Out in the open

A whistleblower rips the veil asunder.

Project Veritas released a bombshell video today where a Google manager admits to election interference to support Joe Biden.

Google’s Cloud Technical Program Manager Ritesh Lakhar said that it is intentional that the Google search results that show scathingly negative content regarding Donald Trump and entirely positive content about Joe Biden.

He said that the content was “skewed by the owners and drivers of the algorithm.”

“If Trump wins, there will be riots. And if they left wins, they will be ecstatic. I disagree with the corporations playing God and taking away freedom of speech on both sides, basically.”

“So, I’m like, you’re like playing selective God. Like, if it was fraud it doesn’t matter, but for Trump or Melania Trump, it matters. And on the other side, Trump says something, misinformation, you’re gonna delete that because it’s illegal under whatever pretext. And if a Democratic leader says that, then you’re gonna leave it like that. So I’m like, okay, you’re not following one way or the other. You are just plain and simple trying to play God.”

“When Trump won the first time, people were crying in the corridors of Google. There were protests, there were marches. There were like I guess, group therapy sessions for employees, organized by HR.”

Aww, poor fragile dears. It’s enough to make a confirmed Android man go buy himself an iPhone, despite the exorbitant price.

Update! More, from GP.

Recall, over the summer Congressman Jim Jordan asked Google if they were actively helping Joe Biden win the 2020 election.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai refused to give Jim Jordan a “yes” or “no” answer during his appearance before the House Anti-Trust committee.

Congressman Jim Jordan asked Sundar Pichai several times if he can assure the American people that Google won’t tailor its features to help Joe Biden win the election.

Sundar Pichai didn’t say “no,” he just went into his carefully crafted talking points in an effort to sound neutral.

It’s way past time to bust these nefarious Big Tech monopolies the fuck up, and straight to hell with any disingenuous Neocon handwringing over government interference in the “free market.”

Tonight’s Tune Damage™ selection

Heard this on the car radio earlier. I’d almost forgotten how much I always dug it.




I’ve been told, by people who would certainly know, that Ian Astbury was a pluperfect prick to work with, for whatever that’s worth to ya. But no matter; if the guy never produces another hit record his whole life long, he sure did good with that one.

Busted!

As I just cross-posted on MeWe: I love this story SO DAMNED MUCH.

The New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin for masturbating on a Zoom video chat between members of the New Yorker and WNYC radio last week. Toobin says he did not realize his video was on.

Two people who were on the call told Motherboard separately that the call was an election simulation featuring many of the New Yorker’s biggest stars: Jane Mayer was playing establishment Republicans; Evan Osnos was Joe Biden, Jelani Cobb was establishment Democrats, Masha Gessen played Donald Trump, Andrew Marantz was the far right, Sue Halpern was left wing democrats, Dexter Filkins was the military, and Jeffrey Toobin playing the courts. There were also a handful of other producers on the call from the New Yorker and WNYC.

Both people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, noted that it was unclear how much each individual person on the call saw, but both of the people we spoke to said that they saw Toobin jerking off. The two sources described a juncture in the election simulation when there was a strategy session, and the Democrats and Republicans went into their respective break out rooms for about 10 minutes. At this point, they said, it seemed like Toobin was on a second video call. The sources said that when the groups returned from their break out rooms, Toobin lowered the camera. The people on the call said they could see Toobin touching his penis. Toobin then left the call. Moments later, he called back in, seemingly unaware of what his colleagues had been able to see, and the simulation continued.

And we’re all supposed to believe that it’s Trump who’s the degenerate.

Update! Didn’t think of it until just now, but I believe I’m gonna put up permanent links to MeWe, Gab, and Duck Duck Go over in the right sidebar. Just as a public service, y’unnerstand.

“Is the nation’s top law enforcement agency protecting society from sociopaths or is the bureau itself sociopathic?”

Take a wild guess.

After 9/11, the FBI spent few years going after very petty Islamists while covering its collective eyes to the work of major sources of trouble, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Authority, and Saudi Arabia—each beloved by parts of the ruling class. But before and after this period, these profiles more often than not pointed to the ruling class’ favorite enemy: fellow Americans “excessively concerned with their liberties.”

The FBI’s method? Place agents among the target group, stoke their sentiments, and lead them to say or do something that could be characterized as a crime, then arrest them and claim credit for foiling a plot. In intelligence lingo, that is provocation. In legal terms, it’s entrapment. By whatever name, this is the work of cheap, dirty cops.

In the 1950s, the joke was that any meeting of a Communist Party cell in the New York area was likely to consist of two-thirds infiltrators, half from the FBI and the other half from the New York Police Department. But these FBI infiltrators, like those of the Vietnam era in the 1960s and early ’70s, and like those who penetrated organized crime were merely watching. Doing an honest job. They were not provoking or entrapping, not creating something that would never have been there except for their presence.

