Circling The Bowl

In a world brimful of other ways for people to spend their time and money, Hollyweird can't seem to stop shooting itself in both feet to drive potential audiences away.

Link

Cinemas can't fill seats anymore because people are tired of Hollywood's repetitive garbage and heavy-handed leftist messaging. Now theater owners are raising ticket prices, thus further ensuring their decline.  

A new report from the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) states that the average ticket price hit a new high in the second quarter of 2017 at $8.95, a 2.5 percent increase from last year. 

... 

The 2017 box office has been abysmal for Hollywood, with studios seeing an eight percent drop from last year in overall domestic box office receipts. 

 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Transformers: The Last Knight, Alien: Covenant, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, The Mummy, and Baywatch have all seriously under-performed in the domestic box office.

Nobody's entire studio lot has gone under in this town since MGM ate the big weiner in 1974.

But as every mutual fund prospectus reminds you:
Past behavior is no guarantee of future performance.

And like raising bus fares because of dwindling ridership, increasing ticket prices as movies slip from sucky to absolutely atrocious is the beginnings of a death spiral. And as long as the idiots are in charge, there may not be another generation of Spielbergs, Lucases, and Scorseses in the wings to save the ballgame this time around. 

Nobody should be happy about that (although I thoroughly applaud the punishment of the libtards who're running the industry into the ground), because movies are first and foremost, the quintessential American art form. It doesn't matter how many other countries had or have thriving movie industries, or how well they do at it, they are all incomparably lesser than anything that's come out of America since Edison made the first "flicker". We invented the art form, we've perfected it, we dominate it, and by all that's right we should continue to do so until long after I'm cold and dead, and past caring.

So watching a bunch of shit-for-brains idiots run it into the ground is like watching the third- and fourth-generation kids of your family squander the fortune your father left you, and which you built into a gargantuan behemoth, and seeing them do it like setting fire to the family cash pile with torches.

A Visigoth is still a Visigoth, even if they're allegedly your kin.

What Are You Prepared To Do?

From comments today:

So then we stop the rallies, stop the demonstrations. People don't see us anymore, we cease all operations.

And then we do what? What's next? I know what THEY will do next. All Confederate Statues will disappear and then the statues of the Founders will disappear. Then ANY statue of ANY white person. Then streets will be renamed, schools, etc.

THEY are going to DO that. And some of them will also keep attacking random whites on the street, "knockout game" style.

What are WE going to do?

That's an easy question.
 "What are you prepared to do?"

By all accounts, most people are neither inclined nor prepared to do fuck-all.
Bitter or not, swallow that medicine, and move forward.

Do you live in the Blue hives?
Then street theatre probably isn't on the menu, nor should be.

If you aren't, then you can take a shot. You might notice that when Antifa tries things outside their comfort zone, it doesn't go well for them.
So you're not going to lose ALL the fights, nor even most of them. Berzerkely, Boston, etc., are probably not going to go well for you though.

In case this wasn't obvious, Charlottesville had an unfriendly mayor, unfriendly cops, unfriendly state police, unfriendly governor, and was ground zero for tens of thousands of leftists at the university. And it's a lazy two-hour drive from D.C.

Let's, by all means, hold an outright Klan rally there, and see how many normies are willing to get beat up for their right to free speech, shall we?
And BTW, let's do not one single fucking thing to think this through pro-actively, even though we'll have two months to get our shit in one bag.

And, oh yeah, let's have the whole fustercluck organized by an (until 5 minutes ago) Occupy! organizer and Clinton/Obama supporter.

That will turn out well. And when it explodes in our faces, let's let Lucy tee up the football for another try.

And another.

And another.

And another.

As I noted elsewhere, I have diligently perused every dead-tree and electronic list of pre-apocalyptic "Things To Do To Prepare For ________" that I could find.

By a strange coincidence, on exactly NONE of them, did I find listed nor explained, the entry "Protect Confederate monuments".
If your list is different somehow, explain that one to me. Please show your work.

The Leftards' 10-month crybaby hissyfits weren't working for them - not once - and in fact was making them an object of scorn, mockery, and public derision, including from their own nominal supporters, until dumbasses showed up to play the Washington Generals to Antifa's Harlem Globetrotters in Charlottesville.

If you ever saw "The Devil's Brigade", perhaps you can understand the disgust Pvt. Ransom's sprint and faceplant engendered from Col. Frederick on the return from the forced ruck march.

              It's also a great flick. Watch it. Again, if necessary.

Do what you can, not what you can't. And if you're going to f*** it up, for the sake of everything, try not to do your spectacular faceplant in front of God and everyone.

And that's directed at everyone to whom it applies, not merely you, Comment writer, although you asked.

You or whomever, read the four links I posted in this post.
(Just to make it easy: here, here, here, and here.)
Make a farking list.
Then make a no-shit analysis of what you can do, and from there tell me what you should do, to get to where you can accomplish what you want to do.
This isn't hard at all, if folks just go in order.

Then start looking at list of what to look at after you get beyond one person:
here
here
here
here
here
and here.

There are no short-cuts. Folks can continue to do this half-witted, half-cocked, and half-assed, and marvel at the results.
Or, they can do it by the numbers, and get marvelous results.
My suggestion only has a century or two or warfare ("a continuation of politics, by other means" -von Clausewitz) in support of the theorem.

And if all that is still "too hard", then by all means, go back to MYOB, and taking care of yourself, and solving your own little problems. Which isn't a bad idea for life in general.

But qwitcherbitchin' when things you want don't happen, like they won't.

