Blogs & Bloggers

Inexpressibly sad

Posted on January 26, 2023January 26, 2023 by Mike

Boy, ain’t THAT the mot juste.

For Gerard

I know that most of you have gotten the news that Gerard Vanderleun is in hospice care now. It is inexpressibly sad.

I’ve been wrestling with this for a while. And by “this” I mean: how to say what I’m about to say. Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m a very private person and don’t go in for much disclosure, dramatic or otherwise. But I’m about to write something very personal because detachment doesn’t work right now.

And it’s something Gerard wanted me to write, too, and so I’m doing this at least in part for him as well.

Gerard and I met through our blogging nearly eighteen years ago, became a couple about a year later and stayed that way for many years, and for the past ten or so years have been extremely close friends. We never lived together but would visit each other for lengthy periods, travel together, and have talked on the phone almost every day for most of the time we’ve been apart. He deferred to my need for privacy by not writing about our relationship, although I appear in some of his writings as the mysterious woman who was there for this or that occasion.

We’ve been in touch every day right through this illness, which came on so quickly and was diagnosed so recently – only this past Wednesday – that it took everyone by surprise. I am the “updater” at American Digest, too.

I’m very distraught, I’m on my way out west to see him, and this will be my only post for today. I’m not planning on giving a running account, but at some point I probably will write more about this.

Thank God for your presence in Gerard’s life, Neo, and may He bless you for being there in this good and gentle man’s hour of greatest need. She does indeed have a brief followup post.

I saw Gerard yesterday and I believe he’s quite close to death, perhaps days to a week. I’m not going to go into details except to say that meaningful conversation seems to have ceased, and he has also stopped drinking water. He’s being cared for attentively at a good place.

It is very hard to face losing his enormous presence in my life.

I’m sure it is. We’ll all lose something unique and wonderful when GVDL finally departs this vale of tears.

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Publick Notice

Posted on January 17, 2023January 17, 2023 by Mike

Since the native WP posting editor has begun to suck so horribly, and my reliable third-party standby for years, Ecto, doesn’t work at all with the new/old iMac’s decrepit operating system, I’ve been casting desperately about for months now in search of another blog-posting alternative that will run on this infernal machine. This casting about led me to download MarsEdit for a test run to see how it might suit.

I’m thrilled to find that it does indeed support custom macros, which is one of the primary things I loved about Ecto and have been missing most. Unfortunately, after a 14 day trial run I’m required to buy the damned software at a hefty 60 bucks, which after having shelled out 39.99 for Ecto already sticks in my craw pretty badly. If I understand things correctly, I can still use ME to write posts and store them locally, I just can’t actually upload ’em to the ol’ websty without purchasing a license first.

We’ll see what transpires on all that hoo-ha, I reckon, but for the moment I gotta say I’m thoroughly loving MarsEdit. In addition to downloading all my posts, categories, and pages from WP on CF’s server, it also grabbed all the media files I’ve embedded in past posts as well, something Ecto didn’t do. That means I’ll have a complete archive of everything but the actual database files ready to hand in case those Russian hackers get frisky and make another run at Ye Humble Blogge again.

Lots of new-to-me features with this ME thing too, some of which look likely to be right handy. Maybe I need to consider holding another fundraiser hereabouts when my 14-day trial period is about to expire…

Update! Aw yeah, this thing rocks for sure. SOOOO much better than that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned WP posting editor. Need to find some kind of YT embed next, see how that goes. Stand by…

KNOCKED OUT update! Man oh MAN, is this MarsEdit software amazing! Had I known about it before tonight, I woulda switched off from Ecto years ago.

See, in both the Ecto and ME main window, the main window shows a list of previous posts up top, below which is a preview of whatever post you click on and highlight. Well sir, I just learned that, with ME, you can download your blog’s theme template to be used for the preview. With Ecto, you could customize your preview template, but it was a right pain in the arse to do, so I never did bother with it.

This handy-dandy feature could well mitigate the need for me to hold off doing all the proofreading and editing until after the post has gone live, which is a good thing. Screen grab:

CF ME grab

Brilliant, no? Turns out, MarsEdit’s built-in Upload Utility allows you to resize the image, reformat it, &c before you even upload it, bypassing the need to further fool around as is required by the infernal WP editor. Yeah, it’s definitely looking more and more as if I need to come up with the sixty simoleons for this little gem.

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So close, and yet so far

Posted on January 16, 2023January 16, 2023 by Mike

As y’all no doubt know by now, I find myself increasingly frustrated with James Kunstler. He is indeed a wonderfully skilled, insightful writer, no doubt about it. But his recent penchant for constructing an impeccable argument on a given issue, only to shy away in the last paragraph or two from the obvious conclusion that there really is no political solution to be found has become downright wearisome, at least to me.

