Happy Peak of Western Civilization Day

{Note: This essay is a re-post from 2018. While we look with favor on billionaires pioneering private space adventure, they haven't yet achieved what the US space program had done, with slide rules and vacuum tubes, by 1962. And until they get to Mars, nothing I wrote here originally is any less true today. - A.}

Fifty-two years ago today, and just a few hours from now, is the exact anniversary of when 50,000 steely-eyed missile men, crew-cutted geeks with pocket protectors, test pilots, fighter pilots, and hundreds of metric tons of raw testosterone kicked the rest of the world's ass right to the bottom of the heap, going back to the dawn of time, from the moment that Eagle landed, to when this guy's foot stepped off the LEM ladder.

Neil Armstrong, ace X-15 test pilot, and mission commander of Apollo XI, became the first man from earth to ever set foot on the Moon, and if and until we ever get people to Mars, he put every explorer in history, and even every guy to follow, below him on what Tom Wolfe correctly called "the top of the pyramid."

He was there because he and his sidekick, lunar module pilot, and outside-the-box revolutionary thinker Buzz Aldrin

had managed to land the lunar module manually, off course, and with mere seconds remaining for landing before a crash-tastrophe, because you don't fly 250,000 miles to puss out at the last 12 seconds, just for such piddling concerns as running out of fuel.

Meanwhile, as command module pilot Michael Collins

was searching the Moon's surface from lunar orbit to spot whereinhell (or rather, where in the Sea Of Tranquility) Eagle had actually landed, Armstrong and Aldrin were running through checklists and getting ready for the culmination of the combined effort of tens of thousands of people at NASA (back when they had a purpose, and a clue) and hundreds of thousands of contractors and subcontractors, all accomplished to make the trip possible, less than a decade from Kennedy's speech promising we'd do it.

Because that's what Americans do.

There are countries that use the metric system, and those that have landed on the Moon.

It wasn't until 8 years later, with the lackluster premiere of uber-mediocre science fiction government conspiracy trope film Capricorn One in 1977 (James Brolin and O.J. Simpson as heroes in that movie should have been the tip-off there), after the moon landings had all concluded, that any one of countless hordes of fruitcakes started seriously espousing the idea that we'd somehow magically faked the landings, necessarily including hundreds of thousands of people, from NASA, to the Russians, to every country with a radar, as being somehow "in" on the hokey asstardian imaginary conspiracy suggested, and all agreeing to STFU about it. Until it was cleverly revealed by people showing how they did it, using special effects and video technology completely unavailable anywhere in 1969. Well played, lunatards.
Occam's Razor alone slashes the throat of that nonsense, but some of these former alien seekers, bigfoot hunters, and Loch Ness monster fisherman still cling to their flat-earth retarded psychosis, despite the fact that people were regularly bouncing laser beams off the reflectors placed there in during the Apollo missions to prove the lie of such nonsense,

and the mental illness persists today despite even recent high-res fly-by photography of the lunar surface that has photographed the sites of all the lunar missions, including spotting the astronauts' footprint tracks and the tire ruts from the buggy explorations of later flights, and spotting the pieces of our space leftovers from altitude, right where they're supposed to be.
Because, as news to a previous America-hating president, we built that.

But you can't argue mentally defective lunatics out of a position with reason and logic when they didn't use that to get there in the first place.

The inescapable truth, for those sane enough not to fart simply to smell their own tailwinds, is that we went there, as the only nation that could, and the one that did, and the glory of that belongs to those who did it, for all time.



America haters at home and abroad: This is what it looks like when patriotic geeks
 cut loose and freak out. So you losers can suck it.

But on the day, that summer Sunday afternoon in 1969, when Armstrong stepped out the door to rendezvous with destiny, there wasn't one single car on the streets, anywhere. I was there, and I went outside, and I saw it with my own eyes, kids, from a house just up the street from where Rocketdyne made the Saturn V engines that took us there, again and again. 
Nothing outside moving, anywhere. Not. One. Single. Person.

Every single human on the planet with access to one was huddled in front of black-and-white or color TVs, back when TV had those choices, and each holding their breath waiting for the moment that the cream of 1969 video technology broadcast the shadowy moment to the waiting world.

Not Adidas. Or Nike. But totally made in America, baby.

