Cold Fury – Harshing your mellow since 9/01

Ixnay on the Okeway

Posted on 5/23/20195/23/2019 by Mike 3 Comments

Dunkin’ Brand – which owns both Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins – has taken a stand against politicizing their businesses, according to remarks made by senior executives during a panel at the 2019 International Trademark Association (INTA) meeting in Boston.

Attendees took to Twitter to praise the company for their commitment to remain politically neutral – and for the shot they took at their competitor Starbucks.

One attendee tweeted a quote from the vice president of brand stewardship Drayton Martin wherein the Dunkin’ executive says “we are not Starbucks, we aren’t political.”

Martin further specified politically provocative designs on cups was something Dunkin’ would not partake in: “We don’t want to engage you in political conversation, we want to get you in and out of our store in a matter of seconds.”

Such a shame that a company announcing that it intends to stick to its knitting without piously lecturing its customers on matters unrelated to the business it’s in comes across as such a refreshing departure from the norm. I hope they make a mint because of it. Screw Starbucks anyhow; all PC preachiness aside, their burnt-beans hellbrew tastes revolting. I never have understood how they managed to do so well peddling that nasty parody of coffee they fob off on the more gullible among us, especially in an age when there are so many vastly superior choices available.

A herd of swine

Posted on 5/23/20195/23/2019 by Mike 1 Comment

Y’all might notice a new addition to my small notable-quotes section at top-sidebar-right, an Immutable Truth I gleaned here.

The devious relationship between one party and its willing accomplices in the media has moved beyond the point of eye-rolls and shoulder-shrugs. It has reached a tipping point for our nation. Joseph Goebbels famously stated, “Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine.” This has become the incestuous relationship the Left lustfully pursues with increasing reliability. Through decades of permeation, the media have been given over to the Left, and for leftists, our society has become the herd of swine.

Not surprisingly, the playbook isn’t limited to the national mainstream media. Media technology group AllSides published a report that Google News results lean heavily toward media outlets with a “left” bias. The author of the study, John Gable, stated that the bias is a result of “most news outlets and most news consumption online being from a left perspective.” The purveyors of Google News are well aware of this egregious bias, but because Google’s corporate culture sways heavily left, we can hardly expect the company to create an algorithm that provides a fair and balanced narrative.

Indoctrination of the masses by the Left used to come in the form of opinion pieces. During the Reagan administration, White House network reporters certainly reported the news. However, they steadily began introducing the technique of ending each report with strongly worded opposing viewpoints from critics of the administration. Who were these unnamed critics? The ones holding the microphone.

Oh, they started a long, long time before that, buddy—certainly no later than Cronkite’s notorious post-Tet declaration of defeat, probably well before. By Reagan, their bias-insertion techniques were as highly developed as they were ever gonna get. After that, it was less a matter of refining them and more one of brazenly, relentlessly deploying them.

Thus began the stepped up infiltration of political views into national news. Subsequently, what began as infiltration has become full-on partisanship. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, and various other “news” outlets used to portray themselves as impartial. Reading an opinion piece masquerading as a news story in a national news publication no longer seems brazen. It has become the new normal.

Opinion pieces masquerading as news is hardly their only ploy. A more subtle and insidious one is the calculated selection of which stories get reported, and which get buried. It’s a sneaky little subterfuge, that one; call it stealth-editorializing.

On any number of subjects, building a wall between Mexico and the United States being a current topic of the day, there are literally dozens of video recordings of Democrats contradicting themselves from the position they took even a decade ago. Joe Biden once pounded the pulpit demanding that we build a wall. With Joe Biden as the Democratic frontrunner for U.S. president, you’ve seen that contradiction reported all over the national mainstream media, haven’t you?

Contrast that with anything and everything Donald Trump says. The media are quick to pull any quote, any tweet out of context or bend it out of shape to promote the narrative that the president is an unhinged liar. With very few exceptions, how can one not be entirely cynical of our news sources and online media?

A: one can’t, without being either a liberal red in tooth and claw, or a total moron. Anybody who still believes in their integrity and honesty isn’t fit to tie his own shoes or feed himself without assistance, and should be kept well away from sharp objects…and voting booths. The first, for their own good. The second, for everybody else’s.

Quick hit

Posted on 5/22/20195/23/2019 by Mike Leave a comment

A short one from Steyn that, its brevity notwithstanding, is well worth posting:

On Wednesday I returned to the Golden EIB Microphone for three hours of substitute-host-level Excellence in Broadcasting on America’s Number One radio show.

The broadcast began with Trump walking out of a meeting with Schumer and Pelosi after three minutes, and saying he wouldn’t be working with Democrats until they stopped investigating him. Good luck with that. I pointed out that the logic of their situation demands investigation without end: first, to distract from the fact that their agenda is nuts – open borders, transgender supremacism, fourth-trimester abortion – and, second, because it is necessary to investigate Trump for “obstructing” their previous investigation of him in order to prevent him investigating the rottenness of the original investigation of him: the counter-intelligence surveillance operation launched by Obama’s guys against the Trump campaign.

There IS no working with Democrat-Socialists now—period—and it’s worse than a waste of time to bother about it. There is only victory, or defeat; they’ve left nothing else to us, no matter how hard we might wish otherwise. Anybody willing to “work with” or “compromise” with them has a question to answer: which of the Bill of Rights, which of your essential God-granted rights and freedoms, are you willing to give up? What degree of liberal-fascist tyranny and control do you consider acceptable?

On the bright side, Steyn is right: they’ve well and truly painted themselves into a tight corner, and have no option but to carry on. Their metastasizing lunacy is both the agent of and the consequence for their self-destructive lurch into extremism. At this point they can only play the string out, hoping for a miracle to come along and save their stupid asses. One way or another, their ultimate ruin is inevitable. That’s the sic semper for all tyrannus.

Blind staggers update! Senile, or just dead drunk? Pursuant to the Trump walkout mentioned above, Stretch Pelosi weaves and wobbles her way through a completely incomprehensible monologue about…well, God only knows what it was about. But it’s quite disturbing. And hilarious. Fuckerberg doesn’t allow video embeds outside the Fakebook cage, so you’ll just have to hit the link to see it.

(Hat tip to Brak)

LOL get fucked update! More deets:

President Trump on Wednesday cut off infrastructure talks with congressional Democratic leaders after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said he was engaged in a “cover up,” then lit into Democrats and declared he would not work with them until their investigations are over.

After their meeting abruptly ended, Trump appeared in the White House Rose Garden and demanded that Democrats “get these phony investigations over with” before talks resume.

“I’ve said from the beginning that you probably can’t go down two tracks,” Trump said. “You can go down the investigation track or you can go down the investment track … We’re going to go down one track at a time.”

The sudden, public blowup came as House Democratic leaders are facing increased pressure to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, which has further raised partisan tensions in Washington.

Pelosi traveled to the White House for the long-planned infrastructure meeting shortly after she met with members of her caucus to discuss possible impeachment, during which she said her colleagues agreed Trump is “engaged in a cover-up.”

“I don’t do cover-ups,” Trump responded during his remarks.

Just another example of the habitual Democrat-Socialist MO of accusing others of the very things they’re guilty of. Good on ya for stiff-arming the obnoxious bastards, Mr President. Tawdry, slanderous innuendo and open discourtesy and disrespect, all disgracefully flaunted by conniving, unscrupulous pustules right before what’s supposed to be a serious conference, aren’t things anybody is required to put up with, much less a sitting President who was just exonerated by their own damned handpicked Grand Inquisitor.

But does it get even better, you ask? Hold onto your hats, friends.

DURBIN continues about the WH mtg on infrastructure: “(Trump) objected to the continued investigation of obstruction of justice, he said he cooperated and gave his side of the story, as we’ve heard before.”

“I don’t know where this leaves us as a nation,” Durbin said.

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) May 22, 2019

“As a nation”? Kinda hard to call this a “nation” anymore with a straight face, Dickie-boy. How could it be, when half the population, their elected officials, and a significant chunk of the permanent federal bureaucracy all refuse to peacefully abide by the results of any election they don’t win, eagerly resorting instead this time around to a baldfaced coup attempt founded on flimsy pretexts and lies to overthrow the legitimate President? That sounds nothing like a nation to me; it sounds like a faltering, doomed banana republic, well on its way to collapse and dissolution. A people so bereft of any sense of civitas that they no longer accept the outcome of their elections is by definition ungovernable; the society has come unglued, the bond of a shared sense of civic duty and responsibility dissolved.

The supreme irony being, of course, that Despicable Dick portrays himself as “deeply concerned” about our great national unraveling—even as he himself is one of the ill-intentioned tapeworms working tirelessly to bring it about. That one pegs the chutzpah needle as deep into the red as it will go, shattering all previous records and setting a new standard for shameless hypocrisy.

And they call US deplorable.

Fighting words…

Posted on 5/22/20195/22/2019 by Mike 1 Comment

…or empty threats? First, the backstory:

The journalists at CBS This Morning on Tuesday laughed at a new trend by militant leftists: Dumping milkshakes on politicians they don’t like. Co-host Tony Dokoupil began with a whimsical recounting: “In the latest of a series of attacks on right-wing politicians, Brexit Party Leader Nigel Farage was doused with a milkshake yesterday. That was actually salted caramel if anyone is wondering.”

This prompted laughter from Dokoupil’s co-hosts. Continuing the jovial discussion of political violence, he added, “I’m sure it feels great. I’m sure people love the feeling. Pictures fly around the world.”

Ace responds:

You know what else might feel great?
Throwing milkshakes at CBS personnel, both when they’re doing live-shots and when they’re just walking down the street on their own private time.

The rules you make for me, you also make for yourself.

For people who bitch and complain when they’re jeered at the opposite political party’s campaign rallies, they sure take a more blithe attitude about conservatives being physically assaulted.

Well, like I said: We’ll see how great it feels when the media starts getting pelted with some harmless, fun, happytime street justice.

The sentiment expressed is perfectly true, I have no quarrel with it. Problem is that, as with the Ogabe-era blogosphere bluster about how the Democrat-Socialists were surely going to regret it when their own tactics were thrown back at them by newly-empowered Righties, it never, ever comes to pass.

Sadly enough, the only person even making an attempt at forcing the Left’s New Rules down their throats has been one Donald J Trump, President of the United States of America. And when he does, or even talks about doing it, the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth each time from the fraudmeisters of Conservative Inc over the horror of it all is truly dismal to witness. My God, the pathetic feebs even get their panties in a bunch when he so much as hurls a few insults at them on Twitter. And THESE are the ones we think are going to finally draw a line, say enough already, and finally start dealing out some quid pro quo most righteous in return?

