The last century hasn’t actually brought about great “scientific” improvements in governance or the condition of man. It has brought about better production and better commerce, which was enough to stop the periodic famines which plagued our ancestors.
Famines and scarcity subsist only where pernicious central governments stomp on human liberty and individual freedom. And they need to stomp pretty hard. We haven’t managed it. But there are rumors out of China and Venezuela. And of course Russia managed it, just as they did the near-starvation of “never quite enough.”
However, all those advances in material culture didn’t bring about similar advances in centralizing government and “sculpting” the new man.
Humans remain human. And the more centralized, over a larger area, that government is, the more inefficient it is. Even — fortunately — at creating misery. Government that requires certain results gets certain results reported. Even if they have nothing to do with reality.
Sure, the Soviets didn’t have nearly our nuclear arsenal. But the people at the top there MIGHT very well have thought they did, at least after a while. Because the underlings had to report it was done. or else.
All of you repeating the nonsense about boiled frogs, and how their sloooooowwww plan has worked perfectly are just buying into the same juvenile, retarded lie. NONE of their plans ever worked perfectly. Their history is littered with five year plans that worked only in someone’s imagination.
So why would their plans work better in a far away place they never fully understood? With a people who are notoriously averse to obeying?
Of course they didn’t. They don’t. You can convince yourself they have, particularly if you listen to the left and ignore all the times they got stomped on, got smacked, got their cookies taken away.
Look, their plans at changing THE PEOPLE and the people’s beliefs worked so well that despite their total control of federal democracy, two presidents that broke the script, almost 40 years apart, were enough to wreck all their illusions and control. Reagan and Trump, amid a train of uniparty parrots were enough to destroy the left’s certainties and “control.”
This is because their control was always — and still is — largely not real. It’s an illusion created by the mass-industrial communications complex. Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative. The narrative is how they keep telling you to give it all up, because, look, their plan worked perfectly, and now your children are theirs and mwahahahaha.
In true fact, they’ve broken their teeth on America. They’ve managed — with propaganda — to take over the sectors that are less in contact with reality: academia, the arts, the rarefied heights of corporations. (Those aren’t really business. They’re to business what MBAs are to running a lemonade stand. Having worked for corporations, the large ones have more in common with massive, inefficient states than with commerce of any kind.)
The rest of us? We have not surrendered our guns or our minds. Yes, the propaganda machine keeps pushing those who have, but that’s the only thing the centralized state was ever good at: propaganda.
But if their plans were working perfectly, “Let’s go Brandon” would not have gone viral. That one proved not only that the majority of people aren’t with the left, but also that the majority of people see the media manipulation. More importantly, do you remember what the “Let’s go Brandon” was all about? Right. There were spontaneous flash mobs forming everywhere screaming “F*ck Joe Biden.” I’d known about them for months. They were forming everywhere, including in New York City. That one was just one that was caught on camera. (Because of course, the media never showed those.)
If their plans were working perfectly, each of their “let’s ban guns’ would be having an effect.
If their plans were working perfectly, their attempts at grooming people’s kids would be ignored or applauded.
If their plans were working perfectly, they wouldn’t have needed federal agents in twitter, to make sure the narrative didn’t break. They wouldn’t need armies of Chinese and Russian commenters in blogs, trying to paint the idea America is what it isn’t. (They’re very distinctive too. Russians will never understand we’re not as racist or anti-semitic as they are. Their idea of America is just Russia, but with more territory. Their view of us and what they think they’re playing to is as obvious as their screwed up syntax. As for the Chinese, they just tend to be repetitive and extol the virtues of China. Much big, so strong.)
If their plans were working — I remind you they’ve been at this for A HUNDRED YEARS — twitter as it appeared to be would be the real America. The real Britain. Etc. But it’s not.
If you think any of those are aberrations, you’re falling for the narrative: for what the media pushes and showcases.
This isn’t going their way. They have the levers of visible power. They have the big megaphones. They have the narrative.
We have…. everything else. And the more they push things that will outright kill us, like idiot fuel bans, the less their “levers” will work, because people have a self-preservation instinct. People will want to stay alive, and will do it by any means possible. Which means, largely, ignoring the “official power.”
Those who will wail and say “but that destroys law and order” aren’t precisely wrong. but they aren’t precisely right either. Americans have a very strong instinctive grasp on “legitimate authority” and seem to bounce back to it when the illegitimate one is disassembled.
They aren’t winning. They’re dangerous as heck, don’t get me wrong, because they keep insanely grabbing things and making them not work, both to try to save themselves and frankly to punish us for not loving them.
It will hurt. But they’re losing.
The image you should have of them is not of the careful planner in the shadows — they ain’t that. Look at their luminaries — but of the falling monster, grabbing at chunks of the building to prevent his fall, and inevitably breaking things.
It’s going to hurt. It might even take decades of pain. I don’t think so, because America is not that patient.
But their control is breaking.
If it weren’t they wouldn’t need ever increasing levels of fraud just to keep control of the bureaucracy and the “obvious” power.
The problem is they keep thinking they’re masterminds. Their self conceit is staggering. But in everything else? They’re petty small people, each of them obsessed with his tiny fiefdom, and willing to knife their best friend in the back to keep it.
In fact, they are the current incarnation of a very old evil. An evil we keep defeating. An evil that America stomped on very decisively just with its founding.
They’ve grabbed hold of us again — spits on the graves of Wilson and FDR — now and then. But we always punt them. Because they’re not natural here. They might not be natural anywhere in the West.
They’re a disease. And we have an immune system. Even in the rest of the world, they’re in increasing trouble — though you’ll never know it from mass media — because they don’t work. They never have. All they have is the narrative. And the more distant the narrative is from reality, the more obvious the break is.
Be not afraid. Don’t fall for the narrative. The way to defeat them is not to try to follow them into their house of lies.
The way to defeat them is to ignore them, and build what works.
Build over, build under, build around.
Be not afraid.
According To Hoyt 
The white blood cells of our immune system is the 2nd Amendment!
Well written Sarah.
Exactly…and it’s about all the immunity we have left, with millions of 3d world invaders entering the US every year, who don’t care about the Constitution…
S^3
“The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.”
-Jeff Cooper
If most people were not good — for whatever definition of ‘good’ you want to use — we would never have developed civilization. We would still be violent savages, living in caves and killing each other over sticks and rocks.
Instead, the violent savages are a tiny minority which can be kept in check by the civilized majority IF they have the will to do it. Obviously, the Democrats not only lack that will, they want to ensure that anybody with the will lacks the means.
———————————
When Eric Swalwell farted during a press conference, it was the most intelligent thing heard from a Democrat all day.
:looks at world, and looks at Bible:
Well, “we” have kind a sorta managed to get into a mostly doesn’t suck state….. Historically speaking, though, the currently dominant cultures are very fragile. Even though they work well enough for a tiny group to become world-wide dominant…..
“Humans remain human.”
Yes they do, to the great disappointment of Leftists and other central planners everywhere.
If there is an alien Mothership out there, and they are visiting us, (and if they’re not assholes) we should pay them to do anthropology. Really MEASURE what humans actually, physically -do-. Coming at the issue from left-field the way a completely alien being would have to do, that would be valuable.
Aliens should drop me a line, I can get them a good deal on maple syrup. ~:D
And chocolate!
There have been a lot of suspicious ‘incidents’ involving our food supply recently. Mysterious fires, explosions, airplanes ‘accidentally’ crashing directly into food processing facilities.
What are the results? Famine? Food riots? Naw, just reduced variety and higher prices. We already had that from Bidenflation, anyway.
So now you’ve got Mayor Adams in New Yuck, trying to ban meat. You know what that means:
Bootleg meat! Barbecue Speakeasy’s!
You thought Prohibition was demented, you ain’t seen nuttin’.
In fact, L. Sprague DeCamp wrote a story about a worldwide ban on beef brought about by India’s overwhelming vote in the One World Government. Parts of it are hysterically funny.
———————————
The government can mandate stupidity, but they can’t make it not be stupid.
It certainly does look suspicious in Clown World but I’d say at least a fair number of them are due to deliberately putting off essential maintenance for the sake of keeping production numbers up, whether because the decision makers are more afraid of uncertainty than they are of catastrophic failure or they’re just operating on “I have the fancy credentials and fancy title so what I say goes” hubris. A major retailer damn near burned down one of their distribution centers by not stopping production long enough for the maintenance team to adequately deal with a serious electrical problem (as in, the crew members could feel there was something wrong just by getting close to the problem area). Of course it failed and they lost a few days of production time anyway. If you’d ask any of the people on the ground a few days’ lost production wasn’t worth that kind of risk but thair just stoopid wearhowse munkys. Thay not edumacated lyke tha Big Bosses.
These incidents occurred regularly before the last few years; the difference is 1. there’s more ways to find out, and 2) we’ve had three years of lies and various governments / NGOs admitting they WANT to wreck our agriculture.
Makes people nervous.
THIS
Problem i see in this one, without any idea of how it came about, 18000 cows take up a great deal of space even shoulder to shoulder, nose to tale, would be around 14 acres!
VERY big explosion.
This was a ginourmous milking barn. Think Amazon warehouse size, full of cows.
It wasn’t the explosion itself that did most of the killing; it was the barn burning down with the cows inside.
Based on the reports I’ve seen, with commentary by Larry Correia, who comes from a dairy farm family background.
The drone footage here shows you where the cows not being currently milked would be– and the place had a natural gas contract.
BIG boom, and then fire.
Unless you lived in the Midwest, the annual grain elevator explosions of the 1960s-1980s were invisible. If you did live in the Midwest, they were a known hazard, and you just hoped that it wasn’t one near you (or that you weren’t driving near one when it went). The dairy fire not all that far from me was very sad because of the loss of animal lives (18,000+ and no that’s not a typo. Huge dairies out here.) It wasn’t part of a Great Conspiracy, more like horrible timing for anything to short or ignite.
Did you see some of the videos from when they were building it?!
The most powerful non nuclear detonations currently known are FAE, Fuel Air Explosions, where very fine flamable particulates become suspended in air. Given the correct ratio the explosion can approach the force of a small tactical nuke.
Those particulates can be a vapor, atomized liquid, or the fine dust once common in grain silos. Plenty of air, add a spark, and you get an Earth shattering kaboom!
As I recall, the UN has banned its use in warfare.
And modern silos and grain elevators have extensive systems in place to prevent such conditions from occurring.
And even without the kaboom, you’ll get a flash fire that will ignite anything remotely flammable, consume most/all of the oxygen in the confined space, and panic 18000 cows.
Plus, I think people are more primed than ever to look for a conspiracy of some sort. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t conspiracies out there. But not everything that goes wrong is a conspiracy.
When all the experts and newspeople urinate on others and call it precipitation, one tends to get suspicious of both rain and snow.
OTOH, people may have a little too much faith in anyone who has told a disallowed truth. Which is also dangerous, because all BS needs to be called out.
When all the experts and newspeople urinate on others and call it precipitation, one tends to get suspicious of both rain and snow.
OTOH, people may have a little too much faith in anyone who has told a disallowed truth. Which is also dangerous, because all BS needs to be called out.
The “fun” part will be ‘reminding’ Certain Parties that they have now told everyone who should be hanged… in Minecraft.
There’s a lot of strange here in the U.S.
For example trains derailed here in America 1,164 times last year, and 1,095 times in 2021. In Japan 5 trains derailed in 2022 and 6 in 2021.
Around 19,000 miles of track in Japan and 93,150 miles of track in the USA, BTW.