That said, though, the opening ‘graph of today’s piece is a real gem.

So many calamities, quandaries, and mysteries swirl in the zeitgeist these days that life in the USA feels like swimming against a rising tide of poisoned guacamole. Nothing has been able to stop that green spewage from the political Left, especially as it desecrates our very language to turn everything up, down, and everything inside, outside. You end up drowning the consensus about reality under the muck. Now, finally, there are political forces gathering to oppose all this deliberate malice and deceit and they will need something like a fire-hose to clean the joint up.

Heh. “Green spewage,” poisoned guacamole, and firehoses? Now, THAT is gooooood squishy right there. Makes me kinda reluctant to read the rest of it, knowing the piffle about “investigations” and “Congressional inquiries” and other such rot that surely awaits towards the end of it.

Update! And sure enough.

Obviously, there are many other channels of inquiry waiting to be explored in the government’s war against the people, especially the lingering questions about election interference and the official censorship of news. The excellent writer who goes by Sundance at The Last Refuge website made some capital suggestions for going forward with these inquiries: one is to rely primarily on witness testimony rather than on documents that federal officials will surely do everything possible to hide. Don’t turn this into a futile battle over the docs. Let’s just hear what the people-in-charge have to say. Secondly — and this may be hard for many angry, injured people to swallow — immunize witnesses against prosecution, to give them no incentive to hide what they know, what actions they carried out, and who told them to do it. Give them this immunity, Sundance wrote, in the interest of maximum transparency — because punishment of these characters is less important than showing the people of this country how far off the rails we have gone, and how to get back on. It may not be optimally satisfying, but it’s an argument worth pondering.

No, it assuredly is NOT—seeing as how the argument from the very git-go relies entirely on a fatally-flawed premise: that the best way to “get to the bottom” of all this knavery and deception is via the selfsame government that is indeed waging war against its people. It’s pure self-deception, and it’s pathetic.

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Hitting the books

Posted on January 2, 2023January 2, 2023 by Mike

I am thrilled as all git-out to report that, after my having contacted him a day or two ago about the possibility of getting my greasy hands on one, the esteemed and estimable Oleg Atbashian of the wholly brilliant People’s Cube satire site has most graciously provided me with an ePub copy of his latest autobiographical book, Hotel USSR, for review purposes. I have two other books with pending reviews on my to-do list—Jonathan Fesmire’s unconventional, wild, and rollicking ~~Bodacious Creed and the San Francisco Syndicate~~ (done, and done—M), and our good friend TL Davis’s uncompromising, bare-knuckled Rogue, the sequel to his paean to freedom, REBEL: The Last American Novel. I’ll be catching up on this happy backlog of reading and reviewing in a trice, folks.

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A very worthy cause

Posted on December 7, 2022 by Mike

Was chatting over the teleomaphone with my brother-from-another-mother Billy earlier and he made a request I’m only too happy to grant: a rerun of the link to the Saving Adriana Grace fundraiser page. I know times are tough out there these days thanks to the usual bitch’s brew of DemonRat fuckery and misgovernance, and Christmas is nigh upon us also. But having met Adriana myself and knowing her to be the sweet, lovely little girl she definitely is, I can’t think of a finer place for y’all to donate any extra dough you might have lying around, in whatever amount you can manage.

Billy and Gretch are fighting the good fight here, and that ain’t never cheap nor easy. There have been some positive developments of late, so let’s see if we can’t put some truly good people and a most deserving child into the win column here.

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Best wishes to all

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Mike

The very happiest of T-days to all CF Lifers wherever they may be, along with a heartfelt happy birthday to my brother-in-arms-and-everything-else Big Country as well. May your days be merry, and bright.

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Publick Notice UPDATE

Posted on October 27, 2022October 27, 2022 by Mike

Many, many thanks to all the CF Lifers who showed up to register at Claire’s Freedomista forums today, from both myself and Claire. She told me earlier that she was absolutely stunned at the response to yesterday’s mention, saying, and I quote:

Not only am I going to be busy this morning, but it’s possible you’ve just single-handedly — and very generously, I must add — altered the nature of the forums forever.

I am proud to know you, my friend.

…I have never been very good at promoting myself or my creations. You just did more for the forums than I’ve managed in the last year.

“Proud to know me”? Right back atcha, Claire, tenfold. And the same goes for the CF Lifers as well, also WRSA for so kindly linking the original post. Thanks again, everyone.

