep thinking ‘this specific guy needs to die, and everyone can see that it would be justice’ is less “and so I will make and carry out a plan”, and more “Okay, what is wrong with my health now?”

      I had a physical thing go badly wrong with my health last fall, and if I am recovering, it is ongoing or recently finished.

    2. I crossed into “when the Saxon began to hate” territory some time ago. Not being utterly lacking in self-control or a Leftist (BIRM), I keep it locked down and don’t vent it on the undeserving. Learning more and more about prayer these days…

      (My semi-sainted mother kept her political prayers limited to “may my family be safe” and “may those who plot evil be exposed”. I’m good with that.)

      1. “Let them repent and give up their ill-gotten gains. And raise up for us righteous leaders to replace them.”

      2. I crossed into “when the Saxon began to hate” territory some time ago

        Some months ago now (early last year), regular Ian Bruene gave that a near-perfect name: Beyond the (Red) Rage Horizon.

        Very much as in, the event horizon of the black hole is a surface you can cross only (at most) once. As in, no going back once past it. And that is exactly the way it feels, to me and apparently a lot of others. Like what people of many faiths have said about religious conversion and initiation, it divides the world into a “before” and an “after” that often don’t match up so very well, even when you try to make them.

        And for me, like (again it seems) a lot of others, that crossing came sometime soon after November 2020.

        Oddly enough, I don’t really mind it so much… the changes involved are by no means all negative ones. And one of the most interesting things about those changes is, they make you less disposed, not more in the same circumstances of provocation, to “just go wild” — it even seems to give you (the 21st-century “red” or “red-pilled” person) at least a little of that amazing stability so much of the World War II generation had (in my experience of many of my parents’ friends, once upon a time). Which seems to echo that of the post Civil War Between the States era, e.g. out West — and which made “the old West” so much of what it was. (In the language of that time, the one word “sand” sums it up pretty well.) And indeed echoes the experience of a (very recent) cancer survivor I was talking with just tonight…

        Of course it does have costs, not just outwardly but inwardly. Like most powerful things, it can do a huge lot of damage if not handled right — what happens if the ravening flame that is the inside of the chamber of a running rocket engine goes just a little out of control?

        I’m still not sure how to finish the prospective guest-post I started back then, “Beyond the Red Rage Horizon: Fighting Well on the Inner Front” — it always seemed the practical suggestions I had towards doing the latter were too few and too vague. But perhaps simply knowing that second, inner front is there, that not only do you have to decide what you will do (or not do!) in the outer world, but you also have to deal with the side effects and psychological “recoil” inwardly of doing (or not) those things… might help win that fight too.

        And as far as political prayers go, there is a very old and very simple (and ultimately, very brave) battle cry that goes: God send the right! I’m inclined to believe it works for political (figurative) warfare too.

    3. I did not say I don’t sometimes want it, either, Herb. I get very angry. But I am a rational human being, and know the results. And also that this bunch is THE least likely to do well at violence.

      1. Ugh, I forgot my final part.

        I was going to add I think most of the violence in revolutions is unnecessary because things failed to the point to bring one about. However, the elite that didn’t do their job through negligence or malice have created so much bad will at that point that the violence is “necessary” for the public to believe the revolution isn’t a fraud.

        Think of it as the generalized “if you don’t like Trump you’ll hate what replaces Trump” saying.

    4. “Yet every day despite hard filtering I had to see more of this BS. Eventually, I thought, “I can’t wait until we’re shooting leftists so I never have to hear these people again and they pay for making an effort to make me hear them.””

      I’m of the opinion that A) you’re right, and B) most of this is an artifact of Twitter. A tiny group of a-holes with a huge number of sock puppets. Musk said 25% of accounts are bots a few days ago but it behaves like 50% or more are bots, aided and abetted by the algorithm tuners.

      F- ’em. I’m not going to have my emotions decided for my by liars and crappy AI algos.

      1. If it was just Twitter, maybe. The Big Purple (rpg.net) is now SJW central where the biggest rpg board on the net is more about Social Justice and Current Thing than it is about RPGs. Most discussion has migrated to FB whose timeline will be about what FB considers important no matter what you do (give Twitter this, despite the default being what the algorithm decides is important you have the option to make your feed a true timeline of what people you follow posted).