Fast forward to our time. The contrast between how the FBI behaves with regard to persons connected to the ruling class and those who are not speaks for itself. The 918 Americans who died in mass suicide in Jonestown Guyana in November 1978 were victims of a cult that had been closely associated with the California Democratic Party. Relatives of the people who were being drawn in had complained to the FBI. But the FBI had refused to keep an eye on the movement, and later officially argued that doing so would have infringed on its political and religious liberties.

And yet when the Tea Party movement arose to protest collusion between the Republican and Democratic parties against popular sentiment on a host of political issues, the FBI rushed to infiltrate it.

The FBI has been corrupt since its inception, and it always will be. Its officials, both high and humble, conspired to first rig and then reverse a legitimate election via a plethora of obviously illegal and unethical acts, for which they will suffer no consequences whatsoever. It is a rogue, unaccountable, out of control agency whose continued existence in any nation that dares to flatter itself with empty platitudes about “liberty” and “the rule of law” is an abomination. It should be dismantled. Period.

Update! Let’s not leave this out.

One of the strangest details of the exclusive New York Post story involving the recovered data from a computer linked to Hunter Biden is the story of the laptop itself and what is alleged about it. You can read about the evidence alleging that Hunter Biden was trading influence with foreign actors in Matt Margolis’s piece here. But what also interested me was the part of the NYP investigation where they claim there’s a sex tape and pornographic photos starring Hunter on the laptop—and the FBI knew about it in December.

Let’s forget for a moment that there’s reportedly a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack and romping with hookers on the laptop. That’s par for the course, isn’t it?

What about the part where the FBI had possession of this information back in December? Why didn’t the FBI come forward with this evidence about Hunter Biden’s emails, which appear to show collusion and influence-trading? Isn’t that something they should have told the president or members of Congress? Was the FBI deliberately covering it up? If the good citizen who came forward and alerted the FBI of the contents of the laptop had not made a copy of the information, it would still be under FBI lock and key. But the computer repairman did make a copy and sent it to Rudy Giuliani. If true, it’s a stunning indictment of the FBI that an American citizen—who alerted them to alleged multiple crimes involving a guy with the last name Biden—knew not to trust them and made other arrangements should they try to cover it up (which, apparently, they did).

That, too, is par for the course.

Fireflying in an Alliance lockdown

We’re too close for comfort.

As the “two weeks to flatten the curve” Wuhan virus pandemic has stretched to “you’ll be free when we say so and we may never let you go to church or synagogue again,” many of us have turned to TV to fill the hours and help us mark the days. Woke sports provide no respite from the social civil war anymore. TV is mostly mental poison these days, but not entirely. Firefly is flying again, with all its episodes available on Hulu. I’ve turned to re-re-re-watching Firefly over the past week or two. It’s not as good as I remember it being when I first watched it. It’s better now. 

Firefly is a spaghetti Western set on the edges of a galaxy still in turmoil, much like The Mandalorian is now. Firefly has trains and cattle drives and heists, and it probably shouldn’t work. But it does. Capt. Mal christens his beat up but mostly reliable ship Serenity after a climactic but losing battle, despite knowing the very name will raise suspicions about him and his crew with the Alliance and its operatives. He’s more loyal to the cause than it was loyal to him, but that’s just who he is.

Nowadays, we have the government of California telling its residents they must wear a mask between bites when they go out to eat and they won’t be allowed to buy gas-powered cars in a few years. New York is snooping on Orthodox Jews to make sure they’re not gathering in large numbers to pray — while violent riots are allowed night after night whenever they spring up in any Democrat-run city. The NBA denounces America while it turns a blind eye to slavery enforced by its corporate partners in Beijing. This is all asinine and unconstitutional and wrong. The Alliance just keeps creeping in on us, spoiling for a fight in some Serenity Valley.

Because the network ruined its one shot at broadcast glory, Whedon and company wrapped up what they planned to take place over several seasons into the one film, Serenity. That film feels a little compressed compared to the series, but it’s consistent in character and message. Serenity also has a message that offers some grit in our time of plague: “You can’t stop the signal.”

Tech tyrants Facebook and Twitter tried stopping the NY Post signal this week. That blew up in their faces, as it should, and as Serenity predicted it would. 

Oh, did it now? Tell me, how many have left Twitter for Gab or Parler? Did the Malignancy Twins suddenly reverse their censorship and election-tampering policies to allow a truly free, open, and impartial platform, and I just missed the announcement? Did they reinstate Trump’s, McEnany’s, and the Republican Congressmen’s accounts? Are they allowing people to Tweet and re-Tweet the NY Post expose all of a sudden? Have they had their protected status under S230 duly revoked, as it damned well ought to be?

No? To ALL of that? Well, hey, get back to me when it truly HAS “blown up in their faces” then, ‘kay? Until such time, it’s safe to say that the signal has indeed been stopped.

We’re the Ramones…and you’re not

Just put up my first MeWe post, but sadly the video I tried to embed failed to embed for some reason. Yes, I’ve posted this one here before, I know, but I just don’t care. Deal, baby.




