Flotsam and/or Jetsam

On reality

Posted on January 11, 2025January 11, 2025 by Mike

And, y’know, NOT.

No, you aren’t
So I saw a dude (and yes, it had the adam’s apple, so a dude) wearing a skirt with leggings (and really nice heels) and a shirt that said “Everyone is entitled to their own view of reality” I couldn’t help but tell him: “No, reality is what it is, denying it makes you a fool and an idiot.” He got mad and pouted. No matter, he’s still a man, in a skirt. Not a chick. “Don’t call me Stupid!” say he. “Then don’t act stupid or say stupid shit, says I”…He flounced off in a huff. I laughed out loud at his back.

Just because a woman wants to think “Big is Beautiful” doesn’t mean that fat girls are as pretty or attractive as women who take care of themselves. Shy’s lying to herself or to her fat friend. Trans people (I.E. Men that pretend to be women or women who pretend to be men) are not the opposite sex just because they put on a skirt or pants. To believe otherwise is stupid. Trans men can’t have babies or nurse, and trans women are not strong men, even with supplements of Testosterone. Saying otherwise is stupid.

I can believe I can fly all I want, right up ’til I step off that cliff. Being upset when reality (and the ground) smacks me in the face is stupid….Stepping off the cliff is stupid. Don’t like the truth? Reality and the world just don’t care. Being upset that you can’t fly is also stupid.

Man or woman (and those are the only choices), to deny reality is stupid and it really is stupid to think otherwise. Reality is what it is. Deal with it. Stop being foolish.

We, as a society, need to stop pandering to people, be they straight or trans or gay, men or women, old or young, that feel that their alternate view of reality is just as valid.

Seems simple enough, no? Obvious; beyond argument; plain for all with eyes to see; as fair as fair ever gets in this life—none but a fool, a madman, or a stubborn, spoiled child would think to object. So readily apparent is it, in fact, that it shouldn’t have to be said at all; even the most rudimentary powers of observation will confirm that to contend otherwise is a pointless waste of time and/or energy.

And yet, somehow…well, here we all are nonetheless.

Via Bayou Peter, who adds:

This blatant falsehood manifests itself particularly in the “You can’t criticize me! You can’t judge me! You can’t say I’m wrong!” crowd. Look, if what you’re believing, or preaching, or doing, flies in the face of objective fact and natural reality, I can judge you (your actions, at any rate – not your soul, that’s God’s business) and I can say you’re wrong. I will. Loudly and frequently. To indulge your false fantasy would make me as guilty of ignoring reality as you are!

I saw this particularly as a prison chaplain. We had psychologists on staff whose job was to help inmates figure out where they’d gone wrong, and help them to change. The problem is that far too many of those psychologists tried to lead the inmate to come to the right conclusions on his or her own, without actually telling them they were wrong. In many cases, those inmates had never been taught how to think, and had none of the normal frame of reference (morality, civics, etc.) used in our society. To expect them to come to the “right” conclusions when they were filled with the “wrong” personal history, information (or the lack thereof), relationships, etc. was nonsensical – yet those psychologists persisted in that approach. They had to. That’s what the “system” demanded – and that’s why we have a 70%+ recidivism rate among US prison inmates over the first five years after they’re released.

Plenty more at both links, all of it well worth reading.

Free verse

Posted on January 6, 2025January 7, 2025 by Mike

In the course of a phone confab with my friend Don just now, for some strange reason the hoary old English limerick that begins “In days of old/when knights were bold…” came up. The version I’ve always known best runs thusly:

In days of old, when knights were bold
And condoms not invented
We wrapped a sock around our cock
And babies were prevented.

Now tell me that ain’t just hi-larious, I triple dog dare ya.

Anyhoo, this memory inspired me to do a Luxxle search for the opening line after I’d hung up, seeing as how I knew there was any number of different iterations of this bit of bawdy doggerel. And sure enough.

In days of old when knights were bold
And women weren’t invented,
They all drilled holes in telegraph poles,
and came away contented.

And:

In days of old when knights were bold
and toilets weren’t invented,
they laid their load upon the road
and walked away contented!

And:

In days of old
When men were bold
And paper not invented
They wiped their ass
With blades of grass
And walked away contented.