Needs better maintenance.
I seem to remember that the train Union workers were striking during the shutdowns because they were way understaffed and more and more workers were quitting due to burnout. I seem to recall they were offered more vacation time, that they could literally not take off. It actually seemed to be a very reasonable thing for a strike.
But since Biden is in bed with the Union bosses the strike got shutdown. To my mind more train derailments seems to be a reasonable part two to, train workers are way understaffed and so tired they might fall asleep at the wheel. Just the regrettable result of socialists seeing people as widgets instead of individuals.
There’s more to it.
The zeks are MBAs who have never worked on the railroad, and decided that the best way to move freight more efficiently, was longer trains.
It’s less safe, and they aren’t even able to fit in the railyards. (Which didn’t magically get bigger.)
Since the railyards can’t process them efficiently, trains get stuck on the tracks. And a scheduled eight hour day can double in length.
Because It’s a vital industry, the workers don’t have many levers to pressure management for changes…
The simplest and best way to break the strike would have simply to start employing peoples in the industry who understood the trade offs behind the numbers into management.
But that was discarded out of hand.
A contract that allowed for sickouts was the next best thing. But it was obviously crushed by Biden and the labor relations board.
So the railroads are being run by people with no idea how to run a railroad, who have cut themselves off from feedback.
Ayn Rand to the courtesy phone….
It may be because training standards have gotten extremely lax. Apparently the train that derailed with the vinyl did have the axle box temperature increasing rapidly in the last few check spots, and was just a hair below the stop line at its last check point, so the crew, if they were paying attention they would have spotted the problem before it failed.
As it was they just said “Below the level so everything good. Yay!” and trundled on to doom like good little robots.
Or possibly, “If we stop and get this fixed we’ll lose our day off and also get heavily dinged by corporate for not making schedule. Let’s hope it doesn’t break until it’s Somebody Else’s Problem.”
I am generally not a supporter of Big Labor, but I’ve been hearing a lot of very bad stories coming out of the US rail industry lately.
Awesome. So enforced stupidity. Even better. Isn’t that just prime…
I’ve got associates with family members who work in the rail business, and yeah. The stuff I hear is not great. The unions have a lot of valid complaints about hours, super-long trains, and the lack of trained people to run the trains.
You’re presuming the guys on the train had the authority to make the decision.
Unfortunately, that’s not a valid assumption.
So very much this.
Unions are, at best, a necessary evil.
Best is rare.
But in this case…
(Too bad the Union bosses didn’t answer to the workers who supposedly employed them.)
Employed by C&NW Railroad for 10 years at their Clinton IA car shops. Seven unions on site and periodically one would strike and the others were required under the bylaws to strike as well in sympathy. Unions had considerable leverage because the company trackage also carried most of the Chicago commuter rail traffic. Strikes were always staged for Sunday evening, made Monday in the Windy City rather sporty.
Company would of course get an immediate Federal injunction to return to work as an essential service, but the head of the striking union upon which it had to be served would hide for at least a couple of days before a process server could track him down.
Iowa was a right to work state, but being under Federal control you had no choice and were required to join the appropriate union within 90 days of being hired on.
Always felt like as a worker you were caught between a rock and a hard place smack between the union and management, neither particularly interested in your welfare.
At the very end there I was promoted into management, received an honorable withdrawal from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, entered the role of corporate official, and was immediately sent to Headquarters for a week of strike breaker school.
And C&NW no longer exists, being absorbed by one of the bigger dogs, Union Pacific if I remember correctly. And I went on to get an engineering degree and work NASA civil service for 25 more years.
All the C&NW lines up here (Michigan ore trains and Michigan/Wisconsin freight) are now run by CN though E&LS still owns some of the lines and does the yard work in Esky and Marinette. CN took over Soo Line in the area as well, that did freight stuff mostly, as well.
There are derailments, and then there are DERAILMENTS. Back when I worked at the powerplant, every winter we would have several incidents when a coal car would ride up on a chunk of frozen coal and the truck would come off the tracks. Grab the frogs, put them under the wheels, pull the car back up on the tracks, and you’re back in action; 15 minutes tops. Still technically counts as a derailment, though not on the scale of the recent Ohio disaster. If the U.S. includes in the count all the former and Japan only counts the latter, it could explain (at least in part) the disparity in numbers.
I don’t remember that as much of a problem, as happening often, when I worked in a coal fired plant some fifty years ago. Our coal was sub bituminous C, one step above lignite, maybe even frozen it crushed fairly easily without derailing the car.
Your point may be valid though in today’s, report everything, environment. When I worked on the oil patch, on the North Slope, EPA required reporting every oil spill, including a vehicle’s drip from the engine’s crankcase on the pad as an oil spill.
That figures in to a lot of our statistic disparities with other countries. Most other countries don’t count EVERYTHING. We tend to, even without excessive regulation we’re the spreadsheet weirdos of the world.
Wait, WTF? Trying to ban MEAT?! You’re not serious. Please tell me it’s a Babylon Bee headline.
Sadly, it’s not. 😦
Not hardly.
https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2023/04/19/study-finds-that-food-is-the-leading-source-of-household-emissions-in-new-york-city/
“The study is split into five categories: food, goods, housing, private transportation, and services. It turns out food is the leading source of household greenhouse emissions in the city. “Within the food category, eating out and animal products (including meat, dairy, fish, & eggs) are the largest sources, accounting for nearly half of all food emissions.”
Adams suggests New Yorkers look to “plant-powered food.” “
Beef IS plant-powered-food! It it’s the plants and turns it into food without even using a factory.
Just as nature intended.
YES
Plants are what food eats!
Cows provide insufficient opportunities for grift.
Oh FFS! Somebody stop the planet, I want to get off now.
The same sooper geniuses who think that humans can digest chiton and other bug-bits think we can live on a 100% plant-based diet and that it doesn’t require lots of synthetic fertilizer AND plowing up the Great Plains, Old Northwest, and Deep South to grow stuff. Idjits.
Funny thing is, plowing up the Great Plains is why North America no longer has locusts.
I thought chitin was the indigestible polyglyceride. Or did the similarity to the greek garment somehow invoke Tyops?
No, you’re correct. I’d blame Otto Corrupt but this computer’s too old. I was trying to look up a different reference (for the WIP) and should have stopped to triple check what I’d typed.
Before there were cattle in the west, herds of millions of methane emitting Bison roamed the plains. From the mountains in the west to the gulf coast and northern plains of Canada millions upon millions of Bison roamed. All emitting methane. Yet some how a few million cattle are now the problem. Adams problem isn’t the food, Adams problem is he can’t get rid of the trash humans produce, Adams problem is really too many people, so you need to get rid of people. Have them eat things that cause them to die faster and his problems are solved. Or so he thinks.
His problem is that he’s a vegan.
And if he has his way, everyone else will be too.
given my health and dietary issues, I propose that attempting to force veganism on me counts as attempted murder and justifies the appropriate response thereto.
#metoo
We’re more likely to find out the carbon footprint of cannibalism first.
Escape From New York was not supposed to be a documentary.
And btw, Adams is a vegan, so…
He’s apparently decided that not only is he not going to shut up about it….
One of the effects of a vegan diet is apparently becoming an obligate evangelist.
LOL
Nope. Gonna ban meat. Also gonna ban gas stoves, because [mumble] shut up. But hey, no meat, no need to have a gas stove to grill it properly right? Win win!
The fact that humans are CARNIVOROUS PREDATOR MAMMALS seems not to have been included in modern education. Which means the morons pushing this are going to be very shocked at the pushback that’s coming for them.
Banning meat in -America-? Sure. Good luck with that.
For glory! For freedom! FOR BACON!
They may take our lives, but they’ll never take… OUR BACON!!!
We pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. AND our bacon.
I call it obligate omnivores. It is reportedly very difficult to have a healthy strict vegetarian diet: There are essential nutrients which are at best scarce in plant sources. It’s no accident that cooking meat smells good: It’s a signal below the level of rational thought that there is something there that your body needs. You don’t need those in great abundance, but you do need a little.
Everyone in this UpsideDownWorld age of propaganda conveniently forgets that a strict vegetarian diet is a religious asceticism. The point of it is to mortify the flesh to free the soul. Hindus are big on this, its part of their schtick. Picked up by Christian ascetics in the 18th Century, apparently.
Bottom line, it is not good for you. Cue the Vegans to rage and roar, but biology does not care about your religious convictions and propaganda. Human beings are predatory, flesh eating mammals. We eat other animals because that’s how we are built.
If we don’t eat them, we get sick and die. End of story.
But of course the same clever fools who LOVE them some Central Planning (its so efficient!) also love the idea of stack-a-prole housing and rooftop gardening. Being very bad at arithmetic they don’t see why the 2D surface of a building can’t be farmed to produce enough algae/bug gruel for the 3D volume of proles stacked inside.
You will eat your bug gruel in your 5’x5’x5′ cube, and you will be happy. Or we will reduce your gruel ration until you are. So efficient!
Wasn’t there a Twilight Zone episode on a part of that theme? Of course they’re happy. Just ask them. They”ll tell you. At least, they will when Ron Howard (IIRC) is in earshot. 😉
Yes, and that was a TV re-do of a pernicious story I read called “It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby. I read it in “Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953)” as a kid.
(There are things that kids should not read. That was certainly one of them. Thanks, Asimov.)
Predictably on point, the story was a Retro-Hugo finalist in 2004 for the “best” of 1954.
I also read it as a kid. I think a lot of us did. Ace keeps threatening to send people to the corn field.
I was recently reading about how high tech 3-d farming in a warehouse, which was all the rage in certain quarters a few years ago has been given up as unprofitable. It had something to do with how sunlight is free, electric lights aren’t; Water flows downhill and has to be pumped to get to the top; air circulation is impeded by walls so the air has to be stirred by fans, and assorted other technical difficulties. I was grimly amused: another example of a Bright! Shiny! New! idea being brutally murdered by mundane fact.
Meat and fish supply essential proteins and fats needed for brain development.
So, yes, the would-be brahmandarins want kids starved of brain food.
And yes, they understand that
The late Jerry Pournelle (miss that man) once noted that a lot of science fiction features “intelligence enhanced” chipmanzees bred as servents, but that it would actually be easier to “stunt” humans (Brave New World style) for that purpose.
Seems some folk took yet another “caution” as a how-too.
Don’t wind doctor Monkey up on “vegan mothers” No, seriously. You can damage the baby.
Also, gen z seems to be smaller/shorter/etc than previous ones. Diets.
It is starting to become apparent that the Silicon Valley Ubermenchen have decided that THEY are the ones qualified to rule the world. Stunting child development on a mass to create nicely pliable, disposable serfs is exactly the type of thing they love. So efficient! So techy!
They get to live forever because of bio-enhancement, the masses get to eat bugs and be grateful. That’s their whole plan.
The plan is easier if they bio-DE-enhance the rest of the population first. Gun bans first, then meat bans, then you eat bugs. If you live through the Great Depopulation, anyway.
It’s like they watched Metropolis and decided that was what they wanted.
Dairy products make it possible to live a healthy life of vegetarianism. It’s vegan that’s impossible without artificial supplements.
But at least we can roast our bugs on hot lightbulbs, right?
Hot lightbulbs are a crime against Gaia, prole.
Well, maybe. They’re hard to catch before they get roasted, and afterwards, they are usually burned on one side and raw on the other. And the wings get stuck in your teeth. Besides, who know what’s in those wild bugs? And what about FDA approval and and grading?.
