Belated birthday wishes

Yesterday was the 270th anniversary of the birth of the greatest composer of orchestral music to ever draw breath: the incomparable Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can hear you Beethovenn snobs sniffing and pouting and harrumphing from all the way over here. Just pipe down awready; you ain’t ever gonna get me to diss Ludwig Van, I wholeheartedly love his stuff. Bit considering that A) his output is simply not in Mozart’s league just in terms of sheer numbers; let’s see now, Beethoven’s Nine (9) symphonies against Mozart’s forty-one? One (1) Beethoven opera versus twenty-two for Mozart? Granted, Beethoven’s work is all top-notch (except for that one opera, which kinda sucks if you ask me), and Mozart had more active working years than Beethoven did. Mozart began composing seriously as a child, completing his Symphony No 1-—among his best creations, still performed to this day, a mature, fully realized, exquisitely put-togeher work, in no sense the slapdash, hit-and-miss, half-baked product from the mind of a child—at the tender age of eight (8) years!

Somewhat more telling, there’s also B) Beethoven himself was profoundly influenced by Mozart, an influence which is easily discerned in several Beethoven compositions. Ludwig Van maintained deepest respect for his gifted peer, even going so far as to lift  sections from Mozart pieces and insert them, whole and intact, into his own work, even giving official, written credit to Mozart on one of them. Beethoven also wrote some of the all-time best cadenzas for Mozart compositions. Extra-secil fine are the cadenzas for several Mozart piano concertos.

Taken all together, these gestures are indicative of Beethoven’s high regard for Mozart’s creative ability, ingenuity, impeccable taste and sense of style,, and positively uncanny talent. Whenever somebody tried to cop something from one of my songs to use himself, I considered it a tremendous complimen: sincere. honest, and stright from th heart, mo way of faking it. To me, that’s high praise indeed.

Anyhoo, yes, sinçe I was a young kid taking piano lessons I have considered Mozart the absolute best ever, although there quite a few other greats I revere as well: Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Chopin, to name but a few. At ay rate, here’s the third movement of the wee tyke’s First Symphony, one of my personal faves since I was about nine (9) my own self. Never tried to write up an arrangement of it for solo piano but I never did, it just never occurred to me until recently and now, with my hands crippled into near-uselessness, it’s too late.

Happy birthday, Wolfgang. We will never forget you.

The TRUTH, at last

Lakeside Joe lays it on us straight up, no chaser.

These statements are drafted from today’s National Review, and boy do they make sense. In the article the writer states very clearly that using the term ‘demonstrator’ to describe people like Pretti and Goode is a misuse of the term. ” That’s not what {either of them} was.

They report that both were killed while “protesting.” This is the most common description of what they were doing in Minneapolis last week. They both got in confrontations with federal immigration agents that ended in both of their shootings.” If Pretti – and Goode – were merely protesters, we need to change the definition.

A protester, as typically understood, is someone who is making a point, often as part of a gathering of other like-minded people and, usually but not always, in opposition to something. A protester might hold a sign outside a coal-fired power plant calling for it to shut down. A prtoestor might go to Union Square Park in New York City to hear speeches from bullhorns whenever something happens that outrages the left. They might march against the Iraq War, or the Vietnam War – or in favor of Hamas.

What we are seeing in Minneapolis, though, is often quite different. Run-of-the-mill protesters don’t seek out federal agents and harass and obstruct them. They don’t follow and block their vehicles or establish a robust communications network to deploy resources creating maximum disruption of their operations.
Put simply, they don’t obstruct law enforcement officers, and in so doing, literally put their lives on the line. Neither of the two killed abstained – they interfered. And, as tragic as it is, they paid with their lives. There are many lessons to be learned from both incidents, if only people are willing to learn…

I’ll just go ahead and say it right out loud, in front of God and everybody: these fucking oxygen thieves are indeed NOT innocent, non-violent “protesters” seeking to exercise their First Amendment right to “petition the government for redress of grievances,” as specified in our Constitution.

