If Hitler had won the Civil War…
GIVE TIL IT HURTS!
Just clearing an old open tab here, no big thang. I promise you, though, you’re almost certainly gonna enjoy it.
Common JoJo L 😏 pic.twitter.com/OiToNssaEV
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs)
OUCH! I felt that stinging slap from all the way over here.
1Any article that opens with Cromwell’s most well-remembered quote is bound to catch my eye, and this too-brief piece is some seriously heady stuff.
“Is it therefore infallibly agreeable to the Word of God, all that you say? I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”–Oliver Cromwell, letter to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland (3 August 1650)
Five years ago, I wrote a book about evolution and human cognition. This was a stretch for me, as I am a three-time English major, so I did a lot of research. It was fascinating research, which taught me a lot of important things about knowledge, human nature, cognition, and storytelling. It also taught me the single most depressing thing that I know, which is this: human reason did not evolve to help us find the truth; it evolved to help us defend positions arrived at in largely unreasonable ways.
The reasons for this lie deep in the reptilian corners of our brains. Natural selection selects for what is useful, which may or may not be what is true. Decisiveness is useful. Appearing confident is useful. Defending one’s turf is useful. And winning fights is always useful. But knowing the truth about abstract universal propositions involving beauty, truth, and God? Not so much. It turns out that appearing to know the truth about these things is much more valuable, evolutionarily speaking, than actually being right.
Culture reinforces these evolutionary dynamics in different ways. Mormon culture, for example, places an enormous premium on appearing to know the truth, especially in religious matters. Few people ever stand up in testimony meeting to proclaim that they think the Church is true, or even that they hope or believe the Church is true. From the time we can talk, we announce from the pulpit that we know the Church is true. We know it from the bottom of our hearts, with every fiber of our beings, absolutely, certainly, completely, just like Moroni promised.
But here’s the deal: you are wrong about stuff. I am wrong about stuff. We are all wrong about stuff. This is just math. Given the number of things that all of us believe (or do not believe) to be facts, the number of things that we consider (or do not consider) valuable, and the number of policies that we think (or do not think) will work, there is no possible way that we are going to be right about everything. We understand this retroactively. We can all remember times that we were wrong in the past. But such is the nature of human cognition that we can barely even fathom what we might be wrong about today.
And this is why Cromwell’s challenge–“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you might be mistaken”–is so important to us (and yes, I do realize how ironic it is to quote Oliver Cromwell on the possibility of being wrong). Another word for this is “humility.” This is important because it actually is part of our religion, and because it makes us people that other people can stand to be around. But it is also important because, as a matter of near-mathematical certainty, we actually are wrong about some religious things–and probably quite a few.
Yeah, well, with so many Leftards all around us nowadays, humility has necessarily become a quite scarce commodity.
Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not.
Lest any of us get to feeling smug from the cozy “couldn’t happen here” cope, may I remind you that, for the last five-six decades at least, the FUSA has tended to lag no more than five to ten years behind the Mother Country in such matters. As Bracken says, this is but the force-assembly phase of a thousand-year campaign of civilizational conquest and subjugation the decadent West can’t be arsed to concern itself about nowadays, much less prevent, still less reverse.
In the course of re-skimming through some of my favorite speculative-fiction works over lo, the past year or thereabouts—Peter Hamilton in particular, although there are others—I’ve noticed a thing that amuses me greatly. Namely, the unfounded assumption that Once-Great Britain will somehow project the cultural dominance it enjoyed several hundred years ago across the spacefaring worlds of the 30th-31st-32nd Century and beyond. Offhand references to obscure London neighborhoods, linguistic tics, architectural styles, even such prosaic artifacts as steak and kidney pie, bangers & mash, and baked beans for breakfast (?!?) get tossed around liberally, betraying the quaint, vanity-inspired notion that anybody in the far-distant future will even know what those things are…or, y’know, were.
For the matter of it, many of them are barely even remembered in present-day Londonistan, let alone Proxima Centauri in 3426; already, they are no longer traditions to be cherished and preserved, but irrelevant antiquities to be discarded. Will cookies still be known far and wide as “biscuits”? Will a yobbo still be a yobbo, a wog still a wog, a Frenchman still a Frog?
More to the point: will a Moslem-overrun England be capable of engineering and developing a wormhole drive, FTL communications, colony arkships, artificial-gravity generators? Will the Abdul-Abdel-Abdullahs, Saddiqs, and Achmeds in charge of the New British Caliphate be at all interested in undertaking such ambitious, multi-generational projects?
Not bloody likely, mate.
Not to beat up too much on Hamilton and his confreres, mind. Hey, nobody gets everything right every time; foresighted as he was, even Heinlein never saw touch screens coming, and his futuristic computer gizmos printed their output on actual paper, ferchrissakes—a long, laborious process which usually took not just hours but days. Also, Heinlein’s transtellar-flight helmsmen operated their ships’ version of “warp drive” via clunky levers, knobs, and pushbuttons; his navigators (astrogators?) plotted their course not with a holographic projection or main-viewscreen star chart, but boring old No 2 pencil and paper.
