Page 159

Wherein Ye Olde Blogge Hoste shamelessly swipes another good idea

Posted on May 1, 2023May 1, 2023 by Mike

Just went over for the daily look-in at Bill’s place, and I note he’s had an idea I think well worth the stealing: putting the link to his own Substack column at the top of the main page, making it more noticeable and immediate. Since our Daily Donnybrook open-thread post is already made “sticky” when I put each new one up, what I think I’m a-gonna do is append an “Eyrie” notification to it as well; should serve the same promotional function as Bill’s notice, without impinging on the main page of the blog any more than I just absolutely have to.

Update! Done, and done. I removed the Eyrie image from the sidebar and stuck it into the DD post, which I think looks great, and modified the DD title slightly too. What say y’all, CF Lifers? Like it, or no?

Updated update! So again I got to thinking (a VERY dangerous thing), and began asking myself whether, with the sticky Eyrie notification up top, I should carry on with the “Eyrie up” biweekly notification posts also. What I’m thinking is that I should, and will; they don’t do any real harm, don’t eat much, and are doable at a relatively affordable price, namely free, so why the hell not?

Eyrie up!

Posted on May 1, 2023May 1, 2023 by Mike

Monday’s Substack, Making sense of life—and death, is now live and kicking. An expostulation mainly on atheism, this one is less of a standard blog post, and more like the long-form essays I used to do a lot of back in the day. Sample ‘graphs:

Despite a passing flirtation with it back in my own youth, symptomatic more of jejune rebellion than of reflection, I now see atheism as willful, blank stupidity. No, the existence of a supreme and benelovent Lord reining over all of His creation cannot be proven empirically. But then, neither can it be proven that God does NOT exist. Matters of faith are not subject to empirical proof; after all, that’s why it’s called faith. It’s the very definition of the word.

So to my way of thinking, atheism must necessarily also be a matter of faith, not empiricism. Atheists don’t know any more than I do whether we have immortal souls, whether we were created by a loving God in His own image, whether death truly is the final indignity—snuffing out all that we are, all that we know, all that we’ve experienced. As if those things, so incredibly rare throughout this incalculably vast universe of ours, bear no weightier import than snuffing out a candle—extinguishing forever the unique light of our lives, leaving nothing but darkness behind.

Read, subscribe, comment, &c. You all know the drill.

Another Righteous Shoot

Posted on April 30, 2023April 30, 2023 by Mike

Fucked around. Found out. Exactly as he damned well deserved to.

Sometimes you F around and find out… this guy did… pic.twitter.com/ZcjxlLsl8y

— Matt Couch (@RealMattCouch)

April 28, 2023

Divemedic says it for me.

I have heard the complaints that the guy shouldn’t have shot him when he was leaving, and you know what? I don’t give a shit. If the cops and courts won’t protect their citizens, the citizens eventually will.

Precisely so. I’m not so sure the soon-to-be-ventilated perp actually was leaving. He walked back around the counter, but he wasn’t moving in the direction of the door; probably looking around to see what else in the store might be worth stealing, seems to me.

“Shouldn’t have shot him”? Like bleedin’ hell. What shouldn’t have happened was, the predatory Gibmedat shouldn’t have robbed the guy in the first place, that’s what. Had he not chosen to commit armed robbery and ADW, thereby putting an innocent man in fear for his life, then he wouldn’t have gotten his sorry ass shot. That’s all on Sh’Quan’zellaramalamadingdong, and absolutely nobody else.

Be sure to stick with it for the happy ending; the footage of the worthless parasite writhing in pain on the sidewalk, bleeding profusely, is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Tucker’s bridge too far

Posted on April 30, 2023April 30, 2023 by Mike

Was Carlson’s Heritage speech a cpl weeks ago, in particular his references to Christianity and “evil,” the straw that broke Murdoch’s back, so to speak?

The veteran television host and journalist, whose Fox News show attracts millions of viewers every evening, remarked at an event for the Heritage Foundation that fellow conservatives must swiftly adjust their approaches to the national conversation since some political forces desire to tear down the nation rather than engage in legitimate political dialogue.

“We write our papers and they write their papers, and may the best papers win. I don’t think that’s what we’re watching now at all. I don’t think we’re watching a debate on how to get to the best outcome. I think that’s completely wrong,” Carlson said. “There is no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement with that mindset. Policy papers don’t account for it at all. If you have people who are saying, ‘I have an idea, let’s castrate the next generation, let’s sexually mutilate children,’ I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. That has nothing to do with politics.”

Carlson likewise described such a sentiment as a “theological phenomenon” that fundamentally cannot be considered a rational policy position. “And that’s kind of the point I’m making: none of this makes sense in conventional political terms,” he added. “What you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.”

Carlson told the Heritage Foundation audience that older conservatives must shift their mindset in order to effectively engage in the current political arena. “I’m just noting what’s super obvious. Those of us who are in our mid-50s are caught in the past on how we think about this,” he remarked. “One side’s like, ‘I’ve got this idea, and we have this idea, and let’s have a debate about our ideas.’ They don’t want a debate. Those ideas won’t produce outcomes that any rational person would want under any circumstances. Those are manifestations of some larger force acting upon us.”

