Lesson 1: make sure you have plenty of Whypeepuh around, just to maintain it and keep it running smoothly.
Southern Pacific passenger train, 1940’s pic.twitter.com/BmGhqPmeSd
— Americana Aesthetics (@AmericanaAesth)
Man, how could you not just HATE everything about that picture, and everyone in it? Dunno myself, asking for a “liberal” friend.
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1Two real gems from Matt Margolis’s Meme-manic Monday Substack post, to which I am pleased and proud to be a (free, natch) subscriber.
Heh. Gotta love it, amIright? Lots more fun schtuff at the link.
3I repeat: If you strike him down, he shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
‘I’M PROBABLY THE FIRST UNEMPLOYED PERSON YOU EVER INVITED TO SPEAK’: TUCKER CARLSON TO SOLD OUT CROWD
Tucker Carlson had a great joke for a sold out crowd in Alabama as he talked about being ‘fired’ and some other things. The crowd wasn’t huge, but it was sold out as 1,189 people showed up to see him speak at the Oxford Performing Arts Center for a fundraiser for Rainbow Omega. Jokingly, Tucker Carlson started off with the epic one-liner saying “I’m probably the first unemployed person you ever invited to speak.” Then Carlson said, “It’s funny. I never give speeches because I’m working. When I accepted this speech six months ago or something, I didn’t realize how much free time I would have. One never knows, does one?”What else did Tucker Carlson say during his speech? Well, here’s some quotes thanks to AL.com who posted it in a news story about the former Fox News host:
I accepted for two reasons, one shallow and one a little deeper. One is, I do love Alabama. I’m not just saying that. We spend a lot of time in rural Maine, which is so close to this culturally, you have no idea. In a great way. The food is not very good in rural Maine. The food here is unbelievable. I’ve spent a lot of time in this state, and part of the reason is you have great hunting and fishing. The real reason is it has everything that I like. It has really nice people. It has amazing food. I have the world’s worst eating habits and here that’s not judged. Fried Oreos? Okay! I love that. I love the lack of judgment.
The perceptions, national perceptions kind of shift very slowly, then you wake up in the morning and everything’s different. The rest of the country’s view of Alabama is one of those things that just changed completely. Nobody makes fun of Alabama, at all, because they realize actually that’s how you’re supposed to be living. The only way to know what people think about something is to not listen to what they say, I say this as someone who has talked for a living for a long time, ignore the words. Watch what they do. Watch how they live. That’s the only accurate measure of what people really think. Ignore that. Be like your dog, who understands not a single word of what you’re saying but knows exactly who you are.
Are people moving to Alabama? Oh, yeah. I love that. Why are they moving here? They’re moving here because Alabama’s everything that you would want in a place that you live. It has cohesive communities, super-nice people, gentle people, people who care about their neighbors, and it has an abundance of nature, something that we I think undervalue. We went through this weird, kind of mass hypnosis where everyone was convinced we had to move to some horrifying concrete city in order to make a living and forgot that actually you need to see green, or else you’ll go insane. If you’re alienated from God’s creation, you become fundamentally alienated. Nature is the most beautiful thing. Driving around here today, I thought to myself, you think of Alabama, if you don’t live in Alabama, as a place that has a lot of past attached to it. And I thought today, especially reading the numbers about what’s happening in your state, Alabama is not the past, Alabama’s the future.
We’d damned well better hope it is, yeah. Thankfully, as Tucker implies, that’s something that just kinda-sorta happens when nobody’s really looking, or expecting it to.
2Again, that is, this time from the shitlibs and their preposterously unworkable “Green energy.”
Conservative watchdogs highlight ‘alarming’ surge in whale deaths as wind farms grow off NY, NJ coasts
Conservative watchdog groups ran a guerrilla-style ad campaign on the Jersey Shore for Earth Day, drawing attention to a surge in whale deaths amid the growth of offshore wind farms.Beachgoers in Atlantic City on Saturday looked on as a single-propeller plane carried a message waving from a banner — “SAVE-WHALES-STOP-WINDMILLS.ORG” — and drivers heading out of town saw a billboard with the same message and a picture of a dead whale washed ashore.
The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Heartland Institute sponsored the ads to highlight the potential threat that wind turbine development poses to whales, dolphins and other aquatic life.
The campaign comes after a ProPublica report last week found that federal regulators in the Biden administration have downplayed environmental risks to greenlight “an unprecedented expansion for offshore wind” projects — including tax incentives through the president’s Inflation Reduction Act for renewable energy developers.
Pics of the aforementioned ads included at the NYPost link, and they’re truly wonderful. Well done, guys, and good on ya for turning the Left’s own twipe back on ‘em and hosing ‘em down good with it like this.