As I said on MeWe: it’s the greatest performance of the greatest song by the greatest band in history. Or, as Louder Than War’s John Robb puts it: “It’s all already there.. the ripped jeans, perfect poses, great tune, simplicity turned to an artform… a year later they would change music for ever…” Perfectly true, all of it.

One of the YT commenters says:

You know you are a serious Ramones fan when you think the terrible audio quality sounds cool

That’s as may be, I suppose. But the audio, umm, “quality” is one of the biggest reasons this video just flies all over me—to quote Little Richard, it makes my big toe shoot up in my boot. That raspy, buzzsaw distortion is every sound engineer’s worst nightmare; one can readily imagine the audio techs in the TV studio control booth literally bursting into tears and pulling their hair out by the handful when they realized that there was absolutely nothing they could do to fix this.

Much as the audiophiles and knob-twiddlers might disdain distortion as the very anathema of good sound and moral propriety, though, it’s also the direct result of the very thing that makes real rock and roll great: the awesome power of sheer, brain-busting VOLUME.

Without volume to excess, rock and roll loses its ability to excite, to incite, to inspire passion and release. Mind you, I don’t mean to say that there’s no ceiling, no point at which enough spills over into way the hell too much. It’s a surpassing-fine line that must be drawn here, and it’s very easy to cross over and get on the wrong side of it, to the ruination of everyone’s good time. I’ve certainly been to shows where the band was so loud it was actually unendurable, a muddled, unpleasant mess.

The fact remains, though: if it ain’t LOUD, it might just as well be jazz. In real rock and roll, and not some lame-ass Chris Cross pop-a-doodle claptrap, you want that guitar to bite; you want that snare to crack, that bass to thump. You want to feel that kick-drum push against your chest. The right level of LOUD is indeed a physical thing. But it shouldn’t be a painful one. You can peg the needles now and then, but you never want to bury them.

To my ears, the Ramones had things dialed in exactly right in this instance. It’s one of their very first TV performances, on a NYC local-access show called Arturo’s Loft, before they were known much of anywhere outside the hallowed halls of CBGB’s. And it’s just…remarkable.

Yes, that distortion is absolutely filthy all right. But notice: the levels of all the instruments, and the vocals too, are dead on. Meaning, nobody is drowning anybody out; you can hear Joey’s vocals just fine, loud if not exactly clear. And the vocals are usually the first thing to suffer from high volume—if they aren’t overwhelmed by a tidal wave of guitar, they’re sure to be lost behind the cymbal crashes perpetrated by an over-excited Keith Moon enthusiast.

But in the above video, you can actually distinguish everything, vocals included. Of course, the Ramones’ pure-as-the-driven-snow simplicity helps a lot with that. And it’s just as Mr Robb says: the Ramones turned simplicity into an art form. In fact, “simple” was the driving force from Day One, the whole idea, their raison d’etre. Johnny, for example, never was much for meandering, self-indulgent guitar solos, a staple of rock from its earliest days. Even later in the band’s career, when he did toss off his (very) occasional lead bits, he always kept them short, sweet, and straight as a razor.

I was fortunate enough to get to chat with Joey for an hour or so once, at the old Coney Island High entertainment complex on St Mark’s Place in NYC. Me and the GF were just kind of hanging out, nothing out of the ordinary going on, when I realized that I was standing not ten feet away from Joey Ramone his own self. I dithered for a moment; on the one hand, the Ramones really did change my life, and that’s the truth. So I very much wanted to express my gratitude for the crucial role they had played for me personally, for the inspiration they had provided me.

On the other, I hated to be That Guy, foisting myself on a celebrity who probably just wanted nothing more than an evening out, without having every Bozo from Brooklyn get all up in his grill and make a damnable nuisance of himself.

In the end, the GF insisted I stop being silly and just go over and say hello to the guy, ferchrissakes. Which I did, after a little more waffling. Even though he had to have heard my worshipful spiel so many times already that it made his hair hurt, he was quite gracious about it all. I succinctly explained to him that, after hearing the Ramones in the 70s, I had left the old classic-rock outfit I had been in before to start up Charlotte’s first punk outfit. I told him I had then drifted into the rockabilly thing, and was doing fairly well with it. He told me that he actually loved hearing such things from fellow players—people who were actually out there fighting the rock and roll road-wars for real and not just idly fantasizing about it, or boasting to their friends about all the big things they planned to do—someday.

Then a fight broke out behind us and some doofus got shoved into Joey’s back, nearly knocking him down and causing him to stagger slightly and spill his drink. He excused himself to head for the bar and a refill, and the GF and I wandered off someplace else.