In reality, they are Communist revolutionaries whose ultimate gol is to overthrow the current government and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship which arrogates all power, authority, and spoils to itself…ie, THEM.

These faux “protesters” are well-organized, trained to a nicety in insurgency tactics, and drilled in all aspects of revolutionary strategic doctrine—from recruitment, to military-style organization and movement of company-strength and up formations in the presence of an enemy force, to psy-ops, deception, and misdirection, to actual physical combat with their avowed enemies.

That being the case, and it is, I certainly do NOT consider the battlefield deaths of two enemy soldiers as anything remotely like “tragic.” To me, it smells more like…victory. The real tragedy here is that more of the slimy cock-a-roaches haven’t been exterminated. I’m glad that Alex Pretti and Renee Good at least have been put down like rabid curs; hopefully, there will be more to come, until their fellow Red Army squad-mates have been sent to join them in Hell, with the survivors forced to admit defeat and retire from the field, demoralized and disgraced by the thwarting of their nefarious ambitions..

Once again, I refer you all to the blunt, hard-won wisdom of Curtis LeMay.

LeMay-2 (1).

Yes, it’s a damnable shame that we’ve allowed the Left to bring us to this sorry pass. No sane, decent, right-thinking person wanted this, but we are now engaged in a second Civil War, this one much more dangerous and truly existential than the first one was. Affter all, the Southern Confederacy had no desire to overthrow or otherwise destroy the US government, and Southern political and military leaders said so right from the start.

This time, Goosesetppin’ Leftists are openly proclaiming their ultimate goals, including but by no means limited to:

  • Overthrow the US government
  • Establish a Communist dictatorship in its place, along the lines of the USSR, Red China, or East Germany
  • Impose their will on all dissenters: the “transgender” lunacy; the fnal, open rejection of the US Constitution; confiscation of all citizen-owned fireams; their presumed “right” to invade churches, disrupt worship services, vandalize and wreck everything within reach; and intimidate Christians everywhere into docile compliance with the diktats of the angry mob 
  • Reinforce and strengthen the government schools in their primary mission: not education, but indoctrination
  • Hunt down and either imprison or summarily execute every member of the current Trump administration, along with everyone who ever attended a Trump really, wore a MAGA hat or shirt, and rejects the Hard Left plan for suppression and elimination of all opposition
  • Erase the national borders. freely admit and warmly welcome every serial rapist, child molester, indolent thief, and/or welfare leech who wishes to come here

If you find the above program objectionable, even intolerable, congratulations: you are now a priority target on the Left’s “Enemies of the State” list. and will be properly dealt with as soon as possible. Make those plans now, load those magazines, and gird those loins. This ain’t just about Minnesota, or NYC, or Portland, or Ca;ifornia alone. Nope, this one is for all the marbles, kiddies.

Some of you will doubtless scoff at my warning of imminent disaster, and bleat that “it could never happen here” with the smug self-assurance of a deluded fool. When the People’s Army comes to arrest snd haut him off to gaol for anti-iimmigrant Hate Tweets and/or seditious Fakebook posts,, he’ll go quietly just as his British counterparts have done. After spending a few godawful months in lockdown, perhaps his attitude will change somewhat.

Update! Just occurred to me that this is a perfect time to refresh our memories regarding  Lenin’s “vanguard” concept. Because this is in fact what these misnomered “protesters” actually are, whether they choose to acknowledge that or not.

Vanguardism, a core concept of Leninism, is the idea that a revolutionary vanguard party, composed of the most conscious and disciplined workers, must lead the proletariat in overthrowing capitalism and establishing socialism, ultimately progressing to communism.

The vanguard works to engage the working class in revolutionary politics and to strengthen proletarian political power against the bourgeoisie.

Vladimir Lenin popularised political vanguardism as conceptualised by Karl Kautsky, detailing his thoughts in one of his earlier works, What is to be done?.[1] Lenin argued that Marxism’s complexity and the hostility of the establishment required that a close-knit group of individuals pulled from the working class to become a vanguard of the greater whole to lead and safeguard the revolutionary ideology within the particular circumstances presented by the reactionary régime. While Lenin wished for a revolutionary organisation akin to the contemporary Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was open to the people and more democratic in organisation, the Russian autocracy prevented this.