2An idea whose time has come is long overdue.
For the first time in history, the ruling class of a powerful nation has abandoned its fellow citizens. What is happening in America today is more than a return to feudalism, although the new economic model into which we’re being herded is correctly compared to feudalism. The reality is actually much worse: America’s elites view ordinary citizens as no longer necessary. Because of globalism, they are replaceable. Because of automation, they are superfluous. Because of environmentalism, they are unsustainable.
These factors explain what is otherwise inexplicable: Constitutional conservatives and Christians, and the values they profess, are now stigmatized by establishment institutions as often, if not more often, than they are praised. Nationalism and religious faith empower individuals and communities to resist a ruling class that has abandoned them. That makes them a threat. They recognize that the ideology of America’s ruling elites is itself leading to disaster. They recognize that America’s elites have decided the nation’s middle class is disposable, and this is the real reason they are pushing an agenda of woke degeneracy and extreme environmentalism, designed to lower birthrates and reduce standards of living.
It’s hard to imagine how America’s elites could get things more wrong. Their transhuman and transnational vision is provoking a clash of civilizations at the same time as they are destroying the human foundation of their own civilization. Nations where nationalism or religion remains the prevailing ideology are not about to emasculate their populations and eviscerate their energy sectors.
Winston Churchill titled the third volume of his World War II memoirs The Grand Alliance. It described an alliance against a threat more obvious and imminent than the one we face today, uniting partners more intrinsically opposed than those who need to join together today. Instead of Western democracies uniting with Communist Russia to fight the fascist dictatorships, we have merely to unite a critical mass of Americans who want to save their nation from an elite that has declared war on their way of life and their future.
This isn’t as hard as it seems for two reasons. First, because most Americans don’t want to live in a degenerate culture. They don’t want to live in a culture that has devolved to cater to society’s lowest, most abnormal, deviant, hedonistic, psychotic, sociopathic, dishonest, crooked, lazy, defiant, bizarre, militant cohorts of individuals, regardless of the fact they’ve become politically organized and demand equality of outcome in every imaginable context. Most Americans understand the inherent necessity and benefits of nuclear families, hard work, and immutable standards for achievement and recognition. There is a deep, latent unity among Americans. It needs only a few sparks to immolate the thin film of oil on the surface.
As Pogo used to say, WOWF! Quite a powerful ‘graph, that one. Kinda surprising to see such no-punches-pulled stuff in a mainstream newspaper. Also, extremely encouraging.
Second, what is the nature of this oil that smothers America’s ocean of common sense and unity? It is a fractious coalition of fanatics and lunatics, relatively small in number, who harbor an innate antipathy toward each other that is only held in check by rivers of money flowing to them from globalist billionaires, opportunistic corporations, environmentalist pressure groups, and government unions. Their resources are money and anger. They win elections because all that money, and all that anger, is used to brainwash voters into thinking that tolerating decadence and chaos is compassion, people who oppose extreme tolerance are bigots, and recognizing the indispensability of fossil fuel is, somehow, “fascist.” The brainwashing, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, is wearing thin.
In his 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe, British journalist Douglas Murray suggests those forces still extant in Western societies and still resisting the derangements of our time—the secular and the religious—put aside their differences and unite to save Western civilization.
Finding a new synthesis of Western culture capable of addressing the questions of the 21st century may be a topic of active debate in think tanks. Still, to date, it hasn’t filtered down to retail politics. On the street, politicians trying to overcome woke insanity have limited themselves, at most, to rolling back the insanity. They have not expressed a new vision for America that unites religious and secular conservatives.
This is regrettable, but it also presents a tremendous opportunity.
Overly optimistic? Perhaps, maybe even damned likely so. Worth trying anyway? Absolutely; right now, anything that stands a ghost of a chance of staving off an actual shooting war is. What the hell, it provides Real Americans with something to do until the shooting war comes along.
Via Porretto, who has more to say his own bad self.
We look at the actions of the Usurpers and their allies at the state and local level, we note the obvious, easily predictable consequences of their policies, and we shake our heads in disbelief. The consequences are always bad for ordinary Americans. Every one of them conduces to a poorer, less safe, less peaceful, less fecund, and (of course) less free society. And the majority of Americans say wonderingly, “Isn’t that as obvious to them as it is to me?”
Well, duh! The people doing this to you are not stupid. Evil? Yes. But they know what they’re doing. It pleases them that so many of you continue to think them misguided rather than malevolent.
The Tennessee Star editorial proposes a “grand alliance” of the great mass of us who want our country back as it was. The Usurpers hope to prevent exactly that, which is the central reason for their policies. As they force Us the People to struggle ever harder to keep ourselves and our loved ones alive, adequately provided for, and reasonably safe, they drain us of the energy that would make it possible to resist them. A man who’s barely succeeding at “treading water” can spare no thought for anything but survival.
