Flotsam and/or Jetsam

In praise of Muir

Posted on October 2, 2022October 2, 2022 by Mike 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PC Vs biology

Posted on October 2, 2022October 2, 2022 by Mike 3 Comments

Christ on a crutch, where to even begin.

‘We are expected to be OK with not having children’: how gay parenthood through surrogacy became a battleground

Well, I mean, y’know, duh. And here I’ve been thinking all this time that “being OK with not having children” was sorta baked right into the life-as-a-gay-couple cake. Silly me.

Corey Briskin and Nicholas Maggipinto met in law school in 2011, were engaged by 2014, and had their 2016 wedding announced in the New York Times. They moved to a waterfront apartment block in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a bright playroom for families on the ground floor.

“We got married and then we wanted all the trappings: house, children, 401K [retirement saving plan], etc,” Maggipinto, 37, tells me in their building’s shared meeting room, tapping the table in sequence with the progression of each idea.

Briskin, 30, grew up assuming he’d have children. He came out in college. “Once I had come out to myself and others, I don’t think my expectation of what my life would look like changed all that much.” With marriage equality won years ago, they expected to be able to have a conventional married life.

Sorry, fellas, but I’m afraid that’s gonna be a mite tough with what is, by definition, a non-conventional marriage.

Six months before their wedding, a targeted ad from an organisation called Gay Parents to Be landed in Maggipinto’s Instagram feed, offering free consultations with a fertility doctor who’d give them “the whole rundown” on how they could start a family. “We had the appointment and we were 100% on the same page – let’s move forward with this,”says Maggipinto.

That’s when they first became aware of the eye-watering cost of biological parenthood for gay men. Maggipinto reels off the price list in a way that only someone who has pored over every item could. There’s compensation for the egg donor: no less than $8,000 (£6,600). The egg-donor agency fee: $8,000-10,000. The fertility clinic’s bill (including genetic testing, blood tests, STD screening and a psychiatric evaluation for all parties, sperm testing, egg extraction, insemination, the growing, selecting, freezing and implantation of the resulting embryos): up to $70,000. And that’s if it all goes well: if no embryos are created during a cycle, or if the embryos that are don’t lead to a successful pregnancy, they would have to start again.

Then there’s the cost of a surrogate (called a “gestational carrier” when they carry embryos created from another woman’s eggs). Maggipinto and Briskin were told agency fees alone could stretch to $25,000, and the surrogates themselves should be paid a minimum of $60,000 (it is illegal for surrogates to be paid in the UK, but their expenses are covered by the intended parents). “That payment doesn’t include reimbursement for things like maternity clothing; lost wages if she misses work for doctors’ appointments or is put on bed rest; transportation; childcare for her own children; [or] lodging.”

It takes 15 minutes for Maggipinto to run me through all the expenses they could incur if they tried to have a child genetically related to one of them. The bottom line? “Two hundred thousand dollars, minimum,” he says, tapping his index finger on the table with each word in disbelief.

Hey, gotta pay to play. Whatever made you guys imagine that bucking biology, rationality, and reality itself could be done on the cheap?

They couldn’t afford it. Maggipinto earns a corporate lawyer’s salary but is saddled with student debt. Briskin used to work for the City of New York as an assistant district attorney, earning about $60,000 a year.

Ugh. Lawyers. It figures.

His employment benefits had included generous health insurance. But when they read the policy, they discovered they were the only class of people to be excluded from IVF coverage. Infertility was defined as an inability to have a child through heterosexual sex or intrauterine insemination. That meant straight people and lesbians working for the City of New York would have the costs of IVF covered, but gay male couples could never be eligible.

This isn’t an oversight, it’s discrimination, Briskin says. “The policy is the product of a time when there was a misconception, a stereotype, a prejudice against couples that were made up of two men – that they were not capable of raising children because there was no female figure in that relationship.”

Briskin was working alongside colleagues who were happily availing themselves of the benefits he wasn’t entitled to. One of his co-workers – an older, single woman – became a mother using donor sperm, IVF and surrogacy. “It was hard,” he tells me quietly. “You want to be happy for people.” Their frustration at not being able to have their own children turned to anguish. “My sister – who is more than six years younger than me – just gave birth to her second baby,” Maggipinto says, twisting his wedding ring. “I was OK with not being a parent at 30, I felt that was very normal for our generation and the current work-life balance ethos. But seven years later, I’m really not happy.”

Anyone capable of uttering gibberish phrases like “work-life balance ethos” with a straight face ought to be legally barred from having children. Thankfully, though, the response confirms that sanity and common sense still do exist in this topsy-turvy world.

Maggipinto and Briskin braced themselves for some kind of backlash when news of their claim broke. But there was a deluge: on Instagram and Facebook, in audio messages and in their work email inboxes, on Reddit and beneath news articles. Wherever you could post public comments, there was condemnation.

A much-liked response to one piece about their story read: “Not having a uterus because you are male, does not make you ‘infertile’ – it makes you MALE. No one – and I do mean no one – has the right to rent another human’s body and womb to use as an incubator. That is not a human right.”

Actually, all my sarcasm and snark aside, these two do in fact seem to be susceptible to making a certain amount of sense here and there, almost despite themselves:

They never claimed any right to surrogacy, Maggipinto says. “I think a woman willing to do this is enormously generous. In the same way that I feel like I’ve been robbed of time in my life because I don’t have a child yet, I feel like the sacrifice a woman makes to be pregnant for someone else is an enormous chunk of time out of her life that she’ll never get back, and the compensation really is a token for that.”

When it comes to the fear that gay surrogacy erases mothers, Maggipinto is defiant. “Our family will be a motherless family,” he says, tapping his finger on the table again, “I won’t tiptoe around that.” But the creation of that family doesn’t depend on the exploitation of women. “We’re not using a woman’s body. We are accepting a woman’s generosity to use her own body in a way that she agrees with.”

Fair enough, I suppose. In the end, though, as I’ve so often said of liberals in general, their quarrel isn’t with me, or with anybody else out there; it’s with reality, which, no matter how they try to adjust it to suit their own desires, isn’t bendable in the direction they need it to be bent. Bottom line brought to you by Phyllis Chesler, who lays it out plain, nary a punch pulled.

Chesler is an author and a professor of psychology and women’s studies. She has been a critic of surrogacy ever since she campaigned for the rights of Mary Beth Whitehead, the New Jersey surrogate who fought for custody of the baby she carried in 1986. (Whitehead’s case was ultimately unsuccessful.) When New York state voted to legalise commercial surrogacy in 2020, Chesler was one of the most vocal campaigners against it. The fight was still fresh in her mind when she heard about Briskin and Maggipinto’s claim.

“Gay men now want insurance companies to treat being born male as a disability or as a protected category, one which requires paid compensation,” she wrote in an article for a feminist website published a few days after the men filed their complaint. “They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of not having been born biologically female.”

“One of them comes from a wealthy family. The wealthy know the world’s their oyster: they can buy whatever they want and if the poor are ill-served, well, so be it, it’s the way of the world. This way of thinking is involved in surrogacy. Nobody is saying: ‘I would rather give up this longing if it means harming another human being.’ The types of people who opt for surrogacy are entitled, used to getting what they want. Here I include celebrity women who do not want to ruin their figures.”