In its first phase, the vanguard party would exist for two reasons. Firstly, it would protect Marxism from outside corruption from other ideas, as well as advance its plans. Secondly, it would educate the proletariat in Marxism in order to cleanse them of their “false individual consciousness” and instill the revolutionary “class consciousness” in them.

Our task is not to champion the degrading of the revolutionary to the level of an amateur, but to raise the amateurs to the level of revolutionaries.

If the party is successful in their goal, on the eve of revolution, a critical mass of the working class population would be prepared to usher forth the transformation of society. Furthermore, a great number of them, namely their most dedicated members, would belong to the party cadres as professional revolutionaries, and would be elected to leadership positions by the mass party membership. Thus the organisation would quickly include the entire working class.

Of course, Lenin falls into the same trap that Marx himself did: he firmly believed that the longed-for revolution would be the result of an overwhelming majority of lower-class, semi-literate, mostly-apolitical peasants rising up and overthrowing their bourgeois masters, deceiving themselves that the Glorious Revolution would be an inevitable natural progression rather than a sudden chaotic, bloody rejection of their current oppressive elites.

Problem being, history has never worked that way, not once. Marx was as piss-poor a prognosticator as he was a student of history. His overly-hopeful misreading of history has doomed his pet project of Communism to ignoble failure, economic disaster, and rigid, cruel despotism every time it’s been tried.

As so many mad Leftist ideologues have learned to their chagrin, one of the few things Communism produces in abundance is excuses for its poor performance, its inevitable collapse and finally, its rejection by the very people who originally constituted Lenin’s “vanguard,” now reduced to a disorganized rabble obsessively seeking vengeance against the hated Tsar Nicholas, scion of the Romanov dynasty which had ruled Russia for more than three hundred years. However, compared to the grotesque, inhuman depredations of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, Russians saw fitt to do some serious re-thinking concerning poor oldt Nicholas II.

Vilified by Soviet historians as a symbol of repression and incompetence, Nicholas has been reassessed more sympathetically in post-Soviet Russia. He and his family were canonised as passion bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000, following the discovery and reburial of their remains in 1998.

Well, whaddayaknow about that. Tsar Nicholas II was admittedly something of a hapless, ineffectual boob, especially when it came to waging war or restoring a faltering, weak economy back to health and vigor. Even so, the Last of the Romanov tsars started to look pretty darn good next to General Secretary Stalin, Lavrenty Beria, and the grim\ parade of megalomanical ogres that came after.

Over the years, I’ve read much speculation suggesting that the Russian people have this funny way of seeing to it that they will ne ruled by one cold, corrupt, heartless tyrant after another—a mystifying  but nonetheless reiiable quirk for which I have yet to see any explanation proffered, or even attempted, by anyone.

The Russian people themselves blandly accept their lot as simply the judgment of Lady Fate, who is at least thoughful enough to dump such a heavy burden of dissatisfaction, deprivation, and futility on a people long since accustomed to it—a people with a great deal of pride in the inner strength and seemingly innate immunity to despair, self-pity,, or regret. This strength, of mind, spirit, and biody enables them to shoulder that weight without bitterness, anger,, or defeatism. Each new “leader” crowing like a banty rooster about this monh’s sure-to-be-succesful-THIS-time Five Year Plan for Agriculture and Industrial Production is no more than Fate playing her usual games again, and the Russian people gave up on asking questions about the vagaries of that fickle Lady ages ago.

Vodka, and plenty of it, is the only known palliative, restorative agent, and refuge from the mind-rotting daily grind of blocks-long queues for food, toilet tissue, shoes, some seriouslu shitty coffee. heavy winter jackets, and sundry other of life’s necessities, all of which are shoddily constructed of poor materials by disgruntled workers whose sole concern is to meet the day’s posted productiom quota and get the hell out of here and back to his tiny three-room apartment in the heart of a VERY bad neighborhood—one in which no sensible woman of any age or appearance dares go outside after dark unaccompanied.

