"I have waited, hoping they would right the ship. But they have not. In opposition to our Unity Principles, they have allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform by their refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful beliefs," Teresa Shook
Quote II
"I am disappointed. It used to be if you wanted to change something, you worked with the contract to change it," she continued. "They just said, ‘We don't want it,' and they are demonstrating against it and it's jobs. It's jobs. I've never seen anything like this." Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.)
Quote III
They spread fake news, and now they're making a bunch of excuses for spreading fake news. Then they wonder why people don't trust them.
The only alternative would be to admit they believed a ridiculous story because they wanted to believe it, and to apologize to the people they smeared by associating them with a hate crime that never actually happened. Jim Treacher
No palace coup can take place without the perception of popular anger at a president.
The deep state is by nature cowardly. It does not move unless it feels it can disguise its subterranean efforts or that, if revealed, those efforts will be seen as popular and necessary—as expressed in tell-all book titles such as fired FBI Directors James Comey’s Higher Loyalty or in disgraced Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s psychodramatic The Threat.
In candidate and President Trump’s case that prepping of the battlefield translated into a coordinated effort among the media, political progressives and celebrities to so demonize Trump that his imminent removal likely would appear a relief to the people. Anything was justified that led to that end.
***
Let's take a look at what's happening in Wisconsin..........
"The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. "While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."
Camila worked for Ristretto Roasters, my husband Din’s coffee roasting company in Portland, Oregon, for five years. She received regular promotions and by 2016 was earning a mid-five figure salary. In October of last year, Camila resigned. The end.
Or, the end until last month, when she sent an email to more than two dozen former and current Ristretto Roasters employees, alerting them to the YouTube series, #MeNeither Show, that fellow journalist Leah McSweeney and I launched in December 2018. In three half-hour episodes, we had discussed, among other topics, celebrities who have exploited the #MeToo movement, and the difference between sexual predators and those swept-up in the excesses of the current moment. The show’s “about” page reads, “#MeNeither is an almost-weekly conversation about the cultural issues of the day, and an attempt to create a space where people can find ways to think out loud through uncomfortable topics.”
My Wife Was Dying, and We Didn’t Tell Our Children
The choice was unusual, but loving: We wanted them to live without the shadow of their mother's mortality hanging over them.
We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given 1,000 days to live, they’d start counting.
They would not be able to enjoy school, friends, their teams, or birthday parties. They’d be watching too closely—how she looked, moved, acted, ate, or didn’t. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children: unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday.
***
The ONT Musical Interlude sponsored by Hugo The Chavez
As the Free Thought Project reported last year, 2018 was the year of the snitches as neighbors turned in fellow neighbors to authorities for selling water, lemonade, or for simply being black at your own apartment complex pool. This see something say something society is the wet dream of the authoritarian and as a recent case of a boy selling hot chocolate in Pennsylvania illustrates, it is showing no signs of slowing.
One would think that in the ostensible land of the free, a little boy selling hot chocolate to willing customers to warm them up on a winter’s day would never be an issue over which people would call the police. However, one would be wrong.
Andrew Donaldson, of Castle Shannon, received a hefty dose of the see something say something state earlier this month when his hot chocolate sales landed him in the cross hairs of police state dependent neighbors.
***
The ONT suggests that you don't do this at home. Slo-Mo Nailgun
-Cops today arrested a “naked and belligerent” Florida Woman for allegedly attacking her fiancée after he declined to have sex with her, according to a police report.
Officers responding early this morning to a disturbance call at a Vero Beach apartment building encountered Samantha Jewel Hernandez, 21, sans clothes and in an ornery mood. Hernandez (pictured at right) denied doing anything to her fiancée, “but was too intoxicated” to provide further information.
Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Directions.
Notice: Posted with permission by the Ace Media Empire and it's favorite step-child AceCorp, LLC. Something about habit forming. Something about assless chaps. Yadda, yadda, yadda.......
... published in Washington, D.C. which is credited with inventing the term "McCarthyism" in an editorial cartoon published in 1950...
2.In a span of three (3) days in January of this year commencing on January 19, the Post engaged in a modern-day form of McCarthyism by competing with CNN and NBC, among others, to claim leadership of a mainstream and social media mob of bullies which attacked, vilified, and threatened Nicholas Sandmann ("Nicholas"), an innocent secondary school child.
3.The Post wrongfully targeted and bullied Nicholas because he was the white, Catholic student wearing a red "Make America Great Again" souvenir cap on a school field trip to the January 18 March for Life in Washington, D.C.when he was unexpectedly and suddenly confronted by Nathan Phillips ("Phillips"), a known Native American activist, who beat a drum and sang loudly within inches of his face ("the January 18 incident").
4.Nicholas stood quietly and respectfully for several minutes after being targeted and bullied by Phillips and Nicholas’body language remained non-aggressive and passive throughout the incident.
...
7.In targeting and bullying Nicholas by falsely accusing him of instigating the January 18 incident, the Post conveyed that Nicholas engaged in acts of racism by "swarming" Phillips, "blocking" his exit away from the students,and otherwise engaging in racist misconduct.
8.The Post ignored basic journalist standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented, biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump("the President") by impugning individuals perceived to be supporters of the President.
9.As a 16-year old secondary school student, Nicholas' political beliefs are anything but established and entrenched in his young mind.
10.Nicholas has zero history of political activism or aggressiveness and did not exhibit any such conduct even when confronted with unbridled racist attacks by activist bullies at the National Mall.
11.The Post's campaign to target Nicholas in furtherance of its political agenda was carried out by using its vast financial resources to enter the bully pulpit
by publishing a series of false and defamatory print and online articles which effectively provided a worldwide megaphone to Phillips and other anti-Trump individuals and entities to smear a young boy who was in its view an acceptable casualty in their war against the President.
12.Unlike the Post's abuse of the profession of journalism, Plaintiffs do not bring this lawsuit to use the judicial system to further a political agenda. This lawsuit is brought against the Post to seek legal redress for its negligent, reckless, and malicious attacks on Nicholas which caused permanent damage to his life and reputation.
13.The Post bullied an innocent child with an absolute disregard for the pain and destruction its attacks would cause to his life.
14.The Post proved itself to be aloud and aggressive bully with a bully pulpit.
15.In this country, our society is dedicated to the protection of children regardless of the color of their skin, their religious beliefs,or the cap they wear.
16.But the Post did not care about protecting Nicholas. To the contrary, the Post raced with a reckless disregard of the facts and truth because in this day and time there is a premium for being the first and loudest media bully.
17.The Post wanted to lead the charge against this child because he was a pawn in its political war against its political adversary –a war so disconnected and beyond the comprehension of Nicholas that it might as well have been science fiction.
18.The Post must be dealt with the same way every bully is dealt with and that is hold the bully fully accountable for its wrongdoing in a manner which effectively deters the bully from again bullying other children. In a civil lawsuit, punishment and deterrence is found in awarding money damages to the victim and target of the bully.
19.In order to fully compensate Nicholas for his damages and to punish, deter,and teach the Post a lesson it will never forget, this action seeks money damages in excess of Two Hundred and Fifty Million Dollars ($250,000,000.00) --the amount Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, paid in cash for the Post when his company, Nash Holdings, purchased the newspaper in 2013.
CNN Thumb Chris Cillizza: The Left Has Pushed Two Racial-Arson Hoaxes. The Right, Meanwhile, Has Criticized the Left For Pushing Two Racial-Arson Hoaxes. As You Can See, Both Sides Are Equally to Blame.
Both the left and the right got Covington wrong, and then got Smollet wrong. They just got it wrong in different ways -- the left got it wrong by getting it wrong, and the right got it wrong by noticing the left had gotten it wrong.
You're everything we've come to expect from CNN "analysis."
The point is that, once again, the left and right were not engaged in the same project. One side was running full speed with confirmation bias and got the story wrong. The other side looked at the actual facts (as provided by the videos) and successfully argued the truth was other than it first appeared. The "counterattack" wasn’t of the same nature as the initial attack. Why can't Chris Cillizza see those differences?
He's a paid shill for a political party. You might just as well ask "Why can't Cory Booker see that Cory Booker is a dummy?"
Meanwhile, the "right wing" is really going to "seize" and "pounce" on this: Nigerian brothers testify before grand jury, says Chicago reporter.
"We began the political revolution in the 2016 campaign, and now it's time to move that revolution forward," the independent senator told Vermont Public Radio in an interview that will air Tuesday morning.
Below, an amazing flashback.
Bernie Sanders used to claim that capitalists were wrong to use the existence of bread lines in socialist countries against socialism.
Because, you see, in non-socialist countries, there are no bread lines -- but that's only because the rich people just get all the bread, and the poor people just die of starvation.
No really -- he said that. A while ago, but his politics have not changed. Once a Red, always a Red.
Justice4Jussie: TMZ Reports Smollet's Role on "Empire" Has Been Slashed
—Ace of Spades
Thank goodness! This poor man needs to recover after being brutally attacked by red-hat wearing MAGA White Devils.
Production sources tell TMZ ... Jussie was supposed to have 9 scenes and a big musical number in the second to the last episode -- which is being shot now -- but, 5 of his scenes have been cut, and his musical number has been 86'd.
As for the remaining 4 scenes ... we're told he's no longer the focus. The scene features an ensemble, meaning he's flanked by a number of cast members.
With his duties pared down, Jussie will be spending way less time on set. Instead of working every day this week, we're told Jussie's working Friday and possibly Thursday, and he won't be rehearsing.
TMZ reports that writers are busy editing his part down. I have a source at Empire, he sent me this animatic of Jussie's planned scenes.
I'm in a busted fast -- I went four full days of fasting (Tuesday through Saturday), then I got panicky that I was going to do damage to myself and the panic spiraled until I broke the fast, first with not-so-unhealthy chicken noodle soup, and then with the greasiest carbiest Chinese food that $60 could buy.
Then I felt like a total dick and total pussy for having gotten panicky and permitted that as an excuse to break the fast, so I threw out what was left of the food (which wasn't a lot, tbh -- I went train on that fucking Chinese food) and restarted the fast Sunday.
So Tuesday through Friday fasting, EAT ALL THE CARBS Saturday, then Sunday through today fasting again.
That makes today Day 3 (again), which is always a real bastard of a day for me. So I've had to go through the really tough Day 3 twice in a week.
I'm thinking about what delicious but low-carb/keto things I can eat when I break fast.
So, talk about YO GAINZZZ here, generally, of any kind.
And also, if you've got some favorite low carb/keto recipes, please let me know. Links to online recipes, whatever.
I'm looking for really good stuff to start making when I break the fast.
One thing I can't find online: a recipe for low-carb fried clam strips, using crushed pork rinds as a "breading." I don't know if the lack of a recipe for this means that this just won't work, or if the lack of a recipe just means, "It's the same as every other recipe where you substitute crushed pork rinds for breading, stupid. Use your imagination."
Anyone have any ideas?
Also, while I've found a lot of recipes for low-carb fried chicken (using almond flour, parmesan, and crushed pork rinds for "breading"), I wondering if anyone has one they would say is the best. The most like KFC, or the most like Popeyes.
Also -- what would the best oil be for it? Buttermilk and egg for the wash, or just egg?
I found a "fried rice" recipe using riced cauliflower -- anyone have any suggestions for how to prepare pork so I can cut it up and make pork fried riced cauliflower?
I'm also really jonesing for batter-fried cod or flounder. Or a McDonald's style Filet-O-Fish. Basically any excuse to deploy some tartar sauce.
It's Time for Congress and State Legislatures to Make Hoax Hate Crimes Themselves Hate Crimes, and Felonies to Boot
—Ace of Spades
As Infobee and John Hayward argue -- what is a hoax hate-crime if not an effort to create waves of hatred and possible violence against a race or group?
BTW, Rush Limbaugh read this thread and pointed out, rightly, that we'd be living in a different, more dangerous world if Smollet's plan to get this fake attack on camera worked.
Apparently the camera he thought would film the attack was pointed in the opposite direction.
But if he had gotten this basic fact right, we'd have seen coverage of this staged attack of MAGA-hat wearing white men (wearing gloves and ski-masks to hide their ethnicity) beating up and tying a noose around the neck of a black man.
This would have of course created -- what's that word? -- Backlash against white people, especially those wearing red hats, and put their lives in danger from bad actors seeking racial vengeance.
According to the alleged victim Terry Pierce, a man pulled a gun on him because he was wearing a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat.
"I have as much right to wear that hat and support my country and my president as he has not to," said Pierce.
The police report confirms that the suspect, identified as James Phillips, admitted to flipping off Pierce and Pierce's wife because of their hats.
Pierce tells 13 News that he was shopping with his wife when Phillips "Pulled a .40 caliber out and stuck it in my face, backed up and said, 'It's a good day for you to die.'"
It's time to criminalize these attempts to stir up Backlash against Republicans, and treat these attempts to stir up lynch parties as the hate crimes they are.
If Smollett isn't charged with a hate crime, then no one should be. It's either a legal principle or an instrument of totalitarian political power. If the latter, then we should get rid of hate-crime laws immediately and should have done so long ago. https://t.co/Q1avtibxyu
We're all supposed to be very concerned about information warfare, disinformation, and "meddling" in our politics and society. Hate-crime hoaxes are prime examples of all of those things, and they are far more influential than Russia buying $1000 of Facebook ads or whatever.
Criminal behavior is usually influenced by risk-reward calculations. At the moment, people see little risk in reporting false hate crimes and enormous reward - instant celebrity, the righteous rush of secular sainthood, possible financial benefits.
We can take a step toward fixing that by throwing the book at Jussie Smollett if he's found guilty of faking a hate crime, which absolutely MUST be considered as much of a hate crime as the incident he faked.
