Believe it or Else

There’ll always be an England?

Posted on January 5, 2025January 5, 2025 by Mike

Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not.

BrokenBritain 1.

BrokenBritain 2.

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)

Hood ornaments? I gotcha hood ornaments!

Posted on January 4, 2025January 5, 2025 by Mike

Schwingin’, mufuggiz.

Why don’t cars have hood ornaments anymore?
Safety, aerodynamics, and style all played a factor

LACK of style, more like. Truth to tell, the reason cars don’t have hood ornaments anymore is because, in the final analysis, nondescript modern-day plastic eggmobiles don’t deserve ‘em. Anyways. Onwards.

Hood ornaments started as a disguise for homely radiator caps more than a century ago. Once upon a time, radiator caps were featured on the outside of the car so drivers could keep an eye on the coolant water vapor temperature. Those caps weren’t particularly fetching as a design feature, so automakers started getting creative by adding “car mascots.”

Early cars were not equipped with coolant temperature gauges. One enterprising company created the Moto-Meter, a temperature gauge mounted on the radiator. As manufacturers began to incorporate coolant temperature gauges, the Moto-Meter disappeared, but the hood ornament remained for some brands.

Today, only a few high-end manufacturers still offer these gorgeous hood jewelry, like Rolls-Royce and Bentley. What happened to these mobile works of art?

The Safety Nazis got ‘em, like most everything else in American life that had class, style, and a certain je ne sais quoi about ‘em. But like I said, ya want a hood ornament, here’s ya a gottdamn hood ornament, bub.

That there chrome spear is from Christiana’s old 56 Fairlane Town Sedan*, which she lovingly called “Lainie,” for reasons which should be obvious.

* NOMENCLATURE NOTE: For the non-Ford-geeks out there, if any: Town Sedan=4-door, Club Sedan=2-door—or, as my old 54-55-56-Ford guru and mentor Don Stickler liked to say of the Town Sedans, you can always tell ‘em when you see ‘em because they had, and I quote, “too many doors.” Pic of mine and C’s beloved rides parked up side by side and nose to tail at the Diamond:

Photo snapped not long after I’d sold my 56 (at left) to a CFD-firefighter pal of mine, Chuckie Inman’s older brother, who yanked the grill (beat all to hell and gone, rusty AF to boot) and hood (which was the wrong damned one, from an earlier model of unknown provenance, so never really fit right anyhow) off altogether and mounted dual-quad Holly carbs atop an Edelbrock manifold because hey, why not? He’s incorrigible like that.

My beautymous Fairlane Club ran the grand old 292 Y Block mill, whereas Christiana’s had a nice little 289 tucked in betwixt the fender walls—a very common, easy-peasy mod with these cars (you don’t even need to change the motor mounts; just find yourself a Pony-car engine somewhere, drop ‘er into the bay, and bolt ‘er right up). Somebody had caught wise to that little swaperoo long before the black Townie had become the apple of my late wife’s eye. How we got her old Ford down from NYC is a heck of a story in its own right, gotta remember to tell youse guys all about it here someday.

Bought my 56 off a guy just across the Alabama line from Jawja—the very first exit, IIRC—who had been Pro-Street drag racing it; when I went to check the sled out, ol’ boy had to remove the fuel cell from the trunk and re-install the boring old stock gas tank while I sat on a tree stump outside his backyard garage/shop and waited, the agreed-upon purchase price of all of 2 grand cash money burning a hole in my pocket the whole time.

Once the fuel-storage issue was resolved I jumped behind the wheel, fired her up, and cruised that classy old girl all the way back to CLT (what, five hours? Six, maybe?) with nary a single hiccup the entire trip. She ran like a sewing machine ever afterwards, nary a smidgeon of trouble did she ever give me.

Well, excepting the time one of the control-arms tore loose from the rusted-out front crossmember and drove itself several inches into the soft, muddy ground at the Harley shop, et-up crossmembers being another well known and all too common fact of 56 Fairlane life. This was due to a piss-poor factory design that had the radiator-overflow outlet pissing directly down onto said crossmember and then just sitting there in a puddle, gnawing away at the metal.

Me and my friend Calvin dealt with that minor nuisance using some square stock culled from the H-D shop scrap-metal pile. We cut said scrap-steel down and welded it into a reasonable facsimile thereof; painted our handiwork in multiple coats of rattlecan Krylon black; and finally welded the whole sordid mess to the frame using Mark 1-Mod 0 eyeball measurements.

Which improvisational scrounging/fabrication/installation project, I freely admit, was not just one hundred percent straight and/or perfectly aligned when we were done. The car kinda crabbed down the road, like a small plane trying to land in a strong crosswind does. Not that it bothered my jerry-riggin’ ass none; I assure you I was NOT dissuaded in the slightest, and happily drove the auty-mobile for many more years having to rassle that huge steering wheel to and fro all the while so as to keep it between the ditches. Of course, I bolted up a custom Bettie Page suicide-knob of my own devising to help out, which I wound up getting a lot of use out of.