Chesler is a mother and a grandmother. She has been married several times – most recently to a woman. Their wedding certificate is framed on the wall. “If you balance the women who could die in pregnancy, the women who could become infertile because of their eggs being harvested, who must endure pain and loss of time in a way not commensurate to what they are being paid, against this new desire of a gay male couple to use surrogacy as their first option, I think the balance of suffering is more on the female side.”

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to conceive. Mother Nature can be a real bitch like that sometimes.

(Via GFZ)

Surprise send-off

Posted on October 1, 2022October 1, 2022 by Mike 1 Comment

Okay, I admit I did NOT see this coming.

Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson attended the funeral of Hells Angels Motorcycle Club founder Sonny Barger, Saturday.

Carlson was one of more than 7,000 people who gathered for the six-hour service at the Stockton 99 Speedway to pay tribute to Barger, according to the Daily Mail. The Hells Angel founder died in June at the age of 83 after a brief battle with cancer.

Carlson spoke at the funeral, according to the Daily Mail, saying that “Sonny Barger died in his home state of California. He was 83-years-old. When he died, his letter to his wife and friends was released, and my college roommate was also a Harley-Davidson fan, sent it to me.” He went on to note that though he’d always been a fan of Barger, he was not fully aware of his personal views outside of the motorcycle club.

“And the letter, if I can summarize it from memory was: ‘Always stand tall, stay loyal… remain free, and always value honor,” Carlson continued, according to the outlet. “Stand tall, stay loyal, remain free, and always value honor. And I thought to myself, if there is a phrase that sums up more perfectly what I want to be, what I aspire to be, and the kind of man I respect.”

He continued to tell the crowd that he wanted to pay tribute to the man who said those words, adding that “the president of the United States should be saying that, every single morning as he salutes the flag, but only Sonny Barger is saying it.”

No surprise there. After all, Sonny was never a shitlib, nor were any other of the HAs I’ve known or heard tell of over the years, as people like Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson, and Neal Cassidy learned to their great regret. Lest we forget, this is hardly the first time Leftards got themselves pantsed by the Red And White, after trying to use them for their own purposes on the grievously mistaken assumption that those burly biker doodz just HAD to be on the side of the hippies, peace love and understanding, and grooving on a righteous high, maaan.

The M/C, for those who may not already know, was originally founded by WW2 vet Otto Friedli, after dropping out of the Pissed Off Bastards M/C over an ongoing hassle with a rival club. Even the origins of the HA moniker itself remains a topic of serious controversy. One version:

The Hells Angels originated on March 17, 1948, in Fontana, California, when several small motorcycle clubs agreed to merge. Otto Friedli, a World War II veteran, is credited with starting the club after breaking from the Pissed Off Bastards motorcycle club over a feud with a rival gang.

According to its website, the club’s name was first suggested by Arvid Olsen, an associate of the founders who had served in the “Hell’s Angels” squadron of the Flying Tigers in China during World War II. It is at least clear that the name was inspired by the tradition from World Wars I and II whereby the Americans gave their squadrons fierce, death-defying titles; an example of this lies in one of the three P-40 squadrons of Flying Tigers fielded in Burma and China, which was dubbed “Hell’s Angels”. In 1930, the Howard Hughes film Hell’s Angels showcased extraordinary and dangerous feats of aviation, and it is believed that World War II groups that used that name based it on the film. According to the Hells Angels’ website, they are aware that there is an apostrophe missing in “Hell’s”, but “… it is you who miss it. We don’t”.

Some of the HAMC’s early history is not clear, and accounts differ. According to Ralph “Sonny” Barger, founder of the Oakland charter, early charters of the club were founded in San Francisco, Gardena, Fontana, Oakland and elsewhere, with the members usually unaware that there were other clubs. One of the lesser-known clubs was in North Chino/South Pomona in the late 1960s.

Other sources claim that the San Francisco Hells Angels were organized in 1953 by Rocky Graves, a Hells Angel member from San Bernardino (“Berdoo”), implying that the “Frisco” Hells Angels were very much aware of their forebears. The “Frisco” Hells Angels were reorganized in 1955 with 13 charter members, Frank Sadilek serving as president, and the smaller, original logo. The Oakland charter, at the time headed by Barger, used a larger version of the “Death’s Head” patch nicknamed the “Barger Larger”, which was first used in 1959. It later became the club standard. The first chapter to open outside California was established in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1961.

It’s worth noting that the M/C itself flatly disavows any connection between the Hells Angels name and the 303rd Bomber Group’s famous “Hell’s Angels” B 17, or any other specific aircraft or military unit, on the club’s website. The one historical fact that no serious person disputes is that there was precious little, if any, common ground to be found betwixt the Hells Angels and the hippies, contra the M/C’s friendly relations with the Grateful Dead. The only possible exception might be the renowned Chocolate George, whose 1967 funeral procession is the stuff of biker legend.

Back to the Tucker/Barger story for our closer, which I find just funny as hell.

Carlson was invited to the funeral and dropped his broadcasting responsibilities in order to attend, according to the Daily Mail.

The Hells Angels motorcycle club has some 2,500 estimated members in the U.S. and abroad, according to the Justice Department. It typically keeps a low profile, but residents in Sweden reportedly protested in May to keep the Hells Angels in an upscale neighborhood rather than have their properties turned over to house migrants.

Heh. Guess nobody wants to wind up living next door to those blasted “migrants,” no matter how staunchly “liberal” they proclaim themselves to be, eh?

Update! Now this, anybody could see coming.

Tucker Carlson showed up at the Hells Angels funeral as a representative of white Christian Nationalism and far right ideology to vulnerable people grieving.

Fascists never miss a brainwashing opportunity to build their army.#DemVoice1 #OurBlueVoice #TruBlue

— Dark Straffin 🇺🇦 (@lyndastraffin) September 26, 2022

GOD, but these Lefty shitweasels give me the ass-ache.

This is who Tucker thinks are real patriots. — Tucker Carlson turns up to pay tribute to Hells Angels leader Sonny Barger https://t.co/mjRhEI5U5J

— Fred Wellman (@FPWellman) September 26, 2022

A damned sight more patriotic than you’re ever gonna be, Poindexter.

GOOD training

Posted on September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 by Mike 4 Comments

PGF over at the Captain’s Journal provides some truly helpful links for the AR15 newbie.

Many Traditional Americans have bought an AR-15 recently but have used it little or not at all. (Ahem, you know who you are!) The first thing to do is read the whole manual that came with your weapon. The manual should have a parts list diagram. This will be important info providing proper terminology. Most say what to do next is to take it partially apart (field strip), clean it, and reassemble it, even before shooting. You should at least field strip it and wipe down the excess manufacturer’s oil.

There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of information about the AR-15 platform on the web. Most of it is useless. It’s super high-speed operators, the bulk of whom are total jerks, trying to impress and one-up each other, whose language and decorum are despicable, which doesn’t help the average family with their homesteading, church, or team-building needs.

The object should be to train with the AR platform to get beyond your hunting knowledge. Your women folk also need to learn to run the gun.

