GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

Empire Of Lies

The FUSA indubitably is such now, but was it always? Could be, could be. Y’all are doubtless familiar with the Bixby Letter of great renown, as so unforgettably quoted by the actor portraying Ike’s CoS, US GEN George C Marshall, in Saving Private Ryan:

Some damned fine acting there, folks—particularly the part where Marshall sits to finish quoting the letter from memory, with wonderfully understated passion and intensity. Those are the kind of actor’s choices which can make or break a movie, which elevate a merely good flick to a truly great one. One thing I know: when I first saw that early Ryan scene in the local cineplexafter the harrowing, almost unbearable D-Day scene at the beginning—there couldn’t be the least doubt that I was in for one hell of a good ride. And so I was at that. There’s a reason Spielberg’s masterpiece went on to be thought of as one of the greatest movies ever made, and it’s a good one too.

Ahh, but was Lincoln’s letter to the bereaved Mrs Bixby all that IT was cracked up to be? Apparently, it wasn’t; in fact, it may well not have been authored by President Lincoln at all, but by his secretary John Hay.

The Bixby letter is a brief, consoling message sent by President Abraham Lincoln in November 1864 to Lydia Parker Bixby, a widow living in Boston, Massachusetts, who was thought to have lost five sons in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Along with the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address, the letter has been praised as one of Lincoln’s finest written works and is often reproduced in memorials, media, and print.

Controversy surrounds the recipient, the fate of her sons, and the authorship of the letter. Bixby’s character has been questioned (including rumored Confederate sympathies), at least two of her sons survived the war, and the letter was possibly written by Lincoln’s assistant private secretary, John Hay.

On September 24, 1864, Massachusetts Adjutant General William Schouler wrote to Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew about a discharge request sent to the governor by Otis Newhall, the father of five Union soldiers. In the letter, Schouler recalled how, two years prior, they had helped a poor widow named Lydia Bixby to visit a son who was a patient at an Army hospital. About ten days earlier, Bixby had come to Schouler’s office claiming that five of her sons had died fighting for the Union. Governor Andrew forwarded Newhall’s request to the U.S. War Department with a note requesting that the president honor Bixby with a letter.

In response to a War Department request of October 1, Schouler sent a messenger to Bixby’s home six days later, asking for the names and units of her sons. He sent a report to the War Department on October 12, which was delivered to President Lincoln by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sometime after October 28.

On November 21, both the Boston Evening Traveller and the Boston Evening Transcript published an appeal by Schouler for contributions to assist soldiers’ families at Thanksgiving which mentioned a widow who had lost five sons in the war. Schouler had some of the donations given to Bixby and then visited her home on Thanksgiving, November 24. The letter from the President arrived at Schouler’s office the next morning.

Nevertheless, at least two of Lydia Bixby’s sons survived the war.

Lydia Bixby died in Boston on October 27, 1878, while a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital. In his initial letter to Governor Andrew, Schouler called Bixby “the best specimen of a true-hearted Union woman I have yet seen,” but in the years following her death both her character and loyalty were questioned.

Writing to her daughter in 1904, Boston socialite Sarah Cabot Wheelwright claimed she had met and had given charitable aid to Lydia Bixby during the war, hoping that one of her sons, in Boston on leave, might help deliver packages to Union prisoners of war; but she later heard gossip that Bixby “kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be”.

In the 1920s, Lincoln scholar William E Barton interviewed the oldest residents of Hopkinton, Massachusetts for their memories of Bixby’s family before she moved to Boston. They recalled her sons as being “tough” with “some of them too fond of drink”. One son may have “served a jail sentence for some misdemeanor”.

On August 12, 1925, Elizabeth Towers, a daughter of Oliver Bixby, told the Boston Herald that her grandmother had “great sympathy for the South” and that her mother recalled that Bixby had been “highly indignant” about the letter with “little good to say of President Lincoln”. In 1949, Towers’ nephew, Arthur March Bixby, claimed that Lydia Bixby had moved to Massachusetts from Richmond, Virginia; though this assertion is contradicted by contemporary records which list her birthplace as Rhode Island.

Scholars have debated whether the Bixby letter was written by Lincoln himself or by his assistant private secretary, John Hay. November 1864 was a busy month for Lincoln, possibly forcing him to delegate the task to Hay.

In 1988, at the request of investigator Joe Nickell, University of Kentucky professor of English Jean G. Pival studied the vocabulary, syntax, and other stylistic characteristics of the letter and concluded that it more closely resembled Lincoln’s style of writing than Hay’s.

A computer analysis method, developed to address the difficulty in attribution of shorter texts, used in a 2018 study by researchers at Aston University’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics identified Hay as the letter’s author.

Good grief, it’s enough to make a fella call into question the entire history of this country, ain’t it? Be all that as it may, though, and whatever the provenance of the Bixby letter might actually have been, the letter will nonetheless forever shine as the diamond of English-language textual expression it is. And rightly so, too; the sentiments, concepts, and ideals so beautifully conveyed therein are nothing less than the most noble of which we lowly, fallen humans are capable as a species. How deeply, painfully ironic, then, that its true origins might have been so tangled and tawdry.

We’ve come a long way from all that sort of thing, alas, and in precisely the wrong direction too. There’s also a lot of intriguing stuff covering the life, times, and career of GEN Marshall at the Wikipedia link I included above, making it well worth taking the time to read as well.

1

Hybrid

These intrepid gearheads built a Tesla worth driving.

We Built the World’s First V-8 Tesla
The Rich Rebuilds team had a dead Model S. They fixed it with a Camaro engine.

The Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show in Las Vegas is extravagant, it is inspiring, it is perhaps the greatest automotive pissing contest you’ll ever witness. It’s an annual gathering for every somebody in the car world to show off the fanciest thing they can create on four(ish) wheels.

My business partner, Rich Benoit, and I thought we finally had something radical and bold enough for the event. We didn’t just want to exist there. We wanted to steal the show. That also meant we needed a car that could actually move under its own power. Most of the cars at SEMA get pushed onto the expo floor, but nobody’s happy about it. The shame of an unfinished ride is something to avoid at all costs. And yet with 30 hours until our transport truck arrived, we were approaching the city limits of Shamesville.

After two years of patiently converting a Tesla to an internal-combustion-engine muscle car—we’ll get to why on earth anyone would do this—we were down to just hooking up the fuel lines but were caught waiting for fitments to arrive in the mail. And they weren’t going to make it in time.

Rich and I have been revitalizing Teslas for about six years now. It started when Rich, an intrepid tinkerer, wanted a Tesla Model S but didn’t think it was reasonable to pay $100,000 for one. His solution: Take a couple of salvaged Teslas and put them together. Simple, right? Start with a flooded electric vehicle—good for its shell, not its corroded batteries—and wait for a second Tesla with a battered shell and a good set of Duracells. After a year and a half of wrenching, our first fully functional electric car emerged for a total of $6,500. It also launched our YouTube channel (Rich Rebuilds) featuring odd and eclectic EV projects in 2017, and eventually the Electrified Garage, our sister company that performs EV maintenance, repair, and conversions for the public.

