Cold Fury – Harshing your mellow since 9/01

Deep State fangs bared

Posted on 12/12/201812/12/2018 by Mike 3 Comments

President Donald Trump threatened to shut down the government during a heated argument with Democratic congressional leaders in the Oval Office on Tuesday in a remarkable display of partisan bickering just 10 days before a partial shutdown is set to take effect.

“I am proud to shut down the government for border security,” Trump said bluntly. “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it. The last time you shut it down, it didn’t work. I will take the mantle of shutting down. And I’m going to shut it down for border security.”

“The fact is, you do not have the votes in the House,” Pelosi said, to which Trump insisted: “Nancy, I do.”

Schumer then confronted Trump directly over his exaggerations and mistruths about the border wall.

“We have a lot of disagreements here. The Washington Post today gave you a whole lot of Pinocchios because they say you constantly misstate how much of the wall is built,” a defiant Schumer said. “You have called 20 times to shut down the government. You say, ‘I want to shut down the government.’ We don’t. We want to come to an agreement.”

At one point, Trump jabbed at Pelosi, saying, “Nancy’s in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now.”

Pelosi fired back immediately, telling the president, “Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as leader of the House Democrats who just won a big victory.”

Nah, they’re not emboldened or anything. This is still a conservative-majority nation, and we’re still winning. Just keep telling yourself that, and maybe the horse will learn to sing.

The partisan jabbing, which came during a photo opportunity before Trump was set to negotiate with Pelosi and Schumer behind closed doors, represented a preview of what to expect with a divided government next year, when Democrats officially take control of the House of Representatives.

Lamentably, incredibly, depressingly, it most certainly is—the opening salvo in what’s going to be a long and dismal war. Kudos to Trump for fighting on anyway, from the deep end of a real shitpile dumped on him by the fickle, witless, and liberal (BIRM) American voter.

Christmas songs: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Posted on 12/12/201812/12/2018 by Mike 5 Comments

A list of some obscurities.

Posterity has an excellent ear for popular music. Setting aside gold records and Grammys, posterity smiles on kings (Elvis) and commoners (Sam Sham and the Pharoahs), with quality its only standard.

But Christmas is posterity’s weak spot. When December comes around, posterity is a sentimental fool, rewarding the good and the bad in equal measure. As a result, classics such as The Drifters’s “White Christmas” are forced to share the Yuletide spotlight with “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” and “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.”

Posterity just isn’t doing its job at Christmas time. That’s where this list come in. What follows are 16 of the coolest and most underplayed Christmas songs ever, songs that deserve at least as much airtime as John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”

I gotta grumble a little here: this list is a bit heavy on the more modern stuff to suit me. Sorry, but I do NOT want to hear John Cougar Mellonhead groaning about working-class Christmas in Indiana. Nor am I interested in having Springsteen bellow at me about how Santa Claus is coming to New Jersey. When it comes to Christmas music, I want Mel Torme. I want Nat King Cole. I want Sinatra and Dino. I want Der Bingle. God help me, I want Andy Williams.

I sure don’t want Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, or Peabo Bryson doing that warbling-wandering contemporary-R&B singer thing of meandering all over the scale in contempt of the actual damned melody, trying to “make it their own,” along the lines of those gut-curdling sportsball Star Spangled Banner butcherings we’re all way too familiar with by now. JUST SING THE DAMNED SONG ALREADY, DAMMIT. It ain’t “your own,” and it ain’t ever gonna be. Christmas music belongs to everyone, and if you can’t just leave a beloved traditional Christmas classic alone and sing it more or less straight, then write one of your own and sing it any damned way you like.

That said, though, there are instances of modern-era artists jazzing up a classic which yield some good results, mostly because the remake is done tastefully, artfully, and respectfully rather than as an exercise in self-indulgence by an artist bereft of the faintest clue as to how the thing might properly be done. In amongst the pointless dreck the author digs up some gold:

1. “Santa Claus Is Back in Town” – Elvis Presley (1957)
“Santa Claus” isn’t just Elvis’s best Christmas song, it’s one of the most powerful recordings of his career. Released by RCA, “Santa Claus” exhibits all the virile recklessness that characterized Elvis’s earlier work for Sun Records. The track plays like a spontaneous recording, as if Elvis and the band were playing the song for fun, and someone just happened to tape the session.

Actually, that’s how a LOT of Elvis’s music got recorded: Elvis would be just noodling around on piano, the band would pick it up, and the tape would roll. Or it’d be vice the versa, with the band leading the way and Elvis getting inspired to jump in. And he’s right, this is a good ‘un. In truth, Elvis did a fine job with the whole album it comes from. But, I mean, come ON: it’s Elvis, man. Early Elvis too, before he shit the bed and became a bizarre parody of himself, and an object lesson on the perils of excess celebrity and wealth.

The author goes on to echo the now-de rigeur gripe about “Baby It’s Cold Outside” (it’s “creepy”), which for the life of me I still just don’t get, and don’t really want to. He saves himself by recommending Sonny Boy Williamson, Los Straitjackets, and even The Youngsters’ hilarious “Christmas In Jail.” For myself, I’ll commend to your attention the Christmas albums of John Fahey, The Ventures, Canadian Brass, and of course Cantus and Chanticleer.

As for new original Christmas music, earlier this evening I chanced to hear this NPR interview with JD McPherson featuring in-studio live perfomances of a few tunes from his newly-released Christmas album:

McPherson is a songwriter, singer and guitarist who is described by music critic Ann Powers as a supreme rock reinventor. McPherson grew up far away from the hubs of the music world on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma. His father runs the ranch. His mother is a preacher. Before becoming a full-time musician, McPherson taught art for four years to students in middle school. His Christmas album “Socks” is his fourth album.

Welcome all of you to FRESH AIR. It’s so exciting to have you here, and the new Christmas album is great. JD, I’m going to ask you to introduce the first song and to introduce the members of the band.

JD MCPHERSON: Certainly. So my name’s JD McPherson, and over to my left is everybody else. That’s Doug Corcoran, the utility guy who plays everything. Jimmy Sutton on bass. Ray Jacildo plays keys with background vocals, and our friend Jason Smay on drums.

Now as it happens, the above-mentioned Jimmy Sutton is an old friend of mine. Back when the Playboys were just getting established as a for-real touring band we did shows with Jimmy’s old outfit, the Moondogs. We also stayed at his house a few times when we were passing through Chicago; he’s a great guy, and an enormously talented musician. Haven’t seen him in a good few years, unfortunately, so it was great to hear him on the radio yakking away with the Fresh Air host.

As for JD’s Christmas rekkid: although it’s by no means what anybody would call traditional holiday fare, I liked what I heard of it. Here, have yourself a taste:

Not bad, eh? And thus does this old dog learn himself a new trick.

Christmas repop

Posted on 12/12/201812/12/2018 by Mike 3 Comments

So I believe I mentioned that I was considering doing a deep dive through the CF archives for some classic Christmas posts for y’all this year. Here’s the first, from…uhh, wait, 2017? Seriously? Jeez, more recent than I woulda thought—probably too recent to be authentically “classic,” I guess, but what the hell. Original item here.

It’s a wonderful movie
Can’t recall offhand if I’ve written about It’s A Wonderful Life here before; most likely I have, not least because it’s one of my all-time favorite movies. I know I did mention the wonderful Donna Reed, the loveliest human female ever to grace the Earth, in this old post. And I’m quite sure I’ve expressed my contempt for the tiresome hipster douchebaggery that had every snotty twerp in hearing distance caviling about the movie as a lightweight, manipulative, sappy piece of schmaltz—little more than a standard-issue three-hanky weeper cranked out by the Frank Capra factory, noted for producing thinly-disguised propaganda flicks promoting those wretched, repressive old American values we’ve thankfully left in the dustbin of history.

Trust me: if you feel that way about this movie, you will NOT enjoy the rest of this post, which I will tuck below the fold to spare your finely-honed artistic sensibilities until such time as you grow the fuck up and cultivate a proper appreciation for Capra’s masterwork, a film that will far outlive anybody’s jejune cynicism towards it.

First, the bare facts:

It’s a Wonderful Life is a 1946 American Christmas fantasy comedy-drama film produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story “The Greatest Gift”, which Philip Van Doren Stern wrote in 1939 and published privately in 1945. The film is considered one of the most loved films in American cinema and has become traditional viewing during the Christmas season.

The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others and whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched and how different life in his community of Bedford Falls would be had he never been born.

Despite initially performing poorly at the box office because of high production costs and stiff competition at the time of its release, the film has come to be regarded as a classic and is a staple of Christmas television around the world. Theatrically, the film’s break-even point was $6.3 million, approximately twice the production cost, a figure it never came close to achieving in its initial release. An appraisal in 2006 reported: “Although it was not the complete box office failure that today everyone believes…it was initially a major disappointment and confirmed, at least to the studios, that Capra was no longer capable of turning out the populist features that made his films the must-see, money-making events they once were.”

It’s a Wonderful Life is considered one of the most critically acclaimed films ever made. It was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture and has been recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films ever made placing number 11 on its initial 1998 greatest movie list, and would also place number one on its list of the most inspirational American films of all time. Capra revealed that this was his personal favorite among the films he directed and that he screened it for his family every Christmas season.

Some more interesting trivia: the movie was shot over the spring and summer of ’46 on RKO’s Culver City studio and movie ranch, and it was HOT that year. I read someplace long ago that temps went well into the 90s routinely that year, doubtless an effect of the early stages of Global Wormening™, and the filming was a miserably uncomfortable experience for everyone involved. I thought this was kinda interesting, too:

RKO created “chemical snow” for the film in order to avoid the need for dubbed dialogue when actors walked across the earlier type of movie snow, made up of crushed cornflakes.

Some more great trivia, from IMDB:

For the scene that required Donna Reed to throw a rock through the window of the Granville House, Frank Capra hired a marksman to shoot it out on cue. To everyone’s amazement, Reed broke the window by herself. She’d played baseball in high school, and had a strong throwing arm.

The gym floor that opens up to reveal a swimming pool was real. It was located at Beverly Hills High School in Los Angeles.

It’s still there, too, and still in use.

As Uncle Billy drunkenly leaves the Bailey home, it sounds as if he stumbles into some trash cans on the sidewalk. In fact, a crew member dropped a large tray of props right after Thomas Mitchell went off-screen. James Stewart began laughing, and Mitchell quickly improvised “I’m alright, I’m okay!” Frank Capra decided to use this take in the final cut, and gave the stagehand a $10 bonus for “improving the sound.”