Does that sound like anyone you know, Gentle Reader? Does it sound like you?
I imagine it does sound quite familiar at that, to all sorts of people. At least, it damned sure ought to.
1Among the many, many email list-type things flooding my inbox daily are quite a few from Twatter (since Musk took over and cleaned house I’m gonna have to stop referring to it with such disparaging names), which I haven’t long since relegated to the CF Spamme Trappe because I actually enjoy quite a few of them. Sander from the Netherlands, a/k/a Buitengebieden, would be on the list of Twitterers I like.
The landing.. 😊 pic.twitter.com/HLeOokLymv
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden)
HAAA! Good stuff, no? I mean, really now, just look at the grin on that face at the end.
The cute little critter coming home to mama for a perfect three-point landing in her hand is a sugar glider, if I’m not mistaken; being a certified Elly May Clampett-level critter person (DEAD GIVEAWAY ALERT: there’s even a “Critters” category here, has been for a long time), I always did want one of those myself. Can’t recollect ever seeing a snowy-white one before, though. Some info on the li’l beasties, for those who might not know what the hell I’m even talking about here.
The sugar glider (Petaurus breviceps) is a small, omnivorous, arboreal, and nocturnal gliding possum. The common name refers to its predilection for sugary foods such as sap and nectar and its ability to glide through the air, much like a flying squirrel. They have very similar habits and appearance to the flying squirrel, despite not being closely related—an example of convergent evolution. The scientific name, Petaurus breviceps, translates from Latin as “short-headed rope-dancer”, a reference to their canopy acrobatics.
The sugar glider is characterised by its pair of gliding membranes, known as patagia, which extend from its forelegs to its hindlegs. Gliding serves as an efficient means of reaching food and evading predators. The animal is covered in soft, pale grey to light brown fur which is countershaded, being lighter in colour on its underside.
The sugar glider is native to a small portion of southeastern Australia, in the regions of southern Queensland and most of New South Wales east of the Great Dividing Range. Members of Petaurus are popular exotic pets and are frequently also referred to as “sugar gliders”, but these are now thought to likely represent another species from West Papua, tentatively classified in Krefft’s glider.
“Short-headed rope-dancer”—gotta love that, it certainly seems apt enough. Here, have yourself another adorable pic:
Oh oh wait, dang it, that’s Elly May. Sorry ‘bout that, folks…maybe. Here’s the one I meant to put in there.
Heh. Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge: where the smart set goes for all their “cuteness” needs.
Moar adorable update! Another critter I always wanted, but never did get.
Those are African pygmy hedgehogs, comically enjoying one of their favorite pastimes: tubing, they call it. Too, too funny, and totally cute too. (SIDE NOTE: yes, that’s an old toilet-paper-roll tube they’re playing with; they’re known for keeping that up for hours, walking themselves off of tabletops, falling off chair seats and sofas, repeatedly crashing into walls, you name it)
The trouble with keeping exotic pets like gliders and hedgehogs is that they’re costly to keep and maintain, in all sorts of ways. They usually need a great deal of attention and affection; their dietary requirements can be expensive and, well, exotic, thus tough to fulfill; finding a vet for one outside of major urban areas can be extremely difficult, the visits frequent and expensive. Exotics are susceptible to bizarre, unheard-of diseases, for which treatment is both demanding in terms of effort and ruinously expensive.
All in all, then, not the best choice of pet for someone who travels as much as I used to. Hell, just keeping up with two cats, two dogs, and a freshwater aquarium which I successfully kept going for well over ten years (stocked with two clown loaches, an albino shark, an albino cory cat, and a firebelly newt; the pleco I got for algae-control purposes, a tiny thing at first, I finally gave away to a friend when the ugly bastid grew to just over two feet long) was hard enough, thanks.
Aww, no.
GORDON LIGHTFOOT DEAD AT 84
Gordon Lightfoot, a folk music and soft rock icon of the 1970s, is dead … according to his publicist.Gordon, best known for his hit, “If You Could Read My Mind,” passed away Monday evening in Toronto, where he’d been hospitalized. His publicist, Victoria Lord, did not say why he was getting medical treatment or release a cause of death.
Ummm…best known for “If You Could Read My Mind,” SRSLY? Forgive me for saying so and all, but I doubt very much that that’s the one which will spring immediately to mind for most people. Personally, this will always be one of my faves.