I only eat bugs after they’ve been processed by our chickens. Fresh eggs are the best.
The butterbugs of Lois McMaster Bujold, “A Civil Campaign” are unfortunately fictional. Once upon a time I aspired to be something like an Enrique Borgos. Alas, It was not to be. Perhaps because I’m a bit too much like him…
When I was a young man I did eat the odd bug, but all that stopped after I got my first full-face helmet. ~:D
It’s hard to roast a bug on an LED. Just sayin’.
Come to the Dark Side, We have bacon…
And cookies. Some of them made with bacon.
One of the chapters in my latest WIP is called “bacon bacon bacon bacon…” Contains a North Korean jailbird, a dragon, and bacon.
“Most amusing,” said Toyotama with a moue of discontent. “I haven’t breathed fire at anything since I’ve been here.”
Song Ah-Rahm rubbed her forehead irritably. “It breaths fire too,” she complained to herself. “Of course it does.”
“She, I remind you, and yes I do,” said Toyotama holding her head up proudly and giving Ah-Rahm a regal glare. “What was your plan with the fork, Madame Song?”
“I was going to stab you in the tongue while you ate me!” declared Ah-Rahm belligerently, glaring right back at her. “Hopefully give you indigestion as well!”
The bacon is silent. ~:D
Finish your gruel and get back to your labors, serfs!
Ban meat? Of course not, just meat from fish, fowl, and critters don’t you know.
You may feel free, in fact strongly encouraged, to dine sumptuously on every sort of bug known to man.
Why am I flashing to dracula and “Small lives”?
And so, The Chef led Mayor Adams through the door into the kitchen. Those doors through which no patron was ever seen again. Those doors, through which the finest of white pork came to be served to the most exclusive people of the city.
Yep.
Just an adaptation from a story I read back as a teenager. Can’t remember the title or the author either.
Mrs. Lovett is using one of those big, heavy marble rolling pins to make the pie crusts. 😀
Would the chef’s name be Sweeney Todd? 😛
With Mrs. Lovett busily making pie crusts.
———————————
Some folks believe ‘Soylent Green’ had a happy ending.
The critic and gourmand known as ‘Dr. Fell’ drops by, from time to time, and is always highly complimentary.
No one comments on his similarity to a certain infamous serial killer.
Not sure. This was 45-50 years ago, and supposedly a short story from a well-known author. It was kind of a weird selection for a school English assignment. I could probably do a search for it. I suspect it will take longer than I think to find it though.
I don’t eat politicians. I DO know where they’ve been.
More than a hundred food processing facilities destroyed…The WEF servants want us to starve, that’s clear….
Did you know there are three (3) meat packing plants in Canada? Three. For the whole f-ing country.
We found that out during The Plague, when the Mexicans working in the one in Ontario all came down with WuFlu and the whole thing ground to a halt.
Doesn’t seem sensible, does it? Three factories to supply food to the whole nation from sea to shining sea?
WEF thinking: “If we destroy the food supply they’ll have to eat bugs! They’ll have no choice!”
Right? Because the worthless hillbillies couldn’t FIX those food processing facilities, or Ghu forbid build new ones…
A lot of rules are finally coming to where you can see the cost, too– like “cage free eggs.” Which resulted in much larger, harder to isolate egg production, which means bird flu wipes out way more than when you could isolate smaller groups.
Bad Luck
Now they’re bringing famine back, through a combination of malice and incompetence. And no, eating bugs is not a good solution to the problems they’ve caused. To all the would-be elites who want us to eat bugs, I say eat lead.
They’re NOT bringing famine back. They’re TRYING.
They are very trying, true.
All that free time? All that hemp? Spin, weave, ROPE. Something about lamps…
Ox slow. Ox not DAMNED FOOL.
At least here in flyoverland I feel most people have plenty of canned food. Probably between being a bit chubby and having plenty of preserved food Americans have about two years of supplies to get alternative food sources up and running. Even lefty friends have emergency food supplies. They will try to starve us.
Obama once had a rant about Americans who had more than two weeks food in the pantry being un-American. Which just added to my list of arguments for why Obama was a Eurocrat, and had had zero contact with real Americans growing up and only had contact with rich elitists who wished they had been born Princes and Princesses in a fantasy Europe of their own imagination.
Talk about a vilkain self-reveal…
“You paranoid Enemies of the State have too much food for starvation to wipe you out!”
“Er… Wait… um..”
We managed to avoid any significant food issues in the 2019-2022 “covid” fiasco.
The would-be saboteurs continue to underestimate our resilience.
Heh. Bugs take more resources (facilities, water, electricity) and they still need to eat. Oh, they also fart, just like cows.
The largest bug facility I’ve heard of to date focuses on animal food and they are capable of producing about 10 tons of bugs (it may be less, I’m going off memory here). Any idea what percentage that is of the necessary protein to supply even a small percentage of the population? Our needs are measured in the millions of tons.
Stupid piled on stupid.
Yep. Bugs use more.
They expect to feed the world on chickenfeed?
Or expect the world to go along with utter bilge?
“No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.” ~:D
We’ll likely find out soon. Europe has okayed food made with big “flour”. Depending on how many people eat the crackers and what-not made with it, we might get some useful data. Assuming it isn’t suppressed.
I remember seeing an image that showed how bug flour would labeled on an ingredients list. Wish I’d saved it.
Italy, bless them, are banning that crap.
Our “food quality standards” have always had an “allowable level of insect parts”. They’ll just raise the percentage.
Bug farts. Heh-heh. Tiny, tiny bug farts. 😀
Termites generate huge quantities of methane, far more than cows. There are trillions of termites and they outweigh the cows by a LOT. 10 times? More? Gee, maybe we could set those eat-the-bugs activists to counting termites…
I’m now imagining a bank of mealworms farting in a high register. It’s YOUR fault.
Bugfarts and Toccatto?
You are welcome.
TTTO “Armour Hot Dogs”
“Bugfarts. Tiny bugfarts.
What is the pitch of tiny bugfarts?
High pitched? Low pitched?
Somewhere in between?
How do you measure
Something that just barely keens?
Bugfarts, tiny bugfarts.
The noise that’s every where.”
Proof of my plan to avoid old age by refusing to grow up.
Still making juvenile fart jokes.
Lead not a filker into temptation, for he will deliver something evil,
😉
Local butcher shops still exist out in the plains. And boy are they getting busy processing animals for hunters and those who use them. You can buy a half a cow and have it processed for your needs. I know neighbors who get together and pool their money to process a cow.
I remember when that was done by the local grocer, or at least I remember seeing a meat saw when I was a boy and my mom took me with her when she went shopping. That store got outcompeted and eventually went out of business when the road network improved enough for bigger trucks to supply bigger chains in bigger towns at cheaper prices, so the younger generation has no such memories, but I still do.
Where I grew up in central MN, one of our neighbors had a fully-equipped and functional butcher shop in a corner of his big barn. Rumor had it that back during the War, he was the ‘connection’ for off-ration meat in the north part of the county. He no longer worked with beef, but he would process deer for his neighbors for a cut (heh) of the venison.
Not to be all conspiracy theorist and whatnot, about Worming and South Dakota have had such a massive winter kill of deer that they are sharply curtailing the number of hunting licenses this coming fall season.
Make of it what you all will.
Worming? Have the Democrats managed to get a new state admitted when we weren’t looking? 😀
Oh cripes! Wyoming. W Y O M I N G
I figured, but you know me — never let a perfectly good Typo Pun go to waste! 😀
Besides, if there’s any place that needs a good worming, it’s D.C.
Now you’re just trying to convince us you don’t live in a high fantasy world.
From somebody who gets a lot of meat from relatives, you may want to double check your local butcher – in 2021 (peak covid hysteria, mind) the nearest butcher to us was booked 18 months out. You may do better with a friend/neighbor who doesn’t care if the USDA inspector knows what’s going on in the shed. Something, something, shortage of inspectors, retiring butchers and shops with equipment that’s grandfathered in as safe as long as it’s in continuous operation by the old guy.
Our beef-guy was playing tetris this year/last fall to get his cows in with a butcher he’d had 5+ years of working with, when his customers could also accept a cow– I think they’re “only” 8 months solid, with occasional drops.
But there’s one completely new butcher, and several of the ones that were niche are now open full time, aim to catch the hunter market.
But it’s Iowa, so a decent number of folks are moving here, and we’re even opening up when kids can work a bit. (YAY! Even before that, the grocery store had at least three kids-still-in-school, and there were kids-in-school age folks at TWO different pizza places! Didn’t realize how long it had been since I saw that in a non-family-owned place until I saw them.)
We ran into the same. Not only the butcher down the street, but the butcher the hobby farmer uses that we got our pork and beef from. Busy with butchering wild game and hobby farmer “not for resale” meat. So much they had limited in what they were selling to public. Even now, local Costco, is way down at the meat counter than they were pre pandemic. Costco is never completely out and there is no limit on how many packages, but the volume in the cases is definitely still down.
Dear Hoyt,
This is the best thing I’ve read here yet, AND just after you’ve been ill, AND following a Marathon trip filled with kittens! As someone who turns 70 soon, I am most impressed. But I’ve enjoyed most everything I’ve read here. I hope to read more in future, too, but your flinty portrait of our “Elites” who don’t know what a woman is, where the money went, what justice is supposed to be, or how to operate a community larger or more true-to-life than “Sims 4” was helpful in many ways! More of the same, please, as the Spirit moves you!
Please don’t call me “Hoyt”. It’s obvious you’re not an hostile, but “Hoyt” reminds me of middle school and being called to account for some minor act of hooliganism. (Even if my name was different.)
Either Sarah or Mrs. Hoyt, please.
Or Beautiful (but Evil) Space Princess.
Whom we all love and obey.
Obey might be a bridge too far for this group.
Whose suggestions we don’t immediately blow off saying “you’re not the boss of me!” ?
It’s as close as we’re going to get. 🙂
You can’t tell me what not to do. 😉
Nah, she never tells us to do anything except Be not afraid and Build over, build under, build arround.
Which, to be fair, we do by nature, being ornery cusses. Easy orders, sufficiently non-specific that we can get into all the trouble we want.
Good leadership never gives orders they know won’t be obeyed. Our hostess has that skill down.
Or Our Gracious Hostess with the dragon and the carpapult.
I think he was looking at the name of the site and taking that as your preferred form of address.
I get it. It just sounds like I’m being called on the carpet.
And I don’t see any period of military service in your background, so you wouldn’t have any trauma from having your last name yelled at you by DIs.
Just be happy that your last name isn’t a homonym of a common word.
The blighters had waaaaay too much fun with mine.
Wait, only the minor acts of hooliganism? What about…?
Let me guess. Sometimes they were too terrified to confront you?
Um…. Minor acts of hooliganism. Like putting a sign on the directive committee’s door saying “a committee is a life form with two or more stomachs and no brain – RAH”
I don’t think anyone was ever scared of me. I looked like a very cute little girl.
…. my life would have been easier if they were scared.
Further points out their ignorance. “Very cute little girl” – among the scariest four words in the English language. (Yes, my middle one was very cute.)
Teachers lounge
Golden Delicious apple
Note: “For the most intelligent.”
….
There was dang near a fist-fight. I mean, c’mon seriously?
ROFL
You’d think they’ve never heard of Greek mythology…
Lawful as I like to think I am (Lawful Good, so long as I am given no reason to behave differently), that should have been nothing more than an amusing gift. The fact that it wasn’t is on the heads of the recipients, not the perpetrator(s). (Of course, intent does matter. But who am I to read another’s mind?)