I listen mostly to classical music on the radio nowadays, and go for long stretches at a time without listening to the Ramones at all. But I swear, every time I put ’em on again I wonder what the hell took me so long, what the hell was I thinking by it. Then I go on a Ramones binge for a few days, and I enjoy every second of it, too. It’s a fact, Jack: though the Ramones may not be everybody’s cup of tea, they really did change rock and roll, completely and forever. It’s kinda funny that their influence is so far-reaching and deep…but just the same, nobody else sounds quite like ’em. Ironically enough, the Ramones’ simple, stripped-down approach turned out to be a thing that moved mountains.

Power play

I’m sure you all know about the execrable Protect-Biden stunt Twitter just pulled, so I won’t bothering with rehashing all that and just cut straight to the chase.

But anyways, Joe Biden potentially doing sleazy shit isn’t the point of this post. Because the really Orwellian thing was what came next, when the big soulless social media megacorps tried to squash the story in the most ham fisted way imaginable.

They didn’t just squash the story. They squashed the story and then bragged about it in public. They declared the story to be “harmful” (as in harmful to the election prospects of their chosen candidate). And they cited some bullshit reasons about why they couldn’t share this story, even though they were happy to ignore all those same rules repeatedly whenever it was a breaking story that hurt Trump.

Supposedly they can’t allow the sharing of a story that makes Biden look bad because the information was “leaked”… except they were gleefully sharing Trump’s leaked tax info last week, and before that Russia Collusion nonsense wasn’t so much a leak as a high pressure lawn sprinkler. That was totally okay.

Of course, prog apologists were quick to dismiss the New York Post as fake news, even though it’s the fourth biggest circulating newspaper in America, and these same sites have zero problem sharing painfully obvious fabricated bullshit from crap sites as long as it agrees with lefty orthodoxy. And even then the Post could be total trash, but that’s still Hunter Biden there smoking crack on camera and influence peddling while talking about getting a cut for Pop. (as in Joe Biden, not Corn Pop, gotta clarify because there’s a lot of guys called Pop in this saga).

That would be bad enough, but then it got extra stupid! So while these evil media empires are pretending that they are unbiased and merely trying to “curate the truth”, they banned the White House Press Secretary! They stopped sitting US senators from sharing news articles. Then they banned the president’s reelection campaign nineteen days before an election!

If social media had banned Obama’s press secretary, and then stopped Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer from sharing articles from the New York Times, and then shut down the Obama campaign page nineteen days before his election against Mitt Romney, everyone would have lost their fucking minds. And rightfully so! Because that kind of blatant manipulation of information is evil.

But Correia, they are private companies and you are usually against meddling in the affairs of private companies, you big hypocrite! Yeah, usually I am, but this is also something new, the likes of which mankind has never seen before, with these entities being the primary exchange of information for BILLIONS of people, so it’s kind of hard to put this thing which didn’t exist before into historical context. Facebook has no real competitors, and it has something like 2.7 billion regular users. With the flick of a switch it can stop a third of the Earth’s population from seeing whatever it doesn’t want them to see. Humanity has never had that before.

That’s real fucking power right there.

Correia gets a bit further into the free-market-good, government-regulation-bad weeds from there, which is perfectly understandable and not really even wrong, as far as it goes. But as Larry also cautions, we’re in truly uncharted waters here. And it would be the worst imaginable folly to allow these evil fascists to get away with what their manipulations because Muh Principles™. It’s been demonstrated repeatedly, for decades now, just where that approach leads. It’s a recipe for defeat, in a war Team Liberty can NOT afford to lose.

I won’t belabor that proposition either, for now at least. Instead, allow me to suggest two social-media alternatives to the heinous, treacherous, and insidious Twitter and Faceberg. You’ll know about Gab already, I’m guessing. I’m actually registered there myself, although not being a 140-character guy I never use the thing. In fact, I’m somewhat pleased with myself for remembering my login and pass just now.

What you may not know about is a Facefap alternative mentioned by one of Correia’s commenters, called MeWe. I went ahead set myself up a page there, although since I always hated Fakebook too and haven’t bothered with it in quite a long while now, who knows how much I’ll use MeWe. But what the hell, if you’re into the social-media thing, do yourself a favor: make the switch to a platform that doesn’t hate your guts, tell all your friends, and help to make the world a better place by undermining the gagalicious Twatter/Facebleccch twin malignancies.

It’s not the crime, it’s the coverupdate! The Deep State looks out for its own.

The owner of a Delaware computer repair store where a man he believes was Hunter Biden dropped off a laptop that allegedly contained emails detailing an opportunity for a meeting between former Vice President Joe Biden and a top Burisma executive and other “disturbing” items, told Fox News on Wednesday that he was frightened by what he saw.

The man, John Paul Mac Isaac, said he has a condition that affects his vision and “can’t be 100% sure” it was Hunter Biden who dropped off the computer for repair. The Wilmington shop owner said he contacted the FBI out of concern, but declined to specify what he meant.

“I just don’t know what to say, or what I’m allowed to say,” Isaac said. “I know that I saw, I saw stuff. And I was concerned. I was concerned that somebody might want to come looking for this stuff eventually and I wanted it out of my shop.”

In September, he contacted an intermediary about the emails. The intermediary then contacted the FBI.

