Flotsam and/or Jetsam

Monopolizing the conversation

Posted on July 12, 2020July 12, 2020 by Mike

Our old blog-bud Doug gets a taste of the Google lash.

Helpful hint. For any political search on the web, I recommend using https://t.co/XCYMbXYwz3 … Google is actively re-ordering search results, censoring news, and hiding damaging information against @thedemocrats.

I proved it long ago here: https://t.co/0poWyNsemC

— Doug Ross ?? (@directorblue) July 8, 2020

Oh, interesting tidbit: I couldn't even find my own 2017 blog post using Google. It was #1 on DuckDuckGo (https://t.co/RYFNlkqWqL)

— Doug Ross ?? (@directorblue) July 8, 2020

The saga continues:

To put it bluntly, Google appears to be deleting search results that criticize its use of algorithms to enforce totalitarian political bias. Looks like I hit a nerve.

What’s next? Is Google going to start deleting blog posts with which it disagrees?

Count on it, buddy. He recommends the same recourse that I’ve been shouting about for a long, long time now: Dump Google, use Duck Duck Go instead. Might want to consider switching hosting-service providers there too, old chum.

Liberal Utopia: if you build it, they will run

Posted on July 11, 2020July 11, 2020 by Mike

Looks like we’re gonna need another Big Beautiful Wall, stat.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and his former police commissioners such as Bernard Kerik, who headed up the NYPD force from 2000 to 2001 and directed the police response to 9/11, can only watch and weep as the city they had so successfully cleaned up rapidly descends into chaos and carnage. This Nightmare in New York is brought to you courtesy of Gov. Andrew Cuomo; Mayor Bill de Blasio; and a cast of thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters, anarchists, and street thugs. The once vibrant city is turning into a virtual no-go zone of looted shops, shuttered store windows, and skyrocketing murder rates. The number of shooting victims is up 51% this year so far, and that tragic trend is accelerating. In June of this year, there were 250 shootings, as opposed to 97 in June of 2019.

New York was already reeling from the highest coronavirus death toll in the (formerly) United States, due in large part to Gov. Cuomo approving the transfer of thousands of recovering COVID-19 patients to nursing homes at the height of the pandemic. Then the rioting began, and Mayor de Blasio’s response was to shame cops and propose cutting his city’s police department budget by more than one billion dollars. (That’s one thousand million for those of you who were educated in the city’s public schools.)

The Dimwitted Duo have caused a mass exodus, with 500,000 mostly middle-class New Yorkers fleeing the city thus far and many more likely to follow. Half a million New Yorkers heading for the proverbial hills. That’s more than the entire population of Minneapolis, where all the madness started. Of course, with the Minneapolis City Council repeatedly voting to disband its police force, the entire population of the “Mini apple” may head for the hills as well.

They should all be forced—at gunpoint if necessary—to stay and enjoy the fruits of their labor. They should DAMNED sure not be permitted to scatter out and infest the more civilized and liveable parts of the country, locust-like, to then start lobbying for, voting for, and otherwise insisting upon the exact same policies that they fouled their own nests with all over again.

Brother, can you spare a…

Posted on July 10, 2020July 10, 2020 by Mike

At first glance, this seemed kinda absurd to me. Then I gave it further thought, and…I dunno, it still seems kinda absurd to me.

Pearl Jam, the Eagles, Guns N’ Roses, and Green Day are among the bands who have received loans from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program, Rolling Stone reports.

According to data from the Small Business Administration and Treasury Department, the money will go to supporting and retaining the artists’ crews and staff; Rolling Stone notes that the Eagles’ loan is listed under their touring company and will help save 50 jobs. Larger loans—between $350,000 and $1 million—were taken out by the Eagles, Pearl Jam, and Disturbed. Out of 660,000 recipients, Rolling Stone reports that over 40 musicians and bands received loans for over $150,000, including Weezer, Imagine Dragons, Chainsmokers, Nickelback, and Jason Isbell.

Various major and independent labels also received PPP loans, including Sub Pop Records, Third Man Records, and Knitting Factory Records, who each received a minimum of $350,000.

Not one of the above-named bands are outfits I would think of as needing any federal aid to scrape by; I’d far rather see that dough put into the hands of the struggling, lower-tier road warriors out there who are certainly worse off than they are, and if I was still working the road myself I’d likely resent this, at least somewhat.