Otherwise, we are reinforcing all of the awful forces that inspire people to invent phony hate crimes, including the poisonous totalitarian idea that some groups are incapable of hatred, while others DESERVE to be hated, so slandering them is not a serious offense. /end
Hoax hate crimes are well beyond the usual threshold at which the media and our Ruling Class declares something to be an "epidemic" and "a scourge which must finally be ended."
Strangely enough, however, this time they're very quiet about the epidemic!
As the Daily Caller reports, there has indeed been an epidemic of hoax hate crimes, and our political-media establishment has done nothing to reduce this epidemic. In fact, they've made it worse, by excusing each new hoax hate crime with the "Deeper Truth" illogic. ("In this particular case, the hate crime may have been a hoax, but the hoax just points out the Deeper Truth of marginalized communities feeling forced to make up hoax hate crimes," etc.)
Childish Media - This is America Thanks for the great idea @Cernovich
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein plans to leave the Justice Department in mid-March, agency officials told news outlets Monday.
A Justice Department official said that Rosenstein's departure is not related to a controversy surrounding his alleged offer to wear a wire during conversations with President Donald Trump, according to CNN.
Lie.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe claimed in an interview that aired Sunday that Rosenstein broached the idea of wearing a wire to the White House in May 2017, days after James Comey was fired as FBI director.
As John Nolte documents, that's yet another Huge Lie from the Truth-Tellers. The media routinely asserted that Smollet had been attacked -- despite the Chicago police leaking like sieves to anyone within a a ten mile radius that they had deep suspicions this was all bullshit.
I think that last fact has to be stressed: This was the perfect set-up for the media to finally get one right.
The story reeked of fabrication, and the police themselves were putting out the word to practically anyone who asked that they had very great doubts this was a real attack.
And yet the media still asserted that an attack happened, and still virtue-signaled up and down twitter -- and their own "news" shows, which now seem like afterthought additions to their twitter timelines-- how "disgusting" "America in 2019" is.
Appearing on CNN’s basement-rated New Day with co-hosts John Avlon and Alisyn Camerota on Monday, Stelter said of the Smollett case: "There was a rush to judgment, I think it was mostly in the celebrity press and among activists and among Twitter people. I think it was a really careful reporting by news organizations. But it all gets lumped in together at the end of the day."
It makes sense for Stelter to muddy the waters like this. After all, the Smollett hoax comes fresh on the heels of the media’s starring role in the Racist Covington High School Hoax, the Brett Kavanaugh Serial-Rapist Hoax, and most of all, the imploding Trump Colluded With Russia Hoax.
Unfortunately for Stelter, his shameless spin is easily exposed as such by countless tweets, headlines, and statements made by his fellow journalists and pundits -- including four high-profile staffers at CNN.
Let's start with videotape of a CNN anchor: "Absolutely despicable," said CNN's Brooke Baldwin on CNN Newsroom, "and this is America in 2019."
CNN anchor Don Lemon said the following on a popular podcast: "One, he has to deal with discrimination as a black man," said Lemon, "then, on top of that, he has to be gay -- and then, fame -- fame is not natural -- When something happens to you and it’s controversial, everyone is coming for you, and so I knew everyone would be picking apart his story.”
CNN’s April Ryan still hasn't deleted this tweet: "This attack on @JussieSmollett is a hate crime and should be treated as such!"
Amazingly, the pure activist Sopan Deb claimed that the media hadn't pushed this story as true. When Mollie Hemingway responded to him that he himself had pushed it as true -- not using the word "alleged" regarding the alleged attack, for example, but simply referring to "the assault" as if that was itself a fact -- he suddenly vanished.
The headlines and chyrons of CNN, NBC News and CBS News from day 1 all clearly take, as fact, that an attack happened . The question raised was only if it was a hate crime. 2/ pic.twitter.com/qkOWBL57jb
Another issue with the media coverage of Smollett was the immediate secondary story. Here, demonstrated by @CNN and @BuzzFeed, any element of skepticism was dismissed by these tweets about celebrity response to the “brutal attack” (no “alleged” in there). 4/ pic.twitter.com/SrmkkyCGZE
There's some raw meat below the fold, but this made me chuckle. And the responses are just as funny. So for today, I hope the spittle flecking your screens is from laughter...
Hello my name is Paul, I have a PhD in physics and thanks to a random brain freeze forgot the word for photon so had to call it a “shiny crumb” in front of my colleagues 😐
Pierce tells 13 News that he was shopping with his wife when Phillips "Pulled a .40 caliber out and stuck it in my face, backed up and said, 'It's a good day for you to die.'"
Pierce went on to tell 13 News, "I said, 'Then pull the trigger. Put the gun down and fight me or pull the trigger. Whichever one you want.' And he backed up and he said it again, he said, 'It's a good day for you to die.'"
JJ Sefton covered this story already, but that quotation is just too good!
[Hat Tip: Bitter Clinger]
******
This is a 14-year-old story. And it refers to an obscene expenditure 15 years before that, so let us not pretend; there has been a border crisis in this country for a very long time. The uncountable billions of dollars spent on illegals over the last two generations could have been spent on Americans, or even better...not taken in taxes in the first place.
Ana Puente was an infant with a liver disorder when her aunt brought her illegally to the U.S. to seek medical care. She underwent two liver transplants at UCLA Medical Center as a child in 1989 and a third in 1998, each paid for by the state.
I am confident that the little loophole has been fixed, and these illegals are getting new livers and hearts and other expensive medical care that crowds out the very people who paid for it...American citizens.
We cannot be the world's policeman, and we cannot be the world's hospital. Call me a racist, call me a nationalist, call me whatever you wish...I don't care. This is wrong, it is not moral, and it is unsustainable. A 22 trillion dollar national debt would seem to demonstrate that last point rather conclusively.
Good morning kids. Tuesday, and the lead story is the now all-but-certain confirmation that the alleged racist attack on homosexual black actor Jussie Smollett by two MAGA hat-wearing white men was in fact a hoax. The reasons why he did it are completely irrelevant. The important takeaways are that even the most patently transparent of lies will be swallowed whole by the media if the accused is a non-Democrat-Leftist. Smollet knew this going in and for days, the geschrei from every quarter was intolerably loud, strident and virulent. That is until all of this began to unravel over the weekend with the refusal to be forthcoming to investigators, the lack of any surveillance video of the incident, the discovery of his buff Nigerian cohorts who helped stage the non-attack, and now a juicy nugget wherein Smollett participated in a reading of a play in New York City hours before the attack that had in its plot an incident strikingly similar to the one he reported happened to him hours later in the Loop. But I digress.
The salient issues are the aforementioned willingness of the media to both run with the story and then do everything it could to run cover for Smollett, the stammering, hemming and hawing by both the self-proclaimed media and cultural "elite" when faced with the cold, hard irrefutable truth and refusal to apologize let alone admit they were wrong. Even Al Sharpton, the loathsome lout who became a very successful and very wealthy national political figure as the preeminent hoax manufacturer and racial arsonist of our age, has vocally condemned Smollett. And yet leading Democrat 2020 candidates Kamala-Toe Harris and Spartacus Booker are, when they're not hemming, hawing and dodging, doing the equivocation boogie.
The willingness and even eagerness to ramp up the stoking of racial animus for political gain that began under Obama is continuing unabated - especially now that a man like Trump is in office who is loudly and proudly doing all that he can to restore those things, ideas and history that defined America and made it great. And that's because all of those things are defined as "racist" or "unjust" or "immoral" by those that seek to divide and conquer. QED.
The other big story is, of course, the aftermath of the CR and the will it or won't it be built Border Wall and border security. As I stated on Friday, I'm not happy about this at all. I felt it would have been a wiser political move for the President to veto the bill and then let Congress in toto - Dems and RINOs alike - take the full blame in the eyes of the American people for trying to bamboozle us with the bullshit, and not insignificantly, continue the generational theft by borrowing and spending America into oblivion. I have several links that are rather on the pessimistic side about the remainder of Trump's first term (hopefully there will be another, please G-d), while Jeffrey Lord has a completely different and optimistic take on the situation. Meanwhile, House Dems are all in on not alerting ICE even if an illegal alien fails a gun background check and groups connected to Nazi collaborator Soros are already filing the first lawsuits against the wall.
In Civil War 2.0 news, a man in a MAGA hat has a gun shoved in his face at a Sam's Club, "Bro-Fo" Omar really needs to be investigated for ties to America- and Joo-hating terrorists, a cemetery in Brooklyn, the epicenter of American Jewry, feels the love from the "Bro-Fo's" and T-Labia contingent, and if you're a Christian you are unqualified to be a judge according to the Left.
To politics where Illinois Governor Pritzker is all about being transparent except when it comes to the salaries of his aides, Kamala-Toe goes full racialist in pimping the abolition of Columbus Day, all of the records for Bite-Sized Bloomberg's time in Gracie Mansion have somehow vanished, the battle brewing in West Virginia over the insane automatic voting registration, and Trump v Dems in 2020 = Borders/Babies v SJW Activism.
Abortion: Utah passes a sane bill while the administration continues to fund Planned Parenthood baby-butchery for medical experiments.
First Amendment and Fake News Fakery: The NY Times states an obvious truth, a You Tube user claims the giant allows an on line pedophile ring to operate with it, Google was in bed with National Review (surprise!), and Al Jazeera foments/pimps Islamism (surprise, surprise!).
The Mueller Inquisition: Big news here is Rod Rosen-traitor is ankling the DoJ in March, as well as a look at the aftermath of the failed coup attempt, or at least this aspect of it as les jeux sont fait elsewhere.
At the foreign desk, President Trump warns Venezuela's military that all options are on the table vis a vis the current crisis there, Europe is still butt-hurt over VP Pence's smacking them around with a dose of reality, certain members of the Brit Labour Party are fed up with the Joo-hate and are leaving to form their own family, Obama's "red line" was in fact a green light for Assad to use chemical weapons hundreds of times, a Chinese cardinal warns about a secret Vatican deal with the Chi-Coms over Chinese bishops, PDT touts a hemisphere free of socialism and another sane call for US troops to get the hell out of Syria. Lastly, the Air Force dame who converted to Islam and spied on us for Iran was radicalized at GWU, the same school that collected millions from Muslim countries. Fire up the Mossad laser Joo-shark. And speaking of Islam, a look at Muslim front groups doing Turkish Turd-ogon's bidding across the globe.
In economic news, food stamp use is at a 12-month low (Dems hardest hit!), Donkey-Chompers Cortez is open to hearing how Bill Gates would confiscate everyone's wealth, a look at the latest obfuscations/misrepresentations about the withholding tax and why your refund might be smaller than usual, and why Breakfast Club Evita was perhaps right about killing the Amazon NYC HQ deal.
Healthcare: Dowdy Depends-Wearing Dipsomaniac decries dearth of healthcare for Americans not realizing that Obamacare, such as it is, is still the law of the land, and an essay about pre-existing conditions vis a vis accepting the premise of forcing the coverage of same.
Education: #RedForEd movement ramps up (meh, the reds already control academia) ahead of a Denver teachers strike, and Klown-Kar Klobuchar is not ingratiating herself with the radicals.
Red-Greens: A good essay on the corruption of science for political ends and the invaluable Discover the Networks takes a look at exactly who these "Justice Democrats" are vis a vis the insanity of this Green New Deal.
Feminazism: Cue Chicago or Spencer Davis singing "I'm a Man" as Rabbi Fischer says it loud and proud.
Hither and Yon: Christian Toto rips yet another anti-Trump agitprop flick, First Lady Melania Trump blasts socialism and offers hope for suffering Venezuelans and finally, George Mendonsa, identified as the sailor captured in the iconic Life magazine VJ day cover photo kissing a surprised nurse, has passed away at age 95. I hope that that is not an allegory for the last vestige of America as founded. Requiscat In Pace.
NOTE: The opinions expressed in some links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue. Anyway, links from around the world, across the nation and up your street. Have a better one and remain blessed.
Monday Overnight Open Thread (2/18/19) President's Day Edition
—Misanthropic Humanitarian
***
The Quotes of The Day
Quote I
I suppose that in the end our fate is decided by market sentiment: Things can continue as they are as long as people believe that they can. Personally, I don’t believe that they can continue, but I don’t know at what precise moment impossibility will supervene. Therefore I keep calm and carry on, enjoying my panic at third hand.Theodore Dalrymple
Quote II
“Amazon just took their ball and went home. “And what they did was confirm people’s worst fears about corporate America. Here’s the 1 percent, dictating to everyone else even though we gave them a fair deal. And I think it’s going to frustrate people all over this country to see a company treat a neighborhood and a city like that.”Mayor Bill de Blasio
Quote III
I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is. G. K. Chesterton
The ongoing collapse of the claimed hate crime against actor Jussie Smollett has been an example of bottom-up, not top-down news gathering. Chicago’s Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and the CPD’s official communications have at every opportunity defended the original narrative. But the rank-and-file cops, quite probably outraged at what was fairly quickly seen by them as an obvious fraud, leaked to their friends in the local media. And two outstanding local websites, Second City Cop and especially CWB Chicago (which reports honestly about crime in the Windy City, and which depends on donations – donate here), have been to go-to sources putting it all together many steps ahead of what the more established media were willing to publish.
CWB Chicago has a round-up of the latest developments in the fast-breaking case. Some excerpts, but be sure to read the whole thing
***
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was the scene of a horrific mass killing. Law enforcement agencies perhaps could have stopped the shooter. But hey, let's leave it up to AI backed solutions to stop these tragedies.
Schools are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence-backed solutions to stop tragic acts of student violence such as the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a year ago.
Bark Technologies, Gaggle.Net, and Securly Inc. are three companies that employ AI and machine learning to scan student emails, texts, documents, and in some cases, social media activity. They look for warning signs of cyber bullying, sexting, drug and alcohol use, depression, and to flag students who may pose a violent risk not only to themselves, but classmates.
