Catchall for whatever doesn’t fit elsewhere
As part of a discussion about the coolest housecats in the world with my friend Don, he confessed to never having seen one, even in a photo. Naturally, I busied myself right away with a Startpage image search, wherein I caught some really good ‘uns.
4I’ve always wanted a Maine Coon Cat, which as far as I’m concerned are among the verymost way-cool pets one can possibly have. I’ve actually known a few, actually, which served as confirmation for my fondness for them. Unfortunately, it’s a virtual certainty that I’ll never have one, for reasons simultaneously both varied and incontestable. So I’ve tried to ease the heartache by looking at Maine Coon-oriented websites now and then, even going so far as to sign up for the email list of two of the better ones.
Today, I found this urgent missive in Ye Aulde Inboxxe:
Mike — Support Mom’s favorite breed — A card or engraved pet gift will be sent directly to your gift recipient for Mother’s Day:
HELP MAINE COONS
DONATE TO 200+ OTHER BREEDS
VIEW ADOPTABLE PETS
Select ‘Instant Gift’ when donating to send an instant email gift today. Cards and engraved pet gifts requested today may not deliver until Monday. Donation acknowledgment gifts are also available for other occasions including birthdays, anniversaries, and memorials.
Mom’s favorite breed, hell. My mom just spent a few weeks staying at my cousin Karen’s place, whose husband recently died after having spent MONTHS at his brother’s bedside in an Arizona hospital, attempting to comfort him any way he could while he slowly died from cancer. The killer note is that, the morning after the night Karen’s husband had gotten back home, he keeled over on the kitchen floor, dead from a sudden heart attack.
Point being, Karen has two Maine Coons in temporary residence at her place. My mom loves ’em all to pieces, but as is typical of the breed, they’re both inclined to curl up on the nearest available lap waiting for some love to be thrown their way. After a short petting session, my mom’s bony 84 year old legs begin to ache and stiffen, requiring her to shoo the economy-sized fluffballs off and away, then painfully climb to her benumbed feet and do the Biden zombie-shuffle around the house until blood flow and sensation in her legs is fully restored.
By an amazing coincidence, I had a long conversation about all that with my mom just last night, then received the above Maine Coon email this morning. I’ll take this curious sequence of events as a directive from God Himself that I must post something on Maine Coons right away, lest I find myself cast into Outer Darkness to be punctured with tiny pitchforks wielded by proportionately diminutive Satans hanging from my corporeal being in Divine retribution. Being acutely reluctant to directly defy a personal command sent to me from Heaven above, I now fulfill my quest with a few lovely Maine Coon pitchers. We’ll begin with a map of US states with Maine Coons available for adoption, which I find astounding:
It seems incredible that I didn’t establish a “Critters” category years ago. But thats aiight, I gots one now.
1Remember, these are America’s greatest minds we’re talking about here.
NASA to launch naked pictures of humans to space in hope of ‘attracting aliens’
DUDE! Have you seen what humans look like these days? Most of us have devolved into doughy, flubberous tubs of jigglesome goo at this point, barely hardy enough to peel themselves off the dangerously over-stressed sofa and lumber over to the fridge for another desperately-needed snack. The remainder of us hoo-mans are, quite literally, starving—horrifying, dead-eyed skels who more closely resemble Auschwitz survivors about ten minutes after being liberated by Allied forces than anything else.
Not for nothing, folks, but I’m thinking “attract” might not exactly be the mot juste here.
NASA scientists plan to launch pictures of naked humans into space in the hope of luring aliens to us.
The depictions will also include an invitation to respond should an intelligent alien race find the space nudes.
Fortunately, the hypothetical aliens shouldn’t be too shocked by the unsolicited nudes.
The pictures aren’t graphic photographs of naked humans but a drawing of a naked man and a woman next to a depiction of DNA.
The article includes this space smut, which is…well, let’s be charitable and call the pre-K level drawing “good enough for government work” and just leave it at that, shall we?
The main aim of the BITG project is to send a message to any alien civilizations that could be out there.
Scientists think the pixelated illustration of a naked man and woman waving hello could help us finally make contact with extraterrestrials.
Oh, sure. Either that, or guarantee that they will never, ever permit such contact, preferring to make a mad dash for galaxy’s edge instead. NASA’s ridiculous and inartful scribblings are more likely to instill in Marvin the Martian a frantic desire to put as much distance between himself and humanity as he possible can, seems to me. The next passage glosses over something important.
Scientists think a binary-coded message is most likely to be understood by aliens.
The scientists explain in their study: “Though the concept of mathematics in human terms is potentially unrecognizable to extra-terrestrial intelligence, binary is likely universal across all intelligence.”
Across all HUMAN-type intelligence, you mean—intelligence itself being strictly definable in terms comprehensible to HUMANS. Me, you, NASA, everybody—none of us have any clue as to alien physiognomy. We don’t know if they even HAVE brains, never mind how those brains work or how advanced their cognitive function might be. IF they have brains at all. Alien perception of basic physical reality might well diverge so radically from our own as to disallow any possibility of communication between our two species. Such an unbridgeable chasm renders NASA’s fanciful speculation that “binary”—an exclusively HUMAN construct, mind, never independently present in Earth’s planetary bioforms, geology, or atmosphere—is “likely universal across all intelligence” the callow daydream that it most definitely is.
This is where we must pay our respects to an irony so deep, so powerful, so profound it almost has a discernible aroma about it: only our most brilliant scientists and thinkers could be arrogant enough to blithely skate past the abundantly obvious possibility that alien life forms are likely to be so wildly at variance with us in every imaginable way—not to mention the UNimaginable ones, which would of necessity be beyond counting—that the very idea of ANY commonality between us physically, intellectually, or emotionally is patently absurd.