On the other hand, though, as the article notes, the assistance is earmarked for their crews and support staff, which makes it seem a bit more reasonable. Although it’s also true that even those guys typically haul down bucketfuls more cash than your average bar band does.

There’s this, too: the fact that no bands, great or small, have been allowed to ply their trade and earn their living during this summer’s touring season is entirely on the goobermint. Also, although people don’t realize it, even the big-name acts earn most of their dough not from record sales, but from touring and merch sales. So why the hell shouldn’t they insist on compensation from the very assholes who shut them all down on a pretext?

Red forever!

Posted on July 8, 2020July 8, 2020 by Mike

Well worth the trip, I’d say.

Photographer Travels Around the World to Capture the Unique Beauty of Red Hair
Entertainment photographer Brian Dowling has photographed famous redheads like Julia Roberts, Julianne Moore, and Amy Adams, but his newest project focuses on the beauty of everyday female redheads. Dowling, an American photographer based in Berlin, spent three summers visiting 20 countries, where he shot portraits of more than 130 women with red hair.

His aim is to show the beauty and diversity in this rarest of hair colors. Just 2% of the population can claim this fiery hair color, which is caused by both parents having the recessive MC1R gene. Even with both parents carrying the gene, their offspring only have a 25% of being born with red hair.

Many associate red hair with Scotland and Ireland, with 13% and 10% of the world’s natural redheads respectively, but Dowling’s around the world jaunt proves they come from all nationalities. From dark auburn to golden copper, each woman proudly shows her locks, as well as other characteristics like the freckles and pale skin redheads are known for.

Actually, as strong a bias as I’ve always had for redheads myself, the spotted-ginger type never was my thing. It’s those fair, clear-skinned redheads with the electrifying blue or green eyes that always got my rapt attention. The girl from “Odessa, Ukraine” is so damned tantalizingly babe-a-licious I’d move there like a shot, if I thought had a hope in Hell of locating her. It’s quite the collection, I assure you fellas.

Plea for assistance

Posted on July 8, 2020July 8, 2020 by Mike

One of my oldest and dearest friends, fella named Tom King, a riding partner of mine since the 80s, nearly lost his life in a serious motorcycle crash over in Charlotte a month or so back. After lapsing into DOA status on the way to the hospital—fortunately, the accident happened within a mile or so of what used to be known as Charlotte Memorial Hospital, who the hell knows what they’re calling it now—he was revived, but suffered the multiple broken bones, abrasions, and brain-rattling skullcracker of a concussion that seems to go hand in hand with most bad bike spills.

The docs say his recovery since has been nothing short of miraculous, considering the extent of his injuries. I’ve told him he had an angel riding on his shoulder that night.

Tom has always been a damned goofball; I pick on his ass all the time about his advanced-level dorkitude, which ribbing he’s always accepted with grace and good humor, along with the occasional subtle jabs back. He’s a truly serious Ironbutt, though, and a damned skillful rider. I won’t say he’s a better rider than I am, mind, because in my own humble and honest opinion (ahem) almost nobody in the whole world is. But there’s not much argument to be made that he’s put more miles under his ass than I have, even though I started riding at a much earlier age than he did. I harbor no illusions of ever catching up, either.

Whenever we’d make the annual trek to Myrtle Beach for the spring rally, which for a long time was every year without fail, we’d go in a large group of ten or fifteen of our biker buds, with Tom as Road Captain in the front-left position and me solid and unflappable on his right. Those rides and rallies are some of the fondest memories of my life. I really oughta write them down one of these days, before I’m too old to remember ’em all. Don’t know why that never occurred to me before.

Did I say Ironbutt? Tom has never thought a thing about making a run up to Lake Lure just to have breakfast, then heading on up to east Tennessee or some other hours-away place just for the sheer hell of it. He always loved to ride fast as hell on his highway jaunts, too. I never was any kind of shrinking violet myself when it came to the Need for Speed—one of my earliest internet nicks, one I still use here and there, was “speedfreek,” and nobody ever claimed it was inapt—but Tom was so incorrigible about it he used to piss me the hell off blasting down the interstate doing the ton, with me lollygagging behind not even trying to keep up. He’d slow waaaaay down once he’d lost sight of me in his mirrors, and exact his revenge for my ribbing by taunting me, “You gonna keep up or what, Grandma? Jeez!”