When potential problems are found, and depending on the severity, school administrators, parents – and under the most extreme cases – law enforcement officials, are alerted.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend, Riley Roberts, was found to have a government email address. Her team was quick to say that Roberts was not a member of AOC’s staff. Therefore he’s not earning a salary. But their denial doesn’t really pass the smell test. If they’re being honest and Roberts is not on the payroll, it’s a different violation of Congressional ethics,
From Daily Mail:
Her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti also argued the move was normal for a spouse or partner.
On Friday, electric truck startup Rivian announced a $700 million funding round led by Amazon. The announcement is notable not just for the size of the investment but also due to Amazon's involvement.
The e-commerce giant has made a variety of investments in mobility, and electric trucks and SUVs like the kind Rivian debuted at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November could help the company further its ambitions in that regard.
Slowly but surely, spinning discs are dying out, and Samsung just put another nail in their coffin. The company told Forbes that it’s done producing 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray players — and CNET was able to confirm that Samsung is halting production on at least some of its 1080p Blu-ray players as well.
“Samsung will no longer introduce new Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray player models in the US market,” a Samsung spokesperson told CNET.
Technically, there’s still the possibility that Samsung may continue to produce its existing Blu-ray players for months or years to come — the company still has quite a few models on sale — or introduce new ones in specific countries outside the US. We’ve asked Samsung to clarify.
February 18, 1933, Born on this day, Yoko Ono, Japanese artist, singer, poet, author and peace activist and wife of John Lennon. Ono moved to New York City from Tokyo aged 14 and first met John Lennon in London in 1966, the couple married in 1969. via thisdayinmusic.com
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February 18, 1953, Born on this day, Robbie Bachman from Bachman Turner Overdrive who had the 1974 US No.1 & UK No.2 single 'You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet'. via thisdayinmusic.com
Last week, an alt-rock mystery puzzled the music press. Almost 25 years after its release, the Dinosaur Jr. song “Over Your Shoulder” appeared at number 18 on Japan’s Hot 100 chart, beating out major new releases like Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.”
The fuzzy, mournful closer to Dinosaur Jr.’s 1994 album Without a Sound, “Over Your Shoulder” is an unlikely candidate for a hit single. Indeed, it was never released in that format. Stranger still, the track rocketed up Japan’s charts thanks to over eight million video plays—earning the country’s top spot for video streams—despite no YouTube upload of the song having anywhere close to that many views.
W.E.B. Griffin, the prolific author of nearly 250 books, nearly 160 of which were military fiction, died on February 12, his publisher, Putnam, confirmed. He was 89.
A man has impressed Chinese netizens with his level of deceit and dedication, managing to juggle three different wives and families at the same time by settling them all down in close proximity to one another.
The 36-year-old man, surnamed Zhang, was able to get hitched three times in a period of three years (2015-2017) to three different women by exploiting a loophole in the system, marrying each time in a different province.
The Republic of Ireland surprisingly has no year-round ice-skating rinks, so the nation’s youth hockey teams have struggled to find suitable practice space—but that’s about to change, thanks to a world famous hockey fan in Canada.
Ever since the Dundalk Ice Dome closed in 2010, the hockey clubs have been practicing on inline roller skates, until the winter holidays when the seasonal rinks open for about seven weeks.
Despite this, more Irish kids are developing a passion for the sport.
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Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Logistical Engineers.
Notice: Posted with permission by the Ace Media Empire and AceCorp, LLC. Contrary to popular belief today's downtime was not a result of yours truly :)
Has Trump wrecked our sex life? "Post-Trump Sex Disorder" is real, says sex therapist
"Big Mean Sexy Daddy"? Salon turns to Dr. Susan Block for answers to questions you didn't want to ask
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
FEBRUARY 13, 2019 9:00PM (UTC)
Donald Trump has made America's mental health crisis much worse.
Beginning with his presidential campaign and through to his third year as president, the United States has experienced an increase in anxiety, suicide, depression, and other mental health problems....
Most of us are doing fine. It's you Cluster B hysterics and basket cases who are tweaking.
Get the fuck off twitter for a few hours a day, you neurotic spazzes.
The only anxiety most of us experience is hysteria-by-proxy, caused by your constant emotional incontinence and daily lunacies.
Donald Trump's negative impact on mental health extends to the intimate sexual lives of many people as well.
What is "Post-Traumatic Trump Disorder"? How does Donald Trump's misogyny and other unhealthy behavior towards women reflect deeper systemic cultural problems in America around gender, sex, and intimacy?
Now some questions for the Sexpert, which is totally a real thing.
How has the Age of Trump impacted the American people's collective mental health and also their intimate lives?
It has had a big impact. For some people Trump's campaign and presidency has created a type of PTSD -- what I call "Post-Trump Sex Disorder." Trump has created feelings of fear, loathing, and nausea. People just don't want to have sex....
You mean your basket-case frigid liberal feminist friends don't.
Some of us haven't been this horny in years.
Let's skip around a bit.
[T]his moment with Donald Trump is also reflected by many men who are dysfunctional and chronically frustrated and who don't know how to properly approach women, and the lethally unhinged "incels." We also cannot forget all of the "ammosexuals" who substitute their favorite guns for a working penis.
What about the Maddowsexuals who can't have sex because they are hysteria junkies who need to get amped up on whatever conspiracy theory and fear-mongering Rachel Maddow is injecting into their veins next?
Most Americans of conscience, and decent people more generally, are appalled by Donald Trump's personal and public behavior. Yet, there are others who are aroused by Donald Trump and see him as a symbol of sexual potency and power.
Yes, Donald Trump is a turn-off for many people. But for some people they are turned on and titillated by Donald Trump. They are not suffering from Post-Trump Sexual Disorder. Sex does not always turn us on the way we think it ought to. A lot of people are attracted to bad boys. I emphasize "people" because it is both men and women who are aroused and attracted to and titillated by Donald Trump. There is definitely a homoerotic attraction for Trump being experienced by his usually very homophobic male supporters. Both men and women really do find Trump to be an appealing "bad boy" and "evil daddy" who's really hot.
In this way, Donald Trump is the daddy of a dysfunctional United States family. And of course evil can be very sexy. Evil is fascinating. As you said previously, Donald Trump is a cult leader and Charlie Manson-like figure. People are just charged up by him and some of those people are driven to commit great crimes by that kind of charisma.
...
American society is very repressed in terms of healthy attitudes about sex. Therefore it is no surprise that people will look to violence to express their sexuality. This is why Donald Trump embodies the symbolic cultural role as the "Big Mean Sexy Daddy."
I just wanted to quote that -- she's admitting that many of her frigid feminist progressive-stack idiot friends are turned on by Evil Daddy Trump, and I'm just LOLing at that.
The interviewer agrees that all of this "fascism" can be "very erotic."
Donald Trump is a right-wing authoritarian and aspiring tyrant. The fascist conception of the State is very masculine in the most crude and basic sense. In this way of thinking about politics and society Donald Trump leads a political cult whose members want to literally be inside of him, to become him, to have a libidinal relationship with the Great Leader. This includes both men and women. The fascist aesthetic can be very erotic for the followers.
Trump's supporters want to be spanked by him. Trump's supporters want to be hugged by him. They want to be with him. They want to identify with him.
Ahem. Are you sure it's us who have these sexual feelings about Trump...? You guys sure seem to have, um, thought a lot about this, in perhaps a rhythmic sort of way, maybe a sort of pulsing kind of way, set to level 2, then increasing to level 3 and then level 4 as it gets hotter and hotter.
One of the things about the evil daddy is that he shames you. This touches your sexuality very deeply. Trump does this all the time with his attacks on people and efforts to shift the blame from him and on to others.
This woman (if it is a woman) is going HAM on the idea of getting spanked by Bad Daddy. Trump has turned her into a puddle of primal need.
Why are some men -- especially conservatives and other authoritarians --frightened and made angry by strong, independent, sexual confident women?
Let me answer this: No one is. People like confidence and sexual confidence is sexy.
You are mischaracterizing bitter, brittle, emotionally incontinent, hateful little female catlady "incels" as "strong, independent, sexual[ly] confident women."
In fact they're none of these things. But every fragile weakling has a powerful psychological drive to characterize his or her flaws as Secret Strengths.
I have talked to so many men in right-wing strongholds, red state America. They need sex therapy more than the guys in liberal parts of the country.
A Sexpert who has a roaming practice?
I don't know about you guys, but the therapists I've heard of have been single-location operators. They don't roam the country from blue state to red state setting up shop for two weeks before moving on like a railway hobo one step ahead of the police.
Oh wait, she's not a "therapist," she's...
...founder and director of the Dr. Susan Block Institute for the Erotic Arts & Sciences. Block is perhaps most well-known for her HBO TV special "Radio Sex TV with Dr. Susan Block," and appearances on HBO series such as "Real Sex" and "Cathouse." She's also a New York Times bestselling author and has been a frequent guest on such TV shows and networks as Oprah, Nightline, and MTV.
I'm not seeing much in that CV that suggests she actually talks with people from any state about their sexual problems as a therapist would.
She just seems like a self-manufactured talking head looking for bookings on TV.
Now comes the part you knew was coming: Yes, it's time to talk about how hot being a cuck can be.
But these right-wing conservative men are very turned on by the thought of seeing their wives or girlfriends with other men. These men, the Trump supporters and especially the "alt-right" types love to use the word "cuck" as a type of insult. But in reality I would estimate that a lot of them, maybe most, are into the cuckold fantasy themselves.
This guy saying this is writing for the leftwing magazine that wrote about the hot sexy practice of cuckolding nonstop for a year or so. Now they want to claim that "most" rightwingers are into it.
Hey, leftwing magazines write about it constantly, but that's really to attract those rightwing readers their advertisers are interested in selling to.
...
A lot of these white right-wing men, especially the "alt-right" types, would love to have sex with African-American men. But this could potentially ruin their social and political power if it became publicly known. But the fantasies still exist.
So... the proper, cultured leftwing response to the "cuck" insult is "I'm not a cuck, but you conservative homos totally want to have sex with Jussie Smollet!!!"
..
[You wrote about the allegations] that Donald Trump's former adviser and campaign manager Paul Manafort practiced "interracial cuckolding." This is all very revealing given that Manafort worked for Donald Trump -- a public figure and now president whose behavior and politics are very racist. Can you explain more about this kink?
What is cuckolding? It's an old English term that actually derives from the French word "cucu" which is of course the cuckoo bird who lays her eggs in another bird's nest. That bird then raises the eggs.
The cuckold is someone whose partner is having sex with someone else. In previous eras in many cultures this was always considered a subject of great humiliation.
...
But cuckold is mostly used in a consensual way. The husband wants it to happen. He’s turned on by it. It’s exciting.
...
It is complicated and not a simple issue. I think it can be great therapy. Interracial cuckolding and other types of role-playing can open up the participant's minds to each other and make them all better people. I really believe that. I also believe that this type of sex can exorcise old demons from your childhood. It can also exorcise old demons from just being an American and this country's history.
Salon once again is all like, "Tell me all the hot stuff about this hot sexy thing called 'cucking' I've read so much about in Salon. And also, try to say something bad about conservatives while you're turning me on."
Hm, I can't figure out why progressives are so hung up about sex in the Age of Trump.
Except that part where they project their own fantasies on to others and then denigrate those fantasies.
And the part where they suggest that people should have interracial cuck sex in order to "exorcise America's historical demons."
I can't think of anything sexier than sex had to correct past racial injustices. Why, I'm getting all steamy just thinking about it.
So, even though it's a bit late for Valentine's Day -- tonight: light some candles, get into sexy underwear, and do it for Thurgood Marshall.
Update: Yeah, TV-and-Twitter addicted liberals, your pathetic sex lives are all Trump's fault.
In case you were wondering who Bill Kristol's remaining audience is this poll sums it up nicely. Good luck converting them into being readers of The Bulwark Bill. pic.twitter.com/DBqoEa85xu
Multiple Sources: When "Jussie" Smollet Didn't Get a Big Enough Media Reaction From His Fake "MAGA" Hate Mail, He Escalated Into Staging the Fake Attack
"Empire" actor Jussie Smollett, upset after a racist letter sent to the sho'’s studio didn’t get a "bigger reaction," is suspected of paying two men to attack him a week later, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the investigation.
"When the letter didn't get enough attention, he concocted the staged attack," a source told CBS 2 Investigator Brad Edwards. Other sources corroborated that information.
If this report is correct, and cops found the magazine out of which the words of the "threatening letter" had been cut, that's pretty much game over.
Though Jussie Smollet can claim the brothers did it without his knowledge. Kind of hard to explain why he ID'd them as white, though, and why he didn't recognize his friends.
De Mar spoke on the phone exclusively with the Osundairo brothers Monday afternoon. In a joint statement, they said: "We are not racist. We are not homophobic, and we are not anti-Trump. We were born and raised in Chicago and are American citizens."
Smollett received a letter containing a white powder Jan. 22. The letter was mailed to Chicago's Cinespace Studios, where the show "Empire" is filmed. The letter prompted a HAZMAT response. CPD says the "white substance" was later determined to be aspirin.
The note was crafted with letters apparently cut out from magazines to form words. The pieced-together message contained racial and homophobic threats directed at Smollett. A magazine is one of the pieces of evidence retrieved from the brother’s home last week during a search conducted by CPD. Investigators also recovered a book of stamps.
Was this all a viral marketing hoax to promote the "anti-lynching bill" Kamala Harris was using to get herself attention?
The giddiness among Trumpsters over the Smollett news is gross. This story is awful. He allegedly abused police resources, exploited raw divisions in this country, and made it harder for every victim of a hate crime to report. This is sad no matter your politics.