You know what Mike’s Iron Law #187 says, folks: whatever the headache, issue, or obstacle may be, there’s ALWAYS a workaround, and any real, true-blue American is ALWAYS gonna find it. Far as I’m concerned, that can-do, never say die spirit is a huuuuge part of what made America great to begin with.

(Original article via Insty)

Update! Seeing as how I’m sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing much tonight, might as well tell the gripping tale of how Christiana’s Lainie made her way down to her new NC home after we got hitched and set up housekeeping together.

Lainie’s prior residence was out in Old Tappan, NJ, in the attached one-space garage of my mother-in-law Xenia’s palatial abode there. Before Christiana acquired her, some previous owner had reupholstered the interior, re-carpeted her, did the engine-swap or had it done, replaced the suspect crossmember and re-routed the radiator overflow outlet, and had the car painted. All in all, though the paint had lost its luster and faded down to almost a matte black, she ran and drove just fine. Every other week C would go out and visit her mom, take the Fairlane out and tool around a bit, wash it, etc. There was a trustworthy auto-repair shop a few blocks away where she’d take the car for regular oil changes and such-like maintenance.

When we got married, the question arose of how we were gonna bring Lainie down to live with us. Although I offered, driving a 1956 Ford twelve (12) hours to Charlotte from NJ was simply out of the question. Christiana did some checking around and found a local auto-transport outfit who would ship the car to their Pineville facility at a not-quite-ghastly rate, whereupon we could come pick it up at our leisure and drive her to her/our new home.

Which is what we did. Somehow, though, once we’d gotten Lainie into the roomy two-car garage at our house, she seemed to fall into something of a snit, stubbornly refusing to start even though she’d made it home just fine from Pineville only a cpl-three weeks before. It was a mystery; after taking several stabs at trying to see what was up, I finally threw my hands up in disgust and walked away.

To this day I still feel guilty about that; Christiana never stopped imploring me to please, please, pretty please get her Fairlane back up and running again, but what with one thing and another—working at the Harley shop, touring with the band, mowing the damned lawn, etc etc etc I never made time to walk downstairs to the garage and just do it.

And then she was gone from me, her beloved Ford still stone-dead out in the damned garage while I sat upstairs doing my utmost to drink myself to death so I might rejoin the love of my life wherever her spirit may have fled before it was too late.

It still haunts me. I would sit at the bar in Snug Harbor and weep loudly and inconsolably, slamming drink after drink, my friends Ned and Jason on either side of me, their arms wrapped tight around me trying to protect me from myself as best they could. They were de facto bodyguards; on the not-infrequent occasions that some unknowing bar patron would ask just what the hell was wrong with me anyway, Ned and Jase would run them off immediately with a no-nonsense snarl, leaving no room for error in anybody’s mind.

The pain of losing Christiana, stupendous as it already was, was compounded by the anguish of knowing that the one thing my beautiful wife had ever asked me to do for her I had foolishly not done. I had let this wonderful woman down for no good reason; I knew I had, and it was too late now to make it up to her. To this very day I still have nightmares about it.

I couldn’t bring myself to ride my prized 06 Sportster anymore; I no longer gave a tinker’s damn about any of the things that had always made life worth living. I could hardly even go into the garage at all; Her Car was in there, and I hadn’t the intestinal fortitude to so much as look at poor Lainie now.

Until one balmy, mid-summer Friday afternoon, my dear friend Joe Lemyre piloted his own Harley Big Twin down from Boone, got all up in my grill, and snapped me the fuck out of it.

First off, Joe informed me in no uncertain terms that tonight I WOULD swing a leg over the Sporty and go riding with him, if only a short putt through the neighborhood. After we’d done that, got back to my place, and un-assed our respective scoots, he laid holt of my wrist with a grizzly-bear grip, dragged me over to dusty, slack-tired, cobwebbed-over Lainie and told me that tomorrow, come Hell or high water, we WOULD turn to, get cracking, and put her back on the road again. No matter what it took, how long it took, or how much it cost, it by God WOULD get done.

And damned if we didn’t do it. Took several months of wrenching, replacing worn-out or broken parts, draining the tank and replacing the smelly near-varnish with fresh gas. We installed new plugs, plug wires, and a Mallory electronic distributor. We borrowed a brand-spanking-new, high-buck Quicksilver 4-barrel from a friend and took the battered, clogged Motorcraft one-lunger off, wrapped it in red shop rags, and shoved it to the back of my workbench to await further developments. We Windexed the filmed-over glass; we wiped down the vinyl seats; we re-inflated the sagging tires to spec.

When we finally did coax Lainie into coughing, farting, sputtering life again at last, the cheers, shouts, and raucous laughter which erupted from the five or six of us in the garage that night rang in my ears no less gloriously than the sound of choirs of angels singing. As she gradually settled down to a smooth, loping idle there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen, nothing but happy smiles on every grease-smudged face.