Not so for the good-enough-for-government-work Superbrains of NASA, however. These impeccably well-educated and competent “experts” seem to think it squarely within the expansive ken of such Übermenschen as themselves to make certain assumptions without squandering a second of their priceless time and energy pondering whether or not those assumptions are valid. Funny, innit, that one of the bedrock prequisites which help to not only identify true intelligence but also elevate it from mere gauzy potentiality into a genuinely useful thing—from the nebulous stuff of idle fantasy into real-world practicality—would turn out to be plain, familiar old humility.
Funnier still that arrogance should be the easiest, most natural-feeling attitude for most humans to adopt, the very first resort of both the egotistical but otherwise well-intentioned chowderhead and the conniving scalawag whenever forced to confront his own insufficiency of knowledge, his unwarranted overconfidence, his fallibility—while humility is by far the most awkward, toilsome, and wholly alien-seeming and oblique character trait to summon, much less to maintain. The demands humility imposes are numerous, non-trivial, and painful. But the rewards it bestows are rich beyond belief, a fulsome bounty reinforced and multiplied every time we choose it as our response to challenge or adversity.
Arrogance always makes one look like a goddamned jackass in the end. Worse still, most who succumb to its empty blandishments never even know what utter fools arrogance has made of them, their heads being crammed too far up their own asses to see the light of day. Those capable of inculcating and bolstering a proper sense of humility, on the other hand, will find themselves widely admired and respected for the very trait that did so much to ensure their success, whatever their chosen field of endeavor may be.
They added: “The proposed message includes basic mathematical and physical concepts to establish a universal means of communication followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System’s time-stamped position in the Milky Way relative to known globular clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System, and Earth’s surface.”
“A universal means of communication.” Do these people even hear their words? Across, what, about 2-300,000 fucking years of the existence of what we think of as “modern” man, no “universal means of communication” has ever been developed. EVER. Dios mio, mankind has never created a universal language in all that time, nor is there the slightest prospect of such a thing on the horizon. But hey, that can’t stop the bright boys at NASA, and why should it? They’ve been sooooo incredibly successful since the halcyon days of the 1960s and 70s, right?
The concept of sending depictions of naked humans to space isn’t new.
The Pioneer plaques sent to space on the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 missions, also featured drawings of naked humans.
The plaques are attached to the antennas on the crafts.
They’re still sailing away from Earth to this day.
With nary a peep heard from any of our prospective alien friends from that day to this. Those NASA folks might be smart, but they don’t seem to have learned a whole lot. But hey, I’m probably just too dumb to understand such heady stuff; it’s all probably WAY over my head. So shamed am I by my intellectual inadequacy, I’d never even DREAM of asking the NASA brain trust to explain—in detail and with extensive confirmatory references in the footnotes—exactly what all that taxpayer money bought for us.
Hope those brainiacs will remember to request access to the FBI “evidence” locker so’s they can glom some kiddie-porn to slap onto that phallic launch vehicle of theirs. Celebrating the entire spectrum of human sexual “diversity” is what the modern American “space program” is all about, don’tchaknow.
Oh, and Mooselimbs too. Gotta throw a few Korans in there, maybe a nice set of those checkered kitchen drapes they like to wear on their heads.
1Ed Driscoll reports from the Dallas International Guitar Festival, and if you’re at all into guitars, it’s pretty sweet stuff.
On Saturday, I attended the 2022 Dallas International Guitar Festival at the Dallas Market Hall, the second festival after a timeout in 2020 due to the pandemic lockdown. As I wrote last year at Instapundit, unlike the previous guitar shows in the DFW Metroplex, 2021’s show had a somewhat more low-key feel, lacking the large exhibits by the music industry heavy hitters such as Gibson and Fender. (In pre-pandemic times, a large trailer owned by Gibson would be displaying their newest and most impressive guitars, Fender usually had a large display, and Roland was showing off the latest effects in their Boss line as well.)
While Gibson and Fender were still absent in person, this time around it was nice to see a few bigger names back on display, such as…
Fender, Boss, Gretsch, Taylor, Eventide; Les Paul, Strat, Tele, Black Beauty—the names alone evoke an overwhelming nostalgia in me whose taste is bittersweet at best nowadays, seeing as how my hands have been utterly ruined by the curse of DePuytren’s Contracture, or Viking Disease. My left-hand ring and pinky fingers are curled tightly up against my palm and can’t be straightened, even by physical force; as I tell foks who ask, my once-agile fretting hand is useful mainly as a place to hang my keys, no more. The right hand is only a little bit behind, but well on its way. The sensation brought on by this condition is so intensely unpleasant it actually wakes me up at night sometimes. It’s fucking awful, is what it is.
All that aside, any halfway serious guitar slinger—by which I do NOT necessarily mean a professional musician who earns his daily bread wielding an axe onstage and/or in the studio—will enjoy Ed’s reportage tremendously. The photos alone will be enough to bring a tear of joy to your jaded eye, trust me. Although I must say the Les Paul pics run way heavy on the Tobacco and Honey Burst varieties—which, I can’t stand those ugly, dull-looking turdballs—and way light on Cherry Sunburst—which are my all-time faves. Examples:
Of course and as always, your mileage may etc on that. There’s no real shame in disagreeing with me; it just means your taste is in your ass, that’s all. I should maybe also mention the subspecies of the parent Tobacco and Cherry Burst finishes, such as Lemon and Tangerine. In fact, the Honey Burst model depicted above is actually a sub-category of Tobacco Burst its own bad self.
One last photo from Ed’s post to take home witcha.
