Alternative History

April 19th

Posted on April 19, 2023April 19, 2023 by Mike

A big, big day, historically speaking, for all sorts of reasons.

The 24 hour period that begins with sunrise on April 19 is a very busy day in history.

1775—American Revolutionary War: The war begins at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

1782—The Netherlands becomes the first nation to officially recognize the United States as being an independent nation

1861—First Union soldier of the Civil War is killed by rioters in Baltimore while quelling pro-secession riot

1865—Abraham Lincoln’s Funeral is held

1943—World War II: In Poland, German troops enter the Warsaw ghetto to round up the remaining Jews, beginning the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

1989—A gun turret of the USS Iowa explodes. I was nearby on another ship. Had friends on the crew. The Navy tried to make one of the dead sailors into a patsy.

1993—The Government kills 76 people in Waco, TX in revenge for the killing of 4 ATF agents. The original raid was due to the failure to pay taxes on rifles.

1995—Murrah Building is bombed by Tim McVeigh in revenge for the Waco killings.

Coincidence? I think n…uhh, well, actually, it’s hard to know quite WHAT to think about this. Believe it or not—and it’s equally hard to—there’s even more yet.

Headless body in topless bar

Posted on April 17, 2023April 18, 2023 by Mike

The backstory of “the most anatomically evocative headline in the history of American journalism.“

This month marks the 40th anniversary of a watershed moment in journalism: the publication of the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline on the front page of the New York Post.

Headlines sell newspapers — at least, they sell the print newspapers offered via those relics known as newsstands. In 1983, almost all of the 965,000 daily newspapers that rolled out of the Post’s building in Lower Manhattan were sold on newsstands.

No one on the Post’s news desk debated the news value of the story: A Brooklyn man named Charles Dingle shot Queens bar owner Herbert Cummings to death and held patrons hostage. When Dingle learned that one was a mortician, he ordered her to behead the victim. Dingle, a box containing the head next to him, was arrested in an unlicensed cab in Manhattan. (Dingle died in prison in 2012, according to New York state records.)

The New York Times also covered the story, stuffing it on Page 2 of the Metropolitan section under the headline, “Owner of a Bar Shot to Death; Suspect Is Held.”

There would have been no Post headline without the gory story. Reporter Jim Norman wrote in a 2012 recollection that the police teletype in the newsroom had two items — one about the discovery in Manhattan of a cardboard box containing a head and the other about the discovery in a Queens bar of a mutilated torso. Norman said he helped to connect the dots as the “headless body” angle riveted the newsroom.

The headline went viral, by 20th-century standards. (then-NYPost managing editor Vincent) Musetto was on David Letterman’s show. It also was the title of a black comedy in the mid-1990s.

In this digital age, when search engine optimization rewards literal headlines and punishes wordplay, “Headless Body in Topless Bar” could perform well online. Was it too over the top? When veteran editor Steve Dunleavy heard criticism at the time, he supposedly replied, “What should we have said? Decapitated cerebellum in tavern of ill repute?”

Musetto always said his favorite headline was “Granny Executed in Her Pink Pajamas” over the 1984 story about the execution of Margie Velma Barfield, who killed her husband in North Carolina. (Musetto seemed to get all the good stories. My own favorite from my year at the Post was “Art thieves take the Monet and run.”)

Heh. Good stuff, that is, from a lost era before the qualities of wry, frisky humor; convention-straining wordplay; hard-boiled iconoclasm; and an above-all-else dedication to Getting The Story encoded in the DNA of crusty, old-school reporters with the de rigeur pint of whiskey tucked away in the bottom desk drawer had all been exorcised in favor of today’s fear-mongering; obeisance to Big Government and the urgenturgentURGENT!!! blandishments of “experts”; and lickspittle fealty to the PC/Woke/Hard Left agenda entire—a noxious hell-brew that poisoned bona-fide American journalism as it had previously been known fatally, and for all time.

Back in the 90s when I was living in NYC, the Post was the only daily I cared much about purchasing and perusing. NY Newsday plainly and simply sucked, on those occasions when it wasn’t infuriating; then again, it was an offshoot of Long Island-centric Newsday, and what sophisticated, urbane Manhattanite such as moi cared a whit about what those yokels might get themselves up to way out there in the boonies, anyway?

The WSJ was meh, boring, and still is. The Old Grey Whore (a/k/a the NYT) had nearly completed her long, slow slide into total hyperpartisan irrelevance and rank dishonesty; the NY Daily News was middle-of-the-road bland, making it a small cut above the rest of the shitlib propaganda broadsheets.

Later, 2002 would see a short-lived stab at reviving the old NY Sun, but despite the sly, self-deprecating insider-witticism of being printed on piss-yellow paper early on (because yellow journalism, get it?), the Sun failed to distinguish itself otherwise and thus quickly died the death, at least in its print version. Maybe it was good, who knows; although I was still spending a lot of my time in NYC, I still can’t remember ever even reading the thing, honestly.

As for the rest of NYC’s then-crowded field of news outlets: weekly radical-Left alternarag The Village Voice…well, most of the people I hung out with bought it exclusively for the voluminous rock-show and apartment-for-rent listings; amusing if frequently scandalous, even pornographic, personal ads; and maybe Nat Hentoff, among the small handful of my punk-rocker pals who cared about topical affairs.

When it came along, Russ Smith’s NY Press felt like a welcome breath of fresh air to NYC’s minuscule minority of RightWingNaziDeathBeasts like me, but it was short on the aforementioned Voice features New Yorkers had come to rely on. Even though I bought a copy every week the minute it appeared at the bodega down the street and read it cover to cover, I never for a minute thought it could ever amount to serious, credible competition for the Voice. And that’s pretty much how it went, eventually.

Maybe the best thing about this noteworthy anniversary of an unforgettable tabloid headline is that The Power hasn’t gotten around to outlawing any remembrance or remark upon such lighthearted, entertaining mass-media insouciance yet. You can bet they’re probably working on it, though.

