Cinematic Immunity: Not Really A Thing

Bob Uecker, R.I.P.

Bob Uecker, MLB player, actor, and for only 50+ years, the Milwaukee Brewers' announcer, of lung cancer, aged 90 years.

Uecker had seven lackluster years in the majors, traded about every other year to a new club on the strength of a lifetime .200 batting average, and the misplaced suspicion he had greater  potential. He managed a scant 14 home runs, averaging a bare two a year, including one apiece against future Hall Of Famers Sandy Koufax, Gaylord Perry, and Ferguson Jenkins, and being present to win a World Series ring with the 1964 Cardinals. As a catcher, he led the league in passed balls despite catching only 59 games his final season as a player, but in his defense, many of those were trying to stop Phil Niekro knuckleballs, and his technique for getting those was "Wait until it stops rolling, then pick it up". Once let go for good, he moved to the announcing booth for the Atlanta Braves for a couple of seasons, before moving to the Brewers for the beginning of his epic broadcasting stint starting in 1971.

Along the way, trumpeter Al Hirt convinced Johnny Carson to get him on the Tonight Show shortly after the end of his playing days. His anecdotes and self-deprecation killed ("Companies would pay me not to endorse their products." I came up in the bottom of the ninth with the score tied, two outs, and the bases loaded, and when I looked in the dugout, my team was already in street clothes."), and when it was over, neither Carson nor Ed McMahon was entirely sure he'd ever been in the major leagues, but they definitely wanted him back again. Which they did, turning into over 100 always-watchable appearances on the show, earning him the title "Mr. Baseball".

That leveraged him into a string of Budweiser commercials (back when they marketed beer to heterosexuals), which got him the recurring role of Harry Doyle (he did that character from muscle memory) in the Major League franchise, and a sitcom (Mr. Belvedere), all the while announcing the Brewers' games season after season, during which time they only made the playoffs 10 times, and only won a single division pennant. Looking at Uecker, him announcing such a sad-sack club was a match made in heaven.

On the strength of all those seasons in the booth, and being one of the funniest guys ever in baseball, Uecker finally made it into the Hall Of Fame in Cooperstown. As an announcer.

One hopes, when he gets to the Pearly Gates, St. Peter will call "Safe."

But if Uecker hears "Juuuuuuuust a little outside..." he'll probably understand.

The world is poorer at the passing of such a funny and beloved man.

Beltway "Wisdom"

And they actually think this way.
For some value of the word "think".

Disaster Relief

 

We cannot and do not, in good conscience, recommend sending so much as a thin dime to either the Red Cross nor Satan's Army for use for any victims of the current fires in SoCal.

1) The American Red Cross has the official policy that they, and they alone, will set a secret limit of relief for any given disaster. Any funds contributed for a given disaster which exceed that amount, will be shunted without informing you to their general operating funds, for use howsoever they see fit, including for disasters that are less sexy and PR-positive.

Any way you slice that, it's underhanded, and we refuse to give them any money because of that sneaky shit. They should either publicize it forthrightly, and either return excess contributions, or ask your kind permission before repurposing them for their own pocket.

Any other course of action is quite simply fraud.

2) Satan's Army, AFAWK, never fired the two woketarded @$$holes from a couple of years back, who promulgated as an official policy, the idea that whypeepo were the root of all evil.

Fuck them sideways, with a rusty chainsaw, until they forthrightly renounce that, publicly fire those two sumbitches at a public press conference, and apologize profusely for ever giving them a platform for their vile anti-white hate speech.

If you choose to send them instead a pre-printed White Guilt apology slip in lieu of cash in any amount, good on you.

If you choose to look up either of the above grifters' addresses, and instead send them a bag of dildos from an adult store, and suggest that their leadership eat said bag of dicks until they get their collective heads out of their hindquarters and return to their apolitical missions of humanitarian aid, feel free to do so, with our profound and sincere compliments.

Otherwise, seek other venues for any aid you might wish to contribute to actual victims. And vet any agency to which you contribute very carefully, to include who else they take care of. Ideally, such victims not being millionaire dilletantes who wouldn't give two shits if your home burned down. Anyone of those celebutwats who didn't send contributions to the Western NC or Florida hurricane victims "because that's Trump country" should be considered de facto ineligible for anything but another bag of adult appliances as well.

Do as you see fit.

