Flotsam and/or Jetsam

FLY, YOU FOOLS!

Posted on April 23, 2021April 23, 2021 by Mike

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Minneapolis is my home. My happiest memories are here. It’s where I learned to ride a bike, had my first date, received my high school diploma.

But today, I’m too afraid to even walk in my neighborhood by myself.

The ACE Hardware down the street? The one that I used to bike to in the summer? Robbed twice in the past five days.

The Walgreens next to my elementary school? Molotov cocktail thrown into it.

The Lake Harriet Bandshell, where we spent countless Mother’s Days? Homeless encampment popped up next door.

These are the things you don’t read about in the news.

Ten minutes from my house, at 38th and Chicago, there is still an autonomous zone. Police are not allowed to enter. Residents have died because medical authorities couldn’t get through, and carjackers (of which there are MANY) will speed into the zone to escape officer pursuit.

My favorite dinner theater canceled its production of Cinderella because it was “too white.”

My church — my beloved, tiny, Lutheran church — organized social justice marches for our congregation while refusing to reinstate in-person services (they’re still virtual, by the way).

And how about the week of the 2020 riots?

We lived under a curfew for days while looters seemingly roamed freely. Friends fled their home at 3:30 a.m. because the auto parts store behind them was on fire. And then we watched in horror as our City Council members demanded that the city defund the police — as they hired armed security for themselves.

I no longer recognize Minneapolis. I no longer want to live here. We are done, and I am leaving.

Can’t say as I blame ya, kiddo. Sadly, though, what’s been done to Minneapolis is no different than what’s been done to many if not most other formerly-American blue cities and states. And until Americans come to grips with what the Democrat-Socialists truly are and resolve to rise up against them en masse, the Progressivist campaign of destruction and despair will grind on.

Leftybint lecture archetype

Posted on April 23, 2021April 23, 2021 by Mike

Too much pork for just one fork.

It’s a mystery why she’s single https://t.co/9eWGNDVRIu

— thatstarwarsgirl77 (@thatstarwarsgrl) April 21, 2021

I just can’t figure out how it could be that this mouthy termegant is still single, to rephrase Starwarsgirl’s take. As pointless, predictably vapid, and cliched as the irksome cunt’s Standard-Issue, Mark-1 Mod-0 Progtard harangue is, though, there IS one modestly useful aspect here: it provides one and all with a handy catalogue of Lefty jabberwock, all in one handy-dandy place.

“You are either actively part of the solution, or you are part of the problem,” is it? Got me in one, bitch; I am pleased and proud to be thought of by the likes of you as “actively part of the problem.” I intend to do absolutely everything within my power to hinder you and your loathsome ilk—to harry you, cramp your style, piss you off, and do you harm in all and every conceivable way, by any means at hand. My compassion for you is nil; my regard for you, your rights, and your well-being is imperceptible even with an electron microscope; my intentions toward you are nothing but through-and-through ILL; my only wish for you is misfortune, hardship, and a lifetime of suffering, all capped off by a slow and excruciatingly painful death.

Think of the above as a threat if you want; be assured I don’t give a tinker’s most hearty damn what you might think, about anything whatsoever. Myself, I think of it as a most solemn oath.

“Actively part of the problem”? Take my word for it, little darlin’, when I say that you and yours ain’t seen NOTHIN‘ yet. You rectal fissures think you want a fight? Keep on as you are and you’ll get yourselves one. I promise you you won’t enjoy it. It ain’t related, but here’s a little slice of fun from which I lifted my opening line for some reason. Consider it a palate-refresher to cleanse our mouths of the foul taste of strident, bitter Feminazi.

How it happened

Posted on April 23, 2021April 23, 2021 by Mike

Wherein a most intriguing case is made in support of a somewhat unusual proposition: the origins of our national woes, pretty much all of them, are directly traceable to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

For over fifty years, it has been a recurring promise of conservative candidates running for election that they will stand up for our constitutional rights and support the appointment of judges and Supreme Court justices who will uphold the Constitution.

Yet time after time, the left seems to win both ideological and legal battles on monumental issues such as abortion, marriage, gun control, immigration, racial preferences for minorities, and the ever-expanding size and scope of government — no matter what the text of the Constitution actually says.

In The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, (2020; ISBN 978-1-5011-0689-7) author Christopher Caldwell advances the thesis that the Constitution of 1788 has been effectively nullified by our elites and supplanted with a “new constitution” that originated in, and reflects the values of, the “Civil Rights Era” of the 1960s. Though the civil rights movement began as a reformist movement within the old order, it evolved into a “revolution” that has nearly triumphed over the polity created in the 18th century:

The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible[.]…Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave — it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788…with centuries of American culture behind it…or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as liberation.

Caldwell argues that the new “de facto constitution” has been used to supersede the Bill of Rights and the black-letter law of the traditional Constitution. Forced busing and forced integration violated the First Amendment right to freedom of association, as did affirmative action for blacks and women. Racial and sex-based preferences offend the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. These policies were enacted despite opposition from most Americans. Speech codes and political correctness designed to cater to the sensitivities of minorities infringe on the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The “right” to an abortion, which existed nowhere in the traditional Constitution and was opposed by a majority of the people (with limited exceptions), was essentially created by the Supreme Court.

Lest anybody be inclined to assume that Demonrat-appointed Justices and Presidents are entirely to blame, or nearly so, that erroneous notion is handily dispensed with. After the infuriating way in which Trump’s eagerly-anticipated USSC picks have performed so far, that comes as no big shock. Caldwell even goes so far as to rip Saint Ronald of Reagan a new ‘un for his own not-insignificant contribution to the national trainwreck. Then, from there:

If Caldwell’s thesis can be criticized, it is for understating his case — things have proven to be worse than he described.