Get very familiar with the weapon platform, how it performs, its capabilities, and its uses. Training with an AR is different than hunting; the platform is designed primarily for defense. That’s why you bought it, right!?!

Well, you need practice in all phases; handling and manipulation, including loading/unloading/reloading mags, safety, sling, sights, how and when to use the “ping pong paddle” – bolt catch/release lever, safety positions, the six-position buttstock, learning/running drills, shooting static/moving targets, shooting while you’re moving, etc.

You can see how this is definitively not a bolt gun and not like hunting! The time to learn your AR isn’t when your family is in trouble but before.

Indeed so. There’s also some handy, and free, AR info to be found here.

(Via WRSA)

An odd omission

Posted on September 28, 2022September 28, 2022 by Mike 9 Comments

HAD to have been an oversight, I’m guessing.

‘Take your a** home!’ Heavily-armed black rights groups march through Austin chanting anti-illegal migrant slogans, demands Biden ‘close the border’ and calls for ‘reparations to be paid NOW’

Armed activists with a coalition of black self-defense groupsmarched in Austin, Texas over the weekend calling for an end to illegal immigration and demanding that President Biden close the borders.

Some of the activists chanted ‘close the borders’ and ‘take your a** home’ as they marched toward the Texas Capitol in the ‘Second Amendment Unity Walk’ on Saturday.

The march was led by The Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt Pistol & Rifle Gun Club. Their demands also included reparations for descendants of enslaved people and a hate crime bill protecting Black Americans.

The group faced opposition from a handful of Trump supporters and other protesters gathered at the Texas State Capitol to support January 6 defendants.

Saturday’s march comes after Texas Gov. Abbott and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey sent thousands of migrants by bus to Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago, Illinois – all three sanctuary cities that have pledged not to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

Video and photos of the third annual ‘Second Amendment Unity Walk’ show marches armed with guns as they walked through the streets of Austin toward the Texas State Capitol.

Other than The Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt Pistol & Rifle Gun Club, several other groups were involved including the Black Riders Liberation Party.

‘Reparations now!’ the group chanted, according to Ford Fischer who tweeted from the march.

‘We don’t say ‘hands up, don’t shoot!” one explained. ‘Guns up!’ they chanted. ‘Shoot back!’

‘Close the borders!’ they chanted. One yelled ‘build the wall’ but the phrase didn’t catch on.

‘Immigrants, we’ve been here!’ another person yelled. ‘Take your ass home!

Vehicles honked their horns at the activists as they marched through the intersections chanting: ‘What do we want? Closed borders! When do we want it? Now!’

Once at the capitol building, a speaker summarized the group’s demands as ‘Reparations now, delineation, a stop to illegal immigration.’

Aside from that increasingly tedious “reparations” horseshit, I must admit I’m not finding a whole hell of a lot to disagree with here. Brothas got some right-nice hardware, if the pics are any indication. As for that strange “omission” I mentioned, here t’is: I scanned the whole piece without ever once running across a single usage of words like “extremist,” “radical,” “violent,” “terrorist,” etc. Didn’t see any of the usual FBI agents provocateurs in amongst ’em, either. Funny, that.

Gearheads

Posted on September 16, 2022September 16, 2022 by Mike

Man, where was this awesome chick back when I was 17?

Carburetors may represent old-school tech in the automotive world, but don’t tell Riley Schlick, a high school senior in Florida who rebuilds them for a tidy profit. Send your tired, dirty, mucked-up carburetor to Schlick and she’ll return it to you clean, shiny, and ready for duty once again. She has operated her Bradenton-based business, Riley’s Rebuilds, for three years now, and a steady stream of carburetors has crossed her path.

At first, Riley’s Rebuilds was a way for 17-year-old Schlick to buy her first car, which had to meet her parents’ specifications: It needed to have a manual transmission and a roll bar. Within a few months, she made enough money to buy a Jeep. Then, she brought on four friends to work with her. That hiring spree solved two problems, in Schlick’s mind. Her friends make more money rebuilding carburetors than they would working a minimum wage job, and they get to spend time together.

She learned how to do the work from her dad. “I said to her, ‘You can get a job at Publix or I can show you how to do some restoration stuff in the garage,” says Schlick’s father, Dane Trask, who rebuilds classic cars as a hobby. He showed her how to do it, and also made use of some YouTube tutorials. “She picked it up quick,” he says.

That alone is impressive. Myself, I had the hoary old gag line drilled into my head from early on: “Carburetor” is French for “leave it the fuck alone.” This next bit is pretty impressive as well.

Once the origin of the carb is determined, Schlick and the team document the model number and CFM rating (cubic feet per minute) and get the device ready to break down. Each carburetor has eight screws on top, Schlick explains, and they remove the hat and the floats (those work similarly to a float in a toilet tank, regulating the fuel level). Out comes the choke, which controls the air intake, and all the springs, screws, and bolts inside.

The team takes the screws and bolts and tosses them into a tumbler for about 20 minutes. Next, they soda blast the body, which harnesses tiny baking soda fibers to remove the dirt and grime. Then they transfer the parts to an ultrasonic tank, and blow out the ports with an air compressor to clear any remaining soda bits.

“We use soda blasting instead of sand or glass because it’s not super aggressive,” Schlick said. “The soda doesn’t get stuck in the carburetor like other materials would.”

We had a glass-beader in the HD shop I worked in, and the quickest way I can think of to convert any carburetor into an overpriced doorstop would be to put it in the beading cabinet and blast away at it. Hell, if my boss had ever seen me walking too close to the beading cabinet with a carb in my hand—even a lowly old S&S Super B, a long-outdated piece o’crap Harley carb consisting of nothing but a venturi’d throat, an idle screw, and an air screw, with a flange bolted onto the side to attach the throttle cable and fuel line to and a float bowl on the bottom—he’d have skinned me alive with a rusty old Buck pocketknife.

Nope, suffice it to say that in our shop, carbs and blasting cabinets did NOT mix. Using baking soda as a blasting/scouring medium is a genius idea, if you ask me. Via Bayou Pete, who follows up thusly:

God bless them all:

The parents who encourage their kids to succeed;

The girls who aren’t afraid of hard work;

The ability of all concerned to recognize a gap in the market, and fill it;

The girls’ drive to succeed, and build a business that’s as much fun as it is work.

That’s just great!

Those girls won’t have to waste tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a worthless degree, and won’t have to beg for extra money from their parents. They’re earning their own way in life from a very early age, and setting an example for every one of their peers. They’ll hopefully be able to afford to choose their further education based on what they can pay for out of their own pockets, and what interests them rather than what’s politically correct.

Congratulations to all concerned, and thank you. We need more like you!

Do we ever. This calls for a song I actually wrote for my own darling daughter, who shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in turning wrenches and busting knuckles, the lone exception to that total dearth of interest being the day I snapped this pic at the shop:

Jr wrench

The young ‘un took a notion all on her own hook, went to Daddy’s rollaway box, snatched up a wrench, and monkeyed around with the shift lever on that unfinished custom-build for a while before scampering off someplace else, lured away from a prospective mechanicing career by God only knows what. Probably a good thing, as anyone who’s ever wrenched for a living could tell you. Now for that tune I mentioned…

That song came to be when I was out working on something or other underneath the ol’ 56 Club Sedan one fine day, with baby Madeleine strapped into her little rocking-chair thingy on the driveway nearby. I cracked my skull but good on the front crossmember as I tried to slide under the blasted thing, whereupon the young ‘un just about choked herself laughing at poor old Daddy’s plight.