“You never change anything by fighting the existing. To change something, build a new model and make the existing obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller

Stop Me If You've Heard This One...

h/t Remus

From Traditional Right

One of the cardinal principles of 4GW is that before you ever set foot on the battlefield you should already be tilting the battlefield in your favor.  Don’t fight the kind of battle the enemy wants in the place that the enemy wants to do so. So my first piece of (probably unheeded) advice would be to stop having rallies in the first place, at least of the kind that are likely to degenerate into brawls with antifa and BLM. 

The fact of the matter is that right-wing activism always fails.  You’re not going to be able to steal a page from their playbook and turn the Left’s game against them.  This is because the Right does not have the institutional support of the politicians, bureaucracies, and other elements of the state apparatus. As a result, antifa can get away with beating you because the police will arrest you when you fight back.  In fact, the police may openly side with the antifas, as they did in Charlottesville.  Is it fair? Of course not. But life isn’t fair, so get a helmet.  Earlier this year, I thought there might be a chance that the legal climate for legitimate self-defence against antifas might be changing, but I have since revised that opinion in the negative direction. So the question is, why show up armed with sticks and shields if you’re not going to be allowed to use them without getting a criminal record?  Why give unsympathetic news media the opportunity to tar you dishonestly to millions of viewers across the country?  There are other means by which antifa and BLM can be countered...

RTWT.

I'm hoping that if only a few hundred people keep intelligently telling Team Fucktard point by blistering point why they should stay home and try other methods, it will eventually penetrate their left-bell-curve IQs and bulletproof skulls that we're saying this because it's true, and not just to piss off the stupid people.

Tally up how many of the points I made here, here, here, and here you can find.
Almost as if I knew WTF I was talking about.

GMTA.

Shoe. Other foot. Assembly required.

Earl of Taint via WRSA

Absolutely perfect.
Antifa: Sh*tbaggers they shall be, henceforth.

Can ya feel us now, Leftards?

Idiocracy From The Terminally Stupid

From the fishwrap of record in Los Angeles.

(Stupidville) Tesla and SpaceX chief  (and idiot savant - A.) Elon Musk has joined dozens of CEOs of artificial intelligence companies in signing an open letter urging the United Nations to ban the use of AI in weapons before the technology gets out of hand.The letter was published Monday — the same day the U.N.’s Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems was to discuss ways to protect civilians from the misuse of automated weapons. That meeting, however, has been postponed until November. 

“Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare,” read the letter, which was also signed by the chief executives of companies such as Cafe X Technologies (whichbuilt the autonomous baristsa) and PlusOne Robotics (whose robots automate manual labor). “Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close. Therefore we implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers.” 

The letter’s sentiments echo those in another open letter that Musk — along with more than 3,000 AI and robotics researchers, plus others such as Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak — signed nearly two years ago. In the 2015 letter, the signatories warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence in weapons, which could be used in “assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group.”

So let me get this straight: the guy whose business is something like 50+% dependent on government subsidies to keep its doors open, along with the guys whose products are replacing $15/hr dumbasses at coffee kiosks, and put dues-paying union assembly drones out on the street in the Rust Belt for going on forty years, don't want any of that government money going towards weapons that have been cutting edge since JFK's older brother died testing them in 1944, and have petitioned the world's champion toothless gasbags to help them put an end to what's been going on quite merrily since Leonardo daVinci (perhaps Musk has heard of him) was looking to make a fast buck off the ruling Medicis in Florence ca. 1480 or so. What an ignorant bunch of fuckwits.

This sort of mindless shrieking is Proof #10,043 in why Intelligence In One Narrow Field of Endeavor Does Not Confer Basic Intelligence In Anything Else.

One wonders what exactly Musk thinks Werner von Braun was up to in 1943 at Peenemunde, before we captured him and his toys, and set him to play over at NASA.

Musk, and his fellow-Flat Earthers, are about 70 years late (if not 6,000 years), and two functional synapses short, in trying to stuff toothpaste back into the tube nearly a century later.

Time fuzes on artillery shells became a thing back in 1800s, and as noted above Kennedy was killed in Operation Aphrodite, testing a radio-controlled B-24 heavy bomber loaded with explosives when it and they became so much heat and noise.

So despite Mssr. Musk and Co.'s sudden notice of misty historical realities, this march has been pronounced and inexorable since before the US Civil War. Them or anyone else getting worked up about it only now merely announces to the world that you slept through your grade-school history classes, and just woke up, now. Dumbfucks.

Lastly, covering this level of asinine moonbattery as if it were earth-shattering actual news is also why the selfsame fishwrap is the local town joke in "journalism" (and has been since the communist heirs of the Chandler clan ran it in the 1960s) just underwent yet another desk-clearing, to re-arrange deck chairs on the newspaper Titanic.

Fake News and manufactured outrage, on sale near you 24/7/365.
(While supplies last.)

Go catch a flick, Elon. It might explain things for you, and it's funny.

Even if, like your notice, it's a wee bit dated.

McCain Torpedoed By Incompetence And Stupidity

Sorry, folks, I meant this one, the USS John McCain , not Senator Braintumor McCrazy:

Many aboard are dead and missing. Prayers for the families, of course.

Because this exemplar of the most nimble and agile ship in any fleet got hit by a tanker (and the entire conn crew was apparently working with a severe handicap, mentally).

But the Metaphor Prize Committee has met, and announced we have a winner.

Say, Navy, how's that Diverse, Gender-fluid Crew(tm) thingie working out for youse?
More collisions and deaths in a year than we had in the past twenty?
Even back when the Soviets were ramming our ships?