In hindsight, the Trump presidency exposed the fact that the elites and the Deep State are now completely untethered by the original Constitution of limited and enumerated powers and by the Bill of Rights. They have demonstrated that they are willing to use the FBI to surveil presidential candidate and to fabricate a false narrative for the purposes of impeaching him. They have demonstrated that they will side with illegal aliens over American citizens, and that they will freely let black BLM and communist Antifa agitators run riot in the streets while ruthlessly prosecuting and suppressing as “domestic terrorists” patriotic and nationalist groups who caused a ruckus at the Capitol. They have demonstrated that they are willing to turn a blind eye to vicious and violent attacks by blacks against whites, but drop the hammer of “hate crimes” on any “deplorable” white who has the slightest dispute with a black, or on any cop making a traffic stop of a black criminal. They have demonstrated that they will continue to expand so-called “civil rights” to include all manner of insanity and freakishness, such as “transgenderism.”

Caldwell does not propose a solution to this situation. But recognizing the problem is a necessary first step in finding one. “Civil rights” has been used as an effective battering ram against conservatism and against the Constitution of the 1780s; conservatives can no longer allow themselves to be browbeaten by “civil rights” activists. The rigged election of 2020 and the double-impeachment of Trump should have awakened conservatives to the fact that merely voting Republican and asserting your “constitutional rights” is no longer enough. But it may be too late.

In 2014, Gov. Cuomo sneered that conservatives have no place in the state of New York. Increasingly, our elites have adopted the attitude that conservatives have no place anywhere in the country, and they are willing to act on it.

They’ll do precisely that, unless/until enough Real Americans nut up and demonstrate a willingness to act on a few things their own selves…in a way that won’t soon be forgotten, is impossible to ignore or minimize, and will leave a smarting, stinging welt.

Train kept a-rollin’

Posted on April 20, 2021April 20, 2021 by Mike

Yep, still loving the guy over here.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Anti-Riot Bill Which Also Includes Civil Immunity For Drivers Who Hit Road-Blocking Protestors
Earlier Monday Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB1, a new bill from the Florida legislature that establishes new criminal definitions under the anti-riot law. The House and Senate worked on the legislation for a year after Governor Ron DeSantis led the initial effort.

[HB1] “defines a “riot” as a public disturbance involving three or more people “acting with the common intent to assist each other in violent and disorderly conduct” that results in injury to another person, damage to property, or danger of injury or damage.

The law grants civil immunity to people who drive into protesters who are blocking a road, prevents people accused of rioting from bailing out of jail until after their first court appearance, and increases penalties for assaulting law-enforcement officers while engaging in a “riot.” It also penalizes local governments that interfere with efforts to stop a riot and allows law-enforcement agencies that face funding reductions to file objections.”

The anti-riot law titled “Combating Public Disorder,” creates a new crime of “mob intimidation,” enhance penalties for riot-related looting and violence and create an affirmative defense for individuals who injure or kill violent protesters. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judge spoke at the signing.

No, America’s Governor™ can’t save us anymore than Trump could. But it sure is fun watching the man work.

Sundry useful info

Posted on April 19, 2021April 19, 2021 by Mike

First off, I should mention my own Gab addy, even though I don’t post much there; frankly, I haven’t even spent enough time in the joint to know all the ins and outs of how the thing works. But for whatever it might be worth, here I is. From there, we hop over to the Sooper Seekrit FlammenWurfer Klub, which is basically the hangout for former commenters and other friends/fans of the hallowed Western Rifle Shooters Association websty, with which you will no doubt be acquainted. And from there, we move right along to this, posted by SooperSekrit member ZeroGov, whose name is also a familiar one.

Gentlemen, the root cause of all totalitarian movements is a lust for power over other human beings in commanding their lives and extracting their labor. A proximate cause that enables this is fear and obedience on the part of the potential serfs who must have their willingness to obey reinforced and their willingness not to comply erased.

If we accept these premises, we start to understand why woketopia is the asymmetric employment of collective stereotyping to set sub-groups against one another so they lose sight of the root cause that informs their submission.

The collectivists need two vital elements to set this in motion and maintain the swirl: a talking and reading culture that does not tolerate any moral and intellectual dissent from a monochromatic communist world-view and a vast informant culture that eventually becomes a self-perpetuating blame and grievance machine that runs under its own power.

Not to mention that since their positions are wholesale and in detail morally and intellectually indefensible they must shout down and shut down opposing voices.

That is what you are seeing around you today and why…

But there will be outliers on the bell curve who will fight either overtly or covertly and while the story of totalitarianism is that all the systems die in the end, the decades of misery and agony are suffered by hundreds of millions.

What gift will you give your children?

Discuss or prove me wrong.

Buppert’s post then garners a response.

There isn’t a proving you wrong. We as a country/culture are at an impasse. There isn’t reconciliation. What does it matter to assign blame or discuss ad nauseum. This is a divorce of cultures. Yet it isn’t just America, those across the planet who enjoyed a wee flavor of our freedoms, envied our world, are now becoming enslaved more by the day. England looks like the movie Brazil, a sci fi dystopian future of government over reach.

“dont suspect a friend, report him”

Fear is weaponized against everyone so that many act in fear. Yet it is not fear that motivates those calling themselves patriots, no, when it was time to be afraid no one listened. Now its a resignation. I’ve been divorced. I’ve seen that lifeless cold countenance directed at me from the one I so loved, would have died for. One in whom I invested immeasurable effort and sacrifice. One in whose eyes I saw a thousand sunsets. I saw that countenance and resigned. There was no hope, no future, no reconciliation. That in my opinion would be the mature patriot.

Resignation from the order of things citing irreconcilable differences.

What gift will I give my children? Freedom.

His lips, God’s ears. If you ain’t on Gab yourself yet, go sign up, follow Tommygunmike’s worthless ass, then join the SSFK group. You’ll be glad you did it, on at least two of those suggestions anyway.

Is the Woke worm turning?

Posted on April 19, 2021April 19, 2021 by Mike

I’m skeptical, but then again this is NYeffingC we’re talking about here, dumbfuck Progtardism’s Ground Zero—one of these guys is even a TEACHER, ferchrissakes—so I could be wrong.

