Sweeping Day

226 thoughts on “Sweeping Day”

1. Elections are going to be interesting next month. Everyone knows the bloodbath is coming. If it somehow doesn’t come, there’s going to be a lot more talk about cheating. And it’ll come just after the progs have lost control of Twitter.

   1. I really wish people wouldn’t keep using the term “bloodbath” in relation to this election. Tsunami, landslide, tidal wave, those are all catastrophic, but they don’t embody human violence. Let’s just hope for a peaceful, honest, overturning of power from those who have abused it for so long. Just have your ammo and guns nearby the night of the election; because I’m sure that some people, somewhere, are not going to like the results, and will decide to burn the city down, again.

      1. So do we all hope. That the wave of red voting is so comprehensive as to overcome anything the vile progs might do in the way of cheating.

         1. Already documented blue cheating in AZ, CA, FL, PA, TX, and WI.

            The major problem is that even if the GOP wins, the current leadership is too corrupt make significant changes. Be ready to go RINO hunting in 2024!

      2. Seconded.

         Some people would like to see bloodbath be literal.

         Most people would rather it weren’t. Even if it seems like that would solve certain problems.

   2. Wild speculation: Musk backed out of the Twitter deal to delay it to just before the election so the Democrats didn’t build their fraud plans around not having control of public discourse. Now they have to choose between scrapping the fraud and having it be a major topic of conversation.

      1. I don’t know about that, but I kind of like Musk’s style. He walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink, tweeted “Let this sink in!”. The man dropped 44 billion fricking dollars to perpetrate a dad joke. Ya gotta respect that.

         1. To be fair- his purchase of Twitter is exactly like my revenge fantasies.. “If I had enough money, I’d buy this and show them what I think of them!”
            Of course, I don’t have enough money- and am too cheap to really go through with it 😉

            I don’t think for a moment he’s on our side- but he’s against the Regime right now, so thats good enough. Its not enough to make me go back to Social Media- but shutting some folks up is a good start.

            1. Even to Musk I don’t think 44 Billion is chump change. Is he on our side? Don’t know, I suspect he does have some of our groups tendencies, I’m willing to put good money down that he’s read “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem”. For the present I’m willing to accept him as a fellow traveler. The finger he stuck in the eye of the liberals yielded so much delicious schadenfreude. And if Starship works, we have just had a sea change in space travel that rivals steam engines, trains and steam driven ships. On top of that the darned things look like the pictures that Willy Ley drew and were on the cover of “The Rolling Stones”, AND they land by their rockets as the Author and Heinlein intended.

               1. I’m willing to put good money down that he’s read “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem”.

                  I’ve been saying for at least a decade that Elon Musk is the real-life Delos D. Harriman.

   3. I just saw a video clip from New York of somebody in a police uniform taking at least half a dozen Zeldin For Governor signs from people’s yards. In broad daylight. They’re not even slightly worried about getting caught.
      ———————————
      Elections are far too important to be left up to a bunch of uncontrolled voters. The Party MUST exercise oversight and management to prevent mere voters from electing the wrong candidates!

      1. Should have done a citizen arrest, and jailed him in someone’s basement until after the election. Yeah, that would be classified as kidnapping; but you can’t trust anyone in the NYC government to either uphold the law, or do the right thing.

   4. Yep, I’ve no worries about the votes, I worry about the vote counters.

      1. THIS. As sort of a trap (to help prove the cheating is real as most everyone here knows) on my absentee ballot, I double voted with a sharpie (for both the demonrat and the republicrat) on a down ballot race. I crossed out the demonrat and handwrote wrote “no to Democrat”. I believe this is sufficient cause (double -voting) for my vote to be “adjudicated” I wrote down my ballot number and took photos of my ballot too. After the selection, I will request a copy of my ballot and the matching “adjudicated” and copied ballot. If they don’t agree, THEY (cheating counters) have been exposed.

         1. Tom that method won’t work with any decent vote counting system. Here they use a connect the arrows with a sharpie kind of form. I was voting in a while back (2016?) and managed to thrash and got an extra mark in one of the voting areas. it was maybe 3-5 mm (< 1/4″). I toke my vote to the place where you get it registered , and my name and address was checked (again, first was when I got the ballot) by the officials and I entered the form (face down) into the machine. It almost immediately kicked back out and the officials came over. They again checked name and address. They exchanged my ballot for a fresh blank one which both officials had verified as blank before handing me. Before I stepped back to mark my new ballot my ballot was put into a shredder that shredded into a clear plastic bag. Total time from start to end for my failed ballot ~3 minutes. THAT is the way balloting should be run, 2 man rule ALL the way through. Vote when entered is counted by the machine and drops into a locked vault underneath. Polls close at 8pm votes are tallied from the machines and summed up by ~9pm. Paper votes are in those little safes read to either be recounted by machine or hand, The machine has checked, no over votes no stray markings nothing to be Florida’s hanging chad of 2000. I know a couple of the little old ladies that are the poll officials, I asked. WTF Atlanta and others were doing beats me (although something nefarious seems highly likely). Heck even the absentee and early vote’s seem to be done on a fill in the bubble form which also can be machine counted and stored. Not saying you can’t rig this, especially if a pair of poll workers was willing to collaborate and lie on various forms. And yeah massive vote by mail is a DEEP invitation to fraud.

            1. I believe the goal here is to “Trust but Verify” . The state I vote in uses those little circles and believe me, a sharpie bleeds through the ballot. After the last fraudulent selection, they will have to earn back the trust of half the electorate that managed to decide to vote again in hopes that their vote might actually be counted honestly. I’m sure quite a few people have called it quits on voiting too. (Why vote to legitimize fraud?). I call either a massive red landslide or fraud to the max. to achieve Steal 22 (but barely enough to for Demonrats to keep Congress.).

               1. We use singled sided ballots. No problems from bleed through.

                  1. Actually, after all we’ve been through, I think corporis delectum and red-dyed fingers might be the final solution. LOL

            2. Not saying you can’t rig this, especially if a pair of poll workers was willing to collaborate and lie on various forms.

               Best way to deal with that is the way it worked in Virginia, where by law every polling place had both GOP and Dem poll-workers.

               1. That’s the law in a lot of places. The Democrats just break it. Like they did in 2020. They broke state election laws, federal election laws, defied court orders and violated the Constitution. I’m still waiting for ANY of them to face any consequences.
                  ———————————
                  Grandpa voted Republican until the day he died — but he’s been voting Democrat ever since.

               2. Not sure if that is required here in Massachusetts (one of the other 2 commonwealths) but it is generally what I observe in my suburban North Shore town. Of course Essex County outside the cities is more Republican than Democrat. Its just that Salem, Lynn, Lawrence outnumber us. In parts of Salem you might be hard pressed to find enough republicans to be anything 🙂 let alone poll watchers.

               3. Texas has the same law. But who picks? And how do you check whether the “Republican” is one? If the County clerk and the local DA are Democrats, a lot gets through.

            3. Not saying you can’t rig this, especially if a pair of poll workers was willing to collaborate and lie on various forms.

               In Virginia every polling station was required to have both Republican and Democratic poll-workers.

2. OK back to “conspiracy theories” are the new spoiler alerts.

3. > And what do you suggest precisely? That the world buckle down and give Russia everything? WHY?

   John Brunner advocated precisely that at a big SF convention in California in… 1963? Because if we didn’t let the Rooskies have their way, we were all going to diiiie!

   He apparently didn’t get the responses he was expecting, and returned to England a bitter man; his writing took a sharp turn to the dark after that.

   1. Never heard that one. And wow, that sounds like it would have been great to be a fly on the wall….

   2. Funny how Reagan faced down the Russians like the sheriff facing down the outlaw in a gun fight. Most of the time, the choices are: you either shoot first, shoot straighter, or intimidate the other guy into giving up. But there’s a fourth choice when facing a gun pointed at you. Attack, charge, and accept the risk of injury or death to gain a fighting chance. Giving up is almost always the wrong thing to do.

   3. Of course, we’ll all going to die. The question how do you want to live? I refused to ruled by leftwing fearmongering.

      1. I like Heinlein’s comment in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long: “It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.” 🙂

4. I’m going to have to go find the definition of decadence that Whatifalthist used. I forget the specifics but it was something along the lines of getting so wrapped up in your cultural myth that you forget to deal with physical reality, usually because myth-measuring competitions had replaced measurable results for social advancement.