Walking away from a sick, ruined system

Posted on September 12, 2022 by Mike

Kudos to this woman for her courage and her moral fiber, but I must strongly suggest she hire herself some bodyguards. I suspect she’s gonna need ’em, and I don’t mean just one, either.

So, here’s my big (for me) announcement: I am retiring from the active practice of law in the courts. I will no longer be representing clients in litigation (criminal, civil, appeal, administrative) matters or defending investigations. I am done being a working litigator.

I’ll have more to say later, but the bottom line is, after 26 years, & especially the last few, I have come to an inescapable conclusion: there is no justice to be had in our “justice” system. I am no longer willing to participate in a system that I consider to be a total farce.

My status as a practicing litigator has constrained me from speaking truth to and about the system. With that constraint removed, I will not be silent any longer.

The state of our institutions – particularly the criminal “justice” ones, but also the federal civil courts – is dire, & is unacceptable for a functioning republic. They must be radically overhauled & reformed, & a renewed emphasis on first principles restored.

Lawyers working from inside the system can make some changes, but not the radical reforms that we now need. Some of us will need to be outside the system to do what is necessary & what can only be done by speaking freely.

That can’t be done by me personally unless I no longer have clients whose interests I am honor-bound to place above those of the system and the nation. So, I am changing that to chart a new course.

I may in future again testify as an expert in clearances & I will probably still provide consulting advice to people who need help w/the clearance process.

But, in the main, & for the foreseeable future, I am going to be focusing on our most urgent needs as a nation.

We must rededicate ourselves to the rule of law, to federalism, to free speech, to true tolerance, to the Bill of Rights, to liberty values.

We have lost our connection to these things. We must find it again. We will lose the Republic if we don’t.

I leave you for now with this observation from Elmer Davis:

“This republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it.”

Amen to everything you’ve said here, ma’am. Fair winds and following seas to you and yours.

(Via Insty)

To “boldly” go where no man has gone before we’ve already been a dozen or so times

Posted on September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 by Mike

Forgive me and all, but I’m finding it mighty hard to get excited about this.

Half a century ago, the future felt different. Take 1969, quite a year in the aerospace biz: In one twelve month period, we saw the test flight of the Boeing 747, the maiden voyage of the Concorde, the RAF’s deployment of the Harrier “jump jet” …and Neil Armstrong’s “giant step for mankind”. Buzz Aldrin packed a portable tape player with him on Apollo 11, and so Sinatra’s ring-a-ding-ding recording of “Fly Me To The Moon” became the first (human) music to be flown to the moon and played there. Had any other nation beaten Nasa to it, they’d have marked the occasion with the “Ode To Joy” or Also Sprach Zarathustra, something grand and formal. But there’s something marvelously American about the first human being to place his feet on the surface of a heavenly sphere standing there with a cassette machine blasting out Frank and the Count Basie band in a swingin’ Quincy Jones arrangement – the insouciant swagger of the American century breaking the bounds of the planet.

In 1961, before the eyes of the world, President Kennedy had set American ingenuity a very specific challenge – and put a clock on it:

This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

That’s it. No wiggle room. A monkey on the moon wouldn’t count, nor an unmanned drone, nor a dune buggy that can’t take off again but transmits grainy footage back to Houston as it rusts up in the crater it came to rest in. The only way to win the bet is with a real-live actual American standing on the surface of the moon planting the Stars and Stripes. Even as it happened, the White House was so cautious that William Safire wrote President Nixon a speech to be delivered in the event of disaster:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace…

Yet America did it. “Fly Me To The Moon/Let me sing forever more.” What comes after American yearning and achievement? Democratization: “Everybody Gets To Go The Moon”. That all but forgotten Jimmy Webb song from 1969 catches the spirit of the age:

Isn’t it a miracle
That we’re the generation
That will touch that shiny bauble with our own two hands?

Whatever happened to that?

Four decades later, Bruce Charlton, Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham in England, wrote that “that landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans.” That’s a good way to look at it: The political class presented the boffins with a highly difficult and specific problem and they solved it – in eight years. Charlton continued:

Forty years ago, we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something… But I am suggesting that all this is BS… I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe, but, comparing 1950 to the early twenty-first century, our time traveler from 1890 might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn’t it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet blasting out from his iPod Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas or whatever the 21st century version of Sinatra and the Basie band is… It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a nineteenth century date farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here someplace.

So what happened? According to Professor Charlton, in the 1970s “the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy”. The old can-do spirit? Oh, you can try to do it, but they’ll toss every obstacle in your path. Go on, give it a go: Invent a new medical device; start a company; go to the airport to fly to DC and file a patent. Everything’s longer, slower, more soul-crushing. And the decline in “human capability” will only worsen in the years ahead, thanks not just to excess bureaucracy but insufficient cash.

“Yes, we can!” droned the dopey Obamatrons of 2008. No, we can’t, says Charlton, not if you mean “land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover breakthrough medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22…”

Houston, we have a much bigger problem.

As Steyn notes with a wince and a groan, how depressingly far we’d fallen by the time Bathhouse Barry decreed that NASA would make “Muslim outreach” its top priority, so as to make sure the Muzzrats would feel better about their grotesquely exaggerated “achievements” in mathematics and science 800 and some-odd years ago. The sad, sorry denouement:

It’s easy to laugh at the likes of Abu Hamza, although not as easy as it should be, not in Europe and Canada, where the state is eager to haul you into court for “Islamophobia”. But the laugh’s on us. Nasa is the government agency whose acronym was known around the planet, to every child who looked up at the stars and wondered what technological marvels the space age would have produced by the time he was out of short pants. Now the starry-eyed moppets are graying boomers, and the agency that symbolized man’s reach for the skies has transformed itself into a self-esteem boosterism operation. Is there an accompanying book – Muslims Are from Mars, Infidels Are from Venus?

There’s your American decline right there: From out-of-this-world to out-of-our-minds, an increasingly unmanned flight from real, historic technological accomplishment to unreal, ahistorical therapeutic touchy-feely multiculti.

So we can’t go to the moon. And, by the time you factor in getting to the airport to do the shoeless shuffle and the enhanced patdown, flying to London takes longer than it did in 1960. If they were trying to build the transcontinental railroad now, they’d be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the Golden Spike to celebrate the point at which the Feasibility Commission’s expansion up from the fifth floor met the Zoning Board’s expansion down from the twelfth floor.

And there you have it: the Überstate’s metastasization into the strangling, all-powerful Gorgon it has now become was well under way back in Kennedy’s day, but America still had stones enough to make it to the moon and back repeatedly even so. Now, under the aegis of senile old Pedo Jaux and encumbered by a federal bureaucracy so stupendously vast it can’t even figure out how many people “work” for it? Sorry, but we lost that mojo long, long ago. Unless Elon Musk is involved, I’ll believe it when I see it.

No easy pickin’s

Posted on September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 by Mike

I don’t know much at all about Repub candidate for Arizona governor Kari Lake. But so far, I like what I’m seeing.