Back home in his cramped government-assigned rat hole, sitting at the small kitchen table pouring himself a third stiff jolt from a just-opened bottle of freezer-chilled Stolichnaya Elit, he reviews the situation as he feels the vodka starting to kick in: the three kids—the eldest a girl of 12, the youngest a feisty, inquisitive 6 year old boy—share a single bed in the smallest bedroom, Mom and Dad have a double  bed in what serves as a living room next to the barely-functioning old CRT television; Grandma Grigoriev has her own bed amd bedroom, thanks to Grandpa Yuri having passed away almost a year ago now; Uncle Matvey stretches out on the tatty, battered old sofa in the TV room with a blanket and the extra pillow from the closet shelf, entertaining Mom and Dad with a seriously remarkable display of snoring, sleep-farting, bestial groans, sighs, and incoherent muttering, closing out the festivities with a round of sound-asleep ass-crack spelunking, before waking wiith a start and asking what the HELLwas that noise just now, a bomb go off next door or something?

After Mom and Dad have convinced Matvey (an Afghanistan vet whose hideous experiences living among savages with little or regard for human life retell themselves in his baroque nightmares) that there hadn’ been any noise anyplace but in his dreams, he gets up, slips his feet into. a battle-scarred pair of ancient slippers, wraps his worn-out old bathrobe around himself and cinches up the waist belt, then plods into kitchen area to get a pot of that nasty coffee going before shuffling off to the bathroom to enjoy the morning whiz.

Yep, it’s another beautiful morning in the working-class Moscow slums, with early-rising Muscovites getting into their pesonal wakey-wakey rituals to ready themselves for another day of poorly-compensated, unappreciated, pointless paper-shuffling. Meanwhiile, the muggers, crackheads, second-story men, rapists, carjackers, whores, and housebreakers spend their entire day sleeping off last night’s action, not stirring again till sundown.

The Daily Donnybrook, and other fine things

Welcome to Ye Aulde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. New posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…

Mike @Substack


New Eyrie posts go up every Monday and Friday, although the time of day may (and most likely will) vary. Mike’s latest Eyrie offering is available for perusal here: Better men than I’ll ever be. Links to archived Golden Oldies are findable down at the bottom of each post.

Please do consider subscribing to The Eyrie, gang; it’s free, unless you’re feeling big-hearted enough to pony up for a paid sub. Either way, paying customer or freeloading looky-loo, an Eyrie subscription is a bargain at any price, a move you won’t ever regret making.

All subscribers receive email notification whenever each new post goes live, although CF management promises not to blow up your inbox with a bunch of junk mail. Latest Eyrie offering is getatable (yes, that’s really a word—trust me!) for one and all to read and enjoy totally free of charge, regardless of subscriber status. However, a paid sub is required to unlock commenting privileges—an almighty incentive to kick loose and chip in if ever there was one. Thanks, everybody!

Recent Comments

  • tominor on Power play: “As I was saying, Sweasey got 190,000 and a cushy new job where she reported to Mary Moriarty.  Sweasey quit…Apr 17, 13:33
  • tominor on Power play: “Amy Sweasey was the prosecutor who wrote the original criminal complaint against Derek Chauvin.  She won 190,000 in an anti-retaliation…Apr 17, 13:26
  • PovertyInLuxury on Power play: “Everyday it gets more fake and gay. Moriarty? Of course she is. The defense attorney, we’ll soon learn, is one…Apr 17, 05:57
  • Barry on Ingrates: ““And, let’s be honest, Americans are widely looked down on. To add insult to injury, we don’t think that highly…Apr 16, 23:07
  • Barry on “How it works”: “LOL, I really didn’t get enough popcorn for this shit.Apr 16, 23:02

    

Memezapoppin’!