After a couple of years, we were running out of Tesla projects and started building up cars that we simply wanted to enjoy. We resurrected a BMW i8. We gave a 1932 Ford Model A an electric powertrain from a crashed LAPD motorcycle. And we restored a neglected twin-turbo Audi RS7—too beautiful not to save. Not every project had a battery, which upset the die-hard EV hive, but we love all things automotive.

It’s an amazing project, which yielded a beautiful result. I especially dig the S1 Sequential short-throw shifter they used—all billet and leather, just a loverly piece of old-school craftsmanship. This next bit will sound all too familiar too anyone who’s ever worked in a custom car or motorcycle shop and has turned a wrench on a totally wild, outlaw project like this—which, y’know, I have.

Normally we’re a chipper group of people, but two weeks out, our garage felt like a funeral home. We were eating meals in there, napping on-site in a Mercedes Sprinter van conversion, and showers? Meh, no one was coming near us anyway. The lack of sleep started to make us feel numb inside, but we could see the finish line again. Then we got a call that the fitments were delayed. There was no way our Tesla could drive onto the trailer under its own power for the trip to Vegas.

Yup, shoprat cred: ESTABLISHED, firmly and fully. Ahh, but did the boys make it to the show on time? You better believe they did, amigos; ain’t no stopping a gearhead who’s motivated and dedicated enough to not bother about piffling trivialities like sleeping, eating, or bathing in his quest to put another custom-build notch on the proverbial bed-post.

After 2,733 mind-bending miles (seriously, check out how weird it gets on our YouTube), we pulled into Geddy’s driveway on Monday morning at 8 a.m. We had until 5 p.m. to deliver the car 20 minutes down the road to the SEMA floor. Taking our box of fitments, Geddy tuned the motor so that it didn’t run too lean and sound like a clangorous mess of sputters and backfires, or too rich that it bogged itself down and smelled like a BP tanker spill. Either option would be as embarrassing as pushing the car to its booth. We had precious few hours to find the balance, and then…the cylinders started to align like the planets to an astrologer. The sound was snappy, throaty, and downright mean.

We drove into SEMA with two hours to spare. It was time to scare and confuse people with something they’d never seen or heard before. Our work isn’t conventional, but you have to respect it—we received praise and admiration from a lot of our industry heroes that week.

It’s funny, we’ve been looking at the Tesla T on hoods of ever-so-quiet cars for the better part of a decade. But when our eyes drift to the side exhaust on our Model S, they begin to moisten from the inky smoke of 376 cubic inches ready to lay down now-444 ponies. We’re brought back to the thing that made us love automobiles in the first place: the thunderous sound of power.

Amen, brother. And that right there is the real payoff: finally firing that bad boy up, cracking a beer, leaning back on your Snap-On mechanic’s creeper seat to just catch your breath and listen to a high-output mill you’ve built with your own greasy, aching, scarred-up hands as it purrs like a contented big cat who just caught the daily impala. Such blissful moments usually come along well after regular business hours, and trust me, folks, there’s no feeling in the world quite like it.

And just think: not one stop did they have to make on the road to Vegas so as to charge the gott-damned battery overnight, either.

Update! Think I was kidding about those totally wild, outlaw projects, do ya? Well then, try Goose’s legendary Model-A bodied, overbored big-block Chevy crate motor-powered barbecue smoker on for size.

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Slick, no? Can’t see it in these pics, but the radiator overflow-catcher is a standard-issue, Mark 1-Mod 0 Jack Daniel’s Black Label bottle, in the handy dandy fifth size. Somewhere around here I also have pics of the outrageous Pro-Street Bar Stool we built, a no-shit drag-racing barstool powered by a hopped-up Evo Sportster engine out of one of my old bikes. It’s a beaut, too. Have to see if I can’t dig those snaps up and add a cpl of ‘em to this post later on, maybe.

Updated update! Almost forgot to tell ya, the big round thing on the back is a 500-gallon propane tank Goose liberated from a local junkyard, the actual smoker part of the whole dealio: slice two big oven-style doors in the side, mount two levels of huge, gnarly steel racks inside for the pork, stoke up the firebox on the back, and away we go. He told me the idea for this thing came to him in a dream one night, which is how Goose usually gets his best ones. Porky’s Purgatory, he ended up naming the beast, which apt moniker is now splashed in big, bold yellow letters across the top rear of the cab.

The vintage, beat-to-hell Model A body was too narrow to be squeezed onto the early-70s Chevy pickup frame rails, so we had to cut it into two sections, then weld in a widening strip to make it fit. All pinstriping was done by hand by the justly-renowned Eddie Brown up near the CMS, and a fine job of it he did too. Eddie’s fee? The aforementioned JD Black bottle, which he returned to us after it had been duly emptied.

The wooden booster steps on each side are actually garden-variety indoor house-stair sections from Lowes, stained in the usual fashion. To make them look more rugged and antique, we burned shallow holes into ‘em all over with a soldering iron, then applied clear varnish for the finishing touch. The zoomie-style exhaust stacks were handcrafted from tube stock by Goose, rattlecanned with Krylon Hi Heat exhaust paint. Carburetion is via a matched set of dual-quad Holly 750s, topped by an old turbo-ram intake, all of which we had lying around the shop for years before Goose finally came up with a fitting Forever Home for ‘em.

Some dream Goose had, eh?

Update to the updated update! OH OH OH—found a pic wherein the JD radiator-overflow receptacle is visible, at mid-top left:

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Heh. How can you not love it, I ask you?

Updates, forsooth! Upon reflection, I realized I simply must dedicate this post to my friend Phil, who will surely understand.

2

Fox dirt duly dished

The widow of Roger Ailes, whose sure hand guided Fox to the top of the cable-news heap and kept it there for nigh on two decades, ladles it up—and it’s delish.

Roger Ailes’s wife publicly attacks the Murdochs amid Tucker Carlson fallout
Elizabeth Ailes refers to Rupert Murdoch’s sons as characters from English nursery rhyme

The wife of the late Roger Ailes has publicly attacked Rupert Murdoch after Tucker Carlson was abruptly sacked by Fox News last month on the heels of the conservative network settling its billion-dollar lawsuit with the Dominion Voting Systems.

Ailes was appointed by Rupert Murdoch to head Fox News when it launched in 1996 and had fallen from grace two decades later after being obliged to stand down in 2016 in the wake of several sexual harassment accusations.

“Happy Heavenly Birthday Roger Ailes,” tweeted Elizabeth Ailes, wishing her late husband, who died at the age of 77, a year after his exit from the network.

“It took you 20 years to build Fox News into the powerhouse that it was and only 6 years for the Murdochs to wreak havoc,” she wrote, weeks after Carlson and Fox News parted ways as the network agreed to pay $787.5m to Dominion to settle a defamation lawsuit over election lies amplified by the channel’s personalities.

“Rupert thought he could do your job. What a joke. He has the checkbook but could never come close to your genius. RIP.”