There’s a cpl of latter-day in-concert pics included at the above-linked and -quoted obit which are truly ghastly. No matter, though; Lightfoot’s “Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” is a pluperfect example of stellar songwriting and nimble, understated performance—a rare earwig of a story-song that, once you’ve heard it, will forever remain in your head and heart..and you won’t mind at all.
When suppertime came the old cook came on deck/Sayin’ “Fellas, it’s too rough t’feed ya.”/At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in; he said/“Fellas, it’s been good t’know ya! Now THAT is some seriously good squishy, folks. I must’ve heard it a blue million times, but those lines STILL give me chills every time I hear ‘em again. From the song’s Wikipedia entry:
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a 1976 hit song written, composed and performed by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot to commemorate the sinking of the bulk carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. Lightfoot drew his inspiration from Newsweek’s article on the event, “The Cruelest Month”, which it published in its November 24, 1975, issue. Lightfoot considered this song to be his finest work.
The song recounts the final voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald, as it experienced troubles then sank in rough seas on Lake Superior, late in the shipping season. Written before the wreckage of the ship was found, it deviates from the known sequence of events, and contains some artistic omissions and paraphrases. In a later interview, Lightfoot recounted how he had agonised over possible inaccuracies while trying to pen the lyrics, until producer Lenny Waronker advised him to play to his artistic strengths and “just tell a story”. Lightfoot’s passion for recreational sailing on the Great Lakes informs his ballad’s verses throughout.
A relatively minor hit when it was orginally released, “Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” has lived on on classic rock radio playlists ever since, its near-universal popularity with listeners never fading—which is pretty danged good for an easy-listening, subtle folk-rock ballad, I should think. Rest easy, Gordon Lightfoot. You won’t soon be forgotten.
8Divemedic recounts the incredible story of a bona fide American hero—a valiant and doughty warrior I’ve written about here myself. DM includes some aspects of the story, most notably a memorable quote, that I hadn’t heard before.
There are so many times that I have heard people, including myself, say that we are getting too old for the conflicts that are to come. It’s easy to think that the trials that we all see as inevitable are for young men, and let’s face it, many of us cannot consider ourselves to be young any longer. So let’s take comfort in the story of Samuel Whittemore.
Comfort? I hardly see it as comforting. Confers a YUGE burden of responsibility, and imposes a very real debt of awestruck gratitude, more like. At the very least, Whittemore’s story is enormously humbling for any present-day Real American with half a lick of sense and a knowledge of US history.
Anyways. Onwards.
Samuel was not a young man when he enlisted in the Third Massachusetts Regiment and fought the French in Canada. He was 49 years old when he killed a French officer and took his sword as a war trophy.
Mr. Whittemore wasn’t done. He fought again against Chief Pontiac in the Great Lakes region at 67 years old as he led troops against the French and Indians. During that conflict, he took a pair of dueling pistols as war trophies.
For the next decade or so, he became a respected leader in the civic arena. He lobbied against the government, speaking out and being a general pain in the ass. He protested the government’s actions, complaining about this and that, went to meetings of government, and represented his town as a member of the Committee of Correspondence. That was how it came to be that, in 1772, Whittemore was one of the three contributors to Cambridge, Massachusetts’ statement in objection to the Tea Act:
If we cease to assert Our rights we shall dwindle into supineness and the chains of slavery shall be fast rivetted upon us
Then came the day when Samuel Whittemore’s family found him in his farm’s field, lying in a pool of blood, and even the town’s doctor didn’t believe that he would survive. British soldiers had left Samuel Whittemore in a pool of blood alongside a stone wall in Menotomy, Mass. after shooting the old farmer in the face, then bayoneted him at least six times and clubbed him, apparently, to death as they retreated from the skirmish at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Samuel was 78 years old.
Located near him were the bodies of three British soldiers: one shot by a musket, another by a dueling pistol, and a third run through with an ornate French sword.
Samuel survived that day, against all odds, and lived to the ripe old age of 96. He is currently buried in Arlington, Massachusetts.
This is the reason why we stand for the National Anthem, to honor men such as this.
Indubitably so. It’s to our everlasting disgrace that, were you to ask any random “American” schoolkid nowadays, he/she/its/zhir/zhimz would have no idea who Samuel Whittemore even was. Hell, he/she/its/zhir/zhimz parents wouldn’t know either. I very much doubt whether their teachers would.
As Founding Father Patrick Henry so unforgettably implored the flock at St John’s Church in Richmond:
Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. Sir, we have done everything that could be done, to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne. In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free, if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending, if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!
They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance, by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.
It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Amen. May we all draw strength from history, from the deeds of our glorious forebears; may we resolve to live up to their illustrious example. May the memory of that history, that example, never fade from our hearts and minds. In awakening Real Americans from their long, torporous slumber, Leftards know not what they have done. Let them reap the whirlwind, then, in fullest possible measure.