        No, the Left will not rest until everything first and foremost is about the Left’s current thing and what it is nominally about second even if the mean it is never about what it is nominally about be that D&D not being about heroic S&S adventures or electricity generation being about electricity. Yes, one of those is worse than the other, but it is the totalizing nature that has made me angry.

        1. I agree. I’m angry too. I went to the bookstore a couple days ago and it just pissed me off. Not only did I not buy anything, it put me off wanting to even look. Walked out with nothing, and mad. Again. Great business model, Chapters. Good thinking.

          As we know to our cost, Leftists make -everything- about Leftism. Everything. You have a nice little non-political hobby newsletter or message board, and some Leftist will bring a swarm of sock-puppets along to politicize it.

          The one that made me laugh was knitting. They f-ing well invaded knitting and sewing clubs on the Interwebz. Social Justice Knitting, for real. That’s a bridge too far, bitchez.

          But again, the thing is the enabling technology. Thanks to the leverage of scripts, anonymity and active cooperation from Farcebook, Groogle, Twatter and Amazoon, one Lefty can look like a legion. But they are not a legion. It’s still one guy with a script running a thousand sock-puppet accounts, banging away at the Party Line he gets off the Party talking-points website/email list/whatever.

          I’m fine with cutting each thing loose as the Lefties sink it. Marvel and DC comics, then all of Hollywood, then all of publishing, then all of social media, no problem. As each business becomes all about politics, I stop doing business with them.

          Next company I stop doing business with looks like Disney, if the new trailer for Thor is any indication. Dr. Strange was not amazing let’s just say, and they made sure to squeeze America Chaves’ two moms in there. Sorry Disney, not paying money to see the combination of less-than-great story plus Woke Heroine and her two moms.

          The good part is already gone. All that’s left is the Woke. It does not bother me to cut them loose. But it bothers -them-. You can tell by the way Netflix started firing Lefties and cancelling Snowflake-friendly projects when their stock price tanked.

          If there’s nothing on Netflix but Lefty propaganda which I will not watch, I lose nothing by cancelling. THEY lose. It hurts them so much more too, because for every complaining Leftist sock-puppeteer on Twitter filling their feed with SJW snowflakery, there are ten thousand guys like you and me who never tweet but do have Netflix accounts. When we quit, they feel it.

          Fido, I say. F- it, drive on.

          2. Thanks to the leverage of scripts, anonymity and active cooperation from Farcebook, Groogle, Twatter and Amazoon, one Lefty can look like a legion.

            The key is the bolded part. Each of those entities has proven they can eliminate scripting sock puppets because they do it to ideas they don’t like all the time. Failure to do it to ideas they like proves intent IMHO.

          3. Damnit word press, i didn’t mean to post yet.

            But they are not a legion. It’s still one guy with a script running a thousand sock-puppet accounts, banging away at the Party Line he gets off the Party talking-points website/email list/whatever.

            While true, the problem is they can create a signal-to-noise issue rendering the website/email list/whatever useless for its original purpose, reducing it to YAPC (yet another propaganda channel).

          4. Disney tried real hard last night with the trailer for Buzz Lightyear which ran before Top Gun: Maverick.

            BTW, if you miss old movies like Top Gun, go see Top Gun: Maverick. Tom Cruise has pulled off one of the rarest things in Hollywood, a sequel that matches and maybe exceeds its original and did it at a 35-year remove at that.

            The last movie I saw in a theater was Bohemian Rhapsody. When it was done C said, “we’re coming back to see it against Wednesday, right”.

            We are.

  17. Ha ha glowies! Sarah’s plot is for Liberty minded Science Fiction and Fantasy fans to get married and have lots of kids and raise them well. 😎

    The left are doomed to failure, even if they gain power for a time. Because they do not have an accurate model of reality.