Damnable Libel

Seriously though, I had nothing to do with any recent fires.
But paraphrasing Mark Twain, I have sent a letter stating
 that I heartily approved of them.

I Told Ya So

Democrat voter turnout in Charcoal Hills, formerly known as Pacific Palisades,
 expected to decrease by 98.4% for next decade. Pisser, huh?

Homeless cause 14,000 Fires per year in L.A. County

Insurance companies dropped coverage because Califrutopia is a massive clusterfuck

authorities drained reservoirs in fire areas for a year despite two record wet seasons, which was why hydrants had no water

Billion$$ unspent: Gov. Moonbeam and Gabbin' Nuisance haven't built a new reservoir in CA in 50 years, as population doubled, and billions of gallons of rain and snowmelt flow out to sea year after year

UPDATE: And (h/t WRSA) all of the above in one Tucker Carlson podcast:

And all this nonsense was voted in and funded lavishly by the millionaire Leftard lunatics in West L.A., which runs about as Democrat as NYFC not counting Staten Island.

I repeat for emphasis:

Stop dropping water on those neighborhoods. Swap it out for napalm and aviation gasoline, and solve this problem for a century or more. Make Stupid Painful Again.

Sunday Music: A Few Hot Tracks

A few apropos cuts that sprung to mind lately. Something for everyone here. Talking Heads, Ohio Players, J.D. Souther, the Pointer Sisters, and Blue Oyster Cult. Riffs on a theme.

Say When

 h/t Divemedic

By all means, read DM's OP, but we've covered this ground times beyond counting, so we're cutting to the chase, and defer to visual aids.

Demographics Is Destiny. Which Works Both Ways.

 h/t WRSA

The bottom half is my helpful addendum to a pic CA posted today. Feel free to fact check my addition, but like Shit Trump Says™, even if it's off by a hair here and there, my addition is likelier far more accurate than most of you want to admit is the case.

Like the pooches in most situations, 49 other states and 85 other countries have f**ked Califrutopia so hard for so long it'll never walk straight again. Remember your own state's or country's role in that multi-decade bestiality caper the next time you want to gloat about how the pooch is getting on currently.

Bonus giggle for me: There were an estimated 500,000 anchor babies born in the U.S. to illegal aliens last year. The largest-growing group was in the 49 states not called "California".

And California is broke, so the welfare gravy train is coming to a slamming halt, which is going to drive both carpetbaggers and whackjobs back home like an electromagnet. So your turns are coming like a freight train. Lube optional. Bummer, man. BOHICA, baby.

Brushfires: It Isn't Just The Government, Stupid

 h/t Peter

If this is global warming, all I ask is a bag of marshmallows and a stout roasting spike.

As Bayou Renaissance Man noted, some other bloggers have offered explanations for the current fire situation hereabouts. Without questioning their bona fides on the topic, we have lived in the exact area in question our entire life (save for a few transitory changes of address required by Uncle Sam), and from time before Reagan was governor, let alone president. In our youth, we and some friends sat on our house roof and watched the hillsides gloriously aflame in all four cardinal directions at the same time, and watched 150' tall flames overtop those same hillsides. This is not a novel phenomenon, and we possess a wee bit more precise and firsthand handle on the situation, and a great deal more historical context than most.

While decades of flagrantly incompetent Democommunist government (but we repeat ourself) hereabouts has an undeniable share of the blame in the raging wildfires hereabouts, trying to portray the current fiasco solely, or even majorly, as government's fault is like trying to blame baseball bats for causing home runs.

Government's role in this is mainly as a symptom, not a root cause.

As we pointed out in comments to an earlier post on BRM, insurance companies abandoning coverage in Califrutopia was a net plus, not a terrible thing, because they were otherwise being forced to subsidize (on the backs of ordinary policyholders) rich, entitled idiots building mansions inches away from literal tons of fireload, in brush-choked wind-tunnel canyons that burn regularly for not years, not decades, not centuries, but for millennia, since Hammurabi himself was in diapers. 

Having seen this phenomenon first-hand for half a century myself, my argument was simple:

Let the insurance companies allow the entitled idiots' homes to burn, with no coverage possible.