Last week, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake masterfully turned the tables on a reporter who thought he was asking her a gotcha question about accepting the results of an election.

“You feel like Joe Biden is dividing the country. Do you feel Donald Trump is doing the same by falsely telling people he won that election when he lost it?” the reporter asked.

“How does that divide the country? Questioning an election where there are obviously problems is dividing the country?” she asked. “Since when can we not ask questions about our elections? As a journalist for many years—I was a journalist after 2016 and I distinctly remember many people just like you, asking a lot of questions about the 2016 election results and nobody tried to shut you up.”

Lake was hardly finished tearing this reporter a new one.

“Nobody tried to tell Hillary Clinton to shut up. Nobody tried to tell Kamala Harris when she was questioning the legitimacy of these electronic voting machines to stop. We have freedom of speech in this country and you of all that people should appreciate that. You’re supposedly a journalist. You should appreciate that. So I don’t see how asking questions about an election where there were many problems is ‘dividing’ a country. What I do see divided a country is shutting people down, censoring people, canceling people, trying to destroy people’s lives when they do ask questions. Last I heard we still have the Constitution. It’s hanging by a thread thanks to some of the work some people in this area have done. But we’re going to save that Constitution and we’re going to bring back freedom of speech. And maybe someday you’ll thank us for that.”

Well said, ma’am, but not bloody likely. After all, they’re steadfastly against freedom of speech for anyone but themselves, the Constitution, and freedom generally.

Where schadenboners come from

Posted on September 4, 2022 by Mike

I love this more than mere words could ever express.

TUCKER COUNTY, W.Va. (WBOY) – On Friday, an electric vehicle broke down along Corridor H in Tucker County on its way to a weekend getaway in Davis. Luckily, a group of local coal miners were happy to help.

Tucker County’s Senator Randy Smith documented the moment on Facebook. The car broke down right in front of the Mettiki Coal access road on US 48, which is several miles from Davis. “Someone called one of our foreman and told him a car was broke down in the middle of our haul road,” said Smith’s post.

Because the vehicle was plastic underneath, there was no way to tow it, so a group of miners decided to push it. “So here are 5 coal miners pushing a battery car to the coal mine to charge up.” You could even see mounds of coal in the background while the vehicle was charging.

Far as I’m concerned, the only thing wrong with this otherwise heartwarming story is the totally unsatisfactory ending. In a perfect world, the stupid EV hunk o’ junk would’ve caught on fire while it was being charged and burned to a crispity crunch.

PSYCH!!!

Posted on September 4, 2022 by Mike

Fascinating stuff, if also a bit disturbing.

5 Psychological Experiments That Explain the Modern World
“Cognitive Dissonance”, “Diffusion of Responsibility”, and “learned helplessness” are phrases that regularly do the rounds, but where do they come from and what (do) they mean?

Well, here are the important psycho-social experiments that teach us about the way people think, but more than that they actually explain how our modern world works, and just how we got into this mess.

The Experiment: Let’s start with the most famous. Beginning in 1963, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments now referred to as the Milgram Obedience Experiments.

The setting is simple, Subject A is told to conduct a memory test on Subject B, and administer electric shocks when he makes mistakes. Of course, Subject B does not exist, and the electric shocks are not real. Instead, actors would cry, ask for help or pretend to be unconscious, all the while Subject A would be encouraged to carry on administering the shocks.

The vast majority of subjects carried on with the test and gave the shocks, despite the distress of “Subject B”.

The Conclusion: In his paper on this experiment Stanley Milgram coined the term “diffusion of responsibility”, describing the psychological process by which a person can excuse or justify doing harm to someone if they believe it’s not really their fault, they won’t be held accountable, or they do not have a choice.

The Application: Almost literally endless. All institutions can use this phenomenon to pressure people into acting against their own moral code. The army, the police, hospital staff – wherever there is a hierarchy or perceived authority, people will fall victim to the diffusion of their own responsibility.

NOTE: They made a decent film about Milgram, and the backlash his experiments caused called Experimenter. In recent years there has been a major pushback on this experiment, with articles in the MSM attacking the findings and methodology and new “researchers” claiming “it does not prove what you think it does.”

Though they’re all quite interesting, the story of the “Monkey Ladder” experiment has to be my favorite of them, for reasons you’ll understand when you read about it. The takeaway?

So, there they are. Five of the most critical pieces of psychological research ever done, hopefully going forward nobody will be left in the dark when these concepts or experiments are referenced.

But the point of this article is not to just make you, the reader, understand these experiments…it is also meant to remind you that they do.

The people in charge, the elite, the 1%, “The Party”. The powers that be – or shouldn’t be – whatever you want to call them.

They know these experiments. They have studied them. They’ve probably replicated them countless times on grand scales and in unethical ways we can barely imagine. Who knows exactly what takes place in the dank dark dungeons of the deep state?

Just remember, they know how the human mind works.

They know they can make people do anything if they reassure them they won’t be held responsible.

They know that they can rely on people to abuse any power they’re given, OR believe they are powerless if they’re treated that way.

They know that peer pressure will change a lot of people’s minds even in the face of undeniable reality, especially if you make them feel completely alone.

They know that if you offer people only a small reward for completing a task, they will make up their own psychological justification for taking it.

They know that people will mindlessly do whatever everyone else is doing without ever asking for a reason.

And they know that people will happily believe something that never happened if it is repeated often enough.

They know all of this. And they use that knowledge all the time – All. The. Time.

Every commercial you see, every article you read, every movie they release, every item on the news, every “viral” social media post, every trending hashtag.

Every war. Every pandemic. Every headline.

All of them are constructed with these principles in mind to elicit specific emotional reactions that steer your behaviour and beliefs. That’s how the media works, not to inform you, not to entertain you…but to control you.

And they have it down to a science. Always remember that.

Indeed they do. The ginned up CoVid panic proved that beyond all possibility of doubt or debate.

Putting a face on the Deep State

Posted on September 3, 2022 by Mike

Bill Barr’s, for one.

“Number one is that I think a lot of the attacks on the FBI are over the top because a decision like this is not made by the FBI,” former Attorney General William Barr told the Bari Weiss podcast on August 25.

“In fact, I don’t think the FBI would push a decision that it’s best to go in and search and obtain those documents after being jerked around for a year and a half. The decision would be made at the Department of Justice, by subordinates of the AG, and ultimately signed off on by the AG. The FBI would be told to go and execute it. I think the idea that the FBI is the problem here is misplaced.”

The former AG was more disturbed by “the constant pandering to outrage” on the right, without discussion of whether the outrage had any merit. The FBI seized Trump’s passports, leaving the impression that the former president had committed a crime and was now a flight risk. FBI agents also rummaged through the closets of Melania Trump, an act of pure intimidation. With Trump attorneys forced outside, the FBI could easily have planted or destroyed information. If that is not cause for outrage, it’s hard to imagine what might qualify.

On the other hand, the former AG explained, “I don’t think that Chris Wray is that type of leader nor do I think the people around Chris Wray are those types of leaders,” people who might “throw the FBI’s weight around to interfere in the political process.” Barr thinks Wray is “very cautious about that,” but observers have to wonder.