6Fucked around. Found out. Exactly as he damned well deserved to.
Sometimes you F around and find out… this guy did… pic.twitter.com/ZcjxlLsl8y
— Matt Couch (@RealMattCouch)
Divemedic says it for me.
I have heard the complaints that the guy shouldn’t have shot him when he was leaving, and you know what? I don’t give a shit. If the cops and courts won’t protect their citizens, the citizens eventually will.
Precisely so. I’m not so sure the soon-to-be-ventilated perp actually was leaving. He walked back around the counter, but he wasn’t moving in the direction of the door; probably looking around to see what else in the store might be worth stealing, seems to me.
“Shouldn’t have shot him”? Like bleedin’ hell. What shouldn’t have happened was, the predatory Gibmedat shouldn’t have robbed the guy in the first place, that’s what. Had he not chosen to commit armed robbery and ADW, thereby putting an innocent man in fear for his life, then he wouldn’t have gotten his sorry ass shot. That’s all on Sh’Quan’zellaramalamadingdong, and absolutely nobody else.
Be sure to stick with it for the happy ending; the footage of the worthless parasite writhing in pain on the sidewalk, bleeding profusely, is worth the price of admission all by itself.
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1Was Carlson’s Heritage speech a cpl weeks ago, in particular his references to Christianity and “evil,” the straw that broke Murdoch’s back, so to speak?
The veteran television host and journalist, whose Fox News show attracts millions of viewers every evening, remarked at an event for the Heritage Foundation that fellow conservatives must swiftly adjust their approaches to the national conversation since some political forces desire to tear down the nation rather than engage in legitimate political dialogue.
“We write our papers and they write their papers, and may the best papers win. I don’t think that’s what we’re watching now at all. I don’t think we’re watching a debate on how to get to the best outcome. I think that’s completely wrong,” Carlson said. “There is no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement with that mindset. Policy papers don’t account for it at all. If you have people who are saying, ‘I have an idea, let’s castrate the next generation, let’s sexually mutilate children,’ I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. That has nothing to do with politics.”
Carlson likewise described such a sentiment as a “theological phenomenon” that fundamentally cannot be considered a rational policy position. “And that’s kind of the point I’m making: none of this makes sense in conventional political terms,” he added. “What you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.”
Carlson told the Heritage Foundation audience that older conservatives must shift their mindset in order to effectively engage in the current political arena. “I’m just noting what’s super obvious. Those of us who are in our mid-50s are caught in the past on how we think about this,” he remarked. “One side’s like, ‘I’ve got this idea, and we have this idea, and let’s have a debate about our ideas.’ They don’t want a debate. Those ideas won’t produce outcomes that any rational person would want under any circumstances. Those are manifestations of some larger force acting upon us.”
Despite multiple self-deprecating remarks about his affiliation with the Episcopal Church, a communion widely regarded for socially and theologically liberal standpoints, Carlson noted that Americans should turn to heaven for hope as the nation’s foundations collapse. “Maybe we should all just take 10 minutes per day to say a prayer about it,” he concluded. “And I’m saying that to you not as some kind of evangelist. I’m literally saying that to you as an Episcopalian.”
Tucker’s right as rain, whether it harelips every cannibal liberal on the Congo Potomac or not, and there’s just no way around it. Praying to the Almighty for deliverance from Their Satanic Majesties is well and good, of course, and can never be a bad thing. But soon or late, every decent Normal American will be forced to ponder the practical application of Algernon Sidney’s well-known aphorism: God helps those who help themselves.
9Tell me, oh Magic Eight Ball: Is the indomitable, perenially-awesome, so-ugly-it’s-beautiful Fairchild-Republic A10 Thunderbolt II the best damned combat aircraft the US has ever fielded? Signs point to YES.
A-10s Return to Middle East with a New Mission, and a New Weapon
Tensions with Iran, Russia have CENTCOM calling upon the venerable Warthog once again.A squadron of A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jets, specially modified to nearly triple their bomb loads, has been dispatched to the Middle East to boost U.S. airpower in the region amid increased tensions with Iran-backed forces in Syria.
With each plane carrying four SDB (Small Diameter Bombs—M) bomb racks, a flight of four A-10s could bomb up to 64 ground targets, a nearly three-fold increase. Each plane can also carry laser-guided rockets along with its famed 30mm tankbusting gun.
“That’s a lot of targets that you can hit from an air-to-ground perspective,” Grynkewich said.
The rugged attack jet also gives commanders more flexibility because it can fly from short or dirt runways.