Of the only twelve men who've ever walked on the Moon, only four remain alive today, including Buzz Aldrin. Neil Armstrong passed away at age 82, nearly nine years ago. The four survivors were all born in the 1930s. The baby of the group is 85. Aldrin is the old man, at 91.

But they, the other astronauts (and even cosmonauts) who made it possible, and the other men and women who built the machines and the systems that allowed us to conquer space and take our first steps on another spinning orb, deserve the eternal glory and thanks of the entire world, both that was and that is, for fulfilling such a primal urge, and manifesting the best and brightest of human destiny.

We need to go to Mars, and beyond that, because that's what we were made to do.
We plan, we measure, and we accomplish, because we have minds to think, imaginations to soar, and dreams to fulfill, always beyond that next horizon.
And we're only at our best when we're doing just exactly that.

We came in peace for all mankind.

Remember their efforts, and their greatness, if the pants-piddling diaper-soiling incompetence of the current crop of government jackholes starts to get you down.

We can do better than them. We can even do better than Apollo.

And. We. Shall.  

Day Of Days

Seventy-six years and about two hours ago, men not much older than the idiots out rioting and looting last weekend, and better men than you or I, were crossing beaches carpeted with the dead and dying, and dodging bombs, bullets, mines, mortars, and artillery, to begin kicking the asses of the Nazis occupying France, and bringing about the end of WWII.

If you ever meet anyone who served during that conflict, especially anyone who landed in Normandy on D-Day (an eighteen year old that day would be 94 today, so they're getting pretty scarce), simply say "Thank you."

Humbly, and respectfully, as befits their service, and that of those who never left Normandy.

The Price For Your Today Was All Of Their Tomorrows

 

"If you are able, save them a place inside you,
And save one backward glance when you are leaving,
for the places they can no longer go.

Be not ashamed to say you loved them,
though you may, or may not have always.
Take what they have left, and what they have
taught you with their dying, and keep it as your own.

And in that time that when men decide, and feel safe,
to call the war insane, take one moment,
to embrace these gentle heroes you left behind."

- Major Michael D. O'Donnell
KIA, Cambodia, March 1970

Lest We Forget

Felt vaguely uneasy today. Then we remembered why.

To Absent Companions.

See you on Fiddler's Green, Kevin.

Veteran's Day PSA

Look, kids, I understand this may be hard to grasp, especially for the 99.5% (the actual percentage) of Americans that have never and will never serve in the military (vs., e.g., the U.S. circa 1944, when 1 in 6 military-aged males was, in fact, in uniform). Don't get me wrong, military service isn't for everyone, and there's nothing wrong per se with being a civilian, but it's not exactly hard: you don't even have to take a physical.

But here's the thing that some of you keep fornicating up, over and over, year after year.
The Fourth of July is pretty self explanatory, and people seem to grasp Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Most times.

But Memorial Day comes in May (yes, every year, Snowflake), and as the name might subtly imply, it's the day you celebrate those who died in the military service of their country, particularly this one.

Today, by contrast, is Veteran's Day, which those possessing more facility with vocabulary might have sussed out (without a good head-slapping with a frozen mackerel) is for people who served (or still are) in the military, and therefore still alive.

You could look this up, cupcakes, but Memorial Day was originally Decoration Day, when the tradition was to decorate the graves of the honored dead.
Veteran's Day was originally Armistice Day, to celebrate the end of the War To End All Wars (before we started numbering humanity's massive clusterf**ks). It isn't that any more. And, let's face it, saying "Thank you for your service" which I'll generally tolerate today, isn't going to do a lot of good for guys dead and buried at Arlington National Cemetery. They can't hear you.

So, just maybe, write this on your hand with a Sharpie:
Memorial Day: dead guys.
Veteran's Day: live guys.

Then you won't be caught on the internet posting Taps, Last Post, In Flanders Field, and any twenty other clips, photos, or memes of guys in flag-draped coffins, today, and the Gunny, above, won't have to smack you in both sides of your slimy civilian head to help you correct your malfunction.

Please?

We appreciate that as a general rule, the childishness and churlishness of the hippie scumbags during the Vietnam Era has given way to thanks (at levels from sincere to patronizing ignorance) to vets, as opposed to spitting on them all, calling them baby killers, and asking them how many people they killed. Walk tall. You're not the juvenile walking penises the pussified flower children of the Sixties were.