And that’s another thing I will never, ever forget.

Yeah, any yay-hoo wants to tell me that internal combustion engines don’t have souls is gonna have to go peddle that horseshit someplace else, sorry. Ain’t no market for it here.

It’s a-coming

Posted on January 3, 2025January 3, 2025 by Mike

Midwest Chick says “if you don’t laugh too, I’m not sure we can be friends.” Seconded, with all my heart and soul.

Looks like we’re really gonna get pounded. https://t.co/733VO8Iagg

— Doug Powers (@ThePowersThatBe)

January 2, 2025

Usually, that huge schlong points outward from DC towards the rest of the country, so this makes for a refreshing change of pace.

The “organic” scam

Posted on January 1, 2025January 1, 2025 by Mike

Gee, color me shocked, I did NOT see this coming.

Factory Farming is Better Than Organic Farming
Some narratives are simply ubiquitous in our culture (every culture has its universal narratives). Sometimes these narratives emerge out of shared values, like liberty and freedom. Sometimes they emerge out of foundational beliefs (the US still has a puritanical bent). And sometimes they are the product of decades of marketing. Marketing-based narratives deserve incredible scrutiny because they are crafted to alter the commercial decision-making of people in society, not for the benefit of society or the public, but for the benefit of an industry. For example, I have tried to expose the fallacy of the “natural is always good, and chemicals are always bad” narrative. Nature, actually, is quite indifferent to humanity, and everything is made of chemicals.

Another narrative that is based entirely on propaganda meant to favor one industry and demonize its competition is the notion that organic farming is better for health and better for the environment. Actually, there is no evidence of any nutritional or health advantage from consuming organic produce. Further – and most people I talk to find this claim shocking – organic farming is worse for the environment than conventional or even “factory” farming. Stick with me and I will explain why this is the case.

A recent article in the NYT by Michael Grunwald nicely summarizes what I have been saying for years. First let me explain why I think there is such a disconnect between reality and public perception. This gets back to the narrative idea – people tend to view especially complex situations through simplistic narratives that give them a sense of understanding. We all do this because the world is complicated and we have to break it down. There is nothing inherently wrong with this – we use schematic, categories, and diagrams to simplify complex reality and chunk it into digestible bits. But we have to understand this is what we are doing, and how this may distort our understanding of reality. There are also better and worse ways to do this.

One of my verymost favorite John Ringo novels, The Last Centurion, gets waaaaay into the weeds on the “organic” versus factory-farm tussle, which lovingly detailed digressions I found completely fascinating, as well as highly educational. So no, the above in-depth expose doesn’t surprise me all that much.

I may or may not have brought this up here before, but for quite a few years there my good friend Al and his ol’ lady Lisa (one of my former NYC roomies who moved down to CLT for good after a disastrous romantic entanglement with another old friend of mine, Joe) made an astonishing wad of on-the-side extra coin peddling “free range” eggs to one of the local yuppie-puppie grocery stores. Al and Lisa live way out in the boonies near Concord, on a big farm passed down to him by his grandmother through his mom, both long deceased. Once, when I was up at their place on one of my regular visits, Al walked me out to the “free range” chicken coop to help him collect those upscale eggs.

Al explained the whole “free range egg” dodge to me on the trudge out there from the century-plus-old farmhouse, and it struck me as just funny as all get-out. See, the coop was the familiar wood-and-wire structure roomy enough to comfortably house about ten-fifteen yardbirds and keep them safe from snakes, coons, foxes, and such-like critters, the distinction which made it “free range” being that this one had wheels. There was a beat-down circular track along which, every other day, either Al or Lisa had to roll the ramshackle rig a minimum of three (3) feet so as to maintain its “free range” status. Once in a while they’d let the chickens out to peck, cluck, and scratch around in the tall grass and dirt for an hour or so, after which brief spell of liberation they’d all be bunged back into the hen-itentiary again.

All in all, the whole setup was about as “free range” as every other garden-variety, stationary henhouse any country boy has seen a blue million of—ie, NOT. As with practically every other goobermint-mandated system, “free range eggs” is nothing but a pure-dee grift, designed from jump for one purpose and one purpose only: to fleece the sucker hordes out of as much of their hard-earned as can be managed without donning a bandanna and sticking a hog-leg Colt in their faces outright

Now that you know the score, feel perfectly free to amble right on past your grocery store’s “free range” and/or “organic” section wearing a knowing smile and head directly for the more reasonably priced but every bit as nutritious and/or healthy aisle with a clear conscience. Let the smarmy yuppie urbanites and/or hippie-dippie doofi waste their gelt on fraudulence and PC hype.

You’re in the Big House now

Posted on December 31, 2024December 31, 2024 by Mike

Contra all odds and expectations, Democrook Rod Blagojevich DOES appear capable of learning, when he just has to.