Tom worked as a journeyman printer at the CLT Observer for more than twenty years, which means he was around long enough to have made the transition from lead type to the digital age. But after the McClatchy buyout, the Observer did some serious downsizing, and Tom’s entire department was eliminated. Understand: Tom has been a worker his whole life, and it about killed him to suddenly find himself on the street. He found another job at a small printing concern up in Davidson fairly quickly after a couple of piddling pick-up gigs, making considerably less money…and with no insurance benefits at all.

Maybe you can see where this is going, I’m thinking.

It ought to be fairly obvious that Tom is up against it here. So a friend put together a GuFundMe campaign to help defray his horrific medical costs, which will be ongoing as he undergoes an extended course of therapy. I thought I’d mention said fundraiser here, since I am too damned perennially broke myself to offer much else in the way of help for him. If you can afford it in these uncertain times, please do consider tossing whatever you can manage in the pot. My thanks to you, and Tom’s and his wife Jen’s as well.

Oh, and why not take this opportunity to get in an additional jab at him, right? I DID say goofball, I believe. First: me, Tom, and his wife Jen at one of those great Myrtle Beach rallies, at our hotel bar at the Ocean Drive Golf Resort.

Next: a shot of me, Tom, and my ravishingly beautiful late wife Christiana—same day, same location.

Hm. Okay, looking at it again, I see that there is just the merest of possibilities that Tom might not be the only goofball in that one. Which is the only comment I’m going to make on exactly where my bleary, blurry gaze seems to be locked. Last one, of us two boys confirming our coveted Master Goofball status for all time.

Back to the future

Posted on July 7, 2020July 7, 2020 by Mike

If you build it correctly, it will work, to turn a phrase. Even a health care system.

More and more doctors across the country want to reduce costs and bring price transparency to the system. In 1997, anesthesiologist Keith Smith left his hospital job and opened the Surgery Center of Oklahoma (SCO) in Oklahoma City. “I wanted to see if markets could actually work in our convoluted health care system,” he told me. “I didn’t want to be an accessory to a crime anymore. Our mainstream system is criminal because of the way it fails to prioritize the care of patients.”

During his first week in business, Smith got a call from a woman needing a breast biopsy. She asked him how much the procedure would cost at his clinic. He had no idea—no one had ever asked before. Smith called his surgeon and the testing lab for a quote, calculated his own cost for the 20-minute procedure, and gave her the estimated price—which ended up being well within her deductible, and a fraction of the price she was given when she pressed a local hospital for an estimate. Smith and his team decided to bundle prices for all their procedures and then made the radical move of posting the full costs on their website.

Almost immediately, Oklahoma hospitals, insurance companies, and legislators went on the offensive and tried to shut down SCO. Insurance companies made it mandatory for consumers to meet their deductible with in-network providers: if they went out-of-network to get a service, their deductible would reset to zero for the year. This made SCO’s otherwise-affordable services cost-prohibitive for many patients with insurance. The center’s waiting room emptied.

But SCO quickly discovered other types of consumers, such as companies with self-funded health-insurance plans, as well as international patients. Employers with self-funded plans take on the financial risk of providing health-care benefits to their employees instead of paying premiums to health-insurance companies like Aetna or Anthem. Though it’s generally larger companies that self-insure—Wal Mart is a well-known example—high costs in health care are driving smaller companies, including those with as few as 50 employees, to move in this direction as well. Self-insured employers have incentives to keep costs down, even if it means flying their employees for out-of-state treatments.

When self-insured companies from across the country learned that procedures at SCO cost a fraction of the bill at most other medical institutions, they began offering their employees incentives to go there, including stipends, paid time off, and even covering the cost for a friend or family member to accompany them. SCO also saw an influx of customers from Canada and Europe. Though these patients had government-funded coverage, delays in treatment for urgent conditions led them to pay out of pocket for treatment at SCO.

GREAT quote coming right up:

“Some people say that health care is too important to leave to markets,” Smith says. “I say it’s too important to leave to government!” Without the pressures of the market, Smith is convinced that there is no accountability and no incentive for health-care providers to pay attention either to value or quality.

Annnnd bingo, we have a winnah! Good on ya, Doc. But isn’t it remarkable how such plain, obvious common sense can sound downright radical to modern ears—and how we find ourselves going back to first principles to re-engineer a humane, functional health care system that will doubtless end up closely resembling the one we had until the government stepped in to screw the old one up so horribly?