   So the Bahramans directing more temples to be built to deal with the invading neighbors, the Chinese bureaucrats decided that it was more important to have bureaucrats than armies when the barbarians are rampaging through.

   I sort of think having enough money makes it easier to sustain those sorts of self delusions for longer, but does not seem to be required.

   1. You can’t say our Brahmandarins haven’t gone there. Flag rank of all the armed services seems to have gone insane. Navy was budgeting more time for fricking touchy feely, Gender and racial nonsense than to training in navigation and war fighting skills. Army and Air Force seemed similar. People talk of teeth and tail. In our case the teeth end seems to have a case of near fatal gingivitis and the tail seems to have grown its own “brain” like the used to tell us dinosaurs had and is trying to run the joint.

      1. Good analogy. And what they’re trying to do to the Marine Corps should get a few of them drawn, quartered and keelhauled; no particular order. My DI is probably spinning like a turbine. 😦

         1. Apologies to forgetting The Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Space Force and Uniformed members of the National Weather Service. As far as I can tell they are also thoroughly screwed and likely combat ineffective. And the most bizarre of all is the Surgeon General and the uniformed Health service people . Lordy, I’m surprised a zombie C. Everrett Koop hasn’t arisen from the grave to wreak vengeance.

            1. No apology necessary; I only mentioned it because I’m a former active-duty Marine, and what the jackasses are trying to do to the Corps pisses me off.

               1. As well it should…

5. c4c

6. Thanks Sarah. Another gem.

   1. K. I saw ur review! Glad you liked it. It’s a different sci-fi novel for sure! An eclectic medley perhaps of genres? email me for a signed copy as a thank you. Just need a few more reviews so I can try some of those online ad amalgamators with their sci fi mailing lists. (I think you need about 10 reviews to get on many of them). tahunter.author at that gmail place.

      1. Oh my word! I had the good fortune of being off work for a week with a sinus infection and I could not put the story down! It felt real in a way most stories reach for but don’t quite attain.
         I’ll surely accept a signed copy though your work earned the good review on its own merit. 🙂

         1. Waiting for your email with a mailing address. I’ll send it book rate USPS

            1. Email sent from a comcast account, just now.

7. Rational thought instead of Feelz?
   Yes.

8. The rumbling sound is Fluffy attempting to pop enough popcorn. (He’s also melting butter, but that’s quieter, if only because the aardvark is keeping an eye on it.)

   1. Does the Aardvark know how to clarify butter? Popping popcorn in clariefied butter is quite tasty, and it should keep Fluffy from overworking the flame systems. Nobody wants an asthmatic dragon (or one with a bad cold, sloppy AND flaming yeesh)

9. Best debunking of conspiracy theories I ever read is Michael Flynn’s book In the Country of the Blind. The basic premise is that Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine was successfully built, in secret, and has been in the hands of a conspiracy to control the direction of history.

   Except that, as the story goes on, there is another century-plus-long conspiracy trying to do the same thing… and then another… and then three more… and then one that doesn’t try to change anything, just to get rich off of stock market predictions, and then… and then… and then…

   And one of the original members of the original conspiracy saw that, even without counting twenty-seven of them all at odds with each other, the original could not last beyond the first generation, and the proof was the children’s game of Telephone. The succeeding generations simply would not have the same aims as the original, even if they intended to and believed they did.

   Something like this is why I think copyright should not last as long as it does. Very few authors’ estates manage their intellectual property in a way the author would have liked. They mostly exist to perpetuate their own existence and bleed the IP for as much money as possible. I only know of two sort-of counter examples, and one of them, Tolkien’s estate, only continued to honor Tolkien’s legacy until his son died. Ever since, they have been beclowning themselves with a vengeance.

   So, even if a conspiracy is successful and efficacious (HAH!), it cannot possibly survive past the first generation of conspirators. The form may go on, but the content will be mutated beyond all recognition.

   1. Jack Chalker’s “War Of Shadows” was an interesting “fight against a conspiracy”.

      A few aspects of the novel come to mind.

      First, the Good Guys were a special team of FBI agents working against an unknown-to-them terrorist group (which were the pawns of the Bad Guys). They were a tightknit team and thanks to a mistake by the Bad Guys knew that the Bad Guys had agents within the FBI & other government agencies, so they used special means to ensure that none of the Bad Guys were among them. (Likely unconstitutional means but they were operating under State Of Emergency Rules).

      Second, the Bad Guys weren’t in complete control but were intending to use the terrorist attacks to take complete control.

      Third, the Bad Guys almost won but the Good Guys learned everything about them in time and managed to bluff them into abandoning their goals.

      Finally, the Leader of the Good Guys believed that they won (with the bluff) mainly because the Bad Guys were the second/third generation of the conspiracy. The original conspirators would have realized earlier that the Good Guys existed and would not have been bluffed.

      1. I may have to turn in my geek card, since I’ve never ready any Chalker. And don’t have time to rectify that for at least a year or two.

         Sounds like a good one, though.

         1. Well of Souls and River of the Dancing Gods series are the two main ones of his that I have. Good yarns. I have a random two or three of this other books.

            1. Also the Four Lords Of The Diamond and Spirits Of Flux & Anchor series.

               1. Yes. For a writer who was personally very ideologically on the left, his work covers a broad range of stuff and usually doesn’t get preachy. All of the above mentioned series are recommended.

               2. I fondly remember flux & Anchor, came along at a time when (Mid-life recommendations?) my mind really needed stretching.

                  1. email me at tahunter.author at gmail dot com. I want to mail you a signed book copy.

                  2. Oh yeah, I forgot about that series. Probably because it’s somewhere up in the attic.

            2. The Well of Souls stuff has a tendency to drag on at points, but in general it works well,
               Never got into Four Lords of the Diamond. I will note if you are an audible subscriber Well of souls is a free audio book. Its the old Heroin/Cocaine dealer first taste is free trick.

         2. Unrelated, I love your new profile image, it’s like Tony Stark, Xanatos, and Cute.

            1. David Xanatos? I loved Gargoyles back in the day.

               1. Same.

               2. Voiced by Jonathan Frakes of ST:TNG fame.

            2. Thank you kindly. I get some good stuff out of MidJourney.

   2. Odd. I thought Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine was only good for making cloth patterns.

      1. Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine was an automatic polynomial evaluator. The Analytical Engine was intended to be a programmable mechanical calculator/computer with 1,000 40-digit registers, a fixed-point decimal ALU, and a punched-card program reader similar to those used on Jacquard looms. Conditional branching and loop operations were to be implemented in the program sequencer.

         Babbage never built the Analytical Engine (that we know of) but the basic design seems sound, if probably beyond the state of 1840’s precision machining. Several attempts have been made to build Analytical Engines, or parts of them, but so far nobody has managed to assemble both the resources and the obsession to build a complete Engine.

         Some people have built Difference Engines with Legos.

         The Enigma code analyzers Alan Turing built at Bletchley Park had some similarities to Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
         ———————————
         Frederick Frankenstein: “What a filthy job.”
         I-Gor: “Could be worse.”
         Frederick: “How?”
         I-Gor: “Could be raining.”
         [Thunder]
         Frederick: [Gives I-Gor a very dirty look]

      2. Hey, I put a post here about Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine and it’s gone! WPDE grrrrr…

         1. It’s B-a-a-a-ck. 🙂

   3. For copyright I think it should be the longer of life of the author or 18 years. You can profit from your work your entire life and your final work can help your children reach adulthood. After that the work enters the public domain.

      1. “Life of the author” can get thorny with pen names, works for hire, and so on. I prefer the old US system of a defined number of years from publication, with a paid renewal of an additional term. But leaving the renewal may lead people to think extending indefinitely, as we almost had (and might have again) is acceptable. It’s really not. Public domain is the default, copyright is a limited exception for a specific purpose.

         And, honestly, lack of copyright led to us having the second half of Don Quixote. Cervantes avoided writing it for ten years, until somebody published, anonymously, a second half that was so bad that Cervantes got pissed off, wrote his, and kept making asides in it about how bad writers might do thus-and-such, virtually always an example from the anonymous work that so incensed him.