Note ye well, all this is a problem for more reasons than just the obvious one: that the effective suppression of all dissent is simply unacceptable. For one, the too-reliable Righty all-talk-no-action response to continually escalating violence has clearly emboldened and encouraged the Leftist enemy, rather than instilling a healthy sense of trepidation and caution in them. This accomplishes absolutely nothing beyond guaranteeing that the assaults will continue, and worsen. For another, it amounts to abdicating the field of battle and tacitly yielding to the Left’s encroachment on our liberty and our rights, granting them victories they don’t deserve and accepting self-inflicted losses we can’t afford.

Not to jump on Ace too hard for this, mind. Vengeance fantasies and daydreams about seeing justice visited upon our enemies at last are very satisfying things to ponder now and then, a harmless enough way to pass the occasional idle moment—actually, a reasonable, completely human response to intolerable provocation. But if we really want this crap to cease, the sorry truth remains: They will not stop. They will have to BE stopped. Sorry, but I’m afraid we all need to face up to the fact that it’s going to take a bit more than just talking amongst ourselves to do it.

Forecast: dire

Posted on 5/22/20195/22/2019 by Mike 3 Comments

Aesop examines the Coming Unpleasantness.

The entire point of law is that it be fixed and reliable for all.
Without that, when it’s random and capricious, it’s worse than no law at all.

If there aren’t indictments, trials, and convictions over what’s gone on, I can tell you what I do have faith will happen: there’s going to be war.

Not a tantrum, or a disturbance, or a riot, or even some low-intensity nonsense.
It’s going to be a full batshit war. It will come in its own time. Maybe slow unfolding, maybe all at once. But come it will.

People are going to start looking for an excuse, any excuse, and then they’re going to find one, and hunting season will be open. And once it starts, it’s going to spiral out of control, like things do, and one side or the other will become extinct before it’s over.

The social construct in this country is that every two to four years, we have peaceful revolutions at the ballot box.

Now one side doesn’t want to play by that any more, and has spent two years subverting every branch of government to support a slow coup against an elected president. Either we nip that nonsense in the bud, and people responsible pay with their lives spent in prison for a decade or two, or we’re going to start getting governments by hard coup, with all the trimmings, and we’ve seen how that’s played out, from Russia in 1917 to Venezuela yesterday.

I suspect a lot of other societal dysfunction is going to get a blowtorch up its tailpipe as part of the show.

The prospect of such times frankly scares the hell out of me, but not as much as the prospect of sitting on my hands and watching the crooked communists in power march ever onward, and plant 100M of their friends and neighbors in mass graves.

Because that’s where we are headed if nothing happens, and no one cares.

Agreed, completely. It’s a horrifying prospect to be sure…all the more so because the alternative scenario is even worse. But there yet remains a glimmer of hope for avoiding such a catastrophe, which can be taken from the most edifying spectacle of nefarious Shadow Government cockroaches scurrying in sheer, mad panic:

Note well: none of the leveraged targets of Robert Mueller turned state’s evidence to accuse Donald Trump of “collusion,” the object of the special counsel’s investigation, although to have done so would have mightily helped their cause and given them John Dean iconic status among leftists. In contrast, we have scarcely begun to investigate wrongdoing at the intelligence and justice departments and already the suspects are fingering each other.

James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey are now all accusing one another of being culpable for inserting the unverified dossier, the font of the effort to destroy Trump, into a presidential intelligence assessment—as if suddenly and mysteriously the prior seeding of the Steele dossier is now seen as a bad thing. And how did the dossier transmogrify from being passed around the Obama Administration as a supposedly top-secret and devastating condemnation of candidate and then president-elect Trump to a rank embarrassment of ridiculous stories and fibs?

Given the narratives of the last three years, and the protestations that the dossier was accurate or at least was not proven to be unproven, why are these former officials arguing at all? Did not implanting the dossier into the presidential briefing give it the necessary imprimatur that allowed the serial leaks to the press at least to be passed on to the public and thereby apprise the people of the existential danger that they faced?

These are rhetorical questions because we know the answers: our top officials at the DOJ, CIA, FBI, and NSC, as well as James Clapper as director of national intelligence, likely broke federal law, betrayed their agencies, and in general acted in an abjectly unethical manner on the premises that 1) Hillary Clinton would be the next president and their behavior would be rewarded; and 2) in the aftermath of her defeat and after Trump became president, that Trump could either be removed or so discredited that their own prior illegality would either never come to light or would be contextualized as noble resistance.

Until election night, they seemed to have been correct in their assumptions.

No longer are Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe along with a host of others insisting that they acted nobly. No longer are they in solidarity in their defiant opposition to Donald Trump.

Now, for the first time, they are pointing fingers at one another, because they have come to realize that their prior criminality may not be rewarded, praised, or even excused, but rather prosecuted.

As of today we can add another Ogabe-appointed malefactor, Loretta Lynch, to that steadily-lengthening list of alarmed cockroaches. Even Mueller himself seems a little nervous:

Special counsel Robert Mueller is reluctant to publicly testify about his report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election because he does not want to become part of a political firestorm.

CNN reported on Tuesday that Mueller and his team are worried about the political environment that he would be stepping into if he agreed to testify publicly before the House Judiciary Committee.

Oh, I just bet so…seeing as how said “political environment” amounts to an abrupt turning of the tables on the coup-conspirators and their cat’s paw Mueller. Secure for so long in their comfortable assumption of perpetual impunity, they never saw ANY of this coming. And they’re absolutely hating every minute of it. Cockroaches never enjoy having the spotlight turned on them, see.

As I keep saying: patience, people. The investigation is only beginning, and the process won’t be quick. It’s entirely possible, too, that Aesop’s worry about some sort of whitewash will turn out to be justified. But the way the seditious Deep State blaggards are turning on each other so readily at this early stage of the game ought to tell us all something about what their own expectations as to where all this is headed might be. Hopefully, they’ll turn out to be right for once.

Go home

Posted on 5/22/20195/22/2019 by Mike 1 Comment

Rod Dreher says LOL get fucked, baby-killing carpetbaggers.

I’m so sorry. Really, just very sorry. Here entitled Yankees like the NYT’s Ginia Bellafante thought the American South existed to give Millennial Brooklynites a place to reproduce Park Slope, but more affordably, and now we’ve gone and ruined it for them with our deplorable social and religious views.

Okay, so right away you guys KNOW I ain’t gonna like tis bint’s twaddle much. Methinks an old-fashioned fisking might be in order here. Emphasis mine throughout.

“The New South’’ was a term conceived in the aftermath of the Civil War to suggest a set of aspirations of some southern elites who hoped to rebuild a backward and devastated place into a world better aligned with Northern urban values.

Oh, so THAT’S what it was, eh? Here I’d thought all these years it was something more comprehensible and less permanently damaging, like a plague of locusts or something. Too Biblical a reference to pass muster, probably.

Over the many decades, it has acquired various layers of nuance, but today it tends to call to mind a string of cities from Charlotte, N.C., to Austin, Tex., that have essentially been Brooklynized by way of a progressive social culture and a tweaked fidelity to some of the South’s more marketable traditions.

Uh huh. And eventually those cities will find they’ve been “Detroitized,” “Chicagoized,” and/or “San Franciscoized,” its residents stepping around humongous piles of human shit in the streets, dodging stray bullets on their way back to the exhorbitantly-priced 600-square-foot apartment they flatter outrageously by calling “home.”

Actually, you dope, Charlotte has been a very liberal city for as long as I’ve been alive—at least. Any recent Progressivist “Brooklynizing” was superfluous and unnecessary here. I can’t really speak for Austin, but I suspect it’s a similar story there. Not that it matters; as with any and every young Progressivist with absolutely no knowledge of or regard for the history of the places they choose to infest in their migratory meanderings, she just can’t help but pat herself on the back for the world of good she’s done for us inbred cretins, the improvements she’s so magnanimously making in our lives and surroundings. She seems completely unaware that these backwaters even existed before she flounced on in and plopped her sorry ass down in our midst.

How will these new abortion laws affect the redistribution of talent to places whose economies prosper from that talent? Under the current conditions, I wondered if women like Tess and her friends, many of whom moved from New York or Los Angeles, would have chosen to relocate to the Deep South. I asked some of them, and they told me that they were not sure.

One, Allison Gourlay, arrived in New Orleans a few years ago from a studio in Greenwich Village she could barely afford. At first she had a hard time finding work and questioned her decision.

“I was talking to a friend one day when I wasn’t sure and she said, ‘Stay, this place is about to blow up. It’s on the cusp of something big, can’t you feel it?’ This is cheesy, but I got goose bumps. New Orleans is really a place to establish work-life balance but I’m getting ready to start a family and it scares me,” she said.

Back to Dreher to handle that one:

She’s getting ready to start a family, but the possibility that the Louisiana legislature might make it harder for her to exterminate her unborn child makes her think about abandoning the city where things are otherwise pretty great for her?

Why not? Makes as much sense as any of the other nonsensical crap they spew. Myself, I encourage her to abandon, abandon away. Don’t waste a moment, honey, you might be too late. Better still, just don’t come down South in the first place. We’re all racist, homophobic, misogynist Neanderthals ’round here, you know: semi-retarded, Christian zealots to the marrow, implacably opposed to a Woman’s Right To Choose (to murder her baby for convenience’s sake), utterly hostile to Women’s Health Care (ie, unrestricted abortion) too. Every cliche you ever heard about us God-bothering knuckedraggers is one hundred percent true, I assure you. Be sure to tell all your hipster-douchebag friends, ‘kay?

“When you meet all these young people moving here who are so passionate and intelligent and changing the rules and making the city what it is, it is so inspiring. But it really worries me that it could no longer be that place.”

Yeah, how deeply awful it would be if our Southern cities were somehow transformed back into the peaceful, affordable, pleasant places they were before you goddamned urban-liberal transplants moved in and got busy turning them into the same kind of blighted Gomorrhian nightmare you left in ruins behind you.

“Making the city what it is”? It never once occurred to you that the city was already something long before you ever thought of moving there, and that maybe its long-time inhabitants liked it the way it was and had no wish to see their rules changed or their communities “Brooklynized,” did it? No, in your staggering arrogance, you and your fellow egotists arrive not to respectfully appreciate or assimilate but to wreck and radically alter, with neither permission nor invitation. Back once more to Dreher for the closing bitchslap:

I concede that it’s interesting to talk to progressive Northerners who moved South, thinking that the Grand March of Progress would inevitably make the benighted (but cheap) metropolises of Dixie into non-deplorable locales — but who are learning that they, in fact, live in the South.