Despite multiple self-deprecating remarks about his affiliation with the Episcopal Church, a communion widely regarded for socially and theologically liberal standpoints, Carlson noted that Americans should turn to heaven for hope as the nation’s foundations collapse. “Maybe we should all just take 10 minutes per day to say a prayer about it,” he concluded. “And I’m saying that to you not as some kind of evangelist. I’m literally saying that to you as an Episcopalian.”

Tucker’s right as rain, whether it harelips every cannibal liberal on the Congo Potomac or not, and there’s just no way around it. Praying to the Almighty for deliverance from Their Satanic Majesties is well and good, of course, and can never be a bad thing. But soon or late, every decent Normal American will be forced to ponder the practical application of Algernon Sidney’s well-known aphorism: God helps those who help themselves.

Civil war and/or secession

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Mike

Bearing in mind my longstanding dictum that there is simply no way of knowing how it will all shake out, that the one sure thing is that such things hardly ever go exactly like anyone thinks beforetimes that they will, Simplicius takes a stab at a little prognostication.

On Secession and Civil War
Will there be breakup by 2030?

I often mention my long-held forecast that I predict the United States will either devolve into civil war or secession by the year 2030. Hearing this, many have asked me to expound at length about my thoughts on this, why and how I see it unfolding. So I’ve decided to finally treat the topic in a more in depth manner than the usual comment reply allows.

Particularly in today’s cultural climate, when they conjure up ‘civil war’, many people are subconsciously referring to some sort of Rwandan Genocide-style conflict between the two opposing sides of Liberals and Conservatives, where the actual civilians have taken up arms and are battling it out in the streets. This notion of a ‘civil war’ is driven by endless memes posted by both sides which depict things like armed antifa leftists against conservative militiamen rifling it out in some dystopian suburban battlefield, perhaps akin to Seattle’s CHAZ ‘Autonomous Zone’.

The Rwandan-style one has the least chance of happening because it presupposes some sort of de-centralized, stochastic ‘free-for-all’ where people just happen to take up arms against the fellow man. Sure, there will be sporadic armed conflicts occurring regionally, owing to the growing racial and political divides in the country. But there exists no real formalized mechanism by which the two sides can even cohere into some semblance of organized, opposing armies with a central command, staff structures, etc. This is mostly a juvenile consideration, at least for any time in the semi-near future, of which we’re speaking. One could perhaps envision such a scenario much farther down the line than is possible to predict: some sort of weird, lawless, dystopian post-apocalyptic Mad-Max-style future in the year 2100, or something like that. But for our purposes, this is unrealistic and unworthy of serious deliberation.

There is a third option some people refer to when invoking civil war: that of ‘people vs. the government’. I’ll treat this one briefly on its own, because there are a few important considerations here.

Firstly, this idea has gained traction as numerous American politicians have wielded this cudgel as a threat against upstart Americans who might like their chances in an uprising. Biden himself has remarked on at least two or three different occasions that ‘Americans need F-15s not AR15s to fight against the government’, implying that U.S. citizens can never defeat the government unless they’re armed with high level strategic weaponry, as opposed to mere small arms.

In short, the government and its ‘mighty military force’ wouldn’t last in a true prolonged conflict against the population of the U.S. Of course, it all depends how many people would be on the revolting side in this hypothetical scenario. But let’s not forget that the U.S. has an estimated 400 million guns, and 393 million of those are in civilian hands. There are reportedly something like 70-100+ million gun owners. The U.S. military has about 800k total ground troops. Even with all the planes and tanks in the world, can 800,000 go against 100,000,000? You could argue they couldn’t even defeat the Vietcong’s less than 1 million, much less 100m. Not to mention that most Americans are far heavier armed than the typical Vietcong and their bolt-action rifles.

But like I said, those are just slightly absurd hypotheticals to put some things in perspective; in reality, this is not the type of scenario I expect to occur. It’s simply a quick two cents thrown into the debate to refute the typical leftist canard that the U.S. military is invincible, when in fact they entirely rely on the civilian sector to even function.

Lots, lots more to this one—which, despite my opening admonishment regarding the ultimate futility of assuming that we can make any predictions here with any realistic expectation of accuracy, I nonetheless consider to be well worth a read. One more thing I feel I ought to address:

Professor Barbara Walter explains she’s studied civil wars for thirty years and has spent the last few of them working for a CIA taskforce which uses such metrics to prognosticate ‘where the next civil war will occur’ in the globe.

Professor Walter explains, when turned against the U.S. itself, these same proprietary calculations reveal that the U.S. is at the edge of what the CIA would deem the cusp of the “RISK” to “HIGH RISK” categories. Normally, a country at ‘high risk’ would be placed on a special CIA watchlist, as upheaval there would be considered imminent.

Walter, the Post said, concludes that the US has passed through stages of “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” and may now be in “open conflict”, beginning with the Capitol riot.

Citing analytics used by the Center for Systemic Peace, Walter also says the US has become an “anocracy” – “somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state”.

