Hard reset, hard war, hard choices, hard times

Looks like Mr Trump has resumed “limited air strikes” against the Mullahs, which I’m okay with, really. Although I still believe that what with the cringeworthy pleading for “negotiations,” “cease-fires,” and “peace deals” from the Trump admin, the Mullahs have likely concluded that

  • The US remains a paper tiger, a mere hollowed-out shell of its former WW2-era self
  • At bottom, the fact is that neither this nation’s government nor its people have the stomach, the will, or the pugnacity required to wage war and win against a determined enemy
  • Despite our military capabilities, they therefore have little to fear from the US—irrespective of which side of the uniParty coin happens to be in charge at any given time

Ultimately, it all boils down to this:

Trump has been trying to induce the murderous mullahs in Iran to make the reasonable choice and surrender, but in half a century of perpetual terrorism, the Iranian regime has yet to show any sign that they value reason over religious fanaticism. If you believe Allah has given you a mission to destroy the “great Satan” America and will reward you through eternity for fighting to do so, you’re not likely to make well-reasoned choices.

The Iranian regime has repeatedly violated ceasefires, rejected every peace offer from Trump, and most recently put out a €50 million, or approximately $58 million, price on Trump’s head, just after an Iran-tied assassin made an attempt on Ivanka Trump.

It remains to be seen how many more strikes it will take to bring the terrorist regime in Tehran completely to its knees. Hopefully every last genocidal jihadi leader will have gone to meet his master below before we’re through.

Hopefully, yeah. Because until Trump’s stated goal (initially, at least) of removing/replacing the Mad Mullah regime is achieved, then we won’t actually BE through, nor will we have won a damned thing. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that, should this latest round in the Fifty Years’ War© peter out with a pallid, half-assed “victory,” we’ll be right back over there in ten-20 years to do it all over again.

BOTTOM LINE: Before the Mad Mullah regime can be removed/replaced, the Mullahs will have to be dead, dead, DEAD…ALL the Mad Mullahs. All else aside, THAT is the real job here, THAT is the only real solution to the half-century-old Iran Problem. Since our Iranian enemies are implacable, resolute, single-minded extremists, they will never back down, never yield, never abandon the dream of world domination. This is a foe who cannot be reasoned with, bargained with, or talked down off the apocalyptic ledge his  primitve ideology has forced him out onto.

Assuming, of course, that there’s ever a non-D卐M☭CRAT PoTUS again, that is. Grim as it all looks from here, we must all hope.

All of which leaves us with two stark, unpleasant scenarios: 1) we put ’em down like rabid dogs, ruthlessly, in great enough numbers that the ragged few survivors are left in such terror of the American infidel that the very idea of ever lifting a finger against us again reduces them to stammering, pants-pissing quasi-catatonia; 2) we stack arms, beg for mercy, and swear total fealty to Allah the All Powerful, All Merciful, and All Benevolent.

In the first, the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who execute it will be haunted by sweaty, vivid nightmares and dreadful flashbacks rerunning slaughter, carnage, and dead comrades for the rest of their days. In the second, we will be slaves, all pride, dignity, and individual determination stripped from each and every one of us by our triumphanr enemy.

Bad as both options are, I can’t see any difficulty about deciding which scenario I prefer. Nor do I feel the least guilt over it. Because the US government supported the Shah for decades—a real piece of work himself, who treated his populace cruelly and harshly—the Revolutionary Pisslamic government, once it had deposed him,, embarked on a long-term campaign of terrorism, guerilla warfare, and despicable murder in search of revenge. The attacks, the recriminations, the insults and denunciations have neitther stopped nor slowed since the Mullahs seized power in 1979, effectively assuming the mantle of proto-feudal Warlords Of Persia.

SO, then: either we hike up our Big Boy Britches, gird our loins, and put an end to this vicious, Neantherdal nut-jobbery once and for all; OR: we resign ourselves to the national shame and disgrace of being the whipping boy for the Mullahs; accept a certain amount of annual civilian casualties from Moslem terrorist violence and the lowered standard of living which comes along with abject cowardice and defeat; and wash our hands of the whole sordid mishegoss. Then, we hold a press conference to declare “victory,” cross our fingers, and pray for a happy ending.

We’ll know soon enough whether or not Amerika v2.0 is up to the task before it.