"With Jussie Smollett's story of being mugged by MAGA racists falling apart faster than whatever's left of Bill Kristol's mind, the usual MSM outlets are new hilariously trying to walk back all of their crap reporting by trying to deflect the discussion to 'the larger picture' or 'the overall context', which, when translated into normal speech, means, 'screw the facts, Trump is still to blame.' It's like they pulled out their own version of the Otter Defense and are now triumphantly marching out of the room in single file, with their noses pointed piously skyward. Bunch of sanctimonious bastards. I just can't wait until Nick Sandmann's lawsuit hits the fan. I want to see these media hacks writhing in pain as they are forced to deliver on-the-air apologies, or their employers are forced to settle for huge sums of money."
Fake Hate Crimes! Get Your Fake Hate Crimes Right Here:
Right after Donald Trump’s election, the SPLC really stoked panic. A pro-gay Episcopal church in Indiana was vandalized w/“Heil Trump,” a swastika, & an anti-gay slur. Turns out it was the gay organ player who did it. He was only charged w/a misdemeanor. https://t.co/QxeOoBHohC
Good morning kids. Start of a new week and the lead story continues to be immigration and border security in the wake of the President's signing of the CR monstrosity that allowed the government to remain open (G-d forbid it shouldn't, right?) while providing some funds for the building of the border wall, along with his simultaneous declaration of a national emergency to use his executive authority to appropriate funds from other agencies. Except within the over 1,100-page monstrosity are thousands of tiny time pills that actually prevent even a shovelful of dirt from being dug, adequate funds or not. I don't know; Trump is boastful as ever that it's going to get done but frankly, I don't see how. From a political standpoint, I would have preferred him vetoing the bill and then forcing Congress - Democrats and GOP-e alike - to override him and then letting them take full blame for this. Beyond that, the insanity of our national debt as well as the size and scope of the feral Federal government are travesties in and of themselves, as well as the lifeblood of the very swamp that the President set out to drain.
I'm disappointed. I still stand behind our President 100% and am grateful for what the alternative could have been. Angelo Codevilla, the author of the seminal essay (and now book) The Ruling Class now laments in Foggy Crossroads (linked below, as well):
...Trump slid into this bind as more than half his presidency slid by because he relied on the Republican Party's establishment. This reliance was his choice. Nobody else's. Recall that Trump won both the nomination and the presidency by running as much against the Republican part of the ruling class as against the Democrat part of the ruling class.
Since the Republican Party is part and parcel of the ruling class that is ruining America, relying on it to make America great again was doomed to be self-defeating...
...But Trump knows (or does he?) that the Deplorables are not stupid, and that a spreading sense of betrayal among them is the one and only thing sure to defeat him and to deliver him, friendless, to ruling class revenge.
On the other hand, Trump really might carry through in deed the role he previewed in his El Paso rally. In that case, through Obamian-Bushite behavior toward existing law (selective enforcement, executive orders) and Jacksonian behavior toward the courts ("now let them enforce it!") he would create pressure on the Republican establishment to bet their jobs on the outcome of the next election. For which outcome he would set the agenda...
Elsewhere, legal eagles from Mark Levin to William Jacobson opine that the declaration of a national emergency is well within the President's Constitutional authority but surprisingly, Heather MacDonald, a woman who is usually spot on about politics is way off base, and declares the President's action a danger to the Constitution, and encouraging SCOTUS to strike it down. On what planet has Ms. MacDonald been living on since 2009? I left this comment for her:
...I think she fails to fully appreciate the situation the nation is in. The Constitution has been all but shredded, especially during the 8-year reign of error that was Obama. The Democrats will do everything to seize and hold power and then use the very same Constitution as either a shield or a cudgel whenever we attempt to reign them in and reverse course.
Does she really think that if and more likely when (G-d forbid) the Democrats regain the White House they will play by the rules and respect the Constitution? Look what they'e done with virtually every part of the Bill of Rights so far and yet she is upset at what the President has done vis a vis declaring a national emergency...
...I really hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we crossed the rubicon ages ago. Frankly, given the nature of who and what the Democrats are, as well as their stooges in the GOP establishment, if President Trump here and now declared martial law, dissolved Congress, took control of the legacy media, outlawed the Democrat and other leftist parties as well somehow rooted out ever anti-American element in society, I would cheer.
America is in the opening stages of breaking apart anyway. I pray its nonviolent and as amicable as possible. I fear it will be the opposite. To not see this is sticking one's head in the sand.
Other links highlight some of the points stated above such as Obama's flagrant and serial lawlessness, the NY Times even admitting that the President's border enforcement policies are working, and the globalist element in the opposition to his policies.
In other news, "Bro-Fo" Omar raising funds for terrorist front group CAIR and Louis Farrakhan with another Day-Ending-in-"Y" entry on who is to blame for the attack on the Women's March. Also, one hum-dinger of a Huma-Danger as the Weiner is loose.
As the Jussie Smollet hoax is confirmed as such, several good links on how no one is distancing themselves from him and/or apologizing for helping to pimp the lie and an indictment of Palsi-Pelosi's refusal to condemn the America-hating and Joo-hating radicals in her midst. Other political news, Joe Bidet slimes his own country in Europe, Fauxca-Has-Been Warren gets heckled on her campaign trail of tears in Georgia, and a look at beyond "the Flight 93 election." Meanwhile, intrepid independent journalists help Kamala-Toe pick out a Lindsay Nelson horse blanket, and Klown-Kar Klobuchar pimps more gun grabbing in response to the shooting in Aurora, IL.
Several good links about the crashing and burning of the Russia Collusion hoax and traitor Andrew McCabe's admission of attempting a coup against candidate and then President Trump, plus a good overview of this madness from Victor Davis Hanson.
Overseas, Austria's chancellor has high praise for Trump's foreign policy, Venezuela is still in crisis, the Deep State State Dept. may be conducting sabotage-cum-shadow diplomacy in Iran with John Kerry and a look at Iran 40 years after the casbah got rocked.
Surprise! "Bro-Fo" Omar's district is the terrorist recruiting capital of the nation, Canada captures an ISIS animal who may have narrated beheading videos and Daniel Greenfield on another troubled young man who was just turning his life around... before raping and killing a teenager.
Domestically, as alluded to up top the swamp is swamping even Bush and Obama levels of pork, the money from Food Stamp fraud could build one big mother wall, and a look at even more Deep State sabotage of Trump vis a vis the failure to get 5-G telecom up and running. Also, I hope we are not going to resurrect Fannie and Freddie, further analysis of the Amazon-NYC HQ fiasco, the future of Social Security and unionized bureaucrats are at a 40-year low.
We need more gun laws, despite the fact that gun-grabbing Illinois already prohibited the Aurora shooter from possessing a firearm, the Vatican finally defrocks Theodore McCarrick, the pants have lost their crease with Brooks and the Green Marxists, real scientists/experts warn of even more forest fires if we do not ramp up logging and finally Colin Kaepernick successfully extorts millions from the NFL. Oh happy day.
NOTE: The opinions expressed in some links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue. Anyway, links from around the world, across the nation and up your street. Have a better one and remain blessed.
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. Oscar Wilde
Quote IB
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth! President Ronald Reagan
Quote II
"Well, I'd have to ask folks in that part of the country to see whether the fencing that exists today is helpful or unhelpful," "Democrats are not afraid of national security or border security. Democrats have funded border security for decades." Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
Quote III
Conservatism does itself no favors when it comes to depend on mercurial and unprincipled sugar-daddies. Mark Steyn
Quote IV
"I am grateful to President Trump and Secretary Pompeo for the trust they placed in me for considering me for the position of US Ambassador to the United Nations. However, the past two months have been grueling for my family and therefore it is in the best interest of my family that I withdraw my name from consideration." Heather Nauert
Ask 100 people to define socialism, you would likely get 100 different answers. It reminds me of the story about blind people in a zoo touching an elephant for the first time. Each person has a different perception, depending on where they touch.
On one end you receive free food, healthcare, and daily treats. Who wouldn’t want free stuff? Those on the “bouquet” end, dealing with the mess, would have a different opinion.
If socialism is so good, one would think people would be migrating to the states offering the most free stuff.
The major moving companies issue annual reports regarding migration.
United Van Lines reports New Jersey at #1 (66.8% outbound) followed by Illinois, Connecticut, and New York (61.5%). Atlas Van Lines also ranked New York 4th (61.0%). Do the outbound migrants feel they are at the bouquet end, and fed up with paying for the free stuff?
Well, one kind of hoax, anyway. I'm not a general hoax expert.
When the story is just too perfect, when it fits the stereotype that the perpetrator wants to believe, that's a big clue. Lots of people wanted it to be true that high school boys wearing MAGA hats were saying racist things and even looking a little violent and out of control. So a Native American says "I thought they were going to lynch those black people." Really? You thought those 16-year-olds were going to pull out some rope and wade into a group of black adults, and start dragging them out one-by-one, looking for a tree branch or a light pole?
But it would just be so cool if they were like that. I'll be they would be like that if they only had the chance. It's not too far-fetched that they could conceivably do that...
Over the last two decades, the Earth has seen an increase in foliage around the planet, measured in average leaf area per year on plants and trees. Data from NASA satellites shows that China and India are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.
The world is literally a greener place than it was 20 years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for much of this new foliage: China and India. A new study shows that the two emerging countries with the world’s biggest populations are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.
The greening phenomenon was first detected using satellite data in the mid-1990s by Ranga Myneni of Boston University and colleagues, but they did not know whether human activity was one of its chief, direct causes. This new insight was made possible by a nearly 20-year-long data record from a NASA instrument orbiting the Earth on two satellites. It’s called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, and its high-resolution data provides very accurate information, helping researchers work out details of what’s happening with Earth’s vegetation, down to the level of 500 meters, or about 1,600 feet, on the ground
Fresh from saving New York City an imaginary $3 billion in tax credits offered to Amazon
to be used for imaginary improvements in New York's infrastructure while losing untold real future billions in tax revenues that Amazon's multi-thousands of direct and indirect jobs plus increasing property values would have generated, Boston University honors economics and international relations graduate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-amn-N.Y.) is at it again.
She's taking her Green New Deal show on the road — to 15 cities in 50 states. With no polluting planes or cars or even farting cows or horses allowed, she's going to do this in under 12 years. Or else. Because the world will end. Or something.
Maybe when the know-it all Congress critter traipses off to Iowa she will see, lawn mowers, tractors, combines, boat motors, snowblowers and other combustion engines in use.
Feb. 15 (UPI) -- China has closed the Tibetan entrance to Mount Everest indefinitely because of mounting garbage that's been left on the world's tallest mountain.
Chinese officials said although the entrance is closed, tourists can still visit the Rongpo monastery area at 16,400 feet above sea level. Only those with climber permits, however, will be allowed to go to the base camp about 600 feet higher, and beyond.
Delaware musician Justin Koerner might just win an award for the world's soundest sleeper.
Koerner left a jam session early in Newark to nap in his Ford Escape as he had things to do early the next morning, reports the Delaware News Journal. His buddies kept playing inside, and Koerner left his Escape turned on as he crawled into the back seat to snooze.
His dreams were anything but sweet, as Koerner told the News Journal, "I had a weird dream that somebody sat on my head and that somebody jumped into the front seat of my car. It was all very surreal."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel won thunderous applause at the Munich Security Conference today with globalist comments supporting retaining the ‘Iran Deal’ put together by the Obama administration and for suggesting the United States keep its troops in Syria. The hypocrisy was astounding as the globalist elites in Europe called for America to continue to send its men and women into harms way as Germany cedes its energy security to Moscow with construction of the Nord Stream II pipeline and spends little on its own defense. European support for the ‘Iran Deal’ stems from its desire to reap financial profits from Tehran’s government and caring little about Iran’s export of terror and its often stated desire to destroy the Jewish State.
If I were POTUS for 48 hours, I would be out of NATO, the UN and Syria so fast.......
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The ONT Musical Interlude
February 17, 1969, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash recorded 'Girl From The North Country' together in Nashville at CBS Studios. The track appeared on Dylan's 'Nashville Skyline' album. via thisdayinmusic.com
February 17, 1975, AC/DC released their debut album 'High Voltage'. The album featured a cover of 'Baby, Please Don't Go' a blues song first recorded by Big Joe Williams and 'She's Got Balls' which was written about singer Bon Scott's ex-wife Irene - the first AC/DC song for which he wrote lyrics.via thisdayinmusic.com
The former baseball MVP is pitching a trip to what he claims are the sites of “authentic alien sightings and proven Bigfoot habitats.”
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They haven't learned their lesson yet. Perhaps three times is the charm. Genius Award Winners.
For the second time in five months, a couple has been arrested for having sex on a Florida sidewalk--this time in the vicinity of a children’s parade, police allege.
Fort Myers cops Sunday afternoon arrested Bernadette Colatarci, 47, and Phillip Daley, 58, for lewd and lascivious behavior.
As detailed in a police report, an off-duty cop first spotted the homeless duo having sex on a downtown sidewalk around 5 PM. At the time, the officer was driving home several children who had participated in the Edison Festival of Light Junior Parade (which included floats, marching bands, clowns, and a fun run).
A North Carolina man with an extensive criminal record was slain as he and two others reportedly tried to rob an area home.
Local media reports that Ryan Jermaine Allen, 40, was shot and killed Monday in the course of a shootout after he and two other men forced their way into a home on West New Hope Road in Goldsboro around 8:30 p.m. One of the men in the home shot Allen, sparking a retreat by the suspects.
Responding police found the wounded Allen in a nearby wooded area and transported him to a hospital where he died during surgery.
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Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by Fashion.
Notice: Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by the Ace Media Empire and Ace Corp, LLC. The ONT can be habit forming.
For Pete's sake! Even Churchill himself didn't fancy the Jungle Carbine! Just look at what he's shooting! Last week we saw what the Brits had to offer in a carbine rifle, so let's return to America and see what our guys were using, shall we?