When selected as FBI boss, Wray denied any “spying” had taken place against the Trump campaign. As the world now knows, the FBI did spy on the Trump campaign. In 2018, Wray proclaimed, “I do not believe special counsel Mueller is on a witch hunt.”

Mueller’s “professional investigation,” aided by partisan Democrats, turned up no evidence of collusion with Russia. All told, Christopher Wray doesn’t sound like someone who is “very cautious” about interfering in the political process. Wray is all-in with the Mar-a-Lago raid, and as it turns out, so is William Barr.

“What is the nature of the highly classified information?” Barr wondered. “What is the evidence, if any, of active conceit by the president or those around him in Mar-a-Lago to mislead the government?” Remember, in Barr’s view, Trump had been “jerking around” the FBI for a year and a half, so they had to launch the raid.

To all but the willfully blind, the FBI is now the American KGB, and like that organization engaged in “special tasks,” not exactly within the law. The FBI plants evidence (funds planted on Trump associate George Papodopoulos), falsifies evidence (Kevin Clinesmith changing the email about Carter Page), engages in political stagecraft, (the fake Whitmer kidnap plot) and pressures social media platforms to avoid news of Hunter Biden’s laptop, supposedly “Russian disinformation.”

Back in 2020, Attorney General Barr hadn’t seen evidence of voter fraud on a scale that would have affected the outcome of the election. Weiss did not press Barr for details on the audits his DOJ conducted on races that suddenly reversed in favor of Biden.

Barr provided no tallies of the number of illegals who had voted in California, where the “motor voter” program automatically registers illegals to vote. Stuffed ballot boxes, as shown in 2000 Mules, also escaped his notice. No second thoughts about voter fraud, but the former AG and CIA man remained certain about POTUS 45.

“Trump is his own worst enemy,” Barr told Weiss. “He’s incorrigible. He doesn’t take advice from people. I said to him when I first started that I thought he was going to lose the election unless he adjusted a little bit. And if he did adjust, he could go down in history as a great president. He continued to be self-indulgent and petty and turned off key constituencies that ultimately made the difference in the election.”

For the former AG, voter fraud had nothing to do with it. Embattled Americans can thank Barr for providing a moment of clarity.

Donald Trump is not his own worst enemy. Donald Trump’s worst enemies include his own attorney general, members of his own party, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has now crossed the line.

Whatever special tasks the FBI has planned, former attorney general William Barr will be there to back them up, just as he did with FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi. The defender of the deep state can be no friend of the people.

Precisely, indubitably so. I was foolish enough to buy into all the “square shooter, impartial seeker of truth and justice” guff early on, which in hindsight is kinda embarrassing. As a commenter puts it, Bill Barr IS the Deep State; he and his ilk can only ever be part of the problem, never the solution.

The greatest airplane story EVAR

Posted on September 2, 2022September 2, 2022 by Mike

Anybody who has even the slightest tinge of affection for the WW2-era piston-engine classics is going to LOVE this one.

On 26 May 1940, No 19 Squadron Leader Geoffrey Stephenson left RAF Duxford airfield in Spitfire N3200, piloting the aircraft on its first and only mission. Before the Battle of Britain, Duxford’s Spitfires were recruited in the defence of Operation Dynamo.

Dynamo was the emergency evacuation of the British Expeditionary Forces from the French port of Dunkirk by the Royal Navy, and had air cover from all available Royal Air Force aircraft – including Spitfire N3200.

Now, 82 years on, the recovered aircraft stands proudly at IWM Duxford, just a short walk from the very same hangar where the No 19 Squadron’s Spitfires were kept during World War Two. Spitfire N3200 has also been fully restored to flying condition, and is set to take flight once again at Duxford Battle of Britain Air Show on 10 and 11 September 2022.

But what happened to Spitfire N3200 in May 1940, and how did it return to its home at Duxford?

The Brylcreem Boys of No 19 Squadron were tasked with a crucial mission in the renowned Miracle of Dunkirk: flying CAS as close-pressed hordes of British, Belgian, and French footsloggers were plucked from the beach and ferried across the Channel to safety. And then…

After shooting down a Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bomber, Stephenson was himself shot down, crash-landing on a beach at Sangatte, near Calais. He was captured, remaining a prisoner for the rest of the war.

While Stephenson spent the war imprisoned, including a stint at the notorious Colditz Castle, Spitfire N3200 sank slowly into the sand.

Which is when events took a REALLY interesting turn.

Over 45 years later in 1986, Spitfire N3200 emerged from the sand on a French beach. Strong currents had revealed the crashed aircraft, and so began the process of excavating the wreck, which although largely intact, not much could be salvaged.

The Spitfire’s pilot, Geoffrey Stephenson, survived the war but was not able to see his aircraft dragged from the beach. He was tragically killed in America in 1954 during a test flight.

In 2000, Dr Thomas Kaplan and Simon Marsh commissioned Historic Flying Limited to restore Spitfire N3200 to its former glory. Only 4 years later, the aircraft returned to the skies.

As you can see, glory is most definitely the mot juste for this war-eagle reborn.

Beautiful, no? And with such a unique story to tell, too.

(Via WeirdDave)

Publick Notice

Posted on September 1, 2022 by Mike

Sporadic and unsatisfactory blogging will continue hereabouts for the nonce, sorry to say. After some increasingly strident urging from a good few friends of mine, my boy Tim hipped me to a good, reasonably priced USB microphone which I’m going to dip into my meager funds and order this coming Friday for podcasting purposes. I’ve been working on getting all set up and ready to go on that long-deferred project the past cpl of weeks, and still have plenty more to do yet.

Second look at “The Talk”?

Posted on August 25, 2022 by Mike

Derbyshire proven right.

Last Sunday, a college couple, 22-year-old Adam Simjee and his 20-year-old girlfriend, Mikayla Paulus, were driving through Talladega National Forest when they were flagged down by a black woman having car trouble. If I tell you the good Samaritans may have been National Review readers, you can probably guess that one of them ended up dead.

As they were trying to fix the car, the woman, Yasmine Hider, pointed a gun at them and demanded they walk into the woods and hand over their phones and wallets. At some point, Simjee pulled out his own gun and started firing at Hider, wounding her. She shot back, killing him.

The reason I suspect the couple were National Review readers is that the “good Samaritan” ruse was one of the bullet points in John Derbyshire’s famous “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” which got him fired from National Review in 2012—standing athwart history and mewling, “Please like me, liberals.”

Derbyshire hadn’t even published the piece in NR.

He was responding to a spate of lachrymose accounts of black parents describing “The Talk” they have to give their sons, instructing them to be super polite to police officers—smile and say, “Yes, sir”—lest the officer shoot them to death for no reason whatsoever. (Ask any police officer, and they will tell you black arrestees, to a man, are the politest people you will ever meet.)

In the piece, Derbyshire issued exhortations about treating black people with “the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen,” but then listed “some unusual circumstances,” requiring extra vigilance due to “considerations of personal safety.”

The “personal safety” rules concerned only complete strangers. His point was that when you have no other information to go on, you have to rely on statistics.

Derbyshire’s Rule 10 (h) was: “Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.” He appended links to stories like the one that began this column.