For the uninitiated, that two-headed beastie at Foreground Left flying Distressed White colors and decked out in its Sunday-best gold hardware is something of an odd duck: a double-necked Strat-style body, with the top half being pretty much the standard three-pickup Stratocaster deal. The bottom half, though, veers off in a decidedly different direction: one single-coil pickup, slightly beefier than those found on Strats, mounted on a steel plate way back by the bridge with the familiar, jaunty Telecaster tilt. It also sports the knurled steel volume/tone knobs and long-throw three-position pickup selector switch which typically adorn the Telecaster control panel.
Ahh, the precious memories. All well beyond my reach now, alas. As my Uncle Murray always insisted, with no little heat: Gettin’ old sucks. Wise man, Uncle Murray was.
1Greatest. Auto. Review. EVAR.
‘Suffice to say the A110 absolutely crushes expectations, and your berry hanger’
The absolutely brilliant Alpine A110 is anything but sterile to drive
You’ll have heard how the Alpine A110’s combination of lightness and rightness has earned the admiration of evo’s tillermen. And that’s all well and good, but what’s it like if you’ve just had a vasectomy? To find out, I went to a central London clinic and invited a large, medically qualified man to have a good rummage amongst my underparts, then realised with dismay that I had booked to borrow a low-slung French sports coupe almost immediately afterwards.The first thing to cross your mind upon seeing the A110 is just how little it is and also how much your balls hurt. You can immediately sense that this is a car from which all excess has been banished, and this impression is reinforced by opening the featherweight aluminium door, which is so lacking in mass that it puts no strain whatsoever on your mangled knacker sack, unlike its low-slung driving position, which is absolute agony.
Once in, you can take a moment to admire the bespoke seats with their one-piece backs and upsettingly unpillowy cushions. You might be interested to learn that these chairs weigh just 13.1kg each, despite fine detailing including quilted leather and a grippy central section that expertly rides your jeans up into the tenderest parts of your plum pouch.
The rest of the interior is, perhaps, a little less successful, featuring a smattering of Renault parts bin components, including remote audio controls seemingly taken from the Renault 19, and the flat keyless entry card from the Laguna, though wrapped in a smart leather case that makes it both more attractive to look at and better equipped to shift awkwardly across your pocket and nudge stoutly into your tenderised clacker hammock.
Okay, that there is some truly inspired stuff. Hats off to Richard Porter for his dedication to his craft, taking one for the team and putting his boy beans in harm’s way to bring us this truly stellar article. Well done, young feller, well done.
“Clacker hammock.” I swear, I just can’t stop laughing at that one.
1Forget it, Jake, it’s Coontown.
When you order ice cream, you don’t want to hear “We’re out” or “It’s broken,” yet it has been happening so often across the United States in recent years that it became somewhat of a cultural meme that spawned considerable media interest. Reports indicate that up to a quarter of McDonald’s ice cream machines are not operational at any given time.
Ice cream sales make up 3% of total McDonald’s sales (over $22 billion annually), amounting to about a quarter of a billion dollars a year. If the company is losing out on roughly 25% of that, we have a $56 million question on our hands every year.
Media outlets looking to cover the story and capitalize on the “McBroken” meme published dozens of quite lousy pieces concluding that the extensive cleaning process and heat sanitization cycle are to blame for the machine’s maladies. I never bought that story for a few reasons. One thing that doesn’t add up with the “cleaning” explanation is why any restaurant would clean a machine while it is open, and how it could be true that ten to 25% of all working hours in them are dedicated to “cleaning.” Perhaps nobody wants to clean the machines, so they merely say that it is not working.
Then, in April 2021, a YouTuber named Johnny Harris uploaded a now-viral video with over nine million views titled, “The REAL Reason McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken.” In this 30-minute exposé, Harris elaborates a new theory that has gained acceptance as the actual reason for the McDonald’s ice cream downtime. Harris explains that the manufacturer of the ice cream machines, Taylor, is to blame. Taylor is the industry standard and the same company that makes ice cream machines for most quick-service restaurants, and has been supplying the equipment to McDonald’s since 1956. The next time you see an ice cream machine, look for the manufacturer’s name. It’s probably a Taylor.
Harris posits that Taylor has made the machines intentionally onerous to operate so they can generate future revenue out of repair contracts. The theory is that Taylor deliberately makes ice cream machines that are always in need of service and are generally too complicated for restaurant workers to understand. Hence, they call Taylor’s service technicians, which keeps the company flush with cash flow. It’s an interesting theory, and the video hams it up. There are plenty of suspenseful cuts, long stares into the camera, and moments when you are supposed to be in shock as facts are uncovered, such as the long working history between McDonald’s and Taylor. Harris wants you to believe that corporate greed on Taylor’s end is to blame. In a way, Harris created the perfect scapegoat: shifting the blame from restaurant workers to shadowy business practices. People loved it, too. And it is entirely wrong.
There are some holes in this story as well…
Of all the outlets to cover the story, none of them got close to what I found, including The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Mashed, Boston Globe, Wired, and Inc. Vice News almost got there; they had the proper dataset to solve the mystery, but they fumbled, as expected.
First, I had to dig back a couple of years to find an article I remembered seeing which confirmed something we already know: restaurants owned by blacks, in black areas, do not perform as well as those in “less diverse” communities. McDonald’s has over 200 black franchisees out of the 1,700 or so owners — enough to make the data statistically reliable. Stores that the black franchisees own an average of $68,000 net less per month than all franchise stores. That’s $816,000 per year, per store, lower than the chain’s average.