After having a look at the Enfield "Jungle Carbine" last week I thought it only made sense to see what Americans fielded during WWII; the M1 Carbine. Where the No.5 Mk.1 was considered by most to be unpleasant to shoot, it was nearly universally praised for it's compact size and light weight. Even lighter and smaller, the M1 Carbine is an absolute pleasure to shoot with the most notable difference being the cartridge, as we'll see a little later.
The following example was made by General Motors, Inland Division, in 1944.
As often happens in the world of government contracting, the design and acceptance of the rifle is a complicated story, so I'll try to boil it down to the salient points. Prior to WWII, the Army had decided the M1 Garand primary battle rifle was too big and clunky for suport troops and paratroopers and requested a smaller, lighter rifle be developed. The Winchester design eventually prevailed and went into production in 1941. The semi-automatic carbine, a gas operated, rotating bolt design, is approximately 36 inches in length and weighs in at just over 5 pounds. An even more compact version with a folding stock was developed for Airborne units. With production ending in 1945, more than 6 million of the rifles were made and have seen use by armies and civilians around the world, even to this day.
Bolt view - note rear sight adjustable for windage
Ammunition
A new cartridge was developed for the rifle based on the .32 Winchester. This new round, known as the .30 Carbine, is a rimless 7.62x33mm cartridge with a 110gr round nose bullet, a muzzle velocity of just under 2,000 fps, and an effective range of about 300 yards. The cartridge performance is remarkably similar in both velocity and energy to the .357 Magnum.
This makes the the rifle considerably less powerful than the M1 Garand, but with greater penetration than the .45 cal Thompson submachine gun. There were reports of marginal effectiveness at the extreme limits of it's range, but inside about 50 yards where most engagements occurred, it was highly effective.
.30 Carbine (l) and .303 British (r)
So now we see the difference in the cartridges. A G.I. could carry considerably more ammunition for the M1 Carbine than they could for the Jungle Carbine, but with a significant corresponding reduction in firepower. The .30 carbine delivers around 970 ft lbs of energy versus about 2,550 ft lbs for the .303 British.
Enfield No.5 Mk 1 (top) and M1 Carbine (bottom)
Side-by-Side Comparison
The M1 Carbine is a semi-automatic rifle with a 15 round magazine where the Jungle Carbine is a bolt rifle with a 10 round magazine capacity. Later the M1 Carbine would be offered in a fully automatic version with a 30 round magazine. We sort of touched on this last week; the Jungle Carbine has significant felt recoil, but would you notice that in combat? I'm not sure that I would. Conversely, would you trade the knock down power of the .303 British for a greater number of .30 Carbine cartridges with excellent penetration, particularly at close range?
Manufacturers
Always of considerable interest to me is the list of companies who produced rifles and other war materiel under wartime contract. Manufacturers of the M1 Carbine included:
- Inland Division, General Motors
- Winchester Repeating Arms
- Irwin-Pedersen
- Saginaw Steering Gear Division, General Motors
- Underwood Elliot Fisher
- National Postal Meter
- Quality Hardware Manufacturing Corp.
- International Business Machines
- Standard Products
- Rock-Ola Manufacturing Corporation
- Commercial Controls Corporation
Does anyone else find the wartime production conversion from automobiles, typewriters, postal meters and juke boxes to rifles interesting? I once had someone suggest a couple of books on the subject, but cannot recall the titles now. Anyone have any recommendations?
Gun Thread Alertness Test!
Can you identify the element that does not belong in the photo? (h/t hcurmudgeon)
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Oh, and an extra special Gun Thread congratulations to Bozo Conservative and Shibumi on their impending nuptials! Best of luck you wacky kids!
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Please note the new and improved gmail account morongunthread at gmail dot com. If you have a question you would like to ask Gun Thread Staff offline, just send us a note and we'll do our best to answer. If you care to share the story of your favorite firearm, send a picture with your nic and tell us what you sadly lost in the tragic canoe accident. If you would like to remain completely anonymous, just say so. Lurkers are always welcome!
That's it for this week - have you been to the range?
Nope, I don't have the recipe, because I don't need one and neither do you. Now, I'm not talking about "grammie winger" levels of kitchen inexperience, but for people who are reasonably comfortable with their pots and pans and knives, recipes are great for radically new dishes, but much less important for stuff you just feel like eating.
In today's NYT, one of that horrid newspaper's few writers worth reading wrote about exactly that..."You Don't Need A Recipe." Sam Sifton manages to keep politics almost entirely out of his food writing, and that is why he is a worthwhile read. So go down to the local pet store and rescue the food section from the parrot cages!
A good non-recipe is like a little story...something your grandmother tells you when she thinks you are mature enough to use her best saute pan. It doesn't require measurements, because after a few years of cooking for yourself you should know how much garlic YOU want in your chicken, or that grandma's recipe for meatballs needs more salt for YOUR palate.
Here's an example from Sifton for Quick-Roasted Chicken With Tarragon (don't worry, it's an outline, not a link to the NYT). A nice narrative that conjures images of lovely dinners and easy meals, but doesn't bog you down in a rigid structure.
The problem for most new cooks is obvious: "How do I get from requiring a recipe for Pasta With Butter to freestyling in the kitchen"...just riffing on a glimpse of a dish in a magazine or a nice dish from a local restaurant.
I think the best way is to pay attention to your favorite recipes and what makes them good. For instance, that great garlic chicken dish that always got you laid in college? How much garlic was it? The recipe may have said "two cloves, minced fine," but the trick is to convert what you see on the cutting board to what you taste an few hours later. So when I see a recipe that calls for "three bay leaves" I laugh and put one small one into the pot, and take it out earlier than called for, because I know how it is going to taste with that much bay leaf, and I do not approve!
I know this sounds a bit silly, but cooking really is this simple. Just start with easy stuff like Spaghetti Aglio e Olio...spaghetti with oil and garlic. Make it according to a recipe, and then decide how those few ingredients, tweaked for you, will shake out. Notice that garlic figures prominently here? It is a strong flavor, and one that can be controlled very easily. That makes it a perfect target for tweaking!
From there it is a simple step to making dishes that exist only in your mind's eye (or mouth?). Just don't go overboard and start imagining combinations like from commenter "Vendette's" link from a few weeks back: popcorn with olive oil, salt, hershey's syrup and cinnamon.
I like spicy soups, and this one looks like fun, in spite of the incredibly obnoxious website. The crispy garlic adds a nice crunch, and the "Tuscan kale" adds...um...I have no idea. I'd swap it with spinach or carrots or whatever you have handy. Chicken and Rice Soup with Garlicky Chile Oil
One of the pleasures of chile oil is how it lingers on your lips after the last spoonful. And it looks fantastic too.
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[Hat Tip: commenter "Blake"]
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Part of me is wary of the possibility that the slim-hipped hipsters of the world will begin to dominate booze making in America, but part of me thinks that this kind of stuff, while ridiculously expensive and unnecessary, is also loads of fun.
Buoyed by the mature-beyond-its-years character and faint salinity of another Jefferson’s bourbon, Ocean—barrels of which are aged at sea—Zoeller sought to recreate conditions under which Kentucky whiskey historically traveled to market by flatboat, putting in just below the Falls of the Ohio and floated downriver to New Orleans and ports beyond. Zoeller’s hypothesis is that, while surrounding whiskey-producing states share a similar geology and climate to Kentucky, travel by boat is what gave bourbon made in the Bluegrass State its singular character and reputation. The effects of wind, water, temperature extremes, and time all caused the whiskey to constantly come into more contact with the charred insides of the barrels as it floated downstream.
What happens when they hit upon one of these things that really does make the bourbon better? I can imagine a factory with an automated line that will receive bourbon barrels at one end, agitate them and heat them and freeze them and do all sorts of strange stuff, then belch them out the other end, ready to be bottled for our pleasure. It would be quintessentially American...and I just love that idea.
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Yeah...this is from the end of last month, but I got a chuckle out of it, courtesy of commenter "Bitter Clinger." It's so cold that beer can't be delivered in parts of the Midwest
It's also a powerful reason to drink more hard liquor, since that doesn't freeze until well below zero. In fact, drink cask-strength booze whenever possible!
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A few years ago I was at a farmer's market in Vermont. It was late summer and everything was about as ripe as could be, including some great tomatoes and, weirdly, some fresh peas or beans or...whatever...I have no idea what they were. The seller wasn't much help (she was a Vermont hippy, barefoot, probably stoned, and certainly a socialist). But the peas were a revelation; incredibly flavorful and tender and sweet. So when I see this kind of stuff I am intrigued. Southern Pink Lady Peas
They are clearly regional, and the odds of seeing them anywhere other than the South are between slim and none. But every place in America has something like this, and it is a testament to our independence that in spite of Big Food's best efforts, we do not all eat the same stuff!
[Hat Tip: artisanal 'ette]
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Food and cooking tips, triple-cream cheeses, young wild pigs, Venison Steak and Eggs (Swiped from Garrett), thick and fluffy pita and good tomatoes that aren't square, pale pink and covered with Mestizo E.coli: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com. Any advocacy of French Toast with syrup will result in disciplinary action up to and including being nuked from orbit.
The pricey toothpaste I stumbled on showed just how far brands like Aesop can go to blur the lines between health-care and beauty products. In doing that, some of them have traded in the finer points of scientific advancement (like fluoride) that have long characterized oral hygiene. In return, luxury toothpastes offer fun flavors, such as jasmine and ginger, and beautiful packaging. While some do tout their "natural" ingredients, they generally don't make any super-scientific claims about their superiority. They're just another option that'll get the job done, if you want to spend 10 or 15 extra bucks. Based on how soothing it is to go into an Aesop store, they might be worth it for a certain kind of consumer, but the reason why doesn't have much to do with shiny teeth.
I can wax rhapsodic with the best of them about a particularly good grilled steak, and I can certainly out-pompous most when it comes to wine...well, nowadays I usually just say, "Fvck, that tastes great! Pour me another glass."
This is toothpaste. Pace Nevergiveup and the other dentists who read this blog, but...this is nuts. It's not just the price, which is absolutely insane; it is the obsessive focus on something that simply isn't that important.
This isn't a perfectly understandable desire for quality. This is virtue signalling more than anything else, and it also smacks of elitism. And stupidity, because fluoride is sort of a big thing amongst people in the know...meaning people who don't burn science on the altar of their post-modern, new-age god.
What's next? Merino wool Q-Tips? Floss woven from the finest alpaca? Natural statins made from Brazilian Rain Forest mud and ground seashells from a remote island in the South Pacific?
Have at it...what's the most ridiculous consumer product you can conjure up?
Iran's Future? Pretty Grim, If These Kids Are Anything Close To Typical
—CBD
Forty years of insane, all-encompassing indoctrination into a particularly virulent strain of Islam, coupled with the seemingly natural predilection of Muslims for Jew-hate, and you get a twisted and deeply damaged society.
At a rally marking the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, these children answered questions about Iran's future.
Imagine a Persia left to its own rather impressive qualities without the malign influence of Shia Islam, or for that matter any fundamentalist strain. They did well under the Shah (don't believe the media's twisting of the truth) who, for all of his flaws tried to modernize Iran. That the Shia mullahs saw modernization as an existential threat to their power speaks volumes about their motives.
So now the primary focus of Iran is its pursuit of nuclear weapons and support for terrorism across the world, with the ultimate goal the destruction of Israel (Little Satan) and America (Great Satan).
HRCWNBPOTUS is particularly pleasing in this light, since an Iran unconstrained by President Trump's reversal of the Iran Deal is a disturbing thing.
Good morning to all you 'rons, 'ettes, lurkers, and lurkettes, wine moms, frat bros, and everybody who's holding your beer. Welcome once again to the stately, prestigious, internationally acclaimed and high-class Sunday Morning Book Thread, a weekly compendium of reviews, observations, and a continuing conversation on books, reading, and publishing by escaped oafs who follow words with their fingers and whose lips move as they read. Unlike other AoSHQ comment threads, the Sunday Morning Book Thread is so hoity-toity, pants are required. Even if it's these pants, which are worn by soy boys all over the world.
In 1906, my great-grandfather, José Lello, and his younger brother, António, created Livraria Lello as we know it today. It’s located right in the heart of the labyrinthine streets of the old town, where you’ll find some of the city’s most important historic attractions. The store was designed by renowned Portuguese engineer Xavier Esteves; its opening was a major event not only in Portugal but throughout Europe.
That central red staircase is quite spectacular. The staircase is an engineering masterpiece and the most photographed element of the bookstore. All the ornaments around the staircase are made of plaster, employing the trompe l’oeil technique to imitate wood. Only the handrails are made of actual wood, brought from Brazil for its high quality. J.K. Rowling, when she lived in Porto, used to visit quite often, and it’s said the staircase was one of the sources of inspiration for the Harry Potter saga. Remember the moving stairs at Hogwarts?
(h/t Scott)
Here's a list of the 30 best local (independent) bookstores. I have no idea what criteria the author used to compile the list, so take it for what it's worth. It might come in handy if you're visiting a city one of the bookstores on the list is in (h/t Timo).
It Pays To Increase Your Word Power®
MALARIA literally means ‘bad air’; it was originally thought to be caused by inhaling the malodorous air found in stagnant bogs and marshes.
Usage: Malaria is a disease, not a bad night at the opera.
It's memoir from a young man who lived through China's Cultural revolution, and eventually escaped to the USA. I can't help but see parallels between the violent lefty crap happening and his account of Cultural Revolution - essentially, lawless youth running around inflicting violence on the "wrong" type of people while the police and military stand back and watch. Have you seen this comparison anywhere?
Why yes, yes I have. A while back, I started to write a few words noting the similarity of China's Cultural Revolution to certain aspects of 21st-century America, but I got distracted by some shiny object and never got around to finishing it. It was when I was reading Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang:
An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.