No energy weapons; no personal force-fields; no magnetized grav-boots for use in micro-gee environments or EVA. No antimatter propulsion; no mass-to-energy converters; no inertial dampeners; no starships capable of atmospheric flight and/or landing. No malmetal, glassteel, or plascrete. Heinlein and his fellow visionaries came up with lots of cool stuff in their day, sure, but their vision didn’t extend quite that far.
Rule of thumb which ought to be remembered but is too often forgotten: just because even our finest minds can’t see it on the horizon doesn’t mean it ain’t coming all the same.
(Via WRSA)
Hell with that shitlib Dave Barry and his snarky swipes at anyone to the right of Josef Stalin, David Thompson dishes out the real deal.
The Year Reheated
In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.The year began with a male Guardian columnist, Mr Phineas Harper, announcing his plan to heroically advance “gender equality” via the medium of self-absorption and by wearing a pleated skirt. Guardian readers were invited to believe that the sight of Mr Harper “dancing in skirts” and feeling “buoyed up” by compliments regarding his ensemble would, in ways never quite pinned down, liberate British women from their grim, downtrodden existence.
We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.
And we concluded a trilogy of posts on the subject of crime and punishment – and the status-chasing contortions of progressives, for whom, pretentious leniency is a kind of social jewellery with which to impress one’s peers. And according to whom, the wellbeing of habitual burglars is much more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, whose homes have just been violated, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”
In February, we learned, via a Canadian socialist podcaster named Nora Loreto, that habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime, a trivial thing. Even a third conviction for thieving someone else’s car should not result in incarceration or any physical impediment, because the victims of car theft – who do not exist, apparently – “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” announced Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.
Other topics included an educational effort in San Francisco, in which elementary school children were expected to “disrupt whiteness,” and to have – or at least regurgitate – strong opinions on the Israeli military. Needless to say, this focus on political indoctrination and imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords,” came at the expense of more mundane subjects, with English and maths scores hitting record lows, and with less than 4% of students considered numerate. All in the name of “removing barriers to learning.”
And we pondered the weirdly woke marketing of retailer John Lewis, whose customers were doubtless inspired to shop harder and more often thanks to photographs of store employees accompanied by details of their mental health problems and niche sexual leanings. Among them, Mr Marc Geoffrey Albert Whitcombe, now known as Ruby, who was thrilled by “the chance to express my true inner self,” and who was photographed in an enormous rose-adorned wig and while clutching a cat o’ nine tails. Customers intrigued by this in-store display soon discovered Mr Whitcombe’s social media presence, which consists of hundreds of selfies in which he attempts erotic poses, complete with ladies’ lingerie and while gripping sex toys in his mouth.
As if all the above wasn’t nauseating enough already, David carries on in like emetic vein from there.
1
1An intriguing idea, one I hadn’t ever thought of myself before. From the NYT, of all unlikely places.
The Unabomber’s Influence Is Deeper and More Dangerous Than We Know
I published a novel about the Unabomber this year, and during a book tour stop in Seattle, a high school teacher raised his hand and asked me what he could tell his students about Ted Kaczynski, because he was a hero to so many of them. The question stopped me cold, reminding me that Mr. Kaczynski’s influence is deeper and more widespread than most people realize.The same feeling of cold unease returned this week when I read news reports that Luigi Mangione, the suspect charged in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, Brian Thompson, had posted a favorable review of the Unabomber’s manifesto online. The similarities didn’t end there. The meticulous planning and use of symbolism in the crime reminded me of Mr. Kaczynski, who spent years choosing his targets, designing disguises (even gluing false soles to the bottoms of his shoes) and leaving messages for investigators. The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” written on the bullet casings found by Mr. Thompson’s body were an eerie echo of the “FC” for Freedom Club that Mr. Kaczynski carved into his bombs. The fact that Mr. Mangione allegedly made his own gun and carried a copy of his own manifesto reinforced the similarities.
There is, of course, still much we don’t know about Mr. Mangione: a full picture of who he is, and what factors shaped him and motivated him. But the teacher’s suggestion that the Unabomber was a hero to some of his students pointed to a larger truth. To many young people living in a system of extreme economic disparity, in a world they believe is on the verge of ecological collapse, the Unabomber represents a dark, growing ideological desperation. To them, his ruthlessly intellectualized turn to violence can seem justified.
At some point before much more time has passed, Our Side will have to get over its girlish squeamishness regarding this purported “ruthlessly intellectualized turn to violence” being utterly unthinkable, amoral, and completely out of bounds, I’m afraid. That’s owing to one very simple reason which ought to be obvious: if we don’t rise to the challenge and match the Leftist enemy blow for blow and then some, then we must inevitably lose to them. And as all of us should know full well by now, losing to the Left means losing absolutely everything.
You definitely want to read all of this one, it’s quite good. Never thought I’d hear myself say that about a NYT article, but there you are. Strange days indeed, sure to get stranger still as time marches ever on.