What chaps my butt about the piece is the assumption by the author (and those she writes about) that the South ought to assimilate to the dominant progressive culture. The message of this piece is, If you Christianist troglodytes don’t let us progressives have our abortions, we’re not going to move there and contribute to your economies.

I have an idea! All y’all could pack up your progressive colonialism ethic and go the hell back home.

I have friends who are pro-choice Southern liberals. I believe they’re wrong about that, but this is their home, and I’ve got no problem with them speaking their minds, and advocating for the kinds of laws they would like to see. But you’d better believe I have a big problem with these people who come down to take what’s good out of the South, but the moment Southerners — who are in general more socially conservative — express through their democratically elected legislators opinions that run counter to the sensibilities of Williamsburg, these people are thinking of leaving? Go. Just, go.

DAMNED skippy. Go indeed; try y’all’s hand at fixing the nearly-uninhabitable rathole you fled, instead of colonizing us, whydon’tcha. Don’t let the door etc, y’heah?

DAMN THAT TRUMP HE’S RUININ’ THE COUNTRY

Posted on 5/21/2019 by Mike Leave a comment

A little good news.

Sears – which revolutionized retail not once, but twice – is now struggling to keep its doors open.

One of the most famous parts of the sad saga is what happened to the retailer’s iconic Craftsman line of tools and lawn and garden equipment. While my dad wasn’t much of a handyman himself (sorry, Dad) millions of families across America once filled their garages and workbenches with Craftsman products sold exclusively at their local Sears.

But as Sears struggled to compete in the changing retail landscape, it also sacrificed one of its most essential brands in the process. Craftsman production was sent overseas, and customers noticed a change in quality. Sears sales continued to decline.

Oh, did they ever. I myself watched in dismay as Craftsman went from a solid, cheaper alternative to the undisputed king of professional mechanic’s tools, SnapOn (worshipfully mentioned in this old post), to cranking out nothing but cheap, shoddy junk seemingly overnight. Nowadays, any time I walk through Lowes I always check out the pathetic excuses for tool chests stinking up the Craftsman aisle of the tool section: thin, flimsy steel cabinets; drawers with a clunky pull that stick and rattle; rough edges, haphazard machining—anybody who knows anything about tools can tell at a glance that Here Be Monsters. It’s depressing, is what it is, and just lately I’ve restricted myself to walking quickly past the squalid display shaking my head so as to avoid further needless suffering. But maybe the USS Cratfsman, after listing and taking on water for years, is about to be shored up and restored to something like its former glory.

In 2017, Sears did the unthinkable and sold Craftsman to Stanley Black & Decker.

As it turns out, the folks at Stanley Black & Decker have big plans for the brand, which includes restoring the production of Craftsman tools in the United States, according to CEO James Loree.

“We ended up simply buying the brand because the products had been left to de-volve over time to the point where they weren’t high quality, respectable products they once were,” Loree tells TheStreet. “They had migrated from made in America to virtually everything being made in China and Mexico. They were in sad shape.”

That’s about to change, Loree says. Stanley Black & Decker has redesigned just under 1,500 Craftsman tools, all with American production in mind:

“We have created as a result products that could be made in America at a cost similar to what they would have been if they had been imported from China. One of the strategies behind re-booting Craftsman is to revitalize the products and make as many [of] them in America as possible.”

About 40 percent of Craftsman products will be manufactured in the United States after the initial product relaunch, which is now underway and will heat up this fall at retailers like Lowe’s, Ace Hardware and Amazon (just in time for the holiday shopping season). The goal is for about 70 percent of Craftsman tools to be Made in America in the next few years, Loree adds.

Good on you folks, and I wish you all the luck in the world. Since I ain’t wrenching for a living anymore—although I do still check in at the shop a couple of times a week and try to assist a little when Goose needs some help—I haven’t had either the occasion or the spare cash to drop on tools, although there’s plenty of stuff I need. What hand tools and equipment I’ve bought over the past few years has all been Kobalt stuff, some of which is of surprisingly decent quality, if admittedly not up to the lofty SnapOn standard. Nonetheless, I’d dearly love to see these folks finally get Craftsman’s act tightened up again, and will be keeping an eye out to see if they can pull it off.

Wrong righted redux

Posted on 5/21/20195/21/2019 by Mike Leave a comment

Been waiting to see what Steyn would have to say about Trump’s pardon Mark’s friend and former employer Conrad Black.

You have the “right to a fair trial,” but U.S. prosecutors win 99 per cent of the cases that go to court — a success rate that would embarrass Kim Jong Un and Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the feds win 97 per cent without ever going near court. In 2007, on the first day of Conrad Black’s trial on the 12th floor of the Mies van der Rohe skyscraper that houses Chicago’s dozens of federal courtrooms, I went looking for somewhere to make a discreet call on my cellphone. There were people everywhere — reporters, lawyers, spouses, curious deputy attorneys dropping in from neighbouring offices, a fan of mine wanting me to autograph my Broadway book to his pal John Mahoney from “Frasier”… Eventually, I pushed open a door and found myself in an empty courtroom. So I phoned from there in complete privacy. When others attending the trial discovered the room, I went to the empty courtroom further down the corridor. And, when in turn that grew popular as a handsomely paneled telephone booth, I went to the empty courtroom upstairs, or downstairs.

So many courtrooms, and no trials. Because, when the odds of not losing are one in 100, who goes to court?

Americans who know anything about the country’s evil and depraved “justice” system grasp that central fact. It’s only rubes who say “let the process play out” or “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear.” For a start, by the time the process “plays out,” you’ll be broke and scavenging from dumpsters (as Trump’s fallen National Security honcho Michael Flynn learned, shortly before copping a plea). Second, from a prosecutorial point of view, “if you haven’t done anything wrong” they can still get you on misremembering to the FBI in a matter for which there’s no underlying crime (as Martha Stewart discovered), or, alternatively, on Robert Mueller’s second-favourite process crime of hanging out with too many foreigners in alleged breach of the “Foreign Agents Registration Act,” which Trump aide George Papadopoulos told me recently Mueller had threatened him with. (I met most Aussie cabinet ministers of the John Howard years, so I’m undoubtedly guilty on that front, even before you factor in dinner with Jason Kenney and a bit of chit-chat with Maxime Bernier).

It’s a corrupt system heavily reliant on blackmail. But its crude thuggish simplicity concentrates the mind, and thus everyone gets it. Which is why, when the dismantling of Conrad Black’s business empire began 16 years ago, the rich and powerful were the first to abandon him: whatever will be will be, but one thing’s for certain — Conrad’s screwed, he’s over, cut him loose now.

This is a well-deserved crisping of America’s dysfunctional, disgraceful, warped “justice” system—as Steyn rightly says, a system evil, depraved, and corrupt to its core. Our Founding ideal of a speedy trial before an impartial jury of one’s peers has been reduced to no more than the punchline to a wholly unfunny joke; the endless prosecutorial manipulation and dirty-deal-making that has brought us to our sorry “the process is the punishment” state of affairs is but one of the factors guaranteeing that true justice will only rarely and accidentally be found within fifty miles of any courthouse in the land.

I’ve been telling both family and friends for years that our abominable system is set up so that, once they find themselves caught up in its crushing gears, it will be damned near impossible to get themselves out. Sadly, it has proved to be entirely true for more than just one of ’em. Alas, this is yet another of those issues for which I have no solution to offer—for which there may not even be a workable one at all, in fact. But one way or another, the system WILL change. It must.

SICK!

Posted on 5/21/20195/21/2019 by Mike 1 Comment

Looks like when Trump OUTRAGED!™ the goofball Left by saying Mexico wasn’t sending their “best and brightest” across our ersatz Southern “border,” he just might’ve been onto something.

An illegal alien convicted of raping a dog to death was released by the sanctuary state of Oregon after being sentenced to just 60 days in prison.

As Breitbart News reported, illegal alien Fidel Lopez, 52-years-old, was convicted last month and sentenced to 60 days in prison after raping his girlfriend’s small Lhasa Apso which led to the dog’s death. The judge in the case said he would have given the illegal alien more prison time but that 60 days is the maximum sentence allowed in Oregon.

Because of course it is.

Following his sentence, Lopez was immediately released because he had already served 60 days while waiting to stand trial. Despite his illegal alien status, Multnomah County, Oregon officials released Lopez back into the community.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency had requested that the illegal alien be turned over to them for deportation should he be released from prison. The sanctuary state officials ignored the ICE request and released the illegal alien into the public.

This subhuman fiend is now back in ICE custody, according to the article, and awaiting deportation. We’ll see how things shake out, I guess. But in any event, Portland will deserve whatever it gets from this guy. I’m kinda thinking if he gets hold of some barren Sanctuary Shitlib’s pwecious little child-substitute half-a-dog next time for an encore performance, at least that one particular weepy moron might begin to rethink a few things—if far too late to do her sweet little BooBoo any good. But I dunno, maybe not.

Of course, the Left’s feeble defense here will be that this is but one extreme case out of many millions. But that entirely misses the point, to wit: EVEN ONE IS TOO GODDAMNED MANY. This depraved fuck shouldn’t be here in the first place; he has no right whatsoever to be here, and should have been sent back long ago, with strict shoot-on-sight orders issued to the Border Patrol should he ever be caught attempting another criminal crossing. The nauseating freak of right ought to be Mexico’s problem, not ours. If Portlandia twits want to make him theirs, well, that’s on them, I guess. May they have joy of their foolish choice.

Lock. Her. UP

Posted on 5/16/20195/16/2019 by Mike 11 Comments

No, not Hillary!™ this time. Well, okay, her too.

A student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was arrested for larceny last month after she was caught on video taking a sign belonging to pro-life activists. The arrest arrives just days after the arrest of a UNC-Chapel Hill student accused of physically assaulted a pro-life activist after allegedly getting angry over his sign.

After which, hilarity ensues.

“Look, sir, I’m not trying to get arrested,” said the student to the officer, after he had informed her that she was being detained for larceny.

“I cannot believe these are the people who you protect,” continued the student, referring to the pro-life activists.

“I’m not trying to protect anyone, but I do have to enforce the law,” responded the officer, “That’s just how it is.”

“Do you see us being subjected to this shit?” said the student, gesturing toward the pro-life signage.

What I see is a sniveling, overprivileged dumbass OUTRAGED!™ at being “subjected” to any opinion that differs from her own.