There are probably many reasons for this disparity. Some black franchise owners postulated that a lack of black leadership in the McDonald’s corporation is an issue. I’m not sure there is a connection. Another issue raised was that black owners tend to own stores in black neighborhoods, where costs are high and sales are lower. There is a notion that nebulous socioeconomic issues tied to things like “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and “systemic racism” are to blame: i.e., blacks have less money as a whole to spend on fast food, therefore making the sales of black-owned McDonald’s restaurants lower. To the extent that socioeconomic forces are genuine and legitimate, I will say the issue is not systemic racism or white people, but sub-Saharan genetics.
One of the black franchisees was interviewed about his experience. He said “my stores are hellholes,” and lamented that they are robbed once or twice per month. His further comments revealed that his stores are often vandalized: people destroy the bathrooms and break the windows, and a murder had even taken place on the premises of one restaurant.
The murder in the McDonald’s reminded me of a grocery store in Atlanta called “Murder Kroger.” The Ponce de Leon Avenue Kroger earned that nickname by being the stage for many violent crimes. Some Kroger stores actually left black neighborhoods not far from where I live because their outlets there were the worst in the company, suffering from extreme shoplifting and security issues. After pulling out of these neighborhoods, the company was declared “racist” and blamed for contributing to “food deserts” in black communities. The stores were simply not profitable and not worth the headache to keep open. Although some argue there is a white supremacist conspiracy theory keeping blacks from having nice grocery stores in their neighborhoods, the black community itself runs them out of business through their behavior. As states and cities continue to decriminalize shoplifting, this trend will continue.
Another black McDonald’s franchisee said that his stores were among the worst in the company. They have low cash flows, serious staffing problems, and are often robbed. The black owners often blame McDonald’s corporate. Still, they did not seem to realize that their real gripe is with their own community and the behavior of their racial cohort. Part of the extra costs that the black franchises have to pay are for security, high insurance premiums, and constant repairs.
I interviewed a McDonald’s employee who works in a very “diverse” restaurant. He confirmed some of my theories and observations and added great additional insights. He mentioned that the restaurant where he works often has to repair bullet holes resulting from drive-by shootings in the street where they are located. Sure, racism could be blamed for the lack of sales in black stores in black neighborhoods, but one might also suggest that many people don’t want to put their lives at risk for a McFlurry or Big Mac.
With that information in mind, and knowing that demographics affects the rate of “broken” ice cream machines, we can draw further conclusions.
Ice cream machines do not know they are in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Thus, we can probably rule out the existence of “racist ice cream machines” that make a conscious decision to stop working so they can deprive black and Latinx communities of ice cream.
Here is where we intersect with the meta-story about journalism. The objective of journalism is no longer to inform the public, but to weave a story of their choosing into a larger tapestry. Here, we see that the mainstream media was not willing or capable of telling the full story. Millions of people reading and watching the dozens of articles and videos on the matter have been led to believe in a conspiracy theory about ice cream machines and corporate greed, when the reality — and much more plausible tale — is one of basic biological differences between groups of people.
Further, it’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that the current mainstream journalist class is made up of people entirely incapable of uncovering deeper truths and unwilling to process any information that might contradict a larger societal theme. Much like the black franchisees, I’m sure they found a way to blame anybody but those actually responsible.
As is the case with everything else in my “social capital anthology,” this isn’t an article about broken ice cream machines. This is about what happens to a society when even the base level of social functionality — the bare minimum standard required to have something that looks like a real society — cannot be met.
At some point along this trajectory, there will no longer be any upside rationalizations to be found. There will come a time when the people who cannot run the ice cream machine are not doing you a favor by making you choose better food options. There will come a time when the people who cannot run the ice cream machine are running things of a much greater importance. What will society look like when the person who is today a McDonald’s Assistant Manager who can’t or won’t ensure that the fries are hot is tasked with staffing air control towers or repairing bridges and roads? What happens when the worker who decided it “wasn’t his job” to clean the ice cream machine feels the same way about inspecting the brakes on your car? What happens when you very much need something to be done correctly, but everybody at the department in charge of whatever you need are those people who could barely keep an ice cream machine running for a full day?
How does that society look?
A very easy question for contemporary Americans to answer, most especially those unfortunate souls trapped in our urban hellholes. All they need to do is look out their window to see it crashing and burning all around them.
A lengthy excerpt from a lengthy article, of which you simply must read the all.
(Via WRSA)
3America’s Governor responds forcefully to calumny most vile.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis blasted the corporate media on Monday, following reports that he attended the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington D.C., Saturday night. The event included many of the big names in politics and the media, and was hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), an organization of journalists who cover the White House.
“I would never attend that. I have no interest in that,” he said when asked about the event during an unrelated news conference in Jacksonville. “I did not watch it. I don’t care what they do. But for them to advertise me when that invitation was rejected by my office. That is a lie,” DeSantis said, adding later that the reason the corporate media is “so reviled” is because of its habit of perpetuating provable lies.
The confusion came after the host of the event, comedian Trevor Noah, falsely claimed during his routine that DeSantis was in the audience, pointing and waving at someone in the audience as if he were the governor.
“One of my favorites, Ron DeSantis is here. Oh man, I’m actually surprised that he found the time,” Noah said. “You know he has been so busy trying to outmaneuver Trump for 2024. I see you, Ron. I see you, player. I see what you been doing!” the comedian added, pointing toward someone in the audience.
The rest of the twerpy shitlib’s little skit didn’t improve from there, to no one’s surprise, being a tired regurgitation of the same old tired Lefty one-liners flogging the same old tired Lefty hobbyhorses in the same old tired way. If you’re one of those people who thinks watching a no-talent Leftard C-lister reassuring a funnybone-bereft Leftard audience that yes, we really ARE the Smart Ones, oh yes we are!! amounts to a swell way to spend your evening, well hey, have at it, and all the best to ya.