Chain of events

Posted on July 5, 2020July 5, 2020 by Mike

So as I was typing up my email to our governor, Comrade Cooper, begging official permission to be allowed to celebrate my “freedom” on the 4th, I was listening to the classical-music radio station as background, as is my usual wont. Amidst all the usual rah-rah 4th of July treacle and sludge, they aired a rendition of “Down In The Valley” for some reason—a lovely old tune, a real classic. And somehow, that in turn reminded me of an old Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder buddy flick called Stir Crazy, which at one point featured a beefy, intimidating cellmate of Our Heroes yclept Grossberger performing maybe the doggone prettiest version of the old chestnut I ever did hear:

Nice, eh? The guy who played Grossberger was a Dutch-American actor, wrestler, and opera singer who also held a BS in computer science named Erland Van Lindth De Jeude. He died, alas, in 1987 at a quite young age. Hats off to him for a real treat of a performance on this tune, anyway. Says something that it’s stuck with me all these years.

The Daily Donnybrook

Posted on July 5, 2020July 12, 2020 by Mike

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

Damned if I’da told it

Posted on July 3, 2020July 3, 2020 by Mike

I’m linking the archive.is version of this pathetic bleat, not because the original is paywalled but because I just can’t bring myself to link to a site caled Treehugger.com.

I will state this up front: I hate fireworks. They are loud and they are dangerous and they are polluting and they scare my dogs and my kids and me. This year, I hate them more than ever; for reasons nobody quite understands, they are ubiquitous weeks before the Fourth of July. According to Gothamist, noise complaints related to fireworks in New York City are up a crazy 4,000% over last year. But it’s not just New York; according to the Associated Press, “They’ve become a nightly nuisance ringing out from Connecticut to California, angering sleep-deprived residents and alarming elected officials.”

This is all after a dream-time when some urbanists fantasized that we would learn from the lockdown and appreciate the quiet streets and clean air. Instead, some say the boom in fireworks is all about making noise and blowing off steam after being locked inside.

The rest of this mincing mess of an article is every bit as gallingly pussified as you would expect. Apparently, Pajama Boy has had all sense of shame edited right out of his wretched DNA, and is incapable of being embarrassed by his own public admission of mewling spinelessness. All that soy, probably.

On the bright side, sort of, if wretched pantywaists like this “guy” had been all America That Was had to storm the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, we would surely have averted the current stupid rhubarb over the national anthem, at least. It would be Deutschland Über Alles.

The feel-good video of the week

Posted on July 2, 2020July 2, 2020 by Mike

Been waiting all day to put this one up.

This is the best! https://t.co/vEfVmBQE5K

— Interracials for Trump ?? (@sandyleevincent) July 1, 2020

My only real quibble is that instead of locking him inside, somebody should have just shot him in the head. It’s not even arguable that the scumbag already has a sheet as long as Michael Jordan’s arm; he will be immediately turned loose yet again to commit more crimes, and the roundy-round will continue, the offenses escalating until he finally does kill some poor, innocent soul. It’s a story as old and familiar as one of Aesop’s Fairy Tales, just not nearly as satisfying.

So short-circuit the cycle and be done with it, I say. The only good goblin is a dead goblin. Let him repeat his suddenly-penitent “I’se sorry, I’se sorry” to St Peter at the Gates and see where it gets him.

The Daily Donnybrook

Posted on July 1, 2020July 5, 2020 by Mike

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

Vicious cycle indeed

Posted on June 30, 2020June 30, 2020 by Mike

As the title says:

An Unexpected Cultural Clue About America Today, from…Elvis
Elvis Presley’s 1969 hit, “In the Ghetto” provides a prescient glimpse of what would later happen to generations of young black men who lived out their short lives on the mean streets of America’s urban ghettos.

As his first big hit in more than eight years, “In the Ghetto” played a key role in resurrecting his singing career, which floundered in the 1960s when he transitioned away from live performances to pursue an acting career in Hollywood.

Written by singer/songwriter Mac Davis, the song was originally titled “The Vicious Cycle,” an apt description of the endless trail of tragedies that would befall millions of young men fated to be born in the ghettos of America’s biggest cities.