“Karma is a b****” said Ms Ailes in a conversation with the Daily Beast. She said none of the scandals, including the Dominion lawsuit and Carlson’s removal, would have happened if her husband was still with the network.

“Roger never had his hand off the wheel when it came to Fox,” she told the outlet, adding that the Murdochs “weren’t born here and don’t have the same pedigree”.

She said her husband referred to James Murdoch, Mr Murdoch’s younger son, and Lachlan as “Tweedle Dumb” and “Tweedle Dumber” respectively.

She also described Mr Murdoch as a “jealous man” who fired Ailes because he “eclipsed Rupert on the world stage”.

She said Fox parted ways with Carlson because he became too popular. “That’s what the Murdochs did to Roger, Bill O’Reilly, Eric Bolling, and they did it to Tucker,” she said. Fox News has not issued a statement on the comments.

Sounds believable enough to me, especially that bit proposing that the whole Tucker thing, along with Ailes and the others, might be more to do with personal ego than anything else. On that level of wealth, fame, and power, such dustups quite often are. Sexual assault allegations seem to go hand-in-glove with it, also.

Via Ace, who notes:

Megyn Kelly confirms that Ailes called Les Freres Murdoch “Tweedle Dumb” and “Tweedle Dumber,” stating that he said that to her all the time.

There’s a video embed of Kelly (who, somewhat to my surprise, is still quite hot-looking, and good for her) to back it up, too. It’s a pretty interesting segment, really; watch it if you have a cpl minutes, and care enough about this sort of thing to spend ‘em on it.

1

UNPRECEDENTED!!! Except when it isn’t

The author’s conclusion is spot-on, incontestable, and utterly priceless.

Senator warns about 1,200 year drought, torrential rains soak Front Range
Climate anxiety is so prevalent among the younger generation who are brainwashed to think they’ll die unless the planet is rid of modern conveniences and meat products, they’re turning to substance abuse to escape depression.

It’s no wonder, when we have the likes of U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet warning his Twitter followers of an impending 1,200-year drought across the West.

Upon further investigation with informed scientist Dr. Google, it turns out we’re not facing a 1,200-year drought, as clearly signaled by the torrential rains sweeping the Front Range.

As The Guardian explains, weather climate has actually been around for centuries, but the last drought of this magnitude in Colorado and the southwest was the year 800 A.D.

Tim Kohler, an archaeologist and professor at Washington State University, says the current megadrought is different from prehistoric dry periods. “This one seems to be more severe than any of the previous droughts and just as long,” he says. “But the really bad news is all the previous megadroughts took place without the influence of increasing greenhouse gases. Now we are playing a new ballgame and scientists don’t know what to expect.”

In other words, the current drought that scientists say is the cause of climate change, is just like the drought we had 1,200 years ago before climate change. Only this is more serious, because we don’t know what to expect, because of climate change.

TA-DAAAH! A real masterpiece of pretzel-contorted Leftard “logic,” wouldn’t you say? Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™: is there ANYTHING it can’t do? Apparently not, no. In light of where I ran across this one, what can one possibly say but: Heh. Indeed.

(Via VP Stephen Green)

Just. Don’t. DO it

Reason #8,741 why you never, ever, EVER try to rob a gun store.

How do gun shops prevent a person from simply walking in, asking to look at a gun and some bullets, then holding up the store owner with the weapon?
You know, this is funny. I was actually in a gun store when something almost exactly like this happened.

It was a fairly large store, with the owner and 4 other sales clerks behind the counters. I was with a friend who was there to pick up a shotgun he’d ordered. A guy walks in and asks to see a Colt .45 Model 1911. The clerk opens the glass, retrieves the pistol, and performs the necessary check, then lays the gun on the counter for the man. He picks it up, looks it over and says “Perfect…I like it.”

He then reaches into his pocket, pulls out a loaded magazine, and inserts it into the gun, then slides a round into the chamber – all pretty darned smooth and quick. He then points it at the clerk and says, “I’ll take it.”

The clerk just shrugged, and nodded past the guy. He backs off a bit, and then looks around the store. Every other clerk was armed, and had pistols pointed at the guy. Every customer had been ushered quickly behind counters or racks out of the way, without any fuss or noise. When the guy looked back at the clerk, he now had HIS pistol out and pointed at the guy. My friend and I were both trying not to laugh at this point.

The owner then starts walking towards the guy, with his hands up. He’s explaining to the guy how badly this is likely to go for him, and points out that he is seriously out-gunned, and he is definitely NOT leaving the store with that firearm. He speaks calmly, gently…and slowly reached out and took the gun from the guy without resistance at all. He then politely asked him to get on the floor, and told one of the clerks to call the police.

Found out later the store owner was a veteran, and the other sales people were either veterans or retired cops. All in all, I was never worried, scared…no, I was amused. And so were the cops, when they showed up (greeting the owner by name as they came in), wondering who’d try to rob a gun store.

I still wonder about that myself, some 30 years later, to be honest.

A gott-damned idiot, that’s who, and nobody whatsoever else. Period fucking DOT, as Ringo always says.

6

Over the target

Taking flak.

Disney CEO Bob Iger rips Ron DeSantis over Florida battle: ‘It’s a matter of retaliation’

Why yes, it most certainly is at that. So? Sit back and suck on it then, you twisted, pedophilia-pimping fucksickle.

He’s the Mouse that roared.

Disney boss Bob Iger slammed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday in the escalating tit-for-tat over the special tax district that oversees the company’s Orlando theme parks.

“This is about one thing and one thing only: them retaliating against us,” Iger said during a call with investors after the Mouse House reporting second-quarter earnings in line with Wall Street estimates.

“Does the state want us to invest more, employ more people, pay more taxes or not?”

Not exactly, no, or not entirely anyway. It wants you to stay in your lane as a business and keep your stunted, withered little wang out of the political arena, thanks. Quite rightly too, I might add. You decided to test the limits of the Disney Corp’s sweetheart deal which placed the Corp outside the purview of the duly-established State and local governments, and you fucking lost. Next time, consider waiting until you can fuck around with a less-politically astute, less-feisty governor, that’s my advice. Failing that, find out.

For my money, the truly salient point here is DeSantis’s refusing to daintily tiptoe around a giant multinational corporation based on some sort of misbegotten Repugnican “principle.” We’re well past the point where slavishly hewing to “principle” is ever going to get us a goddamned thing. So to hell with principle, I say.

In any fight with a thuggish bully who’s flush with victory after victory against the Marquess of Queensberry, unilaterally sticking to the Queensberry rules yourself is a mug’s game. Yes, yes, principles are fine things to have…right up until you find yourself in a bloody street brawl against an opponent who recognizes no rules whatsoever.

“Losing honorably,” after all, is still losing. When winning is a matter of life and death, literally existential, then it’s time to recognize that the one, the only meaningful imperative becomes survival. Far better to “win dishonorably,” if you must. And that’s precisely where we are now; if “principle” still means more to you than the permanent defeat and extinguishing of those selfsame principles, then in my view your thinking is badly, badly skewed, and you probably deserve to lose.