Last but by no means least:

In days of old, when knights were bold,
And girls were not particular
You’d line them all against the wall
And screw them perpendicular

What can one say but: heh. I do love me some lit’ratchure, I truly, truly do.

I’m sure there are many other versions of this classic floating around out there; if you know any, please feel free to share ‘em with us in the comments section. Lord knows that, in these parlous times, we could all use a good laugh any time we can get one.

Update! Upon further reflection it occurred to me that, as fodder for public-restroom graffiti goes, the fine old poesy above ranks right up there with a couple of stellar examples I ran across in a Chapel Hill dive bar the band was playing at long ago, scrawled at eyeball-height above the lone urinal. To wit:

Flush twice—it’s a long way to Taco Bell

And then another, older but still legible graffito:

Why change Dicks in the middle of a screw? Vote for Nixon in ’72!

Good stuff, no? Then there was a pre-Innarnuts listicle enlivening the green room of CLT’s Park Elevator before it went the way of all nightclub flesh, which started off thusly:

REASONS WHY THE INDIGO GIRLS SUCK

They aren’t really indigo

They aren’t really girls

Off limits pussy pie

The above listicle items were added to by various Sharpie-wielding band members over time until finally, two (2) entire walls were covered by ‘em, transforming the ever-expanding list from the ordinary misspelled, punctuation-bereft, and ungrammatical semi-bon mots into a bona fide epic of rowdy witticism. Sadly, the first three are all I can remember now, but I do know the BPs laughed ourselves dizzy the first time we saw it, and raced in to check for new additions each and every time we played the joint ever after; it quickly became our first order of business before we loaded in, set up, and sound-checked, even.

I know the Indigo Girls gigged there at least once before the decrepit Park Elevator building was torn down and replaced by a yuppie-puppie pancake house or million-dollar condos or some such shite, so presumably they must’ve seen the backhanded tribute at some point. Who knows, they may have even added to it themselves—provided that the Girls (not! NOT!!) could’ve scraped up even a facsimile of a sense of humor between them, that is. Never met ‘em myself, so I won’t speculate on how likely that might be.

Park Elevator also happens to be the place where I rode my stripped down, straight-piped, apehanger-bedecked 1971 FLH through the low freight-loading entrance and right onto the stage at the beginning of our set, parking up next to my guitar amp. My friend Joe followed me in on his hot-rod Sportster, parking over on Stage Left opposite my Shovelhead; both bikes were custom-painted white and had been thoroughly shined up beforehand so that they gleamed and glittered beautifully under the multi-colored stage lighting.

Who was it we were opening for that night—the Cramps, maybe? Somebody else? Or were the BPs headlining the show? Ahh, the hell with it; doesn’t matter now, it’s over and done with. The one thing I’m confident of is that nobody who was there to witness our spectacular stunt-entrance has forgotten it, nor will they.

Backstory of how the deal went down: upon arriving at Park Elevator I approached the owner, Tim, to inform him of my nefarious plans and also to confirm that the jerry-built PE stage could handle a total of approximately 1500 pounds of extra weight without collapsing and killing us all. Tim grinned sheepishly, shrugged, and replied, “I dunno; it’s up to you, man, I’m cool with it!” Which noncommittal response put before me a question I’d asked myself time and again before doing another reckless, risky, and altogether foolish thing: What would Jerry Lee Lewis do?

There was but one answer to that, which was clear as a mountain spring. So I fired that bitch up (kick only, natch), muscled the 20-inch apes (on five-inch straight risers) down and back enough to JUST clear the freight-ramp door at Stage Left, and rode on in—so far so good, no problem. Shut the low-slung Shovel down, gently leaned it onto the kickstand, dismounted, strapped on the git-fiddle, slashed that almighty first-position A chord, let that mutha ring until the tormented Marshall amp screamed in razor-edged agonies of feedback, and may the revels commence, baby!

And the rest, as they say, is rock and roll history. A pic of the ol’ gal as she was in days of yore:

As with guitars, amps, cars, and women, I never could seem to keep a bike around for more than four-five years max before losing interest and offloading it. The 71 FL, though, was special: I held onto that one for ten (10) years before dumping her and moving on. A whole lotta years, a whole lotta miles, a whole lotta smiles, two (2) girlfriends, and I don’t even know how many cars, guitars, and amplifiers over that unusually lengthy (for me) period.