For three days, I’ve had sitting on my virtual spindle a post that Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, posted on her Substack page. It’s entitled “I Refuse to Stand by while My Students Are Indoctrinated.” The author isn’t Weiss but is, instead, Paul Rossi, a math teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan (annual tuition: $57,330). On Friday, Weiss added another open letter, this from Andrew Gutmann, a parent who had just pulled his daughter out of Brearley, another expensive private school (annual tuition: $54,000). Both are horrifying exposés of and attacks against the woke culture saturating these institutions.

Both letters are long and don’t yield easily to a brief summary. I’ll quote a few select paragraphs from each, but you must read them to get the full flavor of the Maoist madness at these institutions.

A little taste of Rossi’s toothsome missive:

I know that by attaching my name to this I’m risking not only my current job but my career as an educator, since most schools, both public and private, are now captive to this backward ideology. But witnessing the harmful impact it has on children, I can’t stay silent.

Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.) It was a bait-and-switch “self-care” seminar that labelled “objectivity,” “individualism,” “fear of open conflict,” and even “a right to comfort” as characteristics of white supremacy. I doubted that these human attributes — many of them virtues reframed as vices — should be racialized in this way. In the Zoom chat, I also questioned whether one must define oneself in terms of a racial identity at all. My goal was to model for students that they should feel safe to question ideological assertions if they felt moved to do so.

It seemed like my questions broke the ice. Students and even a few teachers offered a broad range of questions and observations. Many students said it was a more productive and substantive discussion than they expected.

However, when my questions were shared outside this forum, violating the school norm of confidentiality, I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.”

He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.” The school’s director of studies added that my remarks could even constitute harassment.

A few days later, the head of school ordered all high school advisors to read a public reprimand of my conduct out loud to every student in the school. It was a surreal experience, walking the halls alone and hearing the words emitting from each classroom: “Events from last week compel us to underscore some aspects of our mission and share some thoughts about our community,” the statement began. “At independent schools, with their history of predominantly white populations, racism colludes with other forms of bias (sexism, classism, ableism and so much more) to undermine our stated ideals, and we must work hard to undo this history.”

Sounds as if this ~~school~~ indoctrination center is re-enacting one of Chairman Mao’s infamous Struggle Sessions, don’t it? No surprise there, though: our homegrown Leftist brainwashers, their CCP antecedents, and their contemporary ideological brethren are all operating out of the self-same playbook. Rossi’s damning broadside is disturbing, to be sure. But Gutmann’s urgent letter to his fellow parents is “if anything, even more horrifying,” as the esteemed Ms Widburg says. A wee dram of it:

Dear Fellow Brearley Parents,

Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year. She has been at Brearley for seven years, beginning in kindergarten. In short, we no longer believe that Brearley’s administration and Board of Trustees have any of our children’s best interests at heart. Moreover, we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child’s education is irreparable.

It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley’s antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.

I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression. Facile and unsupported beliefs such as these are the polar opposite to the intellectual and scientific truth for which Brearley claims to stand. Furthermore, I call bullshit on Brearley’s oft-stated assertion that the school welcomes and encourages the truly difficult and uncomfortable conversations regarding race and the roots of racial discrepancies.

Plenty more to both of these letters of protest, every word of which you should read. Widburg’s heartening conclusion:

A couple of years ago, ensconced in a Senate chamber in which almost half of the senators and all the national media agreed with him, and lying about violating Senate rules, Sen. Cory Booker made the ridiculous claim that he was having his “I am Spartacus moment.”

In fact, what we’re seeing from Rossi and Gutmann, in the belly of the beast that is true-blue New York, should be the start of a true Spartacus moment. We must join together to defeat the racist Critical Race Theory and other maddened toxins oozing from leftists.

Indeed we must. The sad fact remains, though, that while these letters are a good, and unexpected, first step—particularly considering that the protests were lodged from the very belly of the Progressivist beast—even the most astringent of words will never be enough to excise this deadly cancer from the body politic. If we truly hope to heal, a big dose of some much harsher medicine is the one and only cure for what ails us.

What goes around comes around

Posted on April 18, 2021April 18, 2021 by Mike

Or: Karma is a brass-plated bitch.

Maricopa woman finds tires slashed and a severed finger in her driveway

Right off the bat, you know this is gonna be good.

A couple in Maricopa woke up to their tires slashed and a severed finger in the driveway on Thursday morning.

“I literally have been laughing all day because if I don’t, I might cry,” said Francesca Wikoff.

I confess, I’m already giggling a bit over here myself.

The truck belongs to the Wikoff family. Wikoff, a former volunteer firefighter and EMT, has the stomach for this sort of thing. “It’s pretty comical. You would think that if you’re gonna go to the hospital, especially if you just severed your finger off, that you would take said finger with you,” said Wikoff.

Wikoff believes the tire slasher cut her back tire then cut his finger off on accident. “We assume it happened at 10:30 last night because we had our neighbor that lives next to him heard a loud scream and then a car speeding off,” said Wikoff.

The Maricopa mother believes the finger belongs to her neighbor because they argued with him the night before and a trail of blood leads to his house.

“Pretty comical” doesn’t even BEGIN to cover it, Miz W. Be sure to click on over for her closing quip, which is a doozy.

Good reads

Posted on April 18, 2021April 18, 2021 by Mike

Pete gives us a steer to this book recommendation from DTG:

If you haven’t read James Tarr’s, “Dog Soldiers,” you would do yourself a solid in doing so. Very entertaining and instructive, especially for anyone who doesn’t have a really good idea what ‘Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain’ (MOUT) is about.

Anyway, get this and read it. You’ll be glad you did.