If, on the other hand, you’re the kind of guy who knows a small auditorium’s worth of tightassed, smarmy flatworms, not one of whom would recognize funny if it knocked them down, tore off their skinny jeans, raunched them up the fudge tunnel, and left them a sore-assed heap on the sidewalk tearfully pleading for you to CALL ME! when you see one…well, here, have yourself a little more really funny stuff.
“Why are people saying Governor DeSantis is at the White House Correspondents Dinner!? Because DC Democrats and media (but I repeat myself) can’t stop talking about him even during their nerd prom?” DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw tweeted on Sunday. “This is wishful thinking/obsession.”
DeSantis expressed his disgust with the media on Monday for getting yet another story wrong while pretending to be “paragons of truth.”
“And so here they are saying how important they are that they’re somehow these paragons of truth, and yet there they are lying about something that is readily verifiable,” he said. “And so the idea that I was there is false the idea that I would have ever gone is false, and why they would want to try to perpetuate a lie about that I don’t know. But I think it just shows you why that cabal of people in DC [and] New York, are so reviled by so many Americans. I think it’s a reputation that’s been well deserved.”
Deserved is right, and many times over.
It’s starting to seem kinda pitiful, don’tchathink, how Leftards carry on trying to poke and prod and irritate people who have clearly moved on, and no longer give a fiddler’s fuck about what they might think, say, or feel about anything. Yet still they persist. Now, that’s bad enough for them, absolutely. But now, with this latest feeble Hail-Mary lunge trying to trip up DeSantis—claiming he was at Nerd Prom when he provably wasn’t, ferchrissakes—all they managed in the end was to look like fools lost in Loserville, mired up to their clavicles with no chance of finding their way out again.
Meanwhile, DeSantis is floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee, leaving droolcase Proggy canvasbacks baffled, bemused, and punchdrunk, searching frantically about for a neutral corner to go collapse in. If Reagan was the Teflon President, well, I do believe Ron DeSantis is rapidly earning himself a similar nom de guerre. The shitlibs just can’t seem to lay a glove on him no matter how hard they try, and it’s a total gas to watch, as good as 1980’s Hearns/Sugar Ray Leonard classic donnybrook.
One of the bigger reasons I’m such a big fan of Da Gov is that he’s one of a very, very few Righty public figures who are beginning to see the value in the approach I’ve been urging for so long: stop already with the expressions of stunned horror over each day’s fresh new example of hypocrisy, unfairness, double standards, and wheeled goalposts from the Left, as if their reliably bad behavior could be anything more than mere routine by now—just standard, dull fare, not really worth taking note of anymore, if it ever was.
Anyone still genuinely surprised by the Left’s endlessly obnoxious monkeyshines after all this time probably shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house without close adult supervision, lest they fall down a well or some such thing. Their guardian, keeper, or warden needs to remove all sharp objects from the vicinity posthaste, put a large cork on the tines of his fork at dinnertime, and clip a leash around his neck whose other end is attached to the clothesline in the backyard, like my Grandma used to do to my dad when he was a young ‘un so as to keep him from wandering far enough off to get himself in trouble.
Probably the most useful thing any Real American can do whilst we all wait around for the ball to drop and hostilities to commence is to separate and segregate ourselves from Leftists to the greatest extent possible. When forced into any sort of contact or congress with them, we should igjore them when we can, treat them with undisguised contempt when we can’t. Under NO circumstances should we give the least indication that we take them seriously; that their views are in any way worthy of serious consideration; that we respect or like them personally. We should instead think of them as the witless pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates they truly are, worthy only of being stomped on and crushed into noisome goo under our boots.
“What would you Democrats do if a Republican said that?” “Dems won’t like it much when the Republicans treat them the exact same way once we get back in charge again!” “We must not sink to their level! That’s not who we are!” “Oh look, the Leftard protesters trashed the park, but WE always clean up after ourselves!” And perhaps my all-time favorite: “They put 23 of us into the hospital today, but at our rally last week none of them were injured!”
Folks, if you’re talking like this, you are NOT winning, you are LOSING. It’s time and past time to retire all follow-through-free rhetoric, no matter how thunderous. All those with a fucking lick of sense know The Enemy top to bottom, stem to stern, and forwards and backwards by now. Any who DON’T know, or are pretending they don’t, should be put out to pasture and forgotten right along with the aforementioned empty rhetoric. It’s time to start waging this war as if we mean to win the goddamned thing. Note ye well: no war was ever won by talking one’s enemy to death. You have to KILL THEM. You must BREAK THEIR SHIT.
One last Sunshine State-style bitchslap for y’all to groove on. It would seem that when DeSantis The Barbarian hired the endlessly entertaining Chris Pushaw as his press secretary, he accomplished something Trump talked about throughout the 2016 election campaign but, inexplicably, never even came close to actually doing: HIRING THE BEST PEOPLE.
wow, politicians who spent the last 2 years pushing lockdowns, forced masking, and the unconstitutional OSHA vaccine mandate are pretending to be worried about "a future in which the government can potentially interfere in the personal decisions you make about your life" https://t.co/IoUH83FwVK
— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) May 3, 2022
Ouch! That one stung all the way over here. Go get ’em, Christina. Another good ‘un, wherein Pushaw gives Minnesota dunderhead Amy Klobuchar a good pantsing.
Amy Klobuchar @amyklobuchar
Health care decisions should be between a woman and her doctor, not Ted Cruz.Christina Pushaw @ChristinaPushaw
Replying to @amyklobuchar
So nice to see Democrats taking a stand against vaccine mandates and using the word “woman” instead of “birthing person.”