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Publick Notice

Posted on October 26, 2022October 27, 2022 by Mike

The more attentive—or anal retentive, perhaps—among you have doubtless noted a new addition to the right sidebar, apart from the recently installed Gab Pay donation button. Nestled just under my friend Claire Wolfe’s deathless words of wisdom kicking off the “Notable Quotes” whoopjamboreehoo is a spanking-new link to Claire’s Cabal, a web forum in the classic style wherein the focus is homed in, laser-like, on discussion of the verymost fundamental issue today in America That Was: freedom. How we lost it, where it went, how we might go about getting it back are all welcome topics at Claire’s joint, which is chock-a-block with erudite, witty, and friendly freedom lovers. It’s a discussion I’m perfectly confident that readers here will be interested in, and are well-equipped to advance. Check it out, you’ll be glad you did. A sample of the multifarious topics:

Administrivia
Announcements, rulz, all the dull necessities
1112 Posts
77 Topics

Let’s Talk
A place for general discussion. BE AWARE: This is the one section of Living Freedom Forums that can be read by the public, even though only members can post.
14477 Posts
2325 Topics

Outlawry
As Mike Vanderboegh used to say, “Defy, resist, evade, smuggle.” Talk about it discreetly, even here. But talk about it if you are so inclined. The place for Freedom Outlaw Moles, Agitators, and Ghosts. Monkeywrenchers, too!
2225 Posts
247 Topics

Freedomista Safe Space
A place to rant, rave, and let your hair down
8686 Posts
1184 Topics

Silver’s Corner
Money, free-market economics, and political threats to them
7497 Posts
570 Topics

Intel & OPSEC
For anybody seeking to increase personal or organizational security. For becoming more wise in action and communication.
3240 Posts
448 Topics

Our Minds, Ourselves
Forget for the moment what “they” are doing to destroy freedom. This board is about changing our own minds and lives to better create freedom for ourselves and our loved ones
2116 Posts
190 Topics

Fire When Ready
Guns, gear and self defense
8932 Posts
1362 Topics

Gimme Shelter
All about land, housing, and shelters for yourself and your possessions.
788 Posts
101 Topics

Food, Family, and Life on Ye Olde Homestead
Food: Growing it, raising it, cooking it, storing it, choosing it. For both emergency and non-emergency use. Family: Kids, pets, elders. And general domesticity and life.
4067 Posts
401 Topics

Take Care of Yourself Out There
All about health and well-being
4441 Posts
470 Topics

As you can readily discern from those impressive Posts/Topics tallies, Claire’s Cabal is a lively, humming internet hangout, covering a variety of well-chosen, interesting, and important subjects. Which, to repeat, is a mere sampling of what’s over there. The esteemed and estimable Ms Wolfe has done one hell of a job putting this thing together, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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OUTLAW!

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Mike

Welcome back to our brother from another mother BCE, who sneaked in the back door over at Blawgsplat to set himself up a temporary alternate site until Divemedic can resolve a few serious issues and get the new Big Country Expat v2.0 up and running.

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A bleg

Posted on October 11, 2022October 12, 2022 by Mike

For reasons which are abundantly obvious, I’ve been looking into a PayPal replacement of late. I’m going to try AlignPay for a while, I think. Launched by Dan Bongino and a couple other folks, it’s touted as the “free speech,” “Cancel Culture Free” PayPal alternative, one that will never suspend, deplatform, or otherwise hassle anybody on Our Side based solely on their political leanings. So far, Wise also looks pretty good also, being a hell of a lot cheaper on their transfer fees than PayPal is. Overall, Amazon Pay may well come out on top in the PayPal substitute sweepstakes, if for no reasons other than the ubiquitousness of the parent company, and everyone’s familiarity with its interface.

I dunno, we’ll see. Definitely going to get to work implementing AlignPay here for the nonce, on the principle of lending support for the side of Truth, Justice, and the American Way alone. If anybody out there has any suggestions on all this, please do drop ’em in the comments section, aiiight? Thanks in advance, y’all.