Students were actually hauling off teachers they didn't like and murdering them in cold blood. And just because you yourself may have happened to be a commie and mouthed all the correct slogans doesn't mean you were exempt from having the mob turn on you at some point. It seemed as if the entire country of China lost its mind and degenerated into a series of 'woker-than-thou' fights where yesterday's 'woke' radicals were eaten alive by an even more 'woke' radical crowd.
And all of this was presided over by Madame Mao, who wielded enormous power during these years, and who made Madame Hillary look like Mother Teresa.
Scott also sent me a photo of some bookends he owns. I get the best pics sent to me by lurkers:
Moron Recommendations
18 Sci-Fi recommendation:
The World Treasury of Science Fiction
1000 pages or so and full of really good short stories ranging from works from the 30s up to the 80s (it was published in '89).
Some foreign pieces translated into English, too, which was interesting because sci-fi means different things to different cultures. The other neat part was finding work by big name authors who dipped their toe in the genre but became famous for other styles.
Best $5 I've spent in years.
Posted by: Moron Robbie - Everything I Needed to Know About Coding I Learned From RBG at February 10, 2019 09:09 AM (LX21o)
I cut my eyeteeth on The Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology series, compiled by Robert Silverberg, Ben Bova, and others. Vol. 1, 2A, 2B, and I think there's Vol. 3 and 4 now. The only Kindle edition available is the one for Vol. 1. The earliest story in the first volume was first published in 1934. It's kind of fun reading about starships zipping through interstellar space with the aid of computers powered by vacuum tubes.
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91 Candace Millard's The River Of Doubt.
Many of you probably have read this one, but it was new to me (Candace takes a great picture by the way, and no disrespect intended). Anyway, this was a very fine story of the harrowing river trip Teddy Roosevelt took after his election loss, a trip that very nearly killed him and most every one else in his expedition. Well-written, gripping story and some new geography to learn about.
Posted by: Huck Follywood, Virginia is for comic relief at February 10, 2019 09:45 AM (Z216Q)xxx
After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.
Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.
So, not your typical summer vacation outing, then. The Kindle edition is reasonably priced at $8.99.
At the age of twenty-four, Winston Churchill was utterly convinced it was his destiny to become prime minister of England. He arrived in South Africa in 1899, valet and crates of vintage wine in tow, to cover the brutal colonial war the British were fighting with Boer rebels and jumpstart his political career. But just two weeks later, Churchill was taken prisoner. Remarkably, he pulled off a daring escape—traversing hundreds of miles of enemy territory, alone, with nothing but a crumpled wad of cash, four slabs of chocolate, and his wits to guide him.
See, that'd be another great movie. Of course, these movies won't happen since they're primarily manly stories about manly men doing manly things in manly (i.e tough) environments where they have to man up or lose their man cards, if not their manly lives. The current political climate frowns on these sorts of narratives, and doesn't consider them to be authentic. In fact, their masculinity on display would be considered downright toxic.
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104 Had started Light it Up by Nick Petrie last week and finished it this week, It is the third book in his series about Peter Ash, a veteran with a "certain set of skills". Well-written and tightly plotted and finds characters still dealing with issues from previous books- Ash has PTSD with problems being indoors for long periods of time, which kind of causes issues when one needs to be indoors.New book in series just came out and I have an Amazon gift card tempting me to purchase it...
Posted by: Charlotte at February 10, 2019 09:53 AM (JwHYp)
Light It Up is the third novel featuring Peter Ash, a combat veteran who
...leaves a simple life rebuilding hiking trails in Oregon to help his good friend Henry Nygaard, whose daughter runs a Denver security company that protects cash-rich cannabis entrepreneurs from modern-day highwaymen. Henry’s son-in-law and the company’s operations manager were carrying a large sum of client money when their vehicle vanished without a trace, leaving Henry’s daughter and her company vulnerable.
When Peter is riding shotgun on another cash run, the cargo he’s guarding comes under attack and he narrowly escapes with his life. As the assaults escalate, Peter has to wonder: for criminals this sophisticated, is it really just about the cash?
After finding himself on the defensive for too long, Peter marshals his resources and begins to dig for the truth in a scheme that is bigger—and far more lucrative—than he’d ever anticipated. With so much on the line, his enemy will not give up quietly...and now he has Peter directly in his sights.
So it seems that marijuana can be bad for your health after all.
Lurking moron SoulEspresso e-mailed this week and asked me to pimp a novel written by a buddy of his. He describes it this way:
It’s a World War I dieselpunk fantasy that deals with different kinds of reality—weird but fun.
The novel is Storm Dreams (The Cycle of Somnium Book 1) by Jeb R. Sherill, his first novel. The Amazon blurb says "Storm Dreams is a fantastic existential adventure and the first published novel of an author who may prove to be one of the strangest writers in the industry."
Do dreams dream? Can a dream become real?
Trapped between the real world and the lands of dream, John Cassidy is a WWI fighter pilot with no memory of his past. He may not even be a real person. Rescued from a dream by a mysterious airship captain named Banner, Cassidy is thrown into a chaos he can't begin to fathom. Forced to flee Armada agents, bounty hunters and the demons of his past, he searches for a meaning to life and the man who dreamed him in the first place. Between dogfights, pirates, demons and the dogged police of the dream worlds, Cassidy pits himself against the armies of both the real and the unreal. Something is very different about himself and Captain Banner, but what it is may require death to discover.
The Kindle edition is $3.99. Also available in paperback and on Audiobook.
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If you like, you can follow me on Twitter, where I make the occasional snarky comment.
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Don't forget the AoSHQ reading group on Goodreads. It's meant to support horde writers and to talk about the great books that come up on the book thread. It's called AoSHQ Moron Horde and the link to it is here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/175335-aoshq-moron-horde.
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So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, bribes, insults, threats, ugly pants pics and moron library submissions may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at the book thread e-mail address: aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.
What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as you all know, life is too short to be reading lousy books.
Saturday Overnight Open Thread (2/16/19) Bachelor & Bachelorette Party Night
—Misanthropic Humanitarian
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The Saturday Night Joke
A group of women were at a seminar on how to live in a loving relationship with their husbands. The women were asked,
"How many of you love your husband?" All the women raised their hands. Then they were asked, "When was the last time you told your husband you loved him?" Some women answered today, a few yesterday, and some couldn't remember.
The women were then told to take out their cellphones and text their husband: "I love you, sweetheart."
Next the women were instructed to exchange phones with another woman and read aloud the text message they received in response to their message.
Below are 12 actual hilarious replies.
If you have been married for quite a while, you understand that these replies are a sign of true love. Who else would reply in such a succinct and honest way?
1. Who the hell is this?
2. Eh, mother of my children, are you sick or what?
3 Yeah, and I love you too. What's wrong?
4. What now? Did you wreck the car again?
5. I don't understand what you mean?
6. What the hell did you do now?
7. Are you sure this is for me?
8. Don't beat about the bush, just tell me how much you need?
9. Am I dreaming?
10. If you don't tell me who this message is actually for, someone will die.
11. I thought we agreed you wouldn't drink during the day.
12. Your mother is coming to stay with us, isn't she?
The Moron Horde is a remarkable community. Gray box friends, MoMes and now a wedding. Congrats to Shibumi and Bozo Conservative on their upcoming nuptials.
Here is the story in Shibumi's words:
Shibumi here, from a different address with her actual meat space identity.
As you both may or may not know, I'm engaged to a fellow moron; we decided to meet one afternoon after I just put out a "hey, anyone near SE Mi want to have lunch?" call on a random ONT in September.
Well, I met up with Bozo Conservative and eventually, after much work on his part, we hit it off. We got engaged in late May and are tentatively planning the wedding the last Friday in February.
I'm located north of Detroit and he's a bit north of Columbus; there is no way in hell that we would have ever met if it wasn't for the HQ, my reckless feeling of possible isolation since my job was ending and his tenacity.
Thanks for everything, and thank all of you for providing the platform where I met my future husband.
Take care,
shibumi
The ONT Musical Interlude
Per shibumi, "Our official song is this:"
The wedding processional song, suggested by the bride to be.
Wedding music and the outfits to be worn by Shibumi and Bozo Conservative
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We know shibumi would never do this.......
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Quite the friends the lucky groom to be has.........
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Good luck on your wedding!
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Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by the Wedding Reception Hall.
Notice: Posted with permission by the Ace Media Empire and AceCorp, LLC. No objections here, you kids get married and have a great life.
Saturday Evening Movie Thread 02-16-2019 [Hosted By: TheJamesMadison]
—OregonMuse
One Frame at a Time
I love old special effects.
Rear projection that's obviously fake, compositing that has elements fading into each other, literal drawing on the film cells, I love it all. Beyond their quaint qualities, I like to see people with limited means to create the impossible visually stretch, using every tool they had at their disposal, to invent new images that the audience had never seen before.
Out of all of it, though, my personal favorite is probably stop-motion animation, using a stiff and articulated doll, filming it a single frame at a time, to create the illusion of moving, breathing creatures on film. The technique is almost as old as film itself (there's a lost short film from 1898 called Humpty Dumpty's Circus), and it was used for decades until newer technologies supplanted it.
Stop-motion animation is largely used for fantasy type movies. Silent films used it, in particular around The Lost World, the adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story, but there was something about its use in King Kong that inspired a young boy in California.
The interesting thing about Kong is the hair on his body. Willis O'Brien used rabbit fur to cover the giant ape's rubber musculature, but they never figured out a good way to keep the hair from moving when they manipulated the armature from one shot to the next. Without any way to solve the issue, the team charged forward with the work, concerned that the public would see the movement of the fur from shot to shot and instantly call it fake looking.
The movie released, and there are contemporary reviews of the film that actually praised the movement of the fur.
I don't think that anyone over the age of 8 ever really considered Kong to be terribly realistic looking, but audiences of the day were more open to less than realistic special effects because it was the best they could get. They seemed to be more open than modern audiences in general to extend suspension of disbelief towards things like a giant ape made from a puppet moving jerkily from one frame to the next.
I remember talking to my dad about the film, and he told me that he didn't like the movie. All he could see was the fake looking puppet.
Ray Harryhausen
That little boy in California was none other than Ray Harryhausen who would go on to become the name known for stop-motion animation. He worked for decades creating models and moving them slightly and very slowly while taking their pictures and trying to combine them with footage of actors.
What he ended up creating were some of the most magical fantastical creatures in film. From Kali, the six armed goddess in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and the skeletons in Clash of the Titans all the way back to his work on the ape in Mighty Joe Young, Harryhausen embraced the fantastical, eschewing the literal, and bringing classic visions to celluloid.
And that's really what I love about stop-motion animation. It was a combination of heedless ambition, limited means, and the desire to simply bring new visions to the screen. There was little concern for providing evolutionary explanations for how a giant cyclops would populate on a small island, it was simply there. Jason lived in a land of magic, and that was enough explanation.
What We've Begun to Lose
That heedless embrace of fantasy in its widest terms is something that I feel is lost in modern fantasy cinema. I love the design of The Lord of the Rings, but it flies in the face of the old aesthetic. Everything in Peter Jackson's fantasy feels like it came from a real time and place, long ago, and it works there, but most fantasy has embraced that philosophy in its wake.
There's a literalism to many filmgoers that discourages things like weird images unmoored from reality. There's a pickiness about how some creature could never exist in Earth's gravity or that wings that small couldn't provide the lift to carry a creature of that size. Most audiences don't care, but the ones who do tend to have Youtube channels that get millions of hits complaining about little things just like that (*cough*Cinema Sins*cough*) and they highlight all of it. Writers and directors see that sort of traffic around such nitpicks and don't want to be called out for such "sins", so they actively move to prevent it, undermining the sort of fantasy you might want from lighter fare.
That aesthetic isn't quite gone, though. I think of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The first one had walking skeletons, a la Jason, while the next two films were filled with sea monster people and ended with a goddess growing in size to a giant and then turning into a sea of crabs. I know that the director of all three movies, Gore Verbinski, was influenced directly by Harryhausen, and it's this embrace of the absurd that helps me to appreciate all three films.
My favorite is actually the second one, Dead Man's Chest, because, while the plot went ridiculous, it had a light and fun tone that matched well with its clippy pace and the absurd design of Davy Jones and his crew. It was the third movie that embraced a more somber and serious tone (for some reason) where the clash really began to set in for me.
Still, the films worked best when it combined unrealistic design with a light tone. We didn't need a literal mindset to appreciate how the weird creatures fit into the world, because the movie never really asked us to take the creatures' origins terribly seriously. Hand waving the word "magic" at weird things in stories can have a certain charm that I feel isn't really appreciated.
Back to the Point
The unreality of stop motion animation, the fact that it's really hard to get smooth motion from moving dolls one frame at a time, lends itself naturally towards fantasy. In order to get the kind of smooth motion from a stop motion puppet, you'd need a very large model in order to produce the tiny movement that real life sees in one-twenty-fourth of a second. It doesn't help the art form's reality when most productions actually film at a slightly lower framerate (like sixteen frames per second), which ups the jauntiness.
The last major motion picture that I can find that used stop-motion animation in a way to create an intendedly believable creature (as opposed to something jokey like in Monkeybone) was Coneheads. The below represents about the best that stop-motion animation was ever going to get:
That very same year, Steven Spielberg rejected a form of stop-motion animation for Jurassic Park (called Go-Motion, which was used in Robocop), and the success of the computer generated dinosaurs represented the end of the stop-motion technique for believable creatures. Just compare the look of the (now 26-year old) CGI to the stop-motion above:
It moves so much more smoothly and in a much more lifelike manner than the stop-motion monster. It's inherently more believable because it moves more in line with how we see motion in the real world. For many, that's an all around plus, but for me, it represents the end of something that I found wonderful. It represents the end of the embrace of pure fantasy, which is ironic since computer generated effects can produce so much more than stop-motion animation ever did. But it was the unreality of stop-motion animation techniques that I found provided that intangible sense of fantasy, almost like I was stepping into another world that operated on different rules.