         Yes, we got the completion of a world classic because of badly done fanfic. Maybe of GRRM lost the rights to Clash of Kings (first published in 1996, so the original US copyright term of 28 years, including extensions, would almost be up), bad fanfic could egg him into finishing the series. And it’s not like he’s failed to make money from it.

         1. My protest on htat is that I might live another thirty years, some of the books are 20 years old. And I kind of HAVE to count on some of that to keep me from the poor house in my old age.
            My kids and grandkids? Let them make their own money.

            1. I tended toward 20 year limit but I buy your argument, life of author is just and fair, so I quite agree.

               Now how do we keep copy rights in the hands of the authors, rather than the publishers?

               1. Well, that’s changing as we go more indie.

            2. I’d say life of the author unless there are minor children.

               1. “Writer Dad, please adopt your great-grandchildren!”

                  1. “Oh, no one would ever do that!” (sarc off)

                     That said, I agree with life of author or majority of biological children, whichever comes last. (need to work out details of actual adoptees vs. adoptees-of-convenience).

                     Of course, as a non-author my preferences are only theoretical.

            3. For actual authors(composers etc) I think life of the Author + N (where N is something under 20) should work. For Works for hire, Some M years, maybe same as patent, maybe with one renewal total not more than 50 years from initial publication. Pseudonyms, if it is attributable to a single author (E.G. Anson MacDonald is RAH) same rules as a single author. If it is a Corporate Pseudonym like Nancy Drew mysteries had its a work for hire. If the is ANY doubt it reverts to the actual author unless that can’t be found in which case Works For hire rule rules. Public Domain HAD a purpose. So much depends on letting later groups take advantage of earlier stories. Many of Shakespeare’s works (Hamlet) are based on extant stories that he just raised to a new level.
               Our Hostess is right, a large part of having a decent old age as an author seems to be having a back catalog that is producing income. I’m all for that and feel that’s a fair trade off to the advantage of having the information in the public domain. Also only fair to let authors deal with their characters when the author is alive.

               1. Already is. Work for hire or pseudonymous is 90 years from release.

                  1. I would prefer to see that closer to the old 34 year basis (skip the 17 year renewal thing). 90 years is ludicrous especially for software works. I’ll likely be dead and buried by the time Pong enters public domain.

            4. Exact term is arguable. But a set term from date of publication at least lets the creator know they should keep creating if they want royalties past that term. And since encouraging makers to keep making is the raison d’etre of copyright, as stated in the Constitution, well, there you go.

               I figure if I argue for 28, and we dial back to 56, the way it used to be, that’s a win.

               1. 56 would be fine.

                  1. It is certainly to be preferred over 95 years, which is the current expiry for works that got properly renewed, or life plus 70, which is the current term.

         2. Pen names shouldn’t be that hard for the person alleging copyright violation to establish. Presenting a sales or distribution agreement for some of the pen name’s work that predates those of the person who violated the copyright should do it. At the very least a notarized document along the lines of “I intend to write and publish dinosaur erotica under the pen name Joe Blow” should be sufficient. For heirs you would just add standard proof of inheritance and a publication date less than 18 years in the past.

            1. Pen names shouldn’t be that hard for the person alleging copyright violation to establish.

               “Well, I don’t think thus and such is a big deal at all…” virtually always belies a limited view of things. You’re only taking it from one direction. How about someone coming across a story nobody remembers, by an author under a pen name or a house name, whose real identity has not been established? First, how can they be certain it was a pen name in the first place. Second, how do they tie it to a specific writer, in order to establish a definite death date? Third, if the author had a name like Joe Smith, how do you make absolutely certain it was the right Joe Smith?

               As someone who republishes public domain fiction, this is something I have to deal with, and sometimes it is a right pain in the ass, especially convincing Amazon that someone who died in 1934 with no apparent heirs, and no obituaries in “approved” sources, actually died then, actually had no heirs, and had zero copyright renewals. Yes, they require me to prove negatives.

               And that’s before getting to the fact that publishers, literary agents, and even heirs have zero compunction against lying. The author who died in 1934 that I have in mind has several books that publishers and agents claim had their copyrights renewed in the 1950s. There are no such renewals registered. But they keep on claiming it, even so.

               And while quite a number of pen names have been undisputably connected to specific writers (Max Brand was one of over a dozen pen names Frederick Schiller Faust used), there are still pulp stories whose authorship is not established, and others that are only tentatively so. Their lack of renewal registrations establishes their public domain status in the United States, but I literally cannot publish them outside the US, according to Amazon, because without established authorship, there is no established death date for the author, and thus no way of determining when “life plus 70” ends.

               So things are a fair bit more complicated than your scenario takes into account.

               1. You’re talking about extreme edge cases as if they’re generally applicable. In fact, the specific scenario you mention would be easier under my proposal. Unless they died very young it would be implausible that they’re still alive. Since they died more than 18 years ago the copyright would have lapsed, heirs or renewals be damned.

                  1. Fixed term after publication is still easier, more open, and more transparent. And if I’m talking about “extreme edge cases”, perhaps you could explain to me why I’ve had to deal with several, before I’ve even published a hundred books.

                     You have an opinion. I have experience. Your fantasy might work the way you imagine it would, but given how the actual laws work and are applied, and the interests invested in extending copyright terms as far as possible, I rather doubt it would work as intended, and I know it won’t come to pass while I’m still breathing.

                     1. Since we’re talking about changing the laws your experience is irrelevant. It’s quite clear that your ego is overriding your brain.

   4. I mean thats almost all foundations. Any of these tax avoidance tricks used by the hyper rich and connected will be taken and used to the behest of the forktongued. At best you have people just trying to ride them and take all the money they can, at worst you get actively damaging ones like Ford foundation. we have worst of all worlds. Antique products are nursed along as cash cows and thus prevent newer options from being feasible (epipens, jets, comic books), or get rubber stamped again and again to keep it rare.

   5. Something like this is why I think copyright should not last as long as it does.

      Different angle agreement, but if it’s valuable enough to protect it like patents… it is valuable to be released for public use like patents, just with some minor adjustments to allow profit to be made.

   6. “So, even if a conspiracy is successful and efficacious (HAH!), it cannot possibly survive past the first generation of conspirators. The form may go on, but the content will be mutated beyond all recognition.”

      Sounds like a conspiracy to debunk conspiracy theorists.

      After you spend some serious time in the history books, tracing modern day connections between organizations and individuals, plus doing forensic accounting, you realize that it’s not a conspiracy, just an multi-generation aristocracy of evil arseholes and their minions with a core of what our hostess calls “Lizard People” instead of the more technically correct identifiers.

      Realize Smedley Butler was right and still is. So was Eugene McCarthy. Also Kanye West.

   7. I think the 1790 Congress copyright law (14 years, renewable once so max 28 years) was much better than the current day one.
      Disney made a lot of money telling public domain stories and locking up pieces of them with copyright (or threat of copyright litigation – a lot of fair use art was probably quashed due to not wanting to fight their lawyers), then pushing to get copyright extended every time the Giant Rodent got close to going into public domain.
      Given our longer lifespans I can see extending to life of author but life +50 years, or 75 years for corporate works is counterproductive to the purpose of copyright.

10. If I recall correctly the one time that Putin threatened to use force against the US while Trump was President, Trump essentially told Putin that if there is war with Russia, Moscow gets nuked first. Putin backed down.

    Thugs respect strength, and Trump, by repeatedly projecting strength of the “f-ck with us and you get f-cked” variety, became the first President in a long time to not start a war and the first one since Reagan to deter attacks on the USA.

    Wishful thinking while singing kumbaya is a recipe for national suicide. On the other hand, a lot of Democrats clearly think that would be a good idea.

    1. Right?

    2. I was informed that it’s now “. . . all join hands and sing ‘It Only Takes a Spark.’ ” Which is a wee bit too close to home in this case.

       1. It’s easier to sing than “it only takes a critical mass”

       2. Or “We Will All Go Together When We Go”

          1. Oh, we will all char together when we char
             And let there be no moaning of the bar
             Just sing out a Te Deum
             When you see that ICBM
             And the party will be come-as-you-are

             The forced rhyme of Te Deum with ICB M(ehem) is just beautiful, brings tears to my eyes. Tom Lehrer may be a raving loonie leftist, but outside of him and Weird Al there are few other folks making such hilarious lyrics and music.