Trannysaurus Rex

Posted on April 15, 2023April 15, 2023 by Mike

Modern “science”—is there ANYTHING it can’t ruin completely?

Apparently not.

T-Rex to Modern Science: Don’t Give Me Any Lip
Breaking news from the Mesozoic Era is a phrase you might not have expected to hear. Nevertheless, recent research suggests the Tyrannosaurus Rex, that terrifyingly toothsome star of the movie “Jurassic Park,” might have had lips.

A study recently published in the well-regarded journal Science proposes as much. Respectfully—for I wouldn’t want to sound lippy around the experts, who I assume aren’t writing with tongue in cheek—I have questions.

First, how can we be so sure? No leviathan lipstick case was unearthed in Uruguay. No oversized Oxford with a telltale red on its collar was found bedside in Bangladesh. No love letter sealed with a kiss was discovered in Denmark.

Such a note would be suspicious anyway, unless we’re also to believe the newly-lipped Tyrannosaurus Rex’s arms were not too short for writing. Were they only metaphorically stubby-armed? Did disinclination to pick up a check contribute to their demise? Paleontology keeps a conspicuous silence.

Much of the case for dinosaur lips turns on the surprisingly low enamel-wear found on the solitary tooth of one Daspletosaurus, a distant T. Rex relative. Modern-day crocodiles, which are lipless, have substantially more outer-tooth enamel-wear than this solitary prehistoric chopper found in the dirt. Ergo, T. Rexes must have had lips.

So it’s “case closed, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”? According to my dentist, I have more advanced enamel-wear than most men my age. I hope in the distant future nobody digs up my worn-down chicklets and convinces my descendants I was lipless.

This conclusion is really a mouthful. Glad though I am to have skipped the “checking enamel-wear on crocodiles” booth on career day in high school, I wonder: what if this particular dinosaur simply practiced uncommonly good dental hygiene?

I suppose unearthing a Little Black Dress, color-matched clutch purse, and a pair of high-heel pumps all preserved in amber from a T Rex fossil-bone orchard as confirmation of this dino’s perfectly normal, sane, and admirable gender-bender tendencies is a little too much to hope for. But we all know the truth about this cross-dressing, sexually emancipated Thunder Lizard just the same.

With “friends” like these…

Posted on April 15, 2023April 15, 2023 by Mike

The NRA, The GOPe, all sorts of other ostensibly “conservative” outfits, like the Heritage Foundation among too many others—for many decades, Real Americans thought they could count on these organizations as at least lukewarm allies, if occasionally unreliable or even treacherous ones.

Well, guess what.

NRA was the first National Gun Control Organization
There are many in the gun community that are angry with Trump for the bump stock ban. I have never blamed Trump for the travesty that was the bump stock ban, because I don’t think that he is the one who sold out gun owners. Let’s be honest here- the NRA greenlighted the bump stock ban. This is nothing new, the NRA was pro gun control for most of its history.

In the 1920s, the National Revolver Association, the arm of the NRA responsible for handgun training, proposed regulations later adopted by nine states, requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon, five years additional prison time if the gun was used in a crime, a ban on gun sales to non-citizens, a one day waiting period between the purchase and receipt of a gun, and that records of gun sales be made available to police. Florida becoming the 26th state to get rid of concealed weapons carry as a crime meant getting rid of that NRA proposal after 100 years.

During the 1930’s, the NRA helped shape the National Firearms Act of 1934. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to make gun control a feature of the New Deal. The NRA assisted Roosevelt in drafting National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act, the first federal gun control laws. These laws placed heavy taxes and regulation requirements on firearms that were associated with crime, such as machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and silencers. Gun sellers and owners were required to register with the federal government and felons were banned from owning weapons. Not only was the legislation unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in 1939, but Karl T. Frederick, the president of the NRA, testified before Congress stating, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

After the assasination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald with an Italian military surplus rifle purchased from a NRA mail-order advertisement, NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth agreed at a congressional hearing that mail-order sales should be banned stating, “We do think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

The NRA also supported California’s Mulford Act of 1967, which had banned carrying loaded weapons in public in response to the Black Panther Party’s impromptu march on the State Capitol to protest gun control legislation on May 2, 1967.

Then came 1968. The assassinations of JFK, jr and Martin Luther King prompted Congress to enact the Gun Control Act of 1968. The act brought back some proposed laws from 1934, to include minimum age and serial number requirements, and extended the gun ban to include the mentally ill and drug addicts. In addition, it restricted the shipping of guns across state lines to collectors and federally licensed dealers. The only part of the proposed law that was opposed by the NRA was a national gun registry. In an interview in American Rifleman, Franklin Orth stated that despite portions of the law appearing “unduly restrictive, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

It wasn’t until a mini-revolt was staged at the 1977 NRA convention that there was a change in direction. A group of gun owners pushed back and deposed the old leaders in a move called the “Cincinnati Revolt.” Led by former NRA President Harlon Carter and Neal Knox, the revolt ended the tenure of Maxwell Rich as NRA executive vice president and introduced new bylaws. The Revolt at Cincinnati marked a huge change in direction for the NRA. The organization thereafter changed from “hunting, conservation, and marksmanship” and towards the defense of the right to keep and bear arms. The catalyst for this movement was that the NRA wanted to move its headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado. The new headquarters in Colorado was to be an “Outdoors center” that was more about hunting and recreational shooting than it was the RKBA.

I became a member of the NRA about a decade later and remained an annual member, until I became a life member about 15 years later. I believed for years that the NRA was fighting the good fight for gun owners. It wasn’t.

The NRA was always influenced by a group of Fudds who supported hunting, but hated guns that weren’t for hunting. The bureaucrats who were a part of the NRA’s organization always tried to steer towards hunting, eventually caused the organization to morph into an organization that used the threat of Democrat gun bans for fundraising.