Oh yeah, almost forgot: the “Luigi Babe” reference in the post title hails from my own voluminous memory archive—just another of my ceaseless attempts to amuse myself which constitute one of the primary reasons this h’yar blog exists in the first place. Hey, even if none of y’all get a laugh out of it, I do. As is said of the Hokey Pokey, that’s what it’s all about.
See, Luigi Babe (as he insisted everyone call him) was this irritatingly ubiquitious show promoter, self-styled raconteur, and all-around hipster douchebag back in my NYC days. He was unfailingly chatty, touchy-feely, faux friendly, cloying, and utterly oblivious as to how vanishingly few, if any, of his fellow scenesters actually liked him even just a little bit.
When I was host/DJ/barman of a popular weekly rockabilly night* at what was bona fide Downtown scene-maker Deb Parker’s arguably least-successful venture, Babyland, Luigi Babe would show up every Thursday night, to everyone else’s profound chagrin.
If I’m lying, I’m flying: the minute Luigi Babe made his Grande Entrance into Babyland (or anyplace else, really)—clad in his trademark vintage gabardine suit with matching fedora and ascot, an immaculately-drawn pencil-thin moustache adorning his upper lip, flourishing his affected cigarette-holder in one hand like a scepter, carrying himself as if he were the dashing reincarnation of Clark Gable and/or Errol Flynn, the fleshly exemplar of what people mean by the word smarm—you’d see ten or twenty other regulars get up from their booths and beat feet for the exit with alacrity, often as not abandoning a table-full of overly pricy cocktails untouched in the urgency of making good their post-haste escape. Jackets, handsome cardigan sweaters, gloves, purses, you name it, who cares? These were but material objects, no more; unlike the precious time lost enduring the dread Luigi Babe’s presence, they could be replaced.
No shit, the dust cloud those fleeing bar patrons left in their wake would’ve shamed even the Roadrunner speeding away from Wile E Coyote. MEEP MEEP!
* Yclept the Chicken Shack, which moniker would go on to earn me a subtly cheeky nod from no less august a personage than the great Max Weinberg, at a Conan O’Brien show taping—yet another of those incredible stories I really gotta tell y’all sometime
Spencer rolls out a truly inspired idea.
Hey, How About Elon Musk As Speaker of the House?
Elon Musk just pulled the House of Representatives back from the brink of betraying the American people yet again and continuing to fund the out-of-control leviathan that is the federal government. So why not make him speaker of the House?After all, Trump has tabbed Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head up the new Department of Government Efficiency, which will be dedicated to cleaning up the government and stopping the wasteful spending that is a real pandemic in Washington. What better way to do that than by one of them becoming House speaker? That way, Musk or Ramaswamy would be in a perfect position to put a stop to the longstanding practice of passing these impossibly lengthy bills that no one who is voting for them could possibly have read and that contain all manner of poison pills that the American people would never have approved if these measures had been made subject to a referendum.
There was widespread discontent with the bill, which was marketed as a “Continuing Resolution” (CR) to keep the government going but actually contained all manner of pork. Before Johnson withdrew the bloated measure altogether, Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Tex.) wrote on X: “I’m voting NO on the CR and much like the American people, I’m getting tired of governing this way. The federal government has become addicted to writing blank checks, not for voters, but for illegal immigrants, foreign countries, and, in some cases, even terrorist organizations. This is NOT acceptable.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) agreed: “We got the 1,500+ page, not-so-clean CR late last night. There’s no way anyone is reading this whole thing that quickly. It’s longer than the average Bible, for goodness’ sake! This is the same tired trick Washington uses repeatedly to force reckless spending and wasteful government programs through Congress, forcing us to vote on bills before we even know what’s in them. IT HAS TO STOP!”
Yes, it does. But how? Hunt noted that “House Republicans were promised that the days of continuing resolutions would end in the 118th Congress. Yet here we are again, regifting the same tired excuses. How many times can Congress recycle the same broken promises and call it a solution?”
Indeed. It’s time for a radical new approach. So why not Musk or Ramaswamy as speaker of the House? The fact that neither of them are members of the House of Representatives is actually a mark in their favor, just as the fact that Donald Trump is not a career politician is a massive plus. Speaker Musk or Speaker Ramaswamy would not be beholden to any of the moneyed interests that seem to buy up members of Congress and senators with the greatest of ease and carry them around in their pockets like so many nickels and dimes.
To slightly misquote Kelly Bundy’s unabashedly lesbian cheerleading coach: I like it. I like it a LOT.
11SO, here’s where we’re at 83 years on: “Great” Britain, France, and Germany have all been overrun by Mooselimbs, without ever bothering to put up a fight. The FUSA has been overrun by pretty much everybody, including the ChiComs, who already effectively owned it lock, stock, and barrel anyway. Japan, after looking for a few years there like they’d be the Far Eastern nation that was gonna end up owning everything and everybody, is now a floundering economic and military basket case whose young men have been so cowed, beaten down, and feminized they can’t even be bothered to chase pussy anymore.