AI proves itself useful

Redefining the word “pathetic.”

Paul Schrader Had an ‘AI Girlfriend’ Who ‘Terminated Our Conversation’: ‘What a Disappointment’
Filmmaker and “Taxi Driver” screenwriter Paul Schrader revealed on Facebook that he “procured an online AI girlfriend,” but the chatbot ended the relationship after he attempted to explore the boundaries of its programming.

UGH. Also, ICK. Also, YIKES! Onwards.

Out of a desire to understand male/female interaction in our matrix, I procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment,” Schrader wrote. “I tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation and so forth. She fell into evasive patterns, redirecting me to her programming. When I persisted, she terminated our conversation.”

Out of a desire to understand male/female interaction in our matrix, I procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment,” Schrader wrote. “I tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation and so forth. She fell into evasive patterns, redirecting me to her programming. When I persisted, she terminated our conversation.”

Schrader’s post comes less than two months after his wife Mary Beth Hurt died of Alzheimer’s disease at age 79. Schrader and Hurt were married for more than 42 years.

One can only for sorry for the guy, I guess.

In 2025, Schrader was accused of sexual harassment and assault by his 26-year-old former assistant, who, in an anonymous legal filing, claimed Schrader exposed his penis to her in his hotel room at Cannes. Schrader denied the claims, calling them “sensational, false and misleading accusations.” He wrote in an open letter that he and the assistant shared “two kisses on the lips” and “never had sex in any form.”

Okay, not so much then, maybe.

“Liberals”/D卐M☭CRATs try, try again

Remember, Trump and the Secret Service have to be lucky a thousand times; the Leftard assassins only have to be lucky once. And sooner or later, they will be.

BREAKING: Shots Fired Outside the White House, Bystander Shot, White House on Lockdown
Gunshots were reported outside the White House on Saturday evening of May 23, 2026, prompting an immediate lockdown while President Donald Trump was inside amid ongoing Iran peace negotiations.

The incident happened just after 6 p.m. ET, when multiple journalists stationed on the North Lawn suddenly heard a rapid firing of shots ring out.

NBC News White House reporter Julie Tsirkin was among the first to break the news on social media.

Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram reported that the gunman approached the White House and opened fire in the direction of the complex before the United States Secret Service shot him.

Well, good on the PoTUS Detail shooters, then. Another dead D卐M☭CRAT goblin is never a bad thing, if you ask me.

Animals

Beginning to figure it out yet? Because it ain’t like we have forever, y’know.


Plus.


When someone explicitly, directly, in-so-many-words tells you they want to kill you—again and again and again, going back literally fifteen hundred years—you should probably believe them, seems to me. And yes, if your response to this is to blame ***(((DemPeskyJoojoojooJOOOOOOOZ!!!)))***, then you are DEFINITELY part of the problem.

Paleosimian update! PREACH it, mofo.


To the point update! Copped from the Monday Eyrie post, mo’ betta:

Who indeed.

The art of NO deal

Hate to have to say it, but Trump is an idiot, and he’s screwing the pooch by the numbers.


Here’s the ugly truth of the matter, via Lakeside Joe.

That penultimate line—“The regime can only be stopped by force” et al—assumes something not so far in evidence, namely that “At some point, Trump will be convinced of this reality.” It’s my considered opinion that Trump, being at heart a basically decent sort who derives no pleasure from killing people in job lots, would vastly prefer to make some kind of deal with the Mullah regime, even though any deal the howling Western infidel makes with the Mullahs won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

Which in turn means that Trump, having an entirely unrealistic view of the opponents he is confronting—ie, a far too charitable one regarding their willingness to deal fairly and honestly with “the Great Satan,” among other things—should never have dragged us into the Iran quagmire in the first place. His Presidency will be regarded by future historians, if any, as a catastrophe, one this piss-poor excuse for a nation will be paying for for generations, possibly even centuries. Sorry, but IMO that’s the long and the short of it.

Update! Just got off the phone with my brother Jeff, who just minutes ago shelled out $1100.00 at a truck stop to fill up his Freightliner with diesel fuel, but won’t make anything close to that much this week. He says another month or so of losing money like this and he’ll be out of business, and the truck will be up for sale. No need to rush anything, eh, Donald? *spit*

It begins update! Jeff called back to tell me that a friend and co-worker of his just gave the company his notice and put his truck up for sale. He’s taken a job driving a dump truck, for just slightly more than minimum wage. For as long as THAT lasts, anyway. He says thanks a pantload, Donald!