    They are people who define themselves as ‘the good people’. As they fail in every endeavor (I will note that leftist policy almost always produces more of what it claims to be trying to fix, some of them do that intentionally ala Alinsky, but most actually think the problems are fixable with material distribution. But in our incredibly free country, with incredibly low barriers between classes, most problems are self inflicted, through laziness, addiction, or occasionally lack of knowledge). It really gets my goat that the left want to institute a class system. 😞

    I’m not worried about the left winning, I’m worried about everyone losing. Even the top dictators will lose, dictators have a habit of buying their nice things from the US, and sending their kids to safety to live in the US. If you make the US into a leftist utopia dictatorship, bye bye nice things and safe places to stash family.

  18. I think they still have the dream of the rising third act. Where the villains come out as proper villains, there’s a…reasonably decent battle scene, the evil white guy (who probably looks right now like Trump in their minds, or whatever incel/4chan/basement dwelling troll they think is the real bad guy) suffers a nice, karmic death that is clean and doesn’t muss up the hero’s hair, then they have the final song, the denouement, and credits roll while the hero kisses his boyfriend.

    Yet…that isn’t the third act that is really going to happen, and they should be thankful that it’ll probably be our version of the third act, not the leadership’s.

    1. I suppose I could twirl my mustache for them. Of course I haven’t got one any more but I can try to simulate it 🙂 .

      1. I thought about that, but decided that I wouldn’t want the extra effort of waxing and twirling them. It’s a pain. So, I’ll just have to inflict pain and suffering in other ways.

  19. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m just to the point where I want to Get It Over With. I’m tired of the apprehension, the sick dread in the pit of my stomach.

    Which is probably why I’m writing so much Grissom timeline stuff, with a focus on the Sharp Wars era. It’s about resistance to an American dictatorship, but sufficiently different from here in the Armstrong timeline that it’s less likely to look like an instruction manual for glowies.

    Now working on rewriting “Martha’s Daughters “ for KDP. Then hoping to hack my way through some of the Continental Sharp War stuff.

  20. My first thought seeing the poking figure with the stick is that he should have been glowing. But alas…

    On a more serious note, popular revolts are organic in nature. It’s the mob mentality at play, but on a massive scale. Trying to instigate it yourself just gets you John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.

    The raid, of course, was an ill-thought out mess. But ending the raid and capturing Brown didn’t prevent the deluge that would arrive within two years. And within several years, Brown’s goal of achieving a slavery-free USA would be achieved. That arrived despite Brown’s foolishness.

    1. I call this the Judas problem. Trying to force God’s hand. Judas knew Jesus was the Messiah. He figured Jesus was just having a failure of nerve, so “betray” HIM, force Him to act. That explains why Judas killed himself. YMMV.

      If you don’t believe in God you do it even more often. All those 70’s revolutionaries, the SLA etc. It is the Iranians with the 12th Imam. Last days theology that only focuses on the “Last Day.” A very common human sin. We want to be the center of attention, not realizing: You do not want to be selected to throw the ring of power into the volcano. It is Hard.

      1. Indeed Eschatology may seem an obscure part of religion, but more cults and weirdos have gone down in flames because their Eschatological visions have gone sour and they decide to force the Authors hand, Jonestown, Aum Shinrikyo, Heavens Gate, ISIS The Millerites, and on and on and on…

      2. I’m just going to note that this particular view of Judas is a minority one, and leave it at that. IIRC, John hints in his gospel that Judas was embezzling from the alms funds, which Judas was in charge of.

        1. There’s a minority but persistent apocryphal story that Judas was spending the stolen money on a girl. Which is hilarious, because it makes the Gospels into a classic highwayman type “warning against bad girlfriends” story.

          Btw, I hadn’t realized that Joab betrayed this dude Amasa with a kiss, and then stabbed him to death. 2 Samuel 20:9.

          That’s kind of a bold statement on Judas’ part, because Amasa had just gone out to summon the tribe of Judah to fight a rebellion against David by Sheba son of Bikri, and dragged his feet for many days past the appointed time. And before that, he had been fighting for Absalom, and David had pardoned him and put him in charge of David’s army — in place of Joab.

          And so Joab killed Amasa right in the middle of the road and left him there, so everybody could see him dead.