3

How the rock and roll sausage gets made

The sublime and the ridiculous, butting heads with one another.

Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary”
A Masterwork Conceived, Composed, and Recorded in Less Than 24 Hours

In late September 1966, Jimi Hendrix landed in London, leaving behind the hardscrabble life he’d led in New York City. Within a couple of days he began a relationship with Kathy Etchingham, who worked as hairdresser and part-time DJ. While still in the first blush of romance, Jimi and Kathy discovered that although they’d grown up an ocean apart, in some ways they shared similar backgrounds. They’d both had challenging childhoods with at least one alcoholic parent. Both of their mothers had abandoned the family. Kathy had spent her earliest years in Derby, living in a working-class house without an indoor bathroom. After her mother left, she and her brother were sent to stay with relatives in Ireland. During her teens she was placed in Dublin’s Holy Faith convent boarding school.

Jimi had mostly grown up with his father, James “Al” Hendrix, and, on occasion, his younger brother Leon. They lived in a variety of rented rooms, apartments, and small houses around Seattle. When times got hard for Al, he shuttled Jimi to stay with relatives and friends. “He’d had a very unhappy childhood,” Kathy wrote in Through Gypsy Eyes: My Life, the Sixties and Jimi Hendrix. “He did talk about how he had no food, no shoes, hadn’t got to have a change of clothes, had to go to other people’s houses to be fed, how his dad used to punch him in the face and shave his hair, and how he would run away but had to go back because, of course, he had nowhere else to go. He didn’t really consider that he had a family.”

Throughout Jimi’s initial nine-month stay in London, the couple shared lodgings with Jimi’s discoverer/producer, Chas Chandler, and his Swedish girlfriend, Lotta Null. In December 1966 Ringo Starr offered to sublet them his flat at 34 Montagu Square for £30 a month. They accepted the offer, and on December 6th Chas, Jimi, Kathy, and Lotta moved to Montagu Square. “We were lucky to get it,” Kathy wrote, “as Paul McCartney had just moved out of the flat before us. The neighbors weren’t too happy about having musicians in the flat. Paul had been using it as a [demo] recording studio and I’m sure it wasn’t very soundproof. The elderly lady who lived upstairs could be rather grumpy. She wouldn’t let us have the keys to the communal gardens when the photographer wanted to take some photos of Jimi in the gardens.”

Away from public view, Jimi and Kathy’s life together at 34 Montagu Square was not always peaceful. Chas and Lotta were sometimes taken aback by the volume of the arguments coming from the rooms downstairs. During one disagreement Kathy smashed her foot through the back of an acoustic guitar. Another one led to a broken sitting-room door. For Jimi and Kathy, though, heated arguments were nothing new. “Having rows never worried either of us much,” Kathy explained. “I guess we both had listened to them enough throughout our childhoods not to take them too seriously. We could be shouting and screaming one moment and forgetting about the whole thing the next…. Both of us operated on very short fuses, and neither of us was ever willing to climb down, so we could only end them by one or the other of us storming off – usually me.” At one point, Chas Chandler and Experience manager Michael Jeffery called Jimi into the office and urged him to break up with Kathy. Hendrix told them to mind their own business. In truth, he felt possessive of Kathy, and their most violent exchanges tended to occur when he felt jealous or suspicious of her.

An especially heated argument on January 10th inspired Jimi to write one of his most achingly beautiful songs. As Kathy described, “He was moaning about my cooking again and I felt I had put a lot of effort into whatever it was – mashed potatoes, probably. I didn’t take kindly to being told they were disgusting, so I picked up the plate and smashed it on the floor. ‘Hell – what are you doing?’ he screamed at me, so I picked up a few more plates and threw them around the room as well, yelling back at him. Eventually I turned on my heel and stalked out, crossing the street to find a cab. He followed, trying to persuade me to come back, but I refused to listen. I found a taxi and jumped in, and without letting Jimi hear I told the driver to take me to Angie and Eric [Burdon]’s place in Jermyn Street. When I returned the next day, having cooled down, I asked him what he had done while I was away. ‘I wrote a song,’ he said and handed me a piece of paper with ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ written on it. Mary is my middle name, and the one he would use when he wanted to annoy me. I took the song and read it through. It was about the row we had just had, but I didn’t feel the least bit appeased.”

Lots, lots more here, all of it completely spellbinding for any fan of the great James Marshall Hendrix. Which, of course, I am and always have been. Don’t doubt me on that, people; in fact, when I was a teenager I once took a huge piggy-bank stuffed full of a cpl hundred bucks’ worth of small change to purchase a grotesquely-abused old Fender Strat from a dealer who was a longtime friend of my uncle’s, Carroll Dill, owner and proprietor of Carroll’s Music.

The guitar was a total no-hoper which was so entirely rat-fucked it wouldn’t make a sound when I bought it; the fretboard was actually, literally rutted down its entire length, from nut to body-join. The poor old thing had a blue body with white stars painted on, with a red-and-white striped pickguard. It had been the property of the guitarist for the house band at a venerable old CLT tittybar, the Paper Doll Lounge, still extant after all these years. The Spontanes, they were called, and the American-flag Strat was trotted out for their nightly rock and roll set, in semi-mufti as Harley Hogg and the Rockers.

None of which backstory I gave a tinker’s damn about at the time, of course. Jimi Hendrix played a Strat, so by God I needed me one too. That added up to me trotting off to Carroll’s to trade all those pennies plus my insanely valuable, immaculate 1964 Jazzmaster (the exact same shade of blue as the soon-to-be-spraybombed Stratocaster, it so happens) for a Strat that was incapable of producing so much as an annoying buzz when plugged into an amp, to my uncle’s undying fury.

No shit, he actually rode over to Carroll’s Music to cuss his old friend out for rooking his nephew in such a bald-faced, egregious way after he’d found out what his stupid-ass nephew had gone and done. They’d been good friends for thirty-some-odd years, but Uncle Murray never spoke to Carroll again after he’d cussed him up one side and down the other. Never said word One to me about it; I found out years later, when my Dad told me the whole story with a rueful shake of his head at both his genuinely dangerous big brother and his damnable fool of a teenaged son.

Meanwhile, I proudly hustled my new acquisition home and proceeded forthwith to disassemble it completely, so as to A) investigate the obvious electrical fault that had rendered my poor baby voiceless, and B) spray-paint it bone-white like the one my idol Jimi played. I did just that, too: a rattlecan of Krylon obscured that obnoxious flag-pattern paint job quite nicely, thanks, although for the next several years of wielding that poor old raggedy-ass axe, I was left with a big smudge of white paint smeared all over my right forearm where it rested against the body every time I played it.

Didn’t matter a whit to me; I finally had myself a Jimi Hendrix guitar, dammit, and despite her crippling flaws I loved her all to pieces.