Update! Okay, several of you have suggested Gab Pay, which I’m trying to figure out now. And yes, BCE’s site got nuked, but I haven’t spoken with him in a cpl-three days and so have no new news to impart as to what’s going on, other than that he does have a backup site which he’s working on getting up and running. Soon as I gots more to tell ya, and I’ve verified that he’s okay with me telling it, I will do so. Thanks for asking…

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In praise of Muir

Posted on October 2, 2022October 2, 2022 by Mike

Chris Muir and I have been good friends since the earliest days of his outstanding Day By Day comic. In fact, I was one of the very first, if not THE first, blog to run the strip, as I recall, and have been an enthusiastic DBD evangelist from Day One. Chris is a good and decent dude, hugely talented and politically astute. He’s done several custom drawings for me over the years, some of which you CF Lifers may remember. First, the CF masthead back when my dear departed wife Christiana was an occasional poster here:

Then, a sidebar image I kept up for a long while after Christiana’s passing:

And the most recent, done to accompany BCE’s fundraiser for me whilst I languished in the rehab center earlier this year after I’d lost a good-ish bit of bodily real estate and damned near died my own self:

Yowza! — *Help Mike get WHAT up again, now?*

I remember a few times some years back when a cpl-three readers here took me and Chris both to task for some of his, umm, racier DBD illos, a complaint I’ll never be able to second or endorse. To my way of thinking, we’re all adults here, and ought to be able to handle a little cartoon nudity now and then without undue fuss, right? Plus, the man really does have a way with titties, as is readily obvious from the above. And, while your mileage may of course vary, I LIKE titties myself.

Speaking of which, Chris has just done a strip promoting Big Country’s Save Adriana Grace fundraiser, featuring another of his masterful fun-bag depictions at bottom left:

Yowza! To rejigger an old phrase, I don’t know if it’s art, but I know I like it. And yes, that’s the artist’s immortalization of the Big Man himself in the panel immediately above yon bodacious boobage. All joshing and scandalous naughtiness aside, the Adriana fundie is a serious and important matter indeed, and can be found here.

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By their friends enemies shall ye know them

Posted on August 31, 2022August 31, 2022 by Mike

First, our bud Aesop uncorked one of his patented unleavened rhetorical bloodlettings, to wit:

In any Emergency Department in the country, he wouldn’t be deemed competent to make basic medical decisions for himself, and would be detained for a psychiatric evaluation as gravely disabled. He doesn’t have sufficient orientation to be allowed to wander freely in society, and would be locked up for his own good.

Not even twenty months into his fraudulent regime, and his functional incompetence and senility is far too big to hide or ignore, and is plainly visible 8000 miles away. And if they’re seeing it this clearly in Sydney, it’s long since been noted in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Teheran.

The far scarier question that follows:

What cabal of unelected behind-the-curtains coup-masters are actually running the United States’ executive branch, including the DoJ and the armed farces?

This pants-shitting fucktard can’t even run a lawnmower, and any federal agency that refused to do anything he said would be on firm legal grounds due to his basic mental incompetence.

And clearly, his minions and their house-organ media buddies have decided that since they pulled off one coup with the 2020 fake election, another ongoing one now is simply child’s play.

This is the point in world affairs where DefCon levels take on an algorithm of their own, as sphincters pucker up in nearly a dozen important places.

This big-bore salvo against God-Emperor Joey Rapefingers (Piss Be Upon Him) and, by extension, Our Sacred Democracy™ (GAG, SPIT) itself, moved Goolag to get itself busy Not Being Evil, in their own Bizarro-World sort of way.

Goolag/Blogger have apparently throttled all traffic to this site, shortly after the previous post was published, with recorded site hits dwindling to a number lower than the number of commenters, which is impossible.

We have just watched the number of visitors going backwards with each refresh, so in fact, they’re actually erasing visits and views in real time.

Aesop’s response? Exactly what those of us who have known him a while might’ve expected it to be.

Heh. What can one say but: nice shot, man.

ADDENDUM: Aesop, shoot me a kite at mike at this-url-dot-etc when ya can, brother. Got a suggestion for ya I think you might possibly enjoy.

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Setback

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Mike

Spoke with BCE earlier, to check in on the results of today’s court date. Alas, the news was…not good. Increasing the awfulness by orders of magnitude is that I got to meet the Gran, Adriana, when BCE and fam made a stopover here on the way to Tennessee. What a sweet, adorable little thing that young ‘un is. It did my crusty, desiccated old soul good to watch her running merrily from one end of the house to the other, a purloined TV remote clutched tightly in one hand, a practice Big Country said was SOP at Casa Expat. Too, too funny.

From what he told me, Tennessee’s court system is a total bag of dicks, just a fucked-up mess of a shit-circus. I can scarcely even believe some of the things that went on in that court today, so incredibly outlandish were they. The mind, it reels. “Miscarriage of justice” doesn’t even begin to meet the case.

My heart just breaks for my brother-from-another-mother Big Country, his wife Gretch, and poor little Adriana most of all. Hang in there, all of you, any way you can manage. I refuse to believe that this is the end of it; no God worthy of the title would allow it to be so, nor should He. I implore you good people: stay strong and keep the faith. There are more chapters to be written in this book yet. I love you all, and will be praying that we see a happier resolution soon.