Walter’s second point is indisputably true. The first, though? Meh, not so much; the notion that we may be in a state of “open conflict” is seriously undercut by A) the simple fact that what she blithely refers to as a “riot” was no such thing; and B) excepting the ever-escalating incidents of mostly black-on-black violence in the nation’s urban jungles, all most Normals need to do to disprove the idea that we’ve arrived at “open conflict” is to just take a look around. Any conflict we might be in is certainly not “open,” and for the vast majority of us, there sure doesn’t seem to be very much of it to be seen.

That said, Simplicius sounds a cautionary note here:

These findings, however, are already more than a year old, and the country has likely slipped even further into the danger zone.

Fair enough, no argument. Even so, the danger zone isn’t quite the actual thing; they’re very different animules—as I suspect we’ll soon be finding out, to our great chagrin and injury.

As I said, there’s much more to this deep-dive examination of every facet of this issue, so do read it all.

(Via WRSA)

The “climate change crisis” is STILL the bunk

Posted on April 30, 2023April 30, 2023 by Mike

And it always will be.

1540 Experts Agree There Is No Climate Emergency
There is no climate emergency. As I have been saying for years, the climate change agenda to end fossil fuels is merely a fraudulent cause intended to gain power. The Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok. “The climate view of CLINTEL can be easily summarized as: There is no climate emergency.” Over 1540 experts respected in their independent fields have joined CLINTEL to spread the message that there is no scientific data to indicate that climate change is political propaganda.

“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. In particular, scientists should emphasize that their modeling output is not the result of magic: computer models are human-made. What comes out is fully dependent on what theoreticians and programmers have put in: hypotheses, assumptions, relationships, parameterizations, stability constraints, etc. Unfortunately, in mainstream climate science most of this input is undeclared.

To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. We should free ourselves from the naïve belief in immature climate models. In future, climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science.”

We MUST question why governments across the world are fighting tooth and nail to eliminate fossil fuels and our way of life as we know it. Why are we following the World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda to save a planet that does not need saving? Why are we allowing our elected officials to spend endless funds on an imaginary cause? Everything has a cycle, including the weather. So while the climate may be changing, there is absolutely nothing humans can do to alter the course of nature, and those stating otherwise are lying.

1540 experts, pshaw. In Amerika v2.0, they’re the wrong experts according to TPTB, so you should just ignore ‘em. Alternatively, you could take Bayou Pete’s advice:

So, when you hear politicians and pressure groups demanding that we sacrifice this, or that, or the other, in the name of “climate change”…remember that they’re all lying through their teeth.

Yup, that’s about the size of it—whether the lies issue from the yaps of “elected” officials, bureaucrats, “experts,” or the gooberment’s bought-and-paid-for “scientists,” we’d all do well to consider the source before swallowing a single word of the snake-oil they’re peddling. Need more proof? Howzabout this, then, in commemoration of *gag puke* Earth Day:

Bald Hedgehogs and Witch Executions: Remembering Earth Day’s List of Promised Calamities
Hello everyone! Allow me to wish you a joyous Happy Earth Day!

This means, of course — because this is an environmentalist national holiday, after all – that there is nothing at all happy or joyous about today because we need to focus solely on doom and the promise of our demise. Hey, don’t scream at me; this is the consensus of the scientific community.

Welllllll — in actuality, it is really more the consensus of the media covering the scientific community — but this is serious stuff! So long as you don’t analyze their claims, that is. This is because in the mad rush to report on anything and everything that can be connected to planetary calamity, they do not exactly do the research.

Why is so much of the “settled science” data so contradictory? I may be more open to these claims on which scientists are all on the same page if they did not keep offering up pages of conflicting promises.

Let’s start with those sharks I mentioned earlier. Recall how they will be attacking us more frequently? We are also told they will be attacking us less, as a result of global warming. Or, climate change. This only sends us down a long and winding path of unsettled certainty with global alterations. Basically, we see that when science reaches a fork in the road the answer is “Take it.”

Let us look at the effects on our beaches. AGW will make the oceans saltier; also, it will lead to the oceans becoming lower in sodium at the same time. The change in climate is promised to make ocean waves much bigger. It is also having a negative impact by making the waves…uh, well much smaller. Also, global warming is going to have a diminishing effect on coral reefs. The good news is something will help the reefs grow; global warming.

Part of the reason we’ll be heating up is due to an increase in clouds which will have heat-trapping effects. Another reason we’ll be heating up is there will be fewer clouds, no longer trapping heat but we will roast in the sunlight. UNLESS – that increase in clouds will reflect that sunlight and shade the planet. OR, we’ll see a decrease in clouds altogether…which means they will NOT be trapping the heat…nor will they reflect the sun, which is either bad or good, depending. Truthfully, when it comes to discussing climate change, just avoid any mention of clouds at all; you will just make the doomsday prophets cranky.

Obviously, as we heat up it means there will be less snow, but that means fewer avalanches. Except, we are also promised mountain regions will also experience more avalanches. Not sure how the math works out on that one. Probably best to just hope for the best.

No no no NO; yer doin’ it wrong, see. You should all be scared to death, or at least out of your wits. Because after all, fearful, witless sheep are much easier to herd, corral, and above all, shear.

Many, many supporting links salted throughout that last excerpt, of which you should read the all, including as it does a huge selection of doomsday predictions which failed to pan out that I hadn’t heard of before.