And that whole one-serving-admiral-per-commissioned-ship policy is paying vast dividends as well, huh?

Go, Navy!

Note to CNO: If our fleet is ever attacked by an enemy equipped with nothing but tankers and freighters, you guys are in a world of shit, huh?

You might want to have a Coastie cutter tag along with the capital ships when deployed, for lifeguard duty.

Otherwise, you might consider going back to being a fucking military navy, just for the novelty.

There Is No Such Thing As Knowing Too Much

Reference this thread at WRSA, based on these two from MDT.

What some folks think of as trivial arcana, whether we're talking military subjects, or any other field of subject matter, is frequently anything but useless, or trivial. Case in point today is the referenced subjects above.

Someone in comments at WRSA thought he didn't have a grasp on clearing landing zones, but that was OK, since he was never going to need it, nor have any friendly helos to need to clear LZs for.

Today's lesson:

Natzsofast there. Don't think two-dimensionally.

While you may not have helos, someone you someday don't like very well, and who has a hard-on for you and your tribe, might.

But a helo without an LZ/DZ is a wasted trip. Read anything about Vietnam from the first battle of Ia Drang in '65  ( We Were Soldiers Once, And Young, etc.) up through the Easter Offensive of '72, and nota bene how things worked for the US when Mister Charles had all the nearby LZs covered with interlocking fields of HMG/AAA fire. (Total US helo losses in Vietnam were nominally 43% - 5,086 birds out of 11,827 deployed there - but actually much higher, because many helos were shot down, salvaged, flew again, shot down again, salvaged again, etc., so that as long as they eventually flew again, they were not counted as destroyed. So we may have lost more total birds than we had on paper in the course of 10+ years of the Southeast Asia War Games.)

Point to all that being that while there's precious little jungle in the States, there's one helluva lot of impenetrable forest, as anyone in the PNW, or who served at Ft.s Bragg, Benning, Knox, etc., knows very well.
And if you can't land birds, drop troops, parachute in supplies, etc., and the only road access is easily blocked/degraded dirt forest service roads, you take a 21st century mechanized military, and turn them into 2d C. B.C. Greek hoplites, marching in on foot, carrying everything on their backs, and forced to evac casualties the same way. {Hint: for the hoplites in question, the Suckage Factor zooms up into the red zone at this point.} Which puts a militia (like raggedy-ass Afghanis, or Vietnamese peasants, for example) back on parity with the .Gov hoplites.

So you might should want to know how much room in square feet they need to get in every helo in

current inventory; how they plan to clear LZs, and where, and where the current LZ/DZs are; as well as the road grid down to goat paths in your AO. And how to deny or degrade them.

Again, not much good in Kansas, but in mountain and forest terrain, which is one helluva big piece of the country, pretty damned useful info to have in your head, and an area notebook.

Make buddy-buddy with the local LifeFlight, wildfire, FD/PD etc. guys.

(Because, for one example, your group is nominally a volunteer wilderness SAR organization. Which coincidentally gives you a reason to have medical supplies and training, feeding and base camp supplies, robust comms, and do helpful wild country exercises, and actually do good, while getting trained, and having a beautiful means and reason for recruiting some hard-assed like-minded folks. Just saying. And you can always swap walking staffs for something black, loud, and semi-automatic, come the day. So now you're not somebody the media's going to tag as racist survivalist Rambo nutjobs. You're the nice quiet local folks who find Suzy Dipshit and Bruce Nancypants from Dumbass City when they go hiking but forget things...like a map, compass, and clue, and then get lost and run out of tofu and soy latte on the backside of Mount Sonofabitch. Now you're little damned heroes.)

There are surveyed and pre-planned LZ/DZs in most limited access areas down to the county level, so they know where they can bring in a wildfire hotshot team, paramedic rescue, SWAT team, etc.

This is also true in urban areas. The FD, PD, and EMS already know they can't drop birds in everywhere, because of wires, towers, and other obstructions, so they have lists and maps of the same pre-surveyed contingency helopad/LZs.

And as we currently live in a relatively open society, such maps are not considered the tactical intel goldmine they would be and become in a time of more existential sportiness.

So there you go: military subjects, Greek hoplites, the Vietnam War, altruism, subterfuge, and John Pinette, all effortlessly rolled into a nice Sunday confection. Have I mentioned that I'm a huge fan of James Burke?

Thus endeth the lesson.

Back To Basics

 Basic. Functional. Primitive. You can do better, and you should.

As entertaining as the political follies have been, they aren't going to help you in the long run. And at the rate people keep leaving the White House, the current occupant's chances for longevity are somewhat in doubt.
So that respite from the nanny-state may be over early, or economic challenges may become a wee bit more important than other distractions.

1) You need a cash float. A month or three, for tough times. ATMs go down, jobs disappear, accidents happen, etc. Cash is king.
The first thing guys going on overseas details do is max out their ATM withdrawal, because American greenbacks (so far) are accepted universally. Have a branch of The Bank Of Average Joe in your abode, whether you have a safe, mayonnaise jar, or under-the-mattress stash, but work out what you'd need for 30-90 days of no other options, and start stacking up $$$: 10s, 20s, and 50s to get to that amount. While 100s are always nice, they piss off store clerks, and you might not get change in interesting times. Start at one month, work on having three. It gives you options nothing else will. And if you couldn't make a better plan with 90 days to think it over, you have bigger problems.