“They have a right to be here,” said the officer, “If you don’t like their views, you can go away, you don’t have to watch it.”

“It doesn’t matter how much you ignore them, they’re gonna come back, and they’re gonna come back again, and this is why women have such a problem getting abortions in North Carolina, and y’all just let them get away with this shit,” said the student, “I cannot believe y’all let this happen.”

Since when have women had any problem at all getting as many abortions as they want, as often as they want, in North Carolina or anyplace else, you baby-murdering bitch?

“Take your backpack off, turn around, and put your hands behind your back, you’re under arrest for larceny,” said the officer.

“I cannot believe this is happening,” said the student upon realizing that she was under arrest, “is there something else that I can do?”

“No, I just told you you’re under arrest,” replied the officer, “I cannot un-arrest you.”

And then the piteous weeping starts, which is a pure delight to watch. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. As Ace likes to say: LOL get fucked. More:

The student grabbed the sign from Austin Beigel, a peaceful protester, and walked off with it – not realizing that an officer would meet her at the end of her path.

“Did you steal their sign?” the officer asked the feminist.

“I just moved it,” she responded.

“Well you took it,” the officer confirmed.

The young feminist then had the nerve to ask the officer why she was being detained. With a look of disbelief on his face, the officer responded, “Uhh…larceny. You stole his sign.”

I’m sure you can guess what happened at this point: the student pulled out her cherished “victim card.”

“I moved it 50 yards,” she said as she tried to weasel out of the situation.

“I don’t care if you moved it one foot,” the officer responded before he gave a needed lesson in ethics. “You don’t have the right to take someone’s property. Period. I don’t care what the circumstance is.”

“I know you may not agree with what’s being said,” he continued. “But you don’t have the right to take someone’s property. Okay?”

One would hope that Little Einstein would be capable of learning this vitally important lesson. Unfortunately, one’s hope would be in vain; the fascist cunt will doubtless be carefully nursing a grudge over how horribly she was “victimized” for the rest of her days, self-righteously blibbering on to anybody willing to listen about her “courageous” and “heroic” days of protest and oppression.

Yeah, tell me again about how we can live peaceably among shitbrains so thoroughly and irredeemably wrong about what free speech, tolerance, and civility are all about, whydon’tcha.

Why is that these leftists think they can commit stupid acts without facing the just consequences of their actions?

Because they’ve been allowed to do exactly that for way too long, that’s why.

Southern by the grace of God

Posted on 5/16/20195/16/2019 by Mike 1 Comment

Interesting reflection on Southern identity, from Z.

In reality, those types we get from popular culture are caricatures of old realities, more than anything based in present reality. In the major population centers in the modern South, you will be hard pressed to find the snaggle-toothed redneck or the courtly southern gentleman. Instead, it is mostly middle-class suburban people living better than most of the country. The quality of life in the modern South is much higher than most of the country, which is why so many are moving there.

Which, in turn, is why the quality of life here won’t be staying higher for long, as ever more damn-Yankee carpetbaggers flee the nest they’ve fouled to come here and foul mine, via the selfsame bonehead liberalism that ruined theirs.

All that said, the South is going to be on the cutting edge of identity politics, even if it struggles to forge a new identity. Georgia is 55% white, with a large black population spoiling for a chance to hold the whip hand over whites. Florida is 56% white with a swelling population of Caribbeans. Texas is already minority white and the flood of migrants is making it more so. It is in the South that white identity, regional identity and identity politics will be the defining issues in the very near future.

How this breaks out is hard to know. There are people with ideas about it, like the folks at Identity Dixie, with whom I did an interview recently. They are in many ways the New South, in that they are college educated, middle-class guys. As I like to put it, the new Southern man has a pickup truck, but it cost sixty grand, has leather seats and the bed has only ever seen his kid’s toys and his golf clubs. If it has a bumper sticker on it on, it is for parking at his office building or maybe his golf club.

It is hard to know where this goes. It is in the South where the homogenization and financialization of America is most obvious. Vast developments of identical houses, with Potemkin “town centers” populated by strangers from all over the earth, is just as much a part of the New South as anything else. If someone had moved away from the Charlotte area thirty years ago and returned for the first time today, they would be in a foreign country. Even NASCAR is different from the recent past.

He said a mouthful there. Actually, if someone had moved away from Charlotte even ten years ago he’d find himself bewildered. My brother says all the time that he often feels as if he’d gone to bed one night and then woke up the next morning to find himself on another planet. The entire landscape has changed, both physically and in terms of those who inhabit it.

For my money, Southern identity is being washed away in favor of a flavorless, dull homogeneity. In fact, it’s all but gone already. It’s pretty rare now to hear a good ol’ hayseed accent around here, unless you’re out in the remoter areas talking to what we used to call country-folk—like, say, Kannapolis, where my mom’s people hail from. Most now speak in a flat, generic dialect that offers no hint of the speaker’s regional roots. In my callow youth, that lazy-mouthed redneck drawl used to annoy me sometimes. Now, I find myself missing it.

Funny thing is, when I first moved to NYC back in the 90s people used to ask me all the time what part of England I was from. Then, I’d come home for a weekend to have folks upbraid me for talking like a Yankee. An indication of how bizarre and indecipherable my own patois is, maybe. My daughter speaks in a very crisp, clearly-enunciated way, with no trace of any kind of accent I can discern, most certainly not a Southern one. Her mom is from rural Ohio, and the young ‘un doesn’t really talk like her either. It’s…interesting, I reckon.

As goes the dialect, so goes the region. For better or worse, Southern culture is on the skids, its once-distinct identity eroded into boring sameness. Yes, the only true constant is change, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Sadly, as that bright Southern color gets sandblasted off, the culture subsumed into an increasingly-amorphous American blob, something precious is being lost forever. But hey, we’ll always have our memories, right?

Worst. NazibigotHitler. EVER

Posted on 5/16/20195/16/2019 by Mike 1 Comment

So incompetent he can’t even get homophobic bigotry right.

Out of all the criticisms of Donald Trump, the one I’ve never understood is that he’s somehow anti-gay. The Trump/Pence ticket was supposed to have put up conversion-therapy camps all across America by now, right? Yet somehow it hasn’t happened. With all the legitimate reasons for a person to oppose Trump, they still keep making stuff up.

Pete Buttigieg has been capitalizing on this, depicting himself as some sort of victim. He wants you to think Trump is oppressing him. He just can’t seem to get Trump to play along.

Check out this clip from an interview Trump just gave to Steve Hilton, which will air on Fox News this Sunday night. Hilton asks what Trump thinks of Buttigieg’s marriage:

“I think it’s absolutely fine…I think it’s great. I think it’s something that perhaps some people will have a problem with. I have no problem with it whatsoever. I think it’s good.”

Is that not the right answer, libs?

Dude, of course not. No answer Trump gives will EVER be right.

An inconvenient shooting

Posted on 5/16/20195/16/2019 by Mike 2 Comments

Not politically useful to the gun-grabbin’, goosesteppin’ Left.

School shootings are terrible events — except for the left where they represent opportunities, as in Rahm Emanuel’s “Never let a crisis go to waste” modus operandi.

CNN, for example, wasted no time in politicizing the latest school shooting in Highlands Ranch, Colorado.

After the shooting, other than some virtue signaling by the media, the story has left the front pages, as the narrative may be inconvenient for the leftist agenda. CNN and MSNBC have lived up to their reputation as “drive-by media” by quickly moving on. No interviews with David Hogg or other gun control fanatics. So, what are some of the inconvenient aspects to this story that the media would prefer to drive by without any discussion or analysis?

Oh, there are lots of them listed here, each and every one pushing precisely the wrong Progtard buttons, thereby guaranteeing the story’s speedy interment. In fact, this one was apparently deemed to be so potentially damaging to our Leftist lords and masters that Enemedia’s usual tacit agreement to quietly abandon further reporting wasn’t enough. The courts got involved, Soviet-style, to make sure those pesky facts STAY buried.

The case of two anti-Trump leftists, one of whom is transgender, who shot up a school in Denver last week has been placed under seal by a judge, banning the public from seeing it.

Devon Erickson, 18, and Alec McKinney, 16, opened fire on two classrooms at the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) charter school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, on May 7, killing one student and injuring eight others.

16-year-old Alec McKinney identifies as male but is biologically female, having been born Maya Elizabeth McKinney.

Following the shooting, it emerged that his accomplice Erickson had posted anti-Christian and anti-Trump messages on social media while praising former President Barack Obama.

It is now being reported that details of the case will remain secret to the public after it was sealed by a judge.

Via Komrade Bill, who adds: “As near as I can tell, it’s still up in the air whether the magenta-haired Easter-Worshiper hater was gay or not. If he was, that makes it even more imperative for the left to shove this one right down the memory hole.” I’m sure you meant “she” though, right Bill? Watch out with those unacceptable (if factual) pronouns there, buddy. That hate-crime shit can get you in all kindsa trouble.

So this is where we are in Amerika 2019, folks: a judge is suppressing information in a case that would ordinarily be receiving blanket, 24-7 Enemedia coverage nationwide, in close enough detail as to require the use of an electron microscope. I mean…just…wow. Since we’ve descended so far into propaganda wonderland, and myself having just deployed the obvious Soviet reference, it might be helpful for us to keep the old Soviet-era joke foremost in mind from here on out: there is no Pravda in Izvestia, and there is no Izvestia in Pravda.

An old friend resurfaces

Posted on 5/16/20195/16/2019 by Mike Leave a comment

Well dang: our old bud Doc Weasel thoughtfully provides us with a bookmark-worthy link to his “Political Violence” post category, a handy-dandy compendium that ought to come in damned useful for research purposes. Thing is, though, I wasn’t even aware he was still out there doing this stuff in the first place. Into Ye Olde Blogrolle you go, Doc, with a quickness.

A wrong, righted

Posted on 5/16/20195/16/2019 by Mike 1 Comment

The first of many, it is to be hoped.

Only once before, 18 years ago, had I received a telephone call from an incumbent president of the United States, prior to Monday of last week, and I had not spoken to the current president since he took office. When my assistant said there was a call from the White House, I picked up, said “Hello” and started to ask if this was a prank, (suspecting my friends in the British tabloid media), but the caller spoke politely over me: “Please hold for the president,” and two seconds later probably the best known voice in the world said “Is that the great Lord Black?” I said “Mr. President, you do me great honor telephoning me.”