Oh, the ‘Elites’ know where most of the money goes, they just don’t have a clue where money comes from. They believe it comes from the government!
They don’t realize that printing money does not create value any more than printing empty bread wrappers creates bread.
———————————
Governments can only print money; they can’t make it worth anything. They can make it worth nothing.
it comes from taxes and banks which are an infinite and inexhaustible resource. Or so Congress has been pretending to an increasing degree, since about 1913. The possibility that the whole system will become overstressed and come crashing down is so inconcievable that no one sane* even considers it. (*Sane as defined by the PTB, whose own grip on reality is increasingly suspect.)
Author Josephine Tey had her detective Grant say that criminals couldn’t reason from B to C. They could get from A to B—that is, “if I steal this thing I will have this thing”—but they couldn’t do the next step, which is to think that there might be repercussions from that act. No secondary or tertiary effects. She went on to have him say that the “criminal mind” is the one that happily holds up two completely incompatible things and thinks how well that works.
I’m reminded of that for some reason…
And on that note, Reason has a video series called “Great Moments in Unintended Consequences.” It features and old-style radio announcer describing the event, with the catchline: “What a great idea, with the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?”
The left cannot do second order effects. We’ve figured that out a while back.
Dear Hostess many days they don’t get first order effects. Much of their thinking seems to fall into that of the cargo cults.
I know. But second order really are past them.
They don’t even get the concept of second order effects. Not as it pertains to any of their perfect plans.
See the plan to tax people with good credit scores to subsidize people with bad credit scores.
All I can figure is we’ll probably end up with public and secret credit scores, where everyone has a public credit score optimized to minimize gov’t fees and a real secret credit score that companies use to figure out of they’re actually getting their money back.
Or just no loaning out of money.
Harryvoyager they’ve been been using that for years. Just look at the 2008 bank issue. That was because they had been forcing banks to make mortgages to folks that were at best marginal, and sometimes downright defrauding the lender. We got a mild downturn in the economy and housing prices and boom all the loans and the fancy securities based on them crashed. And then they bailed the banks out who had been using the securities to get better return rates. All because someone thought making it easier for families to have hoes would make them behave like the middle class folks that HAD homes (but had saved and scrimped to do it and so had the ability to self control)/ And of course the way we fix it is borrow to make the banks good which drives up inflation and makes credit harder to get for everyone.
This is a new one. They’re going to raise the government fees on loans based on how high your credit score is so they can subsidize the fees and insurance for loans to people with poor credit ratings.
Kicks off on May 1. I’ve seen estimates that it will cost people with good scores something like an average $14k effectively added to a home loan.
Thing is there are things you can do that will short term tank your credit score without doing real financial damage, and I don’t know how tightly regulates credit scoring really is, so I can see a market for being able to short term tune your credit rating to minimum costs. And once people are gaming credit ratings on an industrial scale, you cannot trust them.
HMMM that is rather direct and nasty. I suppose one could tank their score by taking out several new credit lines (but not using them or using them rather minimally). Not liking that at all, but there isn’t much I like about this regime.
You just made the Reader’s head hurt! He had seen the story but hadn’t spent any time considering the second order effects.
Oh just you wait. The result is -much- worse.
What happens to the apprentice-knights of Dave Ramsey the Unleased, who have no credit scores?
You still have a score, it’s just really high, so you get the biggest fees.
Joy.
Not if you go without credit for long enough. My credit score is zero. I’ve applied for cards, and been turned down because my score’s nonexistent.
Ok, probably best to assume it’s Murphy’s score then: whichever is most inconvenient to have 🙂
For us, we don’t carry any long term loans, and just pay off our credit cards every month so ours is really good.
I could write an essay on how to get credit when you’re dirt poor. 1) Keep a savings account. Your bank may consider it collateral and offer you a credit card account to go along with it. 2) Buy something from a retailer who offers terms such as “90 days same as cash”. Pay it off ASAP. Before you know it, banks and credit card companies will deluge you with offers “Borrow from us!! PLEASE!!”. If only I could get job offers that easily….
44 years ago. Jobs in hand. Go to get CC to buy furniture to sit on (VS the bean bag chair), and a washer/dryer. Color our surprise that two (one each) gas station cards “do count as credit”. What? We were able to get general credit through Sears. (Explains our loyalty to Sears until they went away.) We’ve worked dang hard to get to and keep our credit ratings (“They really, really, like you!”) We took that lesson to launch our son. His credit rating is “Excellent, but thin” just based on his having a single low balance CC. He is now adding his own car payment and insurance.
Now they are weaponizing all this against us. Phooey (spit) on them. We can work the system better than they can.
My sister got a secured card and ran with it. A few months of charging near the limit and paying it off.
When we were starting out Secured Cards weren’t available (’79). Definitely are now and have been for 3 decades or so. That or CC with small balances. Son’s CC, after 16 years is still small. He just hasn’t allowed them to increase it.
Gasoline company credit cards used to be a thing. They were only good at that chain’s stations, but my first card was for Gulf Oil.
There’s still some in rural areas, I don’t know what the requirements are, though.
Pacific Pride when I was a kid, and most of the co-ops around here seem to have cards.
…. weirdly, I think Amazon has easy-cards-for-young-folks.
Gas cards still available. But now they are Visa or Mastercard with points earned for chain (cents/gallon off earned). Being Visa/MC they now are part of ones credit rating. Back (before there was dirt, as our son says) they didn’t count on credit rating.
I know. In addition, mine was for “emergency only”. There were times I paid with change. There were times I only put in $5.00, because that is all I had. Oh, fun times.
Now the worst I have worry about, is when we travel remembering to tell the CC’s we plan to use, we are traveling out of our normal pattern. Isn’t THAT embarrassing, especially now since we don’t travel with anywhere near enough cash to pay for gas for which ever rig we’re driving. Luckily normally our destination route the stations are rather used the this problem.
we don’t travel with anywhere near enough cash
I just had to explain what traveler’s checks were to my daughter when they were a plot point in a movie from the ’90s.
When I started out, I was just out of college and there were no debit cards. So I got a CC with a low limit.
“making it easier for families to have hoes”
Uh… I think most families would need to run that by the wife first…
😛
Unless they mean garden tools… 😀
The easiest cure to being a lefty is to try to imagine higher order effects and realizing that it’s all way to complicated to understand. The illusion of control is an illusion. of course, lefties are the smart people, the good people, and won’t look, that why they’re lefties.
Except they really are incapable of getting that.
You can walk them through it, but their belief system tells them that it not only can be done, it must be done. And if you agree, you’re smart.
If you don’t, you’re either dumb, or trying to deliberately lead them astray. Either way, not listening to you is the “smart” move.
That’s the smug intellectual type for sure. Another frustrating type to deal with, at least in my experience, is the type that’s prone to emoting over thinking, and the manipulation needed to get them to do just that. Even if you do get them to acknowledge the issues with their stances and present them with ideas that do factor these effects in they still won’t change their mind because “that’s so mean” or “but mean/scary/crazy people are going to use it as a first step to do bad things.” It’s exasperating.
We just order the proper outcomes, and denounce saboteurs and wreckers.
That works every time it is tried hard enough.
I think it was either Louis L’Amour in one of his detective Westerns or G.K. Chesterton in one of his Father Brown stories that said much the same thing. It may have been both. I haven’t read either in a while, so I might be conflating the two somehow.
Theodore Dalrymple’s Life At the Bottom is good for non-fiction accounts of the mindset.
Here’s my song about Liberals And Conservatives, just to emphasize your point:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ybcd9jbimtf6lg2/1%20liberal%20and%20conservative%20master.wav?dl=0
The music is from Irving Berlin: “Play A Simple Melody”.
Craig Franklin
“Only married folks had sex . . .” In what era, ever?
It’s just that in the Old days, there was a modicum of stigma attached to the activity (and the occasional product thereof). There’s a reason that calling someone a Bastard used to be fightin’ words.
Yep.
Isn’t there section in the Old Testament where if you had sex with someone, you became automatically married,
OR ELSE!
It depended. (I just worked my way through). You might get away with paying daddy a fine. But in a number of cases if you misused the woman you were not only married, you could never divorce her.
Hehehe.
Justice is served.
If you got tired of your qufe and accused her of fornication, her parents were supposed to bring out, “the proofs of her virginity,” (the fabric they lay on together, perhaps?). If they had the proofs, he couldn’t divorce her. Ever.
And if you were really bad, she lived with Daddy and Mommy, and you paid her money and lived alone.
Sarcasm and irony, of course! The real point is that conservatives are obsessed with sex (Monica Lewinsky?), not so much actual policy debate. Honorable exceptions: Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Thomas Massie.
Obsessed with sex? What a funny way to say “workplace sexual harrassment and perjery in a court of law”.
I think you meant “perjury”. OK, let’s look at the overall Republican track record. Many (most?) of them refuse to acknowledge that a woman owns her own body. They attempt to implement their private religious beliefs into law. They harass women entering abortion clinics. They abhor gay practices, let alone marriage. I’m a Libertarian. When you have a choice between love on the one hand and government on the other, it’s an easy choice.
Now the Democrats are even worse. They lionize birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Patenthood to prevent or abort as many black babies as possible. Did you know that most Planned Parentdoid centers are in or adjacent to black neighborhoods?
Let me repeat: my song is pure SARCASM — for BOTH Liberals and Conservatives. But so far, no one has objected to my snark on Liberals, which is 3x the gentle spoof on Conservatives. Why not?
Something prove you understand your enemy by accurately stating their actual positions as they understand them something something
So congratulations on the comprehensive failure.
I cannot prove a negative. No one can. Perhaps you would care to enlighten us as to what you think are the ACTUAL positions you reference, instead of just claiming I misrepresent them.
Or you could just accept that one form of SARCASM is exaggeration and leave it at that.
I was having lighthearted fun. Your intense darkness needs either to transmute itself into facts, logic, reason, and Science, or go elsewhere. Your choice.
No. Your sarcasm goes wide, because you have no idea with whom you’re arguing.
…but the voices in his head assured him it was a great own upon those he was told to hate.
As for “Libertarian” there’s this meme image from some detective video game that usually says “Doubt”. But then for decades I’ve been seeing people claim to be Libertarian, “Concerned Christians” “Lifelong Republicans”, etc. and yet perfectly recite talking points used by leftists so maybe it’s overexposure to that that makes me a bit… skeptical.
Thanks Sarah. You’re right, I don’t.
This.
Straw man is straw.
Watch. He’ll argue it’s dried grass.
There’s a Red Flag warning from the National Weather Service in effect for this area. Bad for straw men, I think.
The problem with abortion is it isn’t just their own body…it’s someone else’s, too, which complicates matters, depending on when you think human life begins to acquire a) a distinct identity, and b) sufficient value worth trying to preserve. I would consider that a humanitarian argument, not a specifically private religious one.
Precisely. THIS IS NOT SIMPLE. And has zero to do with female bodily autonomy. In cases of rape, maybe, but those are what 0.3% of abortions?
And if rape/incestuous rape, or underage sex, is not punished by execution…
Why would it be a death penalty offense to be a baby of such a union?
Why would the unborn baby not get a day in court?
I guarantee that they all identify as “alive.”
Obviously. But at least I could see that meaning something to do with “female body autonomy.”
Otherwise it’s “female lack of responsibility.”
I would withhold execution of rapists until the child has reached adulthood. Something like the old Yuma prison, with labor gangs, and any profits go to the mother and child.
The (also rare) cases involving severe injury or death.