It’s taken quite a long time for Real Americans to awaken to the sad, sorry reality that they are in fact beset on all sides, to emphatically include the one they had thought of for years as their own. One hates to plummet all the way down into unleavened, constant cynicism about absolutely everything and everyone. But in times such as these, when all that was once considered reasonable has been redefined—intentionally, and with malice aforethought—as unreasonable, even intolerable, what else can one sensibly do?

Bud transitioning

Posted on April 15, 2023April 15, 2023 by Mike

The obvious next step.

Budweiser Replaces Clydesdales With Cows Dressed As Horses
ST. LOUIS, MO — In a natural continuation of its push for diversity and celebration of transgender lifestyles, Anheuser-Busch has announced the company will be replacing the iconic Budweiser Clydesdales with cows that identify as and dress like horses.

“We feel this is a natural next step,” said Anheuser-Busch CEO Brandan Whitworth. “If we’re going to bend reality and ignore all basic understanding of science and biology with our Bud Light brand, then it only makes sense to make that philosophy consistent across our other brands, including the classic Budweiser advertising campaigns.”

The beverage giant scoured the nation in search of dairy cows that live their lives as horses. “I was very excited to receive a phone call from the Budweiser marketing folks,” said dairy farmer Ed Herman. “I just can’t get this group of cows to produce any milk because they insist on pretending to be horses. I was ready to put down the whole lot of ‘em, but now they can actually make me some money with this ad campaign.”

Budweiser marketing executives have mapped out an extensive campaign that will culminate in an emotionally stirring commercial during next year’s Super Bowl broadcast. “We really want to tug on everyone’s heartstrings,” said the company’s marketing spokesperson Katie MacDonell. “We’re absolutely certain that everyone in the country will be excited to follow the journey these proud horses embark on to discover their true inner species.”

After staring closely at the attached picture, I must admit I’m convinced.

Update! Transheuser-Busch tries to win back their traditional customer base, earning only mockery and derision for the patronizing, insultingly schmaltzy effort.

Anheuser-Busch has been devastated financially due to the company’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

The company has lost over $7 billion in market value since they decided to shove Mulvaney in America’s face. Merchandisers have also revealed no one is buying Anheuser-Busch products.

Desperate to win back former customers, Budweiser decided to bring back the beloved Clydesdales in a new ad on Friday.

The ad opens with a Clydesdale galloping across a field of grain and then a town street. The horse next passes a fire department, a flag raising ceremony, and a beach.

The commercial concludes with the Clydesdale standing on its hind legs on top of a hill.

Couples and friends are seen throughout the ad along with national monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial.

Ad transcript:

Let me tell you a story about a beer rooted in the heart of America, found in a community where a handshake is a sure contract, brewed for those who found opportunity and challenge and hope in tomorrow, raised by generations willing to sit, share, risk, remember.

This is a story bigger than beer. This is the story of the American spirit.

If Budweiser thought former customers would forgive and forget, they were sorely mistaken. The former fans instead had an absolute field day over the commercial.

Follows, a collection of hilariously scornful Tweets from disgusted ex-Butt Light drinkers, my favorite of which would have to be this one:

The new Budweiser Clydesdales. pic.twitter.com/9QvPvE9FGK

— masonbo (@masonbo)

April 15, 2023

Heh. Pinky Pie*, a “transgender”? Who the hell knew?

*NOTE: My ID of the above My Little Pony character might very possibly be in error; my daughter’s agonizing-but-inevitable phase of Pony-love was mercifully brief enough so that I hadn’t time to learn any but a very few of their names.

The Passion of the Christ—updated with PONIES!!

Posted on April 11, 2023April 11, 2023 by Mike

Some intriguing facts and behind-the-scenes backstory about the movie, from guess where.

Mel Gibson warned actor Jim Caviezel that playing the character of Christ was going to be very difficult and that if he accepted, he most likely would be marginalized by Hollywood.

Caviezel asked for a day to think about it and his response to Mel who was funding and directing the movie was: “I think we have to make it, even if it is difficult. And something else, my initials are J.C., and I am 33 years old. “I didn’t realize that until now.”

Mel responded with “You’re really scaring me you know.”

During filming, Jim Caviezel who plays the part of Jesus lost 45 pounds, he was struck by lightning, he was accidentally struck twice during the scourging scene leaving a deep 14-inch scar, he dislocated his shoulder when the cross was dropped into the hole with him on the cross. He then suffered pneumonia and hypothermia from being nearly naked with only a loin cloth on the cross for endless hours. The crucifixion scene alone took 5 weeks of the 2 months of shooting.

His body was so stressed and exhausted from playing the role that he had to undergo two open heart surgeries after the filming production.

Jim explained, “I didn’t want people to see me. I just want them to see Jesus. Conversions will happen through that.”

Almost like a clairvoyant prediction many amazing things happened.

Pedro Sarubbi, who played Barabbas, felt that it was not Caviezel who was looking at him, but Jesus Christ himself, as he played that role he said of Caviezel, “His eyes had no hatred or resentment towards me, only mercy and love.”

Luca Lionello, the artist who played Judas, was an avowed atheist before shooting began. He eventually converted, and baptized his children.

One of the main technicians working on the film was a Muslim converted to Christianity.

Some producers said they saw actors dressed in white they didn’t recognize during one of the filming sessions, and when they reviewed the recordings they realized they couldn’t see them in that footage.

The Passion of the Christ is the highest grossing US religious as well as the highest R-rated film of all time, with $370.8 million! Worldwide, it grossed $611 million.

More importantly, it has reached 100’s of millions of people around the world.

Mel Gibson paid $30 million out of his own pocket for the production of the film because no studio would take on the project.

Never saw the film myself, but I remember the huge controversy generated by it well enough.

Update! Unrelated, but here’s another Quora Digest find. I may have to look into some psychological counseling at some point, to help me cope with this unhealthy addiction to their stuff I’m developing. But this is another good ‘un too, so there’s that.

There is an old pony in a big pen by the barn. He has no real purpose. No kids ride him, he is not a companion to another old horse.

We have no history together. He came into my life by happenstance. There are no fond, warm fuzzy memories. I owe him nothing. But he’s polite and kind, and nickers to me as I come out the door in the morning.