“We would be able to maneuver [the A-10] very rapidly to different locations and show an ability to do strike operations that really would be very difficult to to counter in any meaningful way should things escalate,” he said.
The A-10 could also be used to patrol the Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian go-fast boats have harassed warships and tankers.
“There certainly are maritime threats that are out there that are promulgated by the Iranians,” Grynkewich said. “The A-10 brings you a capability that can counter that, as well—kinetically if necessary with those rockets and the gun.”
Designed in the 1970s as a specialized ground-assault weapon, the A-10 has won the love of generations of infantry. Protected by a “bathtub” of cockpit armor, Warthog pilots fly slow and low, eyeballing their targets before ripping into them with copious armament. But Air Force leaders have spent decades trying to win Congressional permission to retire the twinjet. They call it a sitting duck for modern air defenses, and they say stealthier, higher-flying, more lightly armed fighter jets can do the job. Earlier this year, Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown said the last A-10s would be gone by decade’s end.
Grynkewich’s command is also responding to a call from CENTCOM’s Kurilla to be more innovative. Air Forces Central aims to experiment with the A-10’s ability to shoot down enemy drones. Since the A-10 lacks a radar, officials plan to use a network of U.S. and allied radars to guide the attack jets to their uncrewed targets. The Warthog could then use its infrared targeting pod to engage a drone with heat-seeking missiles or laser-guided rockets, Grynkewich said.
Is there ANYTHING the ‘Hog can’t do? Apparently not. Stout, amazingly versatile, a-bristle with ferocious lethality—she’s a credit to her noble lineage and her namesake, no doubt about it.
Update! So in the comments, I said this to Steve:
Pretty sure I’ve told this story before here, but back when the band was regularly traveling from NC to NYC for shows, we always took the back way up the spine of the Shenandoah on 81, through Harrisburg, and then on into a stretch paralleling a mountainous area with a USANG base close by (Fort Indiantown Gap, I believe it was). The base had A10s attached, and quite often we’d see a flight of ‘Hogs practicing attack weaves, crisscrossing low and slow from one side of the mountains up over the crest to the other and back again.
We’d all watch this airshow completely spellbound, which is when it occurred to me how truly awful it must be to be a ground-pounding camel-humper being hunted by one of those truly magnificent bastards. Bet there’s been whole damned laundry-trucks’ worth of djellabahs ended up smeared in fresh-squeezed shit by guys in that unenviable position. If not, then they were just too stupid to live anyhow.
Just for shits and giggles, I poked around some when what to my wondering eyes did appear but this choice vid:
And dammit, that’s IT, the spontaneous, unannounced “airshow” we looked forward to seeing on every trip up to the Rotten Apple. Hell yeah! How fuckin’ cool is THAT?
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1The wit and wisdom of George Carlin, delving into why government schools suck.
George Carlin Warned us Why Public Education Sucks and Won’t Get Better
Carlin, despite his left-leaning tendencies, could also grasp certain concepts even his fellow liberals could not. For example, I recently came across an old clip of Carlin talking about education—and boy, was it spot on.In the clip, Carlin talks about politicians who don’t want to improve education, despite always calling for more money to support it. Carlin also criticized the education system’s approach to addressing poor test scores by suggesting that instead of improving the quality of education, they lower the passing grades, a common practice in many schools.
“That’s what they do in a lot of these schools. Now they lower the passing grades so more kids can pass. More kids pass the school looks good, everybody’s happy. The IQ of the country slips another two or three points, and pretty soon, all you’ll need to get into college is a fucking pencil. ‘Got a pencil? Get the fuck in there.’ It’s physics. Then everyone wonders why 17 other countries graduate more scientists than we do. ‘Education.’ Politicians know that word, they use it on you.”
Carlin continued, “There’s a reason for this. There’s a reason education sucks. And It’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that.”
“I’m talking about the real owners now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. They get the politicians — politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies. So they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.”
“But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking they’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.”
Imagine a liberal saying this today. I can’t.
Of course you can’t. There’s about a jillion and one things Carlin used to say that no shitlib today would, nor even could.
I’ve been an avid fan of George Carlin since I was just a kid—and I’m talking here like 13 years old or thereabouts—when I plunked down my entire weekly allowance at my Uncle Gene’s drugstore for a copy of his FM & AM album, brought it home, and put it on the turntable of my family’s big old console-stereo rig. Then, after no more than about five minutes of me and my brother giggling at all the funny cuss-words, my enraged father stormed into the living room, slapped the tonearm off the disk so viciously he dislodged the entire needle cartridge and sent it flying across the room, and ordered me to take that obscene thing straight back to wherever you got it from, he wasn’t about to tolerate having any such filth in HIS house!!!