Welcome to this week’s installment of our Wednesday meme feature, folks. Links to the “found via” sources will be attached to the specific MiQ’s (Memes in Question) whenever I can remember them, which likely won’t be very often. Only the first two memes will appear above the fold to save on bandwidth usage, since I assume not everybody who shows up at this here websty will want to see all of them. This intro will appear at the top of each week’s Memezapoppin’! post. Enjoy, funny-pitcher lovers.

Continue reading Memezapoppin’!

Memezapoppin’!

Welcome to this week’s installment of our Wednesday meme feature, folks. Links to the “found via” sources will be attached to the specific MiQ’s (Memes in Question) whenever I can remember them, which likely won’t be very often. Only the first two memes will appear above the fold to save on bandwidth usage, since I assume not everybody who shows up at this here websty will want to see all of them. This intro will appear at the top of each week’s Memezapoppin’! post. Enjoy, funny-pitcher lovers.

Continue reading Memezapoppin’!

Ever-shifting shitib opinions, values, and mores

First, this happened (bold mine).

Curtis Houck
@CurtisHouck

Jim Acosta: “[JD Vance is] the future of MAGA. It is a — a — it is a fascist, authoritarian, white nationalist MAGA.”

Jennifer Welch: “It’s worse than Trump.”

Acosta: “It is worse than Trump.”

Welch: “He’s worse.”

Acosta: “It’s Trump with staying power. You know, Trump, the other day is, you know, he’s — he’s — he’s asking, am I gonna go to heaven? Am I gonna go to heaven?”

Welch: “Yeah.”

Acosta: “It must be dawning on him that the sand in — in Dorothy’s hourglass is running out, you know, in the Wizard of Oz.”

Welch: “The curtains are closing.”

Acosta: “The curtains are closing. JD Vance doesn’t have to worry about that. This whole crew of guys who are going to try to come in after it, they’re — they’re not worried about that. The American people have to show that movement the door. I’m not talking about — Republican presidents want to come in, and act like Mitt Romney and — and — and folks like that —”

Welch: “Right.”

Acosta: “— everybody can deal with that. Everybody can stomach that. If — if Mitt Romney had been president instead of Donald Trump in 2016, you and I probably wouldn’t be talking right now —”

Welch: “That’s right.”

Acosta: “— because you — you know, Jen, you’d be down in Oklahoma enjoying your life”

Welch: “Instead of doing interior design, yeah.”

A pair of half-assed, half-baked Leftard bullshit artists, these two. Remember back when Mittens Romneycare was himself a demonic Hitlerite spawned in the hottest pits of Hell, anyone? Nah, me neither.

Mitt Romney is owed an apology for how he was attacked in 2012. He’s unlikely to get it
“Romney didn’t win, did he?”

That was former Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid’s response to whether he regretted lying about then-GOP presidential nominee — and now Utah senator — Mitt Romney.

Reid accused Romney on the Senate floor in 2012, when he was running for president, of not having paid any taxes in four years. It was absolutely untrue and was discredited by Washington Post fact-checkers and others at the time. But that didn’t stop the onslaught of unfair and inaccurate accusations and innuendos.

The Mitt Romney who ran for president in 2012 went on to vote for conviction in President Trump’s impeachment trial. And that same Romney became the first known Republican senator to march with the George Floyd protesters over the weekend.

You remember 2012, right? That was the year of the last presidential election before Donald Trump’s victory. And the way liberals attacked Romney’s presidential campaign on opinion pages of newspapers, news broadcasts and in the media echo chamber of blue check-mark Twitter, has a lot to do with how the next election went — and how this one will go. Their treatment of Romney was an inflection point for many on the right.

It’s straight out of the Left/lib/Progtard playbook: any and everyone not a flaming, Red-in-tooth-and-claw Leftist who dares to run for office against a sheep-dipped Woketer revolutionary will be duly vilified, defamed, and slandered outrageously right up until the next cloven-hoofed GOPe “rising star” emerges, at which juncture the previous Two Minutes’ Hate target will be miraculously rehabilitated as perhaps misguided, but in the main a decent, fair-minded centrist.