According to Isaac’s account, the FBI first made a forensic copy of the laptop, then returned weeks later with a subpoena and confiscated it. When he stopped hearing from the FBI, Isaac said he contacted several members of Congress, who did not respond. At that point, his intermediary reached out to Rudy Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello.

Making his own copy of the hard drive was a smart move on his part. In the Fox interview, Isaac says that he was worried about shadowy figures “coming back” for the laptop—as well he should have been. If I was him, I’d be looking into hiring myself a full-time bodyguard. But will there be a reckoning for the censorious Twin Malignancies and their sleight-of-hand electioneering? Ummm…wellllll, maybe.

The backlash from Republican leaders against the platforms was severe, with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, saying the Twitter CEO would be receiving a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“We have seen Big Tech—we’ve seen Twitter and Facebook—actively interfering in this election in a way that has no precedent in the history of our country,” Cruz said in a statement alongside committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-SC.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to know what the hell is going on,” Cruz said.

“… Let me be clear: I don’t know if these New York Post stories are true or not,” he continued. “Those are questions Vice President Biden should answer. But Twitter and Facebook and Big Tech billionaires don’t get to censor political speech and actively interfere in the election.”

Oddly enough, Cruz announced this in, umm, a Tweet. So, more hearings and committees and blue-ribbon panels then. What’s that old line about “sound and fury” and what they signify again?

You GO, sassy girl!

However Roberts-like a disappointment she may or may not turn out to be eventually, I do like the cut of her jib so far.



Via Bill.

Update! Okay, I admit did NOT see this coming.

Senate Democrats said earlier this week that they hoped to defeat the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court by focusing “on the issues and the merits.”

Now, on day two of her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dems are telling reporters are impressed with what they see.

While Barrett was still being grilled Tuesday, even liberal reporters on CNN and NBC  had to admit that she was doing a good job answering the Senators’ questions.

Sen. John Cornyn, (R-Texas) had earlier asked Barrett about how she had prepared for the hearing.

All morning long, Barrett effortlessly answered questions on a wide range of judicial matters, and was able to summon from memory her own past judgments and those of other courts.

“You know most of us have multiple notebooks and notes and books and things like that in front of us,” Cornyn said. “Can you hold up what you’ve been referring to in answering our questions?”

Barrett smiled and held up a blank notepad that was sitting in front of her.

“Is there anything on it?” Cornyn asked.

“The letterhead that says ‘United States Senate,’” she responded.

“That’s impressive,” Cornyn said.

Won’t stop all the Demonrats from voting against her confirmation, I’m sure.

Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion!

Francis waxes even more outraged than I did over the Left’s desecration of LOTR.

“Worried” doesn’t nearly cover it. I’m outraged by the mere possibility.

Their moral clarity is one of the main reasons for the immense popularity of Tolkien’s works. They pit good against evil, freedom against enslavement, and heroes against villains, vacillators, compromisers, and the “let me think it over” types whose sole concern is to be on the winning side. Those who insist that “there’s no black or white, only shades of gray” can never be comfortable with such a premise.

Please don’t confuse moral clarity with prudishness. No, there are no sex scenes in Tolkien’s stories, but that’s irrelevant to the larger issue. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, best known by the title of its first volume, A Game of Thrones, is founded on a completely different moral perspective: one in which essentially everything goes and who was in the right is determined, after the dust has settled, by the victors. It’s not founded on a clash between good and evil, but on what the movers and shakers are willing to do to triumph.

A simple touchstone – “Would you prefer to associate with Tolkien’s heroes or Martin’s?” – dramatizes the differences between the two conceptions, and the reason for the far greater (and more enduring) appeal of Tolkien’s oeuvre.

Cold comfort it may be, but it’s still true: The products of Tolkien’s creative genius will remain with us long after the Left’s peurile attempts to sully and diminish them have been forgotten. In their twisted ignorance, they think they’re “expanding” them, “enlarging” them, “broadening” their scope. They will not do so, because they cannot. To paraphrase Lincoln, Tolkien’s works are far beyond their little ability to add or detract; they can only make themselves smaller and more miserable by the effort.

A new low

Yes, Virginia, there really IS nothing they won’t try to debauch, defile, degrade, and destroy.

Amazon Prime’s “Lord of the Rings” series set to release in 2021 has been eagerly anticipated by devoted LOTR fans around the world. The $1 billion series will be set in the Second Age of Middle Earth, which spans 3441 years, before the events of the LOTR movies.

Unfortunately, it looks like the creators of the series, which they claim is based on J.R.R Tolkien’s original work, may be trying to imitate “Game of Thrones”-type nudity and “rapey” storylines. This, no doubt, will delight the left, who have long detested Tolkien’s writing and distinctive Christian influence on popular culture.

According to TheOneRing.net, the casting agency for the series put out an open call for actors who “must be comfortable with nudity.” In addition, Amazon Studios has hired an “intimacy coordinator,” and the writer and producer from “Game of Thrones,” Bryan Cogman, has officially been hired as a consulting producer.