Those ten glorious years saw:

Three (3) custom paintjobs

Five (5) sets of exhausts, the uncontested champeen of which was an HD two-into-one system featuring no-shit tuned headers—the stock factory system for one (1) year on certain late-70s FX models, a rara avis greatly prized among Those Who Know. Ugly as sin, excessively heavy, too quiet for comfort, that rig nonetheless made my Milwaukee Marauder run like a raped ape after me and Goose punched holes in the big, clunky baffle it came with, a mod which increases exhaust-gas flow while still retaining the back pressure highway and byway cruiser machines require to operate at peak efficiency all day. There’s a reason, after all, why HD straight-pipe exhausts are pretty much universally known as “drag pipes,” even amongst non-biker types who have never swung a leg over a Hog in their lives and know precious little and care even less about ’em: it’s because drag pipes only work well on actual dragsters that run at full-throttle all the time, for short but exhilarating bursts down a stick-straight quarter- or eighth-mile strip

Five (5) sets of handlebars/risers: buckhorns on pullbacks, drag bars, 16″ apes, 20” apes, these wide-ass dresser longhorns I could only put up with for a cpl-three months

A full-custom suicide shift designed, built, and installed by me and Goose; unavailable at any price back then, now offered by several aftermarket manufacturers

Two (2) primary drives, enclosed chain and open belt

Six (6) seats, with and without sissy-bar, from a horrible solo seat on springs to the near-perfect Mustang pillow-seat shown above

Four (4) detachable saddlebag sets, one a rare factory Sportster arrangement; two throwover leather bag sets, one all fringed and fancy, one plain-Jane; lastly, the fiberglass bags shown above, a set of aftermarket el-cheapos

As the above partial list shows, I expended a great amount of time and effort on re-imagining, customizing, and re-working that faithful, rock-solid murdersickle into various guises. All part of the fun of Harley-Davidson ownership—actually, one of the primary reasons crusty old gearheads like me get addicted to the blasted things.

Updated update! After extensive digging, I eventually managed to unearth a pic showing the OEM 2-into-1 exhaust I waxed rhapsodic about earlier.

1978 FXS Lowrider, that would be, a very well preserved example of a long-dead breed. Look close and you’ll see the points (!) cover proudly sports the Number One-American flag insignia from the AMF (Annoying Manufacturing Flaw) era.

Simple, rugged, uncompromising: to me, this is simply what a Harley Davidson motorcycle looks like. Not anymore, unfortunately. Check out the official H-D website and you’ll find page after tiresome page of bland, cookie-cutter mundanities that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the straightforward, classic machines of yesteryear, which I think is a crying shame.

Yes, they leaked oil. Yes, they vibrated so bad they could make your hands go numb and shake your teeth loose on a long trip. Yes, they were so slow they could barely get out of their own way. Yes, they were heavy pigs. Yes, the inferior clutch, four-speed tranny, long-throw shifter, and loosey-goosey shift linkage could make changing gears a hit or miss proposition sometimes. Yes, the suspension, handling, and brakes were a good bit shy of adequate. What of it? All those shortcomings could be addressed with a little backyard wrenching and some high-performance components, which even back then were readily available.

No self-respecting biker I’ve known would think having to work on his own bike so as to get everything dialed in to his personal satisfaction to be a bridge too far. Hell, invite your bros and their ol’ ladies over and have ‘em bring a case or three of cold beer along, crank up some slammin’ tunes on the jambox, and have yourselves a blast. Far from being any kind of deal-breaker, it’s an integral part of the biker lifestyle.

See what I mean about that exhaust, though? Pretty it ain’t, but it performed superbly, at least on my FLH. Looks as if Harley-D went for Function and said straight to hell with Form on those babies. Note how the rear pipe curls around the nose-cone cover like a snake, which is what it took to make tuned headers out of the system. Tuned headers, for anyone who doesn’t know, are basically just header pipes of equal length and diameter, see. After the first foot, foot and a half from the manifold clamp, the rest doesn’t matter. Rare as hen’s teeth back in the 70s and 80s, 2-into-1 exhausts with tuned headers for Harleys are common as dirt nowadays—you can’t take two steps without tripping over the aftermarket ones, for Big Twins and Sporties alike.