He could not have been more gracious and quickly got to his point, that he was granting me a full pardon, that would “Expunge the bad wrap you got.” He had followed the case closely and offered to come to give evidence at my trial in Chicago in 2007 on one of the counts that was later an acquittal. He said that there would be some controversy, “But you can handle that better than anyone.” I asked “Do you authorize me to say that your motivation is that it was an unjust verdict?” He checked with the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who was in the room, if this would be a problem legally, and was told and affirmed to me that I could say that was his motive and that he was reversing an unjust verdict. “We’ve known each other a long time, but that wasn’t any part of the reason. Nor was any of the supportive things you’ve said and written about me.” I suggested that he knew ”better than anyone” the antics of some U.S. prosecutors. (I had had Robert Mueller as director of the FBI, which we caught installing illegal bugging devices in our home in New York and in many falsehoods; James Comey as deputy attorney general, and Patrick Fitzgerald, now Comey’s counsel, as U.S. attorney in Chicago. They were all, as my distinguished caller on Monday has described Comey, “bad cops.”) We moved briefly on to generalities, greetings to wives, I thanked him for his call and again for the purpose of his call, and the conversation ended.

It was never anything but a confluence of unlucky events, the belligerence of several corporate governance charlatans, and grandstanding local and American judges, all fanned by an unusually frenzied international media showing exceptional interest in the case because I was a media owner. The rock-slide began in 2003 when it came to light that some payments from our American to our Canadian company and to certain executives, including me, though fully revealed in public filings, had not been fully authorized.

Of course, the damage was already done.

As the controversy continued, Local Toronto judges and the Ontario Securities Commission prevented us from running the company, where there was no accounting fraud, hard profitable assets, and $2 billion of shareholder equity, all of which was squandered in poor administration and greedily consumed by court-appointed or sanctioned lawyers and accountants and the relentless intrusions of regulators seeking headlines and not the shareholders’ interest.

The vaporization of two billion dollars of shareholder value affected tens of thousands of families in all parts of Canada and the United States. With aching slowness the case against me disintegrated. Of the 17 counts in 2005, four, including money-laundering and perjury, were abandoned. Nine others were acquittals by a prodigiously un-Solomonic jury, many of whom slept through the proceedings.

On May 7, 2012, I went directly from Miami Federal Prison to the airport and onto a chartered plane and returned to my home in Toronto after an absence of five years. It was seven years less a day after that that President Trump called me. I am now, at last, officially not guilty even in the conviction-mad United States. None of this would have been the subject of a criminal case in any other serious jurisdiction. It was for this fiction that I spent three years and two weeks in prisons and endured significant official persecution in Canada, and the great companies my associates and I built over more than thirty years were torn down, driven into bankruptcy and destroyed, while the trans-border corporate governance hypocrites stuffed a third of a billion dollars into their pockets in ill-gotten professional fees.

I did have the satisfaction of winning the greatest libel settlement in Canadian history ($5 million) from the egregious Richard Breeden, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the other authors of the infamous special committee report of 2004, which really poured gasoline on the fire and ignited the criminal charges. The American criminal justice system is frequently and largely evil; I was convicted for attempted obstruction of injustice. It was never anything but a smear job.

Three years in prison; a multi-billion dollar business destroyed, its who-even-knows-how-many employees thrown out of work; a rightfully-earned personal fortune zeroed out; years and years of hassle, humiliation, anxiety, and surreal, slow-mo destruction. Over a decade and a half of abuse while Grond crawled relentlessly on, shredding everything and everyone caught up in its ravenous maw into bloody pulp.

After having been so ruinously tormented—personally and professionally bled white—at its gratuitous instigation, I’d say Conrad Black is being entirely too generous when he says the American “justice” system is only “frequently and largely evil.” It is WHOLLY so—distorted, dysfunctional, and perverse through and through, incapable of rendering true justice except by accident or happenstance.

A war unfought is a war unwon

Posted on 5/16/20195/16/2019 by Mike 3 Comments

The Koup Kucks Klowns, exposed.

A common occurrence is to hear or read “conservative” commentators discussing the notion that the left and right are engaged in some sort of grand kulturkampf for the soul of the West.

If only.

The left throws at us wave after wave of panzer battalions and we respond with water balloons.

To call the pantomimic resistance proffered by the pundits of the so-called “conservative” movement a war is a ludicrous overstatement. The left throws at us wave after wave of panzer battalions and we respond with water balloons.

Sure, every now and then an intellectually honest and professionally brave culture warrior sticks his head above the parapet and returns some decent fire, but these brave voices are few and far between and do little to repel the relentless onslaught of “progressive” modernity.

Moreover, both discouragingly and damningly, those happy few who dare resist the left’s cultural revolutions with anything more aggressive than a shrug are often felled by not-so-friendly fire. It seems whenever we get a warrior, there are already voices on our side ready to defenestrate them. This is of course hardly surprising, given that the Mainstream Conservative Movement is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Globalism Inc.

Conservative timidness was bad enough in the 90s and early 2000s, when the left was promoting things like affirmative action and civil partnerships, and invasions of migrant masses were but a distant nightmare confined to the pages of The Camp of the Saints.

Now we have blatant anti-white bigots like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar in Congress and self-obsessed LGBT mayors running for office lecturing us on the true meaning of Christianity. Meanwhile, crossdressers are brought into children’s libraries for story-time, and white kids are picked up from school in tears because their curriculum is so virulently racist against them.

The sour cherry on top of this dystopian progressive cake is that anyone that dares to resist the madness is deplatformed, depersoned, and dehumanized. We are living in the age of thoughtcrime, and it is clear beyond doubt that those who question either progressive or globalist orthodoxy will be reprogrammed or ruined.

The refusal of many in the so-called “conservative movement” to engage fully in any sort of cultural war is a sign that they are not really on our side.

Exhibit A:

WASHINGTON — The Senate has confirmed a new federal judge in Eastern Texas, despite comments he made disparaging former President Barack Obama.

Lawyer Michael Truncale was confirmed, 49-46, on Tuesday. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney was the only Republican to vote against President Trump’s nominee.

Romney said in a statement that his “no” vote was not a matter of qualifications or politics, but because of Truncale’s 2011 comments in which he called Obama an “un-American imposter.”

Romney, who lost to Obama in the 2012 presidential race, called the comments “particularly disparaging” and said that “as the (former) Republican nominee for president, I just couldn’t subscribe to that in a federal judge.”

Got that, folks? This, from a “severe conservative” who has thrown much worse, again and again, at Trump, calling him “a phony, a fraud,” “very, very not smart,” and more. He’s accused Trump of “bad character,” incompetence, and dishonesty. And then there’s this cheap smear from the 2016 campaign:

“Today, there is a contest between Trumpism and Republicanism. Through the calculated statements of its leader, Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence. I am repulsed by each and every one of these,” Romney wrote in a Facebook post at the time.

So here we have a “man” who has viciously insulted Trump, doggedly worked to undermine his agenda as a Senator—in other words, NOT a guy who has any real problem with talking some smack about his political adversaries. But now, in a petty, cheap gesture of defiance towards Trump, this “severe conservative” has joined the Democrat-Socialists in voting against the appointment of a conservative judge because he once expressed a derogatory opinion about…BARRACK FUCKING OBAMA?!?

Yeah, fuck that greasy weasel over, under, sideways, and down—with a rusty razor blade, and sand in the Vaseline. He’s a grimy, grubby, vindictive pissant, a snake in the grass of the same filthy stripe as his pal Obama. He’s a two-faced rumpswab, all butthurt from being passed over for the SecState job after he so obsequiously kissed Trump’s ass trying to get it. Unfortunately, Mittens has plenty of company in the ranks of “Conservative” Inc:

You probably don’t know Senator Richard Burr (R-Chamber of Commerce), because he’s utterly undistinguished in everything except his total commitment to doing the bidding of his corporate donor masters in service of reinforcing the Establishment’s grip on power. He allegedly represents North Carolina, but he is actually the Distinguished Gentlemen from Open Borders.

And he’s a sap.

He’s chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee – go ahead and insert your own oxymoron joke – and it was with him that Donald Trump, Jr., agreed to give 20+ hours of testimony about the whole bogus RUSSIA TREASON EMOLUMENTS TRAITOR COLLUSION lie on the condition that his testimony was once and done. In the end Mueller, who would have gleefully charged Don Jr. with anything he could have found or invented charged Don Jr. with nada. So, after Mueller reluctantly put a stake in the heart of this garbage scandal – because you know Mueller and his pack of Democrats was slobbering at the thought of a Trump scalp – what did Burr decide to do?

1.Celebrate the total exoneration of the President of the false charges made against him by Democrats and their lying mainstream media transcriptionists?

Or

2.Decide to play along with the Democrats’ craven and malicious effort to keep the lie alive by subpoenaing Don Jr. to testify again about claims made by Federal Convict #86626, aka Michael Cohen, currently a resident of the old stoney lonesome for lying to Congress, as part of an attempt to frame the President’s son for perjury?

“Well, gosh,” you might think, “Only a Democrat-collaborating hack, or slack-jawed idiot, or both, would choose Option Two,” but then you remember we’re talking about an Establishment bot like Richard Burr.

This kind of nonsense is just part and parcel of what Never Trump is. See, though Burr is apparently not running again in four years, he’s laboring under the delusion that by then America will come to its senses and welcome him and his gooey ilk back into unchallenged power. He’s counting on some sort of Establishment payback down the road – a nice job on K Street, an appointment as the token GOP Secretary of Mediocrity for President Creepy Joe, or maybe some CNN hits along with Ana Navarro. He’s burnishing his credentials as one of the Republicans the ruling class can always count on to submit and obey.

He’s Mitt Romney without the dog tormenting. BTW, Mitt was last seen voting against a federal judge nominee because of True Conservatism™ or something.

Heh. Also: ouch. That invidious comparison had to have hurt Barr some.

Wheels, turning

Posted on 5/15/20195/16/2019 by Mike 1 Comment

And the rats are beginning to turn on each other, as the water flooding the hold drives them to abandon the sinking ship.

A potential rift is emerging between James Comey and John Brennan over who pushed to include information from the unverified Steele dossier in an intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Comey, a former FBI director, sent an email to subordinates in late 2016 indicating Brennan, a former CIA director, wanted to include materials from the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, known as the ICA, Fox News reported.

A former CIA official speaking on Brennan’s behalf is disputing the assertion. The former official told Fox that Brennan and James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, opposed Comey’s push to include Steele dossier information in the ICA.

The dispute pits two former intelligence community officials against each other at a time when the Justice Department is investigating how government agencies like the FBI and CIA handled the dossier, which former British spy Christopher Steele authored and the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funded.