Oof. So what next, then? Pushaw and DeSantis have effectively thrown down the gauntlet, serving notice to one and all: from here on out, Our Side will be flying the Black Flag as our battlefield standard. No rules, no remorse, no mercy, no prisoners—it’s kill or be killed, and none but the victorious shall survive.
Swiped from one of Glenn’s commenters, via WRSA.
If Leftwits couldn’t contradict themselves eighteen to twenty times before lunch every day, they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. For them, inconsistency isn’t an aberration, a simple error, or an intellectual shortcoming or oversight; it’s a lifestyle.
What the hell kind of people ARE we, for fuck’s sake?
A 15-year-old boy who was initially targeted by a false rumor that he was unvaccinated was bullied relentlessly until he took his own life in January, a lawsuit claims.
The suit filed Monday against the Latin School of Chicago alleges administrators at the private college prep school — which charges more than $40,000 annually in tuition — committed “willful failure” to stop the incessant bullying, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Never mind, Jake, it’s Chi-town. I feel a tiny bit better knowing the hideous atrocity took place in Chicago, or maybe not so surprised that it did, at any rate. Chicago is a horrible, horrible place, although I must also say that I have a lot of good friends there. But still. People who don’t know any better assume the name shown on most maps for the river that wends its way through and around the shitpit—the Chicago River—is the correct one, but it isn’t. It’s actually the River Styx, or so I’ve always thought of it, anyway.
The teen was also cyberbullied on Snapchat, where another student urged him to kill himself in mid-December, the suit claims.
Nate met with a school administrator at that point, but none of the students involved in the cyberbullying were disciplined, his parents allege.
Nate’s mother contacted the school more than 30 times in October and November alone, but administrators allegedly turned a “blind eye” to the family’s pleas for help. The teen also reported the bullying to a school dean, but was disregarded, according to the lawsuit.
Absolutely everyone involved here except the poor kid’s family and whatever friends he may have had ought to be waterboarded, have a cattle prod jammed up his/her/its ass as far as it can go and then activated and left continuously running for no less than three (3) days or until the batteries need to be recharged, wichever comes first. Then behead them all with a butter knife without benefit of anesthetic or pain meds. Lather rinse, repeat, until the retributee’s voice has failed from all the screaming for mercy.
But if that seems excessively harsh for any of you more delicate types out there, J. kb has a suggestion I can also live with:
The boy’s parents are suing.
They are stronger people than I am.
I would be stacking bodies and eliminating bloodlines.
There is a special place in hell for those that turned getting a shot into something that would make people do this, and I’m more than happy to send them there.
Me too. Let’s get these unspeakable, subhuman monsters reunited with their spiritual inspiration, guiding light, and ultimate Master just as quickly as it can be done. Then maybe we can look into what actions might be taken so as to get the rest of the Vaxxer Karen/Fauxvid panic-ninny/Govern Me Daddy flea circus off our backs and out of our hair for good.
1It’s only been a couple of days since he bought it, but already Elon Musk is making Twitter better. So what might be the next item on the gadfly billionaire’s to-do list?
Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2022
Heh. Go get ’em, Tiger. If he keeps this up, I might actually have to start paying attention to my Twitter feed for once. More hilarity, iconoclasm and random futzing about here.
3Arthur on what the Musk/Twitter brouhaha really means for us.
It is glorious. There hasn’t been this much overwrought reeeeing on social media since the 2016 election and he hasn’t even done anything yet.
Let’s be clear. Elon Musk is not one of us, he is not /ourguy/. Mostly he seems like he is a bit crazy. What he is should be enough though, he is an agent of chaos in many ways like Trump: a goofy billionaire who has enough resources to do crazy crap like becoming President or buying a social media company for $44 billion.
I don’t know if he will make the moderators allow free speech or not. I doubt you will be able to tweet “nigger” on Twitter even with Musk in charge. Maybe old suspended accounts will be reinstated, that would nice so I could have my original account with my real name back although I don’t know what I would do with the other half dozen old suspended accounts. At a minimum I expect to see the Babylon Bee reinstated and hopefully Project Veritas and others on the dissident right who have been suspended like Jared Taylor.
It is a little win for /ourside/ not because Elon is /ourguy/ but because this makes the Left so angry and exposes once again how hypocritical they are. I will bask in the tears, sweet and salty tears, for a day or so but the real fight won’t be won on social media.
Bingo. Musk is an ally of convenience, most likely a very temporary one at that. I can’t say I’ve paid a great deal of attention to the guy until this most recent dustup, and I definitely don’t give a damp fart about Twatter. I do seem to recall that Musk is, or was at least, pretty gung-ho on the Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly “the weather”) scam, one of the leading indicators of latent shitlibbery.
But after watching Musk dangle the Left entire from his finger like the world’s whiniest yo-yo for the last couple of weeks, Mr Musk is all right with me. As I always say: any time Leftists are upset, Americans are winning. No matter how fleeting the victory is, how insubstantial it seems to be, we should still celebrate each win to the fullest. If nothing else, our revelry is sure to make the agony of Le Progtarde last longer and hurt more. Time for this old CF favorite once again, I do believe.
41Taking the high road.
Times Square Billboard Exposes Taylor Lorenz for Doxxing Libs of TikTok
Starts off well enough, looks like. So are we finally about to see some real Back atcha!! action dealt out here, a little of the gander’s sauce spooned onto the goose’s plate? Or will our billboard renters stop well short of doing anything more than spending a crapton of their own money to make a supremely futile gesture which shitlibs will react to not with fear and horror, but with derisive laughter and mockery?