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Three guesses, first two don’t etc

Posted on August 3, 2022August 3, 2022 by Mike

VDH asks the silliest of silly questions.

Are the New Progressive Rules Reciprocal?

Gee, I dunno, Victor, have they EVER been? Even just once? It’s why I’ve always found the empty threats from Our Guys warning shitlibs about how deeply, deeply unhappy they’re going to be when Repugnicants turn the tables and start flinging their own shit back in their faces so annoying—it just never, ever seems to happen, for some strange reason.

Have leftists ever read Thucydides on the stasis at Corcyra and his warning that zealots who destroy laws, customs, and traditions for short-term gain, soon rue the day they began making such changes when, in vain, they seek refuge in the very sanctuaries of behavior that they have destroyed?

Only one small problem with that proposition: they’ll never rue a friggin’ thing unless and until they’re given cause to rue something. Absent that, we’re all just having a wank here, nothing more.

How about the new protocols regarding the Supreme Court?

Should conservatives mass at the home of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, decrying her radical nihilist abortionist ideology? Is that an understandable cri de coeur? Would such intimidation in the future moderate her extremism? Is that now an acceptable strategy?

It damned well ought to be, yes.

Should Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) now lead a throng of screaming, right-wing protestors to the very doors of the Supreme Court? Should he egg them on by calling out by name Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sotomayor, warning that they have sown the “wind” and will soon reap the “whirlwind,” as they will have no idea what “hit” them?

Is that moral courage?

Who the hell cares? What it is, is effective. Or it has been for them, at any rate. In the end, that’s all that really matters. “Moral courage” doesn’t amount to a hill of beans when your foe is consistently kicking your ass up between your shoulder blades.

Will the next FBI director preposterously open an investigation during the 2024 election, on rumors that the activities of the Biden family, of General Mark Milley, of Anthony Fauci, of key senators with Chinese financial interests all constitute a sort-of-kind-of “collusion” conspiracy with China, aimed at advancing a self-enriching and mutual left-wing agenda in the presidential election?

Will the FBI director claim 245 times under oath before Congress he has no memory of what he has ordered? Will it be a slap-on-the-wrist, reduced-sentence tacit approval that an FBI lawyer altered a court document to ensure we get to the bottom of “Chinese collusion”? Is it alright if we learn that a Republican presidential candidate hired a foreign ex-spy, and hid his pay behind three walls, to find dirt on his opponents?

Will Congress bring in some old right-wing FBI retired bulldog to compile a “dream team” of Federalist Society legal zealots to hunt for “Chinese collusion” among Democratic grandees?

Wrong question. The RIGHT question: Is there any conceivable reason we shouldn’t do exactly that?

In sum, are today’s norms tomorrow’s norms?

Or were they simply transitory and necessary in the age of the dreaded Trump—as one-time leftist means to achieve noble ends, and thus should never be institutionalized much less boomeranged?

If so, will they reappear whenever the Left returns to power?

Or should they be applied equally to the Left right now to ensure that outrage and disgust with such immoral and illegal machinations prohibit their use in the future?

Depends, I suppose, on whether or not Team Liberty has lost so much they’ve gotten tired of all the losing, to turn a Trumpian phrase, and wishes to try winning for a refreshing change of pace. Myself, I heartily approve of and endorse commenter cxt’s suggestion:

We should be doing everything possible to force Democrats’ to live in the world they are working so hard to create.

Shipping illegals to Democrat strongholds for example–forcing them to live with the consequences of their policies is a good start.

We need to turn the vise everywhere we can.

That we most certainly do. Judging from the agonies of weeping and wailing emanating from NYC and Mordor On The Potomac over finding themselves on the receiving end for once, finally taking steps to see to it that what goes around does in fact come around appears to be a quite useful strategy.

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Unqualified endorsements

Posted on July 6, 2022July 6, 2022 by Mike

Two notable events from good friends of mine that I have been lax in helping to promote so far, in spite of the fact that I owe both of them much more than I could ever hope to repay:

NUMERO UNO: Francis Porretto is offering free fiction at his place. I’ve heartily endorsed Fran’s amazing writing many times here before, and recommend it highly; his straight-up sci-fi stuff is more strongly reminiscent of the great Robert Heinlein I just can’t even, and would be a bargain at any price. But come now; FREE?!? Hie thee thither, without further ado.

NUMERO DOS: Big Country has been running a raffle of some pretty neat stuff he created with his 3D printing flibbertigibbet, so do go check that out too.

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