You keep using that word, law-abiding

I do not think that it means what you think it means.


Via Insty.

Disappointment

I dunno, man, it’s always great to see a passel of Lefty screechweasels getting the snot pounded out of ‘em, but I was expecting we’d at least see some teeth, hair, and blood left on that icy sidewalk, if not bone fragments, eyeballs, ears, and/or severed limbs. Do better next time, fellas.


The most dangerous job

If ever I’ve seen the ultimate justification for a lightning-fast mag dump, this lumbering Cape Buffalo provides it in spades here.


*shudder* I’d certainly want to be packing something a lot more hefty, a damned sight more brawny, than that itty-bitty little ole Glock to drop that stampeding wildebeest.

Memezapoppin’!

Welcome to this week’s installment of our Wednesday meme feature, folks. Links to the “found via” sources will be attached to the specific MiQ’s (Memes in Question) whenever I can remember them, which likely won’t be very often. Only the first two memes will appear above the fold to save on bandwidth usage, since I assume not everybody who shows up at this here websty will want to see all of them. This intro will appear at the top of each week’s Memezapoppin’! post. Enjoy, funny-pitcher lovers.

Continue reading Memezapoppin’!

The Daily Donnybrook, and other fine things

Welcome to Ye Aulde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. New posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…

Mike @Substack


New Eyrie posts go up every Monday and Friday, although the time of day may (and most likely will) vary. Mike’s latest Eyrie offering is available for perusal here: “Screamin’ meemie Monday!” Links to archived Golden Oldies are findable down at the bottom of each post.

Please do consider subscribing to The Eyrie, gang; it’s free, unless you’re feeling big-hearted enough to pony up for a paid sub. Either way, paying customer or freeloading looky-loo, an Eyrie subscription is a bargain at any price, a move you won’t ever regret making.

All subscribers receive email notification whenever each new post goes live, although CF management promises not to blow up your inbox with a bunch of junk mail. Latest Eyrie offering is getatable (yes, that’s really a word—trust me!) for one and all to read and enjoy totally free of charge, regardless of subscriber status. However, a paid sub is required to unlock commenting privileges—an almighty incentive to kick loose and chip in if ever there was one. Thanks, everybody!

Recent Comments

  • tominor on Power play: “As I was saying, Sweasey got 190,000 and a cushy new job where she reported to Mary Moriarty.  Sweasey quit…Apr 17, 13:33
  • tominor on Power play: “Amy Sweasey was the prosecutor who wrote the original criminal complaint against Derek Chauvin.  She won 190,000 in an anti-retaliation…Apr 17, 13:26
  • PovertyInLuxury on Power play: “Everyday it gets more fake and gay. Moriarty? Of course she is. The defense attorney, we’ll soon learn, is one…Apr 17, 05:57
  • Barry on Ingrates: ““And, let’s be honest, Americans are widely looked down on. To add insult to injury, we don’t think that highly…Apr 16, 23:07
  • Barry on “How it works”: “LOL, I really didn’t get enough popcorn for this shit.Apr 16, 23:02

    

Butt-ugly Leftybitch can’t stand the heat, needs to get the hell out of the kitchen

Welcome to the jungle, twatwaffle.

Zohran Mamdani’s woke, privileged tenant advocate Cea Weaver breaks down crying when asked about hypocritical gentrification comments
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly instated radical-left tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, broke down Wednesday as she dodged questions from reporters about her gentrification hypocrisy.

The 37-year-old, who has faced backlash for blasting homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” in the past, teared up when she emerged briefly from her apartment building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at about 9 a.m.

Weaver, who was tapped by Mamdani to be his new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants, quickly ran back inside after she was asked about the $1.6 million home her mother owns in Nashville, Tennessee.

I read someplace that not only did this big-talking gutless wonder break down crying upon being asked the first pointed question she’d ever faced in her entire life, she also ran screaming down the street before regaining control of herself and sneaking back into her own crib.