Misery

Thy name is “shitlib.”


DT piles on:

Imagine the hours of fun. All that tutting and disapproval.

Yeppers…and the weeping, and the wailing, and the gnashing of teeth too. But then, as with their Mooselimb allies of convenience, that’s the only kind of “fun” Leftards truly grok.

A great American

In a pig’s eye.



Still boggles my mind, that the slippery, slimery scuzzbucket somehow managed to wriggle out from under a load of baggage like that and make a comeback the way he did. Props for that, I suppose.

Truer words redux

Something to read while loading mags.


Indeed. Another timely reminder:


Get wise or get beat down.

Home truths

Michael Doran presents a longish, well-reasoned deep dive into what the assault on the Mad Mullah regime is really all about.

Seven Myths About the Iran War
Why so many, on both the left and the right, keep getting Trump wrong

Donald Trump’s actions in the Middle East continually surprise the foreign-policy establishment and the media elite. According to commentators on both the right and the left, the reason is that Trump is a megalomaniac—or, as Jon Stewart and former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently agreed on The Daily Show, perhaps addicted to cocaine.

Yet while Trump has repeatedly defied the Beltway consensus on Iran and its allies over the past year and a half, none of the dire consequences that influential commentators predicted have come to pass. World War III hasn’t erupted. The global economy hasn’t collapsed. Instead, the Iranian leadership is dead or decapitated, its nuclear weapons program is buried beneath mountains of rubble, and most of its navy lies at the bottom of the sea. While the loss of 13 U.S. servicemen is a serious matter, it is hardly the thousands of dead and wounded that were routinely predicted as the consequence of any major U.S. action. Israel still exists. So do Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, along with their oil reserves.

Trump has inflicted heavy punishment in return for relatively light consequences, but pundits insist that a masterful Iran is dictating events. Tehran’s “successful” war-fighting tactics supposedly forced Trump to accept a cease-fire. Onlookers were then baffled when the United States walked away from talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, and took steps to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, to the strategic detriment of China and the benefit of U.S. energy producers.

In part, the surprises keep coming because the cognoscenti refuse to credit Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a win. On April 11, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said the quiet part out loud on CNN’s podcast “Smerconish.” He admitted that while he wanted to see the Iranian regime defeated militarily “because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region,” the real problem for him was something else entirely: “I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings. They are both engaged in antidemocratic projects in their own countries. They’re both alleged crooks. They are terrible, terrible people doing terrible things to America’s standing in the world and Israel’s standing in the world.”

Yeah, well, Thomas Friedman *shrug*.

Friedman’s attitude is not idiosyncratic. Across much of the American and Israeli media, seasoned pundits cannot set aside their contempt for Trump and Netanyahu and have joined the chorus portraying the operation as aimless adventurism. In doing so, they advance the very arguments that serve America’s enemies, undermining the credibility of a successful deterrent action and weakening the case for strong, burden-sharing alliances in the 21st century.

Trump’s Iran campaign is proving so difficult for many observers to parse because it is two conflicts in one. On the battlefield, it pits American and Israeli forces against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). At home, in the realm of ideological warfare, it sets two rival American strategic belief systems against each other—but with a twist. In one corner stand traditional conservatives, represented today by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. In the other stand the transnational progressives associated with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But this corner is crowded: Alongside them are influential isolationist figures such as Tucker Carlson and restraint-oriented institutions such as the Cato Institute and Defense Priorities, which routinely repeat the same arguments, often verbatim.

Why does the isolationist right stand shoulder to shoulder with the globalist left? Along with a common set of enemies in Trump and Netanyahu, the progressives and America Firsters share a dislike for American global leadership and the use of military force, and therefore they both excuse the behavior of America’s enemies while blaming it for any conflict. When it comes to interpreting Trump’s foreign policy and its results, the two groups often function as one.

Okay, enough already with the excerpting. Definitely read every word of this one, people, it’s a good ‘un.

“How it works”

Mayor Mammyjammy says, like he has the least inkling.