As it happens, I read Dog Soldiers myself not long ago as one of my Kindle Unlimited lending-library choices, and he’s right, it’s a good ‘un. In fact, after devouring DS, I then proceeded to work my way through Tarr’s entire ouvre, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Which brings me to a recommendation of my own: DJ Molles’ Lee Harden series, a five-parter set in Molles’ The Remaining Universe, which I’ll be wading into once I find out how things wind up for good ol’ Lee Harden. I’ve read a crap-ton of what they call PAW (Post Apocalypse World) fiction, and Molles is a real standout in a genre that can be somewhat of a mixed bag as far as the writing itself goes. There’s some really well-written stuff therein, and then again there’s some pretty unreadable dreck to be found also. Molles’ characters are more complex, human, and relatable than a lot of what you run across in lesser PAW fiction, where one-dimensional, ho-hum cliches and/or comic-book superhero-level juvenilia are all too common. Molles’ story arcs are clever, his dialogue fluid and credible, the combat sequences gripping, with the right balance of weapons-system geekery, tactical/strategic/political analysis, character-relationship development, and dramatic tension maintained throughout.

One aspect of PAW fiction that both baffles and exasperates me is the preponderance of sloppy editing. Even books that I otherwise loved, by skilled and well-known authors and respectable publishers, have nonetheless been marred by spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation issues to one degree or another. Of course, poor editing is one of those things that, to repurpose a Biblical phrase, ye will have with ye always, and is by no means exclusively or even predominantly a PAW thang. No matter where you run across it, though, if it’s bad enough it can suck your head right out of the story, which is but a very short hop to just dumping the book altogether for something more competently crafted. It really makes you scratch your head in mystification at how the hell some of these editors ever managed to con their way into the job, and why they bother soldiering on in the field when clearly they could be in politics, where the opportunities for much more remunerative forms of graft are so plentiful.

Alas, the scourge of bad editing rears its ugly head in both Dog Soldiers and the Harden books alike, albeit to a much lesser extent in DS if I remember right. It’s bearable in both, thankfully, amounting to nothing worse than a minor distraction, although there was a certain adjustment period with the first Harden book that I had to make it past before I could really sink my teeth into the thing and enjoy myself. This is all strictly a matter of opinion, so naturally your mileage may vary. However it all works out for ya, I heartily endorse DTG’s recommendation, with great big bells on.

God made Texas so that…

Posted on April 17, 2021April 17, 2021 by Mike

Feel free to complete that dusty old meme any way you like. I’ve had the Republic on the brain all day, ever since seeing last night’s Texas-sized AoSHQ-ONT when I got up this morning. My pick for Best Of Show:

Apparently, I’m far from alone in being in a Texas state of mind today.

According to woke Texas State Historical Association chief historian Walter Buenger, the Alamo is a symbol of “white supremacy.” Some might like for it to be that, but they are a fringe on the left and right extremes, and the facts keep getting in their way. It’s today’s woke history that’s oversimplified and racist. History is as complex as life itself.

Buenger is not a Texas Revolution historian and may not have heard of the Tejanos who died at the Alamo fighting against dictator Santa Anna, his betrayal of the Federalists, his abrogation of the 1824 Constitution, his 1835 proclamation branding those Federalists “pirates” if they lifted a finger to oppose him as he sought to disarm them, or the several other Mexican states besides Texas that rebelled against the hated dictator during the same timeframe. Those facts’ existence violates the revisionist narrative that wokes seek to create regarding the battle that was the crescendo of the Texas Revolution. The life-and-death decisions made by some Tejanos also get in the wokes’ way.

One of those Tejanos was Jose Toribio Losoya. Losoya faced a choice that changed the course of his life and his place in history. He was not alone in that choice. As historian Dr. Jody Edward Ginn has pointed out, Tejanos — native-born Texans of Mexican heritage — in 1835-36 were statistically slightly more likely to fight for Texas’ independence than were the Anglos Buenger and other woke historians claim were fighting for white supremacy and slavery.

Those Tejanos and Texians fought side-by-side as brothers. They had intermarried families. Shared neighborhoods and towns. A shared fate.

Losoya bears two distinctions. The first is that he was a Tejano, not Anglo or American as were many of the famous revolutionaries such as Sam Houston (who would later find himself deposed as governor for opposing secession from the Union). The second is that Losoya was not only born in Texas, he was born in the Alamo itself when it was a neighborhood and Spanish military outpost. He was born there and grew up there in a little house on the compound’s southwest corner.

Losoya was born during an age of revolution. Texas itself had already tried rebellion in 1813. When Losoya was a boy, Mexico rebelled and broke away from Spain. That was in 1821.

When he was a man, Texas rebelled and broke away from Santa Anna’s Mexico.

Losoya faced a choice then: remain with Mexico, which appeared to be the far stronger military power and in whose military he served, or fight for Texas in its rag-tag, mostly disorganized militia.

Losoya chose the latter.

No surprise there. I mean, what true Texan—and that’s what Losoya, a straightup–no-chaser-190-proof boney feeday national hero, most certainly was—wouldn’t? Whether you hail from Texas or only wish you did, you definitely want to read all of this one, folks. Shitlib Leftwits like this Buengwad queef can have the Alamo, Texas, and our glorious American history and heritage when they pry it from our cold, dead fingers. The more we’re reminded of our indomitable forebears and their courage and derring-do, the better off everybody will be in the long run. Think of such reminders as a curative, spine-stiffening tonic for the betterment of our national health.

Some SCIENCE!™ you can believe in

Posted on April 17, 2021April 17, 2021 by Mike

Another one of those too-long-open-tab items, so I can’t recall who I should offer credit for it. But I’m confident you’ll agree it was worth the delay.

AN FAQ ABOUT YOUR NEW BIRTH CONTROL: THE MUSIC OF RUSH

What’s in it?
Every woman deserves to know exactly what’s in her birth control. Rush is a Canadian progressive rock power trio whose golden era is generally considered to be from 1975 to 1982. Thankfully, for your long-term family planning strategy, the band has an extensive discography that spans from 1974 to 2012.

The music of Rush is marked by erratic signature changes, unconventional chord structures, heavy use of synthesizers and electronic effects, and, most importantly, lead vocals that sound like an ancient witch is being exorcised out of your body with live wires. In less clinical terms, imagine taking the most annoying parts of science fiction and Libertarianism, isolating them, and then somehow blending them up into a cursed musical slurry. Then, infuse that slurry with a distinctive incel vibe, and presto! You’ve got one of the most powerful contraception options on the market.