The plane that wouldn’t die

Posted on April 30, 2023April 30, 2023 by Mike

Tell me, oh Magic Eight Ball: Is the indomitable, perenially-awesome, so-ugly-it’s-beautiful Fairchild-Republic A10 Thunderbolt II the best damned combat aircraft the US has ever fielded? Signs point to YES.

A-10s Return to Middle East with a New Mission, and a New Weapon
Tensions with Iran, Russia have CENTCOM calling upon the venerable Warthog once again.

A squadron of A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jets, specially modified to nearly triple their bomb loads, has been dispatched to the Middle East to boost U.S. airpower in the region amid increased tensions with Iran-backed forces in Syria.

With each plane carrying four SDB (Small Diameter Bombs—M) bomb racks, a flight of four A-10s could bomb up to 64 ground targets, a nearly three-fold increase. Each plane can also carry laser-guided rockets along with its famed 30mm tankbusting gun.

“That’s a lot of targets that you can hit from an air-to-ground perspective,” Grynkewich said.

The rugged attack jet also gives commanders more flexibility because it can fly from short or dirt runways.

“We would be able to maneuver [the A-10] very rapidly to different locations and show an ability to do strike operations that really would be very difficult to to counter in any meaningful way should things escalate,” he said.

The A-10 could also be used to patrol the Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian go-fast boats have harassed warships and tankers.

“There certainly are maritime threats that are out there that are promulgated by the Iranians,” Grynkewich said. “The A-10 brings you a capability that can counter that, as well—kinetically if necessary with those rockets and the gun.”

Designed in the 1970s as a specialized ground-assault weapon, the A-10 has won the love of generations of infantry. Protected by a “bathtub” of cockpit armor, Warthog pilots fly slow and low, eyeballing their targets before ripping into them with copious armament. But Air Force leaders have spent decades trying to win Congressional permission to retire the twinjet. They call it a sitting duck for modern air defenses, and they say stealthier, higher-flying, more lightly armed fighter jets can do the job. Earlier this year, Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown said the last A-10s would be gone by decade’s end.

Grynkewich’s command is also responding to a call from CENTCOM’s Kurilla to be more innovative. Air Forces Central aims to experiment with the A-10’s ability to shoot down enemy drones. Since the A-10 lacks a radar, officials plan to use a network of U.S. and allied radars to guide the attack jets to their uncrewed targets. The Warthog could then use its infrared targeting pod to engage a drone with heat-seeking missiles or laser-guided rockets, Grynkewich said.

Is there ANYTHING the ‘Hog can’t do? Apparently not. Stout, amazingly versatile, a-bristle with ferocious lethality—she’s a credit to her noble lineage and her namesake, no doubt about it.

Update! So in the comments, I said this to Steve:

Pretty sure I’ve told this story before here, but back when the band was regularly traveling from NC to NYC for shows, we always took the back way up the spine of the Shenandoah on 81, through Harrisburg, and then on into a stretch paralleling a mountainous area with a USANG base close by (Fort Indiantown Gap, I believe it was). The base had A10s attached, and quite often we’d see a flight of ‘Hogs practicing attack weaves, crisscrossing low and slow from one side of the mountains up over the crest to the other and back again.

We’d all watch this airshow completely spellbound, which is when it occurred to me how truly awful it must be to be a ground-pounding camel-humper being hunted by one of those truly magnificent bastards. Bet there’s been whole damned laundry-trucks’ worth of djellabahs ended up smeared in fresh-squeezed shit by guys in that unenviable position. If not, then they were just too stupid to live anyhow.

Just for shits and giggles, I poked around some when what to my wondering eyes did appear but this choice vid:

And dammit, that’s IT, the spontaneous, unannounced “airshow” we looked forward to seeing on every trip up to the Rotten Apple. Hell yeah! How fuckin’ cool is THAT?

Who owns what, anyway?

Posted on April 29, 2023April 30, 2023 by Mike

The right to repair.

John Deere Corporate Might Have Reason to Panic, But Farmers Will Love What’s Happening
Farmers have been battling the manufacturers of their high-tech farming machinery for years over the right to repair their equipment on their own.

Major companies in the space, including John Deere, began restricting products to manufacturer exclusive service contracts.

These contracts lock out the farmers who own tractors, for instance, from making even small repairs to their machines. Instead, when something breaks down, farmers have to call the manufacturer or dealer to schedule a repairman to come out and service the device, forcing the farmer to shut down his operations while waiting for the repairman to come out to the farm.

This is obviously a serious problem for farmers who are under strict time restrictions during planting and harvesting seasons.

Farmers have been contesting this situation for years, ever since some manufacturers of equipment have begun implementing such exclusionary practices. It has resulted in a campaign among farmers called the “right to repair” movement, where farmers are fighting for the right to make repairs to the tractors and other instruments they bought and own.

The farmers claim that they lose money and time while waiting for these repair men to show up. Not only that, but they contend that if a tractor maker holds the sole right to repair, then the farmers don’t really even own their tractors despite paying tens of thousands for the vehicles.