Tolkien’s books were deeply religious and purposeful. As David Platt wrote in a “Standpoint” article, “Tolkien combined his extraordinary talent for story-telling and philology to communicate conservative and Catholic values and images through his captivating fictional tales of Hobbits, Elves, Men, and Dwarfs.” “The Lord of the Rings” is, as Tolkien said, “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work…”

As Platt pointed out, the left wins political battles “through the domination of institutions, the professions, culture and received thought.” The “social conservatism of Middle Earth” is one of the few things in pop culture that is antithetical to the left’s worldview and goals. Naturally, then, the left has employed their usual tactics to take down Tolkien and his Legendarium, pronouncing “The Lord of the Rings” racist, sexist, and non-inclusive of LGBTQ+ people.

The left is already cheering on the beginnings of the presumed assassination of Tolkien’s legacy. The leftist “NY Magazine” ran a story this week headlined, “Give Us the Horny Lord of the Rings Show We Deserve.” “Are we sure that an overwhelmingly erotic Middle Earth experience is such a bad thing,” read the article. “Make the elves get a little freaky. Allow the hobbits their fun. Give a new meaning to the inscription on the West-door of the Mines of Moria: Speak, friend, and enter.”

It’s actually a sickness, this insatiable megalomania filtered through the dark lens of the Left’s twin obssessions: politics, and sexual perversion. I’ll agree with one thing, though: a “horny Lord of the Rings show” actually IS what you deserve. Because an elevated, ennobling, world-changing work of literary art is over your pointy little head, far beyond the pitifully limited comprehension of intellectual and moral dwarves such as yourself.

What you deserve is exactly the kind of grubby, vapid, here-today-gone-tomorrow piece of garbage you’re going to get: a contemptible reboot of a bona fide masterwork thoroughly grounded in Christianity, collapsing into a sooty pile of pure nothingness from having all the Christianity excised from it. You lack the wit to realize why the only thing you’ll take away from the experience is a nagging dissatisfaction, as only an unimaginative brat’s bootless attempt at cocking his snook at the product of true creative genius can bring forth.

LOTR will live on regardless of shitlib vandalism and desecration; Porno Middle Earth will be totally forgotten the moment it gose off the air.

Rebranding: sieze the initiative

A vintage but truly evergreen Van der Leun post I missed when it first appeared back in 2010, found now via WRSA.

I don’t know about you, but I do not consider myself either a “Conservative” or a “Republican” or a member of the “Alt-Right.” Never have. Never will. I consider myself to be one thing and one thing only:

I AM AN AMERICAN.

Always have been.

Always will be.

Nothing less.

Couldn’t be anything more.

Born and bred from ancestors that go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636.

To call me a Conservative is to miss the point.

To call me a Republican is to mistake me by a mile.

To call me an AMERICAN is to know me down to the bone. I suspect this blunt fact is true of all those who term themselves “Independents,” all those who call themselves “Conservative,” all those who joined the Tea Party, and the Trumpening; they and all the others who,

Came from the hills and mountains,
The valleys and the plains,
Some were kind and gentle,
And some too wild to tame.

That’s who we are and that’s who we shall always remain — Americans.

A single, obvious, and overarching word to cover a wide, wide tent:

Americans.

Americans all regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin.

Let’s rebrand ourselves from this point forward. Let us go back to the original brand:

When you are called a Conservative, you reply, “No, I am an AMERICAN.”

If someone tries to tar you with the label “Republican,” you must correct them by saying, “No, I am an AMERICAN.”

If accused of being some sort of stealth fascist by being labeled “Alt-Right,” you need to sort those mental midgets out by reminding them, “No, I am an AMERICAN.”

If they say you are arguing from Republican or Conservative views, point out to them that you are arguing from AMERICAN views only.

Do that consistently and we can all look forward to future disputes and elections that pit the “Progressives” against the AMERICANS. I know which way I’d bet.

Powerful, powerful stuff, and I love it. It’s precisely what I was groping towards when I came up with that “Real American” formulation of mine not too long ago. But Gerard’s version is way better: simple, precise, to the point, and unassailable by anybody who isn’t—as our contemporary Enemies, Domestic™ blockheads are—actively ANTI-American.

Let the Progtards go on trying to conceal what they really are with their habitual redefining and rebranding. Meanwhile, we can reclaim something that was always our own anyway; tweak the living hell out of some perpetually out-of-joint noses; and restore a sense of righteous pride in the word and all it’s supposed to represent—all in one swift and hard rhetorical punch right in their pinched, sallow faces.

Good reads

Since I first read Bill’s fantastic Lightning Falls, I’ve gotten into PAW (Post-Apocalypse World, for the uninitiated) fiction in a big way, thanks to the indispensable Kindle Unlimited virtual lending library. There’s some great, entertaining stuff to be found in the genre, although some books on the topic read like little more than overlong shopping and honey-do lists for survivalists and preppers. Useful for some in a purely practical sense, maybe, but not exactly what I’m looking for in a work of fiction.