2) Actual savings, in an actual savings account. You should be shooting at having a solid six months' worth of paychecks, in an account you don't touch. Nota bene it's worthless in a bank run, but for a thousand everyday problems, it wins handily. While you don't have your eggs all in one basket, you still have a nest egg in a basket. Otherwise a disaster, illness, employment change, etc., turns you into survival roadkill. You can't realistically do this in your twenties, but if you can't do it by your forties, you're already surviving by the skin of your teeth.

3) Pay off your debts. Live within your means. Pay off your debts. Live within your means. Pay off your debts. Live within your means. Pay off your debts. Live within your means. Pay off your debts. Live within your means. Pay off your debts. Live within your means. Pay off your debts. Live within your means. Pay off your debts. Live within your means. Pay off your debts. Live within your means. Pay off your debts. Live within your means.

4) Once you've gotten 1-3 in control, you can think about precious metals. Gold. Silver. And lead. Gold doesn't appreciate over time - it merely eliminates inflation. You could look it up. An ounce of gold now buys just about what an ounce of gold bought 50, 100, or 500 years ago. But ounces are generally too compact a store of wealth. Get real minted coins, but in fractional ounces: 1/10th, 1/4, or 1/2 ozs. are always better than 1 oz. Krugerands.,Maple Leafs, or Eagles. All are better than bullion ingots, which are, to most folks, just gold-plated lead in times of crisis.
Silver should be "junk silver", i.e. circulated pre-1965 U.S. dollars, halves, quarters, and dimes, which are 90% pure silver. And those ridges on the outside edge? Ben Franklin came up with those, to keep people from getting away with shaving the edges. Funny how great ideas never go out of style.
Lead is ammunition, and gets stored in ammo cans, in convenient common calibers.
And if you wouldn't store your lead supply in safety deposit box at the bank, then your gold and silver shouldn't be stored there either.

5) Stored where? Where you live, and can get to it in under an hour, unassisted, and with minimal hand tools, if that. If you have a home and a separate bolt hole, no more than 1/2 at each place. Cash is king, but cache is king too. (And if you never learned this, they're both pronounced the same way.)

6) Home and/or bolt hole need to be defensible. It's better if they're the same single place, but reality is that most of us (not everyone, mind, but the bulk of US population) live in cities. Which are poor prospects in most problems, sooner or later.
Defensible would mean you can fort in, and it should take tanks and artillery to pry you out.
If one guy in an old beater sedan could drive through your patio glass door, you're doing this wrong. Look at old (I'm talking medieval/renaissance-era) homes and houses. One or two study doors (something that would give a SWAT cop with a ram a day's work, and not just a second's pause. All a ram is, is a 4" sewer pipe filled with concrete, with handles. Brigands have used similar things for centuries.) that'd stop a mob cold. Minimal ground floor window openings. Too small to get into easily. Overhangs, you'll notice, made it harder to climb the walls. Shutters were functional, not decorative. Outside windows sited to view all the walls is ideal. If you have decorative "planters" on all sides that are shoulder-height, and 3-5' thick, planted with whatever (my suggestion is herbs, veggies, and thorny berries near windows), you have a house that's proof against bullets, rockets, tanks and APCs.
Seriously consider some defensive improvements that won't piss off the neighbors, as you can do so. A prefab suburbia-box was designed to be quick and cheap, not secure.
Darker times than the 1900s in Anytown USA - which civilization dictated most urban/suburban architecture - may return; plan ahead. There's also a reason log cabins, and sod houses were the norm in injun country on the American frontiers. It's tough to shoot through or burn down either one.

7) Self-sufficiency. See/get/follow this book. The best $10 you'll ever spend. The spin-offs (except "Building projects", which was greedy publisher's sequel-mania packing a $16 book with $1 worth of information) are mostly four-star too.
Once you have defensible shelter, you need a way to keep it all going. Try this method out on whatever patch you're on, like your life depended on it. It just might.

8) Water. Food. Power. Tools. Weapons. Food production/procurement. Communications. Skills and trades. Every one of these have been post topics, or whole books. Even whole racks of books. If you thought education ended after you got your last diploma, welcome to the New Reality. You will be a renaissance man (or woman)/jack-of-all-trades, with lifetime learning tasks, or you'll be X-ed out of the gene pool. As Heinlein noted at the end of an always appropriate quote from the master: "Specialization is for insects."

9) Fallback occupations. The last item leads inexorably to this one. You should have alternative ways to survive, and even thrive. Gaining knowledge and skills gives you options, so that when - not if - changes come, you can adapt, overcome, and survive. If you can build walls, frame houses, run plumbing or wiring, drill wells, weld, etc. ad infinitum, you will never starve amongst your fellow earth-dwellers. And if you can raise enough food to feed a family, you can probably raise enough for two or ten more, and sell the excess for ready cash, even in the worst of times. Read FerFal's or Selco's accounts of bartering for things in former Yugoslavia and Argentina amidst civil and economic meltdown. Eggs and meat, for instance, never go out of style, and rabbits and chickens can even be raised in a spare bedroom in an urban apartment, or inside a relatively tiny industrial space, with a minimal investment of time, effort, and forethought. And people will always pay money for fresh eggs, going back only 6000 years. Hell, in 99% of cities, it's even legal (if that even appears on your radar screen of concern). So have something, either a commodity, a skill, or both, that you could do if your business/job went away, because of fire, flood, tornado, civil unrest, economic collapse, etc.
What you do with that extra cash you make from your "hobby" now is between you, and the IRS.
Items 1 and 4 come to mind, but YMMV.