    3. Eh, for better or worse Bush 2 had a similar reputation. Part of why Qadaffi actually started to at least act cooperatively. Of course the US threw that away when they followed France in to topple him and create Isus. Now, along with Iraq’s fall and the Taliban’s defeats of the DC Empire its obvious that the US word has an expiration date of less than two decades, although the stupidity of trusting the US should have been apparent since Vietnam. But today, instead of a Marshall plan the DC empire simply imports alphabet ideology and bribe money.

       1. The Shock and Awe in Iraq war (part deux) actually shocked and awed someone. The amazing thing is to some degree the rules of engagement STILL had us pussyfooting (no offense to felines) about compared to what we could have done even with just conventional arms as we had them.

          1. As far as I can tell the RoE in WWII reduced to “see enemy; shoot enemy”. We might be better off if that hadn’t changed. (Of course, WWII was the last actual war in which the US was involved, so…)

    4. There’s also the issue that with the price of oil as low as Trump got it, Russia just plain couldn’t afford to cause any trouble.

       1. THIS 100 times this. Trump’s energy policies were sending the Russians to the poorhouse. Anyone who though Trump was colluding with Russia/Putin was clearly smoking the wacky weed. Because the Turnip in Chief bowed ( or his puppeteers did) to the crazy greenies in the Democrat party he/they let Putin out of the box.

          1. THIS

          2. Yep. It always fractures me when the Left pulls the “Russia collusion” idiocy; it would be like Jeff Davis being accused of colluding with Abe. The worst outcome for Russia in ’16 was a Trump victory.

             Come to think of it, with the Left’s usual habit of transference, maybe there was collusion with Russia, just not by Trump. Hmmm…

             1. That last has occurred to me.

                1. There clearly was because the people in charge of Fusion GPS, who created the bogus dossier, met with a key Russian player both before and after her meeting with Trump, Jr., in NY (the one where it became clear to Trump’s team early on that the meeting was obtained through false pretenses and they quickly ended it). Team Hillary was working actively with the Russians, and the Obama DOJ, FBI and CIA had to have known about it.

                2. It’s always seemed odd to me that the party that never met a leftist it didn’t like and routinely sympathized with left-wing regimes while seeing all right-wing ones as “dangers to democracy,” suddenly decided to hate on Russia. It has a strong flavor of, “Look, it’s all for show, it’s easier to manipulate the plebs if we point them at, “the Russians.” ”
                   But then they seem to have actually started believing their own propaganda. Did our left wing decide the Russians were No True Commies, or what?

                   1. Particularly because they had no idea why we didn’t like the soviets, so they decided we just hated Russians for no reason. Because why not.
                      THEN they drank their own ink, because they always do. Sigh.

       2. THIS. He was beating our enemies with bags of money. It worked.

    5. Forget threatening. the one time Putin used actual force against the US under Trump the mercs got so much hell dropped on them from so many different sources that they routed.

       IIRC I think a bunch even drowned trying to get back across the river they had crossed.

11. Apparently the regime is sicking the FBI on people who express disagreement with Democratic Party dogma and treating them as criminals for “spreading election disinformation”

    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/10/28/heres-what-i-asked-the-fbis-election-crimes-coordinator-about-its-calling-misinformation-an-election-crime-n1640888

    They may be incompetent, but they are certainly making an effort to ensure that they retain power by “any means necessary”.

    1. Yeah. I though Spencer nailed it though. Although I am wondering if we’ll see tomorrow’s news saying the FBI did a no knock raid on his house.

       1. I am expecting a lot of those in the next two weeks with some of them being against candidates in key races.

    2. They’re going insane. This is why I say the next few years will suck.

       1. Madam I fear your verb(s) in the first sentence are in the wrong tense. Past tense probably is more suited to the issue.

          1. I’d go with “have been and still are”. 🙂

             1. My understanding is some languages have a continuous past perfect, Koine(biblical) Greek is one example. the “As it was and ever shall be” is about as close as you can get to in English.

                1. I’m not exactly an expert in languages; my knowledge ends with “English is the result of Norman men-at-arms trying to get dates with Saxon barmaids”. 🙂

                   It’s a very good thing, IMHO, that English, as it developed after 1066, evolved as a non-literate patois, and thius managed to shed many of the useless traits of more “sophisticated” languages; gender of inanimate objects being one of the more obvious.

                   1. It has been fun to watch Anglophone alphabet people step on the rake that is grammatical gender, aka latinx.

                      But yes, I’m happy with a mongrel language that occasionally mugs others for vocabulary. Loan words? Are they expecting them back?

12. “Bullsh*t is a sucky building material. Let’s not use it.”

    If you’re headed west to the frontier, though, it makes good campfire fuel. See buffalo chips.

    1. Uh, no, dried dung is not ‘good’ fuel; it’s just all you have sometimes. Would YOU want to cook over a pile of burning crap?

       1. Ah. Yes, I see your point. Thank you.

       2. It’s an acquired taste. Many Indians immigrants claim to miss it.
          (I’m not vouching for the veracity of such statements, but they are made.)

          1. They’d get a lot of complaints from the neighbors. 😀

          2. Oddly enough. Many of us dairy farm raised folks like an occasional wiff of cow patties.

       3. :waggles hand:

          It’s quite good for making heat, which can let you save your non-nasty fuel for cooking.

          (the smell also varies a LOT, from “yep, that’s burning cow poop” to “huh? I thought that was like lawn clippings”)

          A matter of effective use of available resources.

          1. You’re supposed to use very well dried cow dung. Never tried it while I was growing up. Stuff dropped in the fields just turned into fertilizer naturally. And I never had any desire to play with the stuff I shoveled out of barns, especially when the automated manure removal machine broke.

             1. Domestic Revolution has two opening chapter on what people used before coal. One on wood. The other on the other stuff. Turns out there is a LOT of art into burning a lot of things.

                In particular, remember the cows were eating a rather different diet than current day cows.

       4. Yup being a plains Indian (pardon me, native american) must have been a real pleasure, Dust baths, tough old bison roasted over dried bison sh*t, or bison jerky. Robes made from poorly tanned Bison hide. Nose probably stopped working at about 2 months old. Winters so fricking cold it’ll freeze the balls of a brass monkey. Yeh Hollywood had no fricking clue “Little Big Man” and “Dances with wolves” my maiden aunts (deceased) ass… And they bought in to Sachen Littlefeather’s nonsense. At least Lieawatha had a thought she was 1/1024th native american. As far as we can tell Littlefeather wasn’t even that.

          1. Nope; the evidence I read of says zero native American genetics. My real question is, why didn’t she (and Fauxcahontas) simply say they “identify as” native? Hey, if it works for trans-whatevers and about ten thousand genders, and can’t be denied because “phobia”, why not?

             I plan to somehow get a Ma Deuce and get it “identified” as a flintlock musket… 🙂

             1. Yup indeed 0 < .001. Littlefeather didn’t say that because in 1970 something we were STILL sane enough to have laughed our asses off at hearing it. Lieawatha didn’t because at least at some point she believed it was true. My family (father’s side) claimed a Mohawk Ancestor (female). Family came from upstate NY so never really made sense. Mohawks being folks who kept their word sided with George the III in the revolutionary war and mostly ended up in Canada. Dug to amuse myself and actually found French Canadians you came down into upstate NY in the mid 1800s. Don’t see any obvious female Mohawk in the 2 Generations I can see in detail but that only reaches back to the 1790’s or so. Would I put it down as part my CV? Umm, no, actually HELL NO even if I could certify it. Mohawks wouldn’t let me be a tribal member anyhow but it would be interesting. The one that would have been fun to have in ancestry would have been a little Connecticut tribe. I remember going on a field trip early 70’s where we saw some excavations and got to talk with one of the last full blooded member of the tribe of which there were something like 50 members known. Looks wise he was hard to distinguish from my maternal grandfather. That tribe, an obscure one, perhaps of you’ve heard of them the Mohegans? The ones like this (https://mohegansun.com/) I think every last member of the tribe is a multi millionaire…

                1. Not just that. See Dolezal. You’re not ALLOWED to identify as another race.
                   Race, which is something hard to define (yes, even genetically Husband for sure HAS Amerindian blood — obvious through some health issues in kids — BUT it doesn’t show. Apparently Amerindians, even leaders, are not fond of getting tested) we hold as absolutely true and unbreakable.
                   Sex, which is an iron clad concept and easy to see under the microscope (even if there are “sports” of course) we hold as absolutely non-existent, and you should JUST self-declare.
                   There you have it. Our current age.