How effective is it?
No one has ever gotten pregnant while listening to the music of Rush. Clinical studies show that when combined with watching a male sexual partner play air bass along to the extended solo in “Freewill,” the contraceptive efficacy of Rush approaches 100%.

Will I experience any discomfort?
Yes.

How does it work?
The music of Rush is a tri-modal contraceptive, meaning it acts on three biological systems — endocrine, reproductive, and psychological. Together, this system is known as “Surge, Purge, and Loss of Urge.”

Surge: When a woman hears the ill-considered, stereotypical East-Asian riff at the beginning of “A Passage to Bangkok,” her pituitary gland floods the system with the hormone disgustagen. You’re familiar with this naturally-occurring hormone as it’s released by your body when your male colleague tells you to smile or when someone says, “You’re cute when you’re angry.” This makes Rush a safe, natural alternative to copper IUDs.

Purge: The purge phase begins when the vocals kick in. You’ll think you’re hearing jaws of life prying open a metal car door after a devastating accident. This is actually the testicles-in-a-vise banshee wail of vocalist and bassist Geddy Lee. His countertenor falsetto, combined with the surge of disgustagen, work in concert to trigger a panic response in the ovaries. Your reproductive system intuitively knows that it should not bring a child into a world that would reward this music with success. The ovaries will start tossing eggs overboard like they’re bailing out water from a sinking canoe.

Loss of Urge: The first two contraceptive phases of the music of Rush work synergistically with Loss of Urge, your most reliable tool in pregnancy prevention. About 30 seconds into the melodic meandering and feral-cat-being-threatened-by-a-raccoon vocals, a woman will experience a complete and total shut down of her sex drive. At this point, her legs will snap shut with the spring tension of a bear trap, making intercourse all but impossible.

Are there any side effects?
Common side effects include:

Skin crawling

Jaw clenching

Shuddering

Loss of social status

Embarrassment

Some women report feeling incredibly uncool. You may develop medium-to-severe irritation when your male sexual partner gives an impassioned ten-minute speech on how Neil Peart was the greatest percussionist in human history.

You have many options when it comes to birth control. Ask your doctor if the music of Rush is right for you.

Heh. If you ask me, the “music” of Rush isn’t right for anybody.

A trifle too satanic?

Posted on April 16, 2021April 16, 2021 by Mike

Or demonic, if you want to be kind about it.

Joe Biden’s party must be thinking — if you call it thinking — that being psychotic isn’t enough… it’s time to go demonic! How else to explain the supernatural doings of the folks in charge of things in our nation’s capital. The casual observer might suppose that these things are spinning out of control, but you also have to wonder how much Joe Biden & Company are spinning them that way. Are they looking to start a war, for instance?

Three weeks ago, Ol’ White Joe called Vladimir Putin “a killer.” This week, Ol’ Joe called Vlad on the phone and suggested a friendly in-person meet-up in some “third country.” In the meantime, Ol’ Joe essayed to send a couple of US warships into the Black Sea to assert America’s interest in Ukraine, the failed state whose American-sponsored failure was engineered in 2014 by Barack Obama’s State Department. Turkey, which controls the narrow entrance to the Black Sea, was notified that two US destroyers would be steaming through its territory. Hours after the announcement, the US called off the ships. Then, hours after Ol’ Joe proffered that summit meeting, his State Department imposed new economic sanctions on Russia and tossed out a dozen or so Russian embassy staff. How’s that for a coherent foreign policy?

What’s going on in Ukraine, anyway? The US and NATO have prompted Ukraine to move troops and tanks toward the ethnically-Russian breakaway Donbass region. Russia countered by massing 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. Though supplied with Western armaments, Ukraine’s ragtag and incompetent army has no ability to control the Donbass, nor do either NATO and the US have any real will to interfere there with their own troops — the logistics are insane. Mr. Putin’s elegant solution: evacuate the three-plus million Russians stuck in Donbass into Russia — which needs labor — ceding the empty territory to foundering Ukraine — soon to be an ungovernable post-industrial frontier between East and West. For a rich rundown on these matters, read Dmitry Orlov’s mordant disquisition on the subject: Putin’s Ukrainian Judo.

The lesson there is that the US has absolutely nothing to gain from continuing to antagonize Russia, and that the mentally weak Joe Biden is merely projecting the picture of a weakened and confused USA by keeping it up. Of course, a closer read might be that these hijinks are meant to distract from the more serious and consequential breakdown in relations between the US and China, currently engineered by the blundering team of Sec’y of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who went to Alaska recently to tell the Chinese delegation that they were morally unworthy of conducting trade negotiations, thereby torpedoing the trade negotiations that they went to Alaska to conduct. Smooth move fellas.

Actually, the REAL lesson there will be in what happens when decaying, once-mighty nations with hollowed-out, overly-tech-reliant, and cripplingly politicized military establishments get above their station and go strutting about on a global stage that became way too big for them while they were sitting back on their doughy duffs and going all soft and flubbery. It’s debatable whether Putin and his tough, much-better-trained and -led soldiery will be able to stop laughing at the dress-wearing poofters and Equal Opportunity officer corps we’re pleased to call “soldiers” long enough to kick Amerika v2.0’s transgender ass up between its shoulder blades.

And to think, that’s only the Foreign Policy Follies. James hasn’t even gotten around to Domestic Demonics yet, which are probably even worse.

Update! On the other hand, we still produce a few wild-eyed bastiges who build custom lawnmowers like this beauty.

(Via Bill)

Not too messianic update! I’ll just go ahead and confess right upfront that I did NOT see this coming.

Simone Peer, who once identified as an “ambassador for Satan” shared her testimony of how God used rocker Alice Cooper to deliver her from witchcraft.

Peer never thought practicing white magic was wrong, as she considered it the “good side” of the occult.

“I was a ‘white witch,’ and this was ‘white witchcraft’ that was divine and heavenly,” Peer said in a recent interview with CBN News. But later, she came to realize, “I was an ambassador for Satan.”