10) Thrive. The purpose of survival isn't just to keep shoveling food in your face until the day you stroke out. (Although for some people, that's all they're doing, even now.) It's to live. So now, and even if things get seriously FUBARed, live. LIVE.
Draw, paint, play music or write it, sculpt, write books and poetry, teach, travel, explore.
Life is an adventure. Sometimes it's the really shitty, gritty kind. Okay, so deal with that when you must. But the purpose of survival is to carry, by your life and work the culture, technology, knowledge and wisdom that 6,000 years of written history have brought you to. Do succeeding generations a favor, and expand that treasure trove, while you enrich your own existence. And pass it on to the next generation, with the bag a little fuller than the one handed to you. Starting with making sure there is a next generation, and a you.

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Marcus Tullius Cicero

Lessons From The First Battle Of Show-asses, Pt. II

Dear racist Fucktards:
This was you. Friday night, and Saturday morning.
Not a "few bad apples". Y.O.U.
In Southern parlance, "All Y'all".
Period. Full stop.
(If you are one of the oblivious dipshits who showed up to protect monuments and heritage, and found out after the party started you were foolishly stumbling into co-starring in a Klan march, well, sux to be you, and shit happens. Learn a lesson, and don't get fooled again.)

You @$$holes do indeed have a right to espouse your vile toxic filth in the public square.
Just as every sensible person other than you is free to recognize it and call it vile toxic filth.
If that leaves a mark, take it as reality slapping you in the back of the head.
Your alt-right privileges are over. Get back into your cesspit, and pull the cover down.

You WhitePower national socialists represent nothing but a retarded adherence to the failed idiotology of your spiritual brothers, the anti-national socialists of Antifa. You are peas from the same pod, and co-turds in the same punchbowl. And you need to go away, never to haunt the public square again.

Now, to the nuts and bolts of the rat-killin'.

For those of you stupid - yes, I said stupid - enough to continue to play in the streets, in some misbegotten and manifestly false belief that it does anything but piss everyone off, (because, seriously, how's that tactic been working out for the loonie Leftards since last November 9th?) and sway no one not already convinced, while leaving you open to public ridicule and physical violence, try to muster a few wits in how you go about it.

If you cannot afford a legal team (nota bene that was "team", as in multiple constitutional lawyers, not some guy from The Matchbook Cover College Of Night School Law who does contracts for local landlords), to protect your group's interests like a Rottweiler on crack, before, during, and after - and no, the ACLU helping you out doesn't count - you are already too short for this ride. Get back on the porch.

If you don't have a media plan, including a media-savvy, literate, erudite, camera-worthy designated spokesperson, and cannot and do not promulgate your message, talking points, and produce your own media of the event before, during, and after, while instructing everyone who participates that they are NOT that spokesperson, and are to refer all media requests to your designee, you are too short for this ride. Get back on the porch.

If the leadership doesn't have a sterling reputation and documented history of support for right-wing causes, the event is a fail. (The two @$$clowns running Charlottesville were apparently connected to such Leftard nonsense as Occupy!, etc., until five minutes before launching this last week's stupidpalooza. And nobody knew, noticed, or thought that was a red warning flag last Saturday. Doh!)

You damned sure better put out the word that anyone who breaks out a Confederate flag, swastika, KKKlan hood, or any other jackholian paraphernalia will be ejected from the rally, and handed over to the tender mercies of the Antifa folks on the periphery, on the day.

For some of the salient other details, I refer you to a detailed post on the topic, exactly none of which was apparently easy enough for anyone stupid enough to do Saturday's rally to find, let alone heed. Well played. Starting with the total failure to know what was going on at the site, with the police, the Left's thugs, or on the streets in general, before, during, or after. Instead of walking zombie-like into the pre-located boxcars barricades, helpfully surrounded by the police and the communist mob, without any idea how they'd gotten there, nor how to get out once they got in. Genius, right there.

BTW, a dress code of polo shirts and slacks, or even business attire, wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings or your own visuals. Tea Party rallies seemed to conspicuously lack a body count, and got a rep for leaving the venue cleaner when they left than when they showed up. Learn a lesson.

If your clever plan is to take who you get, and "Just show up", and see how that works out, you're too short for this ride. Get back on the porch.

If you're going to engage in the general idiocy that is street theatre, you can be the Harlem Globetrotters, or you can be the Washington Generals. There is no third option, and no shortcuts to aceing the performance. Plan the work, work the plan. Practice, practice, practice. And you'd better science the shit out of it, because from here on out, showing up includes no guarantees that you're ever going to make it home.

So if you're contemplating showing up, and any of these points are hazy when you do due diligence, and ask in advance (you're gonna do that, right? RIGHT?) about the particulars, that's a good day to clean out your garage, or re-arrange your sock drawer.

Show up or stay to play, but FFS, Stop. Dicking. Around.
Amateur Hour ended last Saturday morning, at about noon EDT.

And you'd damned sure better get that memo.

Lessons From The First Battle Of Show-asses, Pt. I

There is a steady drip-drip of people who were at the Dumbass Rally in Charlottesville Saturday, now claiming "Victory!"

Um, no.

The rally was cleat holes in your dicks.
You can whistle past the graveyard all you like, but the actual effort has your crotches bleeding unstaunchably, and no amount of rah-rah gainsaying will cover up a clusterfuck the equal of Malheur, if not exceeding it.
Little planning, no forethought, no contingency plans, just feed your useful idiots into an Antifa meatgrinder, and watch them get the shit kicked out of them. "But the dog ate my homework!" Genius.