He eats a princely sum of special food, and has a premium round bale of irrigated grass that the other horses can only dream of. His water is fresh, and warmed in the winter. I’ve gone out there late at night to make sure he has food, and he’s the first thing I attend to after morning coffee.

Why? Why not send him to the sale where ‘someone’ will want him? At 40 cents a pound, he’d be worth a nice steak dinner and drinks in town. They’ll load him on a truck with 30 other old ponies and horses, and somewhere down that line, if he doesn’t fall from his bad knee and get trampled in the transport, he will become dog food.

There’s a bum calf in our scale house on this cold frosty night. He’s little and scrawny, with poop stuck to his butt, and a bit of a runny nose. There’s a heater in there keeping the temp above freezing. In the morning I’ll make him a bottle of warm milk replacer and try to convince him to eat some of the pony’s special food. Bob will clean his little house and put down fresh bedding. It would be easier to have left him in the field with the 500 bigger, stronger calves, to steal milk from the occasional tolerant cow, to eventually freeze to death and feed the coyotes that lurk about the herd for just such an opportunity.

There is a wild kitten in the barn who most likely jumped off a utility truck a while back. We’ve been leaving food just for him, and making sure the heated water bowl is full, so he doesn’t have to go outside and perch precariously on the horse waterer to drink.

I guess we sound like saps, the old cowboy and I. Sort of wimpy and un-ranch like.

I guess we are. But at our age, with certain infirmities starting to creep into our daily routines, and the realization that we are not perfect, we are thinking that kindness is a virtue and care is our purpose.

Care of not just the healthy robust animals that make money and pay the bills, but care of everything we are capable of caring for – those creatures that, like us, are in need of a bit more attention to get through the day.

We didn’t go about seeking these creatures- they came to us and landed here not of their own choosing, or ours. But here they are, and off I go to town to a business that provides enough to buy the expensive milk replacer, premium hay, and special pony food.

There may be some karma in all this, or maybe not, but in the end we’ll know we did the best we could for those that needed us.

Peace. Really, I mean it.

And the same to you, ma’am, with all my heart and soul.

Beautiful, no? A lovely, scenic pic of the pony is attached also. Maybe this addiction isn’t so unhealthy after all, I’m thinkin’.

American reality, then and now

Posted on April 9, 2023April 9, 2023 by Mike

Rogert Kimball notes some crucial distinctions, none of which we dare call “progress.”

On Good Friday, I chanced across a photograph of the lower Manhattan skyline at night from Good Friday in April 1956. Three skyscrapers, dominating the space, feature certain windows illuminated to form gigantic crosses to commemorate that most solemn of Christian holidays. The year 1956 was not that long ago. But how much has changed in those 60-odd years! Can you imagine such a public display of Christian affirmation in New York today? Nor can I.

As it happens, the picture is one I received the other day in one of the eleventy million damnable-nuisance emails I get daily from Twatter.

New York City, Good Friday in April 1956. Left to right: 60 Wall Tower, 20 Exchange Place (formerly known as City Bank Farmers Trust Co.), and 40 Wall Street. (Photo by Ed Peters/NY Daily News Archives). pic.twitter.com/Rk40iSYKyr

— olasem (@olasempruch)

April 7, 2023

Quite telling, no? Back to Kimball.

That was then. Now things are different.

I thought about that disjunction between then and now when reading through Washington’s Farewell Address this weekend. Washington had intended to withdraw from politics when his first term ended in 1792. He asked James Madison to draft a valedictory statement but, when the time came, bickering among some of his Cabinet, especially between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, convinced him to run again. He set the original document aside.

Follows, a deep dive into the history and meaning of Washington’s justly-renowned Farewell Address, delivered in 1796 after much revising. Then:

It pains me to say it, but I suspect the Farewell Address retains but a rhetorical claim on America circa 2023.

As does the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Thomas Paine pamphlets, the Federalist Papers, et al.

Then, in 1796, Washington’s exhortations and admonitions had purchase in the political, economic, and moral reality of America. Now, they mostly echo like antique sentimentalities, more or less like the phrase “with liberty and justice for all” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Who still takes that seriously?

Among the younger generations, who even knows what the Pledge of Allegiance is, or for that matter ever even heard of the long-since-abandoned thing?

Even the tone of the document seems chiseled from another world.

Because it in fact was—from another and a very different country, at the very least. Certainly, the words came from a radically different kind of leader than the sad, sorry excuses for such we’re currently burdened with. Onwards.

One important theme of the address is the importance of the union of the states to the preservation of peace and prosperity. Devotion to the union, Washington says near the beginning of the address, is “the palladium of your political safety and prosperity.” What a splendid deployment of the word “palladium,” a “safeguard” or “protection,” from Παλλάδιον, a statue of Pallas Athena that guarded Troy!

The substance of the address seems even more distant. Consider Washington’s strictures against the formation of factions, which echo and expand upon the arguments of Madison and Hamilton in the Federalist. The deployment of factions, Washington writes, puts “in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party.”

Washington was warning about a possible future prospect that has become our daily reality.

Indeed, Washington’s admonitions could be torn from today’s political headlines. “The alternate domination of one faction over another,” he writes, “sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”

Are we there yet?

Alas, I think we all know the answer to that well enough.

Much as I might like to, I can’t excerpt anymore of it without doing fatal violence to the whole concept of Fair Use. But Kimball goes on at length from there in like vein, of which you should read the all.

Days of yore

Posted on April 6, 2023 by Mike

Peters reminisces about a better time, now forever lost.

When We Didn’t Drive Devices
It has been more than 20 years since the day after which Americans got used to being handled like felonious cattle at airports. Stand here, don’t go there. Off with your shoes. Open your purse. Spread your legs. Those born after that day have no memory of what it was like to just get on a plane – sometimes, at the last minute – and fly to your destination without having to do more than show a boarding pass to the stewardess – as opposed to the “flight attendant” – at the gate.