NC Reed’s Fire From The Sky series—now up to volume nine or ten, I believe, every one of which I’ve read—is particularly gripping stuff, as is everything else he’s written…all of which I’ve also read and loved.

Reed is an extremely skillful writer, especially so when it comes to creating believable, very human characters and exploring the relationships between them. He’s a Tennessee boy, as are the characters in the Sanders saga, and his dialogue is as real as hot cornbread in a cast-iron skillet. Southern dialect is actually a surprisingly difficult thing to pull off convincingly; many otherwise fine authors have tried and failed embarrassingly at it. Reed’s only real problem is by no means an unusual one these days, one that isn’t really his fault either: the editing is a little, ummm, off here and there. It’s by no means horrible or frequent enough to set your molars a-grinding in fury over it, mind, but it can be a mite distracting occasionally. That minor quibble aside, though, I can’t recommend Reed’s stuff highly enough.

Matt Bracken’s Enemies Foreign And Domestic trilogy, which I’ve mentioned enthusiastically here before, certainly deserves another mention. If you aren’t familiar with his excellent work, well, you need to fix that. Fran Porretto’s brilliant Spooner Federation Saga books are worthy of mention too, although they don’t fit so neatly into the PAW pirgeonhole as the others.

The past few days I’ve found myself totally engrossed in what’s looking like a real masterpiece of the PAW genre: Dogsoldiers, by a fella yclept James Tarr. Tarr, it turns out, also co-authored Carnivore, a good Gulf War memoir by Bradley IFV commander Dillard Johnson. I was sent a copy of Carnivore for review purposes when it first came out, although I can’t recall now if I ever did get around to posting a review here or not.

Dogsoldiers is some damned tasty stuff, a truly outstanding book. The tale is set in near-future Detroit, centering on a pivotal battle in the decade-long civil war waged by a slowly-weakening US federal tyranny against the ragtag, mostly disorganized, and chronically underequipped resistance of freedom fighters referred to in the title. Tarr’s writing is top-notch; the story isn’t marred by any of the uneven or downright sloppy editing that frequently blunts the impact of ebooks for some reason.

In fact, the reason I brought all this up in the first damned place is because the book struck me as plenty good enough to post some excerpts from it here. Our first passage has one of the Good Guy characters—Early, a grizzled, hardcore veteran originally from JawJa—enlightening a shavetail Dogsoldier volunteer, Jason, on some of the harsher realities of life during CW 2.0:

“Early?”

“Yeah?”

“Why don’t we take prisoners? Why were Weasel and George killing their wounded?”

Early looked and saw the teenager was seriously bothered. “Well, there’s two answers to that. First one is…where would we take them? It’s not like we’ve got a base. Or vehicles to transport them. We wander around, causing trouble, living in empty houses and borrowed basements, and then when the cold rolls in either do more of the same or we hol’ up with friends or relatives or in our own houses, far away from the trouble.”

“We could let them live, let the Army treat their injuries.”

Early nodded. “And that’s the other part of it. At the start of the war we let them be, tried to do the civilized thing. Let the Tabs recover their wounded. Not now. Not after ten years. Because they just keep coming back, like the tide. At this point we’ve all realized we’re in a war of attrition—that means neither side is going to surrender, the war only ends when one side has been ground down so much they’ve got no one left who can fight. They’ve had their chance. Any Tabs still fighting are either too mean or too stupid to know they’re on the side of evil.”

“And after the war? In any other war, you capture POWs, at the end of the war you send ‘em home. Which is somewhere else, a whole ‘nother country. Over there somewhere.” He waved his hand vaguely. “After World War II the Germans were sent back to Germany, where they could be Germans, and be nowhere near us. That’s not what this war is. The Tabs live here; win or lose, they’re not going anywhere. Even if they’re not fightin’, and we’re all peaceable and neighborly, they’ll still believe the same things that caused the war in the first place—socialism, communism, vegan grocery bags, twenty-seven genders, guns are evil, America has never been great, never hit back, government should be in charge of everything, all of it. That’s not peace or victory, that’s just a temporary ceasefire. Their beliefs aren’t just evil, they’re a poison, a cancer, a rot. Winning doesn’t just mean the war stops, we want to have a healthy country after all this.”

“It ain’t pretty, son. It ain’t even nice. Maybe it’s our own brand of evil. You don’ like it? Good. That means you’ve got a soul. But it’s the only way we not just win the war, but win the peace afterward.”

Naaah, THAT doesn’t sound like it has any contemporary relevance at all, does it? Pure escapist fiction, no practical reality to be found there, nossir. But this next excerpt cuts even closer to the bone that that, if you can believe it. It’s gonna be a long ‘un, so I’ll tuck it down below the fold and out of the way.

Continue reading “Good reads”

Forty years after

And suddenly, a new contender appears.