Wanna Know the Downside of Diversity? Look at the Prison System.
Disgraced Illinois governor-turned-felon Rod Blagojevich recently appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” detailing his experience behind bars. It’s a fascinating interview. But this clip in particular is especially worth your time…

Keep in mind, that Blagojevich was a blue-state Democrat. He cruised to victory in his last congressional election with a whopping 87% of the popular vote and won his final gubernatorial race with a 10-plus point edge. Until his downfall, he enjoyed vast support from minorities throughout the state.

But according to him, after his first full day in a maximum-security prison, the correctional officers called him in and told him to join an Aryan prison gang ASAP. He had committed the faux pas of socializing with black inmates out on the yard and was told point-blank that he needed to “ride” with the whites.

Otherwise, he was gonna get killed.

Prison is a deeply segregated environment. It’s expected that the whites stay with the whites, the blacks with the blacks, the Latinos with the Latinos, and never should they mix.

So Blagojevich met with the leaders of the Aryan prison gang and ceded to some of their demands: He wouldn’t sit with the blacks or Latinos anymore and agreed to hang with the whites. He didn’t like it, but he did it.

“And then they told me something which I respected,” Blagojevich told Rogan. “They said, look, you’re not in the real world anymore. This is not a place where you could be a civil rights advocate or a civil rights activist. This is a prison. You don’t have the same rights here that you have out there. …So, if you’re gonna sit with somebody outside your race in the chow hall, that’s a direct affront to us and there are measures that we can take to make sure that you don’t do those sorts of things. And I respected the fact that they said it was to keep order, and it was the culture, and pretty much everybody in the prison system accepts it anyway.”

According to the Aryan gang leader, segregation is what kept people safe.

It’s curious, isn’t it? Outside of prison, we keep hearing that diversity is our greatest strength — and to be fair, sometimes it is. Sometimes, when diverse skill sets converge, the sum total is exponentially greater than all the individual parts.

But sometimes, diversity leads to wars, violence, hatred, and death. Even in a tightly controlled, highly regimented place like a prison.

Diversity is a luxury. It’s the icing on the cake of a stable, successful political system. But it’s not a luxury every country can afford. The consequences of getting it wrong are corruption, crime, social disintegration, and a cataclysmic civil war. Look at Afghanistan and remember the haunting quote from P.J. O’Rourke: “The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.”

That’s not a recipe for stability.

Ahh, but there you go again, assuming that D卐M☭CRATs actually want stability, when they demonstrably do not. Their preference is for chaos, destruction, impoverishment, and immiseration generally. As their heroic icon Lenin is reputed to have said, the worse the better, don’tchaknow. Calls for an update of the old Jimmie Rodgers classic, I do believe.

Update! Worth noting, too, is that when D卐M☭CRATs prattle of “diversity,” they mean not diversity of, as mentioned above, skills and abilities, or of thought, or background, or any other worthwhile things. No, for them, it’s always and exclusively about skin color, and nothing whatsoever else.

2024 in review

Posted on December 31, 2024December 31, 2024 by Mike

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.

Short and Sweet for The Last Day of 2024

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Barry

No comment needed
Beauty in Australia

Publick Notice

Posted on December 27, 2024December 27, 2024 by Mike

For some strange reason, I have been inundated with spam emails today—well over a thousand so far, and counting—forcing me to interrupt what of right ought to be prime blogging time so as to rid myself of the pestilential things.

Also, the MarsEdit v5.3 update dropped yestiddy, so naturally I hit “Download and install” with a quickness, only to find that the blasted thing refused to launch on the trusty iMac, who knows why. The Dock icon would bounce three (3) times in the ordinary manner, then come to a screeching halt and sit there still and lifeless as a dried-white dog turd on an Arizona blacktop in late July. Then the customary nag box popped up: “This software may not be compatible with your current MacOS version.” Which, I’d already checked that before I ever even ran the updater, of course.

Lather, rinse, repeat, far too many times for my own good, always with the same dismaying result. I firmly resisted deleting the ME Preferences file, seeing as how I’d expended a great deal of effort setting up a shitload of custom keystrokes and/or macros therein—probably the single MarsEdit feature I love most, and make use of constantly. I really, REALLY didn’t want to lose my heavily-customized ME setup only to have to do it all over again, as I figgered a clean-reinstall would require of me. Yessir, I was up a tree but good on this one.

After spending waaay too long last night searching the remotest nooks and crannies of the Mac-software Innarnuts for a full-version download of ME 5.2.6, the hassle-free version I’d been running for quite a while now, I finally (FINALLY!) found it at the venerable MacUpdate site, DL’d and decompressed the little beastie, dumped it into the Applications folder, and viola! Back to fair winds and following seas with the best third-party WP editor of all time for me, like I’ve long since come to rely on.