Three guesses. First two etc.
Two political commentators teamed up this week to rent a Times Square billboard exposing Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz for a report in which she revealed personal information about the Twitter user who runs the Libs of TikTok account.
Commentator and podcast host Tim Pool on Tuesday tweeted a video of the billboard, which reads, “Hey [Washington Post], democracy dies in darkness. That’s why we’re shining a light on you. Taylor Lorenz doxxed @libsoftiktok.”
The commentators disseminated their message in response to Lorenz’s controversial Washington Post report on Libs of TikTok, a conservative Twitter account that showcases teachers who attempt to indoctrinate their students and others who espouse radical left-wing ideology. Lorenz not only revealed the identity of the anonymous person who runs the account but also included a copy of the person’s real estate license, which showed her home address. The Post later removed the home address from the story, then lied about it, saying, “We did not publish or link to any details about her personal life.”
Lorenz, who has a history of taking offense at legitimate criticisms, called the billboard “so idiotic” and said “these campaigns have a much darker and more violent side.”
And then she went back to her home, confident that her address was and would remain private and secure, in marked contrast to how she had treated poor LoTT—WITH THE CONNIVANCE AND ACTIVE ASSISTANCE OF HER EMPLOYER, WHICH HAPPENS TO BE ONE OF THE BIGGEST AND MOST WELL KNOWN ESTABLISHMENT PROPAGANDA MANUFACTORIES IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD.
SO: for the barbarous crime of quoting the Left’s own words back to them without embellishment or exaggeration, LoTT will spend the next few years fielding entirely credible death threats; finding nasty notes taped to her front door or the tires on her car slashed day after day; being screamed at in random public spaces by wild-eyed, purple-faced moonbats; and just basically living in constant, eminently justified terror, never knowing where the next deranged assault, the next profane diatribe, the next chest-bumping, pushing-and-shoving denunciation might emerge from.
Lorenz, on the other hand, will get a raise, a bonus, and eventually a Pulitzer for her outstanding achievements in “journalism.” Neither harm nor even unpleasantness will befall her; nothing scary or embarrassing will happen to her. Nobody on our side will so much as give her a sniffy look in the restaurant or the movie-theater line.
Because, y’know, that’s not who we are.
1Dammit, I have GOT to move.
Florida Sheriff Urges Homeowners to Shoot Invaders to ‘Save the Taxpayers Money’
A Florida sheriff said that he’s urging homeowners to get gun safety training while encouraging them to shoot home invaders to “save the taxpayers money.”“If somebody’s breaking into your house, you’re more than welcome to shoot them in Santa Rosa County. We prefer that you do actually,” Santa Rosa County Sheriff Bob Johnson told a news conference several days ago.
Responding to an incident in Santa Rosa County where a homeowner reportedly shot at a repeat offender who attempted to break into their home, Johnson recommended the gun owner take a shooting and gun safety class. The alleged burglar, Brandon Joseph Harris, reportedly had 17 prior arrests on his record.
“If you take that, you’ll shoot a lot better and hopefully you’ll save the taxpayer’s money,” Johnson remarked.
“You’re not in trouble,” he said of the unnamed homeowner. “Come see us. We have a gun safety class we put on every other Saturday.”
Harris wasn’t injured in the incident, Johnson remarked, adding that he “didn’t get hit, and now we have to pay for him,” local media reported. “Some people don’t learn,” the sheriff added. “For us, he is job security. I mean, we deal with him all the time.”
The man has a record stretching back to when he was 13, Johnson said. He had spent more than six years in prison, and he’s now being held on a $157,500 bond, and faces multiple charges, records show.
Looks like DeSantis is not necessarily the only sturdy, sane public official in the Sunshine State. It pains me something awful to reflect on how once widely-accepted attitudes like Sherriff Bob’s perfectly common-sensical approach to eliminating worthless, predatory oxygen thieves from the gene pool have, over time, come to seem radical, even bizarre, to so many of us today.
To paraphrase Al Bundy: God can’t be this busy.
We’ve had a rather substantial amount of evidence to the effect that organized pedophilia is rampant among the higher-ups in government, entertainment, and the media. Jeffrey Epstein was incarcerated for suspicion of it, and died while awaiting trial. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of it and is serving a long prison sentence as we speak. Roman Polanski openly admitted to raping a fourteen year old girl. Harvey Weinstein may have been involved in it. Then there’s the “pizzagate” phenomenon, which though it was (unconvincingly) pooh-poohed by the media, remains unexplained.
No decent person can understand any of it. But that doesn’t make it go away.
Now Facebook – remember Facebook? With all the recent chatter about Twitter, it might have slipped out of mind – is running an advocacy ad for normalizing pedophilia.
Incroyable. Also, mon Dieu! Here’s the ad, which even after having seen it with my own lyin’ eyes still beggars belief:
That closing demand, that all us normal people should work to “overcome our negative feelings” about this perfectly normal, harmless little kink? Yeah, NO, you horrid, pus-nutted filthbag. I ain’t the one with the mental disorder here—YOU are. As such, I won’t be making any adjustments to accomodate you, trust me on that.
In trying to find a way to get a handle on coping intellectually with this ugliest imaginable of cultural developments, Francis confesses himself at a complete loss.
Though I dislike the term for its connotations, I’m fundamentally an intellectual. My driving need is to understand. I can’t understand many recent developments. Recent developments in sex and parasexual behavior are prominent among them.
“A man’s got to know his limitations,” said Harry Callahan. Perhaps this is one of mine. Or perhaps I’m just an old bluenose who thinks that of all the things in existence, the innocence of children and animals most obviously demands protection and respect. But then, obvious really means overlooked, doesn’t it?