          The sudden stabby thing was also big with several Biblical heroes fighting foreign pagans or baddies, so Judas was kinda putting on a front that didn’t match bringing along a bunch of guys to arrest Jesus.

          The other thing is that usually in Greek circles, the money pouch was held by the chief disciple. So Judas may have felt like it wasn’t fair for Peter to be in charge, when he had thought it was going to be him.

  21. “When you’re on an electric bus, um, it’s a bus, and it’s electric, and you’re on it.” — Yet another piece of profound wisdom from Vice President Kamela Harris.

    2. With Apologies to the Who

      I don’t care how much I pay (Too much, Electric Bus)
      I wanna drive my bus to my baby each day (Too much, Electric Bus)
      I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it … (You can’t have it!)

    1. I’ve always loved David Hackett Fischer’s line about, “A Calvinist was someone who was never disillusioned.” (There’s a large Calvinist streak in me. The concept of innate depravity explains so much . . .)

      1. Some of it, making serious decisions while upset.

        I was just musing about that, wrt the usual gun control push for a 18 year old who shot up an elementary school while fleeing from the police.

        I sometimes see new things while I am upset, but it is good practice to delay acting on them, until I am sane and well, and can double check my perceptions properly.

        Lady in first satire, obviously hadn’t built a good foundation for her emotional life, was depressed after a bad break up, and then made ‘decluttering’ choices while seriously ill. Which choices were not for the best of her well being. (Seriously, Marie Kondo might realistically have the sense to figure out that a client will not be helped by her advice, because needing a different form of help.)

        Wasn’t trying to argue the Calvinist theological position. I think what my brain keyed onto was definitely the chill approach to events.

        Total depravity makes a lot of sense to me.

        I’m more skeptical that predestination necessarily means anything for human planning. I’m very interested in planning based on human information limits, and treating the future in a probabilistic way (even if untrue), can fit with that.

        God has LOL information, but that does not necessarily mean that he passes it all to us automatically. I think He expects us to attempt to make Good choices on very limited information.

        1. One of the great paradoxes is that free will and predestination are both 100% true at the same time. We with our limited perspective on the universe (only 3 space dimensions, and one of time), cannot understand a being able to see the end from the beginning. I look at the story of Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, thrown in prison unjustly, and forgotten by Pharaoh’s wine taster for two years. All three are essential for Joseph to save his family. Adversity seems an essential.

          This is why without God, the universe is absurd. To get to the understanding that both free will and predestination are 100% true seems to require starting with accepting predestination as true. You can then traverse the dangerous ground of “understanding”, to hang suspended between two black holes, stretched beyond your comfort zone, understanding that God is fully in charge, yet every action of ours is of cosmic significance.

          I stand in awe of a creator who has designed a universe for free will.

        2. I have real problems with some applications of predestination. Such as missionary work being unnecessary because the chosen will be saved whether anyone tries to sve them or not.

          2. IIRC The Standard of the Predestination Idea is that while we spread the Gospel (and we’re required to do so), G*d choses (had chosen) the ones who accept the Gospel.

            Mind you, there is/was a group (IIRC called Ultra-Calvinists) who didn’t believe in witnessing the Faith because “if G*d Chose You, You Would Come To Them).

            I reject the Ultra-Calvinist view and am not sure about the Predestination Idea.

            There is Scripture talking about “you didn’t chose Gd, Gd chose you”.

            But there is also the Command for Christians to spread the Gospel.

  23. Ace has a link up to an article at American Greatness about an economic doom loop.

    Link here – https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/23/the-economic-doom-loop-has-begun/

    Short version – the government has bought lots of Mortgage Backed Securities to keep the housing market afloat. But now inflation is likely to crash the economy, which will cause lots of mortgage defaults, which will…

    I suspect you get the general idea. I haven’t had a chance to read the article yet. I’ve only read Ace’s summary.

    2. Sounds like someone in the Biden administration needs to sit down and watch the anime C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control, which is probably one of the strangest productions touching on economic philosophy ever produced (seriously – it has pokemon-style duels with moves named after economic terms, eldritch horrors lurking in the background, and a bad guy who’s using inflation as a way to try and save his country).