If that sounds paltry to the point of insulting, just remember that those ten 1946 bucks would amount to, what, about thirty grand or so today. Ahem.

James Stewart was nervous about the phone scene kiss because it was his first screen kiss since his return to Hollywood after the war. Under Frank Capra’s watchful eye, Stewart filmed the scene in only one unrehearsed take, and it worked so well that part of the embrace was cut because it was too passionate to pass the censors.

And oh, what a beautiful moment it is, too. “It’s the chance of a lifetime…” Puddles me up right quick every time I see it, and I’ve been watching this flick for years and years now.

While filming the scene in which George prays in the bar, James Stewart has said that he was so overcome that he began to sob. Frank Capra later re-framed and blew up the shot because he wanted to catch that expression on Stewart’s face. That’s why the shot looks so grainy compared with the rest of the film.

Another golden moment as far as I’m concerned, and profoundly affecting, at least for me. A bit more detail on that snow:

Films made prior to this one used cornflakes painted white for the falling snow effect. Because the cornflakes were so loud, dialogue had to be dubbed in later. Frank Caprawanted to record the sound live, so a new snow effect was developed using foamite (a fire-fighting chemical) and soap and water. This mixture was then pumped at high pressure through a wind machine to create the silent, falling snow. 6000 gallons of the new snow were used in the film. The RKO Effects Department received a Class III Scientific or Technical Award from the Motion Picture Academy for the development of the new film snow.

And here’s more on the heat:

Despite being set around Christmas, it was filmed during a heat wave. It got to be so hot that Frank Capra gave everyone a day off to recuperate.

This one is…well, kinda ugly:

According to Robert J. Anderson, H.B. Warner really was drunk during the scene in which Mr. Gower slaps young George. Warner’s slaps were real and caused real blood to come from Anderson’s ear. After the scene was finished, Warner hugged and comforted Anderson.

Um. Okay then. This one I did not know until now:

In the scene at the dance in the high school gym, when George Bailey first sees Mary and approaches her, the young man talking to Mary is “Alfalfa” of Little Rascals fame in the uncredited role of Freddie Othelo. He is also in the scene where he turns the key that opens the gym floor to reveal the swimming pool.

And this one I did:

Both James Stewart and Donna Reed came from small towns; Stewart from Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Reed from Denison, Iowa. She demonstrated her rural roots by winning an impromptu bet with Lionel Barrymore when he challenged her to milk a cow on-set.

GOD, I love that woman.

When all’s said and done, anyone who can watch the whole movie up to the climactic, stirring final scene when George’s friends all show up to donate their little all to help out in his most trying hour (even old Potter returning the 8 grand Uncle Billy had left in his vile clutches!), and Harry offers a toast “To my brother George—the luckiest guy in town” and not choke up at least a little is just not someone I really want to know, dammit. It’s a damned character flaw is what it is, indicative of a possibly dangerous derangement at the very least.

But that ain’t the only deeply moving scene, not by yards and yards. Another of my all-time favorite moments is when Bert and Ernie bring George home to the “leaky, drafty old barn of a house” at 320 Sycamore and usher him inside. George is flabbergasted by Mary’s transformation of a couple of run-down rooms into a serviceable kitchen and bedroom, and just stands there, hands on hips, smiling at her in stunned surprise. The look she gives him back is the one every man on Earth wants to see on his woman’s face when she looks at him: nearly beatific, eyes shining, the love in her a nearly palpable thing, a presence in the room in its own right. Uncontainable; warm; deep and joyous; enveloping but not smothering, just a thing of perfect natural beauty.

Oh, and did you know that they named Sesame Street’s famous Bert and Ernie after the characters in the movie? Of course you did. (Some of Henson’s colleagues adamantly deny this, though).

So go watch it again without guilt or shame if it hasn’t aired yet in your area. Myself, I watched it last night when it aired on USA Network, and will very likely watch it again before Christmas is upon us; I bought the DVD almost the moment it came out, see, and I treasure it. They just ain’t making them like It’s A Wonderful Life anymore. In truth, I doubt they even can, and I’m near certain they wouldn’t want to. Either way, that’s a damned shame. Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without it, as far as I’m concerned.

So there you have it, folks. And yes, I do still feel the same way about this truly timeless film, all these…umm, this…okay, okay, one year later. A new category for this year’s Christmas posts; it’s baffling why I didn’t establish the thing years ago, considering all the Christmas posts I’ve done over lo, these many years. It woulda made it one hell of a lot easier to round ’em all up for review, that’s for sure.

Death has no dignity

Posted on 12/11/201812/12/2018 by Mike 2 Comments

The Lefty death cult has another of their “suggestions” for you.

It’s getting very dark in euthanasia-land. Not content with legalizing assisted suicide for the terminally ill in six states plus the District of Columbia — with Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Colombia allowing lethal jab euthanasia — and unsatiated with Switzerland’s suicide clinics to which people from around the world attend — the so-called “death with dignity” movement now is pushing self-starvation as a splendid way to die.

Before I explain, two crucial distinctions. First, this essay is not about the common circumstance when a dying person stops eating as a natural part of the dying process. Nor is this essay about feeding tubes, which are deemed a medical treatment that can be legally refused or withdrawn. Rather, this essay addresses the growing advocacy in the assisted suicide/euthanasia movement and within bioethics to redefine self-starvation — known as “voluntary stop eating and drinking (VSED)” in movement parlance — as a means of attaining “death with dignity” in circumstances in which assisted suicide is illegal.

At this late date in my life I’ve seen enough of death up close and personal to be able to say with absolute confidence and authority: death HAS NO dignity, none whatsoever, for anybody involved. It is ugly, squalid, sordid, and degrading. It is messy, and it smells. Excepting the cases I’ve witnessed where the person is completely unconscious, it appears to also be quite painful.

The notion of “death with dignity” is preposterous. Like the stories you see on the teewee news about someone “dying instantly” in fatal car accidents and such, it’s a fiction we use to comfort ourselves a little, to make a little space between our instinctive revulsion at death and the gruesome reality of the thing. It may be a necessary balm for some of us, but fiction it most surely is.

I’m by no means reflexively opposed to a person having the right to have control over the time and manner of his own demise when possible. But anybody nattering about “death with dignity” just demonstrated to my satisfaction that they really don’t know the first damned thing about it. And given the Left’s usual MO in just about any matter you care to consider, chances are they’ll try to make it mandatory. You can’t trust those fascist, sneaky, lying goons with anything at all, least of all dying.

The character of revolt

Posted on 12/11/201812/12/2018 by Mike Leave a comment

Our old and dear friend Claire Berlinski, another of the ever-dwindling handful of real journalists out there, ably plying her craft and reporting the news.

I spent Saturday speaking to the Gilets Jaunes near the Bastille, where I figured I’d have a good vantage point on a traditional protest site. I walked with them as they slowly made their way to the city hall, or Hôtel de Ville. It was obvious from a single glance that these weren’t Parisians, but rural people who couldn’t afford to buy expensive Parisian clothes or get chic haircuts. I instantly understood why Macron rubs them the wrong way. They looked worn out; their hands and faces were lined; they were mainly in late middle-age. They seemed to be decent, respectable, weary people who had worked hard all their lives, paid their taxes, and played by the rules.

They couldn’t have seemed less disposed to violence, nor more apolitical. They were respectful of the police, and vice-versa. As cops drove by, relaxed, the Gilets Jaunes smiled at them, like kids excited about their first trip to the big city, waved at the officers, and gave them the thumbs-up. The cops reciprocated. The sentiment was fraternal. “We’re all weary, overtaxed working men,” they were saying to each other. “We’re on the same side.”

I concluded they were just what they were advertised to be: family men and women who couldn’t make ends meet and who were tired of Macron’s attitude. Why this protest, why now, I asked? The fuel tax was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, they said; it made the difference between “able to make ends meet, barely,” and “not able to make ends meet.” It had just been getting steadily worse every year since the economic crisis began. They had run out of hope.

My heart went out to them. I was prepared to go home and report that the protests had fizzled out. “There isn’t much to this,” I concluded. I had no sense that if I continued walking, toward the Charles de Gaulle Étoile, I’d find myself amid the worst riots Paris has seen in decades. These protesters weren’t about to vandalize a thing, and no one seemed to mind them. The cops seemed sorry for them.

People at the Charles de Gaulle Étoile saw something else entirely. There, the police were physically overwhelmed by about 5,000 Gilets Jaunes who had come explicitly prepared to do violence. About 200 demonstrators showed their ID and allowed police to search them before they entered a security zone on the Champs-Elysées, but the rest refused to play by the rules. From about 8 am, hostile crowds of Gilets Jaunes emerged, in large numbers, from all the avenues around the Arc de Triomphe, trying to push their way onto the Champs-Elysées. The police were physically overpowered because so many of them were protecting the Champs-Elysées and the perimeter around the area where government buildings are concentrated. They were overrun. There were no cops behind the rioters to stop them from burning cars on the other avenues around the Étoile.

The rioter demographics were surprising. They were mainly aged 30-40, the police reported—a bit old for rioting, you’d think. They were “socially well-inserted” into the movement, but unlike the majority of the protesters, they had come with the goal of breaking and smashing things, rejecting the authority of the state and its symbols as savagely as they could. Of the 378 people taken into custody on Saturday, only 33 were minors. Most were rural men. The security services had drastically underestimated the number of violent protesters who would arrive and where they would be. It was immediately clear that this represented a massive police intelligence failure. The Elysée called a crisis meeting. Reports leaked to the press that the failure to anticipate the size of the violent and radicalized contingent of Gilet Jaunes was of a magnitude that “could lead to a deep reform of the Paris police headquarters,” as one television channel put it.

But it isn’t hard to understand how this mistake was made. Most people’s contact with the movement, including the police’s, was like mine—again, most seem to be peaceful, sympathetic people, respectful of authority, and simply too old for that kind of mayhem. What kind of 40-year-old guy from a rural farm comes to Paris carrying a gas mask and a makeshift weapon to desecrate the Arc de Triomphe? I sure wouldn’t have guessed there were so many of them, either.

At this point, the government has no choice but to deploy troops to defend static targets, while allowing mobile forces to police the demonstrations and deal with any rioting that breaks out. No matter what, France must reestablish the principle that governments can only be changed by elections, not violence.

Ahh, but what about when changing the government doesn’t do the trick; what about when a government has lost its mandate, forfeited its legitimacy, and must be replaced? What about when election after election after election changes nothing more substantive than the names of the people in charge? What then? What happens when its subjects finally, as Claire says above, “run out of hope”?