Until Cartard pulled his little stunt, it was just a clusterfuck
He took it to a biblical epic clusterfuck. With a body count.
So now we've cleverly also lost the "first blood" argument.
And gotten the entire right side of the spectrum nationally tagged with the Nazi flag, which was pure delusional horseshit - until actual swastikas and klan hoods came out en masse on Saturday.
Well-played.

The shortcomings of the idiocy in Charlottesville notwithstanding, the duplicity about the Antifa violence is getting out there, finally, and after gleefully tossing Cartard under the justice bus, where he belongs, people are realizing that this was a Leftard set-up, on the behalf of the mayor of the town and the governor there, with the local and state police, and the Notional guard as willing jack-booted allies.

None of that last is to the event organizers' nor participants' credit, any more than they could take credit for growing roses out of a bag of fertilizer.
All they can honestly point to is bringing down a big bag of shit.
And got played by a bunch of jackholes into walking right into their ambush. Good show.

The rally was an unmitigated  shit show.
Getting chased out before you even get your speakers up on the podium is not a win.
Deal with it.
Move on.

The bigger issue still remains: you re-energized Antifa, after they'd had a spring and summer of solid losses, which was a strategic blunder; but you managed to stumble into letting the president play rope-a-dope with the lunatic media, which was a tactical gain.
Settle for that, learn from past mistakes, and stop repeating them.
(And repeating them, and repeating them, and...)

Starting with
Stop Playing in The Street
unless a given group is going to actually put in the time, forethought, and planning necessary beforehand to win regardless of the opposition, and deal with any contingency.

And maybe leave the hoods and swastikas home next time.
They haven't helped one little bit so far, and they won't help anything going forward, either.
Guaranteed.

Some people (I hear) have little "Fifty Shades Of Grey" playrooms in their basements; others, evidently, have little Nazi/White Power shrines. No one needs to know anyone's secret fetishes, but the basement is the best place to keep that sort of behavior.

Instead of coming out in public, and waving your dicks around.
As you've seen, it never turns out the way you thought.

Reality Check

from Sean Linnane

 

 

A little moment of reality:

Confederate soldiers, sailors and marines that fought in the Civil War were made US veterans by an act of Congress in 1957. US Public Law 85-425 sec 410 5/23/1958. This made all Confederate military veterans equal to United States veterans. Additionally under US Public Law 810 - approved by the 17th Congress on February 26 1929: The War Department was directed to erect headstones and recognize Confederate grave sites as US war grave sites.

In other words, when you remove or deface a Confederate statue, monument or headstone, you are removing or defacing the statue, monument or headstone of a United States Veteran. Unlike burning or otherwise dishonoring the United States flag, this behavior is illegal.

Oh, Snap!
Looks like we've once again caught the left spitting on soldiers.
Like they do.
Like they've always done.

How long before the media has to dredge up this decrepit communist harpy to show 'em how it's done?

They've been trying to relive their glory days of the 1960s, and they're going to get a replay of Hippies vs. Hardhats.
(If that was before your time, no points for guessing who won that the first time around.)

And their sons are a little friskier and much less inclined to cut the other side any slack this time.
They're also looking for an excuse to make metaphysically certain there won't be a Round Three in a couple of generations.

Meanwhile, the other side only has one card to play, since the 1930s:

More Nanny State B***$#!^

Link

Drivers aren’t the only ones who could be fined for texting or talking.Now, there’s a proposal to keep pedestrians safe that could set off a national trend.
Crossing busy Broad Street in downtown Stamford can be a challenge, even if you’re not staring down at text messages on your cell phone.
Texting or even talking on an electronic device may soon be illegal in Stamford CT if a proposal to outlaw ‘distracted walking’ is approved.

Besides the First Amendment problem obvious in about two seconds to anyone who passed grade school with at least a B average, this is just government busybody bullshit.

"Distracted walking"???

What next?

Arresting people for daydreaming?
What if you're eating a sandwich?
Talking to a friend standing next to you?

What about this?

If violence is speech, and speech is violence, the assholes who would propose such a law , let alone vote it into being should be dragged out of city hall by the hair, set on fire on the steps of the building, and their ashes thrown in the face of any media who'd condemn the act.

Then go after their families.

And I'm not speaking metaphorically.

It's clearly gotten to the point that it's the only thing they'll understand.

Jihad, M*****f*****s.

No Shit, Sherlock Award: NBC/BBC Discover Violent Facist Antifa At Charlotte

h/t Hot Air

After only five days, including three days of castigating President Trump for "racism" for pointing out what was obvious from only every account to date from Chrlottesville last Saturday, both NBC and the BBC decided to, y'know, watch their own effing video feeds from the scene and have discovered, that, um, well, y'see, there may possibly have been a few Leftard...uh, violent m*****f*****s swinging pipes, throwing rocks, bottles, paint, and shooting pepper spray into people's faces at Charlottesville, exactly as described by the President in the zoo of fucktards pretending to be reporters at Monday's presidential press conference.

Both NBC News and the BBC have put out videos offering fact-checks on some of President Trump’s claims about what took place in Charlottesville. Both agree there were violent anti-fascist protesters who came to the protest looking for a fight.

WELL, NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!
Here's your sign.

ABCNNBCBS: Too Fucking Stoopid to watch their own video until the President calls them on it.

NBC should just change it's name to the Duh! Channel, move to cable, and get it over with.
Here's their five-days-late-and-a-dollar-short half-assed mea culpa for stepping on their dicks and lying about it for the entire week prior, from yesterday:

After noting they stepped on their dicks, they rushed in to try to double down on their narrative, but they can't undo the lies they've already told, except to keep repeating what they have got, which is one retard in a Charger going lethal.