But if you really appreciate veteran's service today, don't force them to humor you for being too retarded to know the difference.

Get that part right, and maybe next year, we can work on disabusing low-information nitwits of the notion that everybody wearing an old army jacket and begging for cash is an actual homeless veteran rather than a chiseling valor thief, and of the liberal asshole meme via Hollyweird that most vets are out panhandling alcoholics and strung out on drugs, from all that PTSD, or one step from climbing a tower with a rifle.
Maybe.
If you work really hard, and pay close attention.

But for today, just remember, it's for the guys still alive.
Not the ones lying under rows of crosses in 20 foreign countries.

Baby steps, campers.

If you've got this without being told, or you're here from 20 other countries celebrating Armistice Day for what it originally was and is elsewhere, carry on.

Happy 4th Of July

Enjoy your 4th of July holiday. Hopefully, you're not working today.

If you're reading this as a citizen of the United States of America, (or you're one of the 40M illegal leaches already here who's crashed the party), you're living in the freest and most prosperous country on the planet, bar none. We know this, because the garbage rafts are never rowed to socialist paradises like Cuba or Venezuela.

This reality mightily irritates those determined to boo that parade, including the lunatics at both ends of our own political spectrum, but it is nonetheless true, so I like to point it out just to piss them off today. Mud in your eye, @$$holes!

If anyone thinks differently, I'd advise them that multiple carriers have connecting flights to anywhere else they'd rather live, and the door at Customs & Immigration swings both ways, so I'd remind them not to let it hit them in the ass on their way out.

Anyone who hasn't availed themselves of that option proves the falsehoods they would mutter, which is why the gradeschool playground logic of "Oh yeah? Then why aren't you there?" is all one needs to make the point.

That being said, this country is nowhere near as free as it once was, even if it is more prosperous.

An average citizen here in 1800 would go years, decades even, without seeing one single minion of the federal government, anywhere, not only his entire day, but for his entire life.

There were no cops walking beats, any place. The standing army was a couple of thousand guys in a couple of forts. If you weren't coming in on a ship, there were no government agents waiting for you, and no daily, weekly, monthly, nor annual taxes to pay. For anyone.

You woke up and moved in a cocoon of total liberty hindered only by laws at all against egregious law-breaking like robbery, theft, battery, or murder.

Your only contact with the government at all, was when you cast your vote every two years for the lone person you had heard of with any federal connection at all, and the only one you voted into office: your congressweasel. (Yes, they were weasels then too.) And once every fourth year, voting for a president, whose effect on your life, by and large, was slightly less than that of a Prom King or Queen of the May nowadays.

That was it.

(And if you had the misfortune to have been brought here in chains, and working a plantation from Maryland south, you didn't vote at all. That brought its own problem set, presently, but you were a fractional exception to the national rule.)

You could wander wherever you had a mind, and never break a single law in anything you did, anywhere.

In fact, you could walk from one coast to the other, and your biggest problem would be Indians, and disease, not the government. Even if you wandered into French or Spanish territory on your trek towards the Pacific.

You could just shoot a deer, or buffalo, and eat it. You wouldn't find many fencelines east of the Appalachians, and damned few streets or houses either. Also precious few maps, no bridges, and not much for roads either. And the trip, at best, would be at your best speed on horseback or wagon.

The convenience of highways, bridges, railroads, telegraph, then telephone, air travel, and internet (to say nothing of health codes and modern medicine), have made Indians and disease a negligible worry, and the trip can be made individually in days, or by air in hours.

In return for which, the blanket of individual liberty we once had as our birthright has been replaced by a cocooning web of government, government, and yet more government, which, like all spiders, wraps up its prey securely in order to suck it dry.

Not all progress has been positive, and what made it easier for you to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific has also made it far too easy for government to spread like a malignant cancer, and intrude its big nose and ravenous maw into everything in your life, every purchase or sale you make, and everything you do, including what lightbulb snaps on when you flip a switch, or what type of toilet you may now flush.