Although yes, Carlin’s political leanings were Left-wards, when and if he spoke of such piffling things at all, what the man also was—always, quite rigorously, and above all else—was honest. Often brutally so, no matter where that honesty might lead him either professionally or intellectually.
Which, being so uncompromisingly honest had to be extremely painful for him at times, I should think. Then again though, perhaps not so much; as I continued to follow his career over the years, even going so far as to watch his middling-at-best TV series, I began to realize that Carlin wasn’t so much a Leftist as he was a true, bred-in-the-bone iconoclast. Clearly, the man despised official authority in all its forms; I can’t recall him ever mentioning politics at all in his routines other than glancingly, as in the above quotes, and always with searing contempt. Certainly he never endorsed any particular candidate, party, or platform, like all too many of his fellow comics so promiscuously do today.
Like almost every other born-and-raised New Yorker, he thought of himself as a liberal, I suppose. But he wasn’t a guy upon whom the silken fetters of liberalism would ever sit easily or comfortably. A genuine free spirit, he flatly rejected chains of every kind, which is exactly what those silken fetters in reality were, and still are.
There is no common ground to be found between 60s-70s liberalism and liberty, then or now. Those two things being so patently (and ironically, given the Latin root of both words) contradictory, though, I kinda doubt it set off any cognitive dissonance for Carlin just the same. Given the man’s visceral loathing for any sort of political encroachment on freedom, whether his own or anybody else’s, it’s obvious that his first loyalty was always to human liberty, and not to what liberalism had by the close of the 60s come to represent—another vile linguistic traducement I doubt George Carlin would have had any patience with.
5Tucker fires back.
Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023
Preach it, brother.
31Commenting on last night’s Junior Brown post, Skeptic said:
I’ve been fortunate enough to see Junior, the Reverend, and Big Sandy live (although not on the same bill). Great entertainers all.
Indeed they are, and excepting Brown, who I’ve never met, just really great guys as well. So I began my response to Skeptic thusly:
Man, Big Sandy (Robert Williams, actually, as you probably know), in addition to being enormously talented, is without doubt one of the sweetest, nicest human beings I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. When my wife was killed, he was one of the very first to call me. He had been friends with both her and her mom since way before I’d met them myself, and you could easily tell he was just heartbroken over it. I’ve never forgotten that act of kindness and open-hearted generosity, and I never will.
First time I ever did a show with him was out in LA, at Ronnie Mack’s Barn Dance. There was just all kinds of big rockabilly names on the bill that night; hell, even Brian Setzer showed up to make a surprise appearance to close out the evening. While Brian was on, me, James Intveld, Sandy, and a handful of others were brought onstage with him as well.
I got that far in, and that’s when it hit me: this story is just too damned good to let it languish in comment-section obscurity, it really merits a main-page post of its own. So here’s the rest of it, blockquoted just becuz.
Brian called out for us to do Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” to end the set, which the backing band launched into. Setzer sang the first verse, then frantically waved all his fellow frontmen into a midstage huddle before going on with the song–he had forgotten the rest of the lyrics, and wanted to know if any of the rest of us knew ’em!
Naturally, being under pressure like that, smack in the middle of actually PLAYING the song in front of a packed house, the spots circling us like hungry sharks, every damned one of us immediately lapsed into a total brain fart, failing to come up with so much as a single syllable of the blood-simple lyrics to one of the hoariest old RaB chestnuts known to man.
I mean, really, now. “Summertime Blues”? Hell, plenty of people who wouldn’t know rockabilly from Adam’s housecat probably know the words to that song! KNEW them? Of course we knew them! We’d all played and sung the blasted thing a million and one times; every one of us was a professional player, with years of onstage experience under our belts, so stage fright couldn’t have been an issue.
But still—there we all were, drawing a total blank, as the backing musicians went right on endlessly repeating the lead-in to the second verse whilst darting looks of confusion, wonderment, and dismay at our little stage-front conference as we all went right on NOT stepping up to the center mic to take charge and get the stalled-out show moving again.
Finally, I did so myself, just repeating the first verse Brian had already sung in hopes that it might jar something loose in my bourbon-addled brain which would bring the rest back to me again. But it’s what happened right before then that still makes me laugh to this very day.
See, Big Sandy was absolutely high-school drunk at that point, drunk as a boiled owl—or, as my friend Joe used to say, fucked up as a nine-eyed nigger. The guy had this goofy, vacant grin smeared loosely all over his slaphappy mug, the look of a man totally at peace with the entire world, delighted to be where he was in that golden moment—wherethehellever THAT might have been.
One of the other players, can’t remember who, nodded me over to where he was struggling to hold Sandy more or less upright by his right arm, in an unmistakable plea for assistance—Sandy is a big, heavy dude, see, and whoever-it-was, well…wasn’t.