Well-played, shitheads.

Like that undoes the violence the president described on both sides, despite the fact that one side had a permit to demonstrate, and the police and Notional Guard, on orders from the race-baiting mayor of Charlottesville, and the race-baiting Gov. of Virgina, abdicated their duty, and refused to intervene, and in fact actually created the violence by unilaterally vacating the court-ordered protest, and forcing the protesters right into the opposing Antifa thugs, and achieving the violence it was their job to prevent.

The most violent thugs in Saturdays melee were the Governor of VA, Clintonista fuckstick Terry McAwful; the Mayor of Charlottesville; badged thugs on the Charlottesville PD and Virginia State police; and their goose-stepping communist supporters wearing the uniforms of the 29th Infantry Division and ancillary units of the VA Army National Guard.

Let's play a tape from Nuremburg circa 1946 about "just following orders" and see if it works in 2017.

Congratulations, Leftards: you wanted another Kent State massacre, and once again, it took the GOVERNMENT acting in concert to bring it about.

I'd bother to castigate the BBC in detail, but those left-wing limey sons of bitches have had their heads up their asses for so long, I'd need a megaphone shoved up their butts to get the message through anyways. Not So Great Britain deserves all the Awful that a state-run media delivers.

Lesson #10,627,119 in proof of the premise:

                                 ABCNNBCBS is Fake News.

 

Absolutely Right: The Charlottesville Doctrine

From T. L. Davis, The New Normal:

The Charlottesville Doctrine

Further demonstration of the fact that the terms Republican and Democrat have no meaning is the way the cowards and traitors of the Republican establishment have come out in favor of Antifa, the new KKK of both parties. There is no other way to interpret the vehemence with which the Bushes, Rubio, McCain, Cory Gardener, etc, etc have attacked Trump for pointing out the simple fact that violence was unleashed on the white supremacists and Nazis at the Charlottesville protest.

Like 'em or not, the white supremacists and Nazi's had a permit to rally and it was the responsibility of the state to protect that right and to protect the demonstrators. Those who did not have a permit were the Antifa counter-demonstrators, who arrived with weapons and the intent to inflict injury on the protesters. This is a coordinated attack on other Americans aided and abetted by the state and city governments.

What Antifa, with the help of government officials, including the police department and state police, have demonstrated to the entire nation, is that if someone has a point of view with which one disagrees, perhaps even vehemently, it should be countered with violence.
...
This is the Charlottesville Doctrine: Protests held and engaged in by individuals with disgusting and socially objectionable points of view should be met with violence.

In the military world, the correct (and quickest) way to get a blisteringly stupid order changed, was to follow it to the hilt. Civilian PTB apparently want to learn that lesson physically and existentially, in a nose-ground-into-the-pavement sort of way too.

This will not turn out the way they think.

Some of us are too old for that shit. And if caught up in other people's nonsense, we won't be playing by Marquis of Queensbury Rules.

Hey, Antifa...are you bulletproof?
How about fireproof...?

So go ahead, idiots.
Bring a knife to a gunfight.
Or bricks to a Molotov fight.
Let us know how that feels the next day.
You really won't like what the other side means when they say "triggered".

You Leftards started this shit. Because you got out-argued, and out-voted.
Life is tough. It's tougher when you're stupid.
Go home now.
Or else, you won't be happy when the pushback from the Right finishes it.

And the Government thugs can either stop it from starting in the first place, and uphold their oaths, like they failed to do in Berzerkely, Charlottesville, and elsewhere. Or they can end up on the same gibbet for trying to keep things one-sided. Hint: If you stood down for the opener, you'd better stay on the porch until it's over, and lift not a finger afterwards; or you've effectively signaled which side you're already on. If you think gangs are tough, Officer Fuckstick, try taking on the entire civil population. You want to go home to your families, now might be a good time. Just leave the guns and badges on the desk on your way out.

The Rest Of The Story

h/t Cold Fury

It's taken a few days, but the one-sided narrative of the MSM of Saturday's riot in Charlottesville, driven by the visuals of one murderous asstard ramming Antifa with his car, is starting to unravel.
City Journal: Why did Virginia’s political leadership order the police and National Guard to stand down?

by Bob McManus

Why did the city of Charlottesville, and the state of Virginia, suspend the First Amendment for Saturday’s calamitous “Unite the Right” rally? And would the outcome have been different—one protester dead in a deliberate car-ramming, two state troopers killed in a demonstration-related helicopter accident, and a nation’s confidence in its institutions severely shaken once again—had the authorities vigorously defended all parties’ constitutional right to free expression?

I'm shocked! Shocked, I say: Leftists in power cheating people of the equal protection of the law.

 But what would have been the outcome had the police and the Virginia National Guard—both on hand in strong numbers—done their duty, enforced properly obtained demonstration permits, and preserved the right of the warring parties to make their respective points without being physically attacked, one by the other and vice versa? It’s worth remembering that Charlottesville did everything it could to prevent the demonstrations, issuing permits only after being sued by the ACLU. And when push came to shove—literally—on Saturday, police and National Guardsmen were to be found only on the periphery of the brawling. Indeed, the Virginia ACLU reported that police were refusing to intervene unless specifically ordered to do so.
“There was no police presence,” Brittany Caine-Conley, a minister-in-training at Charlottesville’s Sojourners United Church of Christ, told the New York Times. “We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.”
Almost at first contact, Charlottesville mayor Michael Signer and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and cancelled the demonstrators’ permits, whereupon police began funneling the alt-right protestors away from the designated demonstration site—and, some reports have it, toward the counter-protestors. The carnage followed in short order. Whether the breakdown in police protection was purposeful—that is, intended to quash a constitutionally protected demonstration and provoke a violent confrontation—is a question unlikely to be pursued in Virginia’s present political environment. As partisan eye-gougers go, Governor McAuliffe, a Democrat, is near the top of the list; Mayor Signer, also a Democrat, seems to be cut from the same cloth.
But deliberate or not, the effect was the same: when the sun went down over Charlottesville Saturday, the First Amendment was lying in the dust, and the civic ties meant to bind all Americans were just that much weaker.