The song grabs you in the first two seconds: two shots on an E chord, followed by quarter-note hi-hat hits. You know something big’s going to happen. No—it already is happening.

At five seconds, the hi-hat hits double into eighth-notes as the E chord shots repeat. At seven seconds, the addition of a swung sixteenth-note (played on cowbell with a brush) signals the imminent, exhilarating plunge into a song you’ve never heard, but which you now want to hear more than anything else.

And at twelve seconds, an authoritative, effortlessly-executed drum fill plunges you into what might be rock and roll’s greatest first song on a first album, ever…and we already know—before the song, or even a proper drum part, has started—we’re in the presence of drumming greatness. The rest of the song, as well as the rest of the album, only further confirms it.

If you’re as dyed-in-the-wool a rocker as I am, you already know which song he’s talking about, and which band, and which drummer. The surprise here, though, isn’t that it’s another great music post from Steyn Online. The surprise is that it isn’t Steyn writing this one; it’s his increasingly-impressive co-author, Tal Bachman, who is the scion of a pretty danged rich rock and roll legacy his own bad self.

I don’t even have to say it, right?

Denounce THIS

Sadly, I think the Proud Boys’ leadership stumbled badly on this one.

Enrique Tarrio insists that the Proud Boys aren’t White supremacists, and he would be in a position to know. For one, he’s the international chairman. For another, he’s Black.

“I denounce White supremacy,” Mr. Tarrio said in a Thursday interview with WSVN-TV in Miami. “I denounce anti-Semitism. I denounce racism. I denounce fascism. I denounce communism and any other -ism that is prejudiced toward people because of their race, religion, culture, tone of skin.”

Mr. Tarrio headed the rising tide of those defending the Proud Boys against accusations of racism after President Trump came under fire for refusing to denounce the right-wing activist group at Tuesday’s debate.

In Salt Lake City, Proud Boys members held a joint news conference Wednesday with a local Black Lives Matter leader to correct the record and “denounce White supremacy.”

Dude, wrong answer. You NEVER apologize to these scum; NEVER justify yourself; NEVER try to appease them; NEVER give a single inch or back down to them in any form or fashion; NEVER legitimize them by responding as if you actually take them seriously, or even consider them worthy of a moment’s notice.

Instead, you HAMMER them. You keep pounding away at them relentlessly, ceaselessly, ruthlessly. You show them no mercy, not ever, not the least little bit, not for one second. There is only one proper response to the accusations, the slanders, the lies. It consists of but two little words:

FUCK.

YOU.

If you like, up the ante by hurling their accusations right back in their teeth: YEAH, I’M A GODDAMNED WHITE SUPREMACIST. I’m a racist, homophobe, transphobe, misogynist, Islamophobe, et al ad infinitum. What of it? NOW what, douchebag? Rile them up further yet by throwing in a casual “nigger,” “faggot,” “bitch,” “raghead,” “freak,” and such-like if you feel like really chumming the water. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you’ve fucked with their heads so badly they can do no more than splutter and choke with confused, vein-popping rage in response.

And then give them the most supercilious, insulting little smirk you can produce, and walk away. You’ve just demonstrated, beyond any possible doubt, just how deep your contempt for them really runs, just how little regard you hold for any halfwit opinion or belief they may cherish.

See, the moment you give Leftards the satisfaction of agreeing to “denounce” whatever stupid-ass thing it is that they insist you denounce is the moment you lose. You’ve conceded their premise, which amounts to agreeing to play THEIR game, on THEIR field, by THEIR rules. And for what? It will buy you nothing. You can be sure that they’ll be back again and again, bringing more hoops for you to jump through. Their demands will only escalate, forever and ever. No matter what you do or say, no matter how severely you debase yourself in hopes of a little peace and quiet, it will never, ever be enough to placate them.

Don’t believe me? You might ask one Donald J Trump about it.

“Trump is a Racist” has been trending on Twitter following Tuesday’s presidential debates, despite President Donald Trump denouncing white supremacy and white nationalists again and again over the years, revealing that the mainstream media has traded what is true for what they want to believe.

Twitter user James Klüg posted a video on Twitter Wednesday evening, stitching together 17 times Trump has publicly denounced white supremacy and white nationalism over the years.

And even that list is almost certainly not all-inclusive.

But still they hound the man. In fact, some of the very same Leftymedia assholes currently indignant over Trump’s OUTRAGEOUS!! “refusal” to “denounce white supremacy” have personally heard him do exactly that before:



They’re lying, they know they’re lying, and they don’t care who knows they’re lying. So fuck them all to hell and gone. Don’t play the game; it’s rigged, and was never a very interesting or amusing one anyway. Give them a hearty FOAD, accompanied by the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign just for added emphasis, and then go find yourself somebody you might actually be able to have a worthwhile conversation with instead. Life’s too short to waste any of it fooling around with shitlibs and their “demands.”

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

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

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

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

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

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

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

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