The Dutch? Same-same. Spain is well on its way to becoming Andalusia v2.0, just another brick in the global-caliphate wall. The Eyeties? Who cares. Does that country still even exist?
Korea is still scarred by a fiercely-enforced DMZ separating its two (2) halves after the Chinks stepped in and dealt the Yanks a solid ass-whupping which ran them back across the Yalu and out of Korea altogether. After almost two (2) decades of pointless war Vietnam was reunified, which all involved parties seem to regret.
Russia is having tremendous difficulty kicking ass and taking names against an adjoining former-USSR shitrapy around one-sixteenth its size which has been saddled with a corrupt government led by a midget robbing both his own nation and the FUSA blind.
Meanwhile, the FUSAn central goobermint is under the iron-fisted control of a shadowy cabal of authoritarian incompetents whose identities We Duh Sheepul will never know, not that most of us seem to care all that much one way or the other as long as we still have Netflix and Super Bowl Sunday to placate us. Said cabal installed as its frontman “President” a hilariously inept, barely-ambulatory, shameless, astoundingly corrupt, unintelligent career conman so far advanced into the final stages of dementia he has repeatedly gotten confused about where he is, why he’s there, how he got there, who brought him, who he’s supposed to be talking to, why certain ex-people who died years ago aren’t there, etc etc.
Then his own criminal organization masquerading as a political party elbowed him out and anointed as his replacement a visibly drunk, embarrassingly inarticulate, cackling old whore that nobody but NOBODY liked at all. Thankfully, an irrepressible, rambunctious, fun-loving outsider promising vengeance against the Swamp critters who have tormented him and his family incessantly for nigh on a decade kicked the day-drinking whore’s ass so hard she ended up wearing it as a hat, crushing her well beyond the margin of fraud which had sufficed to install the previous two (2) “Presidents” at the very least.
Now tell me again who won WW2, please. Hell, for the matter of it, can anybody truthfully be said to have won it? From where I’m sitting, it’s beginning to look like EVERYBODY lost.
Bayou Peter kicks things off thusly:
As part of my research for a forthcoming book, I’ve been reading up about the history of dueling in New Orleans during the 18th and 19th centuries. I came across this very unusual account.
“Unusual,” he says. “Unusual,” forsooth! Just get a load of this, it leaves “unusual” in the dust.
M. Augustin … who afterward became a district judge and general of the Louisiana Legion, was the victor in several … encounters in which the temper of the period caused him to be engaged. One in particular is noteworthy on account of the part it played in an extraordinary freak of fortune. Alexander Grailhe was the offending party, though the insult (or rather provocation, for gentlemen seldom insulted) would in this day be of scant concern. But some cause of action was present, and each was sure that a deadly meeting would certainly follow. They rode together in a carriage with ladies, who, after the duel, commented on their mutual affability during the entire trip, which only serves to show how delicately adjusted was the code of etiquette—especially in the presence of ladies.
They fought at The Oaks, and as soon as the weapons had been crossed and the impressive “Allez, Messieurs,” pronounced, Grailhe, who was high-strung and hot-blooded—doubly so under the stress of what he regarded as a grievous provocation—lost his temper and furiously charged his antagonist. Augustin, on the contrary, was cool, collected, and agile, parrying each savage thrust, until by a temps d’arrêt (sudden pause), judiciously interpolated into a vicious lunge of Grailhe’s, he pierced him through the chest. Grailhe, with one of his lungs perforated, remained for a long time hovering between life and death, and when at last he did come out of his room, he was bowed like an octogenarian.
It was now only a question of time for the wounded man, as an internal abscess had formed where it could not be reached, —surgery then was not what it is now,— and the doctors despaired of saving him. Some time after he had been up and about, a quarrel with Col. Mandeville de Marigny resulted in his challenging that distinguished citizen. This duel was also fought at The Oaks, but as Grailhe was too weak to do himself justice with a sword, the weapons chosen were pistols at fifteen paces, each to have two shots, advance five paces, and fire at will. At the first shot, fired simultaneously, the unfortunate man fell forward, pierced by his adversary’s bullet, which had entered the exact place of his former and yet unhealed wound. Marigny, with pistol in hand and as placid as a marble statue, advanced to the utmost limit marked out, when Grailhe, who was suffering greatly, exclaimed: “Fire again; you have another shot.”
With grave dignity Marigny raised his pistol above his head and fired into the air, saying with frigid politeness: “I never strike a fallen foe.”
More dead than alive, the stricken duelist was carried home by his friends and consigned to the care of his physician; but instead of sinking rapidly, as was expected, he really began to mend, and by the following morning was much improved. The ball had penetrated to the abscess which had threatened his life, and made an exit for its poisonous accumulations. Some time afterward he walked out of his room as erect as ever, and soon regained his health and stately bearing.
YOWZA! I don’t think even “bizarre” quite meets the case here—downright otherworldly, I’d call it.