My position is exactly the same as for shooting a person outside of the womb. Only justified in physical defense of self or others.
(As one commenter replied to me a few day ago – any other road leads, inevitably, to Auschwitz.)
Does the woman also own the body of the child she invited in?
No one harrasses women entering abortion clinics. They pray outside them. NOT THE SAME.
We don’t actually give a good goddamn who you have sex with, dude. This is just insanity.
there’s maybe 2% of “conservatives” who actually care.
We just want it to be consensual. And don’t do it in the street and scare the horses.
AND STOP SOUNDING LIKE ABORTION IS A SIMPLE THING. It’s not. And it’s not women rights, either.
Reproduction for the species goes through women. it doesn’t BELONG to women. BAH.
Talk about second order effects.
He started with a complete misrepresentation of the position regarding the Lewinsky case. When that was pointed out, he immediately shifted goalposts.
Not arguing in good faith.
Somewhere, a bridge is missing its….
Billy Goats Gruff?
Well, given the way things have been going lately (Insty had a couple of links about what the UN has said on the matter), it’s probably important to include the world “adults” following the word “consensual”.
I wish TPTB weren’t running headlong that direction. But they are.
oh. Yes. Sorry.
I’ll note you’re arguing with one of my most libertarian readers, and telling him he’s against sex or some shit. BAH
{Bushes}
“… if I was a young man, I’d go beat them bushes!” 😉
I’m pretty conservative. Abortion is a ghastly “choice”. Murdering your own unborn child is even worse than boiling a kid in its own mother’s milk.
However, this is the real world; and if, and until, we can safely, for the mother and the child both, remove the fetus to another environment to safely gestate it to birth, death of the child or force the mother to carry to term are the only two choices.
But the responsibility for that decision is the woman’s, and not even the father has a right to nay say her. BUT! No one has the right to force the rest of society to subsidize or enable that abortion. You need the money for it and don’t have it, go ask someone who’ll fund it for you. You’re not allowed to use Uncle to force us to cough it up for you.
We are actually in agreement on several points. Liberals want to subsidize abortion with money taken by force from those who believe abortion is murder. That’s obviously wrong — use your own money not ours. Some Conservatives want to outlaw abortion, even in the case of rape or incest, because they believe that something called a soul implants itself at the moment of fertilization. That’s a private religious belief. There is a wonderful book by Andrew Bernstein, called “the philosophical basis of a woman’s right to abortion “, which analyzes ALL the issues logically. I agree with his position.
Look, if you want it, it’s a baby and you give it proper pre-natal care and love and cherish it. If you don’t want it, it’s a fetus and you make a different choice.
Sheesh — if I’d known that my amusing parody of Liberals and Conservatives would stimulate such unamusing and harsh responses, well, I guess I misjudged the caliber of the audience.
Or perhaps you need to check your lyrics and rebuttal and see why they are (if indeed they are) being misinterpreted.
That happens a fair amount around here, actually. We try to make sure we understand what someone intended to communicate, and on occasion discover that it was bad phrasing, or there was an assumption on one side that the other party didn’t catch. And sometimes it really is someone who, oh, never actually read the history of the American Revolution, or who is 100% certain that biology has no/zero/zip/nada effect on human behavior and that everything is social conditioning. [Kitty eye-roll here]
It’s one grievous logical mistake to generalize the private beliefs of “some conservatives” to all of them. It’s another, and to my mind more fundamental error of another kind to claim that the difference between a baby and a fetus (or person and thing) is whether the mother wants it. You’re damn right about the unamused and harsh response to that kind of logic.
I didn’t generalize. Some Conservatives base their opposition to abortion on their private religious beliefs. A few don’t. Bit it IS so serious an issue that Kristen Sinema in Arizona was strongly advised not to move from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party because she would be “primaried out” for her stance on abortion, so she chose to become an Independent. For a very significant portion of Republican voters, it is a litmus test issue and it is enshrined in their national platform.
A clump of cells (a blastocyst) is alive, yes, and a potential human being, yes, but it is NOT an actual human being yet. It is wholly dependent on the mother.. if she wants it, it’s a baby. If not, it’s a parasite. And that’s why it’s the mother’s choice.
I use facts, logic, Reason, and Science. Calling me names is NOT an argument — or will ever be.
Calling a child a blastocyst and vice versa is rhetoric, not science. When a person is actually a person is not something within the competence of science. Alas, there seems to be only opinion. Calling on the great god SCIENCE is no less a religious position than calling on Moloch, which it so often resembles.
I thought I had been careful to restrict my response to the logic of your arguments? What names have I called you? Or are you preemptively reacting to things others may have said but I have not?
Whether the blastocyst is alive and a potential human being is precisely the point at issue. It is the opinion of more than just a few and for more than one reason that such potential should not be discarded without compelling reason. Reasonable people (including many political conservatives who oppose elective abortion in general) differ on what is sufficiently compelling reason. Those who oppose abortion on this basis include those who profess no particular religion, and those whose religion has no official position on when ensoulment occurs.
Admittedly, there are whose who would favorably compare trichinella spiralis to some humans, but this is usually on the basis of adult conscious behavior of said humans, and is considered derogatory and insulting. Like all mammals, the mother’s body is formed to protect the developing young of the species, and barring injury or pathology, or deliberate intervention will normally become one of those. A parasite has no such potential. If you are going to argue from science, you will have to do better than that.
My four-month-old baby is wholly dependent on her mother, too. 100% of her nutrition still comes from her mother’s body, four months after her birth. If her mommy stopped feeding her, the baby would die. Are you arguing that that means that four-month-old babies can be legally killed with no consequence? Because that’s where your logic explicitly leads: to such august company as Peter Singer (spit).
No. The only safe way, that does not have a slippery slope with nastiness beyond belief at the bottom, is to say “if it’s an organism with human DNA, then it’s a human being with human rights, including the right to life”. So, a baby that’s still at the blastocyst stage of development — is it an organism? Yep. Does it have human DNA? Yep.
No religious convictions needed to conclude that human rights begin at conception, just a willingness to apply logic and follow arguments all the way to the end to see where they end up, then reject them if they end up in places where someone’s human rights are being denied based on arbitrary criteria (which always, ALWAYS, become more and more arbitrary).
That’s where I landed after thinking it through. I used to waffle back and forth on all sorts of “nuance,” but Planned Parenthood’s selling the parts of the fetuses for human stem cell research threw the fundamental truth of it into a harsh light: Abortion kills a growing human. Full stop.
When is it okay to kill a growing human that hasn’t done (and couldn’t possibly do) anything wrong? If the answer isn’t pretty darn close to “never,” I hope it’s only a lack of thought speaking, because otherwise, there will be no mercy for you at the day of judgment.
Self-flattery is not an argument, either.
“you live because mommy wanted you” cheapens ALL of our lives.
“and to my mind more fundamental error of another kind to claim that the difference between a baby and a fetus (or person and thing) is whether the mother wants it.”
Actually, that’s precisely what I think the difference is. Ask a hundred different religious scholars, a hundred different bio-scientists, a hundred different doctors, and a hundred random people off the street, and you’ll get at least 400 different claims of when a human becomes a being. Ditto on when they have a soul.
It is said by some, that we save or damn ourselves by our choices. But you can’t save someone by forcing them not to do evil. And if God is infinite, and God wants a soul to experience life, a mere abortion isn’t going to stop Him from creating the opportunity for that soul to live.
Note that I’m thinking of the difference from a legal point of view in this case. IDK when a fetus becomes a human being; but I can tell a newborn baby definitely is one.
“It is said by some, that we save or damn ourselves by our choices. But you can’t save someone by forcing them not to do evil. And if God is infinite, and God wants a soul to experience life, a mere abortion isn’t going to stop Him from creating the opportunity for that soul to live.”
You do realize that logic equally applies to murder?
Absolutely. I’m not going to save a murderer from the sin of murder. But I can try to stop him, even if I have to kill him to do it. Obviously killing an unwilling mother to stop her from murdering her unborn child isn’t going to work. But neither is forcing a woman to bear a child she doesn’t want. That road leads to the Bene Tleilaxu axolotl tanks.
Eh. My mom survived bearing a child she didn’t want. We’re both doing fairly okay now. Thank you.
Odd that you admit you might not have to kill the murderer to stop him, but instantly leap to the notion that you’d have to kill the mother, so you throw your hands up in the air.
Waitaminute. I don’t have to do a …. thing in order to force a woman to bear an unwanted child. Once she consents to start the process, her own body will do that. “Your lack of preparation is not my emergency”. I respect the life she is carrying, even if she does not. Now, if the pregnancy were forced on her without her legitimate consent, that may be a different matter. “
Mary, I was trying to be nice. Not to mention that anything I post here can and will be used against me in a court of law if it ever comes to that. Showing the intent to stop, rather than immediately kill, at least throws any claims of premeditation into doubt. Nonetheless, my stopping a murderer is likely going to result in his (or her) death anyway. I can shoot the gun out of the hand of a stationary dummy at 10 to 20 yards on the range; my accuracy in an active shooter situation is going to be (at least) a magnitude worse, so center of mass is where it’s going. And I think you missed the obvious absurdity of the notion of killing a mother to prevent the murder of the unborn child.
If your only way to imagine stopping one involves killing him, that’s a you problem.
Mary, any scenario that involves “stopping” someone from doing something involves a sliding scale of force, that yes, necessarily involves the possibility of killing them.
That’s NOT saying it’s the only way to stop them. But before you contemplate doing anything about someone’s behavior, you had better be comfortable with the possibility. Because it’s there.
And yet every day we use force to stop people from doing things without killing them
Thank you for repeating what I just said.
Nope. I removed the hyperbolic objection.
Mary, I don’t have a problem with it. Just acknowledging the possible/probable negative consequences. You see, that was a decision I made a lifetime ago when I decided it was okay for me to kill people to defend the ones I love. Having been on the wrong side of a gun several times, I see no reason to change that decision.
People are never someone else’s property.
Even small ones.
As opposed to the belief that all human beings have equal rights? That’s certainly a private religious belief, as you use the term, by any rational standard
Why stop there? Why not let her kill the baby, or the child, on the grounds that she can’t bear let to someone else raise it, and this is the real world?
Or the flip side – noone has the right to pressure her into having one, either.
Including with threats of abandonment if she doesn’t get rid of “it.”
Forcing someone to have an abortion. This was meant for Mike’s comment.
It threaded correctly in email, FWIW; the indent is weird this week….
I was agreeing with you– just looking at the means of force that have been popular in the last 40 years, but also excused/ignored/mocked by those employing them.
How to protect those rights, and prevent claiming someone else’s rights for your own benefit, is a really hairy problem….
Yep, we’re in complete agreement.
If you can’t tell the difference between a woman’s body and another human’s body that happens to be occupying the reproductive system, you’re an idiot.
If you can tell the difference, and are just pretending to not understand the difference, you’re a liar.
And yes, we did notice that rather than answer the argument made against your claims, you changed the subject to more attacks.
ALL of the analysis I support is contained in Andrew Bernstein’s 28 page booklet, “The Philosophical Basis For A Woman’s Right To Abortion “. It costs $1 on Amazon Kindle. It cogently and comprehensively addresses ALL of the objections that everyone on this forum has presented to me. I may choose to respond to any future comments which begin with an acknowledgment of having read Bernstein’s book. I will definitely NOT respond otherwise to anyone else. And that defines my further participation. I must admit, it has been a very educational experience. Thank you all for enlightening me. And to all a good night.