My dear friend and guitar-hero Steve Howard, a fellow Hendrix fan and an extraordinarily talented player in his own right, eventually ended up unwinding one of the Strat’s pickups right down to the magnets, walking around and around and around his house trailing an endless stream of copper single-coil-pickup-wire in a bootless effort to try and suss out what the hell was wrong with the damned thing. No joy, alas; I replaced all three pickups with brand-new DiMarzios, bought new pots and input jack, and rewired the whole damned thing myself, which I had no clue how to go about doing until I, y’know, did it.

NEVER try to stand between a young man’s Hendrix obsession and his quest to requite same, trust me.

Actually, “Mary” was never one of my favorite Hendrix tunes. This, on the other hand, was:

Another of my Hendrix faves, featuring Jimi mercilessly working over a…a…a Gibson SG Custom, of all unexpected, bizarre things? WOW.

I dunno, man; it’s kinda like seeing Stevie Ray flogging a Les Paul, or, say, Charlie Christian wailing away on a Telecaster, or something. It just…doesn’t…compute, somehow.

Be all that as it may, the above vids are a far cry indeed from Jimi’s days as Little Richard’s guitarist, wouldn’t you say? No lie, even after thirty-some years as a professional player myself—someone who’s spent all of those years studying this stuff minutely, with every ounce of passion, will, and energy he has in him—I couldn’t even begin to tell you what Jimi was doing there, or how he did it. It’s simply beyond belief, that’s what. There’s never been anyone quite like him, before or since.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

4

Another righteous blast from the past

In this instance, from 2018, involving none other than Tucker Carlson, showcasing his newly-red-pilled status in his pre-Fox-juggernaut days. Via Brother Bob:

An Interview With Tucker Carlson on What Makes Trump a ‘Political Genius’
Tucker Carlson, host of the popular Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” spoke to Daily Signal Editor-in-Chief Rob Bluey at The Heritage Foundation’s 41st annual Resource Bank meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Carlson received the prestigious Salvatori Prize, recognizing his work to uphold and advance the principles of America’s founding. The full video, plus an edited transcript of the interview, is below.

Rob Bluey: It is a true honor to celebrate the work that you’ve done, and I want to begin with the advice that you left this audience on how conservatives can take back the culture. You had two pieces of advice. Tell us about them.

Tucker Carlson: Well, have more children. I grew up in a world where it was considered embarrassing to have more than two children. I don’t think that’s the case now among middle-class, upper middle-class people, but it was.

First of all, it’s the most rewarding, greatest, most fun thing you can do. But it’s also the most profound thing. If you don’t like the direction of the country, have children, raise them the way that you want, consistent with your beliefs. It seems like all the answers are basic, nature-based answers, in my opinion. To everything. That’s the most basic of all, have more kids. Raise decent children.

And the second was just say what you think is true. I don’t actually think you get a ton out of confronting people and getting in people’s faces. I don’t think you’re going to convince anybody that way. But I think there’s inherent value in speaking principle out loud without shame or fear. And again, without the expectation that you’re going to win people over right away, because most times you’re not going to.

Aggression really doesn’t help much. I’ve definitely concluded that after years of being aggressive. But I think telling the truth is an inherently valuable act.

Bluey: You’ve had tremendous success with your show. It’s highly rated and millions of people are tuning in. How does that last point inform the work that you do on a day-to-day basis?

Carlson: The show’s successful because it’s on Fox News, which is successful. I’ve worked at a lot of different TV networks, and the network is what matters most.

I don’t imagine that my show is successful because I’m so great. I do think much more about what I say because there’s a bigger audience and because we’re in the middle of this revolutionary moment, and I’m counterrevolutionary.

I don’t say a lot of things without thinking them through, which is good. I mean, occasionally I do and get in trouble for it. But I really try to think through what I really believe and what I really think is true.

Good stuff so far, to be sure, but now we come to the real meat of the matter, at least in regards to the Trump mention in the piece’s title (bear in mind, Trump was still President at the time this interview was published).

Bluey: But I’d say the topics you cover and the way that you conduct your questioning is different and unique from other TV hosts.

Carlson: Well, I don’t have a lot to add. I would just say two things. I think President Trump is interesting, and I agree broadly with his agenda. I certainly agree with immigration, that’s for sure. But I don’t think that every story is about Donald Trump, and most other people at the other networks think every story is about Trump.

I don’t have anything to add to that; I don’t think it’s that interesting. I don’t want to talk about Trump five hours a week, I just don’t. And not because I have some political agenda and it’s bad to talk about; I’m just not that interested, actually. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. I try to talk about that.

…The book, like the show, is based on the most obvious questions. I’m not a super-clever person, I try to keep it very simple. Why would America elect Donald Trump president?

And the explanation in Washington is, well, they didn’t really. Putin did. Or voters were just so dumb, they didn’t know the difference. Or America’s racist, so they elected a racist. Those are contemptible nonexplanations. Those are stupid.

The real answer, obviously, is that people were so dissatisfied with the leadership in place as of the first Tuesday in November of 2016, that they decided to punish them by electing Trump.

This was a referendum on the ruling class; and by the way, we have a ruling class, and I’ve lived in it most of my life, so I know it’s real. It’s not a conspiracy, but we have a class system, increasingly, in this country.

The people in charge have done a really bad job on the big things, on foreign policy and the economy; and they’ve gotten us into a number of counterproductive wars. That was a bipartisan effort. It was started by Bush, but it was applauded by Clinton. So it wasn’t one party, it was both parties.

They made a bunch of assumptions about the economy that turned out to be wrong, and they helped destroy the American middle class, and then they don’t care. So they’re terrible. They’re deeply unwise and selfish and stupid.

Trump is the result of decades of unwise, selfish, and stupid leadership. It’s so obvious. I’m not a genius, I’m hardly a genius. It’s just so clear, and no one says that. I’m not sure why.

Lots more to it yet, and it’s all fascinating. I’ve read before in many other places that Tucker was a pretty solidly anti-Trump guy early on, and maybe he was at that, I couldn’t really say. But from this interview, it’s quite clear that Carlson really GOT the whole Trump phenomenon better than just about any other of his big-media confreres did, well before they did—those few of them who actually did come around to understand it, that is.

Perhaps unrelated, but purely in the interests of safeguarding my prized rep as a gadfly-contrarian against any unfounded accusations of being a Trump-licker, I’ll just throw this in too, from Margolis’s Meme-manic Monday email.

Trump Licker NOT

For whatever it’s worth, I checked a cpl of the above quotes I wasn’t totally sure about, and yes, it appears he really DID say all those puzzling-at-best things. I dunno, go figure; I ain’t even gonna try to explain what, if anything, it might mean. I’ve defended Trump plenty over the last six-eight years; I’m just about all “defended” out over here, frankly.

At this point, either you love him or hate him, and are probably no longer subject to persuasion either way. As I’ve said, I believe Trump could still have a significant, positive role to play in what’s to come, but not as President; that, he oughta just give up and walk away from, it’s a total waste of his time and effort.

An unwelcome resurrection

“Expert” me no “experts.” Nor no “intellectuals,” neither.

The Return Of The 20th Century Pestilence
The pestilence of the 20th century that killed millions was not the Spanish flu, not communism, not fascism. It was intellectuals. Intellectuals laid the foundation and rationale for communism and fascism, which resulted in millions dead, and science, art, history being stunted.