41The Jeddak of Jeddaks gets positively jiggy with it.
Trump’s agenda is not compatible with American decline. Trump wants America to thrive. He wants America to be strong.
Just as a weak country must weaken its allies, a strong country can afford to strengthen them.
This would be a complete break with decades of implicit US foreign policy.
Trump has said repeatedly that he wants Europe to pull its weight in NATO, meeting the 2% GDP threshold that all member states are theoretically expected to fulfill, but which almost none of them actually do. Being a businessman, he frames this in financial terms: why should America pick up the tab for Europe’s defence? Which is certainly an urgent matter, given the disastrous state of America’s national debt. But this has inevitable geopolitical consequences. A remilitarized Europe that can actually defend itself is a Europe that is no longer at the mercy of the American military.
Making Europe Great Again isn’t solely a matter of investing more in European militaries. Such an agenda reaches into everything. Arabs and Africans need to be remigrated, in vast numbers. The rainbow parades need to stop: a continent of prancing sodomites is not a continent that can defend itself. And, of course, the economy must be revived: the overly intrusive regulatory fetters must be peeled off and set on fire, in order to make it possible for Europeans to once again exercise that famous, world-shaking creativity. People talk about “American ingenuity”, and Americans are ingenious, but this is only because Americans are a subspecies of European.
Extending MAGA to MEGA is not a matter of charity. The interconnectivity of the world makes MEGA essential to MAGA, and vice versa. The vampire strategy of ruling by weakening the imperial dependencies a little faster than they weaken the imperial core just results in the whole system getting weaker, which is a problem when your opponents are pursuing the opposite strategy domestically.
MEGA is also domestically important. The people running Europe are loyalists of the US deep state. As one example, the EU has been used as a way for the American deep state to try and do an end run around the US Constitution and reintroduce internet censorship, particularly on X, via the back door: the Eurocrats and their tame courts are quite happy to help them with this. There’s also a symbiotic relationship between Eurocrats and their left-wing American counterpart in the deep state: leftist policies are implemented in European political laboratories, which are subsidized by the American economy; their ‘successes’ are then cited as reason to bring these same policies home to America. If Trump is serious about dismantling his enemies at home, he also needs to crush their allies abroad.
This absolutely magisterial piece is a long ‘un indeed, of which you will most definitely want to read the all, folks.
11Conflict and strife with Pisslam is a forever kind of thing.
Remembering Why the U.S. Navy Was Formed: To Combat Islamic Terror
During a recent mosque sermon at the North Hudson Islamic Center in New Jersey, a CAIR official, Ayman Aishat, made a seemingly startling claim:We live in America, the United States of America. Brothers and sisters, those who do not know history, not too long ago, the USA was paying the jizya to the Ottoman Caliph.
Could this be?
First, let us define jizya. In brief (full discussion here), it is the monetary tribute that conquered or cowed infidels pay their Islamic overlords in exchange for peace, according to Koran 9:29:
Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah, nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth [Islam], until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.
And yes, Aishat is correct: once upon a time, in its fledgling youth, the United States succumbed to paying jizya to appease Muslim terrorists. That story is instructive — not least as it includes the genesis of the U.S. Navy.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Muslims of North Africa (“Barbary”) thrived on enslaving Europeans. According to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.” (With countless European women selling for the price of an onion, little wonder by the late 1700s, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”)
As Barbary slaving was a seafaring venture, nearly no part of Europe was untouched. From 1627 to 1633, Lundy, an island off the west coast of Britain, was actually occupied by the pirates, whence they pillaged England at will. In 1627 they raided Denmark and even far-off Iceland, hauling a total of some 800 slaves.
Such raids were accompanied by the trademark hate. One English captive writing around 1614 noted that the Muslim pirates “abhor the ringing of the [church] bells being contrary to their Prophet’s command,” and so destroyed them whenever they could. In 1631, nearly the entire fishing village of Baltimore in Ireland was raided, and “237 persons, men, women, and children, even those in the cradle” were seized.
By the late eighteenth century, Barbary’s strength relative to Europe had plummeted, and the Muslims could no longer raid the European coastline for slaves — certainly not on the scale of previous centuries — so its full energy was spent on raiding non-Muslim merchant vessels. European powers responded by buying peace through tribute, which the Muslims accepted as jizya.
Fresh and fair meat appeared on the horizon once the newly born United States broke free of Great Britain and was therefore no longer protected by the latter’s jizya payments. In 1785, Muslim pirates from Algiers captured two American vessels, the Maria and Dauphin. They enslaved and paraded the sailors through the streets to jeers and whistles. Considering the horrific ways Christian slaves were treated in Barbary — sadistically tortured, pressured to convert, and sodomized, as described in the writings of missionaries, redeemers, and others (e.g., John Foxe, Fr. Dan, Fr. Jerome Maurand, Robert Playfair; see pp. 279-283) — when the Dauphin’s Captain O’Brian later wrote to Thomas Jefferson that “our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” he was not exaggerating.