Well, a day may come when people no longer remember what it was like to drive a car – as opposed to a device.

A car was a machine, first of all. It had a thing called an engine – and these were often radically different, car to car. But all of them were the same in that they burned liquid energy stored in a tank.

One of the really neat things about this liquid energy was its portability and stability. You transferred about 15-20 gallons of this liquid – they called it “gasoline” and “diesel” – into the car’s tank, which only took a few minutes to do and the car was ready to drive for hundreds of miles.

Unlike the way things are now, you didn’t have to wait all the time in order to get going. So you could just go – pretty much anywhere and whenever you felt like it. Almost like flying was, a long time ago – when it was possible to catch a flight, the saying went, on the spur of the moment and without having to show up at the airport an hour or two before the scheduled departure time and wait for the flight.

Because you could just go – by car, in those days – you never had to plan. Life had a spontaneity you may never fully appreciate. If you just felt like driving somewhere, you could – no matter how much gas or diesel you didn’t have in the tank. Even if there was almost none. We were able to do this because there were gas stations – where diesel was also usually available – all over and almost always within range. It was only a small hassle if you ran out of gas on the way to the station because it was possible to carry a small can or plastic jug of liquid fuel from the station to wherever you left the car and pour it into the tank and then drive to the station, where the tank could be filled in about five minutes or even less.

And a lot more cheaply than at today’s exorbitant Biden prices, too. Some truly drool-inspiring photos included with this one as well, folks, so check it out.

America under indictment

Posted on April 4, 2023April 4, 2023 by Mike

There are indictments, and then there are, y’know, indictments.

The Indictment of America
Theoretically a grand jury has indicted President Trump, but in truth the indictment is of the American regime itself.

Like all of us, Donald Trump is a flawed man, but he has become a symbol to those who vested him with a sacred trust. He was made president by us to lead our nation. He fulfilled his part of that bargain, as far as he was able. But too late. The government we asked him to administer was already too corrupt to allow him to do the job, lest they themselves be held to account. Now his persecution for doing what voters asked him to do is breaking the very covenant of government under which we live.

The political drift of the last 100 years has, with a few brief exceptions, been toward authoritarian rule. With the subversion of the English Common Law that had been our foundation, the last bastion of the Republic has fallen. The why and how are worth considering, but the “what” is now before us.

Nancy Pelosi gave away the game (yet again) last week when she said that President Trump had every right to “prove his innocence,” a sentiment applauded by her fellows, who share a total lack of understanding of just how this reverses the presumption of innocence as well as the foundational direction of our nation. When she tore up the president’s State of the Union speech behind his back after he spoke, it was enough to make her sense of the world clear. Her haughty response to a question about the details of the Affordable Care Act—“we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it”—was another. And her mocking laughter in the face of a query about the constitutionality of Obamacare was still another.

A grand jury in New York City has indicted President Trump, but this is problematic. The allegations against him are unworthy of grand jury attention, even after the penalties for these so-called crimes were increased, post facto, from potential misdemeanors to felonies by the wave of a single judicial hand. Laws are now made that way, as if by magic, and not by legislatures as the Constitution once demanded. We are now ruled by men, not laws, and the struggle for power amongst them will ruin us.

Correction: HAS ruined us, plainly. Covering bases that may not have occurred to you, chock-a-block with historical detail, if you only read one essay discussing the Trump indictment—as heinous, sordid, and despicable a sham as ever has been perpetrated—it should definitely be this one. As good as it is, no mere excerpt could possibly do it justice.

Guerilla culture

Posted on April 4, 2023April 4, 2023 by Mike

NC Scout looks into it: what makes it, where it comes from, what it can do for determined men under the thumb of an oppressive, tyrannical government.

Y’know, like us.

A Guerrilla Movement must be reflective of the underlying culture which it seeks to preserve. I reflected upon my respect for the Afghan. In twenty years’ time, and perhaps forty, counting our exploitation of the Soviet misgivings, the West could never understand the Afghan puzzle. How can a people exist as a throwback to another time, absent the comfort we all come to know? Comfort to the Afghan serves two purposes; one, an outward showing of wealth, the other, a precursor to death. To the Afghan comfort leads to complacency, and at least in my experience, they sought simplicity. For all their failings as judged upon Western scales, they endure. Every aesthetic tells a generations-old story of what brought them to the present, and that story will carry their sons and grandsons forward generations more.

In America a great pain has been made to dilute the role of culture. We can no longer point to any one thing that is a cultural aesthetic, the last being the neon techno artwork of the 1980s. Not since then have we produced anything that can uniquely be identified as American, rather, we point to transnational corporate emblems as symbols of American culture. To the outside world its nothing more than a symbol of exploitation and oppression. But this culture was purposefully murdered, made to be called a ‘melting pot’, a cruel type of menagerie meant to establish a ruling hegemony while forcing out the competition. The old ways of Europe, those that cannot be commercialized, must be seen as rubeish, boorish, and backwards. Things to ridicule.

To a person that lives a steady diet of throwaway capitalism; McDonalds, Starbucks, Apple products, and Walmart; the very same traits exhibited at home are apostate. How can these rubes in their rural enclaves dare continue to exist against our metropolis? Clinging to their God, Guns and religion, how dare they. And that contemptful message of apostasy has given way to shades of genocide.

The people of a place, and thus the culture therein, creates the ecology of the Guerrilla. There are those pockets of cultural resistance in America, having borne the brunt of relentless attacks on its history and cultural significance. I frequently encounter these in my travels, training them to fight. One such is the Appalachian mountain region. Years ago in a conversation Dan Morgan made the observation, as an outsider, that the southern region of Appalachia was as clannish and buttoned up as any he’d ever encountered, paralleling his experience in Afghanistan, taking the better part of a decade to begin to build that fragile trust among the local populace. I chuckled, being intimately familiar with the anatomy of local politics. Those of the unelected kind. Those that are outwardly hostile to any unfamiliar face. These are protective measures to ensure the survival of culture. If you know, you know, or so its said, and if you’re fortunate enough to have been raised in such a culture you instantly understand.