It is no wonder that both George Orwell (“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot”) and Eric Hoffer (“When you look into the question of what it is about this country that brings out all the malice and hatred of the American intellectual, you discover that what he can’t stomach is the mass of the people”) had an intense hatred for intellectuals.

Before I continue, I must define my terms. Intellectuals are persons who have a mastery of words and are good at only words, or as Thomas Sowell has so deliciously phrased, they are “masters of verbal virtuosity.” Some disciplines’ entire raison d’être is based on this ability; examples are lawyers, journalists, pastors, writers, and several college disciplines.

This is not a modern phenomenon. It has been with us ever since some individuals were gifted with verbal diarrhea. In Ancient Greece, there were intellectuals called sophists, who were so known for this that the word “sophist” has come down to us to mean someone who is glib at advocating an absurd or immoral viewpoint. And in Roman times, Cicero observed that, “There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher.”

When I first went to study at a university, one of the things that I learned to my surprise is that anything can be argued for and justified. Anything! I mean anything!

Well, not necessarily, or not convincingly, anyway. Not for anyone who is truly intellectually-astute, at any rate, as the author seems to be. To wit:

Today’s leftist intellectuals offer arsenic by calling it honey, censorship of free speech by calling it hate speech, dictatorship and fraudulent elections by calling it democracy, racism by calling it inclusiveness and diversity, methods to prevent electoral fraud are called voter suppression.

Like all pathological liars, they know they are most convincing when they act like they really believe it while simultaneously knowing it is bulls**t – and many do, through the process of doublethink. Read and listen to all of the justifications that liberals use for the purpose of censorship.

The interesting thing is that their rationale at first sounds logical. It kind of makes sense. For example, you can see this phenomenon in reading the rationale for all the countless things that liberals now label “racist” (the outdoors, disliking body odor, organized pantries, horse riding, weight reduction, philosophy, preventing cheating, white paint, proper grammar). When you read the arguments, they sound reasonable, they have a certain logic to them. Except that it’s all BS. You may not be able to initially voice why the argument is BS, but you know it’s BS.

The same is true for just about every other liberal obsession. Like euthanasia, or “reparations,” or solutions for climate change. One of those solutions is that because cow flatulence is a greenhouse gas, we should kill the cows (except a handful, reserved for the elite), do away with farms, and have everyone eat crickets and cockroaches.

There is a certain logic there.

Except it’s bulls**t.

Yep, t’is. Which means that, by definition, it ain’t really logic at all. Being intellectually discriminating enough to discern the difference betwixt the geniune article and the steaming, stinking, fly-blown pile has become something of a lost art in these, the latterly days of our managed decline. And that ain’t no kind of accident, neither.

1

Tucker’s bridge too far

Was Carlson’s Heritage speech a cpl weeks ago, in particular his references to Christianity and “evil,” the straw that broke Murdoch’s back, so to speak?

The veteran television host and journalist, whose Fox News show attracts millions of viewers every evening, remarked at an event for the Heritage Foundation that fellow conservatives must swiftly adjust their approaches to the national conversation since some political forces desire to tear down the nation rather than engage in legitimate political dialogue.

“We write our papers and they write their papers, and may the best papers win. I don’t think that’s what we’re watching now at all. I don’t think we’re watching a debate on how to get to the best outcome. I think that’s completely wrong,” Carlson said. “There is no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement with that mindset. Policy papers don’t account for it at all. If you have people who are saying, ‘I have an idea, let’s castrate the next generation, let’s sexually mutilate children,’ I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. That has nothing to do with politics.”

Carlson likewise described such a sentiment as a “theological phenomenon” that fundamentally cannot be considered a rational policy position. “And that’s kind of the point I’m making: none of this makes sense in conventional political terms,” he added. “What you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.”

Carlson told the Heritage Foundation audience that older conservatives must shift their mindset in order to effectively engage in the current political arena. “I’m just noting what’s super obvious. Those of us who are in our mid-50s are caught in the past on how we think about this,” he remarked. “One side’s like, ‘I’ve got this idea, and we have this idea, and let’s have a debate about our ideas.’ They don’t want a debate. Those ideas won’t produce outcomes that any rational person would want under any circumstances. Those are manifestations of some larger force acting upon us.”

Despite multiple self-deprecating remarks about his affiliation with the Episcopal Church, a communion widely regarded for socially and theologically liberal standpoints, Carlson noted that Americans should turn to heaven for hope as the nation’s foundations collapse. “Maybe we should all just take 10 minutes per day to say a prayer about it,” he concluded. “And I’m saying that to you not as some kind of evangelist. I’m literally saying that to you as an Episcopalian.”

Tucker’s right as rain, whether it harelips every cannibal liberal on the Congo Potomac or not, and there’s just no way around it. Praying to the Almighty for deliverance from Their Satanic Majesties is well and good, of course, and can never be a bad thing. But soon or late, every decent Normal American will be forced to ponder the practical application of Algernon Sidney’s well-known aphorism: God helps those who help themselves.

9

Fox augers in

They unceremoniously dump the biggest star the network ever had, and now they’re surprised at the outrage that bonehead maneuver generated?

Back there in the 1960’s golden era of rock and roll, (from 1966 to 1968) a group known as Buffalo Springfield dominated the air waves for a rock moment. Their big 1967 hit was titled “For What It’s Worth.” And its lyrics included these memorable lines:

There’s something happening here

But what it is ain’t exactly clear 

…Paranoia strikes deep

 Into your life it will creep 

It starts when you’re always afraid

Step out of line, the man come and take you away…

The lyrics came to mind this week in watching Fox reel from the backlash of the company’s “parting ways” with host Tucker Carlson. (And full disclosure, I am a Newsmax contributor.)

And speaking of Newsmax? The network has not been shy in reporting its 8 p.m. audience nearly doubled Monday, reaching 531,000 viewers, based on Nielsen figures. The following night, the number rose to an average 562,000 viewers, a five-fold increase from the previous week.

By contrast, the Tucker hour’s ratings at Fox plummeted, from 2.59 million on Monday (when his departure was formally announced) to 1.7 million on Tuesday and 1.3 million on Wednesday.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but Tucker himself has released his own two-minute video statement on Twitter. In less than 24 hours the video had brought in over 60 million views. Yow.

One can only wonder, as many have, why in the world Fox would shut down its number one host. Tucker Carlson is a very popular conservative and a decidedly smart guy as well. All of which has been evident on his nightly show, and all of which his audience both understands and loves.

Not to mention another popular host, Dan Bongino, has also vanished from Fox.

So why in the world would Fox do this?

At this point, I imagine a good few of the Fox higher-ups are wondering the same thing.

Okay, okay, I admit it—my main motivation for posting this is the excuse it affords me to put up that great old Buffalo Springfield tune.

With a glowingly-affectionate intro by Monkee-man Peter Tork, no less. What can one say but: COOOOOOOOL.