It’s a-coming

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

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

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

— Doug Powers (@ThePowersThatBe)

January 2, 2025

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

The “organic” scam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re in the Big House now

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

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

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

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

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

Otherwise, he was gonna get killed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not a recipe for stability.

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

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

2024 in review

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

Hell with that shitlib Dave Barry and his snarky swipes at anyone to the right of Josef Stalin, David Thompson dishes out the real deal.

The Year Reheated
In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a male Guardian columnist, Mr Phineas Harper, announcing his plan to heroically advance “gender equality” via the medium of self-absorption and by wearing a pleated skirt. Guardian readers were invited to believe that the sight of Mr Harper “dancing in skirts” and feeling “buoyed up” by compliments regarding his ensemble would, in ways never quite pinned down, liberate British women from their grim, downtrodden existence.

We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.

And we concluded a trilogy of posts on the subject of crime and punishment – and the status-chasing contortions of progressives, for whom, pretentious leniency is a kind of social jewellery with which to impress one’s peers. And according to whom, the wellbeing of habitual burglars is much more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, whose homes have just been violated, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”

In February, we learned, via a Canadian socialist podcaster named Nora Loreto, that habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime, a trivial thing. Even a third conviction for thieving someone else’s car should not result in incarceration or any physical impediment, because the victims of car theft – who do not exist, apparently – “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” announced Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.

Other topics included an educational effort in San Francisco, in which elementary school children were expected to “disrupt whiteness,” and to have – or at least regurgitate – strong opinions on the Israeli military. Needless to say, this focus on political indoctrination and imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords,” came at the expense of more mundane subjects, with English and maths scores hitting record lows, and with less than 4% of students considered numerate. All in the name of “removing barriers to learning.”

And we pondered the weirdly woke marketing of retailer John Lewis, whose customers were doubtless inspired to shop harder and more often thanks to photographs of store employees accompanied by details of their mental health problems and niche sexual leanings. Among them, Mr Marc Geoffrey Albert Whitcombe, now known as Ruby, who was thrilled by “the chance to express my true inner self,” and who was photographed in an enormous rose-adorned wig and while clutching a cat o’ nine tails. Customers intrigued by this in-store display soon discovered Mr Whitcombe’s social media presence, which consists of hundreds of selfies in which he attempts erotic poses, complete with ladies’ lingerie and while gripping sex toys in his mouth.

As if all the above wasn’t nauseating enough already, David carries on in like emetic vein from there.

Comeback kids

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

Everything old is new again.

Guardian Angels resume NYC subway patrols for first time since 2020 after shocking arson murder
The Guardian Angels are resuming their patrols of the Big Apple’s subways as if it were crime-riddled Gotham in 1979, after the horrifying arson murder of a sleeping straphanger on a train last week, founder Curtis Sliwa said Sunday.

The red-beret-wearing volunteer vigilante squad is beefing up its ranks to its level 45 years ago, Sliwa said.

“We’re going to have to increase our numbers, increase the training and increase our presence as we did back in 1979,” Sliwa said at the Stillwell Avenue-Coney Island station in Brooklyn where the woman was killed.

“We went from 13 to 1,000 [members] back then within a period of a year,” he said. “Because the need was there. The need is here now once again. We’re going to step up. We’re going to make sure we have a visual presence just like we had in the ’70s, 80’s and ’90s.”

Ever since last week’s shocking slaying, “hundreds of citizens” have requested the Guardian Angels return to patrol the subway cars, Sliwa claimed.

“We’re covering the actual trains from front to back, walking through the trains and making sure that everything is okay,” he told The Post on Sunday. “We’re doing this constantly now. Starting today. that’s going to be our complete focus because the subways are out of control.”

True dat, and it ain’t by accident neither. In my view, New Yorkers really screwed the pooch by not electing Curtis Mayor of NYC when they had the chance some years back. Lots of Rotten Apple denizens made mock of the Angels when I was living there, said they were posers, phonies, vigilantes, unneeded, etc, but I must say I was never sorry to see one of them walk into my car when I was riding the F train back to my nabe drunk as a boiled owl at 4 AM.