Now, I know a lot of folks have become frustrated with the seeming lack of progress towards visiting justice on these cocksure, despicable Deep State malefactors. I’ve struggled with that some myself. Bill’s complaint is a representative sample:

We’ve been groaning under investigations for more than two years, ever more complicated, ever more minutely focused, ever more opaque. We’re drenched with leaks, hammered with interpretation, battered by punditry. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the entire investigatory freak show was designed to destroy any interest in any of it among normal people who work for a living.

We know who the bad guys are, and we know what they did. No more dancing Graham 2.0s, please, with tantalizing promises to “declassify” stuff we’ve known about for a long time. Not one single miscreant has faced a judge yet. The only people actually jailed have been those swept up on ancillary process matters in service to the Witch Hunt For Trump. It’s time to change that.

There are those who say Comey will be the biggest target, but I see no reason why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should not at least face the judicial process, even if they should manage to skate the penalties they really should pay.

But all the rest – Comey, all his gang of corrupt leftist thugs, Clapper and his CIA mob, Brennan, and all the other named miscreants now need to face a hell of a lot more than shame. They need to be sitting in the ultimate perjury trap – an American courtroom passing judgment on their crimes.

Agreed, more or less. Then again, though, I have to offer a mild admonishment: PATIENCE, people. The investigations do FEEL endless, but the truth is the ones we’ve been “groaning under for more than two years” were the PHONY ones; the REAL ones, looking into the origins of the Swamp’s myriad illegalities for specific, actionable offenses, are only just beginning.

Yes, as Bill says, we DO pretty much know who the bad guys are and what they did. But in truth, those are opinions. Indictments, trials, and prison terms aren’t doled out with opinion as their basis, however firmly they may be buttressed by readily-observable reality. That’s why we have investigations in the first place: to provide the legal hook on which to hang criminal charges.

Investigations are but the first step in a process, which can indeed drag agonizingly on. The offenses apparently committed against not only Trump but the American republic itself are grave enough that we can count on the process here being a slow, deliberate one. Which, that ain’t necessarily a bad thing.

Barr looks like a serious man, seriously intent on getting to the bottom of what now looks like being the greatest scandal in our history. As it happens, one of his earliest acts as AG was to appoint another sober, judicious, and yes, serious man—US Attorney John Durham, who has already shown integrity and bull-terrier perseverance in a previous confrontation with the abominably corrupt FBI—a move clearly indicating that Barr suspected from Day One that his investigation was likely to result in indictments and judicial proceedings.

So let’s not throw up our hands just yet, folks. Let the process, long-delayed but moving along at last in an encouraging direction, continue on to its conclusion. Barr, Durham, et al may well flinch in the end from unleashing the kind of profound upheaval likely to come of all this to conclude with a whimper instead of a bang, although the early indications seem to foretell that they won’t. Either way, there’ll be time enough then to sharpen the pitchforks, light the torches, and boil the tar.

Update! I ain’t the only one who sees Barr’s appointment of skull-cracker Durham as a pretty solid tell.

“If I were the Democrats I would be quite worried,” former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Monday night.

And the reason why is, by appointing a U.S. attorney, Attorney General Barr is essentially signaling that he thinks it’s possible that criminal violations occurred in the start of the whole investigation into any kind of Trump-Russian collusion.

As Judge Barr said, there is already an inspector general investigation that’s going to come to a conclusion. That’s what you would do if you were just interested in reforming the way the department does things, the way decisions were made.

But you wouldn’t go with a U.S. Attorney like Durham, someone of his stature, unless the attorney general thinks actually something criminal might have happened, that someone might have violated the law, that there might have been malfeasance, that people at the FBI or the justice department were acting out of partisan motives, not just out of incompetence or stupidity or they were duped by the Russians or Steele or the English or by the Clinton campaign.

So if you are a Democrat, I think you would be really worried to see the appointment of a career prosecutor like this.

Surber says:

Most conservatives have a wait-and-see attitude because we know that Washington takes care of Washington, first, last, and always.

After watching Hillary not only go unindicted but had the FBI destroy the evidence as well, I realize Comey is about as high as they will go.

Still, I believe President Trump will exact a price for this that is high enough to prevent another attempted coup.

But we shall see.

That we shall. Thomas Lifson examines another angle:

Eric Felten noticed something already on the public record last October: that Durham already was investigating leaks to the media from the FBI. This means that at least seven months before his role was revealed, and months before William Barr took office, Durham was on the case. The revelation came not from a leak, but from testimony by James A. Baker, the FBI’s general counsel under James Comey.

The fact that this was kept secret so long, even in the face of this admission slipping out and remaining unnoticed, suggests that the Durham investigation — and maybe Huber’s too — is doing exactly what effective prosecutors do: keeping grand jury proceedings secret, applying pressure to witnesses to sing, maybe offering deals for lighter prosecution and sentence recommendations if they implicate higher-ups, and going for convictions by trial juries, not in the court of public opinion.

I have long believed that the only reason a man like Barr, who was earning millions of dollars a year as a DC lawyer at the very top of his profession, could be lured back into the snake pit of DC politics under Trump would be his devotion to the integrity of our legal/judicial system. If he were a cynic just interested in preserving the establishment that let him succeed so mightily, why not just stay where we was? He had to know that taking on the task of rescuing the system from its abusers would lead to the sort of vilification he now is enduring.

Yep. Patience, people.

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…uhhh…well, it’s…ummmm…well, actually, it’s…

Posted on 5/15/20195/15/2019 by Mike 1 Comment

Sky Dong!

The infamous sky penis of November 17, 2017, hovering over the clouds of Washington, was a total mystery.

On that fateful day, the puzzling dong appeared near Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, around 30 miles north of Seattle. And although the base accepted full responsibility for the phallic drawing in the sky, the public had no understanding of what had actually happened. How’d that big ol’ boner get up there anyway?

Now, two years later, a military report has shed light on the long-awaited details.

A copy of the military’s sky penis investigation was obtained by Navy Times. On that November day, local news station KREM began reporting on a clearly man-made shape in the sky that resembled a penis and testicles. The formation had upset a local parent and began making the rounds on Twitter. The Navy soon confirmed that one of its pilots had formed the phallus and issued an apology.

“The Navy holds its aircrew to the highest standards and we find this absolutely unacceptable, of zero training value and we are holding the crew accountable,” the base said in a statement at the time.

“Zero training value”? ZERO? Ace dispenses handily with that notion.

A point that should be kept in mind is that someone who is playing while actually doing their job — here, flying, executing what I’m going to guess are somewhat precise turns — is practicing that job at a high level. That is, if you’re doing something that might be unnecessary but is still part of your job and is still training your skill, you are likely learning more in those moments than most moments spent in serious study.

The “gamification” of skill-learning is powerful, I think. People like challenges. Every challenge someone makes up for himself is a little game. He understands the success and failure states. He understands that, even in this play, there is victory and their is defeat.

What I’m saying is that it’s a good thing for people to have fun in doing their jobs. Even if they burn up some extra jet-fuel doing so. A pro golfer isn’t directly helping his golf game when he starts playing around with bouncing the ball up and down from his putter-head like it’s a hacky-sack, but he is learning dexterity and comfort with the putter, stuff about balance and head-attitude he wouldn’t learn from just some more putting practice.

Maybe that won’t be helpful. But maybe it will be. It doesn’t hurt to try something different, seemingly unrelated to the core of the skill, to improve the core of the skill by an alternate angle of attack.

So maybe give these guys a (halfhearted) warning because, whatever, people are scandalized to know that Navy pilots (almost all young men) can be fans of puerile, naughty jokes.

But also bear in mind that one of the highest states of skill-acquisition is having fun with the skill and just showing it off. Doing something that seems to have no practical purpose, if it’s difficult and requires off-the-cuff improvisation and quick learning and adjustment (as the dick-drawing stunt did), does stretch and hone one’s skill.

They did have to plot out a path in three dimensional space and imagine what that path would look like as a two dimensional plane.
That’s not nothing.

The Navy probably handled this innocuous mischief perfectly: PR statements expressing OUTRAGE!, disgust, and contrition, while dealing out a finger wagged in disapprobation and a good talking-to. The officer tasked with the actual the dressing-down problem bit nearly through his lip trying not to bust out in wicked snickering. The transcript of the radio chatter from whence this inspired prank sprang—uhh, sprung?—is hilarious:

In the air that day were two lieutenants, a pilot and an electronics warfare officer, known as an EWO. They were soon edging each other on.

“Draw a giant penis,” the EWO said. “That would be awesome.”

“What did you do on your flight?” the pilot joked. “Oh, we turned dinosaurs into sky penises.”

“You should totally try to draw a penis,” the EWO advised.

The lieutenants began breaking down the concept of drawing a penis in the sky.

“I could definitely draw one, that would be easy,” the pilot said. “I could basically draw a figure eight and turn around and come back. I’m gonna go down, grab some speed and hopefully get out of the contrail layer so they’re not connected to each other.”

You telling me this WASN’T at least somewhat useful training, a honing of relevant skills? Not even a little bit?

To quote the immortal Sgt Hulka: Aww, lighten up, Francis.

Read the rest for sure, it gets even more hilarious from there. Naturally, the libmedia reportage I’ve seen dangles the inevitable “sexual harrassment” angle, although even they can only manage a half-hearted, flaccid stab at it. Yes, I’m sure some humorless bluenoses both in and out of the Navy were utterly mortified by this Crime Against Humanity. But not me. Far as I’m concerned, this stunt is one of the reasons bold, audacious young men become fighter pilots in the first place. Carry on, fellas, and good on ya.

A true classic, unearthed

Posted on 5/15/20195/15/2019 by Mike Leave a comment

Steyn does one of his typical Big Digs into the long, strange history of a song that’s been one of my absolute favorites since I was a kid, and still is.

In South Africa, it was huge. “Mbube” became not just the name of a hit record but of an entire vocal style – a high-voiced lead over four-part bass-heavy harmony. That, in turn, evolved into “isicathamiya”, a smoother vocal style that descended to Ladysmith Black Mambazo and others, taking its cue from the injunction “Cothoza, bafana” – or “tread carefully, boys”. That’s to say, Zulu stomping is fine in the bush, but when you’re singing in dancehalls and restaurants in you’ve got to be a little more choreographically restrained, if only for the sake of the floorboards.