                2. A kid (okay he’s at least 31 now) a class behind son’s has a multitude of documented tribal ancestry, both sides of the family. Not one of them is recognized on any tribal roll. Oh the tribes involved agree the documentation is legit. But, seems like the casino tribes are “trimming the roles”. (Or when the US government is handing out the money, the more on the roles the better. When the tribe has to share out Their money …) Does not help that the British Isle red head gene is what gets passed down.

                3. I’ve been told that my maternal grandfather’s grandfather married into one of the tribes; Shawnee, IIRC. My grandfather said it was a myth, so I have no idea what the truth might have been. No big deal; we’re all people, some more rational than others. 🙂

             2. The DNA tests for New England and eastern Canadian residents are hampered by the fact that there was so much early intermarriage with European settlers that it’s nearly impossible to separate any unique Iroquois confederation dna markers from the broader population, especially when so few Iroquois (and I doubt there are many left with no European admixture) will get tested. If the test shows Quebec, Ontario, or the New England state ancestry you can’t rule out (nor in) Iroquois ancestry.

                1. Most North America Indian tribes do not want their DNA into the DNA test databases.

                   IIRC the official reason is that they don’t want people claiming that they are members of their tribes unless they have documented evidence for tribal ancestry.

                   Oh, some have said that the tribes don’t want their DNA into the databases because it might show that the tribal leaders aren’t “true Indians”. [Crazy Grin]

                   1. It is a known fact that Quanah Parker was at least half European …

                      1. well, obviously, since his mother was a kidnapped European girl. From whom he got the surname.

                         1. Exactly. Every tribe practiced this. Just most aren’t as prominent in history. Very few tribal members currently do not have some, or a majority of, European blood lines. Then there is the way DNA is inherited. They don’t want those denied enrollment to show more native tribal DNA than those on the tribal rolls.

                            1. And, on top of that, it didn’t matter how you got the blood. If you were a wife annoyed at the way your husband carried on with his white captive, and snuck off, from frustration, to sleep with a white peddler, that child would also be, like the captive’s, more likely to live when measles or whatever hit.

                   2. This came up when they DNA tested the current chief of the MacDonalds. There’s a mutation common to almost all of them and should the chief not have it then who the chief is would be … interesting. They found the mutation, which proved he’s a MacDonald but little more since, well, they’re all related up there anyway.

                2. Add in the known norm of slave-taking– oh, wait, my teacher called it “adoption,” because that’s a great way to describe killing off everyone but the young females– and oh holy heck no the officially recognized tribes do NOT want to bring DNA into the game.

                   1. Not just the young females were kept alive. Young children were kept alive too (children would forget). More than a few young men too, fewer than the women and children, mostly because they’d be killed fighting.

    2. Actually B.S. pressed into bricks, carefully dried, and sintered in an oxygen-deprived furnace will make an excellent, lightweight carbonized brick! LOL. Instead of living in a house of cards, I suggest everyone live in a house of B.S. LOL.

       1. There was some point that someone had come up with a similar strategy for Lunar or Martian construction back in the L5 Society days.

       2. I already have a television, thank you very much. That’s enough BS for this house.
          Although maybe a brick would improve it.

    3. Horse sh-t does. It’s a key part of daub.

       1. They learned from watching pigeons build nests?

13. Folks egos cannot handle being largely ignored by a cabal de-jure of semi-competent pea-wits fluster-clucking their way to their next screw-up.

    Hypheneticly speaking.

    Seriously, though. People will invent the dark sinister forces conspiring against them to explain away their own foolish mistakes. At least they get some importance from being worth a plot or three.

14. At the risk of getting carped, I will argue on behalf of the hard times meme. Sort of.

    It would be truer to say that weak men don’t survive hard times, so what you have left at the end is the inherently strong, and those who would otherwise be weak but found it in themselves to get strong.

    Easy times have a lot more leeway for the kind of professional useless person who undermines the infrastructure that makes the times easy.

    1. In good times you can survive the storytellers that are full of it. You can let them get fingers in the pot and skim off productivity and be parasites. All that these “good times” denote is shorthand for growing complacency. Folks that lived thru the depression had canned food, lard, and reused their tin foil because they had been bitten. In the century since we have gotten to the point where massive chunks of what you buy have to come along a narrow supply chain that is already failing regularly, but because we haven’t had a real system crash since the 70s everyone is complacent and saves a penny by passing the buck somewhere else. That mixture of lick and past skill are where the weak men come along. Just like California is limping on infrastructure that predates the first Jerry brown years, why so much of our technology except advertising (the tech industry is just ad agencies that get you to work for them for free) is small tweaks to stuff designed in the 60s, and why massive leaps in physical tech or infrastructure seem to come from a small handful of folks who do it on a lark like musk. It would help significantly if we could get the red tape away so that you didn’t already need to be massively wealthy to contribute but it still doesn’t solve the issue of complacency. It’s simple newtonian physics. It’s simpler to go with the flow and pay off the friction with bread and circuses than it is to reroute around or over them.

       1. “the tech industry is just ad agencies that get you to work for them for free”

          I’d say it’s more like the tech industry is a group of test organizations that use the public as negative-paid labor.

          1. “We’re all just beta-testing for the Amish”.

    2. The meme happens to be true, just not necessarily from the point of view being used.

       The cycle of history is largely of power being consolidated, the centralized polis becoming decadent, the provinces becoming oppressed, the borders becoming neglected, the barbarian invasion, skip twoish generations, repeat.

       Decadence is the natural consequence of men who do not delay self gratification. Weakness is the natural consequence of decadence. People who do not suffer the consequences of their actions have no incentive to delay self gratification or possess sound judgement. Centralization always causes decadence and corruption.
       It was not the wealth of Versailles, Weimar, or Dizzy City that caused decadence. But the consolidation of wealth in all three was a primary cause of decadence.
       It’s not the wealth, it’s the consolidation of wealth, by those who did not produce it.

       As to conspiracy theories, powerful people and organizations constantly conspire.
       Sometimes they’re even successful.
       (The Big Tech cartel, Soros’ assault on the British pound, the theft of the 2020 elections, to name only three.)
       That said, the Secret Masters are neither secret nor masters. Sociopaths, yes. Certainly a number of evil geniuses. But operating with imperfect knowledge (at best) of the circumstances and people they’re attempting to control. Groupthink and herd mentality let them get away with it unscathed entirely too often. But when the manufactured consensus fails, or the unexpected dramatically happens, they’ll desperately knife each other to try to save their own sorry hides.

       There are some constants. The family will always be targeted as a rival source of power and authority. Religion will be targeted, co-opted, or some combination of the two. Etc.

15. Via the insty open thread-2 funny not to post and laughs are of the good:

    

16. And then there’s the “We’re all going insane because we are too prosperous.” That one makes me want to reach through the screen with a baseball bat.

    Folks aren’t going insane, they’re BEING SPOILED.

    …hm.

    I think I figured it out– because I know folks who grew up well off, even well off for their area, and aren’t jacked up.

    Prosperity doesn’t cause bad parenting. Prosperity means that it’s possible to survive bad parenting.

    Please note how many folks here survived bad parenting, before suggesting that it’s best the kids not survive such bad parenting…..

    1. The first part sounds right to me, and the last part is absolutely right. Being raised by wolves, or chickens as one discussion elsewhere went, really does leave you in a bad place.

       1. :e-hug:

    2. I keep being appalled by the people I see with nose rings, multiple piercings, massive tattoos, and so forth. The anime-colored hair doesn’t bug me like the permanent alterations. But to me, sleeve tats and a nose ring say, “decadence.”

       1. Permanence and … get-in-the-way-ness … does seem like it’s an importance distinction.
          Not sure I’d call it decadence, but being common and extreme does seem to point at A Problem.

          1. It’s decadence plain and simple. Had a coworker that loved them some body art. Do you know how much a nice sleeve tattoo done by a decent artist. $5-10K and UP. And you are talking MANY multiple hour sessions sitting while someone uses a nasty needle machine to shove ink under your skin. And in 25-30 years its going to look like crap. Had an uncle who had the obligatory navy tattoo during service in WWII. You could distinguish it well in the 60’s when I was a kid, anchor with his ships name on a banner wrapped around the anchor. By the 80’s (last time I saw him) it was effectively a blob of blue/black color. Investing that time and money in something that only amuses you is decadence just like buying a Corvette or a fancy summer home. Just you MIGHT be able to sell the Vette or property 🙂 .