Dang, it only just dawned on me that all of these recent incidents—Daniel Penny, the incineration of that poor girl by a maniacal illegal alien, a cpl others—occurred on the F line somewhere. The F’s East Broadway stop (the last one in Manhattan, if I remember right, before zigging out through Crooklyn and terminating at Coney Island) was the one and only subway station anywhere near my palatial digs at 241 E Broadway, so if I needed to go uptown and didn’t have the scratch to call up Delancey Car Service for a ride it was my best bet; at our pad, we kept a Delancey card next to the phone at all times, and it got a heck of a lot of use, too.

It was a real slog to the E B’way F station—sweaty and miserable in summertime, especially on the not-rare occasions I was lugging at least one (1) guitar case, ball-freezing cold in winter—but I made it many a time just the same. Can’t say I ever felt truly endangered riding the F train, but then again Giuliani was mayor back then too, so go figure.

Resolutions? In a pig’s eye

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Mike

Now far as I’m concerned, this right here is the proper attitude to take towards any so-called “New Years resolutions.”

Stolted from good ol’ Miz Barnhardt’s always awesome Barrage.

Sympathy for the devil

Posted on December 28, 2024December 28, 2024 by Mike

Gee, wonder why his grandson turned out to be the oxygen-thieving little predator he was. Why, one might almost conclude that Grampa’s attitude might have been the REAL problem whence the whole mishegas derived.

Still Baffling: AR-15 Provides Homeowners with Unfair Advantage Over Intruders?
Sometimes in researching stories to share with TTAG’s audience you come across an old one that still makes you shake your head. Sometimes you come across an old one that makes you shake your head so much you just have to share it. After all these years, what this grandfather says, in spite of his obvious grief, is still a head scratcher. So here’s the story:

Years ago, Massad Ayoob once told me, “In a fight for your life, if it’s a fair fight, your tactics suck.” Like many of us, I’ve heard (and used) that same expression countless times. However, a grandfather in Oklahoma apparently thought it should be a fair fight between home invaders like his grandson and innocent homeowners.

Leroy Schumacher told media outlets that the homeowner’s use of an AR-15 gave him an “unfair advantage” against the gaggle of armed thugs who broke into his home. In the end, three of the thugs assumed room temperature.

Don’t you love it when the family members of violent criminals speak out to the media, trying to paint their misguided scholar kin as the true victims.

Grandpa Schumacher brought a big shovel to continue diggin’.

“What these three boys did was stupid,” said Leroy Schumacher.

Schumacher agrees his grandson and his friends made a bad decision, but not one worthy of deadly consequences.

“They knew they could be punished for it but they did not deserve to die,” said Schumacher.

Schumacher says his grandson didn’t have a chance. The 17-year old, he says, never got into trouble.

“Brass knuckles against an AR-15, come on, who was afraid for their life,” Schumacher told the station at the time.

Don’t give a shit, Gramps. Your worthless spawn, happily for all of his future intended victims, has now assumed room temperature, so who was or was not “afraid for their life” is no longer relevant. “Unfair”? Cry me a river, asswipe; your precious “good boy” is dead purely because he made the fatal mistake of breaking into the wrong house, no other reason. If you can’t do the time, then don’t do the crime, as the old saying goes. May he, his hapless partners, and especially you, burn in Hell for a thousand years—a lengthy stretch which should afford the whole sorry lot of you ample time to figure it out for yourselves.

Bottom line, the stupid wannabe-thug brought brass knuckles to a gunfight. The most satisfying part of this story would have to be its decidedly happy ending (bold mine):

Authorities didn’t agree with Schumacher’s sentiments, however, and Zach Peters was not charged with any crimes because police say he acted in self-defense. Schumacher was not convinced that the shooting was justified, though, and reiterated his belief that the consequences didn’t fit the crime. “There’s got to be a limit to that law, I mean he shot all three of them — there was no need for that,” he said.

No, he should’ve probably just shot one of them and hoped the others ran off instead of taking charging at him and using his own gun to kill him. You can’t make this stuff up!