And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Note Washington’s pithy take:
In such an enlightened, in such a liberal age, how is it possible that the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical States of Barbary? Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into nonexistence.
As we all ought to know well enough after ~250 years of continual Muzzrat depredation against the US, the only rational, realistic choice has to be Option B. Remember, too, the “…shores of Tripoli” bit in the very first line of the Marine Corps Hymn. It’s in there for a very good reason, y’know.
11The late, unlamented Supervee.
The little engine that couldn’t: A short saga of the Super Vee
When it comes to motorcycles, I like the odd ducks.
I prefer ducks that are actually capable of moving under their own power, but maybe that’s just me.
I’m no match, though, for Paul and Joel at American Cycle Fabrication. You might remember Paul as the man who had those $35 Harleys we wrote about. Recently, I meandered by to see what the boys were up to and what curiosities I could turn up. I walked in the door, and sitting on a bench was the mother lode: a Super Vee.
Nothing gets me going like an abstruse piece of motorcycle equipment, so when I saw this engine parked there, I started pushing people and parts out of my way so I could snap a few photos. You see, I’ve heard of Super Vees, but I’d never actually seen one live and in color. The particular one I saw was a third-generation, the final design ever offered for sale — and the rarest. Approximately 45 were ever sold.
Now as a rowdy, uncut stripling, I read all the biker rags religiously: Iron Horse, my all-time fave under David Snow (CAUTION: Fakeberg link) and my dear departed friend Chris Pfouts; Outlaw Biker, for whom I would later toil thanklessly; American Iron, for whom my tight Pittsburgh brother Mike Seate ditto; Easyriders, the granpappy of ‘em all, and entirely righteous back before it began to suck dead donkey dicks (in its glory days, ER once ran a pic of the illustrious Traci Lords [link is related, just scroll down] on the cover, under the preposterous nom de slut “Suzy Softail,” IIRC); Biker Lifestyle, an also-ran publication about which there really ain’t a whole lot to say other than they always seemed to run more titty-pics than any of the aforementioned rags; last and probably least, Steve Iorio’s Supercycle, which eventually became little more than a vehicle for pimping Iorio’s useless PoS Supervee doorstops.
A pic of the monstrosity in its natural habitat: to wit, propped up on a workbench surrounded by the tools with which the poor schlub who got suckered into buying it would attempt to ascertain why the &^%@#%)*!!! it wouldn’t run.
The rest of the sordid story.
So what is a Super Vee?
In 1983, Harley was not selling whole engines to custom bike builders. Steve Iorio, who owned an outfit called Nostalgia Cycle, wasn’t really digging that situation, so the Super Vee concept was born. The idea was to create an engine using cheap, easily available small-block Chevy parts, that could power a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. By 1985, the engines were released for sale. Iorio was so bold as to suggest that he was going to unseat Harley and put them out of business. He felt Harley was putting the screws to the workin’ joe, and the Super Vee was the common man’s way to fight back: Engine parts could be had reliably and very affordably from any GM dealership or aftermarket auto parts house.Articles published in Supercycle Magazine as early as 1983 helped get the project off the ground. The engine, though primitive, got rave reviews. Nostalgia Cycle even had a phone number customers could call and hear a Super Vee running! Heady stuff for the 1980s. Nostalgia put together a video (which is pretty funny) extolling the virtues of the new mill. Take a peek. (Bonus points for the first reader to count how many times the narrator says “American.”)
Everything seemed hunky dory, but there were a few problems. First, did you notice in that video that you never hear the engine settle into an idle? That seems a bit strange, right? Secondly, Supercycle was published by the same guy who owned Nostalgia Cycle, Steve Iorio. Steve had dabbled quite a bit in the motorcycle industry. Those initials may be familiar to some — he used to produce springers under the company name SIE, and hung out with Dick Allen, a motorcycle legend in his own right.
Ol’ Steve also went by a few aliases, including “Steve Nelson.” In fact, you can read a lovely article the Los Angeles Times wrote about him — using his fake name! The biggest, most glaring problem with Iorio was his character. The biggest, most glaring problem about the Super Vee was its near-universal reputation of being a complete piece of shit.
For those of you who have never purchased a crate engine, let me fill you in on how the process works. You buy the engine, and sometimes you have to install an ignition and a carb. That’s about it. Install it, and hit the starter button.
The Super Vee was different. It did not run well, if at all. Mating Harley-esque cases to a General Motors rotating assembly presented problems. Critical engine parts didn’t always receive enough oil, yet most Super Vees puked plenty outside the engine. In many cases, engines required some disassembly and some additional machining. Many of the engines required an overhaul simply because of awful quality control during manufacture.
The gruesome saga of Iorio’s exorbitantly overpriced bastard-baby carries on from there; it’s a truly gripping read for any dyed in the wool gearhead-type weirdo, past or present. Won’t do much to bolster one’s naive, childlike faith in the fundamental decency of humanity, I’m afraid. But hey, dem’s da breaks, laddie-buck.