             1. Best Navy tattoo I ever saw was a lawn mower, on a guy’s forearm.

                He shaved behind it every morning….

                1. Oh heavens that’s genius. It is also devotion to a joke, mad props to that guy wherever he is.

                2. LOL

                3. Oh, that’s great! Did he ever fail to shave it, and when asked say, “Nah, didn’t feel like mowing this week”? Seems a perfect addition to the joke. 🙂

                   1. :laughs: I have no idea, I was knee high to a grasshopper and quite intimidated. WWII vet from the same social circles as my mom’s dad.

             2. Zilch the Tory Steller does an ‘aside’ where he rants about tattoos. One part is, “Draw the tattoo you thing you want. Now copy it with Silly Putty. Stretch the Silly Putty. That’s your tattoo in 20 (30?) years!”

                1. Indeed, especially if you were a heavy set (pudgy to be honest) 20 something when you got the tattoo and went through several weight loss/gain cycles in your life.

                   1. I think there’s going to be some weird sights in the nursing homes in a few years.

                2. “It is one thing to be young and stupid. It is quite another to permanently brand yourself with the stupid.”

                   Soooo thankful I never got tattoos…

                   1. Ditto. Even when I was young, stupid and a Marine, I refused to go that far.

             3. Some of the stuff strikes me as self-destructive hatred.

                An unbalanced person can put work into appearance X, figuring it will get them social response Y, and ignore that other people getting social response Y are behaving less obnoxiously, and then get angry and demoralized. Switching to dumping work into appearance Z, and thereby destroying appearance X, can be a way of lashing out over the lack of social response Y, by hurting the only person available to hurt, oneself.

                Is this the grand unified theory of ‘kids these days, and their customs’? No.

                But there can be quite a bit more going on than young/thoughtless, spoiled, or decadent.

                1. I have no issue with folks getting tattoos. Not my thing and I think they may find in a paraphrase of the words of Cmdr Spock to his betrothed that wanting is far more satisfying than having. But if you’re dropping 20K for two sleeves over 6 months while sitting in mommies basement decrying the fact your life sucks, methinks they doth protest too much.

             4. It’s not decadence. It’s fashion and human stupidity.

                1. I now have an idea for a roll of temporary tattoos: “I can’t believe it’s not decadence”.

          2. I’ve talked to servers and other kids with the sleeve tatoos. Some have told me that it was something all the seniors at HS did. It was so common among a certain age group that it seemed to be norm. These days, I can almost tell approx when someone graduated by whether they have a sleeve tattoo. It is kind of sad, though. Whoever figures an easy/cheap way to get rid of them will make a fortune.

             Tattoos themselves can be quite pretty, and certain sizes in certain locations are less prone to the weight cycling distortion problem. But I think those types are actually more by the creatives and less about signally group conformity.

       2. To me, nose rings scream, “I’m someone’s property”

          1. I have to explain to some that nose-rings are NOT cool. “Lead by the nose” has a Very Real Meaning! There is sound reasons I have NO piercings. (not tattoos, nor..intentional.. brands.. look, there was that soldering iron accident, alright?)

             1. I have scars. They’re like tattoos – just with better stories.

                1. Now scars are, generally, not intentional. At least not in the “make it this shape, please” way. Scars are… honest. Perhaps brutal, but honest.

                   1. Ritual scarification is real in some cultures though.

                      1. :pushes glasses up nose:

                         Also, language and culture wise, forbidden by most Christian groups.

                         It’s what most “no tattoos” groups are working off of.

                         1. For those interested:
                            I hold it about where I hold “boiling a calf in his mother’s milk.”

                            There is a definite level of transgression in that action.

                            I do not like it.

                            carry the philosophy over.

                            1. Boiling a calf in its mother’s milk has always struck me as being too much work, since you need an awful lot of milk to boil the whole calf; and back then, milk didn’t keep.

                            2. It was a local recipe, though

                            3. It was done for Really Big Important feasts, like weddings.

                               (still is, actually…)

                            4. It “smells bad” to use something provided to nourish the young animal to boil its remains. I UNDERSTAND that.
                               I also would no more do a tattoo than I would cut off my nose.
                               I will stick out like a sore thumb in the old age home. “Oh, the no tat lady” Seriously, most of my generation have them, though hidden.
                               TBF everyone in Victorian England had them too. Yeah, I know not commonly known

                            5. Sheesh, I am DOWNRIGHT WEIRD now.. simply from NOT having any tattoos or piercings or intentional brands. As said, I might have some evidence of accident, but that’s all.

                2. I have the scar where I brushed against the heat gun during break. (I was removing linoleum that had been laid down with WAY too much glue). Never diss the heat gun.

             2. I suppose I could tell the story about putting a dab of flash powder in my palm and touching it off to do a magic trick. The scar’s faded away, but the lesson lingers.

                1. I didn’t have that, but close enough to have…. memories. Memories that say, “You [REDACTED!] do NOT do that!”

                2. There’s a similar trick with guncotton; from what I’ve read, no (or minimal) burn or damage. Do NOT close your hand before lighting it! And don’t try it with “processed” guncotton (smokeless powder).

       3. No. They say inability to see the future. I mean it’s just fashion to the kids, but they don’t THINK.

17. It’s been a good 100 years of bullsh*t.

    :pushes glasses up nose:

    More than that, Chesterton did most of his career smacking this nonsense out of the park.

18. I have no idea if this story about how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War is true or not, but this is how it was told to me.

    Communism doesn’t work. Reagan knew this.
    His goal: “We win, they lose” and “Tear down this Wall!”.
    Reagan studied Classical Economics at little Eureka College in Illinois. This was before Keynes. He majored in Economics and Sociology. Useful, yes?
    Upon becoming President, Reagan asked, “Where does the USSR get its money?” Answer: “Oil, Gas, Diamonds, Furs.”
    So he went to the Saudi’s and asked them to lower their prices from $100 per barrel to $10. Just for a few years. He explained why. The Saudis had their own agenda: kill wind and solar today and discourage it tomorrow. So they complied. And now Gorbachev had one tenth his former income! Hard to feed the war machine!
    Then Reagan went to deBeers, the South African diamond octopus and asked them to have a fire sale. They needed to clear warehouses full of inventory, so they complied. Now Gorbachev had even less.
    Reagan left furs alone. Too small to bother.
    Then Reagan went to the Pope. The very first Polish Pope ever. Useful, since until Solidarnosc, the Catholic Church was the only major social non-Communist organization in Poland. (Of course, the Secret Police bugged the confessionals!) When Solidarity wanted a printing press so they could print a newspaper, a big American union (the UAW?) donated one and the Pope helped smuggle it into Poland.

    Aside: Why was Poland Catholic, when the Germanic and Scandinavian countries all around had embraced Protestantism? Taxes — German Princes wanted to keep the money that had been going to Rome, so they protected Martin Luther and his ideas — which included preaching obedience to the Princes. At bottom, the Protestant Reformation was a tax revolt! (Clue: the word “Protest” in there — see it now?) But Poland was very poor. No revolt.

    And then Reagan promoted “Star Wars”. (The missle defense, not the movie.) Look, I worked on Apollo. By profession, I’m a computer scientist. I KNEW it wouldn’t work. Didn’t matter. It scared the bejesus out of the Soviets. Softened them up. And Reagan refused to give it up at Reykjavik, even when Gorbachev offered him EVERYTHING in exchange! (If course, that just convinced the Kremlin that it WOULD work!!)
    When the Soviet Union imploded, the intelligentsia all over the world gave Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika all the credit, with a smidgen left over for George H. W. Bush, because it happened on his watch. None for Reagan, of course. Orwell: “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them!” (The French have a phrase for this; they call it “la trahison des clercs” — the treason of the intellectuals.)
    After the Berlin Wall fell, Germany asked Gorbachev to please remove the Russian troops. Gorbachev replied that he had no place to put them. So the Germans, for free, built nice new German quality barracks outside of Moscow — and all the Russian troops went home! Win-win.

    Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest Presidents in US history — and he won the Cold War without firing a shot. Reagan was fond of saying. “You can get an awful lot done if you don’t care who gets the credit!” And it all came true.

    Now I have no way of knowing if this story is true. Any of it or all of it. But it ought to be!

    Craig Franklin

    Here are several such stories; my policy on all of them is “If it wasn’t true, it should have been!

    Did Martin Luther really say, “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen.” Some say he actually said it. Some say a biographer added it. But if he didn’t say it, he should have. (Translation: Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.”)
    Did Patrick Henry really say, “If this be Treason, make to most of it!” Some say his son added it in his biography of his famous father. But if he didn’t say it, he should have!

    1. Gorbachev’s primary achievement was creating a political situation in which he could safely let go of power. He lived for three decades in quiet retirement, and while Putin may have despised him, Gorbachev was not subjected to political reprisals for his actions while in power.

       Putin has destroyed that legacy. He’s taken post-Soviet Russia right back to where the guy at the top has to cling to power until it’s pried from his fingers.

    2. Wind and solar are inherently dead, the Saudis had zero work to do to accomplish that, and the current popularity is purely an artifact of fraud and of insane subsidies.

       Three important things are power density, predictability, and inherent economic performance.

       Energy in the engineering sense correlates somewhat with money, and both correlate somewhat with nutritional energy in food. If an ‘energy source’ needs extensive subsidies to rise to the level of becoming an alternative, you are pulling energy from elsewhere using the economy as a transmission line. Solar and wind are simply a way to use conventional fuel sources, while making the use of those conventional fuels massively less efficient. If anyone starves or freezes this winter, it is purely the result of the massive destruction inherent in green policy.

       1. @ Bob > “If anyone starves or freezes this winter, it is purely the result of the massive destruction inherent in green policy.”

          The Swedes appear to have finally figured that out.

          Sky News Australia “Swedish government ‘threw out the mad greenies'”

19. Operation Star burst only requires an enemy state to fire on us, or one of our allies to go active. They don’t have to wake sleepy Joe.
    What is operation Star Burst, you ask?
    Well, let me tell you, way before our other anti-missile systems come into play, we fire off a few nukes to detinate in the path of of oncoming strategic weapons, letting the burst and the EMP to remove a sizeable number of missiles from viable use. This is the burst part, the star is for the atomic lightshow. This was put before the president that might have been a secret super hero, RR, come on think about it, and has been part of Strategic Command (usually just StratCom), ever since.

    1. EMP is not a good nuclear war tactic. All the meltdowns from the failure of Nuclear Power plants and willemit quite a lot of radiation. Think Chernobyl and Fukushima X 10,000. Not a good result.

       I’m sure their plans are likely to use all the Neutron bombs they’ve perfected and likely kept TOP-TOP-TOP SECRET that are the result of the US government buying $700 hammers.

       1. If you are going to be making statements here predicting physical events, you had probably better sober up first. And maybe retake your physical theory courses.

          Nuclear blasts seem to have a /lot/ of radial symmetry.

          Naively, basic electromagnetic theory would suggest that EMP mostly radiates in a straight line. So, straight line would illuminate a small slice of the Earth with EMP.

          Obviously, there would be some refraction etc. But, there would be a lot of illumination of atmosphere compared to illumination of surface.

          The question is, how many nuclear plants are in the illuminated area, and what are their failure modes?

          CHernobyl and Fukushima are perhaps wildly different cases of reactor failures.

          10k Fukushimas is perhaps wildly high for any reasonable assumption of illuminated surface area. 10k Fukushimas is also perhaps low enough on the radiation scales that the warhead blasts would be more significant.

          1. I’m not a nuclear physicist, etc. but my understanding, such EMP blasts are in the upper atmosphere and the “radioactivity” is negligible on the ground. From the height of 100 miles, a single EMP nuke could cover probably 1/3 of the continental US. (Look up the Hawaii EMP outages from some of those pacific nuclear tests. ) If it were a full scale EMP attack with at least several devices, I would expect every reactor in the US to fully melt down. Note all Fukushima and Chernobyl were largely contained fairly quickly because the rest of society was still functioning, and appropriate emergency countermeasures were applied including sending in workers who voluntarily or involuntarily went inside those buildings knowing they would die from radiation exposure. We all should give all these workers our thanks and prayers as hero’s of all humanity.

             In the case of US-wide EMP, there would likely be no functioning society (only transport would be some military aircraft/vehicles that were nuclear hardened). I admit, my 10,000 estimate was a number pulled out of the air, but think of it this way…. There are 100 nuclear reactors in US.), If all those reactors cannot by contained within 100 days, (remember societal collapse), you end up with the same radioactive effect as at least 10,000 Chernobyl/Fukushimas. It would be a global radioactive disaster. That is why EMP is not a good nuclear war strategy for anyone to use.

             1. Note that US reactor design is NOT “fail-deadly” (Chernobyl). They might melt the core some, if the cooling fails [Ponder that Three Mile Island had multiple levels of Stupid and externally… NOTHING HAPPENED), BUT the reaction will be stopped as the electromagnets holding the control rod fail and the control rods DROP by gravity into the core, quenching the reaction. Still plenty of latent heat, but NOT “it’s gonna go bewm.” NOBODY’s idea of a Good Time, admittedly. And a crappy time after, without that power, but at least NOT Wastelandia.

                1. If this is true, there’s nothing to worry about. For sure, complex systems fail. Without cooling pumps on the water pools there likely will some problems too. Anyway with widespread EMP, most people will die of starvation etc. as all food and fuel distribution will stop. Yeah those solar panels will stop working too. That’s the reason not to fight a EMP war. Read “one second after” if you haven’t already

       2. You do know where that 700 hammer costing comes from, right?

          It is a combination of short production runs for weird specifications, the client (government) changing those specs halfway through production, and really stupid accounting practices (this kit costs 100k and has 100 pieces, so we will count each as 1k even though some are screws and others are jet engines)

20. Sarah, if it was just the bit players, the navel-gazing evil minions like Gates and Soros, and those obnoxiously humanocidal sociopaths at the WEF, I’d 100% agree with you about conspiracies. But it isn’t just them. As the Bible reminds us, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities, against the rulers of the air (i.e., Satan and his demons).

    That supernatural conspiracy is as doomed to failure as any fleeting human one, but in the meantime, battles rage, strategies are put into action, and humanity is caught in the grip of seemingly endless evil and strife.

    But God is our rock and fortress! We need to cling fast to our Savior and Lord, and pray for the lost and hurting around us, and bring them the good news of salvation that they so desperately need. None of us will get out of this life alive unless Christ returns sooner, but some of us have the hope of eternal life with a God who loves us, and so many need that.

    Our best strategy of all is to share that hope as widely and as honestly as we can. Every soul saved is one more that the devil can’t have, one more great loss for him.

21. Perhaps someone else has already pointed this out, I haven’t read all the comments. But I really think, the Biden administration is the one looking for any excuse to use nukes. The Biden administration is akin to religious fanatics and they are very out of touch with and insulated from consequences.

    1. What the Biden Part of the Biden Administration thinks is , “When is my next ice cream cone?” , “Can I make it to the bathroom off the Oval Office before I fill my pants again?”, and ” What was I thinking?”. Well except for the poor Edith Wilson imitation who is thinking, “Can we keep him alive through 2028”, “Choosing Harris as a VP was a masterstroke” and “Why does no one say I’m as pretty as Michelle Obama?”. And yes it feels like whoever is running the joint is into that death first strategy that cults sometimes wander into.

       1. I wonder if we have a “Mrs. Keithley”-type backing Joe Biden.

       2. Just the fact people keep posting photos of furniture with the same prints as Jill’s dresses says she’s not getting the preferred results.

    2. Sure. I think so too, but it’s not working.

22. Couple random thoughts:

    Soviet Plans: “Plans” were all they had. “Plans” existed to be a control mechanism – compliance with or deviation from the Plan could be observed and dealt with (theoretically, but then again, Communism/Socialism/Marxism are all based on “theoreticals” rather than “realistic actuals”).