As the truck drivers always say, so it is for the farmers: if the wheels ain’t turning, they ain’t earning. Not that the corporate types at John Deere, in defense of their “right” to bleed hardworking farmers like a deer tick on a hound with those exorbitantly priced “maintenance contracts” of theirs, give a discernible damn about that.

Now, however, the state of Colorado has become the first to give farmers the legal right to repair their equipment without being forced to pay for a manufacturer’s repair teams. That law was passed on Tuesday.

For their part, companies such as John Deere say that farming equipment is now so highly technical and computer-driven that repairs are often beyond the skill of barn tinkerers. Even more importantly, manufacturers say that if just anyone can start tearing down and rebuilding their high-tech machinery, their proprietary technology will be all too easily open for corporate theft.

Well, which is it, then? Are those slackjawed yokels too stupid to comprehend all that tech, or are those sharpie-farmers looking to inflate their incomes via some sophisticated reverse-engineering and corporate espionage?

For what it may be worth, my Uncle Gene flatly refused to own anything his whole life but a Deere…right up until his last one, which he spent a lot more time cussing and spitting at than actually riding the piece of junk.

Manufacturers also say that allowing tractor owners to make any manner of repair also allows them to bypass emissions controls set by governments and to crank up horsepower or make other modifications that violate laws. This, they say, puts equipment operators at risk of injury, and in turn would unfairly place the manufacturers in a position to be sued for those injuries.

Ahhh, and there it is: the cold, dead hand of government. You knew it would figure into all this somehow. Now for a little compare-contrast.

“Forcing a business to disclose trade secrets, software, and jeopardize consumer safety is poor public policy,” said Colorado state Rep. Matt Soper, a Republican who opposed “right to repair” measures in the Centennial State.

The opposition was not enough to stall the legislation. Colorado’s Democrat Gov. Jared Polis happily signed the new bill into law last Tuesday, saying, “This bill will save farmers and ranchers time and money and support the free market in repair” before exclaiming, “first in the nation!’”

Against all odds and expectations, we’ve now reached the point where the GOPer argues for restricting the rights of hard-working American farmers to do what they wish with the property they nominally “own,” while the Democrat stands up for freedom, real ownership, independent repair shops, and non-interference with said rights. UNEXPECTED!™

Fox augers in

Posted on April 29, 2023April 29, 2023 by Mike

They unceremoniously dump the biggest star the network ever had, and now they’re surprised at the outrage that bonehead maneuver generated?

Back there in the 1960’s golden era of rock and roll, (from 1966 to 1968) a group known as Buffalo Springfield dominated the air waves for a rock moment. Their big 1967 hit was titled “For What It’s Worth.” And its lyrics included these memorable lines:

There’s something happening here

But what it is ain’t exactly clear

…Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you’re always afraid

Step out of line, the man come and take you away…

The lyrics came to mind this week in watching Fox reel from the backlash of the company’s “parting ways” with host Tucker Carlson. (And full disclosure, I am a Newsmax contributor.)

And speaking of Newsmax? The network has not been shy in reporting its 8 p.m. audience nearly doubled Monday, reaching 531,000 viewers, based on Nielsen figures. The following night, the number rose to an average 562,000 viewers, a five-fold increase from the previous week.

By contrast, the Tucker hour’s ratings at Fox plummeted, from 2.59 million on Monday (when his departure was formally announced) to 1.7 million on Tuesday and 1.3 million on Wednesday.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but Tucker himself has released his own two-minute video statement on Twitter. In less than 24 hours the video had brought in over 60 million views. Yow.

One can only wonder, as many have, why in the world Fox would shut down its number one host. Tucker Carlson is a very popular conservative and a decidedly smart guy as well. All of which has been evident on his nightly show, and all of which his audience both understands and loves.

Not to mention another popular host, Dan Bongino, has also vanished from Fox.

So why in the world would Fox do this?

At this point, I imagine a good few of the Fox higher-ups are wondering the same thing.

Okay, okay, I admit it—my main motivation for posting this is the excuse it affords me to put up that great old Buffalo Springfield tune.

With a glowingly-affectionate intro by Monkee-man Peter Tork, no less. What can one say but: COOOOOOOOL.

Update! For those younger readers who somehow wandered in here by mistake and who aren’t old enough to know anything about Buffalo Springfield (for SHAME), here’s some background info.

Buffalo Springfield was a rock band formed in Los Angeles by Canadian musicians Neil Young, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin and American musicians Stephen Stills and Richie Furay. The group, widely known for the song “For What It’s Worth”, released three albums and several singles from 1966 to 1968. Their music combined elements of folk music and country music with British Invasion and psychedelic rock influences. Like contemporary band the Byrds, they were key to the early development of folk rock. The band took their name from a steamroller parked outside their house.

Buffalo Springfield formed in Los Angeles in 1966 with Stills (guitar, keyboards, vocals), Martin (drums, vocals), Palmer (bass guitar), Furay (guitar, vocals) and Young (guitar, harmonica, piano, vocals). The band signed to Atlantic Records in 1966 and released their debut single “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing”, which became a hit in Los Angeles. The following January, they released the protest song “For What It’s Worth”, which became their only US top 10 hit and a counterculture anthem. Their second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, marked their progression to psychedelia and hard rock and featured other well-known songs such as “Bluebird” and “Mr. Soul”.