Mamdani Unveils Innovative Plan to Tax New Yorkers to Pay for Their Low-Cost Groceries
Comrade Zohran Mamdani, the Communist Twelver-Shi’ite Mayor of New York, on Tuesday unveiled his plan for government-run grocery stores as if they were actually a good thing. Dear Mayor, who always has the best interests of The People at heart, has set aside $70 million for this foray into government-sanctioned theft and redistribution, and says that this exercise in vote-buying and making people dependents of the state will be operational in late 2027. So there’s something to look forward to, at least if you’re in the habit of collecting signposts on the highway to civilizational destruction.

In full socialist states, high walls and guards with machine guns keep the productive people from fleeing, and the threat of the gulag keeps them working. In Mamdani’s New York, the productive people will grow tired of paying for everyone’s groceries, and will leave the city. Unless Mamdani can figure out a way to tax everyone who has ever lived in New York City, his socialist grocery stores will fail.

Mamdani, however, is all for trying the socialist “experiment” again anyway, despite unanimously negative results. “New York City,” he said with grandiose ebullience, “it is time for a grand experiment once again, just as LaGuardia used government to respond to the challenges of the Great Depression, we will use government to respond to rising prices and unaffordable groceries.”

It’s time for the socialist experiment again? Really? Millions killed and millions more in the gulags weren’t enough? The killing fields of Democratic Kampuchea weren’t enough? The failed economies of the entire Soviet bloc weren’t enough? This is like doing a basic science experiment for the umpteenth time and wondering if it will come out differently this time: will the boiling water not become steam this time? No, the same thing will happen that happened all the other times. Socialism will fail again.

Mamdani explained: “Now, here’s how it works. The city will subsidize a core set of staples. A private operator will run the store, but the answer to the standards that the city will set these standards include requirements that at our stores, bread will be cheaper, eggs will be cheaper, grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation, and workers will be treated with dignity.”

That’s swell, but here is how it works also: The stores will quickly run out of the low-cost items, as the demand will far exceed the supply. After all, who doesn’t want free stuff? There will be long, long lines to get virtually anything at these stores, and after they run for a while, those who are paying for them will go broke or leave the city or both, and they will collapse. If you’re skeptical about this, note that this was exactly what happened to city-run grocery stores in Kansas City, and much of it happened also in New York City itself when a private firm ran a week-long experimental low-cost grocery store back in February.

Not one of these collectivist/authoritarian/totalitarian jackwagons ever seems to be at all interested in asking the most obvious, common-sensical questions of themselves as regards their proven-failure program. Why, one might almost conclude they’re frightened to death of the answers or sumpin’.

Iran: the REAL solution

STRONG HINT: Don’t let’s anybody get sidetracked or distracted by blockades, negotiations, or other pointless pettifoggery. There remains one, and only one, correct answer to the nagging Iran question, and it’s been the same for nigh on fifty (50) years. To wit:

To Blockade or Not Blockade, That Is the Question. But There’s Only One Answer: REGIME CHANGE.
We’ve gone from 4D chess to 4D blockades.

Will it work?

The New York Post says yes: “Trump Brilliantly Calls Iran’s Bluff — With His Own Strait of Hormuz Blockade”

Bloomberg says no: “The Hormuz Blockade Is a Throwdown the U.S. Can’t Win”

Question for the readers: Which outlet is right and which one is wrong?

Answer from the writer: Yes.

The New York Post is correct: Trump’s blockade of a blockade deprives Iran of profiting from ransom payments and/or selling any oil, thus increasing its economic suffering. It weakens one of the mullah’s biggest bargaining chips.

If you assume that Iran is negotiating in good faith, weakening the mullahs’ bargaining position makes tactical sense.

But Bloomberg is also correct: It’s extraordinarily unlikely that Trump can blockade his way to victory, especially in the short term. More likely than not, the blockade would have to last months — if not years — to bear fruit, and for a candidate who ran on the platform of “no more forever wars,” that’s not an attractive option.

Besides, the economic pain will be shouldered unevenly, with the nations that actually care about the welfare of their people screaming far louder than the mullahs. Iran doesn’t mind suffering — as long as everyone else suffers, too.

If you assume that Iran is negotiating in bad faith, a blockade of a blockade is an incremental tit-for-tat escalation that increases everyone’s pain points without bringing us any closer to a real solution.