Just asking. I have some friends who’d like to know, see. Of course none of those things apply here or are the least bit relevant to Americans, mind. Ahem.

In any event, read the whole thing; as is her wont, Claire has done excellent work here, and puts us all some real knowledge with her efforts. She’s also crowdfunding a new book, so if you’re flush you might consider tossing a few francs in her GoFundMe jar.

Roberts redux

Posted on 12/11/201812/12/2018 by Mike 2 Comments

So it’s looking like maybe Kavanaugh wasn’t worth battling for, except maybe as a way of giving a last fuck-you finger to the Left before Black Tuesday.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas criticized his fellow justices Monday for refusing to do their job when they rejected a case about state efforts to defund the abortion giant Planned Parenthood.

Thomas said the court made a “mess” of the matter, and blamed the other justices for not wanting to touch a case involving the abortion giant Planned Parenthood.

“What explains the court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood,’” Thomas wrote in his dissenting opinion.

Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch joined Thomas, but Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the four liberal justices in refusing to hear the case.

Thomas is of course our greatest, wisest Justice, and we can all be thankful for his presence on the Court. But does it get even worse with Kavanaugh? Why yes; yes, it does.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by President George W. Bush, accepted the assumption in a dissenting opinion he filed last October in the case of Garza v. Hargan that a teenage illegal alien caught at the border and put in detention has a right to an abortion in the United States.

At the same time, Kavanaugh conceded that “this case presents a new situation not yet directly confronted by the Supreme Court.”

Kavanaugh argued that in saying the illegal alien teen had a right to abortion in the United States he was accepting the government’s assumption regarding existing Supreme Court precedents.

Kavanaugh did say that the majority of the appeals court was mistaken in saying the illegal alien had “a right to immediate abortion on demand.” He argued the government could delay the abortion while seeking to find the illegal alien a sponsor.

Kavanaugh wrote that “under Supreme Court precedent in analogous contexts, it is not an undue burden for the U.S. Government to transfer an unlawful immigrant minor to an immigration sponsor before she has an abortion, so long as the transfer is expeditious.”

Codswallop. An illegal alien has NO rights in this country—NONE—no matter how badly any black-robed contortionist must fold, spindle, and/or mutilate the law trying to to create one.

Guess we can look for plenty of Roberts-like gyrations from Kavanaugh in the future, more’s the pity. And since the Democrat Socialists paid no price at all on election day for their abhorrent abuse of the advise-and-consent function during his confirmation hearings, the fight to secure his place on the Court looks like worse than a waste of time.

Overall, Trump has done very well with his judicial appointments; it’s one of his signal achievements in office, and given current conditions will end up being his primary legacy. But nobody can hit a home run every time, I guess.

Update! Bill ain’t happy either:

We all know that those appointed by Democrat Presidents will simply vote in mindless lockstep against any outcome that advances conservative principles in any way. But what we should also realize is that Republican appointees will always provide support in sufficient numbers to the leftist wing of the court to ensure that anything tightly balanced will fall to the left side of the bench.

Hence we got Kennedy, who bludgeoned Scalia into adding the infamous “Scalia Dicta” to the Heller decision, thus creating holes through which lower courts are still driving gigantic legal trucks – and SCOTUS itself refuses to clarify what Heller and McDonald mean and thus close those holes.

Then we have the intriguing spectacle of another GOP appointee, (a Bush appointee, natch) in John Roberts actually making up excuses even the Obama government denied in order to maintain Obamacare.

And now we have another GOP (Trump) appointee who, right out of the box, sides with Roberts in preventing the court from hearing another case that, if decided in a conservative direction, might inconvenience the massive Democrat contribution and abortion mill, Planned Parenthood.

It doesn’t matter how many little bullshit “victories” we get over obscure regulatory issues, history teaches us that the monolithic leftist wall on the court, always coupled with a sufficiency of “conservative” judges, will make damned sure that we lose on the defining issues that direct the course of our nation.

The government ratchet only turns one way: Left.

UNEXPECTED!

Posted on 12/10/201812/10/2018 by Mike 3 Comments

Repeat the Democrat-Socialist mantra after me: there is no election fraud, there IS no election fraud, there IS NO election fraud.

NORTH CAROLINA—Election fraud has been suspected in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district as Russian president Vladimir Putin emerged victorious in the contest Friday.

Putin gave an acceptance speech in Congress, but some still allege the election may have been tampered with. They cite the fact that some of the ballots looked suspicious, as well as that Vladimir Putin is the president of Russia and wasn’t even on the ballot. Those who support Putin have waved away these concerns, stating that “Putin rules, America drools.”

“I assure you, this was 100% legitimate,” Putin told reporters. “I got 154% of the vote, fair and square.” Puzzled congresspeople claim they have no recourse, and as such must accept the Russian president into Congress. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. He’s got the benefit of the doubt—innocent until proven guilty,” President Trump said.

It’s satire, natch—OR IS IT?!?

Good women: gone

Posted on 12/10/201812/10/2018 by Mike 13 Comments

Just walk away.

This is not a debate. This is not me being snarky or sarcastic. It is a very REAL fact men are facing today when it comes to marriage – that the only younger women out there to date and potentially marry up are all brainwashed, leftist, NPC women. They ALL vote democrat. They ALL are feminists. They ALL put their career above everything else. They ALL have crippling debts. They ALL have dubious careers. And to any man who takes having a wife and forming a family seriously, these women are simply unqualified for the job. This isn’t to say literally “all” women are like this (there are engineers, accountants, and traditional women), but the statistics are so skewed, so bad, there is effectively no choice for most men today. I roughly estimate less than 5% of the female population are conditioned AND CAPABLE of being a wife an mother, which falls incredibly short of the 82% of men who wish to marry. Ergo, you can have your Ford in any color you want, as long as it’s black. And most men today can have wife as long as she’s an NPC leftist.

But did you ever wonder how women became so standardized, common, democrat, and (ultimately) boring? Did you ever wonder why there’s truly NO diversity in thought, life-goals, and life-philosophy among young women? Did you ever wonder why ALL of them want a career, an education, a party-lifestyle, shoes, handbags, and none of them want a husband or children? Well, allow me to ask you a question:

How many trillions did you spend training and programming women to be good wives and mothers?

The reason I ask this question is because while it seems absurd (why would you spend any resources programming women to be anything?), trillions have, in fact, been spent on programming, training, and ultimately indoctrinating women into becoming NPC leftists.

The K-College education industry alone has spent trillions of dollars over the past 50 years indoctrinating women to become men, putting their careers ahead of family, their educations ahead of individuals, and their politics ahead of love. Certainly the lion’s share of all education budgets since the 1960’s has been dedicated towards actual education. But if you look at the feminist indoctrination young girls received in K-College to put their careers above all else, you can in an accounting-like-sense attribute at least a couple trillion towards a clear and obvious intent to make women want to be wage-slaves, while belittling, even criminalizing being a wife and a mother.

While trillions of actual dollars have been invested in turning women into NPC, leftist, worker drones, what about the trillions of human hours also invested in conditioning women to become NPC leftists? From teachers to guidance counselors to professors to government PSA’s to media to women’s magazines to women’s studies departments to Jezebel and XOJane to even your own parents, it’s impossible to calculate how many millions of women (and men) spent thousands of hours of their lives, promoting and propagandizing hundreds of millions of women over the past 50 years to abandon being wives and mothers and instead be good, little, obedient, debt-laden careerist NPC democrats. Matter of fact, I can’t think of a single larger expenditure of time in all of the US that comes even close to the resources we’ve spent conditioning women to become NPC leftists. There has never been such a large, nation-wide, institution-wide push to form, program, and ultimately mold a people into something the powers that be want.

And I don’t even know how to begin to measure the total resources spent by media, marketing, and advertisers to sell women the “empowered-don’t-need-no-man-brave-executive” image all so women can buy $5,000 Prada handbags, $10,000 Chanel shoes, and $250,000 masters degree. Be it movies showing the strong independent woman, or Silicon Valley fawning over the latest female CEO hire, or all of the MSM worshiping Hillary Clinton during the election, the entire entertainment/media/social-media world only reinforces to women today that the ONLY thing that matters is your career, your leftist politics, and your feminism. Being a wife or a mother doesn’t even come up on the radar.

Now I could go on citing other instances where resources have been purposely spent on conditioning women to become NPC’s, but my larger point is how much has been spent on conditioning women to become good wives? How many trillions in education budgets have been spent on teaching women to be good mothers? And what institutions of our society (government, educational, media, corporate, etc.) actively promote motherhood and wifery?

And the answer is “none.” Not one cent, not one second, NOT EVEN BY THE PARENTS OF WOMEN THEMSELVES, is spent preparing, educating, explaining, or conditioning young women to be wives and mothers.

Of course not. Quite the opposite, in fact: they’re trained to think of marriage, motherhood, and family as stifling drudgery, unfulfilling and frustrating, the very next-of-kin to literal, outright slavery itself. This did NOT happen by accident:

The sad truth is like sausage, rolls of sod, reams of blank white paper, most women have been purposely conditioned to become mass-produced, boring, unmentionable, unnoteworthy, borg-like NPC leftists. It benefits the democrat party through votes. It benefits the government through increased taxes (both via increased rates AND having women working and paying taxes as well). And it benefits the media/corporate/college/materialist industries as women spend their money on trinkets, bobbles, handbags, and Masters in Social Work degrees. But it will NEVER benefit a husband, children, a family, or loved ones. And I’m not here to tell you some kind of “comeuppance” story, where women in their late 40’s hit menopause and ask “where have all the good men gone” while cuddling their cats.

Personally, I’m glad I’m old and out of all that myself.

Murder and mayhem

Posted on 12/10/201812/10/2018 by Mike 3 Comments

And impeachment too, as part of the Summer Of Hate.

One result of the Obama years was a rise in black violence, peaking with series of BLM murder sprees set off by the White House. From the 2010 election forward, Team Obama had been working to get their voters angry, hoping that would result in good election results in 2012 and 2014. The trouble was those angry blacks thought it was authentic and they expected something to happen. When it did not happen they decided to take matters into their own hands. The result was a summer of BLM murder and mayhem.

Will something like that be in the cards for the summer of 2019? It’s hard to know, but the Democrats take the House in January and they are showing few signs of restraint. They toned it down a bit in the election in order to not scare the remaining whites in their coalition, but they seem to be determined to go full crazy once in power. Maybe it is just a pose. Perhaps they are hoping a well choreographed bit of theater is enough to satiate the howling mobs of their coalition. Maybe they have unleashed forces they cannot control.