After several drug-related arrests and line-up changes, the group disbanded in 1968.

For all intents and purposes, Springfield was one of the earliest examples of what later on came to be referred to in the rock world as a “supergroup,” even though Young, Stills, Messina, et al weren’t all that well known at the time. This next is a bit of trivia for the ages:

While in Toronto in early 1966, Young met Bruce Palmer, a Canadian who was playing bass for the Mynah Birds. In need of a lead guitarist, Palmer invited Young to join the group, and Young accepted. The Mynah Birds were set to record an album for Motown Records when their singer Ricky James Matthews—James Ambrose Johnson, Jr., later known as Rick James—was tracked down and arrested by the U.S. Navy for being AWOL.

ZOMG! Okay, I never knew that myself. It calls for a CELEBRATION, BITCHES!

Heh. Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful, y’all.

The long-awaited reckoning

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Mike

Jeff despairs of it ever showing up.

We are under relentless assault by the ugly and the diseased.

The broken among us have marshaled their armies, collected through screens and keyboards, millions of distinct wretches pulled from failure’s depths into concert by the common causes of envy and emptiness. They are the cacophony of evil rendered into reels and TikToks and Instagram influencers.

They hate your grace. They hate your having purpose. They despise your contentment, happiness, security, drive, commitment, capacity to love, to empathize, to nurture, to accept. They hate that you won’t share in their misery, or celebrate their perversions. They demand their grubbiness be normalized across society. They seek to make themselves Law. They are demons. And they are legion.

We are under relentless assault by the ugly and the diseased.

Science is rejected. Reason is reduced to a tattered construct, its threads frayed and its fabric disintegrating under the strain of centuries-long wear. It is the protective garment we failed to care for. And its ruin lays us bare.

Truth is contingent, and the real, unknowable. The world is a tissue of grievances and warring wills. Of oppressors and oppressed. Of masters and slaves. Power is the one true thing. It is its own metaphysics.

The broken among us have issued their call to arms. They have declared war on the normative, the natural, the real, the actual. They seek your surrender. They demand your submission. They have the force of a folly we watched them beatify — and the apparatus of raw power available to normalize that folly, to weaponize it, to wield it like a cudgel.

They have their acolytes, their clergy, their Praetorian Guard, their cynical benefactors writing off tithing on their taxes, the cost of doing business. And we did nothing as they slithered into their strongholds.

We slept while they erected their clumsy tyrannies.

Which will only make it that much harder to bring them tumbling down. Nonetheless, one way or another, down they will certainly come a-tumbling anyway, whether of direct action at long last taken against them or of their own dead, dreary weight. T’was ever thus.

Publick Notice, forsooth!

Posted on April 29, 2023April 29, 2023 by Mike

Last night, I made mention of going through and clearing out all the spambot attempts at registering manifestly bogus user names ( such as alan23x858932, email addy starr@b.roofvent.xyz, just to name a fairly typical one), which I’d lately been seeing an uptick in. So I did that, slamming about twenty or so of the wormy little bastards with the “Deny” hammer.

Which seems to have acted as something of a tonic on them, because as of right now, there’s been well over 200 of these midges today, with more coming in about every five or ten minutes. I get “User Approval” notification emails in my CF inbox as and when, so here’s a screengrab of what my Thunderbird trash bin looks like at the moment:

SpambotScreenshot

Remember, that ain’t even a tithe of ‘em. I’ve installed another WP plugin, Shield Security, to hopefully help put an end to this unwelcome deluge of pure shite being dumped over my head from the high heavens by these excrescences. Problem is, it also blocks me from posting with MarsEdit; I’m sure there’s a fix for that somewhere in the plugin settings, I just gotta poke around under the hood some and find it.

I swear, some days it just never seems to end.

Update! Christ Almighty, just had to force-delete the fucking Shield Security plugin via FTP after it locked ME out because of, and I quote, “too many access attempts from this IP.” Sometimes, one can only wonder why one even bothers getting out of bed at all.

On the bright side, though, I guess that could be taken as a pretty good indicator that SS is working, no?

Updated update! Calls for a rerun of this venerable classic, I think.

Double! — *When a single facepalm just ain’t enough*

Rumors of war

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Mike

Is Kuenstler getting blackpilled?

On War and Wars
The weird part the news media isn’t telling you about World War Three is that America’s main enemy in this struggle is… the US Government itself! America is looking like that crazy person on the street, punching himself in the head. How else do you explain this epic act of national self-destruction?

The “Joe Biden” regime is “standing up for our democracy” by trying to silence all and any public speech about what it does in the world and how it treats its own citizens. Meanwhile, the entire scaffold of American life crumbles and you are supposed to not notice it’s happening. The funny part is that the Democratic Party thinks this is an election strategy. The funniest part of the funny part is that we bother holding elections at all.

You understand, “Joe Biden” is only pretending to run for president again, in the same way that he’s only pretended to be president the past two years. Are we to believe, for instance, that the old zombie has become a fervent Maoist? Or that he follows any known structured political philosophy at all, other than cashing checks from favor-seekers from all over the world? “Joe Biden” is pretending to run — no matter how preposterous it seems — because his handlers know that only a titanic pretense of political strength can stave off the reveal of his family’s awesome criminality and the fall of everyone hitched to that broke-down wagon.