Movies I Saw This Fortnight: Dragon InnFull Review (Netflix Rating 3/5 | Quality Rating 2/4) Poster blurb: "Hu obviously has a strong eye and can fill a frame artfully, but it all felt so artificial to me." [Netflix DVD] Top HatFull Review (Netflix Rating 4/5 | Quality Rating 3/4) "Astaire and Rogers have real chemistry. The music and dancing really is well done." [Netflix DVD] The Big CountryFull Review (Netflix Rating 5/5 | Quality Rating 4/4) "It’s amazing that Wyler and Heston went on to release the gargantuan Ben-Hur just a year later." [Amazon Prime] BirdFull Review (Netflix Rating 3/5 | Quality Rating 2.5/4) "[F]inely produced and well acted, but it felt too all over the place, trying to gather up as much of the life of Charlie Parker that could fit into 160 minutes." [STARZ] Wild StrawberriesFull Review (Netflix Rating 5/5 | Quality Rating 4/4) "It’s a wonderfully humanist tale from a director who is more well-known for existential dread and stark images rather than a gentle touch." [Personal Collection] Faster (Netflix Rating 2/5 | Quality Rating 1/4) Full Review "Faster piles characters and plot twists where they don’t belong, turning what should have been a simple but fun throwback into a mess." [Netflix DVD] ShoeshineFull Review (Netflix Rating 5/5 | Quality Rating 3.5/4) "It’s not de Sica’s best film (I still think that’s Umberto D and most consider it to be Bicycle Thieves), but it’s still very good and very much worth the time." [Amazon Prime] GlassFull Review (Netflix Rating 4/5 | Quality Rating 3/4) "[W]ell acted, looks good, and has a very interesting take on its central idea." [Theater] To JoyFull Review (Netflix Rating 3/5 | Quality Rating 2.5/4) "I wanted to like it more than I did, but there are some larger elements that I don’t think get quite the support that they should." [Personal Collection] KhartoumFull Review (Netflix Rating 4/5 | Quality Rating 3/4) "It’s thin, razor thin, and assembled so poorly that I was exasperated through the entire movie, desperate for anything to actually grab onto except the occasionally sumptuous desert vistas." ["Library"]
Contact
Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
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I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
Goal: White can force mate in 4
Hint: Black's white squares are fatally weak
r2q1rk1/1pp1n1p1/1b1p1p2/1B1N2BQ/p2pP3/PnP3P1/1P3P2/1R4K1 w - - 0 1
Dress Pr0n For The 'Ettes:
Startling peacock blue plays off against bronze satin, such a vivid cloth from which to make this late #1860s dress. Additional trimmings in blue frame the rest of the garment, you can almost hear the rustle of that silk...@metmuseum#fashionhistorypic.twitter.com/BnwMchABtI
4b1rk/6rp/4p3/1p1pPp2/3NnP2/P1P2B1R/1P5P/3R1K2 b - - 0 1
1...Rg1+
2.Ke2 Rxd1
3.Kxd1 (or 3.Ke3, which gives up the rook outright)
3... Nf2+
4.Kd2 Nxh3 0-1
More Challenging Problem - White To Play
r2q1rk1/1pp1n1p1/1b1p1p2/1B1N2BQ/p2pP3/PnP3P1/1P3P2/1R4K1 w - - 0 1
1.Nxf6+ looks tempting, especially after 1...Rxf6 2.Bc4+ (hoping for 2...Kf8 3.Qh8+
Ng8 4.Qxg8+ Ke7 5.Qxg7+ Ke8 6.Qh8+ Ke7 7.Qxf6+ Kd7 8.Qf5+ Kc6 9.Qb5#), but Black can spoil the party with 2...e5 3.exd5 Rf5 and now White is two pieces down and nowhere to go.
The better move is 1.Bc4!, which really ties Black up. Now there are basically 4 lines, all of which lead to mate in, at the most, 4 moves:
Note: that cryptic line of letters and numbers you see underneath each board diagram is a representation of the position in what is known as "Forsyth-Edwards Notation", or F.E.N. It's actually readable by humans. Most computer applications nowadays can read FEN, so those of you who may want to study the position, you can copy the line of FEN and paste into your chess app and it should automatically recreate the position on its display board. Or, Windows users can just "triple click" on it and the entire line will be highlighted so you can copy and paste it into your chess app.
___________
So that about wraps it up for this week. Chess thread tips, suggestions, bribes, rumors, threats, and insults may be sent to my yahoo address: OregonMuse little-a-in-a-circle yahoo dott com.
Misanthropic Acres has about 36" of snow on the ground. Our dogs are having a hard time getting around. I'll be using the snow blower this weekend in the back yard.
For those of you in snow country, what do you do for your pets to make their lives easier?
In an era long before pet stores and commercial dog food, what did Appalachian settlers feed their dogs?
Not too long ago, I asked my grandmother this question and her answer was quite interesting, “Each Saturday, my mother would take all of our table scraps that weren’t considered unhealthy for the dog and bake it together — we called it ‘dog bread’ and it was the dog’s food for the coming week.”
A California fire department had to evict their beloved cat after it received a complaint about the animal being around fire equipment and supplies.
Edna the cat was evicted from Station 49 of the San Francisco Fire Department after the city received an anonymous complaint about the animal's location near medical equipment.
It’s a universal truth that socks tend to go missing — they get mismatched or they altogether vanish.
But Kim Crosland, a graphic designer in New Zealand, knew that the rate at which her own socks were disappearing was extreme.
Crosland and her family started to notice it two years ago. "We just thought the socks were getting lost in the washing or getting misplaced," Crosland told The Dodo.
Then, one day, speaking to a neighbor, Crosland realized she wasn't alone. "One of my neighbors had mentioned their socks going missing and we laughed about it," she said. "Our sock pile had dwindled as well."
Usually, the socks would disappear overnight, sometimes right out of her shoes.
***
Meet The PetMorons
"I double dog dare you to throw this ball"
Hermes, rescue Lab-Airedale, is intensely projecting that thought into your skull.
Artemis, mini Golden Doodle, is just looking for treats.
Hermes has a hypersonic tail stub, Yoda ears, AT-AT legs and Wookie speech patterns. He's a real StarWars dog. Just like that Last Jedi thing was a dog. AmiRight.
Artie just hypnotizes people with her tail and licks 'em to death.
I'm just a blog reader. Never a commenter. Never even a comment reader. (Wha?) Don't even call me lurker.
Terry
Atlanta
(Hermes will wookie for treats.)
Adorable dogs Terry. Thanks for commenting, lurking submitting your photo and story. Stick around we don't bite.
***
Been lurking around the blog for a long time, and I thought I'd pitch in with my two adorable deplorables. The one curled up in my belt is Angus, the Platonic ideal of the word "galoot" - rambunctious, friendly and slightly dumber than a pile of his own fur. In the foreground is his sister Rally, who at six and a half pounds is the undisputed queen of the house. They've been steadily transforming my paychecks into vet bills and used litter for about thirteen and a half years now, after I went to a Humane Society event in Omaha looking for *a* cat and the furry little devils were being all adorable at me so I couldn't bear to split them up. Had a nasty scare with them, especially Rally, after they had a bad reaction to their rabies vaccine last month and stopped eating for a few days. With a great deal of prayer and an assist from St. Francis they pulled through, much to the collective relief of their humans, and are back to their usual shenanigans. Hopefully they keep it up for a long while yet! -Stephen
Talk about a big heart, adopting 2 cats at one time. Awesome. We are happy to hear that your scare is over and all is well with Rally. Thanks for sharing with us.
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Zuko is a lab mix rescue. He has no shame and assumes this position whenever he naps...which is often. -Roger
Rescued and living the high life it appears. What a tough existence Zuko has. And an unusual but neat name. We appreciate his story.
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Here is Darla, my smooth-haired fox terrier. My daughters and I got her from a town south of us—Amo, Indiana—at a place we nicknamed the Poop Farm, because that is what they had the most of. Dogs, cats, goats, ducks, chickens, all for sale there. Darla loves the snow and is a great little friend -AgathaPagatha
Amazing how dogs love the snow. Good thing little Darla isn't way up north in snow country. It sounds like she has quite the life with you folks. Thanks for sharing.
***
Not an oaf, lurker or lout, but I can be a poltroon in times of great danger, unless I have my magic weapon, called by the elves a "Browning Semi-Automatic". You remember Saki, our rice wine kitteh. You had a picture of her watching college football on my knee. Here she is ready for me to take her to work. She'd be fantastic, better than most I've worked with. Too bad I'm retired. -Ken
Good to see you guys again here at the Pet Thread. Saki appears to be quite comfy in the world of labor. Thanks for the submission.
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Our bearded dragon Newbie enjoying a snoozer in the warm spot in front of our wood stove. He’s spent much of the winter asleep, since it’s too chilly to be out on our porch. He will wake up though for his favorite bugs or slices from an orange. -Christopher
Newbie is no dummie. I think most of us would enjoy curling up in front of that wood stove. Looks comfortable. We don't see too many bearded dragon submissions. Thanks.
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Long time lurker, love the thread. Don’t know if you do video, attached video is of my loved German Shepherd Darby “helping” me mow the lawn. And here is Darby and rescue pup Bean! - Terrence
Sorry Terrence & Darby, the Pet Thread doesn't do videos unless they are in You Tube with a link. Helping mow the lawn? Interesting. Looks like you have 2 very nice buddies there.
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All three Gizmo, Chino and Rocky too posing for the camera - Bill
Thanks Bill for the photo of the 3 Amigos. How many T-R-E-A-T-S did you have to use for the pose?
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Mis Hum, I'm sending you a real bull story of how a foundling calf turned into a pet. I will tell his story in the comments so as not to take up too much space. Ben Had
OK Ben, spill the story. Your pet looks delicious. I think we are all waiting for how this little calf became a big bull and a pet. :)
***
An astounding group of pets today and wonderful stories. Thank you so much for sharing with the AoS Pet Thread.
Do you have a video, photo or story you would like to share? You can reach us at petmorons at gmail dot com.
My passion fruit vine is braving the cold alright. I never realized that a passion vine will fruit twice a year. Spring and fall. Spring is obviously better as my passion fruit is struggling to ripen in the cold as you can see from the pictures. They wrinkle up but they also should turn a bit purple, I am getting a bit of wrinkling but not much purple so far. My spring crop last year was about 20 passion fruit. Next year I am going to try to air layer one of the vines to make another plant to put on another section of fencing. It seems to like it hear and is covering about 25 feet of fencing.
She has a Frederick passion fruit, which is a Passiflora edulis variety. It makes a difference which cultivar you get. Sunset says this fruit does not do well in hot weather, but she can grow this one in Arizona. There are some other edible passion fruits, too. Most are tropical.
I tried growing a P. edulis once in Southern California, but I couldn't get it to produce fruit. And here are fruits in winter, in Arizona!
I found some pictures from last year of the passion vine when it was flowering. I put this plant in, in memory of my mom who had passed 3 years ago. She loved passion fruit, so the plaque you can almost see it one of the pics says Sherry's Passion but the vine has overtaken the plaque.
A beautiful remembrance of your mother.
At least my P. edulis was not as attractive to caterpillars as the more common ornamental passion flowers. Here is some pretty good information on growing passion fruits in Southern California
I have always wanted to grow the cultivar 'Incense", which is said to be root-hardy to Zone 5. It has 5 inch flowers that smell like sweet peas. The fruits are said to have fragrant, tasty pulp. It is a hybrid between our native Maypop, which also has edible fruit that is kind of bland and an Argentinian species. There is something rattling around in my brain about cross-pollinating it with the Maypop to get fruit.
Gardening Questions of the Week
Le Vieux Garde asks:
Anybody know what this is?
Is it a groundcover gone wild or a prevalent weed?
Found an open ground in ditches all over my town.
Looks familliar . . . .
We apparently missed Suzanne's question last year, so here it is again:
This is my amaryllis and for two years it has been in this SW window. It has never bloomed. Why do you think that is? Thanks for any info you can spare me.
There may be some tips here. Anybody had success getting their amaryllis bulbs to repeat? How did you do it?
We would like hers to look something like this:
Last Week
Further to Gordon's question on naturalizing bulbs last week, besides the great tips from Tammy al-Thor on climate considerations, I would recommend checking specialist's catalogs and local nurseries for specific cultivars recommended for naturalizing. For example, even in good climates for tulips, some repeat much better than others. Also remember to consider:
Pest resistance (including rodents and deer)
Summer dryness requirements
Planting depth
Mulching and fertilizing
How often they need division
Do you have any reports on bulbs that have repeated well for you? Or did not repeat ?
Nice tips in the comments on rose varieties last week, too.
Meanwhile, via Hank Curmudgeon, insects are disappearing from biology textbooks. Jeepers. What is going on with our educational system? In order to get people to remember that one in four creatures on earth is a beetle, people do things like name them after Game of Thrones dragons.
Gardens of The Horde
California Girl sent in some photos. Can you identify these?
If you would like to send information and/or photos for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:
ktinthegarden
at g mail dot com
Include your nic unless you want to remain a lurker.
Gavin Newsom decides to destroy the planet, maybe go to Washington someday [KT]
—Open Blogger
Will we even be able to fly for 100 miles now?
Good morning. Busy week in Washington. I think I might be able to add a few local details to the California-centered topic below:
Gavin Newsom decides to destroy the planet
The new California governor is surprising a lot of people by breaking with some of Jerry Brown's priorities. But his decision to abandon the Los Angeles to San Francisco run of the California high-speed rail project had to be a blow to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. No matter how much she spent on air travel during her campaign, her New Green Deal Resolution initially called for the USA to:
build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary
And we only have 10 years to plan and implement this! Or is it 12 years?