  24. Sarah,
    My guess is that a few of the glowies are paid informers, some are paid foreign disruptor trolls, and some are activists for the left trying to deplatform and deperson you based on the content of your comments. Repetitious ones are generally mentally ill or disruptor trolls. Most of the sworn agents would either lurk or manage informants (bots or live) rather than sullying themselves in actually doing it themselves. Basically, the IC model using cutouts etc, computer intercepts, and informants for plausible deniability has become the model for Fed law enforcement officers. Good luck.

      1. See Canada. The Whole. F-ing. Banking industry went after people who made -legal- contributions to a -legal- charity. On their own, let it be noted, not due to force of law. One phone call from the Prime Minister’s Office and they went right at it. Voluntarily.

        You can always tell Deputy Dawg on a blog, he’s the one glowing the brightest.

        On a completely unrelated note, I will randomly mention, for no particular reason, that you never see one (1) policeman in a third-world dictatorship. You mostly see none. Occasionally you’ll see groups of 20 to 50. Armed, and nervous.

        There is a reason for that.

        1. Last I heard, the French Army patrols Paris in squads of four, wearing battle armor and armed with submachine guns.

          And they say America is a violent country!
          ———————————
          “Ehh, on second thought let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.”

      2. Sarah, the Whitmer plot tried to follow that model; the particular agents were incompetent at execution.

  25. And with a single scrawly cartoon, the Boog is exposed for the ridiculous fantasy it is. (Yugoslavia, not Wolverines!). Thanks for the clarifying insight. And to quote Michael Yon “Never. Follow. Squirrel.”

  26. Sarah,
    If you notice, the tricky job of enticing was left to paid informants while one of the Feebs in particular was brought in as the ‘explosives’ expert. That is a familiar pattern if you have followed the GWOT arrests. Essentially, the Feebs want a cutout because it makes an entrapment defense more difficult and CI’s can get away with more than a LEO. One of the Whitmer case FBI CI’s actually committed two crimes while he was informing on the Whitmer case and so wasn’t called as a witness.

    In a way, it is the same way that most CIA human spying takes place–either a walkin comes in to volunteer information or they are recruited and paid as informants. Relatively few times will the CIA risk NOC personnel to do a job that can be done by a local source. Funniest movie take on this was Our Man in Havana.

    The observances on trolls comes from my experiences as a moderator on a board involving a controversial constitutional right. You could tell the wannabe types in a few posts after experience and then had to figure out which category of troll that they were. The mentally ill or the disruptor trolls that do it to focus attention on them were the worst of the bunch because of persistence.

    Enjoy your blog and wish you well.

    1. “CI’s can get away with more than a LEO.”

      This. Precisely. The Feds have to get a court order to ask, say, Facebook or Twitter, to turn over your posts so they can go through them. If someone at Twitter just turns them over, you might be able to sue Twitter, but the Feds can use them as evidence provided there’s no record of them asking for them.

      1. It has to be someone that has a right to the posts– that is, someone on the friends list of the poster, or someone tagged in the post. (If it’s a public post, it’s free for all– and that is SHOCKINGLY common.)

        Not someone working for Twitter, unless there’s a warrant.

        Generally, it’s folks like the college kid they’ve “friended” because as long as they’re threatening to murder his grandmother, he’s hauling drugs for them.

        1. Do you have a citation that shows that? Because I do.

          https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-citizens.html

          “Many cases over the years have defined what constitutes an illegal search by law enforcement. But, in some ways, there’s really no such thing as an “illegal” search by a private citizen, at least in the sense that police searches can be illegal: Regardless of issues like lack of probable cause, evidence found by private citizens acting on their own is usually admissible in court. That’s true even if the private citizen committed a crime like trespass or theft to accomplish the search. (Regardless of the admissibility of evidence, though, the citizen will be liable for any crime committed in the course of the search.)”

          And yes, it says exactly what I claimed: You can go after Twitter and or the leaker, but the cops can still use it.

          1. And yes, it says exactly what I claimed

            You claimed that “someone at Twitter” just turning them over.

            And further specified that people could sue Twitter.

            And offered a citation that matches my correction, that it had to be a private citizen rather than the company.

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