I joking use the term Appalachistan, itself an internet meme among Afghanistan vets, to parallel this reality. I semi-jokingly refer back to another blood-soaked conflict, where a mountain people stared down a first world army that sought to crush them by force. And I only say semi based on the frequent comments people make describing my resemblance to those fighters in a faraway land. Replace Islam with Christianity and you have something of a mirror to the underlying culture of the region. The Chechen example is one that I’ve referenced again and again over the years because its parallel is uncanny to the reality we now face. Seen as backwards people constantly a problem for the ruling elite of both Tsarist and Soviet Russia, they were constantly subjected to genocides, forced relocations, conscription and brutal repression. And yet, the culture endured. The people bore the brunt of time and continued on. Those troubles never ended and thus they never will; struggle makes life worth living. Comfort is the absence of struggle.

The war in Chechnya came into full bloom amid the continuing financial crisis and fallout from the fall of the Soviet Union. The central authority had failed and resorted to force as a means of maintenance of power. When governments are questioned this is universally the case. Having a large number of Chechens who were veterans of the Soviet Afghan War. They knew the failings of Operation Magistral and the tone deaf lessons going unheard in the halls of Frunze. And, at least for a time, they won. Despite the lack of airpower and armor, but well armed with the prerequisite knowledge and understanding that preservation of culture lay upon their shoulders alone. That deafness cost Russia an entire Division of armor in the span of two days.

A disproportionate number of our youth went forward during the ignoble Global War On Terror. Seduced by fools promising small sums of money, we went forth, not in support roles, mind you, but as fighters. And while the luster of those combat awards have faded, it remains an epitaph of the knowledge painfully earned, from both our successes and our failures, in the process. A knowledge to be shared. The Taliban won, and we will too when pushed. We have a culture to be preserved, yours is failing.

Don’t threaten us.

Or, y’know, DO. By all means, do. Fuck around, and find out.

I believe I may have told the story here before of the year or two my brother spent in Boone, delivering log-home kits via eighteen-wheeler into the hills and hollers all around the area for construction companies building dream-home mountain cabins for flatlander Yuppie-types. Jeff got shot at numerous times, potshots sent just overhead or in front of the truck loosed by wild-eyed hillbillies sniping from concealment in the woods, who were not at all happy about the unwelcome incursion and weren’t in the least shy about expressing their displeasure over being displaced from land they considered theirs by birthright.

On occasion, the pissed-off mountain folk would bide their time until the land had been cleared, all the construction materials on-site, the log-house halfway built…and then come down en masse from their tumbledown shacks in the dead of night to torch the whole works, burning everything to cinders and ash.

Jeff said that, after the first couple of months when he’d seen what was involved, his was NOT a restful occupation. In fact, he came to hate the damned job with a passion. But, as he said, it was never boring.

So yeah, threaten away, Pedo Jaux. Bluster, boast, and lecture us all on how we’d have to have F16s, tanks, and battleships to overcome your politicized, emasculated Woke military. Let’s just see how all that works out for ya in the end.

(Via WRSA)

A near-miss is still a miss

Posted on April 2, 2023April 2, 2023 by Mike

Hinderaker gets close, but just misses.

No doubt Trump will get a political bump in the short term, but what if the case is still going on when the primary season begins? Will Republican primary voters really want to nominate a candidate who is in the midst of a criminal proceeding that theoretically could send him to jail? I don’t know.

But I do know that today is an evil day in America’s history. The Democrats are behaving like a party from a pre-Enlightenment, pre-constitutional era. Seeing themselves in the driver’s seat, they are making a naked grab for totalitarian power across a broad range of issues and institutions. Indicting a former president on frivolous grounds is shocking, but it is of a piece with the strategies Democrats are following in Washington and across the country.

Emphasis mine. Actually, they’re behaving like an immune-from-consequences Ruling Class Uniparty operating in a post-Constitutional era in which Enlightenment ideals such as individual self-determination, moral rectitude, equality under the law, and the consent of the governed have been—like the Constitution itself—not merely dismissed and forgotten as irrelevant historical artifacts of no substantive interest, but actively flung down and danced upon. Which, in Amerika v2.0, they’re one hundred percent true and correct about. Wolf Howling gets a bit closer still, but in the end also misses the salient point.

Our Constitution and the laws of this nation are nothing more than words on a page. They were written for a people who operated in good faith. There is no more good-faith to be had in progressive America. There are now two classes of Americans. You are either a progressive ideologue operating above the law, or you are a person below the protections of the law and the Constitution.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg has led a grand jury to indict Donald Trump on 30 felony counts, seemingly all without any reasonable basis in the law. Bragg has, with his wholly political persecution of Donald Trump, led our nation across the Rubicon. The last time this literally happened, Rome fell into Civil War and the Roman Republic came to an end. The last time something of this magnitude metaphorically happened in colonial America, the Brits were marching to Concord with orders to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock for treason. How did that work out?

Quite well for the liberty-minded, of course. The problem we have is that today, there is nary an Adams (either John or Samuel), Hancock, Jefferson, or Washington in sight. Whether there still exists a stout Three Percent of “rough men” standing ready to “do violence on our behalf” remains to be seen.

The rest of Wolf’s post is well worth a look, including among other items a brace of highly amusing memes from the prophets at the Babylon Bee.

(Via Reynolds and Hoyt)

Would that it were so

Posted on March 30, 2023March 30, 2023 by Mike

Incredible as it seems now, there was a day long ago when David Letterman was actually funny.

What would happen if Evel Knievel was president? David Letterman’s top ten answers from 1991 😂#funny #evelknievel #topten #davidletterman #bikelife #legendary #merica 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/kEIL1HuiNV

— Evel Knievel (@evelknievel)

March 30, 2023

I like numbers 7, 8, and 9 best, personally. We coulda done a lot worse than a President Knievel. And, y’know, have.