Coulter goes on to list a few examples, then quotes one of Derb’s more fierce detractors at the time (Slate’s Will Saletan) before deftly skewering him thusly:

Thus, his central complaint was: “Derbyshire thinks his data warrant his conclusions. But all his data references include the crucial term ‘mean’ or ‘average.’ They don’t tell you about the person walking toward you. They tell you what you can assess about the probability of danger when the only information you have is color.”

Yes, exactly, you complete moron. That’s the point, subtly indicated by Derbyshire stating that he was referring only to those occasions when you don’t have any other information about a person. (Do black parents giving “The Talk” remind their sons not to make assumptions about any particular cop walking toward them?)

Back in the halcyon days of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, we had one other fact to guide us: Criminals were in prison. Unfortunately for black people, a small percentage of their community commit a boatload of crime. But as long as criminals went to prison, New Yorkers could pass black men with little concern because if they were criminals, they’d most likely be locked up, not standing on a subway platform next to you.

Not anymore.

Which, to unanimous shitlib amazement, hasn’t worked out at all well for anybody. Go figure, huh?

Good riddance to bad rubbish

Posted on August 25, 2022August 25, 2022 by Mike

Okay: first, this happened.

DeSantis on Fauci: “I’m just sick of seeing him. I know he says he’s gonna retire. Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac!”pic.twitter.com/zB20gKOiZZ

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) August 24, 2022

Needless to say, being a diehard DeSantis fan myself as well as someone who despises the malignant, lying dwarf Fauxci with every fiber of his being, I thoroughly enjoyed Da Guv’s statement—as did his audience, who apparently responded with, as noted crawly-thing David French sniffily sniffed, “wild cheering.” Unsurprisingly, French was hardly the only dainty and sanctimonious NeverTrumporrhoid who found DeSantis’ laugh line upsetting; Ace posts several other like examples of dudgeon most high, before uncorking a hilarious fusillade of his own.

Two interesting points about this Fake Upper-Crust Sensibility thing:

First, it’s fake. This is a competition among weak and inferior men to prove themselves strong and superior. They can’t prove themselves strong and superior in actual strength or superiority, so they change the criteria to better fit them, that is, a more feminine sort of competition they could actually beat other men at. Namely, “refinement,” taste, and a capacity to be offended and terrified by tiny things like humorous jibes and mice skittering across the kitchen floor.

There are actual objective criteria to determine who is the strongest, the smartest, etc., but it’s up for grabs to say who has “the finest taste.” So Noah Blum can compete in the Princess and the Pea Olympics and have a very good chance of winning, especially because most actual men would not compete in such a delicate contest.

Second, this is again just a game of showing hatred for the dreaded Lower Orders. David French and Noah Blum and the rest of the Fake Aristo Swells are always straining to discover exciting new Class Distinctions they can adorn themselves with to prove they are not like the raucous and unseemly Working Classes. A feather of delicate sensibilities worn behind the ear, a ribbon of refined taste in Marvel Movie Appreciation dangled over the heart.

Anything to show that the New Nobility is different than and superior to those thick-fingered White Niggers that vote for Trump and think that a nation’s borders should be enforced.

Fuck off, fairies. Go knit a doily for your wife’s boyfriend to put his drink on.

Oh, and French: Have the lambs stopped screaming, French?

Heh. SIDE NOTE: Ace decided to asterisk-out the N-word in his post, likely in the interests of politesse. But as CF Lifers will already be aware, I’m hindered by no such compunctions myself, so I went ahead and just said it right out loud, in front of God and everybody.

As for Fraudci: physically, literally booting his worthless ass across the Potomac of right ought to be the very least of that good-enough-for-government-work rectal polyp’s worries. The damage he did during his overextended sinecure as a top-level FederalGovCo stooge calls for one hell of a lot more, and worse.

Getting it now?

Posted on August 25, 2022 by Mike

Vile bastards need to be made to bleed. No, I do NOT mean figuratively.

They Want Her Dead: Marjorie Taylor Greene Swatted for Second Night in a Row
For the second night in a row, police showed up at the home of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in the early hours of Thursday morning, responding to a fake 911 call. Once again, it appears that someone on the Left is hoping to get Greene into a situation in which she or others in her home could be killed.

Two police officers rushed to Greene’s home in Rome, Ga., in response to a call they received at 2:53 a.m. The call, according to the Rome Police Department, was about “a male possibly shooting his family members and then himself.”

MSN reported that “the suspect, who called through an internet chat that appeared to be a suicide crisis line, falsely told police responders that a man ‘came out as trans-gender and claimed they shot the family’ at Greene’s address, the report said.” The caller gave his name as Wayne Greene and told police on the call: “If anyone tried to stop me from shooting myself, I will shoot them.” He also warned cops that “they would be waiting for us.”

At the house, there was, of course, no Wayne Greene. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene once again met the police officers at the front door, as she did in the early hours of Wednesday morning. They told her about the call and, according to the Rome Police Department, “confirmed this was a second false report.” The report added that the call can’t be traced, “due to the person(s) using a VPN.”

As Greene stated Wednesday, “This is how they get people killed…it’s like political terrorism.” Police responding to what they have been led to believe is a crisis situation could all too easily respond mistakenly but lethally to innocuous behavior, resulting in Greene’s death or the death of someone else at the house.

Terrorism—no need for that “political” modifier, since ALL terrorism is by definition political—is precisely what this is. Be assured, the investigation and/or prosecution (if any) of this heinous act of bona fide terrorism will be languid and lackadaisical at best, if not downright reluctant, MTG being considered by the Deep State and its various “law enforcement” entities as an approved, legitimate target. Bottom line?

This makes it clear yet again: radical Leftists are totalitarians. They want their opponents silenced. They want their opponents dead. They will brook no dissent.

Precisely, indubitably so. Rest assured that, henceforth, the only justice MTG or any other Real American can realistically expect to see visited upon their assailants and tormentors for their criminal brigandry is vigilante justice.

Save Adriana Grace!

Posted on August 20, 2022August 21, 2022 by Mike

So after the disheartening developments I mentioned the other day, after consulting with the child’s Guardian Ad Litem, BCE and Wifey would seem to have at least some cause for optimism regarding a more positive outcome, which you can and should read about here. Thing is, it’s gonna require them to Lawyer Up, and we all know what THAT necessarily means. To wit:

So, yeah, I did talk to the Guardian Ad Litem for Gran#2 today. BCE EDIT Normally I don’t ‘jump in’ and edit our leader’s stuff, but I got advice to delete and edit ANY and all references to the GAL. Seems I shouldn’t have mentioned him at all what with a trial coming up., so apologies to Mike and y’all. End BCE Edit Good dood IMO.

He also seems to genuinely have the Grans best interests in line with ours. Said the Foster Care she’s in is top notch and WAY better than the morons having her. BCE EDIT Normally I don’t ‘jump in’ and edit our leader’s stuff, but I got advice to delete and edit ANY and all references to the GAL. Seems I shouldn’t have mentioned him at all what with a trial coming up., so apologies to Mike and y’all. AGAIN. End BCE Edit That means having to raise funds for a Lawyer. Between friends and family and y’all, we should be able to do it. I’m going to start a give-send-go as them GoFuckMe err… Fund Me fuckers that I did Mike’s Fundraiser for sucked ass.