In the throes of last night’s grief and angst, I emailed my buddy Daniel of Red Sweater Software, the creator/purveyor/sole proprietor of MarsEdit, whereupon we back and forth’d for a spell trying to ascertain what the blue blazes might be going on here. He asked me to reinstall 5.3 and try it again, having done a little code-fu on it in the interim to get things straightened out for me. Naturally, I promised to do so tomorrow, and to let him know what happens with a full AAR.

As I’ve said before here of Daniel, such prompt, friendly, hands-on customer service/tech support is a rara avis indeed nowadays, in any field of endeavor. After all, it ain’t as if the poor fella doesn’t have more than enough to occupy his time, his mind, and his hands already—during Christmas week, no less (or Hanukkah, as the case may be, having never had occasion to inquire of his religious affiliation, if any). Red Sweater Software, see, is by way of being a sideline for him, something he does more for personal enjoyment than anything else; he works a full time day-job in addition to dreaming up, creating, and de-bugging all kinds of cool software applications, bless his no doubt exhausted, stressed-out heart.

Once more, my utmost gratitude goes out to Daniel, for all he does.

Update! Jeezum H CROW, sixty more spam emails over the transom while I was putting this post together. What the actual fuck…?!?

Oligarchy, kakistocracy, or gerontocracy?

Posted on December 22, 2024December 22, 2024 by Mike

Yet another of those occasions when we must embrace the healing power of “and,” I’m afraid.

US Congresswoman Missing For Six Months Found At Dementia Care Home
Local paper Dallas Express recently launched an investigation into the whereabouts of Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger, who has represented Texas’s 12th Congressional District since 1997. The investigation followed reports that she had been absent from office for months.

Dallas Express found out from a local resident that Granger was not missing but instead residing at an assisted living facility specializing in memory care.

Here’s more from the reporting:

We then received a tip from a Granger constituent who shared that the Congresswoman has been residing at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering lost and confused in her former Cultural District/West 7th neighborhood.

The Dallas Express team visited the facility to confirm whether Granger was residing there and to inquire about how she planned to vote on the spending bill. Upon arrival, two employees confirmed that Granger is indeed living at the facility. However, we were not permitted to conduct an interview regarding the current spending debate in the House of Representatives and how or if Ms. Granger planned to vote.

Taylor Manziel who is the Assistant Executive Director for the senior living facility acknowledged to The Dallas Express that “This is her home.”

It remains unclear why Granger’s staff declined to disclose her condition to the public, especially given the lack of representation during a crucial voting period in Congress.

And, of course, the term limits conversation on X reignited…

As well it might’ve, and should. Yes, yes, I am aware of the shopworn argument against term limits: we don’t need ‘em, they’re already baked into the cake, all’s we have to do is vote the bastards out. Sorry, but as with so many other failed Constitutionally-set “protections,” those built-in “term limits” no longer work as intended. ZH includes a video that hits all too close to home.

This art installation depicts world leaders as they have aged, yet I feel this is our current government. Old, feeble, unable to move, and possibly brain dead. pic.twitter.com/afdrkJgy1T

— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay)

December 21, 2024

Hey, I may not know art, but I know what I like. Another telling aspect: this Congresscritter fell off the map completely for six fucking months…and not a soul noticed, in goobermint or out.

Two terms and OUT, sayeth I—if not voluntary, then by force of law, since they refuse to go voluntarily into that good night.

OOOOPS!

Posted on December 22, 2024December 22, 2024 by Mike

Oops oops oooopsie.

iHeart Radio Retards
This is small potatoes, but we keep hearing the same ad for one of the channels of iHeart radio on several conservative talk stations hereabouts, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard every time they play it.

This is small potatoes, but we keep hearing the same ad for one of the channels of iHeart radio on several conservative talk stations hereabouts, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard every time they play it.

For the ad in question, the copy reader they have (sounds like Rich Marotta, formerly a KFI radio sports guy) tells you earnestly that Shirley Bassey nailed the soundtrack for 1971’s Goldfinger with the title track: Diamonds Are Forever.

> Blinks. SMH. <

Can you spot what’s wrong with this picture? If not, I pity you, fool. I caught it right away, and I ain’t even a James Bond fan, really.

Rueful Teixeira

Posted on December 20, 2024December 21, 2024 by Mike

Yes, he’s a lifelong D卐M☭CRAT, but he nonetheless does seem to have at least some sense—against all odds, expectations, and precedent.

Voters Sent Democrats a Clear Message. They Don’t Want to Hear It.
Many senior Democrats have decided to ignore the fact that the party is out of touch on a range of cultural issues like race, gender, and immigration.

In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.

Questions like: Is America a “white supremacist” society? Is it racist to question levels of immigration? Are citing one’s personal pronouns necessary? Is anyone who questions the differences between trans women from biological women a bigot who should be expunged from polite society? For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it’s a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.

Well, if the six weeks since the election is anything to go by, you’d be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front. Why? Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.