Update! For those younger readers who somehow wandered in here by mistake and who aren’t old enough to know anything about Buffalo Springfield (for SHAME), here’s some background info.

Buffalo Springfield was a rock band formed in Los Angeles by Canadian musicians Neil Young, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin and American musicians Stephen Stills and Richie Furay. The group, widely known for the song “For What It’s Worth”, released three albums and several singles from 1966 to 1968. Their music combined elements of folk music and country music with British Invasion and psychedelic rock influences. Like contemporary band the Byrds, they were key to the early development of folk rock. The band took their name from a steamroller parked outside their house.

Buffalo Springfield formed in Los Angeles in 1966 with Stills (guitar, keyboards, vocals), Martin (drums, vocals), Palmer (bass guitar), Furay (guitar, vocals) and Young (guitar, harmonica, piano, vocals). The band signed to Atlantic Records in 1966 and released their debut single “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing”, which became a hit in Los Angeles. The following January, they released the protest song “For What It’s Worth”, which became their only US top 10 hit and a counterculture anthem. Their second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, marked their progression to psychedelia and hard rock and featured other well-known songs such as “Bluebird” and “Mr. Soul”.

After several drug-related arrests and line-up changes, the group disbanded in 1968.

For all intents and purposes, Springfield was one of the earliest examples of what later on came to be referred to in the rock world as a “supergroup,” even though Young, Stills, Messina, et al weren’t all that well known at the time. This next is a bit of trivia for the ages:

While in Toronto in early 1966, Young met Bruce Palmer, a Canadian who was playing bass for the Mynah Birds. In need of a lead guitarist, Palmer invited Young to join the group, and Young accepted. The Mynah Birds were set to record an album for Motown Records when their singer Ricky James Matthews—James Ambrose Johnson, Jr., later known as Rick James—was tracked down and arrested by the U.S. Navy for being AWOL.

ZOMG! Okay, I never knew that myself. It calls for a CELEBRATION, BITCHES!

Heh. Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful, y’all.

2

When is a liberal not a liberal?

The wit and wisdom of George Carlin, delving into why government schools suck.

George Carlin Warned us Why Public Education Sucks and Won’t Get Better
Carlin, despite his left-leaning tendencies, could also grasp certain concepts even his fellow liberals could not. For example, I recently came across an old clip of Carlin talking about education—and boy, was it spot on.

In the clip, Carlin talks about politicians who don’t want to improve education, despite always calling for more money to support it. Carlin also criticized the education system’s approach to addressing poor test scores by suggesting that instead of improving the quality of education, they lower the passing grades, a common practice in many schools.

“That’s what they do in a lot of these schools. Now they lower the passing grades so more kids can pass. More kids pass the school looks good, everybody’s happy. The IQ of the country slips another two or three points, and pretty soon, all you’ll need to get into college is a fucking pencil. ‘Got a pencil? Get the fuck in there.’ It’s physics. Then everyone wonders why 17 other countries graduate more scientists than we do. ‘Education.’ Politicians know that word, they use it on you.”

Carlin continued, “There’s a reason for this. There’s a reason education sucks. And It’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that.”

“I’m talking about the real owners now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. They get the politicians — politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies. So they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.”

“But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking they’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.”

Imagine a liberal saying this today. I can’t.

Of course you can’t. There’s about a jillion and one things Carlin used to say that no shitlib today would, nor even could.

I’ve been an avid fan of George Carlin since I was just a kid—and I’m talking here like 13 years old or thereabouts—when I plunked down my entire weekly allowance at my Uncle Gene’s drugstore for a copy of his FM & AM album, brought it home, and put it on the turntable of my family’s big old console-stereo rig. Then, after no more than about five minutes of me and my brother giggling at all the funny cuss-words, my enraged father stormed into the living room, slapped the tonearm off the disk so viciously he dislodged the entire needle cartridge and sent it flying across the room, and ordered me to take that obscene thing straight back to wherever you got it from, he wasn’t about to tolerate having any such filth in HIS house!!!

Although yes, Carlin’s political leanings were Left-wards, when and if he spoke of such piffling things at all, what the man also was—always, quite rigorously, and above all else—was honest. Often brutally so, no matter where that honesty might lead him either professionally or intellectually.

Which, being so uncompromisingly honest had to be extremely painful for him at times, I should think. Then again though, perhaps not so much; as I continued to follow his career over the years, even going so far as to watch his middling-at-best TV series, I began to realize that Carlin wasn’t so much a Leftist as he was a true, bred-in-the-bone iconoclast. Clearly, the man despised official authority in all its forms; I can’t recall him ever mentioning politics at all in his routines other than glancingly, as in the above quotes, and always with searing contempt. Certainly he never endorsed any particular candidate, party, or platform, like all too many of his fellow comics so promiscuously do today.

Like almost every other born-and-raised New Yorker, he thought of himself as a liberal, I suppose. But he wasn’t a guy upon whom the silken fetters of liberalism would ever sit easily or comfortably. A genuine free spirit, he flatly rejected chains of every kind, which is exactly what those silken fetters in reality were, and still are.

There is no common ground to be found between 60s-70s liberalism and liberty, then or now. Those two things being so patently (and ironically, given the Latin root of both words) contradictory, though, I kinda doubt it set off any cognitive dissonance for Carlin just the same. Given the man’s visceral loathing for any sort of political encroachment on freedom, whether his own or anybody else’s, it’s obvious that his first loyalty was always to human liberty, and not to what liberalism had by the close of the 60s come to represent—another vile linguistic traducement I doubt George Carlin would have had any patience with.

5

My friend Tucker

Some candid, up-close-and-personal dish from a longtime friend of the Carlson family.

I saw articles and innuendo about a friend of about twenty years, Tucker Carlson. You may have heard of him. 

Why do I care? Because I know his story, I know him, and I have known few people more loyal and, yeah, entertaining than Tucker. And I do not like seeing him get beat up. Fox’s decision to axe him is flummoxing. The most popular host on the entire network? Really? Whatever. He’ll be fine. But I don’t like the trash talk coming from Fox, and it is just that. I read some things this morning that are probably actionable, but that’s not my business. 

Right now, I just want to talk about my friend.

It started with his brother, Buckley. Like Tucker, Buckley is one of a kind and hysterical. We bonded when he came to work as a consultant at a firm I was with for years in D.C. We would do stuff like go to Martin’s Tavern and get hammered and come up with show ideas. One was called “Cocktails With Buckley,” and it was to take place there at Martin’s (a Carlson family favorite) and we even wrote a jingle:

He’s Tucker’s Younger brother

Embarrassing his Mother

Two steps ahead of Johnny Law….

Camel in hand

Pocket full of contraband

It’s time for cocktails with BUUUUUUCKLEEEEEY!

So eventually, of course, Tucker—and their lovely father—moved into the scene. It was mostly at The Palm for lunch. This was around the time when Tucker and Neil Patel (another gem of a man) were launching The Daily Caller. I started writing a bit for them and we all just kind of hung out when we were able to. Then he got the Fox gig and things really blew up. It was fun to watch because I felt he deserved it.