It’s not worth my time or money. I seriously doubt that he has anything to add to the Philosophical Basis of a Woman’s Right to Abortion that hasn’t been hashed and rehashed to death over the last 50 years that I’ve been listening to the debate. It’s not that I don’t know or understand the arguments. It’s that I don’t agree with them.
Standard variant of “the strong have rights the weak do not” and equivocation, made by someone who is safe from the strong, dressed up pretty; heavy vibes of the usual “I didn’t pressure my girlfriend to abort, I let her freely choose what to do with her body, it’s not my fault she’s free” with high levels of DARVO and bonus “it’s not a REAL human life, it’s a POTENTIAL human life. Because science says so, no really, SCIENCE!” special definition right in the blurb.
https://estore.aynrand.org/products/the-philosophical-basis-of-a-womans-right-to-abortion-booklet
If they’re going to claim “science” well, I’d like to see the tstable hypothesis and the falsification conditions. I mean, if it’s really science. 😉
Otherwise it’s just “the prophets say so.”
And isn’t it handy how they happen to have a monopoly on prophets?
Well, since he has mocked those who oppose elective abortion for their religious beliefs and then turns around and presents the work of a philosopher as Ultimate Authority (forgetting that collectively and in general philosophers will argue about anything and have settled nothing), his terms of ignoring anyone not willing to engage on his chosen ground are acceptable.
If only we could trust that he would hold to them!
No, it doesn’t. It has no good answer to the fact that the baby is NOT part of the woman’s body: it is a distinct human being.
Think I’m mischaracterizing the book? Prove me wrong.
So long as we all acknowledge his Holy Book, he’ll allow us to discourse with him. What a maroon.
:snort:
No thanky, piggy wiggy, some animals are not more equal than others, and you already laid out the rule that thinking things because someone else said so is illegitimate, when you pretended to both mind-read and judge being motivated by religious belief as inherently invalid.
You, theoretically, read Sarah’s article and were, again theoretically, attempting to engage first the article and then then audience.
When the “scream louder and attack a strawman” didn’t work, you turned to attacking the audience.
When your first choice of target was incredibly poorly selected, and the rest likewise had no issue handing you your head, NOW suddenly there’s a pay to enter to engage your, ahem, truly incredible powers of discussion and engagement.
Which we should, like, TOTALLY believe won’t be shifted as fast as very other offer you suddenly found less than useful.
Because if you can’t trust some rando on the internet who can’t even agree with himself when things get the least bit challenging, who can you trust?
deep breath*
step back
I’m going to have a bagel with cream cheese and chives. Anyone else want one while I’m up?
I’m good, but there’s a pile of thai tea and vietnam instant coffee by the tea pot. If you do about two, three times the amount of water it says, they’re pretty dang good.
Tea sounds good. But I prefer fresh ground and brewed coffee. Too many bad memories of bad instant coffee. Some things don’t come out of MREs or c-rats without horrible consequences to quality.
I bet you’re the author of that little pamphlet (no, I’m not giving you clicks or views, much less money), and you’re using this blog to steal advert space without paying for it.
Until you show me your driver license held up next to your own face in the mirror with a giant shower curtain with “Frog Lives Matter” painted across it in the background, to prove you are not financially benefiting from stolen advert space, I have no reason to listen to you or respond in any fashion.
(Actually, I think Sarah ought to ban your butt for theft of advert space, but it’s her blog, her choice. )
Remember that “let’s go Brandon” was the result of a single panicking sports reporterette trying to cover up a loud and obvious FJB chant. It was a post-race interview at Talladega Superspeedway after a race two years ago where a kid named Brandon Brown won his first race. So instead of what everybody could CLEARLY hear over the mic–FJB–she spazzed out and said “oh, listen to the crowd, chanting ‘let’s go Brandon.'” The rest is history.
There’s no better capsule representation of the news media. “No, no, don’t believe your own senses, if WE tell you something, you can believe it, it’s true!”
And if you’ve never seen the actual video where this happened, it’s here:
Sort of a Baghdad Biden (or Brandon?) Moment…
About that time I got a bearded, rather hippie-ish mailman named Brandon. I asked him if he had problems. He said no, it didn’t bother him.
He was a very good mailman.
Note that if she’d acknowledged what the chant was, the station probably would have had to cut the feed due to Federal rules on profanity over the air. So while I suspect she was probably in denial, there is a chance that she was merely trying to make sure that she could finish her interview.
Moose, caribou, salmon, halibut in the freezer. Potatoes started though they won’t be in the ground until June. Bought a rather large dehydrator this winter. Planning to start work on my almost adult savage teenage granddaughter’s new, when she’s an independent grownup in a year or so house/barn/garage/etc. at the west end of the eighty acres this spring (& nope, don’t need no stinkin’ building permit.). Working on a two cycle linear engine/generator design. Planning to take the boat down to Valdez, head out a do a little work on a remote, isolated, untaxed piece of property I have this summer.
Illusion or not, life’s great up here atop the world.
& again, again and, again, quoting Albert Camus; “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
In point of fact, a majority of states now have Constitutional Carr, a clear indication that we’re winning that battle toward clawing back our rights from them.
Yep.
The gulf between the states that have it and those that don’t is widening, and the states on the other side are getting much worse, very quickly. WA and OR, case in point.
WA has had a small Democrat majority in its legislature for several decades, but after 2016 it got larger, and since then has been going for broke with the woketard wishlist. And shortly before that, the “progressives” got a stranglehold on the initiative process, which the progtards and fraudsters on the populous west side have used to get “the people” to vote our rights away. We’re between a rock and a hard place.
Which I guess goes to the point of this post; in the places where they can grab, they’re doing it with a vengeance.
Oregon is likely getting Constitutional Carry on the ballot – over the req’d amount of signatures on the petition were submitted to SECSTATE this last week. Now, i’ts obviously going to fail because Mail In Voting, but it’s still likely heading to the ballot.
Blink? Really? Never thought Constitutional Carry would actually get on the Ballot. Agree. With vote by
mailfraud, it won’t pass. Not unless the non-democratic counties wait until the other counties report final tallies. OTOH after 114 fiasco, maybe the suspect counties does pass it? (I know. Not a snowball’s chance where it is burning hot. Or take a peak where it is perpetually hot and discover it has frozen over.)It depends on how heavy a thumb is on the signature measurement scales. If I’m recalling correctly, one of the Despicable Kate Brown recall efforts got a suspiciously large number of invalid signatures. OTOH, there were some screwups on the petitioner’s side, and I’d not be surprised if some out and out sabotage was in play.
And yeah, it will fail because mail-in fraud if it gets to the ballot. I wonder if Idaho has Constitutional Carry–been too long a day to look it up. Side note: can we be ungovernable enough to persuade TPTB to say “good riddance”?
Idaho does. It was one of the first.
Some of the TN politicos are panicking and trying to race through Red Flag laws and assault weapons blocks and so on, even though the main problem in TN cities is not what they want to claim it is.
“People can’t be trusted with guns! Only The Government should have guns!”
“What is the government?”
“Huh?”
“Isn’t the government just a bunch of people?”
“NO! It’s— it’s— it’s The Government! They NEED guns, to enforce The Law!”
“What about all those White Supremacist cops that go around killing unarmed black people? Do they need guns?”
“Gkk…akk…sputz…does not compute…Norman coordinate!”
California had decisions announced a few weeks ago on a couple of trial court cases involving the roster. In both cases, the judge found that while having a roster didn’t violate the second amendment, the requirements in place on what would allow a gun to qualify for the roster did violate the second amendment (i.e. California could maintain the roster, but it couldn’t impose absurd requirements to keep manufacturers from getting their guns on the roster). Of the three items required for a gun to be listed on the roster, the State Attorney General appealed the rulings against the Chamber Load Indicator and the Magazine Disconnect Mechanism. However, he didn’t appeal the rulings against micro-stamping.
So goodbye microstamping, right? We can finally get rid of this absurd requirement for a technology that has never existed, and that wouldn’t work even if a manufacturer tried to implement it?
WRONG!
Apparently a bill has been introduced to the California State Senate that would require all guns on the registry to have micro-stamping, and grandfathered guns without microstamping would be removed from the registry in 2027 (previously grandfathered guns were allowed to remain, with the caveat that they would be removed when guns that met all of the requirements were added to the registry).
/facepalm
When Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, conservatives weren’t happy about it. But attempts to curtail abortion largely focused on finding the edges of what Roe required and attempting to keep it from going any further. Cases usually involved states going just a bit too far (in the court’s opinion) over the line, and getting an admonishment in response. But the reaction of the blue states to the recent Bruen decision is complete and utter denial. If a court rules against the state’s gun control laws, then the legislatures just pass new laws that violate Bruen even more strongly than the laws that were overturned.
It’s really disturbing.
“If a court rules against the state’s gun control laws, then the legislatures just pass new laws that violate Bruen even more strongly than the laws that were overturned.”
Of course; they have an unlimited supply of taxpayer funds to fight this through the courts, and in the meantime, they can do as they please.
“The democrats wanted them here; they didn’t have the authority or support to bring them here or keep them here, but they did it anyway.
And that’s how the trick works. When they are stymied by laws that have been properly passed by the people’s representatives, Democrats simply proceed with their plans. Sometimes they get away with it indefinitely and sometimes the courts rein them back in, but by then they’ve already gotten their way. (Obama’s DACA beneficiaries are still here, and many have children of their own now, who are native-born U.S. citizens.)
This Leftist tactic — just going ahead and doing whatever they want even if they don’t have the authority — was widely used to circumvent election laws, especially in swing states, during the 2020 general election.”
“Mr. Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”
The Founder of the Democrat Party.
And that attitude is why I am resigned to the inevitability of armed rebellion. They aren’t going to allow anything else to work.
Progress in politics and governance is actually possible. A notable instance was the creation of the American constitution.
Yes. But note it’s not “scientific governance” from the center out, controlling every part of your life, which is what the 20th century dictators promised.
Yes, that was exactly the point I was making.
I figured. 😉 I was explaining for bystanders, since we get some every day.
Can’t say fairer than that.
C4C
“If their plans were working perfectly, each of their “let’s ban guns’ would be having an effect.”
It does have an effect. More and more first time gun buyers, and a general uptic in guns and ammo sales.
Who are discovering that, hmm, gee, not so easy to buy guns, is it?
My favorite was the Journo who went in to prove how easily it can be done, and was rejected by NICS for some “youthful indiscretions” followed closely by those try to straw purchase and the FFL tells them to depart or the police will be called, and of course there’s Borat (the boring, Sasha something or other) who tried to get a gun while in some other character, and the dealer recognised him from the get go, and reminded him knowingly filing false background to NICS is a felony.
Zerohedge just published a chart of the US Credit Default Swap (cds) rate, which has been blowing up like it always does when we face one of these debt ceiling kabuki dances. The headline “if anyone can finally do this, it’s Joe”. I’m glad I wasn’t drinking anything when I saw that or I’d be buying a new computer.
It’s not actually funny. Sleepy Joe is a one man set of fat tail events just waiting to happen,
Well, if they meant “If anybody can finally F*K this up once and for all, it’s Joe.” I’d be inclined to agree with ’em.
Joe’s ventriloquists have certainly put the right idiots in place to do it. It couldn’t have been easy to assemble an entire administration without ONE SINGLE competent individual getting appointed, even by mistake.
The Press Secretary can’t answer the simplest questions. The Transportation Secretary knows nothing about transportation. The Treasury Secretary knows nothing about economics. The Secretary Of State is clueless about international diplomacy. The Department Of Justice is practicing injustice as hard as they can. The Secretary Of Defense and Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff blundered their way through the worst military debacle in our history.