Blacks are no longer slaves on Southern plantations. Instead we all are, working annually the equivalent of January to June just to satisfy the recockulous demands on our labors and wealth made by actual armies of local, county, state, and federal versions of the cancer. (No small part of it paid in protection money as welfare, to keep the shiftless descendants of slaves from rioting from coast to coast, for those who aren't already enjoying extended government room and board of an entirely different type, in the local grey bar motel.)

This, none of it, was surely not what the Founders intended, for anyone. And yet, here we are.

So as you enjoy your God-given rights today to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, baseball double-headers, hot dogs, and sales on automobiles and big screen TVs, coupled hopefully with a spectacular fireworks show in honor of that liberty, ponder what you've lost, how you might get some of it back, and what you'll do to instill the desire for liberty to your offspring, and succeeding generations, that they might have more than the shadow of freedom we presently find allotted to us.

Pretty much anything you can do to kill the cancer that's spoiling the party today would be fair game. So plot a little, talk a little treason over a mug at the tavern, and see if you can't figure out whose tea to throw into the harbor, and whose minions you might tar and feather and run out of town on a rail, to mess up their plans and curb their domain year over year.

It's a tradition as American as fireworks and picnics today, and far healthier to the republic than getting a new big screen TV. We are a race of malcontents, thrown out of every civilized country, and dumped here to tame a continent. Anyone whose natural recourse is to run to the government every waking minute ought to be viewed with innate suspicion and reviled with undisguised loathing. And gifted with no small amount of rotten fruit and eggs at whatever speed your arm can manage. (Including, at last count, 21 Democrat candidates for president next November.) Imagine the salutary effect on the republic if their motorcades were thusly pelted from city to city unceasingly for the next 16 months.

Liberty is your birthright. Secure its blessings to yourselves, and your posterity.
Fill your powder horn, clean your muskets, and put a vat of tar on to simmer. Just in case the opportune moment arises. What cannot continue, will not.

Hand...SALUTE!

Over 300,000 troops from 8 countries fought at Normandy for the Allies, 75 years ago today.
Actuarially, there are but a handful of them still alive.
The youngest would be 92, and the average age would be 101.

In a few years, they'll all be dead.
Every one of them are national treasures.

Happy Peak Of Western Civilization Day

Forty-nine years ago today, and just a few hours from now, is the exact anniversary of when 50,000 steely-eyed missile men, crew-cutted geeks with pocket protectors, test pilots, fighter pilots, and hundreds of metric tons of raw testosterone kicked the rest of the world's ass right to the bottom of the heap, going back to the dawn of time, from the moment that Eagle landed, to when this guy's foot stepped off the LEM ladder.

Neil Armstrong, ace X-15 test pilot, and mission commander of Apollo XI, became the first man from earth to ever set foot on the Moon, and if and until we ever get people to Mars, he put every explorer in history, and even every guy to follow, below him on what Tom Wolfe correctly called "the top of the pyramid."

He was there because he and his sidekick, lunar module pilot, and outside-the-box revolutionary thinker Buzz Aldrin

had managed to land the lunar module manually*, off course, and with mere seconds remaining for landing before a crash-tastrophe, because you don't fly 250,000 miles to puss out at the last 12 seconds, just for such piddling concerns as running out of fuel.

Meanwhile, as command module pilot Michael Collins

was searching the Moon's surface from lunar orbit to spot whereinhell (or rather, where in the Sea Of Tranquility) Eagle had actually landed, Armstrong and Aldrin were running through checklists and getting ready for the culmination of the combined effort of tens of thousands of people at NASA (back when they had a purpose, and a clue) and hundreds of thousands of contractors and subcontractors, all accomplished to make the trip possible, less than a decade from Kennedy's speech promising we'd do it.

Because that's what Americans do.

There are countries that use the metric system, and those that have landed on the Moon.