“Tread carefully, boys” is good advice for anyone in the music business. A few years after Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds made their hit record, it came to the notice of Pete Seeger, on the prowl for yet more “authentic” “traditional” “vernacular” “folk music” for the Weavers to make a killing with. He misheard “Mbube” and transcribed it as “Wimoweh”. That’s a great insight into the “authenticity” of the folk boom: the most famous Zulu word on the planet was invented by a New York socialist in 1951…

Still, Seeger was chanting all the way to the bank. “Wimoweh” is a tune that works in any form – as big band (Jimmy Dorsey), folk-rock (Nanci Griffith), country (Glen Campbell), Euro-lounge (Bert Kaempfert), kiddie-pop (*NSync), reggae (Eek-A-Mouse) military march (the New Zealand Army Band), exotica (Yma Sumac), Yiddish (Lipa Schmeltzer), football singalong (the official theme of the 1986 England World Cup Squad). And that’s before we get to REM and They Might Be Giants and Baha Men, and, of course, The Lion King. Solomon Linda’s song has penetrated every corner of the globe. It’s the most famous tune ever to have come out of Africa.

He and his family must be multi-multi-millionaires, right? Not exactly. Linda sold it to the Gallo record company for ten shillings: that would be about 87 cents. Tread carefully, boy. In 1962, just as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was reaching Number One around the world, he died of kidney disease in Soweto, on the edge of Johannesburg, in a concrete hovel with a couple of bedrooms with dirt floors covered in cow dung. He left his widow the equivalent of $22 in the bank and unable even to afford a headstone for his grave. For the last decade he’d swept floors and made the tea at the packing house of the Gallo company. His family lived on a diet of maize porridge – “pap” – and chicken feet.

After Rian Malan drew attention to the plight of Solomon Linda’s heirs, a few music critics took the usual line on the subject. As Thomas R Gruning writes in Millennium Folk: American Folk Music Since The Sixties:

Beyond the economic implications of ‘Mbube/Wimoweh’, the musical development of the song in its different versions illustrates a highly charged symbolic field in which the violence done to Linda’s original piece further reinscribes contested and inequitable power relations between the West and Africa. That is, the issue shifts from conventional notions of cultural imperialism to a more convoluted and complicated process in which ‘plundering and counterfeiting of black culture’ denies the racial authenticities claimed by…

Zzzzzzz. That argument works fine with the likes of Hugo and Luigi and George Weiss. They’re Tin Pan Alley professionals, assignment men. Give Weiss a Broadway score, an Elvis movie theme, and a Zulu chant, and it’s all the same: that week’s job. Who knows what “authenticity” means to such a man? But the only reason the showbiz types were able to “reinscribe” the song in the first place is because of Pete Seeger and the other leftie folkies. The child of wealthy New York radicals, Seeger has always been avowedly anti-capitalist – supposedly. Yet his publisher had a deal with Gallo Music: they snaffled up the rights to “Mbube” cheap and in return sub-licensed to Gallo the South African and Rhodesian rights to “Wimoweh”. And Seeger knew Solomon Linda was the composer. Years later he would plead that back in the Fifties he instructed his publishers to give his royalties from the song to Linda, and he was shocked, shocked to discover decades later that they hadn’t in fact been doing so. But it never occurred to him, as an unworldly anti-capitalist, to check his royalty statements. It was, on his part, supposedly a sin of omission.

Gee, imagine that: another self-righteous, money-grubbing socialist who got rich ripping somebody else off. Why, I’m shocked, I tell you—SHOCKED!!!

Not everyone can plead the same accidental oversight. Having persuaded Linda to sign away his copyright four decades earlier, the relevant parties made sure to slide some forms in front of his illiterate widow in 1982 and his daughters some years later to make sure the appropriation paperwork was kept in order.

And for all Mr Gruning’s huffing about “cultural imperialism” above, it was, in the end, a legacy of colonialism that ended the injustice. There are significant differences between US and English copyright law, and one of them is that the latter attempts to restrain the damage a foolish creator can do to himself. Under British Commonwealth law, the ownership in any intellectual property reverts to the author’s heirs 25 years after his death regardless of what disadvantageous deals he may have signed. In the courtroom, the quiet courtroom, the lawsuit slept for decades, until Solomon Linda’s daughters were apprised of this significant feature of Commonwealth copyright law, and took action. The sleeping lion also took on the Mouse – the Walt Disney corporation, whose film The Lion King had introduced the song to a new generation of children. In America, Linda’s family really had no legal leg to stand on, but, faced with potentially catastrophic complications in Britain, South Africa, Australia, India and other key markets, Disney were only too keen to settle. In 2006, Solomon Linda finally received his due.

Fifteen improvised notes in 1939 powered Africa’s biggest selling record, an entire genre of music, and two separate hit songs on five continents. And, even though those 15 notes and the man who wrote them were buried under all the other names that encrusted to the work, in the end they’re what shine through.

In case you’re a young ‘un and haven’t yet grokked what song Steyn is going on about, this would be it:

The other versions have their merits, but this is the one I myself was smitten by as a kid, still cherish to this day, and most likely always will. Its 80-year backstory is fascinating; the Tokens’ own initial reaction to it is equally so, despite being another chapter of an old, familiar music-biz story:

Back in New York, the Tokens did as they were told but didn’t care for it. “We were embarrassed,” said Phil Margo, “and tried to convince Hugo and Luigi not to release it. They said it would be a big record and it was going out.” It had an orchestra, a trio of Tokens doing the wimoweh-ing, Jay Siegal’s falsetto, an opera singer with a spare half-hour who came in and did a bit of contrapuntal ululating. The first time the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson heard it he had to pull off the road he was so overawed. Carole King declared the record a bona fide “motherf—er”…

It hit Number One at Christmas 1961. Ilonka David-Biluska’s version, “De Leeuw Slaapt Vannacht“, reached Number One in the Netherlands. Henri Salvador’s “Le lion est mort ce soir” was Number One in France. Pace Phil Margo and Ilonka, it is, in fact, very hard not to make a ton of dough from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”.

Label tells band to record song; band dislikes song, balks; song is a monster, career-boosting hit; band is forever after bemused by their initial disdain for the record that would unexpectedly bring ’em fame and fortune. Familiar as that story is, though, The Lion Sleeps Tonight seems to wield a magic almost unique in all of Western music; for a pop song particularly, the near-universality and longevity of its appeal is remarkable indeed. Love it or hate it, once you’ve heard it you’ll never forget it. I had it on 45 when I was a kid, and it’s in my Spotify library now. That’s power, people.

Sex strike

Posted on 5/15/20195/15/2019 by Mike Leave a comment

Yeah, whatevs.

You think, “Nope, progressives can’t possibly be any dumber,” and then they proceed to reset the dumbness bar. The latest example is Alyssa Milano, who has publicly announced she’s not going to have sex anymore until people can once again kill babies without restraint. If that’s what counts as foreplay these days, count us conservatives out.

The 80s TV teen turned leftist Twitter twerp recently tweeted that “Our reproductive rights are being erased. Until women have legal control over our own bodies we just cannot risk pregnancy. JOIN ME by not having sex until we get bodily autonomy back. I’m calling for a #SexStrike. Pass it on.”

Let’s review. Alyssa Milano is not going to have sex unless and until you allow her to kill babies. I am unclear on what our reaction is supposed to be. Does she expect us to pull a 180 on pre-birth infanticide in order to keep the Alyssa Option open?

Liberals are already thoroughly confused (at best – a lot of them know that liberalism is nonsense but embrace it as a vehicle for their personal power), yet when they get going on the abortion issue they get exponentially worse. It’s a pretty simple question – is it okay to kill a human being who has not yet been born? I say “No,” you say “No,” and they say it’s practically mandatory.

It’s not exactly clear why they draw their hardest ideological line on abortion, but they do. Maybe they love to freak out us squares. Maybe they hate the idea of traditional motherhood. Maybe liberalism is just a hideous death cult that has substituted Margaret Sanger for Moloch.

Probably some of all three.

Consequence-free sex via abortion is just one of the weapons in the Left’s anti-family arsenal. Along with his excerpt from the above, Glenn furnishes this amusing graphic:

Heh. When it comes to baby-murdering Hollywood ho’s, abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. But wait, it gets even worse.

Milano received support from fans and fellow actress Bette Midler joined her in also calling for a sex strike. “I hope the #womenofGeorgia stop having sex with men until these indignities are overturned,” Midler said.

Not that they know me from Adam or would give a shit if they did, but Midler and Milano don’t need to go on any strike as far as I’m concerned. I’d gladly go WAY the hell out of my way to avoid having sex with either one of ’em.

Update! Ouch.

If memory serves Bette Midler’s first hit was her version of “In the Mood”. Forty-five years later, she’s finally not in the mood.

And for that, we can all be thankful.

RIP the great Tim Conway

Posted on 5/15/20195/15/2019 by Mike Leave a comment

Having howled at his and Korman’s riotously funny, largely-improvised Carol Burnett Show antics with my family each and every week throughout my youth, I was all set to write something up on his death. But Aesop’s obit concisely says it all, and aside from mourning the fact that they just don’t do TV comedy like that anymore, I have nothing to add. The Burnett Show gang were such beloved staples in my home that my strongest reaction whilst watching the vids Aesop included was to think of my long-departed dad. He LOVED Conway and Co, and laughed harder than any of us. Ahh, those were the days all right.

Fascist is as fascist does

Posted on 5/15/20195/15/2019 by Mike Leave a comment

Just another Democrat-Socialist “hero.”

PHILADELPHIA — When Brian Sims first ran for state representative in 2012, he ran as a new pro-business voice. He was going to be a bridge-builder, brimming with commonsense ideas on pocketbook issues.

Sims never met that promise.

Instead, he became many other things: an outdoor adventurer who climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, a partisan attack dog who accused fellow state Rep. Martina White of saying she wanted to deport all immigrants, something his staff had to admit she never said, and a celebrity activist whose lucrative, nationwide speaking circuit earned him an ethics investigation.

He also became the guy who tweeted a photo of himself wearing a suit and a smirk and raising his middle finger to the vice president of the United States as Mike Pence headed to Philadelphia.

Sims wrote: “Let me be the first to officially welcome you to the City of Brotherly Love and my district! We are a city of soaring diversity. We believe in the power of all people. Black, Brown, Queer, Trans, Atheist, & Immigrant. So…get bent, then get out!”

“The power of all people”—except Caucasians, males, heterosexuals, etc. Actually, though, he DID provide a helpful list of who he means by “all people.” Basically, if you ain’t on that list, you’re fair game.

Last week, Sims decided to film his own harassment of a woman outside an abortion clinic here in Philadelphia, calling her an “old white lady” and her beliefs “grotesque” to her face and to the camera. The clear plan was to incite his audience against this peaceful protester, whom he saw as clearly bigoted and evil.