If anyone is more competent than the boss, they are a threat to the boss, and that sort of boss is extremely good at making sure nothing can threaten them.
As the lightbringer once said, “never underestimate Joe’s ability to f-ck things up.” Still, this would be spectacular, even for him.
I remember when Joe Biden was Barack’s insurance policy. No one would dare harm a hair on Barack’s head if Slow Joe was going to be the one to take over.
Good times. Good times.
Of course you realize President Horse Laugh is going to be the next prezzy, right??
And Fetterman will be the first Person of Lump as VP.
And they only justice that they’ve put on the US Supreme Court doesn’t know where our rights derive from.
Because they don’t believe in “rights”, just “what we want”.
And the proposed head of the BATF knows nothing about the arms industry.
I am more and more convinced that Yellen will be the next president, One way or another.
What’s a fat tail event?
On a much more superstitious note, I’m having, a lot of “a storm’s coming,” dreams.
Me too.
Given we’ve both lost loved ones recently (and I know you’re supporting Dan emotionally), I’m not sure whether the dreams are general or related to the emotional climate. Except I’ve a few from earlier.
One has noticed that as soon as the Democrats obtained a razor thin majority in the Senate and the presidency, they immediately began to attempt to ram through the most obnoxious extreme leftist measures. One is not sure whether this is foolish overconfidence that they have finally won or a desperate attempt to grab and keep hold on power over public policy and discourse before it gets away from them. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that it’s both.
They did the same thing last time, when Obama got into office. The result was a Republican senator elected in Massachusetts.
Naw, that’s just because there was one Republican in Massachusetts and they had to get him out of the state somehow. 😛
I need to get to work, I have some space vikings inside a secret pirate base getting ready to blow it up….
i NEED TO GET TO WORK. i’M BEING HELD HOSTAGE BY 2 LBS OF CAT.
Kittens to Sarah – Stop rattling the keyboard and give us the attention we deserve!
I keep a laser pointer near my desk. If a tossed toy or two won’t placate Special K, I use the laser to run her ragged. She will chase the !!!DOT!!! until she is panting. She then goes to the couch for a nap.
Heh.
What’s the word for something that’s both a noun and a verb? Let’s record a record! Is it piracy when one pirate takes something from another? That is, does “matey, let’s pirate that pirate” even make sense?
Yes, piracy is an act. Look up privateer, basically licensed pirates. During the 1600/1700’s England and other monarchies licensed Privateers to hunt down pirates, that was the cover story. The real truth was they were pirates raiding the pirates of other nations and the Spanish galleons out of the new world. The English and French were the two nations that did this the most in the new world, the others did more it in the Orient. Every European and Far Eastern Monarchies had their own pirates, they were left alone so long as they didn’t raid their own nations shipping. But once you start being a pirate, well shit happens.
An English word. Seriously, English words routinely wear multiple hats; “dream” can be a noun (“I had a dream last night”), a verb (“What did you dream about?”), or an adjective “(A manic pixie dream girl!”).
Nouning verbs, verbing nouns, adjective-ating them both and visa-versa…..
To some this may seem a change of topic, but it really isn’t. Damn phone alerts. It just said Alec Baldwin had the charges dropped. I bet a bunch of leftists are gleeful. Good for them. But in reality it just made Alec Baldwin the poster child for White Privilege. As a leftist Alec Baldwin has proven their idea of equality is a lie. I know you can’t be a leftist without being a hypocrite, but they don’t know it. And he become a poster child by misusing a firearm. He killed two people by playing games with a gun, oh I agree a whole bunch of people screwed up, or someone tried to set him up. Either way, he has proven every line told about the left’s elite is now true. For all their wails about white privilege it is them who have that in spades. The gods of Irony had a field day with this one.
If you go to Aesop’s blog (raconteurreport dot blogspot dot com) and search for the relevant posts, you’ll see someone who considers A. Baldwin to be both lower than pond scum on the humanity scale and innocent of charges. Actors aren’t supposed to know squat about firearms. It’s. Not. Their. Job. Nor does it make sense to try to make it so.
Neither as an actor nor as a nominal producer was Baldwin in a position to know or ensure that the so-called dummy rounds in his pistol were actually dummy rounds. There’s a long manual that the film industry (where it’s frequently required to point a “loaded” gun at a person and pull the trigger) that the two people who should have been controlling this managed to violate almost(?) every rule in that document. The armorer had previously been fired from another production for unsafe practices and continued in the same vein. The line producer (I think that was the name) was supposed to be the checker, and didn’t.
The first rule: “don’t have live rounds on the set” got violated right away. It went downhill from there.
I should have looked for the end-zone dance. His post has the links to the previous info. And yeah, Aesop has done a lot of work doing med-support for movies, so he sort of knows what the hell he’s talking about.
The link: https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2023/04/file-under-eat-me.html
No. Just NO.
If you pick up a gun, YOU are responsible for handling it safely. YOU, not somebody else. If you can’t handle guns safely, DON’T HANDLE GUNS!!
It’s not even that hard. The Four Rules can be recited in less than 30 seconds, and anybody with enough functional brain cells to form a quorum can memorize and understand them.
Yeah, it looks like this was a clusterf*k by committee, but just because somebody else f*ked up doesn’t excuse Alec for contributing yet another f*kup. If ANYBODY had done ANYTHING right, she wouldn’t be dead.
They weren’t even performing a scene! They were just fooling around. There was NO excuse for pointing that gun at people.
———————————
Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send ’em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot.
Aesop’s point is that the Four Rules cannot apply to movie firearms. Note the number of movie fatalities over the 100 or so years of firearms in movies. Hint: most of those were some dumb actors who thought that blank rounds were safe at close range. This gun wasn’t using blanks, but dummys. They’re supposed to look like live rounds. I don’t know how the movie industry marks them, but it’s the armorer’s job, not the actor’s to know the difference.
I don’t believe it was “fooling around”. My understanding is that it was a rehearsal. OTOH, there was fooling around earlier, using the revolver for plinking (seriously against the rules, what a surprise). Three guesses as to where the live rounds came from.
Again, without redoing the movie, what could he have done differently? “Here’s a gun loaded with dummys. Point it at the camera. Pull the trigger. End scene.” It’s neither the responsibility, nor did he have the experience/knowledge/tools to differentiate dummys from the live rounds that weren’t supposed to be anywhere near the set.
And if Alec Baldwin in any capacity, issued an instruction or ordered a weapon that the armorer determined was unsafe, she should have told him she would quit and report him to the appropriate authorities if he kept insisting on it. And then DONE IT.
It’s called a professional obligation.
Considering that the armorer was the one who managed to load live rounds instead of dummies, it looks like she’s the one who should be doing hard time.
IMHO, the only thing Baldwin did wrong was to get involved in a production where the hiring managers (not him) got a thoroughly incompetent/negligent armorer because she was “affordable”.
FWIW, I’m trying to picture a play where the Four Rules would be used for Chekov’s Gun. Pretty much the same situation. It’s a gun-like object, and if the other rules are obeyed, it’s reasonably safe.
What you’re missing is the context of when the gun was fired. IIRC, and if I’m wrong then someone please point it out, they were not rehearsing a scene when Baldwin fired the gun. Rather, he was threatening / bantering with the lady he shot in between rehearsals. He said something like “I outta just shoot you,” pointed the gun at her (on purpose) and pulled the trigger (on purpose). His reasonable belief that the gun was
unloadedloaded with blanks does not excuse violating the Four Rules in that situation, so he should have been found guilty of negligent homicide.They dropped the case because allegedly, they would have a hard time proving that the gun didn’t just accidentally go off, and that would create reasonable doubt. I doubt that very much, myself: guns have been carefully designed for decades to fire only when the trigger is pulled, so all accidental discharges in recent years have been when some object (usually someone’s finger) was inside the trigger guard when it shouldn’t have been.
But the point is that although Baldwin could reasonably expect the gun to have been loaded with blanks, he still had no business pulling the trigger outside the context of a rehearsal, nor pointing it at someone who was not a fellow actor playing the scene. Those facts alone are enough to find him guilty of negligent homicide.
Not just affordable, but apparently her father was well known and thought of as an armorer too. Nepotism is not the best hiring method either.
He’s the producer for the movie, AND the big name.
He even hired the assistant director who, in the original story, announced that the gun had no bullets (not even blanks) in it.
Which should be a pretty obvious check in a revolver.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/alec-baldwin-film-rust-hired-inexperienced-armorer-hannah-gutierrez-reed-before-halyna-hutchins-shooting
The assistant director was charged (not sure with what) and got a light sentence. The armorer is still up for charges. I haven’t seen confirmation about the between-rehearsal-setups about Baldwin doing the “I’ll shoot you instead”.
The production company will see plenty of wrongful death suits, and Baldwin might see his share as one of the producers. The movie was his idea, but AFAIK, he had little to do with the day-to-day production. From the last TV shows I’ve seen, lead actors will get a producer credit, but there’s little chance they are doing any of the grunt production work. Gary Sinise was a producer on CSI_NY. Can’t see him doing the day to day.
I keep getting an idea of a production involving squirt guns but somebody handed the actor one filled with HF.
Already paid off the family.
Which is probably part of why the charges were dropped now.
A lot of the initial reporting suddenly vanished when 1) they realized there was a lawsuit coming, and 2) it didn’t feed in to banning guns.
Movie sets use two kinds of ‘safe’ ammunition.
There are dummy rounds, which have a real bullet seated in the case, no powder, and an inactive primer. If you load one and pull the trigger, nothing happens except the firing pin dents the primer. They provide the ‘look’ of real ammunition without the risks.
Then there are blanks, which have a live primer, a reduced powder charge, and no bullet. If you load blanks and pull the trigger, you get a loud BANG and a muzzle blast which can injure or kill at very short range. Blanks provide the ‘feel’ of real ammunition with minimal risk IF you don’t do stupid shit with them.
I talked to a Wild West show enactor, who told me about how another enactor (idiot) blew his brains out with a blank by holding a 6-gun loaded with blanks up to his head and pulling the trigger. The blast of hot gas blew a hole in his temporal bone.
Brandon Lee was killed on the ‘Crow 2’ set when a revolver was loaded with dummy rounds for one shot, then reloaded with blanks for the next shot. Nobody noticed that one of the dummy rounds came apart, leaving a bullet lodged in the gun. When the blank was fired, the bullet was expelled with lethal force.
So, even mixing the two kinds of ‘safe’ ammunition can still be dangerous if somebody is not paying attention. Which is why everybody should always make their own safety checks, every time a gun is handled on set.
———————————
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
Actors are specifically forbidden from ever messing with guns in ways needed to do those checks, because they have proven that they cannot be trusted with that responsibility.
This!
John-Erik Hexum did himself in on the set of Cover Up in 1984 with a .44 Mag blank. He was goofing around and had one round in the revolver. He played Russian Roulette, says Wiki. (His previous show was SF Voyagers! in the ’82-3 season. I didn’t have a TV at the time, and never saw it.
Darwin Award! 😮
A palate cleanser. The local university Catholic chapel is having a mixer dance that is practically free, and they named it after the priest’s dog.
It is so normal, but a lot of places do not do even this much social life.
Ackchewally, the soviets had nearly twice as many nuclear weapons as the US did at the height of the cold war.
As for scientifically/technologically advancing government: I got this. Almost everything government does is a monopoly on various aspects of insurance markets. Perhaps scientific research is one exception.