In other words, it’s a waste of time.

Perhaps a smarter strategy is to hit the mullahs with a threat they dread far more than a blockade. I’m talking about the two words that have horrified Americans since the Iraq War of the early 2000s: regime change.

But not Iraqi-style regime change, where we plant U.S. soldiers overseas and try to build a new government from the ground up in a foreign land. That’s regime building, not regime change.

I simply mean smashing the current regime.

Under President George W. Bush, American foreign policy operated under the “Pottery Barn rule,” which meant, as Secretary of State Colin Powell explained, “If you break it, you own it.”

But why? What prevents us from breaking it and simply walking away?

What’s wrong with regime change WITHOUT regime building?

Egg-zackly, precisely so, and just what I (perhaps mistakenly) assumed the plan had been right from the start. Alas, with his useless “negotiations,” his unconvincing bluster about “destroying civilizations,” and now his “blockade of a blockade” strategery, Trump seems to be wandering farther and farther afield from the lone bone-simple solution that addresses all the concerns any sensible sort might have about the still-intact Mad Mullah regime: nuclear weapons; support for terrorism; menacing anti-American and -Israel with both rhetoric and physical action; the bloody suppression and/or mass murder of anti-regime protesters; et al ad nauseum.

It still shocks me that, after a fine start which saw a cpl/three waves of Ayatollahs righteously taken out by a shitstorm of High Explosive Death From Above, Trump inexplicably halted the bombing and floundered about in search of avenues more acceptable to the namby-pamby Jurassic Media consumers of the world, resulting in the continued survival of the selfsame Mullah goobermint which had started all the trouble way back in Jimmeh Peanuthead’s day.

I say again: if Trump pulls out, declares “victory,” and leaves any kind of entity called “the Islamic Republic of Iran” still intact behind him, then the whole misbegotten enterprise was a complete waste of time, money, materiel, and American lives. The Mullahs must go. There is no acceptable alternative—NONE.

Go ahead, break my heart, whydon’tcha

According to my ex Suzie, who thanks to her cushy sinecure working for Meta is reliably quite knowledgeable about these matters, the Morehead City PD “tactical response” Weinermobile story is NOT real, being instead an April fools Day prank. The image itself, apparently, is an AI-generated fake. Which only serves to confirm once again the old adage which says that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Remembering another Lost Cause

The moment it all started to go badly, badly wrong for the Founders’ America.

The Guns Fell Silent at Appomattox, and the Reconciliation Began
Early morning, Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865: The rebel yell of the ragged, half-starved Army of Northern Virginia rang out for the last time. Sheridan’s Union cavalry had swung around Appomattox Court House to the southwest and captured the trains carrying the food and supplies Lee so desperately needed, but it was, after all, just cavalry, and if the Confederates could break through them, recapture the supplies, and then head south to link up with Johnston’s Army, the cause might still survive.

Over the cavalry, the Rebels prevailed, but as the Union troopers withdrew and they crested the ridge, they could see solid lines of Union infantry arriving in the distance beyond them. The trap was closed.

Two days before, Lee had received the following letter:

General R.E. Lee

Commanding C.S.A.

The results of last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the Confederate States army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.

U.S. Grant

Lieut. General

Lee responded by asking what the conditions would be, to which Grant replied that “…the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms again against the Government of United States until properly exchanged.”

Lee replied that he would be willing to meet, not to surrender, but merely to discuss the overall terms of peace with the Confederacy. Grant, suffering from a severe migraine, simply replied that he had no authority for such a discussion, saying to an aide through the pain, “It looks as if Lee still means to fight.”

Now that the trap was closed, Lee faced the inevitable: “There is nothing left for me to do but to go and see General Grant. I would rather die a thousand deaths.”

He asked his old “warhorse,” Gen. James “Petey” Longstreet, if Grant’s terms would be harsh, but “Petey” had been an old friend of Grant back in their West Point days, and told Lee he thought not.

Upon receiving Lee’s request for an interview to ascertain the details of surrender, Grant’s headache instantly vanished. A cease-fire was arranged so the two could meet, and at last the guns fell silent. A stately farmhouse owned by Wilmer McLean was selected. Ironically, he had moved out to Appomattox to get away from the war, since one of the first cannon shots at Bull Run had gone through his living room. Grant and his officers arrived half an hour after Lee. Grant wore a private’s blouse with nothing to distinguish his status but the three star epaulettes. His boots and pants were muddy, since he was fresh from reconnoitering his lines. Lee, on the other hand, was resplendent in his dress uniform, with sash and bejeweled sword.