This was an emboldened, out-of-touch, arrogant elected official who woke up one day last week and made a conscious decision to go to Planned Parenthood for the express purpose of fighting and badgering.

And he chose a woman, standing by herself. And he didn’t start a dialogue. He didn’t introduce himself. He badgered her. Repeatedly. Relentlessly. Angrily. He badgered an enemy he himself described as an old lady.

We must reflect on this. This is the extreme Left acting out in public in exactly the manner they ascribe to conservatives: confrontational, intimidating, police tactics, berating women, threatening the First Amendment.

This stunning behavior — premeditated, confrontational, abusing the power of office, targeting women, contrived to gain political benefit — all occurred and was criticized by no one to date on the Left. No elected Democrat has come out and condemned Sims publicly.

Think about that.

No need to. And nobody needs to “reflect” on anything, either; there’s no use in it, it’s worse than a waste of time. Nor will there be any Democrat-Socialist condemnation of Sims’ repulsive violence against his foes. We all already know why: because this is who they are, this is what they do.

No, I’d say “thinking” and “reflecting” time is well behind us, and if any Democrat-Socialists DID condemn his actions, it would be false—they’re all for it, one hundred percent behind him. Hell, getting them to halfheartedly denounce Bernie Bro James Hodgkinson was like pulling teeth. And he was, y’know, shooting people.

No, next time this obstreperous, bullying punk decides to show everybody what a total badass he is by strongarming little old ladies or teenage girls because they dared to disagree with his dumbshit politics, those little old ladies or teenagers need to make sure to have brought along some muscle of their own. Then, should Sims show up feeling frisky, that muscle should proceed to stomp a fucking mud puddle in his worthless ass and walk it dry. Next time, and every time, until the pain of his injuries inspire the necessary “reflection” on his part.

Hate things had to come to this and all, but…well, here we all are. We ain’t the ones that need to “reflect,” as if we were guilty of anything other than being victims of liberal-fascist abuse and violence. We didn’t start this crap. But unless we’re okay with having it continue—and continue to escalate—we cannot, we MUST not, flinch from finishing it. Because that’s all too clearly the only way it’s ever going to stop.

Reparations bottom line

Posted on 5/13/20195/13/2019 by Mike

What it’s really all about.

Apart from the complexities of determining who might get reparations and who should pay, we never hear about the endgame. Are reparations supposed to resolve black America’s complaints? Or will black America simply turn up the demands, saying that $500B isn’t enough? How much would be enough? One hundred trillion dollars in doubloons? a googolplex of gold rands? all of America west of the Mississippi?

If that part ever gets sorted out, perhaps we could then talk about black behavior. There are the endless shootings and murders in the ghetto. There are the victims of “the knockout game” and muggings in the streets. There are the large groups of blacks who go into restaurants, eat a huge meal, and then strut out without paying, usually disrupting other diners and wreaking destruction on the way out.

It’s highly doubtful that reparations will ever be paid or that black behavior will ever be discussed at policy levels. It’s all about Democrats having a club to beat America over the head with, to keep decent America on the defensive, to keep Republicans in the corner where they don’t know how to respond. Republicans were innocent of imposing slavery or Jim Crow, both of which were as Democrat as the KKK.

Though facts don’t matter on the Left, knowing what’s actually going on helps decent people contain their exasperation at the farce. Democrats and their Deep State confederates use reparations, as they have used the phony Russia investigation, as a political battering ram. They don’t care about damage to America because they don’t care about America. They may well be the most repugnant people in America.

Oh, they surely are that. They have been for a good, long while now.

The author is a lot more nonchalant than I am, though, in his confidence that “reparations” will never come about. Its usefulness as a club for Democrat-Socialists to beat America over the head with is one thing. Its usefulness as yet another bureaucratic grift—a bottomless, eternal money-sink into which they can freely dip to buy voter loyalty, grow government, hire more bureaucrats, and further enrich and empower themselves—is quite another. They’re already feeling its powerful allure, which may well prove irresistible if they can figure out how to keep it from splashing back on them too badly. You can bet more than just a few of them are giving very serious consideration to the practical nuts and bolts of how they might ram it down American throats.

Christianity, liberty, and their enemies

Posted on 5/12/20195/13/2019 by Mike

By their fruits shall ye know them.

In the late M. Stanton Evans’ remarkable, critically important book The Theme Is Freedom, he develops a brilliant case for the proposition that political freedom depends upon the acknowledgement of an authority higher than any temporal authority: i.e., God. He further argues that of all the belief systems that have ever been followed, Christianity is the only one that emphasizes individual freedom as the rightful condition of men, to be protected from the encroachments of temporal powers. The United States of America, a near to uniformly Christian country for most of its history, is the modern society in which this coupling of religious belief to liberty has been most clearly demonstrated.

Well, our nation’s Founders would certainly seem to agree with that, yeah.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Funny how the rise to power of the fascist Left, the rapid escalation of encroachment on American liberty, and the en masse abandonment of Christianity since the 60s all seem to coincide, ain’t it? Funny, too, how much effort those same Progressivists have spent on rejiggering the Founders as being either skeptical at best about Christianity, openly hostile to it, or considered themselves “Deists”—a manipulative oversimplification that blithely disregards many direct statements on the subject made by the Founders themselves.

Back to Francis.

Given that premise, does it not make sense that they who seek to eradicate human freedom should target Christianity first and foremost? Does it not suggest that anyone you hear ridiculing Christians or denigrating Christianity should be viewed with a degree of suspicion?

It is an irony to pin all the meters against their stops that they who denigrate Christianity cannot argue against it on any rational grounds. They denounce it as “superstition,” “fear of death,” and other irrelevancies. They refuse to treat with its prescriptions…because those prescriptions directly oppose what they seek: power for themselves and their fellow-travelers.

God Himself has only ten rules for us. He asks nothing more. How dare any temporal authority suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that His rules don’t bind us? And how dare any temporal authority demand more than does He?

The enemies of Christianity, one and all, are totalitarian in ambition. That is: they seek the power to decide what is compulsory and what is forbidden, without any boundaries to the scope of their authority. Christians know that this is wrong. We decry it. We protest against it. In reply, our enemies ridicule us, drive us out of the public square, criminalize living by our beliefs, and ultimately exterminate us.

Progressivism is a religion its own self—a particularly jealous one, one that doesn’t like competition. Might go a long way, too, towards explaining their strange affiliation with Islam. I mean, aside from all the gay-hating and woman-oppressing, they DO have a lot in common: authoritarianism, totalitarianism, intolerance for all other beliefs, and no problem at all with using violence to back it all up, just for starters.

Shadow government shenanigans

Posted on 5/12/20195/12/2019 by Mike

Dirty, through and through.

Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained 44 pages of records from the State Department through court-ordered discovery revealing that the Obama White House was tracking a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records concerning then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system. Months after the Obama White House involvement, the State Department responded to the requestor, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), falsely stating that no such records existed.

“Tracking” them? They were ignoring them. Actually, defying them. The long of it is here. The short of it?

The short of this is that Hillary kept all her official emails on her personal server. When outside parties would make requests, they would only search her unused official accounts and then respond back that no records existed. All the while, they knew Hillary was doing business outside of official channels in a way that clearly subverted FOIA laws.

What we are seeing here is a pattern of continual lying by the Obama administration and its officials about Clinton’s use of a private email server. Furthermore, they did so to directly avoid FOIA requests which were lawfully supposed to be fulfilled.

You are not allowed to simply say “whoops, that’s on my personal account so that’s not subject to FOIA” for obvious reasons. It would allow widespread corruption.

Clinton is bulletproof so nothing will come of this, but it’s just another in the long list of bad, possibly illegal behavior by her and the Obama administration. This entire thing deserves a real investigation and not the whitewashing it got under James Comey. Anyone that opposes that is only doing so for partisan reasons.

Precisely so. Separate, but very much related:

The nature of the government’s surveillance on me and my family is forensically proven and not subject to legitimate question. Yet, unlike with the discoveries about James Rosen and AP, the government has yet to issue its mea culpa. And there’s a reason.

As bad as they were, the other known instances of journalists being spied upon happened under cover of court orders, albeit ones issued in secrecy. But the government spying on me was not done under the authority of a court warrant. That’s why my case is even more dangerous than the others. It implies that the scope of government improperly turning its intel tools on its own citizens, including journalists and political enemies, could be far more extensive than anyone realizes.

How do I know there was no warrant in my case? Not only did inside sources tell me this, but it was also confirmed to me by the Department of Justice inspector general. With no warrant, it means I was perhaps caught up in so-called “incidental” spying upon other figures. Intel sources have told me that when aggressive government agents want to listen in on somebody but know they cannot justify a warrant, they simply find a target around that person and capture their communications in the incidental spying.

Long before the 2016 presidential campaign, confidential sources had alerted me to longstanding misuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court system and the erosion of protections when it came obtaining permission for wiretaps and other surveillance methods. So, the election debacle came of no surprise. I saw it as an extension of years of improper manipulation. It now appears to me as though the effort to target those surrounding Donald Trump had more to do with intel officials’ concern that a President Trump might dig into these longstanding surveillance abuses with the help of none other than Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

It was no secret in the intel community that Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Obama, was not only aware of long-standing intel agency surveillance excesses, but was also planning to clean house. In the end, Flynn was unable to do the job because he got wrapped up in the Trump-Russia allegations. Funny, that.

Ain’t it. Ain’t it just.

So since the DoJ won’t do its job, I’m left to self-fund my own pursuit of justice in civil court. As I have learned in the process, the fight is much bigger than my own. If the government isn’t held responsible for its unwarranted intrusions in my case, according to my lawyers and a dissenting appellate who just sided with us, the government will have a precedent that provides it with a free pass to spy on any U.S. citizen for any reason with no fear of punishment.

Sadly, the orcs roosting in Morder On The Potomac care not a whit for precedent, permission, or propriety. They do whatever they want, and worry about the flimsy rationalizations for their rampant illegalities when they must. Attkisson is by no means wrong in seeking justice for herself and her colleagues victimized by the rogue, tyrannical abomination now (mis)ruling us all. Nor is she wrong on both the law and the principles underpinning it, which have been flung down and danced upon. But her naivete concerning where all this is likely to go is touching at best. And her apparent belief that our conscienceless Deep State masters consider themselves constrained by legality, the Constitution, decency, or any other damned thing is beyond naive; it’s foolish, if not downright delusional.

Harshing your mellow since 9/01

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