In 2017, desperately searching for truth and hoping to have peace in her life, Peer stumbled across a video of famous heavy metal musician Alice Cooper. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer became a Christian late in life and had been publicly sharing his testimony. In the video that Peer watched, Cooper talked about finding freedom in Jesus Christ, freed from alcoholism.

“For those who walked the same path that I did, Jesus is the answer that you are looking for. He truly is,” she declared.
In a 2014 interview with The Hard Music magazine, Cooper denounced “celebrity Christianity” and stressed to his fans that he is “nothing more than” a singer, and they shouldn’t look at him as an expert on Christianity.

“It’s really easy to focus on Alice Cooper and not on Christ,” he said. “I’m a rock singer. I’m nothing more than that. I’m not a philosopher. I consider myself low on the totem pole of knowledgeable Christians. So don’t look for answers from me.”

This might well be the greatest post of all time.

The Daily Donnybrook

Posted on April 15, 2021May 1, 2021 by Mike

Welcome to Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. Do note that the official CF comments policy remains in effect here, as enumerated in the left sidebar. All new posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…

Scalp: collected

Posted on April 15, 2021April 15, 2021 by Mike

The burning of a righteous man.

Papa John’s Pizza founder and CEO John Schnatter was forced out of his own company back in 2018 after he reportedly used the N-word on a phone call. Yet in the past few weeks, Schnatter has released the transcript of the phone call in question, and that transcript reveals the true story — it appears Schnatter was set up and the alleged “offense” wasn’t an offense at all. The Papa John’s founder suffered a heinous defamation of character.

Schnatter has sued Laundry Service, the company he hired to help bolster his public image, for many breaches of contract. His lawsuit claims that the company blackmailed him and orchestrated his destruction.

The racism accusations against Schnatter had always been politically motivated and overblown, but the transcript reveals just how duplicitous Laundry Service was and just how deceptive was the story that tanked Schnatter’s career.

The Laundry Service is a shitlib firm, staffed entirely by dishonest, amoral, hate-crazed shitlibs. Schnatter, as a prominent and tremendously successful Right-thinking entrepreneur, was like a fat, juicy steak dangling in front of a hungry tiger’s nose—a prospective kill so enticing that no vicious shitlib could pass up a chance at taking him down and destroying his life. Yet the inexplicable fact remains that John hired the evil bastards himself, shelling out millions of his hard-earned dollars to enrich the same scabrous curs who would then happily engineer his ruination without batting an eye.

The quote that damned Schnatter, scandalized the citizens, and was used to construct the gallows for the low-tech lynching of a guiltless man?

The Papa John’s founder did not use the N-word in the exercise but rather when he spoke with members of his team after the call. The recording and the transcript captured Schnatter’s remarks along with those of Laundry Service personnel who spoke to one another on mute afterward.

“I got to tell you, heaven forbid this company if they’re not going to use me at all. After I’ve looked at this research, I mean, I’m just not seeing how you’re not going to tell the Papa John story and let them – what bothers me is Colonel Sanders called blacks n******. I’m like, I’ve never used that word. And they get away with it,” Schnatter said. “Yet we use the word ‘debacle’ and we get framed in the same genre. It’s crazy. The whole thing’s crazy.”

Well, I won’t say it isn’t. But what’s much, much crazier is that, after having seen so many of their fellows get their butts caught in the blades the exact same way time and time again, there are still some who profess shock when they DO get away with it. Which they always, always do. Why conservative businessmen go right on entering into business relationships with people that so desperately hate them—foolishly trusting in the integrity, professionalism, and broadmindedness of people who possess none of those fine qualities—is beyond comprehension.

Legend you never heard of

Posted on April 13, 2021April 13, 2021 by Mike

Another day, another effing brilliant SteynMusic outing.

This weekend marks the centenary of George David Weiss, born April 9th 1921. Who was George David Weiss? Well, he’s no household name, but, to reprise my old line on obscure songwriters, you’d be hard put to find a household that doesn’t know at least one George David Weiss song.

So who was George David Weiss? Well, even George Shearing, who wrote his one and only enduring song with Weiss, had no more to say about him in his autobiography than that he was “a man by the name of George David Weiss”. The man by the name of was born under that name in April 1921 and was all set to become a lawyer or accountant when he decided to follow his heart and go to Juilliard, where he learned composing and arranging. The latter got him employment with Stan Kenton and other bands, until he met his first songwriting partner, the talented West Indian composer Bennie Benjamin. A young Sinatra picked up their “Oh, What It Seemed to Be”, and a few years later Kay Starr had a monster hit with “Wheel of Fortune”…

Starr’s chartbuster is of course a true gem, one which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed performing onstage myself who even knows how many times. Robert Gordon did a mighty fine version as well.

Weiss had one hell of a capacious catalog, and as Steyn somewhat bemusedly notes, had everybody from Sinatra to Nat Cole to Peggy Lee to Elvis to…ummm…Whitesnake(?!?) cover his stuff over the years. That’s a variety so stylistically broad that it says a lot about the enduring appeal of the man’s work all by itself. I’ll embed another of my personal all-time Weiss faves before we all move on to what I consider the really fun part of the story.

The Tokens, in an ironic twist quite commonly found in the music biz, not only had no faith in the song but actually despised the thing, even going so far as to plead with the producers and their label not to release the very song that would end up being their one and only bona fide smash. Not the first time such lightning-strikes weirdness has occurred in the biz, and you can be sure it won’t be the last.

Now we come to the part I was most amused by, a chapter of the Weiss story all a-brim with music biz irony of its own unique flavor. This will require some heavy excerpting, but I assure one and all that the payoff is well worth the arduous wade to get there.

It started with Bob Thiele, who was a successful record producer but only a very occasional songwriter. So, for a composing partner, he turned, as so many others have done, to George David Weiss. In theory the latter could have written any or all of “What a Wonderful World”, but Thiele told me that Weiss stayed mostly down the musical end.

Which I find hard to believe, because the tune is mostly “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” and, after decades in the music biz, Weiss was way beyond that.