Tale of the tape

Why yes, the hard-Left flat-rocker bint WAS doing her level best to commit vehicular homicide and instead got herself shot all to Hell and gone for her trouble, why do you ask?

Social media is crawling with self-proclaimed forensic analysts poring over footage of Wednesday’s ICE shooting in Minneapolis and insisting it shows the agent who shot Renee Nicole Good lacked justification. Some of the takes are downright embarrassing, with left-wing influencers confidently analyzing the wrong ICE agent altogether, pointing to the one at the side of the vehicle instead of the agent positioned in front of it. Some simply post the same footage we’ve all seen and merely declare the video proves the agent is a murderer.

I’ve seen it all, and let me tell you, of all the analyses out there, podcaster Tim Pool has delivered the clearest and most persuasive breakdown of the video evidence from the shooting I’ve seen yet.

After initially giving Good the benefit of the doubt, Pool says slowed-down footage forced him to reverse his position completely, and his frame-by-frame analysis is fantastic.

Pool began by acknowledging his earlier assessment and then explained why it no longer holds up. “While I initially said that I believed she wasn’t intending to hit the officer and was trying to flee, but still put the officer in fear of harm — uh, no, I’ve changed my mind,” Pool said.

What changed his view was a close examination of the video at reduced speed. And trust me, lots of people have slowed down and/or enhanced the video, but most have simply done so and claimed it only proved their original conclusion.
Pool, however, walked viewers through the footage and pointed out details that are easy to miss at full speed, details others either missed or ignored, starting with the officer’s feet.

“I’m gonna show you the slowed-down footage that I believe proves this woman was intending to kill that ICE agent. Watch the officer, who has his gun drawn,” he said.

Pool highlights the moment the vehicle makes contact. “Look at his feet right here in the back left. … Notice his feet both slide backwards,” Pool explained. “You see his foot sliding? Yeah, he’s not taking a step. He’s being hit by the vehicle.”

Anticipating the usual defenses, Pool concedes a narrow point before dismantling the broader claim. “Now, I can already hear you saying, ‘Hold on, Tim, if you’re up against a vehicle and it accelerates and it pushes you out of the way, that doesn’t warrant shooting somebody.’ Agreed,” he said.

From there, Pool reversed the sequence to show how the officer ended up directly in harm’s way, and it’s a critical detail.

“Here’s the vehicle reversing. The officer is not in front of the vehicle,” Pool said. “She reverses and now he is in front of the vehicle.” He adds critical context about timing and positioning: “He initially is to the right of the vehicle. By all means argue he should not have placed … himself in this position. We’re talking about seconds.”

The most damning detail comes next.

Eh, if you say so, Matt. Myself, I never from the git-go had the slightest problem believing that—after ceaseless exhortations to interfere, impede, injure, and/or kill ICE officers in the course of doing their jobs emanating from vicious, violent Leftards—one of those mouthbreathers would actually go and do something like this. All things considered, why wouldn’t they? The wonder is that it doesn’t happen four-five times a week, every week.

War, peace, all that

The Jeddak of Jeddaks expounds on…well, pretty much everything, basically.

The Caracasian Cut
Regime decapitation and the consequences of competence

We might ask, in the spirit of an augur inquiring after the flight of a dove at daybreak, a circling hawk at high noon, or the cold gaze of a crow in the gloaming, what is the meaning of the Caracas raid? We do not need to assume that the meaning we look for in this action is intentional, though we should not rule this out, either; what matters is how the act will manifest symbolically, how it will be interpreted in the minds of onlookers, which it will do regardless of intention.

The superficial import of the action is clear enough. America has seized control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world, and at a stroke applies crippling pressure to the economies of China, Iran, and Cuba (who were Venezuela’s best grey-market customers), as well as to the economies of its adversary Russia and its wayward sibling Canada (both of which depend for their prosperity upon high oil prices). Both China and Russia have been deprived of a key New World ally, and thus the Monroe Doctrine is reasserted, and foreign powers pushed out of Washington’s sphere of influence. A hostile communist government has been decapitated, opening the way for the millions of Venezuelans displaced by Bolivarian tyranny, refugees whose presence has destabilized Venezuela’s neighbours for many years now, to return home.