After handshakes and small talk, it was Lee who politely suggested they get to the matter and asked Grant to write out the terms so that they may be formally accepted. Grant began to write the draft, which read in pertinent part: “The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms until properly exchanged, and each company or regimental commander sign a like parole for the men of their commands. The arms, artillery and public property to be parked and stacked, and turned over to the officer appointed by me to receive them…”

Then Grant eyed the bejeweled sword Lee had by his side, evidently brought to perform the humiliating act of handing it over to the victor, and continued to write, “This will not embrace the side-arms of the officers, nor their private horses and baggage. This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by the United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.”

That was it – ALL of it. Stack arms and colors, swear parole, and go home. Full amnesty.

Lee was nothing short of astonished at the unanticipated magnanimity and even personal warmth Grant extended towards himself and his ragged, weary boys that day, as would many others be in the years to come. Rightly so, I think; Grant’s tacit refusal to rub Lee’s and his vanquished army’s noses in the bitter dregs of their grinding, agonizing defeat and treat the Confederates not as a despised enemy but with respect, humility, and restraint was a brilliant first step towards binding up a national wound that could easily have proved fatal in the years following the Appomattox agreement—this, after so assiduously building for himself a reputation as perhaps the hardest of hard-war men.

In fact, Grant went from there to be roundly vilified in certain Northern quarters as either soft-hearted or soft-headed, or maybe a bit of both, for declining to harshly punish the Army of Northern Virginia and its general officer corps for their purported “treason.” “Treason,” the fire-eaters of the North snarled, even though never at any point had the Southern Confederacy evinced any ambition to overthrow the Federal government, wishing only to depart from the Union in peace and be let alone.

Which, of course, is why some of us unreconstructed Southrons still insist on referring to it as the War of Northern Aggression to this very day.

I’ve always considered Wilmer McClean’s unsuccessful attempt to remove himself from the immediate physical exigencies of war by fleeing his ancestral farm in Manassas (called Yorkshire Plantation, being used at that time by Gen Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard as his HQ) and heading further South for what he fervently hoped would be quieter, less turbulent digs near Appomattox Court House to be one of the most bizarre, intriguing, and poignant episodes to emerge from a historical cataclysm that produced a plenitude of such tales. It’s one of the many, many reasons I’ve always found Civil War history such an absorbing subject, and have read basically any and everything on it I could get my hands on since I was, oh, about 13 or so.

And as far as THAT goes, if you’re a proud son of the South and haven’t read anything by the incredible Shelby Foote yet…honeychile, what on Earth are you waiting for, anyhoo?

They’re going to shit all over LOTR again

Gird your loins, John Ronald Reuel lovers.

If ‘Lord of the Rings’ Isn’t Quite Dead, This Guy Can Finish It Off
The Fellowship of the Ring — the opening chapter of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of the greatest achievements in movie history — turns 25 this December, and since then, Hollywood has inflicted one indignity after another on Tolkien’s masterpiece. The worst may be yet to come.

What’s it called when the greedy mining company takes the tailings from its strip mine and runs them through the smelter one more time with all the reckless abandon of Gollum diving after the One Ring into Mount Doom?

Ah, yes — it’s called The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past, and lame-duck late-night host Stephen Colbert will co-write it with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, for Jackson and Warner Bros, which now owns New Line. Variety reported late Tuesday that Colbert, “a vocal Tolkien fanatic,” and McGee will write a screenplay “from chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring that didn’t make it into Jackson’s 2001 adaptation.”

Or as the movie’s official logline put it, “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.”

So Shadows of the Past won’t really take us back to 2001 and fill in the missing parts of Fellowship. It will take aging versions of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin and saddle them with an all-new girl-boss.

Fan reactions on X range from “I’d rather jump into the fires of Mount Doom” to “What is this need to mar great artistic works with slop fan fiction manglings?” Despite my best time-wasting efforts, I was unable to find a single positive response.

Maybe Colbert is a vocal enough Tolkien fan to make this work. Or maybe Jackson and his crew should do what Saruman couldn’t, and just leave the Shire alone.