On the other hand, Trump has been a cunning political animal, even if he has been all thumbs when it comes to governance. He clearly thinks having Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as foils is good for his re-election campaign. That means he will be doing everything he can to poke that hornet’s nest. The stage is set for a year of NeverTrump loons stoking the impeachment fires, while the steam whistles in conservative talk radio and cable TV blow full blast making sure the red hats are fully engaged in the fight.

The trouble with the future is it is unpredictable, so how all this unfolds cannot be known in advance. Most likely, the Democrats have not yet worked out how to proceed and Team Trump is a circus of confusion. Still, the ingredients are in place for a very ugly year and when the Left gets ugly, it always means bloodshed. Now that those Antifa mobs no longer have Richard Spencer to chase around, they will need to do something. Odds are, it means attacking red hat wearing Trump supporters in the coming summer of hate.

Oh, I think we can count on that much, for sure and at the very least. But the real coming-attractions black pill is in the comments:

Trump can’t fire Mueller; only the Attorney General can fire him. Trump should have accepted Sessions’ resignation immediately after he recused himself from the Russia investigation. I had some hope that Matthew Whitaker was the outsider brought in by Trump to fire Mueller and end the investigation, but it’s clear that’s not going to happen. And Trump’s nominee to replace Sessions, William Barr, is a swamp creature with extensive experience in the CIA and the DoJ. He’s a GOPe company man. Mueller’s clown show of an investigation will continue unabated.

Trump will likely be indicted in 2019 by the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan for campaign finance violations. (The US Attorney for SDNY in Manhattan was appointed by Jeff Sessions.) These are felony charges with the potential for jail time. Like the Mueller investigation, the indictment is BS, but it will further cripple Trump’s presidency. I won’t be surprised if Trump resigns in exchange for a full pardon for himself and his family from Pence. Soft coup completed.

Trump took on the establishment but failed to install a loyal leader to keep the careerists at the DoJ under wraps, and now they’ve won. It’s game over for Trump–he’s finished. The Democrats in the House will hound him for the next two years. He’ll get no meaningful support from the Republican establishment. He’ll be indicted in 2019 and will either resign in early 2020 or will lose badly in his bid for 2020. Sessions will publish a memoir and will emerge as a sort of folk hero to the left, rather like Comey. What a shit show.

Z seems a lot more sanguine about the likelihood of impeachment than I am, and the idea that going “full crazy” might be “just a pose” for the Democrat-Socialist loons seems to me little short of absurd at this point—when, especially over the last two years, have they been anything but?

The comment excerpted above, unfortunately, is dead on, with the part I bolded being the key to understanding the whole sordid mess. What a shit show indeed.

Impeachment BINGO update! It’s all about the hamstringing and obstruction.

Since Robert Mueller and his revanchist inquisitors filed their sentencing memoranda on the President’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, the Democrats and their friends in the legacy media have been squealing with undisguised glee. They clearly believe that it marks the beginning of the end for an “illegitimate” presidency. Never mind that the filings contain no evidence of criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and any foreign entity, an odd omission for a “Russia Probe.” Forget that payments of hush money to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal aren’t in and of themselves illegal. Trump’s enemies believe that impeachment is now inevitable.

And they’re right.

But this has nothing to do with the ridiculous Mueller probe. That farcical “investigation” is, and always has been, nothing but a stalking horse. The event that guaranteed Trump’s impeachment was the November election in which the Democrats “harvested” a majority in the House. Nancy Pelosi discouraged the use of the “I” word by her accomplices during the final months of the midterms, but there was never any doubt that it would be the number one item on the Democrat agenda if she managed to get her hands on the Speaker’s gavel again. Nor does Pelosi much care that Mueller hasn’t uncovered anything resembling “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It isn’t really about “getting” Trump per se, although I’m sure at least some of them think they can. It’s about ending the Trump presidency by other means, de facto instead of de jure. This is nothing more than the Deep State fighting back as hard as it can, by any means it can conjure up. And since Americans voted for exactly that on Black Tuesday, I can’t say their newfound confidence—their newly-restored arrogance, more accurately—is at all misplaced. It all comes down to this:

Alright, is it really plausible that the payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal were somehow within the bounds of the law? Yep. To begin with, such payments aren’t a crime at all — and they certainly don’t reach the level of a “high crime.” According to the law, they are just as legal as paying these two people to be quiet about Trump’s affinity for fast food. Nor does it rise to that level even if candidate Trump directed Cohen to make the payments and the cash came out of campaign funds. This is not, of course, what we are hearing from bloviating political hacks like New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, who claims that such actions are impeachable:

They would be impeachable offenses. Whether they’re important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question.… Certainly, they’re impeachable offenses, because, even though they were committed before the President became President, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.

Fraudulently obtaining office? What is Nadler talking about? This novel legal concept has no basis in statutory or constitutional law. Nor is there any such offense mentioned in the Mueller sentencing memo. Even the New York Times seems a little befuddled by the charge, which it discusses in a piece titled: “Prosecutors Effectively Accuse Trump of Defrauding Voters. What Does It Mean?” Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff suggests, “It may mean that the prosecutors haven’t found a crime, but are still pissed off that Trump won the election.”

Once again: BINGO.

Insult etymology

Posted on 12/10/201812/10/2018 by Mike 1 Comment

Steyn puts the Boot in.

Among the admirers of M Macron was my old editor at The Wall Street Journal, Max Boot, a NeverTrumper who’s now “left the right” and, following an on-air altercation at Fox, took a swipe at Tucker Carlson for “yukking it up with Mark Steyn” over Russia. But in these fractious times we must find our yuks where we can. So last year Max Tweeted:

To defeat populism, America needs its own Macron–a charismatic leader who can make centrism cool.

Macron is cool mainly in the sense of cold and frosty and heartless – hence the 23 per cent approval rating. So much for all that charisma: that and 3.95€ will get you a café au lait. So poor old Boot’s year-old Tweet got dusted off last week and subjected to much mockery, which he used to bolster his thesis that all these French protests are the work of Russian bots. Boy, I’ll bet Louis XVI wishes he’d thought of that one.

If you’re having trouble keeping track, the French protests, Trump, Brexit, the Austrian and Italian elections, and the sudden cancellation of the “Murphy Brown” reboot are all the work of Russian bots. Whereas the Tijuana caravan, the UK grooming gangs and that rental car heading toward you on the sidewalk outside the Berlin Christmas market are the authentic vox populi.

Anyway, my main interest in Max’s defense of the inept and unfeeling Macron was this riposte from Katie Hopkins to Boot’s blaming of the bots:

The world thinks you are a cockwomble, sir. If you are looking for someone to blame – find a mirror darling.

Boot was befuddled:

I have no idea what a ‘cockwomble’ is, but it doesn’t sound like a compliment.

“Cockwomble” was new to me, too, but the etymological analysis of Steve Sailer’s British correspondent seems persuasive – with “cock” in the sense of fool, perhaps with a whiff of the Australianism “soft cock” about it. It would also be pleasing to think it something of a portmanteau with a hint of “coxscomb” in the sense of the medieval court jester’s hat or the seventeeth-century fop.

At any rate, it’s an enviable epithet. Indeed, Max Boot appears to be the first American ever to be called a cockwomble.

Enviable indeed, although such creativity seems almost wasted on an airweight insignificance like the unworthy Boot, for whom something more simple and mundane like “pud” should surely suffice. Steyn goes on from there to wring even more mileage out of both Boot and his newly-minted descriptor, all in a most entertaining way.

War on Christmas

Posted on 12/10/201812/10/2018 by Mike 2 Comments

Yes, Virginia, it’s real.

We hear the stories every year: the ACLU suing small towns over Nativity displays, “holiday tree” lightings, colleges banning religious icons, storefronts wishing us an empty “Happy Holidays,” Lena Dunham being Lena Dunham.

Yet, the moment our ears catch wind of the Left’s all-too-apparent “War on Christmas,” the mainstream media and their “useful idiots” in late-night comedy are already roasting us on an open fire before any of us can say “partridge in a pear tree.” Instead of turtle doves and golden rings, we get gaslights and courtroom subpoenas.

Clutch not your candy canes, though. If the Puritans couldn’t do it, if the French Revolutionaries couldn’t do it, if the Nazis couldn’t do it, if the Soviets couldn’t do it, if CBS couldn’t do it, then the party of scrooges will certainly never rid the world of the joy that is “Christmas.” So long as we have Christ, Christmas will always follow. In the meantime, however, let’s all pull up a chair, sip on some hot cocoa, roast up some chestnuts, and ring in the season with a few laughs over the Left’s sorry attempts to transform Christmas into a snowflake’s wonderland.

One of the listed epic fails occurred right here in Harlotte, NC, for whatever it’s worth. But it ain’t my favorite one, if “favorite” is the right word for such a stinking mound of despicable shitlib garbage. This one is:

Here's a higher res of @alperryman's original concept art. Really excited to be working with her and everyone at @harperdesignbks. pic.twitter.com/JTeqAUP8EG

— Kibblesmith ☃️ (@kibblesmith) March 28, 2017

Further explanation:

According to the Left, Santa can neither be fat nor be a white male, but he can be in a gay relationship with a black husband. Released in October by Harper’s Design, the book “Santa’s Husband” tells the incredible story of “a black Santa Claus and his white husband who both live in the North Pole.”

Written by Daniel Kibblesmith of the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the book was intended to be a parody to mock conservatives.

Nothing they won’t ruin, nothing they won’t keep their filthy mitts off of, nothing they won’t attempt to warp, pervert, and degrade. Nothing they’ll leave untouched and unsullied, nothing they won’t politicize and smear with shit. Abolutely nothing. So with that in mind, I just have to ask: is it time to start shooting them yet?

If not, why not?

(Via Ed)

Momentum

Posted on 12/10/201812/10/2018 by Mike 3 Comments

It’s all one way—the WRONG way.

The momentum in this nation is toward collectivism, toward Islamisation, toward obliteration and perhaps even genocide. These were once buzzwords of alarmism; today they are recognition of fact openly avowed and promoted in some circles.

You can defend yourself, hunker down against the roving bands of marauders, the government goons, the tax collectors and the politically correct, but in order to effect change, to address the crisis of culture and the republic, you have to get out into the street. This is the truth and will remain so until you do, or do not. I have been banging this drum for a long time. I have led efforts on the streets of D.C. and owing to my lack of leadership, I was largely alone. I have endured criticism for the stupidity of this point of view. But, it is still true. It is true in France, Hungary and even places like Armenia and Iran. Britain will soon be forced to recognize this truth if they expect to break free of the EU.