Trump’s declaration that America now owns Venezuela’s oil feels a bit premature. Can one really claim control, without boots on the ground? I confess that it is not at all clear to me exactly how this is all supposed to work. Perhaps it is meant to function through pure intimidation: whoever ends up assuming power in Venezuela, they will know that if they don’t do as they’re told, they might be next, and perhaps will not be given the grace of an arrest and a show trial but simply executed without warning by drone; meanwhile, America offers itself as the sole legitimate customer for Venezuela’s sole marketable product, while providing its oil industry engineers to rebuild (and assume control of) infrastructure fallen into disrepair following Chavez’ nationalization and subsequent decades of neglect and mismanagement. Trump holds out one hand in an offer of assistance and mutual benefit, while holding back his other curled in a mailed fist, a threat made plausible by the fact that he just punched them hard in the mouth.

Still, all of this is nothing more than realpolitik, the hard edges of power in the material world.

The real meaning, the symbolic importance, lies deeper. It is not measured in dollars or barrels of oil. It is a message.

Over the last several months of military buildup in the Caribbean, many have issued dire predictions of the inevitable boondoggle that would result if the US allowed itself to be drawn into an invasion and occupation of Venezuela. A repeat of Iraq and Afghanistan, or worse yet Vietnam, an ugly guerrilla war in the steaming tropical jungle that would drain American blood, treasure, and will into the fetid third world swamp in tragicomic counterpoint to MAGA’s promise to drain the swamp at home. There was excellent reason for this cynicism. Every military adventure of the GWOT has been a debacle. Trust is as thin as ragged tissue paper.

Calmer heads pointed out that there was little prospect of an invasion: the forces being assembled in the Caribbean could land at most a few thousand troops, enough for a punitive expedition but hardly sufficient for an occupation. The plan, therefore, was clearly something other than an occupation, though exactly what it was no one could say for sure. My personal guess was that they were simply intending to squeeze the Venezuelan communists to death, enforcing the embargo on oil exports by interdicting contraband tankers flying under the false flags of countries they weren’t actually registered in, and watching from a safe distance as the unpaid military and unfed people turned on one another like starving jackals behind their besieged walls. Ugly, with an immense human cost, but effective.

I certainly never expected them to simply descend like Odin with the Wild Hunt and snatch the country’s president in a lightning raid.

Neither, of course, did anyone else expect such an audacious manoeuvre. Which was the point.

This being a characteristically superb piece in the grand old John Carter style, you’ll definitely want to read it all.

Update! Okay, after scanning through the piece again, I realized just how profoundly remiss of me it would be not to include this delicious bit.

This is the same American military that spent twenty fruitless years fighting to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, climaxing with a humiliating route from Kabul in which billions of dollars of military equipment were abandoned to the very Taliban that the military fought so hard to replace the Taliban with.

It is the same American military that, until just a year ago, was struggling to fill its ranks, because the warrior class had concluded that it was not a military worth belonging to, that a government which held them in such contempt was not a government worth fighting for.

Only one thing changed: a year ago, when Trump won the election, the American state was decapitated.

Because Trump won the election, he could fire the fat bureaucrat Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defence, and appoint in his place the energetic, muscular young Hegseth as Secretary of War. Because Hegseth was the Secretary of War, he could begin eliminating the dross of the Cancelled Years and refocus the American military on its actual mission.

It turned out to be that simple. Change the leadership, replace the dance troupe of hollow men and men in dresses that has cavorted through the halls of power for far too long with platoons of competent men, and allow the competent men to do what they know how to do, without interference from politicians, lawyers, and ideologues. Just point them in the right direction and get out of their way.

OOOF! That one’s gonna hurt all the right people in all the right ways, for all the right reasons.

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