So I got myself over there straightaway, latched onto Sandy’s free left arm, and our two-man rescue squad proceeded to walk/stagger/drag our cheerfully-inebriated charge over to the area of the stage known amongst showbiz types as the backline—ie, the row of guitar/bass amps and drum kit prepositioned for all the night’s bands to use, standard practice when a big venue has an unusually large number of groups booked, so as to shorten the time needed to break down the stage and set up for the next act.
And the backline is where we dumped Sandy, gently lowering him to sit atop a tweed Fender Bassman amp, his back against the rear stage wall. He was a sight: that same smile on his face, tapping both feet to the music, his body precariously swaying, a bottle of Heineken clutched tightly in each hand. Years later, I asked him if he remembered that auspicious evening, to which he replied, “YES! Ummm, maybe. Well, okay, parts of it.”
Too, too funny. I told him if he ever needed help remembering any of the more lurid details, I’d be glad to remind him, because I was never gonna forget it. We both laughed, and then headed on back to the bar.
Big Sandy was by no means the only one deep in his cups that night, mind; it was also the night I hung out after the show with a cripplingly-blasted Janeane Garofalo, which I told all about here. An auspicious occasion indeed, all the way ‘round.
Update! Added a green-room pic from after the Horton’s Holiday Hayride show to the Junior Brown post, in case any of y’all might be interested in such piffling trivialities.
1I’m the Highway Patrol.
That’s guitar-pickin’ legend Junior Brown, working out on his classic “Highway Patrol.” Brown is surely one shit-hot guitarro, one of the best there is, in fact. Some background on that peculiar-looking git-fiddle he’s wailing away on.
In 1985, Brown created a new type of double-neck guitar, with some assistance from Michael Stevens (former Fender Custom Shop designer and luthier—M). Brown called the instrument his “guit-steel”. When performing, Brown plays the guitar by standing behind it, while it rests on a small music stand. The top neck on the guit-steel is a traditional six-string guitar, while the lower neck is a full-size lap steel guitar for slide playing. Brown has two guit-steels for recording and live work. The original instrument, dubbed “Old Yeller”, has as its standard six-string guitar portion the neck and pickups from Brown’s previous stage guitar, a Fender Bullet. The second guit-steel, named “Big Red”, has a neck laser-copied from the Bullet neck; but in addition to electric guitar pickups, both the standard and lap-steel necks use identical Sho-Bud lap-steel pickups. There is a pocket in the upper bout of the guitar to hold the slide bar when it is not in use. Brown also commissioned a “pedal guit-steel” which adds pedals to the instrument for more musical control. Brown has stated that the invention of the guit-steel was always a matter of convenience so that he could play both lap steel and lead guitar during live performances and not directly motivated by a desire to be a “one man band”.
A danged Fender Bullet, of all things—an el-cheapo piece of junk if ever there was one, but somehow Junior makes that humble plank sound awful good, which is the mark of a seriously outstanding player.
As it happens, the BPs did a show with Brown once—Horton’s Holiday Hayride, early in Dec of 2017 (Christ, has it really been that long since I last set foot on a stage?!? That can’t possibly be right, can it?)—a performance that turned out to be our farewell show, although we hadn’t actually planned or announced it that way beforehand. All in all, it was a fantastic night; the Playboys dug down deep and just positively killed it, as did everybody else on the bill.
Here’s what really frosts my nuts about that night, though: I did not see one single damned note of Brown’s set, dammit. I was hanging out in the green room chatting away the whole while with Horton Heat and Big Sandy, both of whom are dear old friends I hadn’t seen in a good, long while. The green room at Neighborhood Theater was situated far enough from the main stage and insulated thoroughly enough that I couldn’t even hear the other bands from in there.
Can’t honestly say I much regret taking the opportunity to catch up with those guys, but still.
Ah well. Don’t know what got me to thinking about Junior Brown earlier today, but something or other did. That’s okay, now y’all get to reap the benefits of my earlier unfocused mental meandering.
Update! It only just occurred to me that I really should’ve appended a Horton’s Holiday Hayride post-show pic to this post. Ah well, better late than never, right?
And to think, you assholes just assumed I was making the whole thing up. Ahem. Pictured, from left: moi, Big Sandy, Jim Heath a/k/a the Reverend Horton Heat. Foreground, a chick I pest-listed for the show. Can’t recall her name, but she was a bartender at my erstwhile CLT haunt, The Diamond. Told me she really wanted to go one night at the D, so I fixed things up for her so’s she could, gratis. As you can see, she was quite the happy girl when she got to hang out with the Boys In The Band après les festivités.
Good times, good times.
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