Bluenose, is it? Fine by me. If being appalled, sickened, and enraged by this abomination is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. Short Eyes Nation is overdue for a smitin’, and I can’t for the life of me think what the holdup might be. Maybe God Himself is so nauseated He can only recoil in disgust from watching what goes on in Amerika v2.0 these days.
Just in case there was still a shred of doubt left: free and unfettered speech, open debate, and respect for dissenting opinion are NOT the essential cornerstones of Leftist ideology. Quite the oposite, actually; they are to the Left what garlic is to vampires.
Human Rights Watch, ACLU, Amnesty International Clutch Their Pearls in Horror At Elon Musk’s Purchase of Twitter
There has been one salutary effect of the weeks-long efforts of Elon Musk to gain control of Twitter, and the debate over the freedom of speech that ensued: now the Left’s foremost individuals and institutions are out in the open about their hatred for the freedom of speech.
What, they weren’t before? My God, how much more “out in the open” could they have possibly been? Why, next, you’ll be telling me that their affinity for naked tyranny, Red in tooth and claw, is no longer a closely-held secret or sumpin’.
The authoritarian heart of the Left has been exposed, as has their war against the foundational principle of any free society: the right to express oneself even if one’s opinions don’t coincide with those of the powerful and/or moneyed elites. Barack and Hillary hate the freedom of speech and want you to think it’s a dangerous toy, too dangerous for you to play with. And now three pillars of the unctuous and hypocritical Leftist “human rights” establishment, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have come out against it as well.
Reuters, adopting the solemn, even funereal tone it reserves for significant Leftist setbacks, noted Monday that Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” and has called the freedom of expression the “bedrock of a functioning democracy.” That’s exactly what it is, and that’s why Leftists are enraged that someone who believes such things has gained control of one of the foremost means of mass communication in our age. They had become complacent in their control of such outlets, as confident of the rightness of their power as much as any medieval king was in his divine election; but now their hegemony has been severely challenged, and so it’s time to try to shape public opinion by calling out the self-appointed and reliably Leftist “defenders of human rights” to explain to us why this is so very, very wrong.
Deborah Brown, whom Reuters describes as a “digital rights researcher and advocate” at Human Rights Watch, asserted: “Regardless of who owns Twitter, the company has human rights responsibilities to respect the rights of people around the world who rely on the platform. Changes to its policies, features, and algorithms, big and small, can have disproportionate and sometimes devastating impacts, including offline violence. Freedom of expression is not an absolute right, which is why Twitter needs to invest in efforts to keep its most vulnerable users safe on the platform.”
See, it’s all about preventing violence. As the Left relentlessly insists, conservative speech not only leads to violence, but in itself amounts to violence. If Twitter allows freedom of speech, people are going to get hurt.
So fucking what? I’m A-okay with hurting them, and I ain’t just talkin’ superficial wounds neither. You shitlibs wanna kvetch, cavil, and snot all over yourselves about how “conservative speech is viiiiolence!” before crawling off to your Safe Space for a good cry, well, I gots one thing and one thing only to say to that:
Yep, I freely admit it: if being willing to stoop to any excuse at all as justification for running another clip from Tombstone—especially one featuring Val Kilmer’s matchless portrayal of Doc Holliday—I am guilty as charged, and can only throw myself on the mercy of this court. Onwards.
This argument would have a great deal more force if Human Rights Watch had ever called out Antifa or Black Lives Matter violence, or if the “white supremacists” that Biden and Merrick Garland and other Leftists keep insisting are the biggest terror threat the nation faces today actually showed themselves, or if HRW had ever shown concern about Leftist violence against those who dissent from its agenda. But HRW is not remotely consistent; it has never shown any concern for the violence that might arise from Leftist speech.
Au contraire, good sir; HRW, ACLU, SPLC, and all the rest of the letters in the shitlib pressure-group alphabet soup are consistency itself. The way they shamelessly flaunt their rank hypocrisy and self-serving double standards is the very heart and soul of the word. You could set your watch by the boneless little twerps; they’re more reliable than Old Faithful itself.
Update! Sarcasm so caustic it burns the skin.
It's so weird how none of you cared that a Saudi owned so much of twitter and that Saudi Arabia literally used the platform to hunt gay ppl so they could be arrested/executed, but you draw the line at the guy who builds electric cars and wants to fly to the moon…
— Yasmine Mohammed ياسمين محمد (@YasMohammedxx) April 16, 2022
Not so terribly weird, really. They’re afraid to say a fucking word to the Saudis, or any Muzzrat; they don’t dare, lest the outraged Muzzie(s) start hacking limbs off them, blowing them up in shopping malls, or toppling buildings onto their chowder-filled heads. Musk, not so much. They may hate his guts for being such a rock-ribbed advocate for freedom of speech, and they do, frantically, frothingly so. But they aren’t afraid of him, any more than they are of us.
(Via Stephen)
Libertad update! Sara Gonzales is having way too much fun with the newly Muskified Twitter.
It’s about to get wild up in here https://t.co/1MBFZfSFIs
— Sara Gonzales (@SaraGonzalesTX) April 25, 2022
Whereupon girlfriend does indeed get wild up in there, bless her heart. Scroll down and read ’em all, then weep for the agonizing trauma old-line Twatterers are suffering after being forcibly exposed to unfamiliar points of view, fresh new concepts, and opinions that aren’t necessarily congruent with their own.
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"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
"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
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—Charles Bukowski
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—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.”
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—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
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—Etienne de la Boiete
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—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
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—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
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—Frederick Douglass
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—Joseph Goebbels
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—Ronald Reagan
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