Update! Another aspect of the Iorio melodrama I thought might be worth a mention: I also spent a fair few simoleons on Nostalgia Cycle parts for my trusty old Shovelhead FLH over the decade or so I owned and rode her, mostly at swap meets and such-like dens of iniquity.
I quickly learned that those Nostalgia Cycle (universally reviled amongst my fellow CLT-area scooter trash as “Nostalgia Psycho”) geegaws and gimcracks were without exception El Cheapo crap: flimsy, soft-rubber handlebar bushings; bolt-ons which couldn’t be bolted on thanks to mis-aligned mounting holes; “stainless steel” engine hardware dress-up kits that were neither stainless nor steel; points that didn’t fire, plugs that didn’t spark, filters that didn’t filter, external oil hard-lines without any holes drilled in ‘em; “high flow” oil pumps with no pump gear, etc. etc.
The chrome on all those fancy-shmancy covers—battery, nose cone, breather, primary, drive chain, coil, &c—would begin to blister, flake, and/or peel within no more than two (2) days of the first time it got wet. I was never much of a chrome-cover guy myself—I was more inclined to remove all that shit, box it up, and store it in the remotest corner of the garage. I vastly preferred the lean, mean, bare-knuckle brawler look, as exemplified by my stripped-nekkid, hellaciously fast, screamin’ demon 06 Sporty:
Custom Hot Rod Flatz paint in Desert Sand (hand-sprayed at the shop by Goose, hand-striped and -lettered by the legendary Eddie Brown, Fender motor-mount bottle opener by yrs truly); wrapped header-pipes; no front or rear belt cover; not a single extraneous piece of chrome anywhere that wasn’t factory-installed—what can I say? Except that I surely do miss that sweet, nasty little bitch.
Anyways. Every last bit of Nostalgia Psycho’s teetotal junk, mind, was made from pure Chineseum© in an era when such foreign-parts profanations were strictly verboten—taboo to any self-respecting Milwaukee Iron aficionado, for which unthinking sacrilege the Harley Gods would surely smite down the blasphemer with a quickness. Suffice it to say, after getting bitten like that a cpl-three times, my days of throwing money down the Nostalgia sewer drain were O-V-E-R over.
Updated update! Awright, awright, awright, quitcher crying, ya sissy-Marys; more righteous photos of my beautiful, decidedly non-shiny Sporty below the fold. Although I’ve described her verbally/textually here before, I don’t believe I ever did post any pics, for whatever bizarre reason.
Continue reading “Rolling abortion”
11In terms of personnel, he’s gotten off to a much better start than he did in 2016.
Trump picks Democrat-turned-Republican Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence
President-elect Donald Trump continued to fill out his national security team Wednesday, announcing that former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard will be his nominee for director of national intelligence.“I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our Intelligence Community, championing our Constitutional Rights, and securing Peace through Strength,” said Trump of Gabbard, who had previously been rumored to be considered for defense secretary and CIA director.
That’s one, now for Numero Dos.
Trump nominates Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general in surprise pick
“It is my Great Honor to announce that Congressman Matt Gaetz, of Florida, is hereby nominated to be The Attorney General of the United States,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social announcement.“Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department. On the House Judiciary Committee, which performs oversight of DOJ, Matt played a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and exposing alarming and systemic Government Corruption and Weaponization. He is a Champion for the Constitution and the Rule of Law,” the Truth statement read.
Well, here’s hoping, at any rate. Senate Republicrats, on the other hand, seem determined to go right on dancing to Yertle McTurtle’s (Uniparty-Knifeinback) sour tune.
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) has been elected the next GOP leader in the Senate, ushering in a new generation of leadership after nearly two decades of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) running the conference.
A majority of GOP senators supported Thune, currently the Senate minority whip, in a secret ballot held weeks before Republicans take control of the Senate. He received 29 votes on the second ballot Wednesday, compared to 24 for Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) was eliminated in the first round of voting after receiving the fewest votes.
“I want to thank my colleagues who placed their faith in me to serve as leader, and those who were supporting another candidate,” Thune said in a press conference after his election. “I promise to be a leader who serves the entire Republican Conference.”
The leadership election marks a monumental changing of the guard. McConnell, who announced his retirement from leadership in February, is the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, having risen to the post in 2007.
Bold mine. And a bigger part of the problem you ain’t ever gonna see.
41Kudos and a big fat “attaboy” to Trump lawyer Mike Davis for putting it straight, no chaser.
🔥🚨BREAKING: President Elect Trump’s lawyer Mike Davis told NY AG Letitia James they will ‘put her fat ass in prison’ if she continues to try to send President Elect Donald Trump to jail.
“I DARE YOU to try to continue your lawfare against President Trump […] We’re not… pic.twitter.com/VCy6XpryMd
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre)
Your “Show more” workaround:
“I DARE YOU to try to continue your lawfare against President Trump […] We’re not messing around this time and we will put your fatass in prison for conspiracy against rights.”