Now, the article itself is good, and you should definitely take a gander at it. Needless to say, the song is a bona fide classic—a powerful, unforgettable piece that Elvis did a most moving rendition of, rightly vaulting the once and forever King back to the pinnacle of artistic and commercial success after his long 60s drought.

But it immediately put me in mind of the parody version Paul Shanklin did for Rush Limbaugh years ago, too. So I did a quick Duck Duck Go search just for the hell of it, and looky what I found.

HOWLINGLY funny, a real scream. Stick with it all the way through and I’m confident you’ll recognize which part has had me choking with laughter all damned day long. Shanklin’s rip is funny enough all by itself, but whoever put this video together is nothing less than a damned genius.

To hell with ’em all

Posted on June 28, 2020June 28, 2020 by Mike

DuToit follows up on my NOOSCAR screed with a sentiment that I can only second, with all my heart and soul.

Ditto for the NFL. Both organizations, flush with TV money, don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about their actual audience.

Naturally, this whole thing is irrelevant to me, as I don’t follow either sport (being of the Europhile heritage, prefer the actual football, and Formula 1). So I can look at the situation dispassionately and with quiet amusement, treating the doings of both as a marketing exercise.

Not that football and Formula 1 are paragons of righteousness, of course; I expect them both to succumb to the blowjobs demanded of them by the various foul organizations such as BLM, feminism and Pantifa and their loathsome offshoots.

The nice thing about supporting a sport, however, is that participation is purely voluntary and money not spent on an NFL Redzone subscription can just be spent on ammunition or a new gun — which will really piss off all the Commies.

And the only way for US to be happy is for THEM to be profoundly unhappy.

Yes, yes, I say!

Posted on June 26, 2020June 26, 2020 by Mike

To our new national anthem. But not the one they think.

In an increasingly anti-racist era when problematic iconography — ranging from Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben to even the Dukes of Hazzard General Lee car and country band Lady Antebellum’s name — is being reassessed, revised or retired, America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” seems to be striking a wrong note.

Last week, protesters in San Francisco toppled a statue of the song’s composer, Francis Scott Key, a known slaveholder who once said that African Americans were “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.” This week, Liana Morales, an Afro-Latinx student at New York’s Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts, refused to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at her virtual graduation ceremony, explaining to the Wall Street Journal, “With everything that’s happening, if I stand there and sing it, I’m being complicit to a system that has oppressed people of color.” Instead, Morales performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn widely considered to be the “Black national anthem.”

So, if “The Star-Spangled Banner” goes the way of the Confederate flag and Gone With the Wind, what should America’s new national anthem be? Whatever it is, Walker says there should be a formal “vetting process” to make sure the next anthem doesn’t have a terrible past; Powell, for his part, suggests John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which he says is “the most beautiful, unifying, all-people, all-backgrounds-together kind of song you could have.”

But what about “Lift Every Voice and Sing”? That song, written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson in 1900, set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson in 1905, and first publicly performed as part of a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday by Johnson’s brother John, was dubbed “the Negro national hymn” by the NAACP in 1919. In more recent years, it has been referenced in Maya Angelou’s 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing; it was also performed in 1972 by Kim Weston as the opening number for the Wattstax festival and by Beyoncé during her celebrated 2018 Coachella set.

Okay, so the Star Spangled Banner, clearly, is out, just another victim of the Left’s ongoing campaign to destroy every last bit of American history, culture, and tradition on the altar of political correctness. And clearly, we will be required to instate something Nee-grow approved in its place. So I have a few suggestions.

WARNING: the videos embedded below the fold are EXTREMELY NSFW. In fact, if rough language and overt sexual suggestiveness and perversion are problematic for you, you’ll probably want to forego clicking the “More” link entirely. Continue reading “Yes, yes, I say!” →

The Daily Donnybrook

Posted on June 26, 2020July 1, 2020 by Mike

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

CF Search

Login, RSS, &c

CF Archives

Categories

2A/Mostly Guns

Alt-American

Big Dogs

Essayists

Mil

Nuttin’ But News

Odds Bodkins

Overseas/Non-US

Portals

Pure Bloggery

REAL Journalism

Substack Scalawags

The Funny Pages

Comments policy

CF Glossary

Subscribe to CF!

Shameless begging

Correspondence

Allied territory

Notable Quotes

RSS feed

.