When you want to decentralize an insurance market, rather than monopolize it, you need to make it cost competitive. The rationale for nationalizing any market is the “its a failed market” argument, ergo it is too expensive to deliver the service or product than the price people are willing to pay without a gun to their head to make them pay it, because people normally have the null option to not buy anything they don’t think they need, and humans, being terrible at assessing risk, are terrible at determining how much insurance they really should have until it is too late and then they obviously scream that someone else should do something about that and make someone else pay for it.
So, how to make formerly “failed markets” price competitive again without the bully fist of government? Firstly you can reduce the cost of doing the administrative paperwork, and of verifying facts on the ground. Secondly, you STOP adding regulatory overhead that adds more cost of compliance, because you can automate compliance with software.
The software to do it is blockchain technology and smart contracts. Insurance markets are all about contracts, and smart contracts are simply code that executes automatically just like a contract based on previously agreed upon data inputs from agreed verifiable sources.
If we convert all the administrative functions of government into smart contracts on a national blockchain, and enable all the people seeking entitlement benefits for retirement, disability, etc to mine that blockchain in a decentralized fashion, the cost of government will drop drastically, and you turn what was previously a cost center into a profit center, and what was previously a drag on the economy (the welfare payments) into an engine of the economy.
Sure, you put all the bureaucrats out of work but fuck them.
No. They didn’t have double the nukes. I also thought so, but NO, in fact they did not. That’s what our “Intelligence community” thought.
I’ll quote krushev “We had nothing and were bluffing.”
They probably had less than that. They don’t maintain anything.
People still accept intelligence estimates from an intelligence community that overestimated the USSR’s economy by an order of magnitude. That’s just sad.
And 51 prominent former members of that same intelligence made public pronouncements denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation.
No, those are the retarded idiot children of the ones that made the first mistake.
Same community, different generation.
And because of all the in-breeding, retarded. Yep.
I do know a retired Army guy I worked with who was on the joint inspection team mentioned that a number of the silos he visited in the USSR turned out to be full of water, and their Russian counterparts just smirked about it.
That and they guys who helped the Russians leave East Germany finding out that the tank battalions were mostly towed from position to position at night because they weren’t capable of moving under their own power.
Yep.
Again, no, they didn’t have double the missiles we had. I doubt they had half.
Meanwhile, in France . . .
I am sympathetic to the French in their opposition to overweening central government.
I am not particularly sympathetic to their demands that they continue to get their pensions at 62.
Besides, those two positions are logically incompatible, because it’s overweening central government that yoicks the money away from workers who are actually working to give it to workers who feel like they want to stop working at a ridiculously young age.
“[…]those two positions are logically incompatible[…]”
Did you miss the part where THEY’RE FRENCH???
“The French are miserable because they live in France, and France is miserable because it’s full of Frenchmen.” — Mark Twain
On the plus side, they do get French women. Bastards.
And I’d cut them some slack. The people in the country side are literally being impoverished to the point of no survival. Perhaps they think retirement will allow them to move/go to a cheaper country/take another job, etc.
(I was mostly making fun of French philosophers. “Logically incompatible” being their middle names, after all. I actually like the French in general.)
LOL
(OK, OK, I like French females, within a certain age range.)
I was rather bemused to discover that Grandma P’s ancestry came by way of Brittany. We were under the impression that her family had lived in the Great Plains from pre-history and greeted the Indians as they arrived. 🙂
Do not confuse Bretons with French people. Bretons are a different nationality that got taken over by the French. The incorporation was only made legally complete during the French Revolution, and it provoked fierce fighting by Breton peasants on the side of the aristocracy (see Victor Hugo’s “Ninety-Three”). You might as well call a Basque a Spaniard.
Calling a Basque such is not good for one’s health
Back in San Diego, I knew a man with a Basque surname. He had, shall we say, a distinctive personality. Then I (a) read The Three Musketeers and (b) learned that “Gascon” is a doublet of “Basque”—and some things fell into place. He really was very like d’Artagnan. . . .
(b) Oh, lord, of course it is. [thwacks self on head for never noticing before]
And even today, Bretons are . . . different. Not bad, just different. And like the folks I met in the Dordogne, if Paris were to abruptly vanish and take the bulk of the French government with it, they wouldn’t object much, if at all.
I was reading an espionage novel set in WWII Brittany and separatist movements were crucial to the plot, and the British main character got credit for being Cornish
It’s not so much the age increase, as the reason for it
Macron was a banker before he was a politician.
The French banks had an awful lot of assets that increasing interest rates were making toxic.
Macron used the pension fund to buy those toxic assets at full face value, and raised the retirement age in an attempt at mitigating the damage to the fund. (If interest rates drop back down near zero in the near future, it might even work. But there’s absolutely no reason to believe that they will.)
And now you understand why even twenty and thirty year olds are incandescently pissed.
Coming soon to a country near you. That pot’s been simmering over here at least since Reagan was in office.
Correction: Reality. We have reality on our side.
Also, in spite of his many (many, many, many) faults, I think it’s fair to say that FDR genuinely loved America. You cannot claim that of the ruling class today. Try to imagine anyone today (well, except Trump) flouting social convention and serving the King of England hot dogs, that most American (and working class) of foods. FDR did just that.
This is not to defend FDR, but just to observe that we used to have a better class of arrogant overlord.
He was just convinced the future was soviet.
I’m not even sure of that. I think he just wanted power.
Man, I needed something like this.
I’m reminded, Old Grognard Wargamer that I am, of one of the cards in an old game from Avalon Hill, one called Kingmaker.
The card was called “Defeatism Rife”
You could have the most titled, powerful noble families with a powerful army, and if you drew that card, one of your nobles would randomly quit your army and return to their home castle. In the middle of a battle. Even when winning.
I suspect that a lot of ordinary Americans, Right, Left (liberal but not socialist), and Center (go along to get along, keep your head down types), are suffering from the constant misery poured out by mass media 24/7/365. You lose hope, and when you lose hope, you’ve already lost the battle before the fight. Many people are obsessed with the food diet, but ignore their thought diet.
These so-called elites are nearly all terrible. For all their Ivy League credentials, Corporate board directorships, and Prestigious Non-Profits they preside over, they are not terribly good are getting things done. ANYTHING done. Even their tyranny is feeble. They want to make most of us beggars so we “will be easier to please”, but where do they think their lifestyles comes from?
You state that like it’s “in spite of” rather than cause and effect.
They are absolutely incongruent with western values. Which is why they continue to try and destroy western values. I just realized it’s a fractal thing. The large picture looks like the medium picture looks like the subatomic picture. The west needs to vomit them out.
Arguably they are incongruent with values as such, let alone western values.
Today on Tucker Carlson: Is New York filthy because it’s full of rats, or is New York full of rats because it’s filthy? A representative of PETA is on hand to clean up any misunderstandings.
Also — Pothole Pete addresses the critical issue of sexist crash-test dummies!
Why can’t some of them just identify as female? Problem solved!
If N Y C is full of rats, let’s hope some incoming cargo ship doesn’t bring in any sick ones.
Okay, I’ll say this much in defense of the “sexist crash test dummies” issue.
Women are on average shorter and lighter than men. We have differently shaped chests. Using crash test dummies of a size and shape close to that of the average woman to ensure that the safety equipment on cars fits is a good idea. Heck, I am the size of the average man, and I still need one of those little seat belt clips to get the shoulder strap to go between the boobs to fit comfortably.
Now, was it sexism that caused manufacturers to not use female dummies? Almost certainly not. It was just lazy thinking. (If there was any sexism involved, it was decades ago when the regulators were imagining what kind of crash test dummy was necessary.)
Wait a minute. I very clearly remember seeing slow-motion videos of car crash tests with male, female, and child dummies. That’s how we know that children sail over the front seats if they’re not belted in the back seat. What the hell is Mayor Pete going on about?
Oh yeah, here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_III. Okay, the “female” dummy is the same body shape as the “male” dummy, just smaller, but in a crash I can’t see how having wider hips and narrower shoulders would make much difference.
Yep.
Well, clearly the problem is that the female Crash Test Dummies aren’t built like linebackers.
Wait a sec, do we know what gender identity the crash test dummies claim?
Given the proliferation of airbags and crumple zones in modern cars, it seems to the Reader that all of the whining about female representative crash dummies misses a point. When are the going to test with representative obese dummies of both sexes?
The demand for unisex/multisex/flexisex/genderless is right there already. Right?
The change to the smaller “female” dummy brought about the changes to airbags as the first gen stuff was good at snapping the necks of petite people (not just females, but drivers of that size trend female) and kids, and the smaller stature dummy gave them had numbers without snapping more necks. Unless they are going to develop differences to record possible injury to the innards, not much is to be gained, and even there it won’t be earth-shattering.
100 Gs is 100 Gs.
Focusing on the obese does make far more sense than another change to “more female-like female” (from the crowd that can’t tell you what a female is)
Plus child ones for passengers
Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative.
Controlling the narrative means a lot.
How many young people are mutilating themselves in service to the narrative? How many of them will later suicide despite their supposed gender-affirming care and feeling to Canada as a refugee because of “transphobic” US laws?
I’m already grieving one (aside to the universe, I realize I’m of the age that I’ll start losing people, but if you could keep the unnatural deaths like suicide and murder under 50% that would be good kay,thx).
How many kids are broke, and believe socialism is their salvation, because the narrative said take loans to go to college and that only college matters?
How many people are childless by choice and alone in their middle and old age not to mention without children to care for them because of the narrative?
People need a narrative to stay, say, to understand life. They control the narrative for a lot of people, and when that falls apart, those people will fall apart or latch onto any narrative to survive.
Many of those they latch onto will not be good.
You are right, they can’t win. But you keep assuming their failure is our success. It is not. Their success would be our failure just as their success would be our failure.
But it is very easy for us both to fail. Thinking, “they can’t win, so we’ll be fine in the end,” is the quickest way for us to fail as well. Especially when we justify it with “all they control is the narrative” because that narrative can easily lead to lots of anti-survival behavior.
How many young people are mutilating themselves in service to the narrative?
In a recent episode of the “Modern Wisdom” podcast (they’re 90+ minutes long 3 times a week so I can’t go find the exact quote), the host postulated that what looks from the outside like a grand conspiracy — trans the kids, destroy the dollar, etc. — is almost entirely people mouthing the platitudes and keeping their heads down so they don’t get cancelled and lose their jobs.
This suggests that the majority only kinda-sorta believes in the “conspiracy” goals, and if the minority of evil thought leaders could be discredited or neutralized then the go-along majority would be susceptible to a preference cascade.
Discrediting or neutralizing the evil thought leaders is the problem, but since they direct and control the narrative, and a huge number of people go along with it, it’s a wicked problem. And “susceptible” does not mean triggering a preference cascade would be easy, because as Herbn points out, people need narratives and tend to stick to the one they know even if they have issues with it. “Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable” and all that.
Note that I never said we should do nohting. They can’t win, but the future can be pretty awful if we do nothing.
I’ve been warning you about this:
https://unherd.com/2023/04/americas-empire-is-bankrupt/
That’s because America doesn’t have an empire. Stop drinking Marxist koolaid.
As for bankrupt, compared to what? If we’re bankrupt, who is left to call the debt?
BAH. You’ve been warning about stupidity. I don’t have time for stupidity.
THINK
Name an empire that exported wealth.
An article written by the “Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America” on the fall of America’s empire is somehow credible because why, exactly? Does he have literally ANY other credential or experience or knowledge that would lead me to believe I should spend any time at all reading him?