It wasn't until 8 years later, with the lackluster premiere of uber-mediocre science fiction government conspiracy trope film Capricorn One in 1977 (James Brolin and O.J. Simpson as heroes in that movie should have been the tip-off there), after the moon landings had all concluded, that any one of countless hordes of fruitcakes started seriously espousing the idea that we'd somehow magically faked the landings, necessarily including hundreds of thousands of people, from NASA, to the Russians, to every country with a radar, as being somehow "in" on the hokey asstardian imaginary conspiracy suggested, and all agreeing to STFU about it. Until it was cleverly revealed by people showing how they did it, using special effects and video technology completely unavailable anywhere in 1969. Well played, lunatards.
Occam's Razor alone slashes the throat of that nonsense, but some of these former alien seekers, bigfoot hunters, and Loch Ness monster fisherman still cling to their flat-earth retarded psychosis, despite the fact that people were regularly bouncing laser beams off the reflectors placed there in during the Apollo missions to prove the lie of such nonsense,

and the mental illness persists today despite even recent high-res fly-by photography of the lunar surface that has photographed the sites of all the lunar missions, including spotting the astronauts' footprint tracks and the tire ruts from the buggy explorations of later flights, and spotting the pieces of our space leftovers from altitude, right where they're supposed to be.
Because, as news to a previous America-hating president, we built that.

But you can't argue mentally defective lunatics out of a position with reason and logic when they didn't use that to get there in the first place.

The inescapable truth, for those sane enough not to fart simply to smell their own tailwinds, is that we went there, as the only nation that could, and the one that did, and the glory of that belongs to those who did it, for all time.



America haters at home and abroad: This is what it looks like when patriotic geeks
 cut loose and freak out. So you losers can suck it.

But on the day, that summer Sunday afternoon in 1969, when Armstrong stepped out the door to rendezvous with destiny, there wasn't one single car on the streets, anywhere. I was there, and I went outside, and I saw it with my own eyes, kids, from a house just up the street from where Rocketdyne made the Saturn V engines that took us there, again and again. 
Nothing outside moving, anywhere. Not. One. Single. Person.

Every single human on the planet with access to one was huddled in front of black-and-white or color TVs, back when TV had those choices, and each holding their breath waiting for the moment that the cream of 1969 video technology broadcast the shadowy moment to the waiting world.

Not Adidas. Or Nike. But totally made in America, baby.

Of the only twelve men who've ever walked on the Moon, only four remain alive today, including Buzz Aldrin. Neil Armstrong passed away at age 82, nearly six years ago.

But they, the other astronauts (and even cosmonauts) who made it possible, and the other men and women who built the machines and the systems that allowed us to conquer space and take our first steps on another spinning orb, deserve the eternal glory and thanks of the entire world, both that was and that is, for fulfilling such a primal urge, and manifesting the best and brightest of human destiny.

We need to go to Mars, and beyond that, because that's what we were made to do.
We plan, we measure, and we accomplish, because we have minds to think, imaginations to soar, and dreams to fulfill, always beyond that next horizon.
And we're only at our best when we're doing just exactly that.

We came in peace for all mankind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*{My thanks to Ian for the clarification in comments. -A.}

R.I.P. R. Lee Ermey, 1944-2018

"The Gunny", R. Lee Ermey, died yesterday due to complications of pneumonia, at age 74.

Ermey was the living embodiment of every drill instructor actual Marines had, and probably the only one every never-Marine knew. After 11 years service in the Marine Corps, including service in Vietnam, and a stint as an actual drill instructor at MCRD San Diego (with the Thundering Third Recruit Training Battalion - Oohrah!), Ermey was medically discharged due to injuries received in the service, and was an American ex-pat living in the Philippines when he nabbed a bit part in Apocalypse Now. Then an indy movie came to town in 1977, looking for tech advisors and extras in a movie about Marines in Vietnam being shot there, with P.I. doubling very adequately for recently-fallen-to-communists Vietnam.

Barely five years out of the Marines at the time, Ermey was one of those hired as a tech advisor and extra, but the guy they'd cast as the lead drill instructor for the film was a Hispanic with an accent so heavy he was hard to understand easily, and Ermey was crushing his bit part in the gig, so he was hurriedly bumped up to leading character, and the other guy shunted aside.

Boys In Company C was the breakout role that brought Ermey from P.I. to Hollywood, and he never looked back. A small role in Purple Hearts solidified Ermey as the go-to guy when a picture needed a guy harder than woodpecker lips to bring the quintessential Marine sergeant to life on the screen.