This. This right HERE, friends. Puts me in mind of a tasty meme I’ve been sitting on for a while now:
To quote my knuckle-tattoos: BANG, ZOOM!
Alas, there are those out there who will insist that we must “take the high road,” that we “not descend to their level,” all the same old codswallop. Ever wonder why Our Side has been losing to the Enemy for so long we can hardly even remember what winning feels like? Very simple, very easy: because Their Side plays hardball—remorselessly, unapologetically, continually—while Our Side plays soft NO-ball.
Ace offers a somewhat different, more pragmatic take:
For context: I think James started this war of words by claiming she was getting ready to prosecute Trump through is presidency.
Which itself is more evidence that all of her charges are bogus.
Here’s the trouble: Trump seems to be on the verge of the New York Court of Appeals overturning this charge. The judges were extremely skeptical of all aspects of James’ felonious prosecution.
But government paper-pushers protect each other. If the Court feels that Trump is threatening a fellow bureaucrat, they can decline to overturn the charges, or just suspend them until Trump’s out of office.
Yelling and blustering like the drunk guy in a bar feels good but it’s usually not the best strategy.
Don’t get me wrong; I do agree that Tish James is behaving illegally and is using her power to punish a political opponent. And indeed, she admitted as much in her campaign.
And it would be justice to do the same thing to her.
But it’s not wise to threaten her openly as the justices debate the charges. Especially when you’re on the verge of a huge vindication.
If you think liberal justices are going to just say “Well, they’re both doing it, there’s no harm here,” then you have a different understanding of partisan liberal Democrats than I do.
He may have a point, and it may even be a good one. Be that as it may, though, I contend that Davis’s approach is the way to go: hit ’em HARD, hit ‘em often; make ‘em cry, bring the pain down on ’em again and again and again until they beg you to stop. Then hit ‘em again, even harder. Never let up, never show ‘em an ounce of mercy. God forgives; we, on the other hand, do NOT. As Juanny Mav McLame confirmed for us so many times over so many years, treating with them as if they were honorable, decent folks is nothing but a mug’s game.
Contra our ol’ buddy Ace, I think it’s far more likely that the NY Court of Appeals is holding a moistened finger aloft, testing which way the wind is blowing—hence the rumors of abandoning the lawfare campaign against Trump. The reason for this sudden volte-face is patently obvious: FEAR, period fucking dot.
As has always been inevitable, the Left/D卐M☭CRATs/whatever spent the last five-ten years pushing way too far, way too hard, way too fast. Tuesday may have slammed on the pernicious Letitia James’s brakes for the nonce, but the accelerator pedal has assuredly been neither removed nor disconnected.
Trump’s overwhelming landslide victory this week of right ought to be viewed not as just a run-of-the-mill, politics-as-usual “election” win, but as an actual, by-God uprising. That point should be, MUST be, driven home like a stake through a vampire’s heart, so that the Goosesteppin’ Left won’t ever dare forget. Nothing less will suffice.
At the risk of becoming tiresome, I’ll make with the sagacious words of history’s greatest cavalryman Bedford Forrest once again: Get ‘em skeered, and keep the skeer on ‘em. It really is the only way. We try to make nice with the cloven-hoofed devils of the Left at our tremendous peril…a grievous unforced error we will, as usual, very much regret ere the end.
22Speaking to us from beyond the grave.
A squirrel ran across the stage while everyone was waiting for Kamala’s concession speech. 👀pic.twitter.com/KstpSlxmEj
— Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq)
Can there be any serious doubt about what’s going on here? I THINK NOT. Thank you, Peanut!
(Via Ace)
4
311Bill “The meaning of the word IS” Clinton, telling the God’s honest truth without somebody holding a loaded pistol against his temple, about anything at all? If you’d told me thirty years ago this day would come, I’da laughed in your face and said you were an escapee from the Ha-Ha Hotel, on the lam from the boys with the butterfly nets and those odd jackets with the straps that buckle at the back. I mean, just…just…WOW.
Bill Clinton On the Palestinians:
“And the only time Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth was when he promised me he was gonna accept the peace deal that we had worked out, which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel, and they got… pic.twitter.com/kQZrqdU3zW
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613)
“Show more” workaround:
“And the only time Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth was when he promised me he was gonna accept the peace deal that we had worked out, which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel, and they got to choose where the 4% of Israel was. So they would have the effect of the same land of all the West Bank. They would have a capital in East Jerusalem.
I can hardly talk about this…. And they would have equal access all day every day to the security towers that Israel maintained all through the West Bank up to the Golan Heights.
All this was offered, including, I will say it again, a capital in East Jerusalem and 2 of the 4 quadrants of the old city of Jerusalem, confirmed by the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and his cabinet. And they said no.
And I think part of it is that Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians. They wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable.
Well, I got news for them, they were there first before their faith existed.
They were there. In the time of King David, in the southern most tribes, Hadjardia and Samaria.”
The truth, the whole truth, and nuttin’ but the truth. From the mouth of a Clinton, yet. Man alive, “unexpected” doesn’t even BEGIN to cover it.
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