Then we'll have fewer entitled jackholes (you guess the missing word there), overwhelmingly - but not entirely - the exact same dancing monkeys in music, film, and television, on either side of the cameras and microphones whose serial idiocy you all rightfully loudly decry and castigate on these same blogs 24/7/265, buying or building homes in those same brush-clogged wind-tunnel canyons, which burn every 5-10 years with the predictability of the seasons, who like having brush and oak trees inches from their multi-million-dollar estates "because it looks pretty", who won't let cities use eminent domain to widen the narrow streets enough to permit emergency vehicles to access those streets even during minor emergencies, let alone brush fires the size of some cities, who elect more government idiots to oppose brush-clearing and controlled burns, simultaneously funding dope-smoking tree-hugging eco-lunatard hippies who oppose brush clearing and controlled burns because they think humans are the parasites who must be eliminated, nor ever vote for any politicians or measures that would fund sufficient infrastructure to make sure there's even water flowing out of the hydrants at the top of those canyons, like for example fixing the 10,000 water main breaks in L.A. unrepaired since the Northridge Earthquake thirty years ago - which is why random sinkholes keep cropping up all over Los Angeles - to use when you need it (like for the semi-annual brushfires that have happened here since Fr. Junipero Serra and Spanish conquistadors first arrived on the scene, and found out the local Indian name for the current San Fernando Valley was "The Valley that Smokes" because of perennial lightning-caused brushfires since time out of mind, thousands of years before Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola). Newsflash, Common-Core grads: there was smog over the Greater L.A. Basin and the adjoining valleys 200 years before the first car or gas station arrived here. You could look it up. History: still a thing.

These are the same entitled Leftard idiots who won't broom out the homeless, who camp in those same canyons smoking meth, and which drug-addicted losers are too tweaked out to notice that 50MPH gust during the regular Santa Ana winds just blew their hillside campfire into a raging inferno, causing five out of every ten fires, going back decades.

Hear me, God! Let those fires rage out of control and burn unrestricted, and weed out the surplus of morons (mostly deported or imported here from 49 other states and 85 other countries), and if possible, ship more morons into the fire zones while the flames rage out of control, to preclude having to deal with them after it's all over, with their upturned palms looking for government relief largely shaken down from the peons in this state and 49 others whom they moved to those canyon mansion to escape.

If we were governor for a day, the aerial tankers would be dropping napalm and aviation gasoline by the ton around the clock for the entire day, until the problem self-corrected, and the hillsides looked like Hiroshima on August 7th, 1945.

Oh, and the inevitable survivors of this disaster? No points for guessing who'll be back grifting next spring, when the scrubbed-bare hillsides turn into raging mudslides and flooding, crying to anyone who'll listen about how terrible is their lot in life, rather than having to attend mandatory public struggle sessions to own up to their stupid life choices and cranio-rectal impaction issues.

Never have so many delusional entitled morons so richly deserved to have been crapped upon from a great height by the Flying Fickle Finger Of Fate.

Even if you could wave a magic wand and instantly make the entirety of government in Califrutopia go away, you wouldn't fix the problem. For the same reason you could kill all the horses in the world, and years later you'd still have hundreds of millions of horses' asses.

You want to fix California? Bite the bullet: this is going to hurt.

Leave the government alone.

Because as always, politics is downstream from culture.

Just take back all your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk who weren't born here but have come in and f**ked the state up royally for the last 40 years, and deport the 15M illegal aliens your congressweasels and senators have not only ignored, but even encouraged (Lindsay Grahamnesty, Marco ScrewYoubio, call your offices), until they started being bussed into your towns and cities, and the government hereabouts will take care of itself. Just like it did without any further input from you for 130 years. The rest of the country has used this state as a giant demographic and economic tampon to catch all the outflow from the other 49 for nearly 50 years, and now you're all aghast about the toxic shock.

Own your own goddam mess. Admitting that is the first step to solving the problem.

If you'd stop sh*tting and pissing in our gene pool hereabouts, you'd be amazed how fast it would resemble a swimming pool instead of the nation's septic tank. Oh, and those carpetbaggers you bitch about? They weren't Californians when they moved here, and they still aren't now that they've moved on to piss and sh*t in your pool. Best wishes dealing with your own states purpling up because of them. Tag, you're it.

And in the short-term, please, let the entitled @$$holes' mansions burn to the ground. Ideally with them locked inside. And not a penny of relief funds for those grifters that survive. Tough love, we beseech you.

At best, it'll build some character, and at worst, it might kill metric fucktons of them. Or at least, induce them to move back home where they came from, and where they belong.

Win-win.