    Government intrusion/monitoring/interference (“ours,” aka, CIA, NSA, et al for monitoring, all other agencies for interference and intrusion). Having seen all the way up Government’s skirt, I’m confident that at least 3/4 of what goes on in D.C., and at least half if not better than 2/3 of what goes on in the 50 state capitals, is sufficiently useless/intrusive/interfering that it could be done away with overnight and turn out to be a National Benefit. (Which would require not just a reset of the American Education Industrial Complex but its complete and total abolition to even permit the conditions necessary for potential success – “reform” is a red herring, an obfuscational term to allow enablers, both in the Education Industrial Complex and Government, which is actually A Unfied Coalition, two heads of the same monster, to continue profiting from the perpetual graft hidden under the bureaucracy.).

    But what if the people “doing” all that uselessness are capable of doing nothing else? Some, certainly, can undergo a metamorphosis and become Productive Members of Society, but I’d wager that’s only 20-35% of them. Maybe. At best. The rest? Dug ditches, picked cotton, harvested fruit and vegetables, etc. are now done better/faster/cheaper by machine and dispatching the Worthless to perform menial tasks, or even sit at home on the dole playing video games, would constitute a drag on the economy and create a national colony of The Disaffected and Disturbed from which nothing good could possibly come.

    I’m not suggesting keeping them employed in useless is a good choice, they uselessness inevitably spills over negatively affecting the Productive; playing video games at home would at least prevent (most) of that, but there must be a better solution.

    RE: Electoral “Bloodbath”; word choice here is mere semantics and hyperbole. The United States has long prided itself on uniformly peaceful power transitions, sometimes massive transitions, which we had until one group decided it and it alone was entitled to accrue power. There is great hope, and much praying in many quarters, that the long standing tradition of Peaceful Transition can be restored.

    Should that not turn out to be the case there will be a different kind of Bloodbath, one not to the country’s immediate benefit but completely necessary. But, I’m quite sure some voiced that sentiment in 1776 as well.

    Sometimes learning comes dearly.

23. I can’t add anything other than very well-put.

24. I’m afraid that “hard times” are most likely to produce desperate men who are manipulated by clever, sneaking, conscienceless men. The desperate men look “hard” because there isn’t much that they won’t do for their manipulators but it’s not strength just lack of a center.

    “Good times” produce careless men who forget how much hard work it is to achieve and maintain good times. It’s not just the physical labor, it’s the demanding work of civilizing people sufficiently that they’re capable of prosperity. It’s not wealth as such which causes the problem but stupidity.

    Strong people are not produced by the “times” but by the combination of good sense, caring about good things, and discipline.

    And wasn’t that a cheery first post! Longtime reader and admirer of the blog, its patroness, and many of the writers who blog here. Recently retired professor, know too much about the academy to believe it’s special, hate Leftism and oligarchy, once described by a friend as a “Tory anarchist.” Don’t know how often I’ll show up but thanks to Sarah and the rest of you regulars for a daily marvel of intelligence and good spirit .

25. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth as the great Mike Tyson put it

    All the black pull doomers will have to counteract the antics of Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson before I give their schleprock stories and credit. The kids are alright.

26. Doomer’s Anonymous

    Hi, my name is Bob, and I’m a (recovering) doomer

    It’s been two months since I took my last black pill.

27. Very much off topic — but our family is looking into whether a family member could have a form of porphyria. Our relative probably has a form of the neurological type (if she has it), but some of the symptoms of the cutaneous (skin) porphyrias remind me of things that Sara has mentioned experiencing.

    Does anybody else have any knowledge about porphyria?

    1. DDGIYF. See:

       https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/porphyria/symptoms-causes/syc-20356066

       Since it’s not about The Dread Flu Covid it’s probably accurate.

       1. Thank you . . . the difficulty seems to be in finding any doctors that know about the problems, and then finding out whether you have to wait until an attack is going on for testing, or whether you can go ahead to DNA testing.

          1. Glad to help. You could try mentioning it to your doctor, along with the symptoms you’re displaying, and give him/her a reference to the Mayo Clinic website. Good luck.

             1. We’ve already taken the relative to two university hospitals and been shunted from one specialists to another to another for years and years now . . . I’d like to think that the doctors would listen but we haven’t had great experiences thus far.

28. I would argue that unearned wealth may lead to decadence (inheritance, political grift, etc). Someone who worked themselves into a fortune is too busy to engage in stupid self-indulgence.

    1. Possibly. But not for everyone.

    2. Then you occasionally get into the problem of “I am brilliant! I created [thing]. Therefore I know how to cure cancer/save the planet/run the world/whatever, and I have the money to do it!” At least (after WWII) Blofeld got his money through honest crime and selling information – he provided desired goods to willing buyers. Some of the guys today?

29. The FICUS(‘s ventriloquists) just placed the blame for the Paul Pelosi attack on “the atmosphere of violence inflamed by the January 6th Insurrection”.

    Unfortunately, there are idiots that will believe it.

    In the 2020 debates, when Biden wanted a commitment that Trump supporters wouldn’t ‘take to the streets’ if he lost the election, Trump should have said:

    “Wait a minute. Wait just one minute. WHOSE supporters have been rioting in our streets for the last six months? They’re not mine. That’s not my circus. So whose are they? Huh? Whose?”

    And then SHUT THE F UP and let Biden flounder. Nearly impossible for Trump, I know.

    1. The Democrats own the atmosphere of violence.

       They carried out perhaps the most concentrated campaign of political terrorism in forty years in 2020.

       They’ve been managing San Francisco as a free range asylum for the mentally ill, as well as deliberately shielding criminals from retribution. If this is anything other than a Reichstag fire false flag attempt on their part, they own a lot of the contributing factors.

    2. Oh, please. I guessed that as soon as I heard of the attack, no one would take my bet, dang it. They were stating that this attack is an outgrowth of Jan 6, before the police made their news statement that “they have no clue of the motive”. Later, mostly because the person in question is supposedly a homeless, drug addict lunatic. They haven’t mentioned accomplices. But I wonder how a homeless drug addict lunatic gets by the gated security, and the Pelosi home security? (May not have Secret Service security, but the Pelosi’s have their own security. Based on prior news reports, along the lines of “Sure, defund the police, you have your own private security”. Gated community, is truth. The other? I don’t know that, just reporting, and grain of salt, etc.)

    3. Rolls eyes.

       1. *watches them roll by … again ….. *

          1. Would you grab Havey before he bats them under the sofa? Thanks.

30. We are not limited to the false dichotomy of ‘fight the Russians now by treating Biden as an ally’ OR ‘surrender to the Russians by refusing to do any small thing that could really screw over the Russians’.

    If we really have a pressing national interest in fighting the Russians, now, and directly, then the Democrats can show their belief in that national interest by resigning. They need to resign so that we could possibly have military leadership that we can afford to trust. After the Afghanistan withdrawal, there is no reason not to suspect that any commitment of US troops against the Russian will result in Biden abandoning them to a Russian prison camp. The Democrats can address this reasonable suspicion by resigning.

    Until they resign, we are entirely free to consider that their Ukraine messaging is purely propaganda for a domestic audience. Mostly an audience of idiots and morons.

    The Russians have through their actions said very loudly that they will never voluntarily have any form of peace with the USA, or with any of their neighbors. Peace with them mostly only means that their have screwed up their logistics and or military hardware too much to do anything.

    Their actions mean that we basically don’t owe them anything in terms of reciprocal behavior. Concepts of reciprocal behavior underlie American cultural norms for sanity and for peace. Randomly nuking the Russians would be breaking even with how they have treated us, and have treated their neighbors for hundreds of years.

    Little things, not involving randomly nuking them, are what we should be doing, if those little things offend them or screw them over, cost us little to do, and do not offend our own sense of how we ought to behave. Like investing in better missile defense. The hissy fits the Russians go into over such small amounts of research money are well worth it.

    Taking seriously the Russian ability to deliver anything right now is a symptom with two possible causes. 1. Being an ancient fossil, who has not kept up with the last forty or fifty years of engineering developments, and is not up to date on technical training. 2. Having never developed any skills in collecting and analyzing intelligence.

    If you have a modern understanding of tech, with a statistics background that would have been considered very extreme during the 1950s, and have put even a minimal effort into following the intelligence from this war, you can work out that it is pretty safe to assume that the Russians have nothing. If this is so, the only danger to Americans lies in i) giving the Democrats any support because of the invasion of Ukraine ii) avoiding any small action that annoys the Russians.

    Cost or hazard or danger to Europeans probably should not bother us at all. Forming the EU is a significant amount of the harm that they have caused themselves.

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