Globalism is slavery and the national systems that exist around the world are weighted toward globalism. Globalists have put a lot of money into the police state, forcing globalism on the world to wipe away nationalism. They have financed the drive toward migration to destroy nationalism, to enforce Islamism which is eminently compatible with slavery and paternalism. Only rabid nationalism with an active populace can reverse the trend toward globalism and the slavery it requires.

Of course, Americans will wait for some calamity, some moment in time to make their move, but one thing is absolutely true: There will never be another free national election held in America. The weakness of voting laws was shown in neon bright lights and it led to nothing. Outright theft of elections was not enough. As we wonder “What will it finally take?” we sit silently polishing our weapons instead of lacing up our boots.

However sad and depressing, it’s understandable, really. Nobody wants to die alone, going down on their very doorstep in a hail of gunfire, for nothing: falling one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle, as the saying goes.

High Low crimes and misdemeanors

Posted on 12/10/201812/10/2018 by Mike 1 Comment

Some “crime.” But make no mistake here, the House is going to impeach anyway.

Donald Trump’s former consiglieri Michael Cohen, along with being charged with tax avoidance and improper business deals, allegedly is guilty also of trying to leverage money and attention by exaggerating his influence with candidate and later President Trump.

In other words, Cohen to spec followed the standard creepy daily fare for Washington and New York wannabe fixers. But did we need Robert Mueller’s 18 months and $40 million to uncover and redirect to federal attorneys what was largely self-evident? Could not the U.S. government long ago, without the prompt of a special counsel, have uncovered that Michael Cohen did not fully pay his taxes—in the manner of an Al Sharpton, Timothy Geithner, and Tom Daschle?

The diabolical Cohen also tried to enforce, extend, or create non-disclosure agreements (Swampese for hush money) with two women from Trump’s past. The two reappeared out of nowhere in 2016, apparently to translate their alleged Trump hookups of a few hours in years past to notoriety and additional profit in the new age of “President Trump.”

In other words, Michael Cohen was a sort of rough-hewn version of former Bill Clinton crony Vernon Jordan. The latter, remember, was the erstwhile Clinton fixer who in 1998 had sought to keep the still unknown Clinton paramour Monica Lewinsky quiet—and to whisk her away from the Washington media, by arranging for Monica a quid pro quo $40,000 a year job with Revlon in New York, via Clinton friend and Revlon CEO Ron Perelman—all with impunity.

Mueller and the New York federal attorneys were rightly upset that Cohen allegedly lied and admitted that he lied under oath. By all means, let us jail Cohen for subverting the entire foundation of our legal system that must rely on honest testimonies in all government inquiries.

And in that same spirit, let the Department of Justice also charge former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for lying under oath when he deliberately misled congress about NSA surveillance (and admitted to lying), and John Brennan as well, who as CIA director lied on two occasions about drone collateral damage and CIA surveillance of Senate staff computers (and admitted to such), and has serially misrepresented his efforts with then-Senator Harry Reid to seed the Steele dossier.

And let us indict either the former director James Comey or the deputy director Andrew McCabe of the FBI—or both—for making false statements to federal investigators and Congress, given their respective testimonies under oath about leaking to the press and the role of the Steele dossier in FISA warrants cannot be reconciled.

And after Black Tuesday, let us certainly not hold our breath waiting for any of that to happen. After all, the American people have spoken. As a famous Messiah once said: Elections have consequences. And, incomprehensibly, they won.

Update! She’s kidding, right? “Victoria Toensing: Why has Mueller ignored Obama administration crimes?” Gotta be. Speaking of crimes, though:

The core problem—at least that we know of—is that Mueller hasn’t found a crime connected with Russiagate that someone working for Trump might have committed. His investigation to date hasn’t been a search for the guilty party—Colonel Mustard in the library—so much as a search for an actual crime, some crime, any crime. Yet all he’s uncovered so far are some old financial misdealings by Manafort and chums, payoffs to Trump’s mistresses that are not in themselvesillegal (despite what prosecutors simply assert in the Cohen sentencing report, someone will have to prove to a jury the money was from campaign funds and the transactions were “for the purpose of influencing” federal elections, not simply “protecting his family from shame”), and a bunch of people lying about unrelated matters.

And that’s the giveaway to Muller’s final report. There was no base crime as the starting point of the investigation. With Watergate, there was the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters. With Russiagate you had…Trump winning the election. (Remember too that the FBI concluded forever ago that the DNC hack crime was done by the Russians, no Mueller needed.)

Almost everything Mueller has, the perjury and lying cases, are crimes he created through the process of investigating. He’s Schrodinger’s Box: the infractions only exist when he tries to look at them. Mueller created most of his booked charges by asking questions he already knew the answers to, hoping his witness would lie and commit new crimes literally in front of him. Nobody should be proud of lying, but it seems a helluva way to contest a completed election as Trump enters the third year of his term.

Mueller’s end product, his report, will most likely claim that a lot of unsavory things went on. But it seems increasingly unlikely that he’ll have any evidence Trump worked with Russia to win the election, let alone that Trump is now under Putin’s control. If Mueller had a smoking gun, we’d be watching impeachment hearings by now.

But with the Democrat Socialists back in charge and newly emboldened we will be soon enough, no matter how flimsy the stated pretext.

Nothing to see here update! Moving on.

The Democrat poised to lead the House Judiciary Committee next year says he has no intention of continuing the GOP-led investigation into FBI and Justice Department (DOJ) decisionmaking during the 2016 election.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who stepped outside of the ongoing closed-door interview with former FBI Director James Comey, told reporters Friday that he plans to end the probe come January.

“Yes, because it is a waste of time to start with,” Nadler said in response to a question about whether he would end the probe. Nadler characterized the Republican investigation as a political sideshow that aims to distract from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“The entire purpose of this investigation is to be a diversion of the real investigation, which is Mueller. There is no evidence of bias at the FBI and this other nonsense they are talking about,” he continued.

No no, of course not. And it wouldn’t matter if there was. Hey, we got us a duly-elected President to overthrow here, dammit!

(Via WRSA and ZH)

Accepting the inevitable update! You bet he will.

While Trump clearly will not be indicted before his term ends…and if he’s re-elected the statute of limitations will have expired…that really isn’t the point. These alleged felonies will serve as the basis for impeachment and all it will take is a simple majority of the House to send the case to the Senate for trial.

The writing is clearly on the wall.

President Trump will be impeached.

The odds of him being removed from office is very low but the odds of him being impeached by the House of Representatives approaches 100%. Despite the noises you are hearing from the Democrat party and its Congressional caucus, the House Democrats can’t not impeach Trump for several reasons.

He goes on to list a few, but really, they only need one: there is no downside for them. More in a new post, coming right up.

Missed opportunity?

Posted on 12/10/201812/10/2018 by Mike 1 Comment

Or missing the point?

The Democrats just took back the House of Representatives. Attempts to either bring back Obamacare or go straight to single-payer will follow. We just concluded a cycle with a Republican House of Representatives. Voters thought the Republicans would act as a pushback to government expansion into health care. What we learned instead is that powerful lobbies all aligned in opposition to keep their piece of the pie. In the forefront impeding health care reform is a federal government with its never sated hunger for money, power, and control. The few Republicans who professed resistance and represented any hope of fighting this array of characters were soon rendered impotent.

The best argument these Republicans could have made was never brought out into the open.

Making prices public provides the opportunity for competition. Competition is capitalism’s secret weapon. Efficiency and innovation are rewarded, and fraud, waste, and corruption are exposed when a consumer is offered a choice. Of course, choice involves risk, risk by definition incurs “winners” and “losers,” and losing when it involves your health can be risky. The unfortunate “losers” make great copy for the mainstream media. But not introducing economic reforms into health care isn’t even a real choice anymore, as the current system is untenable.

It’s a great idea all right, but the underlying assumption is in error: that the Republican Uniparty wing actually wanted to do away with Obamacare. None but a small handful of them ever did—too few to matter, too few to get it done. Being in the minority allowed the GOPe to posture, pose, and take meaningless votes against it that ensured they could go on using it as a campaign issue without its continued existence ever being endangered.

As I’ve said so many times: government is now fully and firmly entwined with health care; the notion of health care as a “right” is equally entrenched. A majority of the American people like it that way; with a new generation coming of age that has never known things to be any other way, the two will assuredly never be disentangled.

You should read the rest of it anyway; for an AmThink piece it’s kind of lengthy, but it’s also damned good.

Oh Jeez, this TOO?

Posted on 12/8/201812/9/2018 by Mike 3 Comments

Scolds, prigs, and killjoys.

You may have noticed that America is going insane with finger-wagging, tut-tutting, outrage-ready Mrs. Grundy censoriousness. The legendary Mrs. Grundy was the representative of conservative social control and excessively strict mores.

Today’s Mrs. Grundys — let’s call them Mx. Grundys to be up to the moment — are progressive bullies intent on shutting everyone the hell up lest anyone fail to conform to their narrow sense of what is and is not acceptable. The humorless scolds have decided they are in charge, and for complicated reasons the rest of the culture is going along.

…Meanwhile, the Huffington Post noted that the 1964 TV show “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was “seriously problematic” because many viewers said they were disturbed by its themes of sexism and bullying.

Then there’s the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” In 1944, the songwriter Frank Loesser began performing a skit in song form at the parties he attended in Hollywood with his then-wife, Lynn. He was “the wolf,” she the “mouse,” and they were together at his home when she decided to take her leave.

She shouldn’t go, the wolf says. But her mother will start to worry, she says. With each reason for leaving she offers, he points out that she’ll freeze out there, her hands are like ice and the fireplace is roaring with heat.

This isn’t date rape. It’s mutual foreplay; indeed, it’s just about the most harmonious portrayal of foreplay in the annals of Western culture. They are enjoying their own wit, and we are enjoying their wit.

But here’s the problem: Wit often eludes the literal. It did in 1949 when an Egyptian visitor to the United States named Syad Qutb heard “Baby It’s Cold Outside” at a church dance in Greeley, Colo. As it played, Qutb later wrote, “The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips.”

He left America and became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and is considered the intellectual father of the Islamic extremism that found its darkest flowing in the 9/11 attacks.

Congratulations, Mx. Grundy. You’ve given Sayid Qutb what he wanted. Radio stations in Denver, San Francisco and Cleveland all announced they were banning “Baby It’s Cold Outside” from their airwaves.