I purely hate doing it but I’m having trouble getting the equity out of the house. My original Mortgage was with Washington Mutual, and got caught up in the maelstrom of subprime package/repackage and OMFG who knows what during the whole sub-collapse back in the late Oughts’ A few of the issues is despite the Ex having done the Quit Deed paperwork when I ‘won’ the divorce, the paperwork in some places still show her as on the mortgage, even though we’ve been through six? years +/-? It’s making the Equity thingy really difficult, and I’m pressed for time.

The campaign is HERE: https://www.givesendgo.com/SaveAdrianaGrace

Even if you don’t have anything to spare for the fundraising campaign, which is entirely understandable in the Biden Era, you should check out the GiveSendGo page anyhow, just for the pic of Adriana; I swear, she really is just the most adorable little thing. Fingers crossed and prayers up for her and her loving grandparents.

The author of all woe

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Mike

Is the Mark-1, Mod-0 nitwit Peter Navarro aptly dubs the Clown Prince of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Take credit for what worked. Shift the blame for what didn’t. Run to Daddy-in-law whenever the big, bad chief of staff got in his way. That was Jared Kushner’s modus operandi during the long four years I had to serve alongside the man most responsible for the loss of the Trump White House.

Kushner came to the D.C. swamp on the coattails of his wife as nothing more than a young and rich, run-of-the-mill liberal New York Democrat with a worldview totally orthogonal to the president he was supposed to serve. Yet, within the West Wing, Kushner considered himself to be the ultimate “Trump whisperer.”

In private, Jared would boast about how he had brought the president back from whatever he considered the brink to be that day—whether it was securing the southern border, leaving NAFTA, or slapping tariffs on China. Never mind that he was derailing, deterring, and delaying Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda in real-time and at great political and economic costs.

Jared’s “neuter the boss” role quickly became a source of friction between us. He believed that I, more than anyone inside the West Wing, could “rile up” the president to take actions that were, in fact, totally consistent with Trump’s central campaign promises. But as this particular Wall Street transactionalist liked to say (and it always made me cringe): “That was the campaign. This is reality.”

In the cold light of a January West Wing day, there was simply no other explanation than nepotism to account for how this decidedly unqualified Clown Prince wound up sitting as a modern-day Rasputin at the right hand of Trump.

To this day, my old Boss still has no idea just how much damage Kushner/Rasputin did to the presidency and the Trump agenda during his four year reign of error at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The work of fiction Jared is now readying for publication is just more self-serving manure to shovel over the past and obscure our view of the damage.

Fortunately, if Trump makes it back to the White House, it will be a Kushner-free zone. Kushner has already disqualified himself from future White House employment by cashing in on his White House connections to fund his many entrepreneurial ventures.

Can’t honestly say I’m unhappy to hear it.

Slut life

Posted on August 17, 2022August 17, 2022 by Mike

A story that’s about much more than just sex.

I Regret Being A Slut

Hey, I didn’t say it wasn’t about sex at all, y’know. Onwards.

I was first inspired to write this piece when a 19-year-old woman I used to wait tables with asked me: “Bridget, have you ever regretted having sex with a man?”

I laughed. “Yeah. All of them.”

That’s not entirely true. There was my first love in high school. And my first husband. But if I’m honest with myself, of the dozens of men I’ve been with (at least the ones I remember), I can only think of a handful I don’t regret. The rest I would put in the category of “casual,” which I would define as sex that is either meaningless or mediocre (or both). If I get really honest with myself, I’d say most of these usually drunken encounters left me feeling empty and demoralized. And worthless.

I wouldn’t have said that at the time, though. At the time, I would have told you I was “liberated” even while I tried to drink away the sick feeling of rejection when my most recent hook-up didn’t call me back. At the time, I would have said one-night stands made me feel “emboldened.” But in reality, I was using sex like a drug; trying unsuccessfully to fill a hole inside me with men. (Pun intended.)

I know regretting most of my sexual encounters is not something a sex-positive feminist who used to write a column for Playboy is supposed to admit. And for years, I didn’t. Let me be clear, being a “slut” and sleeping with a lot of men is not the only behavior I regret. Even more damaging was what I told myself in order to justify the fact that I was disposable to these men: I told myself I didn’t care.

I didn’t care when a man ghosted me. I didn’t care when he left in the middle of the night or hinted that he wanted me to leave. The walks of shame. The blackouts. The anxiety.

The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain—I’m empowered.

I lost my virginity at 17 to my boss at a restaurant where I worked. And a year later, I experienced my first sexual trauma. I felt damaged and dirty and I blamed myself. Everyone responds differently to these situations—I dealt with the overwhelming shame by becoming hyper-sexual and promiscuous.

The Culture was right there to pick me up and dust me off. I doubled down on being a proud slut and internalized the biggest and most damaging lie: that loveless sex is empowering. I basked in the girl-power glow of that delusion for decades, weaponizing my sexuality while convincing myself I was full of the divine feminine.

I was full of shit.

I told myself that because I could seduce a man, I was powerful. But as Perry says in her book, “…women can all too easily fail to recognize that being desired is not the same thing as being held in high esteem.” Deep down inside, I knew that to be the case. But as a defense mechanism, I crafted a man-eater persona. My mantras were rigid.

You can either have a career or a relationship—but you can’t have both.

Intimacy is creepy.

Motherhood and children are a trap.

Sex is only about power.

And there it is, right there in the above list, clear as crystal for anyone with eyes to see: this regretful lass wasn’t victimized, traumatized, and misled by sex. No, at the end of the day t’was Leftist cant that led her astray, manipulated and took advantage of her, and robbed her of both her dignity and her self-respect.

Those four bullet-points she cites are indeed a rigid mantra, but it isn’t one original to her, and she is by no means unique in having adopted it. Each one of those four lies long predated her attainment of the age of sexual majority; they were lurking in the proverbial “grey areas” of a sabotaged moral code just waiting for her to wander by, a trap baited and set by the Left generations before so as to ensnare impressionable, vulnerable young naifs such as herself.

Update! Meant to include this part, and almost forgot it.

I’m not speaking for all women. I know many women with a solid sense of self who happily have loveless sex. This piece won’t make them defensive. But a lot of women will read this and bristle, just like I did, when I used to read something that pushed back on the lie I’d built my entire identity around.

Or maybe you’re a trans or nonbinary person reading this, thinking “What quaint ideas about gender and sex this old trad con has.” And to that I’ll say, it makes sense to me that the generation of young women who have experienced and borne witness to some of the worst side-effects of unyoking sex from consequence and love that Perry meticulously outlines in her book, “rough sex, hook-up culture, and ubiquitous porn”—would take a look around and decide:

I’d rather be a man. Or more accurately, I’d rather not be a woman.

But maybe it’s the inevitable conclusion to the sexual revolution. Today’s youth are being fed an even more dangerous lie than the one that I was fed about loveless sex. I was told sex doesn’t matter. They’re being told biology doesn’t matter.

This is a tragedy.

No, it’s a crime—an abomination, an act of pure, unleavened evil, that’s what it is.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

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