To think those three teens apparently committed that violent home invasion under the leadership of their criminal mastermind friend Elizabeth Rodriguez, who eventually pled guilty to reduced charges and was sentenced to 45 years for each of her criminal partners killed. All three sentences were to be servied concurrently. As for her associates Jacob Redfearn, Jake Woodruff and Max Cook, they will for eternity pay the price for a very stupid decision that they learned too late has very real, long-term consequences. While this incident took place in 2017, it’s a lesson that is still valid today.

You don’t go in a person’s home unless invited. It’s as simple as that.

Annnnd BINGO! ‘Nuff said.

Grandpa’s grief is of course understandable. Which only makes it all the more crucial that the arrant horseshit said grief has led him to espouse be quashed immediately and vehemently, lest such destructive “thinking” gain a toehold via misplaced sympathy and metastasize throughout society entire, to all our great detriment. Decent folks tolerate nonsense like this at their own dire peril. Denounce it or die, sayeth I.

Final positive aspect? Just this: Grampa’s inept thug of a grandson and his criminal ex-confreres will never break into someone else’s house with intent to victimize a homeowner guilty only of minding his own business again, guar-on-TEED. Curmudgeon nonpareil HL Mencken, a/k/a the Sage of Baltimore, expressed the core principle thusly: “Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.” A-fuggin’ MEN, podnah.

Off-topic update! Speaking of happy endings, MarsEdit 5.3 is still choogling merrily away, to my tremendous relief. YAAAAY!

ON-topic update! Via Lakeside Joe: Another lesson learned too late, another goblin DRT.

Florida Man Shoots at Two Migrants in Alleged Home Invasion, One Died
A Florida homeowner shot at two migrants who allegedly broke into his home Thursday night. One of the migrants, a Mexican national, died from multiple gunshot wounds.

Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells told reporters his deputies responded to a call about a shooting connected to an alleged home invasion burglary. The homeowner said his home surveillance camera alerted him to the two masked men who were about to break into his home, Fox 13 reported.

“He [the homeowner] knew something bad was about to happen, and he didn’t stall. He grabbed his firearm, told his wife to get into a safe spot,” the sheriff said. “This is the state of Florida. If you want to break into someone’s home, you should expect to be shot.”

The homeowner reportedly told his wife to find a safe place in the house as he grabbed his firearm to defend his home and family. Florida is a Castle Doctrine state that allows a homeowner to use deadly force to defend himself or others.

Bold mine again, and utterly delightful.

The Great State Of Florida and a handful of other localities notwithstanding, it shows how very far shitlibs have dragged the Overton window towards Leftist tyranny, that the once nearly universal assumption that defending the sanctity of one’s home and the safety of one’s family using deadly force was reasonable and appropriate—in fact, was every self-respecting Man of the House’s solemn duty—should now be questionable, even outrageous, for a great many so-called “Americans.”

Time was, getting shot and/or killed was held to be an occupational hazard for housebreakers, thieves, and other such vermin, far from being unheard of; even said vermin realized that the longer he plied his nefarious trade, his odds of being shot would rise from “Highly Likely” all the way up to “Dead Certain.” The idea that a law-abiding citizen would someday be arrested, tried, and incarcerated for the “crime” of ventilating a marauding armed robber or robbers would have drawn gales of scornful laughter from all and sundry in those days—preposterous, absurd, manifestly Unpossible© here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave!

Today, alas, this upending of the very concept of Law And Order itself is taken as read, a given. Even amongst 2A absolutists, the too-real prospect of imprisonment, persecution, and personal ruin based on the most threadbare pretext—when The Enemy bothers to justify Himself at all, mind—is now accepted as the stuff of everyday life in Amerika v2.0. Again with the Eternal Truth: no matter how much you hate Them, you don’t hate Them enough.

All in all, the newly-controversial God-given right to effectively defend one’s home, loved ones, belongings, and bodily self is yet another Founding principle which has been flung down and danced upon by the Leftist wrecking crew. Having grown up in a very different America than the one I see all around me in my dotage—its exact opposite, in fact; the Disney-reboot version of it, written, produced, and directed by Bearded Spock—I can only wonder how the hell it ever came to this. We’ve come a long way, baby—every step of it in precisely the wrong direction.

Publick Notice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Short eyes

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

She spells it right out, and it’s funnier’n all hell.