There is absolutely no stone the joyless, juiceless Left will leave unturned in their neverending crusade to render all the rest of us—all of life itself—every bit as pinch-faced, sour, and miserable as they are. Funny how all that sexual liberation back in the hippie-dippie 60s has ushered us to an era in which sex itself is, like poor old Rudolph, “seriously problematic.” Steyn says:

As you’ll know if you’re a regular round these parts, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” started life as a party piece for Frank Loesser and his missus that they just did at various soirées around town until they were begged to make it publicly available. So you can see why its fate would be personal to Mr and Mrs Loesser’s daughter Susan in a way that her dad’s more straightforwardly commercial enterprises might not be. In her remarks in The Daily Mail, she blames its apparent controversy on Bill Cosby, and says, “It was written in 1944. It was a different time.”

Well, almost the entirety of human creativity comes from “a different time”. Our time – aside from its notable dearth of great music, great art, great drama, great holiday-season novelty duets – is also the first (or at least the first since Pol Pot) to be set upon destroying everything that dates from a “different time”.

For two-thirds of a century, the song was understood as a distillation of a standard dating ritual: The boy wants her to stay, and the girl wants to stay. But she’s a nice girl so she has to be talked into it, so Rod and Willie and Cee Loo et al give it their best shot.

Now radio stations are banning it not because something has changed since 1944, but because something has changed in the last twenty minutes.

We are in a paradoxical land with a hyper-sexualized yet ideologically puritanical culture. In such a world, the wit and playfulness of Frank Loesser are perforce entirely alien.

Far as I’m concerned, it’s the shrieking soldiers of the Army Of The Aggrieved who are alien; their grim, humorless world ain’t any place I want to live in, or even visit. Hell, I’d be reluctant to so much as fly by it in a starship, unless it was for the purpose of lobbing nukes on the awful place from orbit.

It’s not that the whining twerps are capable of mining offense out of even the most innocuous or trivial thing that frosts my nuts. They’re welcome to be offended over nothing all they like; no skin off my nose, I don’t give a shit either way. No, it’s their implacable demand that we all must devolve to their own pitiful level of shameful, puling weakness—that even their pettiest neurosis must become the standard sturdier, more mentally-balanced people have to live by that rankles. They cannot leave any space at all for normal people to go their own way unmolested.

And they’re getting away with it, too.

Slow suicide

Posted on 12/8/201812/8/2018 by Mike 1 Comment

Just deserts.

Reports indicate that The Weekly Standard soon joins Life, Look, Calling All Girls, Hit Parader, George, and Oui on the great newsstand in the sky. (Perhaps loyal “readers” find Oui on some lower-elevation newsstand.)

Death by internet seems a tempting obit but it does not capture the self-inflicted nature of the magazine’s demise. Like the obituaries of others who “died suddenly at home” at 23, an accurate death notice for the Standard requires some reference, however oblique, to the magazine killing itself by rebuffing its lifeblood, conservative readers. The notion of a “Never Trump” publication appealing to a mass conservative audience during The Donald’s reign seems a difficult trick to pull off. The Standard sought to walk this tightrope by transitioning from Bill Kristol, now a familiar talking-head to MSNBC viewers and 140-characters-or-less-wordsmith to Twittericans also following Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Paul Krugman, to the able and less alienating Stephen Hayes as editor seemed a last-ditch survival gambit. But the magazine’s convoluted identity, aiming for that sliver of conservative America still not sold on a tax-cutting scourge of political correctness who appoints solid judges to the Supreme Court, unsurprisingly did not attract much of an audience.

Perhaps the magazine planted the seeds of its end much earlier.

Take, for instance, the publication’s response to the changing fortunes of big government during the Clinton years. The year after declaring “We Win: ‘The End of Big Government Is Over’” on its cover, the Standard schizophrenically called for “A Return to National Greatness” in the same spot. The David Brooks-penned piece seemed a response to a conversation nobody was having. This familiar problem for the Standard became the problem for the Standard, a supply-driven phenomenon powered by donors and editors in search of a magazine and not by public demand to read such a magazine.

Ultimately, it was a magazine by, of, and for the effete, smug, perennial-loser collaborationists now scornfully referred to as cucks—and the cucks and their Liberal-Lite governing philosophy have finally exceeded their sell-by date. The Left despises them, in spite of the cucks’ eternal quest to court their favor and acceptance; the new New Right—brash, muscular, eager to do real battle with the Left not on the Left’s terms but its own, undeterred by the necessity of getting down and dirty in order to secure meaningful victories—has no use for them; and the market for mushy, ineffectual, dithering pedantry has become, shall we say, bearish. So the Standard is going out not with a bang but with something more akin to the squeaky honk of a halfheartedly-suppressed fart in public: mildly embarrassing, and best overlooked by all present.

If sheep could cook

Posted on 12/8/201812/8/2018 by Mike 2 Comments

Okay, I know this is serious and all, but I just can’t keep myself from laughing here.

In American schools, they take the “separation of church and state” so seriously they ban candy canes, reindeer and red-and-green color combinations. By contrast, in Scotland the state schools still perform nativity plays before Christmas, and little Alfie Cox found himself cast as a shepherd. So his mum ordered the excited five-year-old a costume from Amazon, and was delighted upon its arrival to find that Jeff Bezos had been generous enough to throw in a free blow-up sheep:

But the mom of two was puzzled when a teacher told Alfie to take the sheep home — until she blew it up and found it had a huge hole in its bottom as well as red lips and eyelashes.

Cox, 46, found the exact same sheep was on sale as a “stag night bonkin’ sheep” and is now devising a way to steal it away from unaware Alfie.

Is Jeff Bezos sending free blow-up sheep to all Amazon’s customers this Christmas? Or only five-year-old Scottish boys?

Well, I can only say that I sure didn’t get mine, doggone it. Steyn includes a picture of the, uhh, lucky (?) kid, his mom, and his “bonkin’ sheep,” which only made me laugh the harder.

Never give up, never give in

Posted on 12/8/201812/8/2018 by Mike 1 Comment

But sometimes it sure is hard to keep one’s eye on the ball.

Trump has seemed, at times, to sputter in implementing his transformative agenda—whether it was the Obamacare repeal, the idiotic spending bill from earlier this year, or the border wall. Coulter (and, to be sure, others) think that because it has been difficult to implement the agenda, we should just give it up; we’ve been had, the system is rigged.

Should we just stop trying, since we haven’t achieved the victories we should have won over the past two years? Should we resign to our fate of watching Democrats take over, passively allowing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to be sworn into the presidency and vice-presidency because it’s “their time”?

Well, we lost the House of Representatives and the Democrats are closing in on Trump with the corrupt Robert Mueller “investigation” so, at least we can say we tried?

Republicans, along with forgetting how to win without Trump, have forgotten the cardinal rule of warfare: the enemy gets a vote.

Yes, the Democrats are going to fight hard—harder than they’ve ever fought before—precisely because Trump and the Right are winning so bigly. Just look at what’s been accomplished thus far: massive deregulation that stimulated the economy. Yes, the tax cuts were nice. But the real economic stimulation occurred thanks to Trump’s executive order cutting thousands of unnecessary Obama-era regulations on his first day in office. From that point, the economy has enjoyed one of the greatest expansions in decades. Unemployment has plummeted, Americans are getting back to work. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

Trump is winning. The media won’t tell you that. Academicians won’t acknowledge it. But he is pushing back. His mere presence in office is stopping the Left’s “long march” through America’s institutions.

Just look at the courts.

In two years, Trump has made a more lasting impression on the federal courts than his predecessors ever could have hoped to make. Why?

Ooh, ooh, I’ll take that one! Because of his cantankerousness, his obstreperousness, his rude, crude, obnoxious eagerness to lock horns and tussle, that’s why. In other words: because of the exact same Trumpian traits the effetes, cucks, professional-politician DC snobs, and Vichy GOPe turncoats complain loudest about. Funny, that.

Michael Walsh once wrote that Trump has single-handedly revived the “great man” theory of history. He’s correct. But Trump didn’t revive it so much as remind everyone that it never went away. One man can truly make a difference—even in the face of terrible odds. And, if that one man is a force of nature, such as Churchill or Trump, then, no cause is truly lost…so long as people are inspired and willing to fight for it.

Our task, going forward then, will be to ensure that enough of us on the Right remain so inspired. We cannot be a movement of quitters.

Coulter and others are operating on the assumption that victory is impossible and losing is inevitable.

As y’all know by now, in my heart of hearts I think that’s true. So what? I repeat: if all we have left to us is to bloody Proggy’s nose and make him cry now and then…well, that’s still worthwhile, and is its own reward.

Yeah, I grumble sometimes about the grimness of the larger picture, and I’m gonna go right on doing it. Just the same, nobody should mistake grumbling for a willingness to either surrender or acquiesce. The core truth remains: I hate these Lefty bastards with every fiber of my being. Why on earth wouldn’t I? They intend to enslave me, to bring me to heel under the sway of a grasping despotism that has no limits and no accountability—not just me, but you and everybody else. In my book, that makes them one thing and one thing only: evil.

Plenty of us cringe away from making such a strong statement, pining for the Bygone Better Days of civility, collegiality, bipartisanship, and such-like. Again: so what? Evil is real; it walks among us not on cloven hooves but shod in fine designer loafers, clothed in tailored suits purchased with stolen money—reeking of expensive cologne instead of sulfur, brimstone, and blood. No matter how hopeless the struggle against that evil may ultimately be, it must still be resisted to the very last ounce of our strength. And who knows, maybe one day the horse will learn to sing.

I’ll let the great old punk/oi! band Blitz explain things:

Hollywood, America…

Posted on 12/8/201812/8/2018 by Mike 26 Comments

And (((((((JEWS!!!!)))))))

If you’re still not seeing it, pay attention.

Historical note: you got Hollywood as a largely (but not then nor never entirely) Jewish invention, precisely because of the same white-hooded goose-stepping anti-Semitism in the OP and responses, except at the turn of the last century, coupled with the avarice of Thomas Edison Inc., Philadelphia lawyers, and Tamany Hall politics conniving to try to sue Jewish filmmakers out of business every time they made a movie, and the subsequent and reflexive decamping of the Thalberg/Mayer/Goldwyn/Selznick types from corrupt East coast environs, where justice was sold by the pound to the highest bidder, and getting off the train in Phoenix AZ on the one day in 365 it ever rains there.

That wouldn’t do at all, so they all got back on the train, arrived in Los Angeles, saw they had 300+ days of sunshine/year, ocean, desert, mountain, plains, forest woodland, and city-scape all in close proximity, coupled with a thriving and booming metropolis, hard-working people absent trade unionism, and dirt-cheap real estate, with none of the East Coast kleptocracy previously noted, and the match was made that gave you the single greatest cultural achievement in America since ever: the movie business.