On the other hand, Weiss told Graham Nash (of the Hollies and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) that he wrote it with Louis Armstrong in mind – which suggests he also had a hand in the lyric.

Why Satchmo? Well, it was a ballad of hope and optimism that transcended the times. But for that very reason it also required a singer who transcended the times.

A singer like, say, Louis Armstrong…

And, if you think that seems kind of obvious now, it certainly wasn’t in 1967. If you pick up almost any jazz critic’s biography of Satchmo, they generally follow the same basic arc: Terrific trumpeter, innovative musician – and then he sold out and did commercial pap for suburban hi-fi filler. I don’t subscribe to that crude reductio myself, but it is true that, after he’d booted the Beatles off the top and taken “Hello, Dolly!” to Number One, the calculus changed somewhat for Armstrong’s management: There’s a new Broadway show opening? Take the big song and do another “Dolly” knock-off. Hence Satchmo’s “Mame” and Satchmo’s “Cabaret”, and doubtless, had he lived, Satchmo’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” and Satchmo’s “Phantom of the Opera”.

Nevertheless, the writers met with Louis to pitch the song. As Bob Thiele recalled, “We wanted this immortal musician and performer to say, as only he could, the world really is great: full of the love and sharing people make possible for themselves and each other every day.”

Instead, Satch peered at the sheet – unlike many singers, he was a musician who could read the music – and, when his eye got to the bottom of the page, he looked up and said:

What is this sh*t?

He was studying the music – no words, just a contemporary ballad tune that called not for Armstrong’s tight jazzy All-Stars but for a string section willing to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. I wouldn’t myself say the tune was exactly “sh*t”…But, as I said, Armstrong hadn’t seen the lyrics. And, when they passed him the words, he fell in love. Not so much because of the green trees, red roses, blue skies, white clouds, but because of the final eight bars, which ditch the “colors of the rainbow” theme:

I hear babies cry, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know
And I think to myself
What A Wonderful World…

That quatrain reminded him of 107th Street in Queens, the tree-lined block he and his wife Lucille had lived on for a quarter-century (and whose modest red-brick home now houses the Louis Armstrong Museum):

There’s so much in ‘Wonderful World’ that brings me back to my neighborhood where I live in Corona, New York. Lucille and I, ever since we’re married, we’ve been right there in that block. And everybody keeps their little homes up like we do and it’s just like one big family. I saw three generations come up on that block. And they’re all with their children, grandchildren, they come back to see Uncle Satchmo and Aunt Lucille …and I got pictures of them when they was five, six and seven years old. So when they hand me this ‘Wonderful World,’ I didn’t look no further, that was it.

He was genuinely touched by the heartfelt optimistic simplicity of the sentiment, and its faith in the future – that a new generation would know things that he would never live to see. Like, er, Twitter. Well, let’s not get hung up on the details. He was struck by the song’s message, and so agreed to sing it.

An arrangement was made, musicians were booked, and a studio was procured – for a midnight session in Vegas, after Satch had finished up his set at the Tropicana. There was just one problem. Louis Armstrong had recently switched record labels, to ABC, and the president of the company, Larry Newton, was opposed to Satchmo doing “What a Wonderful World”. I don’t mean he was antipathetic or indifferent to it, or felt it was not a strong choice for a single but would be okay for Side 2 Track 5 of an album. I don’t even mean that he disliked it. He loathed “What a Wonderful World” with a passion: He thought he’d signed the Number One bestselling pop star of “Hello, Dolly!”, and he didn’t want his new act doing what he regarded as the polar opposite of “Dolly” – a soporific inert crawl-tempo ballad.

He’s not necessarily mistaken about that, as my kid’s class certainly demonstrated. So I’m not unsympathetic to Larry Newton’s concerns. The trouble was that on August 16th 1967 he’d flown in to Vegas for a photo shoot with his new star and that evening he showed up at United Studios determined to prevent the recording. He went so totally bananas that Ed Thiele, as producer, and Artie Butler, the arranger, and George Weiss and Frank Military, who were also present, hustled him through the door and locked him out of the studio. Which isn’t exactly conducive to Louis Armstrong recording a tender and sensitive ballad unlike anything he’d sung before…

It was a long session – either because of Newton’s antics or because they were interrupted by the toots of passing Union Pacific freight trains, or because the material was a little outside Pops’ comfort zone. They stayed there till 6am, and then they all went for breakfast. And the label only agreed to pay the orchestra for their extended shift on condition that Satchmo himself accept a mere $250 for the session. But it was worth it: Louis worked and worked on his interpretation until he and the writers were satisfied. I confess as a young child I always heard “the dark sacred night” as “the dark say goodnight”, but once I’d grasped Satch’s enunciation I appreciated what a fine pairing that makes with “the bright blessed day”: it adds a subtle touch of the holy and transcendental to the song; that the world is not merely “wonderful” in the way that a great cheeseburger and a vanilla shake can be, but truly wonderful because it’s the wonder of God’s creation. But, as I said, it’s discreetly done. And Armstrong’s reading of the middle-eight, in that unmistakeable beautiful gravelly rasp, is as sincere and true as anything he ever sang:

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands, saying ‘How do you do?’
They’re really saying, ‘I love you…’

Is that really what they’re saying? Well, Pops bought into it. In the studio that night, representing all those children who’d grow to learn more than he’d ever know, was George Weiss’ kid Peggy. “So you’re George’s daughter? Pleased to meet you!” And he shook her hand, and maybe, for a small, shrunken old man not in the best of health, it really did mean “I love you.”

And, for those wondering what the hell all this hippie-dippie peace’n’love stuff had to do with Louis Armstrong, he waited to the very end to tie it back to his entire oeuvre in what, with hindsight, was the only possible wrap-up:

Ohhhhhh, yeahhhhhh.

Larry Newton wanted another “Hello, Dolly!” Well, he got the last two words.