Maybe Lindsey Graham is right. Gavin Newsom has given up on the big push for HSR in California, the fifth largest economy in the world, even with federal help! What hope is there for the planet now? How can we inspire all those countries that hate us to mobilize all their resources to reach zero carbon emissions? Like Mr. Graham says,
Let's bury the hatchet and enjoy the next 12 years because they are going to be our last, right?
What shape was the HSR project in before Newsom took office?
When we last reported on the extraordinarily expensive (but dreamy) Transbay Transit Center, it was due to open in 2017. It apparently opened for bus service in August of 2018 and closed for repairs in September of 2018, It remains closed. Cracked girders were found. After Newsom's recent announcement, backers are wondering how to pay for rail lines into the center:
Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who chairs the county Transportation Authority board, was unfazed. At this point, he said, San Francisco and the South Bay should go it alone.
"Our responsibility has always been connecting Santa Clara County to downtown San Francisco by bringing Caltrain to the Transbay Terminal, and we will continue to do that with zeal," he said. "Otherwise, we will have built the most expensive bus terminal in the history of humankind."
The shorter but more realistic link from Bakersfield to Merced would be a mere shadow of what Newsom described at the 2010 groundbreaking ceremony for the transit center, when he was mayor of San Francisco.
"We're going to be building ... something that is arguably a generation overdue," he said. "My gosh, I am sick and tired of hearing about how wonderful the transportation system is in France and Japan and 'Have you been to Shanghai?' Or, 'Do you know what they're doing in Beijing?'
"Well," the mayor continued, "finally California is going to get it right with high-speed rail, and that northern terminus will happen here."
Back in December of last year, an article was published on what the high-speed rail audit released shortly after the November election really meant. Perhaps this piece played a part in the new Governor's decision to shrink the high-speed rail project. Examples:
Auditor: "Although the Authority has secured and identified funding of over $28 billion that it expects will be sufficient to complete initial segments, that funding will not be enough to connect those segments, or finish the rest of the system--estimated to cost over $77 billion."
Translation: The Authority has succeeded in talking both the federal government and the state of California into providing billions of dollars on a failed project and yet still has no idea where the rest of the money will come from.
Auditor: "It has incrementally modified its plans for a fully dedicated high-speed rail system since 2012 and now intends to share--blend--existing transit infrastructure wherever feasible. Although blending is less costly, it subjects high-speed trains to lower speed limits and may require sharing time on the tracks with other rail operators."
Translation: All those promises made to voters about getting from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours were never serious.
Auditor: "The fact that [the Authority] has now exhausted all feasible options to use existing infrastructure raises concerns about its ability to mitigate future cost increases."
Translation: The Authority has followed Willie Brown's advice. The former Assembly Speaker, in a moment of candor, once told the San Francisco Chronicle, "In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there's no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in."
Recently, homeless encampments have sprung up in Fresno on properties purchased (and sometimes cleared) by the High-speed Rail Authority, but not managed by them, apparently. So they become like downtown San Francisco, with needles and poop, plus roaming dogs. The homeless people apparently cannot be removed. There are other forlorn empty, degrading properties elsewhere in the Valley, interspersed with people trying to go on with their lives.
What will become of Jerry Brown's dream now?
Some of the few Republicans in Sacramento are not real happy about Newsom's plan for the Bakersfield to Merced route.
While Newsom, a Democrat, earned a surprising amount of praise from California lawmakers in both Washington and Sacramento for pulling the plug - at least for now - on the rail project between the state's two largest urban areas, some are calling his proposal for a high-speed line between Bakersfield and Merced an unnecessary waste of money that voters in the Central Valley don't want.
"I would support the citizens of the Central Valley putting this up to a vote again," Shannon Grove, the Republican Minority Leader of the California State Senate, told Fox News.
Newsom makes some arguments that high speed rail in the Valley would spur economic growth, but I think most people around here would rather have a reliable source of water, road repairs, etc.
There's a piece in The New Yorker that includes a pretty reasonable short historical summary of the High Speed Rail project in California after starting with this:
During his first State of the State address, this week, Gavin Newsom, California's newly sworn-in governor, covered immigration, energy, and water policy, but the remark that made the headlines was about the ghost of a long-promised train. "Let's level about high-speed rail," Newsom said in the middle of his speech, in Sacramento, turning to the subject of a bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. "The current project, as planned, would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long." Instead, he proposed focussing on a shorter inland route, between Merced and Bakersfield, two small cities that, it's fair to say, most coastal metropolitan Californians happily visit rarely or never. . .
The news was received as a downer on par with the extinction of the space program. "This country won't experience modern rail travel for another generation--if ever," Fortune lamented on Wednesday, in an otherwise supportive editorial. On Twitter, the governor was compared with the "Simpsons" character Lyle Lanley, who absconded with the takings from a fraudulent monorail scheme. Finally, on Wednesday night, President Trump tweeted, apparently on behalf of the federal government, that he wanted back the money given for the train, which he referred to as a " 'green' disaster."
It seems to be assumed in the New Yorker article that Jerry Brown's dream is just delayed, not abandoned. Alternative modes of transportation are described, including this:
The rail connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles is expected be finished in 2033. By that point, autonomous vehicles, green in both power source and roadway efficiency, are expected to be in commercial use--not everywhere, one assumes, but almost certainly on the stretch of highway separating the headquarters of Uber, in San Francisco, and Space X, in L.A. Because autonomous cars are more predictable and more controlled--in short, more train-like--there will be another costly push to streamline existing roadways to their habits. (They can use narrower lanes, for instance.) They also have the virtue, especially in spread-out California, of carrying passengers door to door.
You will have to read the piece yourself to see if you can follow the analysis of the effects of these policies on inequality.
I may not agree with all of Dan Walters' positions, but he is an old-time reporter. Started in high school, when he was 16, and never stopped. He retired from the Sacramento Bee in 2017, but kept writing. Didn't go to J-school. I like that. Here he writes on the death, this summer, of a smaller railroad boondoggle. I heard part of discussion about the High Speed Rail project where he was a guest on radio. During the discussion, there were some suggestions that the high speed rail project was really a way to get funds for improved commuter rail in the big coastal cities all along. That's a breathtakingly awful thought. There's a catch with regard to some of that federal money, though:
When the Obama administration gave California several billion dollars for its proposed high-speed rail project last year, it attached an odd string.
The money had to be spent, the feds said, on a relatively short stretch in the San Joaquin Valley.
Why? The official explanation was that it would be the easiest and cheapest segment of a statewide system, could be a demonstration and test track, and could be used for ordinary train service if nothing else happens.
The real reason probably had much to do with building in the congressional district of a longtime bullet train booster, Democrat Jim Costa, who faced a tough 2010 re-election, although everyone denies that crass motive, of course.
The political calculus included an assumption that the transportation-starved and economically depressed region would embrace the project - a supposition that's proven to be very shaky, especially among farmers who would lose their land.
That money was popular with a lot of local politicians in the Valley, but it doesn't directly help people in the coastal power centers upgrade their rail systems. I guess they have to use state money.
What about the rest of Newsom's State of the State Address?
Reihan Salam, executive editor of National Review, writing in The Atlantic, seems to rather like some of Newsom's other priorities, such as affordable housing.
To achieve his objectives, the governor will have to make the case not just for casitas, or accessory dwelling units that can be added to existing homes, or for the occasional smattering of duplexes and townhomes in postindustrial corners of the state where NIMBYs are few and far between. He will have to make an affirmative case for a new way of life, in which Californians embrace multi-family dwellings, walkable neighborhoods, and, sacrilegious though it may sound, trading their private automobiles, or at least their second private automobiles, for increased reliance on buses, bikes, and of course, electric scooters.
That's today's voice of the National Review, I guess. At least he's not a fan of open borders.
As a resident of the Central Valley, I prefer the analysis in the City Journal. (h/t J.J. Sefton) It pours some cold water on the Green New Deal, describes fiscal woes of high speed rail even in the UKand includes this:
. . . Of the many high-speed rail lines built in the developed world, only two (Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon) have ever been profitable, and in each case highway tolls for the same routes exceed $80 one-way, making high-speed rail in those cases an economical consumer choice. California, the green heart of the resistance, has met fiscal reality; reality won.
Some greens and train enthusiasts, such as the deep-blue Los Angeles Times editorial board, have criticized Newsom's move, and others remain adamant in their support of the plane-to-train trope. But California, which has embarked on its own Green New Deal of sorts, has seen these results: high energy and housing costs, and the nation's highest cost-adjusted poverty rate, and a society that increasingly resembles a feudal social order. Attempts to refashion global climate in one state reflects either a peculiarly Californian hubris or a surfeit of revolutionary zeal.
Of course, Newsom and the bullet train's supporters justify spending billions more on the Central Valley line as a way of reviving the terribly challenged, impoverished economy of that region. Yet greens and their allies have already shown what comes of putting their ideas into practice--cutting water supplies to farmers, blocking new energy production, and leaving Route 99, the Valley's main thoroughfare, in such awful shape that it has been named the country's most dangerous highway. The Valley does not need a bullet train to nowhere. It needs, rather, policies that allow for its basic industries, such as agriculture, manufacturing, and energy, to expand and provide desperately needed jobs. Oil-rich California has been replacing in-state production for imported petroleum, to the enrichment of Saudi Arabia but to the detriment of California workers.
Casting aside Brown's obvious love for a statewide system linking Sacramento and San Francisco in the north to Los Angeles and San Diego in the south, Newsom called for completing just the roughly 100-mile-long initial San Joaquin Valley segment, from Merced to near Bakersfield, and making it a high-speed system.
However, electrifying the track now under construction and buying high-speed trains to run on it would be an enormously expensive gesture for such short service. More likely, the stretch of track, when completed, will be folded into the region's existing Amtrak service.
But about the rest of the State of the State address, Walters wrote:
All in all, Newsom set an ambitious agenda for his governorship, the sort of multi-point plan that Brown had often denigrated. And in doing so, the new governor set a high mark for his political future.
Achieving all he seeks would propel him into White House contention sometime after 2020. Failing, for whatever reason, would make him a footnote in California's political history.
What do you think of his prospects for a White House race?
Music
There is already Amtrak service from Bakersfield to Merced. I personally haven't heard many folks from down in Bakersfield hankerin' for an extra-fast trip to Merced. Think politicians will ever help the train station in Bakersfield hit the big time?
Hope you have a great weekend.
Remember, This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread
OK, here are just a few rules for this open thread. No running with sharp objects, the 'ettes don't have cooties and leave their hair alone and as always, place nice with one another.
Only one side of the ever-widening political divide thus far is willing to persecute the other for the most unremarkable of "offenses", with punishments ranging from social defenestration right through to taking away their opponent's means of providing for themselves and family, and all the way up to actual physical violence in the affirmation of their own golden calves.
They take our patience and our forbearance for weakness and press their tyrant's advantage at every turn. Once, however, the walls are truly felt behind the backs of even the most defenseless of oppressed, a remarkable and grim resolve is generally found.
Tyrants usually find an end that was impossible for them to foresee: An inexplicable result unaccounted for in the nihilistic actuarial tables of Marxist post-modernism.
History books may airbrush out the Left's ubiquitous failures, thus enabling their fatal resurgences, but the lamp-posts remember how once they dangled their morbid ornaments.
And I Saw A Pale Horse. And Its Rider's Name Was ONT
—WeirdDave
I'm just not feeling it tonight gang. I suppose that I can help those of you that missed Valentines Day though. It's not too late to get your loved one a thoughtful gift.
Pretty sobering read about the warehousing of kids that passes for “education” in too much of the country today. The system prevents kids who have the desire and ability to learn from being able to do so, in favor of coddling the kids who have neither. Kids need to be pushed, to be expected to meet standards and to expand their horizons. Too often now we do neither, and what's the result?
I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed. – Booker T. Washington
Law And Order
I tend to fall on the “back the blue” side of the equation, I think most conservatives do, but it's not unquestioning and it's not blanket. This is one of the most egregious violations of police authority that I have ever seen. This isn't law enforcement, it's thuggery.
I showed that picture to my teenage son and told him “You ever get tired of living, let me catch you in a photo like that. I will pin you to the wall and skin you alive.” I was joking and he knew it, because we both know that he knows better.
Well, maybe. But with Trump hamstringing himself by signing the bill today, the question becomes what exactly does the “long haul” entail? How far are we from the point where Kurt Schlichter's Kelly Turnbull novels start seeming like a good case scenario? How much of a possibility is there of coexisting with people like this?
Captain Marvel Movie In Trouble? Drops Whopping $80M
"Back in January, following the NCAA trailer, it was reported that Captain Marvel was projected to have a massive $160 million opening weekend with some estimates even offering $180 million."
Now it's $100M and may not even reach that. Go woke, go broke. Much as I love the #MCU, this could be its "Solo". Even Deadline Hollywood is shading its projections. [Fritzworth]
The Field of Life and Death: Writing About Nukes I gave a lecture last month on nuclear strategy and nuclear weapons for a local group and thought the AoS gang here might find it interesting, particularly since it counters (with actual facts and history) much of the 'popular [i.e, leftist] wisdom' on those topics. Unfortunately, the camera was positioned so that I was standing in front of the slides most of the time, so you can get the slides here. [Fritzworth]
Jim Acosta Calls Angel Moms' Dead Children Alleged Victims of Illegal Aliens; Angel Moms Confront Him Boy, the media sure doesn't like talking about or to the Angel Moms, do they? They have that in common with Democrat politicians, who also refuse to meet with them. They can't wait to stage Town Halls with the Parkland kids and parents, but they won't permit the Angel Moms on their channels at all. I wonder why the media behaves the same way as Democrat politicians. It's a mystery I guess we'll never solve.
Please do not post long strings in comments. Either break them up into pieces with spaces, or use tinyurl to get a smaller url, or put the url in the "website" field in your name/email signature. This causes a lot of problems on the blog -- comments become very hard to read -- and I will have to start banning people to get this to stop.
[krak/t]