And then Stanley Kubrick hired Ermey to be a tech advisor, but quickly re-thought his choice and he too decided to cast Ermey himself as exactly the guy he was looking for to be Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in the otherwise atrocious Full Metal Jacket, and the directing maestro had the great good sense to turn Ermey loose on camera, and let him ad lib whole sections of the movie's boot camp scenes, comprising the entire first half (the actual coherent part) of the film.

 

100% Ermey ad lib, beginning to end.

 

When the movie came out, Ermey had moved from movie D.I. to cultural icon, and was nominated for a Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor for the part.

He was now solid gold, and work poured in.

He had parts in over 60 movies and dozens of TV shows, playing everything from Dr. House's father on that eponymous show, to the voice of the Sarge leading the Green Army men in the Toy Story flicks, and hosting Mail Call and Lock N' Load cable TV shows as himself for History Channel. 

In between, he was a ceaseless advocate and military booster, which work induced the Commandant of the Marine Corps to authorize an official honorary promotion to Gunnery Sergeant for Ermey in 2002, the sort of the thing the Marines ordinarily simply do not do. But when you're that exceptional, you can even get meritoriously promoted after being discharged.

He continued to work regularly in movies and TV until 2012, when his public anti-Obama comments got him blackballed by Hollywood, and offerings for parts finally dried up.

If you served in the Marines, you knew a gunny like the Gunny, or had one for your D.I., and because of his work in entertainment, he will live long after the last Marine he ever served with passes on to Fiddler's Green.

And as he would have told anyone, the Corps did pretty good by him, turning a juvenile delinquent into a leader of men, and finally a cultural icon for the ages.

Forty years lived in a life formed from the mold of eleven years' active service proves the literal truth of the phrase,
"Once A Marine, Always A Marine."
It's a damned shame men like him have to die one day.

And when he gets to heaven,
To St. Peter he will tell:
"Another MARINE reporting, Sir;
I've served my time in Hell."

Your work here is done, Gunny.
Time to get the heavenly host squared away.

Semper Fi, leatherneck.

Veteran's Day

And yes, boys and girls, it's November 11th, Veteran's Day (formerly Armistice Day, before we began numbering successive World Wars). The day when, by federal decree, you not only get a bank holiday and a three-day weekend for something most of you never did, but you're nominally supposed to remember the almost literal real three-percenters who've actually served to give you other slacker 97% the freedom to ignore and spit on us the rest of the year (something at which a growing number of the populace truly excel, even compared to the yardstick of the late 1960s, which is really saying something).

I jest (a tiny bit, and with a modicum of bile), given what's probably the overwhelmingly respectful and decent readership hereabouts, no small number of whom are in that three percent club, but unlike Memorial Day (which some civilian idiot lackwits still can't comprehend is for The Fallen), today is the day for everyone who served - honorably - in the republic's military forces.

Which honor, along with about $5, gets us one cup of burned coffee at Starbuck's 24/7/365.

But as we don't yet live in the Heinleinian Utopia where only we proven worthies get to vote, and the rest of you get to lump it, we will content ourselves knowing that we few, we happy few, are your betters, whether we have this day or not, mainly because we don't spend the other 364 days a year reminding you of the fact, nor refer to our elected leader as el heneral and Maximum Leader For Life, unlike so many of our neighbors in this and other hemispheres' Republiques de Bananes.

We'd really be happy if you lot could manage to simply salute the flag instead of burning it or wiping your hindquarters with it, sing the anthem standing up, show the barest minimum of courtesy to them and the republic for which they stand, and generally, not make us regret the sacrifices we make or made on your behalf, and simply treat your citizenship in the greatest country on earth as the unbelievable honor and privilege it is, and simply exercise it with an appropriately small measure of respect and the teensiest of gratitude to those who make it possible. That shouldn't be too much to ask of those among the population who enjoy all the benefits, without ever having taken so much as a physical exam. 

But if even that minimal effort is too challenging for those douchenozzles who deserve nothing so much as a healthy bitch-slapping with a tire iron, we'd settle for their simple respectful silence, just for a day. 
And hey, you're welcome. The hours were rotten, the pay was a joke, the sacrifices cannot be measured, it's years of my life I'll never get back, some of us died for being in the club, even in "peacetime", but we got to meet the greatest bunch of people in the world: our brothers and sisters in arms.

And as in the rest of life, the friends we gather are generally life's way of apologizing to us all for the relatives we were saddled with at birth.