In other words, the exact two-sided street brawl President Trump described in his press conference, the one that has the Usual Suspects shitting themselves and hyperventilating, and the disloyal Opposition from his own party trying to pay Pres.Trump back for kicking the shit out of them in last years' primaries, went down exactly as he described it.

Memo to race-baiting CNN: "Go f**k yourselves. Strong letter follows."

Ann Coulter, after watching Trump wipe the floor with frothing moonbats in the White House press corps, tweeted "We finally got our leader back!"

So much for the 57th thing, since inauguration, that they're sure is going to "really, finally, absolutely - no, we mean it this time - put an end to his administration, and undo the election that pissed all of us commie crybabies off so hard!"

By Request

From comments:

Now that it looks like we may be on the short march to national self-immolation, there are questions that keeps nagging me.

Specifically, if it really hits the fan, how would other powers (read: Russia, China) work to turn it to their advantage? Related: If things REALLY got bad, and it looked like real nut jobs (with the ones I'm thinking about being hostile to Russia) were about to get control of the nukes, how would THAT play out?

The apocalyptic part of me is thinking that pre-emptive EMPs and depressed trajectory SLBM strikes on political and military centers of power could be in our future. That's probably just some anxious BS that could be cured by Xanax, but my mind keeps going there. If you have some thoughts on this, would you mind sharing them?

Others would tread very carefully. The scariest scenario for every nuclear power is when the theoretically rational actors lose control of their own nukes.

It's a scenario of real life baby-with-a-live-grenade - for everyone.
That's why continuity-of-government and continuity-of-command operational plans are some of the most thoroughly detailed, closely-held, and codeword classified far-beyond-top-secret war plans there are.

For the same reason no one tries to sneak up on a crazy guy with a gun, no one (sane) is going to try to "take advantage" of us or anyone if things go squirrelly. Everyone goes to full defensive posture, but nobody wants to get clever when the finger on the button may be some twitchy fruit loop.

We've been through it several times during Russian coups, and on our own for times like when Kennedy and Reagan were shot. The way it plays out in real life is probably akin to the scenes in The West Wing when the president was shot, or when the planes hit the WTC on 9/11: the word gets put out quickly and clearly through diplomatic channels
"Don't screw with us right now".
For this reason, I strongly suspect (from nowhere near the inner sanctum) that if it looked like the NCA (National Command Authority) ability to launch nukes was compromised or about to be, the depressed-trajectory SLBM coming at whoever was attempting a launch would probably be one of our own Tridents from an Ohio-class boomer.
Bet on it.

If you can think of the scenario, there's an envelope covering it sitting in a file folder in a secure safe at NORAD, or whatever passes for it nowadays.

As for EMPs, I defer to former USAF targeting guy and occasional commentor, RandyGC, who noted that EMP effects are largely theoretical, extrapolated from one above-ground test 60 or so years ago. The reality could be far worse, or it could turn out to be Y2K: a giant non-event.

Obviously, no one's going to test it out.

But it would do functionally nothing to the guys on subs and sitting in MCC launch centers, except piss them off, while not doing anything militarily useful except announcing you were willing to play Global Thermonuclear War instead of tic tac toe.

Ain't nobody sane gonna go there.

The insane (Norks, Iranians, random jihadi @$$tards, etc.) are a constant threat 24/7/365, so no point discussing that in this context.

As for national self-immolation, we're a hardy beast. The Nazis going full-on couldn't bring down the Soviet Union. I think we're at least that tough, even now. And an internal crisis would have to get stupid crazy out of hand to become a problem. (Not impossible, just rather unlikely, IMHO). I would expect varying levels of local and regional sportiness if things start to unwind, with some places being pestilential post-apocalyptic sh*tholes right now (Chicongo, Debtroit, D.C., etc.).

As Remus says, "Avoid crowds."

Our biggest problems tend to come from simple stuff no one was paying proper attention to: a squirrel commits seppuku via transformer, and 5 states lose their power grid; a Cat V hurricane lands right on the rinkiest section of levees athwart a major city; and so on.

Invest in planning in two ways: the likeliest scenario where you are, and the most catastrophic scenario where you are. For me here, it'd be The Big One monster earthquake, on both counts. Not, for instance, a meteor ending all life in one hemisphere, or the Yellowstone Caldera ripping loose and giving us two years of unending volcanic winter.
Or China trying to improve their hand by lobbing nukes into space to turn off our grid.

They're all possible, but until my funding approaches infinity, I'll worry about what's most likely. And with rare exceptions, most preps for the likely stuff will also work for most of the sci-nightmare stuff, unless nothing will.

If the horrendous happens, just bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
Nobody gets out of this life alive, so you do the best you can with what you have.

If you're still concerned about it, the reference you want to consult is

this one.
Straight poop, on just about every aspect of what it'd take to get through (provided you don't live inside the CEP from a missile silo or other major military or industrial target).

Thanks for asking, and I hope that answers things for you, or at least gets you pointed in the right direction.