They could shoot cowboy and indian flicks three miles from downtown L.A., because in 1910, everything from that point to the Pacific Ocean was bean fields, cactus patches, and rocky chapparal, and hordes of broke-dick former ranch hands became cavalry troopers and Schmoe-hawk tribe Indian stunt men.

Hollywood is not a Jooooooooooos!!! problem; those exact folks gave you The Wizard Of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Stagecoach (starring some B-list singing cowboy), Goodbye Mr. Chips, Of Mice and Men, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, Dodge City, Drums Along The Mohawk, Gunga Din, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Jesse James, Young Mr. Lincoln, and about 100 other movies, including a couple of Secret Service-entitled flicks starring some kid from Illinois, all in just that one year (1939)!

If you can’t suss that out, that year was the Yankee’s “Murderer’s Row” of movie-making, compared to ever in history, anywhere.

Now tell me the names of the producers and studio heads, just for those 12 flicks, in 1939.

Tell me about the Hollywood that produced, e.g. It’s A Wonderful Life, Sahara, Twelve O’clock High, Ben Hur, and 30K-40K other films, some 1000 of which are international treasures, and the high points of the entire quintessential American art form; then compare and contrast that with the Hollywood that makes any four examples of the current shite you’d care to name, and see if you can spot what changed between Hollywood 1915-1990ish, versus Hollywood from 1990-present.

What changed is who pays for films to be made. Around 1990, give or take.
When you lost the checkbook, you lost the industry’s attention.

This is what happens when you abdicate fighting culture wars, and think you can ignore them, which was the Right, inclusive, from 1960-five seconds ago. Not “conservatism”, not “Boomers” (aged about 0-15 when that clever plan was hatched), but rather every swinging Right-side Richard for 60+ effing years, and counting

Well-played.

Keep doing that, and call me when it succeeds spectacularly.
Not.

This is why those railing against Hollywood, particularly in the vein of “It’s all run by Joooooooooooooos!” are mouth-breathing morons with the IQ of a cup of custard, and less culture than a cup of yogurt.

Hollywood is an American invention, not a Jewish one.

Fucking BINGO. Read it all. From a comment to Aesop’s previous post, which was the springboard for this one:

Anyhow, whatever this “plan” is, the second you start putting parenthesis around names and hauling out the swastikas, yeah, you’ve lost me, and you’ve lost most of the U.S. population no matter how disgusting some people in Hollywood are behaving. Just point out their disgusting behavior – leave the B.S. Nazi crap far away.

Again: bingo. If you have a problem with liberal Jews—which, actually, I do myself—you should be able to easily recognize that it’s not because they’re Jews, it’s because they’re liberals. But if you’re one of those types who likes to rant about “nation-wreckers,” complains about the “exaggeration” of the horrors of the Holocaust, and thinks any Muslim country you can name will ever be as solid, reliable, and trustworthy a US ally as Israel is…well, this probably ain’t the blog for you, bub.

Stabbing ever Rightward

Posted on 12/8/201812/8/2018 by Mike Leave a comment

Zman expands on a point I made the other day myself.

With news that The Weekly Standard is about to shut down due to the lack on interest, I wondered what would fill its place. The need for border security may not be a concern for the political leaders in Washington, but it is a necessity for the people in charge of the moral orthodoxy. The system requires there to be a predictable opposition that will squawk a bit, but eventually roll over for the Progressives. That means there are now job openings in the loyal cuck guard for men (and women!) willing to guard the walls against us.

If you are to become a paid chattering skull on the “right” then you better get used to writing and talking about the double-standard. A standard feature of all cuckservative bleating is pointing how there is one set of rules for Progressives and another set of rules for everyone else. Here’s a recent example in the premiere cuck site, National Review On-line. This one is about the black college professor, who was fired from his CNN job, for saying he hates Jews and wants Israel wiped from the map.

The standard cuck response to these events, is to shift the focus away from the actual issue onto the double-standard. In this case, the effete editor of NRO is begging the Left to stop giving wedgies to cucks like Charlie Cooke, when they fumble their lines. The real issue is why is criticism of Israel in violation of the morality codes, but hating white people acceptable? The cuck can’t allow that. His prime directive is to make sure whitey never thinks about this stuff, so the double-standard mew is employed to change the subject.

Another popular position in the cuck army is to be the guy who spends his days noodling over the rule book. Every time Lefty is about to pull a fast one in Washington, these guys pop up in the pages of cuck publications, talking about the finer points of the law. This post is a recent example from after the election. It is a long snoozer about the details of California election law, written from the ludicrous position that the rules matter. If only we can tweak the rules, the cheating in California will stop!

These are the two faces of the cuck army. When it is time to use the rules against the Left, they start talking about principles and morality. When it is time to talk about principles and morality, they start talking about the rules and the need to respect order. Every time the Left makes clear the rules don’t matter to them and that we live in a lawless age, the cuck army swings into action, lecturing us about the rule of law. That’s important to know. The tongue lashings and lectures are always directed our way, never toward Lefty.

That’s because the cucks are not really on our side, but Lefty’s.

Vive le révolution!

Posted on 12/8/201812/8/2018 by Mike Leave a comment

Uprising.

Fearing that an “enormous violence” will be part of “Act IV” of the mobilization of the “Yellow Jackets,” authorities have announced the mobilization of “exceptional measures” of more than 65,000 security forces deployed throughout France, and putting the finishing touches the security presence already in Paris.

As the fourth Saturday of mobilization of the “Yellow Jackets” approaches, l’Elyssee dreads that “an enormous violence” will explode in Paris this weekend. Throughout France, the calls to gather in Paris and demolish the current establishment rule are multiplying. Last week, a young man encountered by Le Figaro near the Saint-Lazare station was shouting: “This is not a protest, this is the Revolution!” Tuedsay night, on BFM TV, one of the leaders of the movement, Eric Drouet, had even declared wanting to “return” to l’Eyssee Saturday.

Ace provided that translation from Le Figaro, which my own long-ago college-boy French is far too rusty to gainsay. More from Diplomad:

The immediate cause of the disturbances in France is, of course, the “green tax” that the government sought to impose on French people. In the name of protecting Gaia, the already sky-high fuel prices in France were to be hit with additional taxes. That, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. The foolish economic and social policies of France (and the EU) are making average French people into poor people. To an even greater extent than we have seen on these shores, the middle class is being eliminated, ground into dust. I read some interesting stats on France which now I can’t find that showed that the average French citizen is out of money by the 20th of the month. Of course, it’s all very different if you have a senior government or EU job. As one of the Diplosons commented to me the other day, “What does a young Frenchman do to accumulate wealth?” Most avenues to potential wealth are heavily taxed, regulated, or otherwise controlled and put out of the reach of the average person. The French education system is a leftist disaster–Perhaps even worse than ours? Hard to believe–and produces the usual crop of highly credentialed and useless morons now standard fare in the West. On top of it all, the chocolate on the soufflé, France continues to support the immigration of other countries’ poor. What possibly could go wrong? Rhetorical question, folks, the list of answers is too long…

Back to the riots. One thing that struck me was some Rebel Media video in which you can see, through the swirling clouds of tear gas, demonstrators waving the Tricolor and hear them–gasp!– singing La Marseillaise, arguably the most stirring national anthem in the world. I am not French and don’t pretend to be, but that gave me goose-bumps. It, more importantly, also showed that these are not your run-of-the-mill Antifa-type thugs on the street. We might be seeing the rise of militant nationalism in revolt against the elitist globalism that has ruled and ruined the West for the past fifty or so years. De Gaul would have been proud…

France’s absurd President Macron has backed off for now on the new taxes–Gaia can wait, I guess. I don’t think, however, that he and his fellow “leaders” have gotten the message. Perhaps France needs a President Trump to drive home that it’s time to Make France Great Again? I also wonder how a Frexit vote would look? Fat chance that will be allowed…so, France continues to churn.

California should emulate the French citizens in the street. Right.

They should, actually. Then again, though, how many actual, legal American citizens can there be left there by now, anyway? In any event, best wishes and hats off to the Yellow Vests. Diplomad suggests perusing the always-excellent No Pasarán blog for more on all this as it happens, and he’s right.

Tucker turning

Posted on 12/8/201812/8/2018 by Mike 1 Comment

See if you can spot the problem I have with this.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign promises.

“His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund Planned Parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn’t done any of those things,” Carlson told Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.

All too many of us are griping about these things, and sure, they’re disappointing. BUT…notice anything about all three of ’em?

Yep, you got it: they’re all things the Congress is in charge of, not the President. Okay, so maybe Trump could have pushed harder for them than he did, I’ll grant you that. But with both Uniparty wings in league against him, if you think it more than barely likely Trump could have gotten them past a hostile Congress comprised overwhelmingly of fully-paid-up Team Deep Staters, you’re dreaming. As for Carlson’s apparent attitude adjustment, Bill has a theory:

Trump campaigned against The Swamp, which leads me to think he was and is quite aware that his own agencies don’t support him. And he certainly knows that Congress does not support him. In fact, I imagine he is more than aware that both bodies of Congress have, are, and will continue to actively work against him.

I’m also certain he knew that going in. He may eventually triumph, or he may lose it all. But whichever way it turns out, it certainly won’t be because he is incapable.

Personally, I think Carlson has been totally spooked by the attacks on his family, and is starting to look around for an exit from the Trump Train. Maybe to a cruise ship somewhere. Certainly somewhere he feels a bit safer.

Could be. Sad if true, but…could be.

“How Much Blood Would Leftists Be Willing To Shed To Disarm Patriotic Americans?”

Posted on 12/8/201812/8/2018 by Mike Leave a comment

ALL of it, of course. They’d prefer that anyway.

My question for Congressjerk Eric Swalwell is pretty simple: “How many Americans would you murder to achieve your goal of disarming us?”

It’s a fair question.

Now, we know that some Americans would resist this kind of tyranny. People all over the world are resisting the elite’s commands. The Brits Brexited. The French are rioting because they don’t want to sacrifice their livelihoods on behalf of the global elites’ weird weather religion. And a decree that the Second Amendment is not a thing anymore would certainly provoke some serious pushback here.

The Brits ain’t “Brexited” shit yet, and aren’t likely to, more’s the pity. The French, on the other hand, look like getting their act together at last, on which I hope to have more in a bit. But I still think Kurt is right about the likelihood of at least some pushback in the event of a serious gun-grab, although whether it would end up with full-on insurrection is something I’m not quite as confident of as I was before Black Tuesday.