So much for the funny stuff. Things are getting to the point where we stop laughing. It’s only a question now of how the calamity rolls out. There are so many more parts to our national fiasco and they are all out-of-hand in the most disastrous way. The Ukraine project is a big part. It was prodigiously stupid to provoke a war at Russia’s door-step and the side we backed, the Nazi-ish Zelensky regime, has already lost. You just don’t know it because the American news business is a joke on the American public. It reports nothing honestly.

Do note that, at the end of the column, Jim doesn’t resort to the heretofore-obligatory call to VOTE HARDERER™ AT THEM! Kinda sad for him personally, I suppose, painful even. But in the long run, probably better for The Cause itself. Myself, I have a difficult time thinking of another set of blinders at last coming off as a bad thing. Although he does succumb, at least to some degree (his closing line would seem to left-handedly admit to some doubts about it) to the fantasy that the Biden Family Crime Syndicate’s many outrages are finally catching up to them, admittedly. To wit:

On top of all that, observers are reporting that more than ten thousand illegal immigrants a day will be crossing into the USA from Mexico in the weeks ahead. Alejandro Mayorkas’s Dept. of Homeland Security and Mr. Blinken’s State Department have made arrangements with international NGOs working through the UN, to systematically conduct these immigrants across the border, furnishing them with pre-cooked phony asylum documents. This week, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) introduced legislation to allow unrestricted immigration to any person claiming to be LBGTQ. Co-sponsors of the bill include Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. How is any of this a re-election strategy?

It’s not. If these matters are not adjudicated, it will be a civil war strategy.

And WOOT! There it is. They assuredly will NOT be adjudicated, however comforting it might be to think otherwise; the Ruling Party’s boundless arrogance and presumption of a Divine right to rule will not, indeed CAN not, permit it. Which leaves Our Side with the same strictly binary choice we’ve faced all along. The war has been brought unasked for to our very doorstep. Either we fight, or we surrender. We don’t have to like it; we DO have to win it. And that’s all there is to it—full stop, end of story.

Cardinal sin

Posted on April 28, 2023April 28, 2023 by Mike

Matt Margolis commits it, leading to hissing, girlish squee-squee-squeeing to demand satisfaction.

Dylan Mulvaney Wants People Like Me Arrested
Dylan Mulvaney, who recently caused a $6 billion loss in value for parent company Anheuser-Busch through his failed partnership with Bud Light, is making headlines again.

In a video from October 2022 now going viral, Mulvaney declares that journalists who commit the “crime” of “misgendering” him in their reporting should be arrested.

“The articles written about me using ‘he’ pronouns and calling me a man over and over again,” he starts. “I feel like that should be illegal. I don’t know that’s that’s just bad journalism.”

The clip that is going viral is clearly part of a larger rant, but there’s really no concern about his meaning being taken out of context. He made his beliefs known, clear as day. Why does this matter to me? Well, I’m one of those who correctly calls Mulvaney a man and uses masculine pronouns in reference to him whenever writing about him. Why? Because he is a man, and no amount of hormones, makeup, and surgery can change that. I’ve never used feminine pronouns any time I’ve written about him and never will.

Nor should you, nor should any of us. To bend the knee to the capricious whim of these sad, deranged freaks would be to de facto permit them to reshape reality itself into something they find more congenial to them. And that, we must never, ever allow.

It calls to mind the obligatory shrieks from the Usual Suspects decrying the ever-dreaded but never-actually-materializing surge of nonexistent “Islamophobia”-inspired violence against Islamists in the immediate wake of each successive jihadist atrocity against the West, exemplified by a slight rejiggering of the old NYT joke-headline to fit the situation: Muslim terrorists attack again, Muslim terrorists hardest hit! The truly ugly part of all this ugliness follows:

Of course, the real question is, why does this matter? Let’s face it: For reasons that are hard to understand, Mulvaney has become an influential figure solely for acting like a little girl. He’s got woke corporations falling over themselves to give him endorsement deals, and he was invited to the White House by Joe Biden—though I’m sure even Biden wasn’t about to sniff Mulvaney’s hair or rub his back inappropriately. But there is a real risk that “misgendering” people could become a criminal act. It sounds ludicrous, but in 2021 a father in British Columbia was arrested for referring to his 14-year-old daughter as “she” after she transitioned. In Britain, a journalist named Caroline Farrow faced a criminal investigation for “misgendering” a transgender individual on Twitter. Some schools in the United States are punishing students who “misgender” classmates. In May of last year, a school district in Wisconsin filed sexual harassment complaints under Title IX against three 8th grade students because they referred to a classmate with the wrong pronouns. The so-called victim had switched to the grammatically incorrect pronouns “they/them” only a month before the incident. As terrifying as these incidents are, they are the precursor to the criminalization of “misgendering” individuals.

All too many supporting links in the original, alas for sanity, biology, and actual, y’know, truth. It can’t happen here? Oh, I think we all know that, in this era of rampant PC and redundant, spurious “hate crimes,” it most certainly can, and eventually will.