But he wasn’t happy, and he swore to exact his revenge – by doubling down on the petty and stupid. In order to prove he was right about the song, he released the single in late 1967, but refused to promote it. He didn’t ship it to radio stations, so no disc-jockeys played it, and nobody bought it. In those days, ABC’s UK distribution was licensed to EMI, and, in the fullness of time, “What a Wonderful World” showed up at the London office, and they released it as a normal single. Actually, not that normal, because it was, I believe, the very last single EMI released on their HMV label. But, other than that, they did all the things you’re meant to do with a new release: They sent review copies to the BBC and to trade magazines, and discovered what Larry Newton, once he’d gotten over being locked out of the studio, should have realized – that people really liked it. It entered the UK charts at the beginning of February 1968 at Number 45, cracked the Top Forty in its second week, the Top Thirty in its fourth, and then climbed through March and April up to Number One.
So, just for the record, where did it get to on the Billboard Hot 100?

Er, big hit sound Number 116.

In fact, Larry Newton’s singular talent for sabotage was so effective that he wound up with a record that was a hit everywhere except his own territory: Top Thirty in Australia, Top Twenty in New Zealand and the Netherlands, Number Seven in Switzerland, Number Six in Belgium and Germany and Norway, Number Two in Ireland, Number One in Austria… What a wonderful world (America excepted). In London, EMI decided the song was so big they needed an album built around it. At which point Larry Newton decided to triple-down on the moronic. He agreed to the LP, but only if Armstrong did it for $500. Joe Glaser, Louis’ manager, wasn’t in the mood for that, and instructed Bob Thiele:

You tell that fat bastard to go f**k himself and give us $25,000 for eight more sides.

Larry Newton responded:

Tell him to go f**k himself, and why do we give a sh*t about these European companies? Screw ’em all.

They’re really saying “I love you”.

Three years later, Louis Armstrong was dead. If you’d been listening to the radio in Britain, Europe, around the planet in 1971, they marked his passing with “What a Wonderful World”. On American stations, they played everything but.

It took two decades and Good Morning, Vietnam for a great record finally to achieve the recognition on its home turf it had known for a generation everywhere else. It doesn’t matter that Satch was born in 1901; he sounds old and elegaic on the record, and that’s the point: he’s a fellow approaching the end of his life, but he’s not bitter or even bittersweet; he’s not looking back but looking forward to when those babies will grow. It’s an old man, but it’s a young song. That’s why it’s a popular father/daughter dance at weddings: It’s the past blessing the future.

And that’s also true of any great songwriter’s catalogue – which is why we salute George David Weiss on his centennial.

As for Larry Newton, well, I wasn’t sure whether he was still with us or not, so I looked him up, and read:

Newton is probably best remembered today for trying to stop Louis Armstrong from recording ‘What A Wonderful World’.

Ohhhhhh, yeahhhhhh!

Beautiful song, beautiful story, no? Tales like this provide a small window onto why it is that people get into the music business in the first place, and why a not-negligible percentage of them are perfectly willing to break themselves—financially, spiritually, morally, even physically—to stay in, on any level they can contrive. I swear, out of all the great music posts Steyn has done, and he’s done quite a few, this one may well be the beat of ’em all.

About a guy most of us have probably never even heard of.

Plugs in

Posted on April 13, 2021April 13, 2021 by Mike

Steyn gives us one more perfect Prince Phillip quip, with a Shirley Bassey bonus thrown in.

If you’re a Royal consort, you wind up going to a lot of nights out you have not the slightest interest in, like the Royal Command Performance and the Royal Film Premiere and the like. In November 2002, arriving at the Royal Albert Hall for the world premiere of the James Bond film Die Another Day, His Royal Highness was informed by an excited person in the welcome line that Madonna would be singing the title song. He turned to the Queen, and remarked drily, “So we’ll need earplugs then.”

He was quite right. Shirley Bassey had neglected to bring hers, and so, just a few minutes later, the opening titles and the song ended, and Dame Shirl yelled from the stalls, “Rubbish!” She was quite right, too.

Hey, when you’re right, you’re right.

Enemies in common update! If they’re ag’in him, I’m for him.

It's Prince Philip's comments about other nationalities — often inappropriate, occasionally racist and sometimes made on visits hosted by the nations who were the subject of them — that most complicate his legacy. https://t.co/IXLFYTF3oZ

— CNN (@CNN) April 10, 2021

I imagine Philip’s “legacy” will be just fine, thanks, whatever caviling PC nudniks may think, say, or do. In fact, I’d wager the Prince will be fondly remembered long after CNN is dead, buried, and forgotten. I’m with the WSJ’s Gerard Baker all the way:

I had the privilege some years ago to be invited to a July 4 dinner at the American ambassador’s residence in London. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were the guests of honor, there presumably to bear witness that, after a couple of centuries, the unfortunate business over the repeated injuries and usurpations inflicted by one of her ancestors had been quietly forgotten.

The ambassador rose to give the not-so-loyal toast.

He began with the inevitable nod to the two nations’ divergent histories, noting that some time earlier, in their great wisdom, his compatriots had decided to go it alone. “Oh yes!” cried the prince from a sedentary position, fortified, no doubt, by a couple of glasses of the embassy’s very good wine. “And how’s that working out for you?” It was a good question then, and it’s more apt than ever now given America’s current predicament. The people that once boldly threw off the tyranny of a distant monarch now seem to be meekly submitting to the diktats of a regnant class and ideology that tolerate less independence of thought and action than King George III did.

As the prince did at that dinner, he had an unerring capacity to ask awkward questions, speak inconvenient truths and challenge polite orthodoxies.

When we are obligated to toe an increasingly stultifying conventional line, the queen’s consort was the human antidote to the virus of verbal oppression that has us in a death grip. You’d search a very long time to find a less woke individual than the duke of Edinburgh.

He got all the right knickers in a twist, and he’s still doing it, which makes him a-okay in my book. The unhappier shitlib types are, the better I like it. Kruiser says it well:

Three cheers to Prince Philip for being able to annoy our worthless woke morons first from beyond an ocean and now from beyond the grave.

I don’t care how rich he was, I would have bought him a drink in a heartbeat.

Rest in peace, Phil.

Amen to that.

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