Consider Greg Casar, the new chair of the powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus. In a recent interview with NBC News, Casar urged the Democrats to “re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up.” He said that “when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did—with Republican help.” Casar said that “the Republican Party obsession” with culture war issues is “driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

Massachusetts Democratic representative Jim McGovern echoed Casar’s thoughts recently with this rhetoric about Republicans: “They want to blame trans people? Guess what? Trans people aren’t the ones raising people’s grocery prices. Big corporations are.” Republicans, he added, “want to blame immigrants…Immigrants aren’t the ones denying health insurance claims…it’s the billion-dollar insurance companies that do that.”

Get it? These aren’t real issues. They’re just distractions ginned up by Republicans for nefarious political purposes. The logical conclusion of this argument is that Democrats don’t need to actually change their position on any “culture war” issue. Instead, they just need to change the subject and talk about mustache-twirling corporate villains.

If the Democrats’ liability on a range of cultural issues is so clear, why do so many party members refuse to admit the obvious problem?

Part of the answer is a fear of “the groups”—the advocacy nonprofits that push so many of these radical policies. (Harris stated her support for public funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants in an ACLU survey in 2019.) Point out the obvious, and you will face an onslaught of criticism from the groups and their allies across social and mainstream media, foundations, academia, think tanks, and within the Democratic Party infrastructure itself.

But the issue goes deeper than fear. Far too many Democrats simply believe they are on the “right side of history” when it comes to policies around immigration, crime, race, and trans issues.

This mistaken assumption has been a disaster for the party. Voters overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration is wrong and should be deterred—not indulged. They believe crimes should be punished and public safety is sacrosanct. They believe, like Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination. They believe biological sex is real, that spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved, and that medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available simply on the basis of declared gender identity, especially for children.

These issues reflect deeply held beliefs and values and are vitally important to ordinary voters, especially working-class voters. They are not distractions, or fake issues, or nonfactors in the election. So far, even the screamingly obvious implications of this last election have not been enough to shock the party out of its denialist torpor. Until they wake up, Democrats are doomed to repeat the mistakes of 2024.

Doomed they certainly should be. But even that doesn’t go far enough. In the final analysis, the criminal organization masquerading as a political party known as the D卐M☭CRATs of right ought to be outlawed and demolished, until not one party-HQ brick is left standing upon another. Over many years, the feckless sewer-crawlers have willfully forsaken all contact with reason, rationality, and even reality itself. Call it end-stage Leftism if you will, because that’s precisely what it is.

That being so, the D卐M☭CRAT “Party” no longer has any rightful place amongst decent, upright, and somewhat-free people. No longer can they lay claim to being “the loyal opposition,” except in jest; assuming that they ever were, it’s plain that they are no such thing now. They are truly, literally, and indisputably The Enemy©—deceitful, dangerous, depraved, and demented. Continued toleration of their existence as a national organization amounts to a serious blot on the American escutcheon.

Their ultimate goal, openly and boastfully professed instead of the studiously-kept secret it was until recently, is nothing short of the utter destruction of absolutely anything and everything that Real Americans have historically believed, reverenced, and held dear:

Patriotism
Religious faith
Individual self-determination
At least the possibility of prosperity and success
The work ethic
Property ownership
The traditional middle-American lifestyle
The nuclear family

All of these things and many, many more are now on the D卐M☭CRAT chopping block, awaiting the fall of the fearful knife. Which in turn means that the D卐M☭CRATs themselves must be destroyed utterly, at the very least, if only out of self-preservation.

As with termites—the insects, not the bipedal variety—our present-day D卐M☭CRAT infestation cannot be allowed to run riot throughout the joint, lest the House Of Liberty come crumbling down in ruin beyond hope of repair. Unpleasant as the prospect is, we have before us a strictly binary solution set: either exterminate them, or BE exterminated. Me for calling the Orkin Man straightaway, but as always YMMV.

Update! Almost forgot to include the blog-standard (heh; see what I did there? I slay me) “Via…” link-back credit, which goes to Ace, who piles on thusly:

They’re in such a (Satanic) religious fervor now, and they are so ruthless in attacking and shaming and cancelling any heretics who question current cult doctrine, that they might not ever be able to moderate. The entire party might just have to collapse and be replaced by an emergent alternate-liberal party.

Indeed. Here’s hoping for at least that if not a great deal more, and worse (for them).

OHHHH YEEEAAAHHHH!

Posted on December 19, 2024 by Mike

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.

Hiding the decline

Posted on December 19, 2024December 19, 2024 by Mike

They ALL knew, and lied about it? Why, I can’t believe it. I WON’T believe it!

White House Biden health cover-up blown wide open in bombshell report: Joe was senile from day one of presidency
The White House tried to hide from the public Joe Biden’s rapidly diminishing mental condition for his entire presidency, according to a bombshell report.