Publick Notice Part the Second

Posted on April 28, 2023April 28, 2023 by Mike

Albeit unrelated to the earlier one: there’s been a sudden YUUUGE influx of bogus attempts at user-registrations, God only knows why. I am about to begin the process of clearing the mess o’ spammage out by denying most if not all of said requests, a process which, while by no means arduous, nonetheless requires no inconsiderable amount of time and hassle to get ‘er done. Just a necessary if annoying part of blog-maintenance nowadays, that’s all.

So anyhoo, if you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to be caught up as collateral damage in the imminent sweep, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.

Update! Y’know, it occurs to me that I should maybe put up some kind of permanent notice restating the above, more or less. Maybe append it to the CF Comments Policy, something like that. We’ll see what I can figger out along those lines, whilst I’m throwing spam-registrants out on their ear, updating plugins, and such-like.

Updated update! Jeez O Pete: no sooner do I finish culling the spam-bots than four more of the lousy bastards pop up in the “New User Approve” plugin’s interface. As the proctologist famously asked of his nurse, is there no end to these assholes?

Sudan Virus

Posted on April 28, 2023April 28, 2023 by Mike

Ready for the next Plandemic? ‘Cause from the looks of things, you damned well better be.

There’s enough evidence to show that the ‘Vid was a test of some kind, as was the response to the ‘Vid and the Vaxx and well, everything else. Be it an intelligence test (most failed) or a compliance test (most, unfortunately passed), Leviathan and ALL the Powers That Be have made no bones about wanting to reduce OUR carbon so to speak. In that, they’re going to be using the most underhanded back room dealing and evil shit that they can, because, despite the current ‘sheep like’ slumber in which the majority of folks operate in, their biggest problem is that eventually -someone, somewhere- suddenly ‘pumps the brakes’ and says “No More.”

Which has, for the most part happened. No one is getting a booster, hell people are shying away from -any- DotGov sponsored Medical ‘stuff’… the trust bond is irreparably damaged… probably never will be restored, unless we get to hang Fauci and all of his psychopathic friends from streetlights… which I’m saying won’t happen, leastways yet. It’ll be a long cold day in Hell with snowcones being served by Stalin himself before I believe anything the DotGov has for me medically speaking… Literally fuck them untrustworthy motherfuckers.

So, they’ve got to keep the ball rolling.

Hence, ‘The Sudan Gambit’ as I’m calling it. As of the 25th of this month, after a micro-civil war kicked loose in the Sudan, the WHO (World Health Organization, a wholly owned subsidiary of ‘Doctor Evil INC’) announced that the Level Four Biolab that they had operating in Khartoum was overrun and currently ‘inaccessible’…fears that elements and samples of live Cholera, Malaria, Measles, Dengue Fever as well as the Sudan Virus and maybe even Marburg are possibly ‘compromised’ by these actions.

Then, a reader helped put the pieces together. Great Analyst.

As mentioned above, one of the bugs being ‘played with’ (besides all the other “death on a stick” bugs) is this Sudan Virus. Seems it’s a lesser potent variant of Marburg, which, in turn is another variant of Ebola. It’s also called the Sudan Ebolavirus. So, bad juju to say the least. Now, to keep the ball rolling, for the first time ever, Marburg had shown up on both coasts of Africa at the same time (Equatorial Guinea on Feb 13th and Tanzania March 21st). Now, Marburg is bad… to say the least. ALL Filoviridae viruses, essentially ALL hemorrhagic viruses? Bad-Bad to the Bone Bad.

To say the very least, yeah. One of the most chilling, hair-raising books I ever did read is a surprisingly thin little tome called The Hot Zone, available for free at my go-to source for such things (no longer there, looks like, except for a “summary and study guide”), a real-life chronicle of a near-outbreak of Ebola from a research facility outside DC. Basically a marginally-less-lethal little brother to the Ebola virus, Marburg is well-covered in the book, and it is indeed some extremely scary stuff.

If FederalGovCo can reduce the overwhelming majority of Americans In Name Only to quivering catatonia over the Shanghai Sniffles—which they did, and were—one can’t even begin to imagine how badly the pathetic, over-biddable, panic-prone AINO herd would react to something as legitimately scarifying as a genetically enhanced and tuned-up version of Marburg on the loose amongst the gen-pop. Alas, I’ll make no bet against the likelihood of finding out sometime all too soon. As Big Country goes on to say:

Best Shoot yourself if you don’t catch it, meaning figure out you’ve been exposed to it… early… as IF you actually contract it? Extremely bad things happen. Best hope is to figure out you –might– have been exposed, start prophylaxes (taking preventatives) and pray to the Deity of Your Choice that you -do not- get the bug. Getting the bug is bad.

It surely is. And as with Ebola, those “prophylaxes” are mighty thin on the ground, and there IS no known cure and/or vaccine for it at all. More yet at the BCE link, of which you should read the all, assuming you have the intestinal fortitude for it.

If there is one thing, and one thing only, that we all should have learned by now, it is that there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FederalGovCo won’t do, no low too low for them to stoop to in their ongoing war against Real Americans and America That Was. We can but hope to God that they aren’t already well on their way to unleashing this Marburg plague on us. Because make no mistake: if they can, they most surely will.

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

.