My Approach To Life

 

Independence Day

Tonight, I sit here listening to the unending din of freedom's artillery outside, bathed in a constant cacophony of explosions and thundering flashes from all points of the compass, sounding for all the world like the Mother Of All Battles, artillery, bombs, missiles, machineguns, and the like. But what it actually is, is people shooting off all manner of malum prohibitum items, even in this nanniest of nanny states, and giving the minions of intrusive government b.s. full notice (and a pair of middle fingers) that they and their busybody regulations can go straight to hell when it comes to proscribing things which shoot into the air and explode on this day of days.

"I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more." -

John Adams' letter to his wife Abigail, July 1776, regarding the fitting anniversary celebration of American independence

I won't entertain any twaddle or hogwash today about how dire and departed liberty and freedom are in this land. There are 364 other days of the year for folks so inclined to be Eeyore.

Eff off with that $#!^.

Listen to your elders, light some fuses, and go blow some stuff up. If only for practice.
(Besides, the true meaning of today should scare every rent-seeking tax-collecting government shitweasel into an early heart attack. Hear me, God.)

Tomorrow, you can revert to pessimism, and go back to plotting how to get what we've lost back.

But even in the worst of circumstances, a little celebration is always in order.

Our national existence itself is nothing short of a miracle, and our birth certificate, penned to occasion the nation's birth, is one of the most magnificent documents in the history of the human species.

If - and particularly so on this day - you can't wrap your head around that, and give free assent to that notion, you are alien to me, and I do not know you, nor would wish to.

Howsoever cracked the Liberty Bell may be, the echoes of its peals still thunder down through the ages.

...proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof...
- Leviticus 25:10

 And now, you'll have to pardon me. It's after midnight, and I have a few things I need to go set off.

Happy Birthday to the United States of America, still the greatest nation on the face of the earth!

The Case of Tantrum v. Civil War

Been a powerful lotta yappin' and prognosticatin' on the intarwebz about the imagined (imaginary) Civil War we're in. Probably be a sight more.

So, as a public service for all the Clever Clydes out there who want to be doing play-by-play on the apocalypse, here is a handy recognition guide for recognizing a civil war, versus a tantrum.

Tantrum:

Civil war:

Tantrum:

Civil war:

Tantrum:

Civil war:

Tantrum:

Civil war:

 

Nota bene that this handy field guide is not by any means a complete comparison, just a handy reference card.

In a tantrum, there is a copious quantity of whining, bitching, self-pissing, moaning, and being "triggered".

In an actual civil war, being "triggered" takes on a much more literal meaning.

 

Anything solved by a crack on the ass or a punch in the nose is a tantrum.

A civil war invariably involves a body count. Usually, a prodigious one.

 

Also note that if a tantrum becomes a widespread delusion, it can lead to a civil war.

It will usually be rather one-sided, when the tally is complete.

 

In true civil wars, both sides have to kill so many people on both sides that they agree that the disagreement isn't worth carrying forward any longer.

(Currently, the Irish hold the world record for longest inability to reach this conclusion, but multiple suggestions point to this being a dearth of consequences to those continuing the grudge: it simply hasn't been bloody enough on a wide enough scale.)

Or else, because the de facto weaker and less adept side has gone all dead and stuff.

(Antifa, call your office.)

 

History and any minimal facility with mathematics suggest that any attempted civil war hereabouts will either be the short and hilarious version, or the epic bloodletting type.

 

While it's advisable to be wary of the outbreak of either, treat with suspicion all vague suggestions that we're in one, or about to be, with any sense of impending doom.

In an actual civil war, the streams of both refugees, and urine and feces running down the legs of those in close proximity (and attendant odor of both) is a handy, if tardy, clinical indication that you are seeing an actual civil war.

 

In a civil war, people do not go to YouTube.

They pack the car, and GTFO of Dodge, or barricade and barb-wire their position to repel boarders.

They do not fortify their position with facebook postings and ad hominem, or appeals to black helicopters.

The only authorities to reference, at that point, are

 The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

And that after this is accomplished,

and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing

and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us,

as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

with terror and slaughter return!

For anyone confused about things up to this point, we hope the above guide will help folks to properly identify what they're seeing with better precision.