Biden’s team hired a vocal coach, put other officials into roles usually occupied by the president, scrapped meetings on his ‘bad days’, and kept him at arm’s length him from his own Cabinet members.

An explosive investigation by The Wall Street Journal has exposed an extensive, deliberate and years-long cover-up that also saw the administration gaslighting those who dared to claim Biden’s abilities had deteriorated since he was Barack Obama’s vice president.

Despite the efforts of ‘eager beaver hand-holders’, Biden’s decline became increasingly obvious, especially after Special Counsel Robert Hur last year released a report depicting a forgetful and frail then-81 year old.

Hur decided not to charge Biden for keeping classified documents in his Delaware garage because he ‘would likely present himself to a jury […] as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’

According to the Journal, Biden could not even repeat back to his staff lines they fed him while preparing for his interview with Hur.

At the White House, Biden would also cancel important national security meetings, leaving aides to explaining to attendees that the president had ‘bad days and good days’.

A well-connected Democratic strategist confirmed to DailyMail.com that influence over Biden had been ‘concentrated by people who are not external facing,’ including his close advisors Bruce Reed, Steve Ricchetti, and Mike Donilon.

A great many heads ought to roll for this massive conspiracy of Deep State deception. But as we all already know, or at least should, not a one ever will.

Update! Quoting a piece from the Old Grey Whore (a/k/a NYT) which feebly attempts to have it both ways, Ace gives the filthy bastards a good, hard reaming.

Here comes the “aides say he’s totally sharp” again:

Aides say he remains plenty sharp in the Situation Room, calling world leaders to broker a cease-fire in Lebanon or deal with the chaos of Syria’s rebellion. But it is hard to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years.

See, there you go: The media told you the truth both times. When it told you Biden was cognitively fit as a fiddle, it was telling you the truth. He can do the job of president right now.

But on January 20th, he will suddenly degrade precipitously. So they were also telling the truth when they said (after Democrat billionaire donors told them to say it) that Biden must not be the candidate in 2024.

They’re always telling the truth, Bigots. You’re the ones who always lie.

Oh yeah, silly me, I forgot all about that. Sorry, not sorry.

Inevitable

Posted on December 19, 2024December 19, 2024 by Mike

Did someone say “dysfunctional” just a moment ago? Why yes, I believe someone did at that.

Payton McNabb had dreams of becoming a college athlete, until a volleyball spiked by a transgender competitor came within inches of killing her when she was 17 and forever changed the trajectory of her life.

Now, in the hopes of preventing history from repeating itself, she’s sharing her story in the new documentary “Kill Shot: How Payton McNabb Turned Tragedy Into Triumph,” created by the Independent Women’s Forum.

“If my story can in any way help prevent this from happening to at least just one woman or girl, then it was all worth it,” McNabb, now 19, told The Post.

Payton McNabb’s story is being featured in a new documentary from the Independent Women’s Forum.

Before that fateful game in 2022, McNabb and her teammates at Hiwassee Dam High School in Murphy, NC, were aware of a transgender player on the opposing team but afraid to speak their concerns.

“We never thought we would ever be put in this position to begin with,” she said. “I didn’t know one person who agreed with [a transgender athlete competing against us] on my team, but we didn’t know what to do.”

The match was relatively uneventful until that player spiked the ball directly into McNabb’s head, knocking her unconscious for 30 seconds and sending the whole gym into a shocked silence.

Everyone else — including the trans player — ultimately finished the game, while McNabb was rushed off the court with a concussion, neck injury and two black eyes.

“It was 100% avoidable, if only my rights as a female athlete had been more important than a man’s feelings,” she said.

The full extent of her injury unfolded over weeks, as McNabb was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, a brain bleed, partial paralysis and loss of peripheral vision on her right side. She also suffered ongoing memory loss, confusion and severe headaches.

Bold mine. There will be more of it going forward, on this you can rely. But hey, as long as the “transgender” community “feels seen,” and is kowtowed to by those genocidal “”binaries,” then that’s all that really matters, and justice has been served. In a manner of speaking.

Update! Sick.

The latest bit of insanity–no doubt funded by the pay-for-play climate coverage grant that ensures that the Associate Press keeps pumping out climate change propaganda day and night–is this profile of Kamala Harris’ favorite drag queen, Pattie Gonia.

Patti, you see, is on a mission to save the earth by looking fabulous while spouting nonsense.

And the Associated Press is convinced enough that Pattie Gonia will help save the world that they devote a profile including a lot of video time to ensuring that the world follows his efforts to save humanity–at least save humanity until civilization collapses from cultural rot.

Pattie is now touring to bring his message of Queer environmentalism to the world, and I gather that this is supposed to be inspiring a new generation of degenerates to love Gaia and fight the heteronormative racist sexist homophobic capitalist pigs who are destroying Mother Nature.