Weapons of “war”

Posted on March 30, 2023March 30, 2023 by Mike

The hoplophobic, fascist shitlibs don’t have the vaguest clue what they’re prattling about. Not that that’s ever stopped them.

Sen. Kennedy Stumps Mayorkas (Again) Regarding the Definition of ‘Assault Weapons’ He Wants to Ban

Well, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is not having a good week. Earlier this week, he got raked over the coals by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over the border crisis.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) also got a turn with Mayorkas and, as he’s been known to do, asked the secretary a few simple questions that someone in his position ought to be able to answer.

“Mr. Secretary yesterday you testified in judiciary that you support an assault weapon ban and we didn’t have much time to talk about that. Tell me your definition—once more—of an assault weapon,” the senator asked.

Easy, right? When someone says he wanst to ban assault weapons, it stands to reason that he should know what an assault weapon is. Mayorkas would prove in his responses that he has absolutely no idea.

“I am not an expert, right respect to the definition but of the assault bands. And so I defer to—”

“You are the Secretary of Homeland Security,” Kennedy reminded him, clearly suggesting that he ought to know the answer.

“—as as a I was about to say, I defer to the experts, I defer to, for example, the definition of an assault weapon that was codified in the prior iteration of the legislation that was passed and that was in operation when I served as an assistant United States attorney and the United States Attorney in the Central District.”

“So you would support the prior definition…”

“Senator I must defer to the experts with respect to the definition,” Mayorkas said again, before really stepping in it. “But I will tell you, for example, military—military-style weapons are of tremendous concern. ”

“You personally think we should ban assault weapons, and I know you tobe an intelligent man and a thinking person, so I know you’ve thought about it,” Kennedy responded. “What do you mean by military-style weapon?”

Spoiler alert: Mayorkas didn’t know the definition of “military-style weapon” either.

Naturally, Mayorkas is hardly unique in his stem-to-stern ignorance.

Jamaal Bowman Throws Unhinged Fit Against GOP in Hallway, Thomas Massie Drops a Little Reality on Him

For Democrats, whenever there is a mass shooting, it’s the fault of the gun. If the shooter is someone folks view as someone “one of theirs,” it’s the fault of the gun and the evil intolerant society that somehow must have affected the poor shooter, as we saw in the case of the Nashville shooting.

The answer, of course, is that in every case, whoever the shooter is, it’s the fault of the shooter. A gun is just a tool, that can be used for bad or for good, like a knife, a fork, or virtually anything else. The gun isn’t invested with evil powers to shoot people just because it’s an AR-15 or an AK-47. It just looks scarier to folks on the left who know nothing about guns. We heard crazy things on Tuesday from Democrats like Joe Biden claiming that an “AR-15 bullet” will “blow up inside the body.” Yet, he’s in a position of immense power to affect laws and is issuing executive orders from on high when it comes to guns.

But I think the award for the unhinged take of Wednesday has to go to Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a radical Squad member, who just started screaming in the public hallway, falsely blaming Republicans for school shootings. To him, “doing something” means more gun control. Yet he never seems to explain how if virtually every school is “gun-free” why there are mass shootings in schools. So instead of talking about real solutions with Republicans, he throws a fit in the hallway for the cameras and calls the GOP “cowards.” No, sir, cowards are those who shout down anyone who thinks differently than you and who are afraid to deal with the real issues. But Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) stops, tries to calm him down, and gets him to talk. He does manage to lay a little reality on him.

Massie told him that schools don’t allow teachers to carry. That caused Bowman to lose his mind, screaming, “More guns equals more death.” Notice how Bowman was shouting and not listening to what Massie was saying.

Yep, just your typical, Mk 1-Mod 0 shitlib arrogance in ignorance. As for civilian vs military arms, here’s another little tidbit of information the Leftards will blithely go to their graves in total blank ignorance of (via Herschel—thanks!).

Original ATF AR-15 Classification Refutes Claim that Rifle ‘Not Meant’ for Civilians

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request…concerning the following: 1. All classification letters (or if classification letters were named in some other way, those records) regarding Model R6000 Colt AR-15 SP1 Sporter Rifle, Serial No. GX4968 which was approved in approximately 1963; and 2. All classification letters…for AR-15 platform rifles predating the submission to the ATF for the Colt AR15 SP1 Sporter Rifle,” Adam C. Siple, Chief Information and Privacy Governance Division, notified attorney Stephen Stamboulieh in a Nov. 22 response (see below). “In response to your request, we have processed a total of 2 pages of responsive material.”

That referenced FOIA request was sent in May on behalf of firearms designer Len Savage and resulted in the production of a Dec. 10, 1963, letter from what was then called Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division to Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company, Inc. This is the first such classification for the AR-15 and has not been published before.

The FOIA request itself was prompted from a Nov. 2017 article in The Atlantic in which the magazine, unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with its anti-gun bent, attempted to bolster a claim that “these rifles were meant for the military, not civilians.”

“Colt sent a pilot model rifle (serial no. GX4968) to the BATF for civilian sale approval on Oct. 23, 1963. It was approved on Dec. 10, 1963, and sales of the ‘Model R6000 Colt AR-15 SP1 Sporter Rifle’ began on Jan 2, 1964,” one critic of the article contended. “The M16 wasn’t issued to infantry units until 1965 (as the XM16E1), wasn’t standardized as the M16A1 until 1967, and didn’t officially replace the M14 until 1969.”

So, they were being sold to civilians first?

Apparently so, yes. But don’t let’s anybody be holding their breath waiting for the lying liars of the Lyin’ Left to abandon their screeching about “MILITARY-STYLE FULLY-SEMI-AUTOMATIC ASSAULTWEAPONGUNS OF WAAAAAR!!!” They won’t even tone it down a notch out of a half-decent sense of shame, count on it.

Never, ever forget: on any given topic or issue, it’s never really about what they say it’s about. They care not a fig for addressing a problem, resolving an issue, saving a life, or their perennial fave “TEH CHILDREN!” No, it is all about the same thing it always and forever is: power, and control. Period fucking dot.

To call them “pond scum” would be a gratuitous insult to the relatively innocuous slick of slimy green goo that floats atop a pond.

Update! Via WRSA, an excellent Stefan Molyneux quote.

If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’re very Pro-Gun, you just believe that only the Government (which is, of course, so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous…) should be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small, political elite and their minions.

Says it all, don’t it?

The words of a prophet

Posted on March 29, 2023 by Mike

Alexis de Tocqueville, that would be.

The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) describes what form of tyranny or despotism would come to America: it would be relatively mild, retain some of the “external forms of liberty”, but the people would behave like timid “animals” and the government would act like their shepherd:

After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always believed that this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful, of which I have just done the portrait, could be combined better than we imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.

In a number of quotations we have looked at writers who have likened the people to sheep who are protected by the shepherd or “state” in order to better shear them of their fleece or slaughter them for meat. John Milton was quite clear on this analogy and stressed the importance for the state of creating “sheep-like minds” in the heads of the people. Alexis de Tocqueville can be added to this list. In the longer version of the quotation he talks about the importance of “agitation” and “crisis” in creating the precondition for the expansion of state power; that in democratic America the state will create a new form of tyranny, being part despotism, part “tutorship”, and part “paternalism” of the people; that various external forms of liberty will remain but the sheer number of “uniform rules” will reduce the people to a timid and sheep-like status with the state acting like the national shepherd.

Sounds chillingly familiar, don’t it?

The “free trade” falsehood

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Mike

The implicit question: how much does it cost if it’s free?

An American System for America Prosperity
The ideology of global free trade is not American—nor is it the free market system. America had the highest tariff rates in history at the same time we saw the greatest economic expansion in history.

Our founders understood that America could not be independent and strong if we relied on other nations for our manufactured goods. They understood the United States had the natural resources, the technology, the labor force, and ample customers at home to support domestic industry and be largely self-sufficient.

As an example to his countrymen to “Buy American,” George Washington wore a suit of American-made cloth at his inauguration in 1789. “I hope it will not be a great while before it will be unfashionable for a gentleman to appear in any other dress. Indeed, we have already been too long subject to British prejudices,” he wrote. Washington believed the United States could manufacture as well as farm, and he instructed Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to come up with a plan to develop industry on these shores.

Hamilton’s plan, detailed in his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, called for tariffs that would raise revenues and protect infant American industries against predatory competition, and government procurement contracts to encourage American manufacturers.

The American System, also called the American School of economics, guided U.S. national economic development from the earliest days of the republic, through the Civil War, and into the better part of the 20th century. It built the United States from an agrarian frontier society into the world’s largest economy and greatest industrial power.

The American System had three basic tenets to promote domestic industry. The government would:

use tariffs to discourage imports, and leverage the purchasing power of government to give preference to domestic producers;

invest in roads, ports, dams, canals, and turnpikes—then called “internal improvements,” now called infrastructure—to facilitate commerce; and

regulate credit to spur economic development and deter speculation.

Congress passed the Tariff Act of 1789 as its second piece of legislation. The opening section reads, “It is necessary for the support of the government, the discharge of the debts of the United States, and for the encouragement and protection of manufactures that a duty be laid on goods and merchandise imported.”

The tax on imports raised revenue to fund the government and prevented foreign goods from smothering our own infant industries. Tariffs were the nation’s primary source of revenue for its first 150 years. Consider: we taxed foreign industries, not our own.

In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton delivered his Report on the Subject of Manufactures to President Washington. It laid out the plan for the federal government to nurture the growth of domestic manufacturing industries in the United States rather than allow the new nation to depend on manufactured goods from abroad.

Hamilton declared: “Not only the wealth; the independence and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation…ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These comprise the means to Subsistence habitation clothing and defence.”

A diversified economy of agriculture, merchants, and manufacturing would provide opportunities for Americans of all skills, “furnishing greater scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions which discriminate men from each other,” Hamilton wrote.

Hamilton’s report stood in contrast to “free traders” who believed America should confine itself to farming, export raw materials, and buy manufactured goods from Great Britain.

NOTE: I am not an economist, nor have I ever played one on TeeWee. That said, I hadn’t realized before just how recent the Neocon obssession with “free trade” really was until I read this fascinating piece, nor had I known just how adamantly most if not all of the Founders were opposed to any such notion, ditto for several of our later Presidents such as Lincoln and McKinley. Buck Throckmorton, via whom etc, has this to say about it:

Principled Free Traders™ have often been the target of my writing, not because of my having a deep ideological hostility to free trade, but because they have used the term “free trade” as a false-flag for their globalist hostility to US sovereignty, and for their open contempt for working-class Americans.

Unlike 1990s-era free trade, which was promoted as being about reciprocal, barrier-free trade, America’s 21st Century Principled Free Traders™ have advocated for unilateral surrender to foreign mercantilism. (Mercantilism is the economic theory that a country’s wealth increases by having a surplus balance of trade, using protectionism as necessary to ensure the favorable trade imbalance.) Principled Free Traders™ favor unrestricted access to the US market for products made in hostile, authoritarian countries, while gladly accepting that those countries maintain tariffs and prohibitions on importing products from the US.

After doing a learn-to-code grave dance on those working class Americans who lost their middle-class lifestyle, Principled Free Traders™ argued that it was all cool, because products made by cheap foreign labor (and slaves) gave Americans more spending power.

As for me, the reality is that I’ve historically been more of a reciprocal free trader – what many of us called “fair trade” – than a protectionist, thus my contempt for the globalists who actively sought to harm America in the name of free trade.

Our founders and our greatest Presidents agreed that that the US must never be dependent on foreign countries for food, provisions, or the ability to secure our national defense. And even the Father of Capitalism stood for economic nationalism.

I’m proud to be an economic nationalist if the alternative is “free trade” that is designed to harm Americans.

Amen to all that, my friend. Funny, innit, how very much of the Vichy GOPe/Uniparty/Neocon agenda does indeed seem designed to damage AINO rather than to help, their indignant protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

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