That appears to be noted video game expert, ReichWingNaziDeathBeastXtian raconteur, self-proclaimed Carnivore, and all-round troublemaker Melonie Mac, a pulchritudinous young lass who—at least from the looks of her X/Twitter feed—pulls no punches, not one, not ever. Via our friend Phil, who says:

Saying out loud what everybody else has been thinking for the last 5 years.

Pretty much, yup. FULL DISCLOSURE: As I keep insisting re ((((Dem pesky JooJooJooJOOOOOZ!!!))), I have no problem whatever with gays qua gays, never have had. My problem is exclusively and entirely with the strident, in-your-face shitlib variety, for whom I have no use at all.

I assume that, towards the end of Melonie’s rant when she mentions “homos buying children,” she’s referring to this godawful news item.

Gay couple who showed off picture-perfect family gets 100 years in prison for horrific rape of adopted sons
A gay Georgia couple convicted of sickening sexually abuse of their two adopted sons will spend the rest of the lives behind bars.

William and Zachary Zulock, 34 and 36, were each sentenced last week to 100 years in prison without the possibility of parole, the Walton County District Attorney’s office announced.

“These two Defendants truly created a house of horrors and put their extremely dark desires above everything and everyone else,” said District Attorney Randy McGinley, according to WSB-TV.

The couple raised them under the guise of a happy home in an affluent Atlanta suburb.

But their supposedly picture-perfect life — Zachary worked in banking and William was a government employee — held a dark secret.

The couple were regularly forcing the boys to have sex with them, and would film the abuse to make pedophilic pornography.

Evidence showed they even bragged about the abuse to twisted friends, with one telling police Zachary once sent a Snapchat message reading “I’m going to f–k my son tonight. Stand by,” along with images of the boy being abused.

And they allegedly used social media to pimp the boys out to at least two men in a depraved local pedophile sex ring.

Sick fucks. Good luck in prison, freaks, God knows you’re gonna need plenty and to spare of it. From what various hardcore recidivist bikers have given me to understand over the years, you Short Eyes types tend to have it extremely rough on the inside.

OOOOPS!

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

Oops oops oooopsie.

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

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

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

> Blinks. SMH. <

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

Dysfunction, all the way down

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

I don’t usually write about these events, but in this latest case I will make an exception by way of making a broader point.

The 15-year-old girl who killed two people and wounded six others when she opened fire at her Wisconsin Christian school had been in therapy over her troubled home life with her parents — who repeatedly divorced and remarried, court records show.

Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the deadly mass shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison on Monday, was at times yanked between her parents’ homes every two or three days when they were separated, according to records obtained by the Washington Post.

Her mother and father, Mellissa and Jeff Rupnow, first married in 2011, two years after they had Natalie, who had recently started using the first name Samantha.

They divorced in 2014 and shared custody of Natalie, who they agreed would live primarily with her mother.

The couple then remarried three years later in 2017 — just to get divorced for a second time another three years after that, in 2020.

This time, they more evenly split custody of their daughter, with Natalie spending two days with her father, then two days with her mother, followed by three days with her father again in a schedule that would alternate weekly, the DC paper reported.

They married for a third time shortly thereafter — but by April 2021 were splitting up again.

A judge granted the divorce a month later but noted that “parties [were] admonished concerning remarriage,” according to court documents.

In July 2022, a mediator ruled that the couple would again share custody of Natalie but she would live primarily with her father.

By that time, Natalie, just 12 years old, was going to therapy sessions that were meant to help determine which parent she would spend her weeks with, according to court records.

There’s more awfulness yet, all of it as dysfunctional as dysfunctional gets, but the above ought to make for a good enough start. With an upbringing as unstable as that, and as common as such familial instability has come to be nowadays, the real wonder is that more of these poor waifs aren’t picking up a piece and going all “I Don’t Like Mondays” on the rest of the world. The closer is about as stinging a wry jab as I think I’ve ever seen.

In they come, out they go

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

Having accumulated another YUUUGE surplusage of most excellent memery from various sources over recent weeks/months, I’m thinking this Friday’s Eyrie offering is gonna be another meme-blast, by way of clearing out the inventory a bit. Just sayin’, that’s all. As you were….

Update! What the hey, a cpl-three examples just to prime the pump for Friday.