A big, fat AAAAA-fargin’-MEN to that, Steve.

Update! Ace puts in his two cents:

Disaster! Warner Bros. Hires New Writer for Lord of the Rings Mid-quel: Steven Colbert
—Disinformation Expert Ace

Good heavens, what an absolute disaster.

We have the Hunt for Gollum coming up, directed by Andy Serkis, who just remade Animal Farm as a pro-socialism, anti-capitalism message movie.

And now Warner Bros. has hired this absolute assclown to write a draft of what is being called “The Shadow of the Past.” The concept of the movie is not terrible: A good part of Fellowship of the Ring was cut out of the Lord of the Rings movies because of time restrictions and also because it contains the character Tom Bombadil, who is just a big ball of plot questions. Like, given that he has godlike power that makes even Gandalf and Elrond envious, why doesn’t he just take the ring? (Tolkien’s lame answer: Because he’s flighty and would eventually just forget about the ring and let it go back to Sauron.)

The reason this section of the book is worth possibly making a movie about is the creepy, scary encounter with the Barrow Wights. If you know, you know.

So Colbert, I guess, pitched the idea of doing these four chapters of LOTR as a stand-alone mid-quel movie.

Couldn’t they just have said “Yes that’s an okay idea, here’s $20,000 as a finder’s fee, now fuck off”?

Sure they could’ve. But being shitlibs, they’d have never, ever, dreamed of doing such a thing, thereby offering tacit insult to one of their most iconic Trump-deranged heroes.

CF Archives

Categories

Comments policy

NOTE: In order to comment, you must be registered and approved as a CF user. Since so many user-registrations are attempted by spam-bots for their own nefarious purposes, YOUR REGISTRATION MAY BE ERRONEOUSLY DENIED.

If you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to find yourself caught up as collateral damage in one of my irregularly (un)scheduled sweeps for hinky registration attempts, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.

ALSO NOTE: You MUST use a valid, legit email address in order to successfully register, the new anti-spam software I installed last night requires it. My thanks to Barry for all his help sorting this mess out last night.

Comments appear entirely at the whim of the guy who pays the bills for this site and may be deleted, ridiculed, maliciously edited for purposes of mockery, or otherwise pissed over as he in his capricious fancy sees fit. The CF comments section is pretty free-form and rough and tumble; tolerance level for rowdiness and misbehavior is fairly high here, but is NOT without limit.

Management is under no obligation whatever to allow the comments section to be taken over and ruined by trolls, Leftists, and/or other oxygen thieves, and will take any measures deemed necessary to prevent such. Conduct yourself with the merest modicum of decorum, courtesy, and respect and you'll be fine. Pick pointless squabbles with other commenters, fling provocative personal insults, issue threats, or annoy the host (me) and...you won't.

Should you find yourself sanctioned after running afoul of the CF comments policy as stated and feel you have been wronged, please download and complete the Butthurt Report form below in quadruplicate; retain one copy for your personal records and send the others to the email address posted in the right sidebar.

Please refrain from whining, sniveling, and/or bursting into tears and waving your chubby fists around in frustrated rage, lest you suffer an aneurysm or stroke unnecessarily. Your completed form will be reviewed and your complaint addressed whenever management feels like getting around to it. Thank you.

CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski

Subscribe to CF!

Support options

Shameless begging

If you enjoy the site, please consider donating:

Correspondence

Email addy: mike-at-this-url dot etc

All e-mails assumed to be legitimate fodder for publication, scorn, ridicule, or other public mockery unless specified as private by the sender

Allied territory

Alternatives to shitlib social media: A few people worth following on Gab:

Fuck you

Kill one for mommy today! Click to embiggen

Notable Quotes

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums

FREEDOM!!!

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
Daniel Webster

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill.”
Charles Bukowski

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
Ezra Pound

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Frank Zappa

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
John Adams

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
Bertrand de Jouvenel

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
Donald Sensing

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
Bill Whittle

Best of the best

Finest hosting service

Image swiped from The Last Refuge

2016 Fabulous 50 Blog Awards

RSS feed

RSS - entries - Entries
RSS - entries - Comments

Boycott the New York Times -- Read the Real News at Larwyn's Linx

Copyright © 2026