Before I even knew him, I’d watch “Crossfire” with the bowties and such and I always found him interesting and insightful, which he is in real life. It is not an act. And like I said, he is hysterical. Look up the YouTube clip of him and Buck “inaugurating” his studio in Maine during the pandemic and you’ll get it.

Some of the stuff I read this morning that bothered me involved humor. Seems some didn’t like his style in that department. Well, that’s BS and it’s one of the reasons I am living in Mexico. You can’t laugh in America anymore. You lose your job. Like the Carlsons, my sense of humor can be a bit juvenile and politically incorrect, and I make no apologies for that. You can take the boy out of 1980s southern California, but you can’t take the 1980s southern California out of the boy.

It’s similar with the Carlsons. They have been a family of only men for a long time and they are all clever, devoted, and interesting. This makes for a generally good time. It got a little too good once when Tucker, now a longtime teetotaler, tossed a drink in the face of Grover Norquist (another gem) when he perceived a slight about his father, The Ambassador. Stuff happens!

Heh. Good stuff, I only wish there was more to it than is included in this too-brief article. Via the ever-indispensable Larwyn’s Linx, Sundance offers an equally intriguing take:

Over the past 18+/- months, viewers have watched Tucker Carlson essentially red pill himself each evening. As he enjoyed the proximity freedom far away from the Eye of Sauron (DC’s control mechanism), Carlson’s eyes opened further to the reality of the situation that blankets our national consciousness.

Disconnected from the machine, free-range in his abilities, and with the intellectual curiosity of the average person, Tucker Carlson started to see the U.S. system as it is, not as media pretend it to be. This is the increasing red pill absorption you have noted daily. Along with that came a more pragmatic and brutally honest production quality to the content he shared.

Carlson’s influence grew as the audience grew; the more truth he spoke, the larger the audience. That free-range influence became a liability to the system operators that hold power, including Rupert Murdoch who is a part of that control system. In essence, and in the big picture, that’s what led to this event today.

During Tucker’s red pill absorption phase, he changed views on a variety of subjects from the FBI to the Fourth Branch of Government, to vaccination and COVID-19, to his views on Donald Trump as a disruption to an increasingly admitted corrupt political machine.

Context in the Tucker worldview expanded and he began to frame the conflict in a big picture of Good -vs- Evil. Unfortunately for Carlson, this view was from inside a multinational corporate system spreading the darkness. He had to be removed.

This is the reality of the situation as it unfolded. Accept it or not, it matters not. This is the Carlson reality.

Carlson was connecting the dots of manipulation beyond media, beyond social battles and constructs, and into the realm of finance, economics and ultimately behind the Potemkin Village of UniParty politics. Blackrock has an increased stake in Fox Corp.

One has to wonder: how much sway might diehard-liberal-owned Blackrock have had in their pet media corp’s precipitate decision to dump their increasingly-discomfiting ratings juggernaut? Inquiring minds would like to know.

4

Making them live their “truth”

Anything goes.


As do I. I mean, really, what could possibly be more fair? T’was toxic feminism created this voracious, all-consuming beast; now, let them live with it—cheek by jowl, in the house they themselves built for the rest of us, until they’re sick unto death of being forced to keep close-quarters company with the stinking, grotesque thing.

 GP also has a copy of Shepherd’s application to compete as a wyrmynnzzz, wherein zhirm hilariously declares “I identify as a woman for this contest.” Naturally, the weightlifting Powers That Be are pissing all over themselves trying to find a way to short-circuit the jolt of high-voltage reality being hurled their way by the Zeus-like Ms Shepherd.

According to the Reduxx report, the Global Powerlifting Committee of New Zealand (GPCNZ) appears to be scrambling to keep Shepherd out of the competition — even going so far as to change their rule book to say that he is ineligible.

The report points out that in their 2023 Rulebook, the Global Powerlifting Committee of New Zealand (GPCNZ) recognizes self-declared gender identity. In a section of the guidelines titled “Transgender Athletes,” GPCNZ states that “gender is presented on a spectrum” and that the organization “respects the autonomy of the individual and how they identify.”

“An archived version of the official website dated March 30 does not display the GPCNZ rules for trans-identifying competitors, instead leaning heavily on self-identification,” the report explains. “But, after submitting his application and declaring himself a ‘woman’ for the purposes of the competition, Shepherd was hastily sent an email and told he was not allowed to self-identify as transgender and must have been on estrogen for at least one year to compete.”

Shepherd is challenging their decision to exclude him.

You go, girl ummm, boy ummm, Manwoman ummm, whatever.

Clash of the dystopian sci-fi titans

If it was a battle between 1984 and Brave New World, it’s all too apparent that Huxley’s magnum opus won out in the end.

Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)
In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher.

Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel.

Huxley starts off the letter praising the book, describing it as “profoundly important.” He continues, “The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.”

Then Huxley switches gears and criticizes the book, writing, “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.”

Actually, contra my own intro above, there’s no reason to think it can’t be both—and in fact, hasn’t been. The text of Huxley’s letter to Orwell makes it clear that Huxley himself in the main agreed that, instead of being directly in conflict with one another or contradictory, the two theses should be thought of as being more akin to waystations along tyranny’s greater continuum:

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

So in sum, then, it’s as I’ve always maintained, in this and other related contexts: what we have here is not an event, but a process.

Update! Forgot to include this with a “Via…” link, so I’ll just tuck it down here instead, with a little further exposition which a mere “Via” link doesn’t allow for anyhoo.

We’re all living in Brave New World, the technocratic nightmare envisioned in the dystopian 1932 science fiction novel written by UNESCO founder Julian Huxley’s brother, Aldous Huxley.

In some ways, Brave New World is the neglected redheaded stepchild of the futuristic dystopia literary genre. 1984, George Orwell’s magnum opus, gets the most play in the popular discourse in terms of comparing current events to the prescient warnings contained in the historic novel.

However, the horrific future imagined in Brave New World describes more accurately the nature of totalitarianism we are headed for under the stewardship of the World Economic Forum.

“You will own nothing and be happy,” is truly the ruling elites’ ethos.

The key differences between the Brave New World and 1984 dystopias are the mechanisms of control that the state uses to maintain its power. In the latter, the Inner Party relies on pure brute force, as explained by O’Brien in 1984: “If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.”

In the former, Brave New World, the mechanism of social control is subtler, yet arguably more effective than the kind of simple violence used by despots throughout history up until the modern era.

In Brave New World, in contrast to 1984, social conditioning and psychological manipulation are the tools of social control. The nuclear family has been obliterated as humans are birthed in laboratories using curated genetic material. Existential angst is treated with consequence-free sex (minus any meaningful emotional bonds) and a sedative drug called soma. At every turn, the individual is infantilized and conditioned to reflexively depend on the nanny state, afflicted by learned helplessness and neediness and malleable in the Pavlovian tradition.

Nope, none of that sounds even vaguely familiar, now does it? THANK GOODNESS IT COULD NEVER HAPPEN HERE…

*groan*

Updated update! The last laugh?

OrwellDjango

Via WRSA.

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