Rep. Swalwell, some people are going to fight rather than cave in, so what’s the number of bodies you would be willing to pile up to win? Let’s put aside the right or wrong of resistance; it’ll be a thing. It’ll happen. You’re from near San Francisco, so you don’t know any real Americans, but even though I am from that hellhole too, I’ve met a few Americans in my travels. They are an ornery people who don’t give in to the kind of bullying you advocate. So, you’re going to have to kill some people to do what you want, and I just want to know how many you’re prepared to off to achieve your goal.

After all, it’s not as if you Democrats don’t already have a history of killing people for having guns you disapprove of.

Remember Waco? The raid on David Koresh’s compound was because his weird band of misfits allegedly had scary, outlawed guns. That’s why Democrat Janet Reno initially decided to send in the troops. The government got four of our ATF agents killed, then slaughtered the resisters, including women and kids.

I’d guess Kurt wouldn’t much like this sentiment, but I can’t say the loss of the ATF agents in the course of doing their “duty” of murdering men, women, and children at the behest of Leviathan is anything I ever lost any sleep over, or ever will. And while we’re at it, abominable government hitman Lon Horiuchi ought to have been pushing up daisies a long time ago himself, instead of looking forward to a nice cushy federal pension after he retires as a true FBI “hero.”

Now, Congressman Strangelove properly took a lot of grief for suggesting nuking fellow Americans, but even if you accept his backtracking about how this was a joke – nothing’s funnier than suggesting the mass murder of fellow Americans! – he only put nukes off limits. What killing systems are still on the table? Infantry? Artillery? Bombers? Because his answer assumed that he would support prosecuting a war against those who failed to obey and submit to arrest.

So, Congressman, what means of destructions are still on the table to use against fellow Americans who refuse to allow you to strip them of their Second Amendment rights because you Bay Area liberals want to show those hicks in Jesusland who’s boss? Is shooting them okay? Shelling them? Bombing them, just not with nukes?

Again: all of it, plus whatever else it might take to get the job done. This is why:

Understand that the leftists with Swalwell’s mentality are not driven by notions of justice or reason, but by cold hatred for Normal Americans. We’ve been disobedient. We’ve been defiant. We’ve refused to surrender our means of defending our own sovereignty to our elite overlords, and that is intolerable.

Exactly. Which is why, as Kurt concludes, anybody who still thinks of them as “our fellow Americans” needs to get woke, and fast. There are a lot of Swalwells out there—a LOT, probably more than any of us dare to imagine—with government schools churning out more of them every day.

Roll your own

Posted on 12/7/201812/7/2018 by Mike 3 Comments

Not weed, which is A-okay with libtards—anyplace and anytime you care to do it—but tobacco, which most certainly is NOT.

THURSDAY, Dec. 6, 2018 — Smokers who roll their own cigarettes are less likely to try to kick the habit and cost may be the reason why, a new study suggests.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 38,000 adults in England who were smokers or who had quit in the past year. About 56 percent said they smoked only factory-made cigarettes, while nearly 37 percent said they smoked only roll-your-own cigarettes.

Just 16 percent of roll-your-own smokers were highly motivated to quit, compared to 20 percent of factory-made cigarette smokers, according to the University College London (UCL) study. It was published online Dec. 4 in the journal BMJ Open.

Why the difference? Roll-your-own smokers were less interested in quitting because of the cheaper cost of their cigarettes, the study found. Only factory-made cigarettes are taxed, the researchers explained.

“Cost is consistently reported by smokers as one of the primary motives for quitting. With [roll-your-own] cigarettes offering a lower cost alternative to factory-made cigarettes, [roll-your-own] users may be more able to afford to continue to smoke, and therefore less inclined to try to quit,” said study author Sarah Jackson, from the Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care at UCL.

“This has important implications for tobacco control policy, given that a key strategy used by governments worldwide to reduce smoking is to raise taxes on tobacco in order to increase the cost of smoking,” Jackson said in a university news release.

So we all know what’s coming next from these assholes, I reckon.

I’ve been rolling my own for a good while now, and I heartily recommend it to any smoker I run across. I have one of these machines for it: cost, about fifty bucks on Amazon. Once you get the amount of tobacco and the proper packing down, it makes a perfect cigarette just about every time. Cost? About 75 cents a pack—WAY better than the four-something bucks I was paying for Pall Mall blues before.

But cost is hardly the only benefit. I buy Ohm Gold tobacco, free of any chemical additives, and roll ’em in Gambler “light” tubes, which combination produces a cigarette that tastes SO much better than any factory-built ones—larded up as those are with formaldehyde (to make ’em burn faster), carpet glue (to make them go out after a few unattended minutes), and God only knows what else.

As an added bonus, after smoking my full-custom hand-rollies for a while I noticed something: the old smoker’s hack was greatly diminished. No, seriously folks; the old wake-up ritual of coughing up noxious phlegm is all but gone as long as I stay with the home-builts, and comes back quick if I have to resort to the Pall Malls for whatever reason.

Which I occasionally do. It’s the only real problem with RYO smokes: now and then you find yourself away from home for longer than anticipated and run out, necessitating a grudging trip to the store for a pack of the corporate coffin nails. It’s kind of a tedious pain in the ass rolling ’em, I admit, but a minor one; rolling up a pack’s worth or so takes maybe five to ten minutes, no more. I have a friend who’ll sit down and roll himself a whole carton each morn, but not me. I just don’t have that kind of patience no matter how much I’m saving or how much better I feel physically for the trifling effort.

All in all, I must repeat: if you’re a smoker, I strongly recommend you give ’em a try. With RYO smoke shops popping up all over the place, you’re bound to have one close by—and if not, there’s always Amazon. You’ll be glad you did, I promise. Right up until the legions of our Bluenose Betters get their hands on ’em and ruin everything for us just like they always do.

Via Insty, who adds: “Plausible, but I note how much science these days seems to extol the virtues of higher taxes.” Yup. That’s one way you can tell they’re getting ready to make the usual restrict-regulate-and-tax-it-to-death move. RYOers are at present effectively outside the system, more or less, and therefore relatively unimpeded. Can’t be having THAT, don’tchaknow.

On outrage

Posted on 12/5/201812/6/2018 by Mike 4 Comments

Walsh links to a WSJ piece lamenting outrage:

People have been mad as hell for much of the 21st century, starting roughly with the stalemated Bush-Gore election in 2000, followed quickly by 9/11. Fundamentals have been changing fundamentally: marriage, sexual identity, racial politics, geopolitics. Outrage flourishes also because of the rise of social media—the endless electronic brawl—and because it plays so well on our screens. Cable news draws pictures in crayon, in bold primary colors that turn politics into cartoons. On the left, “stay woke” means “stay outraged.” Trumpians want to “lock her up” or “build a wall.” Outrage is reductive, easy to understand. It is an idiom of childhood—a throwback even to the terrible twos.

Ahh, but isn’t outrage appropriate when one side is so clearly right, and the other is not only wrong, but also dishonest about it?

“Trumpians” may well be the only ones who want to “lock her up”—but she damned well SHOULD be locked up, if the rule of law is to have any meaning at all. She committed numerous criminal acts, some of them at best skirting the margins of actual, literal treason—at BEST. She has so far evaded consequence; hell, she’s evaded even honest investigation into those crimes, with the collusive connivance not only of the useless GOPe but also the very federal agencies charged with enforcing the law.

Being outraged over such corruption and malfeasance is supposed to be somehow unreasonable and regrettable? REALLY?

And with illegal immigration so out-of-control as to make it evident that we barely even still have a southern border at all, what the hell is the least bit out of line about being outraged at resistance to building a wall?

Sorry, Charlie, but I humbly submit that there ought to be one hell of a lot MORE outrage over these things, along with plenty of others. The fact that there AIN’T is what we should be fretting about, such fatalistic nonchalance representing as it does a very real threat to the Republic—whatever’s still left of it, that is.

So where IS the outrage? Why, rat cheer:

What’s dispiriting about the 2018 midterm election is that –- voting by district for the House of Representatives -– a slim majority of Americans voted AGAINST the soaring job numbers, the increasing wages, the restoration of the steel and aluminum and auto industries and the rest of our proud industrial manufacturing base in the process of being restored by the Trump trade miracle (which PROVES the globalists and their house negro, B. Hussein Obama, were lying through their teeth when they said this was impossible, that it would “take a magic wand.”)

Instead, that slim majority of mostly urban “blue” voters clearly, unambiguously voted FOR what today’s Democrat party openly stands for: open borders; “sanctuary cities” with sidewalks full of discarded syringes and human feces; illegal aliens (few of whom understand or embrace our constitutional system of limited government) raping and murdering at will (see Kate Steinle’s murderer, just for starters), said illegals now in the process of being fully normalized, issued drivers’ licenses and allowed to vote…

…and let’s not forget the destruction of the traditional heterosexual American family, its mandatory replacement being “gender fluidity,” in which cross-dressing male rapists and child abusers are literally encouraged to use the little girls’ bathrooms, to fraudulently dominate women’s sports, even to be sent to women’s prisons when convicted for their crimes, based merely on the assertion that “When I woke up this morning and scratched my balls, I decided I wanted to wear a dress and call myself ‘Nicole.’”

Why on earth would anyone vote for all that — and against renewed American pride and prosperity? As Victor Davis Hanson articulates so well, they are surrounded, 24/7, by the droning, shrill and shrieking mass media banging the drum that Trump and all he stands for is/are “racist, sexist, homophobic, the whole basket of deplorables.”

Didn’t we troop to the polls and reject and overrule that absurd and totally unsubstantiated charge, in 2016? If they refuse to accept the results of that election, what do they think our next step will be? Accepting the results of elections, after all, is the consensus way we have agreed to avoid settling our disputes through force of arms. Right?

To survive, pending that test of arms, Trump needs SOME kind of counteroffensive to re-energize his dispirited base. Yes, I know he wants to concentrate on arm-wrestling the Chinese into giving us a better trade deal. I get that. But he can’t let himself be seen as a powerless buffoon, assaulted without consequence from all sides on the domestic front, nibbled to death by weasels and ferrets. We need a counterattack. We need several.

We sure do. And it all begins with outrage—RIGHTEOUS outrage, JUSTIFIED outrage, from the put-upon millions being used as human ATMs to foot the bill for a shitpile of unworkable, destructive Leftist insanity they wholeheartedly oppose. While being insulted and slandered every step of the way, to boot.

Be sure to read all of that last link, gang; it’s a long ‘un, virtually guaranteed to stoke the fires of outrage in all the right places, for all the right reasons.

Harshing your mellow since 9/01

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