NEW YORK (AP) — Dressed in a sequin-laced, sleeveless top and puffy pink skirt, drag queen Pattie Gonia strides around the stage in white high-heeled boots that come up to the knees, telling the crowd that nature must be a woman.

“She is trying to kill us in the most passive-aggressive way possible,” joked Gonia, lip-syncing audio from a routine by comedian Michelle Wolf. “It’s not some sort of immediate fire or flood or a cool explosion. She’s just like, ‘What? I raised the temperature a little.’”

“Are you uncomfortable?” continued Gonia, who has a neatly trimmed mustache, long black eyelashes and a wig of long and flowing red hair. “Maybe I wouldn’t have (raised the temperature) if you had taken out the recycling, like I asked!

Indeedy. Recycling rates–recycling, outside of perhaps aluminum and a few other products, is actually worthless and occasionally destruct–will undoubtedly rise because the people drawn to Pattie Gonia were indifferent to these issues prior to his Queer lectures.

Un-huh. Got it.

Yes, there’s video and pix both of this cavorting dementoid at the link, which must be seen to be believed.

Merely meat

Posted on December 17, 2024December 17, 2024 by Mike

A short but pungent rip from our old chum Baron Bodissey.

Italian Women: Don’t Be Uncovered Meat
The late “Australian” imam Sheikh Hilaly became notorious for saying: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it…whose fault is it? The cats or the uncovered meat?” According to him, an unveiled woman is like “uncovered meat”, and deserves whatever might happen to her.

In the following video, a group of “Italian” culture-enrichers attempts to explain the uncovered meat principle to a young woman who catches their collective eye.

Said video manages to be several unpalatable things at once: sick-making, enraging, beggaring belief, chilling, blood-curdling, just for openers. Bitch all you like about (((Dem JooJooJooJOOOOZ!!!))); supposed “genocide” of Paleosimians; Israeli injustice and unwarranted aggression; the USS Liberty incident; the Pollard scandal; Netanyahu being worse than Literally Hitler©; who are/are not our “natural” MidEast allies, &c, I don’t give a fast, furious fuck; one of these things is still NOT like the other, period fucking DOT. Certainly, I cannot recall any Israelis—in any nation anywhere at any time, EVER—behaving like bestial troglodytes in so crude a fashion.

That such an obscene predation could transpire in contemporary times, in a public space, in a Western nation, in broad fucking daylight ferchrissakes, only makes matters worse. That it could be shrugged off as Just The Way Things Are, No Big Deal puts the cherry on the sundae.

Then again, it must be acknowledged that Italy has always been pretty rough sledding for comely, unchaperoned young signorinas.

Unpleasant as the situation must have been for that poor girl, this infamous 1951 photo nonetheless seems fairly tame, innocent almost, compared to what the Muzzrat thugs in the aforementioned vid do. Too, we know for sure and certain that the lead Muzzie antagonist is in no way joking, exaggerating, or just showing off for his likewise high-spirited co-religionists—not a bit of it. The proferred warnings-cum-threats (promises, more like) are real, credible, and in deadly earnest, down to the last syllable.

Disgusting as it may look to present-day eyes, with the 1951 pic it could safely be assumed that running a gauntlet of catcalls, wolf-whistles, loud teeth-sucking noises, and kissy-faces would be the worst it was gonna get for the woman, the absolute limit. Having her clothes ripped off, being thrown to the sidewalk on her back, held down and gangbanged by a succession of excessively cologned, fashionably attired, impeccably coiffed Italian guys, though? No way!

In that time, even in that place, a pinch on the ass or a swift titty-grope as she walked by would’ve been thought by most to be way over the line of decency, propriety, and acceptable behavior, richly deserving of stern rebuke. Once the gropee’s father, uncles, and/or brothers got wind of it, the culprit could expect a thorough, enthusiastic mass ass-whupping to quickly ensue, if they didn’t just kill him outright. Said perp would also be expected to shut up and take his beating like a man, lest such shameful complaining and/or whinging earn him an encore after he healed up from Round Uno.

However, as has been well-established across Europe by now, with the Moslem “youths” in the vid purely-verbal intimidation is but the opening gambit, a prelude to much darker things soon to come.

After all, should this woman decline to heed the kindly advice of young Abdul-Abdel-Abdullah and his devout crew, appearing again sans veil after being duly instructed in what the Koranic Dress Code requires of females, then the only conclusion to be drawn by the Righteous is that the obstinate infidel-whore is in fact ASKING for it—that she in fact WANTS to be gang-raped to death, no?

All this in fucking ITALY, I remind you. Not Yemen, not Saudi Arabia, not Mogadishu, not Tehran. ITALY, gawd help us all.

Over There and in Amerika v2.0 alike, the filthy blaggards responsible for inflicting this plague of unassimilable tenth-century wharf rats on us have a hell of a lot to answer for. We can but hope and pray that before very much longer